Hume: A Very Short Introduction

Hume: A Very Short Introduction provides a summary of the ideas and arguments of the philosopher and historian David Hume (1711–76), looking at Hume’s writings on human nature, morality, politics, and religion. Hume’s books need to be put in biographical, historical, and intellectual context. Hume’s major philosophical works, his essays on moral and political subjects, and his History of England constitute a very important part of his output. Hume’s arguments were complex but his conclusions had subtlety. Hume had an interesting and varied life, from his early solitary philosophical experiments to the achievement of fame and wealth. Hume was without doubt a major contributor to the European Enlightenment.

Introduction

‘Introduction’ presents Hume by way of a summary description of his persona as a public intellectual, or man of letters, for whom philosophy was not so much a distinct subject matter as a style of thought. Hume had some very well-known contemporaries in Adam Smith, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Benjamin Franklin. over his lifetime, Hume developed many theories on the following: human nature, morality, politics, and religion.

Normative Pluralism and Multinormativity

The paper deals with the phenomenon of normative pluralism - that of several normative orders coexisting in various spheres of our life - law, morality, politics, etc. It shows the root causes of normative pluralism and the causes of its development and proliferation - both internal (overcoming legal and moral syncretism) and external (globalization and the related growth in the number of regulatory subjects). The authors offer a way of understanding and reconciling norms by building out of potentially conflicting norms a non-contradictory system without any normative collisions.

The Implications of Morality Politics for Effecting Inclusion in the STEM Workforce

Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) workforce development, identified as a critical consideration for meeting current and future societal needs and challenges, depends on the capacity to draw upon a talented pool of individuals possessing requisite knowledge and training. In the United States, as elsewhere, related questions have arisen about who constitutes that pool and the conditions under which it has been determined. Noting the currency and controversies surrounding persistent inequalities and inequities in STEM educational attainment and workforce participation, the research presented here offers an elaborated framework and dedicated analysis of related processes, with the goal of extending understanding and delineating implications for identifying strategic points for intervention. In ideological and political terms, efforts to combat related educational and workforce disparities reflect a “morality politics” diffused in social identities and behaviors and embedded in structural claims with broad and pragmatic implications for STEM educational access and workforce opportunity. With particular attention to race and ethnicity (and gender), this analysis revisits and unpacks related assumptions and addresses challenges attached to the distribution of benefits and burdens in the face of both ideological and practical expediencies in determining profiles of STEM participation and inclusion.

Discourse ethics, epistemology, and educational justice: A reply to Harvey Siegel

This article explores the contribution of Jürgen Habermas’ discourse theory of morality, politics, and law to theorizing educational justice. First, it analyzes Christopher Martin’s discourse-ethical argument that the development of citizens’ discursive agency is required on epistemic grounds. The article criticizes this argument and claims that the moral importance of developing discursive agency should be justified instead on the basis of moral grounds. Second, the article examines Harvey Siegel’s critique of Habermas’ moral epistemology and suggests that Siegel neglects that the epistemic justification of moral claims proceeds differently from the epistemic justification of assertoric claims. Finally, the article presents a discourse-theoretic conception of educational justice that defends the importance of discursively justifying norms of educational justice through properly arranged structures of justification.

Morality politics: Drug use and the Catholic Church in the Philippines

This article traces the trajectory of the Catholic Church’s discourses on drug use in the Philippines since the first time a statement was made in the 1970s. By drawing on official statements by the Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines (CBCP), it argues that shifts in emphasis have taken place through the years: the destruction of the youth, attack on human dignity, and then social moral decay. Collectively, they emanate from an institutional concern for peace and order. But they also reflect the moral panic around drug use that has been around for decades, which, on several occasions, Filipino politicians, including President Duterte, have mobilized as a populist trope. In this way, the article historicizes the Catholic Church’s official statements and frames them in terms of morality politics through which values and corresponding behavior are defined by an influential institution on behalf of society whose morality it deems is in decline. The article ends by reflecting on the recent statements by the CBCP that invoke compassion and redemption.

The Question of Humanism: A Radical Humanist Reading of The Select Novels of Cormac McCarthy

Cormac McCarthy has often been hailed as a writer’s writer. His writings are difficult to classify as they evoke a complex perspective. A recurring problem in his novels is the ambiguous nature of virtue and violence. It is my aim to look into their dynamics in the context of radical humanism. It will shed light on human nature as presented by McCarthy, with its aspects of virtue and violence. In a world increasingly suffering from violence, where individuals strive for freedom it is important to address the question of radical humanism and its interaction with primal human nature, virtue and violence. A common thread is represented by various questions regarding human nature, free will, pure evil, nature of God, level of morality, language and meaning. The characters have little or no capacity of mind or consciousness and their encounter with the world is not mediated by laws of morality, politics or religion. In other words, the world we are facing “is void of moral meaning”, it is a world that gravitates around a nihilistic core, a “morally nihilistic world.”