Beauty, Wisdom, and Handiwork in Proverbs 31:10–31

The book of Proverbs concludes with an alphabetic acrostic that describes and praises its feminine subject (Prov 31:10–31). The poem’s praise closes with a generalized critique of beauty, its deceptiveness and short-lived nature (v. 30). What function does this critique of beauty serve in light of the praise of the woman and her deeds? How do the poem and, specifically, this critique of beauty function in the broader organization of the book of Proverbs? This study argues that the poem rejects innate beauty in favor of acquired wisdom, a message that can be found elsewhere in Proverbs. The poem rejects beauty through an appeal to a rhetorical device—the “totalizing description”—which is used elsewhere to argue for a subject’s beauty or perfection. Through the structure of the alphabetic acrostic, the poem carefully embeds its message of willed action and acquired wisdom; using a description of the woman’s successive deeds, the poem shows how each deed leads to the enduring success of the woman’s family, her community, and the subsequent generation.

Police Work

This chapter investigates the nature of police work. It reconstructs the minutiae of policing in German Southwest Africa. Most of the policeman's day was filled with a series of established, unspectacular routines. Often, policemen appropriated the tasks at hand in a way that neither contradicted nor ignored given orders, but that executed them in a manner that would add distraction or excitement, or at least a sense of self-willed action to the task. In the field, policemen proceeded according to what can best be described as a tactic of making do. Policemen frequently improvised; they mixed duty and sociability, and they deployed both formal and informal techniques. Trickery paired with bureaucratic rationalization featured prominently. As a result, an organizational culture emerged in which policemen insisted on the primacy of their own experience and established a “commonsensical” course of action. More often than not, making “short shrift,” that is, resorting to the quick solution of violence, was the outcome. Integrated into daily routines, such violent behavior acquired ritualized features.

The Role of Body-Related Afferent Signals in Human Sense of Agency

At present, most of the neurocognitive models of human sense of agency (ie, “this action is due to my own will”) have been traditionally rooted in a variety of internal efferent signals arising within the motor system. However, recent neuroscientific evidence has suggested that also the body-related afferent signals that subserve body ownership (ie, “this body is mine”) might have a key role in this process. Accordingly, in the present review paper, we briefly examined the literature investigating how and to what extent body ownership contributes to building up human motor consciousness. Evidence suggests that, if required by the context, body ownership per se can act on agency attribution (ie, independently from efferent signals). Hence, a unitary and coherent subjective experience of willed actions (ie, “this willed action is being realized by my own body”) requires both awareness of being an agent and of owning the body.

The Good Will Be First

Good-willed or morally worthy action is one that is morally right non-accidentally: as she performs it the agent is, in some way, responsive to its rightness. Several recent accounts have analyzed good-willed action in terms of a composition of right action plus some requirements on the agent’s psychological condition, but tend to leave unexamined the direction of conceptual dependence between right action and good-willed action. This chapter argues that significant difficulties arise when right action is taken as primary and intelligible independently of good-willed action, often relying on the standard causalist picture of agency. Inspired by Aristotle’s notion of virtuous action and Kant’s treatment of action from duty, the chapter sketches an alternative view in which the idea of mere rightness is conceptually dependent on that of a good-willed self-conscious action done for reasons.

Attention

Attention is related to several puzzling phenomena. But its nature, and role in their explanation, is contentious. One such phenomenon is consciousness. Commonsense psychology suggests that if you pay attention to one sequence of events while ignoring another then you can expect one sequence, but not the other, to figure prominently in your conscious experience. It therefore seems that there is some connection between attention and consciousness. But there is controversy about how close the connection really is. Some think that attention is necessary for consciousness, so that only the things we pay attention to can figure in our consciousness, some think that consciousness is necessary for attention, so that paying attention to something requires one to be conscious of it. Others think that attention and consciousness are associated with one another, but that there are no necessary connections either way. Related to the controversy about the connection between attention and consciousness is an older controversy concerning the connection between attention and free will. Writers such as William James suggest that the direction of attention is what produces the experience of freely willed action. This suggestion has some intuitive force since the clearest cases of freely willed action, and of deliberate, rationally executed thought, are cases in which the agent is paying attention, whereas the responses that we make when not paying attention are experienced as being rather automatic. It might be, therefore, that understanding attention can help us to understand rationality and free will, but it is unclear whether elucidating the relation of attention to free will gives us any sort of explanation of free will, and it is unclear whether the relationship between these two phenomena is a necessary one. Two further philosophical puzzles to which attention has been thought to be related are about how words get their meanings and about how we can come to have warranted beliefs about the minds of others. In both cases there is, as before, controversy about whether the relation to attention is explanatory. In connection with the puzzle about word meanings, some philosophers have claimed that attention figures in the explanation of reference, and, in particular, that attention has a central role in determining what is being referred to when we use demonstrative expressions like ‘this’ and ‘that’ and ‘there’. Others (notably Wittgenstein) deny that the attending/referring relation provides us with a route by which reference can be explained. In connection with the puzzle about the minds of others, there is an established view among developmental psychologists that an infant’s ability to respond to its mother’s attention provides the first step towards the development of an understanding of what the mother is thinking. Some philosophers have recently adopted this idea as possibly providing an explanation of how the mental states of others can be known. In each of these cases attention seems to be related to a puzzling and philosophically important phenomenon, but in each case the nature of the relation is unclear. It is particularly unclear to what extent articulating the role of attention in these phenomena can provide us with a philosophically satisfying explanation of them. Partly on account of this unclarity the topic of attention has been discussed more often by experimental psychologists than by philosophers. The best worked out theories of attention are scientific theories about neural mechanisms and cognitive architecture. The philosophical project of saying what attention is and of articulating its relationship to other phenomena has, with a few exceptions, been relatively under-explored.

Agency and will in Agamben’s coming politics

Those commentators who accept that Agamben offers an affirmative political project tend to hold that its realization depends upon pre-personal messianic or ontological alterations. I argue that there is another option based around the notion of individual agency that has received relatively little attention, but which clarifies whether or not Agamben holds that the transition is one that agents can participate in. By engaging with the texts “On Potentiality,” “Bartleby, or On Contingency,” and Opus Dei, I first show that he develops a notion of potentiality that he claims not only underpins willing, but is also defined by an indeterminate contingency between action and non-action that undermines the binary opposition between willed action and non-action that sustains biopolitics. I then turn to the discussions of praxis, work, and poiesis in The Man without Content to determine whether Agamben thinks that other non-will-based forms of activity can contribute to the deactivation of biopolitics and, indeed, highlight his apparent support for thought-as-poiesis. This, however, seems to establish a binary opposition between thought-as-poiesis and will that, by way of conclusion, I question by claiming that Agamben relies upon a reductionist conception of will that fails to distinguish between “will-as-instrument” and “will-as-impetus” and, as a consequence, is unable to recognize that whereas thought-as-poiesis breaks with the former sense of will, it depends on the latter. An act of will, therefore, contributes to the transition to the coming politics and given the intimate bond between thought-as-poiesis and the coming politics and, indeed, the diachronic nature of the latter, will, so I argue, be carried over into the coming politics.

Christian Engagement with Islamic kalām in Late 14th-Century Egypt: The Case of al-Ḥāwī by al-Makīn Jirjis Ibn al-ʿAmīd ‘the Younger’

‭Towards the end of the 14th century ce, a Coptic government-bureaucrat-turned-monk called al-Makīn Jirjis ibn al-ʿAmīd produced a theological/ecclesiastical encyclopedia known sometimes as Mukhtaṣar al-bayān fī taḥqīq al-īmān, and sometimes as al-Ḥāwī al-mustafād min badīhat al-ijtihād, or simply as al-Ḥāwī. Book I, Chapter 1, Part 3 of this work is an essay on al-qaḍāʾ wa-l-qadar, which is described in the present essay. In making his case for humanity’s capacity for freely willed action, Ibn al-ʿAmīd presents arguments from the Old Testament and the New; a story from the Kitāb al-Siyāsa fī tadbīr al-riʾāsa (better known as Sirr al-asrār or Secretum secretorum), purportedly a book written by Aristotle for Alexander the Great (which is interesting as a witness to the use of Alexander-material by the Copts); and a typology in which the Muslim mutakallimūn Abū Isḥāq al-Isfarāʾīnī, al-Bāqillānī, al-Ashʿarī, Abū l-Ḥusayn al-Baṣrī, and the Muʿtazila in general serve as convenient labels for the positions described—and which turns out to be an epitome of a passage from masʾala 22 of Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī’s Kitāb al-Arbaʿīn. While the reproduction of al-Rāzī’s typology hardly amounts to a serious engagement with him or with the list of thinkers just mentioned, it is perhaps not insignificant that, in a time of sharp inter-communal tensions, Ibn al-ʿAmīd should claim the Muʿtazila as allies in his discourse on human freedom.‬