Falling In and Out of Love with Philosophy

In this article, principally through autobiographical remarks, some observations concerning philosophical temperament are made, the example of Gerd Buchdahl as a textual interpreter of classic philosophical texts is invoked, and the position of philosophy in relation to history of science is explored, in particular in the work of Kuhn and Foucault. The article concludes with a reminder of the overall history of philosophy at Cambridge through a discussion of the history of the moral sciences.     

Redeeming Love:Rousseau and Eighteenth-Century Moral Philosophy

This essay employs Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) as a vehicle to explore love in eighteenth-century French moral philosophy and theological ethics. The relation between love of self and love of God was understood variously and produced contrasting models of the relation between the public and the private. Rousseau, perhaps more than any other figure in the eighteenth century, wrestled with the complex, competing traditions of love, and in doing so he probed and articulated the tension between and the harmony of life alone and life together. Using as ideal types a set of historical models of private and public vice and virtue, the author describes Rousseau's three contradictory proposals for dealing with the corruption of social institutions and the human heart and discloses their underlying cohesion.     

The Love Affair between Philosophy and Poetry: Aristotle's Poetics and Narrative Identity

In order to grasp the distinctive character of the object imitated in tragedies, Aristotle's Poetics introduces a new notion of action (praxis), which does not refer to individual ethical deeds as in the Ethics. Rather, it signifies a whole with a beginning, a middle, and an end, whose constitutive components are events (pragmata). This paper argues that the notion of agents undergoes a parallel transformation in the treatise on poetry. It no longer refers exclusively to the authors of ethical deeds, but to the characters who enact the entire dramatic action (prattontes). Their nature can be understood in terms of a potential story whose logos (account, articulation) is a muthos (story, narrative). On this ground, the suggestion is made that the Poetics provides the elements of a narrative conception of human identity.     

坐在扶椅上能追求到什么?

这是<哲学的哲学>一书的导言部分,作者指出了该书的基本思想是:第一,认为哲学不同于自然科学研究的例外论假定是错误的,甚至先验与后验之间的区分最终遮蔽了内在的相似性.第二,哲学与其他科学之间在主题上的差异,也不如我们通常认为的那样深.第三,当前的哲学主流未能清楚地阐明一种适当的哲学方法论,部分地是由于它陷入了对数据的心理学化的传统认识论错误.本书对哲学方法论的再思考,包含了在一种恰当的抽象水平上理解如何做哲学.     

Concrete and Otherworldly: Reading Kierkegaard's Works of Love alongside Hegel's Philosophy of Right

Here I argue that much of the confusion surrounding the status of material aid to the neighbor in Kierkegaard's Works of Love is cleared up once one sees the text as participating in a movement that has a fundamentally Hegelian substructure: from Moralität in Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits to Sittlichkeit in Works of Love. As might be expected, Kierkegaard takes this Hegelian structure in a very different direction than the Hegel of Philosophy of Right—a direction best described as an Augustinian ethic that is both concrete and otherworldly.     

The Ethics of Love

The Journal of Ethics -     

The Look of Love

I begin to suggest an alternative to the notion of vision based in alienation and hostility put forth by Jean‐Paul Sartre, Sigmund Freud, andfacques Lacan. I diagnose this alienating vision as a result of a particular alienating notion of space presupposed by their theories. I develop lrigaray's comments about light and air to suggest an alternative notion of space that opens up the possibility that vision connects us to others rather than alienates us from them.     

爱的天使

那用爱心去关爱别人的,才是真天使。就像那位关心同伴的小朋友,其实他才是上帝的天使--孩童那纯洁的灵,爱是那么蒙受我们上帝的喜悦啊!     

The Tunnel of Love

No abstract available for this article.     

The Burdens of Love

While we primarily love individual persons, we also love our work, our homes, our activities and causes. To love is to be engaged in an active concern for the objective well-being—the thriving—of whom and what we love. True love mandates discovering in what that well-being consists and to be engaged in the details of promoting it. Since our loves are diverse, we are often conflicted about the priorities among the obligations they bring. Loving requires constant contextual improvisatory adjustment of priorities among our commitments. Besides delighting in—and being enhanced by—the presence and existence of another person (a place, an institution, profession), love requires extended reflection and work.     

The Philosophy of Sophie,Electress of Hanover

In philosophical circles, Electress Sophie of Hanover (1630–1714) is known mainly as the friend, patron, and correspondent of Leibniz. While many scholars acknowledge Sophie's interest in philosophy, some also claim that Sophie dabbled in philosophy herself, but did not do so either seriously or competently. In this paper I show that such a view is incorrect, and that Sophie did make interesting philosophical contributions of her own, principally concerning the nature of mind and thought.