How Christian ethics became medical ethics: the case of Paul Ramsey.

Over the last century Christian ethics has moved from an attempt to Christianize the social order to a quandary over whether being Christian unduly biases how medical ethics is done. This movement can be viewed as the internal development of protestant liberalism to its logical conclusion, and Paul Ramsey can be taken as one of the last great representatives of that tradition. By reducing the Christian message to the 'ethical upshot' of neighbour love, Ramsey did not have the resources to show how Christian practice might make a difference for understanding or forming the practice of medicine. Instead, medicine became the practice that exemplified the moral commitments of Christian civilization, and the goal of the ethicist was to identify the values that were constitutive of medicine. Ramsey thus prepared the way for the Christian ethicist to become a medical ethicist with a difference, and the difference simply involved vague theological presumptions that do no serious intellectual work other than explaining, perhaps, the motivations of the ethicist.     

Marxism and morality: Reflections on the history of interpreting Marx in moral philosophy

The well-known paradox between Marxism and morality is that on the one hand, Marx claims that morality is a form of ideology that should be abandoned, while on the other hand, Marx makes quite a few moral judgments in his writings. It is in the research after Marx??s death that the paradox is found, explored and solved. This paper surveys the history of interpreting Marx from the aspect of moral philosophy by dividing it into three sequential phases. Then it presents the research on Marx in each phase, points out conflicting questions within the different periods and puts forward the solution in the end. This paper points out that a philosophical viewpoint based on Marx??s theory of historical materialism is the key to solving the paradox between Marxism and morality.     

易哲学发展史之一嬗变--陆王心学的易哲学思想探析

陆王心学的易哲学思想的出现,伴随了一定的时代特点,可谓是易哲学史上继王弼义理易之后的一次深刻嬗变.这表现为其以心释易统易、工夫简易直截的鲜明特征,其中蕴涵了心学派易学对象数易及程朱义理易的解构以及为一般易学研究所忽略的易佛沟通问题.从陆王心学的易哲学思想里面,我们可以发现,心学在宋时的诞生以及它最终的衰微,同样不是一个偶然的现象,它在解构"传统"易学的同时也解构了自身.     

The history of philosophy in contemporary philosophy: The view from Germany

Conclusion I have frequently mentioned objective problems and topics in the preceding sections. But what exactly is the force of objective here? As my remarks should have made clear I have been using objective to contrast with purely historical. A purely historical approach never gets beyond reproduction, commentary, and interpretation. I call an approach objective when it involves a philosopher who advances his own theses and claims.This minimal understanding of objectivity (in the context of my remarks in this paper) by no means implies that there are problems and topics, systems of concepts, methods, and similar factors that are eternal, completely independent of the contingencies of history (of philosophy, of the sciences), that are not relative to a language, to a logic, to a model, etc. Indeed whether there are problems, etc., in just this absolute, atemporal sense is itself a question for systematic philosophy. It seems clear that the formulation of a problem can only take place against a cognitive background of some sort and within some conceptual scheme.³⁴ Such an assumption is made by most if not all analytic philosophers. But the fact that a philosophical tradition recognizes conceptual schemes does not make it a purely historical, non-objective philosophy, in the sense already introduced and described. A philosopher who explicitly accepts a certain conceptual scheme proceeds in an entirely objective and systematic (and not purely historical) manner when, within this framework, he formulates his own theses.This paper is the text of a talk. the title is due to Barry Smith.     

Women,philosophy and the history of philosophy*

ABSTRACT

It is only in the last 30 years that any appreciable work has been done on women philosophers of the past. This paper reflects on the progress that has been made in recovering early-modern women philosophers in that time and the role of the history of philosophy in that process. I argue that as women are integrated into the broader picture of philosophy, there is a danger of overlooking the different conditions under which they originally philosophized and which shaped their philosophies. Having retrieved them from oblivion, we now face the challenge of avoiding a ‘new amnesia’ by developing historical narratives and modes of analysis which acknowledge the different conditions within which they worked, without diminishing their contribution to philosophy. I offer these remarks as a contribution to current debates about the forms that historical narrative should take, and the best way to promote women in philosophy today, in the belief that we can learn from our own more recent history.     

Society,self, and mind in moral philosophy: The scottish moralists as precursors of symbolic interactionism

Many of the concepts central to symbolic interactionism were anticipated by the eighteenth century Scottish moralists. The symbolic-interactionist and Scottish moralist orientations both hold that society alone engenders uniquely human qualities, self arises through sympathetic interaction, and mind and self reconstruct their environments. George H. Mead's conception of thought as internal dialogue between the “I” and “me” aspects of the self and his notion of the “generalized other” were foreshadowed by some of the Scottish moralists, particularly Adam Smith. These schools differ, though, in their treatments of emotion, communication, political structures, and the origin of sympathy.     

Interpretation, psychoanalysis, and the philosophy of mind

I suggest that a conflict between two philosophical models of the mind so far unremarked in discussions of psychoanalysis is at the heart of questions about its status as a science, the objectivity of psychoanalytic interpretations, and the nature of the unconscious. In philosophy one model is embodied in the tradition of Descartes, Hobbes, Locke, Kant, among many others, which construes thought as prior to and independent of language. According to this tradition the mind is self-contained and mental contents or "ideas" are essentially subjective phenomena. It follows that knowledge of other minds and the material world is radically problematic. In the second and more contemporary model the phenomenon of meaning is dependent on interactions between minds, and between mind and the world. Since meaning is understood to be intrinsically social, so in an important sense is mind. I develop this second philosophic model, indicating its relevance for psychoanalysis. I also point out some of the contributions of psychoanalysis to philosophy of mind.     

Writing the history of Russian philosophy

This article addresses the writing of the history of Russian philosophy from the first of such works—Archimandrite Gavriil’s Russian Philosophy [Russkaja filosofija, 1840]—to philosophical histories/textbooks in the twenty-first century. In the majority of these histories, both past and present, we find a relentless insistence on the delineation of “characterizing traits” of Russian philosophy and appeals to “historiosophy,” where historiosophy is employed as being distinct from the historiographical method. In the 1990s and 2000s, the genre of the history of Russian philosophy has grown increasingly conservative with regards to content, with histories from this period demonstrating an almost exclusive Orthodox focus. This conservatism, in turn, has contributed to widespread contention in recent years over the status of these philosophical textbooks—disagreements that often lead to either (1) further appeals to “historiosophical” methods; or (2) denials of the domestic philosophical tradition altogether, where the response to the query “Is there philosophy in Russia?” is emphatically negative. This article argues that the contemporary disputes over the development and preservation of the Russian philosophical canon are in many ways part of a larger debate over the roles of Orthodoxy and the history of philosophy in post-Soviet philosophical thought.