Kantian Marriage and Beyond: Why It Is Worth Thinking about Kant on Marriage

Kant has famously argued that monogamous marriage is the only relationship where sexual use can take place “without degrading humanity and breaking the moral laws.” Kantian marriage, however, has been the target of fierce criticisms by contemporary thinkers: it has been regarded as flawed and paradoxical, as being deeply at odds with feminism, and, at best, as plainly uninteresting. In this paper, I argue that Kantian marriage can indeed survive these criticisms. Finally, the paper advances the discussion beyond marriage. Drawing on Kant's conception of friendship, I suggest that he might have overlooked the possibility of sex being morally permissible in yet another context.     

安乐死立法为什么这样难

关于安乐死的争论由来已久,虽然目前全世界仅有荷兰等极少数国家通过了有关安乐死的法案,但安乐死实际已经在许多国家悄悄实施,越来越多的人对安乐死持肯定态度已成为不争的事实.贵州省贵阳市一个体行医者赵某还声称自己实施过几例"安乐死".我们实在不知道这种"违规"操作在现实中究竟有多少?这些事实提醒我们不应再就安乐死问题采取回避和视而不见的态度,而应正视它,并尽快制定出明确的法规,在认可安乐死的同时,规范安乐死的实施,作出符合人类理性的选择和符合人类法的精神决断.     

The Meaning of Life in Indian Philosophy: A Contemporary Reconstruction

In this paper, I would like to discuss the meaning of life in Indian philosophy. All Indian philosophies are philosophies of life. Indian philosophy is not merely an intellectual activity but has practical application which enables men to lead an enlightened life. Any philosophy, either Indian or Western which makes no difference to human life, is not a philosophy. The human life always strives towards freedom, duty, wisdom, well-being, etc. These are the noble values in Indian philosophy that play a very vital role in shaping the meaning of life. All schools of Indian philosophy give importance to individual freedom for self-realization. Every school of Indian philosophy prescribes its way of overcoming ignorance, and thereby overcoming pain, to achieve the goal of life. Thus, every human being has to look within, understand his nature, and figure out her or his way to self-realization. The way to reach this goal includes selfless love, service to others, self-control, and self-purification. Because of their practicality, each system of Indian philosophy is as new today as it was 3000 years ago. These are the ideas which we can find in Vivekananda, Gandhi, Aurobindo, and many others. All these philosophical schools/thinkers hold that philosophy and practical life are necessarily integrated.

     

Taking Up Thagard’s Challenge: A Formal Model of Conceptual Revision

Journal of Philosophical Logic - Thagard (1992) presented a framework for conceptual change in science based on conceptual systems. Thagard challenged belief revision theorists, claiming that...     

Reading Derrida with Daya Krishna: Postmodern Trends in Contemporary Indian Philosophy

In his published lectures Civilizations: Nostalgia and Utopia (2012), Daya Krishna criticizes postmodern thought and especially the writings of Jacques Derrida. By outlining similarities between the two, I would claim that, indeed, it was Daya Krishna’s unexpected proximity to Derrida’s ‘deconstruction’ project that triggered his scathing critique of the latter. Moreover, Daya Krishna’s response to Derrida reveals an ongoing inner conflict in his own thinking. On the one hand, he provides us with a harsh critique of Derrida the ‘postmodern’; on the other hand, he concedes that the ‘modern’ notion of knowledge has been totally transformed, and the ‘deconstruction’ of its old formulations was the major catalyst that provoked and directed his own philosophical enterprise in the last years of his life, reformulating knowledges (in the plural). Reconstructing in this way, the dialogue which never happened might prove beneficial, not only for understanding the distinctive works of its participants, but also for carrying their writings and us one step further towards a productive, ‘relevant’ philosophical discourse in the twenty-first century.     

Faculty Development in the 1990s: What It Is and Why We Can't Wait

Faculty development efforts are vitally needed in higher education today. Changes in expectations about the quality and assessment of undergraduate education, societal needs, technology, the student populations, and paradigms about teaching and learning argue for viable, credible, and creative programs. The author explores the nature and need for faculty development, discusses some faculty development options, and provides a selected number of resources.     

Critical Psychology: What It Is and What It Is Not

Critical psychology alerts us to the limitations of mainstream research in the discipline, and it promises to put 'social' issues on the agenda in the whole of psychology. A starting point of the stance of critical psychological research is that the claims that psychologists make about human beings often seem to vanish almost as quickly as they are discovered. People, a group or culture do not behave or think like the model would predict, and, more importantly, we find that our awareness, our reflection on a process described by a psychologist changes that process. It is in the nature of human nature to change, to change as different linguistic resources, social practices, and representations of the self become available, and for human nature to change itself as people reflect on who they are and who they may become. That means that any attempt to fix us in place must fail. But it will only fail in such a way that something productive emerges from it if we do something different, and one place to do something different is in psychology. We need to step back and look at the images of the self, mind and behaviour that psychologists have produced, the types of practices they engage in, and the power those practices, those 'technologies of the self' have to set limits on change. When we appreciate this, we can start to look at what psychologists might do instead as part of a genuinely critical approach.     

Animal Morality: What It Means and Why It Matters

It has been argued that some animals are moral subjects, that is, beings who are capable of behaving on the basis of moral motivations (Rowlands 2011, 2012, 2017). In this paper, we do not challenge this claim. Instead, we presuppose its plausibility in order to explore what ethical consequences follow from it. Using the capabilities approach (Nussbaum 2004, 2007), we argue that beings who are moral subjects are entitled to enjoy positive opportunities for the flourishing of their moral capabilities, and that the thwarting of these capabilities entails a harm that cannot be fully explained in terms of hedonistic welfare. We explore the implications of this idea for the assessment of current practices involving animals.     

Animal Pain: What It is and Why It Matters

The basis of having a direct moral obligation to an entity is that what we do to that entity matters to it. The ability to experience pain is a sufficient condition for a being to be morally considerable. But the ability to feel pain is not a necessary condition for moral considerability. Organisms could have possibly evolved so as to be motivated to flee danger or injury or to eat or drink not by pain, but by “pangs of pleasure” that increase as one fills the relevant need or escapes the harm. In such a world, “mattering” would be positive, not negative, but would still be based in sentience and awareness. In our world, however, the “mattering” necessary to survival is negative—injuries and unfulfilled needs ramify in pain. But physical pain is by no means the only morally relevant mattering—fear, anxiety, loneliness, grief, certainly do not equate to varieties of physical pain, but are surely forms of “mattering.” An adequate morality towards animals would include a full range of possible matterings unique to each kind of animal, what I, following Aristotle, call “telos”. Sometimes not meeting other aspects of animal nature matter more to the animal than does physical pain. “Negative mattering” means all actions or events that harm animals—from frightening an animal to removing its young unnaturally early, to keeping it so it is unable to move or socialize. Physical pain is perhaps the paradigmatic case of “negative mattering”, but only constitutes a small part of what the concept covers. “Positive mattering” would of course encompass all states that are positive for the animal. An adequate ethic for animals takes cognizance of both kinds. The question arises as to how animals value death as compared with pain. Human cognition is such that it can value long-term future goals and endure short-run negative experiences for the sake of achieving them. In the case of animals, however, there is no evidence, either empirical or conceptual, that they have the capability to weigh future benefits or possibilities against current misery. We have no reason to believe that an animal can grasp the notion of extended life, let alone choose to trade current suffering for it. Pain may well be worse for animals than for humans, as they cannot rationalize its acceptance by appeal to future life without pain. How can we know that animals experience all or any of the negative or positive states we have enumerated above? The notion that we needed to be agnostic or downright atheistic about animal mentation, including pain, because we could not verify it through experience, became a mainstay of what I have called “scientific ideology”, the uncriticized dogma taught to young scientists through most of the 20th century despite its patent ignoring of Darwinian phylogenetic continuity. Together with the equally pernicious notion that science is “value-free”, and thus has no truck with ethics, this provided the complete justification for hurting animals in science without providing any pain control. This ideology could only be overthrown by federal law. Ordinary common sense throughout history, in contradistinction to scientific ideology, never denied that animals felt pain. Where, then, does the denial of pain and other forms of mattering come from if it is inimical to common sense? It came from the creation of philosophical systems hostile to common sense and salubrious to a scientific, non-commonsensical world view. Reasons for rejecting this philosophical position are detailed. In the end, then, there are no sound reasons for rejecting knowledge of animal pain and other forms of both negative and positive mattering in animals. Once that hurdle is cleared, science must work assiduously to classify, understand, and mitigate all instances of negative mattering occasioned in animals by human use, as well as to understand and maximize all modes of positive mattering.     

Racism: What It Is and What It Isn't

The words `racist' and `racism' have become so overused that they nowconstitute obstacles to understanding and interracial dialogue aboutracial matters. Instead of the current practice of referring tovirtually anything that goes wrong or amiss with respect to race as`racism,' we should recognize a much broader moral vocabulary forcharacterizing racial ills – racial insensitivity, racial ignorance,racial injustice, racial discomfort, racial exclusion. At the sametime, we should fix on a definition of `racism' that is continuouswith its historical usage, and avoids conceptual inflation. Isuggest two basic, and distinct, forms of racism that meet thiscondition – antipathy racism and inferiorizing racism. We should alsorecognize that not all racially objectionable actions are done froma racist motive, and that not all racial stereotypes are racist.     

论医学哲学是什么和不是什么

弄清医学哲学是什么和不是什么,是医学哲学学科建设的基本问题.医学哲学理论构架的逻辑起点是生命健康,基本结构是医学哲学的本体论、认识论、方法论、价值论和发展观以及一系列医学范畴.哲学理论+医学实例不是医学哲学.医学哲学具备超验的思维方式、反思的学术精神、创新的学术风格、开放的学术视野,而临床经验总结、紧跟时局的宣传、时髦热闹的效果,从者众多的场面不是医学哲学.     

论医学哲学是什么和不是什么

弄清医学哲学是什么和不是什么,是医学哲学学科建设的基本问题。医学哲学理论构架的逻辑起点是生命健康,基本结构是医学哲学的本体论、认识论、方法论、价值论和发展观以及一系列医学范畴。“哲学理论 医学实例”不是医学哲学。医学哲学具备超验的思维方式、反思的学术精神、创新的学术风格、开放的学术视野,而临床经验总结、紧跟时局的宣传、时髦热闹的效果,从者众多的场面不是医学哲学。     

Demystifying Intuition: What It Is,What It Does,and How It Does It

Definitions of intuition are discussed and two working definitions are proposed. This is followed by a list of eight unresolved problems concerning intuition. It is suggested that all of these problems can be resolved by cognitive-experiential self-theory (CEST), a dual-process theory of personality according to which people process information with two systems, an experiential/intuitive system that is an associative learning system that humans share with other animals and a uniquely human verbal reasoning system. Intuition is considered to be a subsystem of the experiential/ intuitive system that operates by exactly the same principles and attributes but has narrower boundary conditions. The next section includes a presentation of the most relevant aspects of CEST with an emphasis on the operating rules and attributes of the experiential/intuitive system. This is followed by demonstrating how the operation of the experiential/intuitive system can resolve each of the unresolved problems concerning intuition. The article closes with a comparison of the advantages and disadvantages of the experiential/intuitive and rational/analytic systems. It is concluded that neither system is generally superior to the other, as each has important advantages and disadvantages.     

开端:关于人道主义与异化的讨论

当代中国人学研究是在争鸣中曲折发展的。文化大革命结束后 ,讳言“人”的现象迅速改观 ,“人”在马克思主义哲学中的地位问题重新提到了广大理论工作者的面前。 2 0世纪 80年代初发生的那场争论 ,主要是围绕马克思主义人的学说展开的。争论从什么是马克思主义的出发点引起 ,进而引发出人道主义与社会主义异化问题等 ,为推动当代中国马克思主义人学科学的建立和发展奠定了理论基础。解放后 ,中国哲学界对于马克思主义人学研究曾作了艰苦的探索 ,涌现出一些成果。但是 ,由于左倾错误强调马克思主义阶级斗争一面 ,因而人的研究受到严重的影响 …     

当代美国哲学

本文无意对当代哲学界作一番中立的、不偏不倚的描述,而是要对一些我认为重要的当代哲学的发展情况作一介绍。当代美国哲学虽然极其多样化,但其中仍有一些主题可寻。如今在美国占主导地位的哲学流派是所谓的“分析哲学”。其实,在整个英语世界,分析哲学都是占主导地位的哲学流派。在斯堪的纳维亚国家也是如此,这种现象正日益普遍地波及德国、法国、意大利以及整个拉丁美洲。