What Poetry Brings to the Table of Science and Religion

Ever since Plato's famous attack on artists and poets in Book 10 of The Republic, lovers of literature have felt pressed to defend poetry, and indeed from ancient times down to the present, literature and art have had to fight various battles against philosophy, religion, and science. After providing a brief overview of this conflict and then arguing that between poetry and science there are some noteworthy similarities—that is, that some of the basic mental structures with which the scientist studies the “text” of nature (facts, laws, theories) find their counterparts in ways an informed reader studies the poetic text, I develop what I see as the most important differences between poetry, on the one hand, and science, philosophy, and theology, on the other. These differences lie chiefly in two areas: (1) in the stance that each takes toward language itself and (2) in the stance each takes toward that ancient polarity between the one and the many. The aim of my argument is neither to privilege poetry over the other modes of knowing the world nor to grant, particularly to science in its reductive “objectivity,” a higher epistemological status than that accorded to poetry and the arts. Instead, I wish to argue that science, by pushing the boundaries of knowledge about the material world, shows the poet, as well as the theologian, some of the more important work to be done and that poetry, with its emphasis on the particular over the abstract and on the ambiguities and paradoxes of language as inherently metaphorical, serves science and religion by providing a caution against the naive acceptance of language as literal and the consequent enthrallment to the power of absolutes and totalizing abstractions.     

Developing the Horizons of the Mind: Reich's Response to the Commentators

Some aspects of my writing the monograph Developing the Horizons of the Mind (2002) are highlighted, the central characteristics of relational and contextual reasoning (RCR) are explained, and the contributions to this symposium by John Albright, Varadaraja V. Raman, and John Teske are discussed.     

Social Psychology and Virtue Ethics

Several philosophers have recently claimed to have discovered a new and rather significant problem with virtue ethics. According to them, virtue ethics generates certain expectations about the behavior of human beings which are subject to empirical testing. But when the relevant experimental work is done in social psychology, the results fall remarkably short of meeting those expectations. So, these philosophers think, despite its recent success, virtue ethics has far less to offer to contemporary ethical theory than might have been initially thought. I argue that there are plausible ways in which virtue ethicists can resist arguments based on empirical work in social psychology. In the first three sections of the paper, I reconstruct the line of reasoning being used against virtue ethics by looking at the recent work of Gilbert Harman and John Doris. The remainder of the paper is then devoted both to responding to their challenge as well as to briefly sketching a positive account of character trait possession.     

A Short Letter on Religious Toleration

This paper takes the form of aletter to fledgling democracies such asAlgeria, Turkey, and Iran. It explores thenature of democracy and argues that theequality of citizens requires that differentreligions be treated equally. It presents some``lessons' from United States constitutionalhistory which might be useful to fledglingdemocracies as they seek to achieve aseparation of church and state. Developing atheme first presented in ``A Third Principle ofJustice,' The Journal of Ethics 1 (1997),pp. 355–374, it argues that religious tolerationsometimes may require a heightened sensitivityto the needs of some religious associations. Itconcludes, however, that religious tolerationdoes not require a toleration of intolerantreligious extremists who pose a threat todemocracy.     

(M,R)-Systems and their Realizations

Robert Rosen’s (M,R)-systems are a class of relational models that define organisms. The realization of relational models plays a central role in his study of life, itself. Biology becomes identified with the class of material realizations of a certain kind of relational organization, exhibited in (M,R)-systems. In this paper I describe several realizations of (M,R)-systems, and in particular alternate realizations of the replication component.     

Replies

John Fischer challenges me to defend my arguments regarding the badness of death; I sharpen my position, but make some concessions, discussing the possibility of postmortem harm. In response to John Deigh, I defend the account of disgust given in Hiding from Humanity, together with the research of Paul Rozin that I follow there. I discuss Patrick Devlin’s conservative position, agree that we need to object to its emphasis on solidarity, not only to its emphasis on disgust, and argue that Deigh’s statement of Devlin’s position is too kind to Devlin. In response to Henry Richardson, I summarize my reasons for thinking that the classical social contract tradition cannot handle well the problems posed by the issue of justice for people with disabilities, and that even Rawls’s position requires major modification if it is to do so. I explore differences between Richardson’s position and my own on the issues of self-respect, liberty, and primary goods.     

Re-appraising the Subject and the Social in Western Philosophy and in Contemporary Orthodox thought

The notion of a constitutive lack, which formed the ambivalent initial framework of Western metaphysics, marks the contemporary attempt to think anew the social and the subject. While metaphysics had difficulties to justify ontologically the event of sociality and was tempted to construct a closed subjectivity, post-metaphysical thought by contrast justifies often the sociality of a non-identity. The presuppositions of Orthodox-Christian theology allow us to think of subjectivity and sociality in terms of a different ontology, elaborating a new synthesis between anthropology and eschatology, within which the subject can emerge as radical sociality and natal receptivity, as free and true in its very relationality. The most profound and acute intellectual demands of our present time could then meet central notions of the Orthodox-Christian heritage and point at the perspective of a new historical encounter, which enriches both traditions by mutually engaging to each others fundamental experiences     

A Lesson for Life

Schools have existed since timeimmemorable. From the perspective of the modernworld, the most radical change has been thatschools are now expected not only to reflectcurrent reality, but also to prepare its pupilsfor a changing world. In this article, Wilhelmvon Humboldt's great university reform ishighlighted. Humboldt's ideas of Bildungwere never fully realised in the universitysystem, due to a structural contradiction inhis university plan between specialisedresearch and all-embracing philosophy. The ideaitself, however, remains fruitful, especiallyif combined with John Dewey's moredown-to-earth conceptions.     

《归藏》、《坤乾》源流考——兼论秦简《归藏》两种摘抄本的由来与命名

本文论证了晋代前《归藏》易之文从未面世,晋以降历代《归藏》的版本均出自汲冢书《易繇:阴阳卦》,还着重考证了春秋时宋《坤乾》与战国时《周礼》所称《归藏》的渊源关系,指出王家台15号秦墓出土的卦占书包含有甲、乙两种其底本不尽相同的、以卦占为主体的《归藏》摘抄本,当称为《归藏·64卦占》为宜。     

Shared intentions,public reason,and political autonomy

John Rawls claims that public reasoning is the reasoning of ‘equal citizens who as a corporate body impose rules on one another backed by sanctions of state power’. Drawing upon an amended version of Michael Bratman’s theory of shared intentions, I flesh out this claim by developing the ‘civic people’ account of public reason. Citizens realize ‘full’ political autonomy as members of a civic people. Full political autonomy, though, cannot be realised by citizens in societies governed by a ‘constrained proceduralist’ account of democratic self-government, or the ‘convergence’ account of public justification formulated recently by Gerald Gaus and Kevin Vallier.