CALVINIST RESOURCES FOR CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN POLITICAL LIFE: A Critique of Michael Walzer's Revolution of the Saints

Inheriting the religious prejudices of the Enlightenment, many supporters of liberal democracy consider John Calvin's theology contrary to the norms and virtues necessary for productive public discourse in a religiously and culturally diverse society. In Revolution of the Saints: A Study in the Origins of Radical Politics , Michael Walzer makes a similar assumption, arguing that, despite its contribution to political modernization, the inherent fideism, absolutism, and intolerance of Calvinism constitutes a threat to public discourse in liberal society. In this paper, I contend that the prevailing understanding of Calvin's theology is incorrect. In actuality he is a nuanced natural law thinker, whose complex understanding of human nature and the state encourages the subtle balance of virtues that contemporary political life requires.     

Interrogating Healthy Conflict

The need to turn an enemy into an adversary is an ethical obligation. I try to show that this obligation has multiple religious and philosophical resources. The ethical imperative also requires us to not overstate and magnify any problem at hand to the point that it becomes insurmountable and enmity becomes an end in itself. I do ask the question whether Springs thinks of Colin Kaepernick’s peaceful protest by taking the knee at football games as an instance of healthy conflict. Are the terms peace and healthy conflict perhaps not better viewed as allegories for the interrogation of the human condition? Perhaps healthy conflict remains a series of questions rather than concrete outcomes.     

Oliva Sabuco de Nantes and her Nueva Filosofia: a new philosophy of human nature and the interaction between mind and body

ABSTRACT

The main objective of the New Philosophy was to ‘improve the lives of people and nations in part by improving medical practice’. To this end, Oliva Sabuco sought to improve humankind's knowledge of the philosophical underpinnings of medicine while taking experiential practices into account. She suggested that a variety of procedures (pharmaceutical, emotional and therapeutic) should be adopted to maintain and restore harmony between the mind and body. Oliva Sabuco sought to promote health and prevent disease by expanding our knowledge of the interrelationship between mind and body; the ultimate goal was to understand the body's function and form in order to promote inner harmony and thus health. The influence of classical traditions in moral and natural philosophy, medicine, and cosmography is unmistakable in Oliva Sabuco's text, yet she synthesized these traditions, disagreed with fundamental aspects of them, and transformed them in a holistic philosophy of human nature that is part of a larger view of the cosmos and mankind's place in it.     

Reason with Baggage

In this article I show that David Novak's natural law theory precedes his encounter with Judaism. That is to say, the theory is the product of a theological viewpoint consisting of three components—createdness, commandedness, and response—that is then found by Novak in a number of areas of Jewish thought and practice that admit of the same three parts. As a result of this interpretation, I posit that Paul Nahme, who argues for a pragmatic reading of Novak's theory, as well as Martin Kavka and Randi Rashkover, who offer a political understanding of it, do not account for the theological richness and metaphysical basis of Novak's natural law theology.     

TWO CONCEPTIONS OF LIBERALISM: Theology,Creation, and Politics in the Thought of Immanuel Kant and Edmund Burke1

Constitutional liberal practices are capable of being normatively grounded by a number of different metaphysical positions. Kant provides one such grounding, in terms of the autonomously derived moral law. I argue that the work of Edmund Burke provides a resource for an alternative construal of constitutional liberalism, compatible with, and illumined by, a broadly Thomistic natural law worldview. I contrast Burke's treatment of the relationship between truth and cognition, prudence and rights, with that of his contemporary, Kant. We find that in each case where Kant's system is constructed from the first principle of autonomy, Burke's thought is oriented toward an end that is not of our making. Readings of Burke as a natural law thinker are currently out of fashion among Burke commentators; without relying, for the main thesis, on historical claims about Burke's “Thomism,” I nonetheless explore and challenge some of the assumptions that underlie the current orthodoxy.     

Perceptual fluency effects in judgments of creativity and beauty: creative objects are perceived fluently yet they are visually complex

ABSTRACT

Perceptual fluency typically has a positive influence on aesthetic evaluations of beauty, but few studies have examined its influence on creativity evaluations. Creativity has two facets, originality and quality. If creativity judgments involve estimating product originality, such judgments may be associated with perceptual disfluency, while product quality may be associated with perceptual fluency. We examined the relationship between perceptual fluency and judgments of creativity and beauty across seven experiments. Creativity judgments were affected by most perceptual fluencysources. We observed a highly-fluent-is-beautiful-and-creative relation when testing repeated exposure and figure-ground contrast. Prototypicality displayed a high-fluency–is-beautiful relation, with creativity judgments unaffected. Visual complexity displayed a consistent disfluent-is-creative effect, with mixed results for beauty. For creativity (but not beauty) evaluations, increased saliency of visual complexity led to discounting fluent-is-creative effects, supporting the hypothesis that there are at least two fluency pathways to creativity judgments that take both originality and quality into account.     

From is to ought: Natural Law in Buddhadasa Bhikkhu and Phra Prayudh Payutto

The contemporary Thai Theravada Buddhist monks Buddhadasa Bhikkhu and Phra Prayyudh Payutto espouse a version of natural law thinking in which the norms of good behavior derive from the nature of the world, specifically its features of conditionality, causality, karma and interdependence. An ethic which stresses non-egoic harmony is the result. This paper (1) develops the notion of natural law in their thinking and (2) critically evaluates these ideas as a foundation for ethical thought, specifically asking whether such ideas recognize something of value in the individual per se and in individual freedom and, in an interdependent world, how one can challenge injustice or a brutal government.     

DEFENDING NIEBUHR FROM HAUERWAS

In his 2001 book, With the Grain of the Universe, Stanley Hauerwas has made an extended case for Karl Barth as the model for how to do Christian ethics, and for Reinhold Niebuhr as the model for how not to do it. Though Barth's closer and deeper theological connection to the Christian tradition appeals to a Jewish traditionalist by analogy, nevertheless, Niebuhr's approach to social ethics, based as it is on a version of natural law, is of greater appeal. That is because it is more philosophically arguable in a secular society and culture, and because it is more politically effective there. It is what made Niebuhr a more effective opponent of Nazism than was Barth. Also, Niebuhr's version of natural law is not a christianized version of Stoic natural law teaching but, rather, a profound use of the biblical prohibition of idolatry, having heretofore unnoticed affinities with rabbinic developments of that prohibition.     

Wilhelm Reich Revisited: The role of ideology in character analysis of the individual versus character analysis of the masses and the Holocaust

Abstract

One of the most controversial members of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society and Freud’s intimate for many years, Reich is known not only for his seminal contributions to therapeutic and social psychoanalysis in his 1933 classic Character analysis, but also for his notoriety as a discoverer of an energy he named orgone. This paper is devoted to Reich the psychoanalytic sociologist and reformer, with special prominence given to his other, now somewhat forgotten, 1933 book The mass psychology of Fascism.