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Agency and Autonomy in Kant's Moral Theory: Selected Essays

Andrews Reath

This book contains chapters on various features of Kant's moral psychology and moral theory, with particular emphasis on a conception of rational agency autonomy. The opening chapters explore ... More

This book contains chapters on various features of Kant's moral psychology and moral theory, with particular emphasis on a conception of rational agency autonomy. The opening chapters explore different elements of Kant's views about motivation, including an account of respect for morality as the distinctive moral motive and a view of the principle of happiness as a representation of the shared structure of non-moral choice. These chapters stress the unity of Kant's moral psychology by arguing that moral and non-moral considerations motivate in essentially the same way. Several of the chapters develop an original approach to Kant's conception of autonomy that emphasizes the political metaphors found throughout Kant's writings on ethics. They argue that autonomy is best interpreted not as a psychological capacity, but as a kind of sovereignty: in claiming that moral agents have autonomy, Kant regards them as a kind of sovereign legislator with the power to give moral law through their willing. The final chapters explore some of the implications of this conception of autonomy elsewhere in Kant's moral thought, arguing that his Formula of Universal Law uses this conception of autonomy to generate substantive moral principles and exploring the connection between Kantian self-legislation and duties to oneself.Less

Purity, Sacrifice, and the Temple: Symbolism and Supersessionism in the Study of Ancient Judaism

Jonathan Klawans

This book reevaluates modern scholarly approaches to ancient Jewish cultic rituals, arguing that sacrifice in particular has been long misunderstood. Various religious and cultural ideologies ... More

This book reevaluates modern scholarly approaches to ancient Jewish cultic rituals, arguing that sacrifice in particular has been long misunderstood. Various religious and cultural ideologies (especially supersessionist ones) have frequently prevented scholars from seeing the Jerusalem temple as a powerful source of meaning and symbolism to those ancient Jews who worshiped there. Such approaches are exposed and countered by reviewing the theoretical literature on sacrifice and taking a fresh look at a broad range of evidence concerning ancient Jewish attitudes toward the temple and its sacrificial cult. Starting with the Hebrew Bible, this work argues for a symbolic understanding of a broad range of cultic practices, including both purity rituals and sacrificial acts. The prophetic literature is also reexamined, with an eye toward clarifying the relationship between the prophets and the sacrificial cult. Later ancient Jewish symbolic understandings of the cult are also revealed in sources including Josephus, Philo, Pseudepigrapha, the Dead Sea Scrolls, New Testament, and Rabbinic literature. A number of ancient Jews certainly did believe that the temple was temporarily tainted or defiled in some fashion, including the Dead Sea sectarians and Jesus. But they continued to speak of the temple in metaphorical terms, and — like practically all ancient Jews — believed in the cult, accepted its symbolic significance, and hoped for its ultimate efficacy.Less

Understanding Figurative Language: From Metaphor to Idioms

Sam Glucksberg

The book presents a comprehensive account of how people understand metaphors and idioms in everyday discourse. Traditionally, figurative language has been considered to be derived from and more ... More

The book presents a comprehensive account of how people understand metaphors and idioms in everyday discourse. Traditionally, figurative language has been considered to be derived from and more complex than literal language. The book presents an alternative view, arguing that figurative language makes use of the same kinds of linguistic and pragmatic operations that are used for literal language. A new theory of metaphor comprehension integrates linguistic, philosophical, and psychological perspectives to account for figurative language use. The theory's central tenet is that everyday conversational metaphors are used spontaneously to create new concepts and categories. Metaphor is special only in the sense that metaphorical categories are salient examples of the things that they represent. These categories get their names from the best examples of those categories. Thus, the literal “shark” can be a metaphor for any vicious and predatory creature. Because the same term, “shark”, is used for both its literal referent and for the metaphorical category, as in “my lawyer is a shark”, such terms have dual-reference. In this way, metaphors simultaneously refer to the abstract metaphorical category and to the most salient literal exemplar of that category, as in the expression “boys (literal) will be boys (metaphorical)”. The book concludes with a comprehensive treatment of idiom use, and an analysis and critique (written by Matthew McGlone) of conceptual metaphor in the context of how people understand both conventional and novel figurative expressions.Less

Aesthetic Essays

Malcolm Budd

The book contains a selection of essays on aesthetics, some of which have been revised or added to. A number of the essays are aimed at the abstract heart of aesthetics, attempting to solve a cluster ... More

The book contains a selection of essays on aesthetics, some of which have been revised or added to. A number of the essays are aimed at the abstract heart of aesthetics, attempting to solve a cluster of the most important issues in aesthetics which are not specific to particular art forms. These include the nature and proper scope of the aesthetic, the intersubjective validity of aesthetic judgements, the correct understanding of aesthetic judgements expressed through metaphors, aesthetic realism versus anti-realism, the character of aesthetic pleasure and aesthetic value, the aim of art, and the artistic expression of emotion. Others are focussed on central issues in the aesthetics of particular art forms: two engage with the most fundamental issue in the aesthetics of music, the question of the correct conception of the phenomenology of the experience of listening to music with understanding; and two consider the nature of pictorial representation, one examining the well-known views of Ernst Gombich, Richard Wollheim, and Kendall Walton, the other articulating an alternative conception of seeing a picture as a depiction of a certain state of affairs. The final essay in the book is a comprehensive reconstruction and critical examination of Wittgenstein's aesthetics, both early and late.Less

De Doctrina Christiana

Saint Augustine

R. P. H. Green (ed.)

This is a completely new translation of the work that Augustine wrote to guide the Christian on how to interpret Scripture and communicate it to others, a kind of do‐it‐yourself manual for ... More

This is a completely new translation of the work that Augustine wrote to guide the Christian on how to interpret Scripture and communicate it to others, a kind of do‐it‐yourself manual for discovering what the Bible teaches and passing it on. Begun at the same time as his famous Confessions, but not completed until some thirty years later, it gives fascinating insight into many sides of his thinking, not least on the value of the traditional education of which the Confessions gives such a poor impression. Augustine begins by relating his theme to the love (and enjoyment) of God and the love of one's neighbour, and then proceeds to develop a theory of signs with which he can analyse the nature of difficulties in scripture. In studying unknown signs, Augustine finds a place for some disciplines enshrined in traditional culture and the school curriculum but not all; as for ambiguous signs, he carefully explores various kinds of problems, such as that of distinguishing the figurative from the literal, and has recourse to the hermeneutic system of the Donatist Tyconius. In the fourth and last book, he discusses how to communicate scriptural teaching, drawing on a lifetime of experience but also making notable use of the writings on rhetoric of Cicero, the classical orator. The translation is equipped with an introduction that discusses the work's aims and circumstances, outlines its contents and significance, commenting briefly on the manuscripts from which the Latin text – which is also provided in this volume – is derived, and also brief explanatory notes. There is a select bibliography of useful and approachable modern criticism of this important work.Less

Power and the Spirit of God: Toward an Experience-Based Pneumatology

Bernard Cooke

Both the Hebrew Bible and Christian scriptures equate the Spirit of God with power. Power is a diverse phenomenon in human experience; several instances of power are examined here with the help of ... More

Both the Hebrew Bible and Christian scriptures equate the Spirit of God with power. Power is a diverse phenomenon in human experience; several instances of power are examined here with the help of social scientific and psychological analysis. The book then relates the divine Spirit power to each of these instances of power: force and violence, fear, official and religious authority, law, wealth, images and symbols, language, teaching, sexuality, friendship and love. Finally, as a synthesizing metaphor to help gain insight into the divine outreach, i.e. the Spirit of God, the author uses the experience of a human embrace, examining this with a phenomenological hermeneutic and correlating it to the various forms of power studied.Less

Things: Papers on Objects, Events, and Properties

Stephen Yablo

This book contains a collection of twelve metaphysical chapters that address a range of first-order topics, including identity, coincidence, essence, causation, and properties. Some first-order ... More

This book contains a collection of twelve metaphysical chapters that address a range of first-order topics, including identity, coincidence, essence, causation, and properties. Some first-order debates are not worth pursuing, the book argues; there is nothing at issue in them. Several of the chapters explore the metaontology of abstract objects, and more generally of objects that are ‘preconceived’, their principal features being settled already by their job-descriptions. The book rejects standard forms of fictionalism, opting ultimately for a view that puts presupposition in the role normally played by pretense.Less

Literary and Linguistic Theories in Eighteenth-Century France: From Nuances to Impertinence

Edward Nye

‘Linguistic’ theories in the 18th century are also theories of literature and art, and it is probably better, therefore, to think of them as ‘aesthetic’ theories. As such, they are answers to the ... More

‘Linguistic’ theories in the 18th century are also theories of literature and art, and it is probably better, therefore, to think of them as ‘aesthetic’ theories. As such, they are answers to the age-old question ‘What is beauty?’, but formulated, also, to respond to contemporary concerns. This book considers a wide range of authors from these two perspectives and draws the following conclusions: etymology is a theory of poetry; dictionaries of synonymy, prosody, and metaphor are theories of preciosity; and Sensualism is a theory of artistic representation. The background to these contentions is outlined in Chapter One, in which the book traces the rise of the term ‘nuances’ as an attempt by contemporary authors to understand representation in art as a rationalisation of chaotic reality. The demise of these contentions at the end of the century is described in the last chapter, in which the dominant language theory of the day is shown to be antagonistic to the study of art and literature. Theories of language are no longer an answer to the question ‘What is beauty?’Less

Objects of Metaphor

Samuel Guttenplan

Objects of Metaphor offers a philosophical account of the phenomenon of metaphor which is radically different from others in the literature. Yet for all its difference, the underlying ... More

Objects of Metaphor offers a philosophical account of the phenomenon of metaphor which is radically different from others in the literature. Yet for all its difference, the underlying rationale of the account is genuinely ecumenical. If one adopts its perspective, one should be able to understand the substantial correctness of many other accounts, while at the same time seeing why they are not in the end completely correct. The origins of the account lie in an examination of the conception of predication. Unreflectively thought of as a task accomplished by words, it is argued that predication, or something very much like it, can also be accomplished by non-word objects (‘objects’ here include events, states of affairs, situations, actions and the like). Liberated in this way from words, predication becomes one central element in the account of metaphor. The other element is the move from language to objects which, adapting an idea of Quine’s, is thought of as the limiting case of semantic descent. Whilst the Objects of Metaphor account presents other accounts in a new light, its main importance lies in what it says about metaphor itself. Powerful and flexible enough to cope with the syntactic complexity typical of genuine metaphor, it offers novel conceptions of both the relationship between simile and metaphor and the notion of dead metaphor. Additionally, it shows why metaphor is a robust theoretic kind, related to other tropes such as synecdoche and metonymy, but not to be confused with tropes generally, or with the figurative and non-literal.Less

Metaphor and Moral Experience

A. E. Denham

This book examines the parallels between moral and metaphorical discourse, and the ways in which our engagement with literary art, and metaphorical discourse in particular, informs our moral beliefs. ... More

This book examines the parallels between moral and metaphorical discourse, and the ways in which our engagement with literary art, and metaphorical discourse in particular, informs our moral beliefs. It suggests that there are three ways in which one's beliefs can be improved: if more of them are true, if more of them are warranted or justified, or if the warrant or justification for some of them is strengthened. So the book considers whether and how such improvements can be made to moral beliefs, and what role metaphor can play. It is an integral aim of the work to discern to what extent moral and metaphorical discourses deserve to be regarded as cognitive at all. This involves investigating to what extent such discourses are capable of truth or falsehood, warrant or justification, and how it is that we understand moral judgements and metaphorical expressions. This investigation is founded on an account of the nature of value and of our experience of value.Less