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Belonging, Identity, and Identification - Reviewed: Kinship, Law and Politics: An Anatomy of Belonging. By Joseph E. David. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Pp. 156. $110.00 (cloth); $88.00 (digital). ISBN: 9781108606967.
- Lenn E. Goodman
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- Journal:
- Journal of Law and Religion / Volume 37 / Issue 2 / May 2022
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 05 August 2022, pp. 373-381
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- May 2022
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Belonging and the sense of belonging are vital factors of human identity, loyalty, and roles, the expectations we have of ourselves and of one another. The boundaries, social and sexual, that all human societies deploy to protect personal privacy and personal and group dignity are modulated by our sense of belonging and often by a complementary sense of difference. The bonds of affinity and the corresponding sense of belonging that modulate our norms and roles are perhaps most visible in the striking colorations they assume in the eyes of outsiders viewing the mores of traditional societies. But the vital necessity of a sense of shared identity is all the more critical when social identities are fragmented by faction, tribalism, or racism, or when anomie and alienation have sapped the sense of commitment that energizes collaborative efforts in any human group. Few dimensions of personal outlook and awareness are more powerful in communal, legal, or political settings than the sense of belonging, that curiously shared identity by which we bind ourselves and one another to shared goals and values in some version of the sense that we are one.
Darwin's Heresy
- Lenn E. Goodman
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- Journal:
- Philosophy / Volume 94 / Issue 1 / January 2019
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 18 December 2018, pp. 43-86
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- January 2019
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Challenged by Lord Kelvin's claims that earth and sun were too young to give evolution sufficient time to do its work, especially in the human case, where care for the weak blunts the edge of natural selection, Darwin leaned on Lamarckian thoughts to accelerate the process. The mental and moral traits crowning human distinctiveness, he urged, arose through sexual selection. But promiscuity, infanticide, early betrothals, and female drudgery undermined these effects in “savage races.” In the inevitable decline and ultimate extinction of the “melanin races” Darwin believed he could observe human evolution underway before his eyes.
10 - Judaism and the Problem of Evil
- from Part II - Interdisciplinary Issues
- Edited by Chad Meister, Bethel College, Indiana, Paul K. Moser, Loyola University, Chicago
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- The Cambridge Companion to the Problem of Evil
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- 05 July 2017
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- 09 June 2017, pp 193-209
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What did Epicurus Learn from Plato?
- Lenn E. Goodman, Scott Aikin
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- Philosophy / Volume 92 / Issue 3 / July 2017
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- 28 March 2017, pp. 421-447
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- July 2017
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Epicurus and Epicureans were famously antagonistic toward Platonic metaphysics and the dialectical style and technique pioneered in the Academy. However, there are Platonic methodological and doctrinal themes in Epicurus's epistemology, theology, and politics.
Contributors
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- By Mitchell Aboulafia, Frederick Adams, Marilyn McCord Adams, Robert M. Adams, Laird Addis, James W. Allard, David Allison, William P. Alston, Karl Ameriks, C. Anthony Anderson, David Leech Anderson, Lanier Anderson, Roger Ariew, David Armstrong, Denis G. Arnold, E. J. Ashworth, Margaret Atherton, Robin Attfield, Bruce Aune, Edward Wilson Averill, Jody Azzouni, Kent Bach, Andrew Bailey, Lynne Rudder Baker, Thomas R. Baldwin, Jon Barwise, George Bealer, William Bechtel, Lawrence C. Becker, Mark A. Bedau, Ernst Behler, José A. Benardete, Ermanno Bencivenga, Jan Berg, Michael Bergmann, Robert L. Bernasconi, Sven Bernecker, Bernard Berofsky, Rod Bertolet, Charles J. Beyer, Christian Beyer, Joseph Bien, Joseph Bien, Peg Birmingham, Ivan Boh, James Bohman, Daniel Bonevac, Laurence BonJour, William J. Bouwsma, Raymond D. Bradley, Myles Brand, Richard B. Brandt, Michael E. Bratman, Stephen E. Braude, Daniel Breazeale, Angela Breitenbach, Jason Bridges, David O. Brink, Gordon G. Brittan, Justin Broackes, Dan W. Brock, Aaron Bronfman, Jeffrey E. Brower, Bartosz Brozek, Anthony Brueckner, Jeffrey Bub, Lara Buchak, Otavio Bueno, Ann E. Bumpus, Robert W. Burch, John Burgess, Arthur W. Burks, Panayot Butchvarov, Robert E. Butts, Marina Bykova, Patrick Byrne, David Carr, Noël Carroll, Edward S. Casey, Victor Caston, Victor Caston, Albert Casullo, Robert L. Causey, Alan K. L. Chan, Ruth Chang, Deen K. Chatterjee, Andrew Chignell, Roderick M. Chisholm, Kelly J. Clark, E. J. Coffman, Robin Collins, Brian P. Copenhaver, John Corcoran, John Cottingham, Roger Crisp, Frederick J. Crosson, Antonio S. Cua, Phillip D. Cummins, Martin Curd, Adam Cureton, Andrew Cutrofello, Stephen Darwall, Paul Sheldon Davies, Wayne A. Davis, Timothy Joseph Day, Claudio de Almeida, Mario De Caro, Mario De Caro, John Deigh, C. F. Delaney, Daniel C. Dennett, Michael R. DePaul, Michael Detlefsen, Daniel Trent Devereux, Philip E. Devine, John M. Dillon, Martin C. Dillon, Robert DiSalle, Mary Domski, Alan Donagan, Paul Draper, Fred Dretske, Mircea Dumitru, Wilhelm Dupré, Gerald Dworkin, John Earman, Ellery Eells, Catherine Z. Elgin, Berent Enç, Ronald P. Endicott, Edward Erwin, John Etchemendy, C. Stephen Evans, Susan L. Feagin, Solomon Feferman, Richard Feldman, Arthur Fine, Maurice A. Finocchiaro, William FitzPatrick, Richard E. Flathman, Gvozden Flego, Richard Foley, Graeme Forbes, Rainer Forst, Malcolm R. Forster, Daniel Fouke, Patrick Francken, Samuel Freeman, Elizabeth Fricker, Miranda Fricker, Michael Friedman, Michael Fuerstein, Richard A. Fumerton, Alan Gabbey, Pieranna Garavaso, Daniel Garber, Jorge L. A. Garcia, Robert K. Garcia, Don Garrett, Philip Gasper, Gerald Gaus, Berys Gaut, Bernard Gert, Roger F. Gibson, Cody Gilmore, Carl Ginet, Alan H. Goldman, Alvin I. Goldman, Alfonso Gömez-Lobo, Lenn E. Goodman, Robert M. Gordon, Stefan Gosepath, Jorge J. E. Gracia, Daniel W. Graham, George A. Graham, Peter J. Graham, Richard E. Grandy, I. Grattan-Guinness, John Greco, Philip T. Grier, Nicholas Griffin, Nicholas Griffin, David A. Griffiths, Paul J. Griffiths, Stephen R. Grimm, Charles L. Griswold, Charles B. Guignon, Pete A. Y. Gunter, Dimitri Gutas, Gary Gutting, Paul Guyer, Kwame Gyekye, Oscar A. Haac, Raul Hakli, Raul Hakli, Michael Hallett, Edward C. Halper, Jean Hampton, R. James Hankinson, K. R. Hanley, Russell Hardin, Robert M. Harnish, William Harper, David Harrah, Kevin Hart, Ali Hasan, William Hasker, John Haugeland, Roger Hausheer, William Heald, Peter Heath, Richard Heck, John F. Heil, Vincent F. Hendricks, Stephen Hetherington, Francis Heylighen, Kathleen Marie Higgins, Risto Hilpinen, Harold T. Hodes, Joshua Hoffman, Alan Holland, Robert L. Holmes, Richard Holton, Brad W. Hooker, Terence E. Horgan, Tamara Horowitz, Paul Horwich, Vittorio Hösle, Paul Hoβfeld, Daniel Howard-Snyder, Frances Howard-Snyder, Anne Hudson, Deal W. Hudson, Carl A. Huffman, David L. Hull, Patricia Huntington, Thomas Hurka, Paul Hurley, Rosalind Hursthouse, Guillermo Hurtado, Ronald E. Hustwit, Sarah Hutton, Jonathan Jenkins Ichikawa, Harry A. Ide, David Ingram, Philip J. Ivanhoe, Alfred L. Ivry, Frank Jackson, Dale Jacquette, Joseph Jedwab, Richard Jeffrey, David Alan Johnson, Edward Johnson, Mark D. Jordan, Richard Joyce, Hwa Yol Jung, Robert Hillary Kane, Tomis Kapitan, Jacquelyn Ann K. Kegley, James A. Keller, Ralph Kennedy, Sergei Khoruzhii, Jaegwon Kim, Yersu Kim, Nathan L. King, Patricia Kitcher, Peter D. Klein, E. D. Klemke, Virginia Klenk, George L. Kline, Christian Klotz, Simo Knuuttila, Joseph J. Kockelmans, Konstantin Kolenda, Sebastian Tomasz Kołodziejczyk, Isaac Kramnick, Richard Kraut, Fred Kroon, Manfred Kuehn, Steven T. Kuhn, Henry E. Kyburg, John Lachs, Jennifer Lackey, Stephen E. Lahey, Andrea Lavazza, Thomas H. Leahey, Joo Heung Lee, Keith Lehrer, Dorothy Leland, Noah M. Lemos, Ernest LePore, Sarah-Jane Leslie, Isaac Levi, Andrew Levine, Alan E. Lewis, Daniel E. Little, Shu-hsien Liu, Shu-hsien Liu, Alan K. L. Chan, Brian Loar, Lawrence B. Lombard, John Longeway, Dominic McIver Lopes, Michael J. Loux, E. J. Lowe, Steven Luper, Eugene C. Luschei, William G. Lycan, David Lyons, David Macarthur, Danielle Macbeth, Scott MacDonald, Jacob L. Mackey, Louis H. Mackey, Penelope Mackie, Edward H. Madden, Penelope Maddy, G. B. Madison, Bernd Magnus, Pekka Mäkelä, Rudolf A. Makkreel, David Manley, William E. Mann (W.E.M.), Vladimir Marchenkov, Peter Markie, Jean-Pierre Marquis, Ausonio Marras, Mike W. Martin, A. P. Martinich, William L. McBride, David McCabe, Storrs McCall, Hugh J. McCann, Robert N. McCauley, John J. McDermott, Sarah McGrath, Ralph McInerny, Daniel J. McKaughan, Thomas McKay, Michael McKinsey, Brian P. McLaughlin, Ernan McMullin, Anthonie Meijers, Jack W. Meiland, William Jason Melanson, Alfred R. Mele, Joseph R. Mendola, Christopher Menzel, Michael J. Meyer, Christian B. Miller, David W. Miller, Peter Millican, Robert N. Minor, Phillip Mitsis, James A. Montmarquet, Michael S. Moore, Tim Moore, Benjamin Morison, Donald R. Morrison, Stephen J. Morse, Paul K. Moser, Alexander P. D. Mourelatos, Ian Mueller, James Bernard Murphy, Mark C. Murphy, Steven Nadler, Jan Narveson, Alan Nelson, Jerome Neu, Samuel Newlands, Kai Nielsen, Ilkka Niiniluoto, Carlos G. Noreña, Calvin G. Normore, David Fate Norton, Nikolaj Nottelmann, Donald Nute, David S. Oderberg, Steve Odin, Michael O’Rourke, Willard G. Oxtoby, Heinz Paetzold, George S. Pappas, Anthony J. Parel, Lydia Patton, R. P. Peerenboom, Francis Jeffry Pelletier, Adriaan T. Peperzak, Derk Pereboom, Jaroslav Peregrin, Glen Pettigrove, Philip Pettit, Edmund L. Pincoffs, Andrew Pinsent, Robert B. Pippin, Alvin Plantinga, Louis P. Pojman, Richard H. Popkin, John F. Post, Carl J. Posy, William J. Prior, Richard Purtill, Michael Quante, Philip L. Quinn, Philip L. Quinn, Elizabeth S. Radcliffe, Diana Raffman, Gerard Raulet, Stephen L. Read, Andrews Reath, Andrew Reisner, Nicholas Rescher, Henry S. Richardson, Robert C. Richardson, Thomas Ricketts, Wayne D. Riggs, Mark Roberts, Robert C. Roberts, Luke Robinson, Alexander Rosenberg, Gary Rosenkranz, Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal, Adina L. Roskies, William L. Rowe, T. M. Rudavsky, Michael Ruse, Bruce Russell, Lilly-Marlene Russow, Dan Ryder, R. M. Sainsbury, Joseph Salerno, Nathan Salmon, Wesley C. Salmon, Constantine Sandis, David H. Sanford, Marco Santambrogio, David Sapire, Ruth A. Saunders, Geoffrey Sayre-McCord, Charles Sayward, James P. Scanlan, Richard Schacht, Tamar Schapiro, Frederick F. Schmitt, Jerome B. Schneewind, Calvin O. Schrag, Alan D. Schrift, George F. Schumm, Jean-Loup Seban, David N. Sedley, Kenneth Seeskin, Krister Segerberg, Charlene Haddock Seigfried, Dennis M. Senchuk, James F. Sennett, William Lad Sessions, Stewart Shapiro, Tommie Shelby, Donald W. Sherburne, Christopher Shields, Roger A. Shiner, Sydney Shoemaker, Robert K. Shope, Kwong-loi Shun, Wilfried Sieg, A. John Simmons, Robert L. Simon, Marcus G. Singer, Georgette Sinkler, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Matti T. Sintonen, Lawrence Sklar, Brian Skyrms, Robert C. Sleigh, Michael Anthony Slote, Hans Sluga, Barry Smith, Michael Smith, Robin Smith, Robert Sokolowski, Robert C. Solomon, Marta Soniewicka, Philip Soper, Ernest Sosa, Nicholas Southwood, Paul Vincent Spade, T. L. S. Sprigge, Eric O. Springsted, George J. Stack, Rebecca Stangl, Jason Stanley, Florian Steinberger, Sören Stenlund, Christopher Stephens, James P. Sterba, Josef Stern, Matthias Steup, M. A. Stewart, Leopold Stubenberg, Edith Dudley Sulla, Frederick Suppe, Jere Paul Surber, David George Sussman, Sigrún Svavarsdóttir, Zeno G. Swijtink, Richard Swinburne, Charles C. Taliaferro, Robert B. Talisse, John Tasioulas, Paul Teller, Larry S. Temkin, Mark Textor, H. S. Thayer, Peter Thielke, Alan Thomas, Amie L. Thomasson, Katherine Thomson-Jones, Joshua C. Thurow, Vzalerie Tiberius, Terrence N. Tice, Paul Tidman, Mark C. Timmons, William Tolhurst, James E. Tomberlin, Rosemarie Tong, Lawrence Torcello, Kelly Trogdon, J. D. Trout, Robert E. Tully, Raimo Tuomela, John Turri, Martin M. Tweedale, Thomas Uebel, Jennifer Uleman, James Van Cleve, Harry van der Linden, Peter van Inwagen, Bryan W. Van Norden, René van Woudenberg, Donald Phillip Verene, Samantha Vice, Thomas Vinci, Donald Wayne Viney, Barbara Von Eckardt, Peter B. M. Vranas, Steven J. Wagner, William J. Wainwright, Paul E. Walker, Robert E. Wall, Craig Walton, Douglas Walton, Eric Watkins, Richard A. Watson, Michael V. Wedin, Rudolph H. Weingartner, Paul Weirich, Paul J. Weithman, Carl Wellman, Howard Wettstein, Samuel C. Wheeler, Stephen A. White, Jennifer Whiting, Edward R. Wierenga, Michael Williams, Fred Wilson, W. Kent Wilson, Kenneth P. Winkler, John F. Wippel, Jan Woleński, Allan B. Wolter, Nicholas P. Wolterstorff, Rega Wood, W. Jay Wood, Paul Woodruff, Alison Wylie, Gideon Yaffe, Takashi Yagisawa, Yutaka Yamamoto, Keith E. Yandell, Xiaomei Yang, Dean Zimmerman, Günter Zoller, Catherine Zuckert, Michael Zuckert, Jack A. Zupko (J.A.Z.)
- Edited by Robert Audi, University of Notre Dame, Indiana
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- The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy
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- 05 August 2015
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- 27 April 2015, pp ix-xxx
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33 - Happiness
- from VI - Ethics
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- By Lenn E. Goodman, Vanderbilt University
- Edited by Robert Pasnau, University of Colorado Boulder
- Edited in association with Christina van Dyke, Calvin College, Michigan
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- The Cambridge History of Medieval Philosophy
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- 05 August 2014
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- 19 June 2014, pp 457-471
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Summary
THE ARISTOTELIAN BACKGROUND
At the beginning of the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle claims that all arts and inquiries, acts and choices, aim at some good. Indeed, they presume an ultimate good. For if they sought no good at all they would not be chosen, and without an ultimate intrinsic good their rationality would collapse. Aristotle’s title for that ultimate aim, a title meant to be uncontroversial, is eudaimonia, loosely translatable as happiness. Its nature is not a given: philosophy has its work cut out for it in clarifying just what this ultimate human goal must be. Some seek happiness in pleasure, wealth, or honor; others scramble for whatever sensation appeals at the moment or blindly pursue domination. Aristotle, however, maintains that (1) eudaimonia is something objective, not mere gratification, euphoria, or complacency; (2) it is not merely a passive state of well-being but an active life of doing well (euprattein); and (3) the virtues are dispositions that promote the good life that we seek. Aristotelian moral virtues such as courage, generosity, and self-control are dispositions, or habits of acting in accordance with a mean discerned by reason. Phronesis, strength in deliberation, is an intellectual virtue, but sophia, the queen of the intellectual virtues, finds our most godlike activity in contemplation. As Aristotle sees it, the virtues point the way to happiness, much as Plato sought the nature of reality through his conception of knowledge.
Some Concluding Thoughts
- Lenn E. Goodman, Vanderbilt University, Tennessee
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- Religious Pluralism and Values in the Public Sphere
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- 05 June 2014
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- 07 April 2014, pp 193-202
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Summary
Diversity of outlooks, practices, values, and ideas is inherent in the human condition. Cultures differ. So do personal histories, circumstances, and prospects. Differences between generations may widen as trade, travel, exile, migration, and communication speed our cultural interactions. The question of this book has been how we should cope, as individuals and communities, with the dazzling diversity we confront. The answer I have proposed is rooted in the ideal of openness. Openness does not mean relativism, and skepticism is not its nutriment, although it may be a byproduct or a motive. One can respect differences without abandoning one's commitments. One needs to know oneself if one is to engage in fruitful dialogue with others. A relativism that pretends all views are equally sound or welcomes all practices as equally wholesome or apposite is not generous or practical but patronizing. A skepticism that dismisses all thoughts but what seems self-evident is just the opposite of open-minded. And neither relativism nor skepticism affords stable ground for self-cultivation.
Groups, like individuals, are nourished by what they learn from others. So societies that favor intercommunal understanding are the richer for it. They make a resource of what too often seems a difficulty. The notion that diversity spells trouble may stem in part from the illusion that societies need a common ideology and uniform practices. I do not think either sort of unity has ever existed, unless as an artifact of lazy analysis or simple stereotyping. Just consider how different idiolects can be. Ways of living and thinking are far more varied. Neuroscientists find more synaptic connections in each human brain as it actively responds to experience than there are elementary particles in the universe. So efforts to impose lockstep ideas or behaviors belong not to any history of harmony but to the black record of oppression, be its idols and ideals secular or sacred. The carnage and wreckage left by attempts to cast humanity into a single mold still clutter the world in the broad wake of the Inquisition and Europe's religious wars. They scar living memory in the aftermath of the Holocaust, the Gulag, the Cultural Revolution, and the Cambodian killing fields.
Bibliography
- Lenn E. Goodman, Vanderbilt University, Tennessee
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- Religious Pluralism and Values in the Public Sphere
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- 05 June 2014
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- 07 April 2014, pp 203-212
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4 - The Road to Kazanistan
- Lenn E. Goodman, Vanderbilt University, Tennessee
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- Religious Pluralism and Values in the Public Sphere
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- 07 April 2014, pp 144-192
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Summary
When Rawls is credited with restoring normative discourse in politics, the praise might mean that his example freed theorists long afraid to buck the positivist tide that ran so strong in the first two-thirds of the twentieth century. Or it might mean that his work broke the hold of the machiavellian equation of realism with realpolitik so often attached to the idea of value-free social science in the study and teaching of politics, history, and law. There is some truth in those claims. Rawls did help make normative claims respectable where they had been shunned. He must share the credit, of course, with Watergate, which provoked widespread calls for a new infusion of moral concerns into public life and for the teaching of morality to future leaders and professionals. Such spirited calls seem innocent of the ancient recognition that virtue is learned more from practice and example than from precept and tuition. The fond hopes for moral education externalized the infamy, ducking the admission that Watergate, like many another scandal, was not just a violation of the ethos but also an ugly caricature of it – spit and image of the practices long modeled in the Lone Ranger's forays into villains’ safes and offices: Conscientious subterfuge was fine, so long as it stayed sub rosa. The jig was up when Nixon was caught sending men into the Watergate sniffing for evidence of Cuban ties to the Democratic Party. The same moralists who voiced shock at the burglary lionized Daniel Ellsberg for leaking the Pentagon Papers. Plato's lesson was hard to learn and easy to forget: It was not Socrates but Athens who formed the character of Alcibiades.
Morals, for much of the twentieth century, were readily and willfully confused with moralism. The Vienna Circle – their shadow grown tall by mid-century, silhouetted in the glow of scientistic optimism – shunned value talk. They had seen the rhetoric of idealism carried off by extremist ideologues to misty metaphysical heights and then restored, deflowered and led captive by dubious and dangerous causes. Positivism looked clearer and cleaner. Pragmatism felt more down to earth than overt metaphysics. And utilitarianism, at least, seemed naturalistic and forward looking. Or Marxism – if one could trust its promises and ignore the noises off from the dungeons and the Gulag – bruited itself as scientific and progressive, the wave of the future.
Acknowledgments
- Lenn E. Goodman, Vanderbilt University, Tennessee
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- Religious Pluralism and Values in the Public Sphere
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- 05 June 2014
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- 07 April 2014, pp vii-viii
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Index
- Lenn E. Goodman, Vanderbilt University, Tennessee
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- Religious Pluralism and Values in the Public Sphere
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- 05 June 2014
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- 07 April 2014, pp 213-221
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1 - Religious Pluralism
- Lenn E. Goodman, Vanderbilt University, Tennessee
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- Religious Pluralism and Values in the Public Sphere
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- 07 April 2014, pp 11-53
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There are plenty of reasons for pursuing some form of pluralism as to religion, and even more ways in which pluralism is sought, each with its own advantages and costs. Governments and irenic individuals might seek an end to sectarian strife or hope to build alliances in the interest of some common cause. The spiritually inclined might seek a higher unity, backgrounding their differences for the sake of inner growth. Some see relativism as the high road to tolerance, the surest antidote to dogmatism and bigotry. Others assign that work to skepticism. The baldest response to religious diversity is to reject it – I’m right; the rest are wrong. But exclusion can cause trouble because many place what matters most to them in the shiny coffer reserved for their religious beliefs. Intercultural understanding gets little help from the notion that those who fail to share one's own beliefs and practices will roast forever in hellfire. Nor does it help when atheists say, “Safety demands that religions should be put in cages.”
Alvin Plantinga argues that it is neither arrogant nor arbitrary to hold onto one's own beliefs and reject others. He excuses himself from talk of practices and keeps to beliefs that have been considered carefully and prayerfully, in full awareness that others may dissent just as thoughtfully and with equal conviction. One's beliefs, he reasons, might rest on argument, as in Aquinas's case, or on religious experience, such as Calvin's Sensus Divinitatis. If there's good warrant and one has duly considered alternative views, Plantinga argues, it is not arbitrary to hold fast to the beliefs one has and to exclude others.
Frontmatter
- Lenn E. Goodman, Vanderbilt University, Tennessee
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- Religious Pluralism and Values in the Public Sphere
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2 - Naked in the Public Square
- Lenn E. Goodman, Vanderbilt University, Tennessee
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- Religious Pluralism and Values in the Public Sphere
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- 07 April 2014, pp 54-101
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Time was when organizers of a public meeting were happy if people checked their weapons at the door. But in the charged atmosphere of the decades since Roe v. Wade, self-described liberals may expect those who deliberate on public policy matters to check their ideas too. As Gerald Mara writes, “A number have embraced pluralism not merely as a phenomenon to be recognized within any competent practical philosophy, but also as confirmation of a deeper suspicion that concern with virtue is somehow implausible or illegitimate within political theory.” Behind that concern lurks the idea that pluralism itself demands that the state stay silent regarding the character of its citizenry or, indeed, any areas that touch on conscience or fundamental values. But in a democracy all citizens are members of the state, whether active or passive. From that concept stems the thought that in a democracy everyone should not just refrain from doing harm to others but also keep out of others’ moral and intellectual space.
In recent years, the work of John Rawls has come to dominate much of the discourse of political theory and political philosophy for reasons not hard to understand. As Robert Nozick, a colleague and rival of Rawls's, writes,
A Theory of Justice is a powerful, deep, subtle, wide-ranging, systematic work in political and moral philosophy which has not seen its like since the writings of John Stuart Mill, if then. It is a fountain of illuminating ideas, integrated together into a lovely whole. Political philosophers now must either work within Rawls's theory or explain why not.
3 - Minima and Maxima
- Lenn E. Goodman, Vanderbilt University, Tennessee
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- Religious Pluralism and Values in the Public Sphere
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- 05 June 2014
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- 07 April 2014, pp 102-143
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Summary
Some years ago I took part in an international meeting of philosophers. Of the 180 thinkers who attended, many took the occasion to showcase their values. Socialism was still much bruited in those days, and several speakers scrapped their prepared remarks to sing its praises. Many still imagined, despite Friedrich Hayek's cogent argument in The Road to Serfdom, that civil rights and human flourishing could be safe and well served under socialism – or only under socialism. Some thought basic liberties survivable even in a one-party state, where law and politics, the media and means of production, science, inquiry, and the arts, the councils of labor and sources of capital, the vehicles of distribution, stewardship of the land, and regulation of the marketplace were all gripped in a single set of hands. In that forum, I admired Hilary Putnam's courageous confession that socialist promises were “now universally discredited.”
Because this was an intercultural meeting, many of the philosophers celebrated relativism and its promised yield in tolerance and accommodation. Bimal Matilal, whom I remembered as a handsome young scholar at Oxford but who was now broken in health and pushed in a wheelchair by his wife, worked with spirit to distinguish relativism from pluralism. Keenly aware of the variance in the particularities of practice from one culture to the next, he scanned the traditions of India for norms worthy of universal adherence. He singled out respect for life, deference to truth, abhorrence of theft, and rejection of adultery. In each case he drew specific prescriptions from the broad norms he culled from India's rich religious and philosophical array. Although he cited Hindu and Buddhist scriptures and the spiritual wisdom of Gandhi, he strove not to rely on divine prescriptions.
Introduction
- Lenn E. Goodman, Vanderbilt University, Tennessee
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- Religious Pluralism and Values in the Public Sphere
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- 05 June 2014
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- 07 April 2014, pp 1-10
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Love and war have mingled human populations for eons. Even seeming isolates are hardly homogeneous. No population remains untouched by the genetic markers of panmixia. So with all our ethnic diversity, we humans remain one race. The branches of our language tree attest to eons of migration, commerce, and congress that antedate our written records. We seem fated to live together, and the rapid pace and broad franchise in our travels and interactions today, complemented by the human penchant for settling down in new surroundings, only raise to new intensity the salient question of this book: how we can live together with integrity.
Cultural and intellectual diversity have long prompted claims in behalf of skepticism and relativism. But the claims are specious: The fact of differences does not steal the warrant from all commitments or confirm the equal soundness of just any. Still less does it make differences unreal – as to derive not-p from p. Yet powerful pragmatic worries urge us to deny deep differences with one another, or give up all claims to truth, or concede that no way of thinking or living is better or worse than the rest. Otherwise, we are told, we are doomed to endless conflict, to bootless bloodshed, and ultimate self-destruction.
Contents
- Lenn E. Goodman, Vanderbilt University, Tennessee
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- Religious Pluralism and Values in the Public Sphere
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- 05 June 2014
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- 07 April 2014, pp v-vi
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Religious Pluralism and Values in the Public Sphere
- Lenn E. Goodman
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- 05 June 2014
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- 07 April 2014
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How can we, as people and communities with different religions and cultures, live together with integrity? Does tolerance require us to deny our deep differences or give up all claims to truth, to trade our received traditions for skepticism or relativism? Cultural philosopher Lenn E. Goodman argues that we can respect one another and learn from one another's ways without either sharing them or relinquishing our own. He argues that our commitments to our own ideals and norms need not mean dogmatism or intolerance. In this study, Goodman offers a trenchant critique of John Rawls's pervasive claim that religious and metaphysical voices must be silenced in the core political deliberations of a democracy. Inquiry, dialogue, and open debate remain the safeguards of public and personal sanity, and any of us, Goodman illustrates, can learn from one another's traditions and explorations without abandoning our own.
33 - Happiness
- from VI - Ethics
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- By Lenn Goodman
- Robert Pasnau, University of Colorado Boulder
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- The Cambridge History of Medieval Philosophy
- Published online:
- 28 May 2011
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- 17 December 2009, pp 455-471
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Summary
THE ARISTOTELIAN BACKGROUND
At the beginning of the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle claims that all arts and inquiries, acts and choices, aim at some good. Indeed, they presume an ultimate good. For if they sought no good at all they would not be chosen, and without an ultimate intrinsic good their rationality would collapse. Aristotle’s title for that ultimate aim, a title meant to be uncontroversial, is eudaimonia, loosely translatable as happiness. Its nature is not a given: philosophy has its work cut out for it in clarifying just what this ultimate human goal must be. Some seek happiness in pleasure, wealth, or honor; others scramble for whatever sensation appeals at the moment or blindly pursue domination. Aristotle, however, maintains that (1) eudaimonia is something objective, not mere gratification, euphoria, or complacency; (2) it is not merely a passive state of well-being but an active life of doing well (euprattein); and (3) the virtues are dispositions that promote the good life that we seek. Aristotelian moral virtues such as courage, generosity, and self-control are dispositions, or habits of acting in accordance with a mean discerned by reason. Phronesis, strength in deliberation, is an intellectual virtue, but sophia, the queen of the intellectual virtues, finds our most godlike activity in contemplation. As Aristotle sees it, the virtues point the way to happiness, much as Plato sought the nature of reality through his conception of knowledge.
For medieval philosophers, as for Aristotle, contemplation is typically the consummate human goal, finding its highest object in the divine. Philosophers disagree, however, about the rapport of happiness with an active life. Horrified by the world’s state, some seek withdrawal; others strive for engagement, integrating contemplation and inquiry with moral, social, and political responsibility. Some reserve ultimate felicity to the hereafter, whereas others see windows opening on it in the here and now.
18 - Creation and Emanation
- from V - Metaphysics and Philosophical Theology
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- By Lenn Goodman
- Edited by Steven Nadler, University of Wisconsin, Madison, T. M. Rudavsky, Ohio State University
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- Book:
- The Cambridge History of Jewish Philosophy
- Published online:
- 28 May 2009
- Print publication:
- 15 December 2008, pp 599-618
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- Chapter
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Summary
Consider the varied ways in which existence in general and human existence specifically are conceptualized – the colorful stories that support those conceptualizations, give them birth, or put flesh on their bare bones. For positivists existence is a given, raising no great questions about its being as it is. For theists existence is a given in a profoundly different sense, a gift that need not have been made. That nature is and how it is are marks of divine generosity. Hindus sometimes picture existence as an endless yet fleeting cycle. Buddhists may retort that the cycle of rebirths and sufferings mirrors and mocks the moral logic of our choices, and those of our former selves, a carousel of lives to be escaped only by dismounting, letting go. Heideggerians may speak of our throwness; existentialists, of forlornness, an inevitable consequence of our moral dilemma: forced to choose for all humanity, yet incompetent to make any such choice. For the Stoic, we (and all of nature) are not thrown but cast, assigned a role and a nesting series of responsibilities, to ourselves, our fellows, and nature at large. Creation is the narrative that situates humanity and nature at large among such options, making nature the sign and argument of the unseen: Goodness here bespeaks a larger goodness elsewhere. The energy and thought we admire are arguments, in monotheism, of a higher energy and deeper thought, pointing toward the Unconditioned.