Value Inquiry Book Series – serie

This new and expanded edition of G. John M. Abbarno’s anthology The Ethics of Homelessness underscores what is ignored in plain sight: people without a home or dwelling are also without privacy and dignity. It is argued that they lack moral standing. The chapters uncover the harsh realities of poverty where economic value overrides competing human values. Naomi Zack argues that homelessness is symbolic of society’s materialistic values. It has a tendency to resist sufficient charity and perpetuates conditions of injustice. Uma Narayan questions whether the homeless have protection under the U.S. Constitution. Other authors present an enlarged sphere of homeless to include runaway children, refugees, adoptees and the disabled. The book demonstrates the value of applied philosophy.

The ancient religious thinker Tertullian asked: “What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?”, implying that faith and philosophy have nothing to say to each other. The history of this dialogue has shaped the intellectual dialogue from the very beginning right up to the present. In this book, Jerry H. Gill has traced the dynamics of this dialogue and in the conclusion he has offered his own answer to the questions it raises.

Winner of the 2024 Outstanding Academic Titles award in Choice, a publishing unit of the Association of College & Research Libraries (ACRL)Zero has been axial in human development, but the origin and discovery of zero has never been satisfactorily addressed by a comprehensive, systematic and above all interdisciplinary research program. In this volume, over 40 international scholars explore zero under four broad themes: history; religion, philosophy & linguistics; arts; and mathematics & the sciences. Some propose that the invention/discovery of zero may have been facilitated by the prior evolution of a sophisticated concept of Nothingness or Emptiness (as it is understood in non-European traditions); and conversely, inhibited by the absence of, or aversion to, such a concept of Nothingness in the West. But not all scholars agree. Join the debate.

This book offers the first comprehensive reconstruction of Leonidas Donskis’ political thought, revealing a distinctive liberalism grounded in an embrace of mutual vulnerability, moral responsibility, and human connection against the backdrop of the vicissitudes of modernity. Tracing Donskis’ insights on existential insecurity, hatred and conspiratorial thinking, populism, and the abuses of power, the book aims to uncover a recipe for recovering democracy as a moral order. By foregrounding repersonalisation and the recovery of genuine encounters, the book illuminates Donskis’ hopeful, yet sober, vision: that in an unstable world, responsibility and reflective agency remain the foundations of a resilient democratic life.

This book examines the convergence of emotion, reason, and culture in the development of value theory from modern phenomenology to contemporary debate. It addresses the emergence of values in lived experience and demonstrates how the various theories of value that emerged between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are indispensable for understanding more precisely the contemporary debate on moral issues. Key research questions include: What role did early phenomenologists play in redefining value beyond formal moral principles? How do psychological approaches illuminate the methodological foundations of value analysis? By integrating neglected nineteenth-century sources and providing concrete research frameworks, this book offers scholars a revitalized conceptual apparatus for advancing debates on value across philosophy, psychology, sociology, and cultural studies.

Chiastic order is an ancient expression for cross-classification. As such, it is the primordial form of non-quantified modelling and combinatory heuristics. This book presents an epistemological history of non-quantified modelling: its prehistory in the form of rhetorical and epistemic chiasmus; its early (pre-symbolic) use by Plato as a cross-order (paradigmatic) modelling method; its prototype development by Ramon Llull as a heuristic ars combinatoria; its “modern” use by Gottfried Leibniz based on a calculus of concepts; and Fritz Zwicky’s 20th-century promotion of the “morphological approach”. Examples of contemporary computer-aided combinatorial modelling are presented in the areas of operational research, policy analysis, scenario development and design theory.

What is intrinsic value? What is the origin of value? Are people always superior to nature? This book is a philosophical analysis of the human relationship to the non-human world. It is a pioneering study of the philosophy of nature-conservation in relation to the discussion of intrinsic value. Vilkka develops a naturalistic or naturocentric theory of value that is based on ethical extensionism and pluralism. Vilkka analyzes natural values and environmental attitudes: zoocentrism, biocentrism, and ecocentrism. This book forms a taxonomy for nature having intrinsic value. The theory of intrinsic value is based on naturocentric and naturogenic values. The book questions the thesis of weak anthropocentrism that denies the existence of naturogenic values. In Vilkka's theory, animals and nature are the origin of value. She defends the existence of zoogenic and biogenic values in the non-human world and discusses the possibility of ecogenic value, nature as a whole having value independent of human or animal minds. Vilkka analyzes the goodness and rights of nature, the problem of priorities, and ecological humanism. A naturocentric recommendation is that the well-being of animals and nature should have priority over human values at least in some real decision contexts. Ecological humanism recommends an attitude of respect for people, animals, and nature. The book includes an extensive glossary, index, and bibliography.

The essays in Explorations of Value are drawn from work first presented at the 20th Conference of Value Inquiry. They are not mere records of conference presentations. The authors have reflected on their initial presentations. They have re-thought arguments in light of discussions at the conference. They have revised their work. All of this has combined to bring fresh ideas on important issues into carefully considered discussions.The nineteen authors of the essays do not share a common viewpoint on all problems of value inquiry. They are certainly not in agreement in their conclusions. Their concerns, however, cluster around a recognizable body of questions. Several of the authors raise fundamental questions on the nature of values and the possibility of giving them an objective status. Some of the authors raise questions about where value inquiry becomes value advocacy. They are also ready to ask whether or not advocacy is in the legitimate purview of philosophers. A number of authors set out to examine conditions of moral practice and of harming or benefiting people in general. Other authors show a concern for juxtaposing moral values and aesthetic values, in some cases to observe similarities, in some, differences. Finally, a few authors focus on particular notions such as forgiveness, intimacy, and love that are central to our lives.

This book takes up the philosophical task described by Samuel Taylor Coleridge and F.D. Maurice as digging toward the common humanity that is the ground of value. The book is an essay in philosophy defined by time (its focal point is the nineteenth century), space (its focal point is Britain), and persons (it is concerned especially with Maurice's contribution to social theory). The first chapter explores the Victorian Age as historical context and background for Maurice's work. The second explores Coleridge's thought as philosophical context and background. The third explores a range of Maurice's theological works that spans his entire career. The fourth turns, finally, as Maurice did, to the practice of adult education as the place of social transformation and, more particularly, the contested terrain where human nature and human souls are turned to work in the world as persons, not hands.

This book extends the study of homelessness beyond the need of shelter. Philosophical exploration exposes the fragility of human fulfillment in contemporary society. The authors weave the moral fabric of what it means to be human. They show how economic and political values compromise the dignity of homeless persons. They argue for recognition of rights for the homeless, who otherwise would be voiceless and without membership in the moral community. This pioneering contribution instills our moral sensitivity to the homeless condition and justifies our moral responsibility to change that condition.

In this book, Rhodes provides a nonevaluative account of coercion. He begins with a thorough discussion of the charge that coercion is an essentially contested concept. He argues that effective communication of regulations pertaining to human conduct requires a basic level of clarity as to the kind of conduct being regulated. Accordingly, he argues that before we prescribe or proscribe conduct, we should describe it. In short, he maintains that wherever possible description should precede prescription and proscription. Rhodes begins his descriptive project by providing a fundamental account of human motivation. Upon this foundation he supports his distinctions between threats, offers, throffers, and neutral proposals. He argues that all coercion claims can be understood in light of these components. He applies this analysis to three prominent accounts of coercion as advanced by F.A. Hayek, Harry Frankfurt, and Robert Nozick. After comparing and contrasting these views, Rhodes provides his own account. Rhodes's account is based upon the identification of what he refers to as perceived-threat-avoidance-behavior as a necessary condition for coercion. As a descriptive, or nonevaluative, account, Rhodes is able to identify coercion independent from normative judgments. He argues that it is not the wrongfulness of some conduct that makes it coercion, instead, it is the coerciveness of some conduct that makes it wrong. Unique to Rhodes's account, coercion is not necessarily wrong. As a descriptive account, his view permits an independent analysis of the moral status of an act of coercion. The book concludes with a discussion of the normatively significant variables of a coercion claim.

This book critically assesses the implications of modern medicine's claim to be a natural science. Medicine models its scientific and clinical self-understanding on an obsolete positivist conception of science, reality, and consciousness. In this view, the body is modeled as a biological machine, disease as breakdown of the machine, and therapy as physical measures to fix the machine.The problems besetting medical science and practice are rooted in the inadequacy of the positivist philosophical assumptions regarding the nature of science, reality and consciousness To base the diagnostic practices and therapeutic regimes purely on knowledge of physical processes in the human body is, in view of this analysis, at best grossly inadequate, at worst thoroughly dehumanizing (Anton van Niekerk: Editorial Foreword). This means that medicine's clinical method cannot be transformed without transforming the underlying view of science, of reality, and of the human person.The book proposes a broader model of science which overcomes the outdated dichotomy between human and natural sciences. Science is viewed as an interdisciplinary exercise generating multiple perspectives. The insights of the human sciences are essential for scientific clinical medicine. Utilizing evolutionary biology and complexity theory, the author proposes an alternative understanding of reality and human consciousness as a basis for a transformed clinical method. Reality is a hierarchy of systems of increasing complexity. Different levels can be distinguished, namely material systems, living material systems, conscious living material systems and self-conscious living material systems. Each level represents a new manner of being which requires a different scientific discourse of understanding. Using this model of reality the author argues against understanding human consciousness as a byproduct of physical processes in the brain. The human person is a self-conscious, complex, psycho-somatic system, whose well-being is conditioned by much more than physical processes.

This book discovers freedom in the colonial idea of African primitiveness. As human transcendence, freedom escapes the drawbacks of otherness, as defended by ethnophilosophy, while exposing the idiosyncratic inspiration of Eurocentric universalism. Decolonization calls for the reconnection with freedom, that is, with myth-making understood as the inaugural act of cultural pluralism. The cultural condition of modernization emerges when the return to the past deploys the future.

This book presents a creative approach to the problem of individual authenticity. What is authenticity? What are its necessary conditions? How is an authentic self possible in society? What are the relationships of authenticity, morality, and happiness? The book examines a wide range of questions in Eastern and Western thought, to which it gives novel answers.

This book makes compassionate caring and connectedness the central themes. Imbedded in the human psyche we find a deep yearning for connection. This book explores the many roadblocks that human beings put in the way of a healthy and respectful dialogue with each other, with nature, and with the universe. It also cites numerous examples from literature, philosophy, and society of a reawakening sense of connectedness.

This book contains scholarly contributions to several current debates in the philosophy of medicine and health care regarding the nature of health and health promotion, concepts and measurements of mental illness, phenomenological conceptions of health and illness, allocation of health care resources, criteria for proper medical science, the clinical meeting, and ethical constraints in such a meeting.With one exception, the authors in this book are or have been teachers or graduate students at the interdisciplinary Department of Health and Society (Tema H) at Linköping University, Sweden. While all the texts have a philosophical focus, many other disciplines have influenced the choice of specific perspectives. The university backgrounds of the authors range from medicine, psychology, sociology, and religion to philosophy. What binds the authors together is their deep interest in the theory of medicine and in the pursuit of a philosophy of humanistic medicine and health care.

This book elaborates the author's original metaphysics, panenmentalism, focusing on novel aspects of the singularity of any person. Among these aspects, integrated in a systematic view, are: love and singularity; private, intersubjective, and public accessibility; multiple personality; freedom of will; akrasia; a way out of the empiricist-rationalist conundrum; the possibility of God; and some major moral questions.

This book treats values as the basis for all of philosophy, an approach distinct from critiquing theories of value and far rarer. “First Philosophy,” the effort to justify the foundations for a system of philosophy, is one of the main issues that divide philosophers today. McDonald’s philosophy of values is a comprehensive attempt to replace philosophies of “existence,” “being,” “experience,” the “subject,” or “language,” with a philosophy that locates value as most basic. This transformation is a radical move within Western philosophy as a whole, since it has never been done in such a thoroughgoing way. Hugh P. McDonald makes a comprehensive case against first philosophy as metaphysical, by mounting a case against all metaphysical systems of philosophy.Radical Axiology: A First Philosophy of Values is a fresh start for a rebirth of philosophy. While other movements debate the “death of philosophy,” this book radically re-evaluates the direction of philosophy by discovering values at the basis of all philosophy. This reorientation addresses the question of what the love of wisdom can mean for us today.

This volume collects twenty-one original essays that discuss Michael Krausz’s distinctive and provocative contribution to the theory of interpretation. At the beginning of the book Krausz offers a synoptic review of his central claims, and he concludes with a substantive essay that replies to scholars from the United States, England, Germany, India, Japan, and Australia. Krausz’s philosophical work centers around a distinction that divides interpreters of cultural achievements into two groups. Singularists assume that for any object of interpretation only one single admissible interpretation can exist. Multiplists assume that for some objects of interpretation more than one interpretation is admissible. A central question concerns the ontological entanglements involved in interpretive activity. Domains of application include works of art and music, as well as literary, historical, legal and religious texts. Further topics include truth commissions, ethnocentrism and interpretations across cultures.

This book explores many of the issues that arise when we consider persons who are in pain, who are suffering, and who are nearing the end of life. Suffering provokes us into a journey toward discovering who we are and forces us to rethink many of the views we hold about ourselves.

This book presents a modification of the dialectical method of Jean-Paul Sartre as a tool for critical discourse on aesthetic experience. Three practical demonstrations are offered of the modified progressive-regressive method: (1) on the original location and function of a medieval altarpiece, (2) on a theme in the literature of the Marquis de Sade, and (3) on a theory of consciousness in a novel by Samuel Beckett. The study concludes with guidelines on how the method may enhance critical discourse in teaching.

This book philosophically explores a wide range of subjects relating to evil and human wickedness, including the nature of evil, explaining evil, evil and moral responsibility, and responding to evil.

This book examines core concerns of human life. What is the relationship between a meaningful life and theism? Why are some human beings radically adrift, without radical foundations, and struggling with hopelessness? Is the cosmos meaningless? Is human life akin to the ancient Myth of Sisyphus? What is the role of struggle and suffering in creating meaning? How do we discover or create value? Is happiness overrated as a goal of life? How, if at all, can we learn to die meaningfully?

This extended essay joins an old conversation at the intersection of freedom and necessity. Though it takes place at the beginning of the twenty-first century by the “Christian” reckoning that has become an integral part of European identity, it will at times read like a conversation between classical Greece and nineteenth-century Europe. The cast consists of characters drawn from Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Plato as well as the authors themselves - Plato, Aristotle, Locke, Hume, Kant, Kierkegaard, MacIntyre, and Nussbaum. Some of these writers have been associated with displaced, displacing claims of universality; but each is in place and in time in ways that are instructive for ethics. Myth, the matter of stories, becomes also the matter of critical reflection, which in turn is subjected to critical reflection. Every fragment of philosophy is a contribution to the reflection, and it is nothing if it is separated from the matter - the stories, the myths, and the characters (including us) who both make them and live in them.

This book evaluates the claims of scientific creationism versus materialistic evolution, while examining other scenarios. Consistently philosophical in methodology and perspective, the book is radically interdisciplinary in content, examining data and arguments drawn from natural science, philosophy, and theology. This work challenges the limits of human knowledge regarding every major question touching on human origins.

This book is the first to discuss, for an English-speaking audience, the ideas of the German-Jewish man of letters, thinker, and activist Günther Anders. Anders is one of few philosophers to deal intensely with the moral consequences of Auschwitz and Hiroshima. He can rightly be called the philosopher of the atomic age, and his thinking a philosophy of modern technology.In biting manifestoes, sharp aphorisms, and penetrating essays, in stirring diary notes and political fables, Anders strikes out the age in which we live. As a twentieth-century visionary, he exposes the absence of the moral and social imaginations that is necessary to prevent our history from ending in a total catastrophe. In the gap between our technical creations and our utter inability to imagine their destructive potential lies the basis for the unstoppable activity of this practical philosopher. From every possible angle, he attempts to comprehend this modern schizophrenia in its roots and consequences. Anders is one of the most important thinkers of the twentieth century. He tried to describe and analyze the variety of manifestations of the “self-destructive progress of our technical civilization,” which makes humanity into an “anti-quated” sort. He diagnosed countless important problems, ranging from the world of media to the dictates of the world of machinery, and he investigated their social, political, and philosophical meaning.To read his writings is more than becoming acquainted with a rich and colorful philosopher. It is more than an encounter with a moving and passionate individual. It is ultimately a confrontation with oneself, with our own guilt and responsibility, with our personal hopes and fears, with our lack of imagination and with our need to recover it.

This book is an original philosophic exploration of the meaning of Kierkegaard’s life, his thought, and his works. It makes a bold case for Kierkegaard’s recognition of the concrete existence of the individual, including Kierkegaard himself, as crucial to the spiritual life. Written with delicate insight, and beautifully translated from Hebrew, this work offers valuable new turns to understanding the puzzling life-work of a modern giant of spiritual reflection.

This book demonstrates that the most forceful contribution to George Gurdjieff's world-view is Sufism, understood as the tradition of seeking truth wherever it can be found, especially at the meeting place of the world religions. Gurdjieff's masterpiece, Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson, is philosophically analyzed in its use of literary devices to jolt the reader into radical transformation.

This book deals with a rejection of the widespread fakeries that have emerged in twentieth-century art, which we call by their Platonic name, sophistry. The book also presents brief descriptions of some of the ideas of Martin Heidegger and Nicolas Berdyaev as to what constitutes a beautiful work of art, and how an authentic relation to the beauty in a work of art enhances human existence.