scholarly journals Tom Regan’s Philosophy of Animal Rights: Subjects-of-a-Life in the Context of Discussions of Intrinsic and Inherent Worth

Problemos ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 97 ◽  
pp. 87-98
Author(s):  
Erwin Lengauer

Modern animal rights debates began in the 1970s, mainly as part of the budding field of applied ethics in Anglo-American philosophy. In just a short time, these animal rights discourses received international academic respect, especially through analytically trained philosophers. Central for this development was the analysis that rights language can be principally used species neutrally. This paper’s contribution is to examine the central terms of Tom Regan’s still widely discussed theory for their actuality and usefulness. Hence strengthening these arguments for modern animal rights theory as a serious approach in (inter)national ethical and legal disputes. Translated from German by Gary Steiner, Bucknell University

Author(s):  
Georges Rey ◽  
Dan Blair

Although related to issues in the philosophy of language, the philosophy of linguistics is a largely distinct topic, being concerned not so much with language itself but with the character and significance of scientific theories about it, for example, with the ontology of linguistic entities, and with whether linguistics is properly regarded as a branch of psychology or as of a kind of mathematics. The work of Ferdinand de Saussure and Roman Jacobson initiated interest in many of these topics, leading to the structuralist movement in Continental Europe, but it was the work of Noam Chomsky that later sparked the cognitive revolution in Anglo-American philosophy and psychology. Chomsky argued that linguistics should not be concerned with the actual performance of speakers, but instead with the underlying system of rules that was responsible for the competence to produce and understand those utterances. Calling attention to a stunning array of data, he went on to argue that linguistic theory should be concerned with the innately specified system that enabled young children to acquire that competence so effortlessly in a remarkably short time. This claim he linked to the tradition of philosophical Rationalism, according to which substantial portions of human knowledge are not obtained from experience, as Empiricists had maintained, but are largely innate. These and related claims have occasioned important exchanges with a number of philosophers about the foundations of language and mind.


2020 ◽  
Vol 74 (1) ◽  
pp. 80-104
Author(s):  
Marie-Luise Raters

Most arguments of Applied Ethics (e.g.slippery slope argument, argument of double effect) are well analyzed. An exception is the argument 'I do not do this because it is not my duty'. It makes sense to call the argument the 'argument of supererogation' (ASE): Since J. Urmson's essay Saints and Heroes of 1958, those actions are called 'supererogations' which (despite of their moral value) are not supposed to be duties. The argument is widely used not only in Applied Ethics, but also in ordinary moral everyday life. Nevertheless, there is a need of investigation because it has an indecency-problem. The argument is convincing if an actor does not want to risk his life. It seems indecent, however, if an actor refuses a simple favor or a service of friendship with the 'argument of super-erogation', although they both constitute no duties. This paper reconstructs the 'argument of supererogation' as a syllogism. It analyzes its formal structure by benefitting from current Anglo-American literature on supererogation. The overall aim of this paper is to solve the problem of indecency.


Hypatia ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 309-328
Author(s):  
Asaf Angermann

Gillian Rose (1947–1995) was an influential though idiosyncratic British philosopher whose work helped introduce the Frankfurt School's critical theory and renew interest in Hegel, Kierkegaard, and Jewish thought in Anglo‐American philosophy. After years of relative oblivion, her life and thought have recently received new attention in philosophy, sociology, and theology. However, her work's critical Hegelian contribution to feminist philosophy still remains unexplored. This article seeks to reassess the place and the meaning of feminism and gender identity in Rose's work by addressing both her philosophical writings and her personal memoir, written in the months preceding her untimely death. It argues that although Rose's overall work was not developed in a feminist context, her philosophy, and in particular her ethical‐political notion of diremption, is valuable for developing a critical feminist philosophy that overcomes the binaries of law and morality, inclusion and exclusion, power and powerlessness—and focuses on the meaning of love as negotiating, rather than mediating, these oppositions.


Author(s):  
Stephen Mulhall

Born in Atlanta, Georgia, Stanley Cavell has held the Walter M. Cabot Chair in Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value at Harvard University since 1963. The range, diversity and distinctiveness of his writings are unparalleled in twentieth-century Anglo-American philosophy. As well as publishing essays on modernist painting and music, he has created a substantial body of work in film studies, literary theory and literary criticism; he has introduced new and fruitful ways of thinking about psychoanalysis and its relationship with philosophy; and his work on Heidegger and Derrida, taken together with his attempts to revitalize the tradition of Emersonian Transcendentalism, have defined new possibilities for a distinctively American contribution to philosophical culture. This complex oeuvre is unified by a set of thematic concerns – relating to scepticism and moral perfectionism – which are rooted in Cavell’s commitment to the tradition of ordinary language philosophy, as represented in the work of J.L. Austin and Wittgenstein.


Author(s):  
David Macarthur

In an early essay Cavell set his sights on trying to make Wittgenstein’s philosophy available to Anglo-American philosophy in the first decade after the publication of Philosophical Investigations when it was hard to see what Wittgenstein was up to through the haze of logical positivism, linguistic conventionalism and American pragmatism. In this paper I would like to make an analogous attempt to make Cavell’s philosophy available to Anglo-American philosophy against a perception of it as being slighted, missed, or avoided in contemporary philosophical discussion. 


Author(s):  
Michael Spitzer ◽  
Derek Matravers

This chapter considers the expression of emotion by music, the most interesting of the relations between music and the emotions. It is written from the dual perspective of Anglo-American philosophy and of musicology. The former focuses on the conceptual analysis of emotion, the latter on the underlying causes of the listeners’ experience. The theories of Stephen Davies and Jerrold Levinson are considered and criticized, and recent work in the psychology of music is examined in the light of the pioneering account of expression from Leonard Meyer. Finally, there is some speculation as to the future of work in this area.


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