Kafka’s short story foregrounds an essential relationship between punishment and language: punishment presupposes language and the mediation of discursive meaning through pain. The story prompts the realization that justice, punishment, and painful inscription are interlinked to some degree by all philosophical theories of punishment, thus detracting from the humane and progressive guise they don (relative to traditional forms of punishment). Kafka’s fable thus embodies the disturbing recognition that even liberal theories of punishment are implicated in chilling forms of instrumentalization (whilst occluding this process). Kafka’s story informs our own understanding of justice by offering an uncanny caricature that ought to be confronted by any comprehensive theory of justice. Relating to the story as a literal enactment of the abstract structure of punishment exposes startling links between punishment and components such as ritual, technology, and the attribution of "humane" conduct to those who punish. More specifically, Kafka draws unsettling links between ritualistic aspects of punishment and communitarian bonding by reaffirmation of shared values. He also delicately touches on the role of technology within punishment by exposing how deploying technology as a part of punishment forms a mode of laudatory self-shaping.

abstract

Is nonhuman animal-assisted therapy (AAT) a form of exploitation? After exploring possible moral vindications of AAT and after establishing a distinction between "use" and "exploitation," the essay distinguishes between forms of animal-assisted therapy that are morally unobjectionable and those modes of it that ought to be abolished. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]Copyright of Society & Animals is the property of Brill Academic Publishers and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder’s express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

I argue that many claims regarding the relations between philosophy and literature basically rehabilitate the old justifications of rhetoric. I then address the following challenges: (1) how to justify the idea that an appeal to "one’s whole being" (rather than one’s argumentative capacities) forms an advantage in moral philosophy; (2) how to explicate moral growth through art in the absence of idealistic and theological frameworks that explained such edification in the past; (3) how to formulate an error theory that can distinguish between reasoning and reasoning rationally when one admits the suggestive capacities of art and rhetoric into a mode of inquiry (philosophy) aimed at enhanced moral understanding.

’Speciesism’ accords greater value to human beings and their interests. It is supposed to be opposed to a liberationist stance, since it is precisely the numerous forms of discounting of animal interests which liberationists oppose. This association is mistaken. In this paper I claim that many forms of speciesism are consistent with upholding a robust liberationist agenda. Accordingly, several hotly disputed topics in animal ethics can be set aside. The significance of such clarification is that synthesizing liberationism with speciesism substantially modifies some of the coordinates of the debates over animal ethics. Secondly, defusing some counterintuitive implications of liberationism may make liberationism more popular than it currently is. Liberationism would no longer demand the eradication of ingrained speciesist intuitions. The paper finally presents a form of speciesism that does oppose liberationism, but is too strong and (fortunately) shared by few.

This paper formulates and defends a version of moral vegetarianism. Since eating animals is not causally connected to their death, I begin with analyzing the moral status of consumer actions that do not, taken on their own, harm animals . I then formulate a version of moral vegetarianism. Three different opponents of moral vegetarianism are then distinguished and criticized. I then take up the argument according to which eating animals benefits them. I close with the question of the desirability of collective vegetarianism from the point of view of animals.

Olfactoric imagery is abundantly employed in the Bramhall-Hobbes controversy. I survey some examples and then turn to the possible significance of this. I argue that by forcing Hobbes into the figurative exchange Bramhall scores points in terms of moving the controversy into ground that is not covered by the limited view of rationality that Hobbes is committed to according to his rhetoric (at least as Bramhall perceives it). Bramhall clearly wants to move from cool argument to a more affluent rhetorical appeal. I argue that choosing such a richer epistemology coheres with Bramhall’s deeper anxieties regarding the moral method used in the Leviathan. This essay thus deviates from other form-content analysis of Hobbes, in attempting to examine his rhetoric in practice, under the pressure of controversy. My more general concern is in relating seemingly formal polemical choices to moral concerns.

Beginning with Durkheim’s analysis of secular rituals, this essay explores the spillover from love-talk to religious-talk in Plato’s ’Phaedrus’, Shakespeare’s ’Romeo and Juliet’ and Sacher-Masoch’s ’Venus in Furs’. Religious categories are deployed in these texts in three distinct ways: in Plato, the temptation to worship the beloved is present but is also avoided because of shame; in Shakespeare, the category of worship enables positing the loved one’s supposed holiness in order for it to be transgressed; whilst in Sacher-Masoch, worship and ritual in relation to the love object are literally acted out. I claim that such moments exemplify three ways of relating to erotic merging and three modalities of creating erotic force. The essay’s grander thesis is that the contemporary aggrandizing of love, the present-day "religion of love" in secular culture, can be understood through erotic love’s (rather limited) ability to channel and feed needs that were previously organized into religious experience.

The article discusses the social philosophy of vegans. Vegans charge moral vegetarians with inconsistency: if eating animals is a participation in a wrong practice, consuming eggs and dairy products is likewise wrong because it is a cooperation with systematic exploitation. Vegans say that even the more humane parts of the contemporary dairy and egg industry rely on immoral practices, and that therefore moral vegetarianism is too small a step in the right direction. According to vegans, moral vegetarians have conceded that animals are not means; that human pleasure cannot override animal suffering and death; that some industries ought to be banned; and that all this carries practical implications as to their own actions. Yet they stop short of a full realization of what speciesist culture involves and what living a moral life in such an environment requires. Moral vegans distinguish themselves from moral vegetarians in accepting the practical prescriptions of altogether avoiding benefiting from animal exploitation, not just of avoiding benefiting from the killing. Vegans take the killing to be merely one aspect of the systematic exploitation of animals. The moral logic of veganism appears sound. The viability of moral vegetarianism depends on the ability to establish a meaningful difference between animal-derived products which they boycott, and those that they consume. Moral vegetarians agree that the egg and dairy industry has to be radically reformed.

This essay argues that by structuring specific patterns of response, a work of literature (Hamlet) can create an awareness that cannot be achieved through systematic philosophical presentation. The play’s extensive [...]

In this article I attempt to present an explanation that integrates the five features needed for the cognitive (knowledge-yielding) linking of philosophy and literature. These features are, first, explaining how a literary work can support a general claim. Second, explaining what is uniquely gained through concentrating on such support patterns as they appear in aesthetic contexts in particular. Third, explaining how features of aesthetic response are connected with knowledge. Four, maintaining a distinction between manipulation and adequate persuasion. Five, achieving all this without invoking what David Novitz has called “a shamelessly functional and didactic view of literature.” [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]Copyright of Metaphilosophy is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder’s express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper investigates the complicated status of critical thought and its suspension in Plato’s ’Phaedo’. The philosophical "heart" of this dialogue lies not in the arguments over the immortality of the soul, but rather in the discrepancy between these and the dramatic occurrences and what this implies. Plato uses Socrates to both embody the ideal of critical reflection and philosophical searching, and at the same time to exhibit moments wherein reflection has to give way to suasion and allowing oneself to be "magically charmed". Withdrawing from a critical attitude is articulated both by Cebes and Siminias who are the sharpest and most critical of Socrates’ interlocutors at the dialogue. But the same "misosophic" movement may also be perceived by Socrates. This makes for a fascinating metaphilosophical vision in which philosophy cannot be equated with argumentative, rigorous thought. Underlying this theme is another one, in which Socrates’ general detachment from his own body and the body of others is momentarily replaced by a connection with a beautiful part of another’s body: Phaedo’s hair. Avoiding a critical attitude intertwines with this abrupt emergence of bodily contact, creating a retreat from a certain vision of philosophical life that we usually identify with Socrates.

I argue that some important preemptive causal chains cannot be accommodated by a consequentialist framework. While the literature of the last two decades has discussed the question of ethical deliberation in cases of irrelevant outcome, I construct a different case that directly concentrates on the ’comparative’ assumption that underlies consequentialism. The flaw that would be exposed in case consequentialism cannot successfully deal with some types of overdetermination would, therefore, pertain not only to the ’implications’ of consequentialist reasoning, but to the reasoning itself, when it is predicated (as it is) on comparison limited only to the relative value of states of affairs. Consequentialism would thus be exposed as relying on a notion of comparison that does not encompass some moral elements that we expect it to include.

Issues discussed concern the portrayal of nihilism in William Shakespeare’s ’Macbeth,’ focusing on the existential and psychological aspects of character motivation. Topics include Macbeth’s anxiety over loss of control, his detached emotional state, and the relationship between literature and moral philosophy.

I attempt to explain Plato’s choice of dialogue through an analysis of what he regarded as the conditions of knowledge acquisition. I see the main contribution of the paper in exposing the way in which time and pain are, for Plato, conditions of knowledge acquisition. Plato endorsed the "learning through suffering," or pathei mathos, convention, central to Greek drama, and did so not through theory but through the praxis some of the dialogues employ. This addition of experiential components to the more cognitively oriented definitions of knowledge that Socrates uses complicates what these works may say about human knowledge. I analyze these tensions and the bearing they may have on the question of Plato’s choice of dialogue, that is, on his rhetoric in practice. The requirements for actual persuasion, as Plato specifies them in the Seventh Letter,, are only partially met by the fictional scenes of argumentation and knowledge conveying that Plato presents. However, such scenes permit transcending some of the limitations of written, systematic, nonpersonal discourse. The presentation of such interactions to a real reader through dialogue turns into a mode of writing that is closer to meeting the demands of actual communication of knowledge - at least knowledge regarding what Plato envisaged as being the highest sort of epistemic communication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]Copyright of Metaphilosophy is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder’s express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Details of the characterization and motivation of Richard III in William Shakespeare’s ’The Tragedy of King Richard the Third’ can be used to show one way to explore specifics of connection between the rhetoric of literary texts and philosophical response patterns. Subtleties of Shakespearian rhetoric do not lend themselves to simple connection to a conceptual position. Shakespeare deals with willfully choosing villainy.