Double Motivation, Gods and Psychic Organs in the Iliad

In earlier chapters I outlined the development of the concept of culture in Marxism and sociology, paying particular attention to the contributions of Gramsci and Weber with their critiques of reductionism and their emphasis on human action and purpose. The discovery of culture as an autonomous realm of human values, action and structure corresponds closely with the emergence of an advanced industrial capitalism with powerful modernising forces that generated a fluid and pluralist social structure, new social classes and fractions of classes, new professions, new industries and services, and populations increasingly concentrated in burgeoning urban centres. And it was during the second half of the nineteenth century that the arts, too, were modernised: art, literature, music (as well as philosophy and psychology) were transformed through the development of new modes of narrative and concepts of time (for example, the stream of consciousness novel); painting and music broke from the traditional mimetic forms to conceive a fleeting and fluid reality with no apparent centre (impressionism in painting, Debussy, Schoenberg, Webern and Berg in music); while the expressionist theatre of Strindberg and Wedekind abandoned all notions of a stable and unified self.

The Conclusion addresses several ways in which Hume’s treatment of the passions is supposed to contribute to his general philosophical views. It may function as: (1) a solution to the skeptical problem of the self that emerges from Book 1 of the Treatise; (2) a medium for his account of morality and moral sentiment; (3) a phenomenon that makes sociability and psychological well-being possible; (4) an instrument to explain the psychological aspects of religious belief; (5) a means to explain paradoxical emotions like aesthetic appreciation of tragedy; and (6) a naturalistic alterative to religious perspectives on human action and morality. Hume’s psychology of the passions serves all of these purposes and can only do so because the signature feature of the passions is their role in initiating action.

This chapter starts with a theoretical introduction to the concept of the creation and perception of cultural landscapes. Niche construction theory and human agency, often treated as controverse concepts are discussed as complementary aspects of human environment relations. The DPSIR framework (the concept of Driving forces, Pressures, States, Impacts and Responses) is applied as valuable approach for the explanation of the transformations in human behaviour in reaction to environmental developments. Aspects of intended and unintended reactions to human agency and action are discussed as well as the temporal and spatial scales of transformations that consequently occured. Therefore, four examples are presented from case studies within the CRC 1266. The Palaeolithic and Mesolithic use of natural resources will have left visible but short-lived traces in the landscape as first steps towards a cultural landscape. The role of humans in the spread of plants and the influence of human action on the plant distribution and composition are discussed in this context. The Neolithic transformation shows a new dimension of changes in the landscape. The producing economy leads to a wide range of resource extractions that enable a much higher population being nourished by the manipulated environment with anthropogenic open land as a new landscape element or niche. Bronze Age progression and intensification of land use in many areas lead to soil degradation and the widespread expansion of heathlands. Even though the process was too slow to be perceived consciously, associated economic adaptations to this new type of cultural landscape are observable. The fourth example explains an unexpected positive aspect of deforestation. In the context of Neolithic Trypillian megasites the soil developed towards a deep and fertile Chernozem. The role of earthworms is discussed as key factor for the soil development in the transition from a forest and forest steppe towards the agrarian steppe of today. The difference between human agency and human action is discussed for the presented examples as the awareness of the consequences of human behaviour very much depends the velocity of changes and human perception.

This study investigates the Ogunpa floods in Ibadan as a manifestation of both natural hazard and moral failure, situated within environmental ethics and philosophical discourse. Flooding, though natural in origin, is increasingly intensified by human actions such as deforestation, poor waste management, and urban planning violations, rendering it a subject of ethical scrutiny. While existing research focuses on hydrological and engineering perspectives, a critical gap remains in integrating philosophical frameworks, particularly free will, determinism, and moral responsibility into flood analysis. This research asks: To what extent are recurrent floods in Ibadan a result of human moral failure rather than mere natural occurrence? Employing qualitative analysis, the study draws on philosophical reasoning, environmental ethics, and case study methodology, engaging with Urban Resilience Theory to evaluate systemic vulnerabilities. The key finding is that the Ogunpa floods are not purely natural disasters but are significantly exacerbated by avoidable human decisions, thus constituting a form of moral evil. The paper concludes that sustainable flood mitigation requires not only infrastructural interventions but ethical accountability and proactive governance. Recommendations include institutionalising disaster risk management, enforcing planning laws, and public education on environmental stewardship.

Aquinas argued that every human action is for the sake of some end. Aquinas distinguished between a human action (actus humanus) and an action of a human being (action hominis). Human actions are those that proceed from human beings in virtue of their distinguishing power, which is to be in control of their own actions (dominus suorum actuum) through reason and will. Anything else that a human being does can be called the action of a human being, but not a human action. Human actions are those that are willed on the basis of rational deliberation. Aquinas argued that at any given time, a human being can have only one ultimate end. This single ultimate end can be an aggregate of goods that the agent regards as collectively constituting his perfection. This ultimate end, whether unitary or aggregate, must be (Aquinas argued) the ultimate explanation for all of a given person's actions. All human beings have the same ultimate end, for all human beings desire their own perfection, though different people will have different ideas about what perfection consists in. Consilium is an investigation of the means by which the intended end may be attained or realized. Consilium terminates with an act of iudicium, the intellect's judgment that one of the means that have received the will's consent is the best, all things considered.

Preface. Part I: The Project. 1. Human Nature. 2. Philosophical Anthropology. 3. Grammatical Investigation. 4. Philosophical Investigation. 5. Philosophy and 'Mere Words'. 6. A Challenge to the Autonomy of the Philosophical Enterprise: Quine. 7. The Platonic and the Aristotelian Traditions in Philosophical Anthropology. Part II: Substance. 1. Substances: Things. 2. Substances: Stuffs. 3. Substance-referring Expressions. 4. Conceptual Connections between Things and Stuffs. 5. Substances and their Substantial parts. 6. Substances Conceived as Natural Kinds. 7. Substances Conceived as a Common Logico-linguistic Category. 8. A Historical Digression: Misconceptions of the Category of Substance. Part III: Causation. 1. Causation: Humean, Neo-Humean and Anti-Humean. 2. On Causal Necessity. 3. Event Causation is not a Prototype. 4. The Inadequacy of Hume's Analysis: Observability, Spatio-temporal Relations, and Regularity. 5. The Flaw in the Early Modern Debate. 6. Agent Causation as Prototype. 7. Agent Causation is Only a Prototype. 8. Event Causation and Other Centres of Variation. 9. Overview. Part IV: Powers. 1. Possibility. 2. Powers of the Inanimate. 3. Active and Passive Powers of the Inanimate. 4. Power and its Actualization. 5. Power and its Vehicle. 6. First- and Second-order Powers Loss of Power. 7. Human Powers: Basic Distinctions. 8. Human Powers: Further Distinctions. 9. Dispositions. Part V: Agency. 1. Inanimate Agents. 2. Inanimate Needs. 3. Animate Agents: Needs and Wants. 4. Volitional Agency: Preliminaries. 5. Doings, Acts and Actions. 6. Human Agency and Action. 7. A Historical Overview. 8. Human Action as Agential Causation of Movement. Part VI: Teleology and Teleological Explanation. 1. Teleology and Purpose. 2. What Things have a Purpose?. 3. Purpose and Axiology. 4. The Beneficial. 5. A Historical Digression: Teleology and Causality. Part VII: Reasons and Explanation of Human Action. 1. Rationality and Reasonableness. 2. Reason, Reasoning and Reasons. 3. Explaining Human Behaviour. 4. Explanation in Terms of Agential Reasons. 5. Causal Mythologies. Part VIII: The Mind. 1. Homo loquens. 2. The Cartesian Mind. 3. The Nature of the Mind. Part IX: The Self and the Body. 1. The Emergence of the Philosophers' Self. 2. The Illusions of the Philosophers' Self. 3. The Body. 4. The Relationship between Human Beings and their Bodies. Part X: The Person. 1. The Emergence of the Concept. 2. An Unholy Trinity: Descartes, Locke and Hume. 3. Changing Bodies and Switching Brains: Puzzle Cases and Red Herrings. 4. The Concept of a Person. Index

Moved by the Spirit: Patterning the Gifts on the Passions in Aquinas Monica Marcelli-Chu WHAT IS HIGHEST is grasped according to what is lowest.1 It is fitting, St. Thomas Aquinas affirms, that Scripture teaches spiritual matters by comparison to what is bodily, for the human person “comes to what is intelligible by means of those things that are sensible.”2 What is “more removed from God” is a means by which we come to know God, and so draw nearer to God: “for it is clearer to us what is not of God, than what is.”3 Following this principle, I present the movement of the Holy Spirit in the gifts according to an analogical patterning on the movement of the passions, which ground an understanding of receptivity in human agency. This consideration of passion-movement discloses a mode of activity that emphasizes external agency, and specifies the divine wisdom that undergirds both natural and spiritual instinct. In an essay on the gifts, re-visioning them as being at the center of Thomistic morality, Servais Pinckaers describes instinctus [End Page 273] as needing “to undergo a major transformation” from its use in the broader animal world for use in relation to the Spirit.4 He also notes that spiritual spontaneity is “very different, in its relationship to freedom, from the spontaneity of the senses or of external nature”; and of the instinct of the Holy Spirit he says, “there is obviously nothing blind about such an instinct.”5 The question is thus raised about the relationship between natural and spiritual instinct: can a so-called “blind” instinct of nature be analogically appropriated to spiritual movement? In order to specify this relationship, I investigate passion-movement and its underlying receptivity as the paradigm for being moved by the Spirit in the gifts. This approach considers human activity in terms of movements that reflect the intellectual nature of the human person, even if they are not “properly speaking” rational. “Properly speaking” is a phrase Aquinas often uses to differentiate properties that belong essentially to the nature of a thing or power from those that belong in an extended or accidental sense. In reading Aquinas on human action and virtue, it may be tempting to rely on the former, namely, the essential attributes indicated in a definition.6 Such an approach, however, limits Aquinas’s thought to the realm of the “proper,” leaving aside all other elements as questionable or conjectural.7 Strictly limiting [End Page 274] the meaning of a term in this way is inconsistent with Aquinas’s multivalent use of terms, as well as the limits of particular terms themselves which, in their own limited fashion, signal realities that a term does not (and cannot) fully encapsulate.8 The movement toward precision in understanding the meaning of a term is then also a movement toward grasping its limits.9 In grasping the limits of a term for understanding a reality, the reader grasps the divine mystery and agency that surpasses her reasoned grasp, even as it governs and moves her seeking. The term “human action,” properly speaking, refers to the movement of will under reason’s deliberation of the end and of means to the end; hence the definition of will as “rational appetite.”10 “Passion,” on the other hand, refers to an appetitive movement as “the effect of the agent on the patient,” or as the result of “being drawn to the agent,” namely, the experience of being moved by an agent-object, especially when it involves bodily change; hence passion “properly speaking” belongs to the sensitive appetite.11 While the term “human action” primarily describes the person as a self-mover and bears a direct relation to reason, the term “passion,” as a movement of the sensitive appetite, primarily describes the person as one who is [End Page 275] moved, and is considered a movement that is below reason.12 At the same time, Aquinas uses the term “passion” to describe human action; an extended meaning of the term “passion” is needed to understand the fullness of the reality he calls “human action.”13 The emphasis in Aquinas’s treatment of the virtues is on...

Uusitalo, S. (2015). Addiction, recovery and moral agency: Philosophical considerations. The International Journal Of Alcohol And Drug Research, X(Y), N-M. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.7895/ijadr.vXiY.190 Aims: The purpose of this paper is to argue that it is important to recognize that addicts are morally accountable even for their addictive action, as moral agency is more generally an important factor in full-blown human agency. The challenge is to identify the problems that addicts have in their agency without discarding their potentially full-blown agency. Design: In philosophy of agency, moral responsibility and accountability, in particular, may refer to control over one’s action. I discuss this control as reason-responsiveness and, on a more general level, illustrate the importance of moral agency to human agency with a contrasting example of psychopaths and addicts as agents. Measures: A philosophical analysis is carried out in order to argue for the relevance and importance of moral accountability in therapeutic models of addiction. Findings: The example of psychopaths and addicts illustrates that moral agency is part of full-blown human agency, as psychopaths are generally believed to lack moral skills common to non-psychopathic individuals. I argue that addicts are not analogous to psychopaths in the framework of moral agency in this respect. Conclusions: By fleshing out the conceptual considerations in the framework of addiction therapies, I clarify the relevance and importance of moral accountability in therapeutic models of addiction. If evidence-based therapies attempt to restore the addict’s full-fledged agency at least in respect to addiction, then acknowledging addicts’ moral accountability for their action does matter.

Uusitalo, S. (2015). Addiction, recovery and moral agency: Philosophical considerations. The International Journal Of Alcohol And Drug Research, X(Y), N-M. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.7895/ijadr.vXiY.190 Aims: The purpose of this paper is to argue that it is important to recognize that addicts are morally accountable even for their addictive action, as moral agency is more generally an important factor in full-blown human agency. The challenge is to identify the problems that addicts have in their agency without discarding their potentially full-blown agency. Design: In philosophy of agency, moral responsibility and accountability, in particular, may refer to control over one’s action. I discuss this control as reason-responsiveness and, on a more general level, illustrate the importance of moral agency to human agency with a contrasting example of psychopaths and addicts as agents. Measures: A philosophical analysis is carried out in order to argue for the relevance and importance of moral accountability in therapeutic models of addiction. Findings: The example of psychopaths and addicts illustrates that moral agency is part of full-blown human agency, as psychopaths are generally believed to lack moral skills common to non-psychopathic individuals. I argue that addicts are not analogous to psychopaths in the framework of moral agency in this respect. Conclusions: By fleshing out the conceptual considerations in the framework of addiction therapies, I clarify the relevance and importance of moral accountability in therapeutic models of addiction. If evidence-based therapies attempt to restore the addict’s full-fledged agency at least in respect to addiction, then acknowledging addicts’ moral accountability for their action does matter.

The unfinished nature of Beauchamp and Childress's account of the common morality after 34years and seven editions raises questions about what is lacking, specifically in the way they carry out their project, more generally in the presuppositions of the classical liberal tradition on which they rely. Their wide-ranging review of ethical theories has not provided a method by which to move beyond a hypothetical approach to justification or, on a practical level regarding values conflict, beyond a questionable appeal to consensus. My major purpose in this paper is to introduce the thought of Bernard Lonergan as offering a way toward such a methodological breakthrough. In the first section, I consider Beauchamp and Childress's defense of their theory of the common morality. In the second, I relate a persisting vacillation in their argument regarding the relative importance of reason and experience to a similar tension in classical liberal theory. In the third, I consider aspects of Lonergan's generalized empirical method as a way to address problems that surface in the first two sections of the paper: (1) the structural relation of reason and experience in human action; and (2) the importance of theory for practice in terms of what Lonergan calls "common sense" and "general bias."

People’s understanding of the origins of social structures and their relatedness, or lack thereof, to human actions and divine providence has a bearing on the moral significance they attach to the rules of structures. Within sociology, both structural-conflict theory and micro-interactionist theory has provided theories on the interplay between human actions and structures. Although both strands attempt to ground their ideas in empirical evidence, philosophical-anthropological views on human nature, the human will and human freedom play a major role in constructing the theories. In this article it is argued that the two theories are based on philosophical premises that create moral difficulties. Conflict theory, emphasising structures as the cause of human behaviour, risks cultivating a revolutionary moral attitude towards social structures that may end up in endless cycles of nihilist conduct. In contrast, micro-interactionism’s social constructivist explanation of the relationship between human action and structures could lead to moral relativism and apathy. This article reflects on an alternative approach. At the core of both voluntarist and revolutionary moral attitudes towards structures lies the notion that morality has no grounding in a deeper reality – they are merely social constructions. The article argues that a Reformed-Christian theory that grounds moral responsibility in what Michael Welker calls an ‘anthropology of the spirit’ may provide an alternative that avoids the moral ambiguities created by structural-conflict theory and micro-interactionist theory. This approach resists voluntarism by grounding morality in God who is the origin of being and understanding moral conduct in terms of the encounter between the divine and human spirit. It counters anarchy by promoting a spirit of moral realism and constant social renewal that takes seriously the consistent threat of the desire for power.Contribution: The specific contribution of this article consists in it bringing Reformed theology and sociology into dialogue. It identifies blind spots in conflict and micro-interactionist theories on the relationship between human agency and social structures, especially when it comes to morality. It also indicates how both theories are guided mainly by presuppositions about human nature and the human will. In response, it is attempted to provide an alternative theological outlook on the question of the relationship between human agency and social structures, which grounds morality in an anthropology of the Spirit. Until now, no such attempt has been made.

BOOK REVIEWS 159 Virtuous Passions: The Formation of Christian Character. By G. SIMON HARAK, S. J. New York: Paulist Press, 1993. Pp. 180. $11.95 (paper). Veritatis Splendor spoke of the need for theologians to make central once again the essential unity between body and soul, correcting those elements in contemporary thought that treat the body as an aside in moral considerations. Though not his expressed intention, G. Simon Harak promotes a similar end in his Virtuous Passions, reminding us of the significance of embodiment in a consideration of Christian virtue. While his efforts dovetail in a number of directions, they raise questions concerning the significance of embodiment, especially passions, in Christian morality. "It is my central concern in this book," he says, "to work out a moral theological account of that sense of the rightness or wrongness of passion, and further, to consider ways to transform morally blameworthy passions, and to foster morally praiseworthy passions" (2). Beginning with an overview of contemporary research among the sciences concerning the dynamics of human emotion, Harak challenges a number of contemporaries on the grounds that most conceptions of human action and emotion have some remnants of a "Cartesian" model of the self, i.e., a dualism that bifurcates the essential unity between the physical body and the "self." The effects of this trend are two-fold, both problematic according to Harak: an inability to account for the integrity of the embodied self in the domain of moral action; and a tendency to present the passions as mere "disturbances ." Especially in terms of the latter, Descartes is blamed for the contemporary context, "for he, more than any other thinker ... is responsible for the present prevailing model of virtue as a struggle for control of the passions by reason" (8). Harak's attempt to place the blame for contemporary shortcomings at the feet of Descartes is certainly consistent with a chorus of similar postmodern projects that have chronicled the damaging effects of the Enlightenment. He effectively sets his reader up for an engaging reappropriation of a more "integrated " model of the passionate human person as presented by Thomas Aquinas. A more careful articulation of the limitations of Descartes's conception of "control" would have been helpful, however, in order for the reader to appreciate more fully the alternative model that Harak claims Aquinas offers. Without this further qualification, the reader is left to wonder about the significance of his criticisms against Descartes, who "came to provide us with our image of the strong and virtuous person: one who can control his passions and the reactions of his body to the stimulus of the other" (9). For Aquinas, of course, passions are "controlled" through their paiticipa- 160 BOOK REVIEWS tion in right reasoning, while Descartes (as Harak presents him) presents a wholly extrinsic model. Thomas's integrated, participatory model of the embodied human being fuels Harak's efforts in the second chapter, as he attempts to show that "Thomas' understanding of the passions is far more interactive than his commentators have grasped ... and is quite congenial to contemporary biochemical and neurophysiological research" (69). He argues that Thomas offers an "interactive" model of human agency insofar as one allows "the other" to affect oneself through the passions in significant ways. Thus the meaning of our encounters with others and the world is, Harak suggests , largely a shared phenomenon between the "subject pole" and the "object pole." Harak is correct to note the essential receptive dimension of our passionate selves, and this marks one of the more important contributions of his work. Still, there are times when he comes close to a coherentist model of meaning in human actions in which the normative truth of things is wholly contextualized by the agents involved. He avoids falling entirely into this position, however, by stating that "the interaction cannot wholly define either interactor" (39). There is, in other words, "a distinctiveness to every human that precedes even such primary interactions" (39). That distinctiveness turns out to be human nature, which, as participating in the rational order of creation, supplies the normative context of moral action. Harak's recognition of the significance of our human teleology is an essential dimension...

Benjamin Bennett, Aesthetics as Secular Millennialism: Its Trail from Baumgarten and Kant to Walt Disney and Hitler. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell UP, 2013. xiii + 285 pp.Hannah Arendt argues that modern totalitarianism, most notably Nazism and Stalinism, arose not out of nationalism but out of millennialism. This is the belief that the absolute perfection of the human condition is achievable by human agency alone and is to be distinguished from a religious millennialism or apocalypse that posits an ultimate divine intervention. By this linkage Arendt tries to explain how people are driven by the of an ideal contrary to reason or experience. For Arendt secular millennialism emerged in the twentieth century. This is the starting point for Benjamin Bennett's provocative new book, in which he argues that the millennial impulse can already be found fully developed in eighteenth-century aesthetics. Aesthetics in this sense is not so much about the practical questions of art but about the experience of the beautiful as an ideal and its political implications. Bennett focuses primarily on the Continental philosophical tradition, which he takes to be representative of the whole; there is little concern for the Anglo-American aesthetic and ethical trail that emerges from David Hume. Aesthetics as Secular Millennialism strikes me as an extended unacknowledged debate with the philosopher Roger Scruton.The aesthetic trail traced by Bennett stretches from Baumgarten and Kant to Schiller, later reemerging with Cassirer and culminating with Heidegger and Adorno. It emerges, in Bennett's view, as a response to Cartesian dualism and the problem of the self. For Schiller and Kant the focus is on how to achieve a particularized and unified self while attempting to explain the possibility of communicability between subjects. They posit an apperception that is both the foundation of individual self-consciousness and the basis of a shared universal experience prior to the particularizing of that self-consciousness. In this we can see a millennialist pursuit of the ideal that transcends the factuality of experience. Bennett finds such beliefs self-contradictory, rejecting as delusional or posturing any claims about either an autonomous aesthetic object or an aesthetic experience. For Bennett, such claims harbor ulterior motives related to a millennial desire to impose certainty on an alienating, chaotic world. Thus, we can see two versions of the millennial in Heidegger's pursuit of authentic immediacy and the unattainable ideality in poetry and in Adorno's desperate retreat from barbarism in his conception of critical negativity.The role of communication closely links aesthetics with hermeneutics and the role of language in shaping our understanding of the world. Indeed, Bennett sees hermeneutics as the modern continuation of eighteenth-century aesthetics, the pursuit of truth by the hermeneutic circle as part of the same millennialist impulse. Here he focuses his analysis on Schleiermacher, Dilthey, Gadamer, and Heidegger. Bennett's central argument often dances a delicate logical line between the fallacies of the undistributed middle and the post hoc, repeatedly admitting that those seeking the aesthetic ideal are not necessarily totalitarian, even though both share the millennial. …

Efficient human-machine networks require productive interaction between human and machine actors. In this study, we address how a strengthening of machine agency, for example through increasing levels of automation, affect the human actors of the networks. Findings from case studies within air traffic management, emergency management, and crowd evacuation are presented, shedding light on how automation may strengthen the agency of human actors in the network through responsibility sharing and task allocation, and serve as a needed prerequisite of innovation and change.

One of the primary tasks of a philosopher is to engage with problems, and in turn offer potential solutions to them. Unsurprisingly, problems engaged with can pre-date philosophers, and can sometimes take on a life of its own that is independent to the philosopher. Of course, philosophy can be more than understanding problems, however, in this chapter I have turned to MacIntyre’s concern with the role of reason in human agency, particularly the restoration of rationality. To some, they may be wondering: What is at stake in MacIntyre’s arguments put forward regarding rational human agency? According to MacIntyre, philosophical discourse has shown that actions cannot have causes, and as a result demonstrates that a good deal of the human sciences is gravely confused because scientists continue to offer-up causal explanations of human action. Indeed, these type of explanations have done a disservice to any notion of rationality in human agency because it overlooks human freedom, responsibility, and the possibility of successful interventions to alter my actions. If we hold that the essence of human agency is reason, then the ramifications for educational systems are significant because anything worthy to be called an education necessitates the cultivation of reason and rationality. This is why MacIntyre’s restoration of rationality is so important to education because it provides the resources to explain rational human action, particularly practical rationality. In turn, MacIntyre’s account of rationality establishes a publically shared framework for explaining rational human agency that is suitable for judging rational human action, but also the means in which it can be cultivated and fostered in educational systems. Subsequently, for the purposes of this chapter I be concerned with the discussion of the following: first, I provide a critique of MacIntyre’s theory of human action; and, lastly I sketch-out MacIntyre’s account of rationality and how social science can assist in its explanation.