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Reprinted in part from the author's Napoleon and Machiavelli. Cambridge, 1903. ; Politics: The man of destiny. Napoleonic memoirs. The poetic Napoleon. Napoleon's marshals. The Waterloo campaign. The politics of the Divina commedia. Machiavelli's "Prince". The Ides of March. Goethe's position in practical politics. Lynch law. Dante's political allegory.--Metaphysics: Mind and brain. Space and time. Pragmatism. ; Mode of access: Internet.

Ian Hunter has made a name for himself as a critic of German university metaphysics, finding its progeny at work in places where many of us would not even think of looking, for example in the late twentieth-century celebration of theory in the humanities. Some of his recent work has focused on a rather different issue: the methodological task of making intellectual history empirical. Here he builds on Quentin Skinner's rationale for the Cambridge School's efforts to make the history of political thought more properly historical. Skinner's argument draws on the work of R. G. Collingwood, at least in its earlier versions, and on neo-Kantian tendencies in mid-twentieth century Oxford philosophy. Thus, in aligning his methodological programme with Skinner's argument, Hunter may risk bringing elements of university metaphysics back in another form.

Ian Hunter has made a name for himself as a critic of German university metaphysics, finding its progeny at work in places where many of us would not even think of looking, for example in the late twentieth-century celebration of theory in the humanities. Some of his recent work has focused on a rather different issue: the methodological task of making intellectual history empirical. Here he builds on Quentin Skinner's rationale for the Cambridge School's efforts to make the history of political thought more properly historical. Skinner's argument draws on the work of R. G. Collingwood, at least in its earlier versions, and on neo-Kantian tendencies in mid-twentieth century Oxford philosophy. Thus, in aligning his methodological programme with Skinner's argument, Hunter may risk bringing elements of university metaphysics back in another form.

Full-text available at SSRN. See link in this record. ; The patent systems of most countries have gradually extended patent protection to inventions involving, and even consisting of, living organisms. In fact, the World Trade Organization ("WTO") Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights ("TRIPS") mandates that, in all of its member countries, "patents shall be available for any inventions, whether products or processes, in all fields of technology, provided that they are new, involve an inventive step and are capable of industrial application." By allowing member countries to deny patentability to "plants and animals other than micro-organisms," TRIPS implies that the default rule is that the full range of organisms, from microbes to macrobes, are indeed potentially patentable subject matter. Canada represents a marked exception. The Supreme Court of Canada ("Supreme Court") negated the patentability of animals and plants, in general, and a genetically engineered mouse, in particular, despite the fact that Canadian statutory patent law is silent on the issue. Although the Canadian government had never availed itself of the escape clause of TRIPS Article 27(3)(b), which allows member states to exclude from patentability "plants and animals other than micro-organisms," a bare majority of the Supreme Court divined that the intent of Parliament was to exclude "higher life forms" from patentability. The Supreme Court variously justified its decision on the basis of "commonly understood" distinctions of "higher" and "lower" life forms, and the striking hypothesis that "higher," though not "lower," life forms "transcend" their genomes. The Supreme Court offered no scientific evidence whatsoever to justify its demarcation of the border between patentable and unpatentable organisms, nor could they because no scientific evidence exists. Failing to cite supporting evidence in this way might be acceptable if the science purported to underlie the decision were self-evident, either through ...

Over the past few decades, feminist philosophy has become recognised as a philosophical sub-discipline in its own right. Among the 'core' areas of philosophy, metaphysics has nonetheless until relatively recently remained largely dismissive of it. Metaphysics typically investigates the basic structure of reality and its nature. It examines reality's putative building blocks and inherent structure supposedly 'out there' with the view to uncovering and elucidating that structure. For this task, feminist insights appear simply irrelevant. Moreover, the value-neutrality of metaphysics seems prima facie incompatible with feminism's explicitly normative stance in that feminist philosophy involves advocacy: speaking on behalf of some group on political grounds. The prospects of feminist metaphysics thus look grim. Nonetheless, feminist philosophers have in recent years increasingly taken up explicitly metaphysical investigations. The basic ideas behind such investigations can be summed up as follows: feminist metaphysics is about negotiating the natural and going beyond the fundamental. In so doing, feminist investigations have expanded the scope of metaphysics. Further, feminist philosophers typically bring new methodological insights to bear on traditional ways of doing philosophy.With this in mind, the article considers the following questions: when thinking about philosophical methodology, how does feminist metaphysics fare relative to 'mainstream' metaphysics? More specifically, is feminism's political advocacy inconsistent with apparent objectivity that some prominent contemporary versions of metaphysics are committed to?

This book seeks to retrieve metaphysics and reveals its theological nature. It shows how ancient and modern conceptions of being in terms of individual substance fail to account for the irreducible, ontological relations that characterize all things. Those relations bind immanent, finite beings to each other and also to their transcendent, infinite source in God. As such, there is no abstract individuality that is somehow more primary than being in relation. Rather, the 'individuality' of a thing is both existentially and essentially its metaphysical positioning in relation to other things. In turn, the relational ordering of all things suggests a priority of relation over substance. That priority intimates a first principle and final end that is itself relational – the triune God of the Christian faith. To develop this argument, the book provides a close reading of the Neo-Platonist theology that we find in the works the Church Fathers and Doctors. The main figures are St. Augustine, Boethius, Dionysius the Areopagite and St. Thomas Aquinas. Common to them is the idea that the creative relationality of the three divine persons brings everything out of nothing into existence. God gives all beings a share of Trinitarian being in which the created order participates. Thus, the argument is that the doctrine of creation ex nihilo and the Trinity provide a better account of individuation than purely philosophical theories. In short, the book combines the theological 'turn' of contemporary philosophy with the re-hellenization of theology that Pope Benedict XVI and other theologians have defended. Based on a genealogical account from Plato to 'postmodernism,' the essay argues that the Christian Neo-Platonic fusion of biblical revelation with Greco-Roman philosophy produced a theological metaphysic that surpasses ancient and modern ontology.

Asouzu's 21st-century philosophy of complementary ontology (popularly known as ibuanyidanda) has brought to bear the abstract nature of metaphysics as expounded by the west. Through the West has a different world view which many African scholars have seen to be driven by anthropocentric tendencies. African system of thought imbibed in communalism have often called for mutual complementarity among whatever that exist, for the essential purpose of attaining the greatest possible flourishing and realizing the common good of man. The Ibuanyidanda philosophy of mutual complementation holds that there is a mutual dependence of all missing links in their unifying interrelatedness. Hence, all cultures, races, sexes, tribes, nations, religions, and political affiliates are in mutual complementary indebtedness to each other in their privileges and responsibilities. The essence of this paper is to a critical look at the position of Ibuanyidanda on metaphysics.

Neugrundlegung von Politik und Politikwissenschaft auf geisteswissenschaftlicher Basis in der Tradition von Platon und Christus. ; New foundation of politics and political science on the basis of mind in the tradition of platon and Christ.

Allegories of America offers a bold idea of what, in terms of political theory, it means to be American. Beginning with the question What do we want from a theory of politics? Dolan explores the metaphysics of American-ness and stops along the way to reflect on John Winthrop, the Constitution, 1950s behavioralist social science, James Merrill, and William Burroughs. The pressing problem, in Dolan's view, is how to find a vocabulary for politics in the absence of European metaphysics. American political thinkers, he suggests, might respond by approaching their own theories as allegories. The postmodern dilemma of the loss of traditional absolutes would thus assume the status of a national mythology—America's perennial identity crisis in the absence of a tradition establishing the legitimacy of its founding. After examining the mid-Atlantic sermons of John Winthrop, the spiritual founding father, Dolan reflects on the authority of the Constitution and the Federalist. He then takes on questions of representation in Cold War ideology, focusing on the language of David Easton and other liberal political "behaviorists," as well as on cold War cinema and the coverage of international affairs by American journalists. Additional discussions are inspired by Hannah Arendt's recasting of political theory in a narrative framework. here Dolan considers two starkly contrasting postwar literary figures—William S. Burroughs and James Merrill—both of whom have a troubled relationship to politics but nonetheless register an urgent need to articulate its dangers and opportunities. Alongside Merrill's unraveling of the distinction between the serious and the fictive, Dolan assesses the attempt in Arendt's On Revolution to reclaim fictional devices for political reflection.