•  1
    Book Reviews (review)
    with Eric White, Giorgio Baruchello, Cristelle Baskins, John Bokina, Edmund J. Campion, Victor Castellani, Harvey Chisick, Edward J. Harpham, Grant Havers, Horst Jesse, J. -Guy Lalande, Iddo Landau, Walter Leimgruber, Hugh Lindsay, Clinton R. Long, Edwin R. McCullough, William Mengel, Stephen Morris, Gloria Mound, Samuel Moyn, Tim Murphy, Katarzyna Nowak, Gabriel B. Paquette, Brayton Polka, Erkan Rehber, Hans J. Rindisbacher, Mia Roth, Richard Sakwa, Arthur Shostak, Stanley Shostak, Armand Singer, Madeleine Soudée, Peter Stansky, Chris Tucker, John E. Weakland, Amy C. Whipple, Reva Wolf, and Fredric S. Zuckerman
    The European Legacy 12 (4): 497-543. 2007.
  •  6
    “The re-discovery of Marx,” Marcello Musto argues, “is based on his persistent capacity to explain the present: he remains an indispensible instrument for understanding it and transforming it.”. It is true that the continuity of problems connecting our world to Marx’s ensures the relevance of historical materialism. At the same time, changes in the structure and scale of capitalism, as well as failures of nineteenth and twentieth century socialism to build a democratic and life-affirming alterna…Read more
  •  78
    The Life-Value of Death: Mortality, Finitude, and Meaningful Lives
    Journal of Philosophy of Life 3 (1): 1-23. 2013.
    In his seminal reflection on the badness of death, Nagel links it to the permanent loss “of whatever good there is in living.” I will argue, following McMurtry, that “whatever good there is in living” is defined by the life-value of resources, institutions, experiences, and activities. Enjoyed expressions of the human capacities to experience the world, to form relationships, and to act as creative agents are intrinsically life-valuable, the reason why anyone would desire to go on living indefin…Read more
  •  10
    Embodiment and the Meaning of Life
    Mcgill-Queen's University Press. 2018.
    The long tradition of pessimism in philosophy and poetry notoriously laments suffering caused by vulnerabilities of the human body. The most familiar and contemporary version is antinatalism, the view that it is wrong to bring sentient life into existence because birth inevitably produces suffering. Technotopianism, which stems from a similarly negative view of embodied limitations, claims that we should escape sickness and death through radical human-enhancement technologies. In Embodiment and …Read more
  •  29
    This paper explores the ways in which neoliberal schooling is threatening education. We define education as the development of cognitive and imaginative capacities for understanding of and critical engagement with social reality. Education opens horizons of possibility for collective and individual life-experience and activity by exposing the one-sidedness and contradictions of ruling-value systems. Schooling, by contrast, subordinates thought and imagination to the reproduction of the ruling mo…Read more
  •  13
    Need Satisfaction and Group Conflict
    Social Theory and Practice 30 (2): 175-192. 2004.
  •  13
    Marx is famous for apparently dismissing the practical role of philosophy. Yet, as accumulating empirical knowledge of growing life-crises proves, the simply availability of facts is insufficient to motivate struggles for fundamental change. So too manifest social crisis. The economic crisis which began in 2008 has indeed motivated social struggles, but nothing on the order of the revolutionary struggles Marx expected. Rather than make Marx irrelevant, however, the absence of global struggles fo…Read more
  •  7
    Essays and Reviews, 1959–2002 (review)
    The European Legacy 22 (6): 748-750. 2017.
  •  5
    All varieties of socialism share this trait in common: they are systematic alternatives to capitalism. But why should a systematic alternative to capitalism be necessary? Has it not proven to be the most productive economic system in history? Has it not created social conditions in which the powers of human imagination, creativity, and scientific understanding have grown to wider scope than in any previous society? Has it not enabled human beings to extend their life span and live healthier and …Read more
  •  12
    Since its publication in 1971, John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice has defined the terrain of political philosophical debate concerning the principles, scope, and material implications of social justice. Social justice for Rawls concerns the principles that govern the operation of major social institutions. Major social institutions structure the lives of citizens by regulating access to the resources and opportunities that the formulation and realization of human projects require. Rawls’ theory of …Read more
  •  20
    Subjecthood and Self-Determination: The Limitations of Postmodernism as Democratic Theory
    Canadian Journal of Philosophy 29 (sup1): 147-169. 1999.
    (1999). Subjecthood and Self-Determination: The Limitations of Postmodernism as Democratic Theory. Canadian Journal of Philosophy: Vol. 29, Supplementary Volume 25: Civilization and Oppression, pp. 147-169
  •  14
  •  12
    To the extent that classical, neoclassical, and Marxist political economy have traditionally ignored the problem of economic scale and valorized economic growth, all three have much to learn from ecological economics. Its most important contribution is the argument that the human economy is a subsystem of the finite earth’s natural life-support system. Implied in this argument is a new metric of economic health, the life-value rather than the money-value of that which economies produce and distr…Read more
  •  13
    Death, Life; War, Peace
    Philosophy Today 48 (2): 168-178. 2004.
  •  5
    Book reviews (review)
    with Peter Groves, Thomas Anderson, Richard Sheldon, Frederick M. Schweitzer, Cynthia Patterson, Jutta Birmele, J. H. Reid, Gary K. Browning, John Morrow, John Peacock, Donna Landry, Anne E. Brownlow, Tim Harris, Richard G. Hodgson, Brigitte Glaser, David W. Lovell, Gary Kates, Marilyn J. Boxer, Nikolina Sretenova, Jennifer Johnston, James L. Boren, Richard S. Findler, Gerard Delanty, Fabienne‐Sophie Chauderlot, Edna Hindie Lemay, Stephen George, Albert Rabil, Lee C. Rice, Augustinus P. Dierick, Eleanor Ty, Michael James, David A. Warner, Michele Frucht Levy, John Gascoigne, Fredric S. Zuckerman, Janine Maltz Perron, Hans Derks, Marcel Cornis‐Pope, Brayton Polka, Nancy Hudson‐Rodd, Joseph Femia, Mike Hawkins, Maurice Larkin, Kevin J. Hayes, Gabriel P. Weisberg, Louise A. Tilly, Gerald Seaman, Graeme Gill, Manfred B. Steger, Jonathan S. Myerov, Laurie M. Johnson Bagby, and Julius R. Ruff
    The European Legacy 2 (6): 1040-1108. 1997.
    The World on Paper. By David R. Olson xix + 319 pp. £17.95/$24.95 cloth. Milton and the Revolutionary Reader. By Sharon Achinstein xv + 272 pp. £27.50/$35.00 cloth. The Rise of Christianity: A Sociologist Reconsiders History. By Rodney Stark xiv + 246 pp. £16.95/$24.95 cloth. The Idea of Luxury: A Conceptual and Historical Investigation. By Christopher J. Berry xiv + 271 pp. £45.00/$69.95 cloth, £17.95/$24.95 paper. Will to Live: One Family's Story of Surviving the Holocaust. By Adam Starkopf 24…Read more
  • Carol C. Gould, Globalizing Democracy and Human Rights (review)
    Philosophy in Review 25 183-186. 2005.
  •  1
    Book Reviews (review)
    with Kevin Aho, Erik Bleich, Ioana Boghian, Viola Brisolin, Mihaela Culea, Liviu Drugus, Georgina Evans, Tim Harris, William M. Hawley, Marcel Herbst, Raphael Israeli, Mary Helen Kolisnyk, André Mineau, Nadia Nicoleta Morarasu, Darryl J. Murphy, Marianna Papastephanou, Jean Elisabeth Pedersen, Brayton Polka, Chiara Rabbiosi, Timothy Scheie, Richard Shorten, Arthur B. Shostak, Stanley Shostak, Marcia Landy, Hans-Peter Söder, Lavinia Stan, Lisa M. Steinman, K. Steven Vincent, Ann Ward, and Samuel C. Wheeler Iii
    The European Legacy 16 (6): 811-846. 2011.
  •  4
    Between egoism and altruism: Outlines for a materialist conception of the good
    Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 5 (4): 68-86. 2002.
  •  23
    This paper explores the metaphysical foundations of critical theory in Marcuse and Habermas's postmetaphysical alternative. It argues that Habermas's attempt to free critical theory from a normative conception of life‐activity deprives it of the conceptual tools required to accurately diagnose the fundamental structure of social problems today. It thus concludes that Marcuse's efforts towards specifying a life‐grounded foundation to critical theory must be renewed if the project of human freedom…Read more
  •  5
    Materialist ethics and life-value
    McGill Queens university press. 2012.
    Current patterns of global economic activity are not only unsustainable, but unethical - this claim is central to Materialist Ethics and Life-Value. Grounding the definition of ethical value in the natural and social requirements of life-support and life-development shared by all human beings, Jeff Noonan provides a new way of understanding the universal conception of "the good life." Noonan argues that the true crisis affecting the world today is not sluggish rates of economic growth but the mo…Read more
  •  4
    Democratic society and human needs
    McGill Queens university press. 2006.
    About the Author:Jeff Noonan is associate professor, philosophy, the University of Windsor. He is the author of Critical Humanism and the Politics of Difference
  •  2
    Critical humanism and the politics of difference
    McGill Queens university press. 2003.
    The most influential theories of oppression have argued that belief in some shared human essence or nature is ultimately responsible for the injustices suffered by women, First Nations peoples, blacks, gays and lesbians, and colonised people and have insisted that struggles against oppression must be mounted from the unique and different perspectives of different groups. Jeff Noonan argues instead that such difference must be seen to be anchored in a conception of human beings as self-creative. …Read more
  •  20
    MacIntyre, Virtue and the Critique of Capitalist Modernity
    Journal of Critical Realism 13 (2): 189-203. 2014.
    This paper is a review essay of two collections of essays focused on the work of Alasdair MacIntyre. The review focuses on three core themes. First, it discusses those papers that explore the central role that the relationship between practices and institutions plays in MacIntyre’s critique of modernity. Second, it turns to those papers that examine the foundational role that human needs play in MacIntyre’s ethics. Third, it places in dialogue those papers that defend MacIntyre’s politics as a f…Read more
  •  20
    Kant, Marx, and the Origins of Critique
    Historical Materialism 14 (2): 203-214. 2006.