•  483
    This book manuscript, entitled United Nations Human Rights Ethics: For The Greatest Success of the Greatest Number, critically examines most all major normative ethical theories since Socrates and finds Roman Stoic ethics to be the least deficient. It divides ethical theories into popular ones with little academic support, other popular ones that have had such support, and Kantian ethics standing alone as a philosopher's academic ethical philosophy with limited popular support. It criticizes the…Read more
  •  169
    This article is the preface to a completed book manuscript, United Nations Human Rights Ethics. Based on the indivisibility of human rights, the Four Freedoms Speech, and the Preamble of the Universal Declaration, the book takes freedom of expression as the one human right. Other rights are modes of this one. For example, one exercises freedom of expression (speech) by exercising the right to life, access to courts, etc.. The book argues that human rights are primarily an ethical concept (introd…Read more
  •  90
  •  14
    Human Rights Ethics
    Proceedings of the XXIII World Congress of Philosophy 12 41-49. 2018.
    Human rights have increasingly come to the center of political and social philosophy since 1945. The have been widely discussed in publications on topical human rights issues, in the work of some of the most notable philosophers of the time like Jürgen Habermas and John Rawls, and in volumes on global justice. But, despite Habermas work in Diskurs Ethik, discussion ethics has never clearly been presented as a normative ethical theory in competition with the classical rivals such as utilitarianis…Read more
  •  47
    The Place of Process Cosmology in Absolute Idealism
    The Owl of Minerva 16 (2): 161-174. 1985.
    In Jena Hegel began his philosophical career under the auspices of Schelling’s Spinozism. His declaration of philosophical independence from Schelling, dating from publication of the Phenomenology, was a repudiation of the Spinozistic definition of the absolute as merely substance. Substance without the flux of accidents, he came to see, is nothing at all. Yet in the judgment of history Hegel’s break with Schellingian Spinozism, though clearly embarked upon, was not so clearly consummated. The s…Read more
  •  4
    Two Views of Freedom in Process Thought (review)
    Process Studies 11 (1): 52-55. 1981.
  •  6
    The Mind-Body Problem
    Idealistic Studies 2 (3): 229-248. 1972.
    A defense of panpyschism based on Ockham's Razor, arguing against the materialistic identity thesis, e.g., J J C Smart.
  •  7
    Hegelian Panentheism as Joachimite Christianity
    Proceedings of the Hegel Society of America 11 131-142. 1992.
  •  34
    Panpsychism: A Restatement of the Genetic Argument
    Idealistic Studies 8 (1): 33-39. 1978.
    The usual version of the genetic argument for panpsychism is not difficult to refute. The version is based on the principle of biological continuity according to which the various species differ in degree rather than in kind. It is then asserted that if there is some point in the evolution of life out of inanimate matter, or of higher out of lower life, such that before this point minds did not exist while thereafter they do exist, then the principle of continuity is violated. The argument, as P…Read more
  •  25
    Motion and Objective Contradictions
    American Philosophical Quarterly 18 (2). 1981.
    This article denies that Hegel upheld the objective truth of any contradictory statements. Yet he did admit objective contradictions in the sense of intersubjectively held contradictory beliefs at the basis of some institutions, most famously lordship and bondage. He also shared the belief of Zeno, the inventor of dialectic, that continuous motion is self-contradictory but is an objective contradiction more widely shared by all institutions presupposing continuants (people and ordinary things).
  •  66
    This article defends linguistic descent in contrast to the possibility of linguistic ascent or the formal mode in metaphysics. We can go both ways, but metaphysics metaphysically defined presupposes metaphysics conceptualstically defined, which presupposes metaphysicas ontologially defined. Predicates implie abstract concepts (categories in metaphysics), and abstract oncepts presuppose the concrete qualities from which they are abstracted. A distinction is made between any quality and that which…Read more
  •  25
    This article distinguishes between dogmatism as usually understood, unconditional dogmatism, and "dogmatism" in good sense, heuristic dogmatism. Reprinted as "Philosophy: What it is and Why" in Statements, edited for classroom use by Kathleen Squadrito, pp. 1-10.
  •  9
    The purpose of this book is to advance responsible rehabilitation of the speculative philosophy of history. It challenges the idea popularized by thinkers such as and Claude Lévi-Strauss and Jean-François Lyotard that historical meta-mythology and meta-narrative are philosophically obsolete. As long as humanity, viewed anthropologically, lives by over-arching narrative, the quest for a version that survives rational criticism remains vital. Here human rights serve as the key to unlock such a ver…Read more
  •  3
    World history has been consigned by professional historians to textbooks for the public schools. But people will obtain ideological or mytihcal notions of the meaning of history unless philosophers ofhistory step in to rationally regulate accounts of world history. Despite its dependenc in most cases on secondary sources, world history not an impossible academic research disclipline due to the countless cultures and ethnic groups in history--much as astronomy is not impossible due the countless …Read more
  •  16
    Lectures on Logic (edited book)
    with Georg W. F. Hegel
    Indiana University Press. 2008.
    The first English translation of Hegel's important lectures on logic
  •  14
    Panpsychism
    Idealistic Studies 8 (1): 33-39. 1978.
    The usual version of the genetic argument for panpsychism is not difficult to refute. The version is based on the principle of biological continuity according to which the various species differ in degree rather than in kind. It is then asserted that if there is some point in the evolution of life out of inanimate matter, or of higher out of lower life, such that before this point minds did not exist while thereafter they do exist, then the principle of continuity is violated. The argument, as P…Read more
  •  14
    Technological society and its counterculture: An Hegelian analysis
    Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 18 (2). 1975.
    The paper analyzes the American counterculture of the 1960s and early '70s, from the New Left through the hippies, revolutionaries and Jesus people, to the counterculture's collapse in artistry and the cynicism of Watergate; this evolution is viewed as a re-enactment of Hegel's dialectic of 'active reason' in the Phenomenology of Spirit , from the critique of 'observation' to 'society as a community of animals'. Secondly, an attempt is made to account for this re-enactment in the twentieth cent…Read more
  •  41
    The mind-body problem: A nonmaterialistic identity thesis
    Idealistic Studies 2 (September): 229-48. 1972.
    A defense of panpyschism based on Ockham's Razor, arguing against the materialistic identity thesis, e.g., J J C Smart
  •  20
    The Place of Process Cosmology in Absolute Idealism
    The Owl of Minerva 16 (2): 161-174. 1985.
    In Jena Hegel began his philosophical career under the auspices of Schelling’s Spinozism. His declaration of philosophical independence from Schelling, dating from publication of the Phenomenology, was a repudiation of the Spinozistic definition of the absolute as merely substance. Substance without the flux of accidents, he came to see, is nothing at all. Yet in the judgment of history Hegel’s break with Schellingian Spinozism, though clearly embarked upon, was not so clearly consummated. The s…Read more
  •  18
    The reducibility of ethics to human rights
    Dialogue and Universalism 5 (7). 1995.
    First Statement of what would become Human Rights Ethics, Purdue University Press, 2008
  •  53
    The Advent of Freedom (review)
    The Owl of Minerva 28 (1): 97-99. 1996.
    This volume argues that the Hegel system is not closed, but open to the future. The conclusion is convincing, although it may not have required as arduous an exposition as Hoffmeyer gives it. His prose as well as the usually solid substance of what he says is reminiscent of Hegel’s Logic, whose sections bearing on his conclusion he analyzes closely. One of the interesting aspects of his book is that Hoffmeyer argues against Hegel’s own explicit exposition to establish his conclusion. Hegel, we k…Read more
  •  1
    Hegel’s defense of the welfare state retains appeal when grounded in dialogical human rights ethics defended as true normative ethical theory. His dialectic of trade passes through budding consumer desires in the once sovereign family and trade between households risking market-induced poverty, ending in market regulation by an external welfare state. The dialectic recurs on a higher level as we in domestic civil society turn to foreign products. Market-induced poverty generates an external glob…Read more
  •  8
    Neither journalistic nor sensationalistic eye-witness accounts, this is the first book of serious reflection on the moral background and issues of internal legality surrounding the events of Guantanamo Bay.
  •  32
    This book proposes a treatise on the Hegelian dialectical method as based on dialectical logic. Part One explores sources of dialectical logic before Hegel in ancient thought. Part Two examines dialectical logic and the dialectical method in Hegel, with attention to the relationship between dialectical logic and contemporary formal logic. Part Three concerns the dialectical method after Hegel, in which we seek to show that the method is available for uses other than the one to which the historic…Read more