Todd May

The first two chapters of the book are largely a defense of individual freedom against those who would speak in the name of some sort of determinism. Professor Flew sees the urgency of this task to lie in the “general moral decline widely perceived to have been in progress for many years in both the UK and the USA”, a claim for which he cites Robert Bork as providing evidence, at least in the United States. In particular, Professor Flew is concerned about sociobiologists, social scientists, and others who would remove individual responsibility by ascribing causal mechanisms to behavior. He distinguishes between physical and moral causality, arguing that the former may necessitate but the latter only incline behavior in one direction or another. His defense of this distinction relies on Locke’s distinction between personal power of choice and physical power possessed by inanimate or unthinking objects.

In one of the earliest scenes in the first episode of The Good Place, the head demon, Michael, points to a picture of Doug and says that he was the person who most nearly understood what it takes to get into the Good Place, which is a point system. In addition to showing full‐blooded characters and stories and making phenomenological type arguments, a show like The Good Place can sometimes pose philosophical questions in a way that's more engaging than a written text. The humor in The Good Place is often sophisticated, from jokes about The New Yorker to “Easter eggs” – those little details snuck into the background of episodes that viewers pride themselves on discovering – to philosophy jokes. Philosophical fields that are non‐normative might have a more open field in staging and investigating philosophical themes.

Moral individualists like Jeff McMahan and Peter Singer argue that our moral obligations to animals, both human and non‐human, are grounded in the morally salient capacities of those animals. By contrast, what might be called moral relationalists argue that our obligations to non‐human animals are grounded in our relationship to them. Moral relationalists are of various kinds, from relationalists regarding assistance to animals, such as Clare Palmer and Elizabeth Anderson, to relationalists grounded in a Wittgensteinian view of human practice, such as Cora Diamond and Alice Crary. This article argues that there are, in fact, two distinct types of moral reasons, those based on salient capacities and those based on relationships. Neither type of reason is reducible to the other, and there is no third type to which to reduce them both. Any attempt at reduction would run counter to deep intuitions about our moral relation to non‐human animals as well as to other humans. Among the implications of this is that certain kinds of arguments, such as the argument from marginal cases, seem to be incomplete precisely because they do not capture the complexity of our moral relations to non‐human animals.

Michel Foucault introduced a new form of political thinking and discourse. Rather than seeking to understand the grand unities of state, economy, or exploitation, he tried to discover the micropolitical workings of everyday life that often founded the greater unities. He was particularly concerned with how we understand ourselves psychologically, and thus how psychological knowledge developed and came to be accepted as true. In the course of his writings, he thus developed a genealogy of psychology, an account of psychology as a historically developed practice of power. ;The problem such an account raises for much of traditional philosophy is that Foucault's critique of psychological concepts is, in the end, a critique of the idea of the mind as a politically neutral ontological concept. Thus the basis relied upon by all forms of subjective foundationalism is rendered politically suspect by the critique. This suspicion, however, turns back upon Foucault and raises for him the question of how he is to justify his own writings epistemologically if not by recourse to subjective foundationalism. ;By turning to a non-foundationalist, but at the same time non-relativist, picture of knowledge advocated by Wittgenstein and Wilfred Sellars, Foucault would be able to ground his critique without falling into the problematic choice of relativism versus absolutism. The key is to understand that the important epistemological issue for Foucault is not truth, but justification. A picture is offered of knowledge as a set--or set of sets--of interlocking justifications, any of which can be put up for question, but not all at the same time. ;On such a picture, Foucault is able to retain the radicality of the genealogical critique without falling into the decisionism he is accused of by his critics. Moreover, this picture of knowledge is of a piece with his view of resistance as local and shifting

The fact that we will die, and that our death can come at any time, pervades the entirety of our living. There are many ways to think about and deal with death. Among those ways, however, a good number of them are attempts to escape its grip. In this book, Todd May seeks to confront death in its power. He considers the possibility that our mortal deaths are the end of us, and asks what this might mean for our living. What lessons can we draw from our mortality? And how might we live as creatures who die, and who know we are going to die? In answering these questions, May brings together two divergent perspectives on death. The first holds that death is not an evil, or at least that immortality would be far worse than dying. The second holds that death is indeed an evil, and that there is no escaping that fact. May shows that if we are to live with death, we need to hold these two perspectives together. Their convergence yields both a beauty and a tragedy to our living that are inextricably entwined.Drawing on the thoughts of many philosophers and writers - ancient and modern - as well as his own experience, May puts forward a particular view of how we might think about and, more importantly, live our lives in view of the inescapability of our dying. In the end, he argues, it is precisely the contingency of our lives that must be grasped and which must be folded into the hours or years that remain to each of us, so that we can live each moment as though it were at once a link to an uncertain future and yet perhaps the only link we have left.

French philosophy since World War II has been preoccupied with the issue of difference. Specifically, it has wanted to promote or to leave room for ways of living and of being that differ from those usually seen in contemporary Western society. Given the experience of the Holocaust, the motivation for such a preoccupation is not difficult to see. For some thinkers, especially Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Derrida, Emmanuel Levinas, and Gilles Deleuze, this preoccupation has led to a mode of philosophizing that privileges difference as a philosophical category. Nancy privileges difference as a mode of conceiving community, Derrida as a mode of conceiving linguistic meaning, Levinas as a mode of conceiving ethics, and Deleuze as a mode of conceiving ontology. _Reconsidering Difference_ has a twofold task, the primary one critical and the secondary one reconstructive. The critical task is to show that these various privilegings are philosophical failures. They wind up, for reasons unique to each position, endorsing positions that are either incoherent or implausible. Todd May considers the incoherencies of each position and offers an alternative approach. His reconstructive task, which he calls "contingent holism," takes the phenomena under investigation—community, language, ethics, and ontology—and sketches a way of reconceiving them that preserves the motivations of the rejected positions without falling into the problems that beset them.

For most of the past century, philosophers on the Continent and those in the United States and Britain have taken themselves to be working in very different, even mutually exclusive, philosophical traditions. Although that may have been true until recently, it is no longer so. This piece surveys ten different proposed distinctions that have been offered between the two traditions, and it shows that none of them works, as there are major thinkers on both sides of each proposed distinction that do not neatly fit the proposal. The upshot of this is that it no longer makes sense to uphold the idea of two traditions, and that it is time we all dropped the mutual suspicion and denigration that have characterized relationships between us for the past hundred years.

We see nonviolent resistance all over today’s world, from Egypt’s Tahrir Square to New York Occupy. Although we think of the last century as one marked by wars and violent conflict, in fact it was just as much a century of nonviolence as the achievements of Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. and peaceful protests like the one that removed Ferdinand Marcos from the Philippines clearly demonstrate. But what is nonviolence? What makes a campaign a nonviolent one, and how does it work? What values does it incorporate? In this unique study, Todd May, a philosopher who has himself participated in campaigns of nonviolent resistance, offers the first extended philosophical reflection on the particular and compelling political phenomenon of nonviolence. Drawing on both historical and contemporary examples, he examines the concept and objectives of nonviolence, and considers the different dynamics of nonviolence, from moral jiu-jitsu to nonviolent coercion. May goes on to explore the values that infuse nonviolent activity, especially the respect for dignity and the presupposition of equality, before taking a close-up look at the role of nonviolence in today’s world. Students of politics, peace studies, and philosophy, political activists, and those interested in the shape of current politics will find this book an invaluable source for understanding one of the most prevalent, but least reflected upon, political approaches of our world

The fact that we will die, and that our death can come at any time, pervades the entirety of our living. There are many ways to think about and deal with death. Among those ways, however, a good number of them are attempts to escape its grip. In this book, Todd May seeks to confront death in its power. He considers the possibility that our mortal deaths are the end of us, and asks what this might mean for our living. What lessons can we draw from our mortality? And how might we live as creatures who die, and who know we are going to die? In answering these questions, May brings together two divergent perspectives on death. The first holds that death is not an evil, or at least that immortality would be far worse than dying. The second holds that death is indeed an evil, and that there is no escaping that fact. May shows that if we are to live with death, we need to hold these two perspectives together. Their convergence yields both a beauty and a tragedy to our living that are inextricably entwined.Drawing on the thoughts of many philosophers and writers - ancient and modern - as well as his own experience, May puts forward a particular view of how we might think about and, more importantly, live our lives in view of the inescapability of our dying. In the end, he argues, it is precisely the contingency of our lives that must be grasped and which must be folded into the hours or years that remain to each of us, so that we can live each moment as though it were at once a link to an uncertain future and yet perhaps the only link we have left

In Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault offers a history of the rise of discipline in its application to the body. Foucault suggests, although he does not develop this suggestion, that the politics of discipline is war carried on by other means. The lecture series “Society Must Be Defended” can be seen as a development of this suggestion. In these lectures, Foucault offers a way of thinking about the society and its politics in terms of war, as well as a way of thinking about war. If this concept of war is integrated into the thought ofDiscipline and Punish, the work that that text does can be extended in several ways. First, we are offered an analysis of the social body that fractures the holism in the name of which penal reform is offered. Second, the disciplinary body can be seen not merely as the confluence of a series of power effects, but as the site of a contestation of power. Finally, the possibility of resistance, which has often been found lacking in Foucault’s genealogical works, appears as a live possibility.