"Three lenses through which Vallalar's philosophy, the Tamil philosopher Ramalinga Swamigal (1823–∞), can be considered epistemologically are: (1) as a distinctive non-Western epistemology grounded in direct luminous experience (Suddha Sanmarga), (2) as a provocation and critique of Western rationalist epistemology, whose exclusion of embodied, compassionate knowing constitutes a structural impoverishment of what counts as knowledge; or (3) as a generative frame for investigating perennial questions, the nature of consciousness, the relationship between knower and known, through the radical claim that light of absolute compassion is not merely metaphor but the fundamental substrate of both being and knowing.
This paper will argue that Vallalar's epistemological claim, that compassion (Jeevakarunyam) is not merely an ethical disposition but the very condition of possibility for direct knowing. The purification of the body, mind, soul and spirit through compassionate practice opens faculties of perception unavailable to the detached rational subject, constitutes a direct challenge to the Cartesian separation of knower from known that underwrites modern Western epistemology. Where Kant forecloses the noumenal, Vallalar proposes a phenomenology of light of absolute compassion in which the noumenal is progressively disclosed through transformed perception."
How can resistance to wrongful action be justified within ethical traditions that do not accept the intrinsic value of individual rights? This paper develops the concept of virtue-protective resistance: resistance justified, at least in part, by the aim of preventing the wrongdoer from suffering moral self-harm, damage to their own moral integrity through wrongdoing. I argue that this justificatory structure is conceptually distinct from rights-based and consequentialist alternatives. It operates on a different normative input (the wrongdoer’s moral integrity rather than the resister’s rights or aggregate consequences) and contains an irreducibly relational element grounded in the resister’s structural position within the wrong. Taking an initial cue from early Chinese philosophical texts but developing the argument independently, I defend the moral self-harm thesis and show that virtue-protective resistance scales from self-removal to power-restriction under graduated conditions of necessity and proportionality. Because the moral self-harm thesis is accepted across a wide range of independent ethical traditions, such as Aristotelian, Confucian, Stoic, Christian, Islamic, Buddhism, the framework supplies a justification for moral reform that is internal to traditions where rights-based critique lacks traction, addressing wrongdoers in a normative language they already speak.
Sextus Empiricus plainly states that the sceptics take the goal to be tranquillity. Commentators usually understand this to be a claim about the goal of life, and note, with some discomfort, that it is a little strange for sceptics to take any position on this at all. The goal of life is a hotly contested topic, and the sceptics believe we should suspend belief in the face of disagreement. Worse still, the sceptics believe we should live in accordance with convention and appearances. Other candidates, such as pleasure and wisdom, appear to be the goal to many people and are more conventional than tranquillity.
In this paper, I argue that commentators have been misled by Sextus’ point blank statement that tranquillity is the goal. Across PH I, Sextus makes multiple and mutually incompatible claims about the sceptics’ goal. Drawing on Bett’s analysis of Sextus’ use of “variation”, I argue that these contradictions constitute a deliberate strategy to induce suspension of belief about the sceptics’ take on the goal. Moreover, I show how Sextus uses “ersatz goals” to sell scepticism to readers no matter their life-orientation. The appeal of these goals depends on the success of the sceptics at balancing arguments.
The paper seeks to examine Spinoza’s theoretical relationship to slavery through a historical and political perspective. Early modern natural law tradition, in which (as Grotius argued) slavery was consistent with natural justice and the slave could freely sell their own liberty forces us to confront the paradoxical ways in which modern notions of freedom were articulated in relation to increasingly abstracted uses of slavery. I focus my attention on Spinoza’s paradoxical formulation of servitude. The source of Spinoza’s characterisation of slavery is found in Chapter 16 of the TTP, positing the foundations of the state in terms of mutual utility rather than a Hobbesian absolute transference of right to a sovereign authority. Yet Spinoza defines the figure of the slave as someone who fails to actively pursue their utility. Inscribed at the very heart of Spinoza’s political vision is an unsettling reality – the condition of slavery reveals itself to be a permanent condition and limit of the political, the ever-present possibility of a catastrophic collapse of social relations and the inability to form secure and durable relationships with others.
A number of philosophers analyse value in terms of fitting attitudes. On such views, very roughly, something is valuable just when it is a fitting object of certain favourable responses. However, these views face a problem about partiality. Suppose that either my friend or a stranger can be rescued from drowning, but not both, and that the two rescue outcomes are equal in intrinsic value. It still seems fitting for me to prefer my friend’s rescue. This creates a difficulty for fitting-attitude analyses: if the two outcomes are equal in value, why is it fitting for me to prefer one to the other?
The main aim of this paper is to offer a Brentanian solution to this problem. I argue that the difficulty arises because we fail to distinguish two different roles that preference can play. In one role, preference is a way of assessing which object is better. In another, it is a practical response involved in deciding what to do. Once this distinction is made, we can say that my friend’s rescue and the stranger’s rescue are equal in value, while also allowing that it is fitting for me to choose my friend’s rescue. This preserves the intuition that partiality can be fitting without implying that my friend’s rescue is intrinsically better.
