Liberalism and Toleration Research Papers (original) (raw)

2025

Wright's Free Church Free State is a cautionary book on the West's strenuous relationship between church and state. What happens when the church wields too much power or when the state controls the church? His message aims to give a "positive Baptist vision which implies a new conception of society by means of a particular understanding of the church." (p xx). He talks about the concept of sacred and absolute power between these two structures of religion and the public and how the contemporary church, in all its imperfection, can seek to

2025

My intention is to discuss briefly several elements of the connection between liberal democracy and religion. This topic is decisive in much of Richard Neuhaus' work. Conserving liberty is a central task today, and religion's place in this task important, although controversial. The orientation of my paper is toward this political or ethical issue, not toward faith as such. One should recognize, however, that from some secular standpoints the unlikelihood, improbability, or lack of evidence for revelation shapes from the start the seriousness with which one addresses the connection between religion and politics. From these standpoints, the moral height and strength of the Jewish and Christian revelations is not as such evidence of their truth. The fact that Farabi, Maimonides, Aquinas, Hobbes, Locke, Kant, and Hegel -and in their own way Plato and Aristotle -considered the issue of the connection between thought and faith does not show its intellectual power. We and they grapple with a problem that there is no special intellectual reason to deal with earnestly -as distinguished from historical or political reasons. The evidence for revelation is not greater than that of other possibilities one would not dream of taking seriously. Similar (although opposed) assurance may also govern those convinced by faith. It is sometimes said that judgments about the importance or superiority of reason cannot escape from an original leap of faith not different in principle from faith as we ordinarily understand it. The choice to follow along reason's path must at first be irrational, or not demonstrated. One begins by assuming a superiority of reason that one cannot prove. Yet, this argument apparently does not lead those who doubt the evidence and authority of pious faith to take its claim more seriously. One reason is that, however reason begins, its journey can always remain open to

2025

The relations of ethics with the other aspects of the socio-historical domain and the impact of an acute socio-political crisis on ethics are quite old topics and may appear saturated. In any case, the goal of this text is more modest; it primarily aims to analyze the status and role of ethics in our current age. Nevertheless, this task necessitates a certain analysis of ethics in general, in its diversity of forms and abstract unity, as well as the theories about history and society, especially about social crisis. However, even the latter part is not an independent investigation and demands a preliminary outline of the fundamental ontological, epistemological, and methodological principles and presuppositions.

2025, Jerusalem Post

From liberalism to authoritarianism, the warning we need to take from Washington. I am sure that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's people watch all this and learn. The warning is written on the wall loud and clear.

2025

This paper examines the Talmudic framework of par he’elem davar shel tzibur—a communal offering brought when a judicial error by the Sanhedrin leads the public to sin—and its implications for judicial accountability in Jewish law. By comparing this ancient legal mechanism with the American doctrine of judicial immunity, particularly as developed through cases such as Stump v. Sparkman and Pierson v. Ray, the paper explores the philosophical and structural differences between the two systems. Whereas American law prioritizes judicial independence by shielding judges from personal liability for decisions made within their jurisdiction, Jewish law, at least according to one opinion in the Mishnah, assigns both ritual and financial responsibility to the judges themselves for the harm caused by their erroneous rulings. Through this comparative analysis, the paper highlights how Jewish legal principles centered on collective spiritual responsibility and public acknowledgment of error might offer valuable insights into enhancing accountability and restoring trust in modern legal systems. The study ultimately proposes that adopting mechanisms for transparent acknowledgment of judicial error—without necessarily undermining judicial independence—could enrich the ethical landscape of contemporary American jurisprudence.

2025

En los primeros años de la vida republicana, el actual territorio de la República de Colombia hospedaba 1.110.907 habitantes y la provincia de la capital contaba con 188.695 personas de las cuales 35.000 residentes en la ciudad. Bogotá se... more

2025, Ethical Perspectives

The paper argues that the ethics of compromise, toleration, and war sometimes have to bracket who is right in the underlying conflict. It starts by highlighting a parallel between the ethics of compromise, toleration, and war: All three sometimes seem to apply symmetrically to those who are right and those who are wrong. It then discusses three attempts to make sense of this without bracketing who is right: One employs the idea of secondary oughts, a second appeals to conventions that are justifiably articulated in neutral terms, a third interprets the relevant oughts as subjective. The paper tries to show that none of them succeeds, and it concludes that we should embrace the view that the ethics of compromise, toleration, and war sometimes have to bracket who is right. The deeper rationale for this view, it suggests, is that sometimes all parties to a conflict must count as legitimate.

2025, History of Science Journal (№ 1, 2025)

There are various concepts that are accepted as symbols of the struggle between good and evil in the world. One of these is Armageddon. Detailed information about Armageddon is available in the Bible. According to Christians, the Battle of Armageddon is the final battle between the forces of good and evil in the world. The article discusses which forces will participate in Armageddon and what the consequences will be. There have also been wars and political changes in various periods of history that have been associated with Armageddon. The site of the battle of Armageddon is thought to be Megiddo. There is various information about this region in history. The city of Megiddo has been the centre of many wars. The Battle of Armageddon has been identified with many events in history. This is mainly due to the interpretation of biblical information by researchers. The Bible does not clearly state when the battle of Armageddon will take place. Although there are different estimates in the Christian world, none of them gives a precise date.

2025, Perspectives on Politics

2025, Synthesis Philosophica

The aim of my paper is to show some elements in Milton's and Locke's political writin gs, depending on their attitudes to different media. Milton in his argumentation against censorship must demonstrate that all the ancient instances for censorship, usually cited in his century, can be interpreted as examples of another phenomenon. However, Milton, analysing loci of Plato's Republic and some Scriptural topics, recognises the scope and significance of nonconceptual, nonprinted, nonverbal forms of communication; he des cribes them as signs of childish, female or uneducated behaviours, as valueless phenomena from the point of view of political liberty incarnated in the freedom of press. John Locke's attitude is the same. I will show a chain of ideas, similar to Milton's one, in his Two Tracts on Government and in his Epistola de tolerantia, focusing the analyses on the concept of adiaphora (indifferent things).

2025

This paper brings together three central aspects of Locke's philosophy-his theology, epistemology, and political theory-to present a more holistic understanding of his thought. I argue that we can find a commonality in these three aspects, in what I call Locke's Christian individualism: that is, his view of human nature as created in the image of God. Thus, this paper establishes two things, first, Locke's view of the image of God is in two parts: i) reason and ii) immortality. Only the latter was lost after the Fall. Reason, the intact part of the image, Locke calls the Candle of the Lord, a view I argue he shares with the Cambridge Platonists. Second, the paper establishes that Christ's mission, for Locke, has, like the image, two connected aspects: i) to promulgate a Law of Faith and ii) to restore human nature to the full image, to immortality. This hinges upon an understanding of Locke's Christology, the divinity of Christ and the individual's relation to God, through Christ as the seed of God and the mediator. In this way, I argue, Locke inhabits a middle ground between empiricism and Platonism, as individuals must experience the world, thus making use of their reason to receive salvation and reach a higher state of understanding God's truth, wisdom and love.

2025, Maimonides

The Colloquium is a conversation between seven highly educated representatives of various religions and worldviews: a supporter of natural religion (Toralba), a Calvinist (Curtius), a Muslim (Octavius), a Roman Catholic (Coroneus), a Lutheran (Fridericus), a Jew (Salomon), and a pagan (Senamus). Bodin never signed this work and it was not published during his lifetime. The new concept of religion represented by Toralba emphasises the role of reason and natural law, independent of any ecclesiastical allegiance. Here, natural religion is not conceived, as it was earlier, as being preliminary to divine revelation, but rather as a free-standing position, always distinguished from-and at times opposed to-traditional religions. Toralba's universalism and the genealogies of natural religion that he traces distinguish his religion from Judaism even though he relies on a twofold foundation: the biblical history of primitive mankind and natural reason.

2025

This investigation aims to provide a contemporary theory of evil. Due to its theoretical and methodological presuppositions, it will start with the question of the conditions of possibility of such a theory of evil. Nevertheless, this type of investigation is quite abstract, and tends to go beyond methodology, and become substantial but ambiguous and speculative. Thus, it seems that its concrete interpretation and validation are facilitated, or even become possible, by providing a specific draft or outline of a concrete theory. Thus, this text presents not only an abstract investigation of the conditions of the possibility of a theory of evil, but it tries to use and apply the outcomes of that work and provides an outline of a theory of evil, and so the critique and the validation-process of the product indirectly enable a preliminary test of the overall theoretical presuppositions and the methodological core.

2025

Secularism is often defined as requiring a separation between church and state, or between religion and politics. However, contemporary controversies over religion in the public sphere and in state courts suggest that the border between these two domains may be impossible to define. Complicating matters is that this division of labor appears more characteristic of the Christian Middle Ages than of our own age, in which the nation state has assumed a monopoly over sovereignty. The doctrine of separation itself is indebted to the theological claim that there are “Two Kingdoms,” indicating that this doctrine may not be religiously neutral and universally applicable. My chapter traces the ambivalent history of political secularization in relation to the theologico-political problem, and suggests the impossibility of such separation. From the seventeenth century we have inherited not one but two competing models for the relation between church and state: Thomas Hobbes’s thorough subordination of the church and of civil religion to the state Leviathan, for the purpose of unifying sovereignty; and John Locke’s argument for a strict boundary between church and commonwealth that would enable religious toleration. The tension between these two models, rather than any clean separation between religion and politics, defines our present, post-secular age.

2025

A short article analyses history from underside.

2025

Analyses the reasons why history to be viewed from underside.

2025, The Social Order as Locus of Liberalism

The various manifestations of liberalism, whether in the political and economic orders, or in the sphere of the family and the human person,
are related and find their common locus in the social order. This paper argues that it is hostility to any influence by a collectivity to individual opinion or conduct that therefore is the hallmark of liberalism.

2025, Derechos Y Libertades Revista Del Instituto Bartolome De Las Casas

ABLAR hoy de fundamentación difiere mucho de la idea que de fundamentar se ha tenido hasta hace apenas veinte años. Con la aparición de la modernidad, se vio la necesidad de dar un principio firme y una estructuración precisa a los nuevos conceptos ético-políticos que se propugnaban. De este modo, la fundamentación tenía una función doble: por una parte, se daba con un origen desde el cual inferir deductivamente -tan sólo atendiendo a la razón (neutral y universal)-las políticas que la modernidad propugnaba; por otro lado, en este proceso deductivo se establecían los justos límites que los nuevos conceptos debían tener. Con respecto a esto último ha de tenerse en cuenta que los valores modernos (la tolerancia, la libertad, la autonomía, etc.), apenas puestos sobre la mesa de las IM-Oclamas políticas, reclamaban el ser limitados justamente: no era posible tolerar al intolerante, ni al que se aprovechara de nuestra tolerancia para hacemos daño. La fundamentación (por más de demostrar aquellos valores como inevitables en una sociedad moderna y, con ello, reclamarlos), daba también con Esta comunicación parte de un trabajo financiado por la Fundación Caja de Madrid.

2025, Journal of the History of Sexuality, Vol. 32, No. 3, p. 288-312

When organized homosexual emancipation took root in the late nineteenth century, it was largely based on the then prevailing biomedical and psychiatric conceptualizations of homosexuality. These presented it as an innate inclination of a minority, while science-based knowledge was seen as the road towards societal acceptance. In this article it is argued that as early as in the eighteenth century, distinct efforts were made towards ‘homosexual emancipation’, if preliminary and less coherent perhaps, yet also quite radical in tone and contents. While the modern gay movement largely steered a defensive course way into the twentieth century, based on a clearly demarcated minority group’s sense of ‘being different’ and ‘having no other option’, in the eighteenth century there were voices that appealed to homosexual behavior as a matter of self-determination and choice by deriving inspiration from early liberalism, libertinism, cultural history and literature. The examples provided in this article are derived from (mainly English and French) court archives, pamphlets, political-philosophical treatises, personal documents and (semi-pornographic) literary texts.

2025

In order to think about the purposes of Jewish education in America after October 7, we first need to understand what we mean by “this moment,” a moment characterized by an explosion of antisemitic rhetoric and actions as well as an underlying erosion of liberal democratic norms. Educating for this moment entails understanding the dynamics of antisemitism, not in order to fight against it but rather in order to empower American Jews to navigate the spaces in which they live and work. Beyond that response to the contemporary reality, it also demands the development of an American Jewish civic education, in order to build a better future. The chapter proposes five themes that ought to be at the heart of such an education.

2025, Artikel

Das als „mysteriös“ geltende Attentat hängt mit den in der Bevölkerung und im politischen Feld verankerten Toleranz-mustern eng zusammen. Daher ist der Fall alles andere als singulär. Die Haltung des Attentäters lässt sich eindeutig im... more

2025, Archives de philosophie du droit

2024, Current Events in Public Philosophy Series (APA Blog)

In this first installment of a three-part series, I focus on the critique of civility. In so doing, I do not defend incivility. In fact, part of my critique of civility extends equally to incivility. My position is that we must move our normative discourse beyond both the thesis of civility and the antithesis of incivility to a synthesis that reframes the discussion in terms of nonviolence.

2024, The Journal of Ecclesiastical History

This article delves into the often-overlooked scholar Robert Greene, a fellow of Clare Hall, University of Cambridge, who authored works in both religion and natural philosophy. Greene made significant contributions to the debate on the interplay between reason and faith, with his primary target being John Locke, whose epistemology and views on the relationship between reason and faith he considered detrimental to religion. This article examines Greene’s criticism of Locke’s views on the relationship between reason and faith within its institutional context, shedding new light on Locke’s early reception at the University of Cambridge.

2024

Vincent de Coorebyter, directeur général du Centre de Recherche et d'Information Socio-Politiques (CRISP) > 2 e partie > PISTES PÉDAGOGIQUES Michel Dechamps, professeur à l'École Normale Catholique du Brabant Wallon (ENCBW) Stéphane Noirhomme, formateur à l'Institut d'Éco-Pédagogie (IEP) Jean-Philippe Robinet, formateur à l'Institut d'Éco-Pédagogie (IEP) COLLABORATION > Yves Hanosset, consultant pour le projet « Politique au programme » CONTRIBUTION RÉDACTIONNELLE > Cristina Marchi COORDINATION FONDATION ROI BAUDOUIN Guido Knops, directeur Benoît Fontaine, conseiller de programme Anne-Françoise Genel, responsable de projet Delphine Saudoyer et Thao Nguyen, assistantes GRAPHISME > Dominique Hambye IMPRESSION > Éditions européennes Cette publication peut être téléchargée gratuitement sur les sites www.kbs-frb.be et www.portaildemocratie.be. Elle peut également être commandée (gratuitement) sur notre site www.kbs-frb.be, par e-mail à l'adresse publi@kbs-frb.be ou auprès de notre centre de contact, tél. + 32 70 233 728, fax + 32 70 233 727. La série « Politique au programme » comporte deux autres carnets pédagogiques : l'un consacré au thème des Clivages et partis, l'autre au thème de L'éthique en politique. Ces publications peuvent également être téléchargées ou commandées gratuitement.

2024

Slightly further afield, but not completely off the point, is Wisconsin v. Yoder, 406 U.S. 205 (1972), where the Court held that Amish parents could not be compelled to send their children to a certain level of state-provided schooling, due to the impact such a requirement would have on the parents' Free Exercise Clause rights and rights to raise their children in a particular religious tradition. 7 390 U.S. at 639 (1968). 398 [Vol. 41 8 Compare id. (noting that the restriction allowed parents to purchase pornographic magazines for their children), with Reno v. ACLU, 521 U.S. 844,865 (1997) (striking down the Communications Decency Act in part because "neither the parents' consentnor even their participationin the [offensive] communication would avoid the application of the statute"). 9 See 438 U.S. at 764-66 (Brennan, J., dissenting). 1o See id. at 748 (plurality opinion) (noting the importance of the fact that radio intrudes into the home in determining the level of permissible government regulation). " Compare Am. Library Ass'n v. United States, 201 F. Supp. 2d 401, 409 (E.D. Pa. 2002) (discussing libraries' provision of Internet services as creating a public forum); with Mainstream Loudoun v. Bd. of Trs., 24 F. Supp. 2d 552, 562-63 (E.D. Va. 1998) (discussing the same).

2024, La interculturalidad en cuestión

Reflexiones sobre los derechos humanos, la construcción de la ciudadanía y la lucha por el reconocimiento pleno y real de las diversidades culturales en las sociedades latinoamericanas.
Índice:
- El «No» radical como «lo universalmente intolerable»
- Los límites de la tolerancia
- Lo intolerable desde la concepción liberal
- Lo público como espacio de convivencia de lo diverso
- Tolerancia y autonomía: ¿dos caras de la misma moneda?
- El problema de las minorías culturales
- Autonomía con restricciones
- Tolerancia e intolerancia: una línea delgada pero precisa
- Hacia un universalismo intercontextual dialógico

2024, Zwischen Rechtsstaat, Kultur und Religion.

In dieser Studie sollte herausgefunden werden, inwieweit muslimische Zuwanderer aus verschiedenen Ländern Subsahara-Afrikas wesentliche Werte der Aufnahmegesellschaft im Großraum Wien teilen und ob sich abweichende (religiöse) Werte in... more

2024, Actas del Congreso Internacional III Centenario de Jean-Jaques Rousseau (1712-2012))

Si hay un tema que marca de forma definitiva el siglo XVIII es el problema
de la intolerancia civil y religiosa y las distintas formas de enfrentarlo.
Las guerras de religión habían impactado las conciencias de los
filósofos y prefiguraban la necesidad de encontrar un medio para evitarlas.
Fueron muchos los sufrimientos causados a todo el mundo por esto
y el mayor de todos a la propia religión cristiana, dividida tanto social
como teológicamente. El sueño de reconstrucción del Sacro Imperio Cristiano
había despertado abruptamente en una pesadilla de barbarie entre
aquellos que decían seguir al nazareno, entre aquellos que predicaban la
paz y la concordia. Las armas rugían con fuerza y las cabezas rodaban
a la par que el fuego prendía en las conciencias del pueblo hasta hacer
arder a todos los cismáticos, herejes y renegados que pisoteaban la verdad del Redentor.

2024, Die Macht der Rechtfertigung, Mahmoud Bassiouni, Eva Buddeberg, Mathias Iser, Anja Karnein, und Martin Saar (Berlin: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2024), pp. 249-265.

A discussion of toleration, drawing on Rainer Forst's work, particularly Toleration in Conflict and The Right to Justification. Special attention is paid to his idea of shareable reasons, to the possibility that toleration can involve a kind of insult, and to the ways we must tolerate the intolerant. Rainer Forst analyzes tolerance in terms of three elements: objection, acceptance, and rejection. 2 Toleration presupposes some objection to a view or practice; it nonetheless requires that view or practice to be accepted in certain ways; but it requires this only within limits, outside of which it permits rejection (the withholding of acceptance.) This analysis brings out the inherent tensions that tolerance involves. The most obvious tension is felt by those whom tolerance requires to accept things that they have reason to object to. As Forst points out, however, tolerance can also involve tension for those who are tolerated but feel insulted by being merely tolerated, rather than accepted more fully. Given that it involves these tensions, why accept toleration itself? Why accept views or practices that one has reason to object to? And, from the point of view of those who are tolerated, why regard tolerance as good enough if the acceptance it involves is only partial, or conditional, or leads to a status one has strong reason not to want? Toleration as Acceptance

2024, Public Ethics for Real People: Toleration, Equal Respect, and Democratic Distortions

To assess the complex struggles for recognition in which our societies are engaged, we need better to understand what we owe one another as a matter of justice.
This chapter critically examines Elisabetta Galeotti’s notion of (what I call) recognition as legitimation, a notion that falls somewhere between traditional liberal understandings of respect and toleration, on the one hand, and esteem recognition, on the other. I focus on whether legitimization can be a demand of (second-personal) justice and how it relates to the notion of dignity as a kind of authority to demand respect from others. I argue that while legitimation as recognition may be justified as a pragmatic means for remedying systematic patterns of disrespect, we should not see it as an alternative and better conception of respect. We need the second-personal and Kantian conception of respect, which regards it as something owed unconditionally to everyone, as a response to dignity, and as something that persons can exact from each other, which are features the idea of recognition as legitimation fails to account for and realize.

2024

This paper examines how changing social values in Western societies have affected public discourse, motivating social exclusion and cancel culture. It critiques both contemporary progressive movements and liberal ideologies. What we now... more

2024, Trajecta: Religion, Culture and Society in the Low Countries

This article explores the circulation and evolution of the European discourse of geldmacht (‘money power’) from 1840 until 1911. During this period, a variety of thinkers used the notion of geldmacht to express opposing arguments.... more

2024, Tolerancia ¿El valor último o el último de los valores?

La tolerancia, su necesidad, sus alcances y sus límites, configuran un núcleo de controversia en el discurso actual en ética y filosofía política.
En 2009, las estudiantes avanzadas de la Licenciatura en Filosofía de la
Facultad de Humanidades y Ciencias de la Educación de la Universidad de
la República Deborah Techera y Jacqueline Fernández presentaron un proyecto de investigación que fue aprobado y financiado por la CSIC, radicado en el Departamento de Filosofía de la Práctica, en el marco de la voluntad de la mencionada universidad de impulsar trabajos de jóvenes estudiantes investigadores.
Las actividades, desarrolladas en 2010, fueron acompañadas por quien escribe en calidad de docente orientador. Cerca del cierre, se organizó un taller donde las ponencias aquí reunidas fueron presentadas y ampliamente discutidas.
Las mismas han sido levemente reelaboradas para esta publicación.
Hemos decidido poner como subtítulo a nuestro libro un interrogante que resume los interrogantes de esa jornada: «Tolerancia, ¿el valor último
o el último de los valores?». Consideramos que los valores fundamentales son inconmensurables.

2024, Philosophical Inquiry in Education

I recently attended a professional development workshop for high school teachers, and we were asked to share ideas about the characteristics of a great teacher. People offered a range of responses: great teachers are experts in the subject they teach, are passionate about their subject, create strong classroom structure, and articulate clear expectations. They are caring, encouraging, engaging, enthusiastic, fair, and firm. When I was asked, I thought only of what seemed to me to be the quality proving useful in some of my more challenging encounters with teenagers: a thick skin. I am in the midst of the reverse of Trent's professional journey. He taught in high schools and then later anchored his scholarly interests "in how people learn to understand and cope with life's more trying realities." I taught and wrote about philosophy and education in universities, but now teach full time in a high school. I brought my scholarly interests to bear in helping me cope with one of life's more trying realities: the high school classroom. Like Trent, I have been thinking about stoicism often lately, and I was thinking about it during that professional development session. Trent mentions early in this paper that he helps his students "get to grips with what it would look like to be the sort of teacher who shows up facing the 'difficult' aspects of teaching without being 'discouraged' by them." He goes on to discuss how we would all benefit from a new orientation nowadays, "finding the strength to try to make things better for our fellow travelers." Philosophers of education, he argues, should develop the themes of acknowledgement and affinity, helping people develop these stoic principles. Trent shows that those themes prove foundational for our ability to encounter and engage others. Trent suggests that affinity and acknowledgement are educational ideals-ideals far more meaningful than those we are told to reach through pedagogical alignment or other educational buzzwords. In many ways, I'm an ideal respondent to Trent's paper. Like Trent, I have found the modern stoics like Donald Robertson (2019) and William Irvine (2008) to be compelling guides to living well. But those sympathies place me too close to Trent's side. In this response, therefore, I focus on the subject he mentions briefly before turning to broad stoic themes in philosophy of education: what value is stoicism for teachers?

2024, Religions

The main aim of this paper is to provide an account of Leibniz’s engagement with the doctrine of cosmic dualism in his Theodicy, i.e., the view that there are two distinct fundamental principles that are responsible for the existence of the created world, one good and the other evil. Leibniz’s discussion is primarily a response to arguments in favour of cosmic dualism that he finds in the writings of Pierre Bayle. However, in addition, he presents a genealogical argument that appears to be intended to provide reasons to reject the view. The paper also contains a critical discussion of Leibniz’s case, and finishes by drawing attention to some issues which arise that are worthy of further consideration.

2024, HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe)

2024, RePEc: Research Papers in Economics

Firms activities generate increasing environmental and social negative effects. As an answer, the notion of "corporate social responsibility" comes to light and begins to be integrated in multinational firms strategies. Usually grounded on Universal Declarations and especially on the "Universal Declaration of Human Rights" adopted by the United Nations in 1948, those strategies presuppose that this declaration promotes universal values. This paper aims a criticism to this occidental "evidence". A synthetic analysis of hindhuist and animist philosophies shows that they are based on values that we do not find in the "presupposed" universal declaration. This conflict of values involves that with its current contents, this declaration cannot be applied everywhere.

2024, International journal of social sciences

This paper unveils the belief that there exist some natural duties that individuals are obliged to fulfill. This permits one to abandon the hopeless question of sovereignty in the state. The various means to gain access to the content of natural law with complete certainty is also an indispensable preoccupation. First, the possibility of arriving at this knowledge is thanks to the dependence on the natural faculties of the individual. Second, by demonstrating that God exists while laying much emphasis on the argument from design. An omniscient God who is the creator of the universe and everything in it would not have created human beings without giving them certain objectives to attain or purposes in their lives to be fulfilled. Individuals are expected to refer to their natural duties. The content of our natural duties is deduced through a rational reflection on one's own human nature. These rational and inherent reflections are those that force people to act through three different natural duties. First, people always owe themselves the duty to ponder over the creations of God based on his knowledge that is manifested and evident in nature. The second duty is to be involved in praiseworthy activities involving God worship, adoration and honor which an omnipotent and benevolent God that he is deserves. Third, man must not only be concerned about the satisfaction of material needs as a prerequisite to a happy life but should equally partake in societal activities through speech, language, and the preservation of his life in particular and those of others in general.

2024, HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe)

2024, Modern Language Studies

2024

Secular or free thought, inconvenient bits of knowledge, and the rule of law are under attack again. But this time the attack is not inspired by the infamous and intolerant ideologies from World War II. It is not from the left, led by the international socialists, headquartered in the USSR, and not from the right, led by the national socialists. Before the war, independent secular thought was respected mainly in the liberal democracies of Europe and the Americas. After World War II, liberal democracies have flourished, and so has secular thought. After the war, the US took over leadership of the world order from Great Britain. It led by proposing and helping establish liberal international institutions in order to broker peace between nations. These institutions included the United Nations and its subsidiary organs, such as the Security Council and the International Court of Justice, as well as the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. The World Trade Organization has promoted world trade and so boosted world income. Eleanor Roosevelt led the effort to adopt the Universal Declaration of Human Rights at the UN General Assembly.

2024, Locke on Tolerating Atheists

Letter Concerning Toleration (Letter, henceforth) disappoints many modern liberals because in it he denies that atheism should be tolerated in a Commonwealth. Lockeans who wish to avoid this conclusion argue that Locke's deeper moral and political commitments require tolerating atheists. My interest here is rather different. I offer a close reading of Locke's Letter. I argue that there are reasons to believe that Locke hints to the alert reader that he does not accept the rationale he offers for being intolerant of atheists. I do not take the kind of case I offer here to be definitive, but I hope that it is nonetheless compelling.

2024

The first section of this paper tries to demonstrate that the mosque conflict is a veritable issue of toleration within contemporary pluralism. This argument requires a preliminary reassessment of the theory of toleration concerning: (a) the reassessment of the private/public divide as a useful boundary for toleration; (b) the intersection of the horizontal and the vertical notions of toleration, namely the social attitude and the political dimension; (c) the politicization of cultural issues by the democratic process, which tends to transform the cultural dialectic between majority and minority into a political one. In the case of mosques, the author argues that the problematic difference engendering the conflict is not the Muslim religion per se, nor its practices of worship which are allegedly incompatible, offensive and unacceptable by democratic society. It is rather that the Muslim religion provides a unifying label to group together many immigrant communities whose growing nu...

2024, The Journal of Ethics

Traditionally, an adequate strategy to deal with the tension between liberty and security has been toleration, for the latter allows the maximization of individual liberty without endangering security, since it embraces the limits set by the harm principle and the principle of self-defense of the liberal order. The area outside the boundary clearly requires repressive measures to protect the security and the rights of all. In this paper, we focus on the balance of liberty and security afforded by toleration, analyzing how this strategy works in highly conflictual contexts and sorting out the different sets of reason that might motivate individual to assume a tolerant attitude. We contend that toleration represents a reliable political solution to conflicts potentially threatening social security when it is coupled with social tolerance. Hence, we examine the reasons the agents may have for endorsing toleration despite disagreement and disapproval. In the range of these reasons, we a...

2024

Purpose. To determine the identity of the prototypical blind man repeatedly described by philosopher John Locke (1632-1704). Methods. Historical books were reviewed. Results. In several works, John Locke described a studious man he knew who went blind from smallpox at a young age. This man struggled to understand visual concepts such as the yellow color of saffron, the clarity of the sun, or the color of scarlet, which the man compared to a trumpet. Nonconformist minister John Troughton (1637-1681) went blind from smallpox at a young age. Troughton was a fellow student with Locke at Oxford University. Troughton's sermons quoted the exact portions in Song of Solomon (Canticles 4-6) and Revelations (chapter 18) which contain the imagery (and the association of the color scarlet with the sound of trumpets) found in Locke's writings. Thus, Locke's comparison of the color scarlet with the sound of trumpets was probably not a description of synesthesia, but rather was an attempt of a blind scholar to understand Biblical imagery. Conclusions. The struggles of blind nonconformist minister John Troughton to understand Biblical imagery probably stimulated John Locke to ponder what humans can know innately about vision, independent of experience.