Papers by Thomas Kiefer
Journal of Animal Ethics, 2019
such an approach lacks consistency. I found it refreshingly instructive. After all, practicing ve... more such an approach lacks consistency. I found it refreshingly instructive. After all, practicing veterinarians must daily make their own decisions regarding challenging situations that may have no single-best solution. Different clients and their companion animals present an infinite array of variables to contend with. The contributing experts were on the whole diligent in framing their responses in the oft-competing contexts of ethical ideals and practical realities. Inevitably, then, users of this book will not concur with all of the recommendations for a given scenario. Nevertheless, I found the contributions notably conscientious. For example, instead of simply condemning vegan diets for cats, Richard Green, currently with the Veterinary Defense Society, presents a nuanced discussion that considers all stakeholders, including the animals processed into “pet” food. Similarly for the multipronged response of Andrew Gardiner (Royal School of Veterinary Studies) on how to deal with an...
Comparative Civilizations Review, 2015
IntroductionOur question is: can collective wisdom save civilization? On one rendition this quest... more IntroductionOur question is: can collective wisdom save civilization? On one rendition this question is rather straightforward and can be empirically answered. For if 'collective wisdom' is understood as the collective knowledge of a society or culture and 'civilization' is associated with a certain level of social or technological advancement, then our question concerns whether collective knowledge can help create or maintain certain kinds of social structures or technologies, certain levels of urbanization or kinds of civil infrastructural technology.Characterized this way, the answer to our question is an obvious, and perhaps trivial, "yes." But both 'collective wisdom' and 'civilization' have alternative definitions, which render our question less trivial and more important, though more difficult to answer.'Collective wisdom' may not refer merely to the collective knowledge of a particular society or culture, but can refer instea...
Although physician aid-in-dying (PAD) continues to gain acceptance in the United States, many he... more Although physician aid-in-dying (PAD) continues to gain acceptance in the United States, many health care professionals still oppose the practice. There are a number of reasons for this opposition, including the potential for unethical social, professional, and legal consequences. But one recurring theme is the belief that PAD runs contrary to the medical role of the physician as a healer with a duty to 'do no harm.' This belief in turn rests on the claim that intentionally killing an innocent person, even indirectly, is harm in the relevant sense, and to some, morally equivalent to murder as unjustified killing. While bioethicists have considered the moral status of PAD from a number of normative perspectives, less attention has been paid to the nature of the intuitions that inform opposition to the practice as such and apart from potential negative consequences. In this essay I consider the moral status of PAD by inspecting these intuitions. I argue that the intuitions that inform opposition to PAD as an act likely result from a type of moral illusion. A moral illusion is similar to an optical illusion, which occurs when our expectations fail to align with the reality of a situation and persist even upon being made aware of it. Insofar as moral intuitions are immediate assessments of a situation that do not result from conscious deliberation, they may fail to indicate the reality of a moral situation. Thus even if PAD is morally permissible, this fact alone does not alter which intuitions we form in response. I support this by considering recent findings in cognitive neuroscience indicating that moral judgments are driven by moral intuitions and are thus subject to distortion, and in evolutionary biology demonstrating why we have certain moral intuitions that can in effect “misfire” in situations that differ greatly from the ones in which the capacity for moral judgment evolved. I then apply these findings to PAD by arguing that it is because intentionally killing an innocent person is immoral in the vast majority of cases that we evolved in such a way as to form the intuition that it is normally harmful and unjustified in every case, including an indirect case like PAD.
Ethical concerns about policing, immigration, and security, among others, have recently sparked r... more Ethical concerns about policing, immigration, and security, among others, have recently sparked renewed national debates and even protests centered around xenophobia, especially on college campuses. The causes of such problems are often complex, nuanced, and structural. But recent research suggests they have a common basis in the psychological predispositions to form implicit biases and hold negative stereotypes about others. Acknowledging this is an important part of addressing these ethical concerns. But counteracting these predispositions requires a framework for understanding why they exist in the first place, which is often left out of ethical accounts. As an increasing number of human beings live in or near large urban centers, we are now tasked with coping with an unprecedented level of diversity, impersonality, and complexity. In this way, the social environments of the twenty-first century pose new challenges to ethical life, and only by asking what virtue requires today can we hope to address these issues. In this essay I provide a framework for identifying and justifying the moral virtues required to meet the ethical challenges posed by twenty-first century societies. This account updates an Aristotelian understanding of moral virtue through reference to recent findings in evolutionary biology and cognitive neuroscience. I argue that moral virtues should be redefined as adaptive forms of evolved psychological predispositions towards cooperating with others that we can identify through the social use of rationality. I then show that due to certain changes in our social settings we are presented with unique moral challenges that can only be met through the cultivation of specific moral virtues concerned with cooperation and the avoidance of specific moral vices concerned with conflict.
Comparative Civilizations Review, Apr 2015
Can collective wisdom save civilization? This essay is an attempt to answer this question. I argu... more Can collective wisdom save civilization? This essay is an attempt to answer this question. I argue that, in one sense, yes, collective wisdom can save civilization. But in a more important sense, collective wisdom should be understood as a form of civilization, as the result and expression of a moral civilizing-process that comes about through the creation and transmission of collective interpretations of human experience and human nature. Collective wisdom traditions function in this manner by providing an interpretation of what it means to be human and what thoughts, skills, and actions are required to live a successful human life at the most general level of analysis. Collective wisdom can have a civilizing effect on individuals, and indirectly on societies, by providing a type of orienting framework for understanding the proper relationship between the self, others, and the world. Such traditions in effect provide a “blueprint” for the successful human life as such, by providing guidance on thought and action, on what is appropriate to think, feel, desire, and do in theoretical and practical contexts. A wise individual will be a 'civilized' individual in this moral sense, an individual who is properly habituated and educated so as to now reflectively endorse and desire thinking and acting in virtuous ways. However, this understanding of collective wisdom and civilization is in many ways today controversial and met with justified critiques and skeptical criticisms. To defend this way of approaching and answering our question against these critiques, I turn to ancient wisdom traditions from ancient India, China, and Greece as paradigms for understanding exactly how collective wisdom can achieve the end of civilizing humanity. Based on this analysis, I sketch the outlines of a revitalized ancient wisdom tradition able to civilize individuals today, but such a tradition must be updated to reflect the advancement of modern natural science and to meet the demands of living in our diverse, pluralistic, and globalized world.
Disability Studies Quarterly, Feb 2014
This essay attempts to explain the traditional and contemporary philosophical neglect of disabili... more This essay attempts to explain the traditional and contemporary philosophical neglect of disability by arguing that the philosophical prioritization of rationality leads to a distinctly philosophical conception of disability as a negative category of non-normative embodiment. I argue that the privilege given to rationality as distinctive of what it means to be both a human subject and a moral agent informs supposedly rational norms of human embodiment. Non-normative types of embodiment in turn can only be understood in contradistinction to these rationalized norms, which are predicated on the elimination of certain features and types of embodiment deemed inimical to reason. To establish this thesis, I focus on Platonic philosophy and the Republic as Platonic conceptions of reason and normative types of embodiment have a historical and conceptual influence on contemporary assumptions concerning rational human nature, medicine, mental health, vice, disease, and impairment.
Philosophy Today, Mar 2013
Recent scholarship on the nature of truth within Hans-Georg Gadamer’s and Martin Heidegger’s phil... more Recent scholarship on the nature of truth within Hans-Georg Gadamer’s and Martin Heidegger’s philosophies has focused primarily on identifying and explicating the commonality between their respective accounts of truth. However, this emphasis on commonality has overlooked Gadamer’s distinctive understanding of truth outside of and beyond a simple development of Heidegger’s consideration of truth as alētheia. This paper defends the claim that the specific manner in which Gadamer and Heidegger critique the correspondence theory of truth is indicative of their distinctive conceptions of truth more generally. While Heidegger understands truth as the unconcealment of beings through the disclosure of Dasein as Being-in-the-world as such, Gadamer concludes that truth is the disclosure of human being through hermeneutical understanding as realized in concrete dialogical engagement in particular. These similar, but often conflicting, accounts of truth cannot be subsumed within one another without overlooking and thereby misunderstanding the philosophical insights found in Gadamer’s and Heidegger’s distinctive philosophies. More importantly, the inability or unwillingness to distinguish their conceptions of truth prevents any subsequent analysis of which thinker provides a more compelling critique of the correspondence theory of truth and which account is more plausible as an understanding of the phenomenon of truth broadly construed. This paper ends with a brief defense of Gadamer's understanding of truth.
Books by Thomas Kiefer
The book explores the fluid boundaries between animal and human nature from a philosophical-anthr... more The book explores the fluid boundaries between animal and human nature from a philosophical-anthropological perspective. It draws on the animal as a reference point and metaphor that allows us to understand what is distinctively human and what is not.
Editors: Geoffrey Dierckxsens (University of Antwerp), Rudmer Bijlsma (University of Antwerp), Michael Begun (Fordham University), Thomas Kiefer (Fordham University)
Publisher: Rowman &Littlefield
Forthcoming, November 2016
Table of Contents
Introduction
PART ONE
1. Nonhuman animals: a shared life and a licence to kill by Prof. Dr. Giulia Sissa (UCLA)
2. Kata Phusin: Ancient and Contemporary Perspectives on the Hermeneutics of Animality by Thomas Kiefer (Fordham University)
3. Animal and Human Nature in Early Modern Philosophy: Spinoza and Hume by Dr. Rudmer Bijlsma (University of Antwerp)
4. Kafka’s Animals in the Philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre by Dr. Jo Bogaerts (University of Antwerp)
5. What is Distinctively Human? Charles Taylor and Alasdair MacIntyre on the Relation between Humans and Animals by Rob Compaijen and Michiel Meijer (University of Antwerp)
6. Is it better to be a Human than a Lion? by Dr. Lantz Miller (CUNY)
PART TWO
7. Imagination - The Imagination of Animals by Prof. Dr. Jennifer Gosetti-Ferencei (Fordham University; St. John’s College, University of Oxford).
8. Politics – Werewolves: A Reconsideration of Hobbes’s State of Nature from the Perspective of Biopolitics by Prof. Dr. Herbert De Vriese (University of Antwerp)
9. History - The Human Being as Historical Animal: Dialectic and Polemics in Marx’s “The German Ideology” and Nietzsche’s “On the Genealogy of Morality” by Michael Begun and Lilian Cicerchia (Fordham University)
10. Shame - Shame in Front of the Cat? On Shame and the Other by Prof. Dr. Arthur Cools and Geoffrey Dierckxsens (University of Antwerp)
11. Finitude - Being-toward-Meat: An Analytic of Human-Animal Finitude by Prof. Dr. Matthew Calarco (California State University at Fullerton)
12. Joy - Animal Joy: Towards Cat Phenomenology by Prof. Dr. Babette Babich (Fordham University)
Teaching Documents by Thomas Kiefer
What do scientific discoveries entail for the possibility of an objective moral theory? Numerous ... more What do scientific discoveries entail for the possibility of an objective moral theory? Numerous philosophers have recently argued that empirical findings imply that morality is at best a human creation and at worst a useful fiction. Others, accepting this argumentation, defend objectivity but only at the cost of rejecting a scientific approach altogether. In " Nature, Value, and Virtue: An Evolutionary Defense of Moral Realism, " I propose that these commonly accepted views amount to a false dilemma. Rather than being forced to choose between naturalism and objectivity, I argue that morality is a real feature of the natural world that concerns social cooperation. I conclude that we can discover scientific answers to ethical questions that hold true universally by referring to findings in evolutionary biology, cognitive neuroscience, and social psychology. My view combines two approaches often deemed to be incompatible: a neo-Aristotelian focus on human nature as the basis for ethical claims and a neo-Humean understanding of moral psychology. By uniting evolutionarily-informed versions of these approaches, I establish that moral facts are natural facts concerning social cooperation and conflict. These facts result from our evolved human nature and inform ethical decision-making by way of certain prosocial emotions and desires.
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Papers by Thomas Kiefer
Books by Thomas Kiefer
Editors: Geoffrey Dierckxsens (University of Antwerp), Rudmer Bijlsma (University of Antwerp), Michael Begun (Fordham University), Thomas Kiefer (Fordham University)
Publisher: Rowman &Littlefield
Forthcoming, November 2016
Table of Contents
Introduction
PART ONE
1. Nonhuman animals: a shared life and a licence to kill by Prof. Dr. Giulia Sissa (UCLA)
2. Kata Phusin: Ancient and Contemporary Perspectives on the Hermeneutics of Animality by Thomas Kiefer (Fordham University)
3. Animal and Human Nature in Early Modern Philosophy: Spinoza and Hume by Dr. Rudmer Bijlsma (University of Antwerp)
4. Kafka’s Animals in the Philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre by Dr. Jo Bogaerts (University of Antwerp)
5. What is Distinctively Human? Charles Taylor and Alasdair MacIntyre on the Relation between Humans and Animals by Rob Compaijen and Michiel Meijer (University of Antwerp)
6. Is it better to be a Human than a Lion? by Dr. Lantz Miller (CUNY)
PART TWO
7. Imagination - The Imagination of Animals by Prof. Dr. Jennifer Gosetti-Ferencei (Fordham University; St. John’s College, University of Oxford).
8. Politics – Werewolves: A Reconsideration of Hobbes’s State of Nature from the Perspective of Biopolitics by Prof. Dr. Herbert De Vriese (University of Antwerp)
9. History - The Human Being as Historical Animal: Dialectic and Polemics in Marx’s “The German Ideology” and Nietzsche’s “On the Genealogy of Morality” by Michael Begun and Lilian Cicerchia (Fordham University)
10. Shame - Shame in Front of the Cat? On Shame and the Other by Prof. Dr. Arthur Cools and Geoffrey Dierckxsens (University of Antwerp)
11. Finitude - Being-toward-Meat: An Analytic of Human-Animal Finitude by Prof. Dr. Matthew Calarco (California State University at Fullerton)
12. Joy - Animal Joy: Towards Cat Phenomenology by Prof. Dr. Babette Babich (Fordham University)
Teaching Documents by Thomas Kiefer
Editors: Geoffrey Dierckxsens (University of Antwerp), Rudmer Bijlsma (University of Antwerp), Michael Begun (Fordham University), Thomas Kiefer (Fordham University)
Publisher: Rowman &Littlefield
Forthcoming, November 2016
Table of Contents
Introduction
PART ONE
1. Nonhuman animals: a shared life and a licence to kill by Prof. Dr. Giulia Sissa (UCLA)
2. Kata Phusin: Ancient and Contemporary Perspectives on the Hermeneutics of Animality by Thomas Kiefer (Fordham University)
3. Animal and Human Nature in Early Modern Philosophy: Spinoza and Hume by Dr. Rudmer Bijlsma (University of Antwerp)
4. Kafka’s Animals in the Philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre by Dr. Jo Bogaerts (University of Antwerp)
5. What is Distinctively Human? Charles Taylor and Alasdair MacIntyre on the Relation between Humans and Animals by Rob Compaijen and Michiel Meijer (University of Antwerp)
6. Is it better to be a Human than a Lion? by Dr. Lantz Miller (CUNY)
PART TWO
7. Imagination - The Imagination of Animals by Prof. Dr. Jennifer Gosetti-Ferencei (Fordham University; St. John’s College, University of Oxford).
8. Politics – Werewolves: A Reconsideration of Hobbes’s State of Nature from the Perspective of Biopolitics by Prof. Dr. Herbert De Vriese (University of Antwerp)
9. History - The Human Being as Historical Animal: Dialectic and Polemics in Marx’s “The German Ideology” and Nietzsche’s “On the Genealogy of Morality” by Michael Begun and Lilian Cicerchia (Fordham University)
10. Shame - Shame in Front of the Cat? On Shame and the Other by Prof. Dr. Arthur Cools and Geoffrey Dierckxsens (University of Antwerp)
11. Finitude - Being-toward-Meat: An Analytic of Human-Animal Finitude by Prof. Dr. Matthew Calarco (California State University at Fullerton)
12. Joy - Animal Joy: Towards Cat Phenomenology by Prof. Dr. Babette Babich (Fordham University)