This article considers the relation between tolerance and hospitality. It situates this discussion in the history of philosophy with reference to a range of thinkers from Homer and Aristotle to Levinas, Derrida, and Walzer. It argues that the virtue of hospitality is important for negotiating the complexities of our contemporary world. Hospitality responds to the challenge of what is most needed for re-conceiving how one might remain committed to the values of one's own community while also remaining open to those who do not share these same commitments.

This paper looks at the question of sustainability through the prism of a collective action problem fundamentally driven by human desires and needs. It ftrst characterizes the problem of non-sustainability by combining environmental ethics with the philosophy of technology. The paper then considers four basic strategies for resolving the collective action problem: virtue, regulation, price, and innovation. Each solution has its own set of weaknesses and strengths, meaning that achieving sustainability will remain a difficult balancing act.

Assuming a relational understanding of the self, I argue that empathy is necessary for individual and cultural recovery from rape. However, gender affects our ability to listen with empathy to rape survivors. For women, the existence of cultural memories discourages empathy either by engendering fear of their own future rape or by provoking sympathy rather than empathy. For men, the lack of cultural memories makes rape what Arendt calls an "unreality," thus diminishing the possibility for empathy. Although empathetic listeningpresents gender specific challenges for both women and men, it should not be abandoned as a strategy for trauma recovery. I make two broad suggestions for promoting empathy. First, we need to teach empathy for victims and survivors. Second, we need to discredit problematic gender norms, which buttress rape culture and sexual violence.

Eschewing talk about a strong or weak will, I view the will of the dieter to be essentially identical to that of the normal eater, and say they differ only in the luck of their circumstances. However, I adopt a compatibilist approach to the will, generally, such that the dieter, despite having unlucky circumstances, is responsible for her efforts to lose weight. I base this on Hook's view that a person does not know what she can do before doing it, and that she can "redetermine the direction of events" through effort. But a model of "redetermining" the will in which this is a conscious activity is insufficient to address the dieter's problem. I advocate consideration of another dimension of experience, based on the psychoanalytic theory of D.W. Winnicott, in which creative insight arises from the unconscious true self. I suggest that creative insight bypasses the will to radically change the dieter's perspective in a way that conscious strategies alone cannot achieve. I conclude that freedom is possible on the basis of conscious willing and in tapping the unconscious true self.

Alain Locke, an often neglected classical American Pragmatist, developed a pluralistic value theory as an antidote to the "value absolutism" he considered the root cause of social conflict. Values, for Locke, are not immutable features of a transcendent reality, but rather emerge from human functional attitudes, or what he calls "feeling-modes." However incommensurable the contextualized values of diverse cultures may appear, they can always be traced back to common modes of valuing. Recognizing the common character of our human faculty of valuation allows us to see a basic functional equivalence among superficially conflicting values, thus undermining value absolutism. This paper suggests that one reason the debate over same-sex marriage in the United States has persisted is that the arguments have been advanced primarily in absolute value terms. Re-casting the debate in terms of a Lockean pluralistic value dialogue suggests a path out of the stalemate.

Recent developments in Washington State and Montana have revived interest in death with dignity legislation. Oregon has a decade of experience with this professional experiment in the ethics of end-of-life care that is relevant for subsequent citizen referenda or legislation. This essay discusses the professional, regulatory and ethical issues displayed by the implementation of death with dignity in Oregon. My analysis generates conclusions that while the Oregon statute and its implementation has advanced patient choice andempowered professionals, it has failed a critical test of public transparency and has diffused philosophical meanings of the concept of "dignity."

This paper explores whether resolving to "live like there's no tomorrow" would be conducive to living life to the fullest. While there is much to commend a life lived with a sense of urgency, I conclude that living like there's no tomorrow, in the final analysis, is neither advisable, nor realizable. In its place I suggest a life lived in mindfulness of the transitory and uncertain nature of our lives.

James offers ways for escaping pessimism: i) leaving "the bare facts by themselves" - in construing the scientific order of nature - or permitting ii) a "religious reading to go on" by postulating "supplementary facts which may be discovered" or iii) "believed in". Adopting ii), we can trust the idea that "a still wider world may be there" as a "maybe" and then act as if the invisible world thereby suggested was real, enabling us "to live in the light of " our "religious demands". One way of approaching Bloch's philosophy is to see him as dealing with James's three ways. A case can be made for Bloch's naturalism, phenomenologically understood, akin to James's second way. Yet, Bloch could also be regarded as adopting something like James's third way in terms of a teleologism messianically understood needed to ground the idea of Hope. But can Bloch's reconcile these two conceptions successfully?

This paper argues that private, individual memory is often only made possible through a collectivelhistorical memory that makes itself felt at a most fundamental level of place. It draws upon Husserl's concept of the lifeworld in opposition to Ricoeur's notion of narrative identity. I show that in focusing on narrative, Ricoeur fails to recognize the ways in which the very constitution of the world, of places, becomes the avenue of support for narratives, intersubjectivity, and collective memory. The analysis makes explicit the manner in which experience itself can be collective and is grounded not only in narrative, but in the world, specifically in places in the world that are not private, isolated places, but places of communality. The idea of lifeworld serves as a foundation for collective memory in terms not only of shared experiences, but also in terms of traditions that have been inherited through built places.

In Sartre's philosophy, the existence of consciousness as a negation of Being is problematic for considerations of the Self, which. is required for foundations within the world. This grounding seems to entail an essential relationship with an Other. However, he maintains that one can only know the Other as a fact of the world By explicating his theory of the emotions, I will argue that an emotive relationship with an Other is the ontological qualification for the grounding of consciousness. Emotions affect the body, one's facticity,which is what anchors a person in a situation to an Other.

John Lachs has argued that the value of academic philosophers rests not in their scholarly writing, but fundamentally in their ability to educate minds to be critical and open. In this paper, I show the continuity of this outlook on the work of philosophers with Lachs's stoic pragmatism. Stoic pragmatism is the view that the pragmatic optimism of thinkers like James, Royce, and Dewey must be tempered by a stoic acceptance of our limitations as human beings. While I support Lachs's controversial views regarding stoic pragmatism, I suggest some ways that we can employ the skills of philosophers beyond the classroom as well.

This essay responds to Eric Weber's article, "The Responsibilities and Dangers of Pragmatism" (in this issue of PCW). It reflects on the question of what academic philosophy can contribute to the contemporary world. Its conclusions are modest but animated by hope that philosophy can help to gradually improve the human condition.