Published in 1941, The Secret of Pascal was intended by its author, H. F. Stewart, to be a complement to his previous study, The Holiness of Pascal, which ...

An aspect of Peirce’s thought that may still be underappreciated is his resistance to what Levi calls _pedigree epistemology_, to the idea that a central focus in epistemology should be the justification of current beliefs. Somewhat more widely appreciated is his rejection of the subjective view of probability. We argue that Peirce’s criticisms of subjectivism, to the extent they grant such a conception of probability is viable at all, revert back to pedigree epistemology. A thoroughgoing rejection of pedigree in the (...) context of probabilistic epistemology, however, _does_ challenge prominent subjectivist responses to the problem of the priors. (shrink)

Australian prisons are overpopulated with people suffering from numerous health problems. COVID-19 presents a significant threat to prisoner health. This article examines the current regulatory responses from Australian state and territory governments to COVID-19 and a recent case which tested the human rights of prisoners during a pandemic.

Adolescence methamphetamine use is an issue of considerable concern due to its correlation with later delinquency, divorce, unemployment and health problems. Understanding how adolescents initiate methamphetamine abuse is important in developing effective prevention programs. We formulate a mathematical model for the spread of methamphetamine abuse using nonlinear ordinary differential equations. It is assumed that susceptibles are recruited into methamphetamine use through imitation. An epidemic threshold value, Ra\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$${\mathcal {R}}_a$$\end{document}, termed the abuse reproduction (...) number, is proposed and defined herein in the drug-using context. The model is shown to exhibit the phenomenon of backward bifurcation. This means that methamphetamine problems may persist in the population even if Ra\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$${\mathcal {R}}_a$$\end{document} is less than one. Sensitivity analysis of Ra\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$${\mathcal {R}}_a$$\end{document} was performed to determine the relative importance of different parameters in methamphetamine abuse initiation. The model is then fitted to data on methamphetamine users less than 20 years old reporting methamphetamine as their primary substance of abuse in the treatment centres of Cape Town and parameter values that give the best fit are chosen. Results show that the proportion of methamphetamine users less than 20 years old reporting methamphetamine as their primary substance of abuse will continue to decrease in Cape Town of South Africa. The results suggest that intervention programs targeted at reducing adolescence methamphetamine abuse, are positively impacting methamphetamine abuse. (shrink)

Originally published in 1942, this book constitutes the companion volume to The Heart of Pascal ; both volumes were formed using selections from Pascal's Pensées. The text gathers together a series of selections, presented in French, which illustrate Pascal's Christian faith and thoughts on the relationship between man and God. An appendix and preface by the editor are also provided. This is a highly informative book that will be of value to anyone with an interest in Pascal and his late (...) thought. (shrink)

Published in 1950: The Penseés is a collection of philosophical fragments, notes and essays in which Pascal explores the contradictions of human nature in psychological, social, metaphysical and - above all - theological terms. Mankind emerges from Pascal's analysis as a wretched and desolate creature within an impersonal universe, but who can be transformed through faith in God's grace.

Originally published in 1945, this book constitutes the companion volume to The Apology of Pascal ; both volumes were formed using selections from Pascal's Pensées. The text contains his meditations and prayers, notes for his anti-Jesuit campaign, and remarks on language and style. An index and preface by the editor are also provided. This is a highly informative book that will be of value to anyone with an interest in Pascal and his late thought.

This book conveys 12 case studies about projects taking place in a School/University/Community Partnership Network in southwest Ohio. Participants partner to better the education experiences and the lives of community members in the region. This book shows how educational and community partnerships take shape and how they look in practice.

There are a limited number of neuroimaging investigations into motor control of the lumbopelvic musculature. Most investigation examining motor control of the lumbopelvic musculature utilize transcranial magnetic stimulation and focus primarily on the motor cortex. This has resulted in a dearth of knowledge as it relates to how other regions of the brain activate during lumbopelvic movement. Additionally, task-based functional connectivity during lumbopelvic movements has not been well elucidated. Therefore, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging to examine brain activation and (...) ROI-to-ROI task-based functional connectivity in 19 healthy individuals during the performance of three lumbopelvic movements: modified bilateral bridge, left unilateral bridge, and right unilateral bridge. The whole brain analysis found robust, bilateral activation within the motor regions of the brain during the bilateral bridge task, and contralateral activation of the motor regions during unilateral bridging tasks. Furthermore, the ROI-to-ROI analysis demonstrated significant connectivity of a motor network that included the supplemental motor area, bilateral precentral gyrus, and bilateral cerebellum regardless of the motor task performed. These data suggest that while whole brain activation reveals unique patterns of activation across the three tasks, functional connectivity is very similar. As motor control of the lumbopelvic area is of high interest to those studying low back pain, this study can provide a comparison for future research into potential connectivity changes that occur in individuals with LBP. (shrink)

In the early twentieth century an apparently obscure philosophical debate took place between F. H. Bradley and Bertrand Russell. The historical outcome was momentous: the demise of the movement known as British Idealism, and its eventual replacement by the various forms of analytic philosophy. Since then, a conception of this debate and its rights and wrongs has become entrenched in English-language philosophy. Stewart Candlish examines afresh the events of this formative period in twentieth-century thought and comes to some surprising (...) conclusions. (shrink)

Interest in the notion of the possible financial sacrifice suffered by socially responsible investment (SRI) fund investors for considering ethical, social and environmental issues in their investment decisions has spawned considerable academic interest in the performance of SRI funds. Both the Australian and international research literature have yielded largely mixed results. However, several of these studies are hampered by methodological problems which can obscure the significance of reported results, such as the use of small sample sizes, inconsistencies in the time (...) frames selected to analyse performance and different modelling frameworks used to estimate investment returns. This study attempts to redress some of these issues by investigating the returns performance of 89 ethical funds in Australia over the period 1986-2005. Using a multi-factor CAPM model [Fama, E. F., and K. R. French (1996) J. Finance 51(1), 55] (which controls for factors such as size, book-to-market value and momentum) we find that ethical funds significantly under-perform the market in Australia, particularly in the most recent 5 years of our sample period (2000-2005). Risk adjusted returns (using Jensen's alpha) indicate that average annual underperformance is around 1.52% in the 2000-2005 period for our sample and .88% over the whole sample period. Our results contrast with many previous studies (both Australian and international), which have not found statistically significant differences in the performance of ethical funds relative to market benchmarks and/or a matched sample of conventional funds. (shrink)

The s, p, d and f blocks of the elements, as delimited by Charles Janet in 1928, can be represented as parallel slices of a regular tetrahedron. They also fit neatly on to the surface of a sphere. The reasons for this are discussed and the possible objections examined. An attempt is made to see whether there are philosophical implications of this unexpected geometrical regularity. A new tetrahedral design in transparent plastic is presented.

1. Max Cresswell has argued recently that F. H. Bradley’s metaphysics needs to be viewed with far more respect than it is by contemporary philosophers. It is true that a substantial proportion of the postwar English-speaking philosophical world has tended to assume, on the authority of Russell and Moore, that Bradley made elementary errors right at the start of the obscure reasoning which led him to the Absolute, and consequently that he is worth looking at as little more than a (...) striking example of how awful metaphysicians can be. But it is further true that a serious look at these early refutations of Bradley reveals that they are almost entirely founded on ignorance and misconception. So Cresswell’s attempt at rehabilitation should be given serious scrutiny. (shrink)

This is the first of a three-volume work dedicated to exploring the influence of G.W.F. Hegel's philosophical thinking in Golden Age Denmark. The work demonstrates that the largely overlooked tradition of Danish Hegelianism played a profound and indeed constitutive role in many spheres of the Golden Age culture. This initial tome covers the period from the beginning of the Hegel reception in the Danish Kingdom in the 1820s until the end of 1836. The dominant figure from this period is the (...) poet and critic Johan Ludvig Heiberg, who attended Hegel's lectures in Berlin in 1824 and then launched a campaign to popularize Hegel's philosophy among his fellow countrymen. Using his journal Kjøbenhavns flyvende Post as a platform, Heiberg published numerous articles containing ideas that he had borrowed from Hegel. Several readers felt provoked by Heiberg's Hegelianism and wrote critical responses to him, many of which appeared in Kjøbenhavnsposten, the rival of Heiberg's journal. Through these debates Hegel's philosophy became an important part of Danish cultural life. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: The Ghost in the Machine Objection The Private Language Argument Ockham's Razor and Identity Argument from Neural Dependence Arguments from Personal Identity Argument from Evolution.

Human subjects research is an annual $10 billion dollar global activity. In May 2012, Harvard Law School hosted a conference on human subjects research . The conference critically examined HSR relative to the proposed American regulatory framework for federally funded research. The conference did not question the need for human subjects research. Rather, it discussed the need to balance the protection of human subjects from possible research risks while not hindering research—an epic, ongoing debate regarding the balance between paternalism and (...) autonomy. This book draws on the analysis and insights of 33 experts in the field of HSR. The authors critically analyse the epic balance in five parts:‘The Regulation of Risk’, ‘The Protection of Vulnerable Populations’, ‘Re-defining the Participant-Researcher Relationship and the Role of IRBs’, ‘Specimens, Data and Privacy’, and ‘Paradigm Shifts in Research Ethics’. Within each part, the authors sketch out their preferr .. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS 697 however, that extreme caution is to be advised upon entering those waters? Fully respectful of this concern, Professor Stambaugh enjoins the reader to "reach his own conclusions about parallels and affinities" concerning "some strains of Nietzsche's thought that are most consonant with an Eastern temper of experience." DAVID B. ALLISON SUNY, Stony Brook W. J. Mander. An Introduction to Bradley's Metaphysics. New York: Oxford University Press, (...) 1994. Pp. viii + 175. Cloth, $39-95. T. L. S. Sprigge. James and Bradley: American Truth and British Reality. Chicago: Open Court, 1993. Pp. xiv + 63o. Cloth, $66.95. Paper, $29.95Until the appearance of Mander's book there had been no short general introduction to Bradley in print since Penguin dropped Wollheim's F. H. Bradley from their list. But in any case, as a result of the work of scholars since its last revision in 1969, Wollheim's account, despite its many virtues, is now known to be misleading in crucial places, for he remained to some extent in the grip of the dismissive caricature of Bradley bequeathed to analytic philosophers by Russell and Moore and stilloften just taken for granted. (See, e.g., almost any textbook which has a chapter on truth.) By drawing on this scholarship Mander offers us a philosopher strikingly different from this caricature. Mander's replacement portrayal is, in its broad outlines, accurate enough to be confidently recommended as giving a good general sketch of Bradley's views (excepting the ethics, which Woliheim managed to include), presenting them sympathetically but not completely uncritically in a way which should offer something of interest to both advanced undergraduates and their teachers. As Oxford has also recently published a selection from Bradley's works (Writings on Logic and Metaphysics, edited by James Allard and Guy Stock, with both general and topic-specific introductions), there is the added benefit that one who wishes to read him can now do so without being faced with wading through some intimidatingly large volumes of often meandering discussion in baffling prose. The two should make a good pair around which to structure classes concerning Bradley. I am not quite so confident about some of the detail of Mander's account, which is, moreover, sometimes explained in a way nearly as obscure as the original on which it is intended to cast light. This last is, of course, hard to avoid in expounding a writer whose whole cast of mind is opposed to the exact formulation of precise theses illustrated with clear examples, and is less misleading than artificial precisification; it also perhaps reduces the risk that students will use it as a substitute for, rather than a guide to, the primary texts themselves. And I want to stress that Mander's overall picture of Bradley's views seems to me reliable and as well situated historically as the book's ' G. M. C. Sprung, "Nietzsche's Interest in and Knowledge of Indian Thought," in The Great Yearof Zarathuara (188z-1981), ed. David Goicoechea (Lanham, MD.: University Press of America, x983), 166-8o. 698 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 33:4 OCTOBER 1995 brevity allows. Its usefulness is enhanced by a very full bibliography which does include some coverage of the ethics. Sprigge's massive work is far more ambitious. His aim is "to provide a comparative exposition and personal evaluation of [Bradley's and James's] main views on truth and on the general nature of reality" (xiii). He gives several reasons for selecting these two philosophers for attention: they are the most important of their time; they are misunderstood and misrepresented; and their views have much in common that is largely correct while being the main alternative solutions to the problems they confront. Further, ajoint treatment makes sense because "it is toJames, rather than Russell, let alone Moore, that we must look for a serious critique of Bradley" (417). This is a labor of love, exhibiting reading of remarkable breadth and depth and the familiarity with its subject matter that is the product only of decades of exploration. Perhaps this very familiarity is part of the explanation of an occasional paucity of textual backup for the pictures Sprigge... (shrink)

This is the first volume in a three-volume work that explores the influence of G.W.F. Hegel’s philosophical thinking in Golden Age Denmark. The work demonstrates that the tradition of Danish Hegelianism played a profound role in many spheres of the Golden Age culture.

This is the second volume in a three-volume work that explores the influence of G.W.F. Hegel’s philosophical thinking in Golden Age Denmark. The work demonstrates that the tradition of Danish Hegelianism played a profound role in many spheres of the Golden Age culture.

Originally published in 1830, this book can be called the first modern work in the philosophy of science, covering an extraordinary range of philosophical, methodological, and scientific subjects. "Herschel's book . . . brilliantly analyzes both the history and nature of science."—Keith Stewart Thomson, American Scientist.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:66 IN DEFENCE OF KEMP SMITH D. C. Stove argues against Kemp Smith's contention that Hume's philosophy "was intended not to subvert but to endorse our natural beliefs" in general, and our belief in the Causal Principle in particular. His arguments are insufficient. Kemp Smith does not need to deny that the falsity of the Causal Principle is believed by Hume to be possible in the strongest of Stove's (...) three suggested 2 senses: it is not merely self-consistent, but the Principle is unverifiable and unconfirmable in the sense that no empirical proposition is relevant to its truth. However, to say flatly that its falsity is possible is to say that it is not impossible in any way at all; and that is what is at stake both in Hume's letter to Stewart and in the use Kemp Smith makes of it. If Hume had written a letter to Stewart or to any scientific enquirer urging him to desist from his labours on the ground that "something may begin to exist, or start into being without a cause," he would have been a fool, and in representing Hume's position in this way Stewart is in fact calling Hume a fool. It is not surprising that Hume is indignant. The problem is whether, and how, one can hold both that the Causal Principle is undeniably true and that it can be supported neither by deductive nor by inductive argument, and whether Hume on the most reasonable interpretation of his published works held both these views. Clues to the answer lie in the in tradition of sceptical philosophy, and in the difference between a cause and a reason. Hume's philosophy is indeed, as he says, 'very sceptical'. But scepticism is a kind of philosophy with a long history, from Sextus Empiricus to Bayle, and it is reasonable to suppose that Hume was aligning himself with this position, especially since so much of the argument in 67 the Treatise is derived from Bayle. But sceptics do not behave otherwise than ordinary men. Scepticism is not directed against everyday beliefs but again.st arguments: this is a point on which Sextus insists." It would not be the part of a sceptic to doubt that every event has a cause, but to refute all arguments purporting to show that such is the case. To assert "that any thing might arise without a Cause" would not be scepticism, but an inverse dogmatism: to infer from a philosophical argument a belief about the real world that is at variance with everyday belief. The crucial step in Stove's argument occurs in his gloss of Hume's claim that he had maintained "that our Certainty of the Falsehood of that Proposition proceeded neither from Intuition nor Demonstration; but from another Source" phrase "sic., experience, of course". This could be misleading. It could mean that Hume here claims that experience gives us reason to believe that the Causal Principle is true; and this Hume has denied, as Stove urges ad loc. But nothing in what Hume says in his letter requires us to interpret him thus. And his sceptical principles tell against it: an argument from experience, whether inductive or by analogy or whatever, is still an argument and thus liable to sceptical attack. What Hume could mean, and what Kemp Smith took him to mean, is that our experience causes us to regard the principle as necessary: experience is not a premise in any sort of argument at all, but a causal explanation for a universal propensity to believe in the Causal Principle. It is true that Hume's citation as analogues of such empirical affirmations as "That Caesar existed" is misleading. But it is not in fact the case that Hume represents these as in any way 'parallel' with the Causal Principle: he says only that, like it, They are believed without recourse to Reason and Intuition. In 68 point of fact, Stove is going a bit far when he says that this is (like "There is such an Island as Sicily") an observation-statement; but that point is hardly relevant here. It is worth noting that in the offending passage... (shrink)

The material anthropological proposals of Wolfhart Pannenberg are best interpreted in light of the methodological reciprocity that lies across and holds together his treatments of theology and science. In the context of a response to a recent book on Pannenberg by Jacqui Stewart, this article outlines a new interpretation of his theological engagement with the human sciences. I provide a model of the relationality that links these disciplines in Pannenberg's work and commend its general contours as a resource for (...) the ongoing reconstruction of the interdisciplinary dialogue vis‐à‐vis the concerns of late modernity. (shrink)

The new German edition of these lectures will constitute four volumes of the Felix Meiner Verlag series: G.W.F. Hegel, Vorlesungen: Ausgewählte Nachschriften und Manuskripte. The editors of these volumes, Pierre Garniron and Walter Jaeschke, chose the Berlin lectures of 1825–1826 to represent the history of philosophy lectures in this series. The University of California Press is publishing all of the series in English, including translations of the Religionsphilosophie and of the lectures on Naturrecht und Staatswissenschaft, on Kunst, and on Logik. (...) The same group that did the Philosophy of Religion is continuing with the History of Philosophy, with some shifting of roles: Robert F. Brown, J. Michael Stewart, H.S. Harris, Peter C. Hodgson. This brief report outlines the nature of the project on the history of philosophy and the plans for its completion. (shrink)

Quite honestly, it is not easy to see what all the fuss is about. Sir Julian Huxley was clearly impressed. “A landmark in modern thought which we cannot afford to pass by” wrote John Stewart Collis in the Sunday Times, and the following week Arnold Toynbee in the Observer wrote: “This is a great book. If it is eclipsed by anything, it is by the spirit of the author, which shines through it”. The French reaction to the original text (...) was at least equally enthusiastic. André Rousseaux in Figaro Littéraire says: “Not since the 12th. Century has there been such a satisfying exposition of the perfect understanding between the material world and that of Christ Incarnate”. One wonders how much of the enthusiasm is due to the fact that Father Teilhard was not allowed to publish his philosophical thought in his own lifetime. The facts of his life are well known. Born in 1881, he joined the Jesuits in 1899 and was ordained. in 1912. Prehistory, geology, palaeontology, anthropology, were his chief intellectual interests, and he took his doctorate in the Sorbonne in 1922. He became professor of geology in the Institut Catholique in Paris and in 1923 went with Pére Licent S.J. to China on a palaeontological mission. The detail is given by Sir Julian in the introduction, in the course of which he pays Père Teilhard many felicitous tributes, notably that he was “a dedicated Christian priest.” On his return to France, Sir Julian tells us, “some of the ideas which he had expressed in his lectures about original sin and its relation to evolution, were regarded as unorthodox by his religious superiors, and he was forbidden to continue teaching.” He spent the next twenty years mostly in China with occasional scientific visits to India, Burma, Java, Abyssinia and the United States. The work under review was all but finished in Peking in 1938-1940. (shrink)

ABSTRACT: Stewart Shapiro recently argued that there is no higher-order vagueness. More specifically, his thesis is: (ST) ‘So-called second-order vagueness in ‘F’ is nothing but first-order vagueness in the phrase ‘competent speaker of English’ or ‘competent user of “F”’. Shapiro bases (ST) on a description of the phenomenon of higher-order vagueness and two accounts of ‘borderline case’ and provides several arguments in its support. We present the phenomenon (as Shapiro describes it) and the accounts; then discuss Shapiro’s arguments, arguing (...) that none is compelling. Lastly, we introduce the account of vagueness Shapiro would have obtained had he retained compositionality and show that it entails true higher-order vagueness. (shrink)

Many countries have regulations that require firms to engage in minimum levels of corporate social activities in areas such as the environment and social welfare. In this paper, we argue that changes in a firm’s compliance with CS regulations are reflected in its reputation for corporate social responsibility, which affects the firm’s performance. The performance impacts depend on whether the firm’s CSR reputation in the current and prior periods is positive, neutral, or negative. Our theoretical framework draws on the reputation (...) literature and on the concepts of recency bias, which weights the present more heavily than the past, and negativity bias, which weights negative assessments more heavily than neutral or positive assessments. We test our hypotheses on a sample of 7317 banks over 1992–2007 where we compare a bank’s return on assets with its current and prior compliance ratings under the U.S. Community Reinvestment Act. We find that changes in CSR reputation have predictable, asymmetric, and sizeable impacts on firm performance. For example, for an average bank with $1 billion in assets, gaining a positive CSR reputation translates into a rise in profits of 4.04%; gaining a negative CSR reputation results in a drop in profits of − 7.8%. (shrink)

The strategies of action employed by a human subject in order to perceive simple 2-D forms on the basis of tactile sensory feedback have been modelled by an explicit computer algorithm. The modelling process has been constrained and informed by the capacity of human subjects both to consciously describe their own strategies, and to apply explicit strategies; thus, the strategies effectively employed by the human subject have been influenced by the modelling process itself. On this basis, good qualitative and semi-quantitative (...) agreement has been achieved between the trajectories produced by a human subject, and the traces produced by a computer algorithm. The advantage of this reciprocal modelling option, besides facilitating agreement between the algorithm and the empirically observed trajectories, is that the theoretical model provides an explanation, and not just a description, of the active perception of the human subject. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that purely quantitative understandings of Aristotle's concept of "the mean" are oversimplified, and I make this argument by analyzing the particular emotion of anger. Anger, I contend, helps to complicate the purely quantitative understanding of the mean, insofar as, I argue, the amount of anger experienced is not the morally salient feature in determining whether or not the anger is virtuous. Rather, anger is one example of an emotion or trait for which other, non-quantitative parameters (...) of the mean are more salient, giving us a more nuanced understanding of what the mean is. Anger is virtuous not when it is in the right measurable degree, but rather when it is directed at the proper target. In this way, the virtue-making property of anger is distinctly qualitative. Examining anger provides insight into the concept of the mean and its role in Aristotle's ethics, and also helps to shed light on contemporary debates about political anger. (shrink)

In this essay, I argue that Christian ethicists should not think of themselves as religious ethicists. I defend this claim by arguing that the concept of religious ethics, as it has come to be understood as a discipline that is distinct from secular ethics, is incoherent. In part one, I describe the fraught attempts by theologians in the 20th century to identify the distinctiveness of Christian ethics. In part two, I argue that certain accounts of natural law unwittingly reinforce a (...) problematic conception of secular ethics. Part three examines some trends in religious studies and comparative religious ethics to highlight problematic conceptions of religion. Drawing together these strands of inquiry, I contend that that the secular‐religious dichotomy in contemporary ethics should be rejected, but by the same token, I suggest that comparative ethics remains a worthwhile enterprise. (shrink)

"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics," said Twain—or was it Disraeli? Even if statistics are honest, they submerge individual differences in generality. On a hostile interpretation, statistics are a deceiver's toolkit, a numerical expression of the tyranny of the average, a power capable of denaturing anything it touches. Many a clinical trial boasts results with statistical, albeit not clinical, significance.1For the hater of statistics Swift's "A Modest Proposal" is a locus classicus. Purporting to correct the (...) "computations" of other pamphleteers, the narrator of this masterpiece of irony gives a numerical cast to his argument for the butchering of human yearlings as the solution to... Read More. (shrink)

Guardians of Islam: Religious Authority and Muslim Communities of Late Medieval Spain. By Kathryn A. Miller. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008. Pp. xv + 276. $55, £38.

Tome I: Catalan, Chinese, Czech, Danish and Dutch -- Tome II: English, A - K -- Tome III: English L-Z -- Tome IV: Finnish, French, Galician and German -- Tome V: Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Norwegian and Polish -- Tome VI: Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Spanish and Swedish.

This paper is an attempt to reflect on our relative proximity and remoteness to Nazi perpetrators of evil by examining what Bernard Williams has called the problem of “moral luck.” Such situational factors as genetics, class, race/ethnicity, religion, political upheavals and special nurturing relationships provide us with what John Rawls has called the “starting points” of our lives as emergent adults and moral agents. For skeptics like Williams, though, it is unclear that either “saint” or “sinner” has the requisite moral (...) responsibility we take them ordinarily to have, given such situational luck. This paper responds to such skepticism by sketching a version of “compatibilism” that helps itself to insights from recent virtue theory in ethics and functionalism in cognitive science. A major part of this response is a discussion of Chapter 6 of David H. Jones’ important study, Moral Responsibility in the Holocaust, where he argues that Hitler was to blame for the evil he perpetrated because he was responsible for becoming the person he was through an active project of self-deception. Of particular concern here will be how we can use a functionalist account of mind, virtue/vice and compatibilism to understand the phenomenon of a moral agent engaged in an active project of self-deception. At stake here is, of course, our own proximity to such agency. (shrink)

The Canonization of Islamic Law: A Social and Intellectual History. By Ahmed El Shamsy. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Pp. ix + 253. $90.

El presente trabajo investiga las tesis sobre el poder civil de Alonso de la Veracruz que buscan incorporar en la comunidad política española a los habitantes autóctonos del Nuevo Mundo, tesis que suelen relacionarse con F. de Vitoria y el tomismo español, y que últimamente son consideradas parte del republicanismo novohispano elaborado desde la periferia americana. Se busca demostrar que su propósito era aplicar una teoría de derechos naturales, sin que ello implique participación política de los indios americanos. Se analiza (...) la postura del fraile frente a la diversidad cultural y la guerra contra los indios. The paper explores Alonso de la Veracruz's theses on civil power, which sought to integrate the native inhabitants of the New World into the Spanish political community. These theses, which have usually been associated with F. de Vitoria and Spanish Thomism, have recently come to be considered part of a Novohispanic republicanism developed in the American periphery. The article seeks to show that the purpose of such theses was to apply a theory of natural rights that did not entail the political participation of the indigenous population, as well as to analyze Veracruz's position regarding cultural diversity and the war against the indigenous peoples. (shrink)

The work ethic has been deeply challenged by two trends – the division of labor and the destruction of continuity in employment. Here a narrative model is proposed for reconstructing the work ethic. Narratives embody assumptions about the flow of time, and work becomes charged with meaning when "contractual time" is interrupted, when new functions are invented to cope with obstacles having to do human character and action. Content for this abstract model is provided by four historical movements in the (...) U.S. having to do with the reorganization of work or work relations: scientific management, the human-relations movement, the human-potential movement, and early management thought. (shrink)