Luttrell, John It is now fifty years since the 'Goulburn Strike' when six Catholic schools in Goulburn New South Wales were closed by their bishops on Friday 13 July 1962 as a protest against the failure of the state government to fund the upkeep of the schools. On the following Monday 1500 pupils from these Catholic schools applied for enrolment in the government schools of Goulburn. There were places for only 640 applicants and these were selected mainly by ballot. (...) Authorising the closure were Eris O'Brien, Archbishop of Canberra-Goulburn Archdiocese, and his auxiliary bishop, John Cullinane who lived in Goulburn and had first suggested a closure protest to a meeting of Goulburn parents. (shrink)

In March of this year the British Medical Association , the Resuscitation Council and the Royal College of Nursing published guidelines outlining the legal and ethical standards for decision making in relation to cardiopulmonary resuscitation .1 The guidance follows a year of increasing public awareness and concern about the issue and builds upon joint guidance issued by these institutions in June 1999.In April 2000 Age Concern issued a press release stating that “some doctors are ignoring national guidelines on the resuscitation (...) of older people” and indicating that they had information on cases that had come to light in their campaign against age discrimination. Age Concern went on to say that older people have found “not for resuscitation” recorded in their medical notes without their agreement or knowledge.During the same month Professor Shah Ebrahim wrote a leader in the British Medical Journal stating that doctors regularly issue “do not resuscitate” orders for patients without their knowledge.2 He claimed that black people, alcohol mis-users, non-English speakers and those with HIV are more likely to get a “do not resuscitate” order, suggesting that prejudice is influencing medical decisions.This combination of events was followed by intense press and media interest in the way in which decisions were being made about cardiopulmonary resuscitation. Such was the level of concern that a health service circular was issued to all National Health Service trust chief executives in September 2000 asking that appropriate resuscitation policies be in place which respect patients' rights, are understood by …. (shrink)

American media is very quick to ask victims of anti-Black violence if they forgive their victimizers. The media’s nearly reflexive framing is a symptom of the broader, cultural demand that Black victims grant forgiveness for racist violence. Reading Juliet Hooker and Myisha Cherry, this paper links the current preponderance of such demand for forgiveness to a demand for apology in America’s lynching tradition. Drawing from Sonya Renee Taylor, Ida B. Wells, and Frederick Douglass, I give a history to both kinds (...) of normative demands and show how, though they appear as seem­ing contraries, demands for forgiveness and apology function together as methods of anti-Black violence. I then draw from work in transformative justice to differentiate the perspectives of asking, giving, and demanding forgiveness. When understood through the perspective of victims, a certain kind of embodied forgiveness can have liberatory potential. However, observers’ demands for forgiveness too often function as a method of racial oppression. (shrink)

The language that global justice theorists use to characterize global poverty, the terms of duty and charity, are detached discourses that fail to capture the reality of poverty as most people currently experience it, as slum dwellers living on the outskirts of the world’s megacities. In contrast, the language of alienation better captures the experience of global, urban poverty. This article’s aim is to draw from Hannah Arendt to form a new idea of alienation that responds to the specific conditions (...) of urban, global poverty. Arendt posits alienation in terms of the ‘loss of the world’: the deprivation of durable material structures and lasting institutions that are the preconditions for political speech and action. The language of alienation evidences how the problem of poverty is one of a lack of meaningful work, the kind of work that creates a livable world. (shrink)

Development literature on global gender empowerment devotes much attention to employment, a code word for the inclusion of women’s labor in the global market. Recent work in transnational feminisms shows that the emphasis on employment over assets may not prevent exploitation of labor and perpetuity of poverty. This paper first highlights research on how women are increasingly taking on too much responsibility, working in a confluence of survival-oriented activities that undermine their own well-being. I also address how women are increasingly (...) able to get out of poverty: when they can labor in such a way that they are not merely working to survive but also working for accumulation of their own material assets, foremost of which is basic housing. Finally, I consider these transnational feminist insights about the importance of housing for women in light of philosophical concerns about property ownership, specifically Locke’s theory of property. In justifying property rights through labor, and arguing against the state’s right to usurp property, a Lockean can give a defense against forced evictions that still occur in some contexts and give support for a normative connection between women’s labor and assets. (shrink)

Like proper names, demonstratives, and definite descriptions, pronouns have referential uses. These can be 'essentially indexical' in the sense that they cannot be replaced by non-pronominal forms of reference. Here we show that the grammar of pronouns in such occurrences is systematically different from that of other referential expressions, in a way that illuminates the differences in reference in question. We specifically illustrate, in the domain of Romance clitics and pronouns, a hierarchy of referentiality, as related to the topology of (...) the grammatical phase. Our explanation is based on extending the 'Topological Mapping Hypotheses' of Longobardi and Sheehan & Hinzen. The extended topology covers the full range of interpretations, from purely predicative to quantificational, to referential and deictic. Along this scale, grammatical complexity increases, and none of these forms of reference is lexical. This provides evidence for the foundational conclusion that the source of essential indexicality is grammatical rather than lexical, semantic or pragmatic. (shrink)

According to much modern social psychology, behavioural economics and common sense, people's actions and beliefs are frequently the result of rapid intuitive thought rather than careful deliberation. Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, in their influential book, Nudge, synthesised the literature and used it as the basis for numerous policy ideas.1 Not least, they gave the word ‘nudge’ as a handy term to apply to all sorts of ways of taking advantage of people's psychological quirks without coercing or bribing them. But (...) while Nudge was long on ideas and enthusiasm, it was short on conceptual clarity. The idea of a nudge was inconsistent with some of the policies Thaler and Sunstein endorsed and their account of nudging's relation to freedom and paternalism was flawed.In Salvaging the concept of nudge, Yashar Saghai acts as a friendly critic who thinks nudging has plenty to offer the policy world but sees that it needs both conceptual clarity and ethical defence.2 He wants to show how some of ways of taking advantage of people's psychology could leave them as free as before and he is especially concerned with what I would describe as a question of manipulation: …. (shrink)

An interpretation is offered of Thrasymachus' account of the nature of justice and just action in book I of the 'Republic' which is internally consistent throughout on all important points. Just action is not defined in terms of its practical consequences, as many commentators assume, but rather in terms of its logical consequences 'vis-a-vis' just agents. When one man acts justly towards another, the performance of the just act renders the just agent vulnerable to unfair or unjust exploitation by those (...) with whom he deals. The "strong man", in Thrasymachus' sense, would thus never be a just man. It is argued that Socrates addresses himself to this position, but that, while the textual Thrasymachus is silenced, Socrates' best arguments are, in fact, inadequate to refute Thrasymachus. (shrink)

Social theory remains puzzled by the relation between practices and structures, or the link between ‘micro’ and ‘macro’. Grand theorists including Giddens and Bourdieu have gained distinction for their writings on these questions, trying to marry insights and concerns of a ‘micro’ sociological nature with traditional ‘macro’ structural questions including inequality, power relations, and social reproduction. These theorists arguably fail, however, in their attempts to move social theory beyond traditional dualisms. Relevant but neglected contributions from ethnomethodology are introduced and compared (...) to the work of Giddens and Bourdieu in an attempt to identify and outline an approach to practices and structures that more reliably avoids problems of dualism and reification, and at the same time offers an understanding of structures and their relations to practices that can be much more closely grounded in empirical studies. Key Words: micro-macro link • reification • ethnomethodology • Pierre Bourdieu • Jeff Coulter. (shrink)

Bentham and Mill and probably most utilitarians have a good deal in common with Hobbes and Spinoza as moral thinkers. For they share a commitment to deriving ethics from the actual and normal motivitations of human beings as creatures of the natural world rather than, like Kant and many religious moralists, from some transcendent realm to the requirements of which natural man has a duty to submit without expecting any help therefrom in the satisfaction of his natural inclinations. In the (...) present context I shall call all such thinkers ethical naturalists, though I do not mean this expression in any very precise technical sense, only to indicate a commitment to somehow deriving morality from natural fact. (shrink)

This classic study of Santayana was the first book to appear in the _Arguments of the Philosophers_ series. Growing interest in the work of this important American philosopher has prompted this new edition of the book complete with a new preface by the author reassessing his own ideas about Santayana and reflecting the new interest in the philosopher's work. A select bibliography of works published about Santayana since the book's first appearance is also included.

While discussing critical individuality as oneof the main goals of liberal education, theemphasis has usually been on direct educationalmeasures. Much less attention has been given tothe social preconditions for its development.This paper discusses the societal aspect of thequestion by employing the notion of spherepluralism. The attempt is to point out someways in which the diversified nature of societycan be employed in its full potential for thedevelopment of critical individuality. Thearticle aims to outline a form of spherepluralism, which is based on (...) structuraldifferentiation, cultural diversity, communalvitality, confessional pluralism andcross-communal criticism. The suggestion isthat the critical potential of sphere pluralismpresupposes a proper balance between sphereautonomy and inter-sphere criticism as well asthat between social construction of meaning andobjective-structural constraints. (shrink)

[T. M. Scanlon] It is clearly impermissible to kill one person because his organs can be used to save five others who are in need of transplants. It has seemed to many that the explanation for this lies in the fact that in such cases we would be intending the death of the person whom we killed, or failed to save. What makes these actions impermissible, however, is not the agent's intention but rather the fact that the benefit envisaged does (...) not justify an exception to the prohibition against killing or the requirement to give aid. The difference between this explanation and one appealing to intention is easily overlooked if one fails to distinguish between the prospective use of a moral principle to guide action and its retrospective use to appraise the way an agent governed him or herself. Even if this explanation is accepted, however, it remains an open question whether and how an agent's intention may be relevant to the permissibility of actions in other cases. \\\ [Jonathan Dancy] My first four sections concentrate on the second section of Professor Scanlon's contribution, where he lays out his conception of moral principles and of the role they play in theory and practice. I will raise questions on the following issues: 1. Scanlon's initial introduction of the notion of a principle. 2. His rejection of the standard view that principles are concerned with the forbidding, permitting and requiring of actions. 3. His rejection of pro tanto conceptions of principles in favour of a conception of them as conclusive. 4. The resulting account of what it is for a principle to face and survive exceptions. Scanlon's discussion of these matters here both appeals to and is in some respects more detailed than the relevant section of his recent What We Owe to Each Other. The topic is interesting both for the role played by principles in Scanlon's present discussion of intention and permissibility, and more generally because of his account of wrongness: an act is wrong iff it is ruled out by principles that nobody could reasonably reject. The remainder of my contribution is concerned with the ostensible focus of IP, namely the relevance of agent-intentions to the permissibility of what is done. (shrink)

In social cognition, knowledge-based validation of information is usually regarded as relying on strategic and resource-demanding processes. Research on language comprehension, in contrast, suggests that validation processes are involved in the construction of a referential representation of the communicated information. This view implies that individuals can use their knowledge to validate incoming information in a routine and efficient manner. Consistent with this idea, Experiments 1 and 2 demonstrated that individuals are able to reject false assertions efficiently when they have validity-relevant (...) beliefs. Validation processes were carried out routinely even when individuals were put under additional cognitive load during comprehension. Experiment 3 demonstrated that the rejection of false information occurs automatically and interferes with affirmative responses in a nonsemantic task. Experiment 4 also revealed complementary interference effects of true information with negative responses in a nonsemantic task. These results suggest the existence of fast and efficient validation processes that protect mental representations from being contaminated by false and inaccurate information. (shrink)

This chapter examines the philosophy of T. H. Green, the initial leading figure among the absolute idealists who dominated British philosophy in the late 19th century. Green sought to establish that the existence and nature of human beings, especially of the human mind, was not susceptible of a purely empirical or scientific explanation. He claimed that the only possible explanation involved reference to the existence of an Eternal Consciousness, which was gradually realizing itself in the temporal world, more especially in (...) the life of human beings. Further issues in his philosophy are examined, such as that things count as real only if they are in unchanging relations to each other, the difference between negative and positive freedom, the nature of moral choice, the superiority of a virtue ethic to a utilitarian one. (shrink)

Introduction At some point in your life you will have told a lie and have been believed. You will have deceived the person to whom you lied. ...

In this book we provide a collection of writing by eminent scholars in our field, in which we asked them to engage with the thoughts of many of the philosophers and theorists who have influenced thinking and practice about young children and their care and education. Some readers may feel their favourite philosopher or theorist has been omitted or been given little space but we do not claim the Handbook is comprehensive – there is always more to say, more to (...) write about. Further, it would be impossible to provide a real introduction to the vast and exciting discipline of Philosophy, which includes a number of different areas of study. (shrink)

The pages of the history of science record thousands of instances of similar discoveries having been made by scientists working independently of one another. Sometimes the discoveries are simultaneous or almost so; sometimes a scientist will make anew a discovery which, unknown to him, somebody else had made years before.

Futile medical interventions have virtually no chance of success. Doctors might perform such procedures because of pressure from families or patients. The doctor might also have an ulterior motive of gain or prefer to do it rather than take time to communicate with the patient about a poor prognosis. Established ways to communicate bad news to patients are not always used by managing physicians with time constraints. The SPIKES protocol method is outlined to assist in sensitive communication where further intervention (...) is futile. This review primarily explores various aspects of medical futility. It also explores strategies for effectively communicating with patients and their families regarding futility interventions. A side-effect of futile interventions is burnout in doctors and other health practitioners (HPs). The complex relationship between futility and burnout is described. (shrink)

This essay examines the claim that physicians have a special obligation to engage in social and political activism. Four ethical paradigms are considered. Two paradigms, the preventive medicine and the social medicine models, embody a limited professional obligation to advocate the priority of health in society; the justification for a more aggressive stance is limited by the failings of paternalism. The radical model and the heroic model speak to issues of personal virtue rather than professional obligation; they are not strictly (...) comparable. (shrink)

Purpose. Without claiming to explain the meaning and purpose of the Cycladic figurines of the canonical type in the context of the culture that created them, the author attempts to investigate the phenomenon of these ancient images and their impact on contemporary humans through the lens of Carl Gustav Jung’s theory of the collective unconscious and the archetypes. Theoretical basis. The primary meanings and purposes of the Cycladic figurines are ambiguous and incomprehensible to us. We cannot understand them in the (...) context of their original culture. But we are able to create our own meanings: unfinished images generate an opportunity to bypass our conscious mind and to contact the unconscious. The Cycladic figurines may resonate with female archetypes in the male and female psyche, as well as symbolize the ontological primacy of creative unity of opposites, the integrity of consciousness and the unconscious. Originality. The author outlined the possible unconscious meanings generated by the Cycladic figurines for human psyche. The Cycladic figurines actualize the archetypes of the collective unconscious, such as the Great Mother, the Anima, and the Self. These ancient images can be used for introspection, art therapy, active imagination, meditation, mindfulness. Conclusions. The results show that the Cycladic figurines have had a huge impact on the artists of the 20 th century and continue to influence our contemporaries due to the emotional response they evoke in the unconscious, which conceals the primordial features of the ancient mind. Laconic ancient images provide a vast space of options for human imagination. In an attempt to interpret them, we are suddenly seized and carried away into unknown depths. Archetypal images are manifested in any form – from sublime and beautiful to terrible, but they create a single space full of numinous awe and beauty. Engaging with the archetypes and revealing their hidden messages, we establish a connection between consciousness and the unconscious, between the personal and collective unconscious to achieve a deep self-awareness and inner growth. (shrink)

Quartz & Sejnowski (Q&S) disregard evidence that suggests that their view of dendrites is inadequate and they ignore recent results concerning the role of neurotrophic factors in synaptic remodelling. They misrepresent neuronal selectionism and thus erect a straw-man argument. Finally, the results discussed in section 4.2 require neuronal proliferation, but this does not occur during the period of neuronal development of relevance here. Footnotes1 Address correspondence to TE at te@proteus.psyc.nott.ac.uk.

Traditional document clustering algorithms consider text-based features such as unique word count, concept count, etc. to cluster documents. Meanwhile, event mining is the extraction of specific events, their related sub-events, and the associated semantic relations from documents. This work discusses an approach to event mining through clustering. The Universal Networking Language -based subgraph, a semantic representation of the document, is used as the input for clustering. Our research focuses on exploring the use of three different feature sets for event clustering (...) and comparing the approaches used for specific event mining. In our previous work, the clustering algorithm used UNL-based event semantics to represent event context for clustering. However, this approach resulted in different events with similar semantics being clustered together. Hence, instead of considering only UNL event semantics, we considered assigning additional weights to similarity between event contexts with event-related attributes such as time, place, and persons. Although we get specific events in a single cluster, sub-events related to the specific events are not necessarily in a single cluster. Therefore, to improve our cluster efficiency, connective terms between two sentences and their representation as UNL subgraphs were also considered for similarity determination. By combining UNL semantics, event-specific arguments similarity, and connective term concepts between sentences, we were able to obtain clusters for specific events and their sub-events. We have used 112 000 Tamil documents from the Forum for Information Retrieval Evaluation data corpus and achieved good results. We have also compared our approach with the previous state-of-the-art approach for Router-RCV1 corpus and achieved 30% improvements in precision. (shrink)

We group encephalitic behaviors as shown in Table 1. It is striking that the majority of these behaviors, namely groups 1 and 2, help spread viral and bacterial infections underlying encephalitis, a situation similar to Ophiocordyceps unilateralis .Could some of the behaviors in Table 1 be of utility to the host as well? Note that the behavioral symptoms may not coincide with impaired intellect . Furthermore, these symptoms may be vestigial in the sense of having been of utility to the (...) host species at a time when the latter possessed lower intelligence to begin with. It is also important to note that encephalitis is often triggered by physical and emotional stress, so that utility of behaviors is better assessed for such conditions.Continuous and compulsive exploration of one’s environment is of course a recipe for learning and discovery. Drinking, eating, biting, chewi .. (shrink)

Every one who has used Dr. Meusel's excellent edition of Caesar's Bellum Ciuile will welcome the first volume, comprising Commentaries I.–IV., of his final edition of the Bellum Gallicum. Nominally, each of the two books is a revision of the work of other men,–in the former case of Kraner and Hofmann, in the latter of Kraner and Dittenberger; really each, especially the latter, contains the fruit of so much independent research that the personalities of the older editors are obscured. That (...) part of the joint work of Kraner and Dittenberger which corresponds with the revision consisted of 199 pages ; the revision extends to 464. As Meusel remarks in the Preface, it is no longer intended for the use of schools, but of teachers and classical scholars. The historical introduction and the section on the Roman army, which retain much of Kraner's work, have been carefully retouched; many of the footnotes have been corrected or rewritten; many, both on linguistic points and on the subject-matter, have been added. (shrink)

The author continues the preceding exchange of views on the nature of metaphor with the American philosopher Nelson Goodman that has been published in 'Poetics Today'. He offers his own theory of metaphor, which assumes a middle ground between Goodman's semantic theory and Davidson's pragmatic conception. The article also presents another argument in support of the thesis that there are only true metaphors, and that the logical space assumed by Goodman for the metaphorical falsehood is already reserved for the category (...) of statements that are nonsensical. (shrink)

Generous selections from these four seminal texts on the theory and practice of education have never before appeared together in a single volume. The Introductions that precede the texts provide brief biographical sketches of each author, situating him within his broader historical, cultural and intellectual context. The editors also provide a brief outline of key themes that emerge within the selection as a helpful guide to the reader. The final chapter engages the reflections of the classic authors with contemporary issues (...) and challenges in the philosophy and practice of education. (shrink)

The paper examines that aspect of Slovak political thinking, which contributed to the building of the Slovak nation and the Slovak civil society. The memories of the past, the constituting of national memory were the crucial elements of the thinking, which contributed to the creation of Slovak nation. They initiated the project of constituting of national subjectivity. The historical speculations were only protopolitical. The political journalism of Slovak writer Dominik Tatarka serves as an example of deviation from the politics justified (...) by history and of the acceptance of politics as a civic activity, based on the rights an needs of individuals. (shrink)

The Slovak political thought of the 19th century mingles with the nation-building efforts. According to the author the nationalists were one of the intellectual elites of Central Europe, which based their nation-building on ethnic ideology. This ideology embodied various elements, such as passive historicism, "prilepenectvo" and the will to become a historical subject. They made use of a non-political concept of nation as a language an cultural community, which gradually became politicized. The ultimate objective was the institutionalization of the nation, (...) defined originally non-politically. According to the author there are two ways of achieving this objective, conceived of as ideal types: the type A implies the institutionalization from above, based on an intervention of a power instance ; the type B implies the institutionalization resulting from gradual growth of national capacities in the political frame of Hungary of that time. These types correspond to different views of what is political activity. Nevertheless, the Slovak political thought of the 19th century did not go beyond the level of experimentation. (shrink)

Although the word “indoctrination” in the English language originally had a neutral meaning almost equivalent to educative teaching, it gradually assumed the connotations of coercive teaching and became disassociated from the emerging concepts of democratic education. During this century it finally acquired a derogatory connotation similar to propaganda and brainwashing and came to be regarded as the antithesis of education for life in a democracy. McClellan regards indoctrination as a counterfeit of teaching in two crucial senses: While the counterfeit and (...) the genuine forms of teaching share the same properties, they differ in one property that crucially qualifies all the others. Counterfeiting subverts the institution that gives point to the counterfeiting itself. Indoctrination subverts educational institutions in their activity of teaching-andlearning. (shrink)

Extending lifelines still further, beyond determinism leads to doubt about females' ability to select mates with “good genes,” and to a scenario for troop selection and to a link with questions of scale in ecology.

Everyone interested in Bradley will be delighted at this excellently edited edition of his correspondence. My remit as a reviewer is to comment on the first of the two volumes of correspondence, which covers the years June 1872 to December 1904. My only complaint is that it would have been convenient to have a list of the letters, each with dates and correspondent, in the prefatory material.

ABSTRACT In “Il faut défendre la société”, Foucault attempted to historicize and criticize Nietzsche’s equating of the social with struggle. In order to do so, Foucault produced a descriptive discursive history of his genealogical project by deploying the method of the critical archaeology. Foucault realized thereinafter that his archaeological exposition of the genealogical discourse in fact laid bare a close historical and conceptual bond between genealogy and modern racial discourses. In the first lectures, Foucault, unearthed the genealogical discourse hidden in (...) the literature written by the nobility as they attempted to resist the centralisation of royal power. In the latter part of his lectures, he described a discursive interplay between genealogy-as-struggle and the biopolitical practices of the modern state. As such, he gave a tentatively description how the modern state inherited and extensively applied the notion of struggle in its biopolitical control on its populations. The immoral and historical consequences of this affinity, resulting in the biopolitics of genocide, warranted Foucault to distance himself from Nietzsche’s concept, which in effect resulted in rethinking the social within the framework of gouvernmentalité, in which struggle was a modality rather than the prime mover of society. (shrink)

The elite theory of Max Weber has recently been rediscovered by political scientists and political theorists who have sought to explore both the heuristic and the normative potential of plebiscitary leader democracy. Notwithstanding the merits of this wave of studies, this paper argues that attention should be shifted from Weber's context-specific defence of plebiscitary leadership in post-WWI Germany to his broader conception of charisma as an attempt to grasp the enigma of significant social and political change. Contemporary democratic theory, this (...) paper contends, can fruitfully draw on Weber to sink into the antinomies and ambiguities of a transformative democratic politics. (shrink)

This paper considers the politics of tolerance through the lens of Spinoza’s philosophy of immanence. The contention is that Spinoza’s philosophy of immanence provides us with a better conceptualization of the relationship between tolerance and power, and that it in so doing reinvigorates a theory of active tolerance that, for the most part, has been lost in contemporary democratic theory. Spinoza’s philosophy of immanence does so because it animates a sensorial orientation to politics, one that heightens our attention to the (...) affective components of political life, enabling us to better theorize how all modes of existence, including the so-called passive ones, harbor a degree of power that can be mobilized for purposes that go beyond the “non-practice” highlighted by advocates and critics of tolerance in contemporary democratic theory. The paper develops this argument with ongoing reference to Marcuse’s critique of tolerance. (shrink)

Hugh of Saint-Victor's De Sacramentis is usually regarded as an early summa of theology. As such it has been regarded as not totally satisfying, lacking a clearness of its conceptual system when compared with the work of e.g. Peter the Lombard. What may make up for this lack of system and even confer coherence, be it on a different level, is Hugh's pedagogical view of creation and salvation history, as it shows most clearly in his tropological digressions. In his exposition (...) of the history of salvation as it unfolds since the very beginning, Hugh incorporates the process by which the monk can not only follow the story of the macrocosm, but at the same time can read his self into being, allowing recognition of ambivalence from the start, and thus presenting a multi-demensional view of being human. In the same way as, on the cosmic level, any pre-lapsarian state of innocence exhibits a flaw from the very beginning, so the life of man is in a permanent state of ambiguity. This ambiguity is the framework for man as a moral being. Only within the possibility of choice can man be just or happy, without choice justus and beatus have no real significance. Matters are shown to be even more complicated when, in the story of Eve Hugh draws attention to her doubtful interpretation of God's command, as a factor which precedes her choice. In this way, De Sacramentis is not only a doctrina in our sense of the content of Christian dogma, but it offers the monk a point to which he can attach and conform his intentio: by bringing his intentio in form with the story about creation and fall and reparation, the reader can in fact effect the necessary reparatio, consisting of knowledge of truth and love of virtue. (shrink)

Constant changes in the economic, social and political life of the people of the nations force the Church to enter into a dialogue with the world. The object of her attention is culture, politics, science, dealing with human problems. Church leadership of various Christian denominations sees the possibility of applying their socio-political guides in a wide socio-cultural space - personal and family circles, political and public activities, social life in general.

Some philosophers have thought that life could only be meaningful if there is no God. For Sartre and Nagel, for example, a God of the traditional classical theistic sort would constrain our powers of self-creative autonomy in ways that would severely detract from the meaning of our lives, possibly even evacuate our lives of all meaning. Some philosophers, by contrast, have thought that life could only be meaningful if there is a God. God and the Meanings of Life is interested (...) in exploring the truth in both these schools of thought, seeking to discover what God could and couldn't do to make life meaningful (as well as what he would and wouldn't do). Mawson espouses a version of the 'amalgam' or 'pluralism' thesis about the issue of life's meaning – in essence, that there are a number of different legitimate meanings of 'meaning' (and indeed 'life') in the question of life's meaning. According to Mawson, God, were he to exist, would help make life meaningful in some of these senses and hinder in some others. He argues that whilst there could be meaning in a Godless universe, there could be other sorts of meaning in a Godly one and that these would be deeper. (shrink)

My purpose in what follows is not so much to defend the basic principle of utilitarianism as to indicate the form of it which seems most promising as a basic moral and political position. I shall take the principle of utility as offering a criterion for two different sorts of evaluation: first, the merits of acts of government, social policies, and social institutions, and secondly, the ultimate moral evaluation of the actions of individuals. I do not take it as implying (...) that the individual should live his life on the basis of constant evaluations of this sort. For there are different levels of decision making each with its appropriate criteria. For example, we each inevitably make many of our decisions from the point of view of our own personal self-fulfilment and this cannot regularly take a directly utilitarian form, nor should the utilitarian want it to do so. His claim is at most that we should sometimes review our life from the point of view of a kind of impersonal moral truth of a universalistic utilitarian character. (shrink)

The world appears to conscious creatures in terms of experienced sensory qualities, but science doesn't find sensory experience in that world, only physical objects and properties. I argue that the failure to locate consciousness in the world is a function of our necessarily representational relation to reality as knowers: we won't discover the terms in which reality is represented by us in the world as it appears in those terms. Qualia -- arguably a type of representational content -- will therefore (...) not be found in the physical world as characterized in experience or science. Instead, consciousness constitutes a subjective, representational reality for cognitive systems such as ourselves, and the physical world is a represented objective reality. I suggest that naturalistic approaches to explaining consciousness should acknowledge the non-objectivity of experience, and be constrained by evidence that consciousness accompanies certain sorts of behaviour-controlling representational functions carried out by complex, physically instantiated mind-systems. I evaluate a variety of current hypotheses about consciousness, and suggest that a mature science of representation may help explain why, perhaps as matter of representational necessity, experience arises as a natural but not objectively discoverable phenomenon. (shrink)

Green agrees with Kant on the abstract character of moral law as categorical imperatives and that intentional dispositions are central to a moral justification of punishment. The central problem with Kant's account is that we are unable to know these dispositions beyond a reasonable estimate. Green offers a practical alternative, positing moral law as an ideal to be achieved, but not immediately enforceable through positive law. Moral and positive law are bridged by Green's theory of the common good through the (...) dialectic of morality. Thus, Green appears to offer an alternative that remains committed to Kantian morality whilst taking proper stock of our cognitive limitations. Unfortunately, Green fails to unravel fully Kant's dichotomy of moral and positive law that mirrors Green's solution, although Green offers a number of improvements, such as the importance of the community in establishing rights and linking the severity of punishment to the extent that a criminal act threatens the continued maintenance of a system of rights. (shrink)