In a seventeenth-century English landscape populated with towering political and philosophical figures like Hobbes, Harrington, Cromwell, Milton, and Locke, William Penn remains in many ways a man apart. Yet despite being widely neglected by scholars, he was a sophisticated political thinker who contributed mightily to the theory and practice of religious liberty in the early modern Atlantic world. In this long-awaited intellectual biography of William Penn, Andrew R. Murphy presents a nuanced portrait of this remarkable entrepreneur, philosopher, Quaker, and (...) politician.Liberty, Conscience, and Toleration focuses on the major political episodes that attracted William Penn's sustained attention as a political thinker and actor: the controversy over the Second Conventicle Act, the Popish Plot and Exclusion Crisis, the founding and settlement of Pennsylvania, and the contentious reign of James II. Through a careful examination of writings published in the midst of the religious and political conflicts of Restoration and Revolutionary England, Murphy contextualizes the development of Penn's thought in England and America, illuminating the mutual interconnections between Penn's political thought and his colonizing venture in America. An early advocate of representative institutions and religious freedom, William Penn remains a singular figure in the history of liberty of conscience. His political theorizing provides a window into the increasingly vocal, organized, and philosophically sophisticated tolerationist movement that gained strength over the second half of the seventeenth century. Not only did Penn attempt to articulate principles of religious liberty as a Quaker in England, but he actually governed an American polity and experienced firsthand the complex relationship between political theory and political practice. Murphy's insightful analysis shows Penn's ongoing significance to the broader study of Anglo-American political theory and practice, ultimately pointing scholars toward a new way of understanding the enterprise of political theory itself. (shrink)

The value of accuracy and quantity as memory measures is assessed. It is argued that (1) accuracy does not measure correspondence (monitoring) because it ignores omissions and correct rejections, (2) quantity is confounded with monitoring in recall, and (3) in recognition, if targets and foils are unequal, both measures, even together, still ignore correct rejections.

dixerit hoc idem Epicurus, semper beatum esse sapientem … quem quidem, cum summis doloribus conficiatur, ait dicturum: ‘quam suaue est! quam nihil curo!’ non pugnem cum homine, cur tantum †habeat† in natura boni …This text, containing Cicero's oft-repeated canard, is deeply problematic. Both Reynolds and Moreschini resort to daggers here. Madvig's abeat for habeat has failed to convince, since Cicero appears to use abeo metaphorically without specifying the place of origin or destination of movement within a narrowly circumscribed semantic field (...) which does not encompass our passage. C.F.W. Müller, on the other hand, offered aberret, which can appear without such specification in the sense ‘be deceived’ or the like. Editors evidently hesitate, however, because of the difficulty of explaining the corruption. Perhaps one might rather consider the merits of haereat. haereo can mean ‘be stuck in difficulties’, but the usage is uncommon enough that it could easily have been a stumbling block for an inattentive scribe. Moreover, in some scripts where r is written with somewhat elongated hasta and an arc curving down, it can be easily confused with b; and once haebeat appeared, the ‘correction’ to habeat was all but inevitable. (shrink)

America's supposed moral decline from an imagined golden age, and the threat of divine punishment for the sin of straying from the path of righteousness, have been consistent themes in its political and religious rhetoric. In Prodigal Nation, Andrew Murphy investigates the jeremiad's historical roots and probes the ways in which it continues to illuminate themes and tensions in American social and political life.

This paper deals with the relationship between the embodied cognition paradigm and two sets of its implications: its implications for the ontology of selves, and its implications for the nature and extent of phenomenal consciousness. There has been a recent wave of interest within cognitive science in the paradigm variously called ‘embodied,’ ‘extended,’ ‘situated’ or ‘distributed’ cognition. Although ideas applied in the embodied cognition research program can be traced back to the work of Heidegger, Piaget, Vygotsky, Merleau-Ponty, and Dewey, the (...) current thesis can be seen as a direct response and, in some cases, a proposed alternative to the cognitivist/classicist rule-based, information-processing model of cognition. Embodied cognition, by contrast, arises from real-time, goal-oriented bodily interactions with the world. I lay out three relations: the implications of embodiment for consciousness; the implications of embodiment for the self; and the tension between these two. I argue that the embodiment paradigm introduces a radical split between consciousness and the self, and that it does so by deflating our pre-theoretical instincts about consciousness and self in two different directions; however, I claim, what both these theoretical movements have in common is a scepticism about the notion of a psychological container defining a boundary between ‘inside’ and ‘outside.’ (203 words). (shrink)

Using a dataset of corporate philanthropic gifts of $1 million or more, we examine the influence of corporate donors on the performance of recipient non-profit organizations. We find that corporate donors positively influence NPO performance, specifically in the form of higher revenues per employee, program ratios, and fundraising returns. We find little evidence that large foundation or individual donors similarly enhance organizational performance. In additional analysis, we find that large corporate donations matter when the corporation is more likely to have (...) influence over the recipient NPO. These findings suggest that corporate donors provide the monitoring and expertise needed to enhance organizational performance beyond simply providing funding to NPOs. Our results are robust to a two-stage model and propensity score matching to address endogeneity concerns. While prior research has examined the effect of corporate philanthropy on donor organization performance, we contribute to the literature by examining whether corporate philanthropy also improves recipient organization performance. (shrink)

qua re flecte te, quaeso, et maiores tuos respice atque ita guberna rem publicam ut natum esse te ciues tui gaudeant: sine quo nec beatus nec c[l]arus nec †unctus† quisquam esse omni potest.

On the eve of the 2016 election, which ushered in the Trump era, an article by Alan Jacobs in Harper's Magazine lamented the decline of the Christian public intellectual and noted the need for such figures today—what Jacobs describes as the "'Where Is Our Reinhold Niebuhr?' Problem." Jacobs has in mind the Christian social and political thinkers of the early and mid-twentieth century, such as Niebuhr, T. S. Eliot, C. S. Lewis, "and their fellow travelers," who were willing to challenge (...) the prevailing social order of the time. He characterizes Christian public intellectuals—what others might call public theologians—as follows: "They should be intellectuals who speak the language of other intellectuals, including the... (shrink)

Summary This paper seeks to be a systematic reflection on the difficulties raised by the sixteenth century Reformed notion of the atonement, rather than a repetitio of centuries-old methods of conceptualization. I will therefore look beyond the somewhat imprecise confessions of the period, and instead focus on the dogmatic work of John Calvin to find a more robust Reformed notion of the atonement. Yet, as we shall see, Calvin’s account of the atonement is not without its inconsistencies. Namely, if it (...) is the wrath of God that is satisfied on the cross of Christ, as Calvin states, then the divine love becomes obscured from view. In reply, Karl Barth’s theology of the atonement will be surveyed in order to uphold that the holy love of God is effective at every moment in the accomplishment of our redemption. Thus, this paper seeks to found a theology of the atonement guided by the Reformed theology of the sixteenth century, yet at the same time considers it possible to decisively bend the Reformed tradition without breaking with it. (shrink)

Considered a foundational text in modern philosophy, the _Meditations on First Philosophy_ presents numerous powerful arguments that to this day influence debates in epistemology, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of religion. This new translation incorporates revisions from the second Latin edition and the later French translation to make Descartes’ reasoning as lucid and engaging as possible. Also included in this edition is a brief introduction to Descartes and the _Meditations_, revised and expanded from Andrew Bailey’s acclaimed anthology, (...) _First Philosophy_. The introduction helps the reader to understand the context and purpose of Descartes’ project without over-explaining his arguments. (shrink)

Journal of Mass Media Ethics, Volume 26, Issue 2, Page 181-183, April-June.

Book 1 of De Natura Deorum exhibits in a nutshell Cicero's philosophical method, with the prior part stating the case for Epicurean theology, the latter part refuting it. Thus the reader observes Cicero at work in both constructive and skeptical modes as well as his art of characterizing speakers. Prefaced to the Book is Cicero's most elaborate justification of his philosophical writing. The Book thus makes an ideal starting point for the study of Cicero's philosophica or indeed of any philosophical (...) writing in Latin, since it delineates the problems such a project raised in the minds of Roman readers and shows how Cicero thought they could be met. There is also a systematic and detailed doxography of ancient views about the deity, an important document in itself, presented from an Epicurean perspective. The volume's Introduction situates this text within Cicero's intellectual development and ancient reflection about the gods. (shrink)

Judgments of direct comparisons, probabilities, proportions, and ranks can all be considered referent-specific judgments, for which a good estimate requires a target to be compared against...

This dissertation develops and defends a detailed realist, internalist account of qualia which is consistent with physicalism and which does not resurrect the epistemological 'myth of the Given.' In doing so it stakes out a position in the sparsely populated middle ground between the two major opposing factions on the problem of phenomenal consciousness: between those who think we have a priori reasons to believe that qualia are irreducible to the physical , and those who implicitly or explicitly treat qualia (...) as contentful but non-phenomenal physical properties . ;I present a minimal, non-question-begging definition of "qualia" and then use this definition in a reformulation of the argument from perceiver relativity which shows that qualia must, at least in humans, be properties of states of the central nervous system. That is, brain states do not simply indicate the colours of external objects---they instantiate phenomenal colours. Since brain states are not coloured in the same way as are external objects, I argue that to token phenomenal property F must be to be the first-person phenomenal sensation of F. I build on this position to argue that the phenomenal apprehension of qualia, is "given"---immediate, certain and private---but that qualia nevertheless do not provide an absolutely certain epistemological foundation since they do not constitute a set of indisputable propositions about facts. I then define what it would be for physicalism to be true of qualia, but argue that the main a priori arguments for and against qualia physicalism---including the logical possibility of zombies and the impossibility of epiphenomenalism---fail. Whether qualia are consistent with physicalism, I claim, is still an open question, answerable only when we discover in more detail how qualia depend upon the brain. ;Although strongly in sympathy with many commonsensical intuitions about qualia, this account stands in contrast to most influential extant theories of qualia, such as eliminativism , externalism , or property-dualism : I conclude the dissertation by using its results to argue explicitly against these three positions. (shrink)

The first part of this paper defends a 'two-factor' approach to mental representation by moving through various choice-points that map out the main peaks in the landscape of philosophical debate about representation. The choice-points considered are: (1) whether representations are conceptual or non-conceptual; (2) given that mental representation is conceptual, whether conscious perceptual representations are analog or digital; (3) given that the content of a representation is the concept it expresses, whether that content is individuated extensionally or intensionally; (4) whether (...) intensional contents are individuated by external or internal conditions; and (5) given that conceptual content is determined externally, whether the possession conditions for concepts are external or internal. The final part of the paper examines the relationship between representation and consciousness, arguing that any account of mental representation, though necessary for a complete account of consciousness, cannot be sufficient for it. (shrink)

This paper is the first of a two-part reexamination of causation in Descartes's physics. Some scholars ? including Gary Hatfield and Daniel Garber ? take Descartes to be a `partial' Occasionalist, who thinks that God alone is the cause of all natural motion. Contra this interpretation, I agree with literature that links Descartes to the Thomistic theory of divine concurrence. This paper surveys this literature, and argues that it has failed to provide an interpretation of Descartes's view that both distinguishes (...) his position from that of his later, Occasionalist followers and is consistent with his broader metaphysical commitments. I provide an analysis that tries to address these problems with earlier `Concurentist' readings of Descartes. On my analysis, Occasionalism entails that created substances do not have intrinsic active causal powers. As I read him, Descartes thinks that bodies have active causal powers that are partly grounded in their intrinsic natures. But I argue ? pace a recent account by Tad Schmaltz ? that Descartes also thinks that God immediately causes all motion in the created world. On the picture that emerges, Descartes's position is both continuous with, and a subtle departure from, the Thomisitic theory of divine concurrence. (shrink)

"The French philosopher Nicolas Malebranche popularized the doctrine of occasionalism in the late seventeenth century. Occasionalism is the thesis that God alone is the true cause of everything that happens in the world, and created substances are merely "occasional causes." This doctrine was originally developed in medieval Islamic theology, and was widely rejected in the works of Christian authors in medieval Europe. Yet despite its heterodoxy, occasionalism was revived starting in the 1660s by French and Dutch followers of the philosophy (...) of René Descartes. Since the 1970s, there has been a growing body of literature on Malebranche and occasionalism. There has also been new work on the Cartesian occasionalists before Malebranche - including Arnold Geulincx, Geraud de Cordemoy and Louis de la Forge. But to date there has not been a systematic, book-length study of the reasoning that led Cartesian thinkers to adopt occasionalism, and the relationship of their arguments to Descartes' own views. This book expands on recent scholarship, to provide the first comprehensive account of seventeenth century occasionalism. Part I contrasts occasionalism with a theory of divine providence developed by Thomas Aquinas, in response to medieval occasionalists; it shows that Descartes' philosophy is compatible with Aquinas' theory, on which God "concurs" in all the actions of created beings. Part 2 reconstructs the arguments of Cartesians - such as Cordemoy and a Forge - who used Cartesian physics to argue for occasionalism. Finally, it shows how Malebranche's case for occasionalism combines philosophical theology with Cartesian metaphysics and mechanistic science"--. (shrink)

"In the United States, we try to comfort ourselves with the belief that this country, as the leading world power and industrial democracy, is different from the rest of the world--that we have solved our day-to-day problems. Such optimism--undergirded with the best of intentions--obscures the reality of the social problems that remain among us. To name only a few, these include violence, drugs, and other crime illiteracy, homelessness, and poverty and the rising rate of illegitimacy in our society. "A vigorous (...) debate over these issues, which are of such pressing concern, is taking place now in our country. It largely concerns the means we should use to address them: What is the proper role of the government in solving these problems without depriving individuals of their right to shape their own destinies?" --from the Introduction by Andrew R. Cecil. (shrink)

Ombudsmen are profoundly a part of the ethos of newspaper journalism. In this essay, I argue that Daniel Okrent's tenure as the public editor of The New York Times provides American journalism and individual ombudsmen a model by which to meet part of the ethical standard Meyers (2000) posits. I assume that individual ombudsmen should assert moral authority in the position through a persuasive use of rhetorical ethos. The ethical appeals of Okrent and Michael Getler, ombudsman at the Washington Post, (...) were compared. Despite structural and institutional similarities in the positions, Okrent's ethical appeal fits Meyers' model and Getler's does not. (shrink)

SummaryThis article examines the disputes amongst Irish Presbyterians about the teaching of moral philosophy by Professor John Ferrie in the college department of the Royal Belfast Academical Institution in the early nineteenth century and the substantive philosophical and theological issues that were raised. These issues have largely been ignored by Irish historians, but a discussion of them is of general relevance to historians of ideas as they illuminate a series of broader questions about the definition and development of Scottish philosophy. (...) These are represented in the move from two philosophers who had strong connections with Irish Presbyterianism—Francis Hutcheson, the early eighteenth-century moral sense philosopher and theological moderate from County Down, and James McCosh, nineteenth-century exponent of modified Common Sense philosophy at Queen's College Belfast and a committed evangelical. In particular, this article addresses three important themes—the definition and character of ‘the Scottish philosophy’, the relationship between evangelicalism and Common Sense philosophy, and the process of development and adaptation that occurred in eighteenth-century Scottish thought during the first half of the nineteenth century. (shrink)

quod idem [sc. the invalidity of Clodius’ legislation] tu, Lentule, uidisti in ea lege quam de me tulisti. nam non est ita latum ut mihi Romam uenire liceret, sed ut uenirem; non enim uoluisti id quod licebat ferre ut liceret, sed me ita esse in re publica magis ut arcessitus imperio populi Romani uiderer quam administrandam ciuitatem restitutus.