Rémi Brague in On the God of the Christians gives a defence of the validity of faith against modern presumption that science supplies the model for all knowledge. Brague argues that since God is superpersonal, faith must know God in the way we know persons. Personal knowledge requires the connaturality of a loving will: hence faith in God requires love, utterly unlike any scientific knowledge. In criticism, it is suggested that love is essentially motivated by its object's value, and so (...) presupposes knowledge of the object. What is crucial in faith is not the love the subject brings but the demands of a supremely valuable reality. Since faith is, in the broadest sense, experiential, it has points of contact with scientific rationality. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Cicero the Advocate, and: The Roman World of Cicero's De OratoreAnthony CorbeillJonathan Powell and Jeremy Paterson, eds. Cicero the Advocate. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. xii + 448 pp. Cloth, $150.Elaine Fantham. The Roman World of Cicero's De Oratore. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. x + 354 pp. Cloth, $120.Emphasis falls emphatically on "advocate" in the fine Powell and Paterson collection. Each essay concentrates on the forensic speeches (...) and the various strategies that Cicero employs "to ensure that the person he represents is acquitted or that the person he is prosecuting is found guilty" (from the dust jacket, the only place advocacy is defined). Well-organized and unusually coherent (given the genre), all of Cicero the Advocate can be read with profit.The book has three parts: an "editorial introduction," "themes," and "case studies." The concise and accurate introduction (1–57) provides a context for understanding Roman forensic oratory. Topics include a helpful comparison between Greek, Roman, and modern expectations; the mechanics of the Roman courts; the role of rhetorical theory in the construction of Cicero's orations; and, [End Page 144] finally, a review of the possible relationship between Cicero's published and original speeches. Indeed, the coverage is so comprehensive that it occasionally overlaps unnecessarily with the treatment of individual contributors (e.g., Lintott, Burnand, Laws).Needless polemics, however, tend to mar the introduction's tone. In advocating advocacy, the editors adopt a Ciceronian rhetoric of deniability, attacking a position that a subsequent statement grudgingly acknowledges. For example, the editors note early on: "Reading the work of some recent scholars [one relevant eighteen-page essay is cited], one might think that a Roman law court was a place in which all kinds of considerations, personal, social, or political, mattered more than the legal and factual points that the court was supposed to be deciding" (3). Before one can ponder this assessment of recent scholarship on Cicero (characteristic of "the individualistic 1980s" [3, n. 11]), the next paragraph begins, "Nobody, of course [my emphasis], denies that the outcome of a trial—in any legal system—can sometimes be affected by extraneous (especially political) issues." So perhaps these "recent scholars" are worth reading after all; indeed, the study of the cultural background that contributes to persuasion certainly warrants consideration in a book on advocacy. Fortunately, the individual contributions that follow adopt a more conciliatory tone.The range and number of essays preclude active engagement, so in what follows I will summarize key issues. After a survey of "Legal Procedure in Cicero's Time" (61–78) by Andrew Lintott, Jeremy Paterson's "Self-Reference in Cicero's Forensic Speeches" (79–95) assesses the oratorical function of self-praise. Attributing this practice to the original role of the patronus (80), Paterson identifies the advertisement of wealth and status as an important element of Roman advocacy, necessarily changing in tone for Cicero as his own status increases. Paterson's fine analysis, however, would need to change if applied to non-forensic speeches, in which Ciceronian self-praise is particularly pronounced. This surely would affect his conclusion that "Cicero never forgot what he was about, which was to win the case for his client" (95). In the dramatically titled "A Volscian Mafia? Cicero and his Italian Clients in the Forensic Speeches" (97–116; "mafia" refers simply to "local networks of obligations and contacts," 114), Kathryn Lomas surveys the role of Italian communities in five of Cicero's works (Pro Roscio Amerino, Pro Cluentio, Pro Caecina, Pro Caelio, Pro Plancio) to try to discover why there is a "relatively low level of visibility" of Italians even in those cases in which such connections are vital (98). The Italians defended by Cicero fall into two categories: municipals who, like Cicero, seek prominence in Rome (Caelius, Plancius), and the wealthy who have key connections within the capital but do not seek political office in Rome (Roscius, Cluentius, Oppianicus). Lomas convincingly demonstrates that Cicero defends clients from regions where he could hope for political support (especially in southern Latium). In "Reading Cicero's Narratives" (117–46), D. S. Levene employs a reader-response approach to the narrationes of three speeches (Pro Roscio... (shrink)

Everyday lookism, by which I mean the widespread practice of commenting upon and judging the appearance of others, is often regarded as morally troubling. But when, and why, is it morally problemat...

This article argues that supported decision making is ideal for people with dynamic cognitive and functional impairments that place them at the margins of autonomy. First, we argue that guardianship and similar surrogate decision-making frameworks may be inappropriate for people with dynamic impairments. Second, we provide a conceptual foundation for supported decision making for individuals with dynamic impairments, which integrates the social model of disability with relational accounts of autonomy. Third, we propose a three-step model that specifies the necessary conditions (...) of supported decision making: identifying domains for support; identifying kinds of supports; and reaching a mutually acceptable and formal agreement. Finally, we identify a series of challenges for supported decision making, provide preliminary responses, and highlight avenues for future bioethics research. (shrink)

Friedrich Schleiermacher is best known as the ''father of liberal Protestant theology,'' largely on the strength of his massive work of systematic theology, The Christian Faith. In this book, Andrew Dole presents a new account of Schleiermacher's theory of religion. Dole argues that Schleiermacher integrates the individualistic side of religion with a set of claims about its social dynamics, and that this takes place within a broader understanding of all events in the world as the product of a universal, (...) law-governed ''causal nexus.''. (shrink)

Decoherence results from the dissipative interaction between a quantum system and its environment. As the system and environment become entangled, the reduced density operator describing the system "decoheres" into a mixture (with the interference terms damped out). This formal result prompts some to exclaim that the measurement problem is solved. I will scrutinize this claim by examining how modal and relative-state interpretations can use decoherence. Although decoherence cannot rescue these interpretations from general metaphysical difficulties, decoherence may help these interpretations to (...) pick out a preferred basis. I will explore whether decoherence solves nagging technical problems associated with selecting a preferred basis. (shrink)

The idea that research should become more interdisciplinary has become commonplace. According to influential commentators, the unprecedented complexity of problems such as climate change or the social implications of biomedicine demand interdisciplinary efforts integrating both the social and natural sciences. In this context, the question of whether a given knowledge practice is too disciplinary, or interdisciplinary, or not disciplinary enough has become an issue for governments, research policy makers and funding agencies. Interdisciplinarity, in short, has emerged as a key political (...) preoccupation; yet the term tends to obscure as much as illuminate the diverse practices gathered under its rubric. This volume offers a new approach to theorising interdisciplinarity, showing how the boundaries between the social and natural sciences are being reconfigured. It examines the current preoccupation with interdisciplinarity, notably the ascendance of a particular discourse in which it is associated with a transformation in the relations between science, technology and society. Contributors address attempts to promote collaboration between, on the one hand, the natural sciences and engineering and, on the other, the social sciences, arts and humanities. From ethnography in the IT industry to science and technology studies, environmental science to medical humanities, cybernetics to art-science, the collection interrogates how interdisciplinarity has come to be seen as a solution not only to enhancing relations between science and society, but the pursuit of accountability and the need to foster innovation. Interdisciplinarity is essential reading for scholars, students and policy makers across the social sciences, arts and humanities, including anthropology, geography, sociology, science and technology studies and cultural studies, as well as all those engaged in interdisciplinary research. It will have particular relevance for those concerned with the knowledge economy, science policy, environmental politics, applied anthropology, ELSI research, medical humanities, and art-science. (shrink)

In this brief overview paper, we analyse information flow in the brain. Although Shannon’s information concept, in its pure algebraic form, has made a number of valuable contributions to neuroscience, information dynamics within the brain is not fully captured by its classical description. These additional dynamics consist of self-organisation, interplay of stability/instability, timing of sequential processing, coordination of multiple sequential streams, circular causality between bottom-up and top-down operations, and information creation. Importantly, all of these processes are dynamic, hierarchically nested and (...) correspond to continuous brain state change, even if the external environment remains constant. This is where metastable coordination comes into play. In a metastable regime of brain functioning, as a result of the simultaneous co-existence of tendencies for independence and cooperation, information is continuously created, preserved for some time and then dissipated through the formation of dynamical and nested spatio-temporal coalitions among simple neuronal assemblies and larger coupled conglomerates of them—so-called delocalised operational modules. (shrink)

This book, the first to explore religious education and post-modernity in depth, sets out to provide a much needed examination of the problems and possibilities post-modernity raises for religious education.

Programmed cell death (PCD) in unicellular organisms is in some instances an altruistic trait. When the beneficiaries are clones or close kin, kin selection theory may be used to explain the evolution of the trait, and when the trait evolves in groups of distantly related individuals, group or multilevel selection theory is invoked. In mixed microbial communities, the benefits are also available to unrelated taxa. But the evolutionary ecology of PCD in communities is poorly understood. Few hypotheses have been offered (...) concerning the community role of PCD despite its far-reaching effects. The hypothesis we consider here is that PCD is a black queen. The Black Queen Hypothesis (BQH) outlines how public goods arising from a leaky function are exploited by other taxa in the community. Black Queen (BQ) traits are essential for community survival, but only some members bear the cost of possessing them, while others lose the trait In addition, BQ traits have been defined in terms of adaptive gene loss, and it is unknown whether this has occurred for PCD. Our conclusion is that PCD fulfils the two most important criteria of a BQ (leakiness and costliness), but that more empirical data are needed for assessing the remaining two criteria. In addition, we hold that for viewing PCD as a BQ, the original BQH needs to include social traits. Thus, despite some empirical and conceptual shortcomings, the BQH provides a helpful avenue for investigating PCD in microbial communities. (shrink)

Until the time of Karl Marx and John Stuart Mill, philosophers generally held economics to be an integral element of moral philosophy. These days, the language of values—moral, aesthetic, and cognitive—dominates philosophic discourse, even though contemporary philosophers rarely hold economics to be integral to moral philosophy. Examining the thought of Friedrich Nietzsche and the art of Marcel Proust, Edward Andrew provides the first sustained critical analysis of values discourse, an analysis that deconstructs its content and its form.

My last editorial was written before the world became aware of the covid-19 pandemic, and the impact that it would have on our lives. (Editorials are written some three months before publication, l...

"I have been using the book in a freshman seminar in which we are exploring college. Most of the texts we are using are academic satire novels, but we are using Delbanco's book to help us talk about the place of college in American culture.

This article argues that Gilbert Simondon’s philosophy of technology is useful for both science and technology studies and critical theory. The synthesis has political implications. It offers an argument for the rationality of democratic interventions by citizens into decisions concerning technology. The new framework opens a perspective on the radical transformation of technology required by ecological modernization and sustainability. In so doing, it suggests new applications of STS methods to politics as well as a reconstruction of the Frankfurt School’s “rational (...) critique of reason.”. (shrink)

In recent years, and especially in the wake of Barack Obama's reelection, projections that whites will soon become a minority have proliferated. In this essay, I will argue that such predictions are misleading at best, as they rest on questionable philosophical presuppositions, including the presupposition that racial concepts like ‘whiteness’ are static and unchanging rather than fluid and continually being reconstructed. If I am right about these fundamental inaccuracies, one must wonder why the myth of the white minority persists. I (...) will argue that by reenvisioning whites as a minority culture struggling against a hostile dominant group, and by promoting white solidarity as a response to a crisis, such predictions actually serve to defend and legitimize white supremacy. (shrink)

Believing that the distinctions made between mind and body and self and non-self are unnatural separations, Weil explores the nature of the unconscious mind in its relation to ordinary consciousness.

__Modernising School Governance__ examines the impact of recent market-based reforms on the role of governors in the English state education system. A focus of the book concerns how government and non-government demands for ‘strong governance’ have been translated to mean improved performance management of senior school leaders and greater monitoring and disciplining of governors. This book addresses fundamental questions about the neoliberal logic underpinning these reforms and how governors are being trained and responsibilised in new ways to enhance the integrity (...) of these developments. Drawing on large-scale research conducted over three years, the book examines the impact of these reforms on the day to day practices of governors and the diminished role of democracy in these contexts. Wilkins also captures the economic and political rationalities shaping the conduct of governors at this time and traces these expressions to wider structural developments linked to depoliticisation, decentralisation and disintermediation. This book addresses timely and original issues concerning the role of corporate planning and expert handling to state education at a time of increased school autonomy, shrinking local government support/oversight, and tight, centralised accountability. It will appeal to researchers and postgraduate students in disciplines of education, sociology, political science, public policy and management. It will also be of interest to researchers and policy makers from countries with similar or emerging quasi-market education systems. (shrink)

A research study on Theantropy (including shamanism) as the foundation of spiritual life in world religions.

This paper discusses the Internet’s role in promoting civic engagement in Asian countries. China and Singapore were selected because they have similar ethnic groups and cultural backgrounds. This paper concludes that the Internet has a limited role in promoting civic engagement due to Internet censorship and people’s political attitudes, which are deeply rooted for Confucian cultural reasons. Moreover the Internet censorship does not bother people in China and Singapore. The argument presented in this paper differs from previous studies that focused (...) only on the Internet censorship system and ignored the cultural and socio-historical dimensions. The paper argues that the cultural and socio-historical dimensions should be considered when studying censorship. (shrink)

First Published in 2004. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

I begin by sketching a dialectic typical of modern discussions of the ontological argument and explain the underlying modal principles. I will not pursue this well-worn dialectic. Instead I will explicate David Lewis’s valid reconstruction of St Anselm’s argument in Proslogion-II. Lewis’s objections to this argument are based on his idiosyncratic views about modality. Implicitly, Lewis presents a challenge: either I am right about modality, or there is a sound version of the ontological argument. More specifically, Lewis claims there is (...) no good reason to supposethere is anything special about the actual world. I suggest there is good reason to think that must be incorrect. Thus we are left with a formal version of the ontological argument for God’s existence that for all we have seen here looks eminently viable. (shrink)

Field theories have been central to physics over the last 150 years, and there are several theories in contemporary physics in which physical fields play key causal and explanatory roles. This paper proposes a novel field trope-bundle (FTB) ontology on which fields are composed of bundles of particularized property instances, called tropes and goes on to describe some virtues of this ontology. It begins with a critical examination of the dominant view about the ontology of fields, that fields are properties (...) of a substantial substratum. (shrink)

This exploratory study set out to pilot use of a Risk Innovation approach to support the development of advanced biopreservation technologies, and the societally beneficial development of advanced technologies more broadly. This is the first study to apply the Risk Innovation approach — which has previously been used to help individual organizations clarify areas of value and threats — to multiple entities involved in developing an emerging technology.

One of the many reasons for the sustainability of the Arthurian legend in popular culture would seem to involve its educational aspects: most particularly, the educational narrative that describes the relationship between Merlin and Arthur. However much the other elements of the legend suffer alterations through their many retellings, generally the story of Arthur's instruction under Merlin remains unchanged. The reason for this involves the sort of master Merlin is. From his earliest manifestations to present-day representations, Merlin remains a pedagogical (...) hybrid. In one respect, his instruction of Arthur and his motivations for this instruction call to mind the classical conventions of the mentor: conventions... (shrink)