Sedlakova and Trachsel (2023) discuss the ethical concerns associated with employing what they term conversational artificial intelligence as therapist substitutes. Given their apprehensions, they...

Though much philosophical and theological debate centres on various aspects of religious life, the very definition of a religious life in any given tradition is often unclear. This paper focuses on Christianity and asks, what does it mean to be a Christian? Kierkegaard‟s authorship offers an insightful conception of Christian being. An ontological account of being in „correct relation‟ and an ethical imperative to imitate Christ and love one‟s neighbour constitute Kierkegaard‟s idea of what it means to be a Christian. (...) This paper will also discuss whether Kierkegaard over-emphasises the individual aspect of religious life at the expense of the communal aspect. What will be affirmed throughout is that Kierkegaard‟s ontological and ethical conception of Christian being illuminates the issue today as it did for 19th century Danish religion. (shrink)

In this issue, contributors engage Timothy Murphy’s proposal for irreligious bioethics over against religious bioethics. Two essays take opposing sides in the debate, while a third seeks middle ground. Another essay questions the meaning of the words “religion,” “irreligion,” and “secular.” The final essay examines the religious nature of human existence and its implications for the debate.

Bioconvergence is a growing area within the evolving bioeconomy that seeks out synergistic opportunities at the intersection of engineering and the life sciences (Greenbaum 2023). One example is th...

Medical trainees should learn from the actions of Nazi physicians to inform a more just contemporary practice by examining the subtle assumptions, or moral orientations, that led to such heinous actions. One important moral orientation that still informs contemporary medical practice is the moral orientation of elimination in response to suffering patients. We propose that the moral orientation of presence, described by theologian Stanley Hauerwas, provides a more fitting response to suffering patients, in spite of the significant barriers to enacting (...) such a moral orientation for contemporary trainees. (shrink)

Towards the unconditioned: Kant, Epicurus and Glückseligkeit -- Arendt and the time of the pardon -- Kant, evil, and the unconditioned -- Judgment after Derrida.

Are all canonical property designators (i.e. nominalizations of predicative phrases) rigid? Dan López de Sa recently criticized the arguments I gave for an affirmative answer to that question. The current article rebuts López de Sa's objections.

In a period rich with controversy one should perhaps allow fading quarrels to die. It is not my primary intention to rekindle the heated debate that swirled about Miss Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem, but rather to see that book within the larger context of her philosophy. The following reflections were actually prompted by a reading of Miss Arendt’s On Revolution which, at least for this reader, suddenly revealed a certain unity of structure that can be discerned in all her writings. (...) A subsequent reading of the Human Condition, the essays entitled Between Past and Future, the book on Rahel Varnhagen, and a rereading of the Origins of Totalitarianism and other essays have suggested that the polemical attacks on Eichmann in Jerusalem, whatever their intrinsic merits, failed to do justice to Miss Arendt as philosopher. It became clear to me that the Eichmann book can be understood only in terms of a certain preestablishe... (shrink)

What does the law want? -- How the law thinks -- How the law works -- The litigious mind -- Tyranny of the mind -- Lawyers in love -- Staying and going -- Soul values.

Taking the question of phenomenality as its guiding thread, this paper attempts to shed light on the relationship between Heidegger's turn and Derrida's 1964/65 seminar on Heidegger. I argue that deconstruction can be understood as a performative attempt to take into account Heidegger's thinking of originary semblance or errancy, which already announces itself in Sein und Zeit and is a central figure of what the later Heidegger calls ‘the turn’. Instead of trying to grasp this errancy or this différance phenomenologically, (...) Derrida takes up the necessity to read and repeat what is already given, what already appears, and thereby undermines, through his reading of Heidegger's Crossing Out of the Word ‘Sein’, the phenomeno-fundamental ontological approach of Sein und Zeit, or rather: shows that it is always already undermined. (shrink)

The paper deals with the semantics and ontology of ordinary discourse about properties. The main focus lies on the following thesis: A simple predication of the form ‘a is F’ is synonymous with the corresponding explicit property-attribution ‘a has F-ness’. An argument against this Synonymy Thesis is put forth which is based on the thesis that simple predications and property-attributions differ in their conditions of understanding. In defending the argument, the paper accounts for the way in which we come to (...) adopt the conceptual framework of properties. (shrink)

Offers a detailed critique of the Bush administration's foreign policy, including arguments about the imposition of democracy on foreign nations and hypocritical actions by America.

in peirce and religion: Knowledge, Transformation, and the Reality of God, Roger Ward argues that the founder of American pragmatism was a rather traditional Trinitarian Christian throughout his entire life. Such an argument is notable because scholarship on Peirce often underplays the philosopher’s comments about religion while emphasizing his work on logic, mathematics, and other non-religious philosophical topics. Those who take his views on religion seriously tend to interpret Peirce more radically than Ward, placing Peirce’s philosophy of religion and personal (...) theological beliefs in line with modern trends that are critical of traditional forms of Christianity. The argument in Ward’s book stands out against... (shrink)

ABSTRACTRobert Southey’s fictive travelogue, Letters from England, by Don Manuel Alvarez Espriella, inspired several imitators, most importantly José María Blanco White with his Letters from Spain. These works rejuvenate a fictional device popularised by Montesquieu’s Persian Letters—the “familiar stranger”—at a crucial juncture when British involvement in the affairs of Europe provoked a reassessment of pre-Revolutionary cosmopolitanism. The stranger as home-interpreter calls attention to an emerging emphasis in European Romantic thought on the contingency of freedom with hybrid, mobile identities, prefiguring the (...) psycho-social-historical terrain in which Jean-François Lyotard and Dean MacCannell link modernity with travel and tourism. This essay argues that the Romantic figure of the foreign traveller expresses a condition of travel, reflecting Lyotard’s critique of human contingency in his essay “Domus and the Megalopolis.” Southey’s sympathetic stranger modulates a conversation with Word... (shrink)

Recent scholars have examined the important role of English Deism in the formation of a modern naturalistic approach to the study of human religiosity. Despite the volume of important studies of various aspects of his thought, the role of Francis Hutcheson (1694?1746) in this development has been overlooked. The aim of this paper is to show how Hutcheson develops his own account of the origins of religion, consonant with his more well-known theories in aesthetics and moral philosophy, that diverges sharply (...) from the then-prevailing Deist views. Hutcheson pioneers a psychological account of religion that anticipates the work of nineteenth- and twentieth-century scholars in important ways. At the same time, Hutcheson incorporates his account of the origins of religion into an overall vision of human flourishing. (shrink)

This note on human rights practice observes that some pedagogical methods in human rights education can have the effect of making human rights violations both seem to be performed by abnormal, bad actors and seem to occur in places far away from US classrooms. This effect is not intended by instructors; a methodological corrective would be helpful to human rights education. This note provides a corrective by suggesting two practices: (1) a pedagogical emphasis on what the Martinican philosopher Édouard Glissant (...) calls ‘entanglements’, or the way in which normal, local actions are tied to global consequences in our contemporary world; and (2) a pedagogical exercise of performing a phenomenology of, or first-person reflection on, daily life as it relates to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The emphasis and exercise work together to implicate the actor in larger patterns of human rights violations and protections. Overall, the emphasis and exercise prevent an insidious insinuation of some human rights education: that human rights violations are to be theorized in the global North but suffered in the global South. (shrink)

Umberto Eco argues that a mirror image is not a sign. At best it is a double, a thing that ceases to be once the reflected object is removed. Harry Mulisch narratively suggests that mirror images function metaphorically as gateways between human suffering and the divine. And interestingly, science employs mirrors and mirror images both to turn our gaze upwards and to show us reflections of our place in the cosmos. Tying together Eco's notion of the double, Mulisch's insistence that (...) mirror images reflect humanity's construction of the divine, and the Giant Magellan Telescope Project's cosmic images, it is my contention that modern, telescopic mirror images are much more than snapshots of the cosmos. They are constructions of human and divine meaning that—signifying—pose the question, what is reflected: the cosmos or humanity? (shrink)

This Note will address the salience of a simple analogy: will privacy law be for the information age what consumer protection law was for the industrial age? At the height of industrialization, the United States market for consumer products faced instability caused by a lack of consumer competence, lack of disclosure about product defects, and advancements in technology that exacerbated the market's flaws. As this Note will show, these same causes of market failure are stirring in today's economy as well. (...) The modern economy is not one of goods but of information, and although consumers have long been aware that their personal information may have marketing value, the Internet has fundamentally changed the scope and depth of information collection, exposing more consumers than ever to injuries requiring not just a comprehensive remedy but a wholesale change in the level of care of the information industry. Just as the mass-production economy precipitated a wave of reforms in consumer protection (in part thanks to a kick-start by author Upton Sinclair), so too must the mass-information economy adapt. After demonstrating the parallels between the problems of today with those of yesterday, this Note will propose parallel solutions, particularly a consolidation of regulatory power and a new tort for breach of information privacy, which draws its inspiration from general products liability. These proposals show that rather than reinvent the wheel, modern lawmakers can (and should) answer today's problems with lessons from the last century. (shrink)

uber das Programm der kommenden Philosophie. ZUr Kritik der Gewalt. SChicksal und Charakter. GEschichtsphilosophische Thesen. THeologisch-politisches Fragment.

Based on the definitive English edition of Kierkegaard's works by Princeton University Press, this series of commentaries addresses all the published texts of ...