This article assesses Bill Rowe's 1979 version of the evidential argument from evil.

Preprinted in God and the Problem of Evil (Blackwell 2001), ed. William Rowe. In this article, we reply to Bill Rowe's "Evil is Evidence Against Theistic Belief" in Contemporary Debates in Philosophy of Religion (Blackwell 2003).

This is a defense of Bill Rowe's 1979 version of the evidential argument from evil.

Until recently, philosophers tended to be suspicious of the concept of need. Contributors to this volume build on recent work establishing its philosophical importance. David Wiggins, Gillian Brock and John O'Neill propose remedies for some mistakes made in ignoring or marginalising need, for example in need-free theories of rationality or justice. Christopher Rowe, Soran Reader and Sarah Miller highlight insights that emerge when the concept of need is explored through Plato, Aristotle and Kant - and others that emerge when (...) historical work is seen through the lens of need. Jonathan Lowe and Garrett Thomson consider the role need plays in the philosophies of action and mind. Bill Wringe, David Braybrooke and Sabina Alkire debate how our obligations relating to need are best understood and articulated, and how we can best ensure they are fulfilled, exploring for example how talk of need is related to talk of rights, well-being or capability. (shrink)

Imprecise definition of key terms in the “public participation” domain have hindered the conduct of good research and militated against the development and implementation of effective participation practices. In this article, we define key concepts in the domain: public communication, public consultation, and public participation. These concepts are differentiated according to the nature and flow of information between exercise sponsors and participants. According to such an information flow perspective, an exercise’s effectiveness may be ascertained by the efficiency with which full, (...) relevant information is elicited from all appropriate sources, transferred to all appropriate recipients, and combined to give an aggregate/consensual response. Key variables that may theoretically affect effectiveness—and on which engagement mechanisms differ—are identified and used to develop a typology of mechanisms. The resultant typology reveals four communication, six consultation, and four participation mechanism classes. Limitations to the typology are discussed, and future research needs identified. (shrink)

Allen, B., Arithmetizing Uniform NC, Annals of Pure and Applied Logic 53 1–50. We give a characterization of the complexity class Uniform NC as an algebra of functions on the natural numbers which is the closure of several basic functions under composition and a schema of recursion. We then define a fragment of bounded arithmetic, and, using our characterization of Uniform NC, show that this fragment is capable of proving the totality of all of the functions in Uniform NC. Lastly, (...) in the spirit of Buss, we show that any function which is definable by a ∑b1-formula in our theory is a function which is in Uniform NC. (shrink)

There is a growing call for greater public involvement in establishing science and technology policy, in line with democratic ideals. A variety of public participation procedures exist that aim to consult and involve the public, ranging from the public hearing to the consensus conference. Unfortunately, a general lack of empirical consideration of the quality of these methods arises from confusion as to the appropriate benchmarks for evaluation. Given that the quality of the output of any participation exercise is difficult to (...) determine, the authors suggest the need to consider which aspects of the process are desirable and then to measure the presence or quality of these process aspects. To this end, a number of theoretical evaluation criteria that are essential for effective public participation are specified. These comprise two types: acceptance criteria, which concern features of a method that make it acceptable to the wider public, and process criteria, which concern features of the process that are liable to ensure that it takes place in an effective manner. Future research needs to develop instruments to measure these criteria more precisely and identify the contextual and environmental factors that will mediate the effectiveness of the different participation methods. (shrink)

Background: Locke's Conception of Freedom For how can we think any one freer than to have the power to do what we will. — John Locke n his chapter on power ...

The notion that the metric field in general relativity can be understood as a property of space-time rests on a feature of the theory sometimes called universal coupling—the claim that rods and clocks “measure” the metric in a way that is independent of their constitution. It is pointed out that this feature is not strictly a consequence of the central dynamical tenets of the theory, and argued that the metric field would better be regarded as a field in space-time, rather (...) than as the very fabric of space-time itself. (shrink)

The political writings of Jean-Francois Lyotard, the prophet of the postmodern, are presented here as both the missing dimension of his work and the key to understanding his position within contemporary debate.

Mary Kalantzis was from 2006 to 2016 Dean of the College of Education at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Bill Cope is a Professor in the College of Education at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. They are co-authors of multiple books including Making Sense: Reference, Agency, and Structure in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning (Cambridge, forthcoming), New Learning: Elements of a Science of Education (Cambridge, 2008, 2012), Literacies (Cambridge 2012, 2016) and e-Learning Ecologies (2017).

The history of cosmology is often understood in terms of the development of modern science, but Asian cosmological thought and practice touched on many aspects of life, including mathematics, astronomy, politics, philosophy, religion, and art. Because of the deep pervasion of cosmology in culture, many opportunities arose for transmissions of cosmological ideas across borders and innovations of knowledge and application in new contexts. Taking a wider view, one finds that cosmological ideas traveled widely and intermingled freely, being frequently reinterpreted by (...) scholars, ritualists, and artists and transforming as they overlapped with ideas and practices from other traditions. This book brings together ten diverse scholars to present their views on these overlapping cosmologies in Asia. (shrink)

This is the first full-length biography of John Langshaw Austin (1911–60). The opening four chapters outline his origins, childhood, schooling, and time as an undergraduate, while the next four examine his early career in professional philosophy, looking at the influence of Oxford Realism, Logical Positivism, Pragmatism, and the later Wittgenstein. The central twelve chapters then explore Austin’s wartime career in British Intelligence. The first three examine the contributions he made to the campaigns in North Africa; the next seven the seminal (...) role he played in ensuring the outstanding accuracy of the D-Day Intelligence; while the final two explore his contributions to Arnhem, the Ardennes, and the post-war administration of Germany. The last main section of the book then outlines and assesses Austin’s contributions to post-war Oxford Ordinary Language Philosophy. The first three chapters discuss the impact on Oxford philosophy of the cultural atmosphere of post-war Britain and the later Wittgenstein’s ideas. The next four look at Austin’s influence on post-war Oxford, particularly his Saturday morning discussion group and his perception lectures. The next five chapters concentrate on America’s influence on Austin and vice versa, paying particular attention to Austin’s work on speech-acts and his semesters in Harvard and Berkeley. The final two chapters examine Austin’s declining influence in Oxford, and his tragically premature death. (shrink)

This paper offers a novel account of how complaints of unfairness arise in risky distributive cases. According to a recently proposed view in distributive ethics, the Competing Claims View, an individual has a claim to a benefit when her well-being is at stake, and the strength of this claim is determined by the expected gain to the individual’s well-being, along with how worse off the individual is compared to others. If an individual is at a lower level of well-being than (...) another, their claim to a given benefit is stronger. On this view, the strength of individuals’ claims are a function of their comparative well-being levels. In this paper, I instead argue that competing claims obtain only when a particular relationship obtains between the fates of individuals: that one individual’s gain is at the expense of another. This is a particular complaint that obtains when the fates of individuals are tied together in such a way that inequality that is to the detriment of the person who is worse off is guaranteed to obtain. I demonstrate that this complaint arises only when individuals are exposed to a particular type of risk that allows some to gain only if others lose. As such, I propose that complaints of unfairness occur less frequently than we might think if we take the Competing Claims View to be true. A purely comparative view is unable to account for this unique complaint of unfairness. I argue that this complaint is not only independently plausible, but can serve as a foundation for a more general account of competing claims complaints. (shrink)

Recently, scholars have looked more closely at the philosophical importance of the imaginative and literary aspects of Plato's writing, and have begun to appreciate the methods of ancient philosophers and commentators who studied Plato. This study brings together leading philosophical and literary scholars to investigate these new-old approaches.

In Fiction, Truth and Literature, Lamarque and Olsen argue that if a critic claims or attempts to prove that the outlook of a work of literature is true or false, he is not engaging in literary or aesthetic appreciation. This paper argues against this position by adducing cases where literary critics discuss the truth or falsity of a work’s view, when their opinions are obviously relevant to the work’s aesthetic assessment. The paper considers in detail the way factual errors damage (...) a work’s aesthetic standing, and shows that Lamarque and Olsen’s alternative account of the role of propositional truths in literature only looks plausible because it considers a restricted range of examples. Finally, it considers the role intention, date and genre play in discussions of the aesthetic damage done by literal falsehood. (shrink)

This paper reports an experimental investigation of presuppositions and scalar implicatures in language acquisition. Recent proposals posit the same mechanisms for generating both types of inferences, in contrast to the traditional view. We used a Covered Box picture selection task to compare the interpretations assigned by two groups of children and by adults, in response to sentences with presuppositions and ones with either ‘direct’ or ‘indirect’ scalar implicatures. The main finding was that the behavior of children and adults differed across (...) inference types. This asymmetry is consistent with the traditional perspective, but poses a challenge for the more recent uniform accounts. We discuss how the latter could be amended to account for these findings, and also relate the findings to previous results on presupposition processing. Finally, we discuss an unexpected difference found between direct and indirect scalar implicatures. (shrink)

An attitude which hopes to derive aesthetic pleasure from an object is often thought to be in tension with an attitude which hopes to derive knowledge from it. The current article argues that this alleged conflict only makes sense when the aesthetic attitude and knowledge are construed unnaturally narrowly, and that when both are correctly understood there is no tension between them. To do this, the article first proposes a broad and satisfying account of the aesthetic attitude, and then considers (...) and rejects twelve reasons for thinking that deriving knowledge from something is incompatible with maintaining an aesthetic attitude towards it. Two main conclusions are drawn. 1) That the representational arts are often in a good position to communicate non-propositional knowledge about human beings. 2) That while our desire to obtain pleasure from a work's manifest properties, and our desire to obtain knowledge from it, are not the same motive, the formal similarities between them are sufficiently impressive to warrant both being seen as elements of the aesthetic attitude. (shrink)

Doping poses a threat to sport worldwide. Studies have revealed that, in addition to elite athletes, amateur and recreational sportsmen and sportswomen are making increasing use of performance-enhancing drugs. Worryingly this trend has been documented among young people. Anti-doping efforts seeking to deter elite athletes from doping through detection of the use of prohibited substances are costly and have not been completely effective either at the top-level or the amateur/recreational level. A thoughtful education program, inspired by honesty and respect, might (...) be more effective in shaping attitudes towards doping in young people and protecting their health. For these reasons, the Italian “Lotta al Doping” (Fight Against Doping) project sought to cause a cultural shift in young people by taking anti-doping seminars to high schools. In the 2017-2018 school year we reached more than 20,800 students from 157 high schools through 202 seminars. Before and after the seminars, we administrated anonymous, voluntarily completed surveys with a set of questions (items = 15), taken from the WADA-Play-True-Quiz. Upon completion of the 2-hour seminar, the majority of the answers given by the students resulted correct (13 out of 15 items, p<0.000001, McNemar) confirming the value of the initiative. This project stands out as promising in the doping prevention process at the youth and amateur levels. (shrink)

Advance directives enable individuals to project their healthcare preferences into a period of anticipated incapacity. With advance directives, individuals can designate whom they would like to have make healthcare decisions for them, or give their healthcare provider advice on what to do, or both. Canada has an unusually wide variety of legislative approaches to advance directives. In what follows we describe and evaluate these, with the aim of pointing the way toward the ideally best legislation and policies on such directives.

The twelfth volume of the Correspondance générale comprises more than 400 letters written in 1821–1822, two years of intense parliamentary and journalistic activity for Constant. Like the previous volumes, it offers unique insights into the intellectual and political life of the time, as well as into Constant’s relationships with his friends and family.

Mainstream theories of decision making conceptualise uncertainty in terms of a well-defined probability distribution or weighting function. Following Knight, radical Keynesians consider subjective expected utility (SEU) theory and its variants as a restricted theory of decision-making applicable to situations of risk and, hence, of limited relevance to the understanding of crucial economic decisions under conditions of fundamental uncertainty in which probabilities are ill-defined, possibly non-existent. The objective of this paper is to outline a radical Keynesian theory of decision-making under uncertainty, (...) arguing that Keynes's suggestion to a two-dimensional probability-credence framework provides the basis for determining the limitations of mainstream approaches and points the way forward to the construction of a more general encompassing theory relevant to psychologists and economists outside of the Keynesian tradition. (shrink)

This paper examines and evaluates a range of methodologies that have been proposed for making useful claims about the probability of phenomena that would contribute to existential risk. Section One provides a brief discussion of the nature of such claims, the contexts in which they tend to be made and the kinds of probability that they can contain. Section Two provides an overview of the methodologies that have been developed to arrive at these probabilities and assesses their advantages and disadvantages. (...) Section Three contains four suggestions to improve best practice in existential risk assessment. These suggestions centre on the types of probabilities used in risk assessment, the role of methodology rankings including the ranking of probabilistic information, the extended use of expert elicitation, and the use of confidence measures to better communicate uncertainty in probability assessments. Finally, Section Four provides an annotated literature review of catastrophic and existential risk probability claims as well as the methodologies that were used to produce each of them. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis essay argues that retrieving insights from the ancient Stoic philosophers for Christian ethics is much more difficult than is often assumed and, further, that the “ethics of retrieval” is itself something worth prolonged reflection. The central problem is that in their ancient sense both Christianity and Stoicism are practically dense patterns of reasoning and mutually incompatible forms of life. Coming to see this clearly requires the realization that the encounter between Stoicism and Christianity is a conflict of lived traditions. (...) Precisely because we cannot simply extract Stoic insights from the lives in which they belong, the task of determining how Stoicism is useful for Christianity is exceptionally challenging. Indeed, doing justice to the Stoics has more to do with facing an alternative to Christianity than it does with appropriating insights for our own use. These points are developed in conversation with Elizabeth Agnew Cochran's recent article on the Stoic influence upon Jonathan Edwards. (shrink)

For young children, gesture is found to precede and predict language development. However, we are still building a knowledge base about the specific nature of the relationship between gesture and speech. While much of the research on this topic has been conducted with neurotypical children, there is a growing body of work with children who have or are at increased likelihood of autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Here, we summarize the literature on relations between gesture and speech, including the role of (...) child gesture production as well as that of gesture exposure (caregiver gesture). We include literature on both neurotypical children and children with or at likelihood of ASD, highlight the similarities and differences across populations, and offer implications for research as well as early identification and intervention. (shrink)