Abstract The increasing prevalence of armed drones in the conduct of military operations has generated robust debate. Among legal scholars, the crux of the dispute generally pits those who herald the new technology's unparalleled precision against those who view such newfound capabilities as an inducement to employ excessive force. Largely overlooked in the discussion over how drone strikes can be accomplished lawfully is a more fundamental question: Can a model of warfare that eschews any risk of harm to one party (...) be squared with the ethical framework that informs the law of war? This matter has less to do with the technology per se than with a policy orientation that utilizes such technology as a strategy in itself, as opposed to one military tool in a larger arsenal. A corollary to the incongruity of riskless warfare is to query whether the ensuing breakdown of ethical and legal norms unwittingly encourages the very instability that the law of war attempts to control, thereby endangering the civilian populations of all parties to the conflict. While other authors have previously addressed the challenges posed by asymmetry to the law of armed conflict in different formats, this article explores these issues through a hypothetical scenario and seeks to elucidate some of the potential ramifications of the pursuit of physical impunity in war. (shrink)

The business enterprise is a major instrument in the creation of a just society. However the tension between profit and ethicality requires sound decision making and business ethics instruction is central to creative alternatives to business leaders. Therefore, instruction is aided with a model for framing one’s thoughts about ethics and while several earlier business ethics models exist, they tend to be closed and at times parochial. This paper draws on insights from other academic disciplines to offer a broader yet (...) flexible framework for professors, students, scholars, and decision makers. At the center of the model is the four stage framework of Rest et al. as impacted by four sets of variables—individual, organizational, environmental, and issue. These are rooted in the work of Dunlop’s Industrial Relations Theory and Jones’ Moral Intensity. A literature review of important variables is presented and the paper concludes with several take aways for instruction and policy suggestions. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Ralegh and the Punic WarsCharles G. Salas“For he doth not feign, that rehearseth probabilities as bare conjectures....”Sir Walter Ralegh, The History of the WorldThe Secret HistoryIn 1603 Sir Walter Ralegh was judged guilty of treason and imprisoned in the Tower of London to await execution. The wait was a long one —execution did not take place until 1618—giving this artful courtier, warrior, poet, and poseur time to script new (...) roles for himself. The most memorable of these was historian, and the stage on which he performed was the entire world. Universal history had been a time-honored genre in England, but never had there been so remarkable a performance by a native son as Ralegh’s The History of the World (1614). In five books Ralegh offered to king and country his interpretation of events from Creation to 168 bc. Book V, last and lengthiest of the entire work, deals in large part with the struggle between Rome and Carthage. The story of that struggle is Ralegh’s most mature historical writing and the most revealing of himself, for when he gave up his plan to carry his history into modern times, the Punic Wars became the context for things about the present that he was loath to leave unsaid.Despite its length (about a million words) and premature ending, the History was an enormous success with a public eager to possess the meaning of it all. Oliver Cromwell particularly liked the way it followed “the strange windings and turnings of Providence”; 1 no doubt he found Ralegh’s emphasis upon the Providential control of events reassuring. For Ralegh claimed to show how “kings and kingdoms have flourished and fallen, and for what virtue and piety God made prosperous, and for what vice and deformity he made wretched both the one and the other.” 2 In fact what Ralegh showcased [End Page 195] were the acts of a vengeful, Old Testament God more concerned with punishing monarchical sins than with making monarchs prosperous, and the History was temporarily suppressed by James for being “too saucy in censoring princes.” 3If the king did not like what he saw in the History, the king’s critics did; and Ralegh, never a friend to Puritan or republican in his lifetime, became a hero to both as a pious author and victim of Stuart tyranny. Those sympathetic to the Stuarts, like Alexander Ross, Chaplain to Charles I, saw Ralegh rather differently; but the popularity of the man and his History could not be denied. Ross himself profited from that popularity by doing both an abridgment and a continuation of the History as well as Som Animadversions and Observations upon Sir Walter Raleigh’s Historie of the World. Wherein his mistakes are noted, and som doubtful passages cleered (1653). Many of these animadversions were directed at Ralegh’s treatment of the Punic Wars. Ross recognized that “mistakes” and “doubtful passages” there formed a pattern: “Sir Walter cannot look upon the Roman Glorie with but a squint eye”(8), he complained. But did he also recognize the reason for that squint eye, that Ralegh kept one eye on the past and the other on the present? That many of those “doubtful passages” were in fact strategic elements in a campaign (based on parallels) against Rome, against James, and against James’s ministry? Had this been obvious to Ross, he still would not have said so. Writing under Cromwell, he could no more afford to complain explicitly about abuse of James than Ralegh, writing under James, could afford to make the abuse explicit.Parallels—implicit or imagined—are part and parcel of Ralegh’s providentialism. In brief: God controls events, God does not change, events do not change. This is not to say that Ralegh believed that God’s control was transparent, that God couldn’t change, or that free will did not exist. Ralegh did not solve the great problems of theology. 4 What he is sure about is that the same sins continue to be punished just as they have always been: “So also hath God punished the same and the like sins in all after-times, and... (shrink)

This essay posits that Peirce puts the Normative Sciences implicitly to work at three junctures of his Neglected Argument for the Reality of God (NARG): (1) in the distinguishing of musement from play; (2) in the generation of the Humble Argument via musement; and (3) in the portrayal of the Humble Argument as the first stage of an inquiry into its confirmability. Then, focus shifts to Peirce’s notions of the initiating “play” and the “plausibility” of the God-hypothesis, as a means (...) both to analyze and underscore the foundational role of esthetics in the Normative Sciences. After a discussion of the theological content of the argument, the essay concludes that Peirce did indeed employ the Normative Sciences as postulated, but that his truncation of NARG at the abductive stage renders the overall argument inconclusive, amounting more to a report of a religio-esthetic experience. (shrink)

I remember when I was a youth and excitable, I went to a performance of Ibsen's Ghosts. The question may be asked, excitable in which direction. Certainly it was not the one Ibsen intended. The truth is, I had absorbed (second or third hand) The Decline of the West, and was all for the spiritual expression of the early cultural ages and the sweep and energy of the first secular expansion (the Renaissance), but I would have run blocks to avoid (...) the romantic and nineteenth century, or any of the products of the conscious and disillusioned selfhood. Under these circumstances it was manifestly absurd to go to Ghosts anyway. I came away with no very amiable remembrance. Such a play I refused to call tragedy, the name was too noble. I coined another word, ‘pathody’, the story of pathetic suffering, and dubbed it so. (shrink)

(2012). The Making of the Humanities, vol. 1: Early Modern Europe. Intellectual History Review: Vol. 22, No. 2, pp. 293-296. doi: 10.1080/17496977.2012.694178.

Erasmus’s Adages were among his most influential works in his own time, particularly later editions, which included both Greek and Latin. In the adages included in volumes 35 and 36, Erasmus criticizes secular and ecclesiastical life, commenting on topics such as war, reform of the church and spiritual life, and the corrupting effects of the relentless pursuit of wealth and power. Erasmus aims his narrative and commentary in Paraphrase on the Gospel of Matthew (volume 45) at a general educated audience (...) (rather than professional theologians). Together, these volumes provide readable and accurate edition of Erasmus’s work and helpful special indexes. (shrink)

Nicht nur mit Engelszungen: Beiträge zur semitischen Dialektologie—Festschrift für Werner Arnold zum 60. Geburtstag. Edited by Renaud Kuty; Ulrich Seeger; and Shabo Talay. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2013. Pp. xx + 412. €118.

Neuaramäische Texte in den Dialekten der Khabur-Assyrer in Nordostsyrien. By Shabo Talay. Semitica Viva, vol. 41. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2009. Pp. xv + 712. €148.

What strikes me at the outset, and prompts the title, is that nothing exhibits more clearly than mathematics the complicity between man, God and Satan. That man should have knowledge so luminous, so absolute, would seem impossible did he not share, under whatever doubt or qualification, in the divine. On the other hand, the arrogation of that knowledge, its over-reaching distortion and delimitation of mind and world, hints how far it reenacts the revolt of Lucifer.

Most of us came into ecology with memories of special personal places. A cliff top that Claude Monet might have painted. Allen as a youth spent his holidays on the Dorset Coast near Swanage; he can still smell the sea breeze of his childhood. Curtin grow up on a farm in southwestern Wisconsin, the dew of the grass and the bright green on a June morning remains vivid. The catching of reptiles and insects for him awakened a curiosity about the (...) natural world that has remained to this day. But once into the field there came the scholarship. With ever tighter grant monies, the pressure to publish takes so much of the fun out of it. A climate of unbridled careerism prevails and shows itself in the incremental state of the literature: little things to list on this year's activities report. There are now even predatory journals that cynically do not seriously review submissions, and only collect page charges. As journal editors have a desperate time getting reviews done by mature scholars, instead of a hand off to their overworked graduate students. So what is to be done - how can we bring the joy and importance of discovery back into it all? After all ecology is done by human beings. Mostly it is a personal mission, for what great ecologists write is frequently personal and life changing. So an undercurrent of this book is to remind and reveal the original purpose of science. Not professional advancement, but the genuine search for novel ideas and the imperative to share hard won insights and personal passions. (shrink)

“Die Geheimnisse der Vorväter”: Edition, Übersetzung und Kommentierung einer esoterischen mandäischen Handschrift aus der Bodleian Library Oxford. By Bogdan Burtea. Mandäistische Forschungen, vol. 5. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2015. Pp. 153, illus. €49.

Prostitution in the Eastern Mediterranean World: The Economics of Sex in the Late Antique and Medieval Middle East. By Gary Leiser. London: I.B. Tauris, 2017. Pp. xv + 332. $52.50, £35.

Since essence examined from one point of view can always be dissolved into relationship, and since the act of this dissolution—which is the general analyzing act of science—seems at first to explain the essence or transcending cause, therefore in every science and with every such new discovery of material determining agents, there will be a period of enthusiasm when real explanation and cause seem to be revealed. But after the discovered relationship has been examined for a time, it becomes apparent (...) both that further unexplored relationships are required to connect these agents we have found with the operations they are supposed to effect, and that a new transcendental unity must be postulated of the whole to bind the agents into the ordered pattern they maintain. (shrink)