Kant actively struggles with the problem of how to conceive of God's creative action in relation to human freedom. He comes to the view that human freedom can only be protected if God withdraws in certain ways from the created world. The two pillars of Kant's mature philosophy - transcendental idealism and freedom - are in part shaped and motivated by Kant's need to provide a solution to his theological problem. The medieval and early modern theological tradition conceives of divine (...) action as unlike the action of any created being. When the creature acts, God directly causes this action, but without reducing the creature's freedom. Kant explicitly discusses and rejects this account of divine and human concursus. This rejection has significant and surprising ramifications for Kant's wider philosophy, explaining otherwise incomprehensible claims in his critical philosophy. Christopher J. Insole presents a definitive study in the history of ideas, engaging with a wide range of Kant's texts from 1749 until the early 1800s. Many of these texts have received little or no attention in Kant studies to date. Insole places Kant's thought in relation to numerous historical and traditional positions and illuminates these positions by a close engagement with recent debates in analytical philosophy and systematic theology. Kant is unrelentingly honest when grappling with the difficulty of relating divine and human freedom. This study, of Kant's theological struggle and legacy, goes to the heart of the problem in the modern reception of what the Christian tradition has affirmed about human freedom. As such, the book throws light on one of the defining fault-lines in modern theology and philosophy. (shrink)

The most arresting aspect of the Scottish Enlightenment is its conception of commercial society as a distinct and distinctive social formation. Christopher Berry explains why Enlightenment thinkers considered commercial society to be wealthier and freer than earlier forms, and charts the contemporary debates and tensions between Enlightenment thinkers that this idea raised. The book analyses the full range of literature on the subject, from key works like Adam Smith's 'Wealth of Nations', David Hume's 'Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects' (...) and Adam Ferguson's 'Essay on the History of Civil Society' to lesser-known works such as Robert Wallace's 'Dissertation on Numbers of Mankind'. (shrink)

This chapter suggests that descriptive epidemiological studies like the Global Burden of Disease Study can usefully be divided into four tasks: describing individuals’ health states over time, assessing their health states under a range of counterfactual scenarios, summarizing the information collected, and then packaging it for presentation. The authors show that each of these tasks raises important and challenging ethical questions. They comment on some of the philosophical issues involved in measuring health states, attributing causes to health outcomes, choosing the (...) counterfactual against which to assess causes, aggregating and summarizing complex information across multiple domains, discounting, age-weighting, handling fetal deaths, measuring health inequalities, representing uncertainty, and assessing personal responsibility for health outcomes. (shrink)

The relatively recent increase in empirical research conducted in business ethics has been accompanied by a growing literature which addresses its present shortcomings and continuing challenges. Particular attention has been focused on the difficulties of obtaining valid and reliable primary data. However, little or no attention has been paid to the use of secondary data. The aim of this paper is to stimulate the interest of business ethics researchers in using secondary data, either as a substitute or complement for primary (...) data, bearing in mind both the benefits and shortcomings of doing so. It is suggested that secondary data not only offer advantages in terms of cost and effort, as conventionally described in research methods books, but also that in certain cases their use may overcome some of the difficulties that particularly afflict business ethics researchers in the gathering of primary data. In order to help business ethicists respond to this call for greater consideration of the potential offered by secondary data, the wide variety of forms that such data may take is indicated and a number of themes regarding their use discussed. (shrink)

The increasing demands placed on private welfare services and calls for business to fulfil its social responsibilities have heightened interest in corporate charitable donations in the United Kingdom. Adjustments to the corporation tax system have been made to encourage companies to give more. The article outlines the legal and fiscal background to company giving, examines its magnitude and reports on a survey of company practice.

In this article, we review approaches to modeling a connection between spatial and mathematical thinking across development. We critically evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of factor analyses, meta-analyses, and experimental literatures. We examine those studies that set out to describe the nature and number of spatial and mathematical skills and specific connections between these abilities, especially those that included children as participants. We also find evidence of strong spatial-mathematical connections and transfer from spatial interventions to mathematical understanding. Finally, we map (...) out the kinds of studies that could enhance our understanding of the mechanisms by which spatial and mathematical processing are connected and the principles by which mathematical outcomes could be enhanced through spatial training in educational settings. (shrink)

In a laboratory on a university campus in Santa Cruz, California, Ben Novak is doing everything he can to bring Ectopistes migratorius back from the dead. Using techniques now available in genome reading and gene synthesis, he and paleogenomicist Beth Shapiro hope that, by 2032, a flock of passenger pigeons ten thousand or more strong will have resumed an ecologically significant role in the mast forests of the Eastern United States. Novak knows—and the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) (...) affirms—that the challenges involved in making de‐extinction work are far from solely genetic. Novak is doing an ecological risk assessment of passenger pigeon reintroduction to figure out whether flocks of the resurrected species would pose any special hazards to ecosystems. Ecological harm is one of several worries attending the prospect of de‐extinction. Among other concerns are the possible harm that individuals born through this process might suffer and the possible introduction of disease vectors. But I want to step back from these immediate questions and think about some conceptual ones that operate in the background. Technology can be a grand shaper of cultural norms and expectations, and de‐extinction should be looked at in relation to a number of emerging technologies. This paper will examine the degree to which de‐extinction is part of a more widespread restructuring of ethical relationships to the surrounding world that are under way at the hands of emerging technologies. This restructuring is part of an ongoing shift in how to think about conservation in the new epoch of the Anthropocene. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to explore the relationship between revolution and violence in Marxism and in a series of texts drawing on Marxian theory. Part 1 outlines the basic normative frameworks which determine the outer limits of permissible violence in Marxism. Part 2 presents a critical analysis of a series of later discussions - by Sorel, Fanon and Žižek - which transformed the terms in which violence was discussed by developing one particular aspect of Marxist thought. By teasing (...) out the implications of revolutionary theory for the commission and permission of violence, it is possible to specify those points at which it tends towards excess. This in turn points towards limits that an adequate normative theory of revolutionary violence should establish. (shrink)

Whether or not youth work should professionalise and to what degree governments should regulate youth work services have been a widely debated topic within the Australian youth sector in recent tim...

Benbaji and Statman’s contractarian ethics of war offers a powerful new philosophical defence of orthodox conclusions against revisionist criticism. I present a two-pronged argument in reply. First, contractarianism yields what I call ‘decent war theory,’ a theory in which war between decent states is paradigmatic. I argue, by contrast, that states should treat wars against indecent states as paradigmatic, resulting in a Rawlsian alternative that issues in an ethics closer to revisionism. The second prong argues that the symmetrical international distribution (...) of power required by contractarianism throws into doubt the viability of war as an instrument for securing just ends. But I argue that there is a very important lesson to take from Benbaji and Statman’s analysis here. Even if contractarianism is arguably weakened by its political assumptions, revisionists frequently fail to pay any attention to the vagaries of power and their effects in shaping the outcomes of different accounts of ethics. I therefore argue that just war theory in general ought to develop an ethics with sufficient versatility to respond to shifts and variations in the distribution of military power. In particular, philosophers must consider morally defensible ways in which decent states can challenge rising indecent powers. (shrink)

According to contemporary ‘process ontology’, organisms are best conceptualised as spatio-temporally extended entities whose mereological composition is fundamentally contingent and whose essence consists in changeability. In contrast to the Aristotelian precepts of classical ‘substance ontology’, from the four-dimensional perspective of this framework, the identity of an organism is grounded not in certain collections of privileged properties, or features which it could not fail to possess, but in the succession of diachronic relations by which it persists, or ‘perdures’ as one entity (...) over time. In this paper, I offer a novel defence of substance ontology by arguing that the coherency and plausibility of the radical reconceptualisation of organisms proffered by process ontology ultimately depends upon its making use of the ‘substantial’ principles it purports to replace. (shrink)

This article examines and contextualizes a health wish formula found at the opening of eight Roman official letters inscribed in Greek, one of Caesar and seven of Octavian. In each letter the sender mentions that he is well ‘with the army’ (μετὰ τοῦ στρατεύματος), hence the term ‘military’ health wish. The health wish was borrowed from Latin letters into Roman letters written in Greek by means of phraseological imitation. The formulation employs appropriate Koine Greek. It was optional during the Republic (...) for the wish to be used in letters either from or to a Roman holding imperium and commanding an army. Because Caesar and Octavian were in such positions, their use of the wish is conventional. The use of this health wish demonstrates that epistolographers working for Caesar and Octavian not only drafted letters that met the conventions of Hellenistic chanceries but also were proficient enough in the medium to incorporate Roman elements with effectiveness. Attestations of the military health wish declined during the Imperial period. The requirement that the sender or the recipient hold imperium would have restricted usage during the Republic but even more so under the Empire through administrative changes to the command of armies and the increasing centrality of the princeps. (shrink)

An example is presented of a model of consciousness based on a description of the world which integrates the material and psychological aspects from the start. An indication is given of work under way to test the model.

The first comprehensive collection of the work of Richard Rorty, The Rorty Reader brings together the influential American philosopher’s essential essays from over four decades of writings. Offers a comprehensive introduction to Richard Rorty's life and body of work Brings key essays published across many volumes and journals into one collection, including selections from his final volume of philosophical papers, Philosophy as Cultural Politics ) Contains the previously unpublished essay, “Redemption from Egotism” Includes in-depth interviews, and several revealing autobiographical pieces (...) Represents the fullest portrait available today on Rorty’s relationship with American pragmatism and the trajectory of his thought. (shrink)

Extinction is usually associated with the death of the last remaining individual of a species, taxon, or population of organisms. Here I ask the question of whether extinction might also be applied to cases where individuals of the relevant category remain alive. Global impacts in the Anthropocene suggest extinction may be broader than typically thought. Technologies available in the emerging ‘synthetic age’ alter taxa in ways that may appropriately be characterized as extinction. The core of the more traditional account of (...) extinction remains valuable. Losing the last few individuals of a taxon matters. But emerging types of loss may demand a broader understanding of extinction. This broader understanding could capture more of what humans are doing to the biosphere. (shrink)

This paper argues that the reason why political leadership often involves dirty hands is because of its relationship with violence. To make the case, it maintains that violent means create and assert a form of dominating power that is in tension with the proper ends of political action. This power casts a wide shadow, frequently dominating large numbers of non-targets and empowering unscrupulous agents. On the other side of the balance, characteristically political justifications for violence are ‘supra-moral,’ meaning that they (...) are motivated by the value of a conception of morality taken as a whole (or, indeed, morality as such) rather than by any particular moral value. The weight that ought to be given to such ends is indeterminate in a way that makes uncancelled remainders arising from the evil of violence likely in many cases. (shrink)

I suggest that in Kant’s conception of autonomy, we have a faithful variant of a perennial philosophical conception of divinity, distinctively re-configured by Kant’s own preoccupations and system, but still recognisably oriented around some philosophical conceptions of the divine, which have their origins in deep classical wells, with dreams and memories of thought-thinking-itself, and joyously diffusing itself, generating plenitude and harmony. If this is correct, then we might find that the most interesting dialogue in the realm of ‘public theology’ is (...) not necessarily between Christianity and secularism, but between Christianity and a latent pagan religious philosophy, that draws upon a perennial strand of Platonism in Western philosophy. (shrink)

Business ethics as a field of academic endeavour has made significant progress over the past two or three decades. It now boasts a substantial body of scholarly literature, which is a major resource in which much time and effort have been invested and from which much can be gained. However, there is still much work to be done, and the dynamic nature of both academic life and the world beyond it ensures that new issues and opportunities will continue to emerge. (...) Business ethicists, individually and collectively, through the allocation of their limited research resources, will govern how well the field progresses and meets future challenges over the years to come. In particular, through our decisions about what we do or do not study and write about, we will determine the future shape of the scholarly literature – what it addresses successfully and on what it remains silent or inadequate. Implicitly or explicitly, individually and collectively, choices are made, and some are presumably better than others. This paper is a reflection on the progress of business ethics as an academic enterprise. Of course, the development of business ethics as a focus of academic interest has been marked by several review papers already, some reflecting underlying concerns consistent with Enderle’s comment that “in its present stage of development, business ethics appears to be far from being an established academic discipline”. Some might question whether something like business ethics can ever be an academic discipline as such, and for the purposes of this paper it will be helpful to distinguish between disciplines – such as philosophy, economics and psychology – and fields to which the concepts and methods of academic disciplines can be applied. Nevertheless, whatever kind of academic activity business ethics is taken to be, there are significant issues relating to its academic status. (shrink)

The philosopher Kant is a key thinker in shaping our contemporary concept of morality, freedom, and happiness. This book argues that Kant believes in God, but that he is not a Christian, and that this opens up an important and neglected dimension of Western Philosophy.

This essay seeks to illuminate the ethical concerns that animate Richard Rorty's philosophy. I argue that Rorty's ethics foregrounds as its central priority the issue of responsibility and frame Rorty's work as offering us a picture of ethical comportment in a postfoundational, pluralistic milieu, where citizens not only recognize the contingency of their own deepest beliefs but give up any sense of responsibilities owed to nonhuman authorities. To paraphrase Rorty, from any number of occasions, all we have to be responsible (...) to is each other. Yet Rorty goes even further than antiauthoritarianism in ethics. He not only shifts to thinking about ethics in terms of our relations to others; he specifically attunes this ethics to those who are suffering or excluded or merely previously unnoticed. What emerges is an alternative Rorty to the smirking gadfly blithely shrugging off criticism and incapable of inhabiting a position of moral seriousness. (shrink)

This paper examines the debate between permissive and impermissive forms of Bayesianism. It briefly discusses some considerations that might be offered by both sides of the debate, and then replies to some new arguments in favor of impermissivism offered by Roger White. First, it argues that White’s (Oxford studies in epistemology, vol 3. Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp 161–186, 2010) defense of Indifference Principles is unsuccessful. Second, it contends that White’s (Philos Perspect 19:445–459, 2005) arguments against permissive views do not (...) succeed. (shrink)

This article tracks the wider politics of emotion that run through the work of Günther Anders. It conceptualises the emergence of “anaesthetic violence”, a feel-good, or even unsensed form of power that configures around user-friendly devices. Anders’ mapping of the sense of inferiority, obsolescence and humiliating dependency our devices can invoke in us is gaining scholarly traction, but his work also exposes anaesthetic structures of feeling that merit further consideration. To open this perspective, the first part develops the quasi-Socratic formula (...) “I feel that I feel nothing” through a detailed reading of the politics of emotion in Anders’ work. This provides the pretext for an outlook on the anaesthetic dimension of human-machine interaction in the context of digital technologies. (shrink)

For many Americans, the election of Barack Obama as the country's first black president signaled that we had become a post-racial nation - some even suggested that race was no longer worth discussing. Of course, the evidence tells a very different story. And while social scientists are fully engaged in examining the facts of race, normative political thought has failed to grapple with race as an interesting moral case or as a focus in the expansive theory of social justice. Political (...) thought's under participation in the debate over the status of blacks in American society raises serious concerns since the main academic task of political theory is to adjudicate discrepancies between the demands of ideal justice and social realities. Christopher J. Lebron contends that it is the duty of political thought to address the moral problems that attend racial inequality and to make those problems salient to a democratic polity. Thus, in The Color of Our Shame, he asks two major questions. First, given the success of the Civil Rights Act and the sharp decline in overt racist norms, how can we explain the persistence of systemic racial inequality? Second, once we have settled on an explanation, what might political philosophy have to offer in terms of a solution? In order to answer these questions Lebron suggests that we reconceive of racial inequality as a condition that marks the normative status of black citizens in the eyes of the nation. He argues that our collective response to racial inequality ought to be shame. While we reject race as a reason for marginalizing blacks on the basis of liberal democratic ideals, we fail to live up to those ideals - a situation that Lebron sees as a failure of national character. Drawing on a wide array of resources including liberal theory, virtue ethics, history, and popular culture, Lebron proposes a move toward a "perfectionist politics" that would compel a higher level of racially relevant moral excellence from individuals and institutions and enable America to meet the democratic ideals that it has set for itself. (shrink)

kant famously rules out the possibility of any knowledge of God’s existence or non-existence.1 In denying the possibility of knowledge about God, Kant departs from his rationalist sources, and from his own earlier position. Leibniz, Wolff, Locke, Crusius, Meier, and Baumgarten all assert that we can have knowledge of the existence and properties of God.2 Although he finds that there is an absence of evidence sufficient for knowledge about God’s existence, or non-existence, this is not, for Kant, a disordered or (...) regrettable deficit. Indeed, Kant finds it “providential” that God has not permitted such knowledge. Kant even tells us that we should “thank heaven”... (shrink)

Although business ethics has a long history as a core theme within the realm of strategic management it has not received considerable attention in top strategy journals until recently. In this paper, we assess the state of business ethics research published over a 5-year period (2006–2010) in Strategic Management Journal to ascertain whether there has been an increase in business ethics research published in the top strategy outlet. The results of our content analysis reveal that ethics research in SMJ is (...) indeed on the rise yet this research stream is still underrepresented with only 5.8 % of all articles published over the five-year period having an ethics theme. Moreover, the link between Corporate Social Performance and Financial Performance was identified as the top theme during the review period. (shrink)

By utilizing the topological concept of pseudocompactness, we simplify and improve a proof of Caicedo, Dueñez, and Iovino concerning Terence Tao's metastability. We also pinpoint the exact relationship between the Omitting Types Theorem and the Baire Category Theorem by developing a machine that turns topological spaces into abstract logics.

He asks what these ideas in contemporary epistemology and environmental philosophy mean for environmental policy, concluding that the grounding of knowledge strongly suggests epistemic reasons for the protection of a full range of physical environments in their natural condition."--BOOK JACKET.

David Hume, Adam Smith, William Robertson, Adam Ferguson, Lord Kames, John Millar, James Dunbar and Gilbert Stuart were at the heart of Scottish Enlightenment thought. This introductory survey offers the student a clear, accessible interpretation and synthesis of the social thought of these historically significant thinkers. Organised thematically, it takes the student through their accounts of social institutions, their critique of individualism, their methodology, their views of progress and of moral and cultural values. By taking human sociality as their premise, (...) the book shows how they produced important analyses of historical change, politics and morality, together with an assessment of their own commercial society. (shrink)

John Rawls’s articulation of what makes for justice in war includes one of his most interesting, yet least discussed, assessments of religion and state coercion. Rawls claims that “the duties of the statesman in political liberalism” are incompatible with adherence to “the Catholic doctrine of double effect” when that doctrine precludes the deliberate targeting of innocent and harmless human beings in a “supreme emergency.” I explicate Rawls’s argument in favor of that claim, articulate various theological objections, and assess some proposed (...) restrictions on the justificatory role of religious reasons in the light of that disagreement. (shrink)