Believing in God requires not only a leap of faith but also an extension of people’s normal capacity to perceive the minds of others. Usually, people perceive minds of all kinds by trying to understand their conscious experience (what it is like to be them) and their agency (what they can do). Although humans are perceived to have both agency and experience, humans appear to see God as possessing agency, but not experience. God’s unique mind is due, the authors suggest, (...) to the uniquely moral role He occupies. In this article, the authors propose that God is seen as the ultimate moral agent, the entity people blame and praise when they receive anomalous harm and help. Support for this proposition comes from research on mind perception, morality, and moral typecasting. Interestingly, although people perceive God as the author of salvation, suffering seems to evoke even more attributions to the divine. (shrink)

Wittgenstein famously remarks that ‘the meaning of a word is its use’ (PI §43). Whether or not one views this as gesturing at a ‘theory’ of meaning, or instead as aiming primarily at dissuading us from certain misconceptions of language that are a source of puzzlement, it is clear that Wittgenstein held that for certain purposes the meaning of an expression could profitably be characterised as its use. Throughout his later writings, however, Wittgenstein’s appeal to the notion of use pulls (...) in two directions. In several places, Wittgenstein seems to connect the notion of an expression’s meaning with that of use in the sense of usage or practice. More specifically, he suggests that for an expression to possess meaning is for there to be a practice of employing it according to certain rules. ‘That’, he tells us, ‘is why there exists a correspondence between the concepts “rule” and “meaning”’ (OC §62; cf. PG 68; PO 51; RFM VI §28; VW 103). Indeed, Wittgenstein goes so far as to say, ‘The rule-governed nature of our languages permeates our life’ (RC §303). Call the view that the meaning of an expression is determined by a general principle governing its use, rulism. (shrink)

Conventional wisdom holds two seemingly opposed beliefs. One is that communities are often much better than individuals at dealing with certain situations or solving certain problems. The other is that crowds are usually, and some say always, at best as intelligent as their least intelligent members and at worst even less. Consistency would seem to be easily re-established by distinguishing between advanced, sophisticated social organizations which afford the supporting communities a high level of collective performance, and primitive, mob-like structures which (...) pull the group towards the lower end of the achievement scale. But this reconciliation meets with some objections. The most familiar ones concern the mixed record of elaborate social systems, which are said to occasionally or even, according to some accounts, systematically produce wrong decisions, poor assessments, disastrous plans, counterproductive measures, etc. A more recent set of objections rests on cases where ‘crowds’, i,e, groups not organized in a sophisticated way, produce good results, in fact, results which better those of most, or even all, members of the group. Such cases are collected in James Surowiecki’s book The Wisdom of Crowds, which argues more generally in favor of an ‘order out of chaos’ view of collective thinking: whether sophisticated or simple, social organizations for the production of knowledge or problem-solving can benefit from the absence of certain individualistc constraints which are traditionally thought to foster excellence in cognitive tasks. This flavor of paradox is enhanced by Surowiecki’s choice of phrase: at the surface level, ‘wisdom of crowds’ conflicts with the well-entrenched cliché of the folly1 of crowds; but at a deeper level, Surowiecki seems to appeal to one frequent connotation of ‘wisdom’ which is precisely its paradoxical character. Whether Surowiecki actually intended to exploit this.. (shrink)

Dealing with major issues in Jewish biomedical law, this book focuses upon the influence of morality, the rise of patient autonomy, and the role played by scientific progress in this area of Jewish Law. The book examines Jewish Law in comparison with canon, common, and modern Israeli law.

Can Rawls’s theory provide a framework for assessing obligations to future generations? Extending the veil of ignorance so that participants in the original position do not know to which generation they belong appears to fail in this endeavour. Earlier generations cannot improve their situation by “cooperating” with later generations. Such circumstances, lacking mutuality, leave no room for an agreement or contract. Nevertheless, the original position can be reconstructed so as to model relations of mutuality between generations even if these are (...) absent from the real world. This chapter assesses earlier attempts to do this and provides a rationale for viewing the just savings principle as a clause in the full formulation of the difference principle. (shrink)

Fleming, Daniel J; Ryan, Thomas Three recent phrases of Pope Francis warrant attention and guide this article. First, there is his call for 'witnesses of God's love' in his tribute to modern martyrs. The second is 'the pedagogy of grace' and the work of the Spirit explained in 'Amoris Laetitia'. Third, from the same document, we find his discussion of accompaniment in the process of moral discernment within the church. With these as guideposts and drawing on recent studies in (...) moral philosophy and psychology, this article unfolds in five steps: setting the scene; witness in relation to moral understanding and intersubjectivity; intersubjectivity and conscience; a pedagogy of grace: Holy Spirit and nonbelievers; and a pedagogy of grace in relation to moral development. (shrink)

Consider this chess puzzle. White to checkmate in two. It appeared recently in the Boston Globe, and what startled me about it was that I had thought it had been proven that you can’t checkmate with a lone knight (and a king, of course). This is a counterexample, a strange circumstance that can arise in a legal game of chess. This fact is a higher-order truth of chess, namely that the “proof” that you can never checkmate with a lone knight (...) and king is unsound. Now let’s consider chmess (I made up the term); it’s the game that you get by allowing the king to move two spaces, not one, in any direction. I made it up and I don’t know if anybody has ever played it. I have no idea whether it’s worth playing. Probably it isn’t, but it doesn’t matter; it’s not even worth our attention long enough to figure out. But a moment’s reflection reveals that there are exactly as many higher-order a priori truths of chmess as there are of chess, namely, an infinity of them. And no doubt they would be roughly as difficult to discover and to prove as the higherorder truths of chess. There are people who make a living working out the truths of chess and certainly it’s been a big avocation for many other people. But I doubt if anybody yet has spent more than 5 minutes trying to work out the a priori truths, and the higher-order truths, of chmess. (shrink)

Fethullah Gülen, a leader of interfaith and intercultural dialogue, writes of “humanity’s vicegerency” that includes “reaping the bounties of the Earth . . . within the framework of the Creator’s orders and rules.” What might this mean for international business ethics in general, and the expansion of Islamic banking practices and global financial ethics in particular? Forthrightness and transparency are critical in the contemporary development and spread of what are nominated Islamic or shariah-compliant financial products and services. This paper seeks (...) to explore the advantages of acceptably disparate analyses of shariah-compliance, by suggesting how a Gülen-like religion-state symphonia can evolve. The resulting arrangement of financial affairs would thus allow for real diversity inbanking options for all sorts of clients, carving out a space for secular and religious-based institutions, alike, in the global marketplace. (shrink)

Betr. Isaak Iselin und die "Basler Preisfrage nach Aufwandgesetzen in einer Republik" von 1779.

The ancient Stoics proposed one of the most sophisticated and influential ethical frameworks in the history of philosophy. Its impact on theory and practice lasted for centuries during the Hellenistic and Roman periods. Today, their arguments and theories still inform many contemporary ethical debates. Moreover, some of the framework’s main tenets have been used as a theoretical foundation for cognitive–behavioural therapy (CBT), a widely used psychosocial intervention for improving mental health. Much of its lasting impact is the result of the (...) special attention Stoic ethics pays to moral psychology, action theory and education. Stoics consider one of the main components of the development of virtue to be a careful and systematic training of our desires and aversions. -/- This chapter will offer a clear, succinct and up-to-date discussion of four main topics: (1) the Stoic theory of desire; (2) the complex taxonomies of desire offered by the ancient Stoics; (3) the arguments, educational strategies, and practices the Stoics recommend to discipline our soul and extirpate our irrational desires and finally (4) a brief discussion of the possibility of adapting the Stoic philosophy for the education of desires in the present day. (shrink)

The argument here comes from consideration of a certain sort of linguistic expression called negative polarity items (NPIs). These are expressions such as “any,” “at all” and “ever.” NPIs are of particular interest for semantics because they can only be used in contexts with a certain rather abstract semantic feature. However, the precise characterization of the feature is itself a matter of some controversy. For those interested in the semantics of natural language it is worthwhile to figure out precisely what (...) this feature is. Once we have an account of it, we can use the account to infer facts about the meanings of various expressions that interact with NPIs. (shrink)

David Atkinson asks whether nonempirical constructions can lead to genuine knowledge in science, and answers in the negative. Thought experiments, in his view, are to be commended only insofar as they eventually lead to real experiments. The claim does not rely on a general study, conceptual or historical, of thought experiments as such: the range of the paper is at once narrower and broader. Atkinson views thought experiments as commonly understood as just one kind of episode in the development of (...) physics in which real experimentation is bypassed, and he believes that such episodes are justified only inasmuch as they are transitory stages on the way to genuine empirical inquiry. Atkinson wants to kill with one arrow what is usually regarded as two different birds: the notion that thought experiments proper can be persuasive in themselves, and the thesis that theories which cannot be brought to the tribunal of experience can nevertheless belong to science. He thus implicitly opposes three views which are commonly, albeit not universally, held: (i) some thought experiments are conclusive; (ii) some theories belong to science despite not being evidently and concretely amenable to empirical corroboration; (iii) the two issues are largely independent. The standpoint from which Atkinson operates is a rather strict form of empiricism, one which relies on a fairly sharp distinction between the conceptual and empirical dimensions of inquiry. My outlook is rather different: the conceptual and empirical seem to me to be intertwined, both conceptually, as suggested by Quine’s critique of logical positivism, and empirically, as revealed by the evidence provided by science itself in its daily and historical reality. Rather than take the high road, I propose to focus first on the critique to which Atkinson subjects Galileo’s thought experiment, and the lessons he draws from his analysis.. (shrink)

Assigning a positive signification to the concept of ‘ideology,’ the basic hypothesis of this paper is that both what we call social reality and what we understand by the expression social knowledge are the result of an ideological projection. In other words, it is my opinion that ideology accomplishes a double purpose: on the one hand, it actively participates in the construction of social reality; on the other hand, it also plays the role of an instrument of social knowledge. To (...) support this assertion, I advance the idea of ideological conventions that are constituent parts of the social projection of reality and that emerge as ‘landmarks’ of the processof understanding it. I provide arguments that, as long as that they are found at the level of social institutions and thus being reproduced in discourse, including symbolically – as codes, norms, rules, habits, behaviours, etc., both formal and informal –, ideological conventions are an expression of social identity, being useful in explaining and understanding social reality and its possibilities of evolving. Finally, taking into account the premise that while social knowledge is not entirely ideological, the ideological element is unavoidable in the process of configuring this knowledge (contributing in a decisive manner to the changes emerging at the societal level), I propose an integrated, interdisciplinary model of ideological analysis. (shrink)

In this essay, I want to provide an introduction to Aristotle's theory of the Greek Tragedy, which he outlines in his book, the Poetics . Many philosophers since Aristotle, including Friedrich Nietzsche and Walter Benjamin, have analysed tragic art and developed their own theories of how it works and what it is for. What makes Aristotle's theory interesting is that it is as relevant to art today as it was in Ancient Greece because it explains the features of not just (...) tragic art, but of the films and stories that we enjoy today. I will explain the features that Aristotle says make a good tragic play and give examples of them from popular culture. The examples I give will be from tragedy, but also from romance, crime and fantasy to demonstrate how he has outlined, not just the features of Greek Tragedy, but also the internal workings of the drama that we enjoy today. The contemporary relevance of Aristotle's theory is in the fact that the features he outlines are basic features of great stories, which I think is best illustrated by applying Aristotle's analysis to popular Hollywood movies. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Popular Culture in the Houses of Poe and CortázarDaniel Bautista (bio)"[…]at the age of nine I read Edgar Allan Poe for the first time. That book I stole to read because my mother didn't want me to read it, she thought I was too young and she was right. The book scared me and I was ill for three months, because I believed in it."…—Julio Cortázar1In interviews and essays, (...) Julio Cortázar, the famous Argentine author, often expressed a lifelong fascination with Edgar Allan Poe (Berg 227–32). Moreover, as a young man Cortázar spent two years translating the American author's prose into Spanish, making irresistible the search for traces of Poe in his own work. His description of Poe as a youthful and guilty pleasure reflects a common reaction to the American author that has led some critics to rue Poe's influence. Jonathan Elmer points out that "Poe's connection with juvenile tastes, and hence with a time when reading and acquiring 'culture' were actually enjoyable […] has been insistently and disapprovingly stressed by the Anglo-American literary-historical tradition" (3). Although Poe himself often liked to "advertise [his work] as ethereal and otherworldly, or avowedly timeless," critics who found elements of the vulgarly popular in his writing regarded the author as a true "stumbling block" in the American literary landscape (Rosenheim and Rachman xii; Eliot 205). In a similar vein, Elmer observes,It has puzzled many critics, sometimes to the point of vituperation, that Poe stands simultaneously as the germinal figure of a central modernist trajectory (leading via Baudelaire to French Symbolism and thence to the high modernism of Eliot and others) and as the much-acknowledged pioneer of several durable mass-cultural genres: detective fiction and science fiction, as well as certain modes of sensational or gothic horror, which are today, to use one of Poe's coinages, "omniprevalent."(2)In the past, such critics tended to dismiss Poe to the fringes of the American canon for what they saw as his highbrow pretensions and lowbrow taste. More recently, critics like Elmer and others have argued that Poe's ability to straddle the high/low cultural divide is precisely what makes him such a perennially fascinating writer and one of the most revealing about American culture in general.Considering Poe's high standing in Latin America, one might assume that the question of his low or popular status was not as much of a stumbling block there.2 Cortázar himself blamed American discomfort with Poe on his use of "baroque" language, an issue that Cortázar's own background as a native Spanish speaker allowed him to ignore: [End Page 1] "since I'm neither English nor American, I see it with another perspective. I know there are aspects which have aged a lot, that are exaggerated, but that hasn't the slightest importance next to his genius" (Weiss 73). The idea that an author's "genius" could rise above the demands of his countrymen was important to Cortázar. Questions about his own cultural status also significantly affected the reception of Cortázar's work, though in many ways he suffered from just the opposite charges made against Poe. The style and themes of his work, and the political context in Argentina during the early part of his career (characterized most conspicuously by the rise of Perónism), led some in the literary establishment of his own country to accuse Cortázar of being too European or elitist.3 Looking at Poe and Cortázar together, this essay compares how both authors negotiated such cultural issues in their writing and the way that Cortázar reworks some of Poe's particular strategies in a modern Argentine setting. Focusing on two of these authors' most well-known stories, "The Fall of the House of Usher" (published in 1839) and "Casa tomada" ("House Taken Over") (published in 1946), I argue that they both reflect some of the ways that Poe and Cortázar grappled with the rise and attraction of a popular culture that threatened to reconfigure their particular literary landscapes.In Keywords, Raymond Williams traces the... (shrink)

The publication of Moshe Idel’s book, Kabbalah: New Perspectives marks a turning point in the field of Jewish mysticism. In this volume, Moshe Idel offered phenomenology as an alternative key to appreciating the history and ideas of Jewish mystical traditions. This study returns to this book in order to assess and critique the meaning and function of phenomenology in his early scholarship, as a prelude to the developing and possibly changing methodologies that he has employed in numerous studies published since (...) the appearance of his now classic study. The study considers the connection between phenomenology and experience and its role within the multiple perspectives suggested in the volume. Moshe Idel’s methodology is thus appreciated within the larger context of his work, positioned within the history of scholarship in the field and serves as a measure of the turn to new perspectives. (shrink)

While 3/11 has altered energy policies around the world, insufficient attention has focused on reactions from local nuclear power plant host communities and their neighbors throughout Japan. Using site visits to such towns, interviews with relevant actors, and secondary and tertiary literature, this article investigates the community crisis management strategies of two types of cities, towns, and villages: those which have nuclear plants directly in their backyards and neighboring cities further away (within a 30 mile radius). Responses to the disaster (...) have varied with distance to nuclear facilities but in a way contrary to the standard theories based on the concept of the . Officials in communities directly proximal to nuclear power plants by and large remain supportive of Japan's nuclear power program, while those in cities and towns at a distance (along with much of the general public) have displayed strong opposition to the pre 3/11 status quo. Using qualitative data, this article underscores how national energy and crisis response policies rest strongly on the political economy, experiences of, and decisions made at the subnational level. (shrink)

Trifft Jacobis unphilosophische Systemkritik auch Hegels Metaphysik absoluter Negativität? Dessen System gilt als Höhepunkt systematisch-systemischen Philosophierens. Als solches führt es ein Denken zur Vollendung, dessen Kern darin besteht, Inbegriff von Begründung zu sein. Somit aber besetzt es den gesamten Raum des Denkbaren, in dem schon alle Kritik im und am Denken durchgeführt ist. Sinnvolle Kritik am System scheint unmöglich, ohne dieses zugleich zu affirmieren oder aber selbst der Sinnlosigkeit anheim zu fallen. Jacobi unternimmt den Versuch, einen Modus der Kritik zu (...) finden, der einerseits aus der Systemlogik selbst erwächst, zugleich aber darin nicht verhaftet bleibt. Ihm gelingt dieses Kunststück, indem er akkurate Rekonstruktion mit lebensweltlicher Erfahrung verschränkt und sich der Systemlogik mit einem Sprung entzieht. Das Sprunggeschehen der sogenannten Unphilosophie zu rekonstruieren und nun auch mit dem System des reifen Hegel zu konfrontieren, unternimmt diese Untersuchung. Die Leitfrage lautet dabei, ob Jacobi auch aus Hegels elaboriertem System gesprungen wäre oder aber der erweiterte Systembegriff seine Kritik obsolet gemacht hat. (shrink)

Scholars from various philosophical schools of thought, including cultural relativism, hermeneutics, and postmodernism, have recently critiqued rationalism in light of new developments in the cognitive sciences. Each of these new developments set into motion new inquiries in each school philosophical school of thought. Now, in Facets of Rationality, a distinguished team of scholars examines these new inquiries and bring rationality back into the mainstream of the social sciences. The unique feature of this book lies in its multidisciplinary exploration of rational (...) concerns and in discovering the integral meaning of rationality as viewed by the perspectives of different disciplines. As such, it will of considerable interest to those involved with the study and teaching of philosophy, theoretical psychology, cognitive science, political theory, and linguistics. (shrink)