This essay challenges the portrayal of philosophical idealism as sinful ‘confinement in the self’, arguing that this obscures a relationship between Hegel and Bonhoeffer characterised by variation rather than contradiction. I first trace a limited congeniality between their respective critiques of the ‘beautiful soul’ and the ‘privately virtuous’, showing how both thinkers resist moral isolation through the call to confession. Second, I follow their attempts to overcome an oppositional logic between such social exchange and divine agency, rooted in the syntax (...) of Hegel’s phrase ‘God existing as community’. This provides sharper focus to Bonhoeffer’s variations, changing the subject from God to Christ and the attendant act from reciprocal confession to intercessory prayer. Rather than merely defensive revision, I argue that this reveals an agile Christology which can sustain an ethical posture of ‘being for others’ through the withheld confession and broken trust typical of a communion of sinners. (shrink)

As the detrimental effects of human agency loom large in the ‘Anthropocene’, theologians and philosophers have called for restraint by invoking the concept of kenosis. Although a ‘self-emptying’ form of life helps to counter the ways that humans are increasingly driving other species to extinction, we argue that such calls are often compromised by relying on notions of the Creator’s own attenuated or self-limited agency. They therefore trade in a competitive construal that is susceptible to the tendency of human agency (...) to either displace, or project itself upon, all other agencies, inadvertently perpetuating the ‘human epoch’. In their place, we critically develop the new direction in kenotic theology that speaks of divine self-realization in history through ‘deep incarnation’. Our constructive proposal argues for a more thoroughgoing recognition of both the transcendence of divine agency and, as a corollary, the diverse agencies of our fellow creatures. (shrink)

Although Mealey's account provides several interesting hypotheses, her integration across disparate samples renders the value of her explanation for psychopathy ambiguous. Recent evidence on Psychopathy Checklist-identified samples (Hare, 1991) suggests primary emotional and cognitive deficits inconsistent with her model. Whereas high-anxious psychopaths display interpersonal deficits consistent with Mealey's hypotheses, low-anxious psychopaths' deficits appear more sensitive to situational parameters than predicted.

Clarke proposes a conception of philosophy that provides an alternative to the reductions of materialism and the search for normative principles. Philosophy's proper role is to describe similarities and differences among differing levels of language, specifically the familiar level of discourse within an ordinary language shared by all and the specialized discourses of social institutions such as science, law, and the arts. By constructing a logical framework in which these comparisons and contrasts can be made, philosophy performs the indispensable role (...) of promoting the integration of disparate elements of our culture. (shrink)

This collection of essays by leading sinologists, historians, and philosophers both challenges and extends the work of David Nivison, whose contributions range across moral philosophy, religious thought, intellectual history, and Chinese language. Nivison himself replies to each essay.

In recent years, the discipline of archaeology has witnessed its scientific base challenged by new interpretive approaches, new kinds of data and proposals for new levels of social relevance. The Reader in Archaeological Theory comprises a summary perspective on these different trends, problems and currents in recent archaeological method and theory, how they are related, and how they differ. Remarkable in its emphasis on North American research, many of the papers in this volume focus on ancient Mesoameria and the native (...) peoples of our continent. The breadth of scholarship covered in the Reader demonstrates how a variety of disciplines--from cognitive neuroscience to poststructural semiotics--have influenced some newer approaches to archaeological theory. (shrink)

Deductive Logic is designed as an intermediate-level text directed at upper-division students from philosophy and the humanities. Its focus is exclusively on deductive logic, avoiding altogether topics such as informal reasoning and scientific method normally included in introductory logic courses. Its exposition of logical topics is informal, with emphasis on explaining the basic concepts and procedures of modern symbolic logic in the simplest and most intuitive manner possible rather than on developing a rigorous formal system and providing proofs of its (...) properties. The fact that the text presupposes a course offered to philosophy students and serves to introduce them to logic as the "language of philosophy" has strongly influenced the selection of topics. The topics here are controversial, and the problems not easily resolved, but this text strives to relate the formal logical structures introduced to issues of philosophic interest. (shrink)

An inadequate grasp of the role of imagination has vitiated understanding of human cognition in western thinking. Extending a project initiated with George Lakoff in _Metaphors we Live By_ (1980), Mark Johnson's book _The Body in the Mind_ (1987) offers the claim that all thinking originates in bodily experience. A range of schemata formed during our early experience manipulating a physical world of surfaces, distances, and forces, lays the foundation of later, more abstract modes of thought. In presenting his argument, (...) Johnson lays special stress on the qualities and dynamics of the image schemata, the (generally unnoticed) metaphoricity of the transformations underlying abstract thought, and the new significance that should be attributed to the imagination, which is the general term Johnson wishes to claim for the mental processes he expounds. In this paper I draw attention to the importance of Johnson's insights for understanding literary response. In particular, I will show how a typical procedure of literary texts involves bringing to awareness image schemata of the kind that Johnson describes. At the same time, several problems in Johnson's account which limit its usefulness will also be examined: an undue reliance upon the spatial properties of schemata; a conflation of dead with live or poetic metaphors; and a neglect of other bodily influences on thought, especially kinaesthetic and affective aspects. These problems, for example, limit the usefulness of Johnson's attempt to build on Kant's theory of imagination. In comparison with Coleridge, who also attempted to build on Kant, Johnson is unable to overcome the formalism of Kant's theory. Coleridge's account of imagination, I will suggest, provides a better foundation for examining the bodily basis of meaning, while remaining compatible with Johnson's intentions and his more valuable insights. (shrink)

Narratives of Tampering in the Earliest Commentaries on the Qurʾān. By Gordon Nickel. History of Christian-Muslim Relations, vol. 13. Leiden: Brill, 2011. Pp. xx + 244. $146.

Conceptual models are descriptions of our ideas about a problem, used to shape the implementation of a solution to it. Everyone who builds complex information systems uses such models - be they requirements analysts, knowledge modellers or software designers - but understanding of the pragmatics of model design tends to be informal and parochial. Lightweight uses of logic can add precision without destroying the intuitions we use to interpret our descriptions. Computing with logic allows us to make use of this (...) precision in providing automated support tools. Modern information scientists need to know what these methods are for and may need to build their own. This book gives you a place to begin. Where do you start when building models in a precise language like logic? One way is by following standard paradigms for design and adapting these to your needs. Some of these come from an analysis of existing informal notations. Others are from within logic itself. We take you through a sample of these, from more commonplace styles of formal modelling to non-standard methods such as techniques editing and argumentation. Each of these provides a window onto broader areas of applied logic and gives you a basis for adapting the method to your own needs. (shrink)

Threat avoidance involves both detection of a threatening stimulus and reaction to it. We demonstrate with empirically validated stimuli that threat detection is more pronounced among males, whereas threat reactivity is more pronounced among females. Why women are less efficient detectors of threat challenges Benenson et al.'s conceptual analysis.

As an undergraduate at the University of Melbourne in the 1980s, I recall a story that used to circulate to the effect that Australian philosophers were realists (the term prefixed by the obligatory adjective "hard-headed") because we lived in a harsh, sunlit environment where no misty meadow or morning fog obscured the objective reality of a mind-independent physical universe.

_Real Essentialism_ presents a comprehensive defence of neo-Aristotelian essentialism. Do objects have essences? Must they be the kinds of things they are in spite of the changes they undergo? Can we know what things are really like – can we define and classify reality? Many, if not most, philosophers doubt this, influenced by centuries of empiricism, and by the anti-essentialism of Wittgenstein, Quine, Popper, and other thinkers. _Real Essentialism_ reinvigorates the tradition of realist, essentialist metaphysics, defending the reality and knowability (...) of essence, the possibility of objective, immutable definition, and its relevance to contemporary scientific and metaphysical issues such as whether essence transcends physics and chemistry, the essence of life, the nature of biological species, and the nature of the person. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Many philosophers who wish to defend abortion, but who have become frustrated by the resistance of the personhood question to yield to any nonarbitrary solution welcomed Judith Thomson's ‘A defense of abortion.’Thomson argues that abortion is sometimes justifiable even if the foetus is a person. In this paper I argue that Thomson's argument is a defense of abortion, rather than merely extraction without death, only because of the current state of medical technology. Once the technology is in place to (...) extract foetuses while preserving their lives and to allow them to develop to full term outside the uterus, Thomson cannot defend the killing of the foetus. If she is right, however, a woman will still have the right to have a foetus extracted from her body. Finally, it is pointed out that the source of the problem with Thomson's argument is the major premise in most arguments for the permissibility of abortion: a woman's right to control her own body. If the defence of abortion is to entail a defence of the termination of the foetus, then this premise, understood as the right to remove an unwanted entity from one's body or the right to alter one's body as one wishes, simply will not do the trick. (shrink)

I rejoinder to Ingmar Persson’s reply to my paper ‘The Metaphysical Status of the Embryo: Some Arguments Revisited’. I argue that Persson, having conceded a large part of my case, has still misunderstood or not fully appreciated the force of that case when he claims the arguments I criticize still make it reasonable to think that a human being does not come into existence at fertilization. In addition, his appeal to the totipotency argument as remaining unscathed by my critique does (...) not succeed. (shrink)

De Neys argues against assigning exclusive capacities to automatic versus controlled processes. The dual implicit process model provides a theoretical rationale for the exclusivity of automatic threat processing, and corresponding data provide empirical evidence of such exclusivity. De Neys's dismissal of exclusivity is premature and based on a limited sampling of psychological research.

Back cover: How is God revealed through the life of a human community? Dietrich Bonhoeffer's theological ethics begins from the claim to 'Christ existing as community', which David Robinson presents as one of several critical and politically astute variations on G.W.F. Hegel's philosophy of religion.

4.2 Conventional signs -- 4.3 Signals -- 4.4 Features of communicative systems -- 5 Language -- 5.1 The role of subjects -- 5.2 Denotation and reference -- 5.3 Meaning, truth and illocutionary force -- 5.4 Addresses -- 5.5 Discourse -- Postscript -- Notes -- Name index -- Subject index.