The precautionary principle has been widely discussed in the academic, legal, and policy arenas. This paper argues, however, that there is no single precautionary principle and we should stop referring to ?the? precautionary principle. Instead, we should talk about ?precaution? and ?precautionary approaches? more generally and identify and defend distinct precautionary principles of limited scope. Drawing on the vast literature on ?the? precautionary principle, this paper further argues that the challenges of decision making under conditions of uncertainty necessitate taking a (...) precautionary approach to decision making that will enable us to understand what particular precautionary principles require of us on a case-by-case basis. (shrink)

I begin with a gap in the literature on conversational relevance, wherein utterances that shift probability distributions included in the common ground do not count as relevant if they do not rule out one or more answers to the question under discussion. In order to provide a satisfying account of probabilistic conversational relevance, I introduce a relevance measure, \(R(\cdot )\). I motivate six axioms for such a function, and show that they uniquely characterize the symmetrized Kullback–Leibler divergence. I then show (...) how we can incorporate this result into an expanded definition of conversational relevance. (shrink)

Solar radiation management is a form of geoengineering that involves the intentional manipulation of solar radiation with the aim of reducing global average temperature. This paper explores what precaution implies about the status of solar radiation management. It is argued that any form of solar radiation management that poses threats of catastrophe cannot constitute an appropriate precautionary measure against another threat of catastrophe, namely climate change. Research of solar radiation management is appropriate on a precautionary view only insofar as such (...) research aims to identify whether any forms of solar radiation management could be implemented without creating new or exacerbating existing threats of catastrophe. (shrink)

Precaution is usually associated with the intuition that it is better to be safe than sorry, and/or that it is sometimes necessary to act in advance of scientific certainty to prevent harmful outcomes. At this point, we cannot entirely prevent climate change, but we can affect how harmful such change is. Adaptation may therefore be understood as a precautionary measure against the damage due to climate change. 'The' precautionary principle alone is too vague to shape adaptation policy, but a limited (...) catastrophic precautionary principle may productively guide adaptation policy makers. I argue in this paper that an explicit commitment to a precautionary approach based on the catastrophic precautionary principle could and should be made to strengthen the adaptation policies introduced at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). (shrink)

Discussions of harm are central in the climate ethics literature. Especially in the rapidly emerging body of work addressing the question of whether or not individuals are morally responsible for their greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, whether or in what way individuals’ emissions are harmful is a hotly debated question. John Nolt’s recent paper, “How harmful are the average American’s greenhouse gas emissions?” illustrates the prevalence of this framing (Nolt 2011). Here I take a step back and ask what we mean (...) by the concept “harmful” when talking about climate change. I argue, as several respondents to Nolt have suggested (e.g., Attfield 2011, Odenbaugh 2011), that we should not be so quick to apply our standard .. (shrink)

John Nolt offers a helpful, albeit rough quantitative analysis of the harmfulness of the average American's greenhouse gas emissions. By examining the lifetime contributions of the average American...

In The Price of Precaution and the Ethics of Risk, Christian Munthe attempts to identify the normative basis of the requirement of precaution and shed light on how we should determine the appropria...

The precautionary principle states, roughly, that it is better to take precautionary measures now than to deal with serious harms to the environment or human health later on. This paper builds on the work of Neil A. Manson in order to show that the precautionary principle, in all of its forms, is fraught with vagueness and ambiguity. We examine the version of the precautionary principle that was formulated at the Wingspread Conference sponsored by the Science and Environmental Health Network in (...) 1998. That version fails to indicate who must bear the cost of precaution; what constitutes a threat of harm; how much precaution is too much; and what should be done when environmental concerns and concern for human health pull in different directions. Whether this vagueness is a strength or weakness of the principle depends on what purpose(s) the precautionary principle is supposed to serve. (shrink)

Elmer John Thiessen; Two Concepts or Two Phases of Liberal Education?, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 21, Issue 2, 30 May 2006, Pages 223–234, https.

Elmer J Thiessen; Indoctrination and Doctrines, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 16, Issue 1, 30 May 2006, Pages 3–17, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-.

Why do religious people attempt to persuade others of their beliefs? What are the current objections to the religious practice of proselytizing? Is proselytizing an ethically defensible practice? Are there kinds of proselytizing activities that are ethically questionable? Elmer John Thiessen responds to questions like these in an effort to provide a philosophical defense of proselytization, or religious persuasion, as an ethical practice. Thiessen examines and refutes current cultural and academic objections to religious proselytizing and offers a thorough ethics (...) of evangelism. (shrink)

This book defends Christian nurture and education against the frequently made charge of indoctrination. It argues that Christian education is fully compatible with a liberal education.

Featuring nine new articles chosen by coeditor Steven M. Cahn, the third edition of E. D. Klemke's The Meaning of Life offers twenty-two insightful selections that explore this fascinating topic. The essays are primarily by philosophers but also include materials from literary figures and religious thinkers. As in previous editions, the readings are organized around three themes. In Part I the articles defend the view that without faith in God, life has no meaning or purpose. In Part II the selections (...) oppose this claim, defending instead a nontheistic, humanistic alternative--that life can have meaning even in the absence of theistic commitment. In Part III the contributors ask whether the question of the meaning of life is itself meaningful. The third edition adds substantial essays by Moritz Schlick, Joel Feinberg, and John Kekes as well as selections from the writings of Louis P. Pojman, Emil L. Fackenheim, Robert Nozick, Susan Wolf, and Steven M. Cahn. The only anthology of its kind, The Meaning of Life: A Reader, Third Edition, is ideal for courses in introduction to philosophy, human nature, and the meaning of life. It also offers general readers an accessible and stimulating introduction to the subject. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Archive, The Native American, and Jefferson’s ConvulsionsJonathan Elmer (bio)1 Saxa loquunturTrauma theory proposes that there are inscriptions that befuddle any clean divide between present and past, records that have been neither selected nor destroyed by evolutionary veto but remain in some kind of limbo, “in abeyance,” as Jacques Lacan phrases it, “awaiting attention.” In a typical maneuver, Lacan emphasizes a double meaning in the French—the “reality” awaiting (...) attention is “en souffrance” [Lacan 56]. Lacan’s wordplay injects a note of pathos into what might otherwise seem a merely cognitive or epistemological question about how, or whether, we can adequately access the historical archive, whether of individuals or of cultures. At its most basic, the psychoanalytic concept of trauma insists on this ambiguous coupling between affect and event, feeling and knowing: trauma names a happening about which one never fully knows how to feel, or feels how to know. In trauma theory—as in its various avatars in current debates about canons, about historical memory and forgetting, about cultural identity as imperiled or reclaimed or repressed—this ambiguity about the relation between affect and event becomes codified as an entanglement between the ethical and the cognitive. In “Archive Fever,” Jacques Derrida notes that the term “archive” itself harbors this ambiguity: the archive is at once the beginning and the authority, it puts into play two “orders of order,” the “sequential” and the “jussive,” “the commencement and the commandment” [9]. The divine fiat of creation is an image of the perfect coincidence of these two orders of order, while historical consciousness, in the West at least, might be understood as the progressive elaboration of the dissociation of commencement and commandment. Such a dissociation is never, perhaps, complete, which is why the question of knowing the commencement, the order of sequence of past events, always seems shadowed by an encounter with commandment, authority, ethical obligation.Derrida emphasizes a drive toward unification in the archive, what he calls the act of “consignation,” or “gathering together signs”: “Consignation aims to coordinate a single corpus, in a system or a synchrony in which all the elements articulate the unity of an ideal configuration. In an archive, there should not be any absolute dissociation, any heterogeneity or secret which could separate... or partition, in an absolute manner” [10]. Because his primary topic in this essay is Freud, Derrida goes on to demonstrate how this practice and ideal of consignation deconstruct themselves in the psychoanalytic archive. On the one hand, Freud’s innovations “made possible,” or so Derrida contends, the notion of an archive that “cannot be reduced to memory: neither to memory as conscious reserve, nor to memory as rememoration, as act of recalling” [58]. On the other hand, and despite his development of this concept of an immemorial archive, however, Freud “was incessantly [End Page 5] tempted to redirect the original interest he had for the psychic archive toward archeology.” Derrida quotes an astonishing passage from the 1896 paper “The Aetiology of Hysteria,” in which Freud indulges in the fantasy that never leaves psychoanalysis, and that evinces the profound implication of this theory with other archival projects, here the imperialist dramas of ethnography. The fantasy is one in which “stones talk”:Imagine that an explorer arrives in a little-known region where his interest is aroused by an expanse of ruins, with remains of walls, fragments of columns, and tablets with half-effaced and unreadable inscriptions. He may content himself with inspecting what lies exposed to view, with questioning the inhabitants—perhaps semi-barbaric people—who live in the vicinity, about what tradition tells them of the history and meaning of these archaeological remains, and with noting down what they tell him—and he may then proceed on his journey. But he may act differently. He may have brought picks, shovels and spades with him, and he may set the inhabitants to work with these implements. Together with them he may start upon the ruins, clear away the rubbish, and, beginning from the visible remains, uncover what is buried. If his work is crowned with success, the discoveries are self-explanatory: the ruined walls are part of the ramparts of... (shrink)

We live in polarizing times. In this book Elmer Thiessen dares to suggest that the solution to the deep divides in our contemporary world and in the church is not to be found in more information, more education, more rationality, or more critical thinking. Instead, we need to cultivate intellectual virtues, such as the love of knowledge and truth, intellectual humility, and committed openness. The penultimate chapter treats intellectual virtues that are more relational in nature--intellectual forbearance, fairmindedness, and intellectual (...) courage. The book explores the biblical and theological grounding of each intellectual virtue and reveals its practical importance for our fractious times, making use of concrete examples throughout. Each of the central chapters begins with a questionnaire aimed at promoting self-examination and stimulating reflection about the virtues and vices under consideration. This is a book for the thoughtful Christian reader aimed at transforming the way we think. (shrink)

It is often argued that religious schools and colleges promote intolerance, divisiveness, and fanaticism and that they violate the principle of academic freedom. Some writers also suggest that economic support for religious schools by the state violates the principle of the separation of church and state. Elmer Thiessen provides a philosophical defence of religious schools and colleges against these and other standard objections. He concludes with a radical proposal: a pluralistic educational system will better prepare students for citizenship in (...) pluralist liberal democracies than a monopolistic state-maintained school system. In placing his argument within the context of liberal-democratic values Thiessen gives concrete examples of objections to religious schools and offers practical suggestions that follow from the philosophical treatment of the problem. In Defence of Religious Schools and Colleges bridges the gap between philosophical argument and educational practice. It will be of interest not only to philosophers and educational theorists but also to practitioners in education. Academics, policy makers, political theorists, lay-people, teachers, administrators, and parents – those who object to religious schools and colleges and those who find themselves trying to answer the objections – will benefit from reading this book. (shrink)

Kenneth Kipnis (2006) presents a normative defense of strict confidentiality, but it follows from an empirical claim that allowing breach would result in all parties being worse off, including, par...

Ineffability, method, and ontology, by G. Bergmann.--The glory and the misery of Ludwig Wittgenstein, by G. Bergmann.--Stenius on the Tractatus, by G. Bergmann.--Naming and saying, by W. Sellars.--The ontology of Wittgenstein's Tractatus, by E. D. Klemke.--Material properties in the Tractatus, by H. Hochberg.--Wittgenstein's pantheism: a new light on the ontology of the Tractatus, by N. Garver.--Science and metaphysics: a Wittgensteinian interpretation, by H. Petrie.--Wittgenstein on private languages, by C. L. Hardin.--Wittgenstein on private language, by N. Garver.--Wittgenstein and private languages, by (...) W. Todd.--The private-language argument, by H.-N. Castañeda.--Wittgenstein on privacy, by J. W. Cook.--"Forms of life" in Wittgenstein's Philosophical investigations, by J. F. M. Hunter.--Privacy and language, by M. S. Gram.--On language games and forms of life, by F. Zabeeh.--Wittgenstein on meaning and use, by J. F. M. Hunter.--Wittgenstein on phenomenalism, skepticism, and criteria, by A. Oldenquist.--Tractarian reflections on saying and showing, by D. W. Stampe.--Wittgenstein and logical necessity, by B. Stroud.--Negation and generality, by H. Hochberg.--Facts, possibilities, and essences in the Tractatus, by H. Hochberg.--Arithmetic and propositional form in Wittgenstein's Tractatus, by H. Hochberg.--Selected bibliography (p. 543-546). (shrink)

This book is an examination of the philosophy of G.E. Moore, one of the foremost Anglo-American, analytic philosophers of the twentieth century. It focuses on Moore's epistemological writings and aims to present an exhaustive overview of Moore's work on analytic epistemology. This book seeks to redress an imbalance in analytic philosophy by making a case for the relevance of analytically oriented historical studies to contemporary problems.

Ancient commentators identify several passages in the Iliad as “epigrams.” This paper explores the consequences of taking the scholia literally and understanding these passages in terms of inscription. Two tristichs spoken by Helen in the teikhoskopia are singled out for special attention. These lines can be construed not only as epigrams in the general sense, but more specifically as captions appended to an image of the Achaeans encamped on the plain of Troy. Since Helen's lines to a certain extent correspond (...) to the function and style of catalogic poetry, reading them specifically as captions leads to a more nuanced understanding of both Homeric poetry and Homeric self-reference. By contrasting Helen's “epigrams” with those of Hektor, one can also discern a gender-based differentiation of poetic functions. (shrink)

English philosopher George Edward Moore (1873-1958) developed the chief modern theory of ethics, Ideal Utilitarianism. A Defense of Realism examines Moore's conception of philosophy and his views on the importance of metaphysics, presenting and evaluating the Principia Ethica author's criticisms and refutations of certain philosophical positions, especially idealism, naive realism, phenomenalism, and pragmatism. Klemke gives a detailed analysis and an appraisal of Moore's defense of common sense, and concentrates on Moore's realism, beginning with the reality of entities in the natural (...) universe, and proofs of the external world. Finally, Klemke analyzes and enhances through personal argument Moore's views on the reality of various nonnatural entities crucial to Moore's defense of philosophical realism. (shrink)

Persons and Their Minds returns persons to the center of philosophy of mind, and advocates retiring materialism, mind-brain dualism and biological naturalism to ...