This study is the most comprehensive account to date of modern treatments of the love commandment. Gene Outka examines the literature on agape from Nygren's Agape and Eros in 1930. Both Roman Catholic and Protestant writings are considered, including those of D'Arcy, Niebuhr, Ramsey, Tillich, and above all, Karl Barth. The first seven chapters focus on the principal treatments in the theological literature as they relate to major topics in ethical theory. The last chapter explores further the basic normative (...) content of agape and discusses some of the most characteristic problems. "The book is in my judgment the best recent work in religious ethics. Outka brings together analytic moral philosophy and theological ethics, providing a masterly survey of views and issues arising in the past forty years.... I can think of few books of interest to scholars in both philosophy and theology, but Outka's is one. Unlike some scholars who are at home in continental theology, Outka is also at home in secular analytic philosophy; he brings them together in a mutually illuminating way."--Donald Evans "Outka has mastered this vast literature on love, and has brought a critical and clarifying analysis to bear upon it. This is a most important book on a most important subject, and brings the whole discussion into a new phase."--John Macquarrie "The first thing to be said about Outka's book quite simply is that it is excellent; in fact, it is probably the very best available book about contemporary Christian ethical theory."--The Humanities Association Review. (shrink)

In the early 1970s, the major industrial states were preparing to shift to nuclear fission as their principal source of electrical power. But that change has not occurred. In part, this is due to a growing public recognition that techniques and institutions for management of spent nuclear fuel, separated plutonium, and long-lived radioactive wastes are not yet fully developed. The consequent pressures for resolution have spurred a series of often ill-defined and sometimes contradictory attempts to promote international cooperation and control (...) of hazardous activities. How are these varied suggestions to be compared and evaluated? By what criteria can plans be selected that are likely to be both effective and negotiable? In this study, Gene I. Rochlin, physicist and social scientist, explores the technical, political, and institutional aspects of international nuclear export and fuel cycle policies. He categorizes existing proposals and suggests way to develop new ones that better promote both national and international goals. Dr. Rochlin argues neither for nor against the use of nuclear power or plutonium fuels. Instead, he addresses the question of how international arrangements could be reached that might jointly satisfy the objective of the several key nations, yet not be too difficult to negotiate. He concludes that a major fault has been the tendency to improvise arrangements for specific technical or industrial operations. As a result, overall social and political goals have become the bargaining points for compromise. Yet attempts to simultaneously resolve all problems are unlikely to prove fruitful. Dr. Rochlin suggests instead the formation of institutions organized around more limited social, political, and technical objectives, even at the expense of excluding some nations or omitting some aspects of the nuclear fuel cycle. Only by so doing, he argues, can immediate agreements be reached that preserve the potential for more comprehensive future arrangements without sacrificing industrial, environmental, or nonproliferation goals. This important book will be of interest to scientists, social scientists, government officials, and others concerned with the problems of plutonium management and nuclear wastes. (shrink)

This volume centers on debates about how far moral judgments bind across traditions and epochs. Nowadays such debates appear especially volatile, both in popular culture and intellectual discourse: although there is increasing agreement that the moral and political criteria invoked in human rights documents possess cross-cultural force, many modern and postmodern developments erode confidence in moral appeals that go beyond a local consensus or apply outside a particular community. Often the point of departure for discussion is the Enlightenment paradigm of (...) a common morality, in which it is assumed that certain unchanging beliefs inhere in the structure of human reason. Whereas some thinkers continue to defend this paradigm, others modify it in diverse ways without abandoning entirely the attempt to address a universal audience, and still others jettison virtually all of its distinguishing features. Exhibiting a range of positions Western participants take in these debates, this volume seeks to advance the substance of the debates themselves without prejudging the outcome. Rival assessments of the Enlightenment paradigm are offered from various philosophical and theological points of view. In addition to the editors, the contributors include Robert Merrihew Adams, Annette C. Baier, Alan Donagan, Margaret A. Farley, Alan Gewirth, David Little, Richard Rorty, Jeffrey Stout, and Lee H. Yearley. (shrink)

The role or place of engineering is to engineer place, a location of engaging life events. That is the case for focal engineering, which is distinguished from two other kinds of engineering: traditional engineering and modernist engineering. These three kinds of engineering are discussed in terms of ways of knowing appropriate to them: know-how for traditionalist engineering, knowhow/know- what for modernist engineering, and know-how/know- what/know-why for focalengineering. Various notions of place and space are relevant to the three kinds of engineering (...) discussed. In traditional engineering, place and space are backgrounded. In modernist engineering, space begins to dominate, causing a disharmony in the place/space constellation. In focal engineering, place is stressed in order to re-harmonize the place/space constellation. (shrink)

Recent work by Jaegwon Kim and others suggest that functionalism leaves mental properties causally inefficacious in some sense. I examine three lines of argument for this conclusion. The first appeals to Occam's Razor; the second appeals to a ban on overdetermination; and the third charges that the kind of response I favor to these arguments forces me to give up "the homogeneity of mental and physical causation". I show how each argument fails. While I concede that a positive theory of (...) mental causation is desirable, there is no reason to think that functionalism renders such a theory unattainable. (shrink)

This paper is not so much a reading of Shakespeare's play as reading through As You Like It to the kinds of resolution and catharsis that can exist in comedy. We will find two kinds of resolution and catharsis, and within each kind two sub-types. We will then read through the figures of the play and the catharses available in it to the kinds of culture that need or can use each type of catharsis.

The American Country LifeAssociation was heir to Theodore Roosevelt'sCountry Life Commission, which examined the“general conditions of farming life in the opencountry, and...its larger problems.” In1919, Kenyon Butterfield, a member ofRoosevelt's Commission, met withrepresentatives from 30 states and 25 nationalorganizations to form the American Country LifeAssociation. In that year, Butterfield, ACLA'sfirst president, published a book, TheFarmer and the New Day, whose defining chapterwas “The Making of Communities: The CommunityIdea.” The ACLA was educator created and led.Solutions to rural problems were seen aseducational (...) matters. But educational philosophywas undergoing scrutiny and new educationalconcepts were arising from the bustling,industrializing, urbanizing times of late19th century. The experimental,unconstrained spirit of the nation at the turnof the century was formalized as pragmatism. Aleading pragmatist and educator of the time wasJohn Dewey, a contemporary of Butterfield.The communitarianism of Butterfield and Deweycarried throughout the life of ACLA in avariety of forms. Even after ACLA ended as anorganization in 1976, the concerns and idealscontinued in successor organizations, and canbe found in environmental, sustainableagriculture, and rural life organizationstoday. This paper traces one of continuingthemes of the ACLA, the community idea as a wayof adding a social dimension to agriculture'seconomic policies and development. The ACLAstory is a metaphor for country life throughmuch of 20th century America. ACLA is alsoa lesson in how organizations come into being,flourish, falter, die, and leave their legaciesto future generations. (shrink)

This experimental study evaluated the influence of stated organizational concern for ethical conduct upon managerial behavior. Using an in-basket to house the manipulation, a sample of 113 MBA students with some managerial experience reacted to scenarios suggesting illegal conduct and others suggesting only unethical behavior. Stated organizational concern for ethical conduct was varied from none (control group) to several other situations which included a high treatment consisting of a Code of Ethics, an endorsement letter by the CEO and specific sanctions (...) for managerial misconduct. Only in the case of suggested illegal behavior tempered by high organizational concern were managers influenced by organizational policy to modify the morality of their actions. However, the responses to the illegal scenarios were significantly more ethical than the reactions given to the unethical (but not illegal) situations. The implications of these findings are then discussed. (shrink)

: The medical and clinical promise of stem cell research is widely heralded, but moral judgments about it collide. This article takes general stock of such judgments and offers one specific resolution. It canvasses a spectrum of value judgments on sources, complicity, adult stem cells, and public and private contexts. It then examines how debates about abortion and stem cell research converge and diverge. Finally, it proposes to extend the principle of "nothing is lost" to current debates. This extension links (...) historic discussions of the ethics of direct killing with unprecedented possibilities that in vitro fertilization procedures yield. A definite normative region to inhabit is located, within a larger range of rival value judgments. The creation of embryos for research purposes only should be resisted, yet research on "excess" embryos is permissible by virtue of an appeal to the "nothing is lost" principle. (shrink)

The article presents three models of radical cultural practice: Adorno’s dissonant modernism, Brecht’s “functional transformation” or “re-functioning” of institutions through estrangement and dialectical realism, and Debord’s Situationist détournement of art, aiming to rupture and decolonize naturalized everyday life. The three models all begin with a critical appropriation of the traditions of art and aims at resisting the social power that passes through art, as an institutionalized field of production and activity. Each of the three modes establishes a set of productive (...) strategies. (shrink)

Prefaced by an argument that the ancients understood mimesis as fundamental to being human, and art as therefore essential to human moral and intellectual development, this book starts from the problematic status of the (happily ending) Iphigenia in Poetics. How Aristotle must explicate tragedy to hold Iphigenia as the best thus sets up the exploration of comedy. Chapter two shows that comedy aims at the catharsis of desire and sympathy. This analysis is then applied in detail to Aristophanes’ Acharnians, Shakespeare’s (...) As You Like It and Stoppard’s Arcadia, exhibiting the cross-cultural application of the theory which Aristotle would expect. (shrink)

Tyler Cowen's ?Why Keynesianism Triumphed? proposed that only Keynesian economists have presented a successful explanation for the Great Depression of 1929?1933 and the continuing slow and intermittent recovery of the rest of the 1930s. This paper examines recent scholarship on the 1930s and finds that there is increasing doubt about the validity of Keynesian explanations, lending credence to both older and recent scholarship that vindicates free?market views of why the Depression happened and why the recovery was so slow and uneven.

Jeffrey Friedman has attempted to make a case for limiting state social engineering that is based on the skeptical epistemology of Sir Karl Popper. But Popper's epistemology is flawed, both in its rejection of a priori theorizing and its insistence on empirical falsification rather than confirmation. Classical liberalism of the sort that Friedman advocates requires, as its basis, positive knowledge of economics and social reality—not Popperian skepticism.

This paper reads through some contemporary literary critical problems and theorizing about textuality to Augustine's Confessions, to the enrichment, if not the ecstasy of both contemporary and medieval thinking. It shows that Augustine is both aware of much that passes as new in theorizing about language, and that his text is argumentatively and rhetorically structured to set difference at play. Like Augustine's writing, this article is a performance piece: besides arguing, it acknowledges; beside demonstration, it questions; besides telling, it shows; (...) it would not be called a study of textuality in Augustine, but a performance of textuality with (in) Augustine. (shrink)

Jesus' teaching that there are two love commandments, that the commandment to love God is the "first and great" one, but that the second commandment to love one's neighbor as oneself is "like" the first, suggest that we should neither blend their features wholly together nor separate their features entirely. This paper supports the suggestion. It considers three central emphases in the Augustinian legacy that specify normative differences, normative ranking, and normative links between the commandments. The emphases are: "God-intoxication," "The (...) Predominance of the Double Love Commandment," and "A Good World Gone Wrong." Such consideration explains and defends the claim that a faithful life honors both differences and points of correspondence between God's action and our own. This study indicates that we can go wrong in distinctive ways, and that we should distinguish "relationality" and "reciprocity". The conclusions reached may inform exchanges with other religious traditions, above all "God-intoxicated" ones. This article was the Presidential Address, given at the annual meeting of the SCE in Vancouver, British Columbia on January 11, 2002. (shrink)

Paul W. Taylor has proposed a foundational structure for developing a respect for nature. This structure appears to go weIl beyond what is needed to justify such respect. The intricacies and nuances of life on Earth can gain our respect without attempting the impossible task of abandoning our human perspective or a particular interest in our own species.

Often different schools or styles of doing economics are seen as inevitably at odds with each other, so that one must be crowned 'correct' and the others vanquished as defective. However, if they actually represent alternative but potentially enlightening views of economic phenomena, then it will be foolish exclusively to pursue one approach at the expense of all others. This paper argues that the latter is a more accurate view of economics than is the former.

After briefly presenting Ronald Giere's (1979, 1980) recent counterfactual characterization of population-level causation, I present two counterexamples to the characterization. The difficulty discussed stems from nonaccidental correlations that can obtain between causally effective and causally neutral factors.