The concept of authenticity plays an important role in how people reason about objects, other people, and themselves. However, despite a great deal of academic interest in this concept, to date, the precise meaning of the term, authenticity, has remained somewhat elusive. This paper reviews the various definitions of authenticity that have been proposed in the literature and identifies areas of convergence. We then outline a novel framework that organizes the existing definitions of authenticity along two key dimensions: describing the (...) type of entity that is evaluated and describing the source of information that is consulted. We argue that this convergence across a number of papers, and more importantly, across a number of domains, reflects significant progress in articulating the meaning of authenticity. We conclude by suggesting new avenues for research in this area, with particular attention toward psychological process. (shrink)

This volume collects the published essays of the late Professor Hourani on Islamic ethics in the earlier classical and formative periods of Islamic civilization. Ethics was from the start at the core of Islam, and the construction of philosophical theories to support normative ethics made those centuries among the most profound and intensely active in the history of ethical thought. The book opens with two general and contextual pieces and thereafter it is organized by schools of thought in a broadly (...) chronological order. The essays centre around two related debates in Islamic philosophy: over the ontological status of value, and over the sources of our knowledge of value. The answers developed follow similar lines to the rational theology and philosophy of the West, and Professor Hourani brings out the frequent parallels. As a whole, the volume will introduce and establish the importance of the Islamic tradition of thought about ethics. (shrink)

Žižek has argued in his books on Christianity and modernity that institutional Catholic Christianity has placed its members in a double bind by insisting on belief in a nonexistent God of Being. The laws of this God of the Symbolic are perverse in that they impose impossible requirements on all believers. By the mid-twentieth century, however, Catholicism was experiencing the revolutionary reforms of the Second Vatican Council. Dogmatic Law at this time gave way to a renewed emphasis on the community (...) of love associated in early Christianity with the Holy Spirit. This God of the Real is inherently Trinitarian: God-Father-Thing, Spirit as community of believers, and Christ as the imaginary Real gap between them. The American gothic writer Flannery O’Connor in her short story “A Temple of the Holy Ghost” provides a meditation on this Real Trinity. In O’Connor’s story a hermaphroditic circus freak becomes an emblem of the deadlock of sexual difference and a monstrous Christ-figure in the Žižekian sense. Its place is theologically incoherent and represents the passion for the Real emerging out of the perverse situation of mid-century Catholic orthodoxy. (shrink)

Can there be major dimensions of a poem, a painting, a musical composition created in the absence of God? Or, is God always a real presence in the arts? Steiner passionately argues that a transcendent reality grounds all genuine art and human communication. "A real tour de force.... All the virtues of the author's astounding intelligence and compelling rhetoric are evident from the first sentence onward."—Anthony C. Yu, _Journal of Religion_.

König, D. [1926. ‘Sur les correspondances multivoques des ensembles’, Fundamenta Mathematica, 8, 114–34] includes a result subsequently called König's Infinity Lemma. Konig, D. [1927. ‘Über eine Schlussweise aus dem Endlichen ins Unendliche’, Acta Litterarum ac Scientiarum, Szeged, 3, 121–30] includes a graph theoretic formulation: an infinite, locally finite and connected graph includes an infinite path. Contemporary applications of the infinity lemma in logic frequently refer to a consequence of the infinity lemma: an infinite, locally finite tree with a root has (...) a infinite branch. This tree lemma can be traced to [Beth, E. W. 1955. ‘Semantic entailment and formal derivability’, Mededelingen der Kon. Ned. Akad. v. Wet., new series 18, 13, 309–42]. It is argued that Beth independently discovered the tree lemma in the early 1950s and that it was later recognized among logicians that Beth's result was a consequence of the infinity lemma. The equivalence of these lemmas is an easy consequence of a well known result in graph theory: every connected, locally finite graph has among its partial subgraphs a spanning tree. (shrink)

In this article, Shea aims to overturn Jürgen Habermas’s characterization of Nietzsche in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity as a postmodern irrationalist. On Habermas’s account, Nietzsche employs Wille zur Macht both as a principle by which to invalidate the claims of metaphysics and as a primordial “other” to reason that unmasks reason as an expression of domination. If Habermas’s reading is correct, Nietzsche’s work is ultimately incoherent since it either lapses back into metaphysics or puts forward a self-refuting anti-metaphysics. Contrary (...) to Habermas, Shea argues that Nietzsche’s theoretical inquiries result from a considered methodological decision on the part of Nietzsche to suspend metaphysical interpretations. For this reason, Wille zur Macht can be read as the fabrication of a post-metaphysical principle for interpreting life rather than as a purported insight into the ultimate nature of reality and thus as a genuine alternative to the trappings of both metaphysical and anti-metaphysical philosophies. (shrink)

Many systems of logic diagrams have been offered both historically and more recently. Each of them has clear limitations. An original alternative system is offered here. It is simpler, more natural, and more expressively and inferentially powerful. It can be used to analyze not only syllogisms but arguments involving relational terms and unanalyzed statement terms.

Using American football as a point of entry, I approach harmful sports from the perspective of fans’ roles and responsibilities. Given that sports’ profitability is a significant obstacle to reform...

Microphysical laws are time reversible, but macrophysics, chemistry and biology are not. This paper explores how this asymmetry arises due to the cosmological context, where a non-local Direction of Time is imposed by the expansion of the universe. This situation is best represented by an Evolving Block Universe, where local arrows of time emerge in concordance with the Direction of Time because a global Past Condition results in the Second Law of Thermodynamics pointing to the future. At the quantum level, (...) the indefinite future changes to the definite past due to quantum wave function collapse events. (shrink)

This article starts out by delineating an interpretation of Kripke on Wittgenstein, an interpretation that seems to stand the best chance of fitting at least the basic concerns and insights expressed in the Investigations. In doing so, this article sketches a conception of meaning and truth conditions against which Wittgenstein's remarks are plausibly directed, and it explains how Kripke's reconstruction of Wittgenstein can be read as incorporating a broad attack on that conception. The interpretation with which the article opens offers (...) what the article calls ‘the dramatic reading of the Skeptical Argument.’. (shrink)

Digital computers carry out algorithms coded in high level programs. These abstract entities determine what happens at the physical level: they control whether electrons flow through specific transistors at specific times or not, entailing downward causation in both the logical and implementation hierarchies. This paper explores how this is possible in the light of the alleged causal completeness of physics at the bottom level, and highlights the mechanism that enables strong emergence (the manifest causal effectiveness of application programs) to occur. (...) Although synchronic emergence of higher levels from lower levels is manifestly true, diachronic emergence is generically not the case; indeed we give specific examples where it cannot occur because of the causal effectiveness of higher level variables. (shrink)

Challenges current claims that humans ought to be vegetarians because animals have moral standing.

Aesopic fables constitute an important case in folk and popular literature. This genre went through various stages of development; its plasticity, pedagogical dimension, and mainly its ability to convey messages through an indirect and pleasant way prompted many to take interest in it, reading, adapting, or even creating new fables. As a result, fables became a favorite topic in literature and, especially, children's literature through many and various adaptations, translations, and metanarratives. In this paper, considering fables as an early form (...) of utopic/dystopic discourse, we aim to demonstrate some cases of such references through examples taken from the corpus of Aesopic fables. (shrink)

Heidegger revisits German idealism after the “turn” in his thought in the mid-1930’s. There are a couple of reasons for this. One is philosophical, if not “theological” in his sense of that term. The other is personal. This later reason is emphasized by Otto Pöggeler, who suggests that after 1945 Heidegger sought to understand what had gone wrong in the tragic European debacle. Heidegger will lay the blame at the doorstep of what he terms onto-theology and the subjectivism he sees (...) as endemic to the German idealist tradition, above all as exemplified in Hegel’s “onto-theo-ego-logy.” The article explores Heidegger’s reading of this tradi­tion of German philosophy as it begins with Leibniz and culminates in Nietzsche. It is the Event itself that makes possible the overcoming of metaphysics and its onto-theology. As Heidegger says in Contributions to Philosophy (From the Event), the ens realissimum (das Seiendste) “is” no more. It is the Event (Ereignis) that is the “most real,” since it is the Event that shows up and manifests itself as the revelation of the truth of Beinge in Da-sein, the being that is there in the Event. (shrink)

Here, the claim that Middle Eastern persons are racialized is a response to complexities that define the United States ; namely, the language of race is seen as antiquated or misleading, and thus it fails to capture MENA American experiences, leading some to call for different terminology. The author argues that we should call social-political violence committed against MENA people racism because to name it otherwise is to ground the experience in an incomplete description which affords lighter moral responsibility and (...) omits historical conflict. The article first elaborates the problem of racial conflict in the US and the specific problem of MENA racialization. It then responds with a historical argument that emphasizes key genealogical markers in the co-emergence of orientalism, colonialism, and racialization. The article closes by contrasting the idea of race with competing terms to defend its use on descriptive and normative grounds. (shrink)

There is a curious asymmetry in cases where the use of religious language involves a breakdown in communication and leads to a seemingly intractable dispute. Why does the use of religious language in such cases almost always arise on the side of patients and their families, rather than on the side of clinicians or others who work in healthcare settings? I suggest that the intractable disputes arise when patients and their families use religious language to frame their problem and the (...) possibilities of solution. Unlike clinicians, they are not bilingual and thus lack the capacity to understand and negotiate differences in terms that are responsive to those who work in healthcare settings. After considering a representative case, I explore whether an ethics consultant or chaplain can function as a translator and suggest that, at best, such efforts at mediation depend on contingent aspects of a case and will only be partially successful. To appreciate limits on the role for bilingual translators, I consider a futility dispute where a parent using religious language demands that everything be done for a permanently unconscious child. I challenge the traditional interpretation that says the parent values “mere duration of biological life irrespective of quality.” From a religious perspective, human life is never “merely biological.” This effort to slot the dispute into standard philosophical schemas misses what is crucial in the dispute. I suggest that a better interpretation views the dispute at a meta-level as one about whether withholding and withdrawing care is morally distinguishable from killing. Curiously, this interpretation makes the advocate of futile care into an ally of those “quality of life” advocates who also challenge this distinction. The crux of their dispute now rests on the normative ethics of killing. While I think my interpretation comes much closer to the views of many who demand ‘futile care,’ I suggest that it still falls short because of the way it reconstructs the religious concerns in nonreligious terms. I close by considering an analogy between the language of suffering and the language of faith, suggesting that both require a much richer understanding of the narratives that orient the lives of patients and their families. (shrink)

This commentary argues that business-society scholars are seriously disconnected from nature. This is problematic because our theorizing about nature largely happens as a mental exercise, thereby restricting our bodies and emotions as power means of transcending the human–nature dualism. As a solution, I offer practical ways for business-society scholars to develop a “deep nature connection.”.

"This accessibly written book surveys all of the major competing theories of truth before formulating the new defence of the correspondence theory and then exploring the consequences of the theory for issues in epistemology and ontology. The book concludes by showing how the idea of 'propositional depth' can be used to dissolve the Liar paradoxes."--BOOK JACKET.

A natural way of viewing compensation is to see it as the restoration of a good or level of well-being which someone would have enjoyed if he had not been adversely affected by the act of another. This view underlies Nozick’s assertion that “something fully compensates … person X for Y’s action A if X is no worse off receiving it, Y having done A, than X would have been without receiving it if Y had not done A”; and it (...) has been held by many others as well. Because the notion that compensation is the restoration of a good which a person would have had but for the act of another is so pervasive, I shall refer to it as the official view of compensation. One noteworthy feature of the official view is the ease with which it allows compensation to be justified in particular cases. If compensation is just the restoration of a good which one would have had if the ordinary course of things had not been disrupted, then to provide a prima facie justification of it, one need only argue that the natural course of things should not have been disrupted in the first place. (shrink)

George Grant's magnificent four-part meditation sums up much that is central to his own thought, including a critique of modern liberalism, an analysis of John Rawls's Theory of Justice, and insights into the larger Western philosophical ...

Volume 20, Issue 7, July 2020, Page 167-169.

While a number of empirical studies have appeared on impaired self-awareness (ISA) after traumatic brain injury (TBI) over the last 20 years, the relative role of denial (as a psychological method of coping) has typically not been addressed in these studies. We propose that this failure has limited our understanding of how ISA and denial differentially affect efforts to rehabilitate persons with TBI. In this selective review paper, we summarize early findings in the field and integrate those findings with more (...) recent observations (i.e., 1999–2019). We believe that this synthesis of information and expert clinical opinion will inform future research on ISA and denial as well as approaches to rehabilitation for persons with TBI. (shrink)