abstract: This project began as an interreligious exercise during Lent, a Christian season of increased spiritual practice. What resulted, in part, is this work, a translation and commentary on the Dhammapada (included here: the introduction and translations of three chapters with chapter commentaries). Like the Sermon on the Mount to Christians and the Bhagavad Gita to Hindus, the Dhammapada is considered the heart of Buddhist teaching. Ultimately, this work is a secondary translation or popular interpretation, akin to Thomas Merton's translations (...) of Chuang Tzu and Coleman Bark's translations of Rumi's poetry. And rather than a scholarly translation, this work is a spiritual and devotional interpretation. Among the choices I have made in this translation include gender-inclusive and affirming language, often opting for they/ them pronouns. In chapter intros, I have included resources, brief commentary, and cultural and academic notes that have helped to shape this translation. Such influencers of this translation include Ella Baker, Kendrick Lamar, Bessel van der Kolk, Lama Rod Owens, and others. The next choice I have made, instead of translating the words dukkha and samsara to sorrow/suffering and reincarnation, respectively, I have often translated these terms to harm cycles and generational suffering. My hope is that these terms capture the original meanings while also creating expansive language to hold possibilities for new understandings within Gautama Buddha's teaching. As the translator of this text, it is important to name my twenty-first-century context, influences, and identity as a person raised mostly in the Upper Midwest of the United States and who has lived in Brooklyn, New York, for the past twenty years. This translation is filtered through the lenses of my lived experience, education, social-familial position, economic status, ethnic-cultural and gender identity (as a cis male of Scandinavian-Hutterite descent, who is identified as white ), and multiple other influences. My sources include peace studies, trauma/resilience studies, liberation theology, and more than fifteen years of experience as a spiritual teacher and minister in the Anabaptist tradition (i.e., the historic peace church) of Christianity. It is through these lived experiences that this translation emerges. And, specifically, what has emerged, at least in part, is a trauma aware, liberationist interpretation of the Dhammapada. (shrink)

Are good and evil a “point of view”? Do Jedi and Sith alike merely crave greater power? What does a “space opera” have to teach us about how to live virtuously? George Lucas created Star Wars as a modern-day morality tale, modeled on classical epics, such as Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, tragic dramas written by the likes of Sophocles, Seneca, and Shakespeare, and the scriptures that inspire religions in the East and West. This chapter canvasses the metaphysical and moral themes (...) across the three trilogies that make up the “Skywalker saga” to construct a genealogy of how “the Force” evolved throughout these films. At the heart of this conceptual development is the question of how the light and dark sides of the Force are related to each other and what that relationship can help us understand about the nature of good and evil in our own experience. (shrink)

As concerns over the negative social and environmental impacts of industrial agriculture become more widespread, efforts to define and regulate sustainable agriculture have proliferated in the US. Whereas the USDA spearheaded previous efforts, today such efforts have largely shifted to Tripartite Standards Regimes (TSRs). Using a case study of the Leonardo Academy’s initiative to develop a US sustainable agriculture standard, this paper examines the standards-development process and efforts by agribusiness to influence the process. Specifically, we analyze how politics operate in (...) seemingly “depoliticized” TSRs, and how agribusiness and the USDA use “framing practices” and procedural complaints to influence the standard-development process. We contend that although governance mechanisms are a potentially powerful tool for advocates of alternative agrifood, their efficacy may be constrained by science-based requirements, an agribusiness countermovement, and a captured state. (shrink)

Debate over whether health care institutions or individual providers should have a legally protected right to conscientiously refuse to offer legal services to patients who request them has grown exponentially due to the increasing legalization of morally contested services. This debate is particularly acute for Catholic health care providers. We elucidate Catholic teaching regarding the nature of conscience and the intrinsic value of being free to act in accord with one’s conscience. We then outline the primary positions defended in this (...) debate and respond to critics of Catholic teaching. In so doing, we show how Catholic health care providers’ claims to conscientiously refuse to offer specific health care services are not essentially faith-based, but are founded upon publicly defensible reasons. We also address the question of whether conscientiously refusing health care providers may become complicit in moral wrongdoing or potentially cause scandal by means of disclosure or referral to another provider. (shrink)

There is a basic methodological difference in the way anarchists and non-anarchists think about politics, often more implicit than explicit. Anarchists see politics and justice as being concerns of social institutions, norms, and relations generally – both inside and outside the state. Much of academic political philosophy talks of politics and justice as if they are definitionally concerns about what states should do, or our relationships with each other through the state. In this chapter, we argue that the anarchists are (...) on the right side of this difference. We call the insight that undergirds the anarchists’ understanding of politics and justice “methodological anarchism.” We seek to exorcise the policy framework in favor of methodological anarchism. Indeed, we believe it should be embraced by all political philosophers, not only the anarchists among their ranks. Political philosophers ought to abstain from the policy framework for two reasons. Firstly, it is analytically impoverished inasmuch as, when followed to its logical conclusion, it is unable to engage with enormous areas of analysis that are relevant to what makes a society just or unjust. Secondly, it instills subtle prejudice against other important approaches to mitigating injustice that are unconcerned with public policy. This also carries the danger of lending ideological support for existing injustices and thereby entrenching them. Accepting our critique of the policy framework and adopting methodological anarchism does not necessarily require the acceptance of any kind of substantive political anarchism. But it does mean thinking a bit more like an anarchist about how to make society more just – thus our characterization of it as “methodological.”. (shrink)

As the author of a book entitled The Nature of Human Persons: Metaphysics and Bioethics (Eberl 2020), one might reasonably expect me to lament Jennifer Blumenthal-Barby’s (2024) call to end the use...

This chapter considers Nietzsche's and Spinoza's views on freedom – a theme of central interest to both thinkers. It draws from Yonover in order to provide an outline of their rejections of one conception of freedom: freedom of the will. The chapter also considers their positive visions of a very different kind of freedom, which rather consists in self‐determination. Nietzsche's naturalism surely plays a major role in his rejection of freedom of the will, too. Nietzsche and Spinoza praise a comparable (...) kind of freedom characterized especially by the primary elements. Spinoza writes in the first appendix of the Ethics that at least one portion of the foremost “prejudice” to undermine is the idea that God “directs all things to some certain end”. (shrink)

Hermann Lotze was an important influence for founding philosophers in major contemporary philosophical methodologies such as pragmatism (e. g. William James and Josiah Royce), phenomenology (e. g. Edmund Husserl), and analytic philosophy (e. g. Gottlob Frege). This chapter focuses on Lotze’s Logic for clues to Lotze’s widespread appeal to various contemporary philosophical movements. In particular this essay explores the logical status of Lotze’s Sigma as the sought but not yet fully understood subject. By finding in Sigma a shared term between (...) idealistic and empirical sciences, Lotze provides an interpretive middle ground between pure (a priori) and applied (a posteriori) logic, as well as between purely logical scientific inquiries (as are found in mathematics and philosophy, for instance), and applied logical inquiries into the nature of the world (as for instance in the natural sciences). Sigma may have been a powerful influence on the phenomenologists, pragmatists, and analytic philosophers who followed, having shown a way beyond seeming dichotomies of idealism vs. empiricism. Lotze shows the fruitful interaction between these two modes of logical science but also their uniqueness; in turn, he shows how logic is both a unique philosophical science and also valuably related to ethics and metaphysics. (shrink)

The aim of the current study was to explore the process of self-transformation as a result of coping with a major life event, and to address the role, if any, that spirituality plays within the coping and transformational process. Using grounded theory methodology, six participants were interviewed over a period of 6 months. The findings, supportive of previous research, produced a preliminary model illustrating transformation as a gradual process. The core category was identified as “openness,” in that by being open (...) to others or to the “Transcendent,” the participants were able to let go and transform. It was theorized that openness, in this sense, enables acceptance of material deriving from a realm of self beyond the everyday ego. Indeed, such a journey of transformation crucially seems to entail expanding the conception of self beyond customary limits. Understood in this way, transformation may be conceptualized as a process of continual movement into the unconscious, where the totality of the self is awakened, resulting in a reinterpretation of life purpose. The consequences of the transformation for participants were positive in nature. The role that spirituality plays within the coping and transformation process was seen to manifest as being subtle and unfolding and/or supportive. (shrink)

Provocative, brutally honest, and timeless, Machiavelli’s _The Prince_ is one of the most important yet misunderstood writings in history. In it, Machiavelli lays bare the reality behind politics as it has always been practiced, teaching leaders to avoid the errors and failings of others while also educating those outside of government about what goes on inside the halls of power. This edition offers a new and lively translation of _The Prince_, written in fluid modern English that is impressively accurate to (...) the original source. It also includes extensive selections from the _Discourses on Livy_, together with a range of Machiavelli’s other works such as his poetry, his personal correspondence, and the _Florentine Histories_. The supplemental readings, engaging original introduction, and thorough annotations provided in this edition show the relevance of _The Prince_ to a wide range of themes: human nature, the philosophy of history, and the existential question all rulers face—how to survive in a world that is largely outside of one’s control. (shrink)

Phenomenological Studies in Education explores and applies methods associated with phenomenological work to build knowledge of experiences in education and pedagogy. Covering topics such as building inclusive environments, descriptive phenomenology, and phenomenological interviewing experiences this book is ideal for researchers in educational studies qualitative researchers and students.

Resumo Os Qualia, ou são “entidades espaciais” – ou seja, estão localizados no espaço como os objectos físicos –, ou não são “entidades espaciais”. Então, o dualismo deve alegar que ou os qualia não-físicos são entidades espaciais, ou que eles não o são. Contudo, qualquer resposta é problemática. Se os qualia não-físicos não são entidades espaciais, então, é difícil de conceber como podem ser atribuídos a cérebros particulares, individualizados uns dos outros, e assim por diante. Mas se os qualia não-físicos (...) são entidades espaciais, então, surgem outros problemas, por exemplo, torna-se difícil perceber como poderíamos ter então um acesso privilegiado a eles. Dada uma ou outra opção, o dualismo é problemático. Portanto, o dualismo é problemático. Palavras-chave : argumento do conhecimento, consciência, dualismo, fisicalismo, problema mente-corpo, qualiaQualia are either “spatial entities” – i.e., they are located in space like physical objects – or they are not. So, dualism must claim that either non-physical qualia are spatial entities or they are not. But either answer is problematic. If non-physical qualia are not spatial entities, then it is difficult to see how they can be attributed to particular brains, individuated from one another, and so on. But if non-physical qualia are spatial entities, then other problems arise, e.g., it is difficult to see how we could have privileged access to them. Given either option, dualism is problematic. Therefore, dualism is problematic. Keywords : consciousness, dualism, knowledge argument, mind-body problem, Physicalism, Qualia. (shrink)

This paper develops two novel views that help solve the ‘now what’ problem for moral error theorists concerning what they should do with morality once they accept it is systematically false. It does so by reconstructing aspects of the metaethical and metanormative reflections found in the Madhyamaka Buddhist, and in particular the Prāsaṅgika Madhyamaka Buddhist, tradition. It also aims to resolve the debate among contemporary scholars of Madhyamaka Buddhism concerning the precise metaethical status of its views, namely, whether Madhyamaka Buddhism (...) can count as a genuine moral skepticism. The paper argues that Mādhyamikas are indeed moral skeptics, and moral skeptics more in a ‘Pyrrhonian,’ or quietist, sense if one follows the Prāsaṅgika line of thinkers. Overall, the claim is that Prāsaṅgika Madhyamaka Buddhists treat morality and normativity more broadly as a source of suffering to be ultimately overcome for therapeutic reasons. They propose to do this by abolishing fully asserting genuine moral and normative beliefs while also occasionally passively and reactively pretending some normative judgments are true when it appears doing so would be salutary. These two approaches are called ‘nonassertive moral abolitionism’ and ‘reactionary moral fictionalism,’ respectively. They are developed and offered to contemporary error theorists willing to consider a non-normative and non-collectivist criterion for solving the ‘now what’ problem. (shrink)

Initiated almost 200 years ago, the accusation that G.W.F. Hegel’s philosophy qualifies as Gnostic has stood the test of time. Beginning with Ferdinand Christian Baur’s 1835 Die christliche Gnosis, thinkers have attempted to inextricably bind Hegel’s philosophical endeavors to the ancient form(s) of religious knowledge production known as ‘Gnosticism’. Two additional figures have surfaced more recently who also champion the Gnostic accusation, namely Eric Voegelin and James Lindsay. Voegelin’s 1968 Science, Politics, and Gnosticism as well as his 1972 ‘On Hegel: (...) A Study in Sorcery’ seek to justify and legitimize the Gnostic accusation in unequivocal terms. Lindsay’s 2022 best-seller, Race Marxism, further perpetuates the charge of Gnosticism against Hegel. I aim to deal with each of these figures and their respective accusations in reverse chronological order, demonstrating how each of them must artificially construct Hegel as a Gnostic in order to successfully defend their accusations. (shrink)

Pieper follows a philosophical tradition set down by Plato, who bears only a superficial relationship to Plato's Stepchildren (TOS) Aristotle, and Thomas Aquinas, all of whom could find some affinity with Star Trek and other sci‐fi/fantasy adventures that tell a good morality tale or stretch the limits of human imagination. Aristotle points out, humans, as rational animals, isn't satisfied with mere pleasure seeking, but is driven to reflect upon the limitless possibilities of existence. The value of festive pursuits during higher (...) times is grounded in the connection between human and divine minds. Socrates set the standard for communal and individual self‐exploration when he emphatically said that the unexamined life is not worth living. Knowledge, according to Aristotle, is not only speculative in nature, encompassing scientific and theoretical reasoning, but also practical, that is, technical and ethical reasoning. (shrink)

Effective Altruism is a movement and a philosophy that has reinvigorated the debate about the nature of beneficence. At base, it is the consistent application of microeconomic principles to beneficent action. The movement has exposed that many forms of giving do little good (or do active harm), but others do tremendous good. Questioning Beneficence uses Effective Altruism as a launchpad to ask hard questions about beneficence more generally. Must we be Effective Altruists, or is Effective Altruism and the ideas driving (...) the movement a mistake? How much should we give and-if anything-how should we give it? What are the respective roles of different kinds of institutions? Is charity anti-democratic and do billionaire philanthropists have too much power? Is Effective Altruism just utilitarianism in disguise? Questioning Beneficence is written by four philosophers, each with distinct points of view. It introduces a new standard for debating ideas in philosophy as each author poses and answers three questions and each of his three co-authors responds to those questions in turn. Finally, the first author replies to his co-authors' responses. Throughout the book, there is a spirit of curiosity, intellectual risk taking, and truth-seeking, rather than point-scoring and one-upsmanship. Questioning Beneficence demonstrates what open-minded, real dialogue over an important issue can be at its very best. (shrink)

When America's Thomas Jefferson insists that work hard to perfect the work of the Framers, he exhorts us to carry forth the creative, revolutionary spirit ourselves. In Kevin Bleyer's Me the People: One Man's Selfless Quest to Rewrite the Constitution of the United States, Thomas Jefferson is a constant source of inspiration. Me the People doesn't remain at the level of theory. The chapter on the Judiciary, devoted to Bleyer's improbable lunch with Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, the Justice most (...) closely associated with the controversial constitutional theory of originalism, is the clear climax of the book. Although Scalia a darling of the Tea Party and a conservative Catholic, evangelicalism does not permeate his legal reasoning. Sure Me the People is a fun book on American history, but it prods the reader comically, by exploiting the comedic value of the fact that so few Americans read the Constitution. (shrink)

Six years ago, the author wrote a book chapter about why intellectuals, especially philosophers, should study and emulate Jon Stewart if they want to return to being relevant public intellectuals. America needs his brand of popular intellectual criticism even more than we did six years ago, as our civic and political discourse has been almost entirely eclipsed by nasty invective and political spin. Indeed, Stewart's fake news is actually one of our last examples of real, engaged political philosophy that was (...) originally cultivated by some of America's best philosophers. But before this chapter looks more closely at Stewart, it considers why Americans hate intellectuals. The fact that most Americans think that smart people are tricky and that dumb people are honest makes it difficult to be a public intellectual in America. (shrink)

This second edition of _Philosophy of Sport: Core Readings_ provides an overview of core topics in the field, ranging from fundamental questions about the nature of sport to ethical issues at the forefront of discussions of what sport should be. On the nature of sport, readers will gain a solid understanding of fundamental theories of games, play, and sports, as well as sport epistemology, the esports controversy, and sport aesthetics. Topics in the ethics of sport include performance-enhancing drugs, cheating, gamesmanship, (...) and sportsmanship. This edition has been updated and expanded to include sections on gender and race and to provide broader and deeper coverage of this rapidly evolving area. (shrink)

In this commentary, I explore the usefulness of the framework Abram Brummett and Erica K. Salter present in their article “Mapping the Moral Terrain of Clinical Deception.” Deception cases are divisive because they nearly always evoke the metadilemma of clinical ethics: a clash between duties (in these cases, truth telling) and consequences (whatever good might come of the lie). Here, I describe a patient case in which the clinical team considered deceiving a patient about his pain‐medicine dosage in exchange for (...) his allowing the clinicians to properly care for his percutaneous endoscopic gastrostomy tube stoma, so as to prevent infection. Applying the framework that Brummett and Salter have developed helped our clinical team parse the numerous complex issues involved. The nuances of our case also illustrated additional ways in which the ethics of deception needs to be further refined. (shrink)

In this paper we examine the relationship between diligence and ethics and the connection between procrastination and ethical misconduct for lawyers. From there we ask the question of whether legal education does enough to teach law students good habits of time management that might minimize the kind of procrastination that so often goes hand in hand with lawyer malfeasance. Far from concluding that legal education addresses these issues adequately we advance the claim that legal education actually teaches procrastination. Drawing on (...) the work of Neil Fiore and his book: The Now Habit: A Strategic Program for Overcoming Procrastination and Enjoying Guilt-Free Play we argue that law students are often susceptible to the psychological factors that lead to procrastination: fear of failure, fear of success and resentment of authority. From there we outline aspects of legal education that feed into rather than combating these vulnerabilities. Finally we outline recommendations for how legal education could begin to take more seriously the relationship between time management and legal ethics and to model and inculcate good time management skills. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Freedom from Poverty Freedom from War Ingredients of Commercial Progress Smith's Nineteenth‐Century Legacy66 Smith's Twentieth‐Century Legacy When Formal Freedom Is Enough Discussion.

This essay is my extended review of Eamonn Butler’s outstanding primer, Classical Liberalism. In his book, Butler notes that the phrase “classical liberal” encompasses a wide spectrum of views, from conservatism to libertarianism. Butler lays out 10 principles that characterize classical liberalism, sketches its history, and discusses the value classical liberals place on freedom and toleration. He also examines the classical liberal views of politics, government, and society, and some useful compendia for the reader.

This book symposium on Jason Holt’s Kinetic Beauty: The Philosophical Aesthetics of Sport includes commentaries from Stephen Mumford, John E. MacKinnon and Andrew Edgar with replies from Holt.

Subjectivists about practical normativity hold that an agent’s favoring and disfavoring attitudes give rise to practical reasons. On this view, an agent’s normative reason to choose vanilla over chocolate ice cream ultimately turns on facts about what appeals to her rather than facts about what her options are like attitude-independently. Objectivists—who ground reasons in the attitude-independent features of the things we aim at—owe us an explanation of why it is rational to choose what we favor, if not because favoring is (...) a source of reasons. My aim in this paper is to supply such a story. The proposal is roughly that when an agent cannot base her choices on her judgments about what she has most reason to do, structural rationality extends to her a license to choose something just because she favors it, without imbuing favoring with the authority of a normative reason. (shrink)

Natural languages all contain constructions the interpretation of which depends upon the situation in which they are used. In Language and Context, Jason Stanley presents a series of essays which develop a theory of how the situation in which we speak interacts with the words we use to help produce what we say. The reason we can so smoothly operate with sentences that can be used to express very different items of information, Stanley argues, is that there are linguistically (...) mandated constraints on the effects of the situation on what we say. These linguistically mandated constraints are most evident in the cases of sentences containing explicit pronouns, such as "She is a mathematician", where interpretation of the information expressed is guided by the use of the pronoun "she". But even when such explicit pronouns are lacking, our sentences provide similar cues to allow our interlocutors to determine the information expressed. We are, in the main, confident that our interlocutors will smoothly grasp what we say, because the grammar and meaning of our sentences encodes these constraints. In defending this theory, Stanley pays close attention to specific cases of context-sensitive constructions, such as quantified noun phrases, comparative adjectives, and conditionals. Philosophers and cognitive scientist have appealed to the dependence of what is intuitively said by a sentence on the situation in which it is uttered to argue against the possibility of a systematic theory of meaning for natural language. The theory developed in this book is a vigorous defense of the possibility of a systematic theory of meaning for natural language against these influential tendencies. (shrink)

In this provocative book, Jason Brennan challenges our fundamental assumptions about voting, revealing why it is not a duty for most citizens--in fact, he ...

-/- Paperback -/- Price: $20.95/£17.99 ISBN: -/- Published: Dec 6, 2016 Copyright: 2015 Pages: 376 Size: 5.5 x 8.5 in. -/- ebook -/- Price: $20.95/£17.99 ISBN: -/- Published: Dec 6, 2016 Copyright: 2015 Pages: 376 Size: 5.5 x 8.5 in. -/- Buy This -/- Common Reading Selection Download Cover -/- Overview Author(s) Praise -/- Our democracy today is fraught with political campaigns, lobbyists, liberal media, and Fox News commentators, all using language to influence the way we think and reason about (...) public issues. Even so, many of us believe that propaganda and manipulation aren’t problems for us—not in the way they were for the totalitarian societies of the mid-twentieth century. In How Propaganda Works, Jason Stanley demonstrates that more attention needs to be paid. He examines how propaganda operates subtly, how it undermines democracy—particularly the ideals of democratic deliberation and equality—and how it has damaged democracies of the past. -/- Focusing on the shortcomings of liberal democratic states, Stanley provides a historically grounded introduction to democratic political theory as a window into the misuse of democratic vocabulary for propaganda’s selfish purposes. He lays out historical examples, such as the restructuring of the US public school system at the turn of the twentieth century, to explore how the language of democracy is sometimes used to mask an undemocratic reality. Drawing from a range of sources, including feminist theory, critical race theory, epistemology, formal semantics, educational theory, and social and cognitive psychology, he explains how the manipulative and hypocritical declaration of flawed beliefs and ideologies arises from and perpetuates inequalities in society, such as the racial injustices that commonly occur in the United States. -/- How Propaganda Works shows that an understanding of propaganda and its mechanisms is essential for the preservation and protection of liberal democracies everywhere. (shrink)

The Human Genome Project is nearing completion, and shortly we will have access to the complete genetic sequence of an average human being. Hopes are high that the sequence will contribute profoundly to medicine in particular, but also to our understanding of our evolutionary past. Of course, detractors have long insisted that because the HGP represents a victory for formalism in biology, determining the function of DNA sequences will remain an outstanding problem for at least the next several decades. Moreover, (...) it is not clear that having the complete sequence will be significantly useful to biologists seeking to understand gene function in the first place. What can we expect in the postgenomic era? ;I reject the very idea that a complete, encapsulated sequence of a human genome is foundational to biological understanding. I set my investigation within the framework of the ancient debate between preformationists and epigenecists. I survey and conceptually analyze arguments on both sides, especially as they relate to the separation of genetics and embryology in the early part of the twentieth century. I identify modern variants of both preformationism and epigenesis, and note their reconciliation in the form of a Modern Consensus on development established after the neo-Darwinian Synthesis in biology in the 1940s. ;Drawing on recent work in molecular and developmental biology, I challenge the seeming intuitiveness of the Modern Consensus and its subsumption of developmental concerns under the aegis of molecular genetics. I then propose and defend an alternative synthesis of preformationism and epigenesis, and of genetics and developmental biology, according to which development does not reduce to mere gene activation. I underscore the practical benefit of my perspective through a lengthy discussion of the psychiatric genetics approach to schizophrenia. (shrink)

This paper has already been published in Policy Futures in Education, 0 1–14, 2017. It is freely available on Academia. We thank Jason Thomas Wozniak for the permission to republish it here.: Debt shapes subjectivity by rhythmically training indebted subjects. Stated slightly differently, there exists a debt dressage that produces indebted subjectivity. One of the principle aims of this article is to introduce rhythm into the debt analysis debates. Building on Henri - Sciences de l'éducation et de la formation (...) – Nouvel article. (shrink)

Biography of Habermas -- Critical theory -- Habermas and his works -- An assessment of the impact of Habermas -- Conclusion.

This paper examines the claim made by certain virtue epistemologists that intellectual character virtues like fair-mindedness, open-mindedness and intellectual courage merit an important and fundamental role in epistemology. I begin by considering whether these traits merit an important role in the analysis of knowledge. I argue that they do not and that in fact they are unlikely to be of much relevance to any of the traditional problems in epistemology. This presents a serious challenge for virtue epistemology. I go on (...) to examine the work of two other virtue epistemologists in light of this challenge and then sketch an alternative approach that reveals how the intellectual virtues might merit a substantial role in epistemology even if not a role in connection with more traditional epistemological projects. (shrink)

Commentary on re-opening dialogue between theological and secular voices in bioethics.

Retroduction -- Contextualized self-interpretations -- Causal mechanisms -- Ontology -- Logics -- Articulation.

Thomas Aquinas presents an account of human immortality and bodily resurrection intended to be both faithful to Christian Scripture and metaphysically sound as following from the Aristotelian view of human nature. One central question is whether a human person persists between death and resurrection by virtue of her soul, given Aquinas’s hylomorphic account of human nature and assertion that a human person is not identical to her soul. Robert Pasnau contends that only a part of a person exists between death (...) and resurrection; whereas Eleonore Stump argues that a person substantially exists, albeit deficiently, during the interim period as composed of, but not identical to her soul. In this essay, I will adjudicate this dispute through textual and metaphysical analysis. (shrink)