Photographer John Humble has lived in Los Angeles for thirty years. In that time he has created a strong body of work that captures the unique architecture and natural environment of Southern California. A Place in the Sun is a celebration of Humble's distinctive view of Los Angeles, from the concrete channels of the Los Angeles River to the instantly recognizable cityscape through which that river winds.

Recent critiques of methodological naturalism (MN) claim that it fails by conflicting with Christian belief and being insufficiently humble. We defend MN by tracing the real history of the debate, contending that the story as it is usually told is mythic. We show how MN works in practice, including among real scientists. The debate is a red herring. It only appears problematic because of confusion among its opponents about how scientists respond to experimental anomalies. We conclude by introducing our (...) preferred approach, Science‐Engaged Theology. (shrink)

The term 'indexical' comes into the philosophy of language from Charles Sanders Peirce's use of the term 'index'. Paradigm indexicals include pronouns such as 'I' and 'you', as well as words like 'here', 'now', 'today', 'tomorrow', and 'yesterday' that occur as both nouns and adverbs. This chapter looks at how such paradigms work, then look at less paradigmatic examples, and eventually try to arrive at plausible definitions of indexical and indexicality. Eliminative theories treat indexicals as short‐cuts for descriptions that the (...) speaker has in mind. Indexicals play no essential role in language and communication and can be eliminated for serious purposes. The chapter reviews McTaggart's use of indexicals in his famous argument about time. In fact indexicals, for all their conversational utility and humble origins, seem indispensable in talking about philosophical topics. Simple and untechnical ‘I’ and ‘now’ may be, compared to words that embody great insights of science or philosophy, they still are words, that express ideas, and connect with complex thoughts words can express. (shrink)

This remarkable reconstruction of Søren Kierkegaard's work based on a reading of original Danish sources could have been entitled Phenomenology of Spirit or, perhaps, Itinerarium Cordis Ad Deum. In ten chapters it attempts to uncover SK's ethico-religious understanding of the humanjourney towards the transcendent God. It is a journey away from speculative absorption in nature and universal history, away from the hubris of poetical self-creation, away even from ethical awareness of the universally human and a kind of Pelagian self-confidence in (...) one's ability to do the good. Thejourney ends with the recognition of one's own powerlessness and nothingness—a recognition that can lead either to prideful despair or to humble faith. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Political Philosophy of Fénelon by Ryan Patrick HanleyJohn J. Conley SJRyan Patrick Hanley. The Political Philosophy of Fénelon. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. Pp. xvi + 306. Hardback, $41.95.In his monograph, Ryan Patrick Hanley offers a revisionist interpretation of the political philosophy of François de Salignac de la Mothe-Fénelon, archbishop of Cambrai. A series of Enlightenment commentators (Montesquieu, Rousseau, Hume, Jefferson) and their progeny have hailed Fénelon (...) as a political subversive who boldly attacked the injustices of the reign of Louis XIV and who prepared the arrival of an egalitarian society with socialist and pacifist traits. Hanley, however, argues that Fénelon actually defended a more moderate and realistic model of political society than his Enlightenment exegetes have suggested. Like earlier commentators, Hanley attempts to prove his argument primarily through an analysis of Telemachus, the pedagogical novel Fénelon had composed for Louis, duc de Bourgogne, the "petit Dauphin" and grandson of Louis XIV, when Fénelon served as his tutor.Three strong chapters demonstrate Hanley's thesis concerning Fénelon's moderate politics and philosophy. Hanley argues that Fénelon's philosophy of education rests on a distinction between true and false glory. True glory resides in virtue and a humble recognition of divine glory, while false glory is the self-centered glorification of the human agent, which easily deteriorates into vanity. Rather than simply condemn self-interest, in his treatment of the education of the prince Fénelon argues that self-interest must be gradually transformed into a broader interest for the good of one's subjects and a deeper recognition of the glory of God. Earning the praise of his Enlightenment acolytes and later feminist commentators, Fénelon defends a solid education for women, but he clearly wants this education to prepare women for their domestic role as wives and mothers; his celebrated treatise and letters on the education of women are not an exercise in gender equality.The economic theory of Fénelon has often been interpreted as a type of utopian socialism. This is largely based on the central place taken by Bétique in the Telemachus. In this mythical land, the happy citizens practice a communist economics; private property is foreign to them. All their basic needs are provided for through communal cooperation. Luxury is also foreign to them; precious metals like gold and silver are used in practical construction as if they were pieces of iron. But Hanley argues that the prosocialist exegetes ignore the varied economies presented in the passages concerning Egypt, Crete, and Tyre. Bétique does not stand alone as an economic ideal. When Fénelon details how the economy of contemporary France should be reformed, it is far from simple socialism. The state has a strong initial role in the state's economic reform, but it works in tandem with private initiatives that will gradually become the stronger partner. "Fénelon differs from later socialists in insisting that the use of state power is not an end in itself, but necessary only to establish the conditions whereby a free economic system can emerge and flourish—at which point direct intervention of the state into economic affairs will diminish, and a free (though hardly unbridled) pursuit of self-interest will be encouraged" (81).Hanley also attacks the common argument that Fénelon is a pacifist who excoriates all recourse to war. Fénelon does indeed condemn war in the most graphic terms. As Archbishop of Cambrai in northern France, he had witnessed the brutal carnage and attendant famines that had decimated the population in repeated wars in this border area. But his nuanced critique of war rests on a distinction between false and true courage. False courage is found in the warrior who initiates war for the sake of his own false glory. True courage lies in those who defend the innocent out of a proper sense of duty; this courage contrasts with cowardice disguised as pacificism. Hanley argues that the confederation of nations that Fénelon envisions as a mechanism to mediate conflict and reduce the recourse to war is less a species of international government than... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A HEIDEGGERIAN CRITIQUE OF AQUINAS AND A GILSONIAN REPLY JOHN F. X. KNASAS Center for Thomistic Studies Houston, Texas I IN HIS BOOK, Heidegger and Aquinas: An Essay on Overcoming Metaphysics, John Caputo investigates among other points a claim of Etienne Gilson's followers. Their claim is that Heidegger's charge of an oblivion or forgetfulness of being cannot be pinned on Aquinas.1 Aquinas escapes the charge because he (...) alone in the history of Western philosophy deepens the understanding of being to the level of esse. How could someone who has seized upon the fundamental principle of being be guilty of a forgetfulness of being? Caputo begs to differ. A Heideggerian would find the Gilsonian thesis unimpressive. What Aquinas has done remains too ontical, for it still deals with things and the principles of things. Something else escapes Aquinas's eye, and Caputo variously expresses the Heideggerian dissatisfaction :... esse for Aquinas means that act by which a thing comes to be " real " rather than " present " in the original Greek sense of shining and appearing, revealing and concealing.... In St. Thomas the original Greek notion of presencing as the shining in which all appearances shine, as a rising up into appearance, into manifestness, has declined into an understanding of Being as "objective presence," the presence of what is mutely there, as a sound in an empty room is thought to be" there" in naive realism and common sense.2 1 John Caputo, Heidegger and Aquinas: An Essay on Overcoming Metaphysics (New York: Fordham University Press, 1982), pp. 100-1, 117-21. 2 Ibid., p. 199. 415 416 JOHN F. X. KNASAS Also: Hence, St. Thomas takes the being, not in its very Being-that is, in its quiet emergence into manifestness-but in its character as something created.3 Then: The metaphysics of actualitas is basically at odds with the meditative savoring of the original sense of Being as presencing.4 Finally: The early Greek experience of Anwesen, of the simple emergence of things into the light, differs fundamentally from St. Thomas's metaphysics of actuality and science of first causes.5 Caputo's conclusion is that one cannot accept Heidegger's criteria of S eindenken and think that Aquinas meets them.6 But a Gilsonian might humbly take Caputo's correction and still feel constrained to note that if the issue is being in the sense of presencing, then another portion of Aquinas's philosophical doctrine becomes relevant, viz., Aquinas's elaboration of the mechanics of cognition. In sum, things are present to us insofar as our form has been informed by their forms. Formal reception of form allows us to become the really other without loss to ourselves. We are then sufficiently actuated to cause the presence of the real as the term of our cognitional activity.7 a Ibid., p. 200. ' Ibid., p. 201. s Ibid., p. 209. 6 Ibid. 7 " ••• knowing beings are distinguished from non-knowing beings in that the latter possess only their own form ; whereas the knowing being is naturally adapted to have also the form of some other thing, for the species of the thing known is in the knower. Hence, it is manifest that the nature of a non-knowing being is more contracted and limited; whereas the nature of a knowing being has a greater amplitude and extension. That is why the Philosopher says that the soul is in a sense all things." Thomas Aquinas, ST I, 14, 2c, ed. Anton Pegis, The Basic Writings of St. Thomas Aquinas (New York: Random House, 1945), Vol. I, p. 136. On the Aristotelian background, see Joseph Owens, " Aristotelian Soul as Cognitive of Sensibles, Intelligibles and Self," Aristotle: The Collected Papers of Joseph Owens, ed. John R. Catan (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1981), pp. 81-98. A GILSONIAN REPLY TO HEIDEGGER 417 Once more, however, I believe that we have philosophers speaking past each other. For Heidegger believes that presencing requires an understanding of being as an a priori condition. Many texts to this effect exist. One of the most striking is from Heidegger's The Basic Problems of Phenomenology (1927). I would like to quote it at length. In... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist-Christian Studies 21.1 (2001) 139-140 [Access article in PDF] Book Review Dimensionen Der Leere: Gottals Nichts Und Nichts Als Gott Im Christlich-Buddistischen Dialog Dimensionen Der Leere: Gottals Nichts Und Nichts Als Gott Im Christlich-Buddistischen Dialog. By Armin Münch. Münster, Hamburg, London: LIT-Verlag, 1998. 337 pp. This is a most unusual study, pieced together out of hidden facets and neglected aspects of Buddhist and Christian studies and containing an unrivaled (...) overview of the literature. If modernWestern theology, taking its cue from Heidegger, has emphasized the temporality of existence, Münch draws our attention to its "spatiality" in what he calls "dimensional thinking." He is able to point to an astonishing number of thinkers from a variety of disciplines who have taken as their starting point our need to orient ourselves in space. In this light, the kenôsis.assage Philippians 2:5-11 is seen to be patterned on a U-shaped movement linking the dimensions "above" and "below" as distinct from S- and O-shaped movements found elsewhere in the mystical tradition.Münch goesonto establish left/right, behind/before, inside/outside, coming to be/passing away as what he calls "immanentals" (12-13) analogous to the "transcendentals" of scholastic theology. In particular, he seeks out thinkers who have tried to formulate the "fourth dimension," which would take us beyond conventional space-time. Plotinus, Eckhart, and the Kabbala are all examined for their attempts to conceptualize the transcendent in this way.What is the purpose of this exercise? Münch's leading question, to which he eventually returns, is clear: "What is lacking in our idea of God if we are ignorant of Buddhist experience?" (5). His purpose is to evaluate the relative significance of kenôsis ("he emptied himself") and tapeinosis."he humbled himself") in Philippians 2. This becomes apparent when he comes to the leading thinkers of the Kyoto School--Nishida, Nishitani, and Abe--and the debate between Takizawa and Yagi. Here Münch finds evidence of a "backwards-directed," or "dorsal," theology that corresponds to a rearwards movement in Buddhist thinking (264). This interesting hypothesis would need further verification by consulting the textual and extratextual traditions that shaped Japanese Buddhism in the context of their Indian and Chinese origins. In criticizing the work of Perry Schmidt-Leukel, Münch suggests that for Buddhists the balance between the experiences of relationship and transitoriness is not so much a matter of different directions or perspectives of transcendence as a leaving behind of all perspectivity (130-133). The search for salvation is orientated rearward in the Buddhist case, forward in the Christian, but these can be seen as complementary directions on the one road.Münch is able to agree with Ueda that Buddhist "nothingness" is best understood as a "desubstantializing dynamic" (283-284). Shûnyatâ.s the "fullness of nothingness" corresponds to the Christian concept of God. Christ is said to have "gone outside himself" rather than to have "emptied himself out" ["Christus entäusserte sich, aber er entleerte sich nicht!"(287)], to have undergone a metamorphosis. In Münch's view, only trinitarian language can encompass all the dimensions, from zero to the [End Page 139] elusive fourth, which are necessary to express what we mean by God in Buddhist terms (305-306).One of the most original things Münch does is to draw a parallel between the Zen ox-herding pictures and the Christian story. This serves to draw together pictorially, if not conceptually, the sometimes arcane researches that go to make up Münch's mosaic. It is perhaps because spatially dimensional thinking has been so rare in Western science, philosophy, and theology that he must search in such dark corners for evidence of it. The result is an at times bewildering patchwork of apparently unrelated contributions that do not blend smoothly into a unity. This sometimes puzzling heterogeneity is justified, in my view, in that it presents us with a highly diversified tool kit for getting to work on the potential offered... (shrink)

The cosmological constant is back. Several lines of evidence point to the conclusion that either there is a positive cosmological constant or else the universe is filled with a strange form of matter (“quintessence”) that mimics some of the effects of a positive lambda. This paper investigates the implications of the former possibility. Two senses in which the cosmological constant can be a constant are distinguished: the capital Λ sense in which lambda is a universal constant on a par with (...) the charge of the electron, and the lower case λ sense in which lambda is a humble constant of integration. The latter interpretation has been touted as the means to a solution to various problems in physics. These claims are critically examined with an eye to discerning the implications for philosophy of science and foundations of physics. (shrink)

Written as companion texts, the Bendō 弁道 and the Benmei 弁名 present Ogyū Sorai’s most mature and comprehensive expression of his philosophical thought. Sorai modestly spoke of the texts in a letter to a student, Uno Shirō 宇野士朗, calling them “my humble achievements”. In another letter to a student, Yamagata Shūnan 山県周南, Sorai related that after a prolonged bout with ill-health, he feared passing like the morning dew. Therefore, he took up his writing brush and completed the two works. (...) Sorai added that while more than a millennium had passed since Confucius’ death, the Way had only been clarified in recent times. Yet rather than boast of this, Sorai suggested that his hand in the process had been by heaven’s decree. With the two works, he added that even if he passed away soon, his life would not have been wasted. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:From Feasting to Fasting: The Evolution of a Sin; Attitudes to Food in Late AntiquityJohn F. DonahueVeronika E. Grimm. From Feasting to Fasting: The Evolution of a Sin; Attitudes to Food in Late Antiquity. London and New York: Routledge, 1996. x 1 294 pp. Cloth, $49.95.The role of food in the ancient world has been the focus of much attention in recent years, as both Greek and Roman (...) dining practices have been examined from a number of perspectives—sociological, anthropological, and semiotic, to name but a few. Noticeably absent, however, has been any sustained study of attitudes toward feasting and fasting in major early Christian writers. Veronika Grimm attempts to correct this deficiency by clarifying the social [End Page 655] and symbolic meanings given to food, eating, and fasting in the writings of those who shaped Christian thinking from the first to the fifth century.Chapters 1 and 2 offer necessary background by surveying both Jewish and Graeco-Roman attitudes toward feasting and fasting. Here we come to an essential difference between the two cultures. For the Jew, food and fasting were part of an ethical conduct, the rules for which were given by God. The result was a keen interest in fasting to serve as “penitence, expiation for transgression, the humbling of the self in order to arouse the pity of the Deity” (32). Even so, this focus never implied dualistic negation of “the flesh,” except with Platonic Philo. On the other hand, pagan gods expected worship and sacrifice, yet showed little interest in regulating the daily life of worshipers, what they ate, or with whom they slept. As Grimm reveals, people worked the rules out for themselves, physicians set guidelines for physical well-being, and philosophers stressed moderation as the appropriate human conduct concerning food.Grimm devotes the remainder of her study to a chronological review of feasting and fasting in the works of the principal early Christian writers, beginning with Paul (chapter 3) and continuing with the Acts of the Apostles (chapter 4), Clement of Alexandria (chapter 5), Tertullian (chapter 6), and Origen and Eusebius (chapter 7). Two concluding chapters trace attitudes to food and feasting in ascetic propaganda and practice in the works of Jerome and Augustine.Within these chapters lies the author’s central achievement: the charting of a course from occasional fasting to active self-denial. Thus, writing in the early years of the Church, Paul and the apostles emphasize the religious significance of the celebration and sharing of food but place little value on fasting as an ascetic or religious practice. By the late second and early third centuries, Clement of Alexandria, heavily influenced by Philo, neither regards food as a religious issue nor promotes fasting; nevertheless, he pleads for moderation and decorum in eating, drinking, and sexual activity. Origen, another Alexandrian of the third century, exhibits similar views, despite Eusebius’ attempts to cast him as the stereotypical “holy man” in his Ecclesiastical History. Tertullian, a contemporary of Clement’s from North Africa, reveals an even stronger revulsion from sexuality and, more importantly, holds the distinction of being the first Christian propagandist of expiatory fasting whose writings survive. In Grimm’s analysis it is clearly Jerome, however, who emerges in the fourth century as the true advocate of fasting, especially as an antidote to sexual appetite in women. She portrays him as a spirited supporter of anorexia and as one obsessed with the dangers of sexual temptation. Similarly, Grimm views Augustine’s ascetic program of corporal self-management as perilously approaching anorectic behavior.Thanks to Grimm’s careful treatment of the relevant texts and her professional training as a psychologist, there is much of value in these pages, especially her insights into the relationship between eating and physical, mental, and [End Page 656] spiritual well-being in the ancient world. Even so, a few minor concerns persist. First, her assertion that the Gospels “have no special message concerning food” (74) is puzzling, given that the evangelists frequently mention banquets, both earthly and divine, in their writings. Second, Grimm’s longest chapter, on Graeco-Roman attitudes toward food and fasting, seems to be her most problematic. She cites... (shrink)

Xenophanes (fr. 2) and Euripides (fr. 282) disapprove of the pan-Hellenic custom of granting athletes conspicuous honors, and Xenophanes in particular, with that of publicly funded meals. Both contrast the uselessness of athletes with the civic contributions of σοφοί. Socrates echoes these sentiments in his counter-proposal that he is much more deserving of σίτησιϚ ἐν πρυτανείῳ than any Olympic athlete (Pl. Ap. 36b3-37a2). I suggest that Socrates deliberately evokes this topos, but does so with a twist: whereas the earlier passages (...) base their claim to honors on σοφία, Socrates deliberately deprives σοφία of its popular meaning, imbuing it with a much more humble and Delphic connotation, thereby making his proposal all the more outrageous. (shrink)

In my book God’s Call1 I gave an historical account of the debate within twentieth century analytic philosophy between moral realism and expressivism. Moral realism is the view that moral properties like goodness or cruelty exist independently of our making judgements that things have such properties. Such judgements are, on this theory, objectively true when the things referred to have the specified properties and objectively false when they do not. Expressivism is the view that when a person makes a moral (...) judgment, she is expressing emotion or desire or will. I used the term ‘orectic’ to refer to these mental states, because we do not have in English a sufficiently general term. In God’s Call, I started with a moral realist whom I called a ‘platonist’, G. E. Moore, and then I traced the argument through the emotivists, A. J. Ayer and Charles Stevenson, and the prescriptivist, R. M. Hare, and Iris Murdoch, whom I called a ‘humble platonist’, and J. L. Mackie’s ‘error theory’, and John McDowell, whose theory I call ‘disposition theory’, and David Brink, the ‘new-wave realist’, and Allan Gibbard, who calls his own theory ‘ norm expressivism ’. My project was to collect together the concessions that the two sides of the debate have made to each other over the course of this history, and then to construct a position which molds these concessions into a single coherent theory. I called this theory ‘prescriptive realism’. (shrink)

Caspar Hare presents a bold and original approach to questions of what we ought to do, and why we ought to do it. He breaks with tradition to argue that we can tackle difficult problems in normative ethics by starting with a principle that is humble and uncontroversial. Being moral involves wanting particular other people to be better off.

Both Hegel and Whitehead endeavored to develop a philosophy that was comprehensive. Yet there is little direct contact from the one to the other. This makes any comparison a creative venture. George R. Lucas, Jr. has found the appropriate forum for meeting such a challenge. In 1984 he organized an international symposium on Hegel and Whitehead at Fordham University, and this book contains a selection of the papers presented. The result is appropriately dialectical. Some, like E. E. Harris, argue that (...) in essence Hegel and Whitehead, despite the difference in vocabulary, are saying the same thing. And George Kline concludes that "what for Hegel is the concept's reconciling mediation of contradictory opposites is for Whitehead the concrescent occasion's reconciling conversion of exclusion". In a similar vein Ernest Wolf-Gazo discovers a parallel between Hegel's negation and Whitehead's contrast. Others stress the differences, and opt for one to the prejudice of the other. Klaus Hartmann claims that Hegel's type of explanation is more successful than that of Whitehead; Tom Rockmore suggests that Hegel's self-reflexive moment is more thoroughgoing than anything Whitehead advances; and J. N. Findlay looks at Whitehead from the perspective of Hegel's Philosophy of Nature. In contrast Ivor Leclerc concludes that Whitehead's was "the greatest attempt after Kant to provide a solid and secure foundation for scientific theory and the knowledge of nature" ; and Jan Van der Veken prefers Whitehead's more open and humble interpretation of God and Creativity to Hegel's arrogance. A third group of papers, like John Smith's "The Meaning of Religious Experience" and Curtis Carter's "On Aesthetic Symbols" explore the diversity while remarking on the relative advantages of one or the other on this feature or that. (shrink)

Deliberative democracy is an embattled political project. It is accused of political naiveté for it only talks about power without taking power. Others, meanwhile, take issue with deliberative democracy’s dominance in the field of democratic theory and practice. An industry of consultants, facilitators, and experts of deliberative forums has grown over the past decades, suggesting that the field has benefited from a broken political system. This book is inspired by these accusations. It argues that deliberative democracy’s tense relationship with power (...) is not a pathology but constitutive of deliberative practice. Deliberative democracy gains relevance when it navigates complex relations of power in modern societies, learns from its mistakes, remains epistemically humble but not politically meek. These arguments are situated in three facets of deliberative democracy—norms, forums, and systems—and concludes by applying these ideas to three of the most pressing issues in contemporary times—post-truth politics, populism, and illiberalism. (shrink)

This book draws from previously unpublished letters and interviews with physicists, theologians, and Sir John’s close associates and family to present Sir John’s ideas on pure unlimited love. Post, who was in dialogue with Sir John for fifteen years on this topic and who had founded the Institute for Research on Unlimited Love, addresses how John Templeton arrived at his philosophy as a youth growing up in Tennessee. Post also shares how classical Presbyterian ideas came to (...) synergize in his mind with the more eastern influences of American transcendentalism and the Unity School of Christianity and ponders if Sir John truly believed that science and spiritualty might fully converge on the same view of Ultimate Reality with their very different ways of knowing. _Is Ultimate Reality Unlimited Love?_ presents Sir John’s hope for spiritual progress with the eventual convergence of ultimate reality and unlimited love at its very center. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Mental Disorder and Religious ExperienceThe Need for a Humble, Pragmatic PluralismWarren Kinghorn, MD (bio)Mohammed Abouelleil Rashed follows Charles Taylor’s argument that in the “therapeutic turn” of modernity, “certain human struggles, questions, issues, difficulties, problems are moved from a moral/spiritual to a therapeutic register,... from a hermeneutic of sin, evil or spiritual misdirection, to one of sickness” (Taylor, 2007, pp. 619–620). While the project of construing mental disorder in (...) naturalistic, non-religious terms carries the risk of subsuming “the rest of life” into the realm of the medical, it is nonetheless needed in order “to protect a region of illness and incapacity from the reach and excesses of the hermeneutic disciplines with their tendency to over-interpretation, and from cultural traditions, including religious discourse, that can implicate the person in narratives of evil, sin, faithlessness, spiritual misdirection, and moral deviance.” Rashed notes, however, that this medical narrative is challenged not only by religious communities but also by various forms of identity-based activism including the Mad Pride and Neurodiversity movements. He argues that strict illness/purpose, deficit/value, mechanism/meaning dichotomies have become “unstable” and encourages scholars to focus their attention on resolving the apparently contradictory realities that people sometimes demand and require medical forms of care while investing significance in the sociocultural and existential context of their distress and refusing reductionistic constructions of their distress as illness.I agree wholeheartedly with Rashed’s conclusion that clinicians and scholars must move beyond a strict mechanism/meaning dichotomy with respect to unwanted and/or disvalued experience and behavior, and must remain open to the social and contextual interpretations that particular cultural communities—including religious communities—offer. But as a psychiatrist who is also [End Page 215] a Christian theological ethicist, I suggest that this sensible conclusion can be reached more straightforwardly by adopting a more flexible approach to “religious experience” and by abandoning the assumptions that mental disorder is “a fully areligious type of suffering” and that religious experience and mental disorder are “fundamentally separate apprehensions of our experience.”Although Rashed never defines religious experience, he posits a distinction between “psychological distress or anomalous experience that has a religious origin, content, or end (purpose)” and “psychological distress or anomalous experience that has no religious origin, content, or end (purpose).” He then helpfully describes how Islamic tradition narrates psychological suffering as deviation from fitrah and as God’s trial, arguing that in Islamic perspective “mental disorder cannot be disentangled from the person’s religious situation and from the religious origin, content, or end (purpose) of his distress.” I make no claim about Rashed’s interpretation of Islam, but would observe that many voices within Christian tradition resist both the equation of psychological suffering with wrongdoing and the assertion that God is the direct cause of psychological suffering (see, for example, John Paul II, 1984). Suffering may instead have to do with being sinned against (as in the case of war, assault, or oppression), or the experience of living in a fallen world that God will one day make right. When the psalmist cries, “Save me, O God, for the waters have come up to my neck” (Psalm 69:1, NRSVue), many Christians observe that it is the psalmist’s enemies, not God, who are the proximate cause of the psalmist’s distress. That is to say, Christian tradition allows for a broad range of interpretations about the cause of distress, including distress resulting from injury, physical illness, and oppression. Christians are encouraged to regard all of their lives as in some way related to God as the creator, sustainer, and orienting end of life—and so in that sense all experience is “religious” in nature. But at least for Christians this does not preclude more naturalistic or sociological interpretations of distress and suffering.Rashed is right that a “fully areligious type of suffering” with “no religious origin, content, or end (purpose)” can only be invoked from a secular standpoint—if “secularity” is taken in Charles Taylor’s first sense of “public spaces... [that] have been allegedly emptied of God, or of any reference to ultimate reality” (Taylor, 2007, p. 2). This is not because... (shrink)

John Duns Scotus holds the view that the Son would have become incarnate even if Adam had not sinned, moreover, even if no other men had been created. This supralapsarian view is not an example of meaningless scholastic speculation; on the contrary, it is essential for understanding the full hermeneutic meaning of Christ’s incarnation in our factual world. It implies that the essence of God’s love should not be understood primarily in connection to sin, but rather, that His love (...) is already humble and personal, apart from sin and the Cross. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A New Direction for Comparative Studies of Buddhists and Christians:Evidence from Nāgārjuna and John of the CrossAbraham Vélez de CeaIs Nāgārjuna's emptiness a means to point out the inadequacy of logic and concepts to express the nature of the Ultimate Reality? Similarly, are John of the Cross's concepts of nothingness and emptiness examples of the apophatic path to God? In sum, is emptiness in Nāgārjuna and (...) class='Hi'>John of the Cross comparable to the Christian via negativa and the apophatic path to God?If you answered yes to any of these questions, I believe you might be interested in reading this article carefully. You are not alone; in fact most if not all previous discussions of Nāgārjuna and John of the Cross in the field of Buddhist-Christian studies have assumed an affirmative answer to the former questions. The comparisons of D.T. Suzuki, Thomas Merton, and the Kyoto school between the Christian God and Buddhist emptiness, as well as the comparisons of members of the Masao Abe–John Cobb group, have greatly contributed to this apophatic interpretation of emptiness. The enormous contributions of D. T. Suzuki, Thomas Merton, the Kyoto school, and the Abe-Cobb group to the field of Buddhist-Christian studies cannot be sufficiently praised and appreciated. However, the future of Buddhist-Christian studies and Buddhist-Christian dialogue requires a new comparative direction, a shift from comparative theory to comparative praxis, from doctrinal comparisons to more ethical and spiritually relevant comparisons.This new direction provides Buddhist-Christian studies with a more practical orientation necessary for the urgent needs of our planet as well as for the needs of a growing number of members of different religions with pluralist attitudes. By pluralist attitudes, I do not mean a relativistic standpoint, but rather an attitude of intellectual humbleness and dialogical openness toward other religions. That humble and dialogical openness seeks neither to proselytize nor to create a new religion. Rather, the objective is to build bridges of understanding and solidarity among religious communities and to be personally enriched by the contributions of all religions.In order to justify the need for this new and more practically oriented comparative [End Page 139] direction, it is imperative to review previous scholarship in the field of Buddhist-Christian studies. A comprehensive analysis of all past scholarship would be too ambitious a goal for the purpose of this article. Thus, in the first part of this article I limit myself to reviewing those questionable hermeneutical tendencies that I have identified in former Buddhist-Christian discussions of John of the Cross and Nāgārjuna. In the second part, I continue the justification of this new direction for Buddhist-Christian studies by providing a specific example, namely, a comparison of the instrumental ethical function of emptiness in Nāgārjuna and John of the Cross.Hermeneutical Tendencies in Previous Buddhist-Christian Studies of John of the Cross and NāgārjunaHermeneutical Tendencies in Comparisons of John of the Cross and BuddhismIn the case of John of the Cross, I have identified three questionable hermeneutical tendencies. The first one is to exaggerate the similarity between John of the Cross and Buddhism. Take, for example, what Thomas Merton—whose pioneering work on Buddhist-Christian dialogue deserves careful study—said in 1968: "Frankly, I would say that Zen is nothing but John of the Cross without the Christian vocabulary" (quoted in Nugent 1996: 53). This comparison suggests that the teachings of Zen and John of the Cross are virtually identical, neglecting important differences between them.Similarly, Christopher Nugent compares John's experience of one's own true self to the experience of Buddha-nature, and describes satori as a fusion of all and nothing, and the coincidence of opposites. For Nugent, John of the Cross is not only a Zen master, but also "more Taoist than dualist" (1996: 62–64). These comparisons of John of the Cross to Zen and Taoism concepts fail to bring justice to his ideas. John of the Cross cannot be categorized a nondualist because he maintains a clear distinction between God and creatures. Similarly, from an ethical... (shrink)

This paper explores how the physicist John Tyndall transformed himself from humble surveyor and schoolmaster into an internationally applauded icon of science. Beginning with his appointment as Professor of Natural Philosophy at the Royal Institution in 1853, I show how Tyndall’s worries about his social class and Irish origins, his painstaking attention to his lecturing performance and skilled use of the material and architectural resources of the Royal Institution were vital to his eventual success as a popular expositor (...) and ambassador for science. Secondly I explore the implications of Tyndall’s ‘popularity’ with respect to debates over the meaning and value of scientific ‘popularisation’. In support of recent work challenging diffusionist models of science communication, I show how Tyndall’s interactions with his audiences illustrate the symbiotic relationship between producer and consumer of ‘popular’ science. By examining the views of Tyndall’s critics—notably the ‘North British’ group of physicists—and his defenders and rivals in the domain of popular scientific lecturing, I show that disputes over Tyndall’s authority reflected anxieties about what constituted popular science and the transient boundaries between instruction and entertainment. The term ‘popularisation’ enjoyed many different uses in these debates, not least of all as a rheorical device with which to either exalt or destroy a scientist’s credibility. Author Keywords: John Tyndall; Audiences; Popularisation; Popular; Physics; Royal Institution. (shrink)

Should we consider irony as a good thing for democratic life? As it is portrayed in the classical texts through which we know Socrates, eirōneia appears as a humble manifestation of self-consciousn...

i am humbled by the opportunity to address you today as the President of the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy. From my first experience at the annual meeting in Boston in 1995 to this meeting more than two decades later, SAAP has been my philosophical home. Here I have come to know many of the philosophers who have most influenced me: John Lachs, Peter Hare, John Ryder, Charlene Haddock Seigfried, Jim Campbell, Marilyn Fischer, Erin McKenna, and (...) John McDermott, whose work, in particular, helped me find my philosophical voice by inspiring both the research that led to my first book and my approach to teaching American philosophy. It was McDermott, the second president of this society, who delivered... (shrink)

This essay is William Grassie's valedictory remarks at the Metanexus Institute's 2007 Annual Conference. Grassie asks what is wrong with religion, what is wrong with science, and why the constructive engagement of the two holds the key to setting things right. He cites Sir John Templeton and others to make his case and proposes a new curriculum for general science education that uses the history of nature as a mnemonic and context for promoting better science literacy and the incorporation (...) of science into our cultural traditions. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 62.3 (2001) 425-444 [Access article in PDF] The Passions and Animal Language, 1540-1700 R. W. Serjeantson "Do not think, kind and benevolent readers, that I am proposing a useless subject to you by choosing to discuss the language [loquela] of beasts. For this is nothing other than philosophy, which investigates the natures of animals." 1 The Italian medical professor Hieronymus Fabricius ab Aquapendente (...) began his 1603 treatise On the language of beasts with this captatio benevolentiae with good cause. For early modern natural philosophers almost universally insisted that only humans were capable of language and speech. In this they followed, sometimes explicitly, their ancient authorities. "Man," Aristotle had said in the Politics, "is the only animal that has the gift of speech." "Men," wrote Cicero in the De inventione, "most excel the beasts in this, that they can speak." 2 They were sentiments echoed throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. "There is no true language among beastes," said Sir Kenelm Digby. "Language" (loquela), concurred G. J. Vossius, "is unique to man." And according to John Ray in The Wisdom of God (1691), speech was "a quality so peculiar to Man, that no Beast could ever attain to it." 3Language was a subject of absorbing interest to numerous early modern philosophers. They investigated its origin, its production, its signification, and its use. But behind almost all of these investigations lay one of the most profound suppositions in early modern anthropology: the uniqueness of the human [End Page 425] capacity for language, and the brutishness of the brute beasts. Harsh judgments were passed on those who thought that animals might be able to speak. Lawyers held that belief in animal language was sufficient evidence of idiocy. According to Kenelm Digby it was only vanity, ignorance, and a specious desire for reputation that had led some authors to argue that animals used "compleate languages as Men haue to discourse with one another in." And the seventeenth-century English writer on the passions, Edward Reynolds, thought that only "melancholy men" believed "that Elephants and Birds, and other Creatures have a language whereby they discourse with one another." 4Yet despite this pervasive assumption that humans spoke and animals did not, the question of animal language kept arising in early modern culture. Readers met speaking animals in beast fablesand on Lucianic voyages. There was a popular belief in early modern England that "in the olde tymes" animals could speak. 5 Theodore Zwinger, Claude Duret, and G. J. Vossius all recorded many accounts of human communication with birds, with the ancient claim that Apollonius of Tyana could understand birdsong being particularly notorious. 6 In the Old Testament Balaam's ass asks his owner what he has done to deserve being beaten. 7 And St. Basil had even suggested that before the Fall Adam and Eve had been able to talk to the animals as well as to name them--a suggestion that both Thomas Browne and Joseph Glanvill gave short shrift. 8 But my purpose in this paper is not to follow speaking animals through early modern fables, popular beliefs, or even Biblical commentary. Instead, I propose to explore the serious investigations of zoosemiotics and animal communication that were undertaken by numerous philosophers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. 9For then as now, the question of animal language, broadly interpreted, was a serious one for the sciences. It was a question that was addressed across a wide range of disciplines, from logic to natural history. As such it was an important component of the many discussions of the nature of animal reason--discussions that provided a means for skeptical moral philosophers to humble human pretensions [End Page 426] to rationality and wisdom. 10 Natural philosophers, too, undertook detailed inquiries into the question of animal expression, exploring issues of articulacy, anatomy, and function. Almost all early modern authors agreed that animals could not speak and did not possess language in the same way that humans did. But this still left a great deal of scope for considering the extent... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:More Evidence that Hume Wrote the Abstract David Fate Norton In the preceding paper, David Raynor has offered several reasons for discounting J. O. Nelson's unfounded claim that Adam Smith was the author ofAn Abstract of..."A Treatise ofHuman Nature." Prior to the discovery ofa copy ofthis work, it may have been plausible to suppose that the Abstract was written by someone other than Hume, but the internal evidence ofthe (...) pamphlet is so strongly in favour of Humean authorship that not even Nelson can bring himself to question this evidence—although he now chooses to ignore it. Given that Nelson's argument rests on the far from compelling assumption that in 1740 there were two and onlytwoMr. Smith's ofwhom Humehadknowledge and whomayhave had an interest in writingor publishing philosophy, it is especially useful to have William Smith, publisher of the Bibliothèque raisonnée, brought again to our attention, and especially since it is obvious that a copy of the Abstract had been sent to that journal prior to the pubUcation ofthe review ofthe Treatise published there in the spring of1740.1 In short, Raynor nicely shows why Keynes and Sraffa were wrong to suppose that Hume, Hutcheson and John Noon were all involved in a conspiracy to undercut Noon's interest by publishing an Irish edition ofthe Treatise2 and why Nelson is wrong to suppose that ifthe "Mr Smith" ofHume's letter is not John Smith of Dublin, then he can only be Adam Smith, and that thelatter musthave written the Abstract. I wish to consider further evidence, some of it circumstantial, relevant to this discussion. This evidence adds probability, I submit, to the conclusion that Hume wrote the Abstract. 1. In the autumn of1737 Hume told Henry Home that he could not give him a "general Notion ofthe Plan" or "Abridgement" ofwhat was to be the Treatise. A careless reading ofthe Abstract might lead one to suppose that this is evidence that Hume did not write this short work. But in fact the Abstract is not an abridgement. It is an effort to make clearer, by carefully tracing "one simple argument... from the beginning to the end," a work thathad been "complained of as obscure and difficult." 3 The available evidence confirms one in the belief that Hume could not abridge the Treatise, but on several occasions he did recast parts ofit in more accessible form. The first such recasting was theAbstract. That this briefworkis not merely an abridgement makes Volume XIX Number 1 217 DAVID FATE NORTON itless likely, I suggest, thatit was written by anyone other than Hume himself.4 2.The Abstract, although said to be "Printed for C. [C]orbet,B at Addison's Head, over-against St. Dunstan's Church, in Fleet-street," wasinfactprintedbyWilUam Strahan, fornone otherthanJohnNoon, the publisher of the Treatise.6 This we know from Strahan's ledgers. These are preservedin the British Library.7Moreover, onApril 19 and 20, 1739, Corbett placed the following advertisement in the London Daily Post and GeneralAdvertiser: Gentlemen, As I have very lately undertaken the Business ofa PubUsher, so will I as faithfully execute it, if at any time you please to employ, Your most Obedient, Humble Servant, Charles Corbett, Who will Inviolably keep secret all Names of Authors, Proprietors, &c. whatever. The fact that Corbett indicates his willingness to undertake clandestine, vanity publishing gives all the explanation one needs of his willingness to become front man for a puffproduced by Hume, and financed, as the Abstract was, by Hume's publisher.8 The fact that it was Noon who arranged for the London printing of the Abstract in no way proves that this work was written by Hume, but it is another bit ofevidence supportive ofthatconclusion,foritindicates thatNoon was in on the effort to publicize the poorly selling volumes ofthe Treatise that he had published.9 3.Robert Connon found a copy of volume three of the Treatise containing extensive manuscript amendments in Hume's hand. As he has also reported, a copy of the Abstract is bound together with this copy ofvolume three, and this copy ofthe Abstract is also amended by Hume. These amendments appear to be those of an author, not... (shrink)

Sir John Eccles, a distinguished scientist and Nobel Prize winner who has devoted his scientific life to the study of the mammalian brain, tells the story of how we came to be, not only as animals at the end of the hominid evolutionary line, but also as human persons possessed of reflective consciousness.

“[Niebuhr] is one of my favorite philosophers. I take away [from his works] the compelling idea that there’s serious evil in the world, and hardship and pain. And we should be humble and modest in our belief we can eliminate those things. But we shouldn’t use that as an excuse for cynicism and inaction. I take away... the sense we have to make these efforts knowing they are hard.”—President Barack Obama Forged during the tumultuous but triumphant postwar years when (...) America came of age as a world power, The Irony of American History is more relevant now than ever before. Cited by politicians as diverse as Hillary Clinton and John McCain, Niebuhr’s masterpiece on the incongruity between personal ideals and political reality is both an indictment of American moral complacency and a warning against the arrogance of virtue. Impassioned, eloquent, and deeply perceptive, Niebuhr’s wisdom will cause readers to rethink their assumptions about right and wrong, war and peace. “The supreme American theologian of the twentieth century.”—Arthur Schlesinger Jr., New York Times “Niebuhr is important for the left today precisely because he warned about America’s tendency—including the left’s tendency—to do bad things in the name of idealism. His thought offers a much better understanding of where the Bush administration went wrong in Iraq.”—Kevin Mattson, The Good Society “Irony provides the master key to understanding the myths and delusions that underpin American statecraft.... The most important book ever written on US foreign policy.”—Andrew J. Bacevich, from the Introduction. (shrink)

This book explores how and when biology emerged as a science in Germany. Beginning with the debate about organism between Georg Ernst Stahl and Gottfried Leibniz at the start of the eighteenth century, John Zammito traces the development of a new research program, culminating in 1800, in the formulation of developmental morphology. He shows how over the course of the century, naturalists undertook to transform some domains of natural history into a distinct branch of natural philosophy, which attempted not (...) only to describe but to explain the natural world and became, ultimately, the science of biology. (shrink)

John Kulvicki explores the many ways in which pictures can be meaningful, taking inspiration from the philosophy of language. Pictures are important parts of communicative acts. They express a variety of thoughts, and they are also representations. Kulvicki shows how the meanings of pictures let us put them to a wide range of communicative uses.

An Islamic coffin discovered in the church of Maria Spilaiotissa near the old Seljuk capital of Konya in central Anatolia bears the following Greek inscription: “Here lies the descendant of men born in the purple, Michael Amiraslan, the grandson of the great-grandson of the blessed emperor born in the purple, Kyr John Komnenos Maurozomes, the son of the humble John Komnenos.”.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 41.3 (2003) 413-414 [Access article in PDF] Katerina Ierodiakonou, editor. Byzantine Philosophy and its Ancient Sources. New York: Oxford University Press, Clarendon Press, 2002. Pp. vii + 309. Cloth, $55.00.Talking about, let alone writing on "Byzantine Philosophy" within the English-speaking philosophical community could cause embarrassment. It is only recently that this field has gained a few notable entries in philosophical works of reference (...) like the Routledge Encyclopedia or the Oxford Dictionary—but still it cannot make its way into the histories of medieval philosophy, not to mention the general histories of philosophy. Byzantine Philosophy aims at providing good reasons for changing that tendency and seeks to "persuade [us] that Byzantine Philosophy is worth investigating" (13).The book contains eleven articles, plus Ierodiakonou's introduction and Linos Benakis's review of the current research, read in part at a Conference held in Thessaloniki, Greece in 1997, but it is more than a mere collection of conference papers. Written both by well-established and younger scholars from diverse disciplines, the volume focuses on the explicit or implicit dialogue of Byzantine thinkers with ancient Greek philosophy, one of the two ingredients of Byzantine Philosophy (the other being patristic thought).Ierodiakonou in her introduction prefers to make a few—but penetrating—remarks on the nature of Byzantine Philosophy and its proper study. Her arguments are presented in a non-conclusive form and they are intended to serve as guidelines to further research. While a longer discussion of the issues involved would be welcome by the less-specialized reader, her choice seems reasonable as long as one thinks—rightly in my opinion—that it is premature to embark on general methodological suggestions about how to investigate Byzantine Philosophy, or believes that scrutinizing the texts themselves is a more promising approach at this relatively early stage of research (as perhaps always).With one exception, each article deals at length with a special issue spanning from metaphysics to political philosophy and concentrates on individual thinkers from the patristic era to the Renaissance; the absence of philosophical theology is surprising. Expectedly the presence of Aristotle can be traced in logic: in an eleventh-century humble handbook (thoroughly analyzed by Jonathan Barnes); in Psellos's Paraphrase on Aristotle's De Interpretationeand in the anti-logical movement in the fourteenth century (Ierodiakonou); as well as in John of Damascus's discussion of will (Michael Frede). On the Christian-neoplatonic tradition are founded a nominalistic position of Basil of Caesarea concerning the semantics of proper names (Paul Kalligas); a sixth-century treatise On Political Science (Dominic O'Meara); Psellos's conception of philosophy (John Duffy); and the peculiar case of Chaldaean Oracles and their commentators (Polymnia Athanassiadi). The last article on the Renaissance controversy between Plethon and Scholarios over the primacy of Plato or Aristotle (George Karamanolis) brings the volume appropriately to an end.That Platonism and Aristotelianism nearly monopolize the contributors' concerns is justified but this must not give the simplified impression that Byzantine Philosophy can be exclusively explained against this background. Other Greek philosophical traditions, such as Stoicism, are mentioned as well, and the fourteenth-century interest in skepticism is densely discussed (Börje Bydén on Metochites). The first essay is an informative outline of the Greek-Latin Philosophical Interaction (Sten Ebbesen), whose inclusion in the volume makes a similar survey of ancient Greek-Byzantine philosophical interaction more warranted.The contributors do not confine themselves to resolving specific problems of a Quellenforschung, by identifying parallel texts or recurring arguments in order to establish the obvious dependence of Byzantine thought on Greek Philosophy. In fact, as many articles show, it is the very analysis of patristic and Byzantine texts that makes us return to their ancient sources and also makes clear how this revisiting can deepen our understanding of the texts and the philosophical problems they are trying to present or to solve. When doing philosophy, Byzantine thinkers have ancient Greek concepts in their minds, and quite often have ancient texts in their hands. Now it is up to us to evaluate... (shrink)

Physicians, philosophers, and theologians consider how to address death and dying for a diverse population in a secularized century.Most of us are generally ill-equipped for dying. Today, we neither see death nor prepare for it. But this has not always been the case. In the early fifteenth century, the Roman Catholic Church published the Ars moriendi texts, which established prayers and practices for an art of dying. In the twenty-first century, physicians rely on procedures and protocols for the efficient management (...) of hospitalized patients. How can we recapture an art of dying that can facilitate our dying well? In this book, physicians, philosophers, and theologians attempt to articulate a bioethical framework for dying well in a secularized, diverse society.Contributors discuss such topics as the acceptance of human finitude; the role of hospice and palliative medicine; spiritual preparation for death; and the relationship between community, and individual autonomy. They also consider special cases, including children, elderly patients with dementia, and death in the early years of the AIDS epidemic, when doctors could do little more than accompany their patients in humble solidarity.These chapters make the case for a robust bioethics—one that could foster both the contemplation of finitude and the cultivation of community that would be necessary for a contemporary art of dying well.ContributorsJeffrey P. Bishop, Lisa Sowle Cahill, Daniel Callahan, Farr A. Curlin, Lydia S. Dugdale, Michelle Harrington, John Lantos, Stephen R. Latham, M. Therese Lysaught, Autumn Alcott Ridenour, Peter A. Selwyn, Daniel Sulmasy. (shrink)

As one of the early Enlightenment philosophers in England, John Locke sought to bring reason and critical intelligence to the discussion of the origins of civil society. Endeavoring to reconstruct the nature and purpose of government, a social contract theory is proposed. The Second Treatise sets forth a detailed discussion of how civil society came to be and the nature of its inception. Locke's discussion of tacit consent, separation of powers, and the right of citizens to revolt against repressive (...) governments, has made The Second Treatise one of the most influential essays in the history of political philosophy. (shrink)

Wee people at London, are so humbly immersd in slavish business, & taken up wth providing for a wretched Carkasse; yt there's nothing almost, but what is grosse & sensuall to be gotten from us. If a bright thought springs up any time here, ye Mists & Foggs extinguish it again presently, & leaves us no more, yn only ye pain, of seeing it die & perish away from us. Humphrey Ditton to Roger Cotes, ca. 1703THE CALCULUS OF ACCOMPLISHMENTDuring the (...) last decade of his life, Sir Isaac Newton took the measure of achievement. Probably shortly before 1725, Newton scribbled on the undated cover of a letter a brief list of those discoveries he believed belonged entirely ‘to the English’. Included were ‘the variation of the Variation’ ; the circulation of the blood; telescopic sights and the micrometer variously improved by his contemporaries, Robert Hooke and John Flamsteed; and ‘the Libration of the Moon’ likely in reference to Newton's own explanation of lunar eccentricity. Notably, this was not simply a personal calculation. Newton makes no mention of such controversial matters as the fluxional calculus, the refraction of light, or even the measure of universal gravitation, which he otherwise might have claimed as his own efforts. Even the private lights of the solitary genius could still accommodate a distinctly broader sense of the depth of national accomplishment. (shrink)

The Heirs of Plato is the first full study of the various directions in philosophy taken by Plato's followers in the first seventy years after his death in 347 BC - the period generally known as 'The Old Academy', unjustly neglected by historians of philosophy. Lucid and accessible, John Dillon's book provides an introductory chapter on the school itself, and a summary of Plato's philosophical heritage, before looking at each of the school heads and other chief characters, exploring both (...) what holds them together and what sets them apart. (shrink)

Philosophical Perspectives, Volume 35, Issue 1, Page 206-228, December 2021.

John Rawls begins a Theory of Justice with the observation that "Justice is the first virtue of social institutions, as truth is of systems of thought… Each person possesses an inviolability founded on justice that even the welfare of society as a whole cannot override"1 (p.3). The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in lock-downs, the restriction of liberties, debate about the right to refuse medical treatment and many other changes to the everyday behaviour of persons. The justice issues it raises (...) are diverse, profound and will demand our attention for some time. How we can respect the Rawlsian commitment to the inviolability of each person, when the welfare of societies as a whole is under threat goes to the heart of some of the difficult ethical issues we face and are discussed in this issue of the Journal of Medical Ethics. The debate about ICU triage and COVID-19 is quite well developed and this journal has published several articles that explore aspects of this issue and how different places approach it.2–5 Newdick et al add to the legal analysis of triage decisions and criticise the calls for respecting a narrow conception of a legal right to treatment and more detailed national guidelines for how triage decisions should be made.6 They consider scoring systems for clinical frailty, organ failure assessment, and raise some doubts about the fairness of their application to COVID-19 triage situations. Their argument seems to highlight instances of what is called the McNamara fallacy. US Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara used enemy body counts as a measure …. (shrink)

Elay Shech and John Earman have recently argued that the common topological interpretation of the Aharonov–Bohm (AB) effect is unsatisfactory because it fails to justify idealizations that it presupposes. In particular, they argue that an adequate account of the AB effect must address the role of boundary conditions in certain ideal cases of the effect. In this paper I defend the topological interpretation against their criticisms. I consider three types of idealization that might arise in treatments of the effect. (...) First, Shech takes the AB effect to involve an idealization in the form of a singular limit, analogous to the thermodynamic limit in statistical mechanics. But, I argue, the AB effect itself features no singular limits, so it doesn’t involve idealizations in this sense. Second, I argue that Shech and Earman’s emphasis on the role of boundary conditions in the AB effect is misplaced. The idealizations that are useful in connecting the theoretical description of the AB effect to experiment do interact with facts about boundary conditions, but none of these idealizations are presupposed by the topological interpretation of the effect. Indeed, the boundary conditions for which Shech and demands justification are incompatible with some instances of the AB effect, so the topological interpretation ought not justify them. Finally, I address the role of the non-relativistic approximation usually presumed in discussions of the AB effect. This approximation is essential if—as the topological interpretation supposes—the AB effect constrains and justifies a relativistic theory of the electromagnetic interaction. In this case the ends justify the means. So the topological view presupposes no unjustified idealizations. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:An American Scholar Recalls Karl Barth’s Golden Years as a Teacher (1958–1964) by Raymond Kemp Anderson, and: The Westminster Handbook to Karl Barth ed. by Richard E. BurnettMatthew R. JantzenAn American Scholar Recalls Karl Barth’s Golden Years as a Teacher (1958–1964) Raymond Kemp Anderson lewiston, ny: edwin mellen press, 2013. 438 pp. $159.95The Westminster Handbook to Karl Barth Edited by Richard E. Burnett louisville, ky: westminster john (...) knox press, 2013. 242 pp. $35.00On April 2, 1966, Karl Barth received a letter from Peter Vogelsanger, informing him that Emil Brunner—the recipient of Barth’s thunderous “Nein!” on the subject of natural theology in 1934—was on his deathbed. Two days later, Barth responded and asked Vogelsanger to tell Brunner that “the time when I thought I should say No to him is long since past, and we all live only by the fact that a great and merciful God speaks his gracious Yes to all of us.” The irenic, compassionate, and affirming tone of this letter is typical of the “mature” Barth, whom Raymond Anderson studied under from 1958 to 1964 as a ThD student at the University of Basel. This period of doctoral study is the subject of Anderson’s interesting and eminently readable new book. Anderson enjoyably weaves together several different genres in his reflections on his experience with Barth, smoothly transitioning back and forth between personal memoir, constructive theological argument, and thoughtful interpretation of Barth’s life and writings.Structurally, the book offers a series of recollections and reflections gathered loosely around common themes rather than a tightly knit argument pursued rigorously from beginning to end. In other words, the work is a series of sketches from the artist’s notebook, as opposed to one intricate and detailed portrait focusing on a single subject. [End Page 207]In the first five chapters of the book, Anderson sketches a picture of the elderly Karl Barth who served as his “doktorvater,” drawing material from his student notes and personal memories of the years he spent with Barth in Basel. While Anderson finds continuity between the earlier and later writings of Barth, he suggests that the older Barth began to increasingly unfold the “fuller, grace-centered and human-shaped positive implications” of the earlier writings (viii). In Anderson’s experience, Barth’s early appeal to “Let God be God!” had in those later years “mellowed to an even deeper appeal to let God be himself, human as well, in the most unexpected ways” (11). This mellowing extended beyond Barth’s writing to his personality and demeanor as a teacher and theologian. The Barth whom Anderson knew was humble, understated, and compassionate, a sympathetic listener and a generous interpreter—in short, an “un-dogmatic” dogmatician (139).In the sixth chapter, Anderson shifts gears and reproduces extensive transcriptions of his own notes from several of Barth’s biweekly English-language colloquia on the topics of natural theology, the Old Testament promise, Paul Tillich, and existentialism. Anderson suggests that these notes are particularly valuable because in them one witnesses Barth explaining the bare essentials of his thinking in clear and simple English terms. This is true for large portions of the transcriptions. However, it must be said that there are also portions of these transcriptions that suffer from the lack of clarity that one might expect to find in student notes of discussions conducted in a language with which Barth was not completely comfortable. Nevertheless, these transcriptions provide previously unpublished primary source material from Barth that is worth examining.From chapter 7 until the end of the book, Anderson takes up the task of “sketching key insights and special teachings from the mature Barth that in the years since Barth’s death have shown themselves to carry special significance for our American college classroom, church school, and pulpit” (205). These include, but are not limited to, Barth’s attitude toward America, his emphasis on the priority of grace, his theology of nature (not his natural theology), and his positions on theories of religion, satisfaction theories of the atonement, election, universalism, and even the possibility of extraterrestrial life. This section also includes... (shrink)

We offer a reconstruction of Richard Price’s intuition-based epistemology of normative essences, highlighting its key elements and showing how it differs from the approaches taken by other intuitionists such as Thomas Reid and G. E. Moore, as well as sentimentalists such as Francis Hutcheson and David Hume. While our analysis aims to shed light on Price’s moral epistemology, it also seeks to contribute to contemporary debates about the epistemology of essence, advancing a general intuition-based theory. These two goals are related, (...) for the former operates in the service of the latter. In this way, our discussion illustrates the role that historical research might play in contemporary inquiries into intuition. (shrink)

This volume examines the psychological basis of moral judgments and what theories of concepts apply to moral ones. It considers what mental states not only influence but also constitute our moral concepts and judgments by combining philosophical reasoning and empirical insights from the fields of moral psychology, cognitive science, evolutionary psychology, and neuroscience. On this basis, Park proposes a novel pluralistic theory of moral concepts which includes three different cognitive structures and emotions. Thus, our moral judgments are a hybrid that (...) express both cognitive and conative states. -/- In part through analysis of new empirical data on moral semantic intuitions, gathered via cross-cultural experimental research, Park draws on this to reveal that the referents of individuals’ moral judgments and concepts vary across time, contexts, and groups. Due to this, he contends for moral relativism, where moral judgments cannot be universally true across time and location but only relative to groups. -/- This text will benefit researchers, academics, and educators with an interest in cognitive science, moral theory, philosophy of psychology, and moral psychology more broadly. Those interested in ethics, applied social psychology, and moral development will also benefit from the volume. (shrink)

Charles Darwin transformed our understanding of the universe and our place in it with his development of the theory of evolution. 150 years later, we are still puzzling over the implications. John Dupr presents a lucid, witty introduction to evolution and what it means for our view of humanity, the natural world, and religion. He explains the right and the wrong ways to understand evolution: in the latter category fall most of the claims of evolutionary psychology, of which Dupr (...) gives a withering critique. He shows why the theory of evolution is one of the most important scientific ideas of all time, but makes clear that it can't explain everything - contrary to widespread popular belief, it has very little to tell us about the details of human nature and human behaviour, such as language, culture, and sexuality. Anyone who is interested in understanding what the theory of evolution can and can't do will find Darwin's Legacy a compelling and enjoyable introduction. (shrink)

“Any writer worth his salt knows that what cannot be spoken is ultimately the thing worth speaking about; yet most often this humbling awareness is unsaid or covered up. There are some who have made it their business, however, to court failure and acknowledge defeat, to explore the impasse of words before silence. William Franke has created an anthology of such explorations, undertaken in poetry and prose, that stretches from Plato to the present. Whether the subject of discourse is All (...) or Nothing does not matter: the struggle of speech to name the unnameable is the same. This ambitious two-volume undertaking demonstrates a preoccupation as old as Western civilization itself: the limits of language and the virtue of being at a loss for words. How long we have been raiding the Inarticulate!” —Peter S. Hawkins, Boston University “Developments in critical theory during the past two decades have led to renewed interest in negative theology. Books like _Languages of the Unsayable_, _Negation and Theology_, _Derrida and Negative Theology _, and _The Otherness of God _ have signaled the resurgence of this ancient tradition. William Franke’s distinctive contribution is to provide the background and texts from which these recent developments have emerged.” —Mark Taylor, Williams College Apophasis has become a major topic in the humanities, particularly in philosophy, religion, and literature. This monumental two-volume anthology gathers together most of the important historical works on apophaticism and illustrates the diverse trajectories of apophatic discourse in ancient, modern, and postmodern times. William Franke provides a major introductory essay on apophaticism at the beginning of each volume, and shorter introductions to each anthology selection. The first volume, _Classic Formulations_, offers excerpts from Plato, Plotinus, Damascius, the Bible, Gregory of Nyssa, Augustine, Pseudo-Dionysius, Maimonides, Rumi, Thomas Aquinas, Marguerite Porete, Dante, Teresa of Ávila, John of the Cross, and more. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reply to CriticsBethany Henningplato knew that philosophy is not something we write; it is something we live. As Deweyans, we know philosophy is an ideal that emerges within experience as the highest possibility for dialogue. Insofar as a book appears as an extended monologue, it obscures the qualitative and transactive dimensions of philosophy as it is practiced. But sessions like these reveal that books are moments in a conversation, (...) "perchings" in a dialogue that is forever in media res. I am deeply grateful to Bill Myers for organizing this panel, and for the generosity of Frank Ryan, Gregory Pappas, and Jim Garrison for having taken the time to read and think about this book. Each of them has served as a model for philosophical scholarship, and I am humbled and honored to have the opportunity to engage with them directly. They have challenged me in three distinct ways and have engaged with what I have written on separate plateaus of thought, at times revealing layers of which I was not fully aware. So I will do my best to respond to their concerns and develop our shared inquiry in their light. I will also own that my reading of Dewey is selective, and it is my attempt to work through a problem that materialized, as all problems do, in the course of ordinary lived experience.At Southern Illinois University Carbondale, where I attended graduate school, we offered a course called "The American Mind." The title was a provocation, so I applied to teach it one semester. It was a fantastic challenge to try to curate a selection of texts that would serve as an encounter with an intellectual tradition that eludes me as much as it informs me—after all, prior to college, I only knew that a "philosopher" is what becomes of the loser in the board game called Life. I did not know that there was something called "American philosophy" until I applied to study at SIUC.If philosophy is the way that a culture reflects upon itself, then in this book, I have tried to invite the American mind to lie down on the couch. [End Page 95] Or, it might be more accurate to say that I have asked John Dewey, as the representative of American philosophy, how he might psychoanalyze such a mind. My hypothesis is that Dewey's theory of aesthetic experience, and the art that communicates and preserves such moments of intensified vitality, touches the deepest, but unspoken meanings that human beings encounter. This is where quality, the character of an event as a singular whole, the immediate aspect of an event that we feel rather than know, can be stabilized and communicated. If an interpretation can be made of the deep conflicts that have left philosophy at the margins of American life, I believe we would be wise to begin with our "dreams," with the creations of our imagination, the artistic products that reveal the felt dimension of our shared world.Many readers of Dewey choose to focus on his theory of inquiry, his recasting of the scientific method, and his instrumentalism as forming the core of his thought. This is an understandable approach; his work here is novel and corrects bad intellectual habits. However, for the purposes of this book, I have emphasized aesthetic experience, the role of the qualitative, and pursuit of meaning over the correction of practice in my interpretation. This is a controversial choice since it courts the irrational and the vague, but I believe that our neglect of these portions of experience prevents philosophy from reconnecting with American life.Response to Frank RyanFrank Ryan is concerned about the extent to which I have cast the organism as porous, and that I have identified aesthetic experience as unconscious. I agree with Dr. Ryan's assessment that defining aesthetic experience as wholly unconscious would be a grievous error—and I hope not to have made it. There is a misleading ambiguity in the title of the book that might predispose the reader to suspect that I am claiming an equivalence, but what I intended to argue was not that aesthetic experience itself is unconscious, but rather... (shrink)

[Editor's introduction: The following are excerpts from three talks given at the conference "Policies and Publics for Science and Technology, " London, April 1990. They introduce a British research initiative in public understanding of science and point to early results. The program was developed and coordinated by the Science Policy Support Group. At the meeting, a new journal for specialists in this area was launched: Public Understanding of Science, to be edited by John Durant, Science Museum, London SW7 2DD, (...) UK. The first issue of the journal is expected to appear in April 1991. Science, Technology, & Human Values reaffirms its long commitment to publishing research on public attitudes toward science and particularly welcomes articles on this topic of general interest to the field of science and technology studies.]. (shrink)