In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Spiritually Bilingual:Buddhist Christians and the Process of Dual Religious BelongingJonathan HomrighausenSociologists studying convert Buddhism in America have found that a surprisingly large number of Buddhists also identify as Christian.1 However, little empirical literature examines these Buddhist-Christian “dual religious belongers.”2 This study aims to fill that gap. Based on extensive interviews with eight self-identified “Buddhist Christians” of varying levels of doctrinal and experiential understanding, this study examines the conversion process (...) of these dual belongers and how they combine these religious traditions. Building on Michael von Brück’s contention that one’s first religion is like a mother tongue, I compare taking on a second religious tradition to learning a second language.3 As practitioners become more “fluent” in the second religion, they differentiate the two religions more clearly while combining them more seamlessly in their daily lives.methodologyThis study employs grounded theory and a qualitative, inductive methodology. Grounded theory is designed to elucidate the dynamic changes involved in a social process, with rich descriptions of categories and explanations for variations between different people’s experiences.4 While the use of qualitative methods with a small sample size means that my results have little statistical significance, such methods have been used in recent research on conversion and dual belonging and yield deep theoretical insight.5Eight participants for this study were solicited via word of mouth, personal acquaintance, and posting in a Buddhist-Christian Yahoo Group. In particular, I focused on Buddhist-Catholic practitioners to limit my sample group. Interviews were conducted and recorded in person or on the phone over a three-month period in fall, 2011. Interviews were open-ended, each lasting from sixty to ninety minutes. Several participants later received a draft of the paper to ensure they felt adequately represented; five participants responded. Names of participants have been changed for [End Page 57] confidentiality. To complement these interviews, I also incorporate written accounts of Buddhist-Christian conversion from both Catholic and Protestant authors.6participants’ backgroundsIt can be difficult to define Buddhist identity in the West, as many people who regularly practice meditation in a sangha do not self-identify as Buddhist.7 This study focuses on those who both practice Buddhist and Christian spirituality and belong to religious groups of both traditions. The eight participants have a range of religious expertise and commitment to both traditions. In terms of Catholic identity, six are laypeople (one in a secular religious order), one a priest, and one a nun. Three participants are theology professors. Seven have been Catholics from birth. One spent a decade living in a Buddhist monastery, two of them are roshis, and five give Buddhist teaching or meditation instruction formally. Seven of them practice various forms of Ch’an or Zen, while one practices Tibetan Buddhism.Cathy went not from Catholicism to Buddhism, but from Buddhism to Catholicism. A former Mormon and Unitarian, she began learning meditation at a Ch’an temple. This Ch’an temple normally only reached out to the Chinese community, but there was a Taiwanese nun there who wanted to reach out to non-Chinese community members. After practicing there for a few years, Cathy moved to another location, where she could not find any sangha that fit her needs. After attending Mass with a friend, she decided to become Catholic because she needed a community. It was not a hard transition for Cathy, who described feeling in meditation “some kind of entity, whether you call it God or Creator or atomic process.” She was confirmed as a Catholic in 2011.Rachel has been a nun for fifty years and a practicing Zen Buddhist for thirty, ten of those years living and working in a Zen monastery in the mountains of California. She described feeling an emptiness in her faith, a lack of practical knowledge of how to attain the spiritual goals that her Catholic tradition had for her. After hearing Zen teacher Cheri Huber speak at a conference, she took Huber on as her teacher. She has facilitated meditation workshops for many years. Though meditation instruction is not her full-time ministry, “meditation is my life … so in a sense... (shrink)

What contribution can political philosophers make to policy questions, such as the best configuration of the welfare state? On one view, political philosophers set out abstract theories of justice that can guide policy makers in their attempt to transform existing institutions. Yet it rarely seems the case that such a model is used in practice, and it therefore becomes unclear how political philosophy can contribute to policy debates. Following a suggestion from Margaret MacDonald, I consider the view that political philosophers (...) can contribute by drawing attention to relatively neglected values. I develop this view to add the possibility that political philosophers can try to correct a situation in which a particular value, though important, can come to be too highly emphasised. I illustrate the account by considering the rise of the value of ‘responsibility’ in the welfare state, and ultimately the damage that has been done to society to disadvantaged groups by the over-insistence on the importance of responsibility. (shrink)

In the works of Sextus Empiricus, scepticism is presented in its most elaborate and challenging form. This book investigates - both from an exegetical and from a philosophical point of view - the chief argumentative forms which ancient scepticism developed. Thus the particular focus is on the Agrippan aspect of Sextus' Pyrrhonism. Barnes gives a lucid explanation and analysis of these arguments, both individually and as constituent parts of a sceptical system. For, taken together, these forms amount to a formidable (...) and systematic challenge to any claim to knowledge or rational belief. The challenge had a great influence on the history of philosophy. And it has never been met. This study reflects the growing interest in ancient scepticism. Quotations from the ancient sources are all translated and Greek terms are explained. Notes on the ancient authors give a brief guide to the sources, both familiar and unfamiliar. (shrink)

I will be arguing that a subject’s belief that p is justified if and only if he knows that p: justification is knowledge. I will start by describing two broad classes of allegedly justified beliefs that do not constitute knowledge and which, hence, cannot be what they are often taken to be if my view is correct. It is far from clear what my view is until I say a lot more about the relevant concept or concepts of justification that (...) concern me. The following section describes several concepts of justification that epistemologists have employed, and, in particular, identifies the two concepts of justification that I claim are coextensive with the concept of knowledge. One of those is the deontological conception of justification: I will be arguing that one ought not believe that p unless one knows that p. I imagine that the major opposition to my view will be that it is simply obvious that there are justified false beliefs, a feeling that I try to dispel in the lengthy section on concepts of justification before I finally get around to giving the main arguments in favor of my view. A view as unorthodox as mine demands more than a single argument: I offer four in the third section. Everyone allows that many people have many unjustified beliefs, and everyone has some unjustified beliefs, but such beliefs appear to be far more prevalent on my view than on more orthodox views. In the last section, I argue that unjustified beliefs, although widespread, are not quite as common as they might appear to be on my view. (shrink)

We are defined by our faces. They give identity but, equally importantly, reveal our moods and emotions through facial expression. So what happens when the face cannot move? This book is about people who live with Mbius Syndrome, which has as its main feature an absence of movement of the muscles of facial expression from birth.

This chapter explores the different grounds for accepting the claim that all truths are knowable, the assumption central to the derivation of Fitch’s result. It argues that although there is no compelling argument for holding that all truths are knowable, there are various positions in which this feature of semantic anti-realism fits naturally; rejecting this puts serious tension into a broad range of philosophical outlooks, including theism and physicalism. In the end, the paradox should be felt by everyone, even those (...) who do not accept the knowability claim, because the heart of the paradox is not simply in what is implied by the knowability claim, but in a lost logical distinction between what is actual and what is possible. (shrink)

Research on the division of cognitive labor has found that adults and children as young as age 5 are able to find appropriate experts for different causal systems. However, little work has explored how children and adults decide when to seek out expert knowledge in the first place. We propose that children and adults rely on “mechanism metadata,” information about mechanism information. We argue that mechanism metadata is relatively consistent across individuals exposed to similar amounts of mechanism information, and it (...) is applicable to a wide range of causal systems. In three experiments, we show that adults and children as young as 5 years of age have a consistent sense of the causal complexity of different causal systems, and that this sense of complexity is related to decisions about when to seek expert knowledge, but over development there is a shift in focus from procedural information to internal mechanism information. (shrink)

Phylogenetic information is often necessary to distinguish between evolutionary scenarios. Recently, some prominent proponents of evolutionary psychology have acknowledged this, and have claimed that such evidence has in fact been brought to bear on adaptive hypotheses involving complex human psychological traits. Were this possible, it would be a valuable source of evidence regarding hypothesized adaptive traits in humans. However, the structure of the Hominidae family makes this difficult or impossible. For many traits of interest, the closest extant relatives to the (...) human species are too phenotypically different from humans for such methods to provide meaningful data. While phylogenetic information can be useful for testing adaptive hypotheses in humans, these generally involve traits that are (a) not widely shared in the species or (b) fairly widely shared in the Hominidae family, and hence likely of a lower order of complexity than the sorts of traits evolutionary psychology has so far been interested in. (shrink)

One of the most salient facts about our experience of the world is that objects appear to have colors. This feature of our experience is both striking and pervasive. Indeed, representations of colors of objects are among the most notable deliverances of the visual modality, which is perhaps our most important source of information about the world. For this reason, among others, questions about the nature of color have crucial significance for a variety of philosophical subjects including perception, ontology, epistemology, (...) semantics, and philosophy of mind. But the nature of color is a fascinating philosophical topic in its own right, and there has been a significant increase in the philosophical attention paid to this matter in recent years. In this essay I'll survey some of the main views about the nature of color in the contemporary literature and attempt to lay out some of the arguments that have been used to support or reject various of these accounts. (shrink)

This paper examines Larry Temkin’s notion of an ‘essentially comparative’ concept and the uses to which he puts it. It is suggested that this notion is a conflation of two distinct notions which need not go together. This leads to a critical examination of Temkin’s arguments that certain central ethical concepts are essentially comparative. These arguments are often found wanting, as is Temkin’s treatment of the Person Affecting View.

In the debate over scientific realism, attention has been given recently to a realist position referred to as structural realism. In this essay, I offer a version of this position and indicate how it addresses two standard forms of underdetermination argument posed by the anti-realist.

The regulation of drugs presents a challenge for liberalism: how can punishing a person for an action that harms only himself or herself be justified? For public policy a related difficulty is to justify the differential treatment of drugs and alcohol. Philosophical arguments suggest that current regulations are unjustified, and that some currently illegal drugs should be treated no more harshly than alcohol. However, such arguments make little or no impact in public policy discussions. This generates a further problem: to (...) understand the different perspectives of philosophical reasoning and public policy so that philosophical arguments can have a greater role in public policy debates. (shrink)

One of the most famous stories in Ugaritic literature is the legend of Aqht that was found at Ras Shamra, Syria, during the early 1930s. Written in Ugaritic script and spread over three worn and broken tablets, this text has been thoroughly studied for the past eighty years. More than a few studies have dealt with the following questions: Is the end of the known text in the third tablet really the end of the story? Or is there perhaps a (...) missing tablet, or tablets, that continue the plot from the third tablet? These questions have been answered on the basis of storyline and plot, and many believe that there must have been more contents that complete this story and that it cannot end where the text ends. In this paper we have tried to answer this question based on epigraphic evidence found in the third tablet of the Aqht legend. After carefully examining four unique features of this tablet, we conclude that KTU 1.19 is, in fact, the last one of this specific sequence. We support this evidence by an analysis of the contents, showing that there is indeed enough text to suggest a proper closure for this legend. (shrink)

This paper discusses issues relating to the normativity of prescriptive rules: what does it mean for a rule to be able to direct action, and what are the implications for the desirability of rule-based decision-making? It is argued that: cognitively, one must allow for more than a single answer to the first question ; and normatively, these different structures typically serve for different purposes in allocation of power and discretion. The next issue is the connection between rule-based decision-making and semantic (...) theories of language. On a meta-discursive level, the paper makes a twofold claim: that normative discourse is possible only on the basis of a sound cognitive inquiry, while cognitive inquiry alone is not sufficient to explain social action and interaction, lacking tools to deal with the contingent normative demands from decision-making systems, such as adjudication. The discussion of prescriptive rules serves as a case-study for this claim. These and related topics have been dealt with by Frederick Schauer. His model of rules as entrenched generalizations and mediators between "justifications " and action is the starting point of the present discussion, which, on most of the issues mentioned above, results in conclusions quite different from Schauer's. (shrink)

“Review a friend’s book? Surely that’s not done: magis amica, no doubt, veritas—but friendship stops the critic’s nose for truth and smoothes his tongue to bland civilities.” But here there’s not the smallest risk of fudge; for here the most exacting reader will heap up superlatives. In truth, you’ll meet no finer work on Hellenistic thought than what’s between the covers of this book.

A chapter on moral epistemology. Asks what, for the particularist, will count as a basic moral fact. Considers the modal status of such facts, arguing that they are contingent, but known a priori. Claims that this position is neither foundationalist nor coherentist. Ends by considering various suggestions that particularism cannot avoid some form of general scepticism in ethics.

Quotation has been much studied in philosophy. Given that quotation allows one to diagonalize out of any grammar, there have been comparatively few attempts within the linguistic literature to develop an account within a formal linguistic theory. Nonetheless, given the ubiquity of quotation in natural language, linguists need to explicate the formal mechanisms it employs. The central claim of this paper is that once one assumes a dialogical perspective on language such as provided by the KoS (KoS is not an (...) acronym, despite emphasizing a Konversationally Oriented Semantics) framework, formalized in a rich type theory like Type Theory with Records, much of the mystery evaporates. In particular, one can utilize as denotations for quotative constructions entities that are independently motivated for dialogue processing—utterance types and locutionary propositions, Austinian propositions about speech events. (shrink)

BackgroundChronic kidney disease is a significant cause of global deaths. Those who progress to end-stage kidney disease often commence dialysis as a life-extending treatment. For cognitively impaired patients, the decision as to whether they commence dialysis will fall to someone else. This scoping review was conducted to map existing literature pertaining to how decisions about dialysis are and should be made with, for, and on behalf of adult patients who lack decision-making capacity. In doing so, it forms the basis of (...) a larger body of work that is exploring how these decisions ought to be made.MethodsTo identify relevant papers, searches were conducted on Ovid MEDLINE(R), Embase, PsychINFO, The Cochrane Library, and Web of Science. Inclusion criteria were then applied, requiring that papers: report on empirical studies about how decisions about dialysis are made and/or discuss how decisions about dialysis should be made with, for, and on behalf of adult patients who lack decision-making capacity; be published from 1961 onwards; and be published in English. This resulted in 27 papers eligible for inclusion.ResultsOf note, the majority of papers originated in the United States. There was wide variation across the included papers. Extracted data were grouped under the following themes: involving various parties (patient involvement, family dominance, and wider communication); objectivity about care options (including difficulties with family detachment); cultural sensitivity; medical versus non-medical factors; managing nonadherent patients; and the role and prevalence of substituted judgement. The literature shows that there is inconsistency in the principles and processes surrounding decisions made about dialysis with, for, and on behalf of adult patients who lack decision-making capacity.ConclusionsThis scoping review demonstrates that there is significant variation in both the practice and theory of dialysis decision making with, for, and on behalf of cognitively impaired adult patients. Complexity arises in considering who should get a say, how influential their say should be in a decision, and what factors are most relevant to the decision. A lack of up-to-date literature exploring this issue is highlighted, with this scoping review providing a useful groundwork from which further research can be undertaken. (shrink)

The Anthropic Principle, in use by physicists, astronomers, and cosmologists, is currently under consideration by philosophers. This principle, in its various forms, appeals to man's existence as a constraint on our determination of natural laws and natural constants, as a principle of prediction, and, in its strongest form, as a principle of explanation which sanctions an argument for the universe being a product of design. What I shall endeavour to show here is how this principle, in its various forms, is (...) used in furthering our understanding of cosmology, and why this principle cannot be used as a principle of explanation. (shrink)

The theory of actively open-minded thinking (AOT) implies standards for good thinking. Two broad aspects of these standards characterise individual differences in their acceptance: myside bias, in which thinking favours possible conclusions that are already strong; and uncertainty aversion, a belief that good thinking results in high confidence. Acceptance of AOT standards is often measured with short questionnaire scales. The present paper reports one study focusing on each of these two biases in the evaluation of the trustworthiness of sources, on (...) the basis of short statements differing in signs of myside bias or of unjustified overconfidence. A 10-item scale measuring largely myside bias predicts sensitivity to both sources of difference in the statements. A third study examines the generality of the two standards across topics. The study used four questions about each topic and an 11-item scale with more items about uncertainty aversion. Individual differences are preserved across topic, although some results imply that individual differences are more pronounced when a standard is seen as more relevant to the content. The two standards are best characterised as two unidimensional factors that are correlated with each other. Thus, individual differences in AOT standards are not unidimensional. (shrink)

I outline the current debate over the European Union democratic deficit in terms of differing methodological approaches towards the realization of freedom and basic rights to political participation. Federalists opt for a model of freedom as noninterference and autonomous self-determination by proposing to tie basic rights in the EU to a univocal form of European-wide popular sovereignty. Although skeptics argue that the EU lacks the fundamental basis for such European-wide democratic self-determination, they ultimately defend a similar view of freedom as (...) noninterference with their appeal to the collective will of the member states. Democratic revisionists instead point to the novel democratic potential of institutions in the EU such as the Open Method of Coordination for mediating overlapping sovereignties. I conclude using the example of basic rights to effective participation for immigrants and minorities to illustrate the strengths of the revisionist view over views that appeal to the principle of subsidiarity. (shrink)

Utilitarians and their critics commonly assume that maximizing utilitarianism necessarily aggregates over cardinal comparable personal utility rankings that are homogeneous in quality independently of their sources or objects, whether utility is conceived in terms of pleasure or preference satisfaction. Although familiar versions of utilitarianism, crude or sophisticated, do make such rich homogeneous utility information part of the very meaning of the doctrine, utilitarian philosophy loses credibility as a result. A more credible version of maximizing utilitarianism along John Stuart Mill's lines (...) relies instead on plural kinds of ordinal non-comparable personal utilities that are heterogeneous in quality. One kind of utility is qualitatively superior to another if and only if the higher kind is more valuable than the lower kind irrespective of quantity. Given that the kind of utility associated with the moral sentiment of justice is qualitatively superior to any competing kinds, Mill's pluralistic ordinal utilitarianism gives absolute priority to a social code of equal rights and duties over competing considerations. Some key practical implications of this extraordinary utilitarianism are discussed with reference to various examples of the sort discussed in the literature. (shrink)