In this thorough compendium, nineteen accomplished scholars explore, in some manner the values they find inherent in the world, their nature, and revelence through the thought of Frederick FerrZ. These essays, informed by the insights of FerrZ and coming from manifold perspectives—ethics, philosophy, theology, and environmental studies, advance an ambitious challenge to current intellectual and scholarly fashions.

In this thorough compendium, nineteen accomplished scholars explore, in some manner the values they find inherent in the world, their nature, and revelence through the thought of Frederick Ferré. These essays, informed by the insights of Ferré and coming from manifold perspectives—ethics, philosophy, theology, and environmental studies, advance an ambitious challenge to current intellectual and scholarly fashions.

This chapter discusses the analysis of Joseph Raz on coercion, trust, and citizenship. The chapter starts with a number of brief comments on some of his observations regarding the doctrine of liberty and the preference for minimum government. The chapter also includes one of Raz's arguments that states that some people favour non-perfectionist forms of government out of a misunderstanding of the implications of perfectionism for liberty.

School choice has lately risen to the top of the list of potential solutions to America's educational problems, particularly for the poor and the most disadvantaged members of society. Indeed, in the last few years several states have held referendums on the use of vouchers in private and parochial schools, and more recently, the Supreme Court reviewed the constitutionality of a scholarship program that uses vouchers issued to parents. While there has been much debate over the empirical and methodological aspects (...) of school choice policies, discussions related to the effects such policies may have on the nation's moral economy and civil society have been few and far between. School Choice, a collection of essays by leading philosophers, historians, legal scholars, and theologians, redresses this situation by addressing the moral and normative side of school choice.The twelve essays, commissioned for a conference on school choice that took place at Boston College in 2001, are organized into four sections that consider the relationship of school choice to equality, moral pluralism, institutional ecology, and constitutionality. Each section consists of three essays followed by a critical response. The contributors are Patrick McKinley Brennan, Charles L. Glenn, Amy Gutmann, David Hollenbach, S. J., Meira Levinson, Sanford Levinson, Stephen Macedo, John T. McGreevy, Martha Minow, Richard J. Mouw, Joseph O'Keefe, S. J., Michael J. Perry, Nancy L. Rosenblum, Rosemary C. Salomone, Joseph P. Viteritti, Paul J. Weithman, and Alan Wolfe. (shrink)

Most philosophical explorations of responsibility discuss the topic solely in terms of metaphysics and the "free will" problem. By contrast, these essays by leading philosophers view responsibility from a variety of perspectives -- metaphysics, ethics, action theory, and the philosophy of law. After a broad, framing introduction by the volume's editors, the contributors consider such subjects as responsibility as it relates to the "free will" problem; the relation between responsibility and knowledge or ignorance; the relation between causal and moral responsibility; (...) the difference, if any, between responsibility for actions and responsibility for omissions; the metaphysical requirements for making sense of "collective" responsibility; and the relation between moral and legal responsibility. The contributors include such distinguished authors as Alfred R. Mele, John Martin Fischer, George Sher, and Frances Kamm, as well as important rising scholars. Taken together, the essays in _Action, Ethics, and Responsibility_ offer a breadth of perspectives that is unmatched by other treatments of the topic. Contributors: Joseph Keim Campbell, David Chan, Randolph Clarke, E.J. Coffman, John Martin Fischer, Helen Frowe, Todd Jones, Frances Kamm, Antti Kauppinen, Alfred R. Mele, Michael O'Rourke, Paul Russell, Robert F. Schopp, George Sher, Harry S. Silverstein, Saul Smilansky, Donald Smith, Charles T. Wolfe The hardcover edition does not include a dust jacket. (shrink)

Due to domestication, dogs differ from wolves in the way they respond to their environment, including to humans. Selection for tameness and the associated changes to the autonomic nervous system (ANS) regulation have been proposed as the primary mechanisms of domestication. To test this idea, we compared two low-arousal states in equally raised and kept wolves and dogs: resting, a state close to being asleep, and inactive wakefulness, which together take up an important part in the time budgets of wolves (...) and dogs. We measured arousal via cardiac output in three conditions: alone, with a familiar human partner, or with pack members (i.e., conspecifics). Specifically, we compared heart rate (HR) and heart rate variability (HRV) of six wolves and seven dogs. As patterns of resting can vary adaptively, even between closely related species, we predicted that dogs would be generally more aroused than wolves, because living with humans may come with less predictable contexts than living with conspecifics; hence, dogs would need to be responsive at all times. Furthermore, we predicted that due to the effects of domestication, emotional social support by familiar people would reduce arousal more in dogs than in equally human-socialized wolves, leading to more relaxed dogs than wolves when away from the pack. Overall, we found a clear effect of the interactions between species (i.e., wolf versus dog), arousal state (i.e., resting or awake inactive) and test conditions, on both HR and HRV. Wolves and dogs were more aroused when alone (i.e., higher HR and lower HRV) than when in the presence of conspecifics or a familiar human partner. Dogs were more relaxed than wolves when at rest and close to a familiar human but this difference disappeared when awake. In conclusion, instead of the expected distinct overall differences between wolves and dogs in ANS regulation, we rather found subtle context-specific responses, suggesting that such details are important in understanding the domestication process. (shrink)

Many scholars agree that the Internet plays a pivotal role in self-radicalization, which can lead to behaviours ranging from lone-wolf terrorism to participation in white nationalist rallies to mundane bigotry and voting for extremist candidates. However, the mechanisms by which the Internet facilitates self-radicalization are disputed; some fault the individuals who end up self-radicalized, while others lay the blame on the technology itself. In this paper, we explore the role played by technological design decisions in online self-radicalization in its (...) myriad guises, encompassing extreme as well as more mundane forms. We begin by characterizing the phenomenon of technological seduction. Next, we distinguish between top-down seduction and bottom-up seduction. We then situate both forms of technological seduction within the theoretical model of dynamical systems theory. We conclude by articulating strategies for combatting online self-radicalization. (shrink)

Empiricism is a claim about the contents of the mind: its classic slogan is nihil est in intellectu quod non fuerit in sensu, ‘there is nothing in the mind (intellect, understanding) which is not first in the senses’. As such, it is not a claim about the fundamental nature of the world as material. I focus here on in an instance of what one might term the materialist appropriation of empiricism. One major component in the transition from a purely epistemological (...) claim about the mind and its contents, to an ontological claim about the nature of the world, is the new focus on brain-mind relations in the eighteenth century. Here I examine a Lockean trajectory as exemplified in Joseph Priestley’s 1777 Disquisitions Relating to Matter and Spirit. But Locke explicitly ruled out that his inquiry into the logic of ideas amounted to a ‘physical consideration of the mind’. What does it mean, then, for Priestley to present himself as continuing a Lockean tradition, while presenting mental processes as tightly identified with ‘an organical structure such as that of the brain’ (although he was not making a strict identity claim as we might understand it, post-Smart and Armstrong)? One issue here is that of Priestley's source of ‘empirical data’ regarding the correlation and indeed identification of mental and cerebral processes. David Hartley’s theory in his 1749 Observations on Man was, as is well known, republished in abridged form by Priestley, but he discards Hartley's 'vibratory neurophysiology' while retaining the associationist framework, although not because he disagreed with the former. Yet Hartley was at the very least, strongly agnostic about metaphysical issues (and it is difficult to study these authors while bracketing off religious considerations). One could see Locke and Hartley as articulating programs for the study of the mind which were more or less naturalistic (more strongly so in Hartley’s case) while avoiding ‘materialism’ per se; in contrast, Priestley bit the (materialist) bullet. In this paper I examine Priestley’s appropriation and reconstruction of this ‘micro-tradition’, while emphasizing its problems. (shrink)

How does Locke contribute to the development of 18th-century projects for a science of the mind, even though he seems to reject or at least bracket off such an idea himself? Contrary to later understandings of empiricism, Locke goes out of his way to state that his project to investigate and articulate the ‘logic of ideas’ is not a scientific project: “I shall not at present meddle with the Physical consideration of the Mind” (Essay, I.i.2). Locke further specifies that this (...) means his analysis of mental processes will not engage with knowledge of the brain (e.g. in terms of corpuscles and animal spirits), even though he had been the student of Thomas Willis. Now, Kant seemed to make an elementary mistake, given such a clear statement on Locke’s part, when he claimed that Locke’s project was a “physiology of the understanding” (in the Preface to the A edition of the first Critique). One can ask of course what this physiology of the understanding was, and if it existed, in or out of the Lockean intellectual world (as I have sought to investigate in a 2016 paper). This leads me to inquire into the outcome of his empiricism for a scientific treatment of the mind, including in the sense of a ‘naturalization’ of the mind (with implications also for our understanding of empiricism: Anstey’s influential distinction between experimental and speculative philosophy does not seem useful here). Because if Kant made this charge, there were also many 18th-century thinkers who positively treated Locke as their great forerunner in psychology and related fields: Charles Bonnet and Joseph Priestley among them, just as some prominent physicians such as Cabanis claimed to be ‘finishing the job’ that Locke had started in, e.g. their materialist theories of the passions. What one might term ‘the Locke Problem’ here is: how can one reconcile empiricism and claims about cerebral processes, while seeking to remain a Lockean? Differently put, what is the process of naturalization, a naturalization of? (shrink)

Bracken synthesizes Polanyi’s notion of morphogentic field and Whitehead’s notion of societies of actual occasions. These comments emphasize the implications of the metaphors involved in these notions. The rnetaphor of plants growing in afield lies beyond the concept of a morphogenetic field, and the metaphor of a society of interacting persons lies behind the concept of a society of actual occasions. I suggest that one of the implications of this metaphor is that there is not, as Bracken argues, a problem (...) of continuity in Whitehead’s metaphysics of events. (shrink)

Panentheism has become a familiar term in contemporary Christian systematic theology and philosophy, for it is widely believed to be an appropriate way to overcome the alleged dualism found in the classical God-world relationship. But what is meant by the term panentheism, and how does it work so as to avoid becoming still another form of pantheism or cosmic monism? In 2004 Philip Clayton and the late Arthur Peacocke published a set of papers on the topic of panentheism that came (...) from a conference in England on that topic in 2001.1 Yet, while there were certain broad affinities in approach and content among many of the papers, none of them used precisely the same conceptual model for analysis of the concept. As.. (shrink)

The essays in this book deal with philosophical issues in the thought of Maimonides. Included are: The Literary Character of the Guide for the Perplexed by Leo Staus, The Purpose of the Law According to Maimonides by Miriam Galston, and Essence and Existence in Maimonides by Alexander Altmann.

Alfred North Whitehead's master work, Process and Reality, is intended to extend the cosmological vision of Whitehead in a new direction. By interpreting societies within Whitehead's scheme as structured fields of activity, the author projects a universe of hierarchically ordered fields of activity, up to and including the all-compassing field of activity constituted by the Christian Trinity.

During the Middle Ages, philosophers and theologians argued over the extramental reality of universal forms or essences. In the early modern period, the relation between subjectivity and objectivity, the individual self and knowledge of the outside world, was a rich subject of debate. Today, there is considerable argument about the relation between spontaneity and determinism within the evolutionary process, whether a principle of spontaneous self-organization as well as natural selection is at work in the aggregation of molecules into cells and (...) the development of primitive forms of life into complex organisms. In _Subjectivity, Objectivity and Intersubjectivity_, Joseph A. Bracken proposes that what is ultimately at stake here is the age-old problem of the relationship between the One and the Many, universality and particularity on different levels of existence and activity within nature. Bracken rejects traditional models of this relationship, wherein either the One or the Many is presupposed to have priority over the other. He instead suggests that a new social ontology—one that is grounded in a theory of universal intersubjectivity—protects both the concrete particularity of individual entities in their specific relations to one another and their enduring corporate reality as a stable community or environment within Nature. What emerges is a bold reimagining of the sometimes strained relationship between religion and science. Bracken's clear writing, sophisticated philosophical analysis, and exemplary scholarship will lend this new work an enthusiastic appreciation by readers with deep interests in philosophy and philosophical theology. (shrink)

The correct understanding of the concept of heart in Rahner consists in a recognition that the highest performance of a finite spirit comprises affective, cognitive, and volitional consciousness in a functional union that could be called the heart-mind. Rather than privilege cognition and volition and then consider feelings and moods as separate and purely subjective phenomena, we must recognize the intentionality of certain higher affective responses, i.e., those that have become integrated into the highest operational synthesis of a person who (...) is developing as an adult in matters ethical and mystical. The highest actions of such a person are intersubjective faith, love, and hope. (shrink)

RECENT THEOLOGICAL SPECULATION ON THE TRINITY HAS CONCEIVED THE DIVINE NATURE AS AN INTERPERSONAL PROCESS. WHITEHEADIAN PHILOSOPHY MAY POSSIBLY BE USEFUL HERE. ON THE ASSUMPTION THAT NOT ONLY ACTUAL ENTITIES, BUT LIKEWISE WHITEHEADIAN SOCIETIES POSSESS AN ONTOLOGICAL UNITY AND EXERCISE AN AGENCY PROPER TO THEMSELVES, THEN THE TRINITY MAY BE VIEWED AS A DEMOCRATICALLY ORGANIZED STRUCTURED SOCIETY WITH EACH OF THE DIVINE PERSONS AS A SUBORDINATE PERSONALLY ORDERED SOCIETY OF ACTUAL OCCASIONS.

Management Ethics provides the rationale, conceptual framework and practical tools needed to build and sustain management and organization integrity over time.

Some Whiteheadians argue that past actual entities only exist and are available for prehension by later actual entities within the divine consequent nature. Others insist that past actual entities are objectively immortal and available for prehension within the extensive continuum. Based on an interpretation of Whiteheadian societies as structured fields of activity for their constituent actual occasions, this article proposes that the world has an objective reality even apart from the existence of God, and that past actual entities arereflected in (...) the current structure of the cosmic process. Yet the world still needs God as its ultimate source of creativity. (shrink)

Long a source for quotations, fragments, and factoids, the Noctes Atticae of Aulus Gellius offers hundreds of brief but vivid glimpses of Roman intellectual life. In this book Joseph Howley demonstrates how the work may be read as a literary text in its own right, and discusses the rich evidence it provides for the ancient history of reading, thought, and intellectual culture. He argues that Gellius is in close conversation with predecessors both Greek and Latin, such as Plutarch and (...) Pliny the Elder, and also offers new ways of making sense of the text's 'miscellaneous' qualities, like its disorder and its table of contents. Dealing with topics ranging from the framing of literary quotations to the treatment of contemporary celebrities who appear in its pages, this book offers a new way to learn from the Noctes about the world of Roman reading and thought. (shrink)

In Religion in an Age of Science, Ian Barbour concludes that the contemporary evolutionary worldview with its emphasis on the interplay of law and chance, relationality and autonomy, can be properly accounted for only by something like the process‐relational metaphysics of Alfred North Whitehead. At the same time, he expresses serious reservations about certain features of Whitehead's scheme, notably, his perceived inability to account for the ongoing identity of the human self and for the fact of multilevel organization within organisms (...) and in the world of inanimate compounds. In this article, I suggest that both of these difficulties can be resolved if one adopts a revisionist understanding of the Whiteheadian category of society according to which democratically organized societies possess an ontological unity and exercise a corporate agency proper to their own level of existence and activity. Furthermore, if one applies this revisionist understanding of societies to the Whiteheadian doctrine of God, a Trinitarian understanding of God becomes possible within the overall parameters of process‐relational metaphysics. In this way, traditional belief in the doctrine of the Trinity can be reconciled with a scientifically credible worldview. (shrink)

String theory is often depicted as the best chance for natural science to find a Theory of Everything. Whiteheadians may object that only a philosophical cosmology such as Whitehead presents in PR can “frame a coherent, logical, necessary system of general ideas in terms of which every element of our experience can be interpreted” (PR 3). But then they have to show that Whitehead’s scheme and string theory fit together nicely, with each helping to resolve residual problem areas in the (...) other. The present article conjectures that the tiny vibrating strings postulated by string theory and the superjects of individual actual entities might correspond to the “final, real things of which the world is made up” (PR 18). Likewise, the extra spatial dimensions required by the mathematics of string theory might be more intelligible in terms of the interaction of different levels of subsocieties within a Whiteheadian structured society. (shrink)

A translation of Zhu Xi's 朱熹 Zhouyi benyi 周易本義 (1188).

This dissertation is a study of the intersection of two monumental products and shapers of the Chinese tradition: the I-ching (Book of Change), which has influenced nearly all schools of Chinese thought for two millennia; and Chu Hsi (1130-1200), whose systematization of the Confucian tradition (known in the West as Neo-Confucianism) has dominated Chinese intellectual history until the present century. Focusing on Chu Hsi's theory of mind and his view of the ordinary person's need for concrete methods of self-cultivation, the (...) dissertation demonstrates how Chu Hsi's understanding of the I – its history, its contents, and it use in the practice of divination -- was fully integrated with his moral-metaphysics and his methodology of attaining Sagehood (the Neo-Confucian religious goal). In broader perspective, this is a study of the nature and limits of Confucian rationalism, the pragmatic character of Chinese philosophy, and the incorporation of a religious ritual (divination) into a philosophical system. Chapter I is an Introduction in two sections. The first is a survey of ancient Greek and modern theories of divination, establishing a comparative framework in which to analyze Chu Hsi's theory of divination. The second is a brief sketch of the two major schools of I-ching interpretation prior to Chu Hsi. Chapter II outlines the intellectual-historical context of Chu Hsi's approach to the I, concentrating on the complementary poles of his central problematic: cultural (the problem of the "transmission of the Way") and individual (the problem of mind). The "mind of the Sage" is discussed as a symbol of the unification of these poles. Chapter III is an examination of Chu's theory of I-ching interpretation, and the role of the mythic Sage Fu Hsi, who created the hexagrams and began the transmission of the Way, in Chu Hsi's system. Chapter IV concerns the practice of divination as a method of self-cultivation. It is proposed that Chu regarded I-ching divination – within certain limits -- as a method of detecting incipient changes in external events and in one's mind, thereby cultivating "moral responsiveness," or the ability to respond in a timely, intuitive, and correct way to change. Chapter V explores certain levels of symbolic meaning in the "philosophy of change" presupposed by hexagram divination. It is suggested that the human ability to transform oneself into a fully realized moral being, in responsive harmony with the natural world, is a Confucian way of grounding the self in the creative principle that constitutes the ontological foundation of the phenomenal world. (shrink)