Two Christian theologians writing in Arabic in the early ninth century argued that God had created humanity to freely choose good or evil actions, a belief shared universally by previous Christian writers in Greek and Syriac no matter the denomination they came from. They were debating with Muslim intellectuals who held that God created all human actions before they were acquired by humans, so that God had already decided which actions a particular human being would choose, whether good or evil. (...) Theodore Abū Qurra and ʿAmmār al-Baṣrī developed dialogues with determinist Muslims in the hope that they might influence these determinist Muslims to adopt earlier Muslim beliefs that the Qurʾan taught that God would judge humans for the choices that they freely made for good or evil. However, the trend towards determinism was so strong that by the end of the ninth century the mainstream Sunni view would be that God decreed all human actions before they were acquired by humans. (shrink)

The arrival of Muslim rulers who were insistent on the unity of God among Christians who testified to the unity of God in His triune nature introduced a considerable challenge to those Christians who were in the ascendency throughout the Middle East. Now they were on the defensive, needing to stem the movement of members of their own community to Islam which would eventually lead to Muslims becoming the majority. In the period of gradual transfer from majority to minority status (...) Christian theologians attempted both to make their faith in the Trinity intelligible to Muslim intellectuals with whom they debated, and to give reasons to Christians for holding firm to their faith. These theologians are hardly known to the global church of the 21st century and it is the purpose of this paper to make them come alive for Christians who are witnessing to their faith before Muslims in our time in the hope that a contemporary testimony to the Triune God can be encouraged. (shrink)

Christian views of the Prophet Muhammad have in the past 30 years covered a wide spectrum from rejection of Muhammad’s prophetic status as a bringer of revelation from God to a warm embrace of the Qur’an as a third testament to revelation after the Old and New Testaments. The significance of the late Anglican Bishop Kenneth Cragg’s assessment of Muhammad, published in 1984, is addressed in this article by surveying the range of responses to the founder of Islam which followed. (...) Twenty-first century Christian–Muslim relations are likely to be deeply concerned with dialogue about Christian attitudes to the Prophet Muhammad. (shrink)

Beyond being the first substantial publication on Fourier, this work contains the text of Fourier's seminal paper of 1807 on the propagation of heat, marking the first time it has ever appeared in print. This paper incorporates many of the mathematical creations on which Fourier's fame rests, including derivation of the diffusion equation, the separation of the treatment of surface phenomena from internal phenomena, the use of boundary values and initial conditions, and the development of "Fourier series" and the so-called (...) "Bessel functions."When submitted to the examiners of the Institut de France, the originality of the paper and the surprising nature of some of its mathematical revelations caused great controversy, and it was denied publication both in 1807 and in later years. Fourier had the support, among the examiners, of Laplace and Monge, but Lagrange was adamantly in opposition, so that Fourier's work did not appear in print until 1822, reworked into book form.Fourier's mathematical discoveries are intimately related to his interest in the solution of physical problems and their experimental verification. The mathematical methods he developed in connection with heat diffusion apply to physical situations far beyond the boundaries of this area. Generally, Fourier may be credited with one of the first major extensions of mathematical physics beyond the applications of Newton's laws of motion and universal gravitation.The opening biographical chapter of this book follows Fourier's career up to the submission of the 1807 paper, and the two closing chapters take up his life and work from that point on. Fourier had strong political motivations and spent much of his life in the public service. These chapters trace his political difficulties, both before and after 1807, when he was the prefect of a department of France and was subjected to the dislocations of Napoleon's ups and downs. These chapters also describe aspects of the turbulent but productive development of French science from the Revolution to 1830.The core of the book presents the paper of 1807 in its original French and with the original notation. Grattan-Guinness has divided the paper into sections by the sequence of the problems taken up, and he introduces and, where necessary, closes each section with commentary relevant to Fourier's later work in these areas. The paper itself (cllows the chronology of Fourier's discoveries, and among the topics treated are, in this order: heat diffusion between disjoint bodies and in continuous bodies; the appearance of partial differential equations; the special solution for the lamina; sine and cosine series for an arbitrary function; reflections on the vibrating string problem; solution for the annulus; the full Fourier series for an arbitrary function; reflections on n-body analysis; solution for the sphere; solution for the cylinder; steady-state diffusion in the rectangular prism; time-dependent diffusion in the cube; and Fourier's experimental work. (shrink)

Al-Radd al-jamīl, A Fitting Refutation of the Divinity of Jesus Attributed to Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī. Edited by Mark Beaumont and Maha El Kaisy-Friemuth. History of Christian-Muslim Rela- tions, vol. 28. Leiden: Brill, 2016. Pp. vii + 207. $125, €104.

Arab Christians and the Qurʾan from the Origins of Islam to the Medieval Period. Edited by Mark Beaumont. History of Christian-Muslim Relations, vol. 35. Leiden: Brill, 2018. Pp. xiv + 216. $120, €104.

After their voyage through the United States, Alexis de Tocqueville and Gustave de Beaumont each wrote about the nature of race relations there. The author offers two theses regarding the nature of U.S. racism and its relation to U.S. democracy as revealed in Tocqueville’s and Beaumont’s texts. First, these works illustrate how European Americans, in subordinating Indians and blacks, produce not a politically and socially egalitarian democracy situated amid an otherwise racist society and culture but, rather, a social (...) state internally structured by inegalitarian relations with non-Europeans. Second, in Tocqueville’s and Beaumont’s portraits there operate (1) a critical narrative of European Americans’ fraternalized relations with Indians, marked by sibling-rivalry-like democratic envy, and (2) a critical narrative of European Americans’ relations of absolute differentiation with blacks, marked by desire to secure inalienable status. Both strategies are, nonetheless, rooted in European American anxiety over democracy’s flux. (shrink)

The mark of a good volume of individual essays is that when brought together the collection is more interesting and evocative than any of the essays individually. Much of the work presented here is well worth reading on its own merits, such as Robert Neville’s reflections on the value of philosophical totality, Ivor Leclerc’s thoughts on the problems of the knowledge of nature, or Thomas Auxter’s reconception of the history of moral philosophy. Yet taken together all of the (...) essays present a very well balanced estimation of the problems and potentials involved in the comparison of Hegel and Whitehead, as well as upon the value and purpose of oft maligned systematic philosophy. (shrink)

A revelatory new theory of consciousness that returns emotions to the center of mental life. For Mark Solms, one of the boldest thinkers in contemporary neuroscience, discovering how consciousness comes about has been a lifetime's quest. Scientists consider it the "hard problem" because it seems an impossible task to understand why we feel a subjective sense of self and how it arises in the brain. Venturing into the elementary physics of life, Solms has now arrived at an astonishing answer. (...) In The Hidden Spring, he brings forward his discovery in accessible language and graspable analogies. Solms is a frank and fearless guide on an extraordinary voyage from the dawn of neuropsychology and psychoanalysis to the cutting edge of contemporary neuroscience, adhering to the medically provable. But he goes beyond other neuroscientists by paying close attention to the subjective experiences of hundreds of neurological patients, many of whom he treated, whose uncanny conversations expose much about the brain's obscure reaches. Most importantly, you will be able to recognize the workings of your own mind for what they really are, including every stray thought, pulse of emotion, and shift of attention. The Hidden Spring will profoundly alter your understanding of your own subjective experience. (shrink)

In the heart of southeast Texas, an industrial powerhouse often referred to as the 'Golden Triangle', the oil refineries and petrochemical plants stand as stalwart testaments to the region's economic evolution. Interestingly, before the discovery of oil at Spindletop, the lumber and cattle industries powered this region's economy. A profound shift occurred when the Lucas Gusher, a fountain of oil spurting thousands of feet into the air, struck the lands of Spindletop Hill on January 10, 1901. This remarkable discovery of (...) the Spindletop oilfield on a slat dome formation south of Beaumont, Texas, marked the birth of the modern petroleum industry and fundamentally transformed the region's geopolitical, economic, and cultural landscapes. People from all over the country relocated to Gladys City and Beaumont in search of work and new opportunities, creating a boomtown as the town's population swelled from 10,000 to 50,000. The newfound urbanization brought by the oil industry transformed the town and the surrounding areas, creating a ripple effect across the region that would be felt for generations to come. The surge in oil-driven economic activity transmuted the region into a vibrant nexus of commerce, with the oil industry emerging as a critical architect of growth and advancement. This newfound affluence incited by the petroleum sector ushered in an era of economic diversification, laying the groundwork for industrialization’s further evolution. The Spindletop Oil Fields not only underscored the United States’ ascent as the foremost petroleum-producing nation but also signaled the nation’s initiation into the Petroleum Age. It was Spindletop that solidified its position as America’s first significant oil field, becoming an enduring symbol of its industrial might. By 1985, over 153,000,000 barrels of oil had been produced and extracted from the Spindletop oil fields, underscoring the magnitude of this extraordinary resource. (shrink)

ed individuals. Total diversity D is the sum of two fundamental principles governing broad classes of such..

This book outlines and evaluates the principal strands of critical legal studies, and achieves much more as well.

NATURAL LAW ARGUMENTS CONCERNING the political order characteristically appeal, at some point or other, to the common good of the political community. To take the clearest example: Aquinas, perhaps the paradigmatic natural law theorist, appeals to the common good in his accounts of the definition of law, of the need for political authority, of the moral requirement to adhere to the dictates issued by political authority, and of the form political authority should take. But while united on the point that (...) arguments for normative political conclusions must take the common good as a principle, natural law theorists have not been united in their understanding of the nature of the common good. The differences among natural law views on the character of the common good are not trivial: they concern such deep issues as whether the common good should be understood as an intrinsic or an instrumental good, and whether the common good should be understood in relation to the good of individuals of that community or solely in relation to the good of the community as a whole. If one aims to develop a natural law account of the political order, then, one cannot remain neutral with respect to the various natural law understandings of the common good, for these various understandings are almost certain to yield differing conclusions on the source, functions, and limits of political authority. (shrink)

I argue in this article that there is a mistake in Searle's Chinese room argument that has not received sufficient attention. The mistake stems from Searle's use of the Church-Turing thesis. Searle assumes that the Church-Turing thesis licences the assumption that the Chinese room can run any program. I argue that it does not, and that this assumption is false. A number of possible objections are considered and rejected. My conclusion is that it is consistent with Searle's argument to hold (...) onto the claim that understanding consists in the running of a program. (shrink)

This essay presents somaesthetics of discomfort as an extension of the field of somaesthetics as developed by Shusterman. Using the work of Peirce and Dewey as a foundation upon which Shusterman and Johnson have considered the body as the basis of aesthetics, I propose that somaesthetics of discomfort provides a means of enhancing bodily awareness and reflection useful for domains of inquiry, such as healthcare and design. Taking Peirce’s notion of the irritation of doubt in a literal sense, I explore (...) bodily discomfort as the inception of inquiry. I consider work done by phenomenologists concerning experiences of comfort and discomfort, which includes definitions of each. My argument follows the perspective put forth by Peirce, Dewey, and contemporary pragmatists that experience is qualitative and that feeling is at the root of reflection. I explain how discomfort may be considered a type of aesthetic experience and provide examples of bodily discomfort as somaesthetic. In closing, I consider somaesthetic focus on discomfort as fostering moral imagination and empathy. (shrink)

In the second volume of his Wissenschaftslehre from 1837, the Bohemian philosopher, theologian, and mathematician Bernard Bolzano introduced his concept of consequence, named derivability, together with a variety of theorems and further considerations. Derivability is an implication relation between sentences in themselves, which are not meant to be linguistic symbols but the contents of declarative sentences as well as of certain mental episodes. When Schmidt utters the sentence ‘Schnee ist weiß’, and Jones judges that snow is white, the sentence in (...) itself expressed by Schmidt is the same as the one to which Jones agrees in thought. This sentence in itself is an abstract entity: in some sense, it exists; but it is unreal insofar as it lacks a position in space and time, does not stand in causal relationships, and is independent of the existence of thinking beings and languages. (shrink)

Suppose that two nations A and B each possess a nuclear arsenal and are rational utility-maximizers. Suppose further that B has some interest in provoking A, possibly by attacking her with nuclear weapons. In the hope of preventing this from happening, A informs B of à conditional intention on her part to retaliate against B with nuclear weapons should B in fact attack A. By doing so A attempts to lower the probability of B's attacking A by increasing B's estimate (...) of the conditional probability of A's retaliating once provoked. Problematic deterrent situations are those in which B prefers to attack A without retaliation, A prefers most of all that she not be attacked, and A prefers an attack-with-no-retaliation scenario to an attack-with-retaliation scenario. Feature is à result of the fact that A prefers to minimize nuclear devastation, i.e., A would herself be worse off retaliating than not retaliating to an attack. Now, if B knows all of this to be the case then A's expression of a conditional intention to retaliate will not in fact deter B from attacking, since A is rational and will not act contrary to her own best interests. B has no reason to fear A's retaliation and therefore B has no reason not to attack. Deterrence, it seems, is an irrational policy among fully rational actors. This is one version of the so-called paradox of deter-rence. If expressing a conditional retaliatory intention is the best way for A to ward off an attack, then the paradox can be strengthened as follows: It is rational for A to intend to act irrationally. (shrink)

It has been argued in the conservation literature that giving conservation absolute priority over competing interests would best protect the environment. Attributing infinite value to the environment or claiming it is ‘priceless’ are two ways of ensuring this priority (e.g. Hargrove 1989; Bulte and van Kooten 2000; Ackerman and Heinzerling 2002; McCauley 2006; Halsing and Moore 2008). But such proposals would paralyse conservation efforts. We describe the serious problems with these proposals and what they mean for practical applications, and we (...) diagnose and resolve some conceptual confusions permeating the literature on this topic. (shrink)

In this chapter, we address the roles that exemplars might play in a comprehensive response to epistemic injustice. Fricker defines epistemic injustices as harms people suffer specifically in their capacity as (potential) knowers. We focus on testimonial epistemic injustice, which occurs when someone’s assertoric speech acts are systematically met with either too little or too much credence by a biased audience. Fricker recommends a virtue­theoretic response: people who do not suffer from biases should try to maintain their disposition towards naive (...) testimonial justice, and those who find themselves already biased should cultivate corrective testimonial justice by systematically adjusting their credence in testimony up or down depending on whether they are hearing from someone whom they may be biased against or in favor of. We doubt that the prominent admiration-­emulation model of exemplarism will be much use in this connection, so we propose two ways of learning from negative exemplars to better conduct one’s epistemic affairs. In the admiration-­emulation model, both the identification of what a virtue is and the cultivation of virtues identified thusly proceed through the admiration of virtuous exemplars. We show that this model has serious flaws and argue for two alternatives: the envy-­agonism model and the ambivalence-avoidance model. (shrink)

Leading scholars examine religious and philosophical dimensions of the Chinese classic known as the Daodejing or Laozi.

Bolzano holds that every sentence can be paraphrased into a sentence of the form "A has b". Bolzano's arguments for this claim are reconstructed and discussed. Since they crucially rely on Bolzano's notion of paraphrase, this notion is investigated in detail. Bolzano has usually been taken to require that in a correct paraphrase the sentence to be paraphrased and the paraphrasing sentence express the same proposition. In view of Bolzano's texts and systematical considerations this interpretation is rejected: Bolzano only holds (...) that the sentence to be paraphrased and the paraphrasing sentence must be equipollent ("gleichgeltend"). It is shown that even this modest view of paraphrase does not help Bolzano in sustaining his claim that all sentences have the form "A has b". (shrink)

The multiverse is a hypothesis for which there is no evidence, and perhaps can never be any evidence. It is only since 1998 that it has leapt off the blackboards of a few physicists doing esoteric mathematics and lodged itself in the popular imagination. As is the way with popular science, it is easy to move from speculating that there might have been more than one big bang to proceeding on the basis that there has been more than one big (...) bang. (shrink)

The contemporary canon of what constitutes ancient political thought was fixed in the course of the nineteenth century by the then newly reigning discipline of the philosophy of history. It made little difference whether this discipline was positivistically or dialectically inclined. Whatever the methodological commitment there was general agreement that the sources of ancient wisdom on the nature and ends of social and political life were to be found in the political and ethical writings of Plato and Aristotle and, to (...) a lesser extent, Cicero. Here Cicero was read, in part, as a repository of a Stoic political wisdom that had not survived in the original texts. According to this tradition, genuine, if not final, political wisdom is to be found in the reflections of these ancient thinkers -- not a totally unexpected conclusion to come from philosophers. For these nineteenth-century practitioners of Geistesgeschichte the essence of ancient experience is distilled in its inner life, its art, literature, religion, and above all in its philosophical speculation, but not, for instance, in its political experience as recorded in its history. (shrink)

What is human freedom? By addressing a number of theological 'limit situations', Robert Greystones, while at Oxford University in the 1320s, developed his own philosophical theory. This volume is the first Latin critical edition, with a clear English translation. There is an extensive introduction describing his life and teaching on human freedom.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A Note on Thomas and the Divine MercyMark JohnsonA PUZZLING THING about the topic of the divine mercy as presented in the early part of the Prima pars, especially in light of the detailed commentaries presented by Cessario and Cuddy, 1 is how relatively little Thomas speaks about it. Pope Francis devoted the entire 2016 year to a Jubilee of Mercy. The Catholic Theological Society of America followed suit (...) by devoting its 2016 conference to the topic. Yet Thomas does not devote a single Scholastic question to it in the Summa. The topic of the divine names gets question 13 (12 articles), the divine knowledge gets question 14 (16 articles), and the divine will gets question 19 (12 articles). Our anchor text, question 21, is a four-article-long question that emerges from the larger issue of God’s will in itself (absolute). Yet the question is not about the divine mercy on its own, but is rather about features or properties of the divine act of love, a topic to which the whole of question 20 is devoted. God’s justice and mercy are considered in question 21 as quasi-virtues that perfect the divine act of love (question 20), which in turn is the proper act of God’s will (question 19).2 The divine will of question 19 [End Page 355] is Halley’s Comet, and mercy is the tail of dust trailing in its wake. When God’s mercy does appear it seems to vie with God’s justice for our attention.Cessario and Cuddy help us understand why this is, both with their two-part structure and with the sources they employ, the commentators. My focus here will be on the original text in its own light, before the varnish of the commentators. Thomas’s original is a dense chiaroscuro, which both raises questions and offers opportunities.First, while Thomas is still well within the consideration of the divine being and action (STh I, qq. 3–26), he is sensitive to our human understanding. For us humans an element of suffering seems to be built into any consideration of mercy. It is the first hurdle that needs to be jumped in question 21, article 3; objection 1 frets about mercy because it is a subset, a species, of sorrow—and that cannot be in God. In the body of the article, Thomas alludes to sorrow via a consideration of the quid nominis of mercy. The term misericordia means having a miserum cor, a heart afflicted by the sufferings of another. Thomas dismisses this right away; in the body of the article he says “being saddened at the misery of another does not befit God” (tristari... de miseria alterius non competit Deo). He does not say more. Similarly, in addressing the first objection he notes that the objection was invoking mercy as a kind of “being affected by suffering” (obiectio illa procedit de misericordia, quantum ad passionis affectum). Again, he gives no further commentary.3 [End Page 356]With the concern about God’s “co-suffering” with us dispatched, Thomas addresses a second objection, the satisfying of which will allow for the existence and procedure of the next article (a. 4). The objection focuses upon the divine justice and worries that mercy seems to mean some kind of “loosening up” of the divine justice (relaxatio iustitiae), in which God seems to act contrary to himself, to his utterances or dictates (dicta sua). Thomas addresses this concern head-on; there is no loss or relaxation of the divine justice, but rather a fulfilling and indeed exceeding of the dictates of divine justice. An example both explains and foreshadows: the man who owes someone a hundred dollars but who fulfills the debt when he pays him two hundred dollars of his own money, has both met the demands of justice and acted with liberality and mercy. He has acted above and beyond justice (supra iustitiam operando). 4 Remembering that objection 2 had included a concern about acting against one’s own self and dictates, Thomas adds that remitting an offense made against oneself by another—he may have had peccatum originale originans in mind—has the... (shrink)

Community of inquiry is most often seen as a dialogical procedure for the cooperative development of reasonable approaches to knowledge and meaning. This reflects a deep commitment to normatively based reasoning that is pervasive in a wide range of approaches to critical thinking and argument, where the underlying theory of reasoning is logic driven, whether formal or informal. The commitment to normative reasoning is deeply historical reflecting the fundamental distinction between reason and emotion. Despite the deep roots of the distinction (...) and its canonization in current educational thought, contemporary cognitive neuroscience presents a fundamental challenge to the viability of the distinction and thus to any effort that sees education for reasonable judgment to be based on the remediation of cognition in isolation from its roots in the emotions. Cognitive neuroscience looks at the deep connections between emotion and memory, information retrieval, and resistance to refutation. This conforms with earlier studies in experimental psychology, which showed resistance to changing beliefs in the face of evidence, including evidence based on personal experience. This paper will look at the recent research including speculations from neurological modeling that shows the depth of connection between, emotions, memory and reasoning. It will draw implications for dialogic thinking within a community of inquiry including systematic self-reflection as an essential aspect of critical thinking. (shrink)