This article explores Karl Rahner’s assessment of Augustine’s treatment of Old Testament theophanies and the Incarnation. It scrutinizes Rahner’s contention that Augustine deviated from the Christological interpretation held by earlier church fathers and finds that while Augustine’s interpretation differs from the majority of his predecessors, he is not the first significant church father to embrace such a view. Moreover, Augustine’s approach to the theophanies is shown to have deep roots in both tradition and scripture, challenging the explanatory power of the (...) Christological interpretation. The article then argues that it is unreasonable to link Augustine’s theophanic non-peculiarity directly to a rejection of incarnational peculiarity. In addition to the absence of definitive texts denying Christ’s incarnational peculiarity, along with texts clearly affirming it, Augustine’s close association between the missions and processions—an association that ultimately supports Rahner’s Rule—eliminates the possibility of him rejecting the Son’s incarnational peculiarity. Consequently, Rahner’s assertion about Augustine’s alleged denial of incarnational peculiarity lacks solid grounding in Augustine’s body of work. (shrink)

Title: Martin Heidegger's Critique of Freedom Author: Charles Robinson Advisor: Professor Susan Shell Boston College Political Science Department This is a study of thought and politics of Martin Heidegger. It presents an examination of his understanding of freedom, principally as he expressed it in Being and Time, but also considers some of his subsequent essays and lectures, as well as his Rectorate Address. Ever since Heidegger's public embrace of National Socialism, his defenders and critics have argued about (...) the possible relation between his thinking and his infamous political commitments. While many of his critics have linked his commitments to an alleged lack of understanding of freedom, some of his scholarly defenders have sought to present interpretations of his concept of freedom at odds with his infamous politics, in order to separate his thought from any association with Nazism. The conclusions of these critics and defenders of Heidegger are both mistaken: in Being and Time Heidegger sought the meaning of being in the authentic experience of human self-determination revealed by the conscience, which he worked out as "forward running resolve." It was this militant concept of freedom that grounded his project for a destined community of battle to be championed by a free corps of freedom fighters, and led him to embrace, in the very name of freedom, the tyranny of Hitler's new Reich. The study of Heidegger's concept of authentic freedom reveals that, far from lacking any understanding of freedom, it was rather a central theme and concern of his philosophical efforts, and that his infamous political commitments were indeed its necessary and coherent practical consequence. Heidegger's thought thus poses a more trenchant and pressing challenge to liberal (and leftist) politics than many of his critics and defenders appreciate. There have been comparatively few sustained thematic treatments of Heidegger's understanding of freedom in English. This study accordingly hopes to contribute to an understanding of this central theme of Heidegger's philosophical efforts, which not only reveals their necessary connection to his politics, but also promises to improve our access to the coherent intelligibility of his thought as a whole. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Remembering Lewis E. HahnGeorge C. H. Sun, President, John Howie, Professor Emeritus, Thomas Alexander, Professor and Director of Graduate Studies, Kenneth W. Stikkers, Professor and Chair, Randall Auxier, Professor, Robert Hahn, Professor, Joseph Wu, Professor Emeritus, Elizabeth R. Eames, Professor Emeritus, Martin Lu, Professor of Philosophy, George Kimball Plochmann, Professor Emeritus, Matt Sronkoski, Philosophy Graduate and Academic Adviser, Dave Clarke, Professor Emeritus, Eugenie Gatens-Robinson, Professor Emerita, Hans (...) H. Rudnick, Professor Emeritus, Stephen Bickham, Professor EmeritusPresident, and Don Mikula (bio)The following testimonials were offered on the occasion of a memorial gathering for Dr. Lewis E. Hahn held on February 19, 2005, and were compiled for presentation here by Sharon (Hahn) Crowell.A Tribute to Dr. Lewis E. Hahn (1908-2004) from a Global PerspectiveGeorge C. H. Sun President, Thomé H. Fang Institute, Inc., Mobile, AlabamaAmong the philosophical community in both the East and the West, no word of introduction is needed for our beloved Master, who was the recipient of numerous distinctions and honors, with titles that included "Man of the Year in Philosophy" and "Award of Lifetime Achievement." The very name "Lewis E. Hahn" itself already stands now for genuineness, dedication, and fulfillment.A great work is a dialogue with eternity; a great person is such a work. In less than thirty years he succeeded in developing Carbondale from what had been a small college town in the Midwest into the Mecca of American philosophy. His most important achievements were the Dewey Center and the Pepper Archives that he helped install at SIUC These, among other such institutions, will remain a unique contribution, a glory of American philosophy, and a monument in the history of human thought.For posterity Lewis E. Hahn will remain an object of wonder and amazement. How is it possible for one human being to have accomplished so much, so well, and in so short a span of time—less than one century—in breadth, depth, and diversity? Some one hundred years ago, by bridging the gap between the New World and the Old, William James was hailed as the great genius of international friendship among philosophical thinkers, but we now find a greater genius in Lewis E. Hahn, who succeeded in bringing together the peoples of East and West from at least four continents: Europe, Australia, America (both North and Latin America), and Asia. To my knowledge, few of his predecessors and contemporaries have been half so widely read and liberal-minded as he was, in view of the range and scope of the Library of Living Philosophers that he helped continue after the passing of its founder, Dr. Paul A. Schilpp.What type of man was Hahn, our younger generation will wonder? Only a pluralist approach can help us understand the true character of such a legendary pluralist-contextualist. In short, he was "a full personality." As I recall, while working on my dissertation with him in the 1970s, we had a brief discussion on Confucius, the sage of ancient China. "A full personality!" was his laconic assessment. Suddenly I realized, to quote the Analects: "The Master is talking about himself!" For, as the Buddhists put it, only a Buddha can understand a Buddha. Or, as William James put it, only one who has philosophy can appreciate philosophy. Many friends [End Page 1] of my generation admire him so much; Te Chen of Hong Kong calls him "a great Confucian in America." Those who regret the loss of many precious Confucian virtues in China today have now rediscovered them in the person of Lewis E. Hahn! If Nietzsche called Kant "a great Chinese in Königsberg," it is simply because he had not encountered our own Master.A paradigm of academic leadership, Dr. Hahn is simply irreplaceable—this is a tribute I personally heard in Carbondale in the late 1960s. It is not an exaggeration to say that he was a superb administrator, and he could have been the best Secretary of the State we ever had, for he possessed more in the way of philosophical wisdom than all his predecessors put together! As a great teacher, he was no less "serene, good, learned, wise, and ardent" than... (shrink)

This chapter starts by restating the causal-hallucinatory argument against naive realism. This argument depends on the possibility of “philosophers' hallucinations.” It draws attention to the role of what the chapter refers to as the nonarbitrariness of philosophers' hallucinations in supporting this argument. The chapter then discusses three attempts to refute the argument. Two of them, those associated with John McDowell and with Michael Martin, are explicitly forms of disjunctivism. The third, exemplified by Mark Johnston, has, the chapter claims, disjunctivist (...) features. None of these responses to the argument is plausible. (shrink)

Cet article examine le(s) lien(s) entre le racisme antinoir et l’antisémitisme en se référant à quatre traditions distinctes : les psychanalyses de Fanon et de Freud, l’École de Francfort, les travaux de Cedric Robinson et la tradition du contrat social dans la philosophie politique des débuts de l’époque moderne. Sa thèse principale est que le racisme antinoir et l’antisémitisme sont intimement liés par la logique et le fonctionnement – la phénoménologie – de l’État dans la tradition occidentale du contrat (...) social. En montrant comment cela se fait, nous pouvons répondre à des questions qui, sinon, restent en suspens dans les autres traditions mentionnées ci-dessus. En résumé, cet article montre comment le racisme antinoir émerge avec force de la logique de l’État dans la tradition du contrat social, tandis que l’antisémitisme se développe comme une négation déformée de cette logique. (shrink)

Reason, Faith and History offers a unique collection of essays on key topics in the philosophy of religion. Published in honour of Paul Helm - a major force in contemporary English-speaking philosophy of religion - this book presents specially commissioned chapters by the most distinguished philosophers and theologians in the field from North America, Israel, the UK and Continental Europe, including: Swinburne, Byrne, Torrance, Clark, Robinson, Gellman, Stone, Pink, Hughes, Trueman. Spanning the breadth of philosophical, historical and theological interests (...) articulated in the work of Paul Helm, and including chapters on Calvinism, philosophical theology, philosophy of mind, Christian Doctrine and Epistemology, this book presents an accessible text for students of contemporary philosophy of religion as well as those interested in philosophical theology more broadly. (shrink)

The 3-valued paraconsistent logic Ciore was developed by Carnielli, Marcos and de Amo under the name LFI2, in the study of inconsistent databases from the point of view of logics of formal inconsistency (LFIs). They also considered a first-order version of Ciore called LFI2*. The logic Ciore enjoys extreme features concerning propagation and retropropagation of the consistency operator: a formula is consistent if and only if some of its subformulas is consistent. In addition, Ciore is algebraizable in the sense of (...) Blok and Pigozzi. On the other hand, the logic LFI2* satisfies a somewhat counter-intuitive property: the universal and the existential quantifier are inter-definable by means of the paraconsistent negation, as it happens in classical first-order logic with respect to the classical negation. This feature seems to be unnatural, given that both quantifiers have the classical meaning in LFI2*, and that this logic does not satisfy the De Morgan laws with respect to its paraconsistent negation. The first goal of the present article is to introduce a first-order version of Ciore (which we call QCiore) preserving the spirit of Ciore, that is, without introducing unexpected relationships between the quantifiers. The second goal of the article is to adapt to QCiore the partial structures semantics for the first-order paraconsistent logic LPT1 introduced by Coniglio and Silvestrini, which generalizes the semantic notion of quasi-truth considered by Mikeberg, da Costa and Chuaqui. Finally, some important results of classical Model Theory are obtained for this logic, such as Robinson’s joint consistency theorem, amalgamation and interpolation. Although we focus on QCiore, this framework can be adapted to other 3-valued first-order LFIs. (shrink)

This is a list of corrigenda to the English translation of Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. The list includes 186 entries: most are corrections of outright mistakes in expressing the sense of Heidegger’s text, and twenty-two entries are marked as representing Heidegger’s own revisions to the work as found in the latest German edition. Explanatory comments accompany many of the entries. The corrigenda are offered as a service to scholars of Heidegger’s magnum (...) opus who work within the discipline of philosophy and also to humanistic psychologists who follow the tradition of continental philosophy in their work as practioners and researchers. (shrink)

In this paper, I suggest that, if we are committed to accepting a threshold approach to personhood, according to which all beings above the threshold are persons with equal moral status, there are strong reasons to also recognise a second threshold that would be reached through human pregnancy, and that would confer on pregnant women a temporary superior moral status. This proposal is not based on the moral status of the fetus, but on the moral status of the pregnant woman. (...) It is not only the fetus which is an organism sui generis: the pregnant woman, also, is a unique being. Following almost any view on the moral status of the fetus, the pregnant woman should be regarded, herself, as more than a singular individual. She is, herself, ‘more than one’. Pregnant women are also necessary for the continued survival of the human species, and there are important justice-based reasons to recognise the higher status. Furthermore, the recognition of a superior moral status for pregnant women does not imply that pregnancy should always be viewed as desirable, or imply any position on the permissibility of abortion. My proposal is not as radical as it might seem, as it does not require that pregnant women should always receive superior treatment, but only that they should to some extent. It could have a range of potential positive practical consequences. Finally, my approach does not threaten, but rather promotes, human equality. (shrink)

The purpose of this book is to clarify the concept of definition and improve defining activities.

This paper examines a doctrine which David Lewis has called 'Humean Supervenience' (hereafter 'HS'), and a problem which certain imaginary cases seem to generate for HS. They include rotating perfect spheres or discs, and flowing rivers, imagined as composed of matter which is perfectly homogeneous right down to the individual points. Before considering these examples, I shall introduce the doctrine they seem to challenge.

Following strict rules of interpretation, this book focuses on the ideas in Plato's early and middle dialogues that lie within the fields now called logic and methodology, specifically elenchus and dialectic and the method of hypothesis.

It is a standard feature of modern philosophy, at least from Locke, to tie together the questions of how we perceive the world and what we have reason to think the world is like in itself. This is a natural connection, because the questions of how we perceive it, and what kind of conception of it we can best form on the basis of that mode of perception, are obviously intimately linked. Part I of this volume defends the sense-datum theory (...) of perception against its opponents, and argues that the sense-datum theory is much closer to a form of direct realism than is normally thought: we directly perceive the world in the form that it naturally manifests itself to creatures like us. This leaves open the question of what it is like in itself, and Part II tries to show that a Berkeleian interpretation—that the world is a nomological structure in the mind of God—is the most plausible option. Arguments with roots in Berkeley, in modern philosophers such as John Foster, and in modern science, are drawn on to support this conclusion. (shrink)

Some health care organizations allow physicians to withhold cardiopulmonary resuscitation from a patient, despite patient or surrogate requests that it be provided, when they believe it will be more harmful than beneficial. Such cases usually involve patients with terminal diagnoses whose medical teams argue that aggressive treatments are medically inappropriate or likely to be harmful. Although there is state-to-state variability and a considerable judicial gray area about the conditions and mechanisms for refusals to perform CPR, medical teams typically follow a (...) set of clearly defined procedures for these decisions. The procedures are based on the principle of nonmaleficence and typically include consultation with hospital ethics committees, reflecting the guidelines of relevant professional associations. Ethical debates about when CPR can and should be limited tend to rely more on discussions of theory, principles, and case studies than systematic empirical study of the situations in which such limitations are applied. Sociologists of bioethics call for empirical study, arguing that what ethicists and health professionals believe they are doing when they draft policies or invoke principles does not always mirror what is happening on the ground. In this article, we begin the task of modeling the empirical analyses sociologists call for, focusing on a cohort at Massachusetts General Hospital. We inductively analyzed ethics committee notes and medical records of nineteen patients whose surrogates did not accept the decision to withhold CPR. (shrink)

Arguments for property dualism offer a strong challenge to materialist views, but even if they are regarded as successful, a large task remains, namely, to develop a positive account of the place of non-physical properties in the world -- one that holds some promise of eventual satisfaction regarding the hard problem. After noting some difficulties in current approaches to this task, this paper outlines one possible line of development for a dualistic view. Like all other suggestions for routes to progress (...) in this area, this one is speculative. However, the empirical findings that would support this line of development lie within current epistemic possibility. Moreover, the conceptual changes that would be required are intelligible from our present vantage point, and have parallels in views that are accepted in science and by non-dualist philosophers. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:Determining the biological function of phenomenal consciousness appears necessary to explain its origin: evolution by natural selection operates on organisms’ traits based on the biological functions they fulfill. But identifying the function of phenomenal consciousness has proven difficult. Some have proposed that the function of phenomenal consciousness is to facilitate mental processes such as reasoning or learning. But mental processes such as reasoning and learning seem to be possible in the absence of phenomenal consciousness. It is difficult to pinpoint in (...) what way phenomenal consciousness enhances these processes or others like them. In this paper, we explore a possibility that has been neglected to date. Perhaps phenomenal consciousness has no function of its own because it is either a by-product of other traits or a (functionless) accident. If so, then phenomenal consciousness has an evolutionary explanation even though it fulfills no biological function. (shrink)