In response to the ravages perpetrated on planet earth by the single-minded pursuit of short-term business bottomline, the author outlines the keynotes of shifting consciousness about economics in the West. She points out the new upsurge of active interest in finer values, including spirituality in business circles. With out a spiritual compass to guide, industrialization has been fostering disvalues. The impact of Eastern reli gions, and their emphasis on the inner self, on American thinking has of late become very strong. (...) The paper also draws atiention to Gandhi's trusteeship concept, and to the successful spiritual experiments done at Nagarjuna Fertilizers Ltd. She, however, has doubts whether business will changes its ways by itself unless something more powerful forces it to do so. (shrink)

In response to the ravages perpetrated on planet earth by the single-minded pursuit of short-term business bottomline, the author outlines the keynotes of shifting consciousness about economics in the West. She points out the new upsurge of active interest in finer values, including spirituality in business circles. With out a spiritual compass to guide, industrialization has been fostering disvalues. The impact of Eastern reli gions, and their emphasis on the inner self, on American thinking has of late become very strong. (...) The paper also draws atiention to Gandhi's trusteeship concept, and to the successful spiritual experiments done at Nagarjuna Fertilizers Ltd. She, however, has doubts whether business will changes its ways by itself unless something more powerful forces it to do so. (shrink)

In _Consciousness and the Existence of God_, J.P. Moreland argues that the existence of finite, irreducible consciousness provides evidence for the existence of God. Moreover, he analyzes and criticizes the top representative of rival approaches to explaining the origin of consciousness, including John Searle’s contingent correlation, Timothy O’Connor’s emergent necessitation, Colin McGinn’s mysterian ‘‘naturalism,’’ David Skrbina’s panpsychism and Philip Clayton’s pluralistic emergentist monism. Moreland concludes that these approaches should be rejected in favor of what he calls ‘‘the Argument from (...) Consciousness.’’. (shrink)

The increasing complexity of human subjects research and its oversight has prompted researchers, as well as institutional review boards, to have a forum in which to discuss challenging or novel ethical issues not fully addressed by regulations. Research ethics consultation services provide such a forum. In this article, we rely on the experiences of a national Research Ethics Consultation Collaborative that collected more than 350 research ethics consultations in a repository and published 18 challenging cases with accompanying ethical commentaries to (...) highlight four contexts in which REC can be a valuable resource. REC assists: 1) investigators before and after the regulatory review; 2) investigators, IRBs, and other research administrators facing challenging and novel ethical issues; 3) IRBs and investigators with the increasing challenges of informed consent and risk/benefit analysis; and 4) in providing flexible and collaborative assistance to overcome study hurdles, mediate conflicts within a team, or directly engage with research participants. Institutions that have established, or plan to establish, REC services should work to raise the visibility of their service and engage in open communication with existing clinical ethics consult services as well as the IRB. While the IRB system remains the foundation for the ethical review of research, REC can be a valuable service for investigators, regulators, and research participants aligned with the goal of supporting ethical research. (shrink)

Drawing on Nietzsche's prolific early notebooks and correspondence, this book challenges the polarized picture of Nietzsche as a philosopher who abandoned classical philology.

Of the various loci of systematic theology that call for sustained philosophical investigation, the doctrine of sanctification stands out as a prime candidate. In response to that call, William Alston developed three models of the sanctifying work of the Holy Spirit: the fiat model, the interpersonal model, and the sharing model. In response to Alston’s argument for the sharing model, this paper offers grounds for a reconsideration of the interpersonal model. We close with a discussion of some of the implications (...) of one’s understanding of the transforming work of the Holy Spirit for practical Christian spirituality. (shrink)

Methodologically rigorous description, analysis, and critique of postmodern phenomena presuppose a rigorous theory of postmodernity, for which the philosophy of Martin Heidegger holds great untapped promise. This essay explicates the basic content of Heidegger’s “metametaphysics,” since for Heidegger a “metaphysics” is the epochally prevailing projection of the meaning of being in general, and he offers a theory of Western metaphysics. I begin with Heidegger’s analysis of the “regional ontologies” of the sciences in his 1927 magnum opus Being and Time, since (...) the metametaphysical works of the “late middle” Heidegger in the 1930s–1940s extend this analytical framework to metaphysics as global ontology. I then explicate Heidegger’s views on modern metaphysics, focusing on his analyses of modern science and the philosophy of Descartes, before turning to his theory of postmodernity, which I extract from his analyses of modern technology and the philosophy of Nietzsche. (shrink)

Teleosemantics explains mental representation in terms of etiological history: a mental state’s representational contents are the result of natural selection, or some other selection process. Critics have argued that the “swampman” thought experiment poses a counterexample to teleosemantics. In several recent papers, Papineau has argued that a merely possible swampman cannot serve as a counterexample to teleosemantics, but has acknowledged that actual swampmen would pose a problem for teleosemantics. In this paper, I argue that there are real-world cases of swampman-like (...) representation, in the form of functional tetrachromacy. People with functional tetrachromacy are born with four types of cones in each eye, rather than the usual three, and as a result can represent a wider variety of colors than the average person. I argue that the functional tetrachromat’s additional color representations are not the result of a selection process. Functional tetrachromacy is therefore a real-world case of mental representation without an etiological history, and therefore poses a genuine counterexample to teleosemantics. (shrink)

There is a strong presumption that mental disorder injures a person's autonomy, understood as a set of capacities and as an ideal condition of agency which is worth striving for. However, recent multidimensional approaches to autonomy have revealed a greater diversity in ways of being autonomous than has previously been appreciated. This presumption, then, risks wrongly dismissing variant, neuro-atypical sorts of autonomy as non-autonomy. This is both an epistemic error, which impairs our understanding of autonomy as a phenomenon, and a (...) moral error, which withholds recognition and respect that autonomous agents are due. I argue that careful attention to the different 'shapes' of agent's autonomy reveals that there are indeed distinctive kinds of neuro-atypical autonomy that are widely mistaken for non-autonomy. This project argues for two propositions. First, that there is a kind of autonomy, with a distinctive shape and texture, available to bipolar agents. This is a variant sort of autonomy, but not a defective or deficient sort. It is the ideal of autonomy that it is worth bipolar agents striving for, given the range and intensity of experiences that they will have to confront. Whilst bipolar autonomy will look unlike more neurotypical kinds of autonomy, it continues to be owed recognition. The second proposition is that we should understand the ideal of autonomy to be both pluralist and highly context sensitive. Given the range of starting points from which agents will strive to an ideal of autonomy, there will be some variation in the ideals worth striving for. The variation in ideals will reflect the existential realities they are local to. Theory of autonomy must be adapted to recognise bipolar, and other neuro-atypical, kinds of autonomy, and to reflect this wider pluralism. These propositions will be argued for with careful attention to the experiences and agency of people living with bipolar, or related, disorders. Understanding the ways that manic or depressive episodes, and the shifts between them, alter and apply pressure to our agency will inform an account of the distinctively bipolar autonomy that can be built on top of it. (shrink)

Abstract: There are epistemic manipulators in the world. These people are actively attempting to sacrifice epistemic goods for personal gain. In doing so, manipulators have led many competent epistemic agents into believing contrarian theories that go against well-established knowledge. In this paper, I explore one mechanism by which manipulators get epistemic agents to believe contrarian theories. I do so by looking at a prominent empirical model of trustworthiness. This model identifies three major factors that epistemic agents look for when trying (...) to determine who is trustworthy. These are (i) ability, (ii) benevolence, and (iii) moral integrity. I then show how manipulators can manufacture the illusion that they possess these factors. This leads epistemic agents to view manipulators as trustworthy sources of information. Additionally, I argue that fact-checking will be an ineffective – or even harmful – practice when correcting the beliefs of epistemic agents who have been tricked by this illusion of epistemic trustworthiness. I suggest that in such cases we should use an alternative correction, which I call trust undercutting. (shrink)

I discuss Ingmar Persson’s recent argument that the Levelling Down Objection could be worse for prioritarians than for egalitarians. Persson’s argument depends upon the claim that indifference to changes in the average prioritarian value of benefits implies indifference to changes in the overall prioritarian value of a state of affairs. As I show, however, sensible conceptions of prioritarianism have no such implication. Therefore prioritarians have nothing to fear from the Levelling Down Objection.

A debate persists over how to distinguish manic states from non-manic ones (such as depressions). A lacuna exists amongst these efforts, where a specifically agentive account of mania would sit. An agentive account centers the manic person’s view of practical reasons, rationalizing their actions in the same way that sympathetic understandings rationalize the actions of more neurotypical agents. In this paper, I argue that mania restructures our agency by creating a pervasive sense of urgency. This urgency changes the kind of (...) handling that our practical reasons seem to call out for. Whilst this can make us less reliable as agents, I argue that this does not undermine the basic capacities on which personal autonomy is founded. The greater threat to manic agents’ autonomy is nonrecognition of this restructured agency, undermining autonomy in its social dimensions. Without an agentive account, we will fail to recognize distinctly manic agency when we see it, limiting our understanding of autonomy, and withholding recognition, fundamental to autonomy in its social dimensions, from manic agents. (shrink)

This paper critically analyses realist evaluation, focussing on its primary analytical concepts: mechanisms, contexts, and outcomes. Noting that nursing investigators have had difficulty in operationalizing the concepts of mechanism and context, it is argued that their confusion is at least partially the result of ambiguities, inconsistencies, and contradictions in the realist evaluation model. Problematic issues include the adoption of empiricist and idealist positions, oscillation between determinism and voluntarism, subsumption of agency under structure, and categorical confusion between context and mechanism. In (...) relation to outcomes, it is argued that realist evaluation's adoption of the fact/value distinction prevents it from taking into account the concerns of those affected by interventions. The aim of the paper is to use these immanent critiques of realist evaluation to construct an internally consistent realist approach to evaluation that is more amenable to being operationalized by nursing researchers. (shrink)

This paper examines Florence Nightingale's realist philosophy of science by comparing it to the contemporaneously dominant philosophy of positivism. It starts by adumbrating the tenets of positivism and continues by assessing the degree to which Nightingale accepted or rejected those tenets. It is argued that while she accepted much of positivism, on realist grounds she opposed its belief in phenomenalism, its rejection of speculative philosophy, its separation of fact and value, and its rejection of religion. Following an examination of how (...) Nightingale's philosophy impinged on her approach to nursing and health care, the paper concludes with a comparison of her ideas with those of modern realism and a discussion of the contemporary salience of her ideas. It is argued that while some aspects of her approach may no longer provide an appropriate basis for modern nursing, her environmental approach, her transcendental realism, and her adherence to caring values may still be of use to contemporary nurses. (shrink)

Forty-two essays by authors from five continents and many disciplines provide a synthetic account of the history of the social sciences-including behavioral and economic sciences since the late eighteenth century. The authors emphasize the cultural and intellectual preconditions of social science, and its contested but important role in the history of the modern world. While there are many historical books on particular disciplines, there are very few about the social sciences generally, and none that deal with so much of the (...) world over so long a timespan. (shrink)

This paper is a philosophical defense of the doctrine of penal substitution. I begin with a delineation of Richard Swinburne’s satisfaction-type theory of the atonement, exposing a weakness of it which motivates a renewed look at the theory of penal substitution. In explicating a theory of penal substitution, I contend that: (i) the execution of retributive punishment is morally justified in certain cases of deliberate wrongdoing; (ii) deliberate human sin against God constitutes such a case; and (iii) the transfer of (...) the retributive punishment due sinners to Christ is morally coherent. Whatever else might be said for and against such a conception of the doctrine of the atonement, the plausibility of the theory presented here should give us pause in the often hasty rejection of the doctrine of penal substitution. (shrink)

Rawls’s account of international toleration in The Law of Peoples has been the subject of vigorous critiques by critics who believe that he unacceptably dilutes the principles of his Law of Peoples in order to accommodate non-liberal societies. One important component in these critiques takes issue specifically with Rawls’s inclusion of certain non-liberal societies (‘decent peoples’) in the constituency of justification for the Law of Peoples. In Rawls’s defence, I argue that the explanation for the inclusion of decent peoples in (...) the constituency of justification is not, as is standardly assumed, that they are the kind of societies that ought to be tolerated in that way on some prior conception of which kinds of societies ought to be tolerated in that way. The real explanation appeals to a methodological principle underlying Rawls’s approach to political justification, according to which liberals owe justification, as a matter of liberal principle, to those who comply with liberal principles for political institutions that apply to them. If such liberal principles can be complied with by agents who nevertheless cannot accept fully liberal justifications for those principles, then liberalism itself requires liberals to seek justifications which they can accept. This approach gives us a new way to view decent peoples: as just such agents, who are therefore owed a justification for the Law of Peoples that they can accept. Decency is thus a concept that is internal to liberal political justification at the international level. Reading Rawls in this way permits a coherent and attractive defence of his strategy of toleration and of his international theory as a whole. (shrink)

Volume 20, Issue 4, May 2020, Page 116-118.

Roman Stoicism is typically read as a therapeutic philosophy that is centered around the care of the self and presented in the form of a self-help manual. Closer examination reveals a less reassuring and more challenging side to the school’s teachings, one that provokes ethical reflection at the limits of the self’s intactness and coherence. The self is less an object of inquiry than the by-product of a complex set of experiences in the face of nature and society and across (...) any number of flashpoints, from one’s own or others’ beliefs, actions, values, and relationships to the difficulty of sizing up one’s place in the universe. The pressures of natural and ethical reflection put intuitive conceptions of the self at considerable risk. The Roman Stoic self proves to be vulnerable, contingent, unbounded, relational, and opaque—in short, a rich matrix of problems that point beyond the individual self and anticipate contemporary critiques of the self. (shrink)

Viewed in the light of the discussions ofscientificlecturing in eighteenth-century London contained in this issue, the case of medicine may be said to be both more of the same but also something different.

Name der Zeitschrift: Nietzsche-Studien Jahrgang: 44 Heft: 1 Seiten: 67-77.

The question of truth is perhaps a perennial question of philosophy. Is truth “merely” epistemological, a function of contingent human practices and conventions, or should we adopt a stonger, metaphysical conception of truth along realist lines, understood as correspondence with objectively existing reality? In this paper I examine a famous debate in the analytic philosophy of language that hinges on the status of truth – specifically, the challenge to traditional or metaphysical realism posed by Hilary Putnam’s model-theoretic argument and the (...) “paradox” that David Lewis derived from it. In the end, I will argue that metaphysical realism is a theoretically excessive position with regards to truth, and that a pragmatic or epistemological understanding of realism is, in Putnam’s words, “all the realism we want or need.”. (shrink)

La aprobación de la Constitución de 1978 marca un punto de inflexión en la historia del CSIC. El cambio de estructura política del Estado centralista al Estado de las autonomías y la creación de instituciones que se encargan específicamente de la planificación, el diseño, la evaluación, la financiación y la ejecución de las actividades científico-técnicas plantean al CSIC la necesidad de reencontrar y desarrollar su papel. Hoy, se trataría de mejorar la posición española en la construcción del Espacio Europeo de (...) Investigación a través de las relaciones institucionales de cooperación entre el CSIC (Estado) y las universidades (Autonomías) responsables, en conjunto, de más del noventa por ciento de la producción científico técnica española. A pesar del insuficiente apoyo económico, y sobre todo político, de los sucesivos gobiernos, los equipos directivos del CSIC han conseguido mejorar desde 1978 la posición del organismo, fortaleciendo el sistema de I+D+i español. (shrink)

While there has been an increase of Black women faculty in higher education institutions, the academy writ large continues to exploit, discriminate, and uphold institutionalized gendered racism through its policies and practices. Black women have navigated, negotiated, and learned how to thrive from their respective standpoint and epistemologies, traversing the academy in ways that counter typical narratives of success and advancement. This edited volume bridges together foundational and contemporary intergenerational, interdisciplinary voices to elucidate Black feminist epistemologies and praxis. Chapters highlight (...) relevant research, methodologies, and theoretical or conceptual frameworks; share experiences as doctoral students, current faculty, and academic administrators; and offer lessons learned and strategies to influence systemic and institutional change for, with, and alongside Black women. (shrink)

This thesis argues for an unorthodox interpretation of John Rawls's egalitarianism as a hybrid of ‘actual contractualism’ and ‘modal contractualism’. It also offers a defence of the theory so understood. According to actual contractualism, a system of political institutions and norms is just only if each person over whom it claims authority actually accepts it in some sense. Actual contractualists stand in contrast with modal contractualists, who take justice to require that no one could reasonably reject the institutions and norms (...) in question. Rawls is standardly read as a modal contractualist, but I argue that his view includes an significant element of actual contractualism. The thesis is divided into three parts. The first part describes actual contractualism and contrasts it with modal contractualism. It goes on to consider the possibility of a hybrid theory, which appeals to modal contractualist reasons to justify an actual contractualist test for justice. I suggest that this is an attractive view. In the second part I go on to argue that a careful understanding of Rawls’s theory view reveals it to be hybrid contractualist. I elaborate Rawls’s strategy of ‘political constructivism’ in the light of this interpretation, and attempt to show that it is very much in the Lockean actual contractualist tradition. The final part of the thesis concerns the justification of specifically Rawls’s egalitarianism. I contend that Rawls’s argument for justice as fairness can be seen as a detailed effort to explain why his egalitarianism is, in the relevant sense, actually accepted by each person, and I argue that as such it succeeds. I then contrast the Rawlsian view with left-libertarianism, another attempt to marry actual contractualism and egalitarianism. I argue that Rawls’s is the more thoroughgoing, unified view, and should be preferred on that basis. (shrink)

This essay compares Aquinas' understanding of the precepts of justice with the various accounts of moral rules developed in the debate over proportionalism among contemporary moral theologians. It is argued that both sides in this debate oversimplify Aquinas' account of moral rules so drastically as to misread him. Moreover, it is argued that because Aquinas' account reflects a sense of the communal context for moral discernment, it is superior to both traditionalism and proportionalism.

This chapter contains sections titled: A Divided Socrates: Ambiguity or Ambivalence? Socratic Constructions Socratic Voices Thematizations.

Alvin Plantinga, Phillip Johnson, and many others, following C. S. Lewis, take their definition of naturalism to mean rejection of the supernatural (and with it, theism). A better definition of contemporary naturalism is proposed: naturalism thinks in terms of reality as understood by the sciences, and the natural is composed of systems demarcated from the rest of the world; those systems have states, and a state is an unambiguous function of time. Naturalism abstracts these from all other features of the (...) things it knows. Action is interpreted as an efficient cause making a change in the trajectory of a natural system. Methodological naturalism merely applies these definitions to this world for purposes of science. Comprehensive naturalism insists that all things whatsoever are exhaustively intelligible on naturalistic terms. Dualistic naturalism (commonly known as supernaturalism) would locate naturalistic efficient causes (including divine causes) in a dual world where they are invisible, but keep their effects in this world. On this analysis, Plantinga and Johnson are as naturalistic as their opponents in conceiving divine action, but because they are dualists, they are not naturalistic in quite the same way. (shrink)

Este cuento es una composición literaria en la que se intenta criticar agudamente las costumbres y vicios de muchos profesores y profesoras que en una planta académica avejentada proliferan haciendo inconmensurable daño a los que pasan por sus manos. El cuento tiene una intención moralizadora, lúdica y más que nada, burlesca, aparte de lo dramático. Es decir, se trata de una sátira. El protagonista es un profesor que alguna vez hizo en Londres su doctorado, siguiendo un proceso que lo expuso (...) a múltiples presiones y humillaciones. Ya en su patria tiene la convicción que es su turno para hacer con otros lo que hicieron con él, discriminar a los que no coinciden con el perfil británico que el protagonista creyó haber introyectado. Enfundado en su atuendo decimonónico, reflejo devoto de la imagen de su padre y abuelo,, ese día se prepara como sinodal de una defensa de tesis de un alumno cuya imagen, clase social y presencia desencadena en él, el resentimiento y rechazo que ha acumulado a lo largo de su vida. Suponemos que dicho candidato no pasará la prueba con los arcaicos estándares que este profesor aplicará. (shrink)

Larry Shiner has risen to an impassioned defence against my criticisms of an iconic figure, claiming that I have ‘misrepresent[ed] Kristeller's central aim’ and therefore missed ‘the real shortcomings of Kristeller's essay’ and ‘obscure[d] substantive issues behind simplistic dichotomies’. These, and a series of disagreements over countless small details, take up the first part of his reply. He then proceeds to summarize his own book's achievements in correcting Kristeller's shortcomings. Shiner acknowledges difficulties in Kristeller's formulations, but accepts their purport and (...) actually expands the reach of Kristeller's thesis. Whatever else one might wish to say about these charges (which are quite impressive as a list but each disputable taken in turn), Shiner remains an unrepentant exponent of Kristeller's views. I realize that dogmas die hard, and it is only to be expected that if one challenges the central tenets of a legacy one will meet with entrenched reactions. Given the word-limit I have been allotted for my counter-reply, I will confine myself to the more substantive issues as these concern Kristeller's arguments, reserving for a possible future occasion any difficulties I may have with Shiner's own theses. My response will take the form of a series of questions followed by my own proposed answers. (shrink)

In the aftermath of the debate between Derrida and Levinas on Hebraism and Hellenism, Christian thought that retains a place for philosophy is often regarded as “Graeco‐Christian”, a monolithic system with an unfortunate history. The work of the French philosopher Stansilas Breton suggests that the reality is more complex. In Le Verbe et la croix , he examines the function of the term logos staurou in Paul, arguing that this untranslatable term stands as a question mark in a world of (...) language that could only speak “Jew” or “Greek”. Far from being a sign of Christian superiority, the cross signals an imperative for dispossession intrinsic to Christian language. In its “nothingness” the cross functions as a principle of critique that makes innovation and engagement possible. Thus while the cross involves negation it moves beyond negative theology. Drawing upon neoplatonist philosophy, Breton delineates the way in which the cross makes possible “the writing of the self in the world”. This paper draws upon Breton's understanding of the function of the cross to argue that the heritage of Athens endures and must be re‐thought, always recognizing the limits of all human language. After examining Breton's understanding of the logos staurou, it relates this notion to his broader understanding of revelation as “writing”. Finally it shows how Breton appeals to neoplatonist meonotology to speak in more universal terms of the need for a principle of dispossession at the heart of all religious language. For Christians the cross is this principle, enabling human beings to be causes of themselves who engender new being. (shrink)

This article is meant to be an apologetic for spiritual formation to those within the evangelical tradition who find themselves concerned about its emphases. Eight common objections to spiritual formation are presented with the twofold aim of recognizing any needed corrective and defusing the objection. While more must be said in response to each of these objections, it is hoped that enough will be said here to relieve much of the anxiety surrounding spiritual formation.