ABSTRACTThis article examines how Christians who had been deprived of the direct sponsorship of the state articulated their claims for political and religious freedom. I examine four cases from the fifth and sixth century in the Eastern Roman Empire and Sasanian Iran. Here I argue that Scriptural models provided an important reservoir of political ideas that could be used by clerics to undermine state authority, whether to underscore the conditional nature of Roman claims to authority or to deny an equality (...) of religious freedom to non-Christian co-citizens. (shrink)

Argues i) that part of what it is to understand what is being asked, when we ask whether something is good, is being able to distinguish stopping points in a series of "Why?" questions, and ii) that this ability explains how we can reason from observable facts to conclusions about value.

An elegant theory in cognitive neuropsychiatry explains the Capgras and Cotard delusions as resulting from the same type of anomalous phenomenal experience explained in different ways by different sufferers. ‘Although the Capgras and Cotard delusions are phenomenally distinct, we thus think that they represent patients’ attempts to make sense of fundamentally similar experiences’ (Young and Leafhead, 1996, p. 168). On the theory proposed by Young and Leafhead, the anomalous experience results from damage to an information processing subsystem which associates an (...) affect of ‘familiarity’ with overt recognition of faces, and, sometimes, scenes and objects. When the normal affect of familiarity is absent the subject experiences an unusual feeling of derealization or depersonalization. The Cotard and Capgras patients adopt different, delusional, explanations of this unusual qualitative state, for reasons to do with ‘attributional style’. It is part of this attribution hypothesis that delusional subjects, like normal people, interpret perceptual phenomena in the light of a set of background beliefs whose structure is a product of social/contextual influences and individual psychological dispositions. That structure predisposes people to reason in certain ways, to discount or reinterpret evidence and to favour certain hypoth-. (shrink)

In the developmentalist era,industrialization has simultaneously transformedagriculture and degraded its natural and culturalbase. Food production and consumption embodies thecontradictory aspects of this transformation. Thispaper argues that the crisis of development hasgenerated two basic responses: (1) the attempt toredefine development as a global project, includingharnessing biotechnology to resolve the food securityquestion, and (2) a series of countermovementsattempting to simultaneously reassert the value oflocal, organic foods, and challenge the attempt on thepart of food corporations and national and globalinstitutions to subject the food (...) question to marketsolutions. It is proposed that the power of food liesin its material and symbolic functions of linkingnature, human survival, health, culture and livelihoodas a focus of resistance to corporate takeover of lifeitself. (shrink)

In response to the liar’s paradox, Kripke developed the fixed-point semantics for languages expressing their own truth concepts. Kripke’s work suggests a number of related fixed-point theories of truth for such languages. Gupta and Belnap develop their revision theory of truth in contrast to the fixed-point theories. The current paper considers three natural ways to compare the various resulting theories of truth, and establishes the resulting relationships among these theories. The point is to get a sense of the lay of (...) the land amid a variety of options. Our results will also provide technical fodder for the methodological remarks of the companion paper to this one. (shrink)

Intermediate Quantitifiers presents and analyzes the logical and linguistic features of intermediate quantifiers, in a fashion typical of traditional logic. Intermediate quantifiers express logical quantities which fall between Aristotle's two quantities of categorical propositions - the universal and the particular. This book is the first to use traditional methods to integrate the logic and semantics of intermediate quantifiers with the two traditional quantities. Few, many and most express the most commonly referred to intermediate quantities, yet in this book Peterson argues (...) that an infinite number of additional quantities can be understood through a deeper examination of the logical nature of all intermediate quantifiers. Drawing on the work of Robert Carnes and taking a critical look at James McCawley's grammatical analysis, Peterson concludes that a new approach to foundations of mathematics based on the syllogistic logic of quantifiers is possible.Offering invaluable insights for those studying across areas of logic, linguistics, and the philosophy or semantics of natural language, this book presents the completion of an explanation for extending traditional syllogistic logic to handle intermediate quantifiers. (shrink)

In explicit memory recall and recognition tasks, elaboration and contextual isolation both facilitate memory performance. Here, we investigate these effects in the context of sentence processing: targets for retrieval during online sentence processing of English object relative clause constructions differ in the amount of elaboration associated with the target noun phrase, or the homogeneity of superficial features (text color). Experiment 1 shows that greater elaboration for targets during the encoding phase reduces reading times at retrieval sites, but elaboration of non-targets (...) has considerably weaker effects. Experiment 2 illustrates that processing isolated superficial features of target noun phrases --- here, a green word in a sentence with words colored white --- does not lead to enhanced memory performance, despite triggering longer encoding times. These results are interpreted in the light of the memory models of Nairne 1990, 2001, 2006, which state that encoding remnants contribute to the set of retrieval cues that provide the basis for similarity-based interference effects. (shrink)

Contemporary discussions of skepticism often frame the skeptic's argument around an instance of the closure principle. Roughly, the closure principle states that if a subject knows p, and knows that p entails q, then the subject knows q. The main contention of this paper is that the closure argument for skepticism is defective. We explore several possible classifications of the defect. The closure argument might plausibly be classified as begging the question, as exhibiting transmission failure, or as structurally inefficient. Interestingly, (...) perhaps, each of these has been proposed as the correct classification of Moore's proof of an external world. (shrink)

This paper sets in context the melodramatic conclusion to R. G. Collingwood’s The Principles of Art (1938) and his exceptional praise of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922). I suggest that the background to this conclusion, with its emphasis on the role of emotion in human agency, must embrace an extraordinary series of essays composed in the mid nineteen-thirties, and which until their publication in 2005 were known as the “folktale manuscripts.” Collingwood’s critique of anthropological method in these essays, (...) with his discussions of ritual, magic and the alleged madness of the so-called “savage mind,” feed into the anxieties about civilization’s condition felt through his reception of Eliot’s poetical diagnosis, and they are developed in Collingwood’s own compelling essay of 1936, “Mad Goes Mad.” The essay is Collingwood’s account of a disease of mind which Art, in the event, proved powerless to cure. (shrink)

This essay offers an introduction to Jeong Yakyong’s ethical philosophy as revealed by his commentary on the Mengzi. Following Mengzi, Dasan insisted that the Confucian Way was grounded in the will of Heaven but looked back to early views about the Lord on High and described ethical life in terms of an everyday, natural order decreed by the Lord on High. Not only did he see a wide range of human emotions as indispensable and central to the good life, he (...) also insisted that Heaven and the Way must be understood in terms of their manifestations in this world. (shrink)

R. K. Meyer once gave precise form to the question of whether relevant implication can be defined in any modal system, and his answer was `no'. In the present paper, we extend S4, first with propositional quantifiers, to the system S4π+; and then with definite propositional descriptions, to the system S4π+ lp . We show that relevant implication can in some sense be defined in the modal system S4π+ lp , although it cannot be defined in S4π+.

In this article, Herbert Marcuse’s nature-ethical considerations, which have to date been scarcely received, are used to develop perspectives on how the nature-ethical gap in contemporary Critical Theory could be closed. The central idea is that nature is tobe recognized as a subject in its own right without needing to anthropomorphize it in the process. The advocatory ethics of nature, which is outlined here, differs from current sustainability and environmental ethics primarily in that it maintains the tension between an anthropocentric (...) and an ecocentric approach and does not resolve it in one direction. Marcuse’s so-called “liberation of nature” is understood as a means for the “liberation of humans”, but the latter can only succeed if the former is also carried out. (shrink)

Arnold Clapmarius’ ‘Traineeship in politics’. Practical Experience and the Semblance of Practical Experience as a Qualification in the Field of Political Science around the Year 1600. In 1600, Arnold Clapmarius was appointed the first professor for Public Law and Political Science in the Holy Roman Empire by the University of Altdorf. He received this professorship though he had not yet published anything because he was a protégé of Landgrave Maurice the Learned of Hesse-Kassel. Two newly discovered letters which were written (...) by Clapmarius to Maurice show that the young scholar did a traineeship at the Landgrave's court to gather practical experience in politics. This was probably the reason for his appointment in Altdorf. Nevertheless, he hushed up this traineeship because it did not comply to the kind of experience that were expected from a ‘politicus’ at that time, id est military service, educational journeys, foreign languages and regional studies. Thus, this paper fills a gap of Arnold Clapmarius’ biography, and provides a new perspective on the value of practical experience in the field of political science in the Early Modern Period. (shrink)

How can materialists begin to do justice to the experiencing subject? Some materialists, whom I call ?structuralists?, believe that the brain sciences offer at least the distant prospect of a materialist psychology with an experiencing subject. Others, and notably those materialists who are functionalists, believe that this faith is misplaced, and offer us instead a functional psychology. I argue, briefly, that functionalism cannot deliver the goods, and go on to elaborate and defend the structuralist claim that consciousness or experience is (...) the formation of content conceived as that laying down of traces commonly assumed to be involved in perception and cognition. (shrink)

Philip H Walkling; The Idea of a Multicultural Curriculum [1], Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 14, Issue 1, 30 May 2006, Pages 87–95, https://doi.org.

We critically investigate and refine Dunn's relevant predication, his formalisation of the notion of a real property. We argue that Dunn's original dialectical moves presuppose some interpretation of relevant identity, though none is given. We then re-motivate the proposal in a broader context, considering the prospects for a classical formalisation of real properties, particularly of Geach's implicit distinction between real and ''Cambridge'' properties. After arguing against these prospects, we turn to relevance logic, re-motivating relevant predication with Geach's distinction in mind. (...) Finally we draw out some consequences of Dunn's proposal for the theory of identity in relevance logic. (shrink)

The challenge to the journal Zygon as suggested here is to respond to three different reference groups: public intellectuals, academia, and religious communities. An extended discussion follows of what I term the situation of irony in which religion-and-science finds itself. I argue that this situation of irony actually constitutes the domain in which our greatest contributions can be offered.

I compare recent work in the sociology of scientific knowledge with other types of sociological research. On this basis I urge a revival of the sociology of science, offer a tentative agenda, and attempt to show how the questions I raise might be addressed.

The contemporary sociology of morality is a form of descriptive ethics that shrinks away from any sort of prescriptive ethics. Building on the moral philosophies of John Dewey, and also of Alasdair MacIntyre and Paul Ricoeur, and in dialogue with recent work by Stefan Bargheer, this article proposes a more ambitious program of critical social ethics that connects concerns with character and the common good but tempers them with attention to alienation and oppression.

Metaphysics, as I understand it, is the attempt to construct theories which give correct accounts in general terms of pervasive structural features of reality. Though not precise and not intended as an explicit definition, this characterization is comprehensive enough to include both descriptive and revisionary varieties of metaphysical theory. The enterprise of descriptive metaphysics, Strawson tells us, consists in describing “the actual structure of our thought about the world.” Presumably a philosopher would favor this approach to metaphysics if he or (...) she believed either that the actual structure of our thought about the world provides, at least for the most part, an accurate portrait of the world’s structure or that the actual structure of our thought at any time provides privileged access, or perhaps our only access, at that time to the structure of the world. Revisionary metaphysics, by contrast, is concerned to produce a structure of thought about the world better than the one we actually have. Obviously a philosopher would adopt this approach if he or she believed that the actual structure of our thought about the world provides, in at least some important respects, an inaccurate portrait of the world’s structure and stands in need of revision in the interests of correctness. And clearly a philosopher might hold that the actual structure of our thought is quite accurate in some respects and need only be described to yield correct theory and yet is thoroughly inaccurate in others and requires substantial revision if correct theory is to be the outcome. Philosophers may, as I suppose most of them do, practice by turns descriptive and revisionary kinds of metaphysics. No global commitment to one approach or the other is required; the choice between approaches can be allowed to rest on the exigencies of local problems. (shrink)

In recent years, political legitimacy as a concept distinct from full justice has received much attention. Yet in addition to querying the specific conditions legitimacy requires, there is a more general question: What is legitimacy even about? How ought we identify and conceptualize these conditions? According to the regnant justificatory liberal (JL) approach, legitimate legal coercion is based on reasons all reasonable persons can accept and JL is explicated in terms of a hypothetical procedure. Alas, Part I explains why JL (...) is inadequate. First, I argue that it de-legitimizes all coercion. Second, it undercuts the proposition that there are certain basic rights which must be protected for legitimacy. Third, I suggest that JL structurally involves paternalism. Where should theorists turn? My perhaps surprising proposal is that they turn to the Christian Reformed (CR) tradition of social thought. As I take it, this tradition is composed of such figures as Augustine and Calvin, Abraham Kuyper and Herman Dooyeweerd, and, more recently, Francis Schaeffer. It has long theorized such issues as church-state separation and permissible coercion, and is replete with conceptual resources. Thus, Part II reconstructs an alternative legitimacy framework out of these resources. The central CR insight is this: legitimacy is a function of preventing basic wrongs. Legal coercion is only necessary "by reason of sin". I develop this insight in terms of three ideas. First, those wrongs which must prevented as conditions of legitimacy are objective wrongs, obtaining universally regardless of consent. Second, they presuppose some view of basic teleology. A teleological view is needed to elaborate contentful basic rights non-arbitrarily, but only a basic teleological view insofar as legitimacy is distinct from full justice. Third, I suggest these wrongs are fruitfully understood as constituting an exogenous standard, one that is neither the product of actual nor hypothetical self-legislation. Part III brings JL and CR legitimacy into dialogue. Understanding legitimacy in terms of objective, teleological, and exogenous wrongs, respectively, helps us avoid each of the unacceptable consequences of JL covered in Part I. Legitimacy is better conceptualized in CR terms; preventing such wrongs is what legitimacy is about. (shrink)