The Book of Common Prayer is the first introduction to Anglican belief and liturgy for many. More specifically, the Book of Common Prayer of 1662 contains the traditional catechism of the Church of England, enjoining catechumens to receive training and instruction in basic doctrines and Christian living. This takes place in the contexts of the liturgy and the more comprehensive doctrinal statements of the 39 Articles of Religion. Anglican religion traditionally allowed its members to verbalise their faith in both ritual (...) and confession, thus serving the church and not so much life in the world. A revisit of the intentions of the catechism within its historical and prayer book contexts will show that it essentially expresses lasting truths of the Christian faith. In a world increasingly divorced from particular Christian expressions, the Anglican Church needs to rethink its particular use of the catechism for its continued relevance in meeting the questions and challenges Anglicans face daily. (shrink)

A collection of paradoxes, dialogues, problems, and essays discusses aspects of philosophy, including the natures of reality, truth, existence, and death.

Abstract I consider Paul Thompson’s Agrarian Vision from the perspective of the philosophy of technology, especially as it relates to certain questions about public engagement and deliberative democracy around food issues. Is it able to promote an attitudinal shift or reorientation in values to overcome the view of “food as device” so that conscientious engagement in the food system by consumers can become more the norm? Next, I consider briefly, some questions to which it must face up in order to (...) move closer in dismantling the barriers that inhibit the capacity for virtuous caretaking of the food system at various levels. Lastly, and more deeply, how successful might agrarianism be in inculcating citizenship values (ones that go beyond food ethics as a private affair), for the democratization of agricultural technologies? Might the Jeffersonian foundation to which the agrarianism (a la) Thompson appeals need something like a contemporary theory of justice in order to facilitate the reconstitution of our politico-moral selves? How can it help guide appropriate ruminations on the intra and intergenerational question, “What do we want the shape of our current and future social and political institutions to look like in relation to food?” Content Type Journal Article Category Articles Pages 1-10 DOI 10.1007/s10806-011-9339-x Authors Raymond Anthony, Department of Philosophy, University of Alaska Anchorage, Anchorage, AK 99508, USA Journal Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics Online ISSN 1573-322X Print ISSN 1187-7863. (shrink)

The MODAL property of contingency is attributed to something X (for instance, a PROPOSITION, STATE OF AFFAIRS, EVENT, or - more debatably - an object) just when X is neither impossible nor necessary, i.e., is both possible and nonnecessary.

This book explores the pervasiveness of poetry's impact on philosophy and, conversely, how philosophy has sometimes resisted or denied poetry's influence.

The most distinctive activities of humankind and the source of its greatest achievements are the scientific investigation of the world and the creation of art. Newton's Sleep examines their complementary roles in contemporary life and defends both against those who assert that science is spiritually empty and inherently dangerous and that art is trivialised by a lack of social mission.

We sketch four applications of Marr's levels-of-analysis methodology to the relations between logic and experimental data in the cognitive neuroscience of language and reasoning. The first part of the paper illustrates the explanatory power of computational level theories based on logic. We show that a Bayesian treatment of the suppression task in reasoning with conditionals is ruled out by EEG data, supporting instead an analysis based on defeasible logic. Further, we describe how results from an EEG study on temporal prepositions (...) can be reanalyzed using formal semantics, addressing a potential confound. The second part of the article demonstrates the predictive power of logical theories drawing on EEG data on processing progressive constructions and on behavioral data on conditional reasoning in people with autism. Logical theories can constrain processing hypotheses all the way down to neurophysiology, and conversely neuroscience data can guide the selection of alternative computational level models of cognition. (shrink)

Le magicien qui croit à l'efficacité des rituels de pluie n'obéit pas à une autre logique que l'homme de science, explique Durkheim. Les croyances religieuses doivent s'analyser comme le produit de raisons, expliquent Tocqueville et Weber. Les percées scientifiques les plus spectaculaires des sciences sociales sont celles qui ont réussi à déplacer les frontières du rationnel : à démontrer que la croyance ou le comportement qu'un regard superficiel juge spontanément irrationnel s'explique comme l'effet de raisons subjectivement fortes et objectivement fondées. (...) Ce déplacement de l'irrationnel au rationnel est indispensable si l'on veut expliquer les changements dans les croyances, les normes, les valeurs et les institutions qu'on observe dans les sociétés contemporaines. (shrink)

These essays, written in the spirit of Goethe’s Epimetheus who "traces the quick deed to the dim realm of form-combining possibilities", display the depth and breadth of Tallis’s fascination with our lives. Whether discussing philosophical "hardy perennials" like time, or a mundane artefact like ink, Tallis challenges us to think differently about who we are and why we are. The first part of the book – Analysis – dives into the deep-end to explore some of the big questions in philosophy: (...) perception, knowledge and belief; time; the relationship between mathematics and reality; and probability and causation. The middle section – Tetchy Interludes – takes a wry look at some aspects of contemporary art; stupidity (including the author’s own); and Christmas. The third part – Celebration – is more experimental in both its subject matter and treatment. It celebrates the complexity of ordinary, everyday consciousness by contemplating the miracle of speech, artefacts that have transformed our lives (and what they reveal about our cognition) such as the wheel, the sail, and ink; and ‘snapshots’ of the author’s own consciousness on an ordinary day, of past consciousness, as captured in historical memory. Notwithstanding their diversity in theme and style, these essays share the common aim of discovering and celebrating the submerged riches in the "quick deeds" of our everyday lives and perceptions. (shrink)

In Britain, policy‐makers tend to view racism as a social attitude rather than an institutional/structural phenomenon. Not until the publication of the MacPherson Report (1999) was the idea of ‘institutional racism’ officially recognised. According to Jules Holroyd, implicit bias as a concept can help us understand and combat the kind of unwitting prejudice the Macpherson report describes. This article explores whether implicit bias is indeed a viable framework for understanding institutional/structural racism. To do so, I bring together Charles Mills’ notion (...) of ‘global white ignorance’ and Lewis Gordon's interpretation of ‘bad faith’. Through Mills’ and Gordon's analyses, which together illuminate both the structural and psychic dimensions of racism I offer an account of the psychodynamics of racism far more consistent with our observations of how racism actually operates in Britain. Specifically, we see that institutional/structural racism is neither unconscious nor is it unmotivated as implicit bias would suggest. As such, I reject implicit bias as a useful or necessary explanatory framework for helping us understand institutional racism as a structural phenomenon. (shrink)

Is moral evolution a mere illusion, as postmodern thinkers state or a more or less permanent feature of history though it can be thwarted by unfavorable conjunctures, as Weber or Durkheim thought? The question is tentatively answered by a reanalysis of data drawn from the World Values Survey conducted under the lead of the University of Michigan. The data on seven Western countries show, when comparing the answers of younger to older respondents and of more to less educated respondents, that (...) definite trends characterize the frequencies. On the questions regarding issues related notably to work, authority, morals, religion, politics and attitudes towards other people, the younger and the more educated appear as giving answers less inspired by tradition. On the whole, the data illustrate Weber’s notion of ratio­nalization. The same trends can be observed in countries outside the Western world as India, Russia and Turkey. Such trends may plausibly be reinforced by globalization. (shrink)

Participants attempted to solve a modified version of Wason's selection task. Variables were: sizes of the sets referenced by a specified assertion, form of the assertion, thematic content of the assertion, and the need for sampling or not. In Experiment 1, participants were given enough information to determine the truth or falsity of the specified assertion with certainty; in Experiment 2, they had to rely on sampling and could not determine the assertion's truth or falsity with certainty. Performance was better (...) in Experiment 1 than in Experiment 2, but in both cases much better than what is typically obtained with the conventional selection task. The results support the hypothesis that performance of the selection task is sensitive to the sizes of the sets involved, add credence to the conclusion that framing the task in a thematically meaningful way can facilitate performance, and demonstrate that facilitation does not require deontic reasoning or a well-known convention being involved. The relationship between expressed confidence and level of performance is consistent with other studies showing the former to be a good predictor of the latter. (shrink)

In this paper we present a semantic analysis of the imperfective paradox based on the Event Calculus, a planning formalism characterizing a class of models which can be computed by connectionist networks. We report the results of a questionnaire that support the semantic theory and suggest that different aspectual classes of VPs in the progressive give rise to different entailment patterns. Further, a processing model is outlined, combining the semantic analysis with the psycholinguistic principle of immediacy in the framework of (...) recurrent networks. The model is used to derive predictions concerning the electrophysiological correlates of the computations described by the Event Calculus. (shrink)

Happiness Is Overrated highlights the greatest thinking on the concept of happiness from classical philosophers such as Plato, to contemporary sociologists and psychologists. It includes practical advice on how to attain happiness, but argues that happiness is not the greatest personal good. Ultimately, the greatest personal good is realized in leading a robustly meaningful, valuable life.

Reinhard Bendix made a major contribution to the early reception and interpretation of Max Weber's work. His classic study, Max Weber: An Intellectual Portrait (1960), developed a remarkably consistent interpretation of Weber as a comparative historical sociologist. Bendix also emulated and subtly reinterpreted in his own work key aspects of Weber's comparative method and research strategies. By searching for a middle course between `Scylla and Charybdis', between the abstractions of theoretical concepts and the richness of empirical evidence, Bendix sought to (...) reinterpret and renew the vital centre of Weber's comparative enterprise as a study of western uniqueness. In so doing, he decisively challenged Talcott Parsons's alternative methodological reading of Weber's work. Yet, curiously Bendix's status as a Weber interpreter and comparative historian profoundly influenced by Weber's legacy has often been neglected or misinterpreted. This article re-examines Bendix's classic reading of Weber's corpus, and the way in which he sought to keep alive in his substantive work the promise and spirit of Weber's comparative historical sociology. (shrink)