Throughout the Middle Ages the expectation of eventual Jewish conversion lay at the center of traditional Christian justifications for protecting the Jewish populations which lived within their midst. St. Augustine and later Pope Gregory the Great enunciated a rationale for Christian protection of Jews, based loosely on Romans 11.25–29, that stressed the historical importance of the Jews as living witnesses to the Old Testament prophecies that confirmed Jesus' messiahship and that foresaw the Jews' eventual conversion to Christianity as a harbinger (...) of the end of days. As has been frequently pointed out, however, this was a theological view formulated much more for a Christian audience than a Jewish one. Nor was it a view that encouraged general campaigns directed at converting Jews en masse to Christianity. (shrink)

Invention is an important source of technology, and, to understand invention, one needs a model system or prototype. A candidate model system is the hand tool. Using the hand tool as an example, the authors present a systematic approach to invention, dealing with description, classification, and joining or integrating simpler forms. Heuristics for when to integrate are presented. Finally, the authors introduce a new way of thinking about hand tools: simple spatial transformations applied to an abstract element make possible the (...) re-creation of a large number of tools. (shrink)

We provide an overview of a transdisciplinary project about sustainable forest management under climate change. Our project is a partnership with members of the Menominee Nation, a Tribal Nation located in northern Wisconsin, United States. We use immersive virtual experiences, translated from ecosystem model outcomes, to elicit human values about future forest conditions under alternative scenarios. Our project combines expertise across the sciences and humanities as well as across cultures and knowledge systems. Our management structure, governance, and leadership behaviors have (...) both fostered and constrained our work and must be continuously responsive to changing group dynamics. Our project presents opportunities for substantial contributions to society, including insights and knowledge about complementary ways of knowing, skills training, and professional development, and opportunities for reflexive learning about effective transdisciplinary, translational, and transformative scientific processes. (shrink)

Patient decision aids enable patients to be better informed about the potential benefits and harms of their healthcare options. Certification of patient decision aids at the national level in the United States is a critical step towards responsible governance—primarily as a quality measure that increases patients’ safety, as mandated in the U.S. Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA). Certification would provide a verification process to identify conflicts of interest that may otherwise bias the scientific evidence presented in decision aids. (...) Certification also benefits clinicians who may otherwise face malpractice claims based on harm to patients caused by possible reliance on patient decision aids that are inaccurate, incomplete, or presented in a manner that biases the patient’s decision. Existing work by the International Patient Decision Aid Standards Collaboration could guide the establishment of a certification process within the U.S. This article argues for national certification of patient decision aids and discusses how that may be achieved. (shrink)

The practice of appealing to esoteric intuitions, long standard in analytic philosophy, has recently fallen on hard times. Various recent empirical results have suggested that philosophers are not currently able to distinguish good intuitions from bad. This paper evaluates one possible type of approach to this problematic methodological situation: calibration. Both critiquing and building on an argument from Robert Cummins, the paper explores what possible avenues may exist for the calibration of philosophical intuitions. It is argued that no good (...) options are currently available, but leaves open the real possibility of such a calibration in the future. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Altars Where We Worship: The Religious Significance of Popular Culture eds. by Juan M. Floyd-Thomas, Stacey M. Floyd-Thomas, and Mark G. ToulouseMichael R. Fisher Jr.The Altars Where We Worship: The Religious Significance of Popular Culture Juan M. Floyd-Thomas, Stacey M. Floyd-Thomas, and Mark G. Toulouse LOUISVILLE: WESTMINSTER JOHN KNOX PRESS, 2016. 250 pp. $25.00The Altars Where We Worship: The Religious Significance of Popular Culture is (...) notable for interested readers of religion and contemporary popular culture. The authors expand scholarly understandings of religion and the sacred, but [End Page 194] more important, the spaces where they appear in society by providing analysis of the religious nature of six aspects of American culture. These "meaning-making" aspects of popular culture function as "altars of worship." They are the body and sex, big business, entertainment, politics, sports, and science and technology. How religious devotion and worship are manifest in everyday life of Americans is fully examined. This book offers an alternative entry to classical secularization debates that have garnered the attention of religious scholars across fields of study. Resisting polarized battle lines in which secularization debates have positioned the death of religion on one hand, and its resilience in industrialized societies on the other hand, this book considers the idiosyncratic nature of secularization by foregrounding historical, national, and local differences that exist in various contexts.The authors argue that "religion is important to Americans. But the religion we practice is often not the religion we confess" (1, emphasis in the original). According to them, Americans basically believe in a serviceable, friendly "God" who meets their every desire and need. In contemporary American culture, the objects that are deemed to fulfill Americans' desires and passions become their God(s) and thus their religion(s). They support their argument by citing studies by the Pew Research Center on "America's Changing Religious Landscape" and "'Nones' on the Rise," which indicate a decrease in religious affiliation among adults and a notable tension between Americans' professed religious beliefs and their actual religious practices. Given these trends, they contend that Americans discover and produce religious meaning in places outside traditional or conventional sacred spaces. Consequently, they confess, Americans have "laid our fair share, if not our all" (186) on the six altars of American popular culture. Thus, though studies indicate a trending decline in traditional religious affiliations, for the authors, this does not "sound the death knell of religion" (185). Religion, they insist, exists in different shapes and practices.In The Religious Experience of Mankind (1969), the religious historian Ninian Smart offers a seven-dimensional scheme for the interpretation of religion: doctrinal, mythological, ethical, ritual, experiential, institutional, and material. This scheme is adopted in the book as a framing device for interpreting the religious nature of popular culture. The sevenfold scheme is paralleled in each of the six chapters dedicated to a particular altar. Making their case, the authors draw on and weave thinkers from across disciplines and over time as critical interlocutors—from Friedrich Nietzsche, Rudolf Otto, Paul Tillich, and Robert Bella to Cornel West, Audre Lord, and bell hooks, among many others—in examining the religious significance of popular culture.Although a truly engaging and provocative book, The Altars Where We Worship is not without challenges. Some readers may find certain categories of analysis underdeveloped. For example, what makes big business or politics sites of popular culture? This line of inquiry may raise questions for readers about what constitutes popular culture in general. Such challenges, however, do not [End Page 195] detract from the overall accomplishments and contributions this book offers the study of religion in the United States.Michael R. Fisher Jr.Vanderbilt UniversityCopyright © 2018 Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)

This book sets the record straight about the greater influence of Dilthey than Husserl in Heidegger’s initial formulation of his conception of phenomenology. Scharff shows how, in Heidegger’s early lecture courses, phenomenology is presented as a genuine philosophical alternative, and explores our own current need for a phenomenological philosophy.

Hastings Center Report, Volume 52, Issue 3, Page 18-29, May–June 2022.

In a recent article, Iris Marion Young raises several challenges to deliberative democracy on behalf of political activists. In this paper, the author defends a version of deliberative democracy against the activist challenges raised by Young and devises challenges to activism on behalf of the deliberative democrat. Key Words: activism • deliberative democracy • Discourse • Ideology • public sphere • I. M. Young.

Expressions of gratitude abound. Hardly a book is published that does not include in its preface or acknowledgments some variation on, “I am grateful to…for…” Indeed, most achievements come to be only through the help of others. We value the benevolence of others, and when we—or our loved ones—are the recipients of benevolence, our emotional response is often one of gratitude. -/- But, are we bound to the requirement of ‘repaying’ our benefactors in some way? If we are, and there (...) are—as ordinary language suggests—debts of gratitude, what kind of debts are these? Does the appropriateness of my gratitude require that my benefactor in fact intended to benefit me (in just the way she did)? Is there a difference between feeling grateful and being grateful? Is a precondition of my being grateful to another that I respect her? Do we owe a special sort of gratitude to those who have shaped us into the persons we are? What are the psychological and normative relations between gratitude the emotion, and gratitude the virtue? -/- These are among the questions carefully addressed in The Moral Psychology of Gratitude. This volume provides readers with the state-of-the-art in research on gratitude. It does so in the form of sixteen never-before published articles on the emotion by leading voices in philosophy and the sciences of the mind. (shrink)

This article traces the evolution by which in the context of 1930s South Africa the liberal philosopher Alfred Hoernlé came to recognize the inability of classical liberalism to address the problems of a society in which a racial hierarchy had become deeply entrenched. Although he must be criticized for his patriarchal approach and for the pessimism that led him to take White attitudes toward Black South Africans as an unchangeable part of the situation that simply had to be accepted, his (...) insight into the limits of liberalism still resonates. While most White commentators were still thinking of racism in terms of beliefs and attitudes, he already understood that the problem lay in the systemic adoption of “techniques of domination” or what we today might call institutional racism. Although his proposal in 1939 that “Total Separation” was “a legitimate application of sound liberal ideas” was deeply problematic in context and might well have had a serious negative impact, it should be understood that it was intended to highlight the fundamental paradox into which liberalism fell when attempting to solve the problems it had helped to create by its belief in a civilizing mission that began with violence. (shrink)

As an introduction to explicating the concept of basic knowledge, I shall examine Aristotle's argument for the existence of basic knowledge and urge two basic points. The first point is that Aristotle's argument, properly viewed, establishes the existence of a kind of knowledge, basic or non-demonstrative knowledge, the definition of which does not require the specification of, and hence the satisfaction of,anyevidence condition. This point has been urged by philosophers like Peirce and Austin but it needs further argumentation because most (...) analytic epistemologists still insist thatallknowledge, whether basic or non-basic, requires the satisfaction of some evidence condition. Secondly, to urge that the basic propositions whose existence is established by Aristotle's argument could be privileged but not known, for the reason that there is no evidence condition for them, would be to adopt a position that either entails wholesale skepticism or undermines the basic distinction between knowledge and belief. (shrink)

In social scientific studies of Europe’s new democracies, there has emerged an analytical approach which transcends the teleology of ‘transitology’ and, focusing on the impact of culture and history, is sensitive to the contingencies and ‘eventfulness’ of social transformations. The main thrust of this article is that such a culturo-historical approach may prove useful not only in assessing the different results to which the processes of democratization lead at the national level, but also to assess the general direction of political (...) change after 1989 towards democracy. Building on Eisenstadt’s notion of modernity as a cultural and political program, this article therefore attempts to understand the revolutions of 1989 not only as the mere sum of particular national events, but also as part of an ‘entangled history’, that is, as a common, transnational phenomenon which was based on and articulated a shared cultural understanding. (shrink)

Sangharakshita (1925-2018) was a Buddhist writer and teacher, founder of the Triratna Buddhist Order and Community (previously FWBO). He died very recently (30th Oct 2018). Apart from his practical achievements, Sangharakshita was an original thinker on the adaptation of Buddhism to modern conditions, an autodidact whose intellectual creativity was stimulated by both cross-cultural experience and practical contingency. His thinking is little known or appreciated outside the movement he founded, but over-dominant within it. This means that there is a shortage of (...) balanced critical discussion of his work that finds any middle way between hagiography and dismissal. Sangharakshita has also been an object of controversy in recent years, but his more controversial views and actions need to be seen in proportion to the whole of his thinking. This book surveys Sangharakshita’s most important and original ideas with an eye that combines appreciation and critical awareness in equal measure. It celebrates Sangharakshita’s pioneering syntheses of Buddhist and Western ideas, but warns against the inconsistencies and dogmas that are also found in Sangharakshita’s work – dogmas whose negative practical effects can also be traced. (shrink)

L'article aborde la question de la fonction cognitive de la fiction. Le dernier terme englobe le langage métaphorique vif aussi bien que ce que l'on appelle «textes». La question considérée implique une théorie générale du discours, présentant celui-ci comme dialectique de l'événement et du sens. La métaphore, en tant qu'innovation sémantique, renvoie à la médiation d'un travail inventif de l'imagination. Le problème qui s'ensuit concerne la référence des énoncés métaphoriques. Le récit, avec sa composition interne, introduit le thème du temps. (...) C'est en lien avec l'expérience temporelle de l'action humaine que le récit de fiction s'entrecroise avec l'historiographie. La notion même de fiction en sort transformée par l'intermédiaire de l'activité heuristique de l'imagination. (shrink)

In Giorgio Agamben's Homo Sacer project, he gives an archaeology of Western political power from ancient Rome up through Carl Schmitt's model of "exceptional sovereignty," where the sovereign is "he who decides on the exception."1 Agamben takes Schmitt's thesis further, arguing that, in modern biopolitics, the "sovereign is he who decides on the value or the nonvalue of life as such," and therefore, on life and death in the state.2 Although this model also appears in Foucault's work, Penelope Deutscher argues (...) that Agamben's use of it includes "the particularly lethal variant seen in the capacity to cancel the status of what is put to death."3 "Homo sacer" is the name that Agamben gives to the form of political... (shrink)