If one's political engagement is to be shaped fundamentally by the Scriptures, it means developing a biblical understanding on a given issue by means of a process vastly more complex than selecting a few isolated proof-texts related to it.

This article addresses the implications of rapid and uncertain ecological change, and global climate change in particular, for reserve oriented and restoration oriented ecosystem management. I argue for the following conclusions: (1) rapid and uncertain ecological change undermines traditional justifications for reserve oriented and restoration oriented ecosystem management strategies; (2) it requires rethinking ecosystem management goals, not just developing novel strategies (such as assisted colonization) to accomplish traditional goals; (3) species preservation ought to be deemphasized as an ecosystem management goal; (...) (4) reserve oriented ecosystem management remains well justified, but the goals for it must be revised. (shrink)

As the crusade to outlaw the teaching of evolution changed to a battle for equal time for creationism, the ideological defenses of that doctrine also shifted from primarily biblical to more scientific grounds. This essay describes the historical development of “scientific creationism” from a variety of late–nineteenth– and early–twentieth–century creationist reactions to Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, through the Scopes trial and the 1960s revival of creationism, to the current spread of strict creationism around the world.

Some have suggested that there is no fact to the matter as to whether or not a particular physical system relaizes a particular computational description. This suggestion has been taken to imply that computational states are not real, and cannot, for example, provide a foundation for the cognitive sciences. In particular, Putnam has argued that every ordinary open physical system realizes every abstract finite automaton, implying that the fact that a particular computational characterization applies to a physical system does not (...) tell oneanything about the nature of that system. Putnam''s argument is scrutinized, and found inadequate because, among other things, it employs a notion of causation that is too weak. I argue that if one''s view of computation involves embeddedness (inputs and outputs) and full causality, one can avoid the universal realizability results. Therefore, the fact that a particular system realizes a particular automaton is not a vacuous one, and is often explanatory. Furthermore, I claim that computation would not necessarily be an explanatorily vacuous notion even if it were universally realizable. (shrink)

Polanyi’s claim that a wholly tacit knowledge is possible is contested. Polanyi’s praise for the tacit, and his critique of the ideal of total explicitness, harbors a threat of Romanticism, which, in turn, may become a threat to the value of the explicit itself, and ultimately a political threat, something that Heidegger’s anti-Enlightenment philosophy and political life manifested all too dramatically. Polanyians must not lose sight of the primacy of the explicit for personal existence, something that Polanyi’s work need not (...) undermine, and indeed, that has the resources to affirm and support. (shrink)

Food Ethics: The Basics is a concise yet comprehensive introduction to the ethical dimensions of the production and consumption of food. It offers an impartial exploration of the most prominent ethical questions relating to food and agriculture including: • Should we eat animals? • Are locally produced foods ethically superior to globally sourced foods? • Do people in affluent nations have a responsibility to help reduce global hunger? • Should we embrace bioengineered foods? • What should be the role of (...) government in promoting food safety and public health? Using extensive data and real world examples, as well as providing suggestions for further reading, Food Ethics: The Basics is an ideal introduction for anyone interested in the ethics of food. (shrink)

It is by now commonly agreed that the proper study of consciousness requires a multidisciplinary approach which focuses on the varieties and dimensions of conscious experience from different angles. This book, which is based on a workshop held at the University of Skövde, Sweden, provides a microcosm of the emerging discipline of consciousness studies and focuses on some important but neglected aspects of consciousness. The book brings together philosophy, psychology, cognitive neuroscience, linguistics, cognitive and computer science, biology, physics, art and (...) the new media. It contains critical studies of subjectivity vs objectivity, nonconceptuality vs conceptuality, language, evolutionary aspects, neural correlates, microphysical level, creativity, visual arts and dreams. It is suitable as a text-book for a third-year undergraduate or a graduate seminar on consciousness studies. (shrink)

Originally published in 1995, Creation-Evolution Debates is the second volume in the series, Creationism in Twentieth Century America, reissued in 2021. The volume comprises eight debates from the early 1920s and 1930s between prominent evolutionists and creationists of the time. The original sources detail debates that took place either orally or in print, as well as active debates between creationists over the true meaning of Genesis I. The essays in this volume feature prominent discussions between the likes of Edwin Grant (...) Conklin, Henry Fairfield Osbourne and William Jennings Bryan, John Roach Francis and Charles Francis Potter, George McCready Price and Joseph McCabe and William Bell Riley versus Charles Smith, amongst many others. The collection will be of especial interest to natural historians, and theologians as well as academics of philosophy, and history. (shrink)

Technology shapes every aspect of human experience and it is the primary driver of social and ecological change. Given this, it is surprising that we spend so little time studying, analyzing, and evaluating new technologies. Occasionally, an issue grabs public attention--for example, the use of human embryonic stem cells in medical research or online file sharing of music and movies. However, these are the exceptions. For the most part, we enthusiastically embrace each new technology and application with little critical reflection (...) on how it will impact our lives and our world. What is more, when an issue raised by an emerging technology is attended to, we often lack the language, concepts, and critical perspectives to thoroughly address it. The aim of this textbook is to introduce students and other readers to the ethical issues associated with a broad array of emerging technologies--including nanotechnology, synthetic genomics, robotics, genetic engineering, geoengineering, synthetic meat, virtual reality, information technologies, sex selection, and many more--and to help them develop analytical skills and perspectives for effectively evaluating novel technologies and applications. (shrink)

We describe some of the ways that the field of content analysis is being transformed in an Era of Big Data. We argue that content analysis, from its beginning, has been concerned with extracting the main meanings of a text and mapping those meanings onto the space of a textual corpus. In contrast, we suggest that the emergence of new styles of text mining tools is creating an opportunity to develop a different kind of content analysis that we describe as (...) a computational hermeneutics. Here the goal is to go beyond a mapping of the main meaning of a text to mimic the kinds of questions and concerns that have traditionally been the focus of a hermeneutically grounded close reading, a reading that focuses on what Kenneth Burke described as the poetic meanings of a text. We illustrate this approach by referring to our own work concerning the rhetorical character of US National Security Strategy documents. (shrink)

The companion volume to Arnold Come's Kierkegaard as Humanist, Kierkegaard as Theologian is an exploration of Søren Kierkegaard's deliberately Christian writings, from Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits (1846) to For Self-Examination (1851). In his later writings Kierkegaard sought to "get further forward in the direction of discovering the Christianity of the New Testament" to resolve his own spiritual crisis. His struggle to understand how authentic theologizing relates to the spiritual struggles of personal faith led him to a discussion of the (...) three basic foci of his theologizing: the self as gift, that is, a creation "out of nothing" from God; the self as failure, which brings on a state of despair; and the self redeemed by God's love and healing compassion. Come probes some of the problematic aspects of Kierkegaard's theology. He addresses the question of whether God's high intentions and demands for human achievement of selfhood and spirituality justify the unspeakable sufferings entailed in human failures to fulfil those demands. He also explores the puzzling relation between Kierkegaard's seeming assignment of exclusivity to the Christian understanding and experiences of both sin and salvation as well as his assumption of the capacity of humans to recognize the need to turn to the eternal that is immanent in every human consciousness - so-called Religiousness A. (shrink)

Summary. A distinction is made between two senses of the claim “cognition is computation”. One sense, the opaque reading, takes computation to be whatever is described by our current computational theory and claims that cognition is best understood in terms of that theory. The transparent reading, which has its primary allegiance to the phenomenon of computation, rather than to any particular theory of it, is the claim that the best account of cognition will be given by whatever theory turns out (...) to be the best account of the phenomenon of computation. The distinction is clarified and defended against charges of circularity and changing the subject. Several well-known objections to computationalism are then reviewed, and for each the question of whether the transparent reading of the computationalist claim can provide a response is considered. (shrink)

Originally published in 1995, The Antievolution Works of Arthur I. Brown is the third volume in the series, Creationism in Twentieth Century America. The volume brings together original sources from the prominent surgeon and creationist Arthur I. Brown. Brown discredited evolution as it was contrary to the 'clear statements of scripture' which he believed infallible, stating evolution instead to be both a hoax and 'a weapon of Satan'. The works included focus on Brown's polemic through his early twentieth century writings. (...) The essays focus on his scientific investigations and provide a negative commentary upon Darwin's theory of evolution instead focusing on biblical explanations for evolution. As a scientist Brown's unique view of evolution from a creationist and scientific viewpoint provides a fascinating lens through which to view the historical debates surrounding evolution and provides a unique insight into how Darwinian theory affected both the scientific and religious communities. This book will be of interest to natural historians, and theologians as well as academics of philosophy and history. (shrink)

The development and deployment of the notion of pre-objective or nonconceptual content for the purposes of intentional explanation of requires assistance from a practical and theoretical understanding of computational/robotic systems acting in real-time and real-space. In particular, the usual "that"-clause specification of content will not work for non-conceptual contents; some other means of specification is required, means that make use of the fact that contents are aspects of embodied and embedded systems. That is, the specification of non-conceptual content should use (...) concepts and insights gained from android design and android epistemology. (shrink)

This brief essay remembers the late William H. Poteat and outlines his intellectual perspective and its its roots.

2.4 The Example: Infants and object-(im)permanence : : : : : : : : : : : : : : 17 2.4.1 Why a contentful account is warranted: Perspectival sensitivity : : : 17 2.4.2 The \searching under a cloth" and \AB" data : : : : : : : : : : : : 24 2.4.3 Two constraints on objectuality : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : (...) : 25.. (shrink)

have context-sensitive constituents, but rather because they sometimes have no constituents at all. The argument to be rejected depends on the assumption that one can only assign propositional contents to representations if one starts by assigning sub-propositional contents to atomic representations. I give some philosophical arguments and present a counterexample to show that this assumption is mistaken.

One can learn a great deal about the relative priorities in any moral theory by understanding how these priorities are conveyed in the perpetually vexing challenge of moral education. Rousseau and Kant are two thinkers whose distinctly modern retrieval of classical virtue was animated by overlapping yet diverging grievances with classical philosophy. One common enemy of Rousseauian and Kantian virtue found in classical thought is the moral vice of envy. This essay argues that whereas Rousseau chastises the vice of envy, (...) replacing it with the central virtue of pity, Kant redirects the vice of envy towards the more salutary virtue of magnanimity during adolescence and beneficence in the adult. The consideration of sympathy in its full moral and educational context in Kant-over and against Rousseau’s emphasis on pity as the central corrective to the vice of envy-underscores the extent of the differences between Rousseau and Kant on this issue. The common criticism of Rousseau and Kant on the problem of envy is animated by some common concerns, but their understandings of it as a problem require responses that are deceptively different in their substance. (shrink)

Virtue ethics is now widely recognized as an alternative to Kantian and consequentialist ethical theories. However, moral philosophers have been slow to bring virtue ethics to bear on topics in applied ethics. Moreover, environmental virtue ethics is an underdeveloped area of environmental ethics. Although environmental ethicists often employ virtue-oriented evaluation (such as respect, care, and love for nature) and appeal to role models (such as Henry Thoreau, Aldo Leopold, and Rachel Carson) for guidance, environmental ethics has not been well informed (...) by contemporary work on virtue ethics. With _Character and Environment_, Ronald Sandler remedies each of these deficiencies by bringing together contemporary work on virtue ethics with contemporary work on environmental ethics. He demonstrates the many ways that any ethic of character can and should be informed by environmental considerations. He also develops a pluralistic virtue-oriented environmental ethic that accommodates the richness and complexity of our relationship with the natural environment and provides effective and nuanced guidance on environmental issues. These projects have implications not only for environmental ethics and virtue ethics but also for moral philosophy more broadly. Ethical theories must be assessed on their theoretical and practical adequacy with respect to all aspects of the human ethical situation: personal, interpersonal, and environmental. To the extent that virtue-oriented ethical theory in general, and Sandler's version of it in particular, provides a superior environmental ethic to other ethical theories, it is to be preferred not just as an environmental ethic but also as an ethical theory. _Character and Environment_ will engage any reader with an interest in environmental ethics, virtue ethics, or moral philosophy. (shrink)