All of us ponder the big and enduring human questions—Who am I? Am I free? What should I do? What is good? Is there justice?

On the horizon between metaphysics and philosophy of religion stands the question of God’s relation to various abstracta. Like other contemporary philosophical debates, this one has resulted in a broadly dichotomous stalemate between Platonic realists on the one hand and varieties of nominalism/antirealism on the other. In this paper, I offer Aquinas’s moderaterealism as a true middle ground between realist or nominalist solutions. What Platonists take to be abstracta are actually the result of intellect’s abstractive work on sensible objects. Further, (...) the Christian philosopher should be concerned as much, if not more so, by nominalism than by Platonism. Given the problems associated with either Platonist or nominalist solutions, one should be open to a Thomistic moderate-realist solution to the problem of God and abstracta. (shrink)

Under present accounting rules, lessees frequently structure contracts for leased assets, in situations where they enjoy benefits similar to outright ownership, in a way that keeps both the leased assets and related liabilities off their books. This method of accounting creates off-balance sheet financing and is called operating lease accounting. The paper debates the ethicality of intentionally structuring lease contracts to avoid disclosing leased asset and liability amounts and describes the “slippery slope” of rule-based accounting for synthetic leases and special (...) purpose entities, that, in the author’s opinion, led to the accounting debacles at Enron and other companies. The ethical intent that is implicit in the Securities and Exchange Commission and Financial Accounting Standards Board regulations is discussed and suggestions for improving the ethicality of financial reporting are provided. (shrink)

The paper discusses examples of integrative metatheoretical and theoretical work undertaken in the spirit of unification. Unification is defined as a recursive process in which the outcome of any one integrative episode provides ideas that may enter into further such episodes. The conceptual materials entering into integration exist at different levels and in distinct contexts. At the metatheoretical level, the examples relate to a number of contexts and issues, including methodological individualism versus holism. At the theoretical level, two examples of (...) the idea of a unification episode are described. In each instance, the ideas entering into the integrative episode are drawn from distinct research programs. It is argued that the spirit of unification, as embodied in theoretical practice along the lines suggested by the examples, can create bridges between disparate theory enterprises so as to help break down particularistic barriers within sociological theory. (shrink)

The paper discusses some aspects of the relationship between Feyerabend and Kuhn. First, some biographical remarks concerning their connections are made. Second, four characteristics of Feyerabend and Kuhn's concept of incommensurability are discussed. Third, Feyerabend's general criticism of Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions is reconstructed. Fourth and more specifically, Feyerabend's criticism of Kuhn's evaluation of normal science is critically investigated. Finally, Feyerabend's re-evaluation of Kuhn's philosophy towards the end of his life is presented.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:THE EUCHARISTIC THEOLOGIES OF LAUDA SION AND THOMAS AQUINAS'S SUMMA THEOLOGIAE THOMAS J. BELL Emory University Atlanta, Georgia MANY works associated with Thomas Aquinas stand both the Office and Mass for the Feast of Corpus Christi.1 The earliest witness to this association comes from two of Thomas's Dominican brothers and younger contemporaries, Tolomeo of Lucca and William of Tocco. Around 1317 Tolomeo wrote in his (...) Historia Ecclesiastica: " Thomas composed [the Corpus Christi Office] in full, including the lessons and all the parts to be recited by day or night; the Mass, too, and whatever has to be sung on the day." 2 William, in his Historia beati Thomae completed around 1320, lists the liturgy of Corpus Christi among Thomas's works and informs us that Thomas wrote the liturgy " at the request of Pope Urban [IV]." 3 It is known that on August 11, 1264, Urban, in the bull Transiturus, declared that the Feast of Corpus Christi was to be celebrated throughout Christendom according to a "new, Roman," liturgy.4 Thomas had returned from Paris to Italy, his 1 This does not mean that Thomas created the liturgy for the feast de nova. Rather it means that Thomas selected and combined older elements from the Scriptures, the Fathers, and existing liturgies, only venturing to write from scratch those hymns and prayers necessary for expressing the theological and devotional views central to the Feast of Corpus Christi. In other words, Thomas wrote or pieced together texts " proper " to the feast and united them with the " ordinary " texts of the Mass and Office. 2 James A. Weisheipl, Friar Thomas d'Aquino: His Life, Thought and Works (Washington, D.C., 1974), p. 177. a Ibid., pp. 132, 177. 4 Ibid., pp. 179, 183. For a partial translation of the bull Transiturus see also Darwell Stone, A History of the Doctrine of the Holy Eucharist (London, 1909), vol. 1, 344-46. This "new, Roman" liturgy promulgated by Urban IV was, indeed, a new 163 164 THOMAS J. BELL homeland, five years before the bull was published. Furthermore, by 1264 he had developed a "warm friendship" with Urban, whom we know to have commissioned Thomas to write several works between 1261 and 1265.5 These facts have led most scholars since the early fourteenth century to conclude that Urban's "new" liturgy was the work of Thomas.6 In recent years, however, Cyrille Lambot has questioned whether Thomas wrote or compiled the liturgy promulgated by Urban. He has noted that Reginald of Piperno, Thomas's amanuensis and companion from 1259 to 1274, did not include the liturgy for Corpus Christi in his list of Thomas's works. Moreover, the Dominican Order, like most Orders and dioceses, did not adopt Urban's liturgy for the Feast of Corpus Christi until 1317, when John XXII required its use throughout Western Christendom.7 If Thomas had written the liturgy, argues liturgy composed for the celebration of Corpus Christi. Around 1246 a certain John, a religious of Mont-Cornillon, had compiled a liturgy for the " Body of the Lord " that was in place throughout the diocese of Liege. Being so impressed by the solemnities of the Liege eucharistic celebration, Hugh of Saint-Cher, a Dominican and the cardinal legate of Germany, declared in 1252 that the feast of Corpus Christi was to be celebrated throughout the territory under his leadership. Jacques Pantaleon, the future Urban IV, knew the solemnities of Liege from his time as the city's archdeacon. It seems that upon his election as Pope, Urban was urged by many people to establish the Feast throughout Christendom. Eventually he did this with the publication of the bull Transiturus. For more details, see Weisheipl, Friar Thomas d'Aquino, pp. 178-79. 0 Weisheipl, Friar Thomas d'Aquino, p. 147. 6 The liturgy for the Feast of Corpus Christi that is associated with Thomas is not identical with the one currently used in both the Roman rite and Dominican rite. The modern texts for the Feast reflect the liturgical reforms that have occurred since Thomas's day. Notwithstanding these reforms, the Mass for the Feast (Cibavit eos), which includes Lauda Sion, has for the most part... (shrink)

This article uncovers a hitherto underappreciated aspect of transatlantic cultural history: Moravian late humanism, and its relationship to contemporary intellectual currents in the Americas and the broader Republic of Letters in the age of Benjamin Franklin. To date, the Moravians have attracted the attention of scholars for their novel theological views on gender and sexuality, their unique approach to reconciling piety with profit, their missionary efforts among native populations, their musical culture and their rejection of slavery. Their interactions with the (...) world of transatlantic and global late humanism, however, have not been studied in any systematic way. The present analysis opens and closes with a remarkable but almost unknown Latin oration, delivered in Philadelphia in 1742 by Nicolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf, to an audience provided with printed copies commissioned from the Franklin Press. A critical edition and an English translation of this work are provided in an appendix. In our article we examine the original European genesis and subsequent transatlantic context of Zinzendorf’s oration, tracing its development from a formal theological apologia into a quasi-legal statement of the count’s commitment to Moravian values, expressed in an erudite allusory language which left its listeners bemused. As our investigation shows, however, the confusion of the Philadelphia worthies who gathered to hear Zinzendorf ’s oration cannot be put down to a lack of cultural awareness among the leading missionaries and settlers from Germany and Denmark, many of whom partook fully in the contemporary culture of late humanism, both before and after they crossed the Atlantic. Through detailed reconstructions of their educations, correspondence networks, reading habits and note-taking practices, we show the richness of the Moravians’ transatlantic culture of late humanism, which ran the gamut from Ciceronian oratory to pious poetry in learned languages. Basing our argument on a little-known body of archival and printed sources in Latin, German, English and indigenous languages, we argue that Moravian late humanism had a significant impact on the development and expression of the Moravian church’s unique theology, its missionaries’ study of native languages and their interactions with other groups in the Atlantic world. In so doing, we also place the Moravians in the context of contemporary intellectual life in New England, the Caribbean, Europe and the Catholic world. (shrink)

The present work is a study of the method of contemporary Soviet philosophy. By "Soviet philosophy" we mean philosophy as published in the Soviet Union. For practical purposes we have limited our attention to Soviet sources in Russian in spite of the fact that Soviet philosophical works are also published in other languages (see B 2029(21)(38». The term "method" is taken in the sense usual in Western books on methodology .1 In view of the content of the first chapter it (...) will be useful to explain the last term a little more fully. By method we mean a procedure and it is obvious that the principles according to which a procedure is carried out are rules, i.e. imperatives, which tell us not what is but what should be done. Such imperatives mayor may not be connected with and founded on certain descriptive statements (the fact that every rule of formal logic is based on a corresponding law has been well-known since Husserl's "Logische Unter suchungen" and is generally accepted in contemporary logic), but such a foundation is irrelevant to a methodological study. The object of such a study is to find out what these rules are, why they are accepted and how they are inter-connected and applied. This is how methodology - the science of method - is conceived in Western treatises on the subject and this is also the standpoint assumed here. (shrink)

The following demarcates the sense of the human person in Orthodox-Catholic bioethics from the family of senses proper to secular bioethics and philosophy. The radically different sources of knowledge about the senses proper to each discipline suggest that the importation of philosophical and secular psychological distinctions and analyses into true Christianity's concern with the human person, is fundamentally misguided. This suggestion is confirmed by examination of the articles of Crosby, Glannon, Hoswepian, and Meador and Shuman.

In this article I argue that the kind of scientific naturalism that tends to underwrite projects of naturalizing religion operates with a tacit conception of nature which, upon closer inspection, t...

Loneliness is commonly conceived of as a topic under the purview of psychology. Empirical research on loneliness utilizes a definition of psychology as essentially subjective, i.e. as a first-personal mental property an individual can have. As a first-personal mental property, subjects have, as it were, privileged access to their state of being lonely. Rehearsing some well-known arguments from later Wittgenstein, I argue that loneliness – contrary to an unargued assumption present in several academic engagements – is not subjective in the (...) sense that whether or not a person is lonely does not in all cases hinge on that person’s subjective mental states. This becomes apparent when considering cases of alienation from self-knowledge (Moran 2001). Using Heidegger’s notion of being-in-the-world and being-with I argue that such cases from alienation point towards the notion that loneliness is not merely a subjective feeling, but a categorically different privation of the fundamental mode of being with others. (shrink)

THE DEVELOPMENT OF SOVIET THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE AND ITS MAIN REPRESENTATIVES By definition the philosophical treatment of knowledge is an integral part of the ...

Lookism refers to discrimination based on physical attractiveness or the lack thereof. A whole host of empirical research suggests that lookism is a pervasive and systematic form of social discrimination. Yet, apart from some attention in ethics and political philosophy, lookism has been almost wholly overlooked in philosophy in general and epistemology in particular. This is particularly salient when compared to other forms of discrimination based on race or gender which have been at the forefront of epistemic injustice as a (...) topic of research. This paper argues that lookism is associated with various forms of epistemic injustice. In the specific case of lookism, hermeneutic injustice takes the shape of the taboo of acknowledging that unattractive people are unattractive. This, on the one hand, results in a hampered understanding of one’s own situation insofar as one is deterred from seeing one’s looks as one major factor for one’s social position. On the other hand, this hermeneutic injustice serves as the backdrop of instances of a special kind testimonial injustice in which the ugly person’s burgeoning realization that their looks influence their social standing detrimentally is discounted due to the pejorative nature of ascribing someone the property of being unattractive or ugly. (shrink)

Conspiracy theories are currently all the rage in philosophy and broader intellectual culture. One of the most common background assumptions in the discourse on conspiracy theories is that conspiracy theorists exhibit certain epistemic vices in the sense of cognitive misconduct. This epistemic vice is mostly seen as a form of irrationality; the corresponding “remedy”, as suggested by some commentators, is a return to the ideals of the Enlightenment. This article argues that this idea is wrongheaded. Upon closer inspection, it becomes (...) clear that conspiracy theorists are actually motivated by the rational Enlightenment ideal of self-thinking in the first place. In contrast to the standard discourse, the article posits that conspiracism is based on a certain form of social scepticism, according to which conspiracy theorists radically mistrust a certain form of expert testimony, namely “official” statements. This form of social scepticism in turn facilitates a naive appropriation of the Enlightenment ideal of self-thinking. The article closes by drawing connections to the ethical and epistemological debate on trust and offers the pessimistic assessment that there are no easy solutions based on individual epistemic virtues. (shrink)

Over 45 million Americans are uninsured or underinsured. Those living in poverty exhibit the worst health status. Employment, education, income, and race are important factors in a person's ability to acquire healthcare access. Having established that there are people lacking healthcare access due to multi-factorial etiologies, the question arises as to whether the intervention necessary to assist them in obtaining such access should be considered a privilege, or a right. The right to healthcare access is examined from the perspective of (...) Western thought. Specifically through the works of Aristotle, Immanuel Kant, Thomas Hobbes, Thomas Paine, Hannah Arendt, James Rawls, and Norman Daniels, which are accompanied by a contemporary example of intervention on behalf of the medically needy by the The Johns Hopkins Urban Health Institute. (shrink)

This essay explores how the scientific community interpreted the discoveries of extinct giant birds during the mid-nineteenth century on the islands of New Zealand and Madagascar. It argues that the Aepyornis of Madagascar was understood through the moa of New Zealand because of the rise of global networks and theories. Indeed, their global connections made giant birds a sensation among the scientific community and together forged theories and associations not possible in isolation. In this way, this paper argues for a (...) closer look at how the creation of science emerged from a world framework that involved multiple sites of discovery and interpretation that continually influenced and reshaped scientific theories. It also stresses the importance of local naturalists in participating in this global exchange of knowledge. (shrink)

The resurgence of rational choice theory in sociology has given rise to a debate about its scope and limits. This paper approaches the debate in a constructive spirit. Taking Coleman's recent work as exemplary of rational choice theory in sociology, the discussion begins by noticing some elements common to this theory and to the framework employed by neofunctionalist critics of rational choice theory. First, the concept of control plays a central role in both theoretical models. Second, both theories attempt to (...) generalize the general equilibrium theory of economics, thereby capturing the economic theory as a special case. The constructive work consists of showing how key concepts of one model relate to analogous key concepts in the other. The aim is to forge the beginning of the synthesis in which the strengths of each model are preserved in one that includes both. (shrink)

While Wittgenstein’s work has been extensively investigated in relation to many other important and influential philosophers, there is very little scholarly work that positively investigates the relationship between the work of Wittgenstein and Wilhelm Dilthey. To the contrary, some commentators like Hacker (2001a) suggest that Dilthey’s work (and that of other hermeneuticists) simply pales or is obsolete in comparison to Wittgenstein’s own insights. Against such assessments, this article posits that Wittgenstein’s and Dilthey’s thought most crucially intersects at the related topics (...) of scientism on the one hand and scientific and philosophical method on the other. In reconstructing Dilthey’s conceptions of understanding versus explaining and central points of Wittgenstein’s Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough, it becomes apparent that they share a staunch rejection of scientism and use the notion of understanding as a means to prevent methodologies from the natural sciences encroaching onto the human sciences (in Dilthey’s case) and philosophy (in Wittgenstein’s case). Notwithstanding a number of central ways in which these thinkers differ, this article closes by suggesting that there is some evidence according to which Wittgenstein, like Dilthey, can reasonably be understood as championing some central tenets of the hermeneutical tradition. (shrink)

Varying forms of ontological and methodological naturalism are among the most popular theses in contemporary philosophy. However, each of these theses faces a different dilemma: ontological naturalism is famously challenged by Hempel’s dilemma, while methodological naturalism faces issues regarding its coherence. Some prominent naturalists (Elpidorou and Dove 2018, Ney 2009, Rea 2002) have suggested to circumvent these respective dilemmas by reconceiving naturalism as an attitude (rather than a thesis). This paper argues that such attitude accounts are unsuccessful: naturalism as an (...) attitude either collapses into a thesis again or is rationally unjustifiable. This paper closes by suggesting two options a naturalist has remaining. Either a naturalist can reasonably choose to revert to defending naturalism as a thesis; given that naturalism receives substantial support, it is not unlikely that a solution to the problems encountered by naturalism qua thesis is forthcoming. Or a naturalist might simply want to embrace an a-rational form of naturalism as a worldview, as suggested by Kim (2003) and Stoljar (2010) (and earlier by thinkers like Dilthey 1960 and Jaspers1925). (shrink)