This groundbreaking volume investigates the most fundamental question of all: Why is there something rather than nothing? The question is explored from diverse and radical perspectives: religious, naturalistic, platonistic and skeptical. Does science answer the question? Or does theology? Does everything need an explanation? Or can there be brute, inexplicable facts? Could there have been nothing whatsoever? Or is there any being that could not have failed to exist? Is the question meaningful after all? The volume advances cutting-edge debates in (...) metaphysics, philosophy of cosmology and philosophy of religion, and will intrigue and challenge readers interested in any of these subjects. (shrink)

This essay shows three things: first, that we cannot comply with a command from God to believe in God; second, that God cannot command us to believe in God; and, third, that the divine command theory is false. The third conclusion follows from the second, and the second follows from the first. The essay focuses on an argument from the medieval Jewish philosopher, Hasdai Crescas. It also draws from, and is something of a sequel to, an argument from Brown and (...) Nagasawa published previously in this journal.†. (shrink)

This essay outlines answers to the problem of evil from Jewish perspectives. The essay uses traditional Jewish sources to illustrate theodicies familiar in other religious traditions, and introduces a few less familiar Jewish theodicies besides. Other responses to the problem of evil are also considered. Jewish responses are not usually framed in contemporary philosophical categories, and mine is an attempt at categorization. The traditional Jewish sources might show some promise of contributing to contemporary philosophical debate.

The essay is a response to the papers written by Nancy Frankenberry and Charley Hardwick in the March 1987 issue of Zygon. Questions are raised about whether Wieman's theology is functionalist in the way described by Frankenberry and whether Hardwick's proposal to establish the logical possibility of naturalism as a framework for an existential interpretation of the Christian message is satisfactory. The most basic question raised by both papers is whether Wieman's theology is fully empirical when viewed from the point (...) of view of the radical empiricist. (shrink)

This article explores the development of victim rights in sentencing through a comparative analysis of the rights of family victims in homicide sentencing proceedings across Australia, the United States, England and Wales and Canada. Of the various rights afforded to victims of crime, the use of family victim impact evidence in the sentencing of homicide offenders has proven most contentious, with various courts grappling with the weight such evidence ought to play in sentencing proceedings. In homicide cases where the family (...) of the deceased victim submits a statement, all Australian and international jurisdictions except the Australian state of New South Wales (NSW) have resolved to allow the consideration of such statements on the basis inter alia that family victims may incur harms potentially relevant to the sentencing process. New South Wales continues to reject such evidence on the basis that family statements may value the deceased’s life above that of another. This article considers the status of family impact statements in homicide cases by examining the treatment of family victims in sentencing law on an international basis, with particular focus on pilot schemes in England and Wales, where family victims have been provided personal counsel at public expense, for use in homicide cases. (shrink)

This paper outlines issues of corporate philanthropy research. Of significant value is that normative prescriptions and non-empirical conceptual models lack thesupport of rigorous empirical research. Moreover, dominant methodological approaches embedded in the positivist tradition lack the depth required inunderstanding managerial involvement in corporate philanthropic programmes. Accordingly, this paper argues for new methodological insights. The research agenda should question the capitalistic nature of corporations, delve deep into management thought and recognise the affect of corporate philanthropy on multiple corporate stakeholders.

Proving the existence of God is a perennial philosophical ambition. An armchair proof would be the jackpot. Ontological arguments promise as much. This Element studies the most famous ontological arguments from Anselm, Descartes, Plantinga, and others besides. While the verdict is that ontological arguments don't work, they get us entangled in fun philosophical puzzles, from philosophy of religion to philosophy of language, from metaphysics to ethics, and beyond.

This book offers a comprehensive introduction to the thought of Chicago Divinity School theologian Bernard Meland. Tyron Inbody places Meland's theology within the development of the liberal tradition. He argues that Meland was a precursor of liberal developments in epistemology -- especially in his view of how experience, language, and culture are related. Inbody explores the extent to which Meland was both representative and critical of process theology. He concludes with an assessment of Meland's contribution to postliberal theology. Inbody's work (...) not only sheds light on the work of this important but neglected thinker, but is in its own right a contribution to empirical theology, theological epistemology, process theology, and the history of liberal theology in North America. (shrink)

Google Trends reveals that at the time we were writing our article on ‘The Coming Crisis of Empirical Sociology’ in 2007 almost nobody was searching the internet for ‘Big Data’. It was only towards the very end of 2010 that the term began to register, just ahead of an explosion of interest from 2011 onwards. In this commentary we take the opportunity to reflect back on the claims we made in that original paper in light of more recent discussions about (...) the social scientific implications of the inundation of digital data. Did our paper, with its emphasis on the emergence of, what we termed, ‘social transactional data’ and ‘digital byproduct data’ prefigure contemporary debates that now form the basis and rationale for this excellent new journal? Or was the paper more concerned with broader methodological, theoretical and political debates that have somehow been lost in all of the loud babble that has come to surround Big Data. Using recent work on the BBC Great British Class Survey as an example this brief paper offers a reflexive and critical reflection on what has become – much to the surprise of its authors – one of the most cited papers in the discipline of sociology in the last decade. (shrink)

Classic analysis of the subject and the development of personal probability; one of the greatest controversies in modern statistcal thought. New preface and new footnotes to 1954 edition, with a supplementary 180-item annotated bibliography by author. Calculus, probability, statistics, and Boolean algebra are recommended.

John Dewey's classical pragmatism, Daniel M. Savage asserts, can be used to provide a self-development-based justification of liberal democracy that shows the current debate between liberal individualism and republican communitarianism to ...

Many religious traditions teach that we should worship God, and philosophers have explored the requirement to worship God, and what might make God worthy of worship. These religious traditions also prohibit worshipping other gods. This essay explores, from a Jewish perspective, what it might mean to worship other gods, what the rationale behind the prohibition might be, and why the prohibition might be so grave.

Classic analysis of the subject and the development of personal probability; one of the greatest controversies in modern statistcal thought.

Churchland proposes a radically new way of representing theories and their acquisition in the terms of connectionist neuro- science. ...

In a well- known barb, CD Broad said: "Mr. Bertrand Russell produces a new system of philosophy each year or so, and Mr. GE Moore none ...

The first part of the paper presents three little arguments from theism to idealism. The second part employs these arguments to make sense of a puzzling doctrine of Jewish mysticism: the doctrine of divine contraction (heb. tzimtzum).

In this paper, I argue that standard psychological continuity theory does not account for an important feature of what is important in survival – having the property of personhood. I offer a theory that can account for this, and I explain how it avoids the implausible consequences of standard psychological continuity theory, as well as having certain other advantages over that theory.

Culture can be said to be about the business of 'self-replication'. From the moment of conception, it impresses its patterns and rhythms on the developing, infinitely plastic neuronal substrate of the fetal organism. It shapes this substrate to become preferentially sensitive to its patterns and thus to seek to replicate them as an adult. This process of neural shaping continues throughout life as the capacity of the brain to reorganize itself according to the uses to which it addresses itself never (...) ceases. The extraordinary capacity of culture to extract different abilities from the biological form is clearly manifest in the lexical, vocal, tool manufacture, and writing capabilities emerging in bonobos raised in a Pan/Homo culture. These findings render moot old questions regarding the innate limits of the ape brain. They raise instead far more productive questions about the form and function of the perpetual dance that is constantly taking place between plastic neuronal systems and their external culturally devised ways of being. (shrink)

They examine the currents of thought behind some of the most significant works in Western philosophy, including those by John Locke and David Hume.