I have before me a letter dated January 5, 2000 from Bradford Wilson, the executive director of the NAS. It begins, “I really enjoyed your contribution to the recent symposium in the January issue of First Things, so much so that I’ve also decided to invite you to join the NAS. Many of your fellow contributors including Robert George, Jeffrey Satinover, and Father Neuhaus are among our current members, and I think you’d find it well worth your while if you (...) joined ranks with us yourself.”. (shrink)

Why does anything happen? What is the best account of natural necessity? In this book, William A. Bauer presents and defends a comprehensive account of the internal structure of causal powers that incorporates physical intentionality and information. Bauer explores new lines of thought concerning the theory of pure powers, the place of mind in the physical world, and the role of information in explaining fundamental processes. He raises probing questions about physical modality and fundamental properties, and explores the possibility (...) that physical reality and the mind are unified through intentionality. His book will be valuable for researchers and students working in metaphysics, philosophy of science, and philosophy of mind. (shrink)

The intelligibility of nature was a persistent theme of William A. Wallace, OP, one of the most prolific Catholic scholars of the late twentieth century. This Reader aims to make available a representative selection of his work in the history of science, natural philosophy, and theology illustrating his defense and development of this central theme. Wallace is among the most important Galileo scholars of the past fifty years and a key figure in the recent revival of scientific realism. Further, (...) his long and productive scholarly career has been shaped by a continuous effort to bring the resources of the Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition to the solution of contemporary problems of philosophy and science. Through all of these contributions, Wallace has provided the foundation for a renewed confidence in the capacity of human knowers to attain understanding of the natural order. Consequently, the overall aim of this volume is to secure continued access to his scholarship for readers in the new millennium. Intelligibility of Nature will contain twenty-nine previously published essays written by Wallace over a period of some forty years. Many of these essays are currently not readily accessible. They are arranged in five thematic groups, each representing a major subject-area of Wallace's scholarly interests. The first group is devoted to essays on making nature intelligible through the use of scientific models. The second group of essays investigates various ways in which the Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition is foundational to contemporary scientific research. Essays in the third group are historical studies on the origins of modern science. The fourth group of essays discuss the viability of the cosmological argument for the existence of God in light of natural science. The final group of essays consider the relation of science and religion. Together these essays provide a representative sample of Wallace's multifaceted contributions to scholarship. (shrink)

William Galston is a distinguished political philosopher whose work is informed by the experience of having also served from 1993–5 as President Clinton's Deputy Assistant for Domestic Policy. He is thus able to speak with an authority unique amongst political theorists about the implications of advancing certain moral and political values in practice. The foundational argument of this 2002 book is that liberalism is compatible with the value pluralism first espoused by Isaiah Berlin. William Galston defends a version (...) of value pluralism - liberal pluralism - and argues, against the contentions of John Gray and others, that it undergirds a kind of liberal politics that gives weight to the ability of individuals and groups to live their lives in accordance with their deepest beliefs about what gives meaning and purpose to life. (shrink)

A book chapter for the volume Eco-Anxiety and Planetary Hope: Experiencing the Twin Disasters of COVID-19 and Climate Change using Nietzsche's philosophy and primarily based on archival research done by William A. B. Parkhurst.

This article reports the findings of a survey examining if there are gender and career stage differences between male and female practitioners regarding ethical judgment. The results show that, on average, females adopted a more strict ethical stance than their male counterparts on 7 out of 19 vignettes. Males on the other hand, demonstrated a more ethical stance than their female counterparts on 2 out of 19 vignettes. The results furthermore indicate there is a significant difference in ethical judgment across (...) career stages. Overall, it appears that practitioners in later career stages display higher ethical judgment than practitoners in lower career stages. Implications are provided for both practitioners and academicians. (shrink)

The equal political liberties are among the basic first-principle liberties in John Rawls’s theory of Justice as fairness. Rawls insists, further, that the “fair value” of the political liberties must be guaranteed. Disavowing an interest in fair value is what disqualifies welfare-state capitalism as a possible realizer of Justice as fairness. Yet Rawls never gives a perspicuous statement of the reasoning in the original position for the fair-value guarantee. This article gathers up two distinct strands of Rawls’s argument, and presents (...) it in a straightforward sequence. Justice as fairness is contrasted to a competitor political conception of justice that is just like it but without the fair-value guarantee. A schema of the two-strand argument is presented in the Appendix. (shrink)

Emotionality is a basic feature of behavior. The argument over whether the expression of emotions is based primarily on culture (constructivism, nurture) or biology (natural forms, nature) will never be resolved because both alternatives are untenable. The evidence is overwhelming that at all ages and all levels of organization, the development of emotionality is epigenetic: The organism is an active participant in its own development. To ascribe these effects to “experience” was the best that could be done for many years. (...) With the rapid acceleration of information on how changes in organization are actually brought about, it is a good time to review, update, and revitalize our views of experience in relation to the concept of basic emotion. (shrink)

This book is a major contribution to the current theory of liberalism by an eminent political theorist. It challenges the views of such theorists as Rawls, Dworkin, and Ackerman who believe that the essence of liberalism is that it should remain neutral concerning different ways of life and individual conceptions of what is good or valuable. Professor Galston argues that the modern liberal state is committed to a distinctive conception of the human good, and to that end has developed characteristic (...) institutions and practices - representative governments, diverse societies, market economies, and zones of private action - in the pursuit of specific public purposes that give unity to the liberal state. These purposes guide liberal public policy, shape liberal justice, require the practice of liberal virtues, and rest on a liberal public culture. Consequently the diversity characteristic of liberal societies is limited by their institutional, personal, and cultural preconditions. (shrink)

This book is the first detailed reconstruction of the late work of John Rawls, who was perhaps the most influential philosopher of the twentieth century. Rawls's 1971 treatise, A Theory of Justice, stimulated an outpouring of commentary on 'justice-as-fairness,' his conception of justice for an ideal, self-contained, modern political society. Most of that commentary took Rawls to be defending welfare-state capitalism as found in Western Europe and the United States. Far less attention has been given to Rawls's 2001 book, Justice (...) as Fairness: A Restatement. In the Restatement, Rawls not only substantially reformulates the 'original position' argument for the two principles of justice-as-fairness but also repudiates capitalist regimes as possible embodiments. Edmundson further develops Rawls's non-ideal theory, which guides us when we find ourselves in a society that falls well short of justice. (shrink)

Based on a review of the literature and historical evidence, I argue that the use of the methodological principle known as the priority principle in Anglo-American Nietzsche scholarship is inconsistent and irreconcilable with historical evidence. It attempts to demarcate between the published works and the Nachlass. However, there are no agreed upon necessary and sufficient conditions of a particular textual object being considered “Nachlass.” This absence leads to implicit and often tacit value demarcation criteria that can be broadly grouped into (...) four types of consideration: publication, authorization, publicness, and audience. Each of these criteria pick out a different set of texts as “Nachlass.” Thus, despite the veneer of agreement, the most broadly accepted methodological approach in the Anglo-American tradition of Nietzsche scholarship is applied inconsistently. I argue that we must either offer necessary and sufficient conditions for a piece of text being Nachlass, or we ought to abandon such abstract criteria altogether and embrace a contextual and historical approach. I then argue that the first option is impossible given historical evidence. I conclude this article by explicating several recent German approaches to the Nachlass which I think can offer a new possible approach. (shrink)

As a young man Bill Adams travelled the world teaching US citizens abroad on behalf of a large state university on the East Coast. Back home he reflected that if there were answers to the great questions of life, then he’d not found them — not in India, in Europe, in China, or Japan. In time he came to see that his lifelong interest in how the mind works could be the clue to the meaning of life. Socrates had been (...) right all along: Know thyself. Adams now sets out a new reasoned argument, based on his experience as a cognitive psychologist and as a human being, to show why Socrates was right: the purpose of life is to recognize ourselves — in each other and in all things. The mind is looking for itself: that is how it works, that is what it does for a living. (shrink)

In Being as Communion philosopher and mathematician William Dembski provides a non-technical overview of his work on information. Dembski attempts to make good on the promise of John Wheeler, Paul Davies, and others that information is poised to replace matter as the primary stuff of reality. With profound implications for theology and metaphysics, Being as Communion develops a relational ontology that is at once congenial to science and open to teleology in nature. All those interested in the intersections of (...) theology, philosophy and science should read this book. (shrink)

The Modeling of Nature provides an excellent introduction to the fundamentals of natural philosophy, psychology, logic, and epistemology.

The last half-century has seen a steady loss of confidence in the defensibility of a duty to obey the law — even a qualified, pro tanto duty to obey the laws of a just or nearly just state. Over roughly the same period, there has been increasing interest in virtue ethics as an alternative to the dominant consequentialist and deontological approaches to normative ethics. Curiously, these two tendencies have so far only just barely linked up. Although there has been discussion (...) of the question whether patriotism should be considered a virtue, and abstract discussion about the virtuous person’s relation to authority and justice in general, there has been little virtue-oriented discussion having specific reference to the kinds of difficulties that have motivated the ascendant skepticism about political obligation. This silence has persisted despite repeated calls for renewed work on “virtue politics”. This article proposes and defends a preliminary account of law-abidance (as contrasted to obedience) as a virtue. It argues that a virtue-theoretic account of our relation to the law offers advantages that are not contingent upon the independence or priority of the virtues with respect to consequentialist and deontological components of a complete moral theory. Chief among these advantages is the promise of an alternative to the deadlocked positions taken by apologists for the duty to obey the law and their philosophical-anarchist critics — positions which have tacitly been assumed to exhaust the viable possibilities. (shrink)

Book reviewed in this article: Sex, Drugs, Death and the Law: An Essay on Human Rights and Overcriminalization. By David A. J. Richards. Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1982. xii + 316 pp. $26.95.

With most states now making sex offender registration information available to the public, journalists must balance their obligation to inform the public about potential dangers with respect for individuals' rights. This article examines the problems journalists face in truth telling and minimizing harm and offers suggestions for covering community notification. At minimum, we suggest journalists verify the accuracy of information received from police, make independent judgments about whether or not publication of sex offender registration information is warranted, and provide background (...) information on the scope and effectiveness of community notification in their areas. (shrink)

Howard Van Till 's review of my book No Free Lunch exemplifies perfectly why theistic evolution remains intelligent design's most implacable foe. Not only does theistic evolution sign off on the naturalism that pervades so much of contemporary science, but it justifies that naturalism theologically -- as though it were unworthy of God to create by any means other than an evolutionary process that carefully conceals God's tracks.

The scientific study of emotion faces a potentially serious problem: after over a hundred years of psychological study, we lack consensus regarding the very definition of emotion. We propose that part of the problem may be the tendency to define emotion in contrast to cognition, rather than viewing both “emotion” and “cognition” as being comprised of more elemental processes. We argue that considering emotion as a type of cognition (viewed broadly as information processing) may provide an understanding of the mechanisms (...) underlying domains that are traditionally thought to be qualitatively distinct. (shrink)

How is a legitimate state possible? Obedience, coercion and intrusion are three ideas that seem inseparable from all government and seem to render state authority presumptively illegitimate. This book exposes three fallacies inspired by these ideas and in doing so challenges assumptions shared by liberals, libertarians, cultural conservatives, moderates and Marxists. In three clear and tightly argued essays William Edmundson dispels these fallacies and shows that living in a just state remains a worthy ideal. This is an important book (...) for all philosophers, political scientists and legal theorists as well as other readers interested in the views of Rawls, Dworkin and Nozick, many of whose central ideas are subjected to rigorous critique. (shrink)

Many philosophers with hedonistic sympathies (e.g., Mill, Sidgwick, Sumner, Feldman, Crisp, Heathwood, and Bradley) have claimed that well-being is necessarily experiential. Kagan once claimed something slightly different, saying that, although unexperienced bodily events can directly impact a person’s well-being, it is nonetheless true that any change in a person’s well-being must involve a change in her (i.e., either in her mind or in her body). Kagan elaborated by saying that a person’s well-being cannot float freely of her such that it (...) is affected by events that do not affect her (Kagan 1992, 169–189). These two claims—that well-being is necessarily experiential and that changes in well-being must involve changes in the person—are two different ways of specifying the general intuition that a person’s well-being must be strongly tied to her. This general intuition imposes an adequacy constraint on welfare theorizing: To be adequate, a welfare theory cannot allow that someone can be directly benefited by events that are not strongly tied to her. Call this the strong-tie requirement. The strong-tie requirement is easily satisfied by welfare hedonism, but it poses problems for desire-fulfillment welfare theories and objective-list welfare theories. Though a great deal has been written about desire-fulfillment welfare theories in relation to the strong-tie requirement, not as much has been written about objective-list welfare theories in relation to the strong-tie requirement. This paper argues that objective-list welfare theories can satisfy the strong-tie requirement, though probably only if they take a perfectionist form, as opposed to a brute-list form. (shrink)

In his recent Gifford Lectures, Holmes Rolston argues that the informational character of biological phenomena is better explained by a theistic God of the process variety than by appealing to naturalistic biological explanations. In this paper, I assess Rolston’s argument by examining current biological and philosophical interpretations of the role of the theoretical concept of information in the description and explanation of biological phenomena. I find that none of these understandings of the concept allow Rolston’s conclusion. Natural selection explanations are (...) in principle sufficient for accounting for the informational character of biological phenomena. (shrink)

Brief thumbnail sketches capture group interest and show the relevance of ethical considerations in real life situations. Bill Bain has considerable experience of business and is currently a PhD student at the Management School of London University's Imperial College, 53 Prince's Gate, Exhibition Road, London SW7 2PG.

Predicates are supposed to slice reality neatly in two halves, one for which the predicate holds, the other for which it fails. Yet far from being razors, predicates tend to be dull knives that mangle reality. If reality is a tomato and predicates are knives, then when these knives divide the tomato, plenty of mush remains unaccounted for. Of course some knives are sharper than others, just as some predicates are less vague than others. “x is water” is certainly sharper (...) than “x is beautiful.” But perfect sharpness, perfect boundaries, and perfect separation seem only to obtain in mathematics. The vagueness inherent in many predicates became particularly evident in the twentieth century. Quantum mechanics, the revival of certain ancient paradoxes, and the philosophy of science all contributed to a growing awareness that vagueness was ineliminable from many predicates. Quantum mechanical superposition seems to allow mutually exclusive simultaneous states. In searching for plausible interpretations of quantum mechanics, some researchers attempted to do away with classical bivalent logic. In its place they substituted multivalent quantum logics. Any logic with more than two values forces its predicates to slice reality into more than two parts. Ancient paradoxes involving heaps and baldness also pointed up the 1 Random Predicate Logic 2.. (shrink)

Many searches are needle-in-the-haystack problems, looking for small targets in large spaces. In such cases, blind search stands no hope of success. Success, instead, requires an assisted search. But whence the assistance required for a search to be successful? To pose the question this way suggests that successful searches do not emerge spontaneously but need themselves to be discovered via a search. The question then naturally arises whether such a higher-level “search for a search” is any easier than the original (...) search. We prove two results: (1) The Horizontal No Free Lunch Theorem, which shows that average relative performance of searches never exceeds unassisted or blind searches. (2) The Vertical No Free Lunch Theorem, which shows that the difficulty of searching for a successful search increases exponentially compared to the difficulty of the original search. (shrink)

I argue that Nietzsche's thought of eternal recurrence is merely a kind of thought experiment that has two forms of engagement. The first form of engagement is destructive and results in the principles of classical logic being reduced to epistemic nihilism. In this first form, Nietzsche is thinking eternal recurrence, as it is presented in previous philosophers, to its end. The second form of engagement does not require the presuppositions of classical logic and is made through the affect of disgust. (...) This second mode of engagement can result in two outcomes; suicidal pessimism or life affirmation. The work on eternal recurrence that scholars typically think of as published has very little positive commitment to the ontological or metaphysical status of eternal recurrence. However, if eternal recurrence does represent the physical nature of the universe, as Nietzsche sometimes speculates about in his notebooks, this would not hurt either his destructive or his affective argument. The affective form of engagement allows us to think about the emergence of this affirmative ideal without strong positive commitment to any particular metaphysics or epistemology. The appearance of such an ideal may be multiply realizable over various physical organizations of the universe. The new life affirming ideal which emerges is not a form of humanism. Rather, Nietzsche thinks that the thought of eternal recurrence will produce "the 'humanity' of the future." The thought of eternal recurrence selects out, via suicidal pessimism, those who cannot affirm life. This fosters the development of a new humanity that can affirm life and create a new kind of happiness unknown to humans previously. This new ideal, amor fati [love of fate], is not simply a reconciliation with suffering and hardship of the past. Rather, one must want and hope that such a thing is the case. This ideal, held by the most powerful people of the future, is an expression of will to power. This ideal understands hardship and challenges on the sea of life as part of what makes us truly great and our lives intrinsically valuable. (shrink)

Recently I asked a well-known ID sympathizer what shape he thought the ID movement was in. I raised the question because, after some initial enthusiasm on his part three years ago, his interest seemed to have flagged. Here is what he wrote: An enormous amount of energy has been expended on "proving" that ID is bogus, "stealth creationism," "not science," and so on. Much of this, ironically, violates the spirit of science. The proof of the pudding is in the eating. (...) But on the other side, too much stuff from the ID camp is repetitive, imprecise and immodest in its claims, and otherwise very unsatisfactory. The "debate" is mostly going around in circles. The real work needs to go forward. There is a tremendous ferment right now in the "evo/devo" field, for instance. Some bright postdocs sympathetic to ID (and yes, I know how hard a time they would have institutionally at many places) should plunge right into the thick of that. Maybe they are at this very moment: I hope so! Every now and again we need to take a good, hard look in the mirror. The aim of this talk is to help us do just that. Intelligent design has made tremendous inroads into the culture at large. Front page stories featuring our work have appeared in the New York Times, L.A. Times, Wall Street Journal, San Francisco Chronicle, and so on. Television, radio, and weeklies like Time Magazine are focusing the spotlight on us as well. This publicity is at once useful and seductive. It useful because it helps get the word out and attract talent to the movement. It is seductive because it can deceive us into thinking that we have accomplished more than we actually have. (shrink)

The first systematic treatment of Karl Popper’s contribution to the philosophy of the social sciences.

Mutual accommodation is about co-operation, compromise, and inclusion. It's a big idea, equal to freedom, science, and compassion. The postwar global economic order led by the United States is one of the greatest historic achievements of mutual accommodation, yet it is now at risk from the centrifugal forces that have led to populism. Today, to many nations and people, Canada is the model country driven by successful mutual accommodation. In Might Nature Be Canadian? William Macdonald explores the theme of (...) mutual accommodation with a close lens on the Canadian experience. Canada has a drive toward mutual accommodation. The United States has a strong drive toward division. There has always been a divergence of ideologies between the two countries. The United States now appears to view the world as a never-ending struggle, which has become greater since 2000, between good and evil, while Canada, by contrast, leans toward the idea that there is an underlying order at the heart of things. Canada has always faced strong limits in creatively overcoming a challenging geography and French/English language differences within its own borders; on the other hand the United States sees itself as a country with virtually no limits. Throughout its history Canada's drive toward mutual accommodation, stronger than that of any other country, has allowed its increasingly diverse citizens to live together peacefully and successfully, even as they retain their own culture, language, and religion. Nature can be described as simultaneously either/or and both/and. Is there something fundamentally Canadian about this? Taking inspiration from British philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, who said that "civilization is the triumph of persuasion over force," Macdonald argues that the urgent spread of mutual accommodation, a charge led by Canada, is central to achieving a bearable world for everyone. (shrink)

In this essay I advance major criticisms of recent work on the concept of liberty by, Among others, I berlin, G maccallum, H j mccluskey, S I benn, And f oppenheim. Emerging from these critical analyses is a new definition of 'liberty, In the spirit of negative liberalism', Which differentiates it from the related but distinct goods of human autonomy, Opportunity, Ability, Power, And self-Development.