In this article, I take my own position within an ongoing debate about what place (if any) Christian theology should have within the secular university. Against both “secularists” and “sectarians,” I argue that we can and should locate the study (teaching and learning) of theology squarely within the secular university, once we cease to demand that all academic study within the secular university be framed by a narrowly defined and overly constrictive “secular perspective.” Freed from the controlling dogma of the (...) “secular perspective,” theology in the secular university can proceed unhindered in its quest for knowledge, following the classical method of “faith seeking understanding,” while still remaining remarkably inclusive of, and respectful toward, those who do not share specific theological commitments. (shrink)

In this essay, I assess Marilyn McCord Adams's important and provocative incarnation-centered approach to the problem of evil. In particular, I examine the central theological components of her approach: her novel but also problematic conceptions of creation, sin, redemption, grace, and eschatological consummation. My further goal is to use my critical analysis of Adams's approach in order to begin to articulate and defend an alternative incarnation-centered approach, based on a more classically orthodox conception of divine defeat of evil, which is (...) both immune to the criticisms I raise against Adams's approach and possesses a higher degree of explanatory power. (shrink)

In this article, I advance what I think is a more theologically robust and informed free-will defense, which allows me to address the problem of evil in a more theologically robust and informed way. In doing so, however, I do not claim to offer a comprehensive response to the problem of evil, or full-blown "theodicy"; instead, I offer a partial response, which I place in the service of a full-blown theodicy. Moreover, my own approach is explicitly Thomistic, insofar as I (...) formulate much of it drawing on Thomas Aquinas's own formulations of the doctrines of original justice and original sin, or the human being as created and fallen. Structurally, the article consists of three main sections. In first section, I consider and critique a recent, expanded free-will defense offered by Peter van Inwagen, which also incorporates the doctrines of creation and the Fall. I then introduce key aspects of Aquinas's own thought in order to make the requisite improvements to this approach. In the second section of the article, I consider some main objections to my own Thomistic approach, as I will have formulated it so far: in particular, that the doctrines of original justice and original sin are unintelligible from the standpoints of moral psychology and evolutionary biology. I also begin to consider the objection that there is no intelligible way of explaining the transmission of original sin. In the third and final section of the article, I respond to these objections, offering a final defense of my central claim that the free-will defense is best served when it is wedded with a specifically Thomistic construal of the human being as originally created in a state of original justice, but now subject to defects (both bodily and spiritual) that are the inherited consequences of original sin. (shrink)

The aim of my dissertation is to exploit philosophical insights advanced by John McDowell in the contemporary analytic philosophy of mind in order to readdress a fundamental theological issue, viz. how persons can have knowledge of God, or more specifically, how God can transcend the mind but still remain known to the mind. In the first chapter, I present the 'problem' of how God can be known, and briefly trace its development in modern and contemporary 'antirealist' philosophies of religion. In (...) the second chapter, I exposit the main features of McDowell's philosophy of mind and place McDowell in his wider philosophical context. A secondary aim of this chapter is to lay the necessary groundwork for the third chapter, in which I exposit and defend Aquinas's theory of cognition as a unique form of direct realism akin to the direct realism that undergirds McDowell's wider philosophy of mind as well as his specific construal of the nature of perceptual experience. In the fourth chapter, I build on themes developed in the third chapter and exposit and defend Aquinas's account of beatific knowledge of God as a paradigmatic instance of cognition and direct realism in Aquinas. In the fifth and sixth chapters, I use Aquinas's account of faith to advance a 'theological realism' akin to McDowell's 'ethical realism', which forms the basis of McDowell's moral psychology. (shrink)

In this article, I outline a strategy for challenging J.L. Schellenberg’s hiddenness argument, and specifically the premise within the argument that asserts the existence of what Schellenberg calls nonresistant nonbelief. Drawing on some of the philosophical resources of skeptical theism, I show how this premise is based on a particular “noseeum assumption”—what I call Schellenberg’s Noseeum Assumption—that underwrites a particular “noseeum argument.” This assumption is that, regarding putative nonresistant nonbelievers, more likely than not we’d detect these nonbelievers’ resistance toward God (...) if there were any. I give reasons for thinking that it is not more reasonable to affirm than to refrain from affirming Schellenberg’s Noseeum Assumption, and so reason to think that the hiddenness argument is not a good argument for atheism. I also defend the strategy I outline against several objections. (shrink)

In this essay, I discuss and defend Augustine’s and Aquinas’s respective epistemologies of faith. This entails analyzing central claims both thinkers make in order to determine the ways in which the true beliefs about God the faithful form and hold are reasonable as well as properly grounded. In the first two sections of the essay, I highlight what I take to be some of Augustine’s enduring epistemological insights concerning the reasonableness and origins of faith. I read Aquinas’s own account of (...) faith in a distinctly Augustinian light, so in the third section of the essay, I turn to Aquinas to explain more fully how faith-beliefs are adequately or rationally grounded—that is, based on a specifically truth-conducive ground. Like Augustine, Aquinas sees love, or desire more broadly, as an essential component of faith (specifically what Aquinas calls “formed faith”): it is our love of God, infused in our will by God’s grace, that draws us to believe what our intellect also recognizes in the infused “light of faith” to be true revelations from God. In the final section of the essay, I consider and then counter three main objections to my reading of Augustine and Aquinas. Thus, by the end of the essay, I not only discuss some of the main features of the accounts of faith that Augustine and Aquinas respectively offer; I also defend those accounts, as well as the epistemology of faith that I derive from them. (shrink)

In this paper, I show how Thomas Aquinas's account of sensory cognition is undergirded by a strong commitment to direct realism. According to the specific form of direct realism I articulate and defend here, which I claim emerges from a proper study of Aquinas's account of sensory cognition, it is only by having sense experiences that possess definitive content--content that is isomorphic or formally identical with the sensible features of mind-independent reality--that we can be credited with occupying world-intending sensory states, (...) in which we see, hear, taste, touch, and smell objective aspects or features of the world itself. Thus, it is by virtue of possessing the requisite content that the veridical sensations or perceptions we enjoy and possess bear directly on the world, and thereby unite us to the world. In defending this claim, I exposit what I take to be the most important features of Aquinas's account of sensory cognition: most notably, the operation of the external senses, and secondarily, the role of the common sense and phantasms. Interpreting Aquinas in the right light allows us better to understand and appreciate his account of sensory cognition as well as the nature and benefits of direct realism itself. (shrink)

The correspondence between G. W. Leibniz and Samuel Clarke on the implications of Sir Isaac Newton’s physics to natural theology was the last battle that Leibniz fought with the Newtonians. That battle, not so famous as the one over the invention of calculus, ended abruptly with the death of Leibniz in November 1716; however, Clarke soon after translated the correspondence into English and published it in 1717. It became one of a relatively tiny number of Leibniz’s writings to be published (...) before the nineteenth century. Thus, besides being a meaningful clash of the rationalist and empiricist traditions, the correspondence between Leibniz and Clarke was one of the few primary sources that eighteenth-century philosophers had of the mature thought of one of Europe’s most celebrated thinkers. Furthermore, it was relevant to the philosophy of that day. Immanuel Kant, for instance, used the correspondence to launch his own formulation of space and considered his theory a resolution of the controversy. (shrink)

As the title suggests, this is a volume of eighteen recent essays on Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz. The idea for this compilation arose out of Jonathan Bennett’s 1995 National Endowment for the Humanities Seminar on Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz. The authors, many of whom were involved in that seminar, worked together to create this kind of loose dialogue. While each essay stands by itself, several of the works in the volume show evidence of the influence of the other authors. As (...) the editors note, “Each author commented on at least two other chapters before the final works were submitted”, and it shows. Furthermore, the volume is consistently edited, with a coherent style, and includes provocative and scholarly essays. (shrink)

The essays in this book, by a variety of leading Augustine scholars, examine not only Augustine's multifaceted philosophy and its relation to his epoch-making theology, but also his practice as a philosopher, as well as his relation to other philosophers both before and after him. Thus the collection shows that Augustine's philosophy remains an influence and a provocation in a wide variety of settings today.

In Organ Transplants from Executed Prisoners, Louis Palmer proposes alleviating the urgent shortage of organs for transplantation by requiring condemned felons to donate their vital organs after execution. The book proceeds as follows. In his first chapter Palmer reviews the development of the quasi-property rights relating to the bodies of the dead, including the right to dispose of one's own body by means of a will and the right of relatives to bury it. In the second chapter, The Market for (...) Human Body Parts, he goes on to review the current American laws restricting the sale of body parts in order to show that death-sentence removal might be permissible within established principles of law. A C MacDonald has recently provided a good review of the legal restrictions …. (shrink)

Abstract:This paper develops a framework for examining decision making about ethical issues and tests the applicability of a social contract perspective. Using two separate samples of students and salespeople, we determine that community members (salespeople) tend to judge a potentially unethical act to constitute a violation of an implicit social contract and non-community members (students) do not. Also, consistent with the emphasis on context specificity of integrative social contracts theory, situational variables influence perceptions of ethicality for the community members, but (...) do not affect the perceptions of individuals outside the community. The study finds considerable support for the use of a social contractarian perspective in the study of decision-making processes about ethical issues. (shrink)

In the WebSurf task, humans forage for videos paying costs in terms of wait times on a time-limited task. A variant of the task in which demands during the wait time were manipulated revealed the role of attention in susceptibility to sunk costs. Consistent with parallel tasks in rodents, previous studies have found that humans preferred shorter delays, but waited longer for more preferred videos, suggesting that they were treating the delays economically. In an Amazon Mechanical Turk sample, we replicated (...) these predicted economic behaviors for a majority of participants. In the lab, participants showed susceptibility to sunk costs in this task, basing their decisions in part on time they have already waited, which we also observed in the subset of the mTurk sample that behaved economically. In another version of the task, we added an attention check to the wait phase of the delay. While that attention check further increased the proportion of subjects with predicted economic behaviors, it also removed the susceptibility to sunk costs. These findings have important implications for understanding how cognitive processes, such as the deployment of attention, are key to driving re-evaluation and susceptibility to sunk costs. (shrink)

Resumo: Nas poucas referências explícitas de Nietzsche ao biólogo alemão Ernst Haeckel, há uma clara rejeição de seu pensamento biológico e cultural. O objetivo deste artigo é propor que, apesar da pequena quantidade de citações diretas, os ataques de Nietzsche a Haeckel constituem um intenso antagonismo entre eles e inserem-se no contexto das críticas nietzschianas contra a formação e a cultura alemãs e contra a condição metafísica da ciência. O texto apresenta quatro aspectos do antagonismo entre Nietzsche e Haeckel: das (...) Darwinismus de Haeckel; a influência de Haeckel sobre David Strauss; a inclusão do evolucionismo científico no currículo na Alemanha; e o conflito entre Ludwig Rütimeyer e Haeckel.: In Nietzsche's few explicit references to German biologist Ernst Haeckel, there is a clear rejection of his biological and cultural thinking. The aim of this article is to propose that, despite the small amount of direct mentions, Nietzsche's criticism of Haeckel constitute an intense antagonism between them and are part place of the context of Nietzschean censure against the German education and culture and against the metaphysical condition of science. The text presents four aspects of the antagonism between Nietzsche and Haeckel: Haeckel’s Das Darwinismus; Haeckel's influence on David Strauss; the inclusion of scientific evolutionism in the curriculum in Germany; and the conflict between Ludwig Rütimeyer and Haeckel. (shrink)

This article looks into Isaiah Berlin’s concept of value pluralism and its consequences in terms of theorizing diversity and difference in moral and political life. Our “situatedness” or our privileged position in society does not give us the license to render judgment on the relative truthfulness or the validity of truth-claims of other people. It does not also give us an excuse to justify oppressive actions in the name of harmony. Rather our being rooted in a particular context provides the (...) social imagination and social empathy to understand and respect the other on the basis of our shared humanity. This is what Isaiah Berlin’s value pluralism is all about and this is what this article will spell out. (shrink)

One of the challenges of the Kantian research is to deal with the different meanings of the term critique, as well as to ask about the author’s possible motivation in choosing this term to title his main works. Through the emphasis on the fecundity of meaning of the term critique, we will show in this article that its connection with the establishment of limits to metaphysics was a sinuous process, which is capable of encompassing interests of heterogeneous natures. For this (...) purpose, we will first problematize, in particular, the appearance of the concept of critique in NEV of 1765 and, later, based on the Reflections (1765-1770), we will identify how its equivocality, more than an obstacle, favored the construction of its protagonist role in the Kantian corpus. Thus, the critical thinking for Kant, instead of a position facing only the problem of metaphysics, is explained as a position facing the most diverse problems of the modern subject. (shrink)

The paper is an introduction to geometric algebra and geometric calculus for those with a knowledge of undergraduate mathematics. No knowledge of physics is required. The section Further Study lists many papers available on the web.

There is growing interest in the role of new urban agriculture models to increase local food production capacity in cities of the Global North. Urban rooftop greenhouses and hydroponics are examples of such models receiving increasing attention as a technological approach to year-round local food production in cities. Yet, little research has addressed the unintended consequences of new modes of urban farming and food distribution, such as increased competition with existing peri-urban and rural farmers. We examine how small-scale farmers perceive (...) and have responded to a recently established rooftop greenhouse and online marketplace enterprise in Montréal, Canada. Drawing on interviews with key informants and small-scale farmers, we find that peri-urban and rural producers have been affected in three key ways that represent tensions, adaptations, and synergies arising from this new urban agriculture and food distribution enterprise. First, many farmers are concerned about increased competition and value conflation with the ideals of community supported agriculture and organic farming. Second, some farmers have adapted by developing novel marketing strategies and working with local bridge organizations to collectively market their produce to urban consumers. Third, a few farmers have decided to wholesale their produce to this new enterprise, allowing them to specialize production and avoid marketing their produce directly to urban consumers. Our study suggests that the emergence of a new form of alternative food network in Montréal has created both positive and negative disruptions for existing small-scale producers. Advocates for the expansion of new urban food production and distribution models should therefore give greater consideration to the effects on other actors in the local food system. (shrink)

In his reflections on his adolescent theft of a neighbor’s pears, Augustine first claims that he did it just because it was wicked. But he then worries that there is something unacceptable in that claim. Some readers have found in this account Augustine’s rejection of the principle that all voluntary action is done for the sake of some perceived good. I argue that Augustine intends his case to call the principle into question, but that he does not ultimately reject it. (...) His careful and resourceful analysis of the motivations of his theft adds subtlety to his own understanding of voluntary action and allows hirn to introduce an important component of his general account of sin, namely, that it essentially involves prideful self-assertion in imitation of God. (shrink)

This book makes a novel contribution to our understanding of Romance SE constructions by combining both diachronic and synchronic theoretical perspectives along with a range of empirical data from different languages and dialects. The collection, divided into four sections, proposes that SE constructions may be divided into one class that is the result of grammaticalization of a reflexive pronoun up the syntactic tree, from Voice and above, and another class that has resulted from the reanalysis of reflexive and anticausative morphemes (...) as an argument expletive or verbal morpheme generated in positions from Voice and below. The contributions, while varied in both empirical content and theoretical approach, all serve to highlight different aspects of the overarching idea that SE constructions have evolved from these two distinct grammaticalization paths. The book appeals to researchers and academics in the field and closes with a unified approach to various SE constructions that makes important use of its status as a verbal morpheme. In addition to aligning a novel string of empirical contributions under a new theoretical umbrella, a clear research direction emerges from this volume based on the morphosyntactic nature of SE itself: Is it a clitic, an agreement morpheme, or a verbal morpheme? (shrink)