Background: Patient autonomy has been promoted as the most important principle to guide difficult clinical decisions. To examine whether practising physicians indeed value patient autonomy above other considerations, physicians were asked to weight patient autonomy against three other criteria that often influence doctors’ decisions. Associations between physicians’ religious characteristics and their weighting of the criteria were also examined. Methods: Mailed survey in 2007 of a stratified random sample of 1000 US primary care physicians, selected from the American Medical Association masterfile. (...) Physicians were asked how much weight should be given to the following: (1) the patient’s expressed wishes and values, (2) the physician’s own judgment about what is in the patient’s best interest, (3) standards and recommendations from professional medical bodies and (4) moral guidelines from religious traditions. Results: Response rate 51% (446/879). Half of physicians (55%) gave the patient’s expressed wishes and values “the highest possible weight”. In comparative analysis, 40% gave patient wishes more weight than the other three factors, and 13% ranked patient wishes behind some other factor. Religious doctors tended to give less weight to the patient’s expressed wishes. For example, 47% of doctors with high intrinsic religious motivation gave patient wishes the “highest possible weight”, versus 67% of those with low (OR 0.5; 95% CI 0.3 to 0.8). Conclusions: Doctors believe patient wishes and values are important, but other considerations are often equally or more important. This suggests that patient autonomy does not guide physicians’ decisions as much as is often recommended in the ethics literature. (shrink)

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) was introduced in 2018 to harmonize data privacy and security laws across the European Union (EU). It applies to any organization collecting personal data in the EU. To date, service-level consent has been used as a proportionate approach for clinical trials, which implement low-risk, routine, service-wide interventions for which individual consent is considered inappropriate. In the context of public health research, GDPR now requires that individuals have the option to choose whether their data may (...) be used for research, which presents a challenge when consent has been given by the clinical service and not by individual service users. We report here on development of a pragmatic opt-out solution to this consent paradox in the context of a partner notification intervention trial in sexual health clinics in the UK. Our approach supports the individual’s right to withhold their data from trial analysis while routinely offering the same care to all patients. (shrink)

Hume's is/ought distinction has long limited the role of empirical research in ethics, saying that data about what something is cannot yield conclusions about the way things ought to be. However, interest in empirical research in ethics has been growing despite this countervailing principle. We attribute some of this increased interest to a conceptual breakdown of the is/ought distinction. MacIntyre, in reviewing the history of the is/ought distinction, argues that is and ought are not strictly separate realms but exist in (...) a close relationship that is clarified by adopting a teleological orientation. We propose that, instead of recovering a teleological orientation, society tends to generate its own goals via democratic methods like those described by Rousseau or adopt agnosticism about teleology such as described by Richard Rorty. In both latter scenarios, the distinction between is and ought is obscured, and the role for empirical research grows, but for controversial reasons. MacIntyre warns that the is/ought distinction should remain, but reminds ethicists to make careful arguments about when and why it is legitimate to move from is to ought. (shrink)

This essay develops a theory of identities, selves, and ‘the self’ that both explains the sense in which selves are narratively constituted and also explains how the self relates to a person's individual autobiographical identity and to their various social identities. I argue that identities are the contents of narratively structured representations, some of which are hosted individually and are autobiographical in form, and others of which are hosted collectively and are biographical in form. These identities, in turn, give rise (...) to selves of various sorts—true selves, autobiographical selves, public and private selves, merely possible selves, and so on—which are the characters (or presupposed subjects) that appear in our various identities. Although the theory I develop bears some obvious affinities with the view that selves are fictional characters, the two views are in fact distinct, for reasons explained at the end. (shrink)

Another title in the Modern Studies in Philosophy published by Doubleday under the general editorship of Amélie O. Rorty. Thirteen essays plus part of J. L. Ackrill's translation of the Categories are included. The view is mainly from Oxford and is, in the words of the editor, "piecemeal" and "pluralistic." What this means is that there are three essays on Aristotle's logic, two on his categories, four on his metaphysics, and four on his ethics. Nothing on Aristotle's psychology is included. (...) This, however, is due more to the fact that little has been written on this Aristotelian topic in Anglo-American circles than to editorial oversight. The essays by Woods, Moravcsik, and Urmson were written especially for this volume and the Austin article also appears for the first time. A short bibliography is appended.--E. A. R. (shrink)

The five chapters in this volume were originally delivered in lecture form at the University of Genoa and have previously appeared in French, German, and English translations. An appendix, "What the Philosopher May Learn from the Study of Law," has also appeared before in English. The book is basically a digest, with some modifications, of Perelman's earlier work Justice et Raison. The chief modification involves a supposed shift away from positivism toward a greater emphasis on the cognitive status of primary (...) values. Through the mediation of his consideration of the nature of practical reason in the Traité de l'Argumentation, Perelman now wishes to argue that values are subject to dialectical justification. The analysis of justice, thus, need not be restricted to merely formal specifications such as the rule of justice or to such inherently nonuniversalizable and nonanalyzable principles as that of equity. Dialectical justification falls short of demonstration, but only someone still under the spell of Cartesianism would wish to maintain that rationality is adequately summarized in the model provided by mathematics and science. Jurisprudence, therefore deals with judgments that have cognitive and not arbitrary or merely historical value. So much for the scheme of Perelman's argument. What about its execution? It must be said that its substance is slight and the base of discussion extraordinarily narrow. Thus, Perelman says he wishes to avoid the Scylla of nominalism and the Charybdis of realism; but his own analysis winds up squarely in a conventionalism that is only minutely distinguishable from the nominalism he presumably attacks: e.g., "the idea of [practical] reason must not be linked to that of truth", "reason is but an attempt to convince the members of [the universal] audience--whom common sense would define as well-informed and reasonable men". The only defense offered by Perelman for the first statement is a flaunting of the bogey of dogmatism. The vicious circle in the second statement is barred from rising to the level of the fruitful Aristotelian paradox by a peremptory dismissal of natural law: "The theorists of natural law... have not convinced the majority of those philosophers of law who are endowed with critical minds." This kind of "you-don't-belong-to-the-club" argument makes the book practically worthless from a truly dialectical point of view. The only critical sparks generated are in Perelman's discussion of Rawls' theory of "justice as fair play." His points here are well taken. But, as this is the only saving grace in the book--the rest being merely a statement of Perelman's own doxa about justice--it would have been better to leave the whole interred in the journals where it had already been published.--E. A. R. (shrink)

Volume IV in the series "New Testament Tools and Studies" edited by Metzger, this book is chiefly a collection of essays that he has produced in the last fifteen years. Thoroughly scholarly and impeccably objective, the book contains chapters on the Lucianic recension of the Greek Bible, the Caesarean text of the Gospels, and Old Slavonic version of the Bible, Tatian's Diatessaron and a Persian Harmony of the Gospels, recent Spanish contributions to the textual criticism of the New Testament, trends (...) in the textual criticism of the Illiad and the Mahabharata, and an appendix on William Bowyer's contribution to the textual criticism of the New Testament.—E. A. R. (shrink)

In the Arthur Stanley Eddington Memorial Lecture for 1965 Eccles uses his considerable knowledge to argue that neurophysiology can give clues to the physical requirements of the unity of conscious experience, but it cannot fully account for it. The way is thus left open to postulate or believe in the special creation of the soul as the principle of self-identity. Specifically, Eccles argues that self-identity is not reducible to gene identity. He does not, however, go into the problems surrounding the (...) origin of the employment of the notion of self-identity; and in this respect his analysis is uncritical from a philosophical point of view. Interestingly enough, some of the positive bits of neurophysiological theory that Eccles puts forth in this short lecture, in particular, the theory of hemispheric localization of the higher functions, have been shaken considerably in the past few months by the results of the Coe hemispherectomy.—E. A. R. (shrink)

In a detailed and careful manner, Taylor sets about an analysis of the notions of causation, human action, purpose, and a whole host of other conceptions such as deliberation, willing, mental acts, and reasons that relate to these key concepts in the philosophy of human action. The issue is, of course, what sort of explanation is suited to grasping the inherent intelligibility of human action. Having argued his way through to a notion of agent causality, which differs little from that (...) of Aristotle, and having concluded to the irreducibility of purpose that this conception implies, Taylor maintains that logical reductionism, behaviorism, and/or mechanism are logically deficient and leave human action unexplained; however, the non-reducibility of common sense, teleological and free will concepts does not imply, for Taylor, a dualism Taylor does leave it open as a matter to be empirically decided whether or not ontological reductionism is a viable alternative. While the book is an extraordinarily skillful and dialectical handling of current discussion in the philosophy of action, there is distressingly little mention of the sources and supports of this discussion. The effect is to make some of Taylor's more controversial pronouncements appear a bit more dogmatic than should be the case; but in the end, content triumphs sufficiently over style to make this book important reading for anyone interested in having some clear light thrown on the thorny problems surrounding the philosophy of action.—E. A. R. (shrink)

In what is at the very least a tour de force, one of the most important contemporary Italian philosophers, Michele Sciacca, has given a critical exposition of literally hundreds of philosophical writers who share in common the tradition of Western philosophy from Kant and Hegel back through Descartes, on the one hand, and back through Augustine, Aristotle, and Plato, on the other. Treatment ranges from a paragraph or two to nineteen pages in the case of Kierkegaard. For those not sharing (...) Sciacca's preference for an integral Christian philosophy which can successfully incorporate all the positive values of humanism, his "criticisms" will frequently seem polemical and unsupported by the exposition he has provided. This is particularly the case in his treatment of scientifically oriented, analytical and linguistic philosophy which he discusses in a chapter with the somewhat unflattering title, "'Physicalism' and the New 'Scientific' Barbarity." But the book is obviously intended more as an act of philosophical reflection than as a history of contemporary philosophy, and is, in this respect, to be assessed more by the criterion of philosophical soundness used to judge, e.g., Aristotle's handling of his predecessors, and Hegel's reading of the history of philosophy, than by considerations of historical scholarship. And, as philosophy, Sciacca's Christian Spiritualism is imposing.—E. A. R. (shrink)

A non-technical review of the state of various of the life sciences—biology, genetics, ethology-as they provide data upon which to erect a philosophy of life. The philosophical problems taken up include emergence, the mind-body relation, and the relevance of evolutionary theory to questions in ethics. Thorpe is at his best when he is operating within the field of scientific biology, not so much as one reporting the results of specific research, but as one making an attempt to see some unity (...) in the total enterprise and results of the life sciences. From this perspective Thorpe finds organicism an hypothesis that is supported much more heavily than any form of reductivism, even at the level of molecular biology where Thorpe questions the mechanistic model that has been imposed, via information theory, on such elemental biological phenomena as gene structure and the working of DNA. Thorpe's philosophizing, however, though often suggestive, never takes the form of sustained argument, and one is sometimes hard put to draw the line between it and bits of biological speculation. Provocative and summative rather than definitive or original, but still quite worthwhile.—E. A. R. (shrink)

In a competent and well-written survey, the author shows how the cosmic eschatological vision of the New Testament was systematically eliminated from Protestant theology by the end of the nineteenth century as the cumulative effect of the rationalism of the Enlightenment. The author criticizes this departure from the tradition, but fails to explore the possibility that rationalism and the elimination of the eschatological cosmic objective of Christianity was a predictable result of Luther's overemphasis upon forensic justification to the detriment of (...) the complementary notion of intrinsic justification, familiar to Pauline as well as Johannine eschatology.—E. A. R. (shrink)

The joy at seeing another of Thomas' historically and doctrinally important Commentaries on Aristotle translated into English is somewhat dampened by the prodigality of this edition. The translator's introduction is printed in both volumes, and, in a way which suggests that some mystical significance was attached to reaching 1,000 pages, 56 identical pages of bibliography and index are printed in each volume. Litzinger has included his translation of what he takes to be William of Moerbeke's Latin translation of Aristotle's Ethics, (...) and supposedly the text from which Aquinas worked. The translator has gone to a great deal of trouble in providing treatise, book, and lesson outlines, based on Thomas' own analytical outline, and lettered in such a way that the reader can always locate in an instant the point in Aristotle's text to which Thomas is referring—E. A. R. (shrink)

Browning has put together a useful anthology of texts taken from Bergson, Peirce, James, Alexander, Morgan, Dewey, Mead, and Whitehead, and arranged around the common allegiance of these philosophers to a "metaphysics of motion" as opposed to a classical "metaphysics of rest." The metaphysical presuppositions of at least one form of process philosophy are delineated in a remarkably concise and coherent introduction by Charles Hartshorne: one is tempted to call this introduction Hartshorne's Monadology. The editor provides an illuminating historical account (...) of the genesis of process philosophy in his preface, and has included a brief biographical introduction and a well-selected and current bibliography for each philosopher.—E. A. R. (shrink)

"From beginning to end, art is bent upon making; this book says nothing else." Fortunately, we need not take the author at his word. But if the reader sees this, maintains Gilson, he will see the errors in those philosophical approaches to art which mistake esthetics for the philosophy of art, and mistake what is a mode of being simply as production with what is a mode of being as knowledge. The foe is "noematism" and Gilson is tireless in exposing (...) its occurrence in all philosophical views of art since Plato—even in Aristotle, for whom he, otherwise, has a decided preference. Only with Nietzsche does art assert its independence of anthrôpos théôrétikos and ally itself with the Will to Power. Gilson does not approve of this extreme but he does recognize it as the inevitable result of trying to cast art in the role of the messenger of meaning, be that meaning the highest, as with the intuitionism of the Romantics, or the lowest, as in the "imitation of an imitation" notion propounded by Plato. Not that there is no meaning to be had from works of art; but concentration on the contemplation of a work of art—the province of esthetics—distracts from the recognition of the purpose of art itself, namely the activity of subordinating matter to form in the well-making of a sensible product whose being is "conceived in beauty." This latter is the proper function of the philosophy of art.—E. A. R. (shrink)

As is pointed out in an excellent introduction, this translation of Peter of Spain's work on syncategorematic terms and the accompanying treatises on Obligations, Insoluables, and Consequences provide important additions to a steadily increasing body of sources upon which an as-yet-unwritten adequate history of medieval logic will be based. As an interesting and helpful guide, the introduction provides modern symbolic translations of the logical rules verbally formulated by the original authors.—E. A. R.

Six papers by theoretical and clinical psychologists, a psychiatrist, and a neurologist, including, in addition to the editors, Seymour Fisher, Herman Witkin, Macdonald Critchley, J. de Ajuriaguerra, and Sidney E. Cleveland. The four middle papers present various findings of clinical psychology on the way in which the individual perceives and identifies with his body. Werner's introduction sets the discussion—albeit sketchily—within the context of recent work in phenomenology on the "body schema" or "body image." Merleau-Ponty is the prime example. In the (...) final paper de Ajuriaguerra returns to the philosophical conclusions which might receive explication and support on the basis of the four middle papers: egological unity is manifested in and mediated through corporeal unity, but in such a way that corporeal unity is not a logically sufficient guarantee of itself and requires an ontological account to ground its characteristic unity—though not necessarily another entity, substantialistic or otherwise. epistemologically, the bogey of psychologism must be rejected in the face of the facts that emerge from the studies in this book and elsewhere: namely, that the perceived world is grasped primordially in relation to the self as necessarily mediated through the body. The implications of this analysis are obviously far-reaching, and the only regret is that they could not be carried out more systematically and extensively in this book.—E. A. R. (shrink)

After an opening chapter, in which he defends an objectivist theory of moral discourse against various forms of emotivism and pragmatism by locating the ordinary import of moral ascriptions in their reference to persons rather than situations, Owen proceeds to generalize this requirement so that moral imperatives are regarded as making sense only if they issue from a personal source. "Making sense" admittedly does not mean that there is any logical contradiction involved in denying that a relation of persons is (...) presupposed by moral conduct and implied by moral discourse; negatively put, stoicism is the only consistent alternative to theism: but stoicism neglects evidence for the existence of God that it need not. Thus, while there is a "gap" between the premisses and the conclusion of the moral argument which can only be bridged by a "leap," this "leap" of faith is far from being blind. While most of this book amounts simply to an incisive and extremely well-ordered restatement of the Kantian moral argument for the existence of God, the author's use of the notion of person and pari passu community as integral features of the argument revise it sufficiently to give it a prima facie better based cognitive appeal than Kant's.—E. A. R. (shrink)

In this, the Henriette Hertz Philosophical Lecture for 1965, Geach adopts a shotgun technique to save Time from the reductionists, both physicalistic and idealistic. The victims of the blasts are variously Quine, Smart, and McTaggart; Russell does not escape unscathed either. At the back of Geach's seeming arbitrary dismissal of various forms and consequences of the reduction of Time lurks an ontology of substance fortified by what Geach envisages as the successful development of a logic of temporal concepts based on (...) modal logic. The key to this ontology emerges at crucial points as the basic inviolability of first-person knowledge and discourse: e.g., "we do know that our plans and purposes radically alter our physical environment, and there's an end on't; any contrary [deterministic] theory, however plausibly argued, just has to be false".—E. A. R. (shrink)

A soberly written biography that sacrifices nothing to scholarship to achieve an impressive readability. The chapters are arranged to treat, alternately and in chronological order, the biographical data available on St. Thomas and the data available on his intellectual development. Bourke adds no new facts and very few conjectures to the material at his disposal. He makes an objective assessment of rival accounts of St. Thomas' activities, paring off, where necessary, overly pious accretions. His selection of "facts" is then put (...) together in a coherent account of St. Thomas' life. The person of St. Thomas continues to wear the garb of the perfect intellectual, but that this is not the mask of colorless impersonality will be apparent to anyone who encounters Bourke's portrait of St. Thomas—E. A. R. (shrink)

The excuse for publishing a new anthology of texts in ancient philosophy is that the effort is not a duplication of previous attempts, either in terms of the texts offered or the interpretations tendered. It is impossible to meet the first criterion for the pre-Socratics, since there is a concise and relatively agreed upon canon of material. What then of the interpretations offered in this volume? They are scant, unimaginative, and, in some cases, misleading. This is especially true in the (...) case of the sophists. Thus, Callicles' long speech from the Gorgias is quoted as representative of sophistical doctrine on the antithesis between nature and convention. The practice of quoting Plato on the sophists is hazardous at best. Why not, instead, print and analyze those intriguing fragments one and two of Antiphon's Περὶ ληθείας? Or if Plato is to be trusted in regard to the sophists, why not quote Protagoras' remarks in the Platonic dialogue of that same name? Or the excursion in the Theaetetus? These selections would present a much more complete picture of Protagoras' doctrines than the seven lines from the doxographical tradition that the editors supply. In addition, there appears to be little logic in the bibliographies. The only secondary source suggested for the sophists is Untersteiner's book. Havelock's The Liberal Temper in Greek Politics is equally controversial, but certainly more reliable. Or if J. H. Loenen's "Was Anaximander an Evolutionist?" could be dredged up from Mnemosyne, surely some material from the other journals could have been found for the sophists. After the pre-Socratics, the book offers about eighty-five pages of selections from Plato, one hundred pages from Aristotle, twenty-five pages from Hellenistic stoicism, Epicureanism, and skepticism and a concluding twenty pages from Plotinus. A novel and quite useful feature of the book is a thematic table which topically indexes the texts according to the editors' conception of the main branches of philosophy.--E. A. R. (shrink)

An ancillary text of readings, mainly from twentieth century sources, and arranged under these headings: I. "Problems in Normative Ethics" ; II. "Problems in Metaethics" ; III. "Problems About Morality". The editorial comments are spare to a fault, the bibliographies are overly slim; and the general lack of an historical perspective detracts from the usefullness of this volume.—E. A. R.

This volume makes available most of the major papers of the "man who may well have been America's outstanding teaching metaphysician during the second quarter of this century." Phelan did indeed have a long list of impressive students to his credit, most of them coming out of the University of Toronto and the Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies in Toronto. Included are Phelan's Aquinas Lecture of 1941, "St. Thomas and Analogy," "Being, Order and Knowledge," "The Concept of Beauty in St. (...) Thomas Aquinas," "Justice and Friendship," "Verum Sequitur Esse Rerum," and eight others. The editor has added a bibliography of everything Phelan ever wrote, from books to book reviews to obituaries. Phelan's interests were clearly metaphysical; but his metaphysics was historical and interpretive, not creative.—E. A. R. (shrink)

A discussion of the notion of infinity as it appears in the prototype of the great Summae of the thirteenth century, the Summa Fratris Alexandri, traditionally ascribed to Alexander of Hales but now known to be a compilation by the monks at the Paris house of the Franciscans to which Alexander belonged. This Summa reveals the initial effects of the Aristotelian analysis upon the then dominant Neo-Platonic, Augustinian and Anselmian Illuminationisms, and its relation to the philosophical notion of an infinite (...) God. As Wass stresses, the notion of infinity systematically expounded in this Summa provided the conceptual framework for most of the subsequent medieval speculation on the subject.—E. A. R. (shrink)

This book is a very expensive disappointment. It is a series of edifying discourses on the limits of the knowledge of physics for understanding the universe in all its dimensions. To bring home the point that physics can provide no ultimate metaphysical, theological, moral/ethical, or even cosmological answers to questions which must inevitably be raised, Jaki races up and down the pages of the more reflective and perhaps near-philosophical utterances of famous physicists, chemists, etc. The fruits of his obviously omnivorous (...) reading are a welter of names, quotes, and footnotes served up to the reader en masse in an attempt to establish by authority, apparently, a general position which might or might not have been establishable by analysis and argument. There are some curiosities that may interest the historian of science in the book, but the philosophical pickings are slim.—E. A. R. (shrink)

A companion volume to the one above in which the only deviation from the format of the previous volume is the inclusion of four school rather than individual-chronological headings. The school headings are "American Realism," "Logical Positivism," "Existentialism," and "Ordinary Language Analysis." The individual philosophers included are James, Bergson, Lenin, Husserl, Santayana, Dewey, Whitehead, Moore, and Russell. In all other respects Volume II is like Volume I.—E. A. R.

These are the first works of Blondel to be translated into English. Blondel has been called the French Newman; but this is misleading, as Blondel was a disciplined and professional philosopher, while it would not be fair to Newman to judge him exclusively or even largely as a philosopher. In this country Blondel has tended to be overshadowed by Maritain, Gilson, and the neo-Thomists generally, to whose camp Blondel emphatically did not belong. The first of the works contained in this (...) volume is concerned with the question of the possibility of a Christian philosophy, i.e., a philosophy that is Christian in its tendency but philosophical, not theological, in its substance. The second work is Blondel's answer to the specific problem of Modernism which raged in Catholic philosophical and theological circles at the beginning of this century, but its importance may now be gauged equally in terms of its being an attempt to incorporate the core of truth included in historicism and relativism without giving up the objectivity of perspective that has always characterized the perennial philosophy. Dru and Trethowan have provided an excellent general introduction of over one hundred pages which covers the necessary biographical details of Blondel's life, as well as giving the intellectual and cultural setting of his thought. Added to this are briefer historical introductions for each of the works contained herein. A bibliography of Blondel's principal works is included.—E A. R. (shrink)

This paper is a contribution to the study of equality-free logic, that is, first-order logic without equality. We mainly devote ourselves to the study of algebraic characterizations of its relation of elementary equivalence by providing some Keisler-Shelah type ultrapower theorems and an Ehrenfeucht-Fraïssé type theorem. We also give characterizations of elementary classes in equality-free logic. As a by-product we characterize the sentences that are logically equivalent to an equality-free one.

This is number 18 in Herder's Quaestiones Disputatae series. It is made up of four chapters from Rahner's Schriften zur Theologie, VI. The first and fourth essays, "The Changing Church" and "The Teaching of Vatican II on the Church and the Future Reality of Christian Life," complement one another, in a rough sort of way, in their treatment of the issue of continuity and change within the Church. The former tackles the problem from the limited point of view of the (...) authoritative and magisterial church. The latter has the more plenary notion of the Church as the solidarity of the faithful and consequently offers a more satisfying treatment of the theme. The second essay covers the topic "Situation Ethics in Ecumenical Perspective" in a non-surprising but quite elegant fashion. Rahner's characteristic sense of proportion is most evident in the essay "The Church's Limits Against Clerical Triumphalists and Lay Defeatists." He resists the all-or-nothing logic which says the Church must completely overlap and transform--at least in intention--the secular domain or be condemned to impotence and irrelevance. The true role of the Church, for Rahner, is found rather in witness: the Church as the sign of the salvation of the world.--E. A. R. (shrink)

Over six hundred entries, each bearing the stamp, in an immensely concise fashion, of that unique synthesis of traditional and contemporary categories of theological understanding that one has learned to associate, particularly, with the name of Rahner. For the beginning student of Catholic theology, this book is a must; nor will the advanced readily exhaust its store of theological perceptiveness.—E. A. R.

It is good to have Huggard's translation of the Theodicy back in print. This book can find excellent use in philosophy of religion courses which attempt to follow the history of the theodical and predestination problems. Since the Theodicy is not otherwise available, however, the fact that this edition is a fifty percent abridgment is very disappointing. Repetitions and digressions could have been bracketed rather than deleted, and the appendices ought to have been retained since some of Leibniz' most concise (...) and subtle argumentation is contained in them. It is even quite a shame that Farrar's superb introduction in the original English edition was not retained. The situation is further aggravated by the fact that $2.75 is a lot to pay for an abridgment.--E. A. R. (shrink)

Hare and Vlastos write on Plato, Anscombe, Ackrill, MacKinnon, Owen, and Bambrough on Aristotle, while Ryle gives some of the history of "Dialectic in the Academy." All of the essays were written especially for this volume, and most show a disappointing lack of polish. Vlastos' "Degrees of Reality in Plato" is an exception, and his thesis is an interesting reworking of a familiar criticism. Bambrough has the best offering on Aristotle: an approving assessment of Aristotle's doctrine and method of employment (...) of equivocal terms, an employment which Bambrough praises as "A Paradigm of Philosophy," and compares favorably with the Wittgensteinian doctrine of family resemblances.—E. A. R. (shrink)

If the author has for his purpose clarifying the hitherto obscured history of seventeenth century Hermetic and Cabalistic teachings on universal salvation, he is to be commended for his painstakingly accurate summaries. If he has wanted to raise theological and philosophical issues concerning the Christian doctrine of Hell—as the title and first part of the book indicate—his spokesmen were poorly chosen and his logic is inadequate.—E. A. R.

This study represents an improvement in the ethics scales inventory published in a 1988 Journal of Business Ethics article. The article presents the distillation and validation process whereby the original 33 item inventory was reduced to eight items. These eight items comprise the following ethical dimensions: a moral equity dimension, a relativism dimension, and a contractualism dimension. The multidimensional ethics scale demonstrates significant predictive ability.