I defend Peter van Inwagen's no-minimum response to the problem of evil from a recent objection raised by Jeff Jordan.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Commentary on “Psychological Courage”Andrew Moore (bio)Putman’s abstract tells us that “philosophy has never addressed the type of courage involved in facing the fears generated by our habits and emotions.” Later he says “almost never.” I think either claim overstates the case. True, Aristotle’s main concern is with courage as a martial virtue, and his central case is the soldier at war. Most translations of Nicomachean Ethics thus talk (...) of “bravery,” rather than “courage.” Aristotle also says, however, that “certainly the brave person is also intrepid... in sickness” (1115b1–2). In sickness, we often face pain and suffering, fear of further sickness, and death. Aristotle takes these to be central concerns: “Then what sorts of frightening conditions concern the brave person? Surely the most frightening; for no one stands firmer against terrifying conditions. Now death is most frightening of all....” (1115a25–26). We may conclude that in Aristotle at least, some attention is paid to psychological bravery or courage. Even if Aristotle had paid no attention to psychological courage, it is still an open question whether his general account of bravery or courage in Book 3, chapters 6–9 of Nicomachean Ethics could be applied also to Putman’s psychological cases, in which the source of fear and object of courage are internal to the agent’s psychology. Even if not, the Aristotelian might still try, as Putman himself notes, to absorb psychological courage into the virtue of “temperance.” I shall not pursue any of these possibilities further here.I turn now to Putman’s general account of courage, and to the way he distinguishes its psychological from its other varieties. His view is that types of courage are to be distinguished from one another in terms of the fear to be faced, and the goal to be attained. Physical courage responds to a fear of death or physical harm. Moral courage responds to a fear of loss of ethical integrity or authenticity. Psychological courage addresses fear of psychic instability or loss of self. It involves us in facing our irrational fears and anxieties, ranging from bad habits and compulsions to phobias. Different kinds of psychological courage then arise from the different sources of the fear of psychic instability. Quick generalizations about the goal to be obtained from various kinds of courage are harder to come by, but in one way or another, they all concern facing up to or confronting fear.A problem for Putman’s general theoretical framework is that fear seems in fact to be inessential to courage. Socrates was a paradigm case of the morally courageous person, as Putman notes, and yet (as Putman also notes) this consisted at least in part in his fearless defense of his moral convictions, even in the face of death. Plato’s Socrates did not face fear.If he had, he would not have had Socratic virtue. We must conclude either that he lacked [End Page 13] courage, or that fear is not necessary to courage. I favor the latter view.If courage is not necessarily a matter of facing fear, then what is it? I suggest that is a matter of facing personal risk or threat. Usually, of course, we respond fearfully to personal threat or risk. But that is not always or essentially so. Socrates and others can still be courageous, even if they face their personal risk or threat without fear. A risk-based conception of courage can also distinguish physical, moral, and psychological courage from one another, in terms of the source of the risk to which they respond. For example, psychological courage is at issue wherever a person is facing up to personal risks generated by her or his own habits, dispositions, commitments, and so on. Note too that fears are not the only elements of one’s own psychology that might generate personal risk. My innocent kindness, for example, might be an ingrained disposition which puts me at risk of cruel exploitation. Facing up to this trait of mine seems to me to be an instance of courage, just as is facing up to my debilitating fears. I probably do not fear my own innocent kindness, though if I strongly identify... (shrink)

In a seventeenth-century English landscape populated with towering political and philosophical figures like Hobbes, Harrington, Cromwell, Milton, and Locke, William Penn remains in many ways a man apart. Yet despite being widely neglected by scholars, he was a sophisticated political thinker who contributed mightily to the theory and practice of religious liberty in the early modern Atlantic world. In this long-awaited intellectual biography of William Penn, Andrew R. Murphy presents a nuanced portrait of this remarkable entrepreneur, philosopher, Quaker, and (...) politician.Liberty, Conscience, and Toleration focuses on the major political episodes that attracted William Penn's sustained attention as a political thinker and actor: the controversy over the Second Conventicle Act, the Popish Plot and Exclusion Crisis, the founding and settlement of Pennsylvania, and the contentious reign of James II. Through a careful examination of writings published in the midst of the religious and political conflicts of Restoration and Revolutionary England, Murphy contextualizes the development of Penn's thought in England and America, illuminating the mutual interconnections between Penn's political thought and his colonizing venture in America. An early advocate of representative institutions and religious freedom, William Penn remains a singular figure in the history of liberty of conscience. His political theorizing provides a window into the increasingly vocal, organized, and philosophically sophisticated tolerationist movement that gained strength over the second half of the seventeenth century. Not only did Penn attempt to articulate principles of religious liberty as a Quaker in England, but he actually governed an American polity and experienced firsthand the complex relationship between political theory and political practice. Murphy's insightful analysis shows Penn's ongoing significance to the broader study of Anglo-American political theory and practice, ultimately pointing scholars toward a new way of understanding the enterprise of political theory itself. (shrink)

Meta chronicles the journey of Andrew Murtagh and Adam Lee in their uncommon exchange turned friendship. Why is there something rather than nothing? Does God exist? What of goodness, free will, and consciousness – what is the ultimate nature of reality and how does that extend into the public square? In this treatise, two young passionate truth seekers aim to change the way the discussion is being had from the vantage points of Christianity and atheism. Is theism or atheism (...) more compelling? If theism, why Christianity? Did Jesus even exist? After theism/atheism, then what? What is the good life? Is morality objective? What does abortion, education, and healthcare look like in the just city? Embarking on a quest for truth on the big questions, their worldviews clash in a philosophical tour de force. In their discord, a blossoming friendship; in their agreement, vows to change the world…. (shrink)

America's supposed moral decline from an imagined golden age, and the threat of divine punishment for the sin of straying from the path of righteousness, have been consistent themes in its political and religious rhetoric. In Prodigal Nation, Andrew Murphy investigates the jeremiad's historical roots and probes the ways in which it continues to illuminate themes and tensions in American social and political life.

In the paper author advocates rejecting a prominent criticism of Marx, which holds that his condemnation of capitalism fails because it is based on incoherent, inconsistent moral reasoning. To rebut this criticism he investigates Marx’s conception of ideological illusion, arguing that some moral judgments could be true even if people always possess moral beliefs because of ideological illusion. To support this thesis he provides epistemological argument about the nature of epistemic justification, proving that on any reasonable interpretation of knowledge, justification (...) of moral beliefs is possible under even the extreme conditions of ideological illusion. He then introduces the final theme of the essay, namely that strikingly Aristotelian themes lie at the heart of Marx’s ethical condemnation of capitalism. By discussing the similarity of Marx’s account of alienation to Aristotle’s account of self-actualization he shows that both thinkers explicitly connect their accounts of development and actualization of human potential and freedom within a society with a sharp critique of economic forms that block or retard that development and actualization. Key words ARISTOTLE, MARXISM, CAPITALISM. (shrink)

This paper examines the use of “literature” in research projects in Sociology and Library & Information Science and proposes that there are some limits to the programme of interdisciplinarity. The loci of considerations are found in literature review sections of published articles. “The literature” is an arbitrary term that refers to recognized and relevant collections of work according to context. Associating aspects of disciplinary work such as concepts, methods and writings, with Wes Sharrock’s ethnomethodological notion of “ownership”, affords analysis of (...) interdisciplinary research strategies. This in turn facilitates examination of how discipline or field-specific terms are put to use. This paper suggests that the use of sociological and ethnomethodological approaches within some disciplinary and interdisciplinary studies is questionable. The equivocal nature of “literature” use arises from attempts to fit “literature” to research projects, and from misunderstanding the internal logic of research app... (shrink)

This essay considers attempts to refute scepticism by transcendental argumentation; in particular I explore attempts to refute traditional "Cartesian" scepticism with idealistic transcendental arguments. My main conclusions are: Transcendental arguments are indispensable for a refutation of scepticism, not redundant; Idealistic transcendental arguments cannot refute Cartesian sceptical doubts; Traditional sceptical doubts can be reformulated so as to be effective against accounts of knowledge based on an idealistic theory of truth; It is possible in principle that idealistic ("Kantian") transcendental arguments can refute (...) such idealistic sceptical doubts and also that non-idealistic ("Strawsonian") transcendental arguments can refute non-idealistic doubts; Merely to assume a theory of truth and just to dismiss certain sceptical doubts based on another theory of truth is to beg the question against the sceptic; but all arguments for a particular theory of truth beg the question against radical sceptics; Because radical scepticism must be taken seriously, a complete refutation of scepticism would require constructing both types of transcendental arguments, viz. Kantian idealistic arguments (to refute idealistic doubts) and Strawsonian non-idealistic arguments (to refute non-idealistic, "Cartesian" doubts). I argue that the allure of idealism as a way to refute scepticism is wholly unfounded, viz. because (1) sceptical doubts can be reformulated so as to be effective against idealistic conceptions of knowledge and (2) idealistic arguments cannot refute traditional Cartesian doubts. But although it doesn't lead where many have hoped, I argue that--in a strange way, for different reasons than are commonly supposed--idealism represents a road which must nevertheless be taken if scepticism is to be refuted. That is, though most of the essay attempts to establish that refuting Cartesian scepticism requires that they be separated, it also follows from my argument that transcendental arguments and transcendental idealism must not be kept apart if scepticism is to be fully refuted.. (shrink)

This article takes a conceptual approach to an issue of pedagogical relevance—the presence of teaching and learning moments within educational environments. We suggest sources of philosophical confusions that design patterns for the classification and creation of typologies of classroom events. We identify three foundational assumptions with the way in which classroom events are analyzed: Describing a classroom event ; Devising a procedure for co-classifying events ; Repurposing decontextualized events to fit a preferred analytic model. Hitherto these assumptions have obscured the (...) phenomenal integrity of the learning environment; since the topic sought is based on critical incidents according to analysts’ interests, but not on the actual identifying details of the setting as made available by the participants. While teaching and learning moments are generic issues, in methodological terms these matters have to be explored in their details. In our article, we align ourselves with particular research approaches, namely ethnomethodology and conversation analysis, that facilitate close analysis of ‘perspicuous settings’, such as classroom interactions, through which phenomena such as teaching and learning moments are made visible as collaborative accomplishments. (shrink)

In this article, the author attempts to explicate the notion of the best known Talmudic inference rule called qal wa- omer. He claims that this rule assumes a massive-parallel deduction, and for formalizing it, he builds up a case of massive-parallel proof theory, the proof-theoretic cellular automata, where he draws conclusions without using axioms.

Paracelsus was a transmutational alchemist: For most of his career, he believed that one metal could be turned into another. In an alchemical text, the De renovatione et restauratione, he explored the theoretical foundations of transmutation and hinted at recipes for bringing it about. He proposed that from plants, gems, metals, and minerals might be prepared a class of marvelous medicaments, which he called prima entia (first entities). Each primum ens had particular uses, but the entia were all supposed to (...) be able to revitalize the human body and cleanse it of disease. Certain entia could also transmute metals. The De renovatione et restauratione affirmed the metaphysical centrality, in goldmaking and medicine alike, not just of purification or alteration but of renewal and transformation. It expressed the author’s eschatological excitement at God’s works of wonder, whether within or above nature. (shrink)

Science and religious faith are two of the most important and influential forces in human life, yet there is widespread confusion about how, or indeed whether, they link together. This book describes this combination from the perspective of one who finds that they link together productively and creatively.

One way to rebut the standard evidential problem of evil is to develop a sceptical form of theism. The resulting position – sceptical theism – is a sophisticated philosophical elaboration on the traditional claim that God works in mysterious ways. Yet sceptical theism is contentious because it has a quite natural tendency to entail a degree of scepticism in other areas of discourse that is normally taken to be unacceptable. To curb this tendency a moderately sceptical theism can be developed (...) that nevertheless retains the benefit of rebutting the standard evidential problem of evil – the moderately sceptical theist attempts to steer a middle course between the Charybdis of mysticism and the Scylla of evil. However, a new evidential problem can be developed and reworked in a formal Bayesian framework. There are various ways to mitigate the new evidential problem and my reworked version, but none of these ways is open to the moderately sceptical theist – her particular ship, I argue, sails too close to Scylla. The moral is quite intuitive: if evil matters at all, then the sheer quantity of evil ensures that it matters a lot. (shrink)

Knee proprioception deficits and neuroplasticity have been indicated following injury to the anterior cruciate ligament. Evidence is, however, scarce regarding brain response to knee proprioception tasks and the impact of ACL injury. This study aimed to identify brain regions associated with the proprioceptive sense of joint position at the knee and whether the related brain response of individuals with ACL reconstruction differed from that of asymptomatic controls. Twenty-one persons with unilateral ACL reconstruction of either the right or left knee, as (...) well as 19 controls matched for sex, age, height, weight and current activity level, performed a knee joint position sense test during simultaneous functional magnetic resonance imaging. Integrated motion capture provided real-time knee kinematics to activate test instructions, as well as accurate knee angles for JPS outcomes. Recruited brain regions during knee angle reproduction included somatosensory cortices, prefrontal cortex and insula. Neither brain response nor JPS errors differed between groups, but across groups significant correlations revealed that greater errors were associated with greater ipsilateral response in the anterior cingulate, supramarginal gyrus and insula. This is the first study to capture brain response using fMRI in relation to quantifiable knee JPS. Activated brain regions have previously been associated with sensorimotor processes, body schema and interoception. Our innovative paradigm can help to guide future research investigating brain response to lower limb proprioception. (shrink)

I propose a novel compatibilist interpretation of Leibniz’s mature views concerning what is metaphysically basic. Drawing on a compatibilist reading of Aristotle on primary substance in the Categories and Metaphysics Z, I argue that Leibniz is working with two complementary ways of being metaphysically basic—one applying to immaterial monads, the other to corporeal substances. Although corporeal substances derive their status as basic from their dominant monads, they are nevertheless fully real, unified, and genuinely capable of acting. This perspective respects Leibniz’s (...) idealist tendencies and his commitment to the reality of bodies without attributing inconsistency to his considered views. View HTML Send article to KindleTo send this article to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about sending to your Kindle. Find out more about sending to your Kindle. Note you can select to send to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be sent to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply. Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.Harmonizing Leibniz’s OntologyVolume 51, Issue 3ANDREW D. H. STUMPF DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0012217312000704Your Kindle email address Please provide your Kindle email.@free.kindle.com@kindle.com Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Send article to Dropbox To send this article to your Dropbox account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about sending content to Dropbox. Harmonizing Leibniz’s OntologyVolume 51, Issue 3ANDREW D. H. STUMPF DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0012217312000704Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Send article to Google Drive To send this article to your Google Drive account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about sending content to Google Drive. Harmonizing Leibniz’s OntologyVolume 51, Issue 3ANDREW D. H. STUMPF DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0012217312000704Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Export citation Request permission. (shrink)

"Permanent Things reminds us that some of the century's most imaginative minds - G. K. Chesterton, T. S. Eliot, C. S. Lewis, Dorothy Sayers, and Evelyn Waugh - were profoundly at odds with the secularist spirit of the age, seeing progressive enlightenment as ushering in, not a millennium of perfect freedom, but a Waste Land whose inhabitants - Waugh's "vile bodies," Eliot's "hollow men," Lewis's "men without chests" - can find refuge from their boredom and anomie only in the ceaseless (...) acquisition of things or in the consoling illusions of pseudo religions - "distracted from distraction by distraction," as Eliot memorably put it." "How does one explain the desolation of a world which, though richly endowed with material comforts, is mentally and spiritually impoverished? The essayists here are united, as were their subjects, by a need to try to answer this question. Modern man's poverty of spirit, visible alike in so much of his art and architecture, his literature and philosophy and political science, reflects his loss of any good reasons for living - his loss of the Permanent Things." "The Christian writers whose work is eloquently interpreted in this book repay our attention for at least two reasons. First is their ability to sharpen our awareness of what, by any previous civilized standards, must be called the abnormal condition of modern man. For all the writers treated in this book, it was never enough to simply capture the spiritual aridity of modern life. It was also necessary to speak of a moral order that may yet be restored by the expressive power and beauty of the written word."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Ethics & the Environment 7.1 (2002) 102-108 [Access article in PDF] Symposium IntroductionEric Katz's Nature As Subject Andrew Light Can and should we distinguish between nature and culture? The question has become a perennial one in environmental ethics, as well as in allied fields in environmental history, sociology, and politics. And just when we think it is settled—as many did after William Cronon's famous deconstruction of wilderness in (...) 1995—and it feels safe to go back into the metaphysical waters of environmental philosophy, such issues pop up again to send us running.What follows extends this debate in the context of Eric Katz's well-known work in environmental ethics. Brought together here are Katz and two critics sympathetic to his positions, Wayne Ouderkirk and Ned Hettinger. While the occasion for the exchange was the publication of Katz's book, Nature as Subject: Human Obligation and Natural Community (1997), which collects his papers from 1979 to 1996, the focus quickly became somewhat narrower, centering on possible problems with Katz's ontological dualism between natural and artifactual entities.Katz has exerted a strong influence on the development of environmental ethics, particularly through his persistent arguments for a distinction between individualist and holist approaches to obligations to the nonhuman natural world and his metaphysical and moral critique of attempts [End Page 102] by humans to create, repair, or restore nature. While these positions continue to be on display here, there is also something more. In this exchange Katz throws down the gauntlet on his nature-culture dualism, admitting at the start that the accusation is true. Like the Protestants in Monty Python's The Meaning of Life, he is a dualist—and fiercely proud of it! Despite whatever misgivings I or others may have about this position, I believe that in making this claim, Katz, similar to David Chalmers's open embrace and resuscitation of dualism in philosophy of mind, has done us a great service. For it is arguably true that many environmental philosophers, along with other academics, have settled into a complacent "labeling as argument" pattern. If we can label a position as "dualist" or "essentialist," then our work is done. But surely not every form of dualism is necessarily wrong, even if, as Ouderkirk reminds us in his reading of Val Plumwood's work, the logic of many forms of dualism has tended toward a pernicious pattern. Arguments are needed in both directions. If nature-culture dualism is mistaken or wrongheaded, or leads to unfortunate conclusions, then we must know why; if dualism is the only way to make sense of the hurdles presented to us in coming to a better understanding of the value of nature and culture then we must know why as well. And further, because many in the field have assumed a nature-culture dualism without admitting to it, we can admire that Katz chooses to "fess up" and finally put the issue squarely on the table.If this is the road we are heading down with this particular exchange, then we are off to a good start. Both critics of Katz do a thorough job of pressing home their arguments, rather than only pointing accusatory fingers. Ned Hettinger, in "The Problem of Finding a Positive Role for Humans in the Natural World," avoids using the term "dualism," but nonetheless argues that Katz has a tendency to "rigidly dichotomize the natural/artifactual distinction." Additionally, Hettinger argues that Katz tends to overlook his own admission that the differences between nature and artifacts admit to degrees rather than a strict dualism. Hettinger focuses the bulk of his critique on the unfortunate upshot of such a position: given such a distinction, there is little if any place for a positive role for human intervention in nature, or for a philosophical contribution to the formation of better environmental policies.Wayne Ouderkirk, in "Katz's Problematic Dualism and its 'Seismic' Effects on His Theory," is sympathetic with Katz's intuitions that some distinction is needed between artifacts and natural entities. The problem [End Page 103] he sees is that such... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:diacritics 30.2 (2000) 43-69 [Access article in PDF] Tracing Ricoeur Dudley Andrew François Dosse. Paul Ricoeur: Les Sens D'une Vie. Paris: La Découverte, 1997. [PR] The Time of the Tortoise Gilles Deleuze chose not to see the end of the century that Michel Foucault claimed would be named after him, a century that began just as philosophy registered the aftershocks caused by the work of his closest progenitors, (...) Nietzsche and Bergson. Amplifying the waves they made with tempests of his own, Deleuze tried to capsize the flat-bottom boat of academic philosophy by insisting that it look beyond its own discourse for both the life and the vocabulary to account for life that should be its only mission. Scanning French philosophy for what it might contribute to art, fiction, and cinema, I invoke the stirring character of Deleuze, but I do so to deflect attention to another figure, Paul Ricoeur, whom Deleuze conveniently sets off by contrast.Less than a decade since his death, Deleuze is in danger of having ceded his claim to Ricoeur, the real long-distance runner, who is now pressing his publications into the new century, moving relentlessly beyond his exhausted reviewers. Last year, a fanfare of publicity greeted La mémoire, l'histoire, l'oubli, another magisterial tome appearing too late to be included in François Dosse's intellectual biography or in my overview here, which lifts off from that biography. Ricoeur, destined to keep writing--unable to conclude his conversation with philosophy--has outlasted Deleuze, whose notoriety derives from the radical break he makes with the thought of our times, for his abrupt deviations and more abrupt conclusions. Ricoeur's reputation rests seldom on anything conclusive but instead on his persistent interaction with and deployment of so much of that thought. By accident or by savvy design, Ricoeur's trajectory (initiated in the phenomenological atmosphere of the prewar era) has taken him through myth criticism, psychoanalysis, structuralism, language philosophy, analytic philosophy, deconstruction, poetics, historiography, ethics, and epistemology. He carries his learning forward to each new endeavor, not believing in "the radical break" or the prefix post-.François Dosse tracks Ricoeur in a magnificent account that places its subject in relation to each of these movements. But Parisian academic fashion forms only one facet of a life whose brilliance is refracted as well by theology, politics, and a remarkable social network. The thickness of his life evidently provides Ricoeur the necessary ballast to maintain his orientation on the stormy seas of intellectual debate. In fact, across a span of seventy years of uninterrupted reading and writing, he has anticipated, invoked, or debated virtually every important school of French thought, doing so in a way that both establishes their value and serves his own agenda. Ricoeur profits from the productive tension that results, even--indeed, especially--when this brings about a dislocation of his views. These exchanges inevitably leave his own ideas clearer, more defensible, and invulnerable to charges of parochialism. Although Ricoeur concludes his three-volume Time and Narrative with an aggressive chapter explicitly asking, [End Page 43] "Should We Renounce Hegel?," there is something deeply Hegelian about this strategy of taking on, then managing to assimilate, all comers so as to emerge stronger. Ricoeur may not share Hegel's limitless arrogance (literally arrogating everything to himself), but his humility is equally ambitious.There was never any question for Deleuze about renouncing Hegel. His antipathy to this "philosophe de l'État" was immediate, total, and itself completely arrogant. As for Ricoeur, Deleuze apparently avoided the man Dosse dubs "philosophe de la Cité," at least before 1986. Then, he links their names after each had just published a multivolume treatise on temporality and fabulation, Deleuze's cinema books picking up the notion of "bifurcated time" that Ricoeur had just developed in Time and Narrative. Proust was explicitly a key source for both of their studies. But apparently, and outwardly, it gets no closer than this. In concatenating these two French philosophers, I follow the lead of Olivier Mongin, who finds them both to be supreme philosophers of time, yet incompatible on... (shrink)

We extend an independence result proved in our earlier paper "Solovay's Theorem Cannot Be Simplified" (Annals of Pure and Applied Logic 112 (2001)). Our method uses the Barwise.

Is it possible to distinguish communities of arguers by tracking the argumentation schemes they employ? There are many ways of relating schemes to communities, but not all are productive. Attention must be paid not only to the admissibility of schemes within a community of argumentational practice, but also to their comparative frequency. Two examples are discussed: informal mathematics, a convenient source of well-documented argumentational practice, and anthropological evidence of nonstandard reasoning.

The article by Jessica Pierce and Christina Kerby, raises some important but seldom asked questions about the use of natural resources in healthcare. They take for their example latex gloves, which are in wide everyday use, especially since the establishment of principles of universal precautions in infection control as a reaction to the spread of HIV. They trace the production of latex gloves back through rubber processing to their origins in Malaysian rubber plantations and elsewhere. They then ask, but do (...) not answer, some hard questions about the ethics of our relationship as patients to the impact of the materials we use on communities and the environment. To draw out their theme more starkly, consider the rumor widespread in South America that some babies purportedly adopted by Northerners are sold and cut up for their organs. Suppose this story were true; suppose your donated organ were obtained in this way. You would probably be so revolted by the immorality of its acquisition that you would refuse to accept it. But now take a morally more ambiguous case, as Pierce and Kerby intend. Suppose that the process of obtaining latex gloves is part of the gradual erosion of the Malaysian environment, and that workers in latex factories are poorly paid. Now, should or would you refuse to use latex gloves? Should or would you even be more selective in their use? The practice of universal precautions presumes a virtually unlimited supply of gloves; yet to react to resource scarcity with selective precautions hazards discrimination. Is there any way philosophically to balance the local justice issue of discrimination in comparison to injustice on a global scale and to future generations? (shrink)

This article offers a comparative study of the approaches of Dworkin and Aristotle to money and the market. For Dworkin the importance of this subject lies in the use he makes of the device of a hypothetical auction to provide the basis of a conception of equality of resources, compatible with liberty, and sustained by his view of ethical individualism. The technical adequacy of Dworkin's auction is considered with the assistance of an insight taken from Aristotle's comments on money, which (...) brings to light the secondary conceptual status of money. Dworkin's attempts to produce a metric of equality of resources are found wanting. It is suggested that Aristotle's insight has repercussions for Dworkin's broader project, as well as implication for any attempt to use the market to provide a sense of value in human affairs. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Classical Rhetoric and the Promotion of the New WorldAndrew FitzmauriceFor many years historians have characterized the relation between the Old World and the New as an encounter in which the New was assimilated to the Old. There is a striking uniformity in the reasons given for this process. It is argued that in their “discovery” the Europeans encountered a world which was radically different from their own and for (...) which they did not possess the concepts to provide a true account. The only available descriptive tools were the categories of European experience. I shall argue that this historical characterization is unsupported by the first English representations of the New World. While it is true that the New World was represented in terms familiar to English audiences, the reason for this translation was dramatically different from that given by historians. The process of conversion to Old World values arises not from an epistemic shock but from the psychology of persuasion found in classical and humanist rhetoric.The purpose of this essay is not to superimpose a new model for under-standing the interaction between Europe and the New World but rather to contribute to recent challenges to precisely the idea that there was a collective European “response” to the New World. Historians who have stressed that the translation of the new into the familiar was imposed by the limits of the European episteme have based these interpretations largely upon accounts of the Spanish conquest, ethnography, and natural history. It has recently been stressed that Europeans differed on the basis of their nationality in their understanding of the issues raised by the conquest of the New World. 1 In this paper I shall argue that the genre of intellectual engagement was equally important to that understanding. [End Page 221]In his seminal lectures The Old World and the New J. H. Elliott compares the Europeans’ discovery of the New World with the response of the Chinese of the T’ang dynasty to the conquest of Nam Viet. Like the Europeans, the “minds and imaginations” of the Chinese “were preconditioned, so that they saw what they expected to see, and ignored or rejected those features of life in the southern lands for which they were mentally unprepared.” 2 Elliott is careful to observe that “what Europeans saw” on the “far side of the Atlantic” inevitably would “depend on the kind of Europeans involved.” 3 From the example of the Chinese experience of Nam Viet, however, he suggests that Europeans shared in a process through which the New World was assimilated, and he argues that this was epistemic: “it may well be that the human mind has an inherent need to fall back on the familiar object and the standard image, in order to come to terms with the shock of the unfamiliar.” 4Stephen Greenblatt has described this process as rhetorical. He stresses that Europeans possessed “many different and conflicting ways of seeing and describing the world” but claims that “the variety is not infinite,” arguing that Europeans shared “a lumbering, jerry built, but immensely powerful mimetic machinery.” 5 “Wonder,” he argues, is “the central figure in the initial European response to the New World, the decisive emotional and intellectual experience in the presence of radical difference.” 6 For Greenblatt the rhetorical process by which wonder reifies and appropriates the alien arises from an epistemic crisis; that is, wonder is provoked by the “presence of radical difference.” 7 [End Page 222]Underlying many of these accounts, as Mary Fuller has recently observed, is the sense of a New World outside language, a sense that “there is something self-evident, unambiguous, unified on the other side of language.” 8 Fuller explores the rhetoric of New World narratives by demonstrating that this referent is always absent and that the “other” is inside language.For the majority of authors writing in English about the New World, however, it is not the presence or absence of the “other” that produces their conversion of the alien to the familiar. Most Elizabethan and Jacobean tracts concerning the New World were promotional: their mode was persuasion. The tracts were written in terms of the classical and humanist art... (shrink)