J. Anthony Blair is a prominent international figure in argumentation studies. He is among the originators of informal logic, an author of textbooks on the informal logic approach to argument analysis and evaluation and on critical thinking, and a founder and editor of the journal Informal Logic. Blair is widely recognized among the leaders in the field for contributing formative ideas to the argumentation literature of the last few decades. This selection of key works provides insights into the history (...) of the field of argumentation theory and various related disciplines. It illuminates the central debates and presents core ideas in four main areas: Critical Thinking, Informal Logic, Argument Theory and Logic, Dialectic and Rhetoric. (shrink)

An important work in the debate between materialists and dualists, the public correspondence between Anthony Collins and Samuel Clarke provided the framework for arguments over consciousness and personal identity in eighteenth-century Britain. In Clarke's view, mind and consciousness are so unified that they cannot be compounded into wholes or divided into parts, so mind and consciousness must be distinct from matter. Collins, by contrast, was a perceptive advocate of a materialist account of mind, who defended the possibility that thinking (...) and consciousness are emergent properties of the brain. Appendices include philosophical writings that influenced, and responded to, the correspondence. (shrink)

School reform and accountability tests have been hotly debated for decades, but the goal of reform and accountability has not. Most agree that the main problem with contemporary education is that it fails to adequately prepare students with the "21st century skills" needed to find jobs and promote national competitiveness in the global economy. Tony Armstrong challenges both the morality and the consequences of pushing this purpose of education. He says it is immoral because it neglects our children's deepest aspiration--happiness--and (...) treats them as mere cogs in the economic machine. Dr. Armstrong shows how methods of well-being based on happiness research--mindfulness, gratitude, perspective--can greatly improve kids' chances to feel better in the present and to live happier lives in the future. And the kindergarten-through-college "happiness pedagogy" he presents would also be a superior way to teach those "21st century skills.". (shrink)

This essay suggests that Hans-Georg Gadamer’s descriptive phenomenology of ‘tarrying’ [Verweilen] can be configured as an essential component of musical experience. At issue is the type of effortful work that intensifies the subject’s most valuable musical experiences and that allows them to become more sustainable and sensitive. It is assumed that music’s presence in the subject’s life should blossom and indeed bloom over time, although this guiding assumption is left unexamined while the essay considers how a detailed phenomenology of musical (...) tarrying might afford the subject a way of underwriting the ways in which human-music relationships are configured. John Cage’s plant piece Child of Tree is deployed, perhaps counterintuitively, as an example of the ideal hermeneutic attitude underwriting tarrying, although it is suggested that the applicability of Gadamer’s constitution of tarrying extends beyond the musical-theatrical avant-garde. (shrink)

This study investigates the function of the common good in the political theory of thomas aquinas. it concludes that at every point in his political theory the concept of the common good plays a significant, if not determinative role. his moderate position between collectivism and individualism recognizes that the individual lives in social relationships which include social responsibilities.

Age of Anxiety: Meaning, Identity, and Politics in 21st Century Film and Literature applies historical and contemporary political and rhetorical theory to current popular culture to discuss the problem of the displaced autonomous self and the quest for a meaningful life.

The ArgumentThe thesis of this paper is that there are three basic processes by which a technological innovation is fitted into an existing culture: Rejection, in situations where all interested groups are satisfied with a traditional technology and reject apparently superior innovations because they would force unwanted changes in technology and ideology; Acceptance, in situations where a new technology is embraced by all because it appears to serve the same social and ideological functions as an inferior, or inoperative, traditional technology; (...) and — most commonly in complex societies — conflict over acceptance or rejection, in situations where a new technology introduced or proposed by one group, who perceive it as advancing their interests, is resisted by another group, who perceive it as threatening their welfare. A traditional tripartite concept of culture is employed, distinguishing technology, social organization, and ideology. Four case studies are introduced to illuminate the issue: the Thonga tribesmen of Mozambique, whose occupation as gold and diamond miners at first suited perfectly the requirements of the Thonga lineage and marriage system; the Yir Yoront of Australia, an aboriginal group who found that the steel axe introduced by whites disrupted the patriarchal status system and confounded their mythology; the Senecas, an American Indian tribe that for generations rejected male plow agriculture because their way of life was organized around female horticulture, but who took up male agriculture at the urging of a prophet when traditional male roles disintegrated on the reservation; and the anthracite miners and mine operators of nineteenth-century Pennsylvania, who discovered that fundamental changes in both social organization and ideology were needed in order to cope with catastrophically high rates of industrial accidents attendant on the new system of deep-shaft mining. (shrink)

A phenomenological account of the forms of life characteristic of late capitalism--including television, celebrity culture, and personal electronics--culminating in an ontology of the gadget-commodity that brings together Marxist theories of commodity fetishism and ideology with Heidegger's attempt to think truth as unconcealment.

In recent years there has been a significant growth in interest of the so-called 'law in context' extending legal studies beyond black letter law. This book looks at the relationship between statute law and legal practice. It examines how law is applied in reality and more precisely how law is perceived by the general public in contrast to the legal profession. The authors look at a number of themes that are central to examining ways in which myths about law are (...) formed, and how there is inevitably a constitutive power aspect to this myth making. At the same time they explore to what extent law itself creates and sustains myths. The book will be of general interest to a number of different disciplines such as legal theory, general law, criminology and sociology. (shrink)

In this paper I examine the nature of Russell's ramified type theory resolution of paradoxes. In particular, I consider the effect of construing the types in Church's cumulative sense, that is, the range of a variable of a given type includes the range of every variable of directly lower type. Contrary to what seems to be generally assumed, I show that the decision to make the levels cumulative and allow this to be reflected in the semantics is not neutral with (...) respect to the solution of the paradoxes. I introduce a distinction between syntactical and semantical cumulativeness. It turns out that noncumulative type theories (in either sense) are equally capable of dealing with the paradoxes. Furthermore, whether cumulativeness is appropriate appears to be context dependent. (shrink)

Although there are several provisions within the Nigerian legal framework that, however, address the issue of church attack, the state capacity to implement effective constitutional sanctioning on perpetrators of this heinous crime has always been found wanting or completely absent, leading to countless religious attacks on churches with seeming state consent. This study employs semi-structured interviews to draw data from affected families from Benue and Enugu States, Nigeria. The article explored their experiences. The study participants were recruited through snowball sampling (...) technique, and data were analysed thematically. The respondents stated that church killings or killing of Christians is rising because of the fact that perpetrators stand lower risk of detection and apprehension than other crimes. Also respondents interrogated that justification for the crime is land acquisition and religious intolerance. On the persistence of the challenge, all the 13 respondents stated that the crime seems to have state approval that has made it seemly impossible to tackle. The article calls for continuous inter-religious dialogue and intentional governmental responsibility in protecting lives of all persons living within the geographical enclave of Nigeria which is necessary for the common good. Closer understanding of other faiths and religions will help build bridges of peace and tolerance. The article also calls for the need to promote African traditional values, such as the value of sacredness of life, human respect and good neighbourliness. Contribution: This study initiated the discussions that will help the public understand the reason for continuous church attacks in Nigeria, what church crime connotes in the Nigerian context and its uniqueness from other crimes. These discussions sit quite well within the transdisciplinary religious perspective of this journal. (shrink)

The moral debate on living-donor organ transplantation historically focused on how to overcome the problem of the mutilation inherent in such a medical operation. In time, theologians began proposing justifications of LDOT that assumed that “mere removals” did not constitute mutilation. The example of mutilation as an “intrinsically evil act” in Veritatis splendor would seem to have closed the debate. Nevertheless, many theologians continue to address LDOT as a question of justifying a mutilation. The authors provide a brief summary of (...) the major contributors before and after Veritatis splendor to show that confusion still exists, and then propose new approaches to help resolve this important bioethical issue. National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly 13.3 : 427–436. (shrink)

Pathological morphogenesis on leaves of Fraxinus ornus (ash) and Solanum lycopersicum (tomato) under the influence of mites (Aceria fraxinivora and Eriophyes cladophthirus respectively) leads to a range of structures whose morphology and development cannot be reduced to the classical categories of plant morphology, but present a heterogeneous continuum which links fundamental structural categories. These findings support the pyramid model of plant construction.

George P. Fletcher, Rethinking Criminal Law Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1978, xviii + 898 pp.

“It Seems natural to suppose”, wrote Mill, “that rules of action must take their whole character … from the end to which they are subservient”. Many moralists have agreed. If we could establish the Summum Bonum, the foundation of morality, the rational basis of moral thinking, this would constitute a criterion, a rule, by means of which men could actually make good practical judgments. This view is radically mistaken. I first try to show this by means of an a priori (...) argument, and then urge the replacement of the “rational model” of practical thinking embodied in this view by an “empirical model”, which should take account of man's actual capacities and limitations. This has important consequences for morality, some of which I investigate. (shrink)