En 1999, à la suite d’un référendum (1997) organisé sous le gouvernement travailliste de Londres, l’Écosse s’est dotée de nouvelles institutions, un parlement et un gouvernement situés à Édimbourg, dans le cadre de la ‘dévolution’, tout en restant intégrée au Royaume Uni. En septembre 2014, à l’initiative du Parti National Écossais (SNP) qui détient actuellement la majorité à Édimbourg, un nouveau référendum a posé la question de l’indépendance. Quel qu’en ait été le résultat, l’émergence d’u...

First published in 1991, this book -- through the examination of ancient Greek literary, philosophical and legal texts -- analyses how the Athenian torture of slaves emerged from and reinforced the concept of truth as something hidden in the human body. It discusses the tradition of understanding truth as something that is generally concealed and the ideas of 'secret space' in both the female body and the Greek temple. This philosophy and practice is related to Greek views of the 'Other' (...) (women and outsiders) and considers the role of torture in distinguishing slave and free in ancient Athens. A wide range of perspectives -- from Plato to Sartre -- are employed to examine the subject. (shrink)

La crise structurelle de la psychiatrie questionne aujourd’hui le modèle médical dans son ensemble. Premier poste de dépense de l’assurance maladie, les techniques de soins psychiatriques, soins de la subjectivité malade, sont-elles destinées à être numérisées? L’influence étasunienne, vecteur d’un retour de la neuropsychiatrie, tend à le laisser croire. À partir des constats observés au fil de l’histoire de la psychiatrie française, nous interrogerons cette tendance, ses fantasmes et réalités, pour préciser les conditions d’une appropriation des technologies qui améliore le (...) service médico-psychiatrique individuel et collectif. (shrink)

La doctrine picturale du classicisme instituait le parallèle de l’image et du verbe, elle adoptait pour maxime la formule extraite d’Horace « Ut pictura poesis » (« Il en est d’une poésie comme d’une peinture »). Gotthold Ephraïm Lessing réfute cette conception dans son Laocoon en opposant les propriétés du lisible à celles du visible, et en affirmant l’impossibilité d’établir une équivalence entre elles. Il met en crise la lisibilité de l’œuvre plastique en opérant une distinction fondamentale entre l’image et (...) le mot, avec pour conséquence de séparer nettement la finalité essentielle de la peinture et celle de la poésie. Lessing défend l’idée que les moyens de la peinture correspondent aux limites de la poésie, et que les moyens de la poésie correspondent aux limites de la peinture. Ce chiasme se résout dans le théâtre qui, unissant les pouvoirs du verbe et de l’image, surmonte les limites expressives de la poésie et de la peinture en conjuguant leurs pouvoirs respectifs. (shrink)

Ancien fleuron de l’industrie horlogère, Lip est une manufacture bisontine connue pour les conflits sociaux retentissants dont elle fut le théâtre en 1973-1974 puis en 1976-1977, et se dota très vite d’une aura légendaire à laquelle participèrent de nombreuses productions culturelles et artistiques contemporaines des événements. Le temps passant, l’intervention fit place à la rétrospection : de nouvelles œuvres s’employèrent à revisiter cette histoire, tendues entre le mythe et ses angles morts, la commémoration et le souvenir. Publiée en 1998, Les (...) Yeux rouges de Dominique Féret est l’une des premières à s’inscrire dans cet après-coup. Composée de quatre entretiens avec d’anciens protagonistes des luttes de Lip, cette pièce en dit au moins tout autant sur le passé que sur le présent qui se tourne vers lui et traduit l’inflexion que connaît tout un pan du théâtre européen des années 2000, marqué par la résurgence de la question sociale mais aussi par des modulations pathétiques qui tendent à sa dépolitisation. (shrink)

Marie-Magdeleine Davy (1903-1998) était philosophe, écrivaine et maître de recherche au cnrs. Profondément engagée dans la vie intellectuelle de son époque, elle confia ses plus riches pensées à d'innombrables écrits publiés pendant plus d'un demi-siècle. On y croise les figures essentielles de sa méditation : Guillaume de Saint-Thierry, Nicolas Berdiaev, Louis Massignon, Gabriel Marcel, Roger Godel, Henry Corbin, Simone Weil, Henri Le Saux et tant d'autres. Esprit indépendant et non conventionnel, éternelle voyageuse en quête d'absolu, Marie-Magdeleine Davy ne cessa d'affirmer (...) que la connaissance de soi se présente comme une recherche du sens de la Vie, c'est-à-dire une recherche de la Vérité conduisant à une démarche d'intériorité.00± Découvrir sa dimension de profondeur permet de prendre contact avec l'Infini qui est en soi ; ce caractère d'éternité humanise et rend possible la véritable communication avec autrui.? Telle est la conviction de Marie-Magdeleine Davy, après avoir lu, médité et conversé avec des hommes et des femmes en Orient et en Occident.00Pour beaucoup d'Européens, Marie-Magdeleine Davy aura été un témoin de la dimension d'intériorité que tout être porte en lui, une preuve vivante de cet aspect autre de la vie capable de donner un sens au monde et à l'Histoire. ± Une grande dame.? C'est ainsi que les Deux-Sévriens qui l'ont connue l'appellent encore. Ses archives, désormais classées, apportent un éclairage nouveau sur une œuvre et une pensée s'adressant à tous ceux qui sont soucieux de répondre à leur destin. (shrink)

Early childhood is characterized by many cognitive developmentalists as a period of considerable change with respect to representational format. Dienes & Perner present a potentially viable theory for the stages involved in the increasingly explicit representation of knowledge. However, in our view they fail to map their multi-level system of explicitness onto cognitive developmental changes that occur in the first years of life. Specifically, we question the theory's heuristic value when applied to the development of early mind reading and categorization. (...) We conclude that the authors fail to present evidence that dispels the view that knowledge change in these areas is dichotomous. (shrink)

Carey proposes a theory of conceptual development that specifies innate conceptual representations that get learning started. Those representations are the output of innate domain-specific input analyzers. I contend that innate core cognition about agency is itself a gradual construction and that the role of Quinian bootstrapping needs elaboration to account for the development of intuitive theories of psychology.

Evidence exists that behavioral and social science researchers have been frustrated with regulations and institutional review boards (IRBs) from the 1970s through today. Making matters worse, many human participants protection instruction programs - now mandated by IRBs - offer inadequate reasons why researchers should comply with regulations and IRBs. Promoting compliance either for its own sake or to avoid penalties is contrary to the developmental aims of moral education and may be ineffective in fostering the responsible conduct of research. This (...) article explores the concept of professional virtue and argues that compliance is capable of becoming a professional virtue like scientific honesty. This requires, however, that regulatory and IRB demands contribute to human well-being and to the aims of research as a profession and that researchers, therefore, internalize the norms that underlie regulatory and IRB demands. This, in turn, requires a series of changes in the way society develops, promulgates, and enforces regulatory and IRB rules. The challenge is, simply put, to embed compliance into the world of living morality. (shrink)

This article deals with the integration of ethical reflection into the research practices of the project at the Lille Nord-Pas-de-Calais genopole: “Multifactorial genetic pathologies and therapeutic innovations”. The general hypothesis of this text is that changes in research practices in biology (mainly through the use of bioinformatics) imply changes in medical practices, which require critical reflection. This hypothesis could be broken down into three sub-hypotheses: (1) Research in biology is undergoing a complete transformation; (2) Research in biology is a cultural (...) practice, which cannot be reduced to a simple cognitive action; (3) Research in biology is a techno-scientific practice. As for the method, the aim of our research at the Medical Ethics Centre is to elucidate the philosophical and ethical range of biomedical practices. This work entails a double task for reflection. On the one hand, from the revelation of ethical tensions present in these practices, we have to think about what is at stake in these practices, and more broadly in society. On the other hand, we have to analyse the conditions enabling the actors to assume the significance of ethical reflection in their practices. The method set up to undertake this double task could be qualified as “narrative hermeneutics”, as its aim is to attempt to interpret the stakes in practices from proximity with these practices and from what their actors have to say about them. The text then goes on to analyse more specifically the emergence and place of bioinformatics in present-day biomedical research. (shrink)

Adolf Reinach was one of the leading figures of the Munich and Göttingen circles of phenomenology, and Husserl's first real co-worker. Although his writings are highly original and remarkably clear, Reinach's tragic death in the First World War prevented him from formulating a definitive statement of his phenomenology, leaving his name virtually unknown to all but a small circle. In his ground-breaking study, Judgment and Sachverhalt, DuBois shows how Reinach succeeds in developing a realist ontology and epistemology based on (...) rigorous argumentation and phenomenological elucidation. Drawing from numerous texts and the developments of Reinach's students and colleagues - Roman Ingarden, Alexander Pfänder and Dietrich von Hildebrand above all - DuBois presents, refines and defends Reinach's `phenomenological realism'. Confrontations of Reinach's theories of states of affairs, concepts and speech acts with the work of contemporary authors like Chisholm and Searle allow readers to evaluate Reinach's philosophy, not only in the light of the later developments of Husserl, but also in the light of certain Anglo-American developments. (shrink)

In this article, we expand the analytical and theoretical foundations of the study of knowledge commons in the context of more classical agrarian commons, such as seed commons. We show that it is possible to overcome a number of criticisms of earlier work by Ostrom (Governing the commons. The evolution of institutions for collective action, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1990) on natural commons and its excludability/rivalry matrix in addressing the inclusive social practices of “commoning”, defined as a way of living (...) and acting for the preservation of the commons. Our empirical analysis emphasizes, using the most recent advances in the IAD/SES framework, the distributed and collaborative knowledge governance in a French peasant seed network as a key driver for reintroducing cultivated agrobiodiversity and on-farm seed conservation of ancient and landrace varieties. These inclusive peasant seed groups developed alternative peer-to-peer models of collaborative peasant-led community-based breeding and grassroots innovations in the search for more resilient population varieties. Our results highlight the various models of collective action within the network and discuss the organizational tradeoffs of opting out of peasant seed activities and recreating a shared collective knowledge base on the benefits of restoring cultivated agrobiodiversity. It helps us better understand how modern peasant seed groups function as epistemic communities which contributes to envisioning alternative agricultural systems. (shrink)

This paper first investigates logical characterizations of different structures of opposition that extend the square of opposition in a way or in another. Blanché’s hexagon of opposition is based on three disjoint sets. There are at least two meaningful cubes of opposition, proposed respectively by two of the authors and by Moretti, and pioneered by philosophers such as J. N. Keynes, W. E. Johnson, for the former, and H. Reichenbach for the latter. These cubes exhibit four and six squares of (...) opposition respectively. We clarify the differences between these two cubes, and discuss their gradual extensions, as well as the one of the hexagon when vertices are no longer two-valued. The second part of the paper is dedicated to the use of these structures of opposition for discussing the comparison of two items. Comparing two items usually involves a set of relevant attributes whose values are compared, and may be expressed in terms of different modalities such as identity, similarity, difference, opposition, analogy. Recently, J.-Y. Béziau has proposed an “analogical hexagon” that organizes the relations linking these modalities. Elementary comparisons may be a matter of degree, attributes may not have the same importance. The paper studies in which ways the structure of the hexagon may be preserved in such gradual extensions. As another illustration of the graded hexagon, we start with the hexagon of equality and inequality due to R. Blanché and extend it with fuzzy equality and fuzzy inequality. Besides, the cube induced by a tetra-partition can account for the comparison of two items in terms of preference, reversed preference, indifference and non-comparability even if these notions are a matter of degree. The other cube, which organizes the relations between the different weighted qualitative aggregation modes, is more relevant for the attribute-based comparison of items in terms of similarity. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to propose a formal approach to reasoning about desires, understood as logical propositions which we would be pleased to make true, also acknowledging the fact that desire is a matter of degree. It is first shown that, at the static level, desires should satisfy certain principles that differ from those to which beliefs obey. In this sense, from a static perspective, the logic of desires is different from the logic of beliefs. While the accumulation (...) of beliefs tend to reduce the remaining possible worlds they point at, the accumulation of desires tends to increase the set of states of affairs tentatively considered as satisfactory. Indeed beliefs are expected to be closed under conjunctions, while, in the positive view of desires developed here, one can argue that endorsing \ as a desire means to desire \ and to desire \. However, desiring \ and \ at the same time is not usually regarded as rational, since it does not make much sense to desire one thing and its contrary at the same time. Thus when a new desire is added to the set of desires of an agent, a revision process may be necessary. Just as belief revision relies on an epistemic entrenchment relation, desire revision is based on a hedonic entrenchment relation satisfying other properties, due to the different natures of belief and desire. While epistemic entrenchment relations are known to be qualitative necessity relations, hedonic relations obeying a set of reasonable postulates correspond to another set-function in possibility theory, called guaranteed possibility, that drive well-behaved desire revision operations. Then the general framework of possibilistic logic provides a syntactic setting for encoding desire change. The paper also insists that desires should be carefully distinguished from goals. (shrink)

abstract Individuals tend to change their behaviour as a response to insurance. Such behavioural responses to insurance are commonly seen as ethically and morally problematic. This is especially true of effects on behaviour from social insurance. These effects have been seen as an ethical problem, associated with irresponsibility, fraud and an immoral character. This article discusses the relevance of four different types of reasons for claims that behavioural responses to social insurance are immoral. These reasons are independent reasons con‐tract related (...) reasons reasons related to fraud and reasons related to justice. I argue that reasons related to justice are most relevant, but that this type of reason does not render the individual morally blameworthy. Hence, insofar as behavioural responses to social insurance are an ethical problem it is a problem that concerns the institution, i.e. what incentives social insurance exhibits, rather than the individual, i.e. the morality of the individual responding to it. Insofar as behavioural responses to social insurance are an ethical problem it is a problem for political philosophy rather than individual ethics. (shrink)

The aim of this work is to revisit the proposal made by Dag Westerståhl a decade ago when he provided a modern reading of the traditional square of opposition and of related structures. We propose a formalization of this modern view and contrast it with the classical one. We discuss what may be a modern hexagon of opposition and a modern cube, and show their interest in particular for relating quantitative expressions.

This paper examines the social and organizational innovation processes undertaken by small-scale producers engaged in short food supply chains in the North Swedish region of Västerbotten. The study uses the notion of proximity to empirically analyse and conceptually explore these phenomena. The paper illustrates the ‘new associationalism’ mobilized by producers in order to promote knowledge exchange and learning and highlights the role of translocal practices in sustaining this transition. The study found that open and trusted interactions with consumers are central (...) to the development of ‘quasi-organic’ practices, and that producers belong to numerous motley associations of food professionals facilitating the creation of collective meanings about near-produced quality food. The paper contributes to the rapprochement between agri-food studies and human geography to understand the formation of local food systems from an evolutionary and relational perspective. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Editors’ NoteJames M. DuBois, Ana S. Iltis, and Heidi A. WalshFrom childhood, David Slakter had undergone tests and invasive procedures to monitor his nephritis. It was not a surprise when in 2015, doctors told him he needed a kidney transplant. The wife of a childhood friend was a close match and gave him one of her kidneys. Before his transplant, aerobic exercise was difficult; a few months after (...) transplant, Slakter could ride his bike, hike, and work out with a personal trainer. He no longer had to weigh food or gauge his potassium consumption, a concern for people with kidney failure. For Slakter, “life post-transplant has been a significant improvement.”Individuals or family members of those who have received an organ transplant from a living or deceased donor share their stories in this issue of Narrative Inquiry in Bioethics. The symposium is titled “Receiving the Gift of Life: Stories from Organ Transplant Recipients.” Organ transplantation can extend an individual’s life by decades. It can also greatly improve an individual’s quality of life, as was Slakter’s experience. At the same time, organ transplantation is expensive and stressful. Recipients can experience complications, including organ rejection, and there are few appealing alternatives.After her heart transplant, author Leilani R. Graham required four open-heart surgeries, ECMO, and an intra-aortic balloon pump. She experienced delirium, necrotizing pneumonia, and severe muscular atrophy that required her to re-learn how to walk. She struggled with weight gain, explosive mood swings, hair loss, and was terrified that her body would reject the new heart. For Graham, “[Transplant] was not the miracle [she] was hoping for.” Graham says she felt unprepared for and inadequately informed about what to expect after her transplant, which left her “battered, beaten, and bruised” with a 12-inch line from neck to navel and “bullet holes” up and down her torso from the chest tubes. When reflecting on her experience post-transplant, Graham says, “It wasn’t the physical trauma that hurt the most. It was that no one seemed surprised [by the aftereffects of transplant].” Seemingly no one, that is except Graham, who calls on transplant providers to “prioritize empathy.”The symposium editors are Jason T. Eberl and Tristan McIntosh. Three commentary articles, written by Macey Leigh Levan, Heather Lannon, and Vidya A. Fleetwood, Roslyn B. Mannon & Krista L. Lentine, offer important insights into the authors’ stories. The editors thank Mid-America Transplant, the UCSF Lung Transplant Program, Donor Connect, William L. Freeman, MD, MPH, MJIL, CIP, Janet Monk, and the individuals who gave anonymous donations to support the publication of this issue, an open-access VOICES edition of the symposium, and accompanying teaching guides.The research article in this issue, “‘A Shell of My Former Self’: Using Figurative Language to Promote Communication about Patient Suffering,” was written by Tyler Tate, Elizabeth Stein, and Robert A. Pearlman. The relief of suffering is a primary goal of medicine. However, the authors note that clinicians often miss or ignore suffering because they focus on the causes rather than the experience of suffering, or the subjective nature of suffering makes it difficult to discuss. The authors believe that “the key to communicating about suffering lies in finding [End Page vii] the right kind of words to describe the experience” and say that figurative language offers a promising approach. In their research, the authors performed qualitative analysis on 52 works of literature and identified 254 excerpts of figurative language with themes of non-physical or psychological suffering. The authors found 13 salient themes: brokenness, diminishment, disorientation, drowning, emptiness, imprisonment, battle, darkness, isolation, invisibility, lifelessness, punishment, and torture. The authors reiterate that developing a shared language of suffering could foster a therapeutic patient-clinician relationship and improve clinicians’ ability to recognize and address a patient’s experience of suffering.María Susana Ciruzzi wrote the first of two case studies included in this issue. “The Sword of King Solomon” addresses a tragic and difficult subject—how to navigate the situation posed by conjoined twins when “any decision will produce damage and suffering.” The case involves two infant male patients born at 37 weeks gestation as omphalo-ischiopagus conjoined twins... (shrink)

The starting point of this work is the gap between two distinct traditions in information engineering: knowledge representation and data - driven modelling. The first tradition emphasizes logic as a tool for representing beliefs held by an agent. The second tradition claims that the main source of knowledge is made of observed data, and generally does not use logic as a modelling tool. However, the emergence of fuzzy logic has blurred the boundaries between these two traditions by putting forward fuzzy (...) rules as a Janus-faced tool that may represent knowledge, as well as approximate non-linear functions representing data. This paper lays bare logical foundations of data - driven reasoning whereby a set of formulas is understood as a set of observed facts rather than a set of beliefs. Several representation frameworks are considered from this point of view: classical logic, possibility theory, belief functions, epistemic logic, fuzzy rule-based systems. Mamdani's fuzzy rules are recovered as belonging to the data - driven view. In possibility theory a third set-function, different from possibility and necessity plays a key role in the data - driven view, and corresponds to a particular modality in epistemic logic. A bi-modal logic system is presented which handles both beliefs and observations, and for which a completeness theorem is given. Lastly, our results may shed new light in deontic logic and allow for a distinction between explicit and implicit permission that standard deontic modal logics do not often emphasize. (shrink)

In this article, the authors, as researchers, are part of a clinical approach to psychoanalytic orientation in education sciences, questioning their research approach during an investigation on the expulsion from classrooms in secondary school in France. Trying to compare themselves to different types of collaborative research, they analyse the modalities of relationship they tried to implement during this research ‘with’ subjects, including teenagers students they have interviewed.

To what level are invisible stimuli processed by the brain in the absence of conscious awareness? It is widely accepted that simple visual properties of invisible stimuli are processed; however, the existence of higher-level unconscious processing (e.g., involving semantic or executive functions) remains a matter of debate. Several methodological factors may underlie the discrepancies found in the literature, such as different levels of conservativeness in the definition of "unconscious" or different dependent measures of unconscious processing. In this research topic, we (...) are particularly interested in yet another factor: inherent differences in the amount of information let through by different suppression techniques. In the same conditions of well-controlled, conservatively established invisibility, can we show that some of the techniques in the "psychophysical magic" arsenal (e.g., masking, but also visual crowding, attentional blink, etc.) reliably lead to higher-level unconscious processing than others (e.g., interocular suppression)? Some authors have started investigating this question, using multiple techniques in similar settings. We argue that this approach should be extended and refined. Indeed, in order to delineate the frontiers of the unconscious mind using a contrastive method, one has to disentangle the limits attributable to unawareness itself, and those attributable to the technique inducing unawareness. The scope of this research topic is to provide a platform for scientists to contribute insights and further experiments addressing this fundamental question. (shrink)

À l’instar d’Humpty Dumpty, le personnage de Lewis Carroll qui fête son non-anniversaire 364 jours par an, Bergson semble inscrire la discontinuité de l’événement dans la continuité de la durée. Il invite son lecteur à concevoir la nouveauté comme la trame du réel. Rien ne se répète jamais à l’identique, chaque événement est singulier et s’inscrit dans un temps irréversible. Pourtant, l’intelligence ne perçoit pas toujours cette « création continue d’imprévisible nouveauté » car elle immobilise et spatialise le réel en (...) le rendant homogène. Mais dès lors que l’esprit retrouve le caractère temporel de la réalité, le présent apparaît comme toujours inédit. Vu sous cet angle, la définition bergsonienne de l’événement semble donner au banal les caractéristiques de l’exceptionnel. Les non-anniversaires possèderaient la même consistance ontologique que les anniversaires sans pour autant disparaître dans l’homogénéité de la répétition quotidienne. L’événement serait à la fois une aspérité surgissant dans le flux de la durée et en même temps l’expression de la plus pure continuité. Pour résoudre cette apparente contradiction il faut alors se demander : comment Bergson réussit-il à concilier la nouveauté de l’événement avec la continuité de la durée? Pour répondre à cette question, nous montrerons comment Bergson introduit des différences qualitatives au sein de la continuité du devenir. Ces différences s’expriment à travers plusieurs niveaux de réalité que l’article étudie successivement. Nous partons de la métaphysique bergsonienne de la durée, capable de donner à l’événement un contenu réel et pas seulement représentatif. Grâce à l’épaisseur du devenir, l’événement se relie à la continuité spirituelle de la durée tout en conservant son caractère inédit et imprévisible. Son hétérogénéité le distingue de la pure discontinuité du fiat lux et de l’homogénéité mécaniste. La causalité des événements se révèle différente du simple mécanisme. Dans la seconde partie de l’article nous tirons les conséquences de cette métaphysique pour les appliquer à l’événement étudié sous l’angle de l’histoire. Partant d’un réexamen des apories du possible, nous examinons la valeur de l’uchronie pour ensuite décrire la manière dont Bergson théorise la connaissance historique et l’action des grands hommes. (shrink)

A critical view of the alleged significance of Belnap four-valued logic for reasoning under inconsistent and incomplete information is provided. The difficulty lies in the confusion between truth-values and information states, when reasoning about Boolean propositions. So our critique is along the lines of previous debates on the relevance of many-valued logics and especially of the extension of the Boolean truth-tables to more than two values as a tool for reasoning about uncertainty. The critique also questions the significance of partial (...) logic. (shrink)

La nouvelle sociologie des sciences réunit un ensemble d'études consacrées aux programmes de recherche dits " fort " et " constructiviste ". Ces programmes, véritables orthodoxies en sociologie des sciences, ont en commun de se focaliser sur le processus de la recherche et d'en donner une représentation singulière : " relativiste " pour le premier, " contingentiste " pour le second. Là où les ouvrages existants consacrés à ces programmes prennent essentiellement le parti de la description, il revendique celui de (...) l'analyse critique. Il propose une réflexion d'ensemble sur les limites de ces approches sociologiques et sur la représentation des sciences qui s'y rapportent : limites de la conception générale de l'explication sociologique et de ses applications, du caractère inédit de ses thèses et principes généraux, de la transposition de données et démarches venues de disciplines voisines, etc. L'ouvrage vient à la suite de l'affaire Sokal au cours de laquelle les représentants de la " nouvelle sociologie des sciences " ont été ouvertement pris à parti par une partie de la communauté scientifique. Il n'invite pas à l'abandon de l'analyse sociologique du processus de recherche mais à une redéfinition des modalités de cette analyse. (shrink)

The intersection of ethics, religion, theology, and peace studies is intensifying through increasingly multi‐disciplinary, contextual, explicitly normative scholarship. This book discussion demonstrates this claim through its profiles of an introduction to Christian ethics by Ellen Ott Marshall, a case study of the School of the Americas Watch by Kyle B. T. Lambelet, a case study of the American Jewish Palestine solidarity movement by Atalia Omer, and a global, historical study of Christian ethics by Cecilia Lynch. Though their methods and subjects (...) vary, these authors are collectively renewing a history of mutual enrichment between religious ethics and peace studies, employing theories of lived, ambivalent religion. To begin, this essay provides introductory remarks about the field of peace studies, highlighting the evolving involvement of religious actors. To conclude, it makes a plea for greater use of conflict theory and peace practice in religious ethics. (shrink)

This thesis is concerned with answering the following question: What is phenomenological realism? I have tried to accomplish this, in part, by looking at the history of phenomenological realism. However, it is not sufficient to look at the history of this movement if we are to understand what it is today. Thus, I have tried to present the reader with the attitude, methods, and the ontological and epistemological foundations of phenomenological realism, both in some of their early formulations and in (...) their later, more refined forms. While many phenomenological realists differ with regards to certain issues, I think that there exists much agreement concerning these basic aspects of the philosophy. I have tried to present these foundational aspects of phenomenological realism using the following outline. Chapter one concerns itself with phenomenological realism as a twentieth century philosophy. I mention the leading figures of this movement, both in the Munich and Goettingen Circles, and I use the works of Adolf Reinach and Dietrich von Hildebrand in order to demonstrate the attitude which is at the heart of this philosophy. I then proceed, in chapter two, to present the ways in which Plato's writings implicitly contain many of the notions which are vital to phenomenological realism. In chapter three I argue that the term ‘phenomenological realism’ does not accurately describe this philosophy and suggest that the term which Fritz Wenisch has proposed, ‘chreontic philosophy,’ more accurately describes this movement. I then present three examples of how the attitude and methods of chreontic philosophy have been used to uncover certain features of reality. Finally, I conclude with responses to three objections concerning insight and the existence of genuine essences. (shrink)