First published in 1970, Bernard E. Jones’s selection of Gifford lectures includes excerpts from the writings of over ninety scholars who occupied a Gifford Chair between 1888 and 1968. Lord Gifford had asked his lecturers to be ‘honest to God’, insisting that they should be ‘earnest enquirers after truth’ and had always envisaged the lectures being published. Dr Jones’s anthology is arranged under headings suggested by phrases from Lord Gifford’s will. The selection, which includes names such as (...) William James, A.N. Whitehead, Temple, Barth, Brunner, Bultmann, Niebuhr and Tillich, was made in such a way that the reader would be able to really grasp what natural theology is about. Bernard Ewart Jones served as a Methodist minister, before being appointed to the Lewins Chair of Philosophy at his old college, Hartley Victoria, Manchester. He was awarded a doctorate by the University of Leeds in 1966 for his thesis on ‘The Concept of Natural Theology in Gifford Lectures’. (shrink)

We submit this brief in support of the Nonhuman Rights Project’s efforts to secure habeas corpus relief for the elephant named Happy. We reject arbitrary distinctions that deny adequate protections to other animals who share with protected humans relevantly similar vulnerabilities to harms and relevantly similar interests in avoiding such harms. We strongly urge this Court, in keeping with the best philosophical standards of rational judgment and ethical standards of justice, to recognize that, as a nonhuman person, Happy should be (...) released from her current confinement and transferred to an appropriate elephant sanctuary, pursuant to habeas corpus. (shrink)

This volume celebrates the remarkable career of Dr. Preston King, an African American political philosopher with an international reputation. King's first degree was from Fisk University (1956). He moved directly to the London School of Economics (LSE), completing his M.Sc. (Econ) in 1958 with a Mark of Distinction. He taught at LSE for the next two years. A scrap with Jim Crow America kept him in exile for the next 40 years. Major friends and influences at LSE were Professors Sir (...) Karl Popper, Michael Oakeshott, and Dr Bernard Crick. King took up subsequent lectureships at the Universities of Keele, Ghana, and Sheffield. He was Senior Research Assistant at the Acton Society Trust (London), then professor at the Universities of Nairobi, New South Wales (Sydney), Lancaster, returning at last to the USA as joint Woodruff Professor at Emory and Distinguished Professor at Morehouse. The essays comprising this volume are by internationally renowned figures. They creatively explore History, Toleration, and Friendship, as three seminal themes running through Preston King's sizeable oeuvre. This book's first third consists of essays on Time and History, with brilliant contributions by Professors Browning, Lawson, Moore, and Cherribi. The second third consists of essays on Time and Toleration, with memorable and penetrating analyses by Professors Jones, Read, Modood/Dobbernak, and Brown. The third part consists of essays on Time and Friendship, with offerings - both charming and insightful - by Professors Devere, Smith, and Coleman. The book concludes with a novel and captivating chapter by King himself, on the philosophy of time, which constitutes the substratum of so much of his work and reflection. (shrink)

This study investigated the relations of cheating on an exam and using a false excuse to avoid taking an exam as scheduled to various forms of minor deviance. College students completed measures of cheating, false excuse making, and minor deviance. A factor analysis identified clusters of deviance behaviors. Cheaters scored higher than noncheaters on measures of unreliability and risky driving behaviors, and false excuse makers scored higher than other students on measures of substance use, risky driving, illegal behaviors, and personal (...) unreliability. In addition, men scored higher than women on substance abuse and illegal behaviors factors. Results are interpreted in terms of personological theories of honesty and reliability. (shrink)

No detailed description available for "Natural and Conventional Meaning".

In Science and Ethics, Bernard Rollin examines the ideology that denies the relevance of ethics to science. Providing an introduction to basic ethical concepts, he discusses a variety of ethical issues that are relevant to science and how they are ignored, to the detriment of both science and society. These include research on human subjects, animal research, genetic engineering, biotechnology, cloning, xenotransplantation, and stem cell research. Rollin also explores the ideological agnosticism that scientists have displayed regarding subjective experience in (...) humans and animals, and its pernicious effect on pain management. Finally, he articulates the implications of the ideological denial of ethics for the practice of science itself in terms of fraud, plagiarism, and data falsification. In engaging prose and with philosophical sophistication, Rollin cogently argues in favor of making education in ethics part and parcel of scientific training. (shrink)

Reid's response to hume has traditionally been taken as begging all of hume's questions. One can, However, Find in reid an argument against hume's phenomenalistic skepticism. Reid's appeal to common sense is an attempt to call attention to the fact that we experience objects as external to us, Not as bundles of impressions. Still, Our access to these objects does arise out of sensations, Which are mental contents. Extending berkeley's idea of the "language of nature" reid suggests that language and (...) signification present apt theoretical models for explaining perception. Using this model, One can provide an answer to the argument from illusion. (shrink)

Occupy Wall Street is best understood, I would suggest, as a new form of political as opposed to civil disobedience that fundamentally rejects the political and ideological landscape that has dominated our collective imagination in this country since before the cold war. Civil disobedience accepts the legitimacy of the political structure and of our political institutions but resists the moral authority of the resulting laws. It is “civil” in its disobedience—civil in the etymological sense of taking place within a shared (...) political community, within the classical Latin framework of civilitas, within an art of civil government. Civil disobedience accepts the verdict and condemnation that the civilly disobedient bring upon themselves. It respects the legal norm at the very moment of resistance and places itself under the sanction of that norm. If it resists the legal sanction that it itself entails, it is, in effect, no longer truly civil disobedience. As Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote in “Letter from Birmingham City Jail,” “an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and willingly accepts the penalty by staying in jail to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the very highest respect for law.” Civil disobedience does not aim to displace the law-making institutions or the structure of legal governance but rather to challenge the governing laws by demonstrating their injustice.Political disobedience, by contrast, resists the very way in which we are governed. It rejects the idea of honoring or expressing the “highest respect for law.” It refuses to willingly accept the sanctions meted out by the legal and political system. It challenges the conventional way that political governance takes place, that laws are enforced. It turns its back on the political institutions and actors who govern us all. It resists the structure of partisan politics, the traditional demand for policy reforms, the call for party identification, and, beyond that, the very ideologies that have dominated the postwar period. (shrink)

It’s no wonder descriptions of riding often resemble the words of Asian mystics and Jedi knights: The ride causes your senses to open completely. You experience only the present, the now. Readers who prefer revving a Harley to meditating in a Zen garden know that biking is just as contemplative as chanting in the lotus position. Here, philosopher-bikers explore this seeming dichotomy, expounding on intriguing questions such as: Why are the motorcycles the real stars of Easy Rider? What would Marx (...) and Foucault say about Harley riders’ tight leather garb? What’s it like to live a dual life as a philosophy professor who wrenches his own 1965 Electra Glide? Would Jesus hang out in a biker bar or a coffeehouse? And more importantly, would He ride a Harley or a Honda? These witty, provocative essays give readers and riders a new appreciation of what it means to become one with the road. (shrink)

Offers a forthright approach to the many disquieting questions surrounding the emotional debate over animal rights. This book includes a chapter on animal agriculture, and additional discussions of animal law, companion animal issues, genetic engineering, animal pain, animal research, and other topics.

The fourth and final volume of The History of Sexuality offers the keystone to Michel Foucault’s critique of Western neoliberal societies. Confessions of the Flesh provides the heretofore missing link that ties Foucault’s late writings on subjectivity to his earlier critique of power. Foucault identifies in Augustine’s treatment of marital sexual relations the moment of birth of the modern legal actor and of the legalization of social relations. With the appearance of the modern legal subject, Foucault’s critique of modern Western (...) societies is complete: it is now possible to see how the later emergence of an all-knowing homo œconomicus strips the State of knowledge and thus deals a fatal blow to its legitimacy. The appearance of both the modern legal actor and homo œconomicus makes it possible to fold the entire four-volume History of Sexuality back into Foucault’s earlier critique of punitive and biopolitical power. And it now challenges us to interrogate how we, contemporary subjects, are shaped in such a way as to implicate ourselves—both willingly and unwittingly—in the social order within which we find ourselves and that, through the interaction of knowledge-power-subjectivity, we reproduce. (shrink)

Numerous ethical issues have emerged from the industrialization of animal agriculture. Those issues ultimately rest in large measure upon overuse of antibiotics. How this has occurred is discussed in detail in this paper.

Although women hold more negative attitudes toward cheating than do men, they are about as likely to engage in academic dishonesty. Cognitive dissonance theory predicts that this attitude-behavior inconsistency should lead women to experience more negative affect after cheating than would men. This prediction was tested in a sample of 92 male and 78 female college students who reported having cheated on an examination during the prior 6 months. Consistent with the results of previous research, women reported more negative attitudes (...) toward cheating than did men, but cheated at the same rate. However, women did not experience more negative affect than did men, although they reported experiencing less positive affect. The gender difference in positive affect was partially mediated by the gender difference in attitudes. (shrink)

While the nature-grace debate rages in Thomistic circles, St. Bonaventure's theological anthropology and his theology of grace is paid much less attention, with the exception of his argument that Adam was created apart from gratia gratum faciens, or in modern terms habitual or sanctifying grace.1 For this position he has come under some scrutiny. John Milbank connects Adam's short time without habitual grace to Bonaventure's deficient understanding of illumination as proof of an incipient voluntarism and a suspect pure nature theology.2 (...) Turning Milbank upon his head, Fr. Christopher Cullen, S.J. defends the "suspended middle" in Bonaventure by appealing to Adam's creation without grace; human nature has a... (shrink)

This paper is a reading of Aristotle's book on justice (Book V of the Ethics) as what he says it is, a study of the disposition or inclination towards doing just (or unjust) acts. In that light, the content of Aristotle's famous treatments of distributive and corrective justice are only incidental, for their true role is as clues to a meaningful picture of the Just and the Unjust person. Aristotle's treatment of Being Just as a specific virtue is the most (...) detailed treatment he offers of any moral virtue. Being Just as distributive justice emerges as a commitment to the equal treatment of all citizens, but to an equality tempered by always contentious considerations of merited reward. Being Just as corrective justice is a commitment to protecting and repairing the sphere of each person's dignity and opportunity from damaging and sometimes malicious interactions. But more is required. For Being Just means overcoming the disordered and misdirected desire that both Aristotle and Plato call "pleonexia", wanting - tyrant-like - more-of-and-more-than. If that is overcome by re-directed libido, the virtuous will then have to integrate more subtle elements if they are to achieve an inclination to this tempered, but real equality. These elements are two. One is present only implicitly, the passion Aristotle calls nemesis, a demand that the world - and justice within the world - must never permit an evil person to go unpunished or a good one, to suffer harm. That passion cannot be admitted, but at best can only be temporarily stilled. The second impediment arises from the dynamic of human communities that are made up of diverse and actively striving individuals: such citizens, haunted by suspicion grounded in their own pleonexia, demand that the community be one of laws. That creates a true dilemma, for in Aristotle's estimation, no set of rules can cabin any virtue. The Rule of Law is in tension with the particularity of justice in real life, and that tension is ultimately only bearable through the invention of equity, the trusted deviation from the law to preserve the law. In making this abstract I have had to leave untouched the subject matter of the first and two last chapters, but in my paper I do treat these. More importantly, I also show how all political community and the inclination to seek to be a Just Person rests on a gracious act of reciprocal commitment. (shrink)

This dissertation studies how Aristotle understands and justifies his Rhetorical Art. It proceeds by explicating the Art in its intellectual context. Rhetoric emerges as a dynamic investigation of human affairs working through the "given" in speech and thought to a plausible account, while giving consideration to the opinions and characters of both speaker and audience within the horizon of a particular occasion. The basic dynamic determines a structure which is comparable to Socrates' requirements in the Phaedrus. That this is the (...) structure and dynamic is supported by considering the fundamentally contingent nature of human experience, understanding the inference types , common sense principles and starting points by which such experience is explicated, and placing such experience in three mutually exclusive genres. Aristotle's art is essentially the resulting plausible account while actual composition is supplementary. ;Aristotle limits the art by reference to dialectic and ethical life. When it is seen that Aristotle's Organon is not a science of logic and the Posterior Analytics is a rarely applicable mode of presentation, the point of dialectic becomes accessible. It too involves strenuous grappling with speech and thought, but its highest purpose lies in peirastic. Peirastic and sophistry are uses of dialectic which have a contrasting moral color. Peirastic aims at the discovery of ignorance and, at the same time, the difference between accident and essence and knowledge and opinion: Being educated is essentially knowing what one does not know. ;What Socrates only alludes to as political art, Aristotle attempts to expound as praxis perfected into phronesis. Even Aristotle does no more than suggest the nature of phronesis negatively as simultaneously a seeking, a finding and an act which is both self-determination and self-knowledge, and none of these separately; it is profoundly disruptive of existing opinion and most clearly to be seen in the rejection of the laws and rules upon which, as deliberation, it is dependent. The Art differs from Gorgias' rhetoric in its emphasis on the plausible and in its subordination to an ethical self-determination that gains the weight of experience appropriated by intelligence and virtue. (shrink)

ABSTRACTShelley’s “Letter to Maria Gisborne” is a playful improvisational verse epistle, widely praised for its urbanity and its display of the poet’s invention. The verses turn on a catalogue of the collection of odd scientific and mechanical objects that Shelley found scattered around him in the place he composed the letter, the Livorno workshop of Gisborne’s son, a young engineer who was building a new-model steamboat at the time. In the context of that space, the poem reads as a response (...) to competing notions of invention. For Shelley, the engineer’s workshop is an attractive alternative to the poet’s tower—which was uncomfortably close to a Grub Street garret. Verbal and visual images of poets’ and scientists’ workshops, from Hogarth and Mary Robinson, to Joseph Wright of Derby and Frankenstein, illustrate the tensions embodied in the physical location and poetic performance of Shelley’s celebrated “Letter.”. (shrink)

This book is a philosophically sophisticated and scientifically well-informed discussion of the moral and social issues raised by genetically engineering animals, a powerful technology which has major implications for society. Unlike other books on this emotionally charged subject, the author attempts to inform, not inflame, the reader about the real problems society must address in order to manage this technology. Bernard Rollin is both a professor of philosophy, and physiology and biophysics, and writes from a uniquely well-informed perspective on (...) this topic. The style is non-technical and anecdotal and will ensure that the book can be used on a wide range of courses on bioethics, biotechnology, veterinary medicine and public policy. The book could also appeal to a general, non-academic reader with a serious interest in genetic engineering. (shrink)

The Southern Journal of Philosophy, EarlyView.

How can we articulate the intimate demand of the spiritual life and the struggle for solidarity? These two issues have often been treated separately; in _Simone Weil: Attention to the Real_, however, Robert Chenavier explores the work of Simone Weil and demonstrates how she brought them together in a single movement of thought. "Our time has a unique mission, calling for the creation of a civilization based on the spirituality of work," she wrote near the end of her short life. (...) Her experience as a militant and the call of the divine nurtured in her writing an intense and unwavering defense of this new civilization, backed by her personal sense of intellectual, moral, and political responsibility. Originally published in French in 2009, _Simone Weil: __Attention to the Real_ leads the reader through her earliest writing as a perceptive social critic to her work on spirituality and materialism, and finally to her extraordinary concept of decreation, produced before her death at the age of thirty-four. "To an exceptional degree," Chenavier says, "the life of Simone Weil, her personality, her commitment, and her reflection form one single whole." Chenavier argues that Weil's vocation took on a very original form in the history of philosophical thought. He is especially concerned with Weil's philosophical writings on the concept of work, which remain relevant today, and which provide an important key to her thinking throughout her life. Bernard Doering's superb translation brings to English readers Chenavier's succinct account of Simone Weil's life and an illuminating introduction to her philosophical thought. "Bernard Doering has crafted a very fine translation of Robert Chenavier's comprehensive but brief introduction to Simone Weil's philosophical project. It provides an excellent English introduction to the social philosophy of Simone Weil, with due attention to her understanding of the importance of work in learning to attend to the real. Doering's translation will be of interest to both a religious and secular readership, both inside and outside the academy." —_Lawrence Schmidt, University of Toronto_. (shrink)

In a series of essays, conferences, and lectures over the period 1959–73, Michel Foucault directly engaged the writings of Nietzsche. This article demonstrates the five different modalities of Foucault's use of Nietzsche’s writings: namely, critical, epistemological, linguistic, alethurgic, and political. Each of these modalities is tied to a particular intellectual turning point in Foucault’s philosophical investigations and can be located chronologically in five important texts from that period.