This volume explores how Catholicism began and continues to open its doors to the wider world and to other confessions in embracing ecumenism, thanks to the vision and legacy of the Second Vatican Council. It explores such themes as the twentieth century context preceding the council; parallels between Vatican II and previous councils; its distinctively pastoral character; the legacy of the council in relation to issues such as church-world dynamics, as well as to ethics, social justice, economic activity. Several chapters (...) discuss the role of women in the church before, during, and since the council. Others discern inculturation in relation to Vatican II. The book also contains a wide and original range of ecumenical considerations of the council, including by and in relation to Free Church, Reformed, Orthodox, and Anglican perspectives. Finally, it considers the Council’s ongoing promise and remaining challenges with regard to ecumenical issues, including a groundbreaking essay on the future of ecumenical dialogue by Cardinal Walter Kasper. (shrink)

Is there a place for the tragic vision in an orderly scheme of things? This is the question that Patrick Madigan asks in an interesting essay that explores not only the place of tragedy and comedy in human experience, but also the place of the opening that tragedy represents in the Aristotelian system. He argues that Aristotle's view of being, if rightly understood, can accept and even embrace the tragic vision, and moreover that the perspective on human experience laid (...) open by tragedy can lead to a more complete understanding of ourselves and the world we try to come to terms with. He argues that it is only in the dreadful character of tragic experience that we can be shocked out of a complacent "doxalogical slumber" into the genuinely self-critical examination required for the attainment of theoretical knowledge. (shrink)

The figure of today’s threat is the suddenly irrupting, locally self-organizing, systemically self-amplifying threat of large-scale disruption. This form of threat, fed by instability and metastability, is not only indiscriminate, it is also indiscrimin able; it is indistinguishable from the general environment. The figure of the environment shifts: from the harmony of a natural balance to the normality of a generalized crisis environment so encompassing in its endemic threat-form as to connect, across the spectrum, the polar extremes of war and (...) the weather. Michel Foucault characterizes the dominant contemporary regime of power, coincident with the rise of neoliberalism, as ‘environmental’: a governmentality which will act on the environment and systematically modify its variables. Its actions, he emphasizes, are not standardizing since the shift in the figure of the environment has moved it out of reach of normalization. Given the indiscriminateness of the environment’s autonomous activity, environmentality must work through the ‘regulation of effects’ rather than of causes. It must remain operationally ‘open to unknowns’ and catch nonlinear, transversal phenomena before they amplify the stirrings to actual crisis proportions. What systematicity is this? And: does power’s becoming-environmental mean that, politically, we are dealing with natural subjects? Where Foucault’s question ends is where, today, we must begin, in light of how the recomposition of power whose dawning he glimpsed in 1979 has since played out. In the context of Foucault’s theories of power, the question amounts to asking: is this still ‘biopolitics’? (shrink)

The central thesis of this paper is that fake news and related phenomena serve as defeaters for knowledge transmission via journalistic channels. This explains how they pose a threat to democracy; and it points the way to determining how to address this threat. Democracy is both intrinsically and instrumentally good provided the electorate has knowledge (however partial and distributed) of the common good and the means of achieving it. Since journalism provides such knowledge, those who value democracy have a reason (...) to protect it. Hostile agents, however, can undermine both the effectiveness of democratic decision-making and faith in democracy itself, by deliberately promulgating fake news and hyper-partisan views; moreover, these effects can come about unintentionally on social media. I conclude that we may need to change, not just the way we process information online, but also the informational environment in which we operate. (shrink)

It is morally negligent or reckless to believe without sufficient evidence. The foregoing proposition follows from a rule that is a modified expression of W. K. Clifford's ethics of belief. Clifford attempted to prove that it is always wrong to believe without sufficient evidence by advancing a doxastic counterpart to an act utilitarian argument. Contrary to various commentators, his argument is neither purely nor primarily epistemic, he is not a non-consequentialist, and he does not use stoicism to make his case. (...) Clifford's conclusion is a universal generalisation that is in a precarious position because of potential counterexamples. But the counterexamples do not preclude a rule against going beyond the available evidence and it is worthwhile making a moral case for such a rule. (shrink)

Since the publication of Ruth Millikan's Language, Thought, and Other Biological Categories in 1984, a great deal of literature has discussed her so-called teleosemantic or biosemantic solution to the problem of intentionality. Only recently, though, has much attention been paid to her co-ordinated solution to the problem of productivity. This article, first, clearly describes the problems of intentionality, productivity, and compositionality, and describes their relationships and their relevance for the theory of meaning. It then describes Millikan's proposal with respect to (...) the problem of intentionality and shows how this buys her a novel solution to the problem of productivity. The article closes by discussing some alternative teleosemantic theories and some issues that will contribute to deciding between them. (shrink)

Originally published 1967, this title reveals how the missionaries, so often misguided and short-sighted, were in fact pioneers of modernization, science and freedom. The structure of the book allows for comparative analysis and the volume illustrates how some of the social consequences of action through the schools could be foreseen. In addition light is thrown on the results of Imperial rule during the nineteenth century and on the nature of the impact of Western education in Asia and Africa.

This contribution is part of the special series of Inaugural Articles by members of the National Academy of Sciences elected on April 27, 1999.

Both the quantity of information and the informational content of a signal are defined in the context of signaling games. Informational content is a generalization of standard philosophical notions of propositional content. It is shown how signals that initially carry no information may spontaneously acquire informational content by evolutionary or learning dynamics. It is shown how information can flow through signaling chains or signaling networks.

This article examines the mobilization of resources for the Human Genome Mapping Project in the United Kingdom. The Project was established through an award of additional funds to the Medical Research Council at a time of financial stringency within publicly funded science, accompanied by relatively little of the debate that had surrounded the U.S. initiative. It is argued, following Fujimura and Star’s terminology, that the project was “packaged” and repackaged by its proponents so that it aligned the, otherwise disparate, agendas (...) of several “social worlds.” Furthermore, by bringing together certain social worlds and not others, some issues were also excluded from discussion. In this instance, the social and ethical issues surrounding genetic mapping were accorded a much lower profile than in other national programs. (shrink)

This article presents two case-studies that shed light on the silent yet significant role an editor might play in the reception of Renaissance texts and the place of Thomas Aquinas therein. Both studies take up texts from fifteenth-century Italy. The first addresses the scholastic philosopher, Dominic of Flanders, suggesting that Dominic’s originality as a thinker may have been ‘corrected’ by an anonymous editor in order to maintain closer accord with Aquinas’s position; inquiry into the manuscript tradition uncovers instances of silent (...) intervention. The second addresses a Latin dialogue by the physician and humanist, Antonio de Ferraris (Galateo), drawing attention to a significant suppression of the interlocutor Thomas Aquinas, this time by a twentieth century editor. (shrink)

This paper opens by reviewing Aristotle’s conception of the natural slave and then familiar treatments of the internal conflict between the ruling and subject parts of the soul in Aristotle and Plato; I highlight especially the figurative uses of slavery and servitude when discussing such problems pertaining to incontinence and vice—viz., being a ‘slave’ to the passions. Turning to Campanella, features of the City of the Sun pertaining to slavery are examined: in sketching his ideal city, Campanella both rejects Aristotle’s (...) natural slave and is critical of the European institutions of slavery. The fact that slavery has no place in the City of the Sun takes on added significance when complemented with Campanella’s remarks on dominion and servitude in his Quaestiones de politiciis: I show that Campanella’s conception of slavery is intimately bound to sin, and consider whether his employment of the trope of slavery within the context of vice diverges from familiar usage. (shrink)

This text provides a wealth of practical strategies and inspirational guidance on incorporating social-emotional and ethical learning across a district and educational community.

This work is the first book-length treatment of Jean Baudrillard as a rhetorical theorist.

"A CEVAM book." Bibliography: p. 259-265. Includes index.

This paper attempts to forge a dialogue between Machiavelli and Andrew Feenburg's Critical Theory of Technology. It makes some interesting points along the way, but I've re-thought a lot of what I say in here, and am not sure if I would still endorse it all.

A substantial part of Marion’s project in Being Given turns on a “triple epoché” wherein Marion brackets each part of the tripartite structure of the gift – the giver, the recipient and the given itself – to show that none of them is essential for thinking about the gift. In three separate variations, each element of the gift is bracketed individually, and in each of these instances the other two elements are specifically not bracketed. Indeed, Marion admits that the reduction (...) he proposes “demands, de jure, that one of the two [recipient or giver] remain in position of the transcendental I.” In this paper, I will argue that the rule is misleading and should be reformulated to indicate that a recipient is always required. I conclude with some suggestions for future work. (shrink)

The career of John Jackson , Arian theologian and controversialist, provides a key to unlocking the early reception and quick collapse of a Newtonian natural apologetic originally developed by Samuel Clarke. The importance of friendship and discipleship in eighteenth-century intellectual enquiry is emphasised, and the links between Newton and his followers are traced alongside those of a group of Cambridge Lockeans, led by Jackson’s direct contemporary Daniel Waterland, who proved instrumental in the initial dismantling of Clarke’s brand of Newtonian apologetic. (...) The controversial context of this engagement is shown to have been largely provided by the religiously compromising rise of freethinking, and Tindal’s Christianity as old as the creation signalled the dangers to proponents of natural religion as an adjunct of Christian apologetic in such a heated atmosphere. Religious division of the sort that resulted paradoxically played into the hands of the freethinkers in the anticlerical atmosphere of the 1730s, and accusations were exchanged between Newtonians and Lockeans accordingly. The dynamic of England’s Enlightenment experience is, then, a complicated one, and, as the career and writings of Jackson and William Whiston demonstrate, it was one which absorbed as well as repudiated ‘enthusiasm’.Author Keywords: Newtonianism; Enlightenment; Enthusiasm; Natural religion; Arianism; John Jackson. (shrink)

Mad scientists -- Big bangs and black holes -- Atomic devastation -- Climate catastrophe -- Extreme biohazard -- Gray goo -- Information meltdown -- No longer human -- Future fears and natural pitfalls -- Cautious optimism.