The hydrogen economy has received increasing attention recently. Common reasons cited for investigating hydrogen energy options are improved energy security, reduced environmental impacts, and its contribution to a transition to sustainable energy sources. In anticipation of these benefits, national and local initiatives have been launched in the United States, creating pilot “roadmaps” and technology partnerships to explore hydrogen economy platforms. Although hydrogen can provide several positive improvements over a carbon- or uranium-based energy system, several problems are also likely. As well, (...) competitive technologies (e.g., hybrid vehicles) may offer comparatively greater economic and/or environmental advantages. Before policies to advance a hydrogen energy economy proceed, it is vital that all aspects of hydrogen be compared with other available alternatives. Important questions to ask in this regard are whether a hydrogen economy can fulfill key energy needs and whether there are appropriate roles for hydrogen to play in a sustainable energy future. (shrink)

The relationship of corporate social responsibility to risk management has been treated sporadically in the business society literature. Using real options theory, I develop the notion of corporate social responsibility as a real option its implications for risk management. Real options theory allows for a strategic view of corporate social responsibility. Specifically, real options theory suggests that corporate social responsibility should be negatively related to the firm’s ex ante downside business risk.

In a series of recent works, Kit Fine, 605–631, 2003, 2007) has sketched a novel solution to Frege’s puzzle. Radically departing from previous solutions, Fine argues that Frege’s puzzle forces us to reject compositionality. In this paper we first provide an explicit formalization of the relational semantics for first-order logic suggested, but only briefly sketched, by Fine. We then show why the relational semantics alone is technically inadequate, forcing Fine to enrich the syntax with a coordination schema. Given this enrichment, (...) we argue, that that the semantics is compositional. We then examine the deep consequences of this result for Fine’s proposed solution to Frege’s puzzle. We argue that Fine has mis-diagnosed his own solution–his attempted solution does not deny compositionality. The correct characterization of Fine’s solution fits him more comfortably among familiar solutions to the puzzle. (shrink)

It is commonplace for philosophers to distinguish mere truths from truths that perspicuously represent the world's structure. According to a popular view, the perspicuous truths are supposed to be metaphysically revelatory and to play an important role in the accounts of law-hood, confirmation, and linguistic interpretation. Yet, there is no consensus about how to characterize this distinction. I examine strategies developed by Lewis and by Sider in his Writing the Book of the World which purport to explain this distinction in (...) terms of vocabulary: the truths that represent the world perspicuously have better, joint-carving vocabulary. I argue that the distinction between a perspicuous and mere truth concerns both the vocabulary of the sentence and its grammar. I then show that the collective motivations for distinguishing perspicuous from mere truths do not allow Lewis and Sider to properly impose constraints on grammar. (shrink)

The idea of ‘community’ dominates politics in Northern Ireland in both popular and political discourse and in academic writing, policy and legislation. Depending upon particular understandings of the notion of community different arguments are made about the policies that need to be implemented to develop the peace process. This has had a fundamental impact on areas such as legislation over parades and the development of a Bill of Rights for Northern Ireland. This essay critically looks at understandings of ‘community’; how (...) it becomes used in political discourse and in policy development and the character of its relationship with ideas about safety and security. (shrink)

The pragmatic conception of truth, anticipated by Henry David Thoreau and developed by C.S. Peirce and subsequent pragmatists, is proposed as a useful analogy for characterising 'sustainability.' Peirce's definitions of 'truth' provides an attractive approach to sustainability because (a) it re-focuses discussions of truth and objectivity from a search for 'correspondence' to an 'external world' (the 'conform' approach) to a more forward-looking ('transform') approach; and (b) it emphasises the crucial role of an evolving, questioning community in the conduct of inquiry. (...) Any successful definition of sustainability must share these characteristics with Peircean truth. While Peirce and John Dewey never reconciled their disagreements regarding the nature and task of 'inquiry', a pragmatist resolution of their differences is offered, arguing that we need both a logic of management sciences (logica utens) and a logic of pure science (logica docens), which (perhaps among other differences) respond very differently to uncertainty. It is shown that adaptive management – can be understood as a first approximation of a logica utens for social learning in pursuit of solutions to environmental problems, and it is suggested that a pragmatist, transform approach to inquiry such as Dewey's may provide a way around the 'fact-value' gulf. (shrink)

Neoliberalism’s relationship to New Public Management is well known but less is understood of how these ideas have become embedded in the state. This article explores one dimension of ‘how the state ‘changes its mind’ by exploring the ideological and cultural transformation within the senior management ranks of Canada’s largest provincial state, Ontario. A broadly Gramscian framework is used to develop greater insight into the process of cultural change within the state and the specific role of senior managers as the (...) ‘organic intellectuals’ of the neoliberal revolution. (shrink)

A global transformation of modes of religious authority has been taking place at an increasing pace in recent years. The social and political implications of the growing dominance of neo-scripturalist discourses on Islam have been particularly noticeable after 11 September 2001. This evolution of religiosity, which is mediated by mass media and new media technology, creates the conditions of existence of a post-Weberian and post-Durkheimian order. In this new social context, legitimacy (and legitimate violence) can be more easily disconnected from (...) the institutionalized framework of religious and political authority. Both in Muslim countries and in Western democracies, the attempt by Islamic activists to make the Shari’a relevant in contemporary settings creates new opportunities and challenges for legal pluralism. At the same time, the multiplication of Muslim voices claiming to be able to interpret the sacred texts, particularly in virtual communities, creates an increasingly inchoate ‘noise’ about Islamic orthodoxy. In the context of an exponential increase in the global possibilities for religious identification and expression, the growth of neo-scripturalist interpretations of Islam reflects a quest for parsimony and stability. (shrink)

Many highly educated people think religious belief is irrational and unscientific. If you ask a philosopher, however, you'll likely get two answers: most religious belief is rational in some respects and irrational in other respects. In my previous essay I explained why they think so many religious beliefs are rational. In this essay I explain why they think those same beliefs are irrational.

This paper introduces a little-known episode in the history of physics, in which a mathematical proof by Pierre Fermat vindicated Galileo’s characterization of freefall. The first part of the paper reviews the historical context leading up to Fermat’s proof. The second part illustrates how a physical and a mathematical insight enabled Fermat’s result, and that a simple modification would satisfy any of Fermat’s critics. The result is an illustration of how a purely theoretical argument can settle an apparently empirical debate.

The essay sheds light on Aristotle's understanding of friendship and its relation to political life. The author challenges the usual view that Aristotle postulates three distinct kinds of friendship. Instead the author argues that Aristotle understood there to be only one kind of friendship, and that other "friendships" were to Aristotle "unfinished" and thus not friendship at all. Aristotle shows that the relation between friendship and politics is grounded in friendship's possibility for human beings, and not as something cherished for (...) its actuality. By looking at proper friendship as possibility and not actuality, we could only ever interpret the infamous statement attributed to Aristotle—"my friends, there are no friends"—not as illuminating of what friendship is but rather as a nostalgic diagnosis of the decay of the possibility of friendship, and hence of politics. By extension, and more poignantly, interpreting Aristotle's work on friendship in this light, we stand ready to reinterpret the mobilization of Aristotelian friendship for contemporary understandings of democratic practice. (shrink)

According to Immanuel Kant, the objective validity of obligation is given as a fact of reason, which forces itself upon us and which requires no deduction of the kind that he had provided for the categories in the Critique of Pure Reason. This fact grounds a moral philosophy that treats obligation as a good that trumps all others and that presents the moral subject as radically responsible, singled out by an imperatival address. Based on conceptions of indifference and facticity that (...) Charles Scott has articulated in his recent work, I argue that these broadly Kantian commitments are mistaken. More specifically, I argue that the fact of obligation is given along with a dimension of indifference that disrupts the hierarchical relation between moral and non-moral goods and that renders questionable the unconditional character of responsibility. (shrink)

This paper takes up the question as to what has primacy within Merleau-Ponty’s existential phenomenology as a way to provide insight into the relation between empirical science and transcendental philosophy within his account of embodiment. Contending that this primacy necessarily pertains to methodology, I show how Kurt Goldstein’s conception of biology provided Merleau-Ponty with a scientific model for approaching human existence holistically in which primacy pertains to the transcendental practice of productive imagination that generates the eidetic organismic Gestalt in terms (...) of which sense is made of empirical facts. Considering the analogous role played by imagination in Merleau-Ponty’s account of perceptual synthesis in the form of what he called projection, I argue that his account of embodiment is, parallel to Goldstein, grounded methodologically on the projection of an organismic Gestalt, and that as a form of operative-intentional praxis projection is the site of primacy in his phenomenology overall. In terms of the relation between natural science and transcendental philosophy in Merleau-Ponty’s account of embodiment, while the theoretical dimension of the latter—the eidetic apriority of the organismic Gestalt—is coupled dialectically with empirical facts on an epistemically coeval basis, these are jointly subordinated to the normative commitments implied by the imaginative projection of that Gestalt. The primacy of the latter is transcendental but in a distinctly practical sense, such that any substantive discrepancy between natural science and Merleau-Pontian phenomenology reflects metaphilosophical, not theoretical, disagreement. (shrink)

I explain why research in non-applied, non-interdisciplinary, non-historical philosophy is worthwhile. The key move in the explanation is the realization that many philosophical problems can be put in the form of a set of highly plausible yet apparently jointly inconsistent claims regarding a fundamental notion.Export citation.

The main themes of the book are introduced in a preliminary and intuitive way.

In this article I will argue that Merleau-Ponty’s reinterpretation of Husserlian phenomenology—in particular as this was initially worked out in Phenomenology of Perception1—is premised methodologically on a certain mythic view of nature and of human embodiment in particular. I will claim, in other words, that the corporeal turn that is central to the philosophical attractiveness of Merleau-Pontian phenomenology rests upon a myth. Within the constraints of this short article, I will explain how and why this is so and consider some (...) of the consequences that result.This argument is intended as a provocative contribution to scholarly discussion of Merleau-Ponty’s work.2 But it is not intended as a devastating objection... (shrink)

The concept of sustainability has become an important—and contested—term in politics prior to its being given a clear, academic meaning, resulting in disciplinary turf wars over defining the term. The conflict, with mainly economists on one side and ecologists and philosophers on the other, has centered on the difference between “strong” and “weak” sustainability. Weak sustainability requires only the protection of wealth across generations, while strong sustainability requires also the protection of ecophysical features of the environment. It is shown that (...) weak sustainability, and solutions meant to achieve it, when applied to the parable of the tragedy of the commons, cannot protect resources whether owned or held in common. A communitarian approach, joined with an idea of communities as multigenerational entities and a commitment to a deliberative process seeking sustainability, can track a path toward strong sustainability. (shrink)

The argument template of chapter 3 is taken together with other live hypotheses to generate other kinds of live scepticism. For instance, one can focus on error theories with regard to colour, or pain location, or character traits. Or, oddly enough, we can plug in, as a live hypothesis, the hypothesis that no one knows any external world proposition. The upshot is that in intellectual communities, in which error theories about belief, pain locations, character traits, and colour are live, mere (...) mortals don’t know that fire engines are red, don’t know that they sometimes have pains in their lower backs, don’t know that John Rawls was kind, and don’t even know that they believe any of those truths. (shrink)

The importance of what was argued in the book was evaluated, with comments on which elements are of lasting significance for epistemology as a discipline. Notions treated include epistemic deference, liveness of hypotheses, mere mortality with respect to a hypothesis, epistemic superiority, responsibility to one’s epistemic community, the epistemic significance of expert disagreement, epistemic externalism, and content externalism.

The so-called “No Threat” solutions claim that the epistemic factors that the live sceptic claims defeat our claims to knowledge are too feeble to mount a threat. On the face of it, the epistemic factors the live sceptic says defeat our chances at knowledge make it look like the sceptical hypotheses are about to ruin our chances at knowledge, but this is an illusion. This chapter presents and evaluates eight such strategies, four of which examine the relation of philosophy to (...) common sense. (shrink)

The live sceptic’s threat is disarmed by taking away their sword: making the factors that threaten one’s beliefs lose their punch without meeting them head on. In this way, the mere mortal need not have any impressive epistemic factors such as evidence that neutralize the sceptical hypotheses, as the latter never posed any threat that had not somehow been rendered truth-conditionally irrelevant to knowledge assertions. Two such strategies are presented. The first, the Set-Aside solution, claims that people explicitly or implicitly (...) set the live sceptical hypotheses aside as truth conditionally irrelevant when they assert ‘S knows P’ and P conflicts with the hypotheses. The second, the Practicality solution, claims that in ordinary contexts practicality and other contextualist factors bracket the sceptical hypotheses so that they aren’t threatening. (shrink)

The anti-sceptic can try to argue that regardless of the strength of the epistemic factors that suggest live scepticism, positive epistemic factors such as evidence and reliability are sufficiently strong to defeat it head on, so to speak. This is the Defeated Threat strategy, which comes in three varieties. The Safety-Sensitivity solution is an attempt to solve the puzzle by claiming that worlds in which people falsely believe, e.g., that fire engines are red, are too metaphysically distant to sabotage their (...) knowledge. The Extreme Externalism solution says, roughly, that the reliability of people’s beliefs is enough of a factor to neutralize the sceptical hypotheses. The Tenacity solution insists that knowledge is not the kind of state that can easily be unseated; thus, since people once knew that fire engines are red, that knowledge stays with them even after they become mere mortals with regard to colour error theory. (shrink)

The notion of the epistemic threat to a belief that P posed by contrary hypotheses, hypotheses entailing not-P is examined. In doing so, it is shown how contextual factors affect the live sceptic’s argument. The three strategies available for constructing anti-sceptical responses to the live scepti’s argument are described. The goal here is twofold: provide a way of classifying possible anti-sceptical solutions, and more hopefully, supply materials useful for constructing an adequate anti-sceptical solution to live scepticism. Finally, the power of (...) the live and classic hypothesis-based sceptical arguments are compared, arguing that the live ones are significantly stronger. (shrink)

The argument template used to generate the new sceptical arguments is presented. In doing so, what it means for a hypothesis to be “live”, what it means for someone to be a “mere mortal” with regard to a live hypothesis, what it means to be able to “rule out” a hypothesis are explained. The key premises of the argument: the Modesty Principle, the Live Hypothesis Principle, and the Mere Mortal Premiss are formulated. Roughly put, if one is a mere mortal (...) with regard to a live hypothesis H, then in order for one to know something P obviously inconsistent with H, one needs to be able to rule out or neutralize H. But since one is a mere mortal, one can’t neutralize H; so one does not know P. (shrink)

This book’s topic is introduced via a brief discussion of what is often found objectionable in traditional forms of scepticism. Some of the more interesting features of Live Scepticism, the theory presented in this book, are listed. Finally, an outline of the remainder of the book is given.

It isn’t clear what scepticism really is. Perhaps it’s the thesis that certain knowledge attributions are false. Then again, it might be that even though knowledge attributions are true pretty much when common sense says they’re true, the facts that make them true are impoverished compared to what anyone thought. For instance, if it turned out that all true beliefs had only piddling amounts of warrant and knowledge is mere true belief, then although knowledge attributions would be true, the sceptic (...) would still win. These matters are explored and it is argued that even if live scepticism is false, since her central thesis ‘The overall warrant possessed by the beliefs targeted by the live skeptical hypotheses is anemic compared to that had by our other beliefs that amount to knowledge and aren’t targeted by any live skeptical hypotheses’ may still be true, she may still win the battle with the critic of live skepticism. (shrink)

The argument template used to generate new sceptical arguments was presented in chapter 3. In this chapter, the template is used to generate the first live sceptical argument by plugging ‘No one believes anything’, or belief eliminativism, into the template. It is argued that in some close possible worlds, eliminativism is a live hypothesis, and many philosophers and cognitive scientists are mere mortals with respect to it. The obvious objections are addressed, and this live sceptical argument is compared with arguments (...) concerning evidence one does not possess. (shrink)

It is argued that most of the counterintuitive elements of traditional sceptical theories do not apply to the live sceptical theories, and that the live sceptic’s argument is identical in form to arguments we rely on without hesitation. The live sceptic is not denying anyone of the warrant they think they have; neither are they denying its quality. The knowledge denied by the live sceptic is frequently ruled out in uncontroversial circumstances. This is important to the live sceptic’s case because (...) it might be objected that it’s nearly impossible not to know one’s own beliefs, pain locations, or sock colours when the beliefs are formed in maximally veridical ways. (shrink)

Suppose the following principle P is true: in order to know X, one needs to be able to rule out scenarios that one is aware is both live and incompatible with one knowing X. If P is true, then the live sceptical argument template can be modified to generate an argument for universal scepticism: in intellectual communities in which belief eliminativism is live, mere mortals with respect to belief eliminativism know absolutely nothing. The principle P and related principles are explored.

The early theology of Karl Barth exhibits a seemingly incongruous emphasis on concepts like “origins” and “memory,” which would seem to suggest a point of contact between God and humanity. Although memory and anticipation are both ambiguous and tend towards self-reference, this article suggests that revelation is mediated through this ambiguity in Barth's theology through the early 1930s. Recollection can legitimately function as the basis of individual and ecclesial anticipation only when it is interpreted through the lens of the character (...) of God. Although this language largely disappears by the Church Dogmatics, this article argues that the early tension between memory and anticipation is gradually eclipsed but remains a crucially neglected foundation to Barth's later thought. (shrink)

How secular is contemporary society? Are pockets of sectarianism embedded in societies of developed countries? This timely book examines the interweaving of politics and religion, and of tradition and innovation in a variety of cultural settings. Eminent scholars from four continents examine here current turmoil in religious beliefs, practices, and organization--not only in the Western world, but in South America, Africa, South Asia, New Zealand, and Japan. They scrutinize evidence of religious change, decline, and revival; investigate challenges posed by new (...) religious movements; and locate religious change and conflict in the context of broader shifts in consciousness and culture. Contributors include Richard Fenn, Phillip E. Hammond, David Martin, Philip Rieff, Roland Robertson, and Mark Schibley. With its focus on the interplay of secularization, rationalism, and sectarianism, this work offers a fitting tribute to Bryan Wilson, who has made so many contributions to the sociological understanding of these phenomena. (shrink)

Alternatives in the History of Science. The paper deals with the function of the scientist's subjective activity in the research process. This will be discussed at the background of the discourse between distant action and narrow action theories of electromagnetism in 19th century physics. The analysis shows in which high degree the protagonists of these theories regarded this situation consciously as a bifurcation in the development of their science. This article describes then how the history of science values the case. (...) The result of this valuation is dependent on the different philosophical points of view. Finally we point out some desiderata for the further discussion on methodology of science that would be the consequence of the acknowledgement of real bifurcations in scientific thought. (shrink)

This practical guide helps us identify the wrong beliefs about God we received from our families of origin and replace them with truth so we can embrace the abundant Christian life we long for.