Cardinal Etchegaray argues here that the dialogue between church and state, with both parties rooted in sometimes conflicting absolute claims and values, has become more recently a wider-ranging dialogue between the church and a pluralist, relativist liberal society. The very definition of “liberal society” is open to argument, and the church may find elements to commend or oppose in any given definition. Since the nineteenth century the church has often found itself in opposition to various ideas of “liberty,” especially (...) those that represent an idolatry of absolute rights that push aside Christian spiritual and moral concerns. Now that liberalism has become the pervasive model for society, the church finds it may more easily express its critique, with the aim of making society more conducive to allowing people to become fully human. Indeed, the church provides a necessary check on the excesses of liberal society, particularly those of capitalism and democratic populism. Its essential point is the transcendent dimension of the human person—our connection with the divine. The pursuit of economic and political ends needs to be governed by a concern for the ethical, itself founded on the divine. Liberal society will only live up to its own highest aspirations through promoting self-mastery and an awareness that humanity’s freedom is ultimately found only in God. (shrink)

The author assures readers that Chris Matthew Sciabarra has met all Aristotelian requirements in full, providing not one but two definitions of “dialectics,” which, as the art of context-keeping, is indeed an essential part of Ayn Rand's philosophical method. He shows how Sciabarra's definitional process compares quite favorably in terms of timeliness, transparency, and benevolence to that of Rand and other Objectivists, and notes that Sciabarra's overriding concern, notwithstanding his obvious great respect for Rand's substantive philosophical achievements, has been to (...) identify and clarify the methods she and other thinkers have used to profound benefit. (shrink)

The volume touches upon many topics and themes shared by Cartesian and late scholastic philosophy: matter and form; infinity, place, time, void, and motion; the ...

Introduction -- The mathematical roots of the concept of analogy -- Aristotle : the uses of analogy -- Aristotle : analogy and language -- Thomas Aquinas -- Immanuel Kant -- Karl Barth -- Final reflections.

Judgments of beauty are neither subjective nor arbitrary, and are a necessary part of practical reasoning in any attempt to harmonise our activities and ways of life with those of our neighbours. The creation of a neighbourhood, a place, a home, or any other settlement in which people of different occupations and views reside side by side involves coordination of a kind that only aesthetic judgment can reliably achieve. And that is why judgment of that kind exists, and why a (...) rational being who has no grasp of it is incapacitated. (shrink)

A-t-on le droit de croire en l'existence de Dieu? Non, répondent ceux qui veulent des preuves. Oui, affirme ce livre, car nous avons le droit de croire même sans justification épistémologique. Cela n'a rien d'intellectuellement honteux, contrairement à ce que disent certains philosophes, en parlant d'une éthique des croyances Une nouvelle question se pose alors : a-t-on le droit de croire avoir reçu une révélation et prétendre connaître ainsi la vérité? Non, répondent ceux pour lesquels la vérité ne peut pas (...) être donnée par Dieu dans la Bible. Oui, affirme ce livre, et, qui plus est, une épistémologie peut défendre la rationalité de notre croyance à la révélation. Dès lors, peut-on faire comme si les affirmations du Credo étaient des fictions? Est-il vrai que la religion est avant tout une affaire pratique et une forme de vie? Non, répond ce livre : les arguments en faveur d'une conception non réaliste de la religion sont faibles ; en revanche, le réalisme théologique peut être défendu. Renouvelant ainsi la traditionnelle question de la relation entre foi et raison, ce livre discute aussi bien les thèses de saint Thomas, de John Locke, du cardinal Newman et de Ludwig Wittgenstein, que celles de philosophes analytiques contemporains de la religion comme Alvin Plantinga, Richard Swinburne, Peter van Inwagen ou Linda Zagzebski. (shrink)

This paper strives to characterize the relation between accent placement and discourse in terms of independent constraints operating at the interface between syntax and interpretation. The Givenness Constraint requires un-F-marked constituents to be given. Key here is our definition of givenness, which synthesizes insights from the literature on the semantics of focus with older views on information structure. AvoidF requires speakers to economize on F-marking. A third constraint requires a subset of F-markers to dominate accents.The characteristic prominence patterns of "novelty (...) focus" and "contrastive focus" both arise from a combination of the Givenness Constraint and AvoidF. Patterns of prominence in questions as well as in answers to questions are explained in terms of the constraints, thanks in part to the way in which the Givenness relation is defined. Head/argument asymmetries noted in the literature on Focus Projection are placed in the phonology-syntax interface, independent of discourse conditions. Deaccenting follows when AvoidF is ranked higher than constraint(s) governing head/argument asymmetries. (shrink)

Emphasizing the continuity between his moral and aesthetic doctrines and the metaphysical basis in which they rest, the author explores Kant's relation to Leibniz and Hume, and his attempt to construct a philosophy which was neither rationalist nor empiricist, and could display the limits of human understanding; he shows that Kant was not only a master of philosophical criticism, but the greater defender of the objectivity of human knowledge, in both the scientific and the moral spheres.

_Rationality and Religion_ deals with the perennial question of how far religious faith needs reason.

This paper will examine a claim that nursing is united by its moral stance. The claim is that there are moral constraints on nurses' actions as people practising nursing and that they are in some way different from both what for now can be called standard morality and also different from the person's own moral views who also happens to be a nurse, hence the defining and unifying factor for nursing. I will begin by situating the claim within the broader (...) area about the need for a definition to state features that are essential to all and only members of its class. This will highlight the fact that there are two distinct types of definition used by authors seeking to find a unity for nursing. One type of definition has to do with goals or purposes given to nursing and the other with ends discovered as nursing. But even if there are ends waiting to be discovered a particular practical concern is how we can have knowledge of them. I will suggest that knowledge by intuition is plausible but that as things currently stand in moral epistemology it will not provide the unifying ground for nursing. Then I will argue that in the latter approach to definition a certain account of human nature has been advanced in order to provide features that are there to be discovered and so not dependent on human beings for the definition or classification. However, such an attempt to define nursing cannot do what is wanted. Rather than the account of human nature grounding morality and doing so for nursing, the account of human nature itself relies upon a prior account of morality. Because of this it loses its supposed ground of unity for the profession. Nursing is not united by its moral stance especially if this is understood in a strong sense as unique moral stance, but as things currently stand in moral epistemology this is not necessarily a bad thing for practitioners or patients. (shrink)

Discussing the history of universal human rights and Confucian values, Ames asserts that a growing dialogue between China and the United States would benefit China in terms of political and individual rights and the United States in terms of a greater sense of civic virtue.

Over the past generation, the rise of East Asia and especially China, has brought about a sea change in the economic and political world order. At the same time, global warming, environmental degradation, food and water shortages, population explosion, and income inequities have created a perfect storm that threatens the very survival of humanity. It is clear now that the Westphalian model of individual sovereign states seeking their own self-interest will not be able to respond effectively to this win-win or (...) lose-lose crisis. In this volume, a cadre of distinguished scholars comes together to reflect on Confucianism and Deweyan pragmatism as possible resources for a new geopolitics that begins from an ontology of interdependence and recognizes the irreducibly ecological nature of the human experience at every level. Both Confucian and Deweyan traditions emphasize the primacy of experience, the importance of vital relationality, and the moral roots of good governance. The potential benefits of conceptually blending the two are many. Indeed, the contemporary Chinese philosopher Tang Junyi provides us with a cosmological understanding of the "idea" of Confucianism that, in parallel to Dewey's "idea" of democracy, can enable us to anticipate the core values, if not the specific contours, of a "Confucian democracy." Just as Dewey's "idea" of democracy is his vision of the flourishing communal life made possible by the contributions of the uniquely distinguished persons that constitute it, Tang Junyi's Confucianism is a pragmatic naturalism directed at achieving the most highly integrated cultural, moral, and spiritual growth for the individual-in-community. In both, we find an affirmation of communal harmony as a process "starting here and going there" through which those involved learn together to do ordinary things in extraordinary ways. Just such a cosmological understanding of democracy is one way of describing what will be needed to address the many predicaments characterizing the environmental, cultural, socioeconomic, and political dynamics of the twenty-first century. (shrink)

In his own time, Lao Sze-Kwang formulated his own intra-cultural approach to the philosophy of culture that begins from the interdependence and organic nature of our cultural experience. In this essay, I address three questions: Why did Lao abandon his early reliance on the Hegelian model of philosophy of culture and formulate his own “two- structured” theory? Again, given Lao’s profound commitment and contribution to Chinese philosophy and its future directions, why is it not proper to describe him as a (...) “Chinese philosopher?” And why is the much accomplished Lao Sze- Kwang not installed in the CUHK pantheon as yet one more of the great “New Confucian” philosophers (xinruxuejia 新儒學家) to be associated with this institution? (shrink)

Features Leibniz's writings including letters, published papers, and fragments on a variety of philosophical, religious, mathematical, and scientific questions.

This book explores contemporary continental philosophy and aesthetics. It addresses the problem of post-Kantian reason in relation to the pathologies of experience, alienation, the transformative and ethical import of aesthetic experience, the relation between philosophy and social critique, and language as disclosure rather than correspondence.

This essay presents a theory of aesthetics for landscape gardening based on Karsten Harries’s theory of the ethical function of architecture. It begins with an attempt to understand Horace Walpole’s praise of William Kent’s contribution to the development of “the modern taste in gardening,” according to which Kent was largely responsible for achieving the progressive revolution in landscape architecture that produced the picturesque style of English landscape gardening. After examining Harries’s theory, the essay discusses whether landscape architecture can produce works (...) of art and examines several historically-important garden styles to argue that it can. Finally, it discusses problems inherent in Modern and Postmodern landscape architecture. (shrink)

Examines the aims and tools of science for creating theories and explanations of phenomena, with an eye to answering the question of whether or not science ...