The paper analyzes Christmas Eve, a short dialogue by the protestant romantic Friedrich Schleiermacher published in 1806, as an attempt to translate the traditional language of Christmas into the idiom of the modern, gendered family life. The central message of Christmas is rearticulated in the realm of private family life, the division of gender, the naïve happiness of the children etc. At the same time, the form of the dialogue among the family members and some close friends (...) is used to raise different interpretations of Christmas, including moments of suffering and national identity. The text thus both reflects and actively shapes a shifting interpretation of religious traditions in the modern word precisely by enacting the translation of Christian language into a modern vernacular (that of family, intimacy, nation) as an ongoing process among the different partners of the dialogue. (shrink)

The article shows the importance of a Christmas carol in the poetic imagination of Tadeusz Nowak. First of all is the presence of a word carol itself, especially because many poems, titled carol are not even connected with the carol’s motives. Then it’s vital, how Nowak is referring to traditional carols and how he is reinterpreting typical themes connected with it, such as: annunciation, motherhood, relation between man and animals, identity of the Other, of someone, who is different than (...) everybody else. It turns out that words specifically connected with carol like: hay, the Star of Bethlehem, Christmas eve, chorus from polish folk song hej kolęda, kolęda are part of his language, he uses them to describe his world, apart from idyllic associations, even apart from Christmas context. (shrink)

Previous research employing Jungian psychological type theory has both demonstrated that Church of England inherited congregations have problems engaging thinking types and suggested that fresh expressions of church have failed to address that problem. Three previous studies, however, have reported higher proportions of thinking types attending cathedral carol services. The present study was designed to check that finding on a larger sample. The Francis Psychological Type Scales were completed by 941 participants at the afternoon Carol Services held in Liverpool Cathedral (...) on Christmas Eve 2019, and the data compared with the profile of 3304 participants within 140 inherited congregations. The present study also found a higher proportion of thinking types among the participants at these carol services. These findings suggest that cathedral carol services may be functioning as fresh expressions of church in a significant way. Further research is needed to explore whether other cathedral services may function in similar ways.CONTRIBUTION: Situated within the science of congregation studies, rooted in psychological type theory and drawing on data from 941 participants at the afternoon Carol Services held in Liverpool Cathedral on Christmas Eve 2019, this study confirms that cathedral carol services at Christmas are more successful than either inherited church or fresh expressions of church in reaching thinking types. (shrink)

This study was designed to test the hypothesis that events such as the Christmas Eve Carol Services at Liverpool Cathedral that include some regular churchgoers (people who attend services most weeks) and much larger numbers of occasional visitors (who may attend church only once or twice a year) make a significant impact on the psychological health and well-being of the participants. Using a repeat-measure design, participants were invited to complete a copy of the Oxford Happiness Questionnaire while they were (...) waiting for the service to begin and then to complete a second copy during a five-minute organ improvisation just before the close of the service. Data provided by 802 participants who completed both copies of the instrument demonstrated a significantly higher score on the Oxford Happiness Questionnaire at time two than at time one, suggesting that attendance at the service had exerted a positive impact on psychological health and well-being. Contribution: Situated within the science of cathedral studies, this article demonstrates by means of a repeated-measure study that cathedrals can make a significant impact on the psychological health and well-being of the wider community served by them. The same well-being measure was completed by 802 participants at the Christmas Eve Carol Services before and after the event, with a significant increase in scores at time two. (shrink)

Hope is hard to characterise because of the exceptional diversity of its applications, to the point that one may wonder whether there is continuity between ordinary cases of hope and what is often called 'hope against hope'. In this paper, I shall follow the relatively small but growing literature on hope and examine propositional hopes, i.e. hopes of the form 'hoping that p', with a particular focus on recent work by Philip Pettit and Adrienne Martin. I shall do this first (...) by identifying a significant difficulty encountered by what has become known as the 'orthodox definition'. The OD defines hope by means of two necessary and sufficient conditions: A hopes that p if and only if A desires that p and A assigns to p a degree of probability between 0 and 1. On this definition, to hope is to desire an outcome we deem neither certain nor impossible. Note that the relevant probability assignment is subjective: the OD allows, for example, that children can hope for Father Christmas to visit them on Christmas Eve. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Discover the Unknown Chekhov in Your ESL ClassroomNinah Beliavsky (bio)I was born in Moscow, ate aladushki, and listened to my mother read Chekhov in Russian. Kashtanka, a tale about a young, ginger-colored pup who gets lost, made me cry. And when I read about the death of Ivan Dmitrich Kreepikov, in The Death of a Civil Servant, I did not know whether to laugh or to cry. The poor (...) civil servant was sitting and watching an opera in a theater when all of a sudden he sneezed and spattered an old gentlemen, General Shpitzalov, in front of him. Now, as Chekhov writes, sneezing is not prohibited to any one or in any place; peasants sneeze, and even the chiefs of police sneeze. But, you see, the poor civil servant, being very much rank-conscious, could no longer live with himself after committing such a misconduct. He apologized profusely and went home, and without taking off his uniform, he lay down on the sofa, and... died.And what about Van'ka Zhukov, an orphan boy of nine apprenticed to a shoemaker who is being beaten and overworked. He writes a letter to his grandfather on Christmas Eve, begging him for the dear Lord's sake to take him away from his misery. After scratching his head and thinking for a moment, he dips his pen in ink and addresses his envelope: "The Village. To Grand Dad." He then dashes out into the street and pushes his precious letter through the opening of the postbox...The second part of my childhood I spent in Jerusalem; there I ate falafel with humus, was obsessed with perfecting the pronunciation of the Hebrew guttural "r," and read Miriam Yalan Shtekelis's children's poetry, which was filled with magical objects that laughed and cried. By the time I was in high school I was living in Milwaukee, eating fries and ice cream sundaes and reading O. Henry.The literature that one comes in contact with during childhood and young [End Page 101] adulthood is often deeply engraved on a person's psyche. It is similar to an adult craving sweets because of the psychological association with her childhood and a safe and protected environment. We tend to think back to the "good old days" because we find comfort in our past. Today, as an adult, a wife, and a mother, I often find refuge in my childhood memories. And, like most people, much of what I encounter and read today I tend to associate with my past. If I come across a story that I heard in my childhood, as I search for something new and amusing to give to my college English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) students, I try to incorporate it into my curriculum. A few years ago I came across the story The Necklace by Guy de Mappassant and immediately recalled reading it in my adolescence. This story brought back the warm memories of home that I felt would be understood and identified with by my foreign students. Today, this story is one of my students' favorites. By using stories from my own past, I feel that I can bring to my class discussions a unique perspective—my own recollections and feelings and an interpretation not only academic in nature but also personal. Often, my international students will recall hearing or reading some of the same stories (that I bring to class) in their childhood, in their native tongues, and thus these stories will not seem out of context anymore because there will be a sense of connection.I teach ESL to college students—reading and writing at the intermediate and advanced levels. Aside from following the standard curriculum of using grammar and writing textbooks, I bring to my ESL classes music, opera, art, young adult novels by American writers, and short stories by both international and American writers. For instance, my students enjoy reading O. Henry's "The Christmas Present," "The Last Leaf," and "The Two Thanksgiving Day Gentlemen." These stories are about real people—just like my students—they are about everyday events, they are humorous and tragic in nature, and they have an unexpected twist... (shrink)

In Malta and Southern Italy, legends centred on the prestigious figure of the Sibyl are still known by the older people. In Majorca, the prophetic song attributed to the Greek Sibyl, Erythrea, is still sung on Christmas eve in the monastery-sanctuary of Lluc. This paper focuses on the history of this prophetic song since its adoption by the medieval Church and on its surviving tradition in certain areas of Catalan culture – a fabulous example of cultural continuity.

Karl Barth leaves room by his own principles for further, even different thinking about Jews and gender than he records in the Dogmatics. Now that Marquardt, Klappert, Sonderegger, Soulen, and others have offered sympathetic critiques from a generally Barthian point of view, and Eberhard Busch has exhaustively laid to rest any biographical questions of Barth’s relation to the Jewish people in his 1996 book, Unter dem Bogen des einen Bundes: Karl Barth und die Juden 1933–1945, the way lies open to (...) carry forward Barth’s theological critique of nineteenth century theology and of abstraction further into the areas of Jews and gender, and to propose constructive pneumatological and exegetical supplements to his thinking. Barth’s thinking on women and men, like his thinking on Jews, labors, for all its promise in its time, under a defect he calls abstraction. Barth faulted Calvin for abstracting both elect human beings and the electing God from Jesus Christ, whom Barth called the elect human being and the electing God in one. Yet on the election of the community Barth did not entirely escape the abstraction. In the manner of Augustine’s Retractions, Barth wrote to Maruardt toward the end of his life that he had been so busy with Israel that he had had no time for the Jews. Does Barth, as Marquardt and Sonderegger suggest, throw up despite himself a conceptual screen onto which he at once projects an abstraction and behind which he hides actual human beings , a screen resistant to the blowing of the Spirit? Do the concepts “ man” and “ woman” form a similar conceptual screen, dating from Schleiermacher’s dialogue Christmas Eve, in which men and women have essentially different responses to the incarnation of Jesus Christ? Das ewig M??nnliche and das ewig Weibliche, inherited from German romanticism, see to run afoul of Barth’s trinitarian particularism, as does “ Israel”. Yet further application of Barth’s own principles, including more attention to the Spirit, leaves him more options in his treatment of Jews and gender, and richer exegesis – including exegesis by anagogy. (shrink)

Rooted in the field of cathedral studies, this paper draws into dialogue three bodies of knowledge: Edward Bailey’s notion of implicit religion that, among other things, highlights the continuing traction of the Christian tradition and Christian practice within secular societies; David Walker’s notion of the multiple ways through which in secular societies people may relate to the Christian tradition as embodied within the Anglican Church and John Fisher’s notion of spiritual wellbeing as conceptualised in relational terms. Against this conceptual background, (...) this paper draws on data provided by 1234 participants attending one of the Christmas Eve carol services in Liverpool Cathedral to explore the perceived impact of attendance on the spiritual health of people who do not believe in God and yet feel that Liverpool Cathedral is their cathedral, and it is this sense of belonging that brings them back at Christmas time.Contribution: Situated within the science of cathedral studies, this paper links in an original way three fields of discourse: Edward Bailey’s notion of implicit religion, David Walker’s notion of the four ways of belonging to God facilitated by the Anglican Church and John Fisher’s conceptualisation and operationalisation of the notion of spiritual wellbeing. The hypothesis developed from this original integration of theoretical perspectives is then tested empirically on data provided by 404 participants at carol services who do not believe in God. (shrink)

All Souls' Day -- Autumn walk -- Christmas Eve interlude -- Walk before spring.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Practice of SurgeryKaren DevonThere’s no one on the snowy road driving beside me. It’s Christmas Eve, the night the newest attending surgeon on staff gets to be on call. Tonight feels like an anniversary of sorts. The first time I performed an appendectomy “alone” was on Christmas Eve. I can’t recall if it was snowing back then since I hadn’t left the hospital in days. I (...) had assumed that while I was operating on that 26–year–old woman with new abdominal pain that moved towards the left lower quadrant, my attending staff on call was sleeping soundly. I didn’t even know where he lived, or how long it would take if something catastrophic were to happen. I phoned the white–haired man to get his blessing just before midnight. “Have you done this operation before?” he asked. “Yes, several, but not completely alone” I confessed. “Go for it and call me when you are done. Oh, and be safe!” Click. Gulp.As I drive in tonight, again past midnight, I reflect upon that night. Was it practice? A right of passage? The most appropriate treatment for the patient? Perhaps it was even safer this way since my attending really had never done this operation the way it is now done—laparoscopically—by residents. I clearly recall telling the patient and her mother, “We do this all the time! The staff surgeon on call will come in if I need him, but the chief residents always do this operation and I feel comfortable taking care of you.” Sign on the dotted line and make sure you read the part where you are told this is a teaching hospital. Not only was independence an expectation, but I was also supposed to teach the more junior house staff how to emulate what I was so expertly performing.That night I took out the rotting appendix without incident and called the grey haired surgeon in the wee hours. “Merry Christmas Doctor. Sorry to bother you. I just wanted to let you know that the patient is awake and doing well.” “Yes I know. Good work” he replied. “I was in my office. Just in case.”As a resident, I was often torn between the need to gain independence in order to learn and grow as a surgeon, and the idea that I was practicing. As most budding surgeons do, I wanted to be the person doing the surgery. Working on my technical skills was clearly an important part of expertise. Surgery is inherently different than other types of medicine. It seemed slightly more difficult for someone to stop my cutting, than to catch the error in a prescription, before some damage is done. Perhaps a little more like driving a car, than learning to use a calculator. Recently a more modern surgical education is evolving, whereby students practice by simulations on machines. Yet educators know that ultimately many “firsts” need to occur with real patients. That proficiency and expertise are more than a diagnosis, a steady hand, or even the two combined. If the experience of operating as the primary surgeon without immediate supervision, on a patient with acute appendicitis never occurred until we passed licensing exams wouldn’t that be more harmful? I may have been the least legally responsible for outcomes, that night of my own first, when the grey–haired surgeon took the [End Page E1] responsibility of trusting me. But in fact, the obligation I felt was enormous. We cannot simulate the weight of responsibility that comes when responsible for another human being, who you have met and who provides their trust in you. Furthermore, as the teachers of this art and science, we need to balance our obligations to each individual patient with our obligation to society to train competent and caring future surgeons. Surgery would have no history if the “practice” of surgery had nothing to do with practice, defined in its simplest form, yet how do we cover all of this during the late night conversation that is called informed consent. Interestingly since that December evening and for the next 200 laparoscopic appendectomies before my graduation in to... (shrink)

Hope is hard to characterise because of the exceptional diversity of its applications, to the point that one may wonder whether there is continuity between ordinary cases of hope and what is often called 'hope against hope'. In this paper, I shall follow the relatively small but growing literature on hope and examine propositional hopes, i.e. hopes of the form 'hoping that p', with a particular focus on recent work by Philip Pettit and Adrienne Martin. I shall do this first (...) by identifying a significant difficulty encountered by what has become known as the 'orthodox definition'. The OD defines hope by means of two necessary and sufficient conditions: A hopes that p if and only if A desires that p and A assigns to p a degree of probability between 0 and 1. On this definition, to hope is to desire an outcome we deem neither certain nor impossible. Note that the relevant probability assignment is subjective: the OD allows, for example, that children can hope for Father Christmas to visit them on Christmas Eve. (shrink)

Hope is hard to characterise because of the exceptional diversity of its applications, to the point that one may wonder whether there is continuity between ordinary cases of hope and what is often called 'hope against hope'. In this paper, I shall follow the relatively small but growing literature on hope and examine propositional hopes, i.e. hopes of the form 'hoping that p', with a particular focus on recent work by Philip Pettit and Adrienne Martin. I shall do this first (...) by identifying a significant difficulty encountered by what has become known as the 'orthodox definition'. The OD defines hope by means of two necessary and sufficient conditions: A hopes that p if and only if A desires that p and A assigns to p a degree of probability between 0 and 1. On this definition, to hope is to desire an outcome we deem neither certain nor impossible. Note that the relevant probability assignment is subjective: the OD allows, for example, that children can hope for Father Christmas to visit them on Christmas Eve. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Great World House: Martin Luther King Jr. and Global Ethics by Hak Joon Lee, and: Democracy in Twenty-First Century America: Race, Class, Religion, and Region by Ronald B. NealReggie L. WilliamsThe Great World House: Martin Luther King Jr. and Global Ethics HAK JOON LEE Cleveland, OH: Pilgrim Press, 2011. 256 pp. $25.00Democracy in Twenty-First Century America: Race, Class, Religion, and Region RONALD B. NEAL Macon, GA: Mercer (...) University Press, 2012. 138 pp. $30.00On Christmas Eve 1967, Martin Luther King Jr. asked the members of a congregation to recognize that they are—every day—interacting with many different nations all around the world as they maneuver throughout their normal daily routines. Hak Joon Lee’s The Great World House: Martin Luther King Jr. and Global Ethics examines the implications of this daily global interaction as the need for a broader ethical perspective in a shrinking world. The need begins with the realization that we do indeed inhabit a shrinking world in which our local behavior has a broader global impact. Once we recognize the moral implications of our local interaction, it becomes clear that we must learn how to live together in a broader community.But how do we speak the language of a global morality? What does a global morality look like? Lee argues that King’s metaphor of a great world house provides a structure on which to frame the content of a healthy global morality in a shrinking world. The metaphor indicates a collective understanding of all humanity as a global community (ix). The notion of a single world house moves people groups beyond rival communities with well-defined in-group and out-group barriers into what Lee describes as a global civil society where we are all seen as members of a collective in-group (13). The concept of a collective in-group helps illustrate what Lee understands to be King’s argument for a global morality; “King’s idea of a great world house redefines what the boundaries and membership of a moral community are: the great world house constitutes a single inclusive ethical community for humanity because it identifies the world as a single unified community” (53). [End Page 234]But as laudable as King’s great world house metaphor is, we are still burdened with the task of imagining a universal moral language in practice. Efforts toward the formation of universal truths have historically been death-dealing for people groups caught on the wrong side of the color line. A one-size-fits-all morality has been a procrustean bed for people who have been racialized and subordinated to white European males. Yet Lee interprets King’s method of universal engagement to begin with convictions shared at home within the particularity of his African American Christian worldview before it moves outward toward a shared vision of a global civil society. The movement from particular to universal for a public morality is unlike the historically harmful practice of universal morality. King’s universal method includes attention to four components: vision, norms, virtues, and political practices. These four components belong to what Lee depicts as a careful and intricate dialectic between what is local and what is universal in a political dialogue that seeks the end of a global civil society with shared conceptions of community and human rights.Ironically, with regard to the conversation about human rights, Lee claims that King’s formative African American interpretation of human rights was primarily informed by the Enlightenment and then blended with an African American experience: “Mostly appropriated from Christianity and the Western Enlightenment tradition, these norms [justice, freedom, and equality] obtained a new significance for African Americans in the context of the sizzling cauldron of slavery and segregation” (55). Yet one would be hard pressed to identify the presence of modern Enlightenment intellectuals within the formative theological worldview of the African American Christianity that Lee identifies. Of necessity, African American Christianity, the Christian worldview that birthed Martin Luther King Jr., was formed to deflect the white Christian worldview that was shaped by the intersection of race, religion, and empire in modernity. The Enlightenment fueled modernity’s... (shrink)

Schleiermacher's Copernican revolution in theology is effected through his presentation of the Christian mythos in terms of a phenomenological anthropology of self-consciousness. Moreover, as Niebuhr shows in this apt study of some features of Schleiermacher's theological thinking, the principles which determine the shape of that revolution can be deduced neither from a biblical dogmatics allegedly purified of philosophical presuppositions nor from a philosophy uninformed by theological experience. In the first part of the book, Niebuhr discusses Schleiermacher's little-known work The (...) class='Hi'>Christmas Eve: A Dialogue, affording us a picture of the author's starting-point in the experience of a salvation or potentiated self-consciousness which is historically and socially mediated. The subsequent analysis of the lectures on hermeneutics and ethics discloses the object of Schleiermacher's inquiry to be not the supernatural being that posits the cosmos, but the creative Logos indwelling the individual and all men by means of the common, organic media of human existence in which the self both comes to be and comes to create history and culture. Finally, The Christian Faith is reviewed by Niebuhr in terms of the expression it gives to the mature Schleiermacher's theology and christology. The primordial consciousness of being-in-relation reveals the historical, societal, worldly context of the self and the various polarities of the self's existence such that religion emerges as a phenomenon coterminous with man's affective response to the relationships in which the whole of human nature is bound, and theology, the "daughter of religion," becomes the methodology by which the articulation of an affective determination of self-consciousness is achieved. The rigorously pursued explicitation [[sic]] of the forms and determinations of self-consciousness is interpreted by Niebuhr with a penetration and a sympathy at once acute and comprehensive. By giving us a series of insights into Schleiermacher's "thinking in motion," Niebuhr has contributed a cogent testimony to the nineteenth-century theologian's central importance in the fields of hermeneutical theory, philosophical ethics, philosophy of religion and culture, and theology. One would have welcomed a more critical appraisal of Schleiermacher's view of the formal and material compatibility of philosophy and theology, understanding and feeling, inasmuch as the scope of theological inquiry appears to be limited by the boundaries of reason set forth in the ethics, and philosophical anthropology is apparently reduced to a rather sophisticated phenomenology of religious experience. In any case, Niebuhr's scholarly treatment of the material should lead the reader to an informed examination of Schleiermacher's text.--J. M. S. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Reason 1: It's a Lie, and Lying is Wrong Reason 2: Santa Doesn't Have Your Best Interests in Mind Reason 3: The Damage to Credulity Having Faith in Santa Cut It Out, Wrap It Up.

What happened in New York City on September 11, 2001, creates an urgent need for a turn to practical reason, to ethics, to critique, and to a radical,transformative theory and praxis. Contemplation, speculation, pure theory, and contemplative metaphysics in philosophy, while necessary and valuable, are notsufficient in dealing with such an infamous crime against humanity. The central idea running through this paper and much of my work is that there is an essentiallink between rationality and radicalism. The aim of this (...) paper is to explore this link in an argument sketched in three parts: self-appropriation as the pearl of great price in philosophy; a critical theory of society; and a metaphysics and philosophy of religion that are both contemplative and political — a threefold radicality, if you like. This argument seeks to show negatively how the postmodern critique of rationality misfires, and positively how a post-imperial phenomenology, critical theory, and metaphysics/philosophy of religion can do justice to and recognize difference and the otherness of nature, other human beings, being itself, and God.Because in Vietnam the vision of a burning Babeis multiplied, multiplied, the flesh on firenot Christ’s, as Southwell saw it, prefiguringthe Passion upon the Eve of Christmas,but wholly human and repeated, repeated,infant after infant, their names forgotten,their sex unknown in the ashesset alight, flaming but not vanishingnot vanishing as his vision but lingering,cinders upon the earth or living onmoaning and stinking in hospitals three abed;because of this my strong sight,my clear caressive sight, my poet’s sight I was giventhat it might stir me to songis blurredWhy do men then not wreck his rod?Generations have trod, have trod, have trodAnd all is seared with trade, bleared, smeared with toilAnd wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell, the soilIs bare now, nor can foot feel, being. (shrink)

At the end of 2003, on the eve of Christmas, French President Jacques Chirac delivered a keynote address on "secularism as a fundamental principle of the Republic" in the Elysee Palace before the Prime Minister, heads of assembly, ministers and members of parliament. The President's speech aroused considerable interest not only in France but also around the world, as it touched upon a very urgent problem in many countries - the relationship between the Church and the State.

Ben Bryan argues that the strongest challenge to natural rights theory is to explain how it overcomes the Problem of Authority. Given that our natural rights are multiply realisable by a range of equally reasonable social conventions, how or why ought one particular realisation have authority? I argue that Thomistic and Kantian solutions to this problem do not count as solutions from natural rights theory, and therefore offer my own solution. When theories of natural rights describe the rights we have (...) in terms that refer not only to moralised act-types, but rather, tell us which non-moralised act-types ought to be moralised in the relevant way, they avoid the Problem of Authority altogether. Such theories of natural rights are singularly realisable at the level of regulative conventional rules, and only multiply realisable at the level of constitutive conventional rules. The latter form of multiple realisability does not raise the Problem of Authority. (shrink)

This book offers a new approach to the analysis of the multiple meanings of English modals, conjunctions, conditionals, and perception verbs. Although such ambiguities cannot easily be accounted for by feature-analyses of word meaning, Eve Sweetser's argument shows that they can be analyzed both readily and systematically. Meaning relationships in general cannot be understood independently of human cognitive structure, including the metaphorical and cultural aspects of that structure. Sweetser shows that both lexical polysemy and pragmatic ambiguity are shaped by our (...) metaphorical folk understanding of epistemic processes and of speech interaction. Similar regularities can be shown to structure the contrast among root, epistemic and speech act uses of modal verbs, multiple uses of conjunctions and conditionals, and certain processes of historical change observed in Indo-European languages. Since polysemy is typically the intermediate step in semantic change, the same regularities observable in polysemy can be extended to an analysis of semantic change. (shrink)

Lockean approaches to property take it that persons can unilaterally acquire private ownership over hitherto unowned resources. Such natural law accounts of property rights are often thought to be of limited use when dealing with the complexities of natural resource use outside of the paradigm of private ownership of land for agricultural or residential development. The tragedy of the commons has been shown to be anything but an inevitability, and yet Lockeanism seems to demand that even the most robust common (...) property arrangements be converted to privatized units. This often motivates a move away from natural law in the moral analysis of property rights. I argue however that it is not the deontological nature of Lockean principles that are at fault, but rather the manner of their application. Lockean theory often exhibits a bias in favour of private property: assuming that only private property can protect one’s interest in autonomy, and therefore asserting that each individual has a power of private acquisition. Starting with a claim against interference however enables us to mould the appropriate property rights to each individual’s particular interest in autonomy. This sometimes leads to private ownership, but often leads to various forms of commons. (shrink)

This essay focuses on conceptual engineers who aim to improve other people's patterns of inference and attention by shaping their concepts. Such conceptual engineers sometimes engage in a form of epistemic paternalism that I call paternalistic cognitive engineering: instead of explicitly persuading, informing and educating others, the engineers non-consultatively rely on assumptions about the target agents’ cognitive systems to improve their belief forming. The target agents could reasonably regard such benevolent exercises of control as violating their sovereignty over their own (...) belief formation. This is a pro tanto reason against such engineering. In addition to the relevant projects of conceptual engineering, paternalistic cognitive engineering plausibly includes certain kinds of nudging and evidence suppression. I distinguish the sovereignty-based concern from other ethical worries about conceptual engineering and discuss how one might justify the relevant conceptual engineering projects despite the sovereignty-based reason against them. (shrink)

Hillel Steiner argues that a necessary and sufficient condition for the compossibility of a set of rights is that those rights be extensionally differentiable. However, given that two or more actions can extensionally overlap without thereby being mutually unperformable, if such actions are specified in the relevant rights, then those rights will not be incompossible, notwithstanding their extensional overlap. The set of compossible sets of rights then is greater than the subset of extensionally differentiable rights, and extensional differentiability is a (...) sufficient but unnecessary condition of compossibility. (shrink)

Like Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking, an extraordinarily moving and engaging look at loss and death. Eve Joseph is an award-winning poet who worked for twenty years as a palliative care counselor in a hospice. When she was a young girl, she lost a much older brother, and her experience as a grown woman helping others face death, dying, and grief opens the path for her to recollect and understand his loss in a way she could not as (...) a child. In the Slender Margin is an insider's look at an experience that awaits us all, and that is at once deeply fascinating, frightening, and in modern society shunned. The book is an intimate invitation to consider death and our response to it without fear or morbidity, but rather with wonder and a curious mind. Writing with a poet's precise language and in short meditative chapters leavened with insight, warmth, and occasional humor, Joseph cites her hospice experience as well as the writings of others across generations--from the realms of mythology, psychology, science, religion, history, and literature--to illuminate the many facets of dying and death. Offering examples from cultural traditions, practices, and beliefs from around the world, her book is at once an exploration of the unknowable and a very humane journey through the land of grief. (shrink)

This book gives an account of a full spectrum of property rights and their relationship to individual liberty. It shows that a purely deontological approach to justice can deal with the most complex questions regarding the property system. Moreover, the author considers the economic, ecological, and technological complexities of our real-world property systems. The result is a more conceptually sound account of natural rights and the property system they demand. If we think that liberty should be at the centre of (...) justice, what does that mean for the property system? Economists and lawyers widely agree that a property system must be composed of many different types of property: the kind of private ownership one has over one's person and immediate possessions, as well as the kinds of common ownership we each have in our local streets, as well as many more. However, theories of property and justice have not given anything approaching an adequate account of the relationship between liberty and any other form of property other than private ownership. It is often thought that a basic commitment to liberty cannot really tell us how to arrange the major complexities of the property system, which diverge from simple private ownership. Property and Justice demonstrates how philosophical rigour coupled with interdisciplinary engagement enables us to think clearly about how to deal with real-world problems. It will be of interest to political philosophers, political theorists, and legal theorists working on property rights and justice. (shrink)

This article focuses on the theological journeying of women ordinands in the Church of England, who have had to negotiate their belonging in the ‘pathway’ to Priesthood in ordination training. Attention is given to the extent to which the personhood of women is enabled to truly flourish in a theological education system that is dominated by men and predominantly patriarchal and Western theologising. It suggests that a gendered politics of belonging has been used and maintained through the socio-religious construct of (...) ‘shame’ in order to maintain the boundaries of belonging within the formation process, and therefore calls for an en-gendered ‘pathway to the priesthood’. This is exemplified in a re-reading of the bleeding woman who dares to challenge the hegemonies of patriarchy and purity by touching the cloak of Christ in Luke 8:40-48. This research is part of an ongoing project with Common Awards at Durham University that explores barriers to belonging in theological education for those in training for ordination. It has therefore received ethical approval for interviews and participant observations. (shrink)

I will clarify when and how a tension arises between epistemic environmentalism (a new focus on assessing and improving the epistemic environment) and respect for epistemic autonomy (allowing, empowering, and requiring people to each govern their own beliefs). Using the example of participatory conceptual engineering (improving the linguistic environment through rational discussion with broad participation), I will also identify an option for avoiding the tension—namely, participatory environmentalism. This means a new focus on how people can each contribute to improving the (...) shared epistemic environment through rational deliberation and thereby govern their own beliefs that are shaped by that environment. (shrink)

We readily claim that great moral catastrophes such as the Holocaust involve evil in some way, although it' not clear what this amounts to in a secular context. This paper seeks to provide a secular account of what evil is. It examines what is intuitively the most plausible account, namely that the evil act involves the production of great suffering (or other disvalue), and argues that such outcomes are neither necessary nor sufficient for an act to be evil. Only an (...) appeal to distinctive patterns of motivation, so it is argued, will allow us to accommodate our intuitionsabout which acts are evil, and hence will provide an adequate account of the nature of evil. (shrink)

I will defend explication, in a Carnapian sense, as a strategy for revisionary ontologists and radical sceptics. The idea is that these revisionary philosophers should explicitly commit to using expressions like “S knows that p” and “Fs exist” differently from how these expressions are used in everyday contexts. I will first motivate this commitment for these revisionary philosophers. Then, I will address the main worries that arise for this strategy: the unintelligibility worry and the topic shift worry. I will focus (...) on the latter worry and provide a solution that makes use of a distinction between practically and theoretically oriented beliefs. On my view, the revisionary philosophers who admit to departing from the everyday language can still criticize everyday knowledge and existence claims, by arguing that while the language embedded in these claims is suitable for beliefs-1, it is not suitable for beliefs-2. (shrink)

Most large cities of the world's most affluent countries are increasingly unaffordable in ways that raise serious normative questions. The price of purchasing and renting housing is relatively high due to political constraints on supply. These constraints do not protect the normative interests of residents of these cities, and generate a system in which development that would be mutually beneficial is prohibited. I argue that rights over commonly used urban space have the same liberty-based justification as traditional private property rights. (...) And that assigning rights over the disposition of common space to those most local to it, to use, develop, or transfer as they collectively wish, would overcome the problem. It would do so by enabling an expansion of housing supply where it is most needed, but only through a procedure that ensures it will benefit local residents, by their own lights. (shrink)

Many libertarians ground their theory of justice in a non-aggression principle. The NAP is often the basis for the libertarian condemnation of state action – that it is necessarily aggressive and therefore unjust. This approach is often criticised insofar as it defines aggression, in part, as the violation of legitimate property rights, and is therefore parasitical upon a prior – and unjustified – theory of property. While it is true that libertarians who defend the NAP sometimes fail to give a (...) satisfactory account of its relationship to libertarian property rights, such an account is in fact available. A commitment to property rights and to non-aggression can both be grounded in a commitment to non-interference. Such a principle, then, brings together the NAP and the theory of property it is parasitical upon, thus saving the unity and austerity of the overall approach. (shrink)

Digital spaces are saturated with metaphor: we have pages, sites, mice, and windows. Yet, in the world of digital textuality, these metaphors no longer function as we might expect. Martin Paul Eve calls attention to the digital-textual metaphors that condition our experience of digital space, and traces their history as they interact with physical cultures. Eve posits that digital-textual metaphors move through three life phases. Initially they are descriptive. Then they encounter a moment of fracture or rupture. Finally, they go (...) on to have a prescriptive life of their own that conditions future possibilities for our text environments - even when the metaphors have become untethered from their original intent. Why is "whitespace" white? Was the digital page always a foregone conclusion? Over a series of theses, Eve addresses these and other questions in order to understand the moments when digital-textual metaphors break and to show us how it is that our textual softwares become locked into paradigms that no longer make sense. Contributing to book history, literary studies, new media studies, and material textual studies, Theses on the Metaphors of Digital-Textual History provides generative insights into the metaphors that define our digital worlds. (shrink)

The Buddhist field of knowledge is now so vast that few can master all of it, and the study and application of its principles must be a matter of choice. One may choose the magnificent moral philosophy of Theravada, the oldest school, or the Zen training of Japan; or special themes such as the doctrine of No-self, the Mahayana emphasis on compassion or the universal law of Karma and Rebirth. But the intense self-discipline needed for true spiritual experience calls for (...) specialization of subject and technique. In this reissue, first published in 1974, Christmas Humphreys takes us on a personal journey through Buddhism, offering insights into the many different paths, doctrines and approaches to Buddhism. This collection of twenty essays ranges from history to doctrine, and from the rise of Buddhism in the West through to the finer points of its everyday practice. It is a truly valuable piece of Western Buddhist literature and its reissue will be welcomed be scholars of Buddhism and interested laypeople alike. (shrink)

The scope of libertarian law is normally limited to the application of the non-aggression principle (NAP), nothing more and nothing less. However, judging when the NAP has been violated requires not only a conception of praxeological notions such as aggression, but also interpretive understanding of what synthetic events count as the relevant praxeological types. Interpretive understanding—or verstehen—can be extremely heterogeneous between agents. The particular verständnis taken by a judge has considerable moral and political implications. Since selecting a verständnis is pre-requisite (...) to applying the NAP, the NAP itself cannot tell us which one we ought morally to choose. Therefore the application of the NAP calls on moral and political considerations outside of the NAP itself. Since some of these are more consistent with an endorsement of the NAP than others, libertarianism is not a “thin” commitment to the NAP alone, but a “thick” commitment to the NAP and other supporting moral and political considerations. (shrink)

"These essays advance a reinterpretation of pivotal categories such as self-knowing, moral agency, and altruism.

The study of the notion of ideology shows that this corpus lends itself to a wide variety of different definitions. A certain opposition runs all the way through this set of definitions. Ideology would appear to be torn between a conception that emphasises its distortion and dissimulation dimensions and another conception which views as a set of social representations. After rapidly presenting the main characteristics of these two polar extremes, Paul Ricoeur's suggestion that these two conceptions can be united is (...) discussed and illustrated by the concept of the `spirit of capitalism', as defined in the book by Boltanski and Chiapello (1999). It is shown that this constitutes an ideology which is in fact an attempt to encompass both these conceptions. It is also shown that the concept of `trial' as proposed in that book helps greatly to understand how this reconciliation is actually possible. (shrink)

This case study of the feminist drag troupe the Disposable Boy Toys examines the relationship between drag and gender identity. Drawing on multiple methods, the author explores the range of gender identities that emerged through participation in DBT. Members saw DBT as the central catalyst for their own identity shifts. The author suggests that these identity transformations occurred through four collective mechanisms: imaginative possibility, information and resources, opportunities for enactment, and social support. The author finds that DBT served as an (...) identity incubator in which participants were able and encouraged to interrogate, play with, and sometimes adopt new gender identities. The author concludes that context is critical in understanding the meaning and importance of drag. Performing gender in this politicized, feminist context shaped the gender identities of the troupe's members in fundamental and varied ways, suggesting that oppositional communities can be an important venue for identity work. (shrink)

Debates regarding clinical ethicists’ scope of practice are not novel and will continue to evolve. Rapid changes in healthcare delivery, outcomes, and expectations have necessitated flexibility in clinical ethicists’ roles whereby hospital-based clinical ethicists are expected to be woven into the institutional fabric in a way that did not exist in more traditional relationships. In this article we discuss three emerging roles: the ethicist embedded in the interdisciplinary team, the ethicist with an expanded educational mandate, and the ethicist as a (...) therapeutic presence in the patient care space. Such expanded capacities offer more robust, positive contributions to institutional culture, stakeholders’ relationships, and patient-centered care. (shrink)

In this paper I criticize a growing movement within public policy circles that self-identifies as neoliberal. The issue I take up here is the sense in which the neoliberal label signals a turn away from libertarian political philosophy. The are many import ant figures in this movement, but my focus here will be on Will Wilkinson of the Niskanen Center, not least because he has most prolifically written against libertarian political philosophy. Neoliberals oppose the idea that the rights that libertarianism (...) claims people have are useful guides for making the world a freer place because they forestall too much governmental/democratic political action that they purport to be necessary for increasing freedom. Wilkinson mistakenly takes libertarianism to be a set of ideal public policies for achieving a perfectly free society. If it were, he would be right to turn away from it. But placing rights to freedom at the center of their theory of justice does not commit libertarians to an all-or-nothing approach to political change. Consequences and strategy matter – particularly in a non-ideal world – without abandoning the idea that each individual has a right to freedom. In mistaking libertarian moral claims as a set of policy prescriptions, Wilkinson complains that idealistic policy prescriptions not only fail to take account of how those who disagree will respond to such policies if implemented, but also thereby undermines the justice of those policies in the first instance. Wilkinson proposes that change in the direction of freedom must go through the proper channels of actually-existing democratic legitimacy. It as this stage that Wilkinson’s project comes into direct conflict with libertarianism. Whilst libertarianism is not committed to any particular method of creating a free society under non-ideal conditions, and therefore does not rule out democratic political activism as one among many means of doing that, it cannot be committed to the permanence of democratic political authority, and this is what Wilkinson’s neoliberalism demands above all else. It turns out that Foucault’s characterization of neoliberalism long ago is still accurate to Wilkinson’s own view: that neoliberalism is not about creating a society of free individuals, it is about designing the state apparatus in ways that are inspired by the workings of free society – it is about legitimizing the chains, not breaking them. Neoliberalism is not a pragmatic alternative to libertarianism, but rather a gross misapplication of it. (shrink)

Charts the development of feminist philosophy as a recognized contributor to intellectual debate, beginning with its origins outside the philosophical establishment in activism, cultural criticism, and social engagement. The fresh approaches of black feminists, lesbian philosophers, American Indian feminists, and ecological feminists are brought into the dialogue. In addition, Cole surveys feminist criticism of the traditional philosophical problems of metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics. She concludes that neither feminism nor philosophy thrives when viewed as the "property" of specialists or in-groups, but (...) that feminist philosophy is a powerful, vital, and inclusive conversation about the concerns most basic to human beings. Suggestions for further readings at the end of each chapter assist students to explore subjects of interest in more depth. (shrink)

Sustaining hope in patients is an important element of health care, allowing improvement in patient welfare and quality of life. However in the palliative care context, with patients who are terminally ill, it might seem that in order to maintain hope the palliative care practitioner would sometimes have to deceive the patient about the full nature or prospects of their condition by providing a ‘false hope’. This possibility creates an ethical tension in palliative practice, where the beneficent desire to improve (...) patient welfare through sustaining hope appears to be in conflict with an autonomy-based requirement not to deceive patients about their condition. In order to resolve this ethical tension, we provide an analysis of the concept of hope and argue that there is at least one conception – the ‘absolute’ conception of hope – which when properly understood allows practitioners to foster hope in terminally-ill patients while avoiding any need to deceive them about their condition. Practitioners therefore do not need to shy away from using the language of hope in the palliative setting, as on this understanding of hope it can be used in a way that both promotes patient welfare and respects patient autonomy. (shrink)