Ever since 1942, when Carl Hempel declared that historical events are explained by subsuming them under laws governing the occurrence of similar events, philosophers have debated the validity of explanations based on "covering laws." In _The Logic of Historical Explanation_, Clayton Roberts provides a key to understanding the role of covering laws in historical explanation. He does so by distinguishing between their use at the macro- and micro- levels, a distinction that no other scholar has made. Roberts (...) contends that the positivists were right to believe that covering laws are indispensable in historical explanations but wrong to think that these laws apply to macro-events. Similarly, the humanists were right to declare that historians do not explain the occurrence of macro-events by subsuming them under covering laws but wrong to deny the role of covering laws in tracing the course of events leading to the macro-event. Roberts resolves this debate by showing that, though useless in explaining macro-events, covering laws are indispensable in connecting the steps in an explanatory narrative. He then sets forth the logic of an explanatory narrative, explores the nature of rational explanation, and distinguishes the logic of historical interpretation from the logic of historical explanation. (shrink)

Curricular and co-curricular civic engagement activities and programs are analyzed in terms of their capacity to contribute to a common set of outcomes associated with nurturing civic-minded graduates: academic knowledge, familiarity with volunteering and nonprofit sector, knowledge of social issues, communication skills, diversity skills, self-efficacy, and intentions to be involved in communities. Different programs that promote civic-mindedness, developmental models, and assessment strategies that can contribute to program enhancement are presented.

The important question is how people process probabilistic information, not whether they process it in accordance with a normative model that we never should have expected them to be capable of following. Experience is not the cure, as widely thought, to problems with utilizing base rate information.

Recent reports of the discovery of a “God module” in the human brain derive from the fact that epileptic seizures in the left temporal lobe are associated with ecstatic feelings sometimes described as an experience of the presence of God. The brain area involved has been described as either (a) the seat of an innate human faculty for experiencing the divine or (b) the seat of religious delusions.In fact, religious experience is extremely various and involves many parts of the brain, (...) including some that are prehuman in their evolutionary history and some that are characteristically human. In the continuing integration of such experiences, spiritual formation takes place. Thus the entire human brain might be described as a “God module.”Such a process is only possible because of the brain's complexity. The human brain is the most complex entity for its size that we know of. As used here, complexity is a specialized term denoting the presence of a web of interlinked and significant connections—the more intricate the web, the more complex the entity. Complex systems develop only in a milieu that provides both lawfulness and freedom, and they tend to be self‐organizing, becoming more complex and more effective as a result of both inward and outward experience. The evidence suggests that both personal growth and spiritual growth are processes of complexification of character, and of the brain itself. This thesis is tested in light of the work of William James and James W. Fowler. (shrink)

The inaugural collection in an exciting new exchange between philosophers and geographers, this volume provides interdisciplinary approaches to the environment as space, place, and idea. Never before have philosophers and geographers approached each other's subjects in such a strong spirit of mutual understanding. The result is a concrete exploration of the human-nature relationship that embraces strong normative approaches to environmental problems.

An important part of our Theory of Mind—the ability to reason about other people's unobservable mental states—is the ability to attribute false beliefs to others. We investigated whether processing these false beliefs, as well as similar but nonmental representations, is reliant on language. Participants watched videos in which a protagonist hides a gift and either takes a photo of it or writes a text about its location before a second person inadvertently moves the present to a different location, thereby rendering (...) the belief and either the photo or text false. At the same time, participants performed either a concurrent verbal interference task (rehearsing strings of digits) or a visual interference task (remembering a visual pattern). Results showed that performance on false belief trials did not decline under verbal interference relative to visual interference. We interpret these findings as further support for the view that language does not form an essential part of the process of reasoning online (“in the moment”) about false beliefs. (shrink)

This article offers a vision for work at the intersection of science and religion over the coming seven years. Because predictions are inherently risky and are more often than not false, the text first offers an assessment of the current state of the science-religion discussion and a quick survey of the last 50 years of work in this field. The implications of the six features of this vision for the future of the field are then presented in some detail. Rather (...) than bemoaning the current diversity of approaches and conclusions as a negative result, I endorse it as a healthy sign—if acknowledged honestly and managed well. (shrink)

In Political Theology on Edge, the discourse of political theology is seen as situated on an edge—that is, on the edge of a world that is grappling with global warming, a brutal form of neoliberal capitalism, protests against racism and police brutality, and the COVID-19 pandemic. This edge is also a form of eschatology that forces us to imagine new ways of being religious and political in our cohabitation of a fragile and shared planet. Each of the essays in this (...) volume attends to how climate change and our ecological crises intersect and interact with more traditional themes of political theology. While the tradition of political theology is often associated with philosophical responses to the work of Carl Schmitt—and the critical attempts to disengage religion from his rightwing politics—the contributors to this volume are informed by Schmitt but not limited to his perspectives. They engage and transform political theology from the standpoint of climate change, the politics of race, and non-Christian political theologies including Islam and Sikhism. Important themes include the Anthropocene, ecology, capitalism, sovereignty, Black Lives Matter, affect theory, continental philosophy, destruction, and suicide. This book features world renowned scholars and emerging voices that together open up the tradition of political theology to new ideas and new ways of thinking. Contributors: Gil Anidjar, Balbinder Singh Bhogal, J. Kameron Carter, William E. Connolly, Kelly Brown Douglas, Seth Gaiters, Lisa Gasson-Gardner, Winfred Goodwin, Lawrence Hillis, Mehmet Karabela, Michael Northcott, Austin Roberts, Noëlle Vahanian, Larry L. Welborn. (shrink)

Parents, providers, policy makers, and the public need to talk about the implications of advances in genomic technologies for state run newborn metabolic screening programs. Technologies, such as highly multiplex testing and whole genome sequencing, are raising old issues with new urgency and are posing new challenges that threaten to overwhelm newborn screening programs.Newborn screening programs in their current form were born in the late 1960s. Robert Guthrie developed a screening test for phenylketonuria that could be performed on blood spots (...) collected on filter cards that Guthrie also developed. States rapidly established newborn screening programs, which were almost always mandatory, in response to advocacy by geneticists and parents. Although the programs initially varied in form and experienced significant pushback from the medical community, by the early 1970s, all states had established programs with centralized laboratories, and the medical community had come on board. (shrink)

Panentheism has often been put forward as a means for bringing theology and science into dialogue, perhaps even resolving some of the major tensions between them. A variety of “faces” of panentheism are distinguished, including conservative, metaphysical, apophatic, and naturalist panentheisms. This series of increasingly radical panentheisms is explored, each one bringing its own core commitments, and each describing very different relationships between religion and science. We consider, for example, the diverse ways that the radical panentheisms construe emergent phenomena in (...) the natural world. In the end, comparing the increasingly radical forms of panentheism yields a new understanding of the state of the religion/science dialogue today. (shrink)

This reader brings together classic and contemporary contributions to debates about social justice. A collection of classic and contemporary contributions to debates about social justice. Includes classic discussions of justice by Locke and Hume. Provides broad coverage of contemporary discussions, including theoretical pieces by John Rawls, Robert Nozick and Ronald Dworkin. Contains papers that apply theories of justice to concrete issues, such as gender and the family, the market, world poverty, cultural rights, and future generations. Philosophically challenging yet accessible to (...) students. (shrink)

Pervasive digitality reveals us as analogue creatures that are unprepared for a world and a logic generated increasingly through automation. Promulgated by capitalism, digitality has created a new form of alienation, one far more powerful and comprehensive than that envisaged by either Marx or Lukács in the analogue-industrial age. Digital alienation-through-automation is the central process in our digital post-modernity. The effects reach increasing registers and spheres of culture, economy and politics. This essay considers the effects within the production of knowledge (...) within higher education. Through a critique of Clayton Christensen’s concept of ‘disruptive technologies’, it develops the argument that knowledge produced in our higher institutions of learning suffer from two forms of ‘knowledge capture’. The first and most comprehensive is knowledge increasingly oriented toward instrumental outcomes, generated in vocationally oriented and market-pressured contexts, and produced by the general-sector institutions; second is knowledge, much of it profound and potentially world-changing—in economics and climate science in the cases discussed here. These are generated in both prestigious general-sector universities, and in the elite Ivy League and Russell Group universities but are unable to gain traction with an ascendant and alien post-Westphalian, post-modern and post-Enlightenment political context—created by a globalising digitality. I argue that unless we recognise our analogue essence, and that this has been alienated by digital automation, then the aporias of digitality, with knowledge production an important element, then our institution of higher learning will continue to produce much valuable knowledge that has diminishing practical (political) effect. (shrink)

Episodic memory is usually regarded in a Conceptualist light, in the sense of its being dependent upon the grasp of concepts directly relevant to the act of episodic recollection itself, such as a concept of past times and of the self as an experiencer. Given this view, its development is typically timed as being in the early school-age years. We present a minimalist, Non-Conceptualist approach in opposition to this view, but one that also exists in clear contrast to the kind (...) of minimalism espoused by Clayton and Dickinson with regard to memory in food-caching birds. While emphasising the nonconceptual elements of episodic memory we also insist on the essentially phenomenological nature of the memory. We propose the third year of life as a plausible onset period. Our view is rooted in Kantian assumptions about the spatiotemporal content of experience and about the synthetic unity of experience—and thus of re-experience. We answer two objections to this position. (shrink)

Can the characters in Black Mirror survive the loss of their bodies? This chapter considers what happens to characters like Greta in White Christmas, Clayton in Black Museum, and Yorkie in San Junipero when artificial models are made of their minds. One possibility is that the original characters persist in cookie form, without their bodies, but retaining the essence of who they originally were. Another possibility is that cookies cannot replicate a person's essence: instead, each time a cookie is (...) created, a new, entirely distinct person comes into being. This chapter explores these and other possibilities, all having to do with personal identity, or the persistence of persons through time. (shrink)

Pan-en-theism is importantly distinguished from pantheism. Whereas pantheism reduces God to the world, panentheists affirm that God is both imminent and transcendent. Where ‘all’ refers to the cosmos, panentheism is the view that all is in God, and God is in all, but God nevertheless transcends the all of the world.Biernacki explains that the collaborative authors of this volume don’t feel compelled to fit any pre-conceived mold. Nor are they trying to imperially supplant all previous conceptions of reality or divinity (...) with a new ‘kind of Hegelian Aufbehen.’ Rather, ‘the panentheisms that the several authors of this volume illustrate propose a host of varied and incompatible possibilities for divinity, where what links them best is the very idea of linking.’ Each chapter deserves its own full-length review, but I can only list them here.Rabbi Bradley Shavit Artson leads off with an exploration of various panentheistic whispers in Jewish scripture and tradition. Artson expresse .. (shrink)

Since the publication of Edmund Gettier's challenge to the traditional epistemological doctrine of knowledge as justified true belief, Roberts and Wood claim that epistemologists lapsed into despondency and are currently open to novel approaches. One such approach is virtue epistemology, which can be divided into virtues as proper functions or epistemic character traits. The authors propose a notion of regulative epistemology, as opposed to a strict analytic epistemology, based on intellectual virtues that function not as rules or even as (...) skills but as habits of the heart. To that end, they divide the task of clarifying and expounding their notion in the book's two parts.In the first part, Roberts and Wood examine various components that constitute their notion of regulative epistemology. The first are the epistemic goods or goals that drive the epistemic process. What is needed, claim Roberts and Wood, is an enriched notion of these goods rather than the restricted notion of justified true belief. Epistemic agents are more than calculating devices in that …. (shrink)

Met lit. opg. Met reg. The author argues that the rupture of post-modernism with the critical culture of modernism, realism and Marxism is in the ligt of the still determining power of many of the aims and concerns of the modernist and realist projects. Also included is a description of the production, distribution and criticism of the visual arts in Britain since the late 1970s and the rise of Thatcherism.

ABSTRACTCommunity-focused journalists increasingly publish their work for global audiences. This project defines a circle of “community privacy”—the understanding that some information is ethically...

This book, with its attention to literature and the visual arts as well as traditional non-fiction sources, provides a distinctive, wide-ranging exploration of utopia and education. Utopia is examined not as a model of social perfection but as an active, ongoing, imaginative educational process the building of better worlds.

As a number of high profile companies have found to their cost, corporate reputations can be significantly affected by firms' management of sustainability issue, including those that are outside their direct control, such as the environmental and social impacts of their supply networks. This paper begins by examining the relationship between corporate social responsibility, reputation, and supply network conditions. It then looks at the effectiveness of one tool for managing supply network sustainability issues, ethical sourcing codes of conduct, by examining (...) how the characteristics of three supply networks branded clothes, DIY wood products and branded confectionary affects the implementation ethical sourcing codes of conduct. It ends by setting out conclusions on why implementation of such codes has been so much more successful in some sectors than others and recommendations on effective approaches to managing sustainability issues in supply networks. (shrink)

"An admirable accomplishment.... Roberts provides valuable insights into the current debate on the nature of historical knowledge in our present 'postmodern' time. Anyone concerned with the philosophy of history will need to reckon with this book."--Allan D. Megill, author of "Prophets of Extremity".

I point out a simple sense in which the standard formulation of Curie’s principle is false when the symmetry transformation it describes is time reversal.

From the ferment of recent debates about the intellectual virtues, Roberts and Wood develop an approach they call 'regulative epistemology', exploring the connection between knowledge and intellectual virtue. In the course of their argument they analyse particular virtues of intellectual life - such as courage, generosity, and humility - in detail.

Resumen: El discurso de la economía ha transitado por una tensión entre pertenecer a una Ciencia Social y presentar rasgos prototípicos de una Ciencia Básica. Ahora bien, evidenciar esta hibridez desafía a los investigadores del lenguaje, sobre todo si estos textos son parte de la formación de un economista. Particularmente, el Informe de Política Monetaria no ha sido estudiado desde el punto de vista lingüístico, por lo que se busca observar, en un corpus de 45 textos, si el género IPOM (...) evidencia dicha tensión discursiva de la disciplina. Para lograr ese objetivo, se ha optado por una metodología basada en dos dimensiones: Contexto de Producción y Organización Retórico-Funcional. Tras el análisis, los hallazgos del corpus IPOM-2013 integradamente muestran que el género IPOM efectivamente evidencia dicha tensión con rasgos más características de la CB como es el uso de recursos matemáticos y, por otro lado, rasgos de la CS, asociados a la modalización del discurso en su macromovida central.: The discourse of economy has gone by a constant tension between belonging to a Social Science and present prototypical features of a Basic Science. However, evidence this hybridity poses a challenge for researchers of language, especially if these texts are part of the training of an economist. In particular, the Monetary Policy Report has not been studied from the linguistic point of view. In this context, this research search to answer the question whether the gender IPOM evidences such discursive tension of the discipline. To achieve this objective, it has opted for a methodology based on 2 dimensions: Production Context and Rhetorical-Functional Organization. After the analysis, the findings Integrally shows that the IPOM genre effectively demonstrates this tension with features more characteristic of the BS such as the use of mathematical resources and, on the other hand, SC traits, mainly associated to the modalization of the discourse in its central macromove. (shrink)

Somatic mutations arising in human skin cancers are heterogeneously distributed across the genome, meaning that certain genomic regions (e.g., heterochromatin or transcription factor binding sites) have much higher mutation densities than others. Regional variations in mutation rates are typically not a consequence of selection, as the vast majority of somatic mutations in skin cancers are passenger mutations that do not promote cell growth or transformation. Instead, variations in DNA repair activity, due to chromatin organization and transcription factor binding, have been (...) proposed to be a primary driver of mutational heterogeneity in melanoma. However, as discussed in this review here, recent studies indicate that chromatin organization and transcription factor binding also significantly modulate the rate at which UV lesions form in DNA. The authors propose that local variations in lesion susceptibility may be an important driver of mutational hotspots in melanoma and other skin cancers, particularly at binding sites for ETS transcription factors. (shrink)

Marx’s Inferno reconstructs the major arguments of Karl Marx’s Capital and inaugurates a completely new reading of a seminal classic. Rather than simply a critique of classical political economy, William Roberts argues that Capital was primarily a careful engagement with the motives and aims of the workers’ movement. Understood in this light, Capital emerges as a profound work of political theory. Placing Marx against the background of nineteenth-century socialism, Roberts shows how Capital was ingeniously modeled on Dante’s Inferno, (...) and how Marx, playing the role of Virgil for the proletariat, introduced partisans of workers’ emancipation to the secret depths of the modern “social Hell.” In this manner, Marx revised republican ideas of freedom in response to the rise of capitalism. Combining research on Marx’s interlocutors, textual scholarship, and forays into recent debates, Roberts traces the continuities linking Marx’s theory of capitalism to the tradition of republican political thought. He immerses the reader in socialist debates about the nature of commerce, the experience of labor, the power of bosses and managers, and the possibilities of political organization. Roberts rescues those debates from the past, and shows how they speak to ever-renewed concerns about political life in today’s world. (shrink)

In 1945, Michael Polanyi achieved, in Full Employment and Free Trade, the integration of Keynesian and monetarist economics that the economics profession did not ahieve until the 1970s. In yet another field, Polanyi saw the heart of important matters long before anyone else.