In his landmark monograph, "The Politics of Jesus", John Howard Yoder challenged mainstream Christian social ethics by arguing that the New Testament account of Jesus's founding of a messianic community entails a normative politics, not only for early Christianity but for the contemporary church. This challenge is further elaborated in several important posthumous publications, especially "Preface to Theology", in which Yoder examines the development of early Christology with attention to its political and ethical implications, and "The Jewish-Christian Schism Revisited", Yoder's (...) proposal for a renewed Jewish-Christian dialogue around the moral meaning of messianism. This article interprets these writings with reference to a range of critical scholarship on and about Yoder, Yoder and Augustine, and Jewish and Christian messianism, paying particular attention to questions of political ethics. (shrink)

Craig A. Condella - Heidegger's Roots: Nietzsche, National Socialism, and the Greeks - Journal of the History of Philosophy 44:4 Journal of the History of Philosophy 44.4 675-676 Muse Search Journals This Journal Contents Reviewed by Craig A. Condella Fordham University Charles Bambach. Heidegger's Roots: Nietzsche, National Socialism, and the Greeks. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 2003. Pp. xxvi + 350. Paper, $24.95. In the last twenty years, Martin Heidegger's encounter with National Socialism has been an ongoing (...) subject of debate. While some scholars believe that Heidegger's politics discredit his overall philosophical project, others argue that we can save Heidegger's philosophy by bracketing out his personal politics, effectively separating the man from the thinker. Splitting the difference between these two.. (shrink)

The European Legacy, Volume 17, Issue 3, Page 402-403, June 2012.

The_ Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy_ is the most ambitious international philosophy project in many years. Edited by Edward Craig and assisted by thirty specialist subject editors, the REP consists of ten volumes of the world's most eminent philosophers writing for the needs of students and teachers of philosophy internationally. The REP is a project on an unparalleled scale: Over 2000 entries ranging from 500 to 15,000 words in length - thematic, biographical and national 10 volumes consisting of over 5 (...) million words of text plus considerable bibliographic material A Chief Editor and thirty specialist Subject Editors from across the world Over 1200 authors from all over the world. The importance of the REP is not to be found just in the sheer size of the project but also in its breadth of subject matter. It covers: The core of most Anglo-American philosophy - the metaphysical, epistemological and logical questions The usual menu of ethics, political philosophy and the history of philosophy The philosophy of other cultures - from Chinese, Arabic and Jewish philosophy to the philosophy of Africa and Latin America The most impressive range of authors have been gathered together on this unique project: William Alston, Roderick Chisolm, Fred Dretske, Joel Feinberg, Sandra Harding, Larry Laudan, Martha Nussbaum, Richard Popkin, Richard Rorty, Alan Ryan, Gyatri Chakravorty Spivak, Stephen Stich, Patrick Suppes and Bernard Williams, to name just a few. Also available online: www.rep.routledge.com. (shrink)

This collection reflects the result of interactive academic work initiated by Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi University Inc., Miami, Florida, during the academic year 2018, and also the scholarly work of academics supporting our University. The authors include international academics from the United States of America, Great Britain, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Switzerland, Austria, Serbia and Macedonia. Table of Contents: About the Authors; Craig Paterson--Contextualism & the History of Philosophy; Darko Bekic--Triangle Concept of Unification-Demilitarization Neutralisation of Korea: An Outline; Orlando Mardner--Economic Dimensions of (...) Armed Groups & Intra-State Terrorism: Preventions Through Geostrategic Changes in the International Laws of Financial Systems; Stephan U. Breu--The Challenge of Educating Refugee Children to Avoid Creating Tomorrow's Extremists; Hatidza Berisa--Historical Context of Military Interventionism; Parvis Hanson--The Future of Globalization: Help or Hurt the World's Poor; Joseph P. Garske--Common Law & Civilian Legal Cultures: Finding A Language of Law for the Global Age; Craig Paterson--The Societas Civilitas, Hate Speech & State Imposed Restrictions; Elmar Kuhn --Education as the Key for a Global Society in Peace & Freedom; Manish Sharma--Global Ecology & Sustainable Development: A Study in Gandhian Perspective; Paul Borrow-Longain--Law of Heraldic Arms; Craig Paterson--William Tyndale's Publication of The New Testament in the English Vernacular; Milka Ristova & Sanja Angelovska--The Contributions of International Law & NonGovernmental Organizations in Facilitating the Peaceful Reunification of the Korean Peninsula; Stephan U. Breu--Blockchains & Cybercurrencies Challenging Anti-Trust & Competition Law; Zoran R. Vitorovic--Preventive Diplomacy as a Key for the Reduction of Asymetric Conflicts; Stephan U. Breu--International Law Under Attack by Geostrategic Tensions Between Leading Nations. (shrink)

There is still very little constitutional control over the decision to use armed force, and very limited domestic implementation of the international principles of jus ad bellum, notwithstanding the increasing overlap between international and domestic legal systems and the spread of constitutional democracy. The relationship between constitutional and international law constraints on the use of armed force has a long history. Aspects of constitutional theory, liberal theories of international law, and transnational process theory of international law compliance, suggest that constitutional (...) design could legitimately be used as a pre-commitment device to lock-in jus ad bellum principles, and thereby enhance compliance with that regime of international law. This paper examines the case of Japan's Constitution to determine the extent to which its war-renouncing provisions incorporated, and are consistent with, international law principles on the use of armed force, and whether the provisions operated to effectively constrain government policy. It concludes that the drafters of the Constitution did incorporate international law principles from jus ad bellum in Art. 9(1), though they also grafted on sui generis prohibitions and rules from jus in bello in Art. 9(2) as well, which complicates the story. The provision was embraced in the ratification process, and became the source of powerful constitutive norms that have helped shape Japan's sense of identity. The paper examines the interpretation of Art. 9, as informed by international law, and concludes that despite deep conflicts over competing narratives and understandings of the provision, the long-standing government interpretation of the provision is consistent with Japan's obligations under the jus ad bellum regime. In looking at the operation of Art. 9, the paper finds that despite the early use of Art. 9 by governments as a pretext behind which it could pursue desired policy objectives, the provision did operate to effectively constrain government policy in times of apparent crisis. During the Gulf War in particular, Art. 9 effectively bound a straining government to the mast, preventing Japan's participation in the war. It did so not only in its operation as a legal norm, effectively enforced by the Cabinet Legislation Bureau, but also as a powerful constitutive and social norm. As such, the experience of Japan with Art. 9 provides support for the argument that it is feasible to incorporate principles of jus ad bellum into national constitutions, so as to effectively constrain government policy with respect to engaging in armed conflict. Broader arguments as to why that might be desirable, or whether it has served Japan well or ill, are left for another day. (shrink)

This work contains newly translated excerpts from Samuel Pufendor's two major works in political and moral thought, Elements of Universal Jurisprudence and The Law of Nature and Nations. The editor and translator have worked to present a readable and comprehensive introduction to Pufendorf's political philosophy. The new English translation far exceeds what is currently available in terms of sophistication and clarity. A substantive introduction is included to acquaint readers with Pufendorf's ideas.

The question of how intellectuals ought to relate to the ideological traditions of the political cultures of modern societies has been a recurrent theme of European social and political thought over the last two centuries. This chapter explores earlier traditions of European thinking, associated with the work of Karl Mannheim, Julien Benda, and Antonio Gramsci, which established the major lines of debate about the relationship of intellectuals to a sense of nationhood and the political traditions of the polities they inhabited. (...) These ideas form the backdrop to the analysis of the drift towards post-national thinking among important groups of intellectual practitioners in the UK towards the end of the twentieth century. Cosmopolitan thinking, the article suggests, has tended to obscure the ideological character of the main lines of political thinking associated with globalization, and ensured that progressive intellectuals tended to abandon the ‘national-popular’ to their counterparts on the political right, with fateful consequences. (shrink)

This work contains newly translated excerpts from Samuel Pufendor's two major works in political and moral thought, Elements of Universal Jurisprudence and The Law of Nature and Nations. The editor and translator have worked to present a readable and comprehensive introduction to Pufendorf's political philosophy. The new English translation far exceeds what is currently available in terms of sophistication and clarity. A substantive introduction is included to acquaint readers with Pufendorf's ideas.

This research involves a review of the submissions to a 2005/06 Australian Government Inquiry into Corporate Social Responsibility. The Inquiry was established to investigate whether corporate social responsibilities and accountabilities should be regulated, or left to be determined by market forces. Our results show that the business community overwhelming favour an anti-regulation approach whereby corporations should be left with the flexibility to determine their social responsibilities and associated accountabilities and ‘enlightened self-interest’ should be retained as the guiding mechanism for social (...) responsibility initiatives. In stark contrast, the submissions from social and environmental organisations and individuals provided counter-arguments in favour of a pro-regulation view. Ultimately Government embraced the ‘free market perspective’ promoted by the business community and decided against the introduction of national legislation pertaining to corporate social responsibilities. (shrink)

This article explains a philosophy of mental health in the light of human dignity and flourishing from the perspective of a Catholic Christian meta-model of the person (meta-model). It conceptualizes healing as the search to attain wholeness of health, flourishing, and holiness through integrated practices at biophysical, emotional, mental, moral, social, and spiritual levels. Healing attains positive change consistent with human nature and flourishing through intra- and interpersonal sources. The paper uses the meta-model as a framework for integration and makes (...) explicit the presuppositions of a philosophical anthropology and ethics that synthesize insights from psychology, philosophy, and theology. It compares the metamodel to contemporary human sciences and ethics, such as that of positive psychology and confirms a value-, virtue-, and vocation-based approach to understand a Catholic philosophy of mental health and bioethics. (shrink)

While citizens often use non-instrumental arguments to support environmental protection, most governmental policies are justified by instrumental arguments. This paper explores some of the reasons. We interviewed senior policy advisors to four European governments active in global climate change negotiations and the UNCED (United Nations Conference on Environment and Development) process. In response to our questions, a majority of these advisors articulated deeply held personal environmental values. They told us that they normally keep these values separate from their professional environmental (...) policy activities. We interpret these findings within the context of the literature on environmental ethics and values. We suggest that environmental policy could be improved if widely held environmental values were articulated, validated, and admitted into the process of policy analysis and deliberation. (shrink)

Adam Ferguson’s twin reputations as the most republican of the thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment and as one of the founding fathers of sociology make him one of the most interesting figures in eighteenth-century political thought. I argue that in his Essay on the History of Civil Society and elsewhere, Ferguson develops a novel understanding of the place of warfare in human social experience. By deploying a proto-sociological account of the naturalness of warfare between nations he proposes a normative criterion (...) for the assessment of civilisation. This argument sets Ferguson apart from contemporaries like Kant who argued for perpetual peace as a criterion of civilisation. (shrink)

There is growing international interest in the choice of socioeconomic indicators for health research. This study used a combination of standard and novel methods to compare three occupation-based measures of social position in terms of their ability to explain variation and measure inequality in self-assessed health. The recently developed National Statistics Socioeconomic Classification (NS-SEC) is compared with its predecessor, the Registrar General64 living in private households in Scotland, logistic regression models are used to compare the classifications' ability to predict self-assessed (...) health. Concentration indices are estimated to compare how well they capture inequality in self-assessed health. The study shows that all three classifications are strongly associated with self-assessed health, though the associations are heavily attenuated by adjustment for one another and for other measures of social position. Despite their differing theoretical bases, the three are closely related. No evidence is found that any of them systematically under- or overstate the extent of inequality in self-assessed health in either men or women, and the extent to which they measure independent dimensions of social inequality is questioned. It is concluded that the availability of the new classifications is unlikely to transform our understanding of the extent or the causes of socioeconomic inequality in health, but provides useful opportunities for sensitivity analysis. (shrink)

Discussion of political and legal citizenship requires attention to social solidarity. Current approaches to citizenship, however, tend to proceed on abstract bases, neglecting this sociological dimension. This is partly because a tacit understanding of what constitutes a `society' has been developed through implicit reliance on the idea of `nation'. Issues of social belonging are addressed more directly in communitarian and multiculturalist discourses. Too often, however, different modes of solidarity and participation are confused. Scale is often neglected. The model of (...) `nation' again prefigures the ways in which membership and difference are constructed. The present paper suggests the value of maintaining a distinction among relational networks, cultural or legal categories, and discursive publics. The first constitute community in a sense quite different from either of the second and third. Categories, however, are increasingly prominent in largescale social life. But the idea of the public is crucial to conceptualizing democratic participation. (shrink)

The conversation seeks to extend and complicate Charles Taylor’s (2004) account of three constitutive formations of modern social imaginaries: market, the public sphere, and the nation-state based on popular sovereignty in two critical respects. First, it seeks to show how these key imaginaries, especially the market imaginary, are not contained and sealed within autonomous spheres. They are portable and they often leak into domains beyond the ones in which they originate. Second, it seeks to identify and explore the new (...) incipient and/or emergent imaginaries vying for recognition and demanding consideration in the constitution (as well as analysis) of contemporary social life, such as the risk-reward entrepreneurial culture. (shrink)

The International Encyclopedia of Communication Theory and Philosophy is the definitive single-source reference work on the subject, with state-of-the-art and in-depth scholarly reflection on key issues from leading international experts. It is available both online and in print. A state-of-the-art and in-depth scholarly reflection on the key issues raised by communication, covering the history, systematics, and practical potential of communication theory Articles by leading experts offer an unprecedented level of accuracy and balance Provides comprehensive, clear entries which are both cross-national (...) and cross-disciplinary in nature The Encyclopedia presents a truly international perspective with authors and positions representing not just Europe and North America, but also Latin America and Asia Published both online and in print Part of The Wiley Blackwell-ICA International Encyclopedias of Communication series, published in conjunction with the International Communication Association. (shrink)

Three of the classic "founding fathers" of sociology (Comte, Marx and Tocqueville) were contemporary observers of the French Revolution of 1848. In addition, another important theoretical tradition was represented in contemporary observations of 1848 by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. The present paper summarizes aspects of the views of these theoretically minded observers, notes some points at which more recent historical research suggests revisions to these classical views, and poses three arguments: (1) The revolution of 1848 exerted a direct shaping influence on classical (...) social theory through lessons (some now subject to revision) learned from observation of the revolutionary struggles. (2) The 1848 revolution influenced classical social theory indirectly by contributing to the submergence of the radical French revolutionary tradition (along with utopian socialism) after the defeat of the June insurrectionaires and Bonaparte's coup. (3) Both writers in the classical tradition and current researchers have failed to thematize adequately a basic transformation in effectiveness of national integration, communication and administration which made 1848 in crucial ways much more akin to 1789 than it was direct evidence for the growth of class struggle and the likelihood of further revolution in advanced capitalist countries. (shrink)

We investigate how state involvement in the ownership of non-listed entrepreneurial firms affects pollution fees levied by national and provincial governments in China. While the national government sets minimum environmental standards, provincial governments can enact requirements that exceed these minimums, and they are largely responsible for enforcing even the national standards, so environmental levies can measure concessions that provinces make to encourage development and employment. Furthermore, state ownership is a good proxy for a firm’s political connections, which can influence the (...) relationship between the firm and the environmental authorities. We find that firms with state ownership pay lower environmental levies, which indicates that concessions are made for political or economic purposes. However, these concessions are conditional on the level of development of the province offering them, with better developed provinces providing fewer concessions. (shrink)

At times of crisis, existing institutional arrangements of societies are thrown into question. Crises that occur in multiple societies simultaneously present rare opportunities for comparative empirical analysis. Social theory can reveal the framing conditions of the responses to crises and the sources of variations between them. This paper compares the immediate responses of the Australian, UK and US governments to the global COVID-19 pandemic, particularly with regard to financing lockdowns, and points out significant differences between the three approaches. Drawing on (...) Polanyi’s method of institutional analysis, we compare the responses of these same national groups to an earlier crisis, the Japanese prisoner of war camps during the Second World War, to show similar patterns of integration recurring eight decades apart. This analysis shows that aspects of moral economies that are not usually apparent can become pronounced during crises, and points to the importance of enduring social imaginaries. (shrink)

This paper investigates a structural void that, especially in the context of poor or developing nations, prevents economic growth from being more inclusive and benefiting wider sections of society. The authors initially examine the imperative for inclusive growth, one encompassing a focus on poverty and development. Utilizing social choice theory, and a capability deprivation perspective, we observe that the poor experience deprivations due to a deficiency in their personal autonomy. This in turn is deeply interwoven with the concept of identity. (...) Legally recognizing the poor as individuals, and providing them with proof of their identity, will empower them and facilitate inclusive growth and poverty alleviation. These conceptual arguments are illustrated with the description of a biometric-linked developmental initiative that is providing proof of identity to 1.2 billion residents of India. By establishing a robust identity management system, the project aims to ensure more inclusive growth and efficiently target welfare programs. The authors further investigate how the establishment of identity rights facilitates financial inclusion, property ownership, and necessity-driven entrepreneurial action. Biometric identification on this scale is, however, fraught with dangers to civil liberties and has other serious ethical consequences. In the last section, issues around privacy and security are debated while highlighting the need for external review and independent monitoring to define the project’s boundaries and usages. (shrink)

Lyons and Whelan provide a useful list of recommendations as to how community engagement on nanotechnology could be improved, which very few people working in community engagement could disagree with. However, as the conclusions of any study are dependent on the data obtained, if more data had been obtained and analysed then different conclusions might have been reached. Addressing the key issues in the paper and providing more data, also allows an opportunity to expand on current issues relating to community (...) engagement on nanotechnology and the challenges it provides for practitioners. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis article examines works by the American-born, Paris-based artist Sheila Hicks and her sense of the universal communicability of thread. Hicks bridges cultures and resists simple identification with any single nationality, media, or art historical paradigm. For these reasons and others, it is timely to examine her work and its relevance for pluralistic, feminist thought. The article situates Hicks in relation to Sarah Ruhl’s 2008 play Eurydice, to Heidegger’s essay “The Origin of the Work of Art,” and to ideas about (...) identity, borders, loss, and language. Hicks’s textiles and soft sculptures fall within a modernist, Bauhaus-inflected framework, but her ongoing experiments with colored lines, weaving, and installation show the way toward a tactile and sensory conception of language. As an artist whose practice revolves around entanglement, she reminds us of the infinite ways in which lineages cross and intersect, and she alerts us to foundational, material commonalities we share in our reliance on threads as clothing and protection. Placing Hicks and Ruhl alongside one another for the first time, the article shows the degree to which two women from different generations challenge overly narrow and too-often patriarchal definitions of what it means to speak, to listen, to grieve, and to remember. Hicks, through her fiber works, and Ruhl, through her reimagining and voicing of Eurydice, invite us to experience language as something porous, precarious, and deeply embodied. Together they demonstrate the value of crossing lines and learning to listen for the unspoken or the unspeakable. (shrink)

We provide a critical assessment of the National Science Foundation's “broader impacts criterion” for peer review, which has met with resistance from the scientific community and been characterized as unlikely to have much positive effect due to poor implementation and adherence to the linear model heuristic for innovation. In our view, the weakness of NSF's approach owes less to these issues than to the misguided assumption that the peer review process can be used to leverage more societal value from research. (...) This idea, although undoubtedly well-meaning, is fundamentally flawed. Retooling or refining the Broader Impacts Criterion does not alter the fact that conventional peer review, based on specialized scientific and technical expertise, is not up to the task of ensuring adequate judgements about social impact. We consider some possible alternative approaches to providing greater social impact in science and include in our assessment past and current efforts at NSF and throughout the federal research establishment that address, in some cases having addressed for decades, the intentions and goals of the Broader Impacts Criterion, albeit using alternate mechanisms. We conclude that institution-building and explicit and targeted policy-making are more useful and democratically legitimate approaches to ensuring broad social impacts. (shrink)

This study examined the emergence of corporate social responsibility (CSR) as a public issue over 25 years using a content analysis of two national news- papers and seven regional, geographically-dispersed newspapers in the U.S. The present study adopted a comprehensive definition encompassing all four CSR dimensions: economic, ethical, legal, and philanthropic. This study examined newspaper editorials, letters to the editor, op-ed columns, news analyses, and guest columns for three aspects: media attention, media prominence, and media valence. Results showed an increase (...) in the number of opinion pieces covering CSR issues over the 25-year period. The prominence of each of the four CSR dimensions varied over time. Each of the four CSR dimensions had its moment of media prominence when it was more important than the other dimensions. The most prevalent valence of the opinion pieces was negative; the volume of negative pieces increased over the 25 years, whereas the number of opinions with positive, neutral, and mixed tones showed little change over time. The study concludes by tracing the implications of the role of the news media for business ethics research. (shrink)

This paper explores the potential for systematic scrutiny of the language of top management to reveal signals of possible deceptive conduct. The language used in letters signed by Ramalinga Raju, Chair of the Indian multi-national company Satyam, are analysed using a multi-method quantitative approach. We explore the language in Raju’s annual report letters from 2002–2003 to 2007–2008; and in his letter of January 7, 2009 in which he confessed to deceptive conduct. We analyse the frequency of personal pronouns, the tone (...) of positivity or negativity, the frequency of words of extreme emotion and aspects of the characteristics of language use indicated by the DICTION 5.0 text analysis master variable, CERTAINTY. The text of Raju’s letters appears to have been influenced by his self-confessed deceptive behaviour. Raju’s word choice changed noticeably in his five annual report letters prior to the collapse of Satyam as the scale and impact of his financial misstatements increased. The methods presented should be considered for adoption by auditors and regulators—as a way of assessing whether signals emerging from language use warrant closer (including audit) scrutiny of a firm’s financial reporting and governance. They should also be considered for use by monitors of entity risk, such as credit rating agencies and financial analysts. (shrink)

_The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere_ represents a rare opportunity to experience a diverse group of preeminent philosophers confronting one pervasive contemporary concern: what role does—or should—religion play in our public lives? Reflecting on her recent work concerning state violence in Israel-Palestine, Judith Butler explores the potential of religious perspectives for renewing cultural and political criticism, while Jürgen Habermas, best known for his seminal conception of the public sphere, thinks through the ambiguous legacy of the concept of "the (...) political" in contemporary theory. Charles Taylor argues for a radical redefinition of secularism, and Cornel West defends civil disobedience and emancipatory theology. Eduardo Mendieta and Jonathan VanAntwerpen detail the immense contribution of these philosophers to contemporary social and political theory, and an afterword by Craig Calhoun places these attempts to reconceive the significance of both religion and the secular in the context of contemporary national and international politics. (shrink)

The United Nations' designation of 1979 as the International Year of the Child marked the first global effort undertaken to heighten awareness of the special needs of children. Activities initiated during this special year were designed to promote purposive and collaborative actions for the benefit of children throughout the world. Michigan State University's celebration of the International Year of the Child was held from Septem ber 1979 through June 1980. A variety of activities focused attention on the multiplicity of factors (...) affecting the welfare of today's children as well as the children of the future. Many people involved with the university were concerned that benefits to children continue beyond the official time allocated to the celebration. The series Child Nurturance is one response to this concern. The first five volumes of Child Nurturance reflect directly the activities held on the Michigan State University campus and consist of original contributions from guest speakers and invited contributors. Subsequent biennial volumes will present original contributions from individuals representing such fields as anthropology, biology, education, human ecology, psychology, philosophy, sociology, and medicine. We hope the material presented in these volumes will promote greater understanding of children and encourage interdisciplinary inquiry into the individual, family, societal and cultural variables which influence their welfare and development. We would. like to express both our thanks and our admiration for who not only typed the camera-ready copy for each of Margaret Burritt the volumes, but also served as general manager of the entire project. (shrink)

National electronic health record initiatives are in progress in many countries around the world but the debate about the ethical issues and how they are to be addressed remains overshadowed by other issues. The discourse to which all others are answerable is a technical discourse, even where matters of privacy and consent are concerned. Yet a focus on technical issues and a failure to think about ethics are cited as factors in the failure of the UK health record system. In (...) this paper, while the prime concern is the Australian Personally Controlled Electronic Health Record (PCEHR), the discussion is relevant to and informed by the international context. The authors draw attention to ethical and conceptual issues that have implications for the success or failure of electronic health records systems. Important ethical issues to consider as Australia moves towards a PCEHR system include: issues of equity that arise in the context of personal control, who benefits and who should pay, what are the legitimate uses of PCEHRs, and how we should implement privacy. The authors identify specific questions that need addressing. (shrink)

"A rich historical pastiche of 17th- and 18th-century philosophy, science, and religion."—G. Y. Craig, New Scientist "This book, by a distinguished Italian historian of philosophy, is a worthy successor to the author's important works on Francis Bacon and on technology and the arts. First published in Italian (in 1979), it now makes available to English readers some subtly wrought arguments about the ways in which geology and anthropology challenged biblical chronology and forced changes in the philosophy of history in (...) the early modern era.... [Rossi] shows that the search for new answers about human origins spanned many disciplines and involved many fascinating intellects—Bacon, Bayle, Buffon, Burnet, Descartes, Hobbes, Holbach, Hooke, Hume, Hutton, Leibniz, de Maillet, Newton, Pufendorf, Spinoza, Toland, and, most especially, Vico, whose works are impressively and freshly reevaluated here."—Nina Gelbart, American Scientist. (shrink)

This article rehearses the critical theory of Craig Calhoun’s book on nationalism and applies his threefold typology of ‘project, discourse, evaluation’ to the peculiar case of modern Philippine nationalism. The Republic of the Philippines is a marine archipelago of over 7100 islands and 85 million people of various ethnic, linguistic and cultural identities. Because of its history of colonizations (Spanish, American, Japanese), the predominance of Christianity, and the lack of a unified or prestigious pre-modern religious, political or economic order, (...) the Philippines is frequently positioned as ‘in but not of Asia’. Because Filipinos are made acutely aware of their peculiar trajectory as a modern nation-state and precarious position within the region, the dominant discourses of ‘the Philippines’ have been too anxious to construct a genealogy of the modern nation-state as telos and to assert some form of ‘Filipino’ identity and spirit. Now that the nationalist moment of contemporary nation-states has passed with the fading of the post-Second World War ‘developmentalist state’ project and its usurpation since the 1980s by ‘the globalization’ project, an opportunity is afforded for a changing of our critical lens from searches for revolutionary projects of founding myths and ends, of romantic nationalisms, or of nostalgic returns to pre-modern idylls (whether ethnic or colonial). Accordingly, this article has three parts. Part One provides a brief synopsis of Calhoun’s arguments about nationalism. Part Two applies these critical insights to the case of Philippine nationalism, especially as it is expressed in the historical and social sciences. Part Three then introduces alternative ways of thinking about the Philippines as sites of cultural hybridity and traffic. (shrink)

I open my eyes and see that the lemon before me is yellow. States like this—states of seeing that $p$ —appear to be visual perceptual states, in some sense. They also appear to be propositional attitudes (and so states with propositional representational contents). It might seem, then, like a view of perceptual experience on which experiences have propositional representational contents—a Propositional View—has to be the correct sort of view for states of seeing that $p$ . And thus we can’t sustain (...) fully general non-Propositional but Representational, or Relational Views of experience. But despite what we might initially be inclined to think when reflecting upon the apparent features of states of seeing that $p$ , a non-propositional view of seeing that $p$ is, I argue, perfectly intelligible. (shrink)

Universities have flourished in the modern era as central public institutions and bases for critical thought. They are currently challenged by a variety of social forces and undergoing a deep transformation in both their internal structure and their relationship to the rest of society. Critical theorists need to assess this both in order to grasp adequately the social conditions of their own work and because the transformation of universities is central to a more general intensification of social inequality, privatization of (...) public institutions, and reorganization of the relation of access to knowledge. This is also a pivotal instance for asking basic questions about the senses in which the university is or may be ‘public’: (1) where does its money come from? (2) who governs? (3) who benefits? and (4) how is knowledge produced and circulated? (shrink)

Open theists deny that God knows future contingents. Most open theists justify this denial by adopting the position that there are no future contingent truths to be known. In this paper we examine some of the arguments put forward for this position in two recent articles in this journal, one by Dale Tuggy and one by Alan Rhoda, Gregory Boyd, and Thomas Belt. The arguments concern time, modality, and the semantics of ‘will’ statements. We explain why we find none of (...) these arguments persuasive. This wide road leads only to destruction. (shrink)

This study examines the presence and roles of female directors of U.S. Fortune 500 firms, focusing on committee assignments and director background. Prior work from almost two decades ago concludes that there is a systematic bias against females in assignment to top board committees. Examining a recent data set with a logistic regression model that controls for director and firm characteristics, director resource-dependence roles and interaction between director gender and director characteristics, we find that female directors are less likely than (...) male directors to sit on executive committees and more likely than male directors to sit on public affairs committees. There is little if any evidence of systematic gender bias in director assignment to other board committees. We find some evidence that boards evaluate resource dependence differently for women than men. (shrink)

John Milbank appropriates John Ruskin as part of his "Augustinian" tradition. Milbank's selective reading, however, omits Ruskin's fixed hierarchies as well as his acknowledgment of conflict in economic life. Neither of these ideas fits the social aesthetics of harmony and difference that Milbank claims is unique to Christian theology. While Milbank's strictly theoretical portrait of theology gains critical force from Ruskin's robust account of social practices and just exchange, Milbank lacks effective historical and institutional responses to the problems in Ruskin's (...) corpus. This deficiency undermines Milbank's dichotomy between theology and secular reason. (shrink)