Once in a blue moon a book comes along capable of effecting a Gestalt Switch and Jeffrey Collin’s The Allegiance of Thomas Hobbes is just such a book. Here we have the duck/rabbit Hobbes, so long seen as an unmitigated Royalist, now exposed as an ardent Cromwellian.

African nations are increasingly focusing on exporting high-value crops. However, a major challenge exists: high rates of food waste within supply chains. The problem is often seen as a technological issue—a lack of proper infrastructure and coordination creates inefficiencies. This research takes a different perspective, focusing on social relations within the supply chain. It uses the concept of “food waste regimes” to understand the underlying structures, relationships, and systems that cause food waste, with a focus on Tanzania’s avocado trade. The (...) goals of the research are to: (1) Identify the factors contributing to food waste within Tanzania’s avocado supply chains, particularly in the context of export-oriented production; (2) Explore how these factors change as production shifts towards exports; (3) Analyse the fairness (equity) of how waste burdens are distributed among those involved. We adopted a “follow the thing” approach, combining interviews and observations across both domestic and export avocado supply chains in Tanzania. The research reveals that interactions between various aspects of the supply chain—practices, physical properties of the product (avocado perishability), and established institutions—influence where food waste occurs and who shoulders the burden of that waste. The research exposes how unequal power dynamics between participants lead to some actors bearing a disproportionate amount of the risk and cost of food waste. By taking a social relations approach, this research highlights that tackling food waste and social inequality are intertwined issues. The paper suggests potential areas for future research and intervention to address these interconnected challenges. (shrink)

Explores contemporary controversies in bioethics from a Hindu perspective. S. Cromwell Crawford breaks new ground in this provocative study of Hindu bioethics in a Western setting. He provides a new moral and philosophical perspective on fascinating and controversial bioethical issues that are routinely in the news: cloning, genetic engineering, the human genome project, reproductive technologies, the end of life, and many more. This Hindu perspective is particularly noteworthy because of India's own indigenous medical system, which is stronger than ever (...) and drawing continued interest from the West. The Hindu bioethics presented in this book are philosophically pluralistic and ethically contextual, giving them that conceptual flexibility which is often missing in Western religions, but which is demanded by the twenty-first century's complex moral problems. Comprehensive in scope and passionate in nature, Crawford's study is an important resource for analyses of practical ethics, bioethics, and health care. (shrink)

This book helps understand Plato’s writings by describing the circumstances in which they were produced. The author begins with an account of Plato’s life and development and a brief analysis of some of the more difficult points arising from the criticism of Plato’s writings. The remainder of the work considers the total setting – political, literary and philosophical – in which Plato’s writings were produced. There are extensive appendices on the Platonic Epistles, Aristotle and the Theory of Ideas, and on (...) the post-Aristotelian tradition. The result is both a lucid account of Plato himself and a comprehensive view of culture in fifth century Greece. (shrink)

This is a breakthrough work expanding the debate of the dilemmas of life and death in contemporary American society by carrying it beyond the insights of Western religious and philosophic thought to include ethical perspectives of the Hindu tradition. The topics covered are the timely ethical issues that concern both Americans and all people of the world — abortion, suicide, euthanasia, and the environment. A lively East-West dialogue probes the roots of each issue in its native setting, and the fruit (...) of this historical approach is a clear-cut analysis of up-to-date cases, giving their current status in terms of ethics, religion, philosophy, medicine, and law. Unlike traditional textbooks that concentrate on a theoretical analysis to the exclusion of practical issues, this book does justice to both theoretical and practical ethics. (shrink)

Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. We are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.

To be human is to be autonomous, yet this is a trait that most of us lack. We are subject to forces external to our being. We are workers; we are citizens; we are needful creatures. Humanity-proper in these times of neoliberal omnipotence is defined differently. The key terms are familiar: personal betterment, personal responsibility, productivity, pleasantness. A forked tongue slithers in our conscience, tells us that these are the traits of the human condition. Through Bataille, this paper argues the (...) substrate of these oft repeated familiar mantras are other. Neoliberal subjects, propelled by need, understand themselves along the axis of the useful choice. The paper turns to myth to understand the interdependence of need and choice, and how this interdependence posits being as always in desire but never in pleasure. Revisiting Don Giovanni, a character central to Acéphalic thought, and the commentary of Søren Kierkegaard, we think in terms of non-abstraction, of pleasurably floating in change, rather than toiling in desire. For it is by grace in the form of chance, that at the very time of transgression, that we – in and for an instant – become human, become as the sacred in the flesh. (shrink)

The collected essays and consensus statements of the second round of the National Evangelical-Catholic Dialogue, and the second book of the series on Evangelicals and Catholics in dialogue. The essays address the Christian ideal of life lived in pursuit of the good that is God, and the witness and imitation of God's action in Christ, as a pathway to fruitful dialogue between Catholics and Evangelicals.

Here are the 18 guidance points contained in the UNAIDS document on Ethical Considerations in HIV Preventive Vaccine Research, reproduced by kind permission of the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS.

The hypothesis of a theoretical unity between On Sophistical Refutations and Prior Analytics presents a major challenge to scholars attempting to unify the criteria of analysis. This paper examines this problem and proposes a middle ground between the perspectives of Woods and Boger to address this crucial question: If a unitary and coherent theory of deduction exists, why does not the technical apparatus of syllogistic modes for analyzing fallacies appear in SE? This paper makes useful contributions to the discussion on (...) the internal unity of Aristotle's logical writings on around categorical syllogistics and the doctrine of sophistical refutations. (shrink)

The concept of mindfulness within the contemporary mindfulness movement was the subject of a recent phenomenological critique. The present article confronts that critique in order to develop a phenomenologically viable interpretation of mindfulness that corresponds with how the word sati is used in the Pāli suttas. By clarifying the distinction between intentional objects and intentional acts, it can be shown that mindfulness was not originally conceived of as an exercise in focusing on a meditation object, but as reflexive self-awareness. Consequently, (...) it is wrong to describe mindfulness as ‘bare attention’. Mindfulness was originally a philosophical enterprise, an attitude that can be cultivated only when one is attending to things while remaining aware of the broader context. Furthermore, an ordinary person (puthujjana) cannot cultivate what the Buddha called ‘right mindfulness’ (sammāsati). This is the province of the noble ones who have acquired the right view and are accomplished in virtue. (shrink)

Volume 25, Issue 2, February 2025, Page 21-22.

Just as some types of philosophical analysis are more useful than others to historians or political scientists, so, I find, are some sorts of historical research more useful to philosophers than are other sorts. Sommerville makes history useful to non-historians by clarifying the large-scale historical background against which his investigative questions are posed, and then separating out crucial figures, ideas, and events from arcana of interest primarily to specialist historians. His interpretations are relatively neutral, striking a welcome balance between mere (...) reporting of events or textual ideas on the one hand, and on the other, accounts so theoretically laden that they prejudge or foreclose promising interpretive possibilities. (shrink)

Thomas Cromwell, chief architect of the English Reformation, served as minister of Henry VIII from 1531 to 1540, the period during which more political and religious reform was accomplished than at any other time in Henry's thirty-seven-year reign. This biography_the first in a generation and the only one now in print_looks at his work and achievements during this period, and includes earlier and more critical assessments that view Cromwell as a disciple of Machiavelli.