How are children raised in different cultures? What is the role of children in society? How are families and communities structured around them? Now in its third edition, this deeply engaging book delves into these questions by reviewing and cataloging the findings of over 100 years of anthropological scholarship dealing with childhood and adolescence. It is organized developmentally, moving from infancy through to adolescence and early adulthood, and enriched with anecdotes from ethnography and the daily media, to paint a nuanced (...) and credible picture of childhood in different cultures, past and present. This new edition has been expanded and updated with over 350 new sources, and introduces a number of new topics, including how children learn from the environment, middle childhood, and how culture is 'transmitted' between generations. It remains the essential book to read to understand what it means to be a child in our complex, ever-changing world. (shrink)

Introduction / David F. Wright -- The natural ethic / Oliver O'Donovan -- Using the Bible in ethics / Howard Marshall -- From Christendom to pluralism / John Briggs -- Towards a theology of the state / Haddon Wilmer -- The challenge of Marxism / David Lyon -- Man in society / E. David Cook -- Human rights / John Gladwin -- Epilogue : tasks which await us / John Stott.

I am becoming increasingly disturbed by the lack of under standing of science revealed by politicians, industrialists and the general public. I am also concerned about the widespread mis use of the word "scientific" which is more and more being used in situations where it is quite inappropriate. As a result, in some circumstances gross overestimates are made as to what science can do. In other circumstances the real power of science is foolishly underestimated and the contributions which it can (...) make are squandered. Science is God is an attempt to explain just what is meant by the scientific approach and to define more closoJ. y what the word "scientific" indicates. It is deliberately brief and controversial because I want it to be read. In fact, the material dealt with in each single chapter really deserves a whole book to itself. In the future I hope that I may be able to give to each subject such full treatment. Meanwhile I hope that this book will stimulate discussion about science and will increase understanding of it. DAVID F. (shrink)

If we do not, at some point in our life, face death—thinking hard and straight about it—we turn away from our authenticity. If that facing rejects irrational faith, dogmas, mystification, and personal immortality, is there yet a path free of despair? David Martin argues that participatory pantheism—the experience of the secular and the sacred both as a unity and as a mystery—provides such a path.

This study aimed to explore the role of two models of well-being in the prediction of psychological distress during the COVID-19 pandemic, namely PERMA and mature happiness. According to PERMA, well-being is mainly composed of five elements: positive emotions, engagement, relationships, meaning in life, and achievement. Instead, mature happiness is understood as a positive mental state characterized by inner harmony, calmness, acceptance, contentment, and satisfaction with life. Rooted in existential positive psychology, this harmony-based happiness represents the result of living in (...) balance between positive and negative aspects of one's life. We hypothesized that mature happiness would be a more prominent protective factor during the present pandemic than the PERMA composite. A total of 12,203 participants from 30 countries responded to an online survey including the Depression Anxiety Stress Scale (DASS-21), the PERMA-Profiler, and the Mature Happiness Scale-Revised (MHS-R). Confirmatory factor analyses indicated that PERMA and mature happiness were highly correlated, but nonetheless, they represented two separate factors. After controlling for demographic factors and country-level variables, both PERMA Well-being and MHS-R were negative predictors of psychological distress. Mature happiness was a better predictor of stress, anxiety, and general distress, while PERMA showed a higher prediction of depression. Mature happiness moderated the relation between the perceived noxious effects of the pandemic and all markers of distress (depression, anxiety, stress, and total DASS-21). Instead, PERMA acted as a moderator in the case of depression and stress. These findings indicate that inner harmony, according to the mature happiness theory, is an essential facet of well-being to be taken into consideration. The results of this study can also orient policies aimed to alleviate the negative effects of the pandemic on mental health through the promotion of well-being. (shrink)

Focusing on general texts of moral theology, this study investigates how Roman Catholic medical ethics emerged in North America as a developed and self-conscious discipline. It applies questions that Roman Catholic moralists have been pondering for centuries to the relatively new field of medical ethics.

In Losing Our Virtue: Why the Church Must Recover Its Moral Vision, theologian David Wells argues that the Church is in danger of losing its moral authority to speak to a culture whose moral fabric is torn. Although much of the Church has enjoyed success and growth over the past years, Wells laments a "hollowing out of evangelical conviction, a loss of the biblical word in its authoritative function, and an erosion of character to the point that today, no (...) discernible ethical differences are evident in behavior when those claiming to have been reborn and secularists are compared." The assurance of the Good News of the gospel has been traded for mere good feelings, truth has given way to perception, and morality has slid into personal preference. Losing Our Virtue is about the disintegrating moral culture that is contemporary society and what this disturbing loss means for the church. Wells covers the following in this bold critique: how the theologically emptied spirituality of the church is causing it to lose its moral bearings; an exploration of the wider dynamic at work in contemporary society between license and law; an exposition of the secular notion of salvation as heralded by our most trusted gurus -- advertisers and psychotherapists; a discussion of the contemporary view of the self; how guilt and sin have been replaced by empty psychological shame; an examination of the contradiction between the way we view ourselves in the midst of our own culture and the biblical view of persons as created, moral beings. Can the church still speak effectively to a culture that has become morally unraveled? Wells believes it can. In fact, says Wells, no time in this century has been more opportune for the Christian faith -- if the church can muster the courage to regain its moral weight and become a missionary of truth once more to a foundering world. - Publisher. (shrink)

Pétra: Atlas archéologique et épigraphique, vol. 1: De Bãb as-Siq au Wãdi al-Farasah. By Laïla Nehmé. Paris: Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, 2012. Pp. 266, 51 plts., maps. €50.

Chariton’s novel, Chaereas and Callirhoe, is intensely interested not only in the emotional experience of the protagonists but also in the emotional effect the narrative has on readers. Among the many emotions depicted within the text, one stands out for its architectonic function: jealousy. Jealousy articulates the plot and propels it forward. Jealousy is also represented as a fundamentally “readerly” emotion: scenes of reading focus on the potential of written texts to stir jealous emotions. Similarly, scenes of embedded narration focus (...) on the jealous reactions of narratees. The plot achieves closure when Chaereas learns to manage his jealousy as narratee and narrator. His experience, however, has implications also for Chariton and his readers. The text’s representation of jealousy as a narrative and textual force speaks both to the experience of writing in a culture that prizes the imitation of prestigious models and to the experience of reading a text that self-consciously hybridizes those models. (shrink)

In 1738, Jacques Vaucanson unveiled his masterpiece before the court of Louis XV: a gilded copper duck that ate, drank, quacked, flapped its wings, splashed about, and, most astonishing of all, digested its food and excreted the remains. The imitation of life by technology fascinated Vaucanson's contemporaries. Today our technology is more powerful, but our fascination is tempered with apprehension. Artificial intelligence and genetic engineering, to name just two areas, raise profoundly disturbing ethical issues that undermine our most fundamental beliefs (...) about what it means to be human. In The Vital Machine, David Channell examines the history of our relationship with technology and argues that, while the resolution of these issues may not be imminent, a philosophical framework for dealing with them is already in place. The source of our fears, he suggests, lies in an outmoded distinction between organic life and machines, a distinction rooted in the two world-views that have defined and guided Western civilization: the mechanical and the organic. The mechanical view holds that the universe is basically a machine--we can understand it by breaking it down into its smallest components. Even organisms are machines. The organic view claims that there is something more, some vital, directive force. The whole is more than just the sum of its parts. Even machines are organisms. Channell presents these polar views in a fascinating chronicle of human thought and achievement, ranging over the discoveries of Galileo, Copernicus, Newton, and Einstein, the philosophies of Plato, Descartes, Kant, and Marx, the fields of alchemy, physics, astrology, and biology. We see not only how the two views progressed independently, but also how they influenced each other, not only how they persisted, but also how they changed. Most fascinating of all, we follow the emergence of a third, all-embracing world view as developments in genetics, relativity, quantum mechanics, and computer intelligence force both science and philosophy to come to a more complex understanding of the universe. As a central metaphor for this third view Channell proposes "the vital machine." And in this stimulating work by the same name, he reveals how this new metaphor may provide us with the philosophical understanding we need to address the ethical issues our science has created. (shrink)

Although we find many merits to Grossmann's fearful ape hypothesis, unlike Grossmann, we see heightened fearfulness as an ontogenetic adaptation, signaling helplessness and fostering caregiving during infancy, which subsequently became exapted to promote cooperation. We also argue that, rather than being the “breeding ground” for enhanced infant fearfulness, cooperative care is more likely the evolved product of enhanced fearfulness.

Periodically, we take stock of SubStance and provide a brief statement regarding initiatives and priorities in the journal's interests. Three years ago, we announced that "Exploring hybrid writing with theoretical impact is at the center of our current preoccupations."1 Since that time, the journal has made significant changes. This issue marks our fourth issue of publishing with Johns Hopkins University Press in a transition that recognizes our new publisher as a leader among university presses.Our plan also expressed our intent to (...) move toward publishing digital work that exemplifies theoretical thinking in nonlinear, experimental forms. In 2018, we launched Digital SubStance, a platform for "hybrid work that... (shrink)

In recent literature in the philosophy of mind and language, one finds a variety of examples that raise serious problems for the traditional analysis of belief as a two-term relation between a believer and a proposition. My main purpose in this essay is to provide a critical test case for any theory of the propositional attitudes, and to demonstrate that this case really does present an unsolved puzzle. Chapter I defines the traditional, propositional analysis of belief, and then introduces a (...) distinction, motivated by the intuitions that underlie Kripke's arguments for direct reference, between purely qualitative and individual propositions. Beliefs typically expressed using proper names, indexicals or demonstratives appear to relate the believer to individual propositions with the entity that may be referred to as subject constituent. Chapter II presents the critical test case . In this and Chapters III-VI it is used to show that the latter sorts of beliefs are not analyzable as dyadically relating the believer to individual propositions. The case constitutes a genuine counterexample to the traditional analysis only if it is possible for a believer to believe an individual proposition with a contingent thing other than herself as a constituent; and the believer in the case is in optimum conditions for believing an individual proposition. In Chapters III, IV, and VI, I criticize views prompted by rejection of , and in Chapter V, I criticize Stalnaker's view, which rejects . Chapter VI also considers the non-traditional, triadic analyses of belief proposed by Kaplan and Richard; they fall prey to the main criticisms of Chapter V. In the Postscript, I give a comparative assessment of approaches to resolving the Two Tubes Puzzle, and I place it in historical context by pointing out the puzzle's similarities to the 'problem of sense data' . Correlatively, I indicate the bearing of Methodological Solipsism on future attempts to solve the puzzle. My conclusion is that although the puzzle remains a puzzle, it gives us reason to supplement, rather than completely abandon, the use of propositions in the analysis of thought; and I say what a supplementing solution must do to remain faithful to the intuitions of Chapter I. (shrink)

This article presents an Activity Cycle Theory of mental imagery.

The article argues for a stand-alone ethics course in accounting and details the shortfalls and questionable approach of “teaching ethics across the curriculum”, especially for those preparing for professional careers in accounting. The need for a prerequisite course in the philosophy of ethics and moral reasoning is also addressed. A proposed semester listing of course topics for an accounting ethics course is presented, with supporting reasoning for their inclusion, and a detailed semester course syllabus is provided for consideration.

There has never been any doubt that an important part of Thrasyboulos’ forces in his campaign at Phyle and in the Peiraieus was non-Athenian. Lysias in his funeral oration, 2. 66 ff., gives fulsome praise to the xenoi who fought and died for the return of the democracy. Other honours paid to the living are recorded by Aeschines, 3. 187 f., and in the inscription I.G. II. 10, a decree followed by a list of names grouped by Athenian tribes, some (...) of which are certainly non-Athenian. However, little has been said about who these people were, or why they chose to help the return. (shrink)