Despite nearly universal condemnation, torture remains a tool for interrogation, intimidation, and punishing. Even many who abhor torture are willing to consider its use in extraordinary situations. Both the deontological absolute prohibition of torture and the consequentialist justification of torture are inadequate ethics to address the issue. Dershowitz, Walzer, and Elshtain, among others, have attempted to redress the problem with more finely-tuned approaches, of which Elshtain's rejection of justification in favor of grace and forgiveness appears the most promising. Confronting the (...) practice of torture is also difficult because there is no generally accepted definition of what constitutes torture. Not all coercion is torture, and some coercion is both legal and moral. Torture, in any case, remains a wrongful act. (shrink)

Douglas proposes a new ideal in which values serve an essential function throughout scientific inquiry, but where the role values play is constrained at key points, protecting the integrity and objectivity of science.

What is truth? What role does truth play in the connections between language and the world? What is the relationship between truth and being? Douglas Edwards tackles these questions and develops a distinctive metaphysical worldview. He argues that in some domains language responds to the world, whereas in others language generates the world.

It can seem a truism that to understand a language is to know what its expressions mean.

There has been a significant shift in the way terrorist violence is organized. Advocates of extreme violence no longer organize first in person and through word of mouth and utilize the internet an...

Volume 25, Issue 1, February 2020, Page 92-97.

Worldview Religious Studies brings the study of religion, spirituality, secularism, and other mixed attitudes of life under the overarching scheme of worldview studies. This book introduces and defines worldviews more generally before establishing a framework specific to religious studies. The drive for meaning-making is explored through ritual-symbolic activities, ideas of 'play', and the power of emotions to transform simple ideas into values and beliefs that frame identity and signpost destiny. Identity and its sacralisation are discussed alongside gift/reciprocity theory in their (...) relation to ideas of merit, karma, and salvation in Eastern and Western traditions. This theoretical background is used to introduce a new classification of worldviews - natural, scientific, ancestral, karmic, prophetic-sectarian, mystical, and ideological. Organised thematically by chapter, this book brings together familiar and unfamiliar authors, theories, and sources to challenge students and teachers of Religious Studies, Theology, and Ethics. It introduces worldview religious studies as a framework through which to re-think human endeavours to identify, cope and even transcend life's flaws and perils. (shrink)

In , John Broome defends a very weak consequentialist account of the value of saving lives. This paper challenges the commitments of this kind of account and describes some reasons for saving lives that would appeal to a non-consequentialist.

In her sole philosophical treatise, The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy, Anne Conway (1631-1679) offers a demonstration of the proposition that, in addition to God and creatures, there is a being whose essence is the medium between God’s essence and creatures’ essence. We offer an interpretation of Conway’s demonstration that reveals its dependence on a rational principle ('PME'): if beings with extreme natures are united, then they are united by means of a being whose nature is the (...) medium between the extremes. We also assess the extent to which Conway offers a justification for her metaphysics by demonstrating her claims from principles known by the understanding. Conway’s philosophical demonstrations are suggestive of a rationalist position on which her metaphysics may be proved from a small number of propositions established independent of experience. However, we ultimately argue that Conway’s philosophical methodology is not rationalist in this sense: for Conway is willing to take our daily experience as the evidence for a metaphysical principle, and also to argue for her philosophy on the basis of a consensus among authoritative texts. (shrink)

Nosso artigo visa um estudo sobre os cadernos intitulados como “Manuscritos econômico-filosóficos” de Karl Marx, do ano de 1844, tendo em vista a posição privilegiada que o texto ocupa no desenvolvimento do pensamento do autor. Do mesmo modo, os manuscritos guardam os primeiros estudos teóricos da economia política de um jovem Marx e seu pensamento precoce – anterior àquele de “O capital” –, ao mesmo tempo que também representou o aprimoramento das “armas da crítica” pela “crítica das armas” contra os (...) jovens hegelianos do grupo de Berlim (principalmente Bauer e Stirner) e o pensamento e herança deixada por Hegel. Tais estudos possivelmente também foram importantes para a edificação da amizade que ele também começaria poucos meses após os manuscritos serem “concluídos” – conclusão que só seria realizada com a publicação mas que nunca ocorreu durante a vida de Karl Marx, senão, ocorreria apenas em 1932 (integralmente) com a redescoberta dos mesmos alguns anos antes com o impulso da revolução bolchevique na Rússia. Por fim, buscaremos apontar em que medida as concepções e o pensamento do jovem autor se conservam ou se transformam – parcial ou completamente – nos anos imediatamente posteriores. (shrink)

This study employs the uses and gratification approach to investigate how different forms of Facebook use are linked to bridging social capital and bonding social capital. A survey of 152 college students was conducted to address research questions and to test hypotheses. Factor analysis identified six unique uses and gratifications: (a) information seeking, (b) entertainment, (c) communication, (d) social relations, (e) escape, and (f) Facebook applications. Findings reveal that intensity of Facebook use and the use of Facebook for social relations (...) are positive predictors of bridging social capital, whereas the use of Facebook for escape is negatively linked to bonding social capital. (shrink)

This chapter discusses the developments of Young Hegelianism in Restoration Prussia, with a special focus on Max Stirner’s radical critique of Hegelian thinking. It presents an overview of the history of Hegelianism in the 1830s and 1840s, and addresses the theoretical issues raised by Stirner’s attack in 1844. It examines important aspects of Young Hegelianism, including ideas of a modernized civic humanism and emancipation, and traces the Young Hegelians’ reconfiguration of Hegel’s thought in order to eliminate what they saw as (...) its conservative or insufficiently critical elements. The refurbished republicanism of the Young Hegelians took up the new challenges of the industrial age that was dawning in Germany, with special attention to the social question and the intransigent conflicting interests that typified the emergent economic order. Stirner’s critique is framed by its anti-humanist repudiation of Left Hegelian emancipatory projects. (shrink)

A new view of the extended mind thesis argues that a stark binary opposition between really extending and seeming to extend oversimplifies the issue.

This reader-friendly book examines philosophies and philosophers using an engaging, non-condescending approach that speaks to you at your level.

In this book Douglas Langston traces its intellectual history to account for its neglect while arguing for its still vital importance, if correctly understood.

_Discusses philosophers Mencius and Aristotle as socio-ecological thinkers._ Mencius (385–303/302 BCE) and Aristotle (384–322 BCE) were contemporaries, but are often understood to represent opposite ends of the philosophical spectrum. Mencius is associated with the ecological, emergent, flowing, and connected; Artistotle with the rational, static, abstract, and binary. Douglas Robinson argues that in their conceptions of rhetoric, at least, Mencius and Aristotle are much more similar than different: both are powerfully socio-ecological, espousing and exploring collectivist thinking about the circulation of (...) energy and social value through groups. The agent performing the actions of _pistis_, “persuading-and-being-persuaded,” in Aristotle and _zhi_, “governing-and-being-governed,” in Mencius is, Robinson demonstrates, not so much the rhetor as an individual as it is the whole group. Robinson tracks this collectivistic thinking through a series of comparative considerations using a theory that draws impetus from Arne Naess’s “ecosophical” deep ecology and from work on rhetoric powered by affective ecologies, but with details of the theory drawn equally from Mencius and Aristotle. (shrink)

Key readings by Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Deleuze, Derrida and Irigaray.

This collection brings together well-established scholars to examine the limits of law, a topic that has been of broad interest since the events of 9/11 and the responses of U.S. law and policy to those events. The limiting conditions explored in this volume include marking law’s relationship to acts of terror, states of emergency, gestures of surrender, payments of reparations, offers of amnesty, and invocations of retroactivity. These essays explore how law is challenged, frayed, and constituted out of contact with (...) conditions that lie at the farthest reaches of its empirical and normative force. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Chaos and Clinical TheoryDouglas W. Heinrichs (bio)In considering the specific issues raised by these three very thoughtful commentaries, it is helpful to reflect on the status of a theory or model for a specifically clinical discipline—what is it trying to accomplish and how might it proceed to do so? Kellert (2005) sees my proposal in terms of "borrowed knowledge"—the metaphorical application of a theory established in one field of (...) inquiry to another field—and views my application of chaos theory as a "nonliteral use of knowledge from the natural sciences" (p. 239). He likens it to attempts to explore consequences of relativity theory or quantum mechanics for areas other than those for which they were developed. He notes the rhetorical functions—including appeal to the disciplinary prestige of natural science—of such metaphorical borrowings.Although clearly there are significant metaphorical aspects at work here, there are at least two factors that distinguish this model from, say, the metaphorical application of quantum mechanics to a field other than subatomic physics. First, quantum mechanics purports to say something specific about the behavior of the subatomic world. Its development is wed to that specific content area. On the other hand, nonlinear dynamics, including chaos theory, is a formal mathematical model intending to characterize the behavior of any system of elements that possess certain formal relational properties. It does not start out as field or discipline specific. In fact it is not uniquely tied to the natural sciences at all, beyond the fact that it may be easier to obtain the sort of detailed repeated measures needed to demonstrate chaotic behavior in physical systems. So it is not just a question of whether chaos theory is a useful intuitive device for thinking freshly about clinical psychiatry. Rather, it is the quite literal and nonmetaphorical question as to whether some of the observable aspects of persons that are relevant to their psychiatric care behave chaotically, and if so what are the implications.Now it is quite true that direct, mathematically rigorous demonstrations of chaos in clinically relevant data sets is currently limited. In fact, one hoped for consequence of presenting this model is to encourage just such studies, and I suggest several promising directions for doing so. However, there are good reasons for thinking the presence of such chaotic behavior to be likely, and this relates to the notion of a clinical theory.One of the consequences of what Globus (2005) calls "triumphalist biological psychiatry" (p. 229) is the frequent assumption that the model or paradigm of psychiatry—an applied clinical practice, a techne—is synonymous with the paradigm of neuroscience—a basic science or episteme. This is clearly not so for many reasons, including the fact that the former has to incorporate the comprehensive treatment of discrete individuals in a way that the latter does not. Yet the respective theories are related more than metaphorically. [End Page 243] The paradigms of neuroscience and those of other relevant basic sciences, such as psychology, substantially inform the clinical paradigm and the clinical model must be at least compatible with those of the relevant basic sciences. Thus, it is reasonable to assume that if chaotic processes are demonstrable in the nervous system, for which significant evidence already exists, there is good reason to expect them to be reflected in clinically relevant domains. The clinical paradigm should make room for it and its consequences, rather than thinking within an outmoded neuroscience model that makes no room for the implications of nonlinear dynamics. And when this generates a picture more compatible than the old model with our usual sense of what it is to be human, the odds that we are on to something is further enhanced. Of course until such time that enough clinical research based on this model is completed, considerable speculation—indeed aided by metaphorical devices—is involved in generating a concrete sense of how the model would be applied to specific clinical problems, such as the treatment of depressed persons.One clear task of the clinical paradigm is the methodologic integration of interventions growing out of different informing basic sciences. Because chaotic modeling can be applied across various content domains and... (shrink)

AbstractIntegrity is considered an important corporate value. Yet recent global events have highlighted the challenges firms face at living up to their stated values, especially when extended supply chain partners are involved. The concept of Supply Chain Integrity (SCI) can help firms shift focus beyond internal corporate integrity, toward supply chain integrity. Researchers and managers will benefit from an understanding of the SCI concept toward implementing SCI to better align supply chain partners with stated corporate values. This research fully develops (...) and empirically grounds the firm-level, inter-firm-oriented SCI concept. The thematic analysis of six firms’ archival and website content elaborated empirical descriptions of SCI themes and enabled the development of a process model for SCI, presenting a novel view of the underlying process by which firms can assess, develop, and maintain SCI across their supply chains. We propose the SCI model as an evolutionary process to improve a firm’s supply chain sustainability, rather than a dichotomous end state where firms either “have” integrity or they don’t. The SCI model could be used as a tool to help leaders create necessary change to better align values and supporting statements with culture, while influencing and affecting stakeholders across the supply chain. This is particularly important in today’s world, where business leaders must consider all stakeholders and address important stakeholder-driven issues such as supply chain sustainability, resilience, and security, which are now at the forefront in the ever-changing environment. (shrink)

John Loke is often referred to as the first of a triumvirate of major British Empiricists, and sometimes even as the father of British Empiricism. In many cases the reference is extremely guarded, and at times the word ‘empiricist’ is being used merely as a convenient label for organising university courses, amounting to little more than a synonym for ‘Locke, Berkeley, and Hume, and to some extent Bacon, Hobbes, Reid, and Mill’. Given that ‘empiricist’ is being used in a philosophically (...) interesting way, however, there is some question as to just how guarded its application to Locke should be. (shrink)

Introduction : beyond the "degree zero" of law after modernity -- Autonomous law or redundant law? : the elusive nature of legal theory -- Law as system : the missing multidimensionality of law -- Reconfiguring the legal landscape : the sojourn of legal pluralism -- The injustice of law after modernity -- Law, justice and injustice -- Legal justice I : "maimed justice" and the rule of law -- Legal justice II : reclaiming the rule of law from its "dark (...) side" : critical legal justice -- The enigma of human rights -- Critical legal justice and beyond : cosmopolitanism -- Beyond cosmopolitanism : the murky world of governance and global "justice" -- Conclusion : law and justice after modernity. (shrink)