Taxation and government policy related to it have only episodic appearance in classical Protestant ethical sources. Of the early sixteenth century reformers, Luther gave most attention to the subject, justifying taxation in general as necessary for the just service of government to the public good and calling the princes to spend tax monies for that good rather than their own luxury. Calvin made much the same claims but called more clearly for official church scrutiny of all government than did Luther. (...) Two centuries later John Wesley criticized English tax policy, appealing to standards of economic efficiency and compassion for the poor with little reference overtly to theology. The churches of colonial and post-revolutionary America developed no systematic, theologically rooted rationale for taxation ethics, either; but official Protestant denominational concern for such ethics has grown measurably in the most recent fifteen years. After a survey of these recent national church statements, and on the basis of them and the slender Protestant heritage on this issue, we end by posing four questions which we see as worthy of much serious thinking by contemporary American Protestant ethicists and church bodies. (shrink)

The papers in Richard Vallée's Words and Contents span twenty-one years. The author navigates the discovery and exploration of different expressions and perspectives on language in this volume. Beginning with referring expressions and later addressing context sensitivity, the book examines how specific words contribute to the contents of utterances and the philosophical issues that surround them.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:An American Scholar Recalls Karl Barth’s Golden Years as a Teacher (1958–1964) by Raymond Kemp Anderson, and: The Westminster Handbook to Karl Barth ed. by Richard E. BurnettMatthew R. JantzenAn American Scholar Recalls Karl Barth’s Golden Years as a Teacher (1958–1964) Raymond Kemp Anderson lewiston, ny: edwin mellen press, 2013. 438 pp. $159.95The Westminster Handbook to Karl Barth Edited by Richard E. Burnett louisville, ky: westminster (...) john knox press, 2013. 242 pp. $35.00On April 2, 1966, Karl Barth received a letter from Peter Vogelsanger, informing him that Emil Brunner—the recipient of Barth’s thunderous “Nein!” on the subject of natural theology in 1934—was on his deathbed. Two days later, Barth responded and asked Vogelsanger to tell Brunner that “the time when I thought I should say No to him is long since past, and we all live only by the fact that a great and merciful God speaks his gracious Yes to all of us.” The irenic, compassionate, and affirming tone of this letter is typical of the “mature” Barth, whom Raymond Anderson studied under from 1958 to 1964 as a ThD student at the University of Basel. This period of doctoral study is the subject of Anderson’s interesting and eminently readable new book. Anderson enjoyably weaves together several different genres in his reflections on his experience with Barth, smoothly transitioning back and forth between personal memoir, constructive theological argument, and thoughtful interpretation of Barth’s life and writings.Structurally, the book offers a series of recollections and reflections gathered loosely around common themes rather than a tightly knit argument pursued rigorously from beginning to end. In other words, the work is a series of sketches from the artist’s notebook, as opposed to one intricate and detailed portrait focusing on a single subject. [End Page 207]In the first five chapters of the book, Anderson sketches a picture of the elderly Karl Barth who served as his “doktorvater,” drawing material from his student notes and personal memories of the years he spent with Barth in Basel. While Anderson finds continuity between the earlier and later writings of Barth, he suggests that the older Barth began to increasingly unfold the “fuller, grace-centered and human-shaped positive implications” of the earlier writings (viii). In Anderson’s experience, Barth’s early appeal to “Let God be God!” had in those later years “mellowed to an even deeper appeal to let God be himself, human as well, in the most unexpected ways” (11). This mellowing extended beyond Barth’s writing to his personality and demeanor as a teacher and theologian. The Barth whom Anderson knew was humble, understated, and compassionate, a sympathetic listener and a generous interpreter—in short, an “un-dogmatic” dogmatician (139).In the sixth chapter, Anderson shifts gears and reproduces extensive transcriptions of his own notes from several of Barth’s biweekly English-language colloquia on the topics of natural theology, the Old Testament promise, Paul Tillich, and existentialism. Anderson suggests that these notes are particularly valuable because in them one witnesses Barth explaining the bare essentials of his thinking in clear and simple English terms. This is true for large portions of the transcriptions. However, it must be said that there are also portions of these transcriptions that suffer from the lack of clarity that one might expect to find in student notes of discussions conducted in a language with which Barth was not completely comfortable. Nevertheless, these transcriptions provide previously unpublished primary source material from Barth that is worth examining.From chapter 7 until the end of the book, Anderson takes up the task of “sketching key insights and special teachings from the mature Barth that in the years since Barth’s death have shown themselves to carry special significance for our American college classroom, church school, and pulpit” (205). These include, but are not limited to, Barth’s attitude toward America, his emphasis on the priority of grace, his theology of nature (not his natural theology), and his positions on theories of religion, satisfaction theories of the atonement, election, universalism, and even the possibility of extraterrestrial life. This section also includes... (shrink)

I am often asked how one finds isolated people whose whereabouts or existence is unsure. There is even greater curiosity about how one can join such people in the absence of common customs or spoken language. Moreso about how one makes sense of what one sees under such circumstances. After several years of contact with variously acculturated groups of settled and semi‐settled sea nomads in the Sea of Andaman Moken, Moklen, and Urak Lawoi (and its Lonta subgroup) two out‐of‐the‐blue opportunities (...) unexpectedly occurred to travel with fully nomadic pagan ones, a type no longer thought to exist. The first trip was short, but it prepared me for the long next one. The first was a band of unknown origin, the second an aboriginal Moken‐related group off southern Burma. (shrink)

Patents and free trade make strange bedfellows. For most of their history, patents have been instruments deployed to resist trade with other countries, not to enhance it. Whether one looks at Venetian laws that punished citizens who practiced local crafts outside the city, the Mercantilist uses to which patents were put in Elizabethan England, or the cartels of the 19th and 20th centuries created on a foundation of interlocking patent rights, patents have had a distinctly protectionist function. It is thus (...) ironic that it is intellectual property rights in general, and patents in particular, that have been held up in recent years as the poster child of much that is wrong with globalization and free trade. Nowhere is this more so than in debates concerning international human rights law and patents, in particular the position that patents violate an international right to health. (shrink)

In remote regions of the eastern Andaman, into the 1990s, a remarkable rapport with nature's forces was occurring.1 Most strikingly expressed during adolescence, it emerged spontaneously from a local type of consciousness. Both the capability and the underlying consciousness were conceived within a pervasive milieu of lushly sensual infant nurture.2 So dependable was the pattern of affection, it spawned a tactile language long before onset of speech. Speech, learning and sociality then followed in the eros‐driven paradigm already set. So did (...) a rare rapport with nature's forces.With nothing in the culture to discourage it, eros was not walled‐off as children grew. It remained firmly at the root of consciousness on through teens. To be a child out in those seas was to move spontaneously and digressively out into life pursuing sundry passion pulses. When erotic power escalated during adolescence, rapport with natural forces dramatically increased. Spectacular gambolings with nature began bursting forth—sometimes astonishingly complex rhythmic ones. No clouds of moody adolescent angst discouraged spontaneity; no flattening of affect suppressed adolescent verve; no emotional dissimulation confounded purpose. Adolescence was a time for a blossoming of affect, for melding deeply and dynamically with habitat. It was a time to profoundly dance with nature's forces.Possessing a protean character, love lies more fluidly within the human frame than language. Following its own inner protocols, love seems able to evade the stable kinds of labeling required for logical inquiry. In exotic cultures it is hard to see at all. In the eastern Andaman, its workings were initially invisible to Western eyes. It was necessary to firm up subliminal awarenesses before the workings out of eros could even be detected there. Though difficult to deal with scientifically, love plays such a profound role in the affairs of humankind that it begs experimental types of scrutiny.A fracturing of love into Bacchanalian and Sublime occurred during the early Greek foundations of Western culture. Out of that schism Western ethos grew. The ethos molded the Western type of consciousness. In the eastern Andaman, eros was not cleaved at all. It shaped a type of psyche not countenanced by the West since its prehistory. (shrink)

Efforts by governments, firms, and patients to deliver pioneering drugs for critical health needs face a challenge of diminishing efficiency in developing those medicines. While multi-sectoral collaborations involving firms, researchers, patients, and policymakers are widely recognized as crucial for countering this decline, existing incentives to engage in drug development predominantly target drug manufacturers and thereby do little to stimulate collaborative innovation. In this mini review, we consider the unexplored potential within pharmaceutical regulations to create novel incentives to encourage a diverse (...) set of actors from the public and private spheres to engage in the kind of collaborative knowledge exchange requisite for fostering enhanced innovation in early drug development. (shrink)

The essay focuses on the survival of Pascal’s metaphors concerning the cosmic wasteland. It analyzes step-by-step the ways in which authors such as Immanuel Kant, George Milbrey Gould, Herbert George Wells, Thomas Henry Huxley, Howard Phillips Lovecraft, Vladimír Hoppe, Jacques Monod, and Eugene Thacker appropriated Pascal’s images of despair from the “eternal silence of infinite spaces”, which they have then used to develop their own arguments in favor of defending (or disparaging) the relevance of a human presence in the universe. (...) The focus of the study lies in an analysis of these connections in the work of the Czech philosopher Vladimír Hoppe. (shrink)

Book reviewed in this article: Rockefeller Medicine Men: Medicine and Capitalism in America. By E. Richard Brown.

BackgroundPreprint usage is growing rapidly in the life sciences; however, questions remain on the relative quality of preprints when compared to published articles. An objective dimension of quality that is readily measurable is completeness of reporting, as transparency can improve the reader’s ability to independently interpret data and reproduce findings.MethodsIn this observational study, we initially compared independent samples of articles published in bioRxiv and in PubMed-indexed journals in 2016 using a quality of reporting questionnaire. After that, we performed paired comparisons (...) between preprints from bioRxiv to their own peer-reviewed versions in journals.ResultsPeer-reviewed articles had, on average, higher quality of reporting than preprints, although the difference was small, with absolute differences of 5.0% [95% CI 1.4, 8.6] and 4.7% [95% CI 2.4, 7.0] of reported items in the independent samples and paired sample comparison, respectively. There were larger differences favoring peer-reviewed articles in subjective ratings of how clearly titles and abstracts presented the main findings and how easy it was to locate relevant reporting information. Changes in reporting from preprints to peer-reviewed versions did not correlate with the impact factor of the publication venue or with the time lag from bioRxiv to journal publication.ConclusionsOur results suggest that, on average, publication in a peer-reviewed journal is associated with improvement in quality of reporting. They also show that quality of reporting in preprints in the life sciences is within a similar range as that of peer-reviewed articles, albeit slightly lower on average, supporting the idea that preprints should be considered valid scientific contributions. (shrink)

A-LOGIC is a full-length book (600+ pg). It functions as a system of logic designed to: 1) solve the standard paradoxes and major problems of standard mathematical logic; 2) minimize that logic's anomalies with respect to ordinary language, yet; 3) prove that all theorems in mathematical logic are tautologies. It covers lst order logic the logic of the words "and", "or", "not", "all" and "some". But it also has a non truth functional "if...then" and differs in its definition of validity, (...) its semantics and its theorems. In the book A-logic is contrasted step by step with standard mathematical logic as presented and defended by Quine. All of standard logic's theorems are proven tautologies in A-logic. But some argument-forms called "valid" in standard logic are not valid in A-logic -- notably non-sequiturs like "(P and not-P), therefore Q". In addition A-logic has many tautologies with its non-truthfunctional "if ... then" that standard logic can not derive -- e.g., "Not-(if P&Q then not-P)." A-logic's semantics is based on syntactically defined concepts of logical synonymy and containment of meanings rather than on truth-values and truth-functions. Its "if...then" sentences (called "C-conditionals") are valid if and only if (i) the meaning of the consequent is logically contained in that of the antecedent, and (ii) the antecedent and consequent are jointly consistent. The predicate "valid" holds only of C-conditionals and arguments. No valid C-conditionals are translatable into standard logic though all of them imply tautologies of standard logic. (shrink)

Jonathan A. Oler,1,4 Andrew S. Fox,2,5 Steven E. Shelton,1,4 Bradley T. Christian, 1,3,5 Dhanabalan Murali,3,5 Terrence R. Oakes,5 Richard J. Davidson,1,2,4,5 and Ned H. Kalin1,2,4,5..

Appeals to human nature in normative inquiry have fallen out of favor among contemporary philosophers. There are a variety of reasons frequently cited by those who see appeals to human nature as deeply problematic: (a) that the notion of human nature, which conceives nature as having a teleological direction, is incompatible with evolutionary biology; (b) that the manifest diversity of cultural values and traditions falsify any essentialist claims involving a common nature necessarily shared by all humans; (c) that appeals to (...) human nature have been frequently employed throughout history to justify the oppression of women and other marginalized members of society; (d) that human nature, if seen as a descriptive account of how human beings naturally are, does not tell us anything about how we ought to be; and (e) that human nature, if seen as a normative account of how we ought to be, lacks explanatory power and cannot play any substantive role in moral inquiry. To fully defend the view that human nature has a substantive role to play in ethics, one would have to address at least each of these challenges. (For a response to such challenges, see Van Norden 2007, 341-50.) Such a defense is not the aim of this essay. Instead, I want to focus on the following question: Are there any good reasons to think that an account of human nature is indispensable for moral inquiry, here conceived as the systematic exploration of the nature of and the connections between such significant moral concepts as practical reason, virtue, and wellbeing? (shrink)

Much of the material found herein originally appeared in The concept of matter, edited by E. McMullin, which consisted of rev. papers from a conference held at the University of Notre Dame, Sept. 5-9, 1961. Includes bibliographical references and index.

This work publishes the entirety of Hobbes's MS E.1.A, "Old Catalogue," the 1630s catalogue of the Hardwick/Chatsworth library. The author provides handwriting samples and a full discussion of the problem of identifying Hobbes's handwriting to prove that the "Old Catalogue" is in Hobbes's own handwriting. He goes on to prove that almost all the books in the library were purchased by the Devonshires for Hobbes's own purposes, and that the Catalogue dates to the 1630s.

THERE WAS A TIME, EONS AGO, when philosophy as the love of wisdom could lay claim to all knowledge. Aristotle’s corpus of writings covered all the main areas of inquiry then known, including an original organon on syllogistic logic and scientific method. But this hegemony over knowledge was soon challenged by separatist disciplines forming their own research strategies. As early as the third century B.C.E., following the deaths of Alexander and Aristotle, the ruling Ptolemies created in Alexandria two centers of (...) scientific research, the Library and the Museum, rivaling the Academy and Lyceum of Athens. In those state-supported institutions specialized research by grammarians, mathematicians, astronomers, physicists, biologists, and physiologists replaced the more speculative syntheses of knowledge of the previous Hellenic period. The resident scholars and those affiliated by correspondence or as legatees were the originators of axiomatic geometry and what we now refer to as protoscience: for example, Euclid, Herophilus, Erasistratus, Apollonius, Heraclides, Hipparchus, and Aristarchus. Each of the major founders of modern classical science acknowledged their indebtedness to these extraordinary ancient Greeks who initiated the scientific exploration of the universe. (shrink)

To leave matters in no doubt, we obligingly assert that the Russell class R, i.e. {x : x 6∈ x}, both belongs to itself and also does not belong to itself; in short, we assert R ∈ R & ∼ . To be quite explicit, we assert the contradiction r & ∼ r, where r abbreviates R ∈ R. Thus, in convenient symbols, `δ r & ∼ r, where δ is the group of dialethicians comprising Priest and Routley. Now Goldstein (...) asserts not, or not just, that we should not do what we have naughtily done, but that we cannot; it “is not that people should not assert contradictions, but that they cannot, even though they may purport to do so”. (shrink)

In this paper we integrate the concept of institutional entrepreneurship to the literature on corporate political activity by examining how the attempts of private actors to influence a public policy domain is fundamentally constrained by the prevailing institutional logics in the field. By examining the role of financial actor, i.e, investment bankers in the commercialization process of Finnish water sector, we show how the political strategies of these actors evolved during the process. Moreover, we identify several factors explaining why the (...) financial actors were able to adapt to the institutional logics of local government actors. (shrink)

Address: Department of Philosophy Goldwin Smith Hall Cornell University Ithaca, New York 14853 Telephone: 607-255-6440 E-mail: [email protected]..

This paper is an ethical exegesis of the biblical story of Gibeah, which concludes the Book of Judges (19–21), to show the catastrophic failure of the anti-political politics of the “community of virtue”, i.e., the rejection of power for the sake of moral society, such as proposed by libertarians, neo-liberals, anarchists and utopians. I consider Kant’s statement of the political problem: given humanity’s unsocial sociality, where each person is tempted to act as an exception to universal law, humans need rulers, (...) but how to obtain rulers who are not themselves ruled by power, and become tyrannical, rather than being ruled by justice? The solution proposed by “the community of virtue” would reject power altogether and replace it with society regulated exclusively according to the moral virtue of its members. The Bible’s story of Gibeah shows graphically and conclusively the failure of any such attempt. Instead, as with normative political philosophy, the Bible endorses the rule of a king, i.e., the rule of the state, and a politics whereby power is disciplined to serve justice because it is rooted in Torah, i.e., a fundamental covenant, charter or constitution, aware and vigilant regarding the ambiguities and temptations of sovereignty, and therefore, ideally, always open to critique. As exemplified by biblical prophets, political protest against injustices perpetrated by the powerful against the least—widow, orphan, stranger—is at once religious obligation and true patriotism. (shrink)

Lacan é um psicanalista cujo intenso diálogo com a filosofia tornou-se um dos traços distintivos de seu pensamento, ao mesmo tempo, contudo, em que concorda com a recusa freudiana da filosofia e muitas vezes assume posições marcadamente antifilosóficas. Este artigo propõe-se a discutir essa aparente contradição e sugerir que o uso que Lacan faz de suas referências filosóficas talvez possa ser melhor compreendido no contexto de uma concepção sobre a natureza metafórica da teoria psicanalítica que subjaz à sua reconstrução da (...) psicanálise freudiana.Lacan is a psychoanalyst whose intensive dialogue with philosophy has become a distinctive feature of his thought. At the same time, however, he agrees with Freud's rejection of philosophy and takes often an accentuated antiphilosophical position. This paper sets out to discuss this seeming contradiction and suggests that Lacan's use of philosophical references may perhaps be best understood in the context of a metaphorical conception of psychoanalytic theory which underlies his reconstruction of Freudian psychoanalysis. (shrink)

This paper distinguishes the respective aims of Jaspers's and Heidegger's philosophical enterprises with reference to their radically divergent uses of the key terms. It was always been of the essence of Jasper's concept of philosophy that it « appropriate » tradition and validate its own possibilities in « differentiation » from tradition. Accordingly Heidegger is not concerned, as is Jaspers, over the « gold » of the « perennial philosophy » but, against the background of the « question of Being (...) » , over the « destruction » of Western philosophy as such. Jaspers's philosophy attempts to save philosophy in the 20th century in the face of Heideggers's destruction of the ontologicei heritage. Cet article distingue les buts respectifs de Jaspers et de Heidegger en référence à leurs usages divergents des termes clés. Il est de l'essence de la philosophie selon Jaspers de « s'approprier » la tradition et de mettre en évidence ses propres possibilités en se distinguant d'elle. Heidegger n'est pas concerné comine Jaspers par la philosophia perennis mais par la « question de l'être » , par la destruction de la philosophie occidentale. Jaspers tente de sauver la philosophie du XX e siècle face à la destruction par Heidegger de l'héritage ontologique. (shrink)

Neste trabalho eu pretendo oferecer um breve esboço de uma das fontes do utilitarismo. A teoria do direito natural de Richard Cumberland. Embora o autor se insira na tradição do jus naturae, há elementos suficientes em seu texto que apontam para a preparação de noções importantes ao utilitarismo, noções de raciocínio consequencialista. Sem fazer anacronismos, eu pretenso esboçar aqui o papel assumido por Cumberland na história dessa corrente do pensamento ético.

Les etudes reunies dans ce volume sont consacrees a l'interpretation des theses principales que defend Aristote en plaidant pour l'exercice d'une veritable politique par le citoyen juste. Ce sont des theses d'un enjeu redoutable. Elles impliquent le plus souvent les conceptions que se fait Aristote des vertus morales et intellectuelles composant le portrait de l'homme, non seulement heureux, mais susceptible d'apporter le bonheur a la Cite. Elles engagent aussi a considerer l'unite profonde que forment, chez Aristote, l'ethique et la politique. (...) A cote d'etudes recemment publiees par l'auteur, le receuil contient d'importants inedits qui font le point sur des questions disputees. L'ensemble peut introduire aux differents aspects de la pensee ethico-politique d'Aristote qui font, aujourd'hui encore, son actualite. (shrink)

Dopo una premessa in cui si precisano le finalità dell'articolo e si fa il punto sugli antecedenti della discussione, concentrandosi sulle trattazioni teologiche degli autori del sec. XII, l'A. studia gli sviluppi offerti da Enrico di Gand alla teoria agostiniana delle relazioni applicata alle tre persone della Trinità. La seconda parte dello studio è dedicata alla risposta elaborata da Duns Scoto alla posizione di Enrico: fondandosi su differenti elaborazioni della teoria della relazione , i due autori analizzzano le proprietà delle (...) tre persone della Trinità, da cui risultano concezioni metafisiche pronfondamente distinte. (shrink)

This work explores questions of God and faith in the context of Martin Heidegger's phenomenological ontology, as developed in Being and Time . One problem with traditional philosophical approaches to the question of God is their tendency to regard God's existence as an objective datum, which might be proven or disproven through logical argumentation. Since Kant, such arguments have largely been dismissed as predicated on a priori assumptions whose legitimacy cannot be substantiated. This dismissal has led to a widening divorce (...) between 'faith' and 'reason,' as the rational grounds for faith have come under increasing, and radical, attack. ;Heidegger provides a new reason to question the legitimacy of traditional philosophical approaches to the question of God. His phenomenological ontology reveals that concernful relations lie at the foundation of our apprehension of Being, hence any attempt to 'prove' the existence of God as a purely 'objective' datum must miss the significance of the very phenomenon it seeks to apprehend. Dasein, as Being-in-the-world, is primordially related to and concerned with the world revealed to it. Any attempt to understand the meaning of Being, then, must take its stance from an examination of the concernfulness of Dasein. This, however, affords us a new possibility for approaching the question of God; one which pursues this question, not in terms of metaphysical categories, but in terms of its significance for the concernful human being. ;At the same time that Heidegger's thought allows us this new approach, however, his existential analyses seem to deny any legitimacy to religious faith at all. For Heidegger, the human being is 'Being-towards-death,' i.e., essentially enclosed in finitude, whereas for religion the human being has an essential relation to the infinity of God. Our work, then, has a twofold purpose. We seek, first, to explore the meaning of God and faith as these may be understood in terms provided by Heidegger's phenomenological ontology. We seek, second, to examine the way in which that ontology is itself challenged by a religious conception of human Being. (shrink)

[opening paragraph]: The following comments are from a psychologist, involved in the study of complex human information processing such as problem-solving, in which overt behaviour cannot be isolated from the subject's representation, since it is the prototype of goal-directed activity. In that respect perception, i.e. interpretation of the situation, is intrinsically linked to action, i.e. to changing the situation so as to complete the goal. In that field representation cannot be assimilated to consciousness, and it is very important, in my (...) opinion, to understand what makes a representation become conscious and what is changed in behaviour when an implicit representation becomes explicit and reportable; and to develop a precise methodology for obtaining and analysing verbal reports, which are in those situations the only ways of access to the subjective experience of other people. (shrink)

Richard Barbrook demonstrate that Americans are very good at doing the contrary of what they are supposed to abide by, i.e. capitalist commodification, and engage instead in a digital economy based on exchange, sharing and the free gift labor, idea, and practices. The tone may be ironic, or downwar facetious, but that should not detract from the issue at stake : the cyberage end of the line for a ’cognitive’ capitalism that will prove unable to surmount the « irresoluble (...) contradictions » of its own making. (shrink)