An edited version of a talk between Urban and Toynbee on Radio Free Europe. The book concerns the nature of history as well as discussing Marxism and Christianity, the third world, and the effects of technology.

George Ciccariello-Maher’sWe Created Chávezis the most important book available in English proposing an anti-capitalist framework for understanding the Bolivarian process in contemporary Venezuela, as well as its historical backdrop dating back to 1958. The book contains within it a laudable critique of Eurocentrism and a masterful combination of oral history, ethnography, and theoretical sophistication. It reveals with unusual clarity and insight the multiplicity of popular movements that allowed for Hugo Chávez’s eventual ascension to presidential office in the late 1990s.We (...) Created Chávezhas set a new scholarly bar for social histories of the Bolivarian process and demands serious engagement by Marxists. As a first attempt at such engagement, this paper reveals some critical theoretical and sociological flaws in the text and other areas of analytical imprecision. Divided into theoretical and historical parts, it unpacks some of the strengths and weaknesses by moving from the abstract to the concrete. The intervention begins with concepts – the mutually determining dialectic between Chávez and social movements; ‘the people’; and ‘dual power’. From here, it grounds these concepts, and Ciccariello-Maher’s use of them, in various themes and movements across specific historical periods of Venezuelan political development – the rural guerrillas of the 1960s, the urban guerrillas of the 1970s, the new urban socio-political formations of the 1980s, Afro-Indigenous struggles in the Bolivarian process, and formal and informal working-class transformations since the onset of neoliberalism and its present contestation in the Venezuelan context. (shrink)

"Lucas' book competently brings Whitehead's philosophy into dialogue with "analytic" philosophy. This is a topic of great originality and considerable potential importance for the field of philosophy.

The Modern Synthesis (MS) gene-centered population model of evolution is currently being challenged by the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis (ESS) organism-centered developmental model of evolution. The predictions of the EES are here examined with respect to the arguments of Edward Drinker Cope (1840–1897) for an organism-centered evolutionary process in which organisms both shape and are shaped by their environments such that the activities of the organisms themselves play a role in their own evolution.

In 1878 evolutionary theoretician Edward D. Cope published an eight-page paper filled with prescient ideas that clearly anticipated theoretical evolutionary topics that are actively being debated some 145 years later. An examination of these ideas and their modern counterparts is the primary objective of this essay. A proposal is also made to provide an answer to Cope’s Puzzle concerning the sequences of events involved in the evolution of adaptive animal structures. This article revisits Cope’s “The Relation of Animal Motion to (...) Animal Evolution” (published in _The American Naturalist_, volume 12, number 1, January 1878, pp. 40–48) for _Biological Theory_’s “Classics in Biological Theory” collection; Cope’s original paper is available as supplementary material in the online version of this article. (shrink)

Abstract This article evaluates the ?drive toward greater autonomy? in lethally-armed unmanned systems. Following a summary of the main criticisms and challenges to lethal autonomy, both engineering and ethical, raised by opponents of this effort, the article turns toward solutions or responses that defense industries and military end users might seek to incorporate in design, testing and manufacturing to address these concerns. The way forward encompasses a two-fold testing procedure for reliability incorporating empirical, quantitative benchmarks of performance in compliance with (...) formalized and programmable rules of engagement, and a conception of ?due care? in product liability. This would be designed in analogy with procedures currently followed by well-intentioned governments and militaries with their own (human) military personnel, both to ensure against failure, and to accept responsibility and compensate victims of inadvertent and unintended accidents. The procedure is designed specifically to address objections first posed by Robert Sparrow (2007) and Noel Sharkey (2007), and echoed in P.W. Singer's critically acclaimed Wired for War (2009), that lethal autonomous systems cannot be meaningfully held accountable for commission of war crimes, and thus the development, manufacture, and deployment of such systems would constitute a violation of international law. (shrink)

The third edition covers topics of recent interest in the twenty-first century, such as Heroic Medicine, Gender Identity, Wealth Inequality, LGBTQ Issues, and more. This encyclopedic work includes more than 1,000 essays organized by broad categories related to ethical issues.

This text prepares undergraduate mathematics students to meet two challenges in the study of mathematics, namely, to read mathematics independently and to understand and write proofs. The book begins by teaching how to read mathematics actively, constructing examples, extreme cases, and non-examples to aid in understanding an unfamiliar theorem or definition (a technique famililar to any mathematician, but rarely taught); it provides practice by indicating explicitly where work with pencil and paper must interrupt reading. The book then turns to proofs, (...) showing in detail how to discover the structure of a potential proof from the form of the theorem (especially the conclusion). It shows the logical structure behind proof forms (especially quantifier arguments), and analyzes, thoroughly, the often sketchy coding of these forms in proofs as they are ordinarily written. The common introductroy material (such as sets and functions) is used for the numerous exercises, and the book concludes with a set of "Laboratories" on these topics in which the student can practice the skills learned in the earlier chapters. Intended for use as a supplementary text in courses on introductory real analysis, advanced calculus, abstract algebra, or topology, the book may also be used as the main text for a "transitions" course bridging the gab between calculus and higher mathematics. (shrink)

Modern religions are confronted by three crises: the scientific evolution, the historical revolution, and the pluralistic revolution. The development of each of these diverse revolutions in Western intellectual history has posed serious challenges to traditional conceptions of religious authority. This paper seeks to briefly elucidate the nature of each of these revolutions and their significance for religious traditions. While the specific challenges posed are separate, the revolutions share common traits. Additionally, it is not enough for a religious tradition to deal (...) with only one of the crises; to proceed into the next stage of religious reflection, it must deal with them all. (shrink)

The so-called person?situation debate in psychology, which pits internal, personality-based explanations of behavior against external, environment or situation-based explanations seems headed for a resolution that will somehow include elements of both perspectives. These two alternative views of human behavior have also been applied to that subset of human behavior thought of as leadership, and in this domain a rapprochement also seems well underway. In the domain of ethical leadership, however, especially as applied to military misconduct, public discussion of such events (...) is dominated by strictly situation-based explanations, while institutional developments within the military are showing signs of integration, paralleling developments in the broader academic domain. The public discussion of such events thus lags behind the approach to ethical conduct in war taken by the military, which increasingly integrates personal and situational factors in the moral and ethical development of soldiers and leaders. Potential consequences of overreliance on situationist approaches to military ethics are discussed. (shrink)

This article, an introduction to a special issue of the Journal of Military Ethics devoted to emerging military technologies, elaborates the present status of certain predictions about the future of warfare and combat made by postmodern essayist, Umberto Eco, during the First Gulf War in 1991. The development of military robotics, innovations in nanotechnology, prospects for the biological, psychological, and neurological ?enhancement? of combatants themselves, combined with the increasing use of nonlethal weapons and the advent of cyber warfare, have operationalized (...) the diffuse, decentralized, ?neoconnectionist? vision of warfare in the post-Clausewitzian, postmodern world that Eco first prophesied. On the one hand, such technologies threaten to make war ever more ubiquitous as the path of least resistance, rather than the option of last resort, for the resolution of political conflict. On the other hand, these same technologies offer prospects for lessening the indiscriminate destructive power of war, and enhance prospects for the evolution from state-centered conventional war, to discriminate law enforcement undertaken by international coalitions of peacekeeping forces. (shrink)

Richard Gelwick has made an important contribution by exploring Lesslie Newbigin’s appropriation of Michael Polanyi’s epistemology. When certain aspects of Newbigin’s epistemological project are understood more clearly and fully, many of Gelwick’s criticisms and concerns are answered. His brief challenges regarding Newbigin’s theological responses to pluralism, seen against the work of Charles McCoy, signal another important area for consideration. This initial work holds great promise for future dialogue between Polanyi scholars and emerging circles of Newbigin scholarship.

The Routledge Handbook of Military Ethics is a comprehensive reference work that addresses concerns held in common by the military services of many nations. It attempts to discern both moral dilemmas and clusters of moral principles held in common by all practitioners of this profession, regardless of nation or culture. Comprising essays by contributors drawn from the four service branches as well as civilian academics specializing in this field, this handbook discusses the relationship of ethics in the military setting to (...) applied and professional ethics generally. Leading scholars and senior military practitioners from countries including the US, UK, France, China, Australia and Japan, discuss various national cultural views of the moral dimensions of military service. With reference to the responsibilities of professional orientation and education, as well as the challenges posed by recent technological developments, this handbook examines the difficulties underpinning the fundamental framework of military service. This book will be of much interest to students of military studies, war theory, ethics philosophy, sociology, war and conflict studies, and security studies. (shrink)

The inherently subjective nature of consciousness severely limits our ability to make progress on the problem of consciousness. The inability to acquire objective, publicly available data on the phenomenal aspect of consciousness makes evaluating alternative theories very difficult, if not impossible. However, the anomalous nature of subjective states with respect to our conventional theories of the physical world suggests the possibility of considering other anomalous data around consciousness that happen to be objective. For such purposes, I propose that we examine (...) the psi data gathered under laboratory conditions, which generally receive little attention. I wish to consider whether we have theories or frameworks of consciousness that attempt to account for subjective qualia but also fit the psi data. I argue that Russellian monism can be combined with an argument regarding quantum holism to arrive at a version of cosmopsychism that fits very well with the psi data. While I do not argue that such a framework exhausts the theoretical possibilities, I do suggest we can move forward with a framework that has attractive theoretical features and is also consistent with objective data currently on the table. (shrink)

There is a notion, cataleptic in its effects, that discussion in ethics and values must ultimately be blocked by the “naturalistic fallacy.” We can go so far in analyzing the categories of “good,” “right,” “ought,” “valuable,” and the like, but never so far as to embark from the field of logic or general philosophy and enter the alien provinces of science—at least with a visa. To think to reduce moral problems to those of psychology or biology or to those of (...) “culture,” is The Fallacy, insensitivity to which brands one as a positivist, a dupe of “scientism,” or at least a sympathetic fellow-traveller. Though the vocabulary of The Fallacy is not old—G. E. Moore and his earnest commentators will date it—the idea is almost as antique as philosophy itself; indeed, it is one of the prime devices whereby philosophy has managed to rationalize its subject-matter as something more than an historical accident. (shrink)

Whatever else one might say concerning the legality, morality, and prudence of his actions, Edward Snowden, the former U.S. National Security Agency contractor, is right about the notion of publicity and informed consent, which together constitute the hallmark of democratic public policy. In order to be morally justifiable, any strategy or policy involving the body politic must be one to which it would voluntarily assent when fully informed about it. This, in essence, was Snowden's argument for leaking, in June 2013, (...) the documents that revealed the massive NSA surveillance program: So long as there's broad support amongst a people, it can be argued there's a level of legitimacy even to the most invasive and morally wrong program, as it was an informed and willing decision.... However, programs that are implemented in secret, out of public oversight, lack that legitimacy, and that's a problem. It also represents a dangerous normalization of “governing in the dark,” where decisions with enormous public impact occur without any public input. (shrink)