The concept of God's acting in the world has been seen to be problematic in light of the claims of scientific knowledge that the regularity of a law like universe rules out divine action. There are resources in both scientific knowledge and religion that can render meaningful and credible divine action. The new physics, chaos theory, cognitive psychology, and the concept of top‐down causation are used to understand how God acts in the world. God's action is not an intervention, but (...) is understood on the model of how the mind influences the brain in a downward causative manner. Suggestions for imagining God's actions are discussed. (shrink)

Pierre Trémaux’s 1865 ideas on speciation have been unjustly derided following his acceptance by Marx and rejection by Engels, and almost nobody has read his ideas in a charitable light. Here we offer an interpretation based on translating the term sol as “habitat”, in order to show that Trémaux proposed a theory of allopatric speciation before Wagner and a punctuated equilibrium theory before Gould and Eldredge, and translate the relevant discussion from the French. We believe he may have influenced Darwin’s (...) revision to the third edition of the Origin on rates of evolution, and suggest that Gould’s dismissal of Trémaux is motivated by concern that others might think punctuated equilibrium theory was tainted by a connection with Trémaux. (shrink)

There are three distinct questions associated with Simpson’s paradox. Why or in what sense is Simpson’s paradox a paradox? What is the proper analysis of the paradox? How one should proceed when confronted with a typical case of the paradox? We propose a “formal” answer to the first two questions which, among other things, includes deductive proofs for important theorems regarding Simpson’s paradox. Our account contrasts sharply with Pearl’s causal account of the first two questions. We argue that the “how (...) to proceed question?” does not have a unique response, and that it depends on the context of the problem. We evaluate an objection to our account by comparing ours with Blyth’s account of the paradox. Our research on the paradox suggests that the “how to proceed question” needs to be divorced from what makes Simpson’s paradox “paradoxical.”. (shrink)

The Farmers Market Nutrition Program (FMNP) is a federal-state partnership designed to provide fresh, locally grown produce to low-income participants at nutritional risk and expand consumer awareness and use of local produce sold at farmers markets. This paper describes the results of a collaboration initiative based on the typology of a “comprehensive, multisectorial collaboration” to support the FMNP. We report the outcomes of the partnerships that developed over three years, including increased outreach to FMNP participants and strategies to decrease barriers (...) to participation. Those partnerships that reached higher degrees of coordination or collaboration are now addressing market accessibility and market quality in new ways. Those partnerships that exhibited the highest degree of collaboration are contributing to community capacity building beyond FMNP issues per se and to larger issues affecting the agriculture community and the food security of residents. (shrink)

This chapter examines: (1) the Black Notebooks in the context of Heidegger's political engagement on behalf of the National Socialist regime and his ambivalence toward some but not all of its political beliefs and tactics; (2) his limited "critique" of vulgar National Socialism and its biologically based racism for the sake of his own ethnocentric vision of the historical uniqueness of the German people and Germany's central role in Europe as a contested site situated between West and East, technological modernity (...) and the Asiatic. Heidegger did not break with radical right-wing Germanist thought, as some scholars have argued. He at most placed National Socialism within his narrative of the history of being, metaphysics, and technology, and thereby relativized it without addressing either its uniqueness or its totalitarian structures and practices. Heidegger formulated his own metaphysical and ontological version of Antisemitism during the National Socialist period. This vision was deeply connected with his understanding of the "history of being" and was intensified during and immediately after the Second World War. Heidegger could perceive no difference between the Shoah and the Allied bombing, defeat, and occupation of Germany. Heidegger's post-war philosophy (of home, history and technology) is deeply shaped by, and remained complicit with, his thinking during this period. (shrink)

The majority of traditional students enrolled at most colleges and universities are a part of what has been termed the Millennial Generation, also known as Generation Y, which typically describes the group of individuals born in most of the 1980s and 1990s. This cohort’s life has been shaped by corporate scandals, economic instability, and worldwide tragedies. Concurrently, business ethics has become a popular topic in the news within the last 2 decades due to the increase in the number of high-profile (...) business scandals. Unfortunately, this trend has also been accompanied by an increased number of reported incidents of academic dishonesty at many major universities. Two underresearched factors that may be related to academic dishonesty and cheating behavior are religiosity and spirituality. This article attempts to shed more light on the relationship between religious beliefs and unethical behavior, with a focus on millennial college students. It is posited that religiosity and spirituality influence an individual’s attitudes, views, decisions, and ultimately behaviors. The results of this study indicate that religiosity but not spirituality is a predictor of students’ attitudes toward cheating and cheating behavior. (shrink)

NATURES AND FUTURES FOR POLITICAL THEORY John S. Nelson What are the problematics, histories, forms, aims, conditions, methods, and topics proper to political theory? Plainly, these change from one context to another; and yet they may ...

Wheatland intends in this work to demythologize the "Frankfurt school" and answer a lacuna by providing a detailed social history of its American exile and reception. He undertakes the first task by distinguishing the "Horkheimer circle" from later portrayals of the continuity and homogeneity of their thought, the mystique of theorizing in the "splendid isolation" of alienated exile, and their significance for the radical politics of the 1960s. Although it is doubtful that many philosophers and theorists believe these myths, and (...) the book can be unsatisfying due to its overly generalizing and partial treatment of philosophical positions and arguments, it is helpful to understanding the Frankfurt exiles' social contexts and the impact of their connections with colleagues, critics, and interpreters in American academic, Jewish, and leftist circles.Part 1 portrays the complicated efforts to re-establish the Institute for Social Research in New York and Columbia University's interest in Horkheimer and his associates. Since they offered expertise in and a model for interdisciplinary empirical research integrating sociology, psychology, and theory, they were a solution to the decline of Columbia's sociology program, which was interested in expanding empirical social research in a situation of intense competition for funding. While fears of their Marxist connections persisted, the exiles' ever. (shrink)

Hegel remarked in his discussion of the nothing in the Science of Logic that: “It is well known that in oriental systems, and essentially in Buddhism, nothing, or the void, is the absolute principle.” Schopenhauer commented in a discussion of the joy of death in The World as Will and Representation: “The existence which we know he willingly gives up: what he gets instead of it is in our eyes nothing, because our existence is, with reference to that, nothing. The (...) Buddhist faith calls it Nirvana, i.e., extinction.” It is striking how nineteenth-century German philosophical discourses (from Hegel and Schopenhauer to Mainländer, von Hartmann, and Nietzsche) concerning negativity, nihility, and nothingness explicitly refer to Buddhism, which was initially conceived by Christian missionaries as a “cult of nothingness” and became entangled with European debates concerning pessimism (the Pessimismusstreit) and nihilism. In this article, I reconsider how the interpretation of negativity and nothingness in Schopenhauer and nineteenth-century German thought informed the reception of Buddhism as a philosophical and religious discourse, and trace the ways in which Buddhist emptiness was reinterpreted in the context of the Western problematic of being and nothingness. (shrink)

Basic course of study of Buddhist logic and dialectrical studies prescribed for Rato Datsang, a monastery at Nyetang in Tibet, China.

Carine Defoort, Mario Wenning, and Kai Marchal offer three ways of engaging with Chinese and Buddhist Philosophy in Early Twentieth-Century German Thought and the philosophical, hermeneutical, and historical issues it attempted to articulate and address.1 This work is historical with a contemporary philosophical intent: to reexamine a tumultuous contested epoch of philosophy’s past in order to reconsider its existing limitations and alternative possibilities. One dimension of this book is the investigation of constellations and entanglements of historical forces and concepts for (...) the sake of articulating critical models and alternatives for the present.2 In the book, I contested the modern self-image of philosophy... (shrink)

Jason M. Wirth's Nietzsche and Other Buddhas is a thought-provoking work that lucidly engages elements of the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche in relation to Buddhist, Kyōto School, and other philosophical sources.This book offers innovative and suggestive strategies for addressing questions of inter- and cross-cultural philosophy in a situation "after comparative philosophy" without an underlying fixed grounding to engage in comparison. Wirth describes in the introduction an interpretive strategy of "co-illuminating confrontation." It does not primarily rely on a comparison between concepts, (...) and does not remain within... (shrink)

This paper explores the possibility that Hobbesian jurisprudence is best understood as a ‘third way’ in legal theory, irreducible to classical natural law or legal positivism. I sketch two potential ‘third theories’ of law -- legal pragmatism and legal dualism -- and argue that, when considered in its broadest sense, Leviathan is best viewed as an example of legal pragmatism. I consider whether this legal pragmatist interpretation can be sustained in the examination of Leviathan’s treatment of civil law, and argue (...) that the pragmatic interpretation can only be successful if we can resolve two textual issues in that chapter. First, while Hobbes argues that law entails the existence of public (sharable) reasons, he does not adequately defend the view that the sovereign is the unique authority over such reasons in all cases, especially as far as they concern known collective emergencies. Second, Hobbes both affirms and denies that a sovereign can fail to do justice, which is paradoxical. Both problems are best resolved by legal pragmatism, though the second problem resists a fully satisfying resolution. The upshot is that, although Leviathan ought to be regarded as an episode of legal pragmatism, there are trade-offs on every reading. (shrink)

Struever argues that White's emphasis on language, use of tropology, and adherence to formalism render his theory ahistorical. However, like White, she fails to define either her terms or her rationale for contrasting tropological with topological rhetoric, fails to take responsibility for our times, and fails to delineate clearly her views on the dynamics of history. What is required is further research and elaboration of White's tropal philosophy. A program for this study includes the clarification of a rhetoric for inquiry, (...) of tropes, and of elective affinity. These concepts should then be applied systematically to the disciplines of social science and to philosophy of history. White's concept of irony must also be isolated, sorted, and examined for its resistance to isolation and sorting. Finally, one must address the principles of politics which underlie these concepts, this text, and ultimately texts in general. (shrink)

This contribution offers a sympathetic historical and intercultural reflection on Stephen Palmquist’s work Kant and Mysticism. It examines the appropriateness of this portrayal of Kant and mysticism in relation to its historical context, suggesting that Kant is committed to an account of rationality, ethical personhood and a ‘critical ethos’ in tension with mysticism; and the inadequacy of Kant’s understanding of mysticism in the context of South and East Asian philosophical and religious discourses, indicating the need for an intercultural turn in (...) the philosophy of religion. (shrink)

Heidegger’s “Evening Conversation: In a Prisoner of War Camp in Russia, between a Younger and an Older Man”, one of three dialogues composed by Heidegger after the defeat of National Socialist Germany published in Country Path Conversations explores the being-historical situation and fate of the German people by turning to the early Daoist text of the Zhuangzi. My article traces how Heidegger interprets fundamental concepts from the Zhuangzi, mediated by way of Richard Wilhelm’s translation Das wahre Buch vom südlichen Blütenland, (...) such as naturalness, letting/releasement, the unnecessary and the useless in the context of his hermeneutical and political situation. I consider to what extent this dialogue, along with his other discussions of the Zhuangzi and intensive engagement with the Daodejing from 1943 to 1950, constitute a “Daoist turn” in Heidegger’s thinking that helped shape his Postwar thought. (shrink)

This paper excavates the practice-oriented background and therapeutic significance of emptiness in the Madhyamaka philosophy attributed to Nāgārjuna and Sengzhao. Buddhist emptiness unravels experiential and linguistic reification through meditation and argumentation. The historical contexts and uses of the word indicate that it is primarily a practical diagnostic and therapeutic concept. Emptiness does not lead to further views or truths but, akin to yet distinct from Ajñāna and Pyrrhonian skepticism, the suspension of assertion. This sense of emptiness as a practice can (...) be traced in the intercultural transmission of Madhyamaka from Nāgārjuna, its paradigmatic philosopher, to Sengzhao 僧肇, its first pivotal indigenous Chinese representative. (shrink)

What follows is an attempt to do some conceptual housekeeping around the notion of secret law as provided by Christopher Kutz (2013). First I consider low-salience (or merely obscure) law, suggesting that it fails to capture the legal and moral facts that are at stake in the case which Kutz used to motivate it. Then I outline a theoretical contrast between mere obscurity and secrecy, in contrast to the 'neutral' account of secrecy provided by Sissela Bok (1989). The upshot of (...) the two sections is that low-salience law is neither secret law nor necessarily problematic, though it closely resembles a kind of law that is both secret and problematic: namely, those legal obscurities that subvert manifest interests related to the informational needs of citizens. The ensuing argument undermines the fiction of constructive presence found in Austin and Blackstone. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Daoism, Practice, and Politics:From Nourishing Life to Ecological PraxisEric S. Nelson (bio)I. Daoism's Multiple ModelsManhua Li, Yumi Suzuki, and Lisa Indraccola have offered evocative insights, questions, and alternatives in their contributions concerning the arguments of Daoism and Environmental Philosophy: Nourishing Life (Nelson 2021). The present brief response and sketch of the book will not address every point in their essays, but I will strive to reply, directly (...) and indirectly, to their primary concerns.First, it should be noted that I take a pluralistic conception of 'Daoisms' as my point of departure. This is necessary since Daoist studies have been hampered by overly ahistorical and one-sided definitions that prioritize one philosophical or religious moment (such as skepticism or mysticism) in historically complex and varied transmissions that encompass a multiplicity of texts and perspectives. Due to the fact of the plurality of incompatible kinds of Daoism in Chinese antiquity and in subsequent history, my text considers a range of early Daoist and Daoist-related perspectives in the context of their potential consequences for environmental philosophy, ethics, and politics. Consequently, my approach is primarily philosophical without limiting any text to being exclusively philosophical, religious, or rigidly committed to one perspective, which would be untrue to the sources themselves.Second, examining distinctive tendencies (modifying Graham 1989 and Liu 1994) in the Daodejing 道德經, the Zhuangzi 莊子, and related texts enables us to articulate distinctive and conflicting ecological, ethical, and political paradigms. In place of constructing a mythologizing ideological construction of 'Chinese culture' and Daoism as intrinsically 'Green', a familiar essentializing tendency that has provoked skepticism regarding the very possibility of Daoist environmental philosophy, my book provides a different 'critical Daoist' strategy. This alternative entails that Daoist exemplars can be deployed as therapeutic models in the present, while at [End Page 792] the same time confronting their ideological codifications and uses. Early Daoist sources have roamed on long intercultural journeys. The Daodejing and the Zhuangzi have provided elements for European thinking about civilization, technology, and nature from Martin Buber and Martin Heidegger (Nelson 2017) to Peter Sloterdijk's 'Euro-Taoism' (Sloterdijk 1989) to contemporary progressive Green movements (Joshi 2022) and even ecofascism (Lubarda 2020). Similarly, in the current Chinese context, Green Daoism has both critical and authoritarian ideological functions in visions of 'ecological civilization' (shengtai wenming 生態文明) (Schönfeld and Chen 2019) and fears of a 'green leviathan'. Accordingly, it is not accidental that my anarchistic and participatory democratic interpretation of one key thread, which I call 'ziranist' and clarify below, in early Daoist and Wei-Jin mysterious-learning (xuanxue 玄學) discourses, has led to the most intense discussions and controversies about this book. These include the contributions by Li, Suzuki, and Indraccola that propose questions and alternative possibilities concerning agency and responsiveness, authority and self-determination, freedom and fate, and adaptation and intervention, as well as purposive techniques and anti-purposive uselessness.Third, this hermeneutical strategy points toward the tertiary aspect of our preliminary definition of Daoism. It does not primarily name a philosophical theory or a religious worldview. It concerns shifting, overlapping, and diverging ensembles of discourse and practice. This is not the vague ahistorical idea of 'a way of life' but rather refers to how philosophy is enacted through a specific configuration of—to adopt early Greek expressions—logos as dis-course (e.g., argumentation, hermeneutics, logic, rhetoric), ethos (e.g., comportment, orientation, a way of dwelling), and praxis (practices of the self, with others, and with things and nature). Thus, the Laozi 老子 and Zhuangzi collections can be analyzed textually and conceptually as having multiple threads (drawing on a variety of authors and sources) that form constellations in the received texts with better and worse historical, practical, and conceptual readings. My interpretive strategy in this discussion, which does not exclude other approaches, is that these texts express forms of practical instead of merely speculative philosophy. They are suggestive of an ethos of relational freedom, irreducible to rules and techniques, which dismantles hypostatized experiential and linguistic fixations, including moralistic fixations, in order to freely encounter the myriad things and enact and practice the dao in one's own singular way.'Critical Daoism', therefore, serves as a pluralistic, diagnostic, and practical designation... (shrink)