Currently more than half of the world’s population lives in cities. This is expected to rise to more than two-thirds by mid-century. Thus, our economic, social, and environmental challenges mostly and increasingly play out in urban settings. How can cities be strengthened to address the growing challenges they face? This special issue addresses the ethical implications of revitalizing urban environments, and the roles that diversity and inclusion, as well as social innovation, play in this process. The five papers herein show (...) that it is not easy to strengthen our cities, but with the right policies, political and corporate leadership, and depth of community grounding in ethical principles, it is possible. In this editorial essay, we summarize the contributions of each of these papers to this important conversation, clarify the questions that remain, and offer directions for future research. (shrink)

A collection of the best feature stories published in the online journal CounterPunch + in 2021, featuring a mix of investigative journalism, political, social and economic commentary and cultural criticism. CounterPunch has been called "America's Best Political Newsletter", largely because of the quality and diversity of its contributing writers, which this year included: Brad Evans and Lee Hall, Andaleeb Adwan and Naomi LaChance, TJ Coles and Eve Ottenberg, Dan Glazebrook and Sudmedha Pal, Anna Buss and Chris Gilbert. The topics (...) range from the fate of the Amazon to mass surveillance, the future of cinema to how COVID exacerbated economic inequality, climate change to the resurgence of fascism in the US, the struggle of Palestinians to the crumbling of the House of Windsor. The anthology is edited by Jeffrey St. Clair and Joshua Frank. (shrink)

The purpose of this entry is to provide a systematic introduction to medieval views about the nature and ontological status of relations. Given the current state of our knowledge of medieval philosophy, especially with regard to relations, it is not possible to discuss all the nuances of even the best known medieval philosophers' views. In what follows, therefore, we shall restrict our aim to identifying and describing (a) the main types of position that were developed during the Middle Ages, and (...) (b) the most important considerations that shaped their development. We shall have occasion along the way, however, to examine in detail certain aspects of the views of important representatives of all the main medieval positions, including Peter Abelard (1079 1142), Gilbert of Poitiers (1085 1154), Albert the Great, (1200 1280), Thomas Aquinas (1225 1274), John Duns Scotus (1265 1308), Henry Harclay (1270 1317), Peter Auriol (1280 1322), and William Ockham (1285 1347). (shrink)

Derek Allen, Richard Boyd, and Alan Gilbert have suggested that Marx’s normative political views should be reconstructed as a sophisticated version of moral consequentialism. This paper investigates whether Marx’s ostensible anti-moralism differs in any interesting way from Mill’s sophisticated utilitarianism plus some Marxist social science. I present an account of the social meaning and implications of moral language and argument, based on Marx’s description of morality as a social practice based on distinctive motives, emotions and sanctions, to explain why (...) Marx would reject moral consequentialism. This account will explain how Marx can consistently reject morality yet retain a normative basis for his social criticism. (shrink)

Margaret Gilbert’s ‘Three Dogmas about Promising’ is a paradigm-shifting contribution to the literature, not only for its account of promissory obligation based on joint commitment, but for its equally important focus on two properties of such obligation, which her account uniquely and elegantly captures: first, that the duty to keep a promise is necessary—the obligation stands regardless of the content or morality of the promise—and, second, that it is directed, with the promisee having unique standing to demand performance. A (...) related point, implied by Gilbert’s argument, is that moral requirements, alone, can never have those properties. Here I challenge that point, arguing that moral requirements, under the right circumstances, can give rise to necessary and directed obligations, after all, and I propose one such moral obligation of which the duty to keep a promise may well be an instance. Nevertheless, I conclude, it may not provide as plausible a basis of promissory obligation as joint commitment. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:A Report from the Front Lines: Conversations on Public Theology. A Festschrift in Honor of Robert Benne, and: Explorations in Christian Theology and Ethics: Essays in Conversation with Paul L. LehmannJeffrey P. GreenmanA Report from the Front Lines: Conversations on Public Theology. A Festschrift in Honor of Robert Benne Edited by Michael Shahan Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2009. 184 pp. $30.00.Explorations in Christian Theology and Ethics: Essays in (...) Conversation with Paul L. Lehmann Edited by Philip G. Ziegler and Michelle J. Bartel Farnham, Surrey, UK: Ashgate, 2009. 206 pp. $99.95.The volumes reviewed here each recognize an important thinker in Christian social ethics in America: Robert Benne, emeritus professor of religion at Roanoke College, a Lutheran social ethicist; and Paul L. Lehmann (1906–94), a Presbyterian who was an influential teacher associated with Princeton Theological Seminary, Harvard University Divinity School, and Union Theological Seminary in New York.The first volume honors Benne’s seventieth birthday. His major writings include The Ethic of Democratic Capitalism: A Moral Reassessment (1981), Ordinary Saints: An Introduction to the Christian Life (1988), The Paradoxical Vision: A Public Theology for the Twenty-First Century (1995), Quality with Soul: How Six Premier Colleges and Universities Keep Faith with Their Religious Traditions (2001), and most recently, Good and Bad Ways to Think about Religion and Politics (2010). Since Benne is known for his traditionalist moral views, some unmistakably conservative voices, including a number of prominent Lutherans and neoconservative political thinkers, are represented in this book. The broad theme is public theology, working from Benne’s definition of public theology as “the engagement of a living religious tradition with its public environment—the economic, political, and cultural spheres of our common life.”The book has three parts. The first section, “The Imperative of a Public Theology,” includes essays by editor Michael Shahan, Carl Braaten, Jean Bethke Elshtain, and Richard John Neuhaus. Shahan’s essay provides a helpful exposition of Benne’s intellectual trajectory. Braaten offers a defense of the historic, bodily resurrection of Jesus as the “crux of Christianity’s case.” Elshtain takes [End Page 206] up C. S. Lewis’s concerns in his Abolition of Man (1944) as she diagnoses the “cultural disorder” reflected in current debates about euthanasia and abortion. Neuhaus’s wistful essay looks back over his efforts in the public square, stating that he and Benne have shared a common concern: “A renewal of Christian confidence in providing a morally informed philosophy for a more just and virtuous society in the tradition of liberal democracy” (47). Taken together, these four chapters sketch the assumed intellectual and cultural landscape that sets the context for the volume as a whole.The second section, “The Lutheran Necessity in Public Theology,” begins with a largely autobiographical essay by James Nuechterlein about his journey in Lutheranism and the value of its theological distinctives, especially the famous simul. Next is Gilbert Meilaender’s account (exploring an insight from Kierkegaard) of the place for a Lutheran “corrective” within the wider normative tradition, then Mark Noll’s chapter that underscores the value of robust Lutheran social thinking against the backdrop of the more revivalist and pietist tendencies of Protestant evangelicalism.The final section, “Contested Issues in Public Theology,” includes chapters by Paul Hinlicky, Ronald Thiemann, Gerald McDermott, Donald Schmeltekopf and Michael Beaty, and Joseph Swanson. The chapters by Hinlicky on Luther’s relation to liberal political theory, and by Thiemann on the idea of the public theologian’s prophetic role as “connected critic,” are the most densely argued material in the book. These two essays will probably be of the most interest for scholars in theological ethics. The chapter by McDermott deals with Lutheran church-related colleges. A coauthored essay by Schmeltekopf and Beaty champions the vocation of Christian university education. Swanson situates Benne’s economic writings within neo-conservative thought.The book takes up some of Benne’s favorite themes and interest areas, but only rarely do the authors engage Benne’s own thought. Virtually nowhere do they prod Benne to become clearer, to strengthen his arguments, or to modify his conclusions. I would have preferred a deeper engagement with Benne’s ideas; in several... (shrink)

This chapter presents the main formalism of the book, which is used in subsequent chapters to describe a variety of concepts in Husserlian phenomenology, and thereby unify them. A dynamical systems approach to Husserl is introduced, and several dynamical laws of Husserlian phenomenology are described. The first is an expectation rule according to which expectations are determined by what a person knows, sees, and does. The second is a learning rule according to which background knowledge is updated in a specific (...) way when experiences fulfill or frustrate prior expectations. In addition to these rules, a “supervenience function” is described, which associates how a thing is seen with a “trail set,” the set ways that thing is expected to look, relative to all possible ways of moving around it. This function further illustrates the explanatory dimension of phenomenology described in Chap. 2, whereby how we immanently experience things is determined by how we expect them to look relative to counterfactual movement patterns. (shrink)

In order to understand ongoing activity, observers segment it into meaningful temporal parts. Segmentation can be based on bottom‐up processing of distinctive sensory characteristics, such as movement features. Segmentation may also be affected by top‐down effects of knowledge structures, including information about actors' intentions. Three experiments investigated the role of movement features and intentions in perceptual event segmentation, using simple animations. In all conditions, movement features significantly predicted where participants segmented. This relationship was stronger when participants identified larger units than (...) when they identified smaller units, and stronger when the animations were generated randomly than when they were generated by goal‐directed human activity. This pattern suggests that bottom‐up processing played an important role in segmentation of these stimuli, but that this was modulated by top‐down influence of knowledge structures. To describe accurately how observers perceive ongoing activity, one must account for the effects of distinctive sensory characteristics, the effects of knowledge structures, and their interactions. (shrink)

The New Imperial Order : the Globalization of the U.S. Empire. It took the U.S. one century to extend their « manifest destiny » from North America to the whole world. In the aftermath of the Cold War, there still seemed to be a red line that the U.S. global empire could not tread easily, represented by the former boundaries of the ex-USSR. After September 11, this red line has been wiped out: U.S. military bases have been established in the (...) heart of the former Soviet Union. The U.S., which acts as the enforcer of capitalist globalization, has widened the gap between its military power and the rest of the world. Thus it can now envisage to establish a quasi-direct colonial rule in Baghdad in contrast with 1991 when it allowed Saddam Hussein to remain in power under embargo and scrutiny for lack of an alternative suitable to its interests. (shrink)

Seule la démarche matérialiste en histoire permet de réfuter radicalement les essentialismes, tel que « l’orientalisme » en dépit de la critique infondée de Marx par Edward Said. L’attitude politique de Marx et Engels envers la religion reste d’actualité. Cependant, la tradition marxiste est déficitaire dans le domaine de la sociologie de la religion. Il faut intégrer d’autres apports, dont le concept durkheimien d’anomie, pour comprendre la résurgence du religieux contemporaine du tournant néolibéral. Tandis que le christianisme des origines se (...) prête facilement à une lecture de gauche, la théologie islamique, et notamment sa version ultraorthodoxe propagée par le royaume saoudien, favorise une lecture intégriste combattante. Il est périlleux pour les marxistes de se placer sur le terrain de l’exégèse en islam au lieu de s’en tenir à la séparation entre politique et religion. (shrink)

It took the U.S. one century to extend their « manifest destiny » from North America to the whole world. In the aftermath of the Cold War, there still seemed to be a red line that the U.S. global empire could not tread easily, represented by the former boundaries of the ex-USSR. After September 11, this red line has been wiped out: U.S. military bases have been established in the heart of the former Soviet Union. The U.S., which acts as (...) the enforcer of capitalist globalization, has widened the gap between its military power and the rest of the world. Thus it can now envisage to establish a quasi-direct colonial rule in Baghdad in contrast with 1991 when it allowed Saddam Hussein to remain in power under embargo and scrutiny for lack of an alternative suitable to its interests. (shrink)

In this article, I propose a business paradigm that allows and enables the integration of environmental ethics into business decisions while creating a competitive advantage through the use of an ethical framework based on classical American pragmatism. Environmental ethics could be useful as an alternative paradigm for business ethics by offering new perspectives and methodologies to grant consideration of the natural environment. An approach based on classical American pragmatism provides a superior framework for businesses by focusing on experimentation and innovation, (...) driving a long-term focus, and providing actionable clarity. Under a pragmatic approach to ethics, the choice for sustainability becomes self-evident for business performance and moral reasons. (shrink)

I show how existing concepts of supervenience relate to two more fundamental ontological relations: determination and dependence. Determination says that the supervenient properties of a thing are a function of its base properties, while dependence says that having a supervenient property implies having a base property. I show that most varieties of supervenience are either determination relations or determination relations conjoined with dependence relations. In the process of unpacking these connections I identify limitations of existing concepts of supervenience and provide (...) ways of overcoming them. What results is a more precise, flexible, and powerful set of tools for relating sets of properties than current concepts of supervenience provide. I apply these tools to a recalcitrant problem in the physicalism literature – the problem of extras. (shrink)

Concepts, not the beliefs employing them, have uses or roles in thought. Most conceptual roles cannot be specified solipsistically, and do not have inner aspects that can be specified solipsistically. (To think otherwise is to confuse function with misfunction.) A theory of truth conditions plays no useful part in any adequate account of conceptual role. Ordinary views about beliefs assign them conceptual structures which figure in explanations of functional relations. Which conceptual structures beliefs have may be relative to an arbitrary (...) choice of "analytical hypothesis" but that does not mean that there is an adequate nonrelative account that dispenses with a system of concepts or language of thought. (shrink)

The stresses of the twenty-first century have exposed the fault lines in Higher Education, both as an instructional space that facilitates student growth and as a social space that shapes our economic, political, and religious institutions. This book uses Paul Ricoeur’s rigorous writings to envision a Just University necessary for the years ahead.