In Amartya Sen’s The Idea of Justice, democracy is necessary for the reconciliation of plural justice claims. Sen’s treatment of democracy is however incomplete and inadequate: democracy is under-specified, there are unrecognized difficulties in any context featuring deep moral disagreement or deep division and a conceptualization of public reason in the singular erodes his pluralism. These faults undermine Sen’s account of justice. Developments in the theory of deliberative democracy can be deployed to remedy these deficiencies. This deployment points to a (...) deliberative system encompassing those affected by collective decisions, with places for non-partisan forums and discursive representatives, conditionally open to multiple forms of communication, and geared to the production of workable agreements under normative and discursive meta-consensus. Democracy does not guarantee justice, but in a plural world it is essential to the pursuit of justice. (shrink)

Ideas about the presence, absence, and growth of democracy in global politics take different forms. After surveying the basic justifications for global democracy, three frames for making sense of the significance of particular developments and proposals are canvassed. “Soup” involves the proliferation of democratic practices, though the consequences of this proliferation for the overall shape of international politics remain open. “Society” stresses the democratization of processes that affect constitutive norms and discourses. “System” identifies differentiated yet ordered parts, geared to the (...) production of collective outcomes. The soup framing is undemanding yet limited. System provides a way to pinpoint democratic deficiencies and possibilities, but its requirements can be highly demanding, and it leaves open the question of normative integration. Understanding global democratization requires both society and system framings. (shrink)

In this article I address a puzzle about one of Francis Hutcheson’s objections to psychological egoism. The puzzle concerns his premise that God receives no benefit from rewarding the virtuous. Why, in the early editions of his Inquiry Concerning Virtue (1725, 1726), does Hutcheson leave this premise undefended? And why, in the later editions (1729, 1738), does he continue to do so, knowing that in 1726 John Clarke of Hull had subjected the premise to plausible criticism, geared to the (...) very audience (mainly Christian) for whom Hutcheson’s objection to egoism was written? This puzzle is not negligible. Some might claim that Hutcheson ruins his objection by ignoring Clarke’s criticism. To answer the puzzle we must consider not only Hutcheson’s philosophy but also some theological assumptions of Hutcheson’s time. (shrink)

The best way to understand the Meditations is through the lens of Descartes's theistic metaphysics rather than via his programme for physical science. This applies to his use of the concept of ‘nature’ in the Sixth Meditation, which serves Descartes's goal of theodicy. In working this out, Descartes reaches a conclusion about the functional role of sensory perception that is, paradoxically, not far from that offered by Darwinian naturalism. So far from being inherently geared to tracking the truth, the role (...) of sensation is linked to its survival value for the organism. In virtue of his theistic metaphysics however, Descartes is able to set this conclusion against the background of other cognitive faculties that are in principle accurate detectors of the truth; the absence of such a resource for modern Darwinian naturalists creates difficulties for the presumption that humans are cognitively equipped to search for the truth. (shrink)

This essay starts off with a modern-day court jester praising a Pope. Fo presents us with an historic moment: Luciani scandalises his Church by calling God “Mother.” With utmost seriousness, Fo appreciates the Pope’s kindness and warmth by which the artist perceives a way of scandalising the world out of complacency. In their idealised and situated presentations of the world, the sacred and the profane return the necessary to the contingent as moments of equal attention and distraction. Likewise, irony and (...) satire mark our situated sense of the ideal by an inability to unlearn the certainties by which we are urged to construct our world. This is done by first presenting a situated pedagogical context that refuses to provide solutions presumed on measurement, certainty or finality. Secondly this begins to lay claim to the political, aesthetic and moral values that are gained through art’s ironic disposition. Thirdly, through our contingent states of being we begin to understand how education is culturally conditioned and why we need to shift it to another gear – that of unlearning through a weak pedagogy. An atheist, Fo suggests that thanks to Pope Luciani, we now could endear to the Holy Spirit as a spirito ridens, a spirit that laughs. Here one finds a kenotic sense that gives us a glimpse in how an ironic disposition owes its strength and effectiveness to a weak pedagogy. By dint of such weakness, the jester’s pedagogical disposition becomes a form of resistance, exiting the Court in order to be with the people and consequently transformed by the people. (shrink)

“I often said before starting, that I had no doubt I should frequently repent of the whole undertaking.” So wrote Charles Darwin aboard The Beagle , bound for the Galapagos Islands and what would arguably become the greatest and most controversial discovery in scientific history. But the theory of evolution did not spring full-blown from the head of Darwin. Since the dawn of humanity, priests, philosophers, and scientists have debated the origin and development of life on earth, and with modern (...) science, that debate shifted into high gear. In this lively, deeply erudite work, Pulitzer Prize–winning science historian Edward J. Larson takes us on a guided tour of Darwin’s “dangerous idea,” from its theoretical antecedents in the early nineteenth century to the brilliant breakthroughs of Darwin and Wallace, to Watson and Crick’s stunning discovery of the DNA double helix, and to the triumphant neo-Darwinian synthesis and rising sociobiology today. Along the way, Larson expertly places the scientific upheaval of evolution in cultural perspective: the social and philosophical earthquake that was the French Revolution; the development, in England, of a laissez-faire capitalism in tune with a Darwinian ethos of “survival of the fittest”; the emergence of Social Darwinism and the dark science of eugenics against a backdrop of industrial revolution; the American Christian backlash against evolutionism that culminated in the famous Scopes trial; and on to today’s world, where religious fundamentalists litigate for the right to teach “creation science” alongside evolution in U.S. public schools, even as the theory itself continues to evolve in new and surprising directions. Throughout, Larson trains his spotlight on the lives and careers of the scientists, explorers, and eccentrics whose collaborations and competitions have driven the theory of evolution forward. Here are portraits of Cuvier, Lamarck, Darwin, Wallace, Haeckel, Galton, Huxley, Mendel, Morgan, Fisher, Dobzhansky, Watson and Crick, W. D. Hamilton, E. O. Wilson, and many others. Celebrated as one of mankind’s crowning scientific achievements and reviled as a threat to our deepest values, the theory of evolution has utterly transformed our view of life, religion, origins, and the theory itself, and remains controversial, especially in the United States (where 90% of adults do not subscribe to the full Darwinian vision). Replete with fresh material and new insights, Evolution will educate and inform while taking readers on a fascinating journey of discovery. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 8.4 (2001) 337-338 [Access article in PDF] On Kimura's Écrits de psychopathologie phénomenologique John Cutting This book is a French translation of six articles that the Japanese psychiatrist, Kimura Bin, wrote in the 1970s and 1980s. There is the usual long introduction in such books by the translator. There is also the mandatory explanation of the whole matter as a postface by philosopher Henry (...) Maldiney as if the meaning of anything these days has to be in the form of a sandwich.The first article by Kimura Bin deals with the meaning of certain Japanese words pertaining to self and inter-subjectivity. The critical Japanese word is aida, which means something like interpersonal bonding and is that primordial state of the human being that founds both everyday sociality and the individual self, the latter both in its external and internal composition and orientation: "From time immemorial, the Japanese understood interpersonal social existence, the being between, life in the aida of itself and of others, as the essential trait of an individual human. The interpersonal aida is in some sense the quintessence of known individuality." Schizophrenia, for Kimura, stems from a disturbance in this aida at the most fundamental level, and all its manifestations follow from this.The second article is entitled "Time and Anxiety (Angoisse)." This sets out his major psychopathological thesis—judging from these six articles—which is that schizophrenia and depressive illness differ fundamentally in their temporality. In schizophrenia the subject is geared toward the future: "Subjects with a schizophrenic tendency give sufficient proof in their daily life of a marked inclination to imagine future possibilities or ideas whose feasibility is impossible or implausible." In depressive illness there is a preoccupation with the past: "The lived time of the melancholic type of person has a preponderance towards the past, or, more precisely, towards lived being up to the present."The third article, entitled "Schizophrenic Temporality," amplifies this thesis and introduces his terminology for these, respectively, as the Latin terms, ante festum and post festum. The French translation gives the meaning of the latter as "apres la fête" and "trop tard"—after the holiday, too late. (I shall deal with the potpourri of languages involved below.) This article is the most elaborate, and in it Kimura attempts to derive the core characteristics of the two nosological entities from these two underlying anomalous temporalities.The fourth article is about borderline states, a nosological entity that I have no sympathy for, and I shall not discuss it.The fifth article is entitled "Reflection and Self in Schizophrenia." Again, it concerns a fundamental difference between the mode of reflection in schizophrenia and that in depressive illness, but I cannot say, despite numerous readings, [End Page 337] that I understand it. The reason for this may be my poor French, an inadequate translation, or a confused formulation in the first place, or all three. The gist of it seems to be that in schizophrenia the "other" is a "stranger" projected by the thinking self, whereas in depressive illness the "other" is a "familiar" inhabitant of the sociality adherent to this condition.The sixth article, "Pathology of Immediateness," is an attempt to seek philosophical, theoretical, psychopathological, and even nosological and biological backing for what Kimura has set out earlier, particularly in the third article. Hegel, Lacan, Bergson, Heidegger, Derrida, and Husserl are brought in as philosophical support. Blankenburg and Binswanger provide psychopathological backing. A third prong is the nosological tradition, prevalent in Germany and Japan in the twentieth century, of promoting the concept of an atypical or third type of psychosis with a biological resemblance to epileptic psychosis. All this is then brought together and complicated by a discussion of language and 'mediation' to support the notion that there is a third psychopathological principle—in addition to the ante festum pertaining to schizophrenia and the post festum pertaining to depressive illness—which is that of an intra festum: a preoccupation with the now, characteristic of atypical psychoses with an epileptic basis.These articles tax one's linguistic and conceptual repertoire to the... (shrink)

Kant's particular philosophical position of transcendental idealism has been a less popular target for recovery than other broadly “Kantian” or “Critical” aspects of his thinking. This chapter outlines Kant's so‐called “Copernican Turn,” which is key to the methodological shift that makes transcendental idealism possible. It discusses the key terminologies of the Kantian project in the First Critique. The chapter then details how these concepts are put to positive use in validating certain traditional metaphysical concepts. It then explores the negative task (...) of Kant's project, which shows that certain other traditional metaphysical concepts are in his view incapable of either vindication or refutation. Finally, it examines how these negative restrictions of Kant's project are themselves geared towards a return to a positive register. Kant introduces or re‐introduces various pairs of notions to explain such achievements: a priori/a posteriori, concept/intuition, cognition/thought, receptive/spontaneous, synthetic/analytic, appearances/things in themselves. (shrink)

From the celebrated author of American Philosophy: A Love Story and Hiking with Nietzsche, a compelling introduction to the life-affirming philosophy of William James In 1895, William James, the father of American philosophy, delivered a lecture entitled "Is Life Worth Living?" It was no theoretical question for James, who had contemplated suicide during an existential crisis as a young man a quarter century earlier. Indeed, as John Kaag writes, "James's entire philosophy, from beginning to end, was geared to save (...) a life, his life"—and that's why it just might be able to save yours, too. Sick Souls, Healthy Minds is a compelling introduction to James's life and thought that shows why the founder of pragmatism and empirical psychology—and an inspiration for Alcoholics Anonymous—can still speak so directly and profoundly to anyone struggling to make a life worth living. Kaag tells how James's experiences as one of what he called the "sick-souled," those who think that life might be meaningless, drove him to articulate an ideal of "healthy-mindedness"—an attitude toward life that is open, active, and hopeful, but also realistic about its risks. In fact, all of James's pragmatism, resting on the idea that truth should be judged by its practical consequences for our lives, is a response to, and possible antidote for, crises of meaning that threaten to undo many of us at one time or another. Along the way, Kaag also movingly describes how his own life has been endlessly enriched by James. Eloquent, inspiring, and filled with insight, Sick Souls, Healthy Minds may be the smartest and most important self-help book you'll ever read. (shrink)

Michael Ruse has argued that evolutionary ethics discredits the objectivity and foundations of ethics. Ruse must employ dubitable assumptions, however, to reach his conclusion. We can trace these assumptions to G. E. Moore. Also, part of Ruse’s case against the foundations of ethics can support the objectivity and foundations of ethics. Cooperative activity geared toward human flourishing helps point the way to a naturalistic moral realism and not exclusively to ethical skepticism as Ruse supposes.

Deliberative democracy puts communication and talk at the centre of democracy. Foundations and Frontiers of Deliberative Governance takes a fresh look at the foundations of the field, and develops new applications in areas ranging from citizen participation to the democratization of authoritarian states to the global system.

"--Joel Cracraft, American Museum of Natural History "This is not the potted history that one usually finds in texts and review articles.

This book contains some rare combinations: first, an author who is as concerned with conceptual clarification as he is with the absolute truthfulness of the biblical text; second, an argument that avoids the common "either-ors" and contends for the importance of both divine sovereignty and divine solicitude in equal measure; third, an approach that espouses divine determinism and divine temporality. No One Like Him takes on the most intractable intellectual challenges of contemporary evangelical theology. Kevin Vanhoozer , Research Professor of (...) Systematic Theology, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School John Feinberg judicially reconstructs aspects of the classical view of God in a way that proves more faithful than process and openness of God theisms. Arguably, this is the best study of theology proper in print. Bruce Demarest , Professor of Theology and Spiritual Formation, Denver Seminary Feinberg reads theology with a philosopher's eye and writes it with a philosopher's sensitivity to illogic and incoherence. J. I. Packer , Professor of Theology, Regent College A magisterial work, one that truly deserves to be called a magnum opus....It reveals its author as...perhaps the only modern scholar whose work, like that of Carl. F. H. Henry, can compare in size, detail, comprehensiveness, and intellectual acuity with the accomplishments of the late Karl Barth.... It is not risky to predict that Feinberg's No One Like Him will come to be a milestone in evangelical theology. Harold O. J. Brown , Professor of Philosophy and Theology, Reformed Theological Seminary. (shrink)

In this expansive and highly original two-volume work, Jim Behuniak reformulates John Dewey's late-period "Cultural turn" and proposes that its next logical step is an "intra-Cultural philosophy" that goes beyond what is commonly known as "comparative philosophy." Each volume models itself on this new approach and argues that early Chinese thought is poised to join forces with Dewey in meeting an urgent cultural need: namely, helping the Western tradition to correct its outdated Greek-medieval assumptions, especially where these result in (...) pre-Darwinian inferences about the world. Relying on the latest findings in Chinese philosophy, these volumes establish "specific philosophical relationships" between Dewey's ideas and early Chinese thought for this purpose, showing how together they can assist us in getting our thinking "back in gear" with the world as it is currently known through the biological, physical, and cognitive sciences. Volume Two: Dao and Culture builds upon Volume One: Dao and Nature to argue that "Chinese natural philosophy" is the proper hermeneutical context in which to understand early Confucian thought. It engages Dewey with themes generally associated with "Confucianism," including education, tradition, ethics, the family, human nature, and religiousness. The volume assesses Dewey's visit to China (1919-1921) as a multi-faceted "intra-Cultural" episode: one that includes not only what Dewey taught his Chinese audiences, but also what he learned from China and what overseas Chinese students learned in the United States. (shrink)

Defining Species: A Sourcebook from Antiquity to Today provides excerpts and commentary on the definition of «species from source material ranging from the ...

It is important to specify terms – the truth is conformity of a word to a thing or an event, whereas a lie is making the truth unavailable to someone who has the right to it. John Paul II promoted the essential truth that a man is God’s creation; God knows what is good for his creation; human person is God’s image, then should act in such a manner that the image is clear. Faith has moral dimension-it is moral (...) dimension. It is the source of practical involvement which remains in harmony with faith. The principles of one’s conduct are God’s commandments, whereas individualistic ethics, practised in the spirit of illusory freedom, prevents us from discovering the only certain truth-God. Contemporary crisis of society is that faith is rejected and as a result there is breaking off the essential and constitutive bond between the truth and freedom. In economy we can see that the truth in one’s conduct cannot withstand the style of the present geared towards profit. It is proper that the Church supports profit but the profit cannot be the only regulator of a company’s life. There are still human and moral factors. Economic growth should respect human values. Freedom in the economic and social area cannot be torn out from the truth about a human being. The meeting of the Church and the workers’ movement in 1980 showed that it is possible to demand ethics in economy in the name of the truth of a human being-then the civilisation of love is created with its main principles: a person before a thing, more important to be than to have, ethics before technology, mercy before justice, defeat evil with good. Problems existing in this area cannot be disregarded. The matter is important and urging – otherwise, as Pope Leo XIII said in the Encyclical Rerum Novarum, delaying would make evil incurable. (shrink)

Dr. Toynbee is the author of A Study of History in ten volumes, on which he spent twenty-five years, and which has received very high praise from competent critics as well as much criticism. Of the present two books the first is based on the Gifford Lectures delivered in the University of Edinburgh in 1952–3, the second on the Hewett Lectures given in the United States in the Fall of 1955. As the two treat almost identical topics, the first more (...) fully than the second, it is intended here to give a summary of the doctrine contained in the two—mostly in the author’s own words—and then to add a few criticisms. (shrink)

A simple numerical procedure is presented for the problem of estimating the parameters of models for the distribution of eggs oviposited in a host. The modelling is extended to incorporate both host density and time dependence to produce a remarkably parsimonious structure with only seven parameters to describe a data set of over 3,000 observations. This is further refined using a mixed model to accommodate several large outliers. Both models show that the level of superparasitism declines with increasing host density, (...) and the rate declines over time. It is proposed that the differing behaviours represented by the mixed model may reflect a balance between behavioural strategies of different selective benefit. (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 ...

Tanner uses Kierkegaard's thought, in particular his theory of anxiety, to enrich a bold new reading of Milton's Paradise Lost. He argues that for Milton and Kierkegaard, the path to sin and to salvation lies through anxiety, and that both writers include anxiety within the compass of paradise. The first half of the book explores anxiety in Eden before the Fall, original sin, the aetiology of evil, and prelapsarian knowledge. The second half examines anxiety after the Fall, offering original insights (...) into such issues as the demonic personality, remorse, despair, and faith. (shrink)

PART VII: PUBLICS AND MOVEMENTS. - PART VIII: GOVERNMENT RESPONSES. - PART IX: POLICY INSTRUMENTS. - PART X: PRODUCERS AND CONSUMERS. - PART XI: GLOBAL GOVERNANCE. - PART XII: RECONSTRUCTION.

An oft-repeated claim is that there is information in some biological entity or process, most especially in genes. Some of these claims derive from the Central Dogma, population genetics, and the neo-Darwinian program. Others derive from attacks upon evolution, in an attempt to show that “information cannot be created” by natural selection. In this paper I will try to show that the term “information” is a homonym for a range of distinct notions, and that these notions are either of concrete (...) properties, in which case they are little more than a periphrasis for correlation and causation, or of abstract properties, in which case they are observer-dependent. In short, if information is in the concrete world, it is causality. If it is abstract, it is in the head. (shrink)

A given but otherwise random environmental time series impinging on the input of a certain biological processor passes through with overwhelming probability practically undetected. A very small percentage of environmental stimuli, though, is ‘captured’ by the processor's nonlinear dissipative operator as initial conditions, and is ‘processed’ as solutions of its dynamics. The processor, then, is in such cases instrumental in compressing or abstracting those stimuli, thereby making the external world to collapse from a previous regime of a ‘pure state’ of (...) suspended animation into a set of stable complementary and mutually exclusive eigenfunctions or ‘categories'. The characteristics of this cognitive set depend on the operator involved and the hierarchical level where the abstraction takes place. Depending on the context, the transition from one state to another occurs in such a cognitive operator. The chaotic itinerancy may play a crucial role for this process. In this paper we model the dynamics which may underlie such a cognitive process and the role of the thalamo-cortical pacemaker of the brain. In order to model them, conceptualization by the notion of ‘attractor ruin’ in high-dimensional dynamical systems is necessary. (shrink)

Oxford Handbooks of Political Science are the essential guide to the state of political science today. With engaging contributions from 51 major international scholars, the Oxford Handbook of Political Theory provides the key point of reference for anyone working in political theory and beyond.