This paper argues that the central philosophical movement in the complex history of Buddhism that originated with Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha and carried on by Nāgārjuna (among other later Buddhist philosophers) shares some common themes with the pragmatic philosophy of John Dewey. These themes are the rejection of traditional metaphysics as definitive of philosophy, a return to the correct understanding of the nature of experience, and a particular view about the conduct and nature of philosophy. Dewey is used to (...) illuminate such controversial problems in the Buddhist tradition as why the Buddha is silent about metaphysical questions, what it means to say that everything is anitya, and how we are to understand Nāgārjuna's key concepts of prattyasamutpāda and únyatá. (shrink)

Is the existence of God a reasonable metaphysical hypothesis? So asks A. C. Ewing in his important posthumous work, Value and Reality. Thus the topic of the book is theistic religion, not in its entirety, but rather merely in its intellectual part. That it does have such a part, and further that it makes claims ‘to objective truth in the field of metaphysics’, is defended on the grounds that a fictional ‘story’ about God has what religious or ethical impact (...) it may have because, or at least mainly because, it is taken precisely not as fictional, but as expressing an objective theological truth; and that a story, or an account, can constitute a good reason for one's acting in a certain way only if the account is, in fact, objectively true. Bearing on both points is Ewing's observation that ‘emotion, at least except in pathological cases, requires some objective belief about the real, true or false, to support it for long, and if it exists without knowledge or rationally founded belief with which it is in agreement, it is to be condemned as irrational or unfitting, as it would be unfitting to rejoice at something disastrous or be angry with an inanimate thing’. The claim is not, we are told, that religious statements are literal as distinguished from symbolic. The door would seem to be left open, in fact, to their all being symbolic. What is essential is that some of them symbolise distinctively metaphysical truths, or truths ‘going beyond the realm of science’ and ‘throwing some light on the general nature of the real’. We should indeed distinguish, Ewing notes, ‘belief in’ from ‘belief that’. Yet the former is not possible without the latter. ‘Unless I believe that God exists I cannot believe in God’. So in Ewing's opinion, statements of metaphysics—if not concerning God, then at least concerning certain general aspects of reality—are most important for religion as a whole, and are, in being true, conceptually necessary to its validity, or to its ‘fittingness’. (shrink)

Fred S. Berlin, M.D., Ph.D., Associate Professor of Psychiatry, The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine --Book Jacket.

The claim that there are incommensurable conceptual schemes through which different cultures see the world (or see their worlds) poses a challenge to the viability of comparative philosophy that cannot be easily dismissed. Donald Davidson’s famous attack on the very idea of alternative conceptual schemes through his rejection of the “third dogma of empiricism,” the dogma of the absolute distinction between scheme and content, has never been very well understood. I will argue that the rejection of the dogma enables Davidson (...) to adopt a realist position (as opposed to the anti-realist position of Rorty, who endorses the rejection)and forms the basis for his theory of radical interpretation, supported by his “principle of charity.” And I will use John Dewey’s “postulate of immediate empiricism” to explain Davidson’s views. Together they provide a way to meet the challenge of conceptual relativism. (shrink)

The February 1997 announcement of the birth of Dolly, the sheep cloned from a mammary cell of an adult ewe, has drawn attention to the growing ability to select, alter, or otherwise manipulate the genome of offspring. Prior to Dolly, ethical discussion of genes in reproduction had focused on negative selection: carrier screening, prenatal diagnosis, and abortion or embryo discard. After Dolly, ethical debate will have to consider the direct or positive use of genetic selection or alteration technology.The principal use (...) of genetic selection techniques in human reproduction likely will be to treat or prevent disease in offspring. In the future, however, such techniques might also be used to enhance or even diminish expected characteristics of progeny. Techniques to accomplish these goals are likely to include: selection of the nuclear genome, as occurs in somatic cell cloning; chromosomal transplants; or direct insertion or deletion of specific genes. (shrink)

This article interprets the logos Christology in the fourth gospel within Ewe-Ghanaian cosmic setting. The article employs a combination of the exegetical and mother tongue biblical hermeneutics as its methodologies. The article compares the concept of the logos in John 1:1–5, 14 with a similar concept in Ewe cosmology with the aim of finding their points of convergence and divergence. The article also identifies linguistic and theological gaps in the Ewe rendition of John 1:1–5, 14 and proposes a (...) new translation that addresses it. A translation of the logos in Ewe cosmic perspective renders the term nyagbe, the intelligible word which dwells with the female pair of Sogbe-Lisa and manifests itself from the absolute state of existence [ logo ] to the embodied state [ logosu ]. When nyagbe journeyed from the eternal state of existence to the embodied state of existence, it manifests itself at five different levels of existence until it reaches the final state where humans exist. Although believed to be the epitome of all creation, human beings are at the same time described as being at the shore of ignorance and therefore must continually climb the ladder of knowledge in order to free themselves from it. It is for this reason that humans constantly petition the cosmic forces for their salvation. The article therefore, identifies a soteriological gap created in the Ewe soteriology and concludes that the only soteriological response to the Ewe cosmic cry for deliverance from the state of ignorance is the logos incarnate in John 1:14. Contribution: The article contributes to the academic knowledge on the logos Christology in the prologue of the fourth gospel (John 1:1–5, 14), specifically in the use of mother tongue in biblical hermeneutics in Africa. (shrink)

Question 11 in Book 2 of John Buridan’s Questions on the Ten Books of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, concerns whether the good can be well divided into the honorable, the useful, and the pleasurable. Aristotle, according to Buridan, claims that it can. But should we follow Aristotle in this respect? Buridan argues that we should not. In his view, it is rather the case that the good is extensionally equivalent with the honorable, as well as with the useful and with (...) the pleasurable. According to Buridan, however, the relevant division is still important for our understanding of goodness. Several centuries before Franz Brentano, A. C. Ewing, and others, Buridan proposes a fitting attitude account of goodness. In its most general sense, he says, the good refers to the desirable, that is, to that which is (or would be) a fitting object of desire. However, we can distinguish between three different ways in which things may be desirable: in themselves (in which case they are honorable), as means to some other good (in which case they are useful) and for ourselves (in which case they are pleasurable). On the substantive level, these always coincide. But that does not follow from the more fundamental account of the nature of the good, according to Buridan. -/- In this paper, we will critically examine both Buridan’s case for thinking that the good is extensionally equivalent with the honorable, the useful, and the pleasurable, as well as his fitting attitude account of goodness. (shrink)

Why believe in the findings of science? John Ziman argues that scientific knowledge is not uniformly reliable, but rather like a map representing a country we cannot visit. He shows how science has many elements, including alongside its experiments and formulae the language and logic, patterns and preconceptions, facts and fantasies used to illustrate and express its findings. These elements are variously combined by scientists in their explanations of the material world as it lies outside our everyday experience. (...) class='Hi'>John Ziman’s book offers at once a valuably clear account and a radically challenging investigation of the credibility of scientific knowledge, searching widely across a range of disciplines for evidence about the perceptions, paradigms and analogies on which all our understanding depends. (shrink)

Gleeson, Damian John In 1924, after a hiatus of a decade, the Australasian Catholic Record was re-established under the driving force of Monsignor John Joseph Nevin, the then vice-president of St Patrick's College, Manly. Mgr Nevin was ACR's principal editor up until 1937 and with the exception of a trip to Ireland and Europe in 1927, he contributed articles and answered questions on topics ranging across canon law, marriage, and moral theology in virtually every quarterly issue of ACR (...) for more than two decades. At Manly, he educated thousands of seminarians for dioceses across New South Wales and beyond, and was the college's president from 1929 to 1942. As such, Mgr Nevin was probably the most formidable Catholic clerical academic in New South Wales in the interwar period, yet we know little of this prodigious writer and intellectual who was a key adviser, not just to the Sydney hierarchy, but to a wide range of bishops. Apart from Dr Kevin Walsh's splendid history of St Patrick's College, Manly, church historians have not sought to consider the significant career of Mgr Nevin and his influence on several generations of clergy and bishops. (shrink)

This book is available either individually, or as part of the specially-priced Arguments of the Philosphers Collection.

Most of us believe that theory-change in science has been a rationally analysable process. We believe, that is, that when one theory, Newton’s for example, is replaced as the accepted theory in science by a rival, Einstein’s in the same example, it is because the newer theory turns out to be better than the old in some objective sense and a sense, moreover, crucially related to the experimental evidence. Even those who have abjectly surrendered (at any rate on Mondays, Wednesdays (...) and Fridays) to an overly subjectivist form of Bayesianism, believe this really – hence their desperate pointing in the direction of (in my view, unavailing) results concerning the ‘washing out of priors’. The problem has always been to construct a set of agreed criteria of theory-appraisal that would convincingly yield this generally agreed result. (Of course by ‘most of us’ here I mean ‘most philosophers of science’; nothing I say will cut much ice with some of our benighted sociologist colleagues.). (shrink)

My aim in this study is not to praise Fischer's fine theory of moral responsibility, but to (try to) bury the “semi” in “semicompatibilism”. I think Fischer gives the Consequence Argument (CA) too much credit, and gives himself too little credit. In his book, The Metaphysics of Free Will, Fischer gave the CA as good a statement as it will ever get, and put his finger on what is wrong with it. Then he declared stalemate rather than victory. In my (...) view, Fischer’s view amounts to sophisticated compatibilism. It would be nice to be able to call it by its right name. In The Metaphysics of Free Will, Fischer develops his own version of Consequence Argument, which turns on two principles, one of which is the fixity of the past. FP: For any action Y, agent S and time t, if it is true that is S were to do Y at t, some fact about that past relative to t would not have been a fact, then S cannot at t do Y at t. I argue that the equipment needed to reject FP (and thereby defend the most plausible version of compatibilism) is needed to deal with the problem of fatalism. In addition, I argue that the rejection of FP is compatible with Fischer’s approach to Frankfurt cases and with his account of transfer principles. (shrink)

Aristotle’s solution to Zeno’s arrow paradox differs markedly from the so called at-at solution championed by Russell, which has become the orthodox view in contemporary philosophy. The latter supposes that motion consists in simply being at different places at different times. It can boast parsimony because it eliminates velocity from the ontology. Aristotle, by contrast, solves the paradox by denying that the flight of the arrow is composed of instants; rather, on my reading, he holds that the flight is a (...) unity which is ontologically prior to the temporal parts that may be abstracted from it. I label this position temporal holism; and an entity that is ontological prior to its temporal parts lasting. Lasting, I argue, is the key to Aristotle’s solution to the arrow paradox, but it has received insufficient attention in the relevant literature. I therefore set out here to investigate lasting and highlight its major role in Aristotle’s metaphysics more broadly, and in his solution to other problems of change. I show, too, how lasting within a contemporary context underwrites a parsimonious and intuitive solution to the arrow paradox that retains instantaneous velocity, and hence solves a problem for those who think velocity is required within the ontology to underwrite certain causal roles. (shrink)

[Editor's introduction: The following are excerpts from three talks given at the conference "Policies and Publics for Science and Technology, " London, April 1990. They introduce a British research initiative in public understanding of science and point to early results. The program was developed and coordinated by the Science Policy Support Group. At the meeting, a new journal for specialists in this area was launched: Public Understanding of Science, to be edited by John Durant, Science Museum, London SW7 2DD, (...) UK. The first issue of the journal is expected to appear in April 1991. Science, Technology, & Human Values reaffirms its long commitment to publishing research on public attitudes toward science and particularly welcomes articles on this topic of general interest to the field of science and technology studies.]. (shrink)

“Punishment,” writes J. E. McTaggart, “ is pain and to inflict pain on any person obviously [requires] justification.” But if the need to justify punishment is obvious, the manner of doing so is not. Philosophers have developed an array of diverse, often conflicting arguments to justify punitive institutions. Gertrude Ezorsky introduces this source book of significant historical and contemporary philosophical writings on problems of punishment with her own article, “The Ethics of Punishment.” She brings together systematically the important papers and (...) relevant studies from psychology, law, and literature, and organizes them under five subtopics: concepts of punishment, the justification of punishment, strict liability, the death penalty, and alternatives to punishment. Under these general headings forty-two papers are presented to give philosophical perspectives on punishment. Included are many not generally available. This book brings together in a single volume the views of such diverse writers as Plato, St. Thomas Aquinas, Samuel Butler, Karl Marx, and Lady Barbara Wooten. Others are J. Andenaes, K. G. Armstrong, John Austin, Kurt Baier, Jeremy Bentham, F. H. Bradley, Richard Brandt, Clarence Darrow, A. C. Ewing, Joel Feinberg, “The Hon. Mr. Gilpin,” H. L. A. Hart, G. W. F. Hegel, Thomas Hobbs, Immanuel Kant, J. D. Mabbott, H. J. McCloskey, J. E. McTaggart, R. Martinson, G. E. Moore, Herbert Morris, Anthony Quinton, D. Daiches Raphael, H. Rashdall, John Rawls, W. D. Ross, Royal Commission on Capital Punishment Report 1949–53, George Bernard Shaw, T. L. S. Sprigge, and R. Wasserstrom. (shrink)

His politicalthought inspired and helped to justify the American Revolution anddeeply influenced the American constitution, and his arguments in favorof human rights, political equality, and government by consent are nowaccepted worldwide. This comprehensive collection is the only student edition of Locke'swritings that includes, in addition to his pioneering political texts,selections from his ethical, epistemological, and religious writings. "Sources" includes writings by the major political theorists whoinfluenced Locke, including Richard Hooker, Hugo Grotius, and ThomasHobbes. Twenty-one "Interpretations" cover the major critical comments (...) andcontroversies surrounding Locke's political thought, including work byLeo Strauss, C. B. Macpherson, Alan Ryan, Ruth Grant, and JeremyWaldron. A Selected Bibliography is also included. (shrink)