Global climate change may result in a wide array of social and environmental harms, and this prospect has given rise to an international treaty, the 1992 UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. Scientific uncertainties, nation state politics, and economic resistance had to be addressed before this landmark environmental agreement could be realized. However, questions remain about the foundations and core commitments of this agreement. Ellul's characterology of technique is applied to the task of building a critique of the current international (...) response to climate change and is allied to the proposition that ecological justice should guide the social response to climate change. It is argued that contemporary international efforts are directed at producing a “rational climate,” rather than a climate for ecological justice. (shrink)

Numerous major holidays celebrate socially gathering in person. However, in major holidays that happened during the pandemic, desires to nurture relationships and maintain holiday traditions often conflicted with physical distancing and other measures to protect against COVID-19. The current research sought to understand wellbeing during American Thanksgiving in 2020, which happened 8months into the COVID-19 pandemic, after months of physical distancing and stay-at-home orders. American Thanksgiving is a major holiday not limited to any religion. We asked 404 American adults how (...) they spent Thanksgiving Day and to report on their experiences of that day. Predictors of wellbeing that we drew from self-determination theory were satisfaction of the fundamental needs for social connection, for doing what one really wants, and feeling effective. The predictors of wellbeing that we drew from regulatory focus theory were a focus on growth, and a focus on security. We found that feeling socially connected and focusing on growth related most strongly to wellbeing. Additionally, participants who saw even one other person face-to-face reported significantly higher relatedness satisfaction, promotion focus, and wellbeing than those who did not. Our research could help construct persuasive messages that encourage nurturing close relationships at major holidays while remaining safe against the virus. (shrink)

In his Philosophical Letters, Voltaire provides a pungent and often satirical assessment of the religion, politics, science, and arts of the England he observed during his nearly three-year exile. In addition to the Letters, this edition provides a translation of Voltaire's Proposal for a Letter about the English, a general Introduction, chronology, notes, and bibliography.

Climate change presents a fundamental challenge to the current global energy regime. Under the Framework Convention on Climate Change, the international community is developing the architecture of a policy response. Three serious flaws are examined: (a) the potential sacrifice of small island states, (b) the use of market-based policy measures to commodify the atmospheric commons, and (c) the substitution of carbon sequestration for meaningful reductions in energy use. The authors’ analysis of the politics of climate change, based on these issues, (...) suggests a new understanding of ecology is emerging—what they term postmodern ecology—in which a global environmental crisis is risked to secure the future of the world energy regime. An alternative, based on principles of sustainability and equity, is proposed that would require abandoning the global energy status quo. (shrink)

Using rhetorical analysis as a bridge, the essay attempts to reconcile the scientific Locke with Locke the social philosopher of rights who worked a persuasion against the fruits of social passivity and the status quo; the latter are represented by ingrained institutions like legal nonage and monarchy. The consistency between the two Lockes is language as it forwards understanding in a legitimating consensus. Ironically, iteration and nominalisms bind Locke's social contract; yet the linguistic reduction inherent in nominalisms precludes the production (...) of a more complex public knowledge that might improve community problem solving. (shrink)

Theological Determinism Theological determinism is the view that God determines every event that occurs in the history of the world. While there is much debate about which prominent historical figures were theological determinists, St. Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, John Calvin, and Gottfried Leibniz all seemed to espouse the view at least at certain points in their … Continue reading Theological Determinism →.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 was met with condemnation from the European Union and the United States as an "unprovoked and unjustified military aggression" that undermines the liberal international order. However, some international relations scholars, such as John Mearsheimer, argue that Russia had genuine security concerns with regard to Ukraine and that the invasion was a response to the threat of NATO membership for Ukraine. Both liberal and realist perspectives on the invasion rely on the assumption of (...) rational, cost-benefit calculations by actors, but cultural factors and irreconcilable non-material interests may also be at play in shaping the actions and motivations of states. Understanding the cultural and national identity factors at play in the invasion of Ukraine is complex and difficult, but they cannot be ignored in attempting to understand and address the conflict. (shrink)

This chapter contains section titled: References.

ABSTRACT Many historians have traced the accumulation of scientific archives via communication networks. Engines for communication in early modernity have included trade, the extrapolitical Republic of Letters, religious enthusiasm, and the centralization of large emerging information states. The communication between Samuel Hartlib, John Dury, Duke Friedrich III of Gottorf-Holstein, and his key agent in England, Frederick Clodius, points to a less obvious but no less important impetus—the international negotiations of smaller states. Smaller states shaped communication networks in an international (...) (albeit politically and religiously slanted) direction. Their networks of negotiation contributed to the internationalization of emerging science through a political and religious concept of shared interest. While interest has been central to social studies of science, interest itself has not often been historicized within the history of science. This case study demonstrates the co-production of science and society by tracing how period concepts of interest made science international. (shrink)

This article argues that protection of the environment requires reconsidering basic liberal ideas relating to value and growth. It selects a central thinker in the liberal tradition, John Locke, as a starting point. The article first shows how Locke’s political writings at first glance might support a “possessive individualist” position that gives primacy to individuals and their rights to property in a way that blocks governmental action to protect the environment, much as some modern versions of liberalism and libertarianism (...) maintain. However, there are other aspects of Locke’s writings that undermine this position. In particular, a reconsideration of his views on private property in combination with his views on the harm principle, the common good, and future generations can support the position that an individual’s right to exploit nature is indeed limited. These elements of Locke are strengthened considerably if Locke’s view of nature is updated by reconsidering nature as composed of ecosystems and as providing ecosystem goods and services. That land should continue to produce abundantly is foundational to Locke, and the failure to protect the ecosystems that provide key services supporting this abundance harms both the property of others and the viability of society: preservation of these constitute a collective good that transcends the individual good. The protection of ecosystem services also works to protect the value of individual holdings as well as the value of land still held in common. Finally, Locke’s writing supports the view that it is the role of government to act to protect the abundance of nature, even against the wishes of an individual property owner.Article first published online: 25 Feb 2017. (shrink)

It is often argued that a shared culture, or at least shared cultural references or practices, can help to foster peace and prevent war. This essay examines in detail and criticizes one such argument, made by Patrick Leigh Fermor, in the context of his discussing an incident during World War II, when he and a captured German general found a form of agreement, a ground for peace between them, in their both knowing Horace's ode I.9 by heart in Latin. (...) By way of introducing the sixth and final installment of the Common Knowledge symposium “Peace by Other Means,” this essay proposes that Leigh Fermor's narrative be understood in terms of commerce, rather than consensus. It concludes by examining Ezra Pound's use of the word commerce in his poem “A Pact” to define his relationship with his “detested” and “pig-headed” poetic “father,” Walt Whitman. (shrink)

The Oxford or Tractarian Movement and later Ritualists and Anglo-Catholics schooled numerous converts in elements of the Catholic faith. Foremost among them was John Henry Cardinal Newman, one of the original founders of the Oxford Movement. Converts numbered in the hundreds and included another cardinal, Henry Edward Manning, the second Archbishop of Westminster, the religious foundress Cornelia Connelly, the priest novelist Robert Hugh Benson and later literary figures such as G.K. Chesterton, Evelyn Waugh and Mgr Ronald Knox. American historian, (...) Patrick Allitt, has argued that on both sides of the Atlantic converts dominated Catholic intellectual life between 1840 and 1960. While such 'Tractarian' converts have indeed greatly influenced Catholic life, many 'Tractarians' who never converted have also had a considerable impact on English-speaking Catholicism. C.S. Lewis is an obvious example. But there have been others, including author Charles Williams, poet T.S. Eliot and theologians John Macquarrie and Michael Ramsey. The author Dorothy L. Sayers also deserves to be counted among their number. (shrink)

The multifaceted work of the late Susan Leigh Star is explored through a selection of her writings and essays by friends and colleagues. Susan Leigh Star (1954–2010) was one of the most influential science studies scholars of the last several decades. In her work, Star highlighted the messy practices of discovering science, asking hard questions about the marginalizing as well as the liberating powers of science and technology. In the landmark work Sorting Things Out, Star and Geoffrey Bowker (...) revealed the social and ethical histories that are deeply embedded in classification systems. Star's most celebrated concept was the notion of boundary objects: representational forms—things or theories—that can be shared between different communities, with each holding its own understanding of the representation. Unfortunately, Leigh was unable to complete a work on the poetics of infrastructure that further developed the full range of her work. This volume collects articles by Star that set out some of her thinking on boundary objects, marginality, and infrastructure, together with essays by friends and colleagues from a range of disciplines—from philosophy of science to organization science—that testify to the wide-ranging influence of Star's work. Contributors Ellen Balka, Eevi E. Beck, Dick Boland, Geoffrey C. Bowker, Janet Ceja Alcalá, Adele E. Clarke, Les Gasser, James R. Griesemer, Gail Hornstein, John Leslie King, Cheris Kramarae, Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, Karen Ruhleder, Kjeld Schmidt, Brian Cantwell Smith, Susan Leigh Star, Anselm L. Strauss, Jane Summerton, Stefan Timmermans, Helen Verran, Nina Wakeford, Jutta Weber. (shrink)

John Yolton seeks to allow readers of Locke to have accessible in one volume sections from a wide range of Locke's books, structured so that some of the interconnections of his thought can be seen and traced. Although Locke did not write from a system of philosophy, he did have in mind an overall division of human knowledge. The readings begin with Locke's essay on Hermeneutics and the portions of his Essay Concerning Human Understanding on how to read a (...) text. The reset of the selections are organized around Locke's division of human knowledge into natural science, ethics, and the theory of signs. Yolton's introduction and commentary explicate Locke's doctrines and provide the reader with the general background knowledge of other seventeenth-century writers and their works necessary to an understanding of Locke and his time. (shrink)

At the outset of _Marx for Cats_, Leigh Claire La Berge declares that “all history is the history of cat struggle.” Revising the medieval bestiary form to meet Marxist critique, La Berge follows feline footprints through Western economic history to reveal an animality at the heart of Marxism. She draws on a twelve-hundred-year arc spanning capitalism’s feudal prehistory, its colonialist and imperialist ages, the bourgeois revolutions that supported capitalism, and the communist revolutions that opposed it to outline how cats (...) have long been understood as creatures of economic critique and liberatory possibility. By attending to the repeated archival appearance of lions, tigers, wildcats, and “sabo-tabbies,” La Berge argues that felines are central to how Marxists have imagined the economy, and by asking what humans and animals owe each other in a moment of ecological crisis, La Berge joins current debates about the need for and possibility of eco-socialism. In this playful and generously illustrated radical bestiary, La Berge demonstrates that class struggle is ultimately an interspecies collaboration. (shrink)

Using Asimov’s “Bicentennial Man” as a springboard, a number of metaethical issues concerning the emerging field of machine ethics are discussed. Although the ultimate goal of machine ethics is to create autonomous ethical machines, this presents a number of challenges. A good way to begin the task of making ethics computable is to create a program that enables a machine to act an ethical advisor to human beings. This project, unlike creating an autonomous ethical machine, will not require that we (...) make a judgment about the ethical status of the machine itself, a judgment that will be particularly difficult to make. Finally, it is argued that Asimov’s “three laws of robotics” are an unsatisfactory basis for machine ethics, regardless of the status of the machine. (shrink)

This article explores ways in which the Revision Theory of Truth can be expressed in the object language. In particular, we investigate the extent to which semantic deficiency, stable truth, and nearly stable truth can be so expressed, and we study different axiomatic systems for the Revision Theory of Truth.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:diacritics 30.2 (2000) 88-112 [Access article in PDF] Milton's Aesthetics Of Eating Denise Gigante It is not a little curious that, with the exception of Ben Jonson (and he did not speak gravely about it so often), the poet in our own country who has written with the greatest gusto on the subject of eating is Milton. He omits none of the pleasures of the palate, great or small. (...) In his Latin poems, when young, he speaks of the pears and chestnuts which he used to roast at the fire with his friend Diodati. Junkets and other "country-messes" are not forgotten in his "Allegro." The simple Temptation in the Wilderness, "Command that these stones be made bread" (which was quite sufficient for a hunger that had fasted "forty days"), is turned, in Paradise Regained, with more poetry than propriety, into the set out of a great feast, containing every delicacy in and out of season. The very "names" of the viands, he says, were "exquisite." And in Paradise Lost, Eve is not only described as being skilful in paradisaical cookery ("tempering dulcet creams"), but the angel Raphael is invited to dinner, and helped by his entertainers to a series of tid-bits and contrasted relishes--Taste after taste, upheld with kindliest change. --Leigh Hunt, "Eating Songs" The title of an old play gives us a direct taste and surmise of its inwards, as the first lines of the Paradise Lost smack of the great Poem. --John Keats, "On 'Retribution, or the Chieftain's Daughter'" That Milton's Romantic readers should invoke the "taste" of his epic poetry suggests an awareness beyond the anecdotal. For as this essay will show, Milton complicates the category of physiological taste in such a manner as to form the ground for the possibility of aesthetic taste, which emerges as a distinct discourse in the early years of the eighteenth century. This is not to say that Milton is the only source for this dubious meaning-in-transition. But precisely how, prior to the interventions of Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Hume, and the entire tradition of post-Miltonic theorists of taste, is one to read Adam's darkly sardonic postlapsarian remark: "Eve, now I see thou art exact of taste... And Palate call judicious" [PL IX.1017-20]? Critics have observed Milton's "ruthless and relentless pressure on 'taste,'" the fact that the word and its variants appear thirty times in Book IX of Paradise Lost alone [Ricks 69]. What I would like to suggest is that just as Milton is a seminal figure for the eighteenth-century aesthetic preoccupation with the sublime, 1 he is theoretically situated at the origins of the more generic thing called taste as well. [End Page 88]Of course Milton himself was aware of the epistemological implications of taste, whereby the Latin sapere can mean both "to taste" and "to know." 2 The fruit whose "mortal taste" was the source of all our woe did, after all, grow on the tree of knowledge, knowingly described by Satan as "precious of all Trees / In Paradise, of operation blest / To Sapience" [PL I.2, IX.795-97]. So too, when Adam calls Eve "exact of taste," he adds "of Sapience no small part" [PL IX.1018]. Throughout Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained, Milton plays with the epistemological connotation of taste, incorporating it even into the 1671 companion piece of the latter, Samson Agonistes, whose blind hero declares, "The way to know were not to see but taste" [1091]. At the time Milton was writing, however, taste was philosophically connected not only to knowledge and pleasure, but to morality as well. At the origins of the British empirical discourse of taste, Anthony Ashley Cooper, third Earl of Shaftesbury, inheriting this link between epistemology, aesthetics, and ethics, inquires: "Will it not be found... that what is beautiful is... true; and what is at once both beautiful and true is, of consequence, agreeable and good?" [2: 268-69]. For Milton as for Shaftesbury, the beautiful was the true was the good, and access to these ideals was bound up with the philosophic complexity... (shrink)

Books Reviewed in this Article: Theological Investigations, Vol. XVIII: God and Revelation. By Karl Rahner. Pp.vi, 304, London, Darton, Longman and Todd, 1984, £18.50. Theological Investigations, Volume XIX: Faith and Ministry. By Karl Rahner. Pp.vi, 282, London, Darton, Longman & Todd, 1984, £18.50. Theological Investigations: Volume XX: Concern for the Church. By Karl Rahner. Pp.vi, 191, London, Darton, Longman & Todd, 1981, £14.50. Concise Theological Dictionary. Edited by Karl Rahner and Herbert Vorgrimler. Pp.541, London, Burns & Oates, 1983, £12.50. A (...) New Dictionary of Christian Theology. Edited by Alan Richardson and John Bowden. Pp.xvii, 614, London, SCM Press, 1983, £19.50. The God of Forgiveness and Healing in the Theology of Karl Rahner. By J.N. King, Pp.93, Washington, University Press of America, 1982, $17.50, $6.75. In Search of Humanity, A Theological and Philosophical Approach. By John Macquarrie. Pp.vii, 280, London, SCM Press, 1982, £8.50. Faith and the Mystery of God. By Maurice Wiles. Pp.viii, 146, London, SCM Press, 1982, £4.50. Trinity and Temporality: The Christian Doctrine of God in the Light of Process Theology and the Theology of Hope. By John J. O'Donnell. Pp.xii, 215, Oxford University Press, 1983, £15.00. The Cosmic Christ in Origen and Teilhard de Chardin: A comparative Study. By James A. Lyons and edited by Maurice Wiles. Pp.xii, 236, Oxford University Press, 1982, £13.50. Grounded in Love: Sacramental Theology in an Ecumenical Perspective. By Frans Josef van Beeck. Pp.x, 151, Washington, University Press of America, 1982, $19.50, $9.25. Justification: The Author's First Book reissued with a New Introductory Chapter and the Original Response of Karl Barth. By Hans Küng. Pp.xlvi, 332, London, Burns and Oates, 1982, no price given. Reality and Evangelical Theology. By T.F. Torrance. Pp.174, Philadelphia, Westminster Press, 1982, $8.95. The Quest for the Historical Israel: Reconstructing Israel's Early History. By George W. Ramsey. Pp.xiv, 193, London, SCM Press, 1982, £5.50. Cantico del Cantici: Interpretatio Ludica. By Enrica Salvaneschi. Pp.140. Genoa, II Melangolo, 1982, 15, 000 Lire. Love Lyrics from the Bible: A Translation and Literary Study of the Song of Songs. By Marcia Falk. Pp.142, Sheffield, Almond Press, 1982, £14.95, £5.95. Old Testament Wisdom: An Introduction. By James L. Crenshaw. Pp.286, London, SCM Press, 1982, £5.95. The Sciences and Theology. Edited by A.R. Peacocke. Pp.xviii, 309, Stocksfield, Oriel Press, 1982, £14.00. Vision and Character: A Christian Educator's Alternative to Kohlberg. By C.R. Dykstra. Pp.viii, 160, Leominster, Fowler Wright Books, 1981, £4.45. Aristotle's Eudemian Ethics, Books I, II & III. Translated with a commentary by Michael Woods. Pp.xii, 234, Oxford, Clarendon Press: Oxford University Press, 1982, £11.50. Kant's Theory of Mind: An Analysis of the Paralogisms of Pure Reason. By Karl Ameriks. Pp.ix, 314, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1982, £15.00. Heidegger's‘Being and Time’and the Possibility of Political Philosophy. By Mark Blitz. Pp.260, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1981, £13.75. Symbol as Sense: New Approaches to the Analysis of Meaning. Edited by Mary Le Cron Foster and Stanley H. Brandes. Pp.xvi, 416, New York, Academic Press, 1980, £19.60. The God Within. By Harry R. Klocker. Pp.x, 147, Washington, University Press of America, 1982, $19.00, $9.25. The Philosophical Frontiers of Christian Theology: Essays Presented to D.M. MacKinnon. Edited by Brian Hebblethwaite and Stewart Sutherland. Pp.ix, 252, Cambridge University Press, 1982, £17.50. Jews, Pagans and Christians in Conflict. By David Rokeah. Pp.232, Jerusalem, The Magnes Press, The Hebrew University, Leiden; E.J. Brill, 1982, 94 gld. Religion, Law, and the Growth of Constitutional Thought 1150–1650. By Brian Tierney. Pp.xi, 114, Cambridge University Press, 1982, £12.50. St John of the Cross: The Life and Thought of a Christian Mystic. By Alain Cugno. Pp.vi, 153, London, Burns & Oates, 1982, £6.95. Meister Eckhart: The Essential Sermons, Commentaries, Treatises and Defense. Translated by Edmund Colledge and Bernard McGinn. Pp.xviii, 360, London, SPCK, 1981, £8.50. Francisco de Osuna: the Third Spiritual Alphabet. Translated by May E. Giles. Pp.xvi, 624, London, SPCK, 1981, £12.50. Rome and the Anglicans. Edited with a Postscript by Wolfgang Haase. Pp.301, Berlin, Walter de Gruyter, 1982, 138 DM. The Westminster Confession in the Church today: Papers Prepared for the Church of Scotland Panel on Doctrine. Edited by Alasdair I.C. Heron. Pp.vii, 154, Edinburgh, Saint Andrew Press, 1982, £4.00. Essaying Montaigne: A Study of the Renaissance Institution of Writing and Reading. By John O'Neill, Pp.ix, 244, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982, £12.50. Rousseau after 200 years: Proceedings of the Cambridge Bicentennial Colloquium. Edited by R.A. Leigh. Pp.xv, 299, Cambridge University Press, 1982, £30.00 An American Experience of God: The Spirituality of Isaac Hecker. By John Farina. Pp.xii, 217, New York, Paulist Press, 1981, $11.95. Hecker Studies: Essays on the Thought of Isaac Hecker. Edited by John Farina. Pp.vii, 243, New York, Paulist Press, 1983, $6.95. (shrink)

Residual categories such as »not elsewhere categorized« densely populate modern information systems. This article roughly categories two types of modern information surveillance and notification systems, statistical and event-based. It examines the nature of residual categories arising from each, and proposes some methodological considerations for how these impact moral order within information infrastructure. The article concludes with comments about how the inclusion of lived experience might ameliorate a sort of moral gridlock often encountered today in large-scale information systems.

Among the most animating debates in eighteenth-century British ethics was the debate over psychological egoism, the view that our most basic desires are self-interested. An important episode in that debate, less well known than it should be, was the exchange between Francis Hutcheson and John Clarke of Hull. In the early editions of his Inquiry into Virtue, Hutcheson argued ingeniously against psychological egoism; in his Foundation of Morality, Clarke argued ingeniously against Hutcheson’s arguments. Later, Hutcheson attempted new arguments against (...) psychological egoism, designed to overcome Clarke’s objections. This article examines the exchange between these philosophers. Its conclusion, influenced partly by Clarke, is that psychological egoism withstands Hutcheson’s arguments. This is not to belittle those arguments—indeed, they are among the most resourceful and plausible of their kind. The fact that egoism withstands them is thus not a mere negative result, but a stimulus to consider carefully the ways in which progress in this area may be possible. (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)

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)

An edition of the letters of Erasmus, regarded as one of the greatest humanist writers. All 12 volumes of this work have been reissued, complete with their scholarly apparatus of commentary and notes, as well as plates.