This compilation explores the significance of religion for the controversies stirred up by populist politics in European and American contexts, engaging Jewish, Christian, and Islamic political thought. Moving beyond essentialist definitions of religion, the contributions offer critical interpretations and constructive interventions for political theology today.

Over the last decade, Robert Talisse has developed a devastating argument against reviving John Dewey’s democratic ideal. In his book, A Pragmatist Philosophy of Democracy, and in other essays, Talisse has argued that Deweyan democracy fails to accommodate Rawls’ conception of “the fact of reasonable pluralism” because it is committed to a perfectionist conception of the good. In response, this article offers a Rawlsian rebuttal to Talisse by drawing on Rawls’ own characterisation of perfectionism to show that Dewey’s conception of (...) the good is not perfectionist on Rawls’ account and thus can reasonably accommodate the fact of reasonable pluralism. is article thus begins by exposing and explaining Talisse’s argument, before articulating Shane Ralston’s rejection of the Berlinian and Rawlsian fillters presupposed by Talisse’s argument. Then, it develops its central argument by showing that, even if we accept the Rawlsian filter, Deweyan democracy does not fail to accommodate the fact of reasonable pluralism, because it only relies on a thin (not a full) theory of the good, before considering some foreseeable Talissean objections. Ultimately, the article concludes by showing that these objections fail because Deweyan democracy does not rely on a ‘full’ theory of the good. (shrink)

The correspondence theory of truth is a precise and innovative account of how the truth of a proposition depends upon that proposition's connection to a piece of reality. Joshua Rasmussen refines and defends the correspondence theory of truth, proposing new accounts of facts, propositions, and the correspondence between them. With these theories in hand, he then offers original solutions to the toughest objections facing correspondence theorists. Addressing the Problem of Funny Facts, Liar Paradoxes, and traditional epistemological questions concerning how (...) our minds can access reality, he challenges recent objections, and defends what has traditionally been the most popular theory of truth. Written with clarity, precision, and sensitivity to a range of philosophical backgrounds, his book will appeal to advanced students and scholars seeking a deeper understanding of the relationship between truth and reality. (shrink)

I show explicitly how concerns about wave function collapse and ontology can be decoupled from the bulk of technical analysis necessary to recover localized, approximately Newtonian trajectories from quantum theory. In doing so, I demonstrate that the account of classical behavior provided by decoherence theory can be straightforwardly tailored to give accounts of classical behavior on multiple interpretations of quantum theory, including the Everett, de Broglie-Bohm and GRW interpretations. I further show that this interpretation-neutral, decoherence-based account conforms to a general (...) view of inter-theoretic reduction in physics that I have elaborated elsewhere, which differs from the oversimplified and often ambiguous picture that treats reduction simply as a matter of taking limits. This interpretation-neutral account rests on a general three-pronged strategy for reduction between quantum and classical theories that combines decoherence, an appropriate form of Ehrenfest's Theorem, and a decoherence-compatible mechanism for collapse. It also incorporates a novel argument as to why branch-relative trajectories should be approximately Newtonian, which is based on a little-discussed extension of Ehrenfest's Theorem to open systems, rather than on the more commonly cited but less germane closed-systems version. In the Conclusion, I briefly suggest how the strategy for quantum-classical reduction described here might be extended to reduction between other classical and quantum theories, including classical and quantum field theory and classical and quantum gravity. (shrink)

In a wide-ranging, provocative anatomy of modern society and its origins, novelist and historian John Ralston Saul explores the reason for our deepening sense of crisis and confusion. Throughout the Western world we talk endlessly of individual freedom, yet Saul shows that there has never before been such pressure for conformity. Our business leaders describe themselves as capitalists, yet most are corporate employees and financial speculators. We are obsessed with competition, yet the single largest item of international trade is (...) a subsidized market in armaments. We call our governments democracies, yet few of us participate in politics. We complain about "invasive government," yet our legal, educational, financial, social, cultural and legislative systems are breaking down. While most observers view these problems separately, Saul demonstrates that they are largely manifestations of our blind faith in the value of reason. Over the last 400 years, our "rational elites" have gradually instituted reforms in every phase of social life. But Saul shows that they have also been responsible for most of the difficulties and violence of the same period. This paradox arises from a simple truth which our elites deny: far from being a moral force, reason is no more than an administrative method. Their denial has helped to turn the modern West into a vast, incomprehensible, directionless machine, run by process-minded experts - "Voltaire's bastards"--Whose cult of scientific management is bereft of both sense and morality. Whether in politics, art, business, the military, entertainment, science, finance, academia or journalism, these experts share the same outlook and methods. The result, Saul maintains, is a civilization of immense technological power whose peoples increasingly dwell in a world of illusion. Already known to millions of readers as the author of novels which portray the overwhelming effects of this power on the modern individual by weaving together international finance, the oil and arms business, guerrilla warfare, drug traffic, and the world of art, here Saul lays aside the mask of fiction to speak in his own voice. Only by withdrawing from our addiction to "solutions," he argues, reclaiming the citizens' right to question and participate in public life, and recovering a common sense capacity for intelligent panic, can we find a way out of our permanent crisis. (shrink)

Since its publication, the Psychopathic Personality Inventory and its revision (Lilien- feld & Andrews, 1996; Lilienfeld & Widows, 2005) have become increasingly popular such that it is now among the most frequently used self-report inventories for the assessment of psychopathy. The current meta-analysis examined the relations between the two PPI factors (factor 1: Fearless Dominance; factor 2: Self-Centered Impulsivity), as well as their relations with other validated measures of psychopathy, internalizing and externalizing forms of psychopathology, general personality traits, and antisocial (...) personality disorder symptoms. Across 61 samples reported in 49 publications, we found support for the convergent and criterion validity of both PPI factor 2 and the PPI total score. Much weaker validation was found for PPI factor 1, which manifested limited convergent validity and a pattern of correlations with central criterion variables that was inconsistent with many conceptualizations of psychopathy. (shrink)

Decades of psychological research have been aimed at modeling how people learn features and categories. The empirical validation of these theories is often based on artificial stimuli with simple representations. Recently, deep neural networks have reached or surpassed human accuracy on tasks such as identifying objects in natural images. These networks learn representations of real‐world stimuli that can potentially be leveraged to capture psychological representations. We find that state‐of‐the‐art object classification networks provide surprisingly accurate predictions of human similarity judgments for (...) natural images, but they fail to capture some of the structure represented by people. We show that a simple transformation that corrects these discrepancies can be obtained through convex optimization. We use the resulting representations to predict the difficulty of learning novel categories of natural images. Our results extend the scope of psychological experiments and computational modeling by enabling tractable use of large natural stimulus sets. (shrink)

I argue that our best science supports the rationalist idea that, independent of reasoning, emotions aren’t integral to moral judgment. There’s ample evidence that ordinary moral cognition often involves conscious and unconscious reasoning about an action’s outcomes and the agent’s role in bringing them about. Emotions can aid in moral reasoning by, for example, drawing one’s attention to such information. However, there is no compelling evidence for the decidedly sentimentalist claim that mere feelings are causally necessary or sufficient for making (...) a moral judgment or for treating norms as distinctively moral. I conclude that, even if moral cognition is largely driven by automatic intuitions, these shouldn’t be mistaken for emotions or their non-cognitive components. Non-cognitive elements in our psychology may be required for normal moral development and motivation but not necessarily for mature moral judgment. (shrink)

Much more than just an anthology, this survey of humanity's search for the meaning of life includes the latest contributions to the debate, a judicious selection of key canonical essays, and insightful commentary by internationally respected philosophers. Cutting-edge viewpoint features the most recent contributions to the debate Extensive general introduction offers unprecedented context Leading contemporary philosophers provide insightful introductions to each section.

[Selected as EDITOR'S CHOICE] Background: Extant surveys of people’s attitudes toward human reproductive cloning focus on moral judgments alone, not emotional reactions or sentiments. This is especially important given that some (esp. Leon Kass) have argued against such cloning on the grounds that it engenders widespread negative emotions, like disgust, that provide a moral guide. Objective: To provide some data on emotional reactions to human cloning, with a focus on repugnance, given its prominence in the literature. Methods: This brief mixed-method (...) study measures the self-reported attitudes and emotions (positive or negative) toward cloning from a sample of participants in the United States. Results: Most participants condemned cloning as immoral and said it should be illegal. The most commonly reported positive sentiment was by far interest/curiosity. Negative emotions were much more varied, but anxiety was the most common. Only about a third of participants selected disgust or repugnance as something they felt and an even smaller portion had this emotion come to mind prior to seeing a list of options. Conclusions: Participants felt primarily interested and anxious about human reproductive cloning. They did not primarily feel disgust or repugnance. This provides initial empirical evidence that such a reaction is not appropriately widespread. (shrink)

Not a lot of work on theistic arguments has been devoted to drawing connections between a necessary being and theistic properties. In this paper, I identify novel paths from a necessary being to certain theistic properties: volition, infinite power, infinite knowledge, and infinite goodness. The steps in those paths are an outline for future work on what William Rowe (The Cosmological Argument, 1975, p. 6) has called “stage II” of the cosmological argument.

This article concerns freedom and financial markets. First, I consider the republican case for liberalization, extending Robert Taylor’s economic model of republicanism to financial markets. This case adopts what I call a “philosopher-king” approach to political theory, arguing by reference an ideal or first-best set of policies or reforms. Then, I investigate the negative externalities of several decades of financial market liberalization, including the erosion of political accountability and the growing concentration of political and economic power in the hands of (...) those best suited to profit from the rise of finance. From this “political economy” perspective, the impact of liberalization is clear: we paid for greater access to credit with political and economic domination. In republican terms, we traded freedom for credit. My analysis, moreover, has implications for republican debates on freedom and the market. In second-best worlds, where reforms will almost certainly be incremental, shaping the balance of power in ways that impact future policy, judging reforms by reference to a vision of domination-free markets will often suggest policies that make individuals less free. The political economy approach is far more relevant to debates about which economic institutions further or hinder freedom as non-domination. (shrink)

In the past two decades, reinforcement learning has become a popular framework for understanding brain function. A key component of RL models, prediction error, has been associated with neural signals throughout the brain, including subcortical nuclei, primary sensory cortices, and prefrontal cortex. Depending on the location in which activity is observed, the functional interpretation of prediction error may change: Prediction errors may reflect a discrepancy in the anticipated and actual value of reward, a signal indicating the salience or novelty of (...) a stimulus, and many other interpretations. Anterior cingulate cortex has long been recognized as a region involved in processing behavioral error, and recent computational models of the region have expanded this interpretation to include a more general role for the region in predicting likely events, broadly construed, and signaling deviations between expected and observed events. Ongoing modeling work investigating the interaction between ACC and additional regions involved in cognitive control suggests an even broader role for cingulate in computing a hierarchically structured surprise signal critical for learning models of the environment. The result is a predictive coding model of the frontal lobes, suggesting that predictive coding may be a unifying computational principle across the neocortex. (shrink)

Supporters of the de Broglie-Bohm interpretation of quantum theory argue that because the theory, like classical mechanics, concerns the motions of point particles in 3D space, it is specially suited to recover classical behavior. I offer a novel account of classicality in dBB theory, if only to show that such an account falls out almost trivially from results developed in the largely interpretation-neutral context of decoherence theory. I then argue that this undermines any special claim that dBB theory is purported (...) to have on the unification of the quantum and classical realms. (shrink)

Recently, several states in the United States have sought to adopt more restrictive abortion policies. Most have tried to enact “heartbeat bills” that prohibit most abortions once a fetal heartbeat becomes detectable. This article explores this question: Are heartbeat bills ethically defensible? I argue that they are not. There are at least four problems with them. First, heartbeat bills rely on a problematic understanding of human death. Second, they contradict and even undermine the leading arguments in ethics against abortion. Third, (...) they are ambiguous not just in terms of when they judge fetal heartbeats to be detectable but also in what they deem to be heartbeats. Finally, there is a case to be made that heartbeat bills are disingenuous, both in their intentions and in their underlying motives. (shrink)

In order to receive controlled pain medications for chronic non-oncologic pain, patients often must sign a “narcotic contract” or “opioid treatment agreement” in which they promise not to give pills to others, use illegal drugs, or seek controlled medications from health care providers. In addition, they must agree to use the medication as prescribed and to come to the clinic for drug testing and pill counts. Patients acknowledge that if they violate the opioid treatment agreement, they may no longer receive (...) controlled medications. OTAs have been widely implemented since they were recommended by multiple national bodies to decrease misuse and diversion of narcotic medications. But critics argue that OTAs are ethically suspect, if not unethical, and should be used with extreme care if at all. We agree that OTAs pose real dangers and must be implemented carefully. But we also believe that the most serious criticisms stem from a mistaken understanding of OTAs’ purpose and ethical basis. (shrink)

Religious belief and behavior raises the following two questions: (Q1) Does God, or any other being or state that is integral to various religious traditions, exist? (Q2) Why do humans have religious beliefs and engage in religious behavior? How one answers (Q2) can affect how reasonable individuals can be in accepting a particular answer to (Q1). My aim in this chapter is to carefully distinguish the various ways in which an answer to Q2 might affect the rationality of believing in (...) God. A literature has sprouted around this exact issue, but it has heretofore focused almost exclusively on one way in which a genealogy for p can affect the rationality of believing p – namely, by the genealogy functioning within a debunking argument. However, there are other ways a genealogy can affect the rationality of a belief. I suggest that we should be interested in whether genealogies more broadly cast doubt on religious beliefs. My main goal is: (i) to argue that CSR does not cast doubt on theistic belief in a few of the primary ways that propositions can cast doubt on other propositions, including via a debunking argument; and (ii) to suggest that one plausible way in which CSR might cast doubt on theistic belief is by undermining various traditional theistic reasons, and to illustrate how this might work with one example of a traditional theistic reason – religious experience. (shrink)

ABSTRACTDuncan Pritchard proposes a biscopic solution to the problem of radical skepticism, which consists in epistemological disjunctivism and a theory about the limits of rational evaluation inspired by Wittgenstein's On Certainty. According to the latter theory, we cannot have rationally grounded knowledge of the denials of radical skeptical hypotheses, a consequence that Pritchard finds attractive insofar as he thinks that claims to know the falsity of radical skeptical hypotheses are epistemically immodest. I argue that there is room for a neo-Moorean (...) to dispute Pritchard's argument for the Wittgensteinian proposal and I raise some doubts about its underlying motivation. Finally, I put forward an alternative, which I call “moderate neo-Moorean epistemological disjunctivism.” While this theory contends that we possess rationally grounded anti-skeptical knowledge, it also allows for a degree of epistemic modesty, by conceding that perceptual knowledge never amounts to knowledge that is absolutely certain. (shrink)

Plural quantification, often used to evade Russell paradoxes, will lead back to them, given certain assumptions about propositions. This chapter provides a more generalized version of the path to paradox by showing that any theory that makes possible the construction of an appropriate packaging relation falls prey to a Russell paradox. It gives examples of widely-held metaphysical theories that require such a relation. It shows that the paradoxes that can result from plural quantification are more widely damaging, and harder to (...) tame, than has been recognized. It also displays formal requirements that any metaphysical framework with a packaging relation must meet if it is to have a chance of escaping self-contradiction. The chapter first gives the general paradox-generating setup, and then shows how three families of metaphysical assumptions allow one to instantiate it. It concludes by assessing the aftermath of the arguments presented. (shrink)

Existential gratitude-gratitude for one's very existence or life as a whole-is pervasive across the most influential human, cultural and religious traditions. Weaving together analytic and continental, as well as non-western and historical philosophical perspectives, this volume explores the nexus of gratitude, existence and God as an inter-subjective phenomenon for the first time. A team of leading scholars introduce existential gratitude as a perennially and characteristically human phenomenon, central to the distinctive life of our species. Attention is given to the conditions (...) under which existence itself might be construed as having a gift-like or otherwise gratitude-inducing character. Drawing on a diversity of perspectives, chapters mark out new territory in philosophical inquiry, addressing whether and in what sense we ought to be grateful for our very existence. By analysing gratitude, this collection makes a novel contribution to the discourse on moral emotions, phenomenology, anti-natalism and theology. (shrink)

I defend three general claims concerning inter-theoretic reduction in physics. First, the popular notion that a superseded theory in physics is generally a simple limit of the theory that supersedes it paints an oversimplified picture of reductive relations in physics. Second, where reduction specifically between two dynamical systems models of a single system is concerned, reduction requires the existence of a particular sort of function from the state space of the low-level model to that of the high-level model that approximately (...) commutes, in a specific sense, with the rules of dynamical evolution prescribed by the models. The third point addresses a tension between, on the one hand, the frequent need to take into account system-specific details in providing a full derivation of the high-level theory’s success in a particular context, and, on the other hand, a desire to understand the general mechanisms and results that under- write reduction between two theories across a wide and disparate range of different systems; I suggest a reconciliation based on the use of partial proofs of reduction, designed to reveal these general mechanisms of reduction at work across a range of systems, while leaving certain gaps to be filled in on the basis of system-specific details. After discussing these points of general methodology, I go on to demonstrate their application to a number of particular inter-theory reductions in physics involving quantum theory. I consider three reductions: first, connecting classical mechanics and non-relativistic quantum mechanics; second,connecting classical electrodynamics and quantum electrodynamics; and third, connecting non-relativistic quantum mechanics and quantum electrodynamics. I approach these reductions from a realist perspective, and for this reason consider two realist interpretations of quantum theory - the Everett and Bohm theories - as potential bases for these reductions. Nevertheless, many of the technical results concerning these reductions pertain also more generally to the bare, uninterpreted formalism of quantum theory. Throughout my analysis, I make the application of the general methodological claims of the thesis explicit, so as to provide concrete illustration of their validity. (shrink)

One of the contentious philosophical issues surrounding the cognitive science of religion (CSR) is whether well-confirmed CSR theories would debunk religious beliefs. These debates have been contentious in part because of criticisms of epistemic principles used in debunking arguments. In this paper I use Ernest Sosa’s respected theory of knowledge as fully apt belief—which avoids objections that have been leveled against sensitivity and safety principles often used in debunking arguments—to construct a plausible debunking argument for religious belief on the assumption (...) that religious belief is formed simply through processes theorized by CSR. But, in fact, most believers also rely on arguments of various sorts, and their beliefs are not debunked. (shrink)

Sculpted Ambiances in Africana Landscape centers on ambiance as it affects the expanded sculptural field, particularly filling a gap in aesthetics left by a lack of focus on sculptures and installations in the Africana world and elsewhere. This book differentiates ambiance from other affective states and emotions and explores its production. It provides an introduction to the history of ambiance and vividly demonstrates, through immersive and experiential writing, how ambiance manifests in different artistic situations and social settings. The book considers (...) the neglected and unique importance of sculptural ambiance to the history of Africana visual culture, and what these works mean in terms of their social, historical, cultural, political, and ecological imagination of space. The book is written in an episodic style and begins with a description of an image before present an analysis of the artist's style and staging for ambient experience. This book will benefit college and university students; scholars of art, architecture, aesthetics, philosophy, geography, anthropology, and sociology; and curators and galleries. (shrink)

This article recovers James Brown Scott’s conviction in American exceptionalism, a belief that underlay both his institutional work as well as his understanding of the origins and trajectory of international law. In the first section, we discuss Scott’s interpretation of Hugo Grotius as part of his tactic to make US foreign affairs policies and perspectives more compelling by presenting them as universal. In the second section, we argue that Scott’s writings on the Spanish origins of international law were in fact (...) meant to protect Anglo-American hegemony and US influence in the Americas in the face of rapidly changing geopolitical pressures. In the final section we suggest that Scott’s US exceptionalism is reflected in his use of the United States Constitution and Supreme Court as a model for key international organizations. We conclude that Scott reframed Vitoria not to redress American bias but to enshrine it. (shrink)

This volume brings together for the first time thirteen recent interviews with the brightest names in contemporary philosophy, including W.V.O. Quine, Richard Rorty, Stanley Cavell, Hilary Putnam and John Rawls. The pieces are culled from the Harvard Review of Philosophy, which has operated at the core of Harvard's Philosophy Department since 1991. Covering wide range of topics from the philosophy of law to logic to metaphysics to literature, the interviews provide a fascinating introduction to some of the most influential thinkers (...) of the day. The book also includes a foreword by Thomas Scanlon. Interviews with Henry Alison, Stanley Cavell, Alan Dershowitz, Cora Diamond, Umberto Eco, Harvey C. Mansfield, Jr., Alexander Nehemas, Hilary Putnam, W.V. Quine, John Rawls, Richard Rorty, Michael Sandel, Cornel West. (shrink)

It is often argued that the great quantity of evil in our world makes God’s existence less likely than a lesser quantity would, and this, presumably, because the probability that some evils are gratuitous increases as the overall quantity of evil increases. Often, an additive approach to quantifying evil is employed in such arguments. In this paper, we examine C. S. Lewis’ objection to the additive approach, arguing that although he is correct to reject this approach, there is a sense (...) in which he underestimates the quantity of pain. However, the quantity of pain in that sense does not significantly increase the probability that some pain is gratuitous. Therefore, the quantitative argument likely fails. (shrink)

Is it moral to sacrifice one's life for a higher goal? Why do many in the U.S. think it admirable to join the army but despicable for Palestinians to sign up with Hamas? How can we actually determine "evil" and "good" in the daily world? These practical questions cut to the heart of what it means to be human. John Ralston Saul, in his matter-of-fact discussion of six basic human qualities — ethics, common sense, intuition, imagination, memory, and reason (...) — confronts basic concepts in a manner not done since Thomas Paine more than two centuries ago. In an easy-to-understand style, Saul explains why essential qualities of being human cannot exist in isolation but instead depend on and enrich each other. On Equilibrium persuasively explores morality and how it can be used to foster equilibrium for the self and achieve an ethical society. (shrink)

In addition to his Noble Prize-winning work in economics, Milton Friedman produced some of the most influential philosophical work on the role of government in a free society. Despite his great influence, there remains a dearth of scholarship on Friedman’s social and political philosophy. This paper helps to fill this large void by providing a conceptual analysis of Friedman’s theory of freedom. In addition, I argue that a careful reading of his arguments for freedom ought to lead Friedman, and like-minded (...) liberals and libertarians, to give absolute priority to his negative income tax proposal. A substantial basic income furthers effective economic freedom (on Friedman’s own understanding), redeems his central claim that markets enable cooperation without coercion, and enables him to address his lifelong interlocutors by mitigating concerns for the ways in which economic dependence and inequality undermine both freedom and democratic legitimacy. (shrink)

In this essay I critique the identification of contingency with sheer arbitrary possibility in Quentin Meillassoux's After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency. After offering logical and metaphysical reasons for why such an identification is a limitation on the speculative potential of reason, I draw upon Charles S. Peirce, Gilles Deleuze, and Giambattista Vico to articulate the outlines of a view of contingency which can underwrite a different speculative position to one that is grounded upon an absolute of (...) unreason. This form of speculation, a realism of contingency without an axiom of unreason, is indicated in outline by the structure of divination practices. I thus propose, without defending its actuality, at least the possibility of a divinatory form of speculation that is adequate to the absolute status of contingency. (shrink)

In this paper, I assess the claim that death renders life absurd. First, I characterize absurdity as something we perceive in situations involving extreme disharmonies which strike us as unexpected or unacceptable. Next, I outline several potential disharmonies which death might introduce into our existence (such as the disharmony between our dignity and capacities, and the undignified annihilation which death promises), but suggest that these examples need not be seen as necessarily absurd; there are perspectives available to us from which (...) these facts can appear to be acceptable aspects of life. Finally, I consider a more problematic case of absurdity—that human beings allegedly fail to grasp the truth of their mortality—but suggest that the underlying disharmony here can be eliminated provided we develop an authentic attitude toward death (and that this is possible, despite some objections). In short, I argue that none of the most obvious potential absurdities which might arise from our mortality are strong enough to entail the claim that death inevitably renders life absurd, at least on one plausible and interesting interpretation of that claim. (shrink)

Nietzsche’s 1873 fragment, the Zeitatomenlehre, posits a temporal conception of action at a distance where space is reduced to a single point and time consists only in a series of discrete atoms. Taken as a physical doctrine that destroys all spatial difference, this conception raises serious conflicts with the rest of his work. I describe and situate this theory within the historical context of debates over action at a distance in nineteenth-century physics, distinguish it from physical theories influential on Nietzsche, (...) and argue that these conflicts can be resolved only by viewing it in the anti-metaphysical phenomenalist and representational terms that he also expressed in his early work. (shrink)

It has become a popular view in jurisprudence that the law exists to guide us. I argue in this article that it is plausible to think that the law does not necessarily exist to guide us. I do this while accepting that the law is necessarily normative. The upshot of the argument is significant. Viewing an attempt to provide guidance as a necessary feature of the law gives rise to a distinctive mode of operating that some think has inherently valuable (...) qualities. We get to say, for example, that the rule of law provides some necessary constraints on how laws should be designed. These valuable aims and constraints become external aims and constraints once guidance is jettisoned from the concept of law. It would not, for example, be true just in virtue of the very nature of law that it should not be secret or oppress people into conformity. (shrink)

This is a selective annotated bibliography of publications in the area of feminist aes-thetics from 1990 to 2003. It is intended to compliment the bibliography presented by Linda Krumholz and Estella Lauter in the Spring 1990 issue of Hypatia.

The empirical literature exploring lawyers and their moral decision making is limited despite the “crisis” of unethical and unprofessional behavior in the bar that has been well documented for over a decade. In particular we are unaware of any empirical studies that investigate the moral landscape of the health lawyer’s practice. In an effort to address this gap in the literature, an interdisciplinary team of researchers at Vanderbilt University designed an empirical study to gather preliminary evidence regarding the moral reasoning (...) of health care attorneys. The primary research question was how health lawyers respond when they encounter ethical or moral dilemmas in their practice for which the law fails to offer a bright-line solution. In exploring this question, we sought to understand better what motivations or influences guide action when health lawyers confront ethical quandaries, and whether there are specific differences, e.g., gender, experience, or religiosity, that are associated with specific responses to situations testing ethical or moral boundaries. (shrink)

This is a book about the American Dream: how to understand this central principle of American public philosophy, the ways in which it is threatened by a number of winner-take-all economic trends, and how to make it a reality for workers and their families in the 21st century. Integrating political philosophy and the history of political thought with recent work in economics, political science, and sociology, this book calls for renewed political and policy commitment to “just work.” -/- Such a (...) commitment is essential to combat the negative moral externalities of an economy where the fruits of growth are increasingly claimed by a relatively small portion of the population: slower growth, rising inequality, declining absolute mobility, dying communities, the erosion of social solidarity, lack of faith in political leaders and institutions, exploding debt, ethnic and nationalist backlash, widespread hopelessness, and the rapid rise in what economists Angus Deaton and Anne Case call deaths of despair. -/- Covid-19 threatens to pour gasoline on these winner-take-all fires, further concentrating economic and political power in the hands of those best suited to withstand (and even profit from) the pandemic-driven economic crisis. In this book, the author provides a model for understanding the American Dream and making it a reality in a post-Covid-19 economy. -/- A tour de force, this book is essential reading for scholars and researchers of political philosophy, political economy, political theory, and economics, as well as for the layperson trying to make sense of the post-pandemic world. (shrink)

This volume takes a multi-disciplinary approach to continental philosophy of religion, engaging with philosophy, theology, religious studies, anthropology, cultural studies, and new religious movements, to explore patterns of mind and mortality, existence and ecstasy, creativity and expression, political possibility and religious matrix.

Though Arthur Danto has long been engaged with issues of embodiment in art and beyond, neither he nor most of his interlocutors have devoted significant attention to the art form in which art and embodiment most vividly intersect, namely dance. This article, first, considers Danto’s brief references to dance in his early magnum opus, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace. Second, it tracks the changes in Danto’s philosophy of art as evidenced in his later After the End of Art and The (...) Abuse of Beauty. And finally, it utilizes Danto’s most recent work on the philosophy of action to suggest a new Danto-inspired definition of art, namely "apposite bodies.". (shrink)