There are diverse pathways to becoming an academic, yet personal histories of successful academics who have taken non-traditional routes often remain undocumented. This qualitative and autobiographical study is guided by the theories of equifinality and career construction (von Bertalanffy, 1968; Toya, 2020; Savickas, 2005), aiming at filling this gap by documenting a personal journey from classroom teaching to academia. The study findings reveal that career pathways are marked by significant milestones, challenges and strategic decision-making processes that shape the career trajectory. (...) The results underscore the validity of equifinality in academic career development and active role individuals play in constructing their career narratives. It is recommended that institutions and policymakers in higher learning institutions should recognize and value non-traditional career paths as valuable assets within individuals’ career development. (shrink)

This essay, in the form of a letter written to director László Nemes in the immediate aftermath of viewing Son of Saul, is at once a critical reading of the film within a larger theoretical framework and a subjective emotional response to seeing on the screen something of the author’s own “most harrowing nightmares.” While bringing Nemes’s film into conversation with Maurice Blanchot, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, the Hassidic tale and ancient myths, Georges Didi-Huberman returns to his reflections (...) in Images in Spite of All (2008) on the four photographs taken clandestinely of the gas chambers in Auschwitz by one of the Sonderkommando. Son of Saul presents the allegory of Saul whose job as a Sonderkommando is to drag countless corpses to the crematorium where they will be reduced to ashes but who sets out on a mad, single-minded quest to give a proper burial, complete with the recitation of kaddish, to the body of one boy. According to the author, the film marks the invention of the “documentary tale” genre, combining Benjamin’s notions of montage based on the document, as manifested in the work of Marcel Proust, James Joyce, and Alfred Döblin, and that of the dying art of storytelling, intimately bound up as it is with the authority of the dying. Thus, the dead child drowning at the end of the film stands as an inversion of the story of Moses, a living child saved from drowning, just as the real historic death of the Jewish people reverses the mythical Biblical birth of the Jewish people. (shrink)

Ulysses is certainly the greatest novel in the English language, and one might argue for its being the greatest single work of art in our tradition. How significant, then, and how teasing, that this masterwork should be a comedy, and that its creator should have explicitly valued the comic "vision" over the tragic—how disturbing to our predilection for order that, with an homage paid to classical antiquity so meticulous that it is surely a burlesque, Joyce's exhibitionististicicity is never so (...) serious as when it is most outrageously comic. Joyce might have been addressing his readers when he wrote to Nora in 1909: "Now . . . I want you to read over and over all I have written to you. Some of it is ugly, obscene, and bestial, some of it is pure and holy and spiritual: all of it is myself." Joyce Carol Oates is the author of, among others, them, Wonderland, and The Assassins. "Jocoserious Joyce" is part of a book on tragedy and comedy. Her contributions to Critical Inquiry, include "Lawrence's Gotterdammerung" and “The Picture of Dorian Gray: Wilde's Parable about the Fall". (shrink)

The purpose of the present essay is to exposit and interpret the principal contours of the phenomenology of Christianity proposed by Michel Henry in dialog with his theological critics. Against the claims commonly made about him, Henry is not a Gnostic of any sort: neither a monist, nor a dualist, nor a pantheist, nor a denier of faith, nor a world- or creation-denier or anything of the sort. He rather proposes a form of “life-idealism” according to which life is the (...) foundation of the possibility of the world, life assumes a visible, external representation in its activities in the world, and the meaning of the world is that it is the arena in which life pursues the goal of its own perfection and growth. Interpreted in this light, his thought is not Gnostic. (shrink)

The purpose of the present essay is to present a version of the evidential argument from evil and to propose a ‘skeptical theistic’ response from a phenomenological point of view. In a word, the problem with the evidential argument from evil is that it attempts to put forth as justified an interpretation of the moral significance of historical events which actually exceeds the limits of human knowledge and which is based on a misinterpretation of experience. The essay also corrects certain (...) analytic-philosophical notions regarding the nature of appearance, terminating with a discussion of the familiar critiques of analytic skeptical theism and the question of whether the belief in the existence of God might not be affected by the apparent skepticism implied by the phenomenological approach to knowledge in general. (shrink)

The present essay elaborates upon some of the important constituent elements of the classical universalist tradition, documented in detail by Ilaria Ramelli’s recent research, in dialog with Oliver Crisp and Jerry Walls, two contemporary objectors to the doctrine of different backgrounds. Its central claim is that the classical universalist tradition can respond to and accommodate the concerns of its objectors while maintaining the firm conviction of the eventual universal salvation.

Christianity proposes that God can be accessed both in the subjectivity of the human self and in the World. This admittedly strange idea can be understood by drawing certain insights from Michel Henry and Dumitru Stăniloae. For Henry, the connection between God and the human self in subjectivity is understood as the generation of the human as a living self in the absolute Life which is God. For Stăniloae, the connection between God and the World is understood through the interpretation (...) of the cosmos as an intelligible medium by which the dialog between God and the human being takes place. These two thinkers have certain lacunae, but their proposals can be fruitfully combined through the supposition that the World is the “body” of God, i.e. His inner life as seen from the outside. (shrink)

Moral thinking pervades our practical lives, but where did this way of thinking come from, and what purpose does it serve? Is it to be explained by environmental pressures on our ancestors a million years ago, or is it a cultural invention of more recent origin? In The Evolution of Morality, Richard Joyce takes up these controversial questions, finding that the evidence supports an innate basis to human morality. As a moral philosopher, Joyce is interested in whether any (...) implications follow from this hypothesis. Might the fact that the human brain has been biologically prepared by natural selection to engage in moral judgment serve in some sense to vindicate this way of thinking--staving off the threat of moral skepticism, or even undergirding some version of moral realism? Or if morality has an adaptive explanation in genetic terms--if it is, as Joyce writes, "just something that helped our ancestors make more babies"--might such an explanation actually undermine morality's central role in our lives? He carefully examines both the evolutionary "vindication of morality" and the evolutionary "debunking of morality," considering the skeptical view more seriously than have others who have treated the subject.Interdisciplinary and combining the latest results from the empirical sciences with philosophical discussion, The Evolution of Morality is one of the few books in this area written from the perspective of moral philosophy. Concise and without technical jargon, the arguments are rigorous but accessible to readers from different academic backgrounds. Joyce discusses complex issues in plain language while advocating subtle and sometimes radical views. The Evolution of Morality lays the philosophical foundations for further research into the biological understanding of human morality. (shrink)

In The Myth of Morality, Richard Joyce argues that moral discourse is hopelessly flawed. At the heart of ordinary moral judgements is a notion of moral inescapability, or practical authority, which, upon investigation, cannot be reasonably defended. Joyce argues that natural selection is to blame, in that it has provided us with a tendency to invest the world with values that it does not contain, and demands that it does not make. Should we therefore do away with morality, (...) as we did away with other faulty notions such as witches? Possibly not. We may be able to carry on with morality as a 'useful fiction' - allowing it to have a regulative influence on our lives and decisions, perhaps even playing a central role - while not committing ourselves to believing or asserting falsehoods, and thus not being subject to accusations of 'error'. (shrink)

Proponents of “early high Christology” maintain that the New Testament teaches that God created the world through Jesus (John 1:3; 1 Cor. 8:6; Col. 1:16–17; Heb. 1:2, 10). Contemporary philosophical theologians sympathetic to Nicene orthodoxy appeal to this trend in order to justify their understanding of the person and nature of Jesus as divine. This article argues from the logic of the word “through” that the belief that God created the world through Jesus is incompatible with the Nicene doctrine of (...) the consubstantiality of Father and Son, and considers what options remain for pro-Nicene theologians. (shrink)

Oliver Crisp proposes “chastened theism” as a theologically realist alternative to classical theism and theistic personalism. I critique his chastened theism and propose the alternative of Christian Pure Act theism, a “chastened” version of theological nonrealism.

The object of the present essay is to establish the possibility of “theology without anathemas.” First, an argument is given for the conclusion that infallible knowledge in matters of theology is not now possible. Both the Protestant doctrine of claritas scripturae and the Roman Catholic understanding of the Magisterium of the Church are rejected. Then, an alternative, “fallibilist” ecclesiology is proposed, according to which to belong to the Church is a matter of having been claimed by Christ as His own. (...) When combined with a universal doctrine of election and a highly objective and actualized doctrine of the Atonement, such a conception of the Church makes it possible to understand theology as a collaborative and cooperative effort on the part of all to understand better this Christ to whom they all always already belong. (shrink)

Proposing a radical critique of the method and dualistic onto-epistemology of the catholic tradition, Steven Nemes draws from the thought of Michel Henry and Huldrych Zwingli in the pursuit of developing a post-catholic Protestant restatement of the Christian faith as a theology of the manifest.

Richard Bradley’s landmark book Decision Theory with a Human Face makes seminal contributions to nearly every major area of decision theory, as well as most areas of formal epistemology and many areas of semantics. In addition to sketching Bradley’s distinctive semantics for conditional beliefs and desires, I will explain his theory of conditional desire, focusing particularly on his claim that we should not desire events, either positively or negatively, under the supposition that they will occur. I shall argue, to the (...) contrary, that permitting non-trivial desirabilities for events whose occurrence is known or assumed is both more intuitively plausible and more theoretically fruitful than Bradley’s approach. In the course of the discussion I will contrast Bradley’s broadly evidentialist picture of decision theory with my own more orthodox causal approach. (shrink)

In his contribution to this volume, Paul Bloomfield analyzes and attempts to answer the question “Why is it bad to be bad?” I too will use this question as my point of departure; in particular I want to approach the matter from the perspective of a moral error theorist. This discussion will preface one of the principal topics of this paper: the relationship between morality and self-interest. Again, my main goal is to clarify what the moral error theorist might say (...) on this subject. Against this background, the final portion of this paper will be a discussion of moral fictionalism, defending it from some objections. (shrink)

One might think at first glance that naturalism excludes any form of theism by definition. This article argues to the contrary that proper scientificity requires that a naturalist remain open to the possibility of the truth of the classical theistic conception of God in particular. The only alternative is for naturalism to devolve into an anti-theistic bias and ideology, forsaking the claim to being properly scientific.

The present essay is concerned with the question of whether analytic theology can be properly phenomenological. Both analytic theology and phenomenology are defined by reference to leading practitioners of both, and responses are given to objections to both approaches. The critique of analytic theology recently proposed by Martin Westerholm is considered, as well the objections to phenomenology brought forth by Tom Sparrow. The compatibility of analytic theology and phenomenology is argued on the basis of the definitions provided. Four brief arguments (...) are given for establishing why an analytic theologian might consider adopting a phenomenological method. The essay concludes with a demonstration of a properly phenomenological analytic-theological treatment of the question of the relationship between Scripture and ecclesial tradition in dialog with the canonical _sola scriptura_ of Kevin Vanhoozer and John Peckham. (shrink)

The doctrine of the perspicuity of Scripture maintains that the meaning of Scripture is clear to those who are enlightened by the Holy Spirit through faith. But this definition provides no way to know whether one has true faith or has been so enlightened by the Holy Spirit, a problem accentuated by persistent disagreement among persons who claim to be Christians of good will. This is a specific instance of a more general problem afflicting “closed” theological epistemologies. This essay provides (...) an exposition of Kevin Diller’s synthesis of the “closed” theological epistemologies of Karl Barth and Alvin Plantinga and critiques it on phenomenological grounds. It then concludes with a phenomenologically redefined description of Christian faith which entails rejecting the doctrine of the claritas scripturae and motivates an “open” theological epistemology. (shrink)

As an exercise in the ‘theology of disclosure’, the present essay proposes a kind of phenomenological analysis of the act of reading the Bible as Scripture with the goal of bringing to light the theoretical commitments which it implicitly demands. This sort of analysis can prove helpful for the continuing disputes among Protestants, Catholics, and Orthodox insofar as it is relevant for one of the principal points of controversy between them: namely, the relationship between Scripture, Tradition, and Church as theological (...) authorities. It proceeds by analyzing both the objective and subjective ‘poles’ of the act, and it illuminates the presence of the Church and her Tradition on both sides. The Church—i.e., the community of God’s people—is both that which is immediately encountered in the text, as well as the factor which enables scriptural reading in the first place. The article terminates with an application of the insights of the preceding discussion to the controversy about icons. (shrink)

Many male traits are well explained by sexual selection theory as adaptations to mating competition and mate choice, whereas no unifying theory explains traits expressed more in females. Anne Campbell's “staying alive” theory proposed that human females produce stronger self-protective reactions than males to aggressive threats because self-protection tends to have higher fitness value for females than males. We examined whether Campbell's theory has more general applicability by considering whether human females respond with greater self-protectiveness than males to other threats (...) beyond aggression. We searched the literature for physiological, behavioral, and emotional responses to major physical and social threats, and found consistent support for females' responding with greater self-protectiveness than males. Females mount stronger immune responses to many pathogens; experience a lower threshold to detect, and lesser tolerance of, pain; awaken more frequently at night; express greater concern about physically dangerous stimuli; exert more effort to avoid social conflicts; exhibit a personality style more focused on life's dangers; react to threats with greater fear, disgust, and sadness; and develop more threat-based clinical conditions than males. Our findings suggest that in relation to threat, human females have relatively heightened protective reactions compared to males. The pervasiveness of this result across multiple domains suggests that general mechanisms might exist underlying females' unique adaptations. An understanding of such processes would enhance knowledge of female health and well-being. (shrink)

This volume considers how current transitions in postsecondary education are impacting Higher Education institutions and subjects in a number of Northern nations, as well as how these transitions are indicative of the wider shift from the welfare to the market state. The university is now considered a key site for training and wealth generation in the so-called 'knowledge economy' that operates in a globalising, high tech world. Further, these transitions are underpinned by neo-liberal economic ideas that assume that the public (...) sector is a drag on the economy unless it is subject to the rules, regulations and assumptions that govern the private sector. This excellent volume - an important contribution to Education as well as Economics and Politics - furthers our understandings of universities as marketable entities as part of the globalized economy. (shrink)

Different versions of moral projectivism are delineated: minimal, metaphysical, nihilistic, and noncognitivist. Minimal projectivism (the focus of this paper) is the conjunction of two subtheses: (1) that we experience morality as an objective aspect of the world and (2) that this experience has its origin in an affective attitude (e.g., an emotion) rather than in perceptual faculties. Both are empirical claims and must be tested as such. This paper does not offer ideas on any specific test procedures, but rather undertakes (...) the important preliminary task of clarifying the content of these subtheses (e.g., what is meant by "objective"? what is meant by "experience"?). Finally, attention is given to the relation between (a) acknowledging that the projectivist account might be true of a token moral judgment and (b) maintaining moral projectivism to be true as a general thesis. (shrink)

Some Bayesians have suggested that beliefs based on ambiguous or incomplete evidence are best represented by families of probability functions. I spend the first half of this essay outlining one version of this imprecise model of belief, and spend the second half defending the model against recent objections, raised by Roger White and others, which concern the phenomenon of probabilistic dilation. Dilation occurs when learning some definite fact forces a person’s beliefs about an event to shift from a sharp, point-valued (...) subjective probability to an imprecise spread of probabilities. Some commentators find dilation disturbing, both from an epistemic and a decision-theoretic perspective, and place the blame on the use of sets of probabilities to model opinion. These reactions are based on an overly narrow conception of imprecise belief states which assumes that we know everything there is to know about a person’s doxastic attitudes once we have identified the spreads of values for her imprecise credences. Once we recognize that the imprecise model has the resources to characterize a much richer family of doxastic attitudes than this, we will see that White’s charges of epistemological and decision theoretic incoherence are unfounded. (shrink)

Following Kripke and Putnam, the received view of chemical kinds has been a microstructuralist one. To be a microstructuralist about chemical kinds is to think that membership in said kinds is conferred by microstructural properties. Recently, the received microstructuralist view has been elaborated and defended, but it has also been attacked on the basis of complexities, both chemical and ontological. Here, I look at which complexities really challenge the microstructuralist view; at how the view itself might be made more complicated (...) in order to accommodate such challenges; and finally, at what this increasingly complicated picture implies for our standard assessment of chemical kindhood—primarily, for the widespread assumption that chemical kinds in general are more neat and tidy than those messy biological ones. _1_ The Received View _2_ A Taxonomy of Chemical Kinds _3_ Atomic Number _4_ H2O, H3O+, OH−, and More _5_ Complicating the Microstructuralist Picture _6_ Concrete and Other Mixtures _7_ Macromolecules, Especially Proteins _8_ Abandoning Sameness of Elemental Composition _9_ Not So Different after All. (shrink)

Colin Radford must weary of defending his thesis that the emotional reactions we have towards fictional characters, events, and states of affairs are irrational.1 Yet, for all the discussion, the issue has not, to my mind, been properly settled—or at least not settled in the manner I should prefer—and so this paper attempts once more to debunk Radford’s defiance of common sense. For some, the question of whether our emotional responses to fiction are rational does not arise, for they are (...) inclined to doubt that we have them at all.2 Emotions, on this view, are fundamentally linked to belief states, as in the following thesis concerning the emotion of fear: 1) We fear for ourselves only if we believe ourselves to be in danger; we fear for others only if we believe they actually exist and are in danger. When we typically engage with fiction we do not ‘suspend our disbelief’, in the sense of coming to believe that the fiction is non-fiction. No matter how engrossed I become in a Dracula movie, I do not begin to believe that I am seeing actual vampires. 2) When we watch a horror movie, we do not believe ourselves, or anyone actual, to be in danger. And so these theorists, endorsing (1) and (2), are obliged to deny the intuitive (3): 3) We are sometimes frightened when watching a horror movie. These three propositions are a version of what is sometimes called ‘The Paradox of Fiction’. For my money, since the denial of (2) is foolish, and the denial of (3) deeply counterintuitive, it is (1)—being a substantive philosophical thesis—that is most likely the culprit. Radford agrees, yet maintains that there is some intimate connection between belief and emotion. For him, the dependence is not the existential one stated in (1), but a normative one: we do not rationally feel fear unless we believe ourselves (or someone actual) to be in danger.3 This revision of the connection allows the construction of a quite different inconsistent triad: 4) We are not rationally frightened unless we believe someone actual to be in danger.. (shrink)

Isaac Levi has long criticized causal decisiontheory on the grounds that it requiresdeliberating agents to make predictions abouttheir own actions. A rational agent cannot, heclaims, see herself as free to choose an actwhile simultaneously making a prediction abouther likelihood of performing it. Levi is wrongon both points. First, nothing in causaldecision theory forces agents to makepredictions about their own acts. Second,Levi's arguments for the ``deliberation crowdsout prediction thesis'' rely on a flawed modelof the measurement of belief. Moreover, theability of agents (...) to adopt beliefs about theirown acts during deliberation is essentialto any plausible account of human agency andfreedom. Though these beliefs play no part inthe rationalization of actions, they arerequired to account for the causalgenesis of behavior. To explain the causes ofactions we must recognize that (a) an agentcannot see herself as entirely free in thematter of A unless she believes herdecision to perform A will cause A,and (b) she cannot come to a deliberatedecision about A unless she adoptsbeliefs about her decisions. FollowingElizabeth Anscombe and David Velleman, I arguethat an agent's beliefs about her own decisionsare self-fulfilling, and that this can beused to explain away the seeming paradoxicalfeatures of act probabilities. (shrink)

This article argues that the claim of traditional Christian theology and religion to be in possession of supernatural revelation cannot be substantiated in a valid and non-circular manner in principle. It then notes the consequences for theology if the notion of supernatural revelation is abandoned. It proposes agnosticism about unknowable matters as a way of exercising faith or trust in the limits God’s providence has established for human knowledge.

This book defends the view that any adequate account of rational decision making must take a decision maker's beliefs about causal relations into account. The early chapters of the book introduce the non-specialist to the rudiments of expected utility theory. The major technical advance offered by the book is a 'representation theorem' that shows that both causal decision theory and its main rival, Richard Jeffrey's logic of decision, are both instances of a more general conditional decision theory. The book solves (...) a long-standing problem for Jeffrey's theory by showing for the first time how to obtain a unique utility and probability representation for preferences and judgements of comparative likelihood. The book also contains a major new discussion of what it means to suppose that some event occurs or that some proposition is true. The most complete and robust defence of causal decision theory available. (shrink)

In his contribution to this volume, Paul Bloomfield analyzes and attempts to answer the question “Why is it bad to be bad?” I too will use this question as my point of departure; in particular I want to approach the matter from the perspective of a moral error theorist. This discussion will preface one of the principal topics of this paper: the relationship between morality and self-interest. Again, my main goal is to clarify what the moral error theorist might say (...) on this subject. Against this background, the final portion of this paper will be a discussion of moral fictionalism, defending it from some objections. (shrink)

The United States considers educating all students to a threshold of adequate outcomes to be a central goal of educational justice. The No Child Left Behind Act introduced evidence-based policy and accountability protocols to ensure that all students receive an education that enables them to meet adequacy standards. Unfortunately, evidence-based policy has been less effective than expected. This article pinpoints under-examined methodological problems and suggests a more effective way to incorporate educational research findings into local evidence-based policy decisions. It identifies (...) some things educators need to know and do to determine whether available interventions can play the right casual role in their setting to produce desired effects. It examines the value and limits of educational research, especially randomized controlled trials, for this task. (shrink)

"A valuable contribution to the existing literature on Edith Stein. These quality essays are written by a well-established international network of commentators and translators of Stein." —_Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, author of _Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World__ "We badly need this new book on Edith Stein, so that we may ponder how a brilliant Jewish woman in Weimar Germany could become a Carmelite nun, yet retain a vivid Jewish identity and close ties to her family. The essays help us synthesize (...) Stein's troubling legacy as an accomplished philosopher, a Catholic saint, a Jewish daughter, and a stubborn feminist who was trapped in very dark times indeed." —_Deborah Hertz, Herman Wouk Chair in Modern Jewish Studies, University of California at San Diego, and author of _Jewish High Society in Old Regime Berlin__ "Readers will be fascinated by this multidisciplinary, state-of-the-art, well-contextualized essay collage on the life and writings of Edith Stein. A remarkable woman in every respect, the deeply spiritual Edith Stein crossed many seemingly uncrossable boundaries—national, linguistic, religious, intellectual—in her search for understanding of the human condition. This volume, ably orchestrated by Joyce Berkman, provides English-language readers an excellent introduction to a brilliant, complex, twentieth-century European woman: intellectual, philosopher, feminist, Jew, Christian, and Catholic saint." —_Karen Offen, Ph.D., Institute for Research on Women and Gender, Stanford University_ Controversy surrounding the beatification and canonization of Edith Stein, a Catholic convert of Jewish heritage who was murdered at Auschwitz, has eclipsed scholarly and public attention to Stein’s extraordinary development as a philosopher. Divided into three sections—biographical explorations, Stein's feminist theory and pedagogy, and her creative philosophical contributions—the sixteen essays in this volume represent the first comprehensive interdisciplinary analysis in English of Stein’s life and philosophical writings. (shrink)

This essay argues that Jesus’s confession of ignorance about the day and hour of his return (Matt. 24:36; Mark 13:32) is logically inconsistent with the Nicene-Constantinopolitan doctrine of his “consubstantiality” (homoousia) with God the Father. The essay first defines “consubstantiality”, then presents three formulations of the argument, and finally rebuts a number of possible responses: from the textual originality of the phrase “nor the Son”; from the reinterpretation of “knows” as “makes known”; from the ideas of partitive exegesis and communicatio (...) idiomatum; and from the question of the Holy Spirit’s knowledge of the things of God. (shrink)

The pragmatic character of the Dutch book argument makes it unsuitable as an "epistemic" justification for the fundamental probabilist dogma that rational partial beliefs must conform to the axioms of probability. To secure an appropriately epistemic justification for this conclusion, one must explain what it means for a system of partial beliefs to accurately represent the state of the world, and then show that partial beliefs that violate the laws of probability are invariably less accurate than they could be otherwise. (...) The first task can be accomplished once we realize that the accuracy of systems of partial beliefs can be measured on a gradational scale that satisfies a small set of formal constraints, each of which has a sound epistemic motivation. When accuracy is measured in this way it can be shown that any system of degrees of belief that violates the axioms of probability can be replaced by an alternative system that obeys the axioms and yet is more accurate in every possible world. Since epistemically rational agents must strive to hold accurate beliefs, this establishes conformity with the axioms of probability as a norm of epistemic rationality whatever its prudential merits or defects might be. (shrink)

This article challenges the modern orthodoxy which states that phratry membership was a necessary precondition of Athenian citizenship in the fifth and fourth centuries BC and argues that the purpose of the phratry was to establish not claims to citizenship, even though membership in a phratry was proof of citizenship, but inheritance entitlements. It questions the widespread assumption that citizens needed to be born of unions legally cemented by engyê. In turn, it challenges a recent attempt to argue that legitimacy (...) of birth and legitimacy in community were one and the same. Finally, in examines passages of orators which show that the concern of the phratry was to establish not the right to participate in Athenian polity, which was the business of the deme to determine, but the right to inherit property, and in the light of those conclusions argues that while membership in the phratry proved citizenship, it was not essential or necessary for each and every citizen of Athens to be a member of a phratry, the chief purpose of which was to establish inheritance claims. (shrink)

Kant's argument that the categorical imperative is the source for morality broken down into premise and conclusion logical format.

Kant's deontological ethical theory is explained in terms that introductory students can understand.

Christian spirituality is often “activist.” It consists in the performance of various actions through which a faithful person attempts to secure the presence of God. The argument of the present essay is that spiritual “activism” cannot actually accomplish this goal. For this reason, it is necessary to seek a foundation for all spiritual activism in spiritual “inactivism.” This means that all Christian spiritual activity must be reconceived as a response to and celebration of a prior presence of God that comes (...) before any performance. The phenomenological philosophy of Michel Henry makes it possible to appreciate how God is so present in the very fact of being alive. This can make the whole of Christian spiritual practice a Eucharist—a perpetual thanksgiving. (shrink)

Although he was not and could not have been a phenomenologist in the proper sense of the term, the writings of Origen of Alexandria contain certain insightful observations about the way in which Scripture is encountered in lived experience, and these can be fruitfully interpreted from a phenomenological perspective. The object of this essay is to present two aspects of Origen’s “proto-phenomenology of Scripture” and to draw from them a conclusion of theological-methodological import. The discussion will revolve around a phenomenological (...) distinction between Scripture and biblical text, a distinction which, though familiar to previous writers, has not yet been fully appreciated. (shrink)