The article first discusses the presence among Christians in Roman Africa of "biblical" writings that are not found in the current canon of Scripture. This is followed by a review of what is known of the Manichaean use of extra-canonical material in general, particularly within the Roman Empire, and especially of the pseudepigraphical Acts of the Apostles. Finally, the article focuses on the use among Manichaeans in Roman Africa of this pseudepigraphic literature, especially the Acts of the Apostles. In all (...) cases, the article focuses on cases of a confirmed pseudepigraphic presence, rather than on mere conjectures about it. (shrink)

Conformity is an often criticized feature of human belief formation. Although generally regarded as a negative influence on reliability, it has not been widely studied. This paper attempts to determine the epistemic effects of conformity by analyzing a mathematical model of this behavior. In addition to investigating the effect of conformity on the reliability of individuals and groups, this paper attempts to determine the optimal structure for conformity. That is, supposing that conformity is inevitable, what is the best way for (...) conformity effects to occur? The paper finds that in some contexts conformity effects are reliability inducing and, more surprisingly even when it is counterproductive, not all methods for reducing its effect are helpful. These conclusions contribute to a larger discussion in social epistemology regarding the effect of social behavior on individual reliability. (shrink)

(1989). The gift of an interval: Michael Oakeshott's idea of a university education. British Journal of Educational Studies: Vol. 37, No. 4, pp. 384-397.

Kevin M. Graham argues that political philosophy cannot fully understand race-related injustice without shifting its focus away from distributive inequities between whites and nonwhites and toward white supremacy, the unfair power relationships that allow whites to dominate and oppress nonwhites. Graham's analysis of the racial politics of police violence and public education in Omaha, Nebraska, vividly illustrates why the pursuit of racial justice in the United States must move beyond redistribution.

A series of imitation games involving 3-participant (simultaneous comparison of two hidden entities) and 2-participant (direct interrogation of a hidden entity) were conducted at Bletchley Park on the 100th anniversary of Alan Turing’s birth: 23 June 2012. From the ongoing analysis of over 150 games involving (expert and non-expert, males and females, adults and child) judges, machines and hidden humans (foils for the machines), we present six particular conversations that took place between human judges and a hidden entity that produced (...) unexpected results. From this sample we focus on features of Turing’s machine intelligence test that the mathematician/code breaker did not consider in his examination for machine thinking: the subjective nature of attributing intelligence to another mind. (shrink)

George Klosko rejects the standard assumption that political obligations, at least insofar as they are conceived as moral requirements to obey the law, must be content-independent. He thereby neglects the familiar distinction between obedience to and mere compliance with legal norms. The present article insists on this distinction by identifying a plausible alternative to the understanding of content-independence that Klosko correctly, even if not for the most obvious reason, dismisses and mistakenly, though not unreasonably, attributes to several philosophers with whose (...) work it is actually incompatible. Given Klosko’s failure to examine this further option, which is consistent with nearly all, including skeptical, theories of political obligation, his case against the necessity of content-independence must be deemed unsuccessful. (shrink)

The rise of modern science and the proclaimed 'death' of God in the nineteenth century led to a radical questioning of divine action and authorship - Bultmann's celebrated 'demythologizing'. Remythologizing Theology moves in another direction that begins by taking seriously the biblical accounts of God's speaking. It establishes divine communicative action as the formal and material principle of theology, and suggests that interpersonal dialogue, rather than impersonal causality, is the keystone of God's relationship with the world. This original contribution to (...) the theology of divine action and authorship develops a new vision of Christian theism. It also revisits several long-standing controversies such as the relations of God's sovereignty to human freedom, time to eternity, and suffering to love. Groundbreaking and thought-provoking, it brings theology into fruitful dialogue with philosophy, literary theory, and biblical studies"--Provided by publisher. (shrink)

In the maximal form of indirect development found in many taxa of marine invertebrates, embryonic cell lineages of fixed fate and limited division capacity give rise to the larval structures. The adult arises from set‐aside cells in the larva that are held out from the early embryonic specification processes, and that retain extensive proliferative capacity. We review the locations and fates of set‐aside cells in two protostomes, a lophophorate and a deuterostome. The distinct adult body plans of many phyla develop (...) from homologous set‐aside cells within homologous larvae. We argue that the stocks from which these phyla arose utilized these respective larvae, and the diversity of their adult body plans reflects diverse pattern formation processes executed in their set‐aside cell populations. Chordates and arthropods develop directly, but share adult characters with indirectly developing phyla. Thus the deuterostome and protostome stocks that were ancestral to chordates and arthropods, respectively, also utilized maximal indirect development. (shrink)

Kevin Hill's highly original new interpretation of Nietzsche's philosophy is the first to examine in detail his debt to Kant, in particular the Critique of Pure Reason, Critique of Practical Reason, and Critique of Judgement. Nietzsche, Hill argues, knew Kant far better than is commonly thought, and can only be thoroughly understood in relation to Kant.Nietzsche's Critiques maintains that beneath the surface of his texts there is a systematic commitment to a form of early Neo-Kantianism in metaphysics and epistemology, (...) ethics, and aesthetics, grounded in his reading of the three Critiques, Kuno Fischer's commentary on the first Critique, and Friedrich Lange's discussion of Kant in The History of Materialism. The book also documents the decisive influence Nietzsche's close reading of the Critique of Judgement had on the writing of the Birth of Tragedy, and offers a remarkably accessible interpretation of Kant's system, while clarifying such difficult issues as the interpretation of Kant's 'Transcendental Deduction' and his notion of reflective judgement.Lucid and thorough, Hill's work will be of great value to scholars and students with interests in either of these philosophical giants, or in the history of ideas generally. (shrink)

We prove that the classes of UHF algebras and AF algebras, while not axiomatizable, can be characterized as those C*-algebras that omit certain types in the logic of metric structures.

This volume presents 15 studies occasioned by the 500th anniversary of the European discovery of America. It covers both the initial encounters between the Europeans and native Americans and the golden age of Hispanic philosophy that followed the discovery - specifically between 1500 and 1650.

This is a reflexive conception of democracy, in which democratic politics circles back to sustain the conditions of equality that make it possible.This view, Olson writes, is meant not to replace traditional economic concerns but to reveal ...

Researchers have long debated the extent to which an individual’s skin tone influences their perceived race. Brooks and Gwinn demonstrated that the race of surrounding faces can affect the perceived skin tone of a central target face without changing perceived racial typicality, suggesting that skin lightness makes a small contribution to judgments of race compared to morphological cues. However, the lack of a consistent light source may have undermined the reliability of skin tone cues, encouraging observers to rely disproportionately on (...) morphological cues instead. The current study addresses this concern by using 3D models of male faces with typically Black African or White European appearances that are illuminated by the same light source. Observers perceived target faces surrounded by White faces to have darker skin than those surrounded by Black faces, particularly for faces of intermediate lightness. However, when asked to judge racial typicality, a small assimilation effect was evident, with target faces perceived as more stereotypically White when surrounded by White than when surrounded by Black faces at intermediate levels of typicality. This evidence of assimilation effects for perceived racial typicality despite concurrent contrast effects on perceived skin lightness supports the previous conclusion that perceived skin lightness has little influence on judgments of racial typicality for racially ambiguous faces, even when lighting is consistent. (shrink)

§1 Simple Seeing and its Relations §2 Acquaintance, Apprehension, Belief, Knowledge, Action & Externalism §3 Simple Seeing, Sense and Meaning §4 Simple Seeing and Primitive Certainty ...at one time they dispute eagerly over certainty of thought, though certainty is not a habit of the mind at all, but a quality of propositions, and the speakers are really arguing about certitude... (James Joyce, 1903, Occasional, Critical and Political Writing, ed. Kevin Barry, 2000, OUP, 69) Like many others, I believe that (...) to see is not, in the simplest cases, to believe or judge. This is a purely negative thesis. What sort of attitude, then, is involved in simple seeing? The answer set out here is that to see is typically to enjoy a form of primitive certainty which is not any type of belief. In order to make the answer plausible it is important to set out also the relations between seeing, belief, knowledge, and certainty. (shrink)

In Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari emphasise the difficulty of confronting ‘micro-fascisms’. Such fascisms occur at the micropolitical level as they permeate and modulate across social collectivities and networks. Arundhati Roy’s novel, The God of Small Things, reflects upon overt and violent modes of social division and classifications that determine ‘who should be loved and how. And how much’. Such a system ‘restrains or limits the individual’s power’, diminishing the ‘capacity to be affected’, as Deleuze (...) wrote in Spinoza, thereby nourishing and sustaining the fascists inside of them. This article will examine micro-fascisms within Roy’s novel, demonstrating how they function at the individual and interpersonal level. (shrink)

In this paper, I consider the difficult relationship between Rawls, religion and the values that religious believers might consider important in order to lead the good life. Contrary to many of Rawls’ defenders, I argue that at least some of the values that religious citizens are likely to hold cannot be accounted for under Rawls’ theory or under his conception of the good life. I argue that the model of goods which Rawls takes to be part of a thin theory (...) of the good is tied to his belief that under the Original Position justice can be derived from calculations of self-interest alone. To perform my critique, I consider the paradigmatic case of honour in so-called traditional societies. I argue that the way Rawls thematizes primary goods in A Theory of Justice , including concepts like esteem, cannot account for the way honour manifests itself inside traditional communities. I conclude the paper by considering how Rawls might be able to defend his theory against my objection, by considering the relationship between Rawls’ theory, and the rationalization and secularization of society. (shrink)

Taking Habermas’s Die nachholende Revolution as a foil, I contend that in his discussions of 1989, Habermas has misunderstood the nature of the anti-Communist revolutions. Comparing them to his writings on the public sphere and the student protest movements in Germany, I argue that the revolutions do not represent the triumph of capitalism anymore than they represent the triumph of Western democracy. Calling the events catch-up revolutions is to frame the events as the expansion of modernity and nothing more. Rather, (...) the revolutions show that the revolutionaries in Eastern Europe were grappling with the same problem, namely the control of technical subsystems, that the students and revolutionaries of 1968 were. Viewed in the light of Habermas’s writings from the 1960s, we end up better understanding the twin extremes of capitalism and bureaucratic-totalitarianism. (shrink)

Ethics and professional conduct are vital to civil engineering undergraduate curricula. Many programs struggle to ensure that students are given an adequate exposure to and appreciation of ethical and professional conduct issues. This paper describes a two-part ethics/professionalism project used in a senior-level course taught at the University of Arkansas. Initially, students scruitinize ethical canons and standards of professional conduct published by the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) and the National Society of Professional Engineers (NSPE), and prepare an essay (...) concerning the applicability of these standards. The second part of the project builds on the first: based on the opinion(s) generated in Part 1, students are asked to develop a set of canons or standards targeted specifically to the undergraduate student, and suggest processes for implementing those standards within the department. Project objectives include: (1) exposure to nationally-recognized ethical canons and standards of professional conduct; (2) personal formulation of ethical and professional standards; (3) skill enhancement for non-technical written communications. Feedback by students prior to and after the project indicates success in meeting all objectives. The feedback also indicates that for some students, definitions and applications of ethics and professionalism are being broadened to include more than academic honesty issues. (shrink)

Wittgenstein was centrally concerned with the puzzling nature of the mind, mathematics, morality and modality. He also developed innovative views about the status and methodology of philosophy and was explicitly opposed to crudely "scientistic" worldviews. His later thought has thus often been understood as elaborating a nuanced form of naturalism appealing to such notions as "form of life", "primitive reactions", "natural history", "general facts of nature" and "common behaviour of mankind". And yet, Wittgenstein is strangely absent from much of the (...) contemporary literature on naturalism and naturalising projects. This is the first collection of essays to focus explicitly on the relationship between Wittgenstein and naturalism. The volume is divided into four sections, each of which addresses a different aspect of naturalism and its relation to Wittgenstein's thought. The first section considers how naturalism could or should be understood. The second section deals with some of the main problematic domains—consciousness, meaning, mathematics—that philosophers have typically sought to naturalise. The third section explores ways in which the conceptual nature of human life might be continuous in important respects with animals. The final section is concerned with the naturalistic status and methodology of philosophy itself. This book thus casts a fresh light on many classical philosophical issues and brings Wittgensteinian ideas to bear on a number of current debates-for example experimental philosophy, neo-pragmatism and animal cognition/ethics-in which naturalism is playing a central role. (shrink)