One book in a series of four, each offering fifteen lessons that encourage quality, heart-shaping quiet time to help readers grow in faith.

Abduction is reasoning which produces explanatory hypotheses. Models are one basis for such reasoning, and language use can function as a model. I treat children’s early use of mental verbs as a model for dealing with a problem from developmental psychology, namely, how children’s early non-referential use of mental verbs might give children an early grasp of the mental realm. The present paper asks what practical knowledge of mental actions accompanies children’s competent use of mental verbs. I begin with examples (...) of non-referential verb uses and some theories from Diessel and Tomasello as bases for discussion. I argue that in using mental verbs non-referentially children understand several kinds of relations which people have to situations. Children learn how to use mental verbs to request someone to search for a situation in the past or in the physical surroundings; they learn to express hopes so as to affect their future; they learn to vouch strongly or weakly for the existence of a situation. In all of these cases it appears that the children’s main focus is on interactions with people, in which one person’s mental action in relation to a situation described in a COMP-clause is intended to have an effect on the other person. Children do not understand the nature or mechanisms of any of these mental actions, but instead focus on practical matters: how to use the verbs to perform certain actions in relation to other people and various situations. It appears that in these early uses children do not view mind as at all separate from the interactional and physical world. (shrink)

I respond to Rev. Jonah Pollock's criticisms of my argument about the contralife argument and the principle of double effect.

Max Stirner (1806–1856) has been named as “The Last Hegelian,” which is usually taken to mean only that he was the final major figure among the so-called “Young Hegelians.” However, an argument can be made that he was not only the last in a historical sense, but that he was also the logical heir of Hegel’s philosophy. In short, Stirner concluded what Hegel had proposed as the “task” of philosophy: to supersede “fixed and determinate thoughts.” This lead Stirner to express (...) a distinctive form of egoism in which the indefinable individual, der Einziger, could neither be comprehended under any general idea, nor would need to act in accord with any ideals whatsoever. This set him in radical opposition to all of the other Young Hegelians, such as Karl Marx, Ludwig Feuerbach, or Bruno Bauer—all of whom sought to revise Hegel’s philosophy to accord with their own humanistic ideals. (shrink)

Max Weber’s contribution to cultural sociology has received insufficient attention, due to the unfinished character of his work and its reception. This paper investigates aspects of his contribution in relation to the field of art, broadly conceived, and in terms of the uses of his ideas by historians of art and design, such as T. J. Clark. Weber’s social theory considers art from two perspectives: the relative autonomy of cultural and artistic forms and modes of expression, and the social construction (...) of works of art and culture. From the latter point of view technics and the technical become important factors in a double sense: The technologies of modern civilization external to art shape the “spirit” of art and its contents, and development in art proceeds as an effort to solve technical problems internal to the art form itself. Examples from painting, architecture and music illustrate the relationships. It is these perspectives that characterize the Weberian approach to art and invite further investigation as contributions to cultural sociology and social theory. (shrink)

In recent years an increasing number of moral theorists have come to embrace the term "moral pluralism" to describe a particular kind of moral theory. Unfortunately, there has been little consensus regarding what exactly constitutes a pluralistic theory, and what specific commitments such theories involve. My dissertation takes on the task of articulating the underlying schema of pluralist moral theory, and of analyzing the plausibility and implications of pluralism's fundamental commitments. I argue that the most thoroughgoing pluralist theories are shaped (...) by two defining theses; the plurality of the good , and the plurality of the right , and that these are conceptually linked by two additional meta-ethical commitments. My analysis of the plausibility of these commitments is at times friendly to moral pluralism and at times critical of it. For instance, I develop an account of "value incommensurability," an idea upon which pluralism depends, that resists some of more the important attacks within the literature. Yet I also criticize the commitment to the plurality of the right, as held by Susan Wolf and several other pluralists. I argue that this view is less plausible than "limited pluralism"---a view that is pluralistic about the good but monistic about the right. In the final chapter I explore the relationship between moral pluralism and political liberalism, focusing on the role that overriding values play within each type of theory. (shrink)

While it is often thought that pluralism is best accommodated by a liberal state, John Kekes has recently argued that pluralism and liberalism involve inconsistent commitments. He maintains that liberalism is committed to the idea that one or more of the “liberal values” must override all other values, while pluralism is committed to the idea that there are no overriding values whatsoever. In this paper I challenge Kekes' position by arguing that ethical pluralism does not require an absence of overriding (...) values, and that liberalism does not require that one or more of the liberal values must override all others. (shrink)

Our paper builds on earlier research to show how Bimal Krishna Matilal and Henry Odera Oruka challenge dominant narratives of the West-centered progress of philosophical and other forms of critical rationality. On the basis of persisting “enlightenment” and colonialist prejudices, a majority of Western philosophers have ignored philosophical inquiry in non-Western cultures. Both philosophical decolonizers had much of their upbringing and education while their countries were British colonies, earned their Ph.D.s in the West, and became renowned philosophers at Oxford and (...) the University of Nairobi. Oruka advocated mainly oral but increasingly written philosophical reflections in various ethnic traditions of Kenya and East Africa, though his ideas have also been applied to other cultures of the continent. Matilal focused on South Asian, Sanskrit philosophical traditions, which though comprising a large written literature are also often oral in their origins and ongoing pedagogical and hermeneutic culture. Beyond just demonstrating that Africans, Indians, and others can think for themselves, the two thinkers have laid the groundwork for, and initiated a number of more substantive philosophical engagements. The perhaps initially slow but exponentially increasing exchanges among non-Western peoples are well exemplified by the dialogs being organized in the present issue, as well as other efforts throughout the global academy. (shrink)

In this monograph, Victor Kal sets out to challenge the role that induction is traditionally said to play in Aristotle's thought. The author wishes to distinguish sharply between intuition and discursive reasoning and to place induction squarely in the later category. This leaves open the question of the origin of our knowledge of first principles, and here Kal proposes that intuition and experience find their function.

The applicability of Nagel's concept of theory reduction, and related concepts of reduction, to the reduction of genetics to molecular biology is examined using the lactose operon in Escherichia coli as an example. Geneticists have produced the complete nucleotide sequence of two of the genes which compose this operon. If any example of reduction in genetics should fit Nagel's analysis, the lactose operon should. Nevertheless, Nagel's formal conditions of theory reduction are inapplicable in this case. Instead, it is argued that (...) genetics has been partially reduced to molecular biology in the sense of token-token reduction. (shrink)

Lawrence, Carmen Why should we protect our heritage? In the broadest sense our heritage is what we inherit; it's what we value of that inheritance and what we decide to keep and protect for future generations. Heritage is both global enough to encompass our shock at the destruction of the Buddhas of Bamiyan in Afghanistan and as local as our own sepia-tinted family photographs. Everything which our predecessors have bequeathed, both tangible and intangible, may be called heritage - landscapes, (...) structures, objects, traditions, stories and language. (shrink)

Anti-individualism is the thesis that features of the social and physical environments contribute to determining the contents of our beliefs. The notion of content implicit in the thought experiments supporting anti-individualism is tied to explications of how our terms and the concepts they express are correctly applied. Since anti-individualists should regard these explications as a subject of ongoing dispute, they should claim that sameness and difference of content is not always detectable upon reflection. Many philosophers accordingly worry that anti-individualists cannot (...) accommodate the use of belief attributions to characterize individual points of view. The key to these objections is the thesis that belief attributions have the same truth-value if they attribute beliefs with the same content. When the semantic and metaphysical motivations for this assumption are discredited, anti-individualism's alleged problems with characterizing individual points of view may be solved without introducing an additional notion of "cognitive" content which tracks differential dubitability judgments. The resulting account of belief requires a new account of understanding and responsibility to evaluation which emphasizes participation in ongoing attempts to formulate explications rather than knowledge thereof. (shrink)

The burden of the present essay is to argue in favor of a proposition which is obviously true: that hypothesis choice in science is largely a rational procedure. This proposition needs arguing for because there is no philosophical theory, generally accepted as adequate, which explains why science is, or explains how science can be, rational. The main obstacles to an acceptable philosophical theory on this matter are the problems of induction . These problems seem to tell us that no amount (...) of evidence can in any way raise the probability or increase the rational believability of any hypothesis not implied by the evidence. The approach taken here is to give up on solving the problems of induction and to attempt to explain scientific rationality on some other basis. There are three main elements of this theory: rational hypothesis choice is explicated as rational acceptance of hypotheses, rather than belief; pragmatic criteria are employed to limit--always tentatively--the hypotheses under consideration; choice among hypotheses is to be made in accordance with rules that have the following property: if the true hypothesis is under consideration, then the probability of choosing the true hypothesis is greater than 0.5. Such rules correspond to what are called hypothesis testing situations in statistics. The theory is illustrated and developed through a number of examples. (shrink)

Descartes is typically interpreted as asserting two related theses: 1) that the will is absolutely free in the sense that no bodily state can compel it or restrain its activity; and 2) that error is always avoidable, no matter what the condition of the body. On the basis of Descartes’s discussions of insanity and dreaming, I argue that both of these interpretive claims are false. In other words, Descartes acknowledged that a diseased or otherwise out of sorts body can compel (...) the will to affirm obscure and confused perceptions. After marshalling textual evidence for this conclusion, I go on to show how Descartes’s acknowledgment of physically induced impaired judgment can be squared with his unqualified assertions of free will, his commitment to the non-deceptiveness of God, and his epistemology. (shrink)