Dans le cadre de ce travail, nous présentons une expérimentation menée auprès d’un public allophone inscrit à une formation universitaire. Ce travail a pour objectif de relever, d’une part, les spécificités dans les productions orales de ce public, et d’autre part, de démontrer l’intérêt d’un apprentissage sur corpus afin de construire un exposé structuré. Cette étude permet de s’ouvrir à d’autres perspectives didactiques en partant d’un corpus d’apprenants.

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be (...) preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. To ensure a quality reading experience, this work has been proofread and republished using a format that seamlessly blends the original graphical elements with text in an easy-to-read typeface. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

Martin Heidegger was engaged in a continual struggle to find words - new words, both descriptive and analytical - for his radical form of philosophy. This tendency can be traced from Being and Time, where he elaborated an entirely new vocabulary for his ontological enquiry; to Contributions to Philosophy, which saw him committed to a transformation of language; to later essays on poets such as Rilke and Trakl in On the Way to Language. The Writing of Aletheia is the (...) first study to appear in either English or German that provides a full account of Heidegger's language and writing style. Focusing not only on his major philosophical works but also on his lectures, public talks and poetry, this book explores the complex textuality of Heidegger's writing: the elaborate chains of wordplay and neologistic formations; the often oblique, circuitous and regressive exposition of his ideas; the infamous tautologies; the startling modification of grammatical rules and syntax; the idiosyncratic typography of his texts; the rhetorical devices, imagery and symbolism; and the tone and voice of his writing. All of these aspects betray not only his will to structure and his assertiveness but also his ongoing self-questioning and reflectiveness about the ultimate goal of his philosophical quest. (shrink)

Martin Benjamin bridges the gap between academic philosophy and the questions of educated nonspecialists.

This English translation of Vom Wesen der Sprache, volume 85 of Martin Heidegger's Gesamtausgabe, contains fascinating discussions of language that are important both for those interested in Heidegger's thought and for those who wish to ...

Professor Strawson was interviewed on video on location at King's College, London during the Spring of 1992. Professor Strawson discusses his thoughts on a variety of topics on which he has written previously, providing some illuminating insights into how his thoughts has progressed. The text published here is en excerpt from this interview, translated with kind permission of Mr Rudolf V. Fara, the producer, in which prof. Strawson discusses his philosophical views with Martin Davies, Wilde Reader in Mental Philosophy (...) at Oxford University, and Mark Sainsbury, Susan Stebbing Professor of Philosophy at King's College, University of London. (shrink)

This paper deals with three topics: types of rights, the development of the terminology of rights, and the question of the primacy of welfare rights. Because these topics are interrelated, my exposition does not observe rigid boundaries among them. There is no pretence at all that any of these subjects is fully covered here; nor is it proposed, except for one writer, to touch upon the contemporary literature on rights, as noteworthy as some of that literature is. In order to (...) gain entrance into the field, on which the writing has grown to massive proportions, I shall begin with an interesting historical phenomenon, some of whose philosophical import I want to explore. I should say at the outset, however, that the general motivation of this paper is the problem of the significance of the language of “rights.” Does it really make a difference, for instance, to speak of the “rights of man” rather than the “common duties of humanity”? Does the term “rights” add anything of special significance or is its only significance rhetorical and ideological? Can we dispense with the language of rights and still say everything we need to say about our moral relations? I confess to a moderate skepticism about the necessity of the language of rights in the last analysis. At any rate, this paper is intended as a contribution, however small, to this problem. The historical phenomenon with which I am going to begin will enable us to bring into focus the issue of the meaning of “rights.”. (shrink)

Listening to someone from some distance in a crowded room you may experience the following phenomenon: when looking at them speak, you may both hear and see where the source of the sounds is; but when your eyes are turned elsewhere, you may no longer be able to detect exactly where the voice must be coming from. With your eyes again fixed on the speaker, and the movement of her lips a clear sense of the source of the sound will (...) return. This ‘ventriloquist’ effect reflects the ways in which visual cognition can dominate auditory perception. And this phenomenological observation is one what you can verify or disconfirm in your own case just by the slightest reflection on what it is like for you to listen to someone with or without visual contact with them. (shrink)

Abstract The work of Martin Buber oscillates between talk in which transcendence is experienced and talk in which transcendence is merely postulated. In order to show and mend this incoherence in Buber's thought, this essay attends to the rhetoric of verification ( Bewährung ), primarily but not solely in I and Thou (1923), both in order to show how it is a symptom of this incoherence, and also to show a broad pragmatic strain in Buber's thought. Given this pragmatic (...) strain, the essay argues that a weak notion of Buberian verification, in which taking a dialogic stance with reference to others evinces the right to talk of the real possibility of transcendence (a You-world, or God as the “eternal You“), is all that is necessary to combat despair. Strong notions of encounter are unnecessary, and also sink Buber in a morass of theodicy, in which he interprets historical misfortune and destruction as evidence of history's meaning. (shrink)

If people believe that some property is true of all members of a class such as sofas, then they should also believe that the same property is true of all members of a conjunctively defined subset of that class such as uncomfortable handmade sofas. A series of experiments demonstrated a failure to observe this constraint, leading to what is termed the inverse conjunction fallacy. Not only did people often express a belief in the more general statement but not in the (...) more specific, but also when they accepted both beliefs, they were inclined to give greater confidence to the more general. It is argued that this effect underlies a number of other demonstrations of fallacious reasoning, particularly in category-based induction. Alternative accounts of the phenomenon are evaluated, and it is concluded that the effect is best interpreted in terms of intensional reasoning [Tversky, A., & Kahneman, D.. Extensional versus intuitive reasoning: the conjunction fallacy in probability judgment. Psychological Review, 90, 293-315.]. (shrink)

In recruitment, promotion, admission, and other forms of wealth and power apportion, an evaluator typically ranks a set of candidates in terms of their perceived competence. If the evaluator is prejudiced, the resulting ranking will misrepresent the candidates’ actual ranking. This constitutes not only a moral and a practical problem, but also an epistemological one, which begs the question of what we should do – epistemologically – to mitigate it. The article is an attempt to begin to answer this question. (...) I first explore the presuppositions that must obtain for individual interventions to likely yield positive epistemological effects in ranking situations. I then compare these with the corresponding presuppositions of a novel, ‘post hoc’ approach to deprejudicing due to Jönsson and Sjödahl (Episteme 14(4):499–517, 2017), which does not attempt to change evaluators but attempts to increase the veracity of the rankings they produce after the fact (but before the rankings give rise to discriminatory effects) using statistical methods. With these two sets of presuppositions in place, I describe the limitations imposed by each presupposition on its intervention, compare presuppositions across the two kinds of interventions, and conclude that the two kinds of interventions importantly complement each other by having fairly disjoint, but non–conflicting, presuppositions. The post hoc intervention can thus complement an individual intervention (and vice versa) in situations where both are applicable (by adding further increases in veracity), but also by applying to situations where that intervention is not applicable (and thereby increase veracity in situations beyond the reach of that intervention). (shrink)

Process-reliabilist analyses of justification and knowledge face the generality problem. Recent discussion of this problem turns on certain untested empirical assumptions that this paper investigates. Three experiments are reported: two are free-naming studies that support the existence of a basic level in the previously unexplored domain of names for belief-forming processes; the third demonstrates that reliability judgments for the basic-level belief-forming process types are very strongly correlated with the corresponding justification and knowledge judgments. I argue that these results lend support (...) to process-reliabilism; I then go on to explore several different ways to make use of them in solutions to the generality problem. (shrink)

Holistic theories of meaning have, at least since Dummett’s Frege: The Philosophy of language, been assumed to be problematic from the perspective of the incremental nature of natural language learning. In this essay I argue that the general relationship between holism and language learning is in fact the opposite of that claimed by Dummett. It is only given a particular form of language learning, and a particular form of holism, that there is a problem at all; in general, for all (...) forms of holism, and irrespective of how language learning is understood, semantic holism is conducive to language learning. The paper has three main parts. In the first, I demonstrate with the use of a simple formal system, that the form of holism that generates the problem that Dummett draws attention to is really decomposable into three distinct components, each of which is necessary for the problem to arise. In the second part, I demonstrate that even Dummett’s strong form of holism is compatible with one natural way in which to understand the incremental nature of language learning. In the third part, I outline the reasons why all forms of holism are conducive to language learning and offer two ways in which this general fact can be spelled out precisely. I end the paper by addressing some possible objections, and in doing so I draw attention to some affinities between semantic holism and the principle of compositionality, a semantic principle which has long been assumed to be conducive to language learning. (shrink)

An experiment is reported which tests for positive confirmation bias in a setting in which individuals choose what information to buy, prior to making a decision. The design – an adaptation of Wason's selection task – reveals the use that subjects make of information after buying it. Strong evidence of positive confirmation bias, in both information acquisition and information use, is found; and this bias is found to be robust to experience. It is suggested that the bias results from a (...) pattern of reasoning which, although producing sub-optimal decisions, is internally coherent and which is self-reinforcing. (shrink)

Martin Kusch puts forth two controversial ideas: that knowledge is a social status and that knowledge is primarily the possession of groups rather than individuals. He defends the radical implications of his views: that knowledge is political, and that it varies with communities. This bold approach to epistemology is a challenge to philosophy and the wider academic world.

Long considered "the noblest of the senses," vision has increasingly come under critical scrutiny by a wide range of thinkers who question its dominance in Western culture. These critics of vision, especially prominent in twentieth-century France, have challenged its allegedly superior capacity to provide access to the world. They have also criticized its supposed complicity with political and social oppression through the promulgation of spectacle and surveillance. Martin Jay turns to this discourse surrounding vision and explores its often contradictory (...) implications in the work of such influential figures as Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, Louis Althusser, Guy Debord, Luce Irigaray, Emmanuel Levinas, and Jacques Derrida. Jay begins with a discussion of the theory of vision from Plato to Descartes, then considers its role in the French Enlightenment before turning to its status in the culture of modernity. From consideration of French Impressionism to analysis of Georges Bataille and the Surrealists, Roland Barthes's writings on photography, and the film theory of Christian Metz, Jay provides lucid and fair-minded accounts of thinkers and ideas widely known for their difficulty. His book examines the myriad links between the interrogation of vision and the pervasive antihumanist, antimodernist, and counter-enlightenment tenor of much recent French thought. Refusing, however, to defend the dominant visual order, he calls instead for a plurality of "scopic regimes." Certain to generate controversy and discussion throughout the humanities and social sciences, _Downcast Eyes_ will consolidate Jay's reputation as one of today's premier cultural and intellectual historians. (shrink)

This is the first time that a seminal collection of fourteen essays by Martin Heidegger (originally published in German under the title Wegmarken) has appeared in English in its complete form. It includes new or first-time translations of seven essays, and thoroughly revised, updated versions of the other seven. Amongst the new translations are such key essays as 'On the Essence of Ground', 'Hegel and the Greeks' and 'On the Question of Being'. Spanning a period from 1919-1961, these essays (...) have become established points of reference for all those with a serious interest in Heidegger. Now collected for the first time in translations by an experienced Heidegger translator and scholar, they will prove an essential resource for all students of Heidegger. (shrink)

Long awaited and eagerly anticipated, this remarkable volume allows English-speaking readers to experience a profound dialogue between the German philosopher Martin Heidegger and the Swiss psychiatrist Medard Boss.

Martin Heidegger's Nietzsche's Second Untimely Meditation presents crucial elements for understanding Heidegger's thinking from 1936 to 1940. Heidegger offers a radically different reading of a text that he had read decades earlier, showing how his relationship with Nietzche's has changed, as well as how his understandings of the differences between animals and humans, temporality and history, and the Western philosophical tradition developed. With his new reading, Heidegger delineates three Nietzschean modes of history, which should be understood as grounded in (...) the structure of temporality or historicity and also offers a metaphysical determination of life and the essence of humankind. Ullrich Hasse and Mark Sinclair offer a clear and accessible translation despite the fragmentary and disjointed quality of the original lecture notes that comprise this text. (shrink)

'Relativism versus absolutism' is one of the fundamental oppositions that have dominated reflections about science for much of its history. Often these reflections have been inseparable from wider social-political concerns regarding the position of science in society. Where does this debate stand in the philosophy and sociology of science today? And how does the 'relativism question' relate to current concerns with 'post truth' politics? In Relativism in the Philosophy of Science, Martin Kusch examines some of the most influential relativist (...) proposals of the last fifty years, and the controversies they have triggered. He argues that defensible forms of relativism all deny that any sense can be made of a scientific result being absolutely true or justified, and that they all reject 'anything goes' – that is the thought that all scientific results are epistemically on a par. Kusch concludes by distinguishing between defensible forms of relativism and post-truth thinking. (shrink)

The patterns of ecological devastation that mark the present unexpectedly enable an ancient and many-storied question to resurface with renewed force: the question of the arts of living — that is, of learning how to live and die well with others on a precarious Earth. Modernity has all but forgotten this question, which has long been buried under the dreams of progress and infinite growth, colonial projects, and the enthroning of technoscience. But what might it mean to reclaim the question (...) of the arts of living today? In this article Martin Savransky reclaims the connection between pragmatism, education, and the arts of living by proposing both that (1) William James's pragmatist philosophy can be read as an ongoing and unfinished experiment in weaving a certain art of living, and (2) James's pragmatism might provide us with uniquely generative elements to begin to experiment with the profoundly educational and ecological challenge of learning to inhabit the Earth otherwise. (shrink)

This article analyses and discusses research-ethical dilemmas, ambivalences and problematic issues. This is done firstly by making a distinction between procedural research ethics and particularistic research ethics. Such a distinction refl ects a theoretical construction and generalization – in practice there can be a very close correlation between the two types. Hereafter, the distinction will therefore be used as a jumping-off point for the presentation of a pragmatic-dualist research ethics. Th e approach is dualist because it draws on the presence (...) of two independent, contrasting understandings, which are essentially diff erent yet equal aspects of good research ethics; and it is pragmatic because this dualism is first and foremost structural and institutional by nature, and designed with an eye to what can realistically and expediently be done in practice. Thus the intention of the article is to both analyze and discuss two different understandings of research ethics and simultaneouslyqualify a research ethics that draws on both these understandings. At the same time, the intention is to try to visualize a diff erent understanding of research ethics which others can address and elaborate on or qualify but even at this point can be included in an arsenal or catalogue of research-ethical understandings and approaches that can be exploited in research-ethical practice. (shrink)

Many philosophers and psychologists argue that normal adult human beings possess a primitive or 'folk' psychological theory. Recently, however, this theory has come under challenge from the simulation alternative. This alternative view says that human bings are able to predict and explain each others' actions by using the resources of their own minds to simuate the psychological etiology of the actions of others. The thirteen essays in this volume present the foundations of theory of mind debate, and are accompanied by (...) an extensive introduction. (shrink)

"A valuable collection both for original source material as well as historical formulations of current problems."-- The Review of Metaphysics "Much more than a mere collection of papers . . . a valuable addition to the literature."-- Mathematics of Computation An anthology of fundamental papers on undecidability and unsolvability by major figures in the field, this classic reference opens with Godel's landmark 1931 paper demonstrating that systems of logic cannot admit proofs of all true assertions of arithmetic. Subsequent papers by (...) Godel, Church, Turing, and Post single out the class of recursive functions as computable by finite algorithms. Additional papers by Church, Turing, and Post cover unsolvable problems from the theory of abstract computing machines, mathematical logic, and algebra, and material by Kleene and Post includes initiation of the classification theory of unsolvable problems. Suitable for graduate and undergraduate courses. 1965 ed. (shrink)

Francesco Guala has developed some novel and radical ideas on the problem of external validity, a topic that has not received much attention in the experimental economics literature. In this paper I argue that his views on external validity are not justified and the conclusions which he draws from these views, if widely adopted, could substantially undermine the experimental economics enterprise. In rejecting the justification of these views, the paper reaffirms the importance of experiments in economics.

In this book, Martin Lenz provides the first reconstruction of intersubjective accounts of the mind in early modern philosophy. Some phenomena are easily recognised as social or interactive: certain dances, forms of work and rituals require interaction to come into being or count as valid. But what about mental states, such as thoughts, volitions, or emotions? Do our minds also depend on other minds? The idea that our minds are intersubjective or social seems to be a recent one, developed (...) mainly in the 19th and 20th centuries against the individualism of early modern philosophers. By contrast, this book argues that well-known early modern philosophers often started from the idea that minds are intersubjective. How then does a mind depend on the minds of others? Early modern philosophers are well known to have developed a number of theories designed to explain how we cognize external objects. What is hardly recognized is that early modern philosophers also addressed the problem of how our cognition is influenced by other minds. This book provides a historical and rational reconstruction of three central, but different, early modern accounts of the influence that minds exert on one another: Spinoza's metaphysical model, Locke's linguistic model, and Hume's medical model. Showing for each model of mental interaction (1) why it was developed, (2) how it construes mind-mind relations, and (3) what view of the mind it suggests, this book aims at uncovering a crucial part of the unwritten history of intersubjectivity in the philosophy of mind. (shrink)

In the revised and updated edition of this classic introductory text, Martin Hollis leads his readers through the age-old philosophical questions of free choice and human nature, appearance and reality, reason and experience.

This volume reconstructs Martin Heidegger's lecture course at the University of Marburg in the winter semester of 1924-25, which was devoted to an interpretation of Plato and Aristotle.

Originally published in 1981. This is a book for the final year undergraduate or first year graduate who intends to proceed with serious research in philosophical logic. It will be welcomed by both lecturers and students for its careful consideration of main themes ranging from Gricean accounts of meaning to two dimensional modal logic. The first part of the book is concerned with the nature of the semantic theorist's project, and particularly with the crucial concepts of meaning, truth, and semantic (...) structure. The second and third parts deal with various constructions that are found in natural languages: names, quantifiers, definite descriptions, and modal operators. Throughout, while assuming some familiarity with philosophical logic and elementary formal logic, the text provides a clear exposition. It brings together related ideas, and in some places refines and improves upon existing accounts. (shrink)

Few words in both everyday parlance and theoretical discourse have been as rhapsodically defended or as fervently resisted as "experience." Yet, to date, there have been no comprehensive studies of how the concept of experience has evolved over time and why so many thinkers in so many different traditions have been compelled to understand it. _Songs of Experience _is a remarkable history of Western ideas about the nature of human experience written by one of our best-known intellectual historians. With its (...) sweeping historical reach and lucid comparative analysis—qualities that have made Martin Jay's previous books so distinctive and so successful—_Songs of Experience _explores Western discourse from the sixteenth century to the present, asking why the concept of experience has been such a magnet for controversy. Resisting any single overarching narrative, Jay discovers themes and patterns that transcend individuals and particular schools of thought and illuminate the entire spectrum of intellectual history. As he explores the manifold contexts for understanding experience—epistemological, religious, aesthetic, political, and historical—Jay engages an exceptionally broad range of European and American traditions and thinkers from the American pragmatists and British Marxist humanists to the Frankfurt School and the French poststructuralists, and he delves into the thought of individual philosophers as well, including Montaigne, Bacon, Locke, Hume and Kant, Oakeshott, Collingwood, and Ankersmit. Provocative, engaging, erudite, this key work will be an essential source for anyone who joins the ongoing debate about the material, linguistic, cultural, and theoretical meaning of "experience" in modern cultures. (shrink)

This book lays out and examines three central aspects of the moral philosophy of Dietrich von Hildebrand: his notions of value, value response, and value blindness. This discussion is supplemented by analysis of the relationship between happiness and morality in von Hildebrand. Martin Cajthaml is the main author of the book; Vlastimil Vohánka contributed most of chapter 5.

Consequentialism, one of the major theories of normative ethics, maintains that the moral rightness of an act is determined solely by the act's consequences and its alternatives. The traditional form of consequentialism is one-dimensional, in that the rightness of an act is a function of a single moral aspect, such as the sum total of wellbeing it produces. In this book Martin Peterson introduces a new type of consequentialist theory: multidimensional consequentialism. According to this theory, an act's moral rightness (...) depends on several separate dimensions, including individual wellbeing, equality and risk. Peterson's novel approach shows that moral views about equality and risk that were previously thought to be mutually incompatible can be rendered compatible, and his precise theoretical discussion helps the reader to understand better the distinction between consequentialist and non-consequentialist theories. His book will interest a wide range of readers in ethics. (shrink)

This is a slightly edited transcript of a lecture given by Per Martin‐Löf on 26 October 2022 at the Rolf Schock Symposium in Stockholm. In 2020, the Rolf Schock Prize in Logic and Philosophy was awarded to Dag Prawitz and Per Martin‐Löf, and the symposium was organised in their honour. The transcript was prepared by Ansten Klev and edited by the author.

In this paper, I identify a theoretical and political role for ‘white ignorance’, present three alternative accounts of white ignorance, and assess how well each fulfils this role. On the Willful Ignorance View, white ignorance refers to white individuals’ willful ignorance about racial injustice. On the Cognitivist View, white ignorance refers to ignorance resulting from social practices that distribute faulty cognitive resources. On the Structuralist View, white ignorance refers to ignorance that (1) results as part of a social process that (...) systematically gives rise to racial injustice, and (2) is an active player in the process. I argue that, because of its greater power and flexibility, the Structuralist View better explains the patterns of ignorance that we observe, better illuminates the connection to white racial domination, and is overall better suited to the project of ameliorating racial injustice. As such, the Structuralist View should be preferred. (shrink)

The International Bill of Human Rights (IBHR) enjoys universal acclaim as the source of the best standards and definition of human rights. This paper argues that the IBHR is inspired by liberalism and harbours ambiguities that open the door to a neoliberal seizure of the rights agenda; and that this effectively destabilises the focus on the IBHR on socio-economic and community rights, and therefore its stated ideal of the equal value of all human rights. I argue that Kwame Gyekye's moderate (...) communitarian political philosophy affords a viable philosophical basis for justification of a more balanced conception of human rights than the theoretical basis of the IBHR does. (shrink)

This article aims to study the practical validity and political operativity that the Commune-form of organization continues to have among us, today. We will focus on two current and untimely self-emancipatory movements: ‘Zapatism’ and the M.A.R.E.Z., and ‘Democratic Confederalism’ and the cantons. These are two collective movements that, according to the activists involved —and here we will be guided by the texts and materials produced from both movements— deliberately update and renew the ‘Commune’ as a form or mode of organization (...) liberatory and egalitarian, depatriarchal and descolonial type, breaking out as a ‘third way’ in the midst of our patriarchal state and capitalist societies, traversed by all kinds of vertical, dissymmetric, hierarchical, andromorphic and phallocratic divisions. We will begin by defining the most fundamental characteristics of the novelty implied by the Paris Commune in the 19th Century. Then, we will see the problem of the ‘commune’ as becoming-minority, proposing that the commune-form produces a differential human subjectivation with respect to state subjectivation. Next, we will study the problem of ‘double combat’, showing how the women’s struggle was the greatest vector of self-emancipatory flight. And finally, we will study the an-organic consistency of the Commune-form of organization, and we will list its differential features. (shrink)

In this extraordinary work Gilles Deleuze, the most renowned living philosopher in France, reflects on one of the figures of the past who has most influenced his own sweeping reconfiguration of the tasks of philosophy.Deleuze's brilliant text shows how current definitions of philosophy do not apply to Spinoza: a solitary thinker, he conceived of philosophy as an enterprise of liberation and radical demystification much as did Leibniz or, later Nietzsche. Spinoza confronts the grand philosophical problems that are still current today: (...) the comparative role of ontology, of epistemology, and of political anthropology.The goal of this book is to determine the rapport among the univocity of Being in the theory of substance; the production of truth and the genesis of sense in the theory of ideas; and practical joy and the selective organization of the passions in the theory of modes. (shrink)

Pastor and author Martin Thielen has compiled a list of ten things people need to believe, and ten things they don't, in order to be a Christian. This lively and engaging book will be a help to seekers as well as a comfort to believers who may find themselves questioning some of the assumptions they grew up with. With an accessible, storytelling style that's grounded in solid biblical scholarship, Thielen shows how Christians don't need to believe that sinners will (...) be "left behind" to burn in hell or that it's heresy to believe in evolution. And while we must always take the Bible seriously, we don't always have to take it literally. At the same time, Christians do need to believe in Jesus--his life, his teachings, his death and resurrection, and his vision for the world. A great benefit of those beliefs is that they provide promising answers to life's most profound questions, including: Where is God? What matters most? What brings fulfillment? What about suffering? Is there hope? Thielen articulates centrist, mainline Christianity in a way that's fresh and easy to understand, and offers authentic Christian insights that speak to our deepest needs. This new edition includes a leader's guide, previously only available online, and a new introduction from the author that reflects on the book's reception. The leader's guide features unique and easily implemented aids for carrying out a seven-week, congregation-wide initiative that will help local churches reach out to their communities. More information is available at thielen.wjkbooks.com. (shrink)

A political challenge facing constitutional democracies in Africa is the lack of adequate representation and participation of citizens in democratic processes and institutions. This challenge is manifest in the vesting of power solely in, and the exercise of this power by, a sectional group – the majority party – to the exclusion of others; as evinced in the liberal democratic systems extensively practised on the continent. Wiredu proposes as a solution to these challenges the adoption of consensual democracy; an indigenous, (...) non-party democratic system rooted in the traditional African humanist and communitarian conceptions of the individual and the community, in which political decisions are characteristically reached by consensus. In this article, I present a critical exposition of Wiredu’s consensual democracy and defend it against liberal democracy on the one hand, and criticisms levelled against it on the other hand. I also offer some modifications to Wiredu’s theory in a bid to render it more suitable for practice in Africa. (shrink)

We usually mean what we say, but sometimes we do not. When I ironically utter ‘What lovely weather’ on a rainy day, or mistakenly utter ‘Jim is a barn door’ instead of ‘Jim is a darn bore’, I say one thing and mean another. However, although utterances like these are not uncommon, they are greatly overshadowed by the volume of humdrum utterances of ‘There is wine in the fridge’ or ‘I really like nachos’ where we mean what we say. And (...) since we usually mean what we say, the following simple thesis will usually be correct. (N) S meant that _p_ by uttering _e_ iff S said that _p_ by uttering _e_. The simplicity of (N) raises the question of whether it can be refined in order to also cover situations where we do not mean what we say. In this paper we defend a modal version of (N): an analysis where speaker meaning in most situations is identified with what is actually said, and in other situations with what the speaker _would have said_ in certain counterfactual situations. The analysis constitutes a radical, but welcome, break with Gricean orthodoxy, where linguistic meaning, rather than speaker meaning, is ultimately used to explain other semantic notions. (shrink)

"a man cannot be thoroughly humbled until he comes to know that his salvation is utterly beyond his own powers, counsel, endeavors, will, and works, and absolutely depending on the will, counsel, pleasure, and work of another, that is, of God only." So speaks Luther in his greatest book, On the Bondage of the Will. In this book, Luther replies to the arguments of Erasmus of Rotterdam, who had pointed to all the commands in Scripture, and believed that they implied (...) that man could obey them. Luther replied that such an argument emptied the Gospel of its power. Luther throwing plenty of entertaining bombshells and insults along the way, but he also gets right to the heart on issues such as grace, human sinfulness, predestination, and man's need for absolute grace and forgiveness. (shrink)

This article surveys western business ethics' recent history to show how this ethic has neglected recently its religious traditions and become construed more narrowly as an applied philosophy and social science. It argues that this narrowness has confused business ethics' role in business education and helped to weaken the distinctiveness of certain institutions of higher education. It then suggests ways that western business ethics might become more integrated, interesting, and autonomous as an academic discipline by incorporating its key religious traditions.

Kant was a keen psychological observer and theorist of the forms, mechanisms and sources of self-deception. In this Element, the author discusses the role of rationalizing/Vernünfteln for Kant's moral psychology, normative ethics and philosophical methodology. By drawing on the full breadth of examples of rationalizing Kant discusses, the author shows how rationalizing can extend to general features of morality and corrupt rational agents thoroughly. Furthermore, the author explains the often-overlooked roles common human reason, empirical practical reason and even pure practical (...) reason play for rationalizing. Kant is aware that rationality is a double-edged sword; reason is the source of morality and of our dignity, but it also enables us to seemingly justify moral transgressions to ourselves, and it creates an interest in this justification in the first place. Finally, this Element discusses whether Kant's ethical theory itself can be criticised as a product of rationalizing. (shrink)

Martin Sand explores the problems of responsibility at the early, visionary stages of technological development. He discusses the increasingly dominant concept of innovation and outlines how narratives about the future are currently used to facilitate technological change, to foster networks, and to raise public awareness for innovations. This set of activities is under increasing scrutiny as a form of “visioneering”. The author discusses intentionality and freedom as important, albeit fuzzy, preconditions for being responsible. He distinguishes being from holding responsible (...) and explores this distinction’s effects on the problem of moral luck. Finally, he develops a virtue ethical framework to discuss visioneers’ and innovators’ responsibilities.​. (shrink)

This textbook by Martin Hollis offers an exceptionally clear and concise introduction to the philosophy of social science. It examines questions which give rise to fundamental philosophical issues. Are social structures better conceived of as systems of laws and forces, or as webs of meanings and practices? Is social action better viewed as rational behaviour, or as self-expression? By exploring such questions, the reader is led to reflect upon the nature of scientific method in social science. Is the aim (...) to explain the social world after a manner worked out for the natural world, or to understand the social world from within? (shrink)

In this analytically oriented work, Peterson articulates and defends five moral principles for addressing ethical issues related to new and existing technologies: the cost-benefit principle, the precautionary principle, the sustainability principle, the autonomy principle, and the fairness principle.