Amalgamating evidence from heterogeneous sources and across levels of inquiry is becoming increasingly important in many pure and applied sciences. This special issue provides a forum for researchers from diverse scientific and philosophical perspectives to discuss evidence amalgamation, its methodologies, its history, its pitfalls, and its potential. We situate the contributions therein within six themes from the broad literature on this subject: the variety-of-evidence thesis, the philosophy of meta-analysis, the role of robustness/sensitivity analysis for evidence amalgamation, its bearing on questions (...) of extrapolation and external validity of experiments, its connection with theory development, and its interface with causal inference, especially regarding causal theories of cancer. (shrink)

Do human beings share a common morality? Natural Law: A Lutheran Reappraisal presents engaging essays from contemporary Lutheran scholars, teachers, and pastors, each offering a fresh reappraisal of natural law within the context of historic Lutheran teaching and practice. Thought provoking questions following each essay will help readers apply key Bible texts associated with natural law to their daily lives.

The debate on the question of the moral status of human beings and the boundaries of the moral community has long been dominated by the antagonism between personism and speciesism: either certain mental properties or membership of the human species is considered morally crucial. In this article, I argue that both schools of thought are equally implausible in major respects, and that these shortcomings arise from the same reason in both cases: a biological notion of being human. By contrast, I (...) show to what extent being human is morally relevant in a non‐biological sense. I establish the living human form as the essential criterion for belonging to the moral community, and defend it against a number of possible objections. This new morphological approach is capable of capturing essential elements of personism and speciesism without sharing their faults, and of reconstructing widespread moral intuitions. (shrink)

Rather than a “logical assertion,” Whitehead described a proposition as a “lure for feeling” for a collectivity to come. The unique contributions in Propositions in the Making articulate the newest reaches of Whiteheadian propositions for a postmodern world.

This book offers a contemporary critique of liberal democracy, understood as a set of institutions and as a set of ideas.

How is distributive justice possible with respect to immigration if political decisions about entry and membership cannot be grounded in the symmetry of a prior commonality, human or otherwise, that could guarantee reciprocal relations between members and nonmembers? This paper deals with both aspects of this question. Initially, it engages critically with Seyla Benhabib's plea for ‘dialogical universalism,’ showing why the strong discontinuity between political and moral reciprocity precludes understanding distributive justice as the process of mediating between political particularity and (...) moral universality. Subsequently, it suggests that a way out of this conceptual and normative impasse can be found in the fact that boundaries create a double asymmetry. This double asymmetry is constitutive for the ‘dia’ of the political dialogue that separates and joins members and nonmembers. This ‘in between,’ which eludes control by the parties to a dialogue, is the realm of distributive justice. (shrink)

THE ARTICLE TRIES TO SHOW THAT AUGUSTINE’S CLAIM THAT THERE ARE NO ACCIDENTS IN GOD IS COMPATIBLE WITH THE CLAIM THAT GOD HAS CONTINGENT PROPERTIES. HIS DISTINCTION BETWEEN SPEECH ABOUT GOD, THOUGHT ABOUT GOD, AND THE BEING OF GOD ALLOWS HIM TO HOLD THAT GOD IS SIMPLE THOUGH A MULTIPLICITY OF TERMS WITH DIFFERENT MEANINGS ARE PREDICATED OF HIM. AUGUSTINE PROVIDES, IT IS ARGUED, A BASIS FOR A RULE TO ALLOW FOR A COHERENT DISTINCTION BETWEEN RELATIVE AND NON-RELATIVE PROPERTIES OF (...) GOD. (shrink)

If the Bucolics as a whole ‘ look on us with dark enigmatical eyes,’ for long no more impenetrable darkness and no more compelling enigma could be found than that of the fourth poem in the collection. But Skutsch, the authors of Virgil's Messianic Eclogue, and more recently Mr. Royds in his Virgil and Isaiah, have done much to solve its many mysteries. Their efforts, however, were mainly directed towards the problems of fact contained in the Eclogue, and so far (...) little attention seems to have been given to an equally interesting point, that of its metrical arrangement. It is plain that we must consult the Sibyll for help: if it is not plain, that is not Virgil's fault. I hope to be able to show here that Virgil himself has left in this poem certain unmistakeable signs for those who have eyes to see and ears to hear, besides his own rather casual reference to the Cumaeum carmen, and incidentally to dispose anew of the theory which reads in that expression an allusion not to the Sibyl but to Hesiod. (shrink)

Physiologists have long proposed that correlated input activity is important in normal sensory development. Here it is postulated that the visual system is sensitive to the correlation in image intensity across the visual field, and that these correlations are used to help calibrate spatial representations. Since measurements made near to each other in the visual field are more correlated than measurements made at a distance, the degree of correlation can be used as an estimate of the distance between two measurements (...) and can therefore be used to calibrate a roughly organized spatial representation. We therefore explored the hypothesis that low level spatial representations are calibrated using a signal based on image intensity correlation. If the visual system uses input statistics to calibrate its spatial representation, then any distortions and anisotropies in these input statistics should be mirrored by distortions in the representation of space. To test the psychological implications of this hypothesis, a collection of 81 images of open and urban landscapes were used to estimate the degree of correlation between image intensity measurement pairs as a function of both distance and orientation. Doing this we show that a system that used the statistics measured to calibrate its representation would show: (1) a horizontal‐vertical illusion;(2) the magnitude of this illusion would depend on the amount of open and urban landscapes in the environment;(3) there would be a nontrivial relationship between line orientation and judged length. Analogues of all these distortions and regularities can be found in the psychophysical literature on distance estimation. This gives strength to the proposal that spatial representations are calibrated using input statistics. (shrink)

In the Classical Quarterly for April, 1927, I tried to show how Virgil, in his fourth Eclogue, introduced assonance and even rhyme to contribute in part to the ‘Sibylline’ atmosphere of the poem. Since then I have further investigated this question of assonance in Virgil's poetry, with what appear interesting results.

Throughout his relatively short life, Albert Camus struggled with nihilism and the absurd nature of human existence. Indeed, many of his writings deal with the problem of nihilism and with the issues of suicide, murder, suffering, and mass death. Always serious in his writings yet never resorting to cynicism or despair, Camus advocated rebellion as a response to nihilism. The choice of rebellion as a response to the absurdity of human existence makes sense when one realizes that his life spanned (...) the two world wars, the horrors of the concentration camps, and the repression of innocent civilians all over the world, from South America to Algeria. Perhaps Camus’s tumultuous background helps to explain why his writings.. (shrink)

In this essay Mordechai Gordon begins to address the neglect of humor among philosophers of education by focusing on some interesting connections between humor, self‐transcendence, and the development of moral virtues. More specifically, he explores the kind of humor that makes fun of oneself and how it can affect educational encounters. Gordon begins his analysis by discussing the nature and purpose of humor in general, while distinguishing it from laughter and amusement. In the next part of the essay, he (...) takes a close look at the characteristics and benefits of the type of humor that we use when we make fun of ourselves. He then turns his attention to exploring the relation between laughing at ourselves, self‐transcendence, and a number of moral virtues. The final part of this essay briefly examines what might happen to the quality of educational encounters when teachers become more comfortable with laughing at themselves. (shrink)

Inspired by Camus’ portrayal of Sisyphus, this essay examines the act of teaching as an absurd profession, one that faces numerous obstacles and challenges and continually falls short of its intended goals. I begin my analysis by demonstrating that Camus’ understanding of the absurd was heavily influenced by Nietzsche’s conception of nihilism. I argue that for Camus the sense of absurdity comes from the conflict between humans’ longing for order and meaning and the disorder and meaninglessness that we experience in (...) our daily lives. Next, I show that Camus’ understanding of absurdity can help us make sense of the recent wave of educational reform. More fundamentally, I argue that that the existential conditions of schooling that many teachers have to negotiate daily are themselves absurd in Camus’ sense of the term. In the last part of this article, I take a close look at how a number of teachers are attempting to resist and even rebel against the new educational mandates. (shrink)

Une approche philosophique de la prière à des fins politiques est possible dans le cas où les deux substantifs sont mis en relais inconditionnel. Le premier élément responsable de cette filature des liens c’est la présence de l’autre. Prier et faire de la politique sont deux activités humaines trop humaines qui exigent l’ouverture à l’autre, pour l’autre comme pour l’édification de sa propre identité individuelle et collective. Comme les rites et les cultes, la liturgie, notamment la prière collective, a un (...) effet thérapeutique, et pédagogique, disons didactique et sociopolitique. Elle calme les esprits, la volonté, apaise l’angoisse et solidifie les liens sociaux. L'Eglise, par exemple, est née du rassemblement du peuple de Dieu en prière et c'est dans son sein que toute célébration liturgique trouve perpétuellement son accomplissement aussi bien que sa régénération dans l’invocation du nom du Christ-Vérité, Rédempteur, Fondateur, Roi et Prêtre. La présente étude sur « Vérité et Royauté » focalise l’attention sur l’essence même du politique qui se nourrit du religieux tout en lui fournissant gloire, pouvoir et moyens d’existence. (shrink)