Blended Learning Solutions for Higher Education explores the origins, empirical foundations, and implementation of blended learning in colleges and universities. Since emerging as a third-way solution to traditional and virtual higher education models, blended learning has become a predominant learning modality in an era of rapid technological proliferation. Offering an alternative to longstanding yet flawed methodologies and assumptions about its validity, this book conceptualizes blended learning as a complex social practice mediated by knowledge, institutional rules, policies, and norms as well (...) as material factors such as technology and physical spaces. The book's original MIRACLE framework offers a research-grounded, highly practical guide to blended learning design, improvement, and long-term efficacy. From demystified history and heuristics to digitized platforms and course content to reimagined governance and regulations, these insights provide a thoughtful exemplar of blended learning's challenges and affordances along with a firm basis for integrating face-to-face and online learning, teaching, and assessment innovatively and creatively. (shrink)

Volume 20, Issue 7, July 2020, Page 101-103.

Philosophers and geographers have converged on the topic of public space, fascinated and in many ways alarmed by fundamental changes in the way post-industrial societies produce space for public use, and in the way citizens of these same societies perceive and constitute themselves as a public. This volume advances this inquiry, making extensive use of political and social theory, while drawing intimate connections between political principles, social processes, and the commonplaces of our everyday environments.

This essay offers a critical examination of Neil Ormerod’s treatment of the debate between Lonergan and Gilson on the question of being. Although this debate concerns a highly technical issue of metaphysics and epistemology, it remains germane and relevant, especially within the field of Christian thought. In Ormerod’s careful and for the most part generous examination of this debate, he argues that being for Gilson is perceived through the senses, whereas for Lonergan being is intended in the questions that (...) arise from the relevant sense data. Where Gilson’s philosophy gives priority to the metaphysics of being, Lonergan gives priority to epistemology and cognitional theory. In arguing for the superiority of Lonergan’s approach to the question of being, Ormerod relies on a fundamental misunderstanding of Gilson’s metaphysics. By appeal to the more recent work of Kenneth Schmitz, this essay proposes a proper understanding of Gilson’s metaphysics as a basis for a more conciliatory relationship between these two giants in modern Christian philosophy who too often are pitted against one another. (shrink)

This collection of essays, published to coincide with Tony Honore's sixty-fifth birthday, focuses on the areas where Honore's thought has made the most significant contribution: Roman law and jurisprudence. Included are essays by P.S. Atiyah, Zenon Bankowski, John Bell, Peter Birks, John W. Cairs, Hugh Collins, David Daube, W. M. Gordon, J. W. Harris Nicola Lacey, A. D. E. Lewis, Detlef Liebs, G. D. MacCormack, Neil MacCormick, G. Maher, Pieter Norr, Alan Rodger, and Peter Stein.

Neil E. Williams develops a systematic metaphysics centred on the idea of powers, as a rival to neo-Humeanism, the dominant systematic metaphysics in philosophy today. Williams takes powers to be inherently causal properties and uses them as the foundation of his explanations of causation, persistence, laws, and modality.

I defend ethical hedonism, the view that pleasure is the sole good thing, by arguing that it offers the only answer to an argument for moral skepticism. The skeptical problem arises from widespread fundamental moral disagreement, which entails the presence of enough moral error to undermine the reliability of most processes generating moral belief. We know that pleasure is good through the reliable process of phenomenal introspection, which reveals what our experiences are like. If knowing of pleasure’s goodness through phenomenal (...) introspection is the only reliable way to form our initial moral beliefs, we should accept ethical hedonism. (shrink)

Of the many futuristic prospects offered by neuroscience, one of the more controversial is ‘brain reading’: the use of functional neuroimaging to gain information about subjects’ mental states or thoughts. This technology has various possible applications, including ‘neuromarketing’ and lie detection. Would such applications violate subjects’ privacy rights? Conversely, if God knows and judges all our secret thoughts, do Christians have any stake in defending a right to mental privacy? This article argues that God’s knowledge of us is different not (...) only in degree but in kind from the knowledge sought through brain reading. This view of divine knowledge supports a theological account of privacy, richer and broader in scope than standard accounts of privacy rights, which can aid the ethical analysis of the use of brain reading technology for purposes such as marketing and lie detection. (shrink)

This article explores whether and how research into biological influences on gender identity can and should inform Christian ethical reflection on gender diversity and gender nonconformity. First, the current state of genetic and neuroscientific research on gender identity is surveyed. While the scientific findings are as yet preliminary, tentative, and sometimes contradictory, researchers argue that they already give grounds for thinking that many biological factors have some influence on gender identity through complex interactions with many social and environmental factors. Next, (...) the article offers some general remarks about how natural scientific findings should—and should not—inform Christian theological and ethical reflection. Finally, three specific proposals are developed for how scientific research can and should inform Christian ethical reflection on gender identity. The article offers both a contribution to this Christian ethical reflection and a case study of how the natural sciences may be used in Christian ethics. (shrink)

Increasingly the body is a possession that does not belong to us. It is bought and sold, bartered and stolen, marketed wholesale or in parts. The professions - especially reproductive medicine, transplant surgery, and bioethics but also journalism and other cultural specialists - have been pliant partners in this accelerating commodification of live and dead human organisms. Under the guise of healing or research, they have contributed to a new 'ethic of parts' for which the divisible body is severed from (...) the self, torn from the social fabric, and thrust into commercial transactions -- as organs, secretions, reproductive capacities, and tissues -- responding to the dictates of an incipiently global marketplace. Breaking with established approaches which prioritize the body as 'text', the chapters in this book examine not only images of the body-turned-merchandise but actually existing organisms considered at once as material entities, semi-magical tokens, symbolic vectors and founts of lived experience. The topics covered range from the cultural disposal and media treatment of corpses, the biopolitics of cells, sperm banks and eugenics, to the international trafficking of kidneys, the development of 'transplant tourism', to the idioms of corporeal exploitation among prizefighters as a limiting case of fleshly commodity. This insightful and arresting volume combines perspectives from anthropology, law, medicine, and sociology to offer compelling analyses of the concrete ways in which the body is made into a commodity and how its marketization in turn remakes social relations and cultural meanings. (shrink)

We can infer moral conclusions from nonmoral evidence using a three-step procedure. First, we distinguish the processes generating belief so that their reliability in generating true belief is statistically predictable. Second, we assess the processes’ reliability, perhaps by observing how frequently they generate true nonmoral belief or logically inconsistent beliefs. Third, we adjust our credence in moral propositions in light of the truth ratios of the processes generating beliefs in them. This inferential route involves empirically discovering truths of the form (...) “Process P, which generates belief in moral proposition M, has truth ratio T", and using them to discover probabilities for moral propositions. The inferential route is noncircular, and progress along it is driven fundamentally by induction. (shrink)

This paper presents the Universality Argument that pleasure is goodness. The first premise defines goodness as what should please all. The second premise reduces 'should' to perceptual accuracy. The third premise invokes a universal standard of accuracy: qualitative identity. Since the pleasure of all is accurate solely about pleasure, pleasure is goodness, or universal moral value. The argument proceeds from a moral sense theory that analyzes moral concepts as concerned with what all should hope for, feel guilty about, and admire. (...) This requires rejecting practical anti-empiricism, the view that moral judgment concerns empirically inaccessible norms governing action. (shrink)

Neil Tennant presents an original logical system with unusual philosophical, proof-theoretic, metalogical, computational, and revision-theoretic virtues. Core Logic is the first system that ensures both relevance and adequacy for the formalization of all mathematical and scientific reasoning.

Researchers from diverse disciplines, including organismal and cellular physiology, sports science, human nutrition, evolution and ecology, have sought to understand the causes and consequences of the surprising variation in metabolic rate found among and within individual animals of the same species. Research in this area has been hampered by differences in approach, terminology and methodology, and the context in which measurements are made. Recent advances provide important opportunities to identify and address the key questions in the field. By bringing together (...) researchers from different areas of biology and biomedicine, we describe and evaluate these developments and the insights they could yield, highlighting the need for more standardisation across disciplines. We conclude with a list of important questions that can now be addressed by developing a common conceptual and methodological toolkit for studies on metabolic variation in animals. (shrink)

On normative order -- On institutional order-- Law and the constitutional state -- A problem : rules or habits? -- On persons -- Wrongs and duties -- Legal positions and relations : rights and obligations -- Legal relations and things : property -- Legal powers and validity -- Powers and public law : law and politics -- Constraints on power : fundamental rights -- Criminal law and civil society : law and morality -- Private law and civil society : law (...) and economy -- Positive law and moral autonomy -- On law and justice -- Law and values : reflections on method. (shrink)

Emerging neurotechnologies promise to make possible the collection and analysis of users’ brain data, the connection of brains to machines or other brains, and modification of brain functions. This article explores questions about identity, agency, moral responsibility, and social justice raised by these technological prospects. The ethical analysis of these questions is framed in terms of the common good, understood as the conditions that make for the fullest possible flourishing of all. Within that perspective, our questions about neurotechnologies are explored (...) by means of some key theological and ethical themes: the imago Dei, understood ‘performatively’ as recommended by Alistair McFadyen, the vision of human sociality set forth in the Pauline metaphor of the body of Christ, as explicated in Dietrich Bonhoeffer's ecclesiology, Bonhoeffer's concept of ‘vicarious representative action’, and the account of responsible life in his Ethics. (shrink)

This essay endeavors to show that application of a universalist epistemic method in theological ethics results in a construal of God, which is, from a biblical perspective, reductionist, and is a form of ethics in which universality is achieved at the expense of plurality. It argues for the formal possibility of an ecclesial ethics grounded in a tradition-centered rationality. It further argues that such an ethic need not result in a narrow and defensive sectarianism, a rigid and static orthodoxy, or (...) an authoritarian dogmatism. The posture of an ecclesial ethic based on the kind of critical realism advocated here may retain an apologetic and dialogical relation with the broader society, as it seeks to embody the incarnational narrative in its particular context. (shrink)

This paper explores connections between theories of morality and theories of properties. It argues that (1) moral realism is in tension with predicate, class and mereological nominalism; (2) moral non-naturalism is incompatible with standard versions of resemblance nominalism, immanent realism and trope theory; and (3) the standard semantic arguments for property realism do not support moral realism. I also raise doubts about trope-theoretic explanations of moral supervenience and argue against one version of the principle that we should accept theories that (...) maintain neutrality. (shrink)

This book examines the ways in which religious communities experimentally engage the world and function as fallible inquisitive agents, despite frequent protests to the contrary. Using the philosophy of inquiry and semiotics of Charles Sanders Peirce, it develops unique naturalist conceptions of religious meaning and ultimate orientation while also arguing for a reappraisal of the ways in which the world’s venerable religious traditions enable novel forms of communal inquiry into what Peirce termed “vital matters.” Pragmatic inquiry, it argues, is a (...) ubiquitous and continuous phenomenon. Thus, religious participation, though cautiously conservative in many ways, is best understood as a variety of inhabited experimentation. Religious communities embody historically mediated hypotheses about how best to engage the world and curate networks of semiotic resources for rendering those engagements meaningful. Religions best fulfill their inquisitive function when they both deploy and reform their sign systems as they learn better to engage reality. (shrink)

LeRon Shults and Palgrave MacMillan are happy to announce the arrival of Postpartum Theology!Shults has changed his guiding metaphors during the short interval between the publication of Iconoclastic Theology: Gilles Deleuze and the Secretion of Atheism and Theology After the Birth of God. While Iconoclastic Theology emphasized the iconoclastic potential of theology with the help of Deleuze’s well-struck hammer blows, Theology After the Birth of God adopts natal imagery. The gods, Shults argues, were conceived in the human mind, born into (...) the world as a result of human cognitive errors, and continue to be borne in diverse cultures. Prophets who have announced the death of God have little impacted our continued... (shrink)

Michael Raposa's long career as a preeminent interpreter of Peirce's writings on religion has taken a surprising turn and he has done what Peirce, in his most famous essays from 1877–78, suggested could not be done. Though Peirce early on cautioned against construing thought as having any legitimate function beyond the fixation of belief and the production of "thought at rest," and warned explicitly against thinking as a form of amusement,1 throughout Theosemiotic Raposa highlights an additional dimension of thought as (...) "something more than doubt's removal, much more than the fixation of belief ". Thought as musement need not, according to Raposa, be so linear and singularly directed towards the ends of... (shrink)

While scholars of religion have explored Peirce's philosophy of religion and extensively mined his groundbreaking work in semiotics, other aspects of Peirce's religious and theological thought have been largely ignored within religious studies. In particular, Peirce's theory of inquiry offers several potentially important insights that scholars of religion would do well to consider more fully. These insights are best realized through conceiving of religious participation as a form of inquiry, continuous with but importantly different from other forms of human inquiry. (...) By focusing on the dynamics of belief, doubt, and inquiry that pervade all human endeavors, religious participation can be conceptualized as a... (shrink)

Most theisms and atheisms share an assumption about what divine action would look like; if God is real and acts in the world, then God acts through intervention, invading the mechanistic world as an alien agent. Whitehead's Religious Thought takes dead aim at this contention, arguing that such conceptions of divine intervention emerge from and reinforce a problematic dualism that permeates western theological discourse. Throughout his text Daniel A. Dombrowski links dualistic conceptions of human experience with metaphysical dualism, but also (...) argues that materialistic or mechanistic conceptions of the universe all presume the same basic constituents: machines and ghosts. Materialism rids the world of ghosts and... (shrink)

Heidegger's ontological theories, his observations about liberalism and fascism, and his evaluation of Being are three premises of an argument for fascism. The ontological premise is that integrated wholes and instruments or objects of will are ontologically superior, as Being and Time suggests in discussing Being‐a‐whole and using tools. The social premise is that fascist societies are wholes integrated by dictatorial will, while liberal societies are looser aggregates of free individuals, as Heidegger describes in his 1930s seminars. The evaluative premise, (...) shared with the medieval tradition and expressed in his notebook remarks about war, is that ontological superiority makes things better. The conclusion that fascism is better than liberalism should be rejected along with the evaluative premise. (shrink)

Is the tick a machine or a machine operator? Is it a mere object or a subject? With these questions, the pioneering biophilosopher Jakob von Uexküll embarks on a remarkable exploration of the unique social and physical environments that individual animal species, as well as individuals within species, build and inhabit. This concept of the umwelt has become enormously important within posthumanist philosophy, influencing such figures as Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Deleuze and Guattari, and, most recently, Giorgio Agamben, who has called Uexküll (...) "a high point of modern antihumanism." A key document in the genealogy of posthumanist thought, _A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans_ advances Uexküll's revolutionary belief that nonhuman perceptions must be accounted for in any biology worth its name; it also contains his arguments against natural selection as an adequate explanation for the present orientation of a species' morphology and behavior. _A Theory of Meaning_ extends his thinking on the _umwelt_, while also identifying an overarching and perceptible unity in nature. Those coming to Uexküll's work for the first time will find that his concept of the _umwelt_ holds out new possibilities for the terms of animality, life, and the whole framework of biopolitics itself. (shrink)

This study continues the anti-realist’s quest for a principled way to avoid Fitch’s paradox. It is proposed that the Cartesian restriction on the anti-realist’s knowability principle ‘ϕ, therefore 3Kϕ’ should be formulated as a consistency requirement not on the premise ϕ of an application of the rule, but rather on the set of assumptions on which the relevant occurrence of ϕ depends. It is stressed, by reference to illustrative proofs, how important it is to have proofs in normal form before (...) applying the proposed restriction. A similar restriction is proposed for the converse inference, the so-called Rule of Factiveness ‘3Kϕ therefore ϕ’. The proposed restriction appears to block another Fitch-style derivation that uses the KK -thesis in order to get around.. (shrink)

This is a reply to the considerations advanced by Schroeder-Heister and Tranchini as prima facie problematic for the proof-theoretic criterion of paradoxicality, as originally presented in Tennant and subsequently amended in Tennant. Countering these considerations lends new importance to the parallelized forms of elimination rules in natural deduction.

This is a controversial work of applied legal theory, addressing urgent contemporary questions about law and the state, about the character of the UK as a state, and about the juridical character of the European Union.

This book develops Tennant's Natural Logicist account of the foundations of the natural, rational, and real numbers. Tennant uses this framework to distinguish the logical from the intuitive aspects of the basic elements of arithmetic.

Drawing on resources from both the analytical and continental traditions, this book argues that a comprehension of Immanuel Kant's aesthetics is necessary for grasping the scope and force of his epistemology. It draws on phenomenological and aesthetic resources to bring out the continuing relevance of Kant's project. One of the difficulties faced in reading ‘The Critique of Pure Reason’ is finding a way of reading the text as one continuous discussion. This book offers a reading at each stage of Kant's (...) epistemological argument, showing how various elements of Kant's argument, often thought of as extraneous or indefensible, can be integrated. Arguing for the centrality of aesthetics in philosophy, and within experience in general, it challenges a blind spot in the Anglo-American tradition of philosophy and will contribute to a growing interest in the general significance of aesthetic culture. (shrink)

Given that a person's death is bad for her,whenis it bad? I defendsubsequentism, the view that things that are bad in the relevant way are bad after they occur. Some have objected to this view on the grounds that it requires us to compare the amount of well-being the victim would have enjoyed, had she not died, with the amount she receives while dead; however, we cannot assign any level of well-being, not even zero, to a dead person. In the (...) population ethics literature, many philosophers have argued along similar lines that bringing someone into existence can neither harm nor benefit her. Working within the comparative framework (on which harms make us worse off), I respond by proposing a good sense in which we can say that dead people, and actual people at alternatives in which they do not exist, have a well-being level of zero. (shrink)

. The ability to enforce the provisions of a code of conduct influences whether the code is effective in shaping behavior. Enforcement relies in part on the willingness of organization members to report violations of the code, but research from the business and educational environment suggests that fewer than half of those who observe code violations follow their organizations procedures for reporting them. Based on a review of the literature in the business and educational environments, and a survey of 3605 (...) students at a mid-sized comprehensive university, this paper attempts to make conceptual sense of the non-reporting phenomenon. We present a conceptual framework based on four distinct factors which we have labeled: (1) factual non-responsibility; (2) moral non-responsibility; (3) consequential exoneration; and, (4) functional exoneration. Each of these factors suggest a different remedial strategy as well as provide a theoretical foundation for future research. Testable propositions for future research are developed, and some implications for organization leaders are discussed. (shrink)