Richard Hooker is one of the greatest theologians of the Church of England. In the light of fierce recent debate, this book argues vigorously against the new orthodoxy that Hooker was a Reformed or Calvinist theologian. In so doing it considers such central religious questions as human freedom, original sin, whether people can deserve salvation, and the nature of religious authority.

This study attempts to refine and test a theory of social influences on ethical decisions of journalists. The theoretical model proposes that several social factors influence any given decision, and that a hierarchy of influences assigns relative value to each: individual, small group, organization, competition, occupation, extramedia, and law. Print and broadcast journalists reacted to 3 hypothetical scenarios that raised ethical problems. The journalists then rated the salience of various reasoning statements, each representing 1 of the 7 social influences. No (...) single source of ethical guidance appeared; in many cases different influences emerge as powerful under different circumstances. But of the 7 proposed influences, 5 showed consistent strength in predicting the decision the journalist makes. The individual influence was the weakest of the 7, despite its prominent strength in the literature. The organizational and small-group strength suggests company-level strategies for media policy-makers who wish to increase journalists'ethical awareness. Overall, the study seems to challenge a traditional assumption that in ethical dilemmas journalists are autonomous moral agents, acting on the basis of their own values alone. The data support the notion of a far more dynamic and complex pattern of social influences. (shrink)

This article reviews recent developments in experimental facial attractiveness research. It outlines the important social consequences of facial attractiveness in social life and briefly reviews the structural factors associated with attractiveness in both sexes taking a theoretical perspective largely influenced by evolutionary biology. The study discusses individual differences in preferences from this theoretical perspective. Attractiveness is also affected by aspects of the face that are manifestly not static. Facial motion and expression involve changing configurations of the face and the execution (...) of specific, discrete gestures that are likely to contribute to attractiveness and yet are largely neglected in the current literature. It shows how an evolutionary viewpoint is also useful when considering attractiveness judgments when expressive or dynamic cues are present in stimuli. (shrink)

How do journalists sort out the tangle of legal rights and ethical responsibilities in their everyday news work? A survey of 1,037 journalists and in-depth interviews with 22 others, found substantial evidence for 3 models of the relation of law and ethics: a Separate Realms model, a Correspondence model, and a new "Responsibility Model" in which the law is considered in problematic situations but only as one of several considerations in what is essentially an ethical decision. The findings have implications (...) for the maintenance of generous levels of First Amendment freedom news media currently enjoy. (shrink)

Nigel Blake; Justifying Peace Education: a reply to Professor Flew, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 20, Issue 2, 30 May 2006, Pages 257–264, https://.

Sinnott, Nigel Review of: Dare to stand alone: The story of Charles Bradlaugh, by Bryan Niblett, Oxford: Kramedart Press, 2010, 2011, viii, 391 pp., 4 plates. ISBN 978-0-9564743-0-8.

Sinnott, Nigel I had been looking forward to 29 July 1962 for a very long time. It marked the end often years spent at two English private boarding schools with their ethos of 'muscular Christianity': a proto-fascist mix of semi-monastic living, lots of compulsory sport and relentless Anglican religious indoctrination. I had loathed almost every day I had spent at these schools, as I disliked ball games and strenuous exercise from the outset, and by the time I was ten, (...) or maybe a few months older, I was a staunch atheist. I was by temperament a studious, imaginative and inquiring boy, but I loathed the formality, petty regimentation, narrow conservative mind-set, intolerance and sometimes brutality of the school system in which I found myself. I had spent a decade feeling confined, frustrated, very bored, often cold and sometimes frightened. I resolved that, if I ever had children of my own, they would never be brought up and 'educated' like this. (shrink)

In Cosmopolitan Love and Individuality, Nigel Rapport outlines his quest for an ethic of social recognition and inclusion based on shared humanity rather than membership of fictional social, and cultural groupings such as nationalities, religions, and ethnicities. The book proposes love as the glue for social inclusion, where love is the emotional recognition of other individual human beings.

Sinnott, Nigel The son of a stonemason, Joseph Symes was born at Portland, Dorset, England, on 29 January 1841, a birthday he was proud to share with Thomas Paine. He joined the Wesleyan church in 1858, became a local preacher, and, encouraged by his devout mother, in 1864 entered the Wesleyan College at Richmond-upon-Thames.

While ethical and moral issues have been widely considered in the general areas of marketing and sales, similar attention has not been given to the impact of strategic account management (SAM) approaches to handling the relationships between suppliers and very␣large customers. SAM approaches have been widely␣adopted by suppliers as a mechanism for managing␣relationships and partnerships with dominant customers␣– characterized by high levels of buyer–seller inter-dependence and forms of collaborative partnership. Observation suggests that the perceived moral intensity of␣these relationships is commonly (...) low, notwithstanding the underlying principles of benefiting the few (large, strategic customers) at the expense of the many (smaller customers and other stakeholders), and the magnitude of the consequences of concessions made to large customers, even though some such consequences may be unintended. Dilemmas exist also for executives implementing strategic account relationships regarding such issues as information sharing, trust, and hidden incentives for unethical behaviour. We propose the need for greater transparency and senior management questioning of the ethical and moral issues implicit in strategic account management. (shrink)

For at least two centuries most social thought has taken the earth to be the stable platform upon which dynamic social processes play out. Both climate change and the Anthropocene thesis – with their enfolding of dramatic geologic change into the space-time of social life – are now provoking social thinkers into closer engagement with earth science. After revisiting the decisive influence of the late 18th-century notion of geological formations on the idea of social formations, this introductory article turns to (...) more recent and more explicit attempts to open up the categories of social thought to a deeper understanding of earth processes. This includes attempts to consider how social and political agency is both constrained and made possible by the forces of the earth itself. It also involves efforts to think beyond existing dependencies of social worlds upon particular geological strata and to imagine alternative ‘geosocial’ futures. (shrink)

Nigel Blake; Intellectual Freedom and the Universities: a reply to Anthony O'Hear, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 22, Issue 2, 30 May 2006, Pages 25.

Nigel Harris argues that the notion of national capital is becoming redundant as cities and their citizens, increasingly unaffected by borders and national boundaries, take center stage in the economic world. Harris deconstructs this phenomenon and argues for the immense benefits it could and should have, not just for western wealth, but for economies worldwide, for international communication and for global democracy.

This is in part a reflection on issues raised by David Cooper in his paper entitled ‘The Idea of Environment’ , a paper that I have an ambiguous attitude towards. On the one hand it has opened my eyes to a way of thinking about the environment, namely as a field of significance, but on the other hand it seems to be unfortunate in its tone of negative criticism of much of the thinking of deep environmentalists, and wrong in its (...) dismissal of the idea that the environment as a whole should be a field of significance. (shrink)

There is currently a debate about resilience and wellbeing of law students and legal practitioners. Tension has developed between a movement promoting the wellbeing of students and those who critic...

Actualmente existe una importante interfaz entre matemáticas y física teórica, que ha producido áreas completamente nuevas. Este artículo está basado en un debate en una mesa redonda organizada en el entorno del International Congress of Mathematicians en 2006 de Madrid, explora algunos de estos temas: los diferentes objetivos y pasado de ambas disciplinas, las interacciones actuales y sus precedentes, las posibilidades para el futuro y el papel de las matemáticas para entender el mundo en que vivimos.

One of the most significant philosophical voices of the twentieth century - the philosopher of 'the Other' - Emmanuel Levinas' work offers a challenge to the discipline of anthropology that claims knowledge of the human. Levinasian philosophy considers subjectivity and identity as 'secret'. For him an attempt to document humanity should then be placed in an ethics of ignorance and 'not-knowing' so that 'otherness' can be inspired. Anthropology thus reaches the Levinasian challenge of defining itself as a humanistic science as (...) well as a humanistic documentation of social life. This book endeavours to take Levinasian and anthropological precepts equally seriously and offers tentative conclusions. (shrink)

As the 20th century began, few effective therapies existed. This soon changed with major therapeutic discoveries turning the century into what has been called the golden age of therapeutics.1 The emphasis of most of these developments was on medicines for common disorders as they presented the greatest need. However, it also allowed pharmaceutical manufacturers to produce blockbuster drugs that provided a large return on investment. Rare disorders were overlooked because most are genetic in origin and scientific knowledge was lacking, making (...) it difficult to find treatments. The first genetic disorder with a therapy was phenylketonuria. The biochemist who proposed the first successful treatment in the 1950s was actively discouraged as phenylketonuria was genetic and ‘incurable’.2 Another reason was an absence of incentives to invest in developing medicines for which the return was limited, given the small numbers of potential patients. This changed from 1983 as several countries began introducing orphan drug policies, with Canada being a notable exception. As the millennium changed, some drugs for rare disorders were available, but the sequencing of the human genome in the early 2000s provided scientific knowledge to develop many more. The new therapies are often costly because they require millions, even billions, of dollars and years to develop, test and satisfy regulatory standards. …. (shrink)

Modern western political thought revolves around globality, focusing on the partitioning and the connecting up of the earth’s surface. But climate change and the Anthropocene thesis raise pressing questions about human interchange with the geological and temporal depths of the earth. Drawing on contemporary earth science and the geophilosophy of Deleuze and Guattari, this article explores how geological strata are emerging as provocations for political issue formation. The first section reviews the emergence – and eventual turn away from – concern (...) with ‘revolutions of the earth’ during the 18th- and 19th-century discovery of ‘geohistory’. The second section looks at the subterranean world both as an object of ‘downward’ looking territorial imperatives and as the ultimate power source of all socio-political life. The third section weighs up the prospects of ‘earth system governance’. The paper concludes with some general thoughts about the possibilities of ‘negotiating strata’ in more generative and judicious ways. (shrink)

This book addresses concerns about educational and moral standards in a world increasingly characterised by nihilism. On the one hand there is widespread anxiety that standards are falling; on the other, new machinery of accountability and inspection to show that they are not. The authors in this book state that we cannot avoid nihilism if we are simply _laissez-faire_ about values, neither can we reduce them to standards of performance, nor must we return to traditional values. They state that we (...) need to create a new set of values based on a critical assessment of contemporary practice in the light of a number of philosophical texts that address the question of nihilism, including the work of Nietzsche. (shrink)

Sinnott, Nigel Review of: Worst words, by Don Watson with Helen Smith Sydney: Vintage Books, 2015. 439 pp., pbk., ISBN 978 0 85798 344 2.

Cognitive science has always included multiple methodologies and theoretical commitments. The philosophy of cognitive science should embrace, or at least acknowledge, this diversity. Bechtel’s (2009a) proposed philosophy of cognitive science, however, applies only to representationalist and mechanist cognitive science, ignoring the substantial minority of dynamically oriented cognitive scientists. As an example of nonrepresentational, dynamical cognitive science, we describe strong anticipation as a model for circadian systems (Stepp & Turvey, 2009). We then propose a philosophy of science appropriate to nonrepresentational, dynamical (...) cognitive science. (shrink)

The natural evolution of ethics is commonly understood in terms of the development from the selfish struggle to survive, via prudent cooperation, to altruism. However, cooperation that is prudent in the sense of serving basically selfish interests is not really altruistic. Besides, Christian ethics should not identify morality with absolutely disinterested altruism. Self-interest is only selfish when it is disproportionate or unfair; otherwise it is morally legitimate. Therefore the natural evolution of ethics is better understood as the gradual diversification of (...) the goods in which human beings have an interest. And evidently, whatever their origins, humans do have an interest in a range of goods, not just the preservation of their genes or their kin or themselves. Therefore the reductionist, Hobbesian assumptions about human motivation that game theory makes are empirically untrue of human behaviour in general, and so the range of cases to which it applies is accordingly narrow. Rather than using biology to interpret human motivation reductionistically, we should use zoology and anthropology to track the evolution of interest in diverse goods. The fact that eudaimonistic Christian ethics, as represented by Thomas Aquinas and Joseph Butler, has long recognised this diversity of human goods is one sign of its continuing explanatory power, and counts towards its truth. (shrink)

Analysis of the degree of intraspecific morphological polymorphism during the evolutionary history of trilobites using an informatic approach1 provides striking evidence of a long‐suspected but previously unsubstantiated pattern: degrees of polymorphism are markedly higher in phylogenetically basal, stratigraphically early species. This unequivocal pattern prompts further exploration of the relationship between microevolutionary variance and macroevolutionary history. It demonstrates that the ‘traditional’ fossil record of skeletonized organisms can provide unique insight into questions of major evolutionary interest. BioEssays 29:1081–1084, 2007. © 2007 Wiley (...) Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

Theoretical identity statements of the form "water is H2O‟ are allegedly necessary truths knowable a posteriori, and assert that nothing could be water and not be H2O. The necessary a posteriori nature of these identity claims has been taken by Kripke, Putnam and Donnellan to justify a move from talk of reference (language) to talk of essence (metaphysics), and has motivated much of contemporary essentialism. In this paper I will contest this move from reference to essence, and argue that (i.) (...) the only way to derive essentialism from semantics (specifically direct reference) is to assume it as a premise, (ii.) that contemporary essentialism is a metaphysical assumption not a thesis, and (iii.) – assuming the accuracy of the analogy between proper names and natural kind terms – present an alternative version of natural kinds classification that is interest-relative, dependent on practical application and reflects the contingent state of affairs which is our world. (shrink)

In his much-discussed Hitler’s Willing Executioners, Daniel Goldhagen claims to bring ‘the critical eye of the anthropologist’ to the task of understanding the motivational state of Holocaust perpetrators. This aspect of his methodology has not received much critical attention. In this article I seek to fill that gap. I do so through consideration of Peter Winch’s reflections on the concept of learning from anthropological study of an alien social and cultural world. Goldhagen tells us that perpetrators acted as they did (...) because they believed it was ‘necessary and just’ to do so. But he only tells us thatthey believed this. We need to know howthey could have believed such a thing. Drawing upon Winch’s reflections, and with recourse to a controversial analogy, I address the ‘phenomenological’ question that Goldhagen poses, but fails, to explore. (shrink)

Is this the right book for me? Understand Existentialism breaks down a complex mode of thought into more manageable sections, enabling you to get to grips with the key concepts within the movement. Chart the origins and development of existentialism in a variety of disciplines and learn about significant thinkers from Sartre and De Beauvoir to Beckett and Camus. Whether you are a newcomer or more experienced student, this book will enhance your understanding of a brand of philosophy designed to (...) give meaning and direction amongst the uncertainties of modern life. Understand Existentialism includes: Chapter 1: Introduction to existentialism Chapter 2: Living dangerously: the roots of existentialism Chapter 3: Between birth and death Chapter 4: Existence precedes essence Chapter 5: The authentic life Chapter 6: Freedom, choice and responsibility Chapter 7: The individual, art and society Chapter 8: Existentialism and religion Chapter 9: Authenticity and the absurd: the fiction of Sartre and Camus Learn effortlessly with a new easy-to-read page design and interactive features: Not got much time? One, five and ten-minute introductions to key principles to get you started. Author insights Lots of instant help with common problems and quick tips for success, based on the author's many years of experience. Test yourself Tests in the book and online to keep track of your progress. Extend your knowledge Extra online articles to give you a richer understanding of the subject. Five things to remember Quick refreshers to help you remember the key facts. Try this Innovative exercises illustrate what you've learnt and how to use it. (shrink)

The fundamental assumption of compensation for visual delays states that, since delays are dealt with, there must be compensatory mechanisms. These mechanisms are taken to be internal models. Alternatives for delay compensation exist, suggesting that this assumption may not be fundamental, and nor should the existence of internal models be assumed. Delays may even be employed in their own compensation.