The once marginal theological question of Christ’s unique status has today entered into general consciousness. Increasing friendly dialogue among religions is one factor contributing to the urgency of the question. Another is the critical nature of the question within Christian theology. This article examines a broad range of responses and calls for a foundational approach based on Karl Rahner. It shares the advantage of this approach in addressing the suggestion that the Christian religion plays a unique role in a “liberation (...) theology of religions.”. (shrink)

The decline of the study of Scripture in the congregation, emanating from the twofold crisis of modern forms of inquiry into Scripture and various failures of the teaching office in contemporary Protestantism, has given rise to programs specifically designed to meet those problems.

The problem of modernity occupies a central place in the political reflection carried out by Leo Strauss. Taking this into account, the fundamental aim of this paper is to analyze how this author understood and questioned the philosophic project proposed by modern thinkers. In this sense, we will try to comprehend how, from Strauss´s perspective, modernity, seeking to bring about in history the best political order through the abandonment of traditional esotericism and a radical politicization of philosophy, involves an ideal (...) of rationalization of human life that is ultimately problematic for both society and philosophy. (shrink)

The preceding five years have brought remarkable advances in our understanding of the primary structure of drug receptors. The roles of certain amino acid residues in binding drugs and effecting receptor function have been proposed. As even more detailed structures become available, the goal of rational design of drug molecules based on predicted fits between the drug and its receptor will be near at hand. Although none of the classical receptors has yet yielded to X‐ray crystallographic analysis, the methods of (...) molecular biology facilitate the production of the large amounts of these rare proteins necessary for crystallization. Receptor proteins share one fundamental characteristic with allosterically regulated enzymes. Both have the structural flexibility that allows information to be transmitted to distant parts of the molecule. We will discuss recent observations about receptor structure and the dynamic nature of drug receptors, and pose questions about the significance of receptor dynamics for drug design. (shrink)

The authors address problems with “compulsory” arbitration clauses in contracts. Specifically, they note that consumers are misguided about their rights in such cases. In addition, arbitration clauses do not allow the press to cover any proceedings that may result. The arbitration clauses in contracts are written in legalese that consumers do not understand. The authors found that even university students had difficulty understanding the information in such clauses. An example of an actual case is included.

In the 1990s academic marketplace, transnational history emerged in the wake of the sprouting of international history, global history, and postcolonial history as historical subject fields. Christ...

Volume 20, Issue 2, February 2020, Page 1-4.

ALL classical palaeographers are familiar with Persius' roster of writing materials: Now we take the book to hand, and the two-coloured parchment purged of hair, and papyrus, and a knotty reed. Of the items mentioned, only ‘two-coloured parchment’ presents any difficulty.I hope in this article to present at least a possible solution to this problem. An obvious supposition would be that Persius is merely referring to the natural differences in colour between the two sides of a piece of parchment.

The "aesthetic attitude" is the primary concept in this aesthetic theory. I argue that it is capable of accounting for both the experiential and the axiological parts of the aesthetic. In the first Part of this dissertation I defend against past and recent criticism such concepts as "aesthetic disinterestedness" and "psychical distance." They are accurate but negative descriptions of the aesthetic attitude. I present as a positive formulation of the aesthetic attitude a theory of "aesthetic attention": a mode of attention (...) whose object is a phenomenal object grounded in the objective self. ;In Part II I explain the value in aesthetic experience as arising from the relation of a subject's immediate or intrinsic interest to an object of aesthetic attention. This theory of value is relational and therefore recognizes no absolute standard for aesthetic value judgments. Authoritative criticism is possible, however, insofar as the critic represents a tradition or community of interests. (shrink)

The common focus of these essays is the debate on the nature of science - often referred to by contemporaries as 'natural knowledge' - in Britain during the first half of the 19th century. A study of these debates allow us to see how British science of this period began to cast loose some of its earlier theological supports, but still relied on a moral framework to affirm its distinctive method, ethos and cultural value.

In 2020, the unmitigatingly brutal year of pandemic, there appeared two significant books about the regime of economics and law known as neoliberalism. This regime of political economy is a social...

Research on human genetic variation can present collective risks to all members of a socially identifiable group. Research that associates race or ethnicity with a genetic disposition to disease, for example, presents risks of group discrimination and stigmatization. To better protect against these risks, some have proposed supplemental community-based reviews of research on genetic differences between populations. The assumption behind these appeals is that involving members of study populations in the review process can help to identify and minimize collective risks (...) that otherwise could go unnoticed. In contrast to this position, critics have argued that supplemental community-based reviews are unnecessary, impractical, and morally problematic. This paper is our attempt to advance this debate by distinguishing the various goals of community review and the forms that it can take. (shrink)

Being able to communicate with students in schools is essential and critical. Richard Burke discusses the significance of communication and other issues in this integral work. In an innovative manner, Communicating With Students in Schools presents an extensive set of exercises for developing skills in communication, leading to better motivation, discipline, and rapport.

Pulling up the Ladder discusses how Wittgenstein's early philosophy became widely known largely through the efforts of Russell and other empirically-minded British philosophers, and to a lesser extent, the scientifically-oriented German-speaking philosophers of the Vienna Circle. However, Wittgenstein's primary philosophical concerns arose in a far different context, and failure to grasp this has led to many misunderstandings of the Tractatus. From Brockhaus' investigation of that context and its problems emerges this new interpretation of Wittgenstein's early thought, which also affords fresh (...) insights into the later Wittgenstein. (shrink)

Save for Anthropologists, few social scientists have been among the participants in the discussions about the appropriate structure of a ‘Universal Darwinism’. Yet evolutionary theorizing about cultural, social, and economic phenomena has a long tradition, going back well before Darwin. And over the past quarter century significant literatures have grown up concerned with the processes of change operating on science, technology, business organization and practice, and economic change more broadly, that are explicitly evolutionary in theoretical orientation. In each of these (...) fields of study, the broad proposition put forth by Darwin that change proceeds through a process involving variation, systematic selection, renewed variation... has proved both persuasive and powerful. On the other hand, the evolutionary processes involved in these areas differ in essential ways from those we now know are operative in the evolution of biological species. The objective of this essay is to highlight those differences, which a ‘Universal Darwinism’ needs to encompass, if it is to be broad enough to be a theory that is applicable to the evolution of human cultures as well as evolution in biology. (shrink)

: A standard interpretation of Kantian "maxims" sees them as expressing reasons for action, implying that we cannot act without a maxim. But recent challenges to this interpretation claim that Kant viewed acting on maxims as optional. Kant's understanding of maxims derives from Christian Wolff, who regarded maxims as major premises of the practical syllogism. This supports the standard interpretation. Yet Kant also viewed commitments to maxims as essential for virtue and character development, which supports challenges to the standard interpretation, (...) and raises questions about the coherence of Kant's overall conception of the role of maxims in practical philosophy. (shrink)

Bioethics and feminist scholarship has explored various justice implications of nonmedical sex selection and family balancing. However, prospective users’ viewpoints have been absent from the debate over the socially acceptable bounds of nonmedical sex selection. This qualitative study provides a set of empirically grounded perspectives on the moral values that underpin prospective users’ conceptualizations of justice in the context of a family balancing program in the United States. The results indicate that couples pursuing family balancing understand justice primarily in individualist (...) and familial terms rather than in terms of social justice for women and girls or for children resulting from sex selection. Study participants indicated that an individual’s desire for gender balance in their family is ethically complex and may not be inherently sexist, immoral, or socially consequential, particularly given the social context in which they live. Our findings suggest that the social conditions that contribute to prospective users’ desires for gender balance in their families may direct them away from recognizing or engaging broader social justice concerns relating to sexism and stratified reproduction. (shrink)