Over a career spanning American history from the 1880s to the 1950s, John Dewey sought not only to forge a persuasive argument for his conviction that "democracy is freedom" but also to realize his democratic ideals through political activism. Widely considered modern America's most important philosopher, Dewey made his views known both through his writings and through such controversial episodes as his leadership of educational reform at the turn of the century; his support of American intervention in World War I (...) and his leading role in the Outlawry of War movement after the war; and his participation in both radical and anti-communist politics in the 1930s and 40s. Robert B. Westbrook reconstructs the evolution of Dewey's thought and practice in this masterful intellectual biography, combining readings of his major works with an engaging account of key chapters in his activism. Westbrook pays particular attention to the impact upon Dewey of conversations and debates with contemporaries from William James and Reinhold Niebuhr to Jane Addams and Leon Trotsky. Countering prevailing interpretations of Dewey's contribution to the ideology of American liberalism, he discovers a more unorthodox Dewey—a deviant within the liberal community who was steadily radicalized by his profound faith in participatory democracy. Anyone concerned with the nature of democracy and the future of liberalism in America—including educators, moral and social philosophers, social scientists, political theorists, and intellectual and cultural historians—will find John Dewey and American Democracy indispensable reading. (shrink)

Robert Cummins argues that any causal theory of mental content (CT) founders on an established fact of human psychology: that theory mediates sensory detection. He concludes,.

My aim is to propose affectivity as a criterion for personal identity. My proposal is to be taken in its weak version: affectivity as _only one_ of the criteria for personal identity. I start by arguing for affectivity being a better candidate as a criterion for personal identity than thinking. Next, I focus on synchronic vs. diachronic and on ontic vs. epistemic distinctions (my proposal will concern diachronic ontic personal identity) and consider the realm of affectivity in its temporal dimension. (...) In my argument, I rely on the genuineness of affectivity and I exploit chiefly long- or everlasting feelings (or emotions) and those which involve the feeling subject more rather than less. I conclude by stating that genuine long-lasting feelings (or emotions) are constitutive of diachronic ontic personal identity. (shrink)

In this article, I take up two arguments in favor of the discursive model of legal argumentation: the claim to correctness argument and the dual nature thesis. The argument of correctness implies the dual nature thesis, and the dual nature thesis implies a nonpositivistic concept of law. The nonpositivistic concept of law comprises five ideas. One of them is the special case thesis. The special case thesis says that positivistic elements, that is, statutes, precedents, and prevailing doctrines, are necessary for (...) law in order to achieve legal certainty. Without this, law would not be as perfect as it could possibly be. But it says, at the same time, that this alone would not be enough to fulfill the claim to correctness. The claim to correctness refers not only to the real dimension of law, defined by statutes, precedents, and prevailing doctrines, but also to its ideal dimension, defined, first and foremost, by justice. The special case thesis is my oldest thesis. It has remained an essential element of my system over the years. Its connection with four other theses—the Radbruch formula, the human rights thesis, the idea of deliberative democracy, and principles theory—does not change this at all. On the contrary, this connection has lent greater strength to the special case thesis. (shrink)

The first part of this article contains (i) considerations as to the relationship between jurisprudence and legal dogmatics, legal philosophy, and sociology of law; (ii) considerations about the status of jurisprudence both as a meta‐ and an object‐theory. These lead to the suggestion that jurisprudence should be defined as a general juristic theory of law and legal science. In the second part, the character and elements of this definition are explained systematically. The article's main thesis is that jurisprudence is not (...) distinguished from legal philosophy and sociology of law by its subject or its method, but by the specifically juristic research aspect or perspective it is based upon. (shrink)

In Michel Tournier’s 1967 novel Vendredi ou les Limbes du Pacifique—published in English under the abbreviated title Friday—the protagonist, stranded on an isla.

The aim of this paper is twofold: The first part, drawing on Spinoza and Deleuze’s reading of Spinoza, develops a broad outline of what might be called a metaphysics of immanence. In the second part, I will propose to understand phenomenology in the context of this metaphysics of immanence and I will point to some methodological and ontological shifts in phenomenological research this metaphysical interpretation might entail.

Identifies what is most radically distinctive about Christian belief. Addressed to a non-technical audience, the book helps the reader examine the most basic questions concerning Christian faith.

D'où viennent nos calembours, nos jeux de mots favoris? Quelle est l'origine des noms propres, celle de l'arobase? Cet ouvrage, fruit d'une recherche sur l'homme, sa parole et son écriture, nous éclaire sur ces questions souvent posées, mais dont les réponses nous échappent la plupart du temps. Se revendiquant de la philosophie des Lumières, Robert Triomphe échappe aux catégorisations habituelles en suivant son enquête là où elle l'entraîne, sans s'interdire aucune frontière autre que ses propres limites. Cette promenade est (...) donc une aventure qui en appelle aux ressources propres de son lecteur comme à sa curiosité d'esprit, et ne cesse de lui ouvrir, chemin faisant, de nouveaux aperçus originaux, philosophiques et toujours stimulants! Promenade-aventure donc, où l'érudition laisse toute sa place à l'intuition, pour suggérer des interprétations ou opérer des rapprochements inédits et pour inciter le lecteur, en partageant avec l'auteur ses découvertes, à questionner sa propre culture. (shrink)

St. Anselm is a master of philosophical prose. His writings on God, truth, and free will are models of clarity born of unflagging concern for argumentative precision. He is especially adept at using analogies to cinch his readers' understanding of these recondite matters. Who could forget the light shed upon the concept of existence by the Painter Analogy in the Ontological Argument or how his River Analogy illumines the unification of the Holy Trinity? Such intellectual insights could only be gifts (...) of the Holy Ghost for the edification of the Holy Mother Church. I shall discuss here the three splendid analogies that St. Anselm draws in De Concordia in order to reconcile grace and free will, fostering an understanding of cooperation according to which divine assistance must accentuate, rather than nullify, exercises of human freedom. Central to my discussion is The Father of Scholasticism's four-fold distinction between a power, its exercises, the effects of those exercises, and opportunities to bring about those effects. (shrink)

Bender, Robert Review of: Income inequality, equality of opportunity and intergenerational mobility, by Miles Corak, Institute for the Study of Labor, Bonn University, 2013, 32 pages.

Bender, Robert Review of: Run, spot, run: The ethics of keeping pets, by Jessica Pierce, Uni of Chicago Press, 2016, 264 pages.

Bender, Robert The USA constitution does not have a clause requiring any separation of church and state and until 1948 there were no Supreme Court rulings to ensure that this was seen as a basic constitutional principle. Then in 1945 Vashti McCollum, a 33-year-old part-time squaredancing teacher from Champaign, Illinois, initiated a legal action that changed all that.

Recently Díaz, Hössjer and Marks (DHM) presented a Bayesian framework to measure cosmological tuning (either fine or coarse) that uses maximum entropy (maxent) distributions on unbounded sample spaces as priors for the parameters of the physical models (https://doi.org/10.1088/1475-7516/2021/07/020). The DHM framework stands in contrast to previous attempts to measure tuning that rely on a uniform prior assumption. However, since the parameters of the models often take values in spaces of infinite size, the uniformity assumption is unwarranted. This is known as (...) the normalization problem. In this paper we explain why and how the DHM framework not only evades the normalization problem but also circumvents other objections to the tuning measurement like the so called weak anthropic principle, the selection of a single maxent distribution and, importantly, the lack of invariance of maxent distributions with respect to data transformations. We also propose to treat fine-tuning as an emergence problem to avoid infinite loops in the prior distribution of hyperparameters (common to all Bayesian analysis), and explain that previous attempts to measure tuning using uniform priors are particular cases of the DHM framework. Finally, we prove a theorem, explaining when tuning is fine or coarse for different families of distributions. The theorem is summarized in a table for ease of reference, and the tuning of three physical parameters is analyzed using the conclusions of the theorem. (shrink)

Empirically successful scientific theories are intellectual hurricanes. They flood lowlands set aside for worries about definitions. They carry away philosophical reflections that are less dense than the accumulated scientific findings that give these storms their strength, and they fundamentally reshape the conceptual landscape. The history of scholarship reveals that once an empirically corroborated scientific theory explains and predicts phenomena in some domain noticeably better than the available alternatives (whether those alternatives are scientific theories or not), among experts at least, the (...) process of conceptualizing those phenomena, thereafter, mostly floats along on the surface of debates about the comparative scientific merits of that theory and its competitors. Earlier debates about definitions lose most of their interest until new theories arise that generate new, less easily managed empirical findings in the pertinent domains. Across the centuries, the fates of such concepts as ‘inertia’ and ‘planet’ are fitting illustrations of these patterns, as are, more recently, the fates of such concepts as ‘gene’ and ‘deciding’ (aka “decision making”). (shrink)

The problem of evil is an obstacle to justified belief in an omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent God . According to Saint Augustine’s free will theodicy , moral evil attends free will. Might something like AFWT also be used to account for natural evil? After all, it is possible that calamities such as famines, earthquakes, and floods are the effects of the sinful willing of certain persons, viz., ‘fallen angels.’ Working to destroy our faith, Satan and his cohorts could be responsible (...) for the natural disasters that bring us to grief. Here, I develop this account alongside AFWT. (shrink)

The aim of this contribution is to analyze the difficulties and possible inconsistencies one may encounter when attempting to integrate substance philosophy and process philosophy. I argue that it is impossible to avoid these problems, and offer a typology that helps to understand the tensions involved in attempts to integrate these two worldviews.