Responding to volatile criticisms frequently leveled at Leo Strauss and those he influenced, the prominent contributors to this volume demonstrate the profound influence that Strauss and his students have exerted on American liberal democracy and contemporary political thought. By stressing the enduring vitality of classic books and by articulating the theoretical and practical flaws of relativism and historicism, the contributors argue that Strauss and the Straussians have identified fundamental crises of modernity and liberal democracy.

Belief in the divine origin of the universe began to wane most markedly in the nineteenth century, when scientific accounts of creation by natural law arose to challenge traditional religious doctrines. Most of the credit - or blame - for the victory of naturalism has generally gone to Charles Darwin and the biologists who formulated theories of organic evolution. Darwinism undoubtedly played the major role, but the supporting parts played by naturalistic cosmogonies should also be acknowledged. Chief among these was (...) the nebular hypothesis proposed by Pierre Simon Laplace in 1796, which explained the origin of the solar system as a natural development over extended periods of time. Ronald Numbers focuses on Laplace's theory as it affected American scientific thought. he first traces the history of Laplace's cosmogony chronologically, from its European inception to its demise about 1900. the last three chapters explore some of the theological and scientific consequences resulting from the acceptance of this cosmogony. Most significant was the change in the status of supernatural doctrine. When the nebular hypothesis lost credence at the end of the nineteenth century, those who had before tried to accommodate natural theory with supernatural doctrine no longer felt compelled to do so when faced with succeeding theories. The nebular hypothesis, it seems, had established natural law in the heavens. (shrink)

Food Ethics: The Basics is a concise yet comprehensive introduction to the ethical dimensions of the production and consumption of food. It offers an impartial exploration of the most prominent ethical questions relating to food and agriculture including: • Should we eat animals? • Are locally produced foods ethically superior to globally sourced foods? • Do people in affluent nations have a responsibility to help reduce global hunger? • Should we embrace bioengineered foods? • What should be the role of (...) government in promoting food safety and public health? Using extensive data and real world examples, as well as providing suggestions for further reading, Food Ethics: The Basics is an ideal introduction for anyone interested in the ethics of food. (shrink)

2.4 The Example: Infants and object-(im)permanence : : : : : : : : : : : : : : 17 2.4.1 Why a contentful account is warranted: Perspectival sensitivity : : : 17 2.4.2 The \searching under a cloth" and \AB" data : : : : : : : : : : : : 24 2.4.3 Two constraints on objectuality : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : (...) : 25.. (shrink)

Ronald Weed's book offers a fresh investigation of political conflict in Aristotle's Politics. While there have been a number of studies on stasis or factional conflict, few provide a thorough analysis of its intractable character dimensions. Weed presents a highly original and provocative analysis of the moral psychology of factional conflict in the middle books of the Politics, arguing that the character deficiencies of a citizenry are the central causes of stasis and indispensable for understanding both the nature of (...) these conflicts and their remedies. In Weed's view, Aristotle contends that stasis can be greatly limited without greatly reducing bad character, so long as the vices that breed it most are limited. Weed presents a novel and detailed explanation of how Aristotle's institutional remedies, such as the selective distribution of honor and wealth, may bypass circumstances that provoke stasis, if they account for what vices are triggered under those circumstances. Weed advances an understanding of Aristotle's practical thought that captures Aristotle's penetrating realism about political breakdown and pathology, while also preserving the robust and irreducible essence of his theory of character and rational choice. (shrink)

It is argued that standard arguments for the Externalism of mental states do not succeed in the case of pre-linguistic mental states. Further, it is noted that standard arguments for Internalism appeal to the principle that our individuation of mental states should be driven by what states are explanatory in our best cognitive science. This principle is used against the Internalist to reject the necessity of narrow individuation of mental states, even in the prelinguistic case. This is done by showing (...) how the explanation of some phenomena requires quantification over broadly-individuated, world-involving states; sometimes externalism is required. Although these illustrative phenomena are not mental, they are enough to show the general argumentative strategy to be incorrect: scientific explanation does not require narrowly-individuated states. (shrink)

The essays in this volume blend historical and philosophical reflection with concern for contemporary political problems. They show that the causes and motivations of civil religion are a permanent fixture of the human condition, though some of its manifestations and proximate causes have shifted in an age of multiculturalism, religious toleration, and secularization.

It is claimed that there are pre-objective phenomena, which cognitive science should explain by employing the notion of non-conceptual representational content. It is argued that a match between parallel distributed processing (PDP) and non-conceptual content (NCC) not only provides a means of refuting recent criticisms of PDP as a cognitive architecture; it also provides a vehicle for NCC that is required by naturalism. A connectionist cognitive mapping algorithm is used as a case study to examine the affinities between PDP and (...) NCC. (shrink)

have context-sensitive constituents, but rather because they sometimes have no constituents at all. The argument to be rejected depends on the assumption that one can only assign propositional contents to representations if one starts by assigning sub-propositional contents to atomic representations. I give some philosophical arguments and present a counterexample to show that this assumption is mistaken.

Virtue ethics is now widely recognized as an alternative to Kantian and consequentialist ethical theories. However, moral philosophers have been slow to bring virtue ethics to bear on topics in applied ethics. Moreover, environmental virtue ethics is an underdeveloped area of environmental ethics. Although environmental ethicists often employ virtue-oriented evaluation (such as respect, care, and love for nature) and appeal to role models (such as Henry Thoreau, Aldo Leopold, and Rachel Carson) for guidance, environmental ethics has not been well informed (...) by contemporary work on virtue ethics. With _Character and Environment_, Ronald Sandler remedies each of these deficiencies by bringing together contemporary work on virtue ethics with contemporary work on environmental ethics. He demonstrates the many ways that any ethic of character can and should be informed by environmental considerations. He also develops a pluralistic virtue-oriented environmental ethic that accommodates the richness and complexity of our relationship with the natural environment and provides effective and nuanced guidance on environmental issues. These projects have implications not only for environmental ethics and virtue ethics but also for moral philosophy more broadly. Ethical theories must be assessed on their theoretical and practical adequacy with respect to all aspects of the human ethical situation: personal, interpersonal, and environmental. To the extent that virtue-oriented ethical theory in general, and Sandler's version of it in particular, provides a superior environmental ethic to other ethical theories, it is to be preferred not just as an environmental ethic but also as an ethical theory. _Character and Environment_ will engage any reader with an interest in environmental ethics, virtue ethics, or moral philosophy. (shrink)

We are causing species to go extinct at extraordinary rates, altering existing species in unprecedented ways and creating entirely new species. More than ever before, we require an ethic of species to guide our interactions with them. In this book, Ronald L. Sandler examines the value of species and the ethical significance of species boundaries and discusses what these mean for species preservation in the light of global climate change, species engineering and human enhancement. He argues that species possess (...) several varieties of value, but they are not sacred. It is sometimes permissible to alter species, let them go extinct and invent new ones. Philosophically rigorous, accessible and illustrated with examples drawn from contemporary science, this book will be of interest to students of philosophy, bioethics, environmental ethics and conservation biology. (shrink)

Polanyi’s claim that a wholly tacit knowledge is possible is contested. Polanyi’s praise for the tacit, and his critique of the ideal of total explicitness, harbors a threat of Romanticism, which, in turn, may become a threat to the value of the explicit itself, and ultimately a political threat, something that Heidegger’s anti-Enlightenment philosophy and political life manifested all too dramatically. Polanyians must not lose sight of the primacy of the explicit for personal existence, something that Polanyi’s work need not (...) undermine, and indeed, that has the resources to affirm and support. (shrink)

As the crusade to outlaw the teaching of evolution changed to a battle for equal time for creationism, the ideological defenses of that doctrine also shifted from primarily biblical to more scientific grounds. This essay describes the historical development of “scientific creationism” from a variety of late–nineteenth– and early–twentieth–century creationist reactions to Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, through the Scopes trial and the 1960s revival of creationism, to the current spread of strict creationism around the world.

Some have suggested that there is no fact to the matter as to whether or not a particular physical system relaizes a particular computational description. This suggestion has been taken to imply that computational states are not real, and cannot, for example, provide a foundation for the cognitive sciences. In particular, Putnam has argued that every ordinary open physical system realizes every abstract finite automaton, implying that the fact that a particular computational characterization applies to a physical system does not (...) tell oneanything about the nature of that system. Putnam''s argument is scrutinized, and found inadequate because, among other things, it employs a notion of causation that is too weak. I argue that if one''s view of computation involves embeddedness (inputs and outputs) and full causality, one can avoid the universal realizability results. Therefore, the fact that a particular system realizes a particular automaton is not a vacuous one, and is often explanatory. Furthermore, I claim that computation would not necessarily be an explanatorily vacuous notion even if it were universally realizable. (shrink)

Exact solutions of the Einstein field equations are found for the exterior and interior gravitational field of an infinitely long circulating cylinder of light. The exterior metric is shown to contain closed timelike lines.