This article explores how the diversity of board resources and the number of women on boards affect firms' corporate social responsibility (CSR) ratings, and how, in turn, CSR influences corporate reputation. In addition, this article examines whether CSR ratings mediate the relationships among board resource diversity, gender composition, and corporate reputation. The OLS regression results using lagged data for independent and control variables were statistically significant for the gender composition hypotheses, but not for the resource diversitybased hypotheses. CSR ratings had (...) a positive impact on reputation and mediated the relationship between the number of women on the board and corporate reputation. (shrink)

Rather than think about citizenship in minimal terms (voting, obeying the law), I argue for a more aspirational “bearing” of the public self, one appropriate for the challenges of globalizing, late-modern political life. For left democratic theory this is hardly an abstract issue, given how successful groups like the Tea Party have been in articulating a right-leaning aspirational portrait. What might a counter-portrait look like that was comparably scripted for the middle classes in affluent liberal democracies? An answer is not (...) immediately clear, given that left democratic theory’s attention has been traditionally focused on an overly simple, two-entity social ontology: elites and demos. The question I consider is what script might be articulated for middle segments of society in relation to how they should bear themselves toward less advantaged segments of society? This does not replace thinking about the demos, but rather supplements it with reflection on the complex alignments of contemporary political life. (shrink)

Aboutness has been studied from any number of angles. Brentano made it the defining feature of the mental. Phenomenologists try to pin down the aboutness-features of particular mental states. Materialists sometimes claim to have grounded aboutness in natural regularities. Attempts have even been made, in library science and information theory, to operationalize the notion. But it has played no real role in philosophical semantics. This is surprising; sentences have aboutness-properties if anything does. Aboutness is the first book to examine through (...) a philosophical lens the role of subject matter in meaning. A long-standing tradition sees meaning as truth-conditions, to be specified by listing the scenarios in which a sentence is true. Nothing is said about the principle of selection--about what in a scenario gets it onto the list. Subject matter is the missing link here. A sentence is true because of how matters stand where its subject matter is concerned. Stephen Yablo maintains that this is not just a feature of subject matter, but its essence. One indicates what a sentence is about by mapping out logical space according to its changing ways of being true or false. The notion of content that results--directed content--is brought to bear on a range of philosophical topics, including ontology, verisimilitude, knowledge, loose talk, assertive content, and philosophical methodology. Written by one of today's leading philosophers, Aboutness represents a major advance in semantics and the philosophy of language. (shrink)

Pre-natal-diagnosis technologies allow parents to discover whether their child is likely to suffer from serious disability. One argument for state funding of access to such technologies is that doing so would be “cost-effective”, in the sense that the expected financial costs of such a programme would be outweighed by expected “benefits”, stemming from the births of fewer children with serious disabilities. This argument is extremely controversial. This paper argues that the argument may not be as unacceptable as is often assumed. (...) In doing so, it sets out a more general framework for assessing the relevance of efficiency calculations to policy-making. The final section also investigates the relationship between the paper’s arguments and claims about parental responsibility for child-bearing and rearing, with reference to Scanlon’s work on “substantive responsibility”. (shrink)

Tench Coxe, a member of the second rank of this nation's Founders and a leading proponent of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, wrote prolifically about the right to keep and bear arms. In this Article, the authors trace Coxe's story, from his early writings in support of the Constitution, through his years of public service, to his political writings in opposition to the presidential campaigns of John Adams and John Quincy Adams. The authors note that Coxe described (...) the Second Amendment as guaranteeing an individual right, and believed that an individual right to bear arms was necessary for self-defense and hunting, as well as for militia purposes and protection against oppression by large standing armies. The views of this important Founding Era political commentator and public servant inform the ongoing Second Amendment debate. The authors argue that Coxe's depiction of an individual right to bear arms encompassing hunting, self-defense, and the public militia power supports the "Standard Model" of the Second Amendment prevalent in the legal literature. This Article also discusses Coxe's important role as an economic scholar in early America, and in the creation of the protectionist system of the early Republic, as both an journalistic advocate and as an executive branch official. One of his executive branch positions involved heading the federal government program to give guns to militiamen who could not afford their own. (shrink)

Postmodernism has evoked great controversy and it continues to do so today, as it disseminates into general discourse. Some see its principles, such as its fundamental resistance to metanarratives, as frighteningly disruptive, while a growing number are reaping the benefits of its innovative perspective. In Political Theory and Postmodernism, Stephen K. White outlines a path through the postmodern problematic by distinguishing two distinct ways of thinking about the meaning of responsibility, one prevalent in modern and the other in postmodern (...) perspectives. Using this as a guide, White explores the work of Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida, Lyotard, and Habermas, as well as 'difference' feminists, with the goal of showing how postmodernism can inform contemporary ethical-political reflection. In his concluding chapter, White examines how this revisioned postmodern perspective might bear on our thinking about justice. (shrink)

Nevertheless, Marx's essay ["On the Jewish Question"] has a profound bearing upon The Jew of Malta; their conjunction enriches our understanding of the authors; relation to ideology and, more generally, raises fruitful questions about a Marxist reading of literature. The fact that both works use the figure of the perfidious Jew provides a powerful link between Renaissance and modern thought, for despite the great differences to which I have just pointed, this shared reference is not an accident or a mirage. (...) "On the Jewish Question" represents the nineteenth-century development of a late sixteenth-century idea or, more accurately, a late sixteenth-century trope. Marlowe and Marx seize upon the Jew as a kind of powerful rhetorical device, a way of marshalling deep popular hatred and clarifying its object. The Jew is charged not with racial deviance or religious impiety but with economic and social crime, crime that is committed not only against the dominant Christian society but, in less "pure" form, by that society. Both writers hope to focus attention upon activity that is seen as at once alien and yet central to the life of the community and to direct against that activity the anti-Semitic feeling of the audience. The Jews themselves in their real historical situation are finally incidental in these works, Marx's as well as Marlowe's, except insofar as they excite the fear and loathing of the great mass of Christians. It is this privileged access to mass psychology by means of a semimythical figure linked in the popular imagination with usury, sharp dealing, and ruthless cunning that attracts both the sixteenth-century playwright and the nineteenth-century polemicist.1 · 1. Anti-Semitism, it should be emphasized, is never merely a trope to be adopted or discarded by an author as he might choose to employ zeugma or eschew personification. It is charged from the start with irrationality and bad faith and only partly rationalized as a rhetorical strategy. Marlowe depicts his Jew with the compulsive cruelty that characterizes virtually all his work, while Marx's essay obviously has elements of a sharp, even hysterical, denial of his religious background. It is particularly tempting to reduce the latter work to a dark chapter in its author's personal history. The links I am attempting to establish with Marlowe or the more direct link with Feuerbach, however, locate the essay in a far wider context. Still, the extreme violence of the latter half of Marx's work and his utter separation of himself from the people he excoriates undoubtedly owe much to his personal situation. It is interesting that the tone of the attack on the Jews rises to an almost ecstatic disgust at the moment when Marx seems to be locating the Jews most clearly as a product of bourgeois culture; it is as if Marx were eager to prove that he is in no way excusing or forgiving the Jews. Stephen J. Greenblatt is the Class of 1932 Professor of English Literature at the University of California at Berkeley. He is the author of Sir Walter Raleigh: The Renaissance Man and His Roles, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World, and the editor of a collection of essays, New World Encounters. (shrink)

This article analyzes the wages (costs) of contempt. It argues that the social and political division and dysfunction caused by contempt and imagined content undermines political discussion and creates terrible costs for contemned and contemner in the burdens of shame and guilt they must bear.

The concept of "practices"--whether of representation, of political or scientific traditions, or of organizational culture--is central to social theory. In this book, Stephen Turner presents the first analysis and critique of the idea of practice as it has developed in the various theoretical traditions of the social sciences and the humanities. Understood broadly as a tacit understanding "shared" by a group, the concept of a practice has a fatal difficulty, Turner argues: there is no plausible mechanism by which a (...) "practice" is transmitted or reproduced. The historical uses of the concept, from Durkheim to Kripke's version of Wittgenstein, provide examples of the contortions that thinkers have been forced into by this problem, and show the ultimate implausibility of the idea. Turner's conclusion sketches a picture of what happens when we do without the notion of a shared practice, and how this bears on social theory and philosophy. It explains why social theory cannot get beyond the stage of constructing fuzzy analogies, and why the standard constructions of the contemporary philosophical problem of relativism depend upon this defective notion. This first book-length critique of practice theory is sure to stir discussion and controversy in a wide range of fields, from philosophy and science studies to sociology, anthropology, literary studies, and political and legal theory. (shrink)

Let us call dispositional monism the view that all natural properties have their identities fixed purely by their dispositional features, that is, by the patterns of stimulus and response in which they participate. DM implies that natural properties are pure powers: things whose natures are fully identified by their roles in determining the potentialities of events to cause or be caused. As pure powers, properties are meant to lack quiddities in Black's sense. A property possesses a quiddity just in case (...) its identity is fixed by something independent of the causal–nomological roles it may enter into. Paradigmatically, a categorical property is thought of as a property whose identity is fixed by a quiddity .The key question about the viability of DM as a theory of properties is how properties can be pure powers devoid of any quiddity. Bird provides an answer. According to Bird , ‘all there is to a property is a matter of second-order relations to other properties’. The second-order relation is just the relation that a disposition, its stimulus condition, and a manifestation condition bear to each other. Call this relation SR. SR is not causation or physical necessitation. The latter relations are first-order relations between concrete events. SR is a second-order relation. Its possession by properties explains why events featuring those properties can enter into certain first-order relations of causation or necessitation.Bird's thought then is this: the sense in which properties have their identities fixed purely by their causal–nomological roles is that they are relationally constituted, where the relation doing the constituting is SR. 1 This thesis of relational constitution does not imply that natural properties are themselves relations. Nothing prevents the identity …. (shrink)

Into those things from which existing things have their coming into being, their passing away, too, takes place, according to what must be; for they make reparation to one another for their injustice according to the ordinance of time . . . . (Anaximander fragment; Simplicius Phys., 24, 18 [DK 12 B 1]; trans. Robinson, EGP, 34)[T]o remember and to bear witness to something that is constitutively forgotten, not only in each individual mind, but in the very thought of (...) the West. (Lyotard, “HJ,” 141)To bear witness to the differend. (Lyotard, DPD, xiii)[I]n witnessing, one also exterminates. (I, 204)Reality is composed of the différend. (shrink)

Knowledge is closed under implication, according to standard theories. Orthodoxy can allow, though, that apparent counterexamples to closure exist, much as Kripkeans recognize the existence of illusions of possibility which they seek to explain away. Should not everyone, orthodox or not, want to make sense of “intimations of openness”? This paper compares two styles of explanation: evidence that boosts P’s probability need not boost that of its consequence Q; evidence bearing on P’s subject matter may not bear on the (...) subject matter of Q. (shrink)

:Neuroprosthetic speech devices are an emerging technology that can offer the possibility of communication to those who are unable to speak. Patients with ‘locked in syndrome,’ aphasia, or other such pathologies can use covert speech—vividly imagining saying something without actual vocalization—to trigger neural controlled systems capable of synthesizing the speech they would have spoken, but for their impairment.We provide an analysis of the mechanisms and outputs involved in speech mediated by neuroprosthetic devices. This analysis provides a framework for accounting for (...) the ethical significance of accuracy, control, and pragmatic dimensions of prosthesis-mediated speech. We first examine what it means for the output of the device to be accurate, drawing a distinction between technical accuracy on the one hand and semantic accuracy on the other. These are conceptual notions of accuracy.Both technical and semantic accuracy of the device will be necessary for the user to have sufficient control over the device. Sufficient control is an ethical consideration: we place high value on being able to express ourselves when we want and how we want. Sufficient control of a neural speech prosthesis requires that a speaker can reliably use their speech apparatus as they want to, and can expect their speech to authentically represent them. We draw a distinction between two relevant features which bear on the question of whether the user has sufficient control: voluntariness of the speech and the authenticity of the speech. These can come apart: the user might involuntarily produce an authentic output or might voluntarily produce an inauthentic output. Finally, we consider the role of the interlocutor in interpreting the content and purpose of the communication.These three ethical dimensions raise philosophical questions about the nature of speech, the level of control required for communicative accuracy, and the nature of ‘accuracy’ with respect to both natural and prosthesis-mediated speech. (shrink)

The historicist approach is rarely challenged by art historians, who draw a clear distinction between art history and the present-centred pursuit of art criticism. The notion of the 'period eye' offers a relevant methodology. Bearing this in mind, I examine the nineteenth-century phase in the development of history painting, when artists started to take trouble over the accuracy of historical detail, instead of repeating conventions for portraying classical and biblical subjects. This created an unprecedented situation at the Paris Salon, where (...) such representations of history could be experienced as a collective 'dream-work', in Freud's sense. In France, this new pictorial language dates back to the aftermath of the Revolution, and the activities of the 'Lyon School'. Two artists, Richard and Révoil, were its leading proponents. However their initial closeness has obscured the differences in their approach to the past. Substituting for Freud's 'condensation' and 'displacement' the concepts of 'Resurrection' and 'Restoration', I analyse the pictorial language of the two painters, taking two works as examples. The conclusion is that Révoil, also a collector, was a precursor of the historical museum, which convinces through accumulating objects. Richard, however, employs technical and rhetorical devices to evoke empathetic reactions, and anticipates the illusionism of cinema. (shrink)

Modern developments in philosophy have provided us with tools, logical and methodological, that were not available to Medieval thinkers - a development that has its dangers as well as opportunities. Modern tools allow one to penetrate old texts and analyze old problems in new ways, offering interpretations that the old thinkers could not have known. But unless one remains sensitive to the fact that language has undergone changes, bringing with it a shift in the meaning of terminology, one can easily (...) perpetrate an anachronism. Yet there is a growing need to bring modern tools and to bear on the struggle for greater understanding of the problems studied and the solutions found by the ancient scholars. If we remain sensitive to the dangers, this openness to new methods can be expected to widen our perspectives and deepen our knowledge of old material. The focus in the present volume is on problems in Medieval and contemporary philosophy of religion. (shrink)

Often, when there is a reason for you to do something, it is the kind of thing to motivate you to do it. For example, if Max and Caroline are deciding whether to go to the Alcove for dinner, Caroline might mention as a reason in favor, the fact that the Alcove serves onion rings the size of doughnuts, and Max might mention as a reason against, the fact that it is so difficult to get parking there this time of (...) day. It is some sign—perhaps not a perfect sign, but some sign—that each of these really is a reason, that Max and Caroline feel the tug in each direction. Mention of the Alcove's onion rings makes them feel to at least some degree inclined to go, and mention of the parking arrangements makes them feel to at least some degree inclined not to. According to some philosophers, reasons for action always bear some relation like this to motivation. This idea is variously known as ‘ reasons internalism’, ‘internalism about reasons ’, or ‘the internal reasons theory’. According to other philosophers, not all reasons are related to motivation in any of the ways internalists say. This idea is known as ‘ reasons externalism’ or ‘externalism about reasons ’. (shrink)

The Principle of Universality asserts that a part retains its intrinsic value regardless of the whole in which it is a part or even whether it is part of a whole. The idea underlying this principle is that the intrinsic value of a thing supervenes on its intrinsic properties. Since the intrinsic properties remain unchanged so does the thing’s intrinsic value. In this article, I argue that, properly understood, the Principle of Universality can handle seemingly troublesome intuitions about the relative (...) intrinsic value of a vicious person having pain and his having pleasure. I specifically argue that the intuition that the former state is better is explained by the nature of the basic intrinsic-value states, which involve a person having a level of well-being and desert at a time. One implication of this is that given the nature of such basic intrinsic-value states, pleasure and pain are not value-bearing parts of virtuous and vicious attitudes. (shrink)

Rudolf von Ihering was the leading German philosopher of law of the nineteenth century. He was also a major source of Weber’s more famous sociological definitions of action. Characteristically, Weber transformed material he found: in this case Ihering attempt to reconcile the causaland teleological aspects of action. In Ihering’s hands these become, respectively, the external and internal moments of action, or intentional thought and the factual consequences of action. For Weber they are made into epistemic aspects of action, the causal (...) and the meaningful, each of which is essential to an account of action, but which are logically and epistemically distinct. Ihering thought purposes were the products of underlying interests, but included ‘ideal’ interests in this category. Weber radicalized this by expanding the category and making it historically central. This radicalization bears on rational choice theory: if ideal interests have a large historical role independent of material interests, and are not fully explicable on such grounds as ‘sour grapes’, the methods appropriate to the study of the transformation of ideas, meaning genealogies in the Nietzschean sense, are central to the explanation of action. (shrink)

This essay explores claims made frequently by artists, critics, and philosophers that artworks bear personifying traits. Rejecting the notion that artists possess the Pygmalion-like power to bring works of art to life, the article looks seriously at how parallels may exist between the ontological structures of the artwork and human personhood. The discussion focuses on Arthur Danto’s claim that the “artworld” itself manifests properties that are an imprint of the historical representation of the “world.” These “world” representations are implicitly (...) embodied in the artist’s style. The “world” that is stamped on the people of a historical period entails a point of view that influences how they might act, something like the logic that guides a conversation. This “conversational” logic is also extant in the artworks that artists of a given period create. This analysis of Danto’s account of how people are connected to their world clarifies Danto’s assertions that a parallel structure of personification in the artwork and the human exists. It also explains his claims that artworks themselves appear to be in a kind of dialogue. (shrink)

he landscape of every career contains a few crevasses, and usually a more extensive valley or two—for every Ruth's bat a Buckner's legs; for every lopsided victory at Agincourt, a bloodbath at Antietam. Darwin's Origin of Species contains some wonderful insights and magnificent lines, but this masterpiece also includes a few notable clunkers. Darwin experienced most embarrassment from the following passage, curtailed and largely expunged from later editions of his book: In North America the black bear was seen by (...) Hearne swimming for hours with widely open mouth, thus catching, like a whale, insects in the water. Even in so extreme a case as this, if the supply of insects were constant, and if better adapted competitors did not already exist in the country, I can see no difficulty in a race of bears being rendered, by natural selection, more aquatic in their structure and habits, with larger and larger mouths, till a creature was produced as monstrous as a whale. Why did Darwin become so chagrined about this passage? His hypothetical tale may be pure speculation and conjecture, but the scenario is not entirely absurd. Darwin's discomfort arose, I think, from his failure to follow a scientific norm of a more sociocultural nature. Scientific conclusions supposedly rest upon facts and information. Speculation is not entirely taboo, and may sometimes be necessary faute de mieux. But when scientists propose truly novel and comprehensive theories—as Darwin tried to do in advancing natural selection as the primary mechanism of evolution—they need particularly good support, and invented hypothetical cases just don't supply sufficient confidence for crucial conclusions. (shrink)

Stephen Jay Gould's Wonderful Life is a study of the fossils of the Burgess Shale of British Columbia. My concern is with the morals that Gould draws, with the ?new picture of life? that, he says, the reinterpreted Burgess animals compel. I conclude that his case is not established. (1) There may have been reasons to do with ?fitness? why most of the Burgess animals left no descendants, even if we cannot guess exactly what they were. (2) We do (...) not know that our past is dotted with the kind of mass extinctions that are needed for the random evolution that he proposes. (3) Even if what happened does rest on random variation and largely random selection, it does not follow that there are no standing forms that will be constantly re?instantiated. If Rational Life, in particular, is not special, then we have no right to think the world we experience bears any remote resemblance to a putative real world. (4) Even if there are no such forms, the fact that nothing in the state of things required us to exist is no good reason to say that No one requires us to. What Gould says does count against a simple progressivism, but not against an older and more orthodox theology. It also has implications for the Search for Extra?Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI). (shrink)

I reply to criticisms of my book, _A Democratic Bearing: Admirable Citizens, Uneven Injustice and Critical Theory_ from Simone Chambers, Rainer Forst, and Sharon Krause.

'I think, therefore I am' - Descartes..'Such tricks hath strong imagination..That, if it would but apprehend some joy,..It comprehends some bringer of that joy;..Or in the night, imagining some fear,..How easy is a bush supposed a bear?' - Shakespeare..A unique compendium of key texts of psychology, from Aristotle to cutting-edge neuroscience.

Metaphysics and Science brings together important new work within an emerging philosophical discipline: the metaphysics of science. In the opening chapter, a definition of the metaphysics of science is offered, one which explains why the topics of laws, causation, natural kinds, and emergence are at the discipline's heart. The book is then divided into four sections, which group together papers from leading academics on each of those four topics. Among the questions discussed are: How are laws and measurement methods related? (...) Can a satisfactory reductive account of laws be given? How can Lorentz transformation laws be explained? How are dispositions triggered? What role should dispositional properties play in our understanding of causation? Are natural kinds and natural properties distinct? How is the Kripke-Putnam semantics for natural kind terms related to the natural kind essentialist thesis? What would have to be the case for natural kind terms to have determinate reference? What bearing, if any, does nonlinearity in science have on the issue of metaphysical emergence? (shrink)

The concept of "practices"—whether of representation, of political or scientific traditions, or of organizational culture—is central to social theory. In this book, Stephen Turner presents the first analysis and critique of the idea of practice as it has developed in the various theoretical traditions of the social sciences and the humanities. Understood broadly as a tacit understanding "shared" by a group, the concept of a practice has a fatal difficulty, Turner argues: there is no plausible mechanism by which a (...) "practice" is transmitted or reproduced. The historical uses of the concept, from Durkheim to Kripke's version of Wittgenstein, provide examples of the contortions that thinkers have been forced into by this problem, and show the ultimate implausibility of the idea. Turner's conclusion sketches a picture of what happens when we do without the notion of a shared practice, and how this bears on social theory and philosophy. It explains why social theory cannot get beyond the stage of constructing fuzzy analogies, and why the standard constructions of the contemporary philosophical problem of relativism depend upon this defective notion. This first book-length critique of practice theory is sure to stir discussion and controversy in a wide range of fields, from philosophy and science studies to sociology, anthropology, literary studies, and political and legal theory. (shrink)

This is a unique book, drawing together the profound insights of Eastern philosophy (Advaita Vedanta), Western depth-psychology (Jungian), and spirituality (Ignatian) as applied to decision-making. Mention is made of Plato, C. G. Jung, Ira Progoff, Viktor Frankl, and Bernard Lonergan, amongst others. Powerful and practical tools and techniques for making wise decisions are offered. There are sections on Descartes's famous square, the ego and the Self, the I Ching and synchronicity, archetypes, neuroscience and the triune brain, biases and blind spots (...) which can derail decision-making, together with chapters on creativity, the "aha" experience, and the Enneagram with its nine decision-making styles. Dr. Costello is at pains to point out that heart (emotions), head (reason), and hands (action/doing) must be integrated before effective decision-making can take place and bear fruition. (shrink)

Attempts within sociolinguistics to model the African American speech community require a sound account of what a competent participant knows when they give correct interpretations of utterances made within such a community, a phenomenon any larger theory of language use ought to address. To provide this account, I reconstruct a line of argument from the philosophical history of discussions on African American speech communities. I give this history in terms of pragmatic arguments, that is, in terms of the ability of (...) vernacular speakers to manage the "slip" between speaker meaning and conventional meaning so as to effectively communicate, and thus be interpretable to competent auditors. ;In the writings of African American philosophers Alexander Crummell and Alain Locke especially, the general pragmatic strategy is to take the regulative background of speech acts to play a central role in vernacular interpretation, particularly as it relates language use to patterns of interpretation available to a speech community and to communicative aspects of the socialization of members of that community . In terms of meaning, interpretation is seen by Crummell as a function of publicly accessible meaning; he endorses the claim that the content which a word expresses is an idea in the mind of a speaker--what I call the Semantic Identity Thesis. Locke's insight, however, that cognitive meaning and content-bearing linguistic vehicles can be assessed independently provides him with the leverage to treat speaker meaning and symbol meaning as distinct components of a speaker's competence to successfully interpret utterances--what I call the Semantic Distance Thesis. ;Using these accounts to model inferences in communication, I argue that a complete account of interpretation will show how a speaker accesses inferential, conventional and social knowledge. These sorts of knowledge are tied to the prevailing norms emerging from a regulative background for communication within the language use of a speech community. In this way, the slip between conventional meaning and speaker meaning can be understood as structuring the communicative context of vernacular speech, in that social knowledge plays a central role in effective interpretive inference. (shrink)

Gustaf son's ethics is both conservative and revolutionary. By taking Calvin, Luther, and Augustine as discussion partners, he avoids the "culs-de-sac" into which seventeenth-century physical science drove the "theology" of nature. In doing so, he shares the Stoic tendency in late twentieth-century science, e.g., in ecology. For him, "the powers that bear down on us and sustain us" are present in our experience of the world; and this experience must square with our other empirical knowledge, e.g., in biology. Yet (...) it is not clear how we are to ground, in detail, the "moral" perceptions of nature to which Gustafson finally appeals. (shrink)

Social Trinitarianism is a family of views that bear some resemblance to each other in a way that distinguishes them from other Trinitarian accounts. In this paper, we address recent objections by Carl Mosser against ST, objections which have not received much attention by defenders of ST. Mosser claims that proponents of ST offer a narrative that is historically inaccurate, employs concepts of personhood and perichoresis that are incompatible, upholds dubious hermeneutical assumptions, and is unable to preclude Mormon theology (...) within its fold. We argue that all four criticisms fail, especially for a specific version of ST: Perichoretic Monotheism. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Wyclif on RightsStephen E. LaheyIn the study of medieval political philosophy the tendency has been to pay attention to thinkers who appear to have contributed to the birth of the modern. While the value in coming to understand how modern political thought developed is undeniable, this tendency is accompanied by an implicit, perhaps unintentional, devaluation of the study of that which did not contribute as obviously to modernity. In (...) the history of the idea of the natural right scholars have distinguished between the objective and the subjective right, characterizing the subjective right as what lies at the heart of the classically modern and liberal. One could get the impression that the good political philosophers, having hit upon the subjective right, dispensed with talk of the old-fashioned objective right just as people abandoned gaslight when Edison’s lightbulb went on the market. 1 But this is not what happened; not only did objective rights discourse continue into the modern period, but it was not necessarily the idiom solely of religious and political conservatives.Some late medieval philosophers, notably Marsilius of Padua, even came up with progressive and unorthodox political visions while adhering to the objective right. I will show that at least one late medieval political theory founded on the objective right, that of John Wyclif, can be argued to be as innovative in several important aspects as that of any of the better-known fourteenth-century advocates of the subjective right. To do that, I will divide this paper into three parts. In the first, I will explain the difference between objective and subjective theories of the right, making note of what we can reasonably expect from a fourteenth-century political theory in the way of toleration and briefly introducing John Wyclif’s life and works. In the second I will recount Wyclif’s view of ius, or the right, as it appears in his political writings, and in the third I will explain how this concept has a bearing on elements in his political thought that are recognizably unorthodox and even tolerant to modern, liberal eyes. Having [End Page 1] shown how Wyclif’s objective right plays out in his innovative and reformative political scheme, I hope to have helped to dispel the dogma that the only early rights theories worth studying are those that evolved into ones we use.I.a. Objective and Subjective RightsThe explicit distinction between objective and subjective rights is a new one, invented by scholars of the history of political thought to distinguish between the sense of the term ius, or right, as that which is just in accordance with a set body of law, and the sense of ius which refers to a licit power or faculty belonging to an individual in accordance with right reason. 2 The objective right is grounded in Roman law and functioned in medieval legal and political thought as it had in antiquity. Generally, an individual had a ius to act or be acted upon if that action was commensurate with the law. Among the Romans, that law was either Roman law, or it was according to objective natural law; with the introduction of Christian monotheism, the ius was “right” according to God’s law. Tuck notes that the concept of dominium had long been of a piece with objective ius and explains that dominium had usually been seen as a species of objective ius. If someone has just dominium over something, it is because their relation of dominium is “(what is) right,” ius, in accord with justice, iustitia. He argues that when dominium, which he understands to mean “property,” is equated with ius, “right,” the foundation is laid for a possessive (subjective) right. 3 While this is problematic on several counts, not the least of which is the restriction of dominium to the ownership of property, it illustrates the relatedness of the two concepts ius and dominium. 4As juristic sophistication grew in the twelfth century, it became useful to distinguish between ius in re, “right in a thing,” and ius ad rem, “right to a thing.” If someone has a ius in re, they can use the thing and/or exercise dominium... (shrink)

In this paper, I consider the question of why future generations need protecting, and how we might go about providing such protection. I begin by claiming that our basic position with respect to the further future can be characterized by what I call the problem of intergenerational buck-passing. This problem implies that our temporal position allows us to visit costs on future people that they ought not to bear, and to deprive them of benefits that they ought to have. (...) Next, I claim that it is plausible to think that this problem is manifest in the case of two serious intergenerational issues: climate change and nuclear protection. Third, I suggest that the problem is exacerbated by a problem of theoretical inadequacy: at present, we lack the basic conceptual tools with which to deal with problems involving the further future. I illustrate this problem through a discussion of the dominant theoretical approach in public policy, cost benefit analysis. Finally, I consider what is to be done. Here I make two basic proposals. The first is that we should investigate a promising form of the precautionary approach, which I call ‘the Global Core Precautionary Principle’. The second is that we should not lose sight of the fact that the problems of intergenerational buck passing and theoretical inadequacy create an atmosphere in which we are extremely vulnerable to moral corruption. (shrink)

How should inquiry into ethical-political life come to terms with “depth experience”? I mean by this extraordinary experience that breaks into the familiar frames of meaning and reasoning that undergird everyday life, bringing some sort of transformation of commitments or identity. I speculate broadly about such experience, expanding the focus beyond theistic experiences, such as being “born-again.” When one does this, depth experience need not be thought, as it often is, anathema to political theory. I show rather that it can (...) be cultivated so as to animate an admirable “bearing” on the part of citizens of affluent, late-modern societies. (shrink)

The most comprehensive collection of essays on Descartes' scientific writings ever published, this volume offers a detailed reassessment of Descartes' scientific work and its bearing on his philosophy. The 35 essays, written by some of the world's leading scholars, cover topics as diverse as optics, cosmology and medicine, and will be of vital interest to all historians of philosophy or science.

A plausible scenario for the future of electronic mass media news goes something like this. On the one hand, there will be the nightly television news, some of it brought to us by public entities and some by private, increasingly concentrated, corporate entities. On the other hand, there will be continually streaming sources of news available over the internet; and each of us will be able to construct, in effect, a tailor-made, continually revisable package of news. What I want to (...) do in this paper is reflect on the normative ideals in terms of which we ought to assess developments along these two paths. I will be assuming, along with the conference organizers, that these ideals must draw upon our notion of democratic dialogue. But what exactly is our notion of democratic dialogue? And how exactly should we bring it to bear on the two media paths? (shrink)

_Disorientation_ is the first publication in English of the second volume of _Technics and Time_, in which French philosopher Bernard Stiegler engages in a close dialogue with Husserl, Derrida, and other philosophers who have devoted their energies to technics, such as Heidegger and Simondon.The author's broad intent is to respond to Western philosophy's historical exclusion of technics and techniques from its metaphysical questionings, and in so doing to rescue critical and philosophical thinking. For many years, Stiegler has explored the origins (...) and philosophical, ethical, and political stakes of a global process he calls "the industrial temporalization of consciousness." Here, demonstrating that technology—including alphabetical writing—is memory, he argues that through new technologies of retention and inscription we have come to live in a world where time devours space, a disoriented world in which we have lost our bearings. Immersed in the multimedia of an over-connected world, with time and space as we know them abolished, we no longer find "cardinal points" to guide us and may even be led where we do not wish to go. We must therefore prepare to confront new spheres of ideological control and discover new possibilities in the digital environment. (shrink)

When I was invited to participate in this symposium, I welcomed what I thought would be the opportunity to apply my views about the semantics and logic of vague language to the real-life problems of vagueness legal theorists worry about. I confess to having formed my ambition without a very clear sense of what jurisprudential problems might be illuminated by general theories of vagueness. To be sure, I was able to guess that a symposium on Vagueness and Law must have (...) something to do with the dilemmas courts face when it is indeterminate how a legal dispute should be resolved. What I had not thought through was how philosophers like myself might help to illuminate those dilemmas by bringing to bear on them their own logico-semantical theories of vagueness. This was unfortunate because, having done a bit of homework, I have reached the conclusion that philosophical theories of vagueness, even if true, have nothing to offer jurisprudential concerns about vagueness. Once she is reminded of certain platitudes about vagueness, the legal theorist needs no further help from philosophers of language and logic. Let’s see why this is so. (shrink)

The proposition that man is the only animal capable of laughter is at least as old as Aristotle . In a strictly physical sense, this is probably false; but it is undoubtedly true that as a psychologically expressive and socially potent means of communication, laughter is a distinctively human phenomenon. Any attempt to study sets of cultural attitudes towards laughter, or the particular types of personal conduct which these attitudes shape and influence, must certainly adopt a wider perspective than a (...) narrowly physical definition of laughter will allow. Throughout this paper, which will attempt to establish part of the framework of such a cultural analysis for the Greek world of, broadly speaking, the archaic and classical periods, ‘laughter’ must be taken, by a convenient synecdoche, to encompass the many behavioural and affective patterns which are associated with, or which characteristically give scope for, uses of laughter in the literal sense of the word. My concern, then, is with a whole network of feelings, concepts and actions; and my argument will try to elucidate the practices within which laughter fulfils a recognizable function in Greek societies, as well as the dominant ideas and values which Greek thought brings to bear upon these practices. The results of the enquiry will, I believe, give us some reason to accept a rapprochement between the universalist assumption for which my epigraph from Johnson speaks and the recognition of cultural specificity in laughter's uses for which many anthropologists would argue, as emphatically asserted, from a Marxizing point of view, in the quotation from Vladimir Propp. (shrink)

In the early 1980s, Edward Shils, together with others, undertook the task of defining what he called ‘The Academic Ethic’. It is perhaps best to think of this task in terms defined by Alasdair MacIntyre in many of his writings, in which he observes that the formulation of an ethic typically came at the point where it was no longer a matter of general tacit acceptance but was becoming lost. Shils’s exchanges with his friends and collaborators who commented on the (...) project bear this out: they understood the changes in circumstances that had made the traditional academic ethic obsolete. So did Shils himself. He understood science in terms of what might be called ‘the liberal theory of science’, which treated scientists, and by extension all of academia, as independent agents seeking truth in their own ways, governed by their own sense of what was promising to research, bound together only by a strong tradition of truth-seeking and mutual respect. This, however, required independence of finance – something that the high costs of science rendered prohibitive. The grants system undermined autonomy, and similar issues undermined the autonomy of non-science academics. What is the relevance of traditional academic values today? If the liberal theory of science is dead, what has replaced it? Answering these questions takes us to the heart of problems of the organisation and financing of academic life, the audit culture and the question of truth itself. (shrink)

Pre-natal-diagnosis technologies allow parents to discover whether their child is likely to suffer from serious disability. One argument for state funding of access to such technologies is that doing so would be “cost-effective”, in the sense that the expected financial costs of such a programme would be outweighed by expected “benefits”, stemming from the births of fewer children with serious disabilities. This argument is extremely controversial. This paper argues that the argument may not be as unacceptable as is often assumed. (...) In doing so, it sets out a more general framework for assessing the relevance of efficiency calculations to policy-making. The final section also investigates the relationship between the paper’s arguments and claims about parental responsibility for child-bearing and rearing, with reference to Scanlon’s work on “substantive responsibility”. (shrink)

The medical profession is not to blame for the limitations of the biomedical model with which it is often associated; the biology upon which that model is built is incomplete and bears some of the responsibility. Some of the more fundamental aspects of biological theory which are currently missing from the biomedical model need to be introduced in order to help provide a better description of the integrated biology involved. AIMS AND OBJECTIVES: By considering the biological nature of the individual (...) human being as an organism, this article introduces a brief sketch of a new biomedical model of the individual as a biological entity. Core to this model is the idea of individual survival in the 'struggle for existence' introduced 150 years ago by Charles Darwin in 'On the Origin of Species'. (shrink)

The Lorentz-Dirac equation is analyzed for the case of a charged particle injected into a step-function electric field of finite extent. It is shown that for small exit velocities, the relation between entrance and exit velocities is “inverted” in the sense that the larger the entrance velocity, the smaller the exit velocity. As a consequence, some entrance velocities can yield at least two distinct exit velocities. Numerical evidence bearing on the possibility of experimentally detecting this dichotomy is presented.

This book explores the overlooked but vital theoretical relationships between R. M. Hare, Alan Gewirth, and Jürgen Habermas. The author claims their accounts of value, while failing to address classic virtue-theoretical critiques, bear the seeds of a resolution to the ultimate question "What is most valuable?" These dialectical approaches, as claimed, justify a reinterpretation of value and value judgment according to the Carnapian conception of an empirical-linguistic framework or grammar. Through a further synthesis with the work of Philippa Foot (...) and Thomas Magnell, the author shows that "value" would be literally meaningless without four fundamental phenomena which constitute such a framework: Logical Judgment, Conceptual Synthesis, Conceptual Abstraction, and Freedom. As part of the 'grammar of goodness,' the excellence of these phenomena, in a highly concrete way, constitute the essence of the greatest good, as this book explains.. (shrink)

What is it for something to be good for you? It is for that thing to contribute to the appeal of being in your position or, more informally, “in your shoes.” To be in one’s position or shoes in the broadest possible sense is to have that person’s life. Accordingly, something is good or bad for a person in the broadest possible sense if and only if it contributes to or detracts from the appeal of having her life. What, then, (...) is a prudentially good life, or a life that goes well for the one living it? It is an appealing life. More precisely, it is a life such that having it is worthy of appeal, in and of itself. This dissertation is a defense and exploration of this way of understanding prudential value. I call it the "appealing life analysis." In Chapter I, I argue that this analysis fits well with our ways of talking about prudential value; preserves the relationship between prudential value and the attitudes of concern, love, pity, and envy; yields promising analyses of the concepts of well-being, luck, selfishness, self-sacrifice, and paternalism; and succeeds where three rival analyses fail. I also examine how this analysis bears on the relationship between prudence and morality and the debate between subjectivists and objectivists about prudential value. Chapter II draws upon the appealing life analysis to interpret a long-standing puzzle about prudential value and time. I highlight various ways in which this interpretation is informative and moves us closer to a solution to the puzzle. Chapter III provides a preliminary investigation and defense of an ethical theory that I call "prudentialism," which prescribes maximizing the appeal of having one’s own life. On certain conceptions of the appealing life, this theory has the virtue of avoiding the charge of being either too morally demanding or not morally demanding enough. I examine the structure of this theory, sketch a partial, substantive account of the appealing life, and discuss how the prudentialist can respond to various objections. (shrink)

Essence and causation are fundamental in metaphysics, but little is said about their relations. Some essential properties are of course causal, as it is essential to footprints to have been caused by feet. But I am interested less in causation's role in essence than the reverse: the bearing a thing's essence has on its causal powers. That essencemight make a causal contribution is hinted already by the counterfactual element in causation; and the hint is confirmed by the explanation essence offers (...) of something otherwise mysterious, namely, how events exactly alike in every ordinary respect, like the bolt'ssuddenly snapping and its snapping per se, manage to disagree in what they cause. Some prior difference must exist between these events to make their causal powers unlike. Paradoxically, though, it can only be in point of a property, suddenness, which both events possess in common. Only by postulating a difference in themanner — essential or accidental — of the property's possession is the paradox resolved. Next we need an account of causation in which essence plays an explicit determinative role. That account, based on the idea that causes should becommensurate with their effects, is thatx causesy only if nothing essentially poorer would have done, and nothing essentially richer was needed. (shrink)

How, if at all, does one's intention to realize an end bear on the justification for taking the means to that end? Theories that allow that intending an end directly provides a reason to take the means are subject to a well-known "bootstrapping" objection. On the other hand, "anti-psychologistic" accounts—which seek to derive instrumental reasons directly from the reasons that support adopting the end itself—have unacceptable implications where an agent faces multiple rationally permissible options. An alternative, predictive, role for (...) intention in means-end reasoning is considered and rejected. A new proposal is then developed, according to which instrumental reasons are not merely reasons to perform an act necessary for a given end, but to perform the act for the sake of that end. (shrink)

In American universities, even Asian Philosophy is still often taught following methods adapted from European universities of the nineteenth century. Whether or not this approach is well-suited to philosophy as it was conceived in that era, it is inadequate if the aim is to develop a deep appreciation of Japanese philosophy. To limit what we consider Japanese philosophy to only what bears a distinct resemblance to academic Western philosophy, and accordingly to approach Japanese philosophy purely theoretically, is to risk missing (...) the greater part. Much of Japanese philosophy is applied philosophy, or in other words, what Pierre Hadot calls a “way of life,” and to appropriate it meaningfully requires practice rather than mere intellectual study alone. Thus, I contend that a proper means for introducing Western students is a more holistic method grounded in practicing traditional arts, such as composing haiku. I argue that the seventeenth century poet Matsuo Bashō can serve as a valuable resource in this process. I conclude with a description of the methods that I use in my efforts at teaching Japanese philosophy to undergraduate university students in South Texas. (shrink)

The question of whether sociology progresses, and how, has been an issue within sociology itself. In this chapter, the reasons for this are explored. The first set relates to the status of ‘theories’ in sociology, which, despite historical aspirations to universality, are not predictive systems that generate puzzles but second-order definitions and ideal types, which abstract over intelligible world of the subjects. They can loosely be said to progress in the sense of providing new ways of framing in response to (...) generically defined concerns, such as the stability of elites, and novel social situations. The second set relates to quantitative models. Examples from causal modelling, a basic form of statistical modelling, are discussed to show how this same problem bears on them. They depend on assumptions about which correlations can be plausibly regarded as causal, and which are outside the system and can be ignored. As the social world changes, these assumptions gain or lose plausibility, and the models themselves lose applicability and predictive power. Change here amounts to providing a better fit to novel situations. But the models are purpose relative and the aims, and therefore progress, are externally defined, typically by changing normative or policy concerns. (shrink)