This anthology applies phenomenological concepts and methods to issues of philosophical theology and philosophical theology and philosophy: the being and nature of God, and the divine modes of relatedness to nature, to society, and to the self. Essays in Phenomenological Theology contains previously unpublished papers by Iso Kern, J. N. Findlay, Charles Courtney, Thomas Prufer, Robert Williams, James Hart, Steven Laycock, and James Buchanan. It is the first volume to assemble an entire spectrum of phenomenological-theological ideas, including those (...) of neo-Platonic meditation, phenomenological neo-Thomism, Hegelian phenomenological dialectics, Husserlian transcendental reflection, and post-modern deconstructive iconoclasm. The book will be useful to philosophers and theologians seeking an enriched understanding of the rapidly-burgeoning discipline of phenomenological theology, and promises unexpected insights even to seasoned phenomenologists seeking to expand their horizons. (shrink)

This collection of essays, offered in honor of the distinguished career of prominent political philosophy professor Clifford Orwin, brings together internationally renowned scholars to provide a wide context and discuss various aspects of the virtue of “humanity” through the history of political philosophy.

This collection of essays, offered in honor of the distinguished career of prominent political philosophy professor Clifford Orwin, brings together internationally renowned scholars to provide a wide context and discuss various aspects of the virtue of “humanity” through the history of political philosophy.

Engineering educators have long discussed the need to teach professional responsibility and the social context of engineering without adding to overcrowded curricula. One difficulty we face is the lack of appropriate teaching materials that can fit into existing courses. The PRiME (Professional Responsibility Modules for Engineering) Project (http://www.engr.utexas.edu/ethics/primeModules.cfm) described in this paper was initiated at the University of Texas, Austin to provide web-based modules that could be integrated into any undergraduate engineering class. Using HPL (How People Learn) theory, PRiME developed (...) and piloted four modules during the academic year 2004–2005. This article introduces the modules and the pilot, outlines the assessment process, analyzes the results, and describes how the modules are being revised in light of the initial assessment. In its first year of development and testing, PRiME made significant progress towards meeting its objectives. The PRiME Project can strengthen engineering education by providing faculty with an effective system for engaging students in learning about professional responsibility. (shrink)

In Lands of Likeness, philosopher, theologian, and poet Kevin Hart utilizes the history of Christian thought and secular philosophy to develop a novel and profound hermeneutics of contemplation. Drawing in particular on the work of Arthur Schopenhauer, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Edmund Husserl, Hart traces the development of notions of contemplation in modernity and refines the approaches he finds there. Utilizing his refined approach, Hart trains our attention on modern poems from G. M. Hopkins, Wallace Stevens, A. (...) R. Ammons, Geoffrey Hill and others as sites for a kind of contemplative reading that phenomenology can make precise. Delivered in its original form as the prestigious Gifford Lectures, Lands of Likeness is a revelatory meditation on contemplation for the modern world. (shrink)

In this dissertation I argue that the concept of a moral right is best explicated by means of the concept of morally legitimate coercion. This thesis, which I call the enforceability thesis, says that to have a right is to have a claim such that one would be justified in pursuing a course of action up to and including harm should the claim be dissatisfied. I contend that this thesis, if it is true, explains much about our intuitions concerning moral (...) rights, accounts for the historical importance of rights-talk in the context of events such as revolutions and political reforms, and explains why rights are a necessary part of the moral vocabulary. If rights do not set out conditions under which coercion is morally appropriate, then they do nothing that other moral concepts could not do. ;Drawing on the work of H. L. A. Hart, John Rawls, and others, I argue that the philosophical strength and practical efficacy of rights on the enforceability thesis is best realized when rights are treated as action-guiding principles set within a framework of moral decision making under reflective equilibrium. Using the process of reflective equilibrium as a backdrop, I argue that rights can have sufficient normative force to play an important role in moral and political theory without being either impracticably stringent or subject to so many exceptions that they lose their efficacy. ;With this background in place I next set out and argue for a view of human rights which, because human rights turn out to be best understood as rights to primary goods, I call the theory of primary rights. The account I give of primary rights emphasizes their justificatory place in arguments for coercion, their importance to the moral integrity of the individual, and the practical applicability of the overarching theory of rights developed in this dissertation. (shrink)

During the 1950s and 1960s, Patrick Devlin and H.L.A. Hart engaged in a heated intellectual exchange over the bases and limits of toleration in democratic societies. By most accounts, Hart is said to have won the debate by successfully refuting Devlin's ‘disintegration thesis’ in favour of liberal principles of political morality. This article draws attention to an unnoticed but essential element in Devlin's case: an appeal to certain principles of democracy. Although Hart is on firm ground in (...) rejecting the disintegration thesis, Devlin's democratic argument confronts Hart with a potentially devastating contradiction, for it rests on a value that liberals themselves accept — that is, equality. Because both supporters and critics of Devlin overlook the element in the debate that poses the most interesting questions about the relation between liberalism and democracy, contemporary students of liberal-democratic thought have good reason to revisit this classic debate. (shrink)

Stevens has presented a “lusty embryonic” Science of Science, as having arisen out of “operationism as a revolution against absolute and undefinable concepts in physics, behaviorism as a revolution against dualistic mentalism in psychology, and Logical Positivism as a revolution against rational metaphysics in philosophy.”.

In debating Patrick Devlin, H. L. A. Hart claimed that the “modern form” of the debate over the legal enforcement of morals centered on the “significance to be attached to the historical fact that certain conduct, no matter what, is prohibited by a positive morality.” This form of the debate was politically important in 1963 in Britain and America, and it remains politically important in these countries today and elsewhere; but it is not the philosophically most interesting form the (...) debate can take. An older form of the debate appealed to natural law or critical morality. It centered on the question of whether political authorities could properly use the criminal law to enforce critical morality, including prohibitions on conduct that was not harmful or disrespectful to others. This paper engages with this older form of the debate. It offers some reasons for thinking that there is a presumption in favor of the view that it is a proper function of the criminal law to enforce critical morality, including that part of critical morality that is not directly concerned with preventing harm or disrespect to others. It then defends this presumption against some arguments recently pressed by Ronald Dworkin. (shrink)

The main previous analyses of punishment by Hart, Feinberg and Wasserstrom are considered and criticized. One persistent fault is the neglect of the idea that in punishment the person subjected to it is represented as having no valid excuse for wrongdoing. A new analysis is proposed which attempts to specify in what sense punishment by its very nature is retributive, as Wasserstrom has asserted. Certain problematic cases such as strict liability offenses and pre-trial detention are considered in light of (...) the new analysis. (shrink)

Although this piece was inspired by the kinds of legal puzzles discussed by Hart and Honore in Causation in the Law, the puzzle cases presented here are intended to test the reader's intuitions about what constitutes murder. Play along!

Sometimes the fact that something is the law can be justified by the law. For example, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act is the law because it was enacted by Congress pursuant to the Commerce Clause. But eventually legal justification of law ends. The ultimate criteria of validity in a legal system cannot themselves be justified by law. According to H.L.A. Hart, justification of these ultimate criteria is still available, by reference to social facts concerning official acceptance - facts about what (...) class='Hi'>Hart calls the "rule of recognition" for the system. -/- Drawing upon criticisms of sociological accounts of the law that can be found in the writings of Hans Kelsen, I argue in this essay that Hart's approach cannot account for statements about the law that assert the independence of legal validity from rule of recognition facts. I offer as an alternative a legal quietist approach, which can account for such statements. For the quietist, legal justification exhausts the possible justification for law. If our judgments about the law are fundamental, in the sense that they cannot be justified by other judgments about the law, then they have no justification (which is not to say that they should be abandoned). I argue that legal quietism is exemplified - if somewhat imperfectly - in Kelsen's writings, and I end the essay by exploring some difficulties that the quietist approach must face. (shrink)

Peter Abelard (1079–1142 ce) was the most wide‐ranging philosopher of the twelfth century. He quickly established himself as a leading teacher of logic in and near Paris shortly after 1100. After his affair with Heloise, and his subsequent castration, Abelard became a monk, but he returned to teaching in the Paris schools until 1140, when his work was condemned by a Church Council at Sens. His logical writings were based around discussion of the “Old Logic”: Porphyry's Isagoge, aristotle'S Categories and (...) On Interpretation and boethius'S textbook on topical inference. They comprise a freestanding Dialectica (“Logic”; probably c.1116), a set of commentaries (known as the Logica [Ingredientibus], c. 1119) and a later (c. 1125) commentary on the Isagoge (Logica Nostrorum Petititoni Sociorum or Glossulae). In a work Abelard called his Theologia, issued in three main versions (between 1120 and c.1134), he attempted a logical analysis of trinitarian relations and explored the philosophical problems surrounding God's claims to omnipotence and omniscience. The Collationes (“Debates,” also known as “Dialogue between a Christian, a Philosopher and a Jew”; probably c.1130) present a rational investigation into the nature of the highest good, in which the Christian and the Philosopher (who seems to be modeled on a philosopher of pagan antiquity) are remarkably in agreement. The unfinished Scito teipsum (“Know thyself,” also known as the “Ethics”; c.1138) analyses moral action. (shrink)

We propose a causal model theory to explain asymmetries in judgments of the intentionality of a foreseen side-effect that is either negative or positive (Knobe, 2003). The theory is implemented as a Bayesian network relating types of mental states, actions, and consequences that integrates previous hypotheses. It appeals to two inferential routes to judgment about the intentionality of someone else's action: bottom-up from action to desire and top-down from character and disposition. Support for the theory comes from three experiments that (...) test the prediction that bottom-up inference should occur only when the actor's primary objective is known. The model fits intentionality judgments reasonably well with no free parameters. (shrink)

Conceptual features differ in how mentally tranformable they are. A robin that does not eat is harder to imagine than a robin that does not chirp. We argue that features are immutable to the extent that they are central in a network of dependency relations. The immutability of a feature reflects how much the internal structure of a concept depends on that feature; i.e., how much the feature contributes to the concept's coherence. Complementarily, mutability reflects the aspects in which a (...) concept is flexible. We show that features can be reliably ordered according to their mutability using tasks that require people to conceive of objects missing a feature, and that mutability (conceptual centrality) can be distinguished from category centrality and from diagnosticity and salience. We test a model of mutability based on asymmetric, unlabeled, pairwise dependency relations. With no free parameters, the model provides reasonable fits to data. Qualitative tests of the model show that mutability judgments are unaffected by the type of dependency relation and that dependency structure influences judgments of variability. (shrink)

Abstract“Psychological essentialism” refers to our tendency to view the natural world as emerging from the result of deep, hidden, and internal forces called “essences.” People tend to believe that genes underlie a person’s identity. People encounter information about genetics on a regular basis, as through media such as a New York Times piece “Infidelity Lurks in Your Genes” or a 23andMe commercial showing people acquiring new ethnic identities as the result of their genotyping. How do people make sense of new (...) scientific findings that are inherently complex if they don’t have years of specialized training and education at their disposal? Given the substantial overlap between a lay understanding of genetics and lay intuitions about essences, we argue that, when most people are thinking about genes, they are not really thinking about genes in the complex ways that good scientists are. Combating people’s essentialist biases can be a formidable challenge. Although we have identified some promising results of trying to reduce people’s genetic essentialist tendencies, there is still much to learn about how these essentialist biases can be countered. It is important to help people understand genetic information so they are able make well‐informed decisions about their lives. (shrink)

With the House of Representatives set to decide next week whether to open an impeachment inquiry, President Clinton's fate may ultimately depend on his theories of language. In his grand jury testimony, Mr. Clinton expounded on the semantics of the present tense (''It depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is'') and of the words ''alone,'' ''cause'' and, most notoriously, ''sex.''.

New technologies often have unforeseeable consequences. Michael Faraday could not have anticipated the rise of the electric guitar and its effects on our culture, nor did the inventors of the laser realize they had laid the ground for a thriving industry of tattoo removal. And it is safe to say that Watson and Crick could not have foreseen a day when an analysis of Oprah Winfrey's DNA would tell her that she was descended from the Kpelle people of the Liberian (...) rainforest. "I feel empowered by this," she said upon hearing the news, overcoming her disappointment that her ancestors were not Zulu warriors. (shrink)

By examining his account of individual virtues, making inferences from his analyses of flawed cities, and teasing out the tacit assumptions behind claims about the nature of political activity, I argue that Aristotle thinks of competition as being a political ideal rather than as an inevitable corruption of civic life. Virtuous citizens compete for civic honor through traditional “competitive outlays” and contend against one another for prestigious offices in the city. Moreover, I argue that the very structure of political deliberation (...) is competitive. It is through a “vis-à-vis” competition among proposals that a winning policy is adopted, and the speakers who offer these proposals are themselves involved in a competition for political influence. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Vatican Manuscript of Spinoza’s EthicaSteven NadlerLeen Spruit and Pina Totaro. The Vatican Manuscript of Spinoza’s Ethica. Brill’s Studies in Intellectual History, 205. Brill’s Texts and Sources in Intellectual History, 11. Leiden-Boston: Brill, 2011. Pp. vi + 318. Cloth, $136.00.By any measure, it is a remarkable find. There was a small codex in the Vatican Library, marked Vat. Lat. 12838. It originally belonged to the Congregation of the (...) Holy Office, which in 1917 inherited the role of keeper of the Index of Prohibited Books. The codex had been transferred to the Library with other materials in 1922. The manuscript, originally acquired in 1677, bore no author’s name. According to the card catalogue it is a Tractatus theologiae, a five-part “Theological Treatise.” Its contents are described as follows: Pars prima de Deo: Definitiones. / 1. Per causam. / Des. Tam difficilia quam rara sunt.Sound familiar?We possess no autograph manuscripts of Spinoza’s philosophical writings (there are a couple of autographs of his letters). And the only philosophical manuscripts we do have are the two Dutch manuscripts of the Short Treatise on God, Man, and His Well-Being, both discovered in the nineteenth century but one of which almost certainly was composed in Spinoza’s lifetime from a Latin original. Thus, to discover a seventeenth-century Latin manuscript copy of the Ethics, even if it is not an autograph, is exciting news indeed. Since it was in the Vatican’s possession by September 1677, we know that it was written out while Spinoza (who had died only a few months earlier) was still alive; it may also be that, while the manuscript is not by Spinoza’s hand, he did look it over.What makes this last possibility even more likely is the fact that, as Leen Spruit and Pina Totaro—the discoverers of the manuscript—argue in their introduction to this volume, the manuscript may originally have belonged to a member of Spinoza’s circle of friends in Amsterdam, Walter Ehrefried von Tschirnhaus. Tschirnhaus was in Paris by 1676, and had in his possession a copy of the Ethics (which a suspicious Spinoza famously told him not to show to Leibniz, who was also in Paris at the time and wanted to have a look at the work). Tschirnhaus was in Rome within a year, where, Spruit and Totaro suggest, he may have made the acquaintance of Niels Stensen, erstwhile Lutheran scientist and friend of Spinoza, now a fervent Catholic convert and anti-Spinozist soon to be appointed Vicar Apostolic of Nordic Missions. Tschirnhaus, or possibly some other “Lutheran foreigner” (in Stensen’s words) to whom he, eager to spread the good word of Spinozism, had given the manuscript, passed it on to Stensen, who in turn handed it over to the Roman Inquisition, along with a denunciation of its author. Stensen’s intention was to have Spinoza condemned by the Church and his works placed on the Index. Spruit and Totaro also claim—on the basis of the handwriting—that the copyist of this manuscript is Pieter van Gent, a member of Spinoza’s circle who played a role in the posthumous publication of his works.While Spruit and Totaro wisely admit that this story behind the manuscript “cannot be established with certainty,” they also say that it is “rather likely.” Their plausible hypothetical reconstruction of the history of the manuscript and of its relationship to the publication history of the Ethics, as well as their account of other important contextual elements, is based on careful and informed scholarship, and makes for fascinating reading.As for the manuscript itself, it is not a revolutionary discovery (as, say, the discovery of the Short Treatise manuscripts were). It will not affect the reading of the Ethics in any major way. There are a variety of discrepancies between the Vatican manuscript and the text of the Ethics in the Opera Posthuma (OP) of 1678: differences in spelling, “rather insignificant” omissions and additions of words and phrases, probable scribal errors, changes in word order, and some noticeable differences in expression. To take just one nonetheless interesting example, the final clause of the... (shrink)

Patient To examine neural responses to aurally-presented sentences, a sparse imaging technique was used to minimize interference from scanner noise. The patient was played a single sentence (or noise-equivalent) in the 7.4s silent period before a single 1.6s scan with stimulus timing jittered relative to scan onset. There were 118 spoken sentences trials, 59 signal correlated noise trials, and an additional 60 silent trials for the purpose of monitoring data quality. The signal correlated noise stimuli had the same duration, spectral (...) profile and amplitude envelope as the original speech, but were entirely unintelligible (S1). The experiment was divided into three sessions of 79 trials with events pseudo-randomly ordered within each scanning session. The sentences were presented using a MRI compatible auditory stimulusdelivery system (Resonance Technology, Northridge, CA), with insert earplugs to further attenuate scanner noise. DMDX software running on a Windows XP PC was used to present the stimulus items. (shrink)

Describes the life and accomplishments of the nineteenth-century author best known for his work "Walden" and his dedication to expanding the philosophy of ...

Happiness today is not just a possibility or an option but a requirement and a duty. To fail to be happy is to fail utterly. Happiness has become a religion--one whose smiley-faced god looks down in rebuke upon everyone who hasn't yet attained the blessed state of perpetual euphoria. How has a liberating principle of the Enlightenment--the right to pursue happiness--become the unavoidable and burdensome responsibility to be happy? How did we become unhappy about not being happy--and what might we (...) do to escape this predicament? In Perpetual Euphoria, Pascal Bruckner takes up these questions with all his unconventional wit, force, and brilliance, arguing that we might be happier if we simply abandoned our mad pursuit of happiness. Gripped by the twin illusions that we are responsible for being happy or unhappy and that happiness can be produced by effort, many of us are now martyring ourselves--sacrificing our time, fortunes, health, and peace of mind--in the hope of entering an earthly paradise. Much better, Bruckner argues, would be to accept that happiness is an unbidden and fragile gift that arrives only by grace and luck. A stimulating and entertaining meditation on the unhappiness at the heart of the modern cult of happiness, Perpetual Euphoria is a book for everyone who has ever bristled at the command to "be happy.". (shrink)

This book develops the idea that meaningfulness is specified as a relation between an acknowledged appeal and an adopted attitude. In the Axial Age classics and again in modern refoundings of philosophy and theology, ideals of a fully commanding supreme appeal and a fully adequate orientation to the world in cognizance of that appeal--a sovereign attitude--are intellectually and spiritually central. Some of the most fundamental challenges of pluralism stem from differences in appeal and attitude ideals.

God and Phenomenology: Thinking with Jean-Yves Lacoste provides a starting point for scholars who seek to familiarize themselves with the work of this French phenomenologist and theologian. Thirteen international scholars comment on Lacoste's work. In conclusion the volume offers an unpublished essay by Lacoste on the topic of eschatology. / Table of Contents -- Introduction: Thinking with Jean-Yves Lacoste by Joeri Schrijvers and Martin Koci / Part I: Critiques -- 1. "'Children of the World': A Note on Jean-Yves Lacoste," by (...) Kevin Hart / 2. "Lacoste on Appearing and Reduction," by Steven DeLay / 3. "Reduction Without Appearance: The Non-Phenomenality of God," by Robert C. Reed / 4. "Only Metaphysics Sustains Phenomenology," by John Milbank / Part II: Commentaries -- 5. "Canonical Texts," by Oliver O'Donovan / 6. "Reading Prayerfully Before God: Jean-Yves Lacoste's Treatment of Lectio Divina as an Instance of Existence Coram Deo," by Christina M. Gschwandtner / 7. "Affection, Mood, and Poetry: Overcoming Mentalism," by Joseph Rivera / 8. "Rejecting the Wrong Questions: Jean-Yves Lacoste's Resistance to a Philosophical-Theological Divide," by Stephanie Rumpza / Part III: Explorations -- 9. "For the Love of Revelation: Open and Relational Theology in Light of Lacoste," by Jason W. Alvis / 10. "Right Use, Right Thinking," by William C. Hackett / 11. "The Beautiful Life of Faith: A Liturgical Reading of Fear and Trembling," by Amber Bowen / 12. "In the Footsteps of Henri de Lubac and Gregory of Nyssa: Jean-Yves Lacoste on Human Becoming, Historical and Eternal," by Stephen E. Lewis / 13. "Kenosis and Transcendence: Jean-Yves Lacoste and Soren Kierkegaard on the Phenomenality of God," by Nikolaas Cassidy-Deketelaere / In Conclusion -- 14. "The Final Word: Prolegomena to Eschatology," by Jean-Yves Lacoste. (shrink)

Examination of the concept of "beauty" as found across Plato's works. What is beautiful may well be what substantiates sophysune, a concept that refers to orderliness and measure.