This essay offers a diagnosis of what may be at stake in the current preoccupation with defining science‐based educational research. The diagnosis unfolds in several readings: The first is a charitable and considerate appraisal that draws attention to the fact that advocating experimental methods as important to a science of educational research is not an inherently evil thing to do. Subsequent readings are grimmer, suggesting more deleterious consequences of the science‐based research movement for the entire enterprise of educational practice and (...) research. The central thesis of the essay is that making arguments about method and science the focal point in the current quarrel may be largely beside the point. Instead, educational researchers should join the political and public conversation about the place of educational science in society and about how science is both implicated in and confronts the politics of what counts as knowledge. (shrink)

This work argues for the need to close the gap between the fields of the philosophy of religion and religious studies. Thomas A. Lewis takes up what, in recent years, has often been seen as a fundamental reason for excluding religious ethics and philosophy of religion from religious studies: their explicit normativity. Against this presupposition, Lewis argues that normativity is pervasive--not unique to ethics and philosophy of religion--and therefore not a reason to exclude them from religious studies. He bridges (...) more philosophical and historical subfields by arguing for the importance of history to the philosophy of religion. He considers the future of religious ethics, explaining that the field as whole should learn from the methodological developments associated with recent work in comparative religious ethics and 'comparative religious ethics' should no longer be conceived as a distinct subfield. The concluding chapter engages broader, post-9/11 arguments about the importance of studying religion, arguing that prominent contemporary notions of 'religious literacy' actually hinder our ability to grasp the significance of religion and impact in the world today. (shrink)

The most interesting, and problematic, claim made by film-philosophy, for me, is the proposition that film thinks. This claim is interesting because it asserts that film has something philosophical to offer that philosophy itself lacks. It is problematic because we tend to think that where there is thinking, there must be a someone doing that thinking. And whatever film is, it is not a someone. This paper brings Karl Poppers model of objective knowledge what he calls knowledge in the absence (...) of a knowing subject to bear on the proposition that film thinks, in order to sketch out an account of film as a process of objective thinking distinct from that of philosophy or any other merely human mode of thought. (shrink)

Natural kinds have been a constant topic in philosophy throughout its history, but many issues pertaining to natural kinds still remain unresolved. This paper considers one of these issues: the epistemic role of natural kinds in scientific investigation. I begin by clarifying what is at stake for an individual scientific field when asking whether or not the field studies a natural kind. I use an example from life science, concerning how biologists explain the similar body shapes of fish and cetaceans, (...) to show that natural kinds play a central epistemic role in scientific explanations that cannot be delegated to other explanatory factors. A task for philosophy, then, is to come up with a theory of natural kinds that adequately accounts for the epistemic role of natural kinds in science. After having sketched the spectrum of available philosophical theories of natural kinds, I argue that none of the available theories adequately performs this task and that therefore the search is still open for a theory that does. (shrink)

A major issue in philosophical debates on the species problem concerns the opposition between two seemingly incompatible views of the metaphysics of species: the view that species are individuals and the view that species are natural kinds. In two recent papers in this journal, Olivier Rieppel suggested that this opposition is much less deep than it seems at first sight. Rieppel used a recently developed philosophical account of natural kindhood, namely Richard Boyd’s “homeostatic property cluster” theory, to argue that every (...) species taxon can be conceived of as an individual that constitutes the single member of its own specific natural kind. In this paper I criticize Rieppel’s approach and argue that it does not deliver what it is supposed to, namely an account of species as kinds about which generalized statements can be made. (shrink)

In Civic Liberalism, prominent political theorist Thomas A. Spragens, Jr. asserts that most versions of democratic ideals—libertarianism, liberal egalitarianism, difference liberalism, and the liberalism of fear—lead our polity significantly astray. Spragens offers another alternative. He argues that we should recover the multiple and complex aspirations found within the tradition of democratic liberalism and integrate them into a more compelling public philosophy for our time—or what he calls civic liberalism.

This chapter examines the status of psychopathy as a scientific kind. I argue that the debate on the question whether psychopathy is a scientific kind as it is conducted at present (i.e., by asking whether psychopathy is a natural kind), is misguided. It relies too much on traditional philosophical views of what natural kinds (or: legitimate scientific kinds) are and how such kinds perform epistemic roles in the sciences. The paper introduces an alternative approach to the question what scientific (or: (...) natural) kinds are. On this alternative approach, the Grounded Functionality Account of natural kinds, psychopathy emerges as a “good” scientific kind that is best understood as a region on a multidimensional space of behaviors rather than as a traditional natural kind. (shrink)

A NUMBER of things are immediately striking about Roderick Chisholm’s way of doing philosophy. He is an analytic philosopher who is quite ready to cite at some length such diverse thinkers as Thomas Aquinas, Franz Brentano, Alexius Meinong, and Edmund Husserl. He unabashedly calls much of his work "metaphysical." His sources and conclusions mark him as something of a maverick, but his philosophical style is quintessential contemporary American establishment. These crosscurrents seem at least potentially exciting. They promise a richness (...) of perspective as well as exactness and clarity in argument. It has become commonplace to deplore the lack of dialogue among the main philosophical "schools" of this century—the analysts, the phenomenologists, etc. In Roderick Chisholm America has produced a philosopher who has consistently refused isolationism even when it has seemed hopelessly fashionable. (shrink)

_Freedom and Tradition in Hegel _stands at the intersection of three vital currents in contemporary ethics: debates over philosophical anthropology and its significance for ethics, reevaluations of tradition and modernity, and a resurgence of interest in Hegel. Thomas A. Lewis engages these three streams of thought in light of Hegel’s recently published _Vorlesungen über die Philosophie des Geistes_. Drawing extensively on these lectures, Lewis addresses an important lacuna in Hegelian scholarship by first providing a systematic analysis of Hegel’s philosophical (...) anthropology and then examining its fundamental role in Hegel’s ethical and religious thought. Lewis contends that Hegel’s anthropology seeks to account for both the ongoing significance of the religious and philosophical traditions in which we are raised and our ability to transcend these traditions. Pursuing the implications of the integral role of practice in Hegel’s anthropology, Lewis argues for a more progressive interpretation of Hegel’s ethics and a “Hegelian” critique of Hegel’s most problematic statements on political and social issues. Lewis concludes that Hegel offers a powerful strategy for reconciling freedom and tradition. "_Freedom and Tradition in Hegel_ is a highly important contribution to the scholarship. Lewis brings Hegel's 'philosophy of subjective spirit' to light in a way that corrects previous interpretations of Hegel's thinking on religion, ethics, and politics. This book establishes Lewis as one of the leading Hegel scholars based in religious studies. It is a book that Hegel scholars in several disciplines will need to take seriously." —Jeffrey Stout, Princeton University "Written with admirable clarity, this important contribution to Hegel scholarship is lively, argumentative, and substantial." —Stephen Crites, Wesleyan University. (shrink)

The dissertation explores the philosophical, literary, and stylistic similarities between the twentieth century American writer Sherwood Anderson and the nineteenth century Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard. These similarities suggest that the Ohio writer's work and aesthetic were deeply influenced by the Danish thinker, and the connection between them lies in the immigrant rural religious communities of the American Middle West. Ultimately, these interrelations reveal a "religious-aesthetic" unique to the entire range of Midwestern literature of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, and they (...) also reveal a politics and an aesthetic of Midwestern art available yet today. (shrink)

Beginning with a Cuban Catholic ritual in Miami, this book takes readers on a momentous theoretical journey toward a new understanding of religion.

Humanity’s creative capacity has never been more unsettling than it is at our current moment, when it has ushered us into new technological worlds that challenge the very definition of “the human.” Those anxious to safeguard the human against techno-scientific threats often appeal to religious traditions to protect the place and dignity of the human. But how well do we understand both theological tradition and today’s technological culture? In _The Indiscrete Image, _Thomas A. Carlson challenges our common ideas about both, (...) arguing instead that it may be humanity’s final lack of definition that first enables, and calls for, human creativity and its correlates—including technology, tradition, and their inextricable interplay within religious existence. Framed in response to Martin Heidegger’s influential account of the relation between technological modernity and theological tradition, _The Indiscrete Image_ builds an understanding of creativity as conditioned by insurmountable unknowing and incalculable possibility through alternative readings of Christian theological tradition and technological culture—and the surprising resonance between these two. Carlson concludes that the always ongoing work of world creation, tied essentially to human self-creation, implies neither an idol’s closure nor an icon’s transcendence, but the “indiscrete image” whose love makes possible—by keeping open—both the human and its world. (shrink)

Alasdair MacIntyre's recent thinking both about the concept of a practice and the existence of narrative unity in human life raises important questions about how we should view clinical medicine today. Is it possible for clinical medicine to pursue patient well-being in a society (allegedly) afflicted with what he calls modernity? Here it is argued that MacIntyre's pessimistic view of the individual in contemporary society makes his call for patient autonomy in the clinical setting pointless. Finally, recent work in gerontology (...) is cited to make three points: first, MacIntyre's pessimism about us is too extreme; second, the concept of a fictionalized personal history is closer to reality than either MacIntyre's notion of narrative unity or the ideas of his imagined opponent (Sartre); and finally, we should not expect clinical medicine to produce patient well-being, when this is understood narratively. (shrink)

Since his inaugural lecture at Freiburg in 1929 in which Heidegger delivered his most celebrated salvo against logic, he has frequently been portrayed as an anti-logician, a classic example of the obscurity resultant upon a rejection of the discipline of logic, a champion of the irrational, and a variety of similar things. Because many of Heidegger's statements on logic are polemical in tone, there has been no little misunderstanding of his position in regard to logic, and a great deal of (...) distortion of it. All too frequently the position which is attacked as Heidegger's is a barely recognizable caricature of it. Heidegger has, from the very beginning of his career, written and said much on logic. Strangely enough, in view of all that he has said, his critique of logic has not been singled out as the subject of any of the longer, more detailed studies on the various aspects of his thought. (shrink)