This symposium represents the first major foray of the Journal of Bioethical Inquiry into what may well become one of its significant strands of scholarship. The JBI has always encouraged critical and marginal areas of bioethics scholarship and particularly those which make use of contemporary continental philosophy and cultural theory in addition to traditional analytic methods. For that reason this symposium is an expression of a “natural fit” or a “match made in heaven” (or at least the Platonic version of (...) that idea). The authors span times and sites in history and culture, from ancient Greece to present day Brisbane. They draw on a variety of literary genres and figures, ranging from Greek tragedy to an epic Chinese novel; from Jane Austen to William Styron, a major American novelist and essayist; from the modern English science fiction of Kazuo Ishiguro, a Japanese expatriate in London, to the 20th-century English poetry of Philip Larkin. The symposium also engages with some recur. (shrink)

This study employed a technology surveillance process in the beekeeping sector with the objective of identifying emerging technologies that are relevant to small beekeepers in emerging economies. The analysis of patents classified under A01K 47/00 revealed the emergence of pivotal innovations in domains such as hive design, automated honey extraction, and the integration of sensors for hive monitoring. The surveillance process facilitated the collection and analysis of data on the most patented technologies in the sector, thereby addressing key planning (...) questions. The study identified technological trends with the potential to transform beekeeping in low-tech contexts, thereby enhancing the productivity and sustainability of beekeeping operations. The findings of this study indicate that the identified technologies have the potential to significantly contribute to the well-being of small beekeepers, provided that their adoption is facilitated through the provision of governmental and organizational support. It is recommended that future research investigate the implementation of these technologies and the factors that influence their adoption in diverse production contexts. (shrink)

Volume IV in the series "New Testament Tools and Studies" edited by Metzger, this book is chiefly a collection of essays that he has produced in the last fifteen years. Thoroughly scholarly and impeccably objective, the book contains chapters on the Lucianic recension of the Greek Bible, the Caesarean text of the Gospels, and Old Slavonic version of the Bible, Tatian's Diatessaron and a Persian Harmony of the Gospels, recent Spanish contributions to the textual criticism of the New Testament, trends (...) in the textual criticism of the Illiad and the Mahabharata, and an appendix on William Bowyer's contribution to the textual criticism of the New Testament.—E. A. R. (shrink)

An Oxford philosopher argues that solving today's problems might require putting future generations ahead of ourselves The human story is just beginning. There are five thousand years of written history, but perhaps millions more to come. In What We Owe the Future, philosopher William MacAskill develops a perspective he calls longtermism to argue that this fact is of enormous moral importance. While we are comfortable thinking about the equal moral worth of humans alive today, we haven't considered the moral (...) weight of future generations. We have put them at grave risk, and not just with climate change. AI could lock humans into perpetual dystopia, or pandemics could end us. But the future could be wonderful: moral and technological progress could result in unimaginable human flourishing. The future is in our hands. As MacAskill shows, we can make the world better for billions of years to come. Perhaps even more importantly, he shows us just how much is at stake if we consign future generations to oblivion. (shrink)

This article provides an introduction to the special issue on post-neoliberalism. It does so by considering challenges to the neoliberal order that have come, post-financial crisis, from the political right. It looks closely at the relation of neoliberalism to conservatism, on one hand, and libertarianism, on the other, in order to address the threat posed to the neoliberal order by paleoconservatism, neoreactionary politics, ordonationalism, libertarian paternalism, and different forms of sovereignty and elite power. The final section of this introduction reflects (...) on the challenge to the neoliberal orthodoxy posed by the current COVID-19 crisis. For while events of 2020–21 have facilitated new forms of privatization of many public services and goods, they also signal, potentially, a break from the neoliberal orthodoxies of the previous four decades, and, in particular, from their overriding concern for the market. (shrink)

Kit Fine’s logic of essence and his reduction of modality crucially rely on a principle called the ‘monotonicity of essence’. This principle says that for all pluralities, xx and yy, if some xx belong to some yy, then if it is essential to xx that p, it is also essential to yy that p. I argue that on the constitutive notion of essence, this principle is false. In particular, I show that this principle is false because it says that some (...) propositions are essential to yy even though those propositions are only about some of its members. I then consider modifications to the principle appealing to consequential essence and argue that such a modification is inconsistent with a central. (shrink)

This chapter is a substantially expanded version of (and so substantially supersedes) “Words Fail Me. (Stanley Cavell’s Life Out of Music)” that appeared in Inheriting Stanley Cavell: Memories, Dreams, Reflections (Bloomsbury, 2020). It offers to read Cavell’s claim that “philosophy, of a certain ambition, tends perpetually to intersect the autobiographical.” Its guiding thought is that a life that finds a home in philosophy from out of its devotion to music (as is true of, among others, Rousseau, Nietzsche, and Wittgenstein, all (...) philosophers Cavell wrote about and cared about) will take on a certain character. In Cavell’s case, his distinctive orientation in philosophy—call this his lifelong coming to terms with his abandoning a life in music—is guided in part by (1) an interest in those moments in experience where words seem to run out, or veer toward nonsense, leaving in their wake touchstones of ecstasy; and (2) an interest in the education of the senses, without which interest we risk their starvation. These twin claims are illustrated through an interweaving of remarks and reminiscences of Cavell on music that culminate in a reading of his last published pieces devoted to music, primarily “Impressions of Revolution.”. (shrink)

Autobiography and Teacher Development in China investigates the roles of autobiography in teacher education, as several scholars in China recontextualize Western conceptions of teacher development, combining them with uniquely Chinese cultural conceptions to articulate a reconceptualization of teacher development that holds worldwide significance. Framed by the work of Zhang Hua and William F. Pinar, these theoretical and practical essays point to an internationally inflected reconceptualization of teachers' professional development, pre-service and in-service. This volume addresses multiple movements of teacher education (...) reform worldwide, focused on crafting a nationally distinctive course not only internationally, but also culturally, historically, and locally. (shrink)

This new edition of a well-regarded book provides a concise and exceptionally clear introduction to Habermas's work, from his early writings on the public sphere, through his work on law and the state, to his more recent discussion of science, religion and contemporary Europe. Outhwaite examines all of Habermas's major works and steers a steady course through the many debates to which they have given rise. A major feature of the book is that it provides a detailed critical analysis of (...) Habermas's most important work, The Theory of Communicative Action. As well as looking at Habermas's appraisal of figures such as Foucault and Derrida, the book also examines his resolute defence of the Enlightenment project, his work on law and democracy and its implications for the important topic of European integration. This book quickly became established as an authoritative guide to Habermas's work, and this updated new edition will be an invaluable critical introduction for students and scholars across the social sciences and humanities, especially sociology, politics, philosophy and social theory. (shrink)

Volume 1: Divine Agency and Divine Action, Volume I lays the groundwork for a constructive contribution to the contemporary debate regarding divine action. Noted scholar William J. Abraham argues that the concept of divine action is not a closed concept--like knowledge--but an open concept with a variety of context-dependent meanings. This volume charts the history of debate about divine action among key Anglophone philosophers of religion, and observes that they were largely committed to this erroneous understanding of divine action (...) as a closed concept. After developing an argument that divine action should be understood as an open, fluid concept, Abraham engages the work of William Alston, Process metaphysics, quantum physics, analytic Thomist philosophy of religion, and the theology of Kathryn Tanner. Abraham argues that divine action as an open concept must be shaped by distinctly theological considerations, and thus all future work on divine action among philosophers of religion must change to accord with this vision. Only deep engagement with the Christian theological tradition will remedy the problems ailing contemporary discourse on divine action. (shrink)

This work opens with a development of the notion of Unfathomed Knowledge, which Bartley makes clear by using it to explain such recent scientific advances as the development of drugs for the treatment of AIDS, and by showing its implications for such far-flung fields as the Marxist theory of alienation, the sociology of knowledge, patent law, and morality.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1860.

With the goal of explaining the maldistribution of evil in the world, Asha Lancaster-Thomas has recently (2023) expounded upon the idea of a fluctuating maximal God (FMG) that she and others developed (Jeffrey et al. (2020)) from the idea of a maximal God originally proposed by Yujin Nagasawa ( 2017 ). Lancaster-Thomas uses this model to answer what I and my co-author, Daniel Linford, have called the problem of geography (Linford and Patterson (2015)). The problem of geography points to the (...) geographically unequal distribution of suffering in the world and argues that this aggravates the original problem of evil (POE) and undermines the primary theodicies offered as solutions to it. I subsequently (2021) added to this problem by pointing out that evil is also maldistributed across race, gender and time. This larger problem may be referred to as the problem of the distribution of evil (PODE). Lancaster-Thomas argues that the FMG, especially under her modified version, is not susceptible to the problem of geography or to temporal inequalities of well-being. In this article I will demonstrate how the FMG, even on Lancaster-Thomas? updated model, fails to undermine either the problem of geography or the more broadly conceived PODE. (shrink)

This article traces the career arc of Dutch psychoanalyst Joost A. M. Meerloo by examining his biography and his psychology of interrogation and confession. His life story, particularly his experiences during the German occupation of the Netherlands and his escape to England during World War II, shaped his views on these issues, as well as his rise to prominence as an expert on these topics in the United States. His psychoanalytic perspectives on interrogation and confession, including false confession, reflected the (...) zeitgeist of the First Wave of Cold War interrogation tactics and related scholarship. His career as a scholar of interrogation faded with the study of distinct interrogation tactics used by communists during the Korean War, the emergence of experimental social psychology, and a growing cohort of scholars who rejected his psychoanalytic views in favor of more contemporary approaches. For these reasons, his work remains undervalued, increasing the risks that today’s scholars will fail to recognize his larger contributions and his warnings about vulnerability and psychologists’ roles in military interrogations. The article reviews the rise and fall of the career of Joost A. M. Meerloo as a scholar of Cold War interrogation, including his contributions and his unheeded warnings about vulnerability and psychologists’ roles in military interrogations. (shrink)

The endowment of religious, charitable, and educational enterprises by the establishment of trusts in land, the income from which could be devoted to such uses, was an immensely popular form of pious expression in both medieval Christendom and the Islamic world. The motives for, and applications of such endowments differed markedly, however, between the two religious cultures. The endowment of prayers and masses for beneficiaries, living and dead, exemplified the sacramental and sacerdotal quality of pre-Reformation Christianity. This ritualistic and ecclesiastical (...) use of endowments in Latin Christian Europe and the Orthodox East, a use dependent on the existence of a sacramental system and an institutional church, contrasted sharply with the broader application of the Muslim waqf, by means of which pious individuals and groups sponsored a wide variety of charities, explicitly life-oriented and quite unconnected with a corporate clerical establishment. The infinite multiplication of private acts of charity by devout Muslims manifested the moralistic bent of Islam, which aspired to recast society according to the norms of the Qur'an and sacred law. The contrasting uses to which the two religious systems put the gifts and legacies of the faithful reflected the operation of fundamentally different religious premises, whereas the institutionalization of these premises in a shared legal fiction, the trust, assured their enforcement in society and life. (shrink)

Charity is not only about giving to those in need, but in a broader sense about loving your neighbor and doing good things for other people without thought of reward. So wrote Swedish visionary Emanuel Swedenborg, who believed that charity, along with faiths, was part of the foundation of spiritual practice. This work combines two of Swedenborg's unpublished manuscripts to form a practical, inspirational handbook for appying the principle of doing good to daily life.

From its genesis in the 1960s, the focus of inquiry in neuroscience has been on the cellular and molecular processes underlying neural activity. In this pursuit neuroscience has been enormously successful. Like any successful scientific inquiry, initial successes have raised new questions that inspire ongoing research. While there is still much that is not known about the molecular processes in brains, a great deal of very important knowledge has been secured, especially in the last 50 years. It has also attracted (...) the attention of a number of philosophers, some of whom have viewed it as evidence for a ruthlessly reductionistic program that will eventually explain how mental processes are performed in the brain in purely molecular terms. As neuroscience developed, however, there emerged a smaller group of researchers who focused on systems, behavioral, and cognitive neuroscience. These investigators have also made impressive advances in the last 50 years and they have been the focus of an even larger group of philosophers, who have appealed to systems level understanding of the brain as providing the appropriate point of connection to the information processing accounts advanced in psychology. (shrink)

Evolutionary debunking arguments attempt to show from the fact of evolution either that there are no evaluative truths existing independently of our evaluative judgments or that we lack knowledge of such truths. In this paper, I consider whether Sharon Street’s influential evolutionary debunking argument threatens natural law theory. I argue that new natural law theory is vulnerable to her argument but that derivationist versions of natural law theory (sometimes referred to as “traditional” or “old” natural law) have the resources to (...) mount a defense. I show that new natural law theory’s account of how we know the precepts of natural law leaves the theory open to Street’s attack. I also show that derivationist natural law theory’s account—on which the precepts of natural law can be derived from facts about human nature and human fulfillment—gives deriviationists what they need for a defense. (shrink)

This article defends epiphenomenalism against criticisms raised in Dwayne Moore’s “On Robinson’s Response to the Self-Stultifying Objection”.

One of the world's great philosophers, William of Ockham's On the Connection of the Virtues (De connexione virtutum) provides insightful perspectives on ordinary issues of human conduct. Written in reasonably simple and nontechnical language, it is translated into English here for the first time. Ockham's views on many subjects have been misunderstood, his views on ethics as much as any. This book is designed to avoid some pitfalls that arise in reading medieval philosophy generally and Ockham in particular. Wood (...) begins her introduction with an account of what is known about Ockham's life and works and with a discussion of his place in the history of philosophy, followed by a brief general guide to his views. Finally, there is a historical account of the medieval debate on the connection of the virtues, to which Ockham's treatise is an important contribution. Problems of interpretation are addressed in the commentary, which follows the translation. Translation, commentary, and introduction provide students of Ockham's treatise with what they need to appreciate his stance on ethical issues and to approach his arguments critically. (shrink)

This research paper comparatively assesses Deleuze’s and Lyotard’s post-Kantian thought on the sublime. Initially, I argue that their unfaithful treatment of Kant bears consonance in dramatizing the heterogeneity of the transcendental faculties, relegating determinate thought to a subsidiary consideration, and conceiving of aesthetics as an excessive mode of production rather than a reflective form of judgement. However, they diverge in the details regarding aesthetic production in their writings on modernist painting. In conclusion, I maintain that these accounts require a paradigmatic (...) shift in thought away from determinate judgement toward a fidelity to events. The significance of drawing these two thinkers together in this regard is in the recognition and elucidation of an event-oriented ontology, whereby the subject is actively transformed through creative responses to singular events in a process of rupture and regeneration. This rests upon the postulate that reality is not exhausted by experience, and carries with it an ethical imperative to resist limiting the future to the present conditions of experience. (shrink)

The ArgumentMany of the epistemological issues that occupied natural philosophers of the seventeenth century were expressed visually in title-page engravings. One of those issues concerned the relative status to be accorded to evidence of the senses, as compared to knowledge gained by faith or reason. In title-page illustrations, the various arguments were often waged by a series of light metaphors: the Light of Reason, the Light of Nature, and the Lights of Sense, Scripture, and Grace. When such illustrations are examined (...) with the authors' theological views in mind, it becomes apparent that in the first half of the seventeenth century, Catholic authors favored the Light of Reason as a source of truth, while Protestant authors favored the Light of Nature. Since by the end of the century it was widely accepted by scientists of all religious persuasions that certain knowledge must be grounded in sense evidence and the direct study of nature, one might argue that in this instance Protestantism was responsible for nurturing an important development of the Scientific Revolution. However, the skewed nature of the sample and the large number of counterexamples available mitigate against taking this offshoot of the Merton thesis too seriously. (shrink)

Widely recognized as the finest definition of existentialist philosophy ever written, this book introduced existentialism to America in 1958. Barrett speaks eloquently and directly to concerns of the 1990s: a period when the irrational and the absurd are no better integrated than before and when humankind is in even greater danger of destroying its existence without ever understanding the meaning of its existence. Irrational Man begins by discussing the roots of existentialism in the art and thinking of Augustine, Aquinas, Pascal, (...) Baudelaire, Blake, Dostoevski, Tolstoy, Hemingway, Picasso, Joyce, and Beckett. The heart of the book explains the views of the foremost existentialists—Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Sartre. The result is a marvelously lucid definition of existentialism and a brilliant interpretation of its impact. (shrink)

Any given society will be comprised of multiple forms of life. That is to say, people will adhere to diverse patterns of organizing and justifying how they make use of their time. One might think that for all of us, time is divided by seconds, minutes, and hours and thus we all live in the same form of life. We are all given 24 hours in a day, and it is up to us all, individually, to decide how best to (...) maximize the value we can squeeze out of the time that we are given. In this view, abstract and homogenous time is the "natural" state of the world. Some people may want to spend their time by focusing on their careers, families, or volunteering, for example. What matters is that we are all free to choose what we will do with the finite seconds, minutes, and hours that we have. The assumed naturalness of "clock time", as Lewis Mumford describes it, allows us to develop a sense of injustice as the unjustified control or evaluation of another's time. To impose one form of life onto another is to violate their dignity as a self-determining agent who has their own reasons for shaping the pattern of their life in light of their own values and goals. So, preliminarily, we might distinguish between forms of life by examining how a bundle of social practices normatively shape the use of time. (shrink)

First Published in 1991. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This volume examines the phenomenon of the migration of philosophical texts and traditions into other cultures, identifies places where it may have succeeded, but also where it has not, and discusses what is presupposed in introducing a text or a tradition into another intellectual culture. -- Book Jacket.

An essential property of a thing tells us about the real definition of that thing. In this dissertation, I argue that a real definition states conditions on the identity of things and explains how they differ from other individuals or members of other kinds. I then apply this account to show that some essential properties are discovered by science. I also argue contrary to reductionist accounts of essence and show that several of Kit Fine's applications of the notion of essence (...) to ontological dependence and to the reduction of modality, are spurious. Finally, I argue that the real definition of each human person accounts for their personal identity over time. (shrink)