Some recent work in formal epistemology shows that “witness agreement” by itself implies neither an increase in the probability of truth nor a high probability of truth—the witnesses need to have some “individual credibility.” It can seem that, from this formal epistemological result, it follows that coherentist justification (i.e., doxastic coherence) is not truth-conducive. I argue that this does not follow. Central to my argument is the thesis that, though coherentists deny that there can be noninferential justification, coherentists (...) do not deny that there can be individual credibility. (shrink)

Coherentists on epistemic justification claim that all justification is inferential, and that beliefs, when justified, get their justification together (not in isolation) as members of a coherent belief system. Some recent work in formal epistemology shows that “individual credibility” is needed for “witness agreement” to increase the probability of truth and generate a high probability of truth. It can seem that, from this result in formal epistemology, it follows that coherentist justification is not truth-conducive, that it is not (...) the case that, under the requisite conditions, coherentist justification increases the probability of truth and generates a high probability of truth. I argue that this does not follow. (shrink)

Striving for a probabilistic explication of coherence, scholars proposed a distinction between agreement and striking agreement. In this paper I argue that only the former should be considered a genuine concept of coherence. In a second step the relation between coherence and reliability is assessed. I show that it is possible to concur with common intuitions regarding the impact of coherence on reliability in various types of witness scenarios by means of an agreement measure of coherence. (...) Highlighting the need to separate the impact of coherence and specificity on reliability it is finally shown that a recently proposed vindication of the Shogenji measure qua measure of coherence vanishes. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Rhetoric 34.3 (2001) 207-224 [Access article in PDF] Virtual Witnessing and the Role of the Reader in a New Natural Philosophy Richard Cunningham [Figures]How did the self-described new natural philosophies of the early modern period displace other philosophic (moral, ethical, legal), and specifically religious, discourses as the locus of truth in our culture? Natural philosophy's rejection of disputation and of revelation as means of producing truth in (...) favor of the "discovery" of truth was more accurately an introduction of the invention of truth than of its discovery, and this invention demanded the creation of and participation of a certain kind of reader. Rhetorical examination of the early modern magnetic philosopher William Gilbert's most influential work, De Magnete, 1 will help us understand the "paradigm change," to use Thomas Kuhn's oft-misquoted term, 2 from a culture that accepted probabilistic truth in the natural realm to one that expected moral certainty, from a culture that accepted revelation as a legitimate means of access to truth to one that increasingly recognized only the "discovery" of truth through sensual experience disciplined through experiment.One way this paradigm change was effected was through the inclusion of the reader as an active participant in the new natural philosophies. The reader was included in the new natural philosophies by engendering in him desires for particular forms of knowledge and particular ways of attaining that knowledge. Peter Dear notes that "in the seventeenth century old practices changed and new ones appeared. Those changing practices represent shifts in the meaning of experience itself" (12-13), and he then asks the question that might well have been on the tongues of many as the old practices gave way to the new: "how can a universal knowledge-claim about the natural world be justified on the basis of singular items of individual experience?" (13). A crucially important way to justify the universal knowledge-claim on singular items of individual experience [End Page 207] was through the employment of a technique Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer have labeled "virtual witnessing" (60-65). Briefly, "virtual witnessing" describes the use of linguistic resources to produce a vicarious experience enabling a reader to confer agreement as though she had actually been present when an experiment was conducted. Virtual witnessing alone, however, cannot explain how the scientific became the dominant truth-producing paradigm in our culture. Virtual witnessing intermingled with a variety of other elements in early modern natural philosophy to encourage readers to participate in the invention of "true" accounts of the world in which we live. In this article I will apply the tools of rhetorical analysis as I use the example of De Magnete to elaborate on how a Foucauldian form of disciplinary impulse combined in the early modern period with the technology of virtual witnessing to create an audience inculcated with desire, interest, and belief in the new natural philosophy, which had to precede and accompany expansion of the scientific into the dominant truth-producing paradigm it has long since become.For the sake of clarity I should expound upon the two key elements of my argument, "discipline," in the Foucauldian sense in which I use the term, and "virtual witnessing." According to Michel Foucault, "discipline" is "a political anatomy of detail... situated on the axis that links the singular and the multiple" (139-49), and I argue that this point, on the "axis that links the singular and the multiple," is exactly the point that enables modern science. William Gilbert's De Magnete can help us understand how knowledge and power--or epistemê and technê, to use another, perhaps more rhetorically inflected, vocabulary--combined in the early modern period to produce the effects that would become those of modern science. Gilbert provides an excellent example of the movement from the production of truth through revelation to the production of truth through discovery and the experimental method. De Magnete persuades its reader by rendering visible a formerly invisible "universal nature," 3 so that truth is no longer warranted by the invisible workings... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Waiting for a Glacier to Move: Practicing Social Witness by Jennifer R. Ayres, and: Domesticated Glory: How the Politics of America Has Tamed God by Gale Heide, and: Being Faithful: Christian Commitment in Modern Society, Ecclesiological Investigations series by Judith A. MerkleDonna YarriWaiting for a Glacier to Move: Practicing Social Witness Jennifer R. Ayres eugene, or: pickwick publications, 2011. 218 pp. $24.00.Domesticated Glory: How the Politics (...) of America Has Tamed God Gale Heide eugene, or: pickwick publications, 2010. 182 pp. $21.00.Being Faithful: Christian Commitment in Modern Society, Ecclesiological Investigations series Judith A. Merkle london and new york: t&t clark, 2010. 208 pp. $46.95.What it means to be a faithful Christian witness in the contemporary social context is the common thread running through Jennifer R. Ayres’s Waiting for a Glacier to Move, Gale Heide’s Domesticated Glory, and Judith A. Merkle’s Being Faithful. Although written from the perspective of three different Christian religious traditions, the three authors are in general agreement on the seriousness of sin in the world, the need for Christians to develop a theology to address sin, and the importance of being a witness in this world. They argue for the importance of Christian community and for engagement with the world. They all consider God to be the source of all good, which humans, at least to some extent, are capable of reflecting. They view sin as a significant hindrance but not an insurmountable one to effective Christian social witness. All draw upon scripture and tradition to fashion a theology for social witness, although the emphasis of each is unique.Waiting for a Glacier to Move: Practicing Social Witness, written from a Reformed and feminist perspective by Jennifer Ayres, explores the practice of [End Page 207] social witness in light of its shape as Christian practice, impact upon participants’ identity, and connections with theologies of sin and hope. The paradox between these two realities is explored in detail. Sin is understood in terms of a web in which we are all embedded, which thereby goes beyond action: the root of every sin is unfaithfulness in relation to God. Hope includes God’s work in the world and the expectation of changes that will undergird and support the work of social witness. Ayres maintains that religious practices are essentially social witness, different from secular social actions in that the former is grounded in theological reflection. She argues for the importance of ethnographic research as a means to fully understand religious social witness, and she includes interviews with Presbyterian groups involved in social action. A key point in her volume is that social witness needs to be rooted in praxis (in which action and belief are in a dynamic relationship) and draw upon the three strands of experience, theological tradition, and social and political theory.In contrast, Gale Heide’s Domesticated Glory: How the Politics of America Has Tamed God does not fit neatly into one Christian theological tradition. While much of the book is a polemic against fundamentalists and evangelicals with a move toward more moderate Christianity, the book ultimately retains a strong conservative emphasis. The author takes a biblically literalist approach to what it means to be a Christian in the world. She takes issue with those Christians who emphasize America as God’s favored nation and warns against the dangers of nationalism. She argues that the Christian Church has forgotten how to be the church, sometimes treating the US Constitution as a sacred text. Heide encourages an Enlightenment turn to the subject and its attendant emphasis on individual and human reason/rationalism, but she also maintains the centrality of Jesus Christ for the world; the real goal of Christianity is to praise the nature of God and to reflect God’s honor through displaying an honorable character, arguing that even too much emphasis on the common good can obscure this goal.Finally, Judith Merkle’s Being Faithful: Christian Commitment in Modern Society explores how to be a faithful Christian in the modern world, rooted in the Catholic tradition’s emphases on devotions, mediation, communion, and sacramentality. She urges examination of various contexts of modern... (shrink)

Jonathan Cohen has claimed that in cases of witness agreement there is an inverse relationship between the prior probability and the posterior probability of what is being agreed: the posterior rises as the prior falls. As is demonstrated in this paper, this contention is not generally valid. In fact, in the most straightforward case exactly the opposite is true: a lower prior also means a lower posterior. This notwithstanding, there is a grain of truth to what Cohen is (...) saying, as there are special circumstances under which a thesis similar to his holds good. What characterises these circumstances is that they allow for the fact of agreement to be surprising. In making this precise, I draw on Paul Horwich's probabilistic analysis of surprise. I also consider a related claim made by Cohen concerning the effect of lowering the prior on the strength of corroboration. 1 Introduction 2 Cohen's claim 3 A counterexample 4 A weaker claim 5 A counterexample to the weaker claim 6 The grain of truth in Cohen's claim 7 Prior probability and strength of corroboration 8 Conclusion. (shrink)

While it is natural to assume that contradiction between alleged witness testimonies to some event disconfirms the event, this generalization is subject to important qualifications. I consider a series of increasingly complex probabilistic cases that help us to understand the effect of contradictions more precisely. Due to the possibility of honest error on a difficult detail even on the part of highly reliable witnesses, agreement on such a detail can confirm H much more than contradiction disconfirms H. It (...) is also possible to model scenarios where we strongly suspect ahead of time that one source has copied another. In these cases, contradiction on a detail due to witness error can even confirm H by disconfirming collusion or copying. Finally, still more complex scenarios show that indirect confirmation, as opposed to exact agreement, provides the “best of both worlds,” simultaneously disconfirming suspected copying while permitting the statements of both sources to be true. (shrink)

THE PAST DECADE has witnessed an extraordinary resurgence of interest in Kant's writings on aesthetics, politics, and history. On the Continent much of this interest has centered on the debate between modernism and postmodernism. Both sides of the debate are in agreement that Kant's differentiation of cognitive, practical, and aesthetic domains of rationality anticipated the fragmentation of modern society into competing if not, as Weber assumed, opposed lifestyles, activities, and value spheres, and that this has generated a crisis of (...) judgment. Tradition is deprived of its authority as a common reference point for deliberation; judgment appears to be all but submerged in the dark void of relativism. Yet, having both accepted Kant's differentiation of reason as emblematic of the pluralism of modern life, modernists and postmodernists remain divided in their response to its implications. Modernists--Habermas and Arendt too, I believe, can be classified under this rubric--attempt to circumvent the relativism of cultural fragmentation by appealing to a universal ideal of community. This solution recalls Kant's own grounding of judgments of taste in the notion of a sensus communis. By contrast, postmodernists such as Lyotard embrace relativism. Whereas the modernist emphasizes the capacity of rational agents to rise above the parochial limits of local community in aspiring toward an autonomous perspective, the postmodernist denies the possibility of impartiality altogether, thus binding judgment to the traditional constraints of practice. (shrink)

Although Ghazzali in his Tahafut al- falasifeh has strongly criticised peripatetic philosophers but in both the two theories that he has offered about the resurrection of the body is under the influence of Ibn Sina’s science of soul. In his Tahafut al- falasifeh, he introduces the theory of a new body as a possibility for the resurrection of the body which is based on being, immateriality and immortality of soul as well as acceptance of soul as a standard for the (...) identity of character which are all peripatetic theories. His other theory is the theory of stimolation that for theologians has been a customary view and Ghazzali has introduced it in his al-Iqtisad fi-itiqad. Also in this theory we are witnessing points of difference between Ghazzali and theologians and the influence of Peripatetic philosophy on him. While for early Asharite theologians believing in stimulation, immaterial soul has no place, Ghazzali has offered the theory of stimulation in such a way that it has no contradiction with the immateriality of stimulation. On the other hand, although like most of the early theologians he considers life after death as a kind of accident but in the analysis of this accident he is not in agreement with them and like peripatetics he interprets these two as the relation and interruption of the soul and body. The influence of Peripatetic philosophy on him in the subject of punishment of grave is also evident. Reviewing the books and treatises such as Maarij al-Qods, al-Maznun behi ala ghir Ahlehi, Kimiyayi Saadat and Ihya Ulum Al-Din also reveals the influence of Peripatetic philosophy on him in the problem of resurrection from the topics of knowledge of self. (shrink)

Since the middle of the 19th century, East Asia, especially Korea, was oppressed externally by the imperialism of Japan and others while internally long-lasting political convention like in-law government was driving the country into troubles at home and abroad. Witnessing such a situation and building up scholarly capability through reading over nearly all spheres, a Confucian philosopher, Ch’oe Han-gi (崔漢綺, 1803-1877), philosophized about the clue to the solution of such a choking phenomenon. Ch’oe believed that there was movement, ki (matter, (...) material force, energy) of revolving transformation inherent in all things, people, or objects. Grasping even the principle and order of existence inherent in things from the viewpoint of ki, he tried to change the traditional theory on the law of existence of things that there existed an ontological reason lacking in motility, which was more dominant than anything existing in the universe and which ruled over the world. From this, he elucidated that the Way, an identity that rules over all affairs and things, was not simply one but diverse. This means, on one hand, that he tentatively accepted the relativity of things. On the other hand, he also taught us “oneness in all things” in which all including human beings exist in close connection to each other transcending the relativity or “agreement” in which they exist in harmony as one and “unity” in which they are united into one. (shrink)

Public health responses to emerging infectious disease rarely try to interrupt the mobility of goods and information. Rather, designed under the rubric of ‘‘public health security,’’ they extend the rationale of free circulation through efforts to intensify movement and communication between international agencies, national health departments, and the pharmaceutical industry. In this way, public health security extends postliberal modes of transnational regulation. This article examines an unfolding scenario which is testing public health’s fidelity to the ethos of international trade agreements: (...) Indonesia has withdrawn from the World Health Organization’s ‘‘virus-sharing’’ scheme because WHO has facilitated the use of Indonesian samples of H5N1 for the commercial development of potentially profitable vaccines without consultation with the Indonesian labs in which they originated. It has been argued that the Indonesian move is one that contests the current securitization of global health. However, I argue that what we are witnessing is the process of emergence of a distinct form of biological sovereignty in the form of rival global health security aggregates, each working to inject a new form of postliberal sovereignty into the field of global public health. (shrink)

After the US Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade, a number of states have immediately banned abortion. Pro-choice activists are responding by promoting medication abortions – a do-it-yourself form of abortion. Women can take pills at home to induce an abortion in the first few weeks of pregnancy. -/- The Biden Administration [1] has backed the abortion pill, too. Attorney-General Merrick B. Garland and Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra both issued statements endorsing it. -/- “We stand ready (...) to work with other arms of the federal government that seek to use their lawful authorities to protect and preserve access to reproductive care,” said the Attorney-General. “In particular, the F.D.A. has approved the use of the medication mifepristone. States may not ban mifepristone based on disagreement with the F.D.A.’s expert judgment about its safety and efficacy.” -/- As the New York Times [1] has noted, this sets the scene for legal battles. The obvious one is: will anti-abortion states prosecute medication abortions? -/- But – based on experience in the United Kingdom - the use of the abortion pill could give pro-life doctors headaches as well. -/- In the past year, UK has witnessed the saga of two Catholic doctors who have been brought in front of the professional regulator, the General Medical Council, after accusations of professional misconduct. Their crime? They had supplied abortion pill reversal (APR) treatment to women. Accusations of this misconduct have been brought forward by pro-choice organisations [2]. -/- The problem is that some women might panic when they discover that they are pregnant or are pressured to make a rash decision. They obtain abortion pills, often without seeing a doctor faceto- face, and soon after taking the first pill, they regret their decision. -/- Is it too late for them to save their pregnancy? Not necessarily. -/- A treatment developed in the US works about half the time. It involves the woman taking progesterone after the first abortion pill to counteract the abortifacient action of the drug. -/- Seventy-three women in the UK are reported to have taken a full APR course, of whom, 38 – more than half — successfully remained pregnant. Admittedly, the procedure is controversial [3], with pro-choice writers denouncing it as unproven, unscientific, and unethical. This has triggered some healthcare practitioners and scholars to analyse the commitments of the pro-choice movement to APR. In a recently published paper in The New Bioethics [4], two colleagues, Dominic Whitehouse and Steven Bow, and I argue that those espousing a pro-choice worldview should actually support abortion pill reversal and that the current evidence indicates that they should actually be doing it. -/- While some pro-choice activists might be happy simply to expand women’s reproductive choices, some might also want to ensure that these choices are safe and effective at achieving the desired outcome, which in principle includes maintaining a pregnancy. -/- We then review the scientific evidence with respect to the ability of APR to halt an abortion, look at the potential impact of APR on mental health, as well as its procedural safety. While highlighting that gold-standard evidence is lacking, we note that APR is associated with about two times higher rate of embryo survival compared to not completing the full early medical abortion course, that there is large agreement in the literature that women who are ambiguous about abortion are at risk of poorer mental health outcomes after abortion (and argue that women who request APR fall into this category), and highlight that there is no evidence that APR is more dangerous than abandoning an initiated early medical abortion. -/- The latter fact is important, as the results of the only randomised-controlled trial of APR have been at times misrepresented in the media [5.6], creating the impression that APR is not safe while most of the adverse effects occurred in the study group that did not receive APR. As our paper argues, with respect to APR the two UK doctors were “champions of women’s choice and should be congratulated, not condemned, by pro-choice advocates”. -/- While the cases against the two doctors have now been dropped (and there have even been accusations against a member of one of these pro-choice organisations that they pressurised a patient into complaining about one of the doctors and twisted the patient’s experience of the treatment [7]), we argue that it is important to set-up systems to facilitate the future provision of APR to protect both patients and healthcare staff. -/- Our conclusion is that, while being open to any change in evidence, those espousing a pro-choice outlook should “support calls for an APR framework that will protect women and the healthcare professionals caring for them” “and certainly not oppose” APR. -/- The debate over abortion pill reversal will be heading to the United States soon. It is quite possible that it will be denounced as dangerous misinformation. It’s not. But pro-life defenders should be prepared to defend their ground. -/- This article was first published by Mercatornet. (shrink)

εἰ δ' ἑκοῦσαι, τί μέμφεσθε εἰς ὃν ἑκόντες ἤλθετε διδόντος καὶ ἀπαλλάττεσθαι, εἴ τις μὴ ἀρέσκοιτο; εἰ δὲ δὴ καὶ τοιοῦτόν ἐστι τόδε τὸ πᾶν, ὡς ἐξεῖναι ἐν αὐτῷ καὶ σοφίαν ἔχειν καὶ ἐνταῦθα ὄντας βιοῦν κατ' ἐκεῖνα, πῶς οὐ μαρτυρεῖ ἐξηρτῆσθαι τῶν ἐκεῖ;And if they descend willingly, why do you blame the cosmos that you willingly entered and that allows anyone who is not satisfied to escape from it? But if this universe is actually such that we can be (...) in it and have wisdom and while being here live according to those intelligible principles, why wouldn't this bear witness to its dependence on those intelligible principles?καὶ οὐδεὶς ἡμῶν τῶν νόμων ἐμποδών ἐστιν οὐδ' ἀπαγορεύει, ἐάντε τις βούληται ὑμῶν εἰς ἀποικίαν ἰέναι, εἰ μὴ ἀρέσκοιμεν ἡμεῖς τε καὶ ἡ πόλις, ἐάντε μετοικεῖν ἄλλοσέ ποι ἐλθών, ἰέναι ἐκεῖσε ὅποι ἂν βούληται, ἔχοντα τὰ αὑτοῦ. ὃς δ' ἂν ὑμῶν παραμείνῃ, ὁρῶν ὃν τρόπον ἡμεῖς τάς τε δίκας δικάζομεν καὶ τἆλλα τὴν πόλιν διοικοῦμεν, ἤδη φαμὲν τοῦτον ὡμολογηκέναι ἔργῳ ἡμῖν ἃ ἂν ἡμεῖς κελεύωμεν ποιήσειν ταῦτα.Not one of our laws raises any obstacle or forbids him, if he is not satisfied with us or the city, if one of you wants to go and live in a colony or wants to go anywhere else, and keep his property. We say, however, that whoever of you remains, when he sees how we conduct our trials and manage the city in other ways, has in fact come to an agreement with us to obey our instructions. (shrink)

John of Damascus (ca. 650/660 – 754 AD) is one of the first contemporary witnesses to critically examine the emergence of Islam and its holy scripture, the Qur’an. John came from a distinguished Melkite family that held political offices in state finance for generations. Like his father, he was initially a civil servant under the Arab rule of Caliph ‘Abd al-Malik (685 – 705). The anti-Christian movement that began in that time forced him to withdraw from public life and enter (...) the Mar Saba monastery near Jerusalem. While at the monastery, John grappled with the text of the “new” religion and defended the Christian position. In this milieu, the interpretation of the divine incarnation occupied a central position. By demonstrating the divine incarnation in Jesus Christ, John makes convergences with the Qur’anic movement of the new rulers. In doing so, he highlights the Qur’ans high esteem of the Virgin Mary as well as the birth and humanity of her Son, Jesus Christ. In this way, he seeks to bring Christianity into agreement with the Qur’an and to break down theological barriers. (shrink)

Late Protestantism - Baptists, Pentecostals, Adventists, and Jehovah's Witnesses have existed in Ukraine for over a hundred years. Under Soviet rule, these denominations were under constant administrative pressure, subject to party-ideological criticism, atheistic propaganda. The Pentecostals were virtually banned and non-registrable, since they were forcibly annexed by evangelical Baptist Christians after the August 1945 state agreement initiated by the Moscow authorities. From the very beginning of the establishment of Soviet power in Western Ukraine, Jehovah's Witnesses were declared an "anti-Soviet (...) sect" and were therefore banned. In March 1951, an act of genocide was committed against Jehovah's Witnesses: according to the "Memorandum Note of the USSR Ministry of State Security", approved by J. Stalin's personal signature, all Jehovah's Witnesses, together with their families, were sent from Ukraine to eternal settlement in Siberia. without the right of return to Ukraine, and their homes and property were confiscated by the state. (shrink)

Considering the official role species play in evolution, there is surprisingly little agreement among scientists or philosophers about what sort of entities species are. Many of the difficulties originate from wholly unexamined, faulty presuppositions about change and causation that characterize most thinking in modern science and philosophy. Thus, since species are essentially bound up with evolutionary change, a coherent account of their nature will require in turn a metaphysically disciplined understanding of change. This study provides both. ;This study considers (...) the known activities of species and surveys views advanced by biologists such as Mayr, Ghiselin, Simpson, Gould, and Dawkins. While competing definitions abound, all ultimately fall into one of two camps. Species are conceived either as real "individual" beings, or as class concepts. Accordingly, these camps debate species' ontological status. However, the debate is unresolvable because neither position is tenable. Actual evidence indicates species are neither individual beings such as organisms are, nor mere class concepts, such as the higher taxa are. The problem is that, wittingly or not, nearly all parties to the debate share an underlying reductionist ontology and corresponding view of causation that cannot explain the observed facts. These assumptions, which are methodological in their origin, are inadequate to explain the general phenomenon of evolutionary change, much less the role of species in it. Thus does the unique nature of species challenge the implicit metaphysical framework of science. ;Taking bearings from Aristotle's metaphysics, this study supplies a framework from which to explain species' observed nature. Of utmost importance is the principle of change, potentiality . Its recovery as a mode of being casts light on species' role in evolution and likewise on their ontological status. More generally, the principles of actuality and potentiality, together with that of function or final cause , all help portray the ontological and causal complexity of species. Recent work in the science of complexity is beginning to corroborate insights long known to Aristotle and Hegel, namely, that "complexity" and all it entails is evident in all entities when their dynamic as well as their formal natures are brought into consideration. (shrink)

All humans laugh. However, there is little agreement about what is appropriate to laugh at. While laughter can unite people by showing how they share values and perspectives, it is also has the power to separate and divide. Humor that "crosses the line" can make people feel excluded and humiliated. This collection of new essays addresses possible ways that moral and ethical lines can be drawn around humor and laughter. What would a Kantian approach to humor look like? Do (...) games create a safe space for profanity and offense? Contributors to this volume work to establish and explain guidelines for thinking about the moral questions that arise when humor and laughter intersect with medicine, gender, race, and politics. Drawing from the work of stand-up comedians, television shows, and ethicists, this volume asserts that we are never just joking. (shrink)

In this paper we make three points about justification of propositions by coherence “from scratch”, where pieces of evidence that are coherent have no individual credibility. First, we argue that no matter how many pieces of evidence are coherent, and no matter what relation we take coherence to be, coherence does not make independent pieces of evidence with no individual credibility credible. Second, we show that an intuitively plausible informal reasoning for justification by coherence from scratch is deficient since it (...) relies on an understanding of “individual credibility” inappropriate for justification from scratch. Third, we show that coherence, when it is recurrent, can make independent sources of evidence with no individual credibility credible. We describe specifically a case in which the same group of independent witnesses with no individual credibility repeatedly produce reports that are in agreement with each other, and their reports become credible as a result. (shrink)

Living organisms are currently most often seen as complex dynamical systems that develop and evolve in relation to complex environments. Reflections on the meaning of the complex dynamical nature of living systems show an overwhelming multiplicity in approaches, descriptions, definitions and methodologies. Instead of sustaining an epistemic pluralism, which often functions as a philosophical armistice in which tolerance and so-called neutrality discharge proponents of the burden to clarify the sources and conditions of agreement and disagreement, this paper aims at (...) analysing: (i) what has been Kant's original conceptualisation of living organisms as natural purposes; (ii) how the current perspectives are to be related to Kant's viewpoint; (iii) what are the main trends in current complexity thinking. One of the basic ideas is that the attention for structure and its epistemological consequences witness to a great extent of Kant's viewpoint, and that the idea of organisational stratification today constitutes a different breeding ground within which complexity issues are raised. The various approaches of complexity in biological systems are captured in terms of two different styles, universalism and (weak and strong) constructivism, between which hybrid forms exist. (shrink)

The boundaries of psychology have never been very distinctly defined and, as a consequence, science has witnessed frequent border incidents. But it obviously is not psychology alone which suffers from such lack of delineation, but its neighbors, the biological and social sciences, do as well. Cooperation between sciences becomes difficult under these conditions. All agree that psychology is the science of mind, but few agree to what “mind” is. At least within our century “mind” has been taken to be “behavior”, (...) for the present day outlook is that mind is behavior rather than that which is responsible for behavior. The metaphysical dynamism of a prime mover has been replaced by an experimental concept, i.e., one that is susceptible to scientific investigation. There is no need to review the complex history of behavioristic psychology in its many ramifications, ranging from Watson's mechanism to the various vitalistic teleologies. We turn instead to a fundamental problem on which there is little agreement: “What kind of behavior should be called mind?”. (shrink)

The past few years have witnessed an exponentially growing body of work conducted under the ‘second person’ heading. This idea has been explored in various areas of philosophy , in developmental psychology, in psychiatry, and even in neuroscience. We may call this interest in the second person the ‘You Turn’. To put it at its most general, and ambitious, the idea driving much of the work is this: proper attention to the ways in which we relate to one another when (...) we stand in second person relation to each other can deliver something like a paradigm shift in the way in which we address questions about a range of fundamental issues in these fields. There is, however, very little agreement about what second person relations are, and a huge variation in why people think they are important. The contributions to this book focus on developing key second-person claims in the philosophy of mind, ethics and epistemology, with the aim of beginning to provide a framework for assessing and relating the multitude of fascinating new questions that come up under the second person heading. This book was originally published as a special issue of Philosophical Explorations. (shrink)

Over the past decades, we have witnessed calls for greater transdisciplinary engagement between scientific and societal actors to develop more robust answers to complex societal challenges. Although there seems to be agreement that these approaches might nurture innovations of a new kind, we know little regarding the research practices, their potential, and the limitations. To fill this gap, this article investigates a funding scheme in the area of transdisciplinary sustainability research. It offers a detailed analysis of the imaginaries and (...) expectations on which the funding scheme rests and how researchers actually practice transdisciplinarity within the respective projects. Identifying three ideal typical models of science–society relations at work, attention is paid to how, where, and when societal and scientific arenas get entangled. This article discusses the tensions between classical academic values and efforts to open research to society, the prevailing power structures that make societal participation challenging, the importance of place and technopolitical cultures, and how temporal project structures impede more radical openings to new ways of knowledge production. We finally emphasize that transdisciplinary knowledge production can only become a serious option for addressing societal challenges if broader changes are made to the knowledge regimes in place. (shrink)

In 1956 U. T. Place proposed that consciousness is a brain process. More attention should be paid to his word ‘process’. There is near-universal agreement that experiences are processive—as witnessed in the platitude that experiences are occurrent states. The abandonment of talk of brain processes has benefited functionalism, because a functional state, as it is usually conceived, cannot be a process. This point is dimly recognized in a well-known but little-discussed argument that conscious experiences cannot be functional states because (...) the former are occurrent, while the latter are dispositional. That argument fails, but it can be made sound if we reformulate it with the premise that occurrent states are processive. The only way for functionalists to meet the resulting challenge is to abandon the standard individuation of functional states in terms of purely abstract causal roles. (shrink)

Twenty first century is posing unprecedented challenges for the human existence and development. This era has witnessed awesome economic & technological growth, increased connectedness but great poverty, malnutrition, anxiety, mental stress and environmental degradation. Thus, this time depicts great contradiction, uncertainty, and risk. Accordingly, in this era a holistic education system has to deal with the challenges such as population growth, terrorism, environmental degradation, hegemony of machines, mental stress, cultivating creativity, bridging the skill and wisdom gap, and expanding human potential (...) etc. To find a sustainable solution to such challenges, we need to develop a holistic education system which acknowledges various dimension of human being. For this task, this paper will try to highlight some philosophical themes which are commonly suggested by various prominent thinkers such as M.K. Gandhi, R.N. Tagore, J. Krishnamurti, S. Radhakrishnan etc. in India, and J. Dewey, I. Illich, and B. Russell etc. in the west. They have put forward their philosophy to discuss the aims of education which are relevant to this century. In this paper, we will analyze their views from the perspective of the challenges that the twenty-first century world is going to face. Our investigation will analyze agreements and disagreements among the approaches taken by these educators. However, the focus will be on the commonalities, so that we can identify some philosophical themes which can work as the solid foundation for holistic model of education. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:This Universalism Which Is Not OneLinda M. G. Zerilli (bio)Ernesto Laclau. Emancipation(s). London: Verso, 1996.Judging from the recent spate of publications devoted to the question of the universal, it appears that, in the view of some critics, we are witnessing a reevaluation of its dismantling in twentieth-century thought. One of the many oddities about this “return of the universal” 1 is the idea that contemporary engagements with it are (...) more or less of a piece, and that they reflect a growing consensus that poststructuralist political theories are incapable of generating a viable alternative to the collective fragmentation that characterizes late modernity. 2 The putative return to the universal marks, on this view, both a homecoming to Enlightenment ideals—purified of their more poisonous elements, of course—and a reconciliation of sorts between those who refuted these ideals and those who sought to realize them. Now that “we” all know and agree that poststructuralism is critically valuable but politically bankrupt; now that we all know and agree that the “old universal” was indeed a “pseudo-universal,” so the homecoming narrative goes; we can get on with the project of constructing a “new universal.” 3 This authentic universal would really be inclusive of all people, regardless of race, class, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, nationality, and whatever else attaches to the “embarrassing etcetera” that, as Judith [End Page 3] Butler reminds us, inevitably accompanies such gestures of acknowledging human diversity.Before signing on to this felicitous agreement about “the necessity of universalism,” we may wish to know whether we have anything like a minimal agreement in language, that is, whether we who speak of this universal are even speaking about the same thing. Apart from the not insignificant problem of translating from a philosophical to a political idiom, the whole question of this agreement is virtually occluded by the rush to rescue politics from the virulent particularisms that admit no common ground or sense of collective belonging. Presented in terms of the familiar binary couple, the choice between universalism and particularism seems settled by merely pointing to global and domestic political realities. Universalism is the only alternative to social fragmentation, wild child of the collapse of communism, the rise of deadly nationalisms, and the multiculturalist romance with particularism. To invoke the name of the universal in any affirmative sense is already to sign on to the political diagnosis and its solution.One of the many virtues of Ernesto Laclau’s Emancipation(s) is that it offers both an alternative to the binarisms spawned by the “return” to the universal (for example, false universalism/true universalism) and a trenchant critique of the original binary couple itself (universalism/ particularism). Demonstrating the imbrication of the universal and the particular, Laclau shows why it is a matter not of choosing one over the other but of articulating, in a scrupulously political sense, the relation between the two. He thus explicitly rejects the notion that this relation is one of mutual exclusion, and shows that the tendency to see it as just that has led to the impasse of the contemporary debate, an impasse that is glossed over in some highly visible academic cases by proclaiming the necessary return to the universal. Although the language of universalism as spoken by Laclau searches for some common ground between particularists and universalists, it is more by way of articulating their mutual contamination, that is, how each is rendered impure by the irreducible presence of the other.The Problem of UniversalsLaclau situates his collection of essays in the context of the increasingly polarized debate over multiculturalism, a debate in which the classical universalism of the philosophical tradition has come under serious question. Reading his essays, one comes to see the deep dependence of the entire contemporary discussion on this tradition, even when its metaphysical assumptions are explicitly rejected (as, say, in the work of Seyla Benhabib) or insufficiently comprehended (as in most of the popularized political discourse). Laclau’s book can help us to see that the political question of universalism cannot be posed properly as long as it remains tethered to the classical philosophical “problem of universals.” At stake in sorting out the affinities and... (shrink)

George Wright - Curley and Martinich in Dubious Battle - Journal of the History of Philosophy 40:4 Journal of the History of Philosophy 40.4 461-476 Curley and Martinich in Dubious Battle George Wright the division of opinion as to the place of religion in the thought of Thomas Hobbes figures today as perhaps the key facet of a general rift in understanding the philosopher's thought and work. A recent conference at University College, London, confirms this observation, but readers of this (...) journal had some time before witnessed an encounter between Edwin Curley, University of Michigan, and A. P. Martinich, University of Texas, which laid out lines of argument that continue to figure in the debate. When two highly accomplished and learned philosophers divide on fundamental points, the result must be of interest. But here the theme itself also compelled attention: Hobbes's theology. Had these dry bones risen? If so, could the dancing angels be far to seek, and what then of the filioque? While there were gestures of accommodation and agreement throughout the exchange, the essentials that divided the two at the beginning largely remained at the end. What assumptions underlay this disagreement and determined its rather unsatisfying conclusion? In answer, I would draw the reader's attention to the peculiarities of the contested concept, that of authorial sincerity: Martinich tenaciously ascribing it to Hobbes's theologus; Curley steadfastly withholding.. (shrink)

Note: The author holds the copyright, and there was no agreement, express or implied, not to use a facsimile PDF. -/- Using erotetic logic, the paper defines the "the whole truth" in a manner consistent with U.S. Supreme Court precedent. It cannot mean "the whole story," as witnesses in an adversary system are permitted /only/ to answer the questions put to them, nor are they permitted to speculate, add irrelevant material, etc. Nor can it mean not to add an (...) admixture of falsity, as that is already included in "nothing but the truth," and, strictly speaking, in "the truth," as any such as admixture renders the whole thing false (given bivalence is presupposed) by &-introduction. (shrink)

Despite the notable lack of Chaplinesque romantic flourishes, Buster Keaton has a sophisticated approach to romantic love in his films. Love in Keaton’s films is a mutual recognition and admiration for the physical and mental competence necessary to deal with an absurd, cruel, or indifferent social and physical environment and an agreement to face the world together. There are two ways in which this claim might seem surprising to someone familiar with Keaton’s films. Keaton’s famously stoic persona seems to (...) be at odds with the very idea that there is an expression of romantic love in the films. How could someone so un-expressive express romantic love? There is simply not enough there to be interpreted. Additionally, the topic of love seems to be the wrong approach to take toward Keaton, the master of the gag. His films are original and interesting and funny because of their visual wit, not because of their thematic value. Watching his films for themes is to miss what is valuable about them. In answering these objections, I will set the stage for my argument that Keaton’s narratives assume the viewer recognizes the Buster character is in love while withholding many of the traditional emotional signifiers of that love. The narrative cannot proceed without this assumption and many of the gags don’t work without recognizing Buster’s motivation. Through careful attention to the resolution of the stories within the films, we can begin to recognize the surprising, sophisticated approach to romantic love that the films contain. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Cit: ConsciousnessAlan PretiCit: Consciousness. By Bina Gupta. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2003. Pp. xi + 203.In his 1988 essay "Consciousness in Vedānta,"1 J. N. Mohanty pointed out that, Heidegger notwithstanding, a metaphysics of consciousness has been the destiny of Indian thought. Indeed, from the earliest Upaniṣadic speculations to the growth of the systems, the centrality of the concept of consciousness to the development of Indian philosophy can (...) hardly be denied. It is even arguable that the nature and function of consciousness was perhaps the greatest bone of contention among the darśanas, with some of the more critical disputes turning on the details of a particular theory of consciousness. The importance of the concept lies in the almost universal agreement among classical Indian philosophers that consciousness enjoys a fundamental epistemic priority regarding the guarantee of any ontological claim; any claim with respect to the existence of such and such, to the way the world is, ultimately depends on evidence that is (or was) in some way present to consciousness. Consciousness is thus the fons et origo of all knowledge; in its absence nothing can be claimed about the world.One of the most recent additions to a growing body of literature concerned with examining the concept of consciousness in Indian thought is Bina Gupta's Cit: Consciousness, the inaugural release of Oxford's Foundations of Philosophy in India series, initiated by the Centre for Philosophy and Foundations of Science in New Delhi. The editors intend for the series "to make available a critical reassessment of the philosophical achievement of the classical Indian tradition in such a way that it contributes to the dialogue between civilizations of the new century"—a prospect most welcome by those engaged in Indian and comparative philosophy. [End Page 619]Cit: Consciousness is a natural extension of Gupta's work in The Disinterested Witness: A Fragment of Advaita Vedānta Phenomenology (1998). While concerned there primarily with the notion of the witness consciousness (sākṣin) in the Vivarana tradition of Advaita Vedānta, in Cit Gupta seeks to provide a more general account of consciousness in Indian thought. Her stated goals are "(1) to demonstrate the profound contribution of Indian thought to the theme of consciousness, and (2) to make Indian thought accessible to my readers, irrespective of whether they belong to the Indian or Western tradition" (p. 11). Consistent with the aims of the series, Gupta's approach is conceptual, rather than historical; her focus is specifically on various theories of the nature of consciousness and on the arguments advanced on their behalf. Concerns regarding the losses incurred by abstracting the theories from their historical context are balanced by the recognition that the historical development of a particular school yields one type of understanding, its conceptual structure another (p. 12). In this connection, one may note that Gupta's emphasis on the arguments and conceptual frameworks could make for greater accessibility to those unfamiliar with the territory; certainly the prominence of philological and historical concerns found in many accounts of the development of the schools can prove distracting to the reader seeking the specific philosophical issues.Cit unfolds dialectically, beginning with an analysis of consciousness distilled from the Upaniṣads, continuing through the Nyāya-Vaiśesika and Yogācāra Buddhist views, and culminating with an examination of Advaita Vedānta, both in its classical form and in its "transformations" effected by the contemporary philosophers Sri Aurobindo, K. C. Bhattacharyya, and J. N Mohanty. The order in which the views are discussed is not arbitrary; Gupta's arrangement of the themes purposefully leads to an analysis of Advaita not only because it is, to her mind, "an amazing case of a sublime metaphysical system, subtle logical discursivity, and detailed phenomenological description" (p. x), but also in order to "show that the conceptual nature of the Advaitic theory of consciousness undergoes transformations in the hands of many contemporary thinkers, which makes the Advaitic theory of consciousness stronger and more responsive to modern philosophic challenges" (p. 13). The book, thus, in effect, seeks to vindicate an Advaitic view of consciousness. The final chapter includes a comparative assessment... (shrink)

Sociologists have increasingly adopted the insight that ‘modern societies’ undergo major historical transformations; they are not stable or undergoingonly smooth social change once their basic institutional structure has been established. There is even some broad agreement that the late twentieth century witnessed the most recent one of those major transformations leading into the present time – variously characterized by adding adjectives such as ‘reflexive’, ‘global’ or simply ‘new’ to modernity. However, neither the dynamics of the recent social transformation nor (...) the characteristic features of the present social constellation have been adequately grasped yet.Rather than assuming a socio-structural or politico-institutional perspective, as they dominate in sociology and political science respectively, this articleconcentrates on the way in which current social practices are experienced and interpreted by the human beings who enact them as parts of a common worldthat they inhabit together. It will be suggested that current interpretations are shaped by the experience of the dismantling of ‘organized modernity’ from the 1970s onwards and of the subsequent rise of a view of the world as shaped by parallel processes of ‘globalization’ and ‘individualization’, signalling the erasure of historical time and lived space, during the 1990s and early 2000s. In response to these experiences, we witness today a variety of interconnected attempts at re-interpretation of modernity, aiming at re-constituting spatiality and temporality. The re-constitution of meaningful time concerns most strongly questions of historical injustice, in terms of the present significance of past oppression and exclusion and in terms of the unequal effects of the instrumental transformation of the earth in the techno-industrial trajectory of modernity. The re-constitution of meaningful space focuses on the relation between the political form of a spatially circumscribed democracy and the economic practices of expansionist capitalism as well as on the spatial co-existence of a plurality of ways of world-interpretation. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Utility and Morality: Adam Smith's Critique of Hume Marie A. Martin Reading Smith's Theory ofMoral Sentiments one cannot help but note that, in spite ofthe obvious similarities between Smith and Hume and the equally obvious borrowings and adaptions Smith makesofportions of Hume's theory, the two differ substantially on the role of utility in morality. The difference is, in fact, practically diametrical opposition. Hume believed that utility was the "foundation (...) of the chief part of morals." Smith, on the other hand, believed that, while utility may contribute an additional beauty to virtue, it is never the source oftheir virtue and rarely the source of moral approbation. Given their agreement in so many other respects, why the difference regarding utility? To answer this question I shall examine both Smith's specific criticisms ofHume regarding the role ofutility in morals and his more general objections to any theory that makes an appeal to utility a foundation ofmoral approval. I shall show that, while Smith does raise anumber ofgenuine difficulties for Hume's theory, he does not succeed in his most serious criticism, that is, that Hume's theory does not adequately capture the essentially social nature ofmorality. Hume's View ofthe Role ofUtility AccordingtoHume, the sentimentofmoral approbation arisesfrom the perception ofqualities ofcharacter or mind which are either useful or agreeable to ourselves or others. Examples of qualities agreeable to ourselves include cheerfulness, confidence, self-respect, and taste. Examples of qualities agreeable to others include manners, wit, eloquence, andmodesty. But themajorityofourmoral sentiments arise from the perception of the usefulness of qualities, that is, "from reflexions on their tendency to the happiness of mankind, and of particularpersons."2 Utility or usefulness is nothing but a tendency to a certain end. But, Hume claims, "itis acontradictioninterms, thatany thingpleases as means to an end, where the end itself no wise affects us" (E 219). Thus, ifwe approve ofthose qualities thathave a tendency to promote the happiness or well-being of either the possessor or others, it must be eitherbecause we value theirhappinessin itselforbecause we value it as a means to our own interests. Volume XVI Number 2 107 MARIE A. MARTIN Hume rejects the second alternative as contrary to experienced fact. The "selfish systems" which attempt to reduce all moral approbation to self-interest cannot account for our praise and admiration ofthe courage and fortitude ofour enemies even when their consequences thwart our own interests. Neither can such systems account for the fact that "[w]e frequently bestow praise on virtuous actions, performed in very distant ages and remote countries; where the utmost subtilty ofimagination would not discover any appearance ofself-interest" (E 215-16). If it is not self-interest that leads us to approve useful qualities, thenitis clear that"[w]e must adopt amore public affection, and allow, that the interests ofsocietyare not, even on their own account, entirely indifferent to us" (E 219). We approve of qualities that promote the well-being of others because we have a natural concern for their welfare. In general, it is certain, that, wherever we go, whatever we reflect on or converse about, every thing still presents us with the view of human happiness or misery, and excites in our breast a sympathetic movement of pleasure or uneasiness. (E 221) Thus, our approval of useful qualities rests on their tendency to promote the happiness of those who possess or are affected by them, and this, in turn, rests on sympathy, the communication of passions, whereby we "feel" for others—happiness for theirjoys, sorrow for their miseries. So, althoughtheutilityofqualitiesofcharacteris notthe solecause ofour approbation, it is the most extensive and important one. It appears tobe matter offact, that the circumstance oíutility, in all subjects, is a source ofpraise and approbation: That it is constantly appealed to in all moral decisions concerning the merit and demerit ofactions: That it is the sole source ofthat high regard paid to justice, fidelity, honour, allegiance, and chastity: That it is inseparable from all the other social virtues, humanity, generosity, charity, affability, lenity, mercy, and moderation: And, in a word, that it is the foundation ofthe chief part of morals, which has a reference to mankind and our fellow-creatures. (E... (shrink)

In the realm of Polish law, arbitration is anything but a new concept. In an ever-developing economy, arbitration has become a useful tool in resolving disputes that are commercial in nature. The issue pertinent to the choice of language in an arbitral proceeding has been thoroughly investigated in the doctrine of international arbitration, yet the conclusions are not set in stone and are likely to change and evolve over time. As evidenced by the technological revolution, introduction of mechanical translations, and (...) artificial intelligence (“AI”) it may seem that the challenges will be difficult to predict. Alternatively, the status quo of the English language as the number one language in the arbitral proceedings will remain. The parties can easily dismiss the linguistic and interpretative problems surrounding arbitration agreements. Thus, this article endeavors to consider the possible implications of a case scenario, wherein a party would attempt to arbitrate an international dispute with a Polish party on the basis of a contract that would be in a language that differs from Polish. Additionally, attention is drawn to the role of witnesses in an arbitration proceeding as such witnesses may speak languages that are the same, similar, or entirely different to the language spoken by the parties involved in the arbitration, as well as differ from the primary language of the arbiters. This article examines the aforementioned hypothetical case-scenario with the emphasis on relevant Polish acts of law. The research presented in this article is also focused on the examination of regulations vested in the statute of the most prominent Arbitration Court in Poland, and its provisions pertinent to language. (shrink)

_ "LaBossiere brilliantly tackles many of the toughest ethical dilemmas of our times, from gender selection, cloning and sexual inequality to violence in the media and the conduct of warfare. In an age of snap judgments and stereotypes, he approaches his topics in a refreshingly open-minded fashion. His quick wit and firm knowledge of contemporary culture bring philosophy full-force into the 21st century." —Paul Halpern, Professor Of Physics, University Of The Sciences in Philadelphia and author of What's Science Ever Done (...) for Us? From the author's introduction: Philosophy, as I see it, is not about believing certain tenets or accepting certain dogmas. Philosophy is about asking questions, seeking answers and entertaining doubt. Critical to that endeavor is a willingness to be rationally provoked by different ideas and to see where they might lead—assuming they turn out to be worth following. If you find that you disagree with me, so much the better. The search for truth and wisdom benefits most from dissent. It is uncritical agreement that derails this search and leaves people stuck in the dark. Of course, if you do agree with me on some points, that is cool, too. _ I n this stimulating book, Michael C. LaBossiere takes a provocative look at issues in contemporary politics, culture and society through the lens of philosophy. Collected from LaBossiere's regular column in The Philosopher's Magazine, this fascinating set of philosophical provocations assumes no background in philosophy and focuses on matters that are of popular interest to the general public, yet are also philosophically significant. Topics range across a whole host of controversial issues that are of genuine interest to the reader, including same sex marriage, video games, gene therapy, true love, chance, torture, gender, god, the media, and freedom. >. (shrink)

One day in the year 1274, Giuntino Jacobi appeared at the church of Santo Stefano in Quarrata. According to the notarial contract in the register of Ildebrandino d'Accatto, Giuntino was already seething with rage when he arrived at the sanctuary. When he then tried to force his way into the church, the presbyter Donato refused him access by slamming the door in his face. There is little doubt that Donato felt threatened, as he very quickly set about raising the hue (...) and cry by sounding the church bell and calling out for help. Meanwhile Giuntino, in a gesture portending Khrushchev's more famous one, took off his shoe and began pounding on the church door until a group of local men arrived and carted him away. Donato lost no time in denouncing the shoe-thumping Giuntino to the court of the podestà. When Giuntino absented himself from court, he was fined 200 fiorini piccoli, declared contumacious, and by order of the General Council banished from the commune of Florence and its territories. Thanks to the institution of the peace agreement, this story has an unexpected ending. Six months later, Donato and Giuntino stood before a notary and three witnesses in the church of Sant'Angelo di Quarrata and reconciled their differences. Their dispute was settled with the kiss of peace. The written witness—the peace agreement—was duly registered in the notarial protocol of Ildebrandino d'Accatto. (shrink)

The epistemology of monotheism offered by philosophers has given inadequate attention to the kind of foundational evidence to be expected of a personal God whose moral character is ’agapeic’, or perfectly loving, toward all other agents. This article counters this deficiency with the basis of a theistic epistemology that accommodates the distinctive moral character of a God worthy of worship. It captures the widely neglected ’agonic’, or struggle-oriented, character of a God who seeks, by way of personal witness and (...) intentional action, to realize and manifest ’agape’ among humans who suffer from selfishness. In doing so, the article identifies the overlooked role of personifying evidence of God in human moral character formation. In agreement with some prominent New Testament themes, the new perspective offered ties the epistemology of monotheism to robust ’agapeic’ morality in a way that makes such epistemology ethically challenging for inquirers about God’s existence. Accordingly, s. (shrink)

Mirrors for princes, in general, give advices to the rulers about the subtleties of political art. Another aim of these books is to define and explain the administration of the state and the duties of rulers based on experience. In consequence of this they reflect the practical ethics of the period in which they were written. As such, they resemble practical handbooks written for rulers. Another point regarding the mirrors for princes works in which the political understanding of the era (...) can be observed is that they generally use sacred texts in order to prove the political legitimacy or invalidity of the power, as well as the rightfulness or the unlawfulness of the claims to the throne. Evidences from the Qurʾān and the ḥadīth literature was almost always used to support such advocated opinions. In fact, during the Middle Ages when religion and politics were considered coupled, it was unthinkable that religious elements should not be included in the works of state administration. The important point here is that the verses and ḥadīths were sometimes removed from their contexts and interpreted and explained in a way to support the ideology of the author or the ruler whom the author presented his work. In this study, we will try to reveal the subjects in which the verses and ḥadīths used in the mirrors for princes, which is a genre that has emerged within the Islamic culture and civilization. Thus, we aim to prepare a background for the future studies, which will focus on a specific verse or ḥadīth.Summary: The first political splits in Islamic history occurred immediately after the death of prophet Muḥammad. These differences were resolved by the agreement of the majority of Muslims on Abu Bakr's name. Until the second half of the rule of the third caliph ʿUthmān, Muslims came together around the unifying power of the idea of conquest. Nevertheless, substantially as a result of economically based problems the period of tranquility in Islamic society came to an end and was replaced by disputes. Disputes turned into conflict and ultimately seperation fused with the massacre of ʿUthmān in the capital Medina turned into a big fire with the Battles of the Camel and Ṣiffīn, the emergence of Khārijīs, the formation of the Shia and the deepening of the intellectual divisions after the all of these. Islamic history has witnessed a clash of different religious views and beliefs. along with deepening of intellectual disagreements as a result of political debatesIn the Islamic political thought, especially the first two centuries process was formed around the views of the jurists, muḥaddiths and theologians. The first sources used by those who tried to justify their opinion in the differences of opinion experienced during this period were the Qurʾān and ḥadīth literature which Muslims accepted as the determining factor in all their acts. The views based on the Qur'an and the hadiths, which are the two main sources of Islamic religion, had been used to influence the people, legitimize the actions and refute the claims of the opponents. On the other hand the sort who gave direction to political thought changed and political thought adhered a new path with Turks and Persians served as bureaucrats and soldiers and took an active position in the state. Especially Persians carried the culture of advice to Islamic thought, which is the product of both Greek and Hind civilization. Such books had brought in the İslamic society with translation movements began in the Umayyad period and peaked with the Bayt al-Ḥikma in the Abbasid period. Together with these books, the ideas of these civilizations on ideal state administration, politics and morality were recognized by Muslim scholars.These type of works, which are famous in terms of Islamic thought as mirrors for princes, have been written by Muslim scholars since the middle of the eighth century. Mirrors for princes are political, moral and religious content books that gives the rulers practical advice to maintain their power in accordance with the religious orders and prohibitions, and to the consent of Allāh’s who grant them this authority and people which appointed for their administration. Mirrors for princes are mostly theoretical books since they are mostly focused on what should be. In addition, since they are written for names that currently hold power, they are centered on how the rulers can maintain and increase their power and with which practices the state will maintain its existence for a longer period. The basic point of political thought and political interpretation are concepts and definitions. When the concept meaning of a word is mentioned, it is generally considered that there is a general definition. However, the concepts reflect the meaning that the user assigns to him in the context of his thoughts, perceptions, criticisms, explanations and analyzes. Concepts such as fair, honest, brave, hero, beautiful, rich, good and clean express what the person imposes on the meaning. In other words, everyone’s experience determines the content of the concept so far. The meaning of the concepts varies with the age and its user of that concept. Even concepts such as justice, merit and consultation can change meaning in different periods and geographies. The concepts, which are often used to facilitate understanding, are sometimes used to judge, to mold or mislead the interlocutor. In this context, it is imperative to enter the mind of the user in order to make concept analysis.In Islamic civilization, the principles of management are explained with concepts. The idiosyncrasies that Muslims expect from an ideal ruler are defined as justice, consultation, merit, trust and legitimacy and a broad corpus has been written about the concepts related to the administration, especially those mentioned. One type of this corpus is mirrors for princes.In Islamic history, there are many Mirrors for princes who are written in different time periods by names coming from different geographies and different backgrounds. Although the advice given in Mirrors for princes indicate a great similarity to each other, the preferred arguments and examples in the foundation of the counsel are different. While the persons in active politics mostly based their opinions on political arguments, scholars with scientific tradition supported their advices with religious arguments.Verses are the leading religious elements highlighted in Mirrors for princes. While explaining the concepts and emphasizing the importance of the advices, many verses have been exploited. Some verses are used only by one author, while some verses are the subject of their work by many authors. In the same way, ḥadīths and the sentences accepted as ḥadīths were also used to reinforce the emphasis and meaning. At this point, sometimes the context of the verses and ḥadīths were not taken care of. In this study, we aim to address the use of religious elements.In the literature, different opinions have emerged about who is ülü’l-emr and the limits of obedience to ülü’l-emr that used describe the names of senior executives and leaders of society. The reason for the difference is that each sect or religious school provides an interpretation on the basis of grounding its own views in explaining the verse. Justice is the most emphasized concept among the advices given to the rulers in mirrors for princes. Justice, which is shown as the most important feature of a sovereign, has been regarded as extremely important for the state to existences until the Doomsday. In addition, justice has been described as the most important condition for the maintenance of the state/sovereign authority. Consultation was important to make the right decision.Verses and ḥadīths were used in the explanations about the personal characteristics of the sovereign. Some features such as being compassionate, keeping promise, controlling anger, patience, honesty, blessing, extravagance, self-esteem, break a promise, revoke a promise and arrogance have become the subject of politics. When the mirrors for princes are considered as a whole, it is seen that religion and state are considered as inseparable twin brothers, taken one step further the understanding that accepts religion and the world as brothers especially is a product of the old Persian tradition. In this understanding, religion was accepted as the root and was given the duty of its patronage to political authority. It is seen that in the Mirrors for princes verses and ḥadīths hold a significant amount. As the reason for this can be said that along with religion takes place on the basis of morality, the authors of the Mirrors for princes, which put deep meanings on the relationship between religion and the state in the period that we are dealing with, consider both institutions to be complementary and integrative. (shrink)

‘The Science of the Soul is Surer than every other Science’. An Eckhartian Interpretation of Bearing Witness (John 8 :17). Why does the knowledge of the soul constitute the surest science, according to the thesis that Meister Eckhart takes from Aristotle? Here is the reason he gives : «Concerning what is within us, we are not seeking the testimony and approval of anyone else». But the argument of the uselessness of the testimony of another seems paradoxical in the context (...) in which it appears : the commentary on the verse in John 8 :17 which is precisely about basing the certainty of the testimony as knowledge through the mediation of another. How are we to understand this paradox? My assumption is that it is necessary to consider the point at which the doctrinal aspect of this commentary about bearing witness and its hermeneutical aspect in relation to the interpretation of Scripture are in agreement. From the perspective of doctrine, Meister Eckhart, reinterpreting John Chrysostom, Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, aims to overturn the conception of noetic mediation into one of immediacy, basing this on the Trinitarian theory of the begetting of the Son by the Father in consubstantiality. Therefore otherness and exteriority are led back towards unity of nature and inwardness. And certain knowledge coincides with the knowledge of the principle of one’s own being. From a hermeneutical perspective, the exegesis of the verse according to its latent meaning suggested by Eckhart becomes for him a model of metaphysical and noetic interpretation : to understand in what way the one who is testifying to the principle that has engendered him delivers the most certain knowledge, it is necessary to move from the patent meaning of being and of knowledge to their latent meaning. To this extent, all knowledge through mediation that is demonstrated as external knowledge is revealed to be, in a latent sense, a manifestation of truth as an act of engendering. (shrink)

In this issue of JCE, Baum-Baicker and Sisti present senior psychoanalysts’ views of wisdom.Although views on wisdom differ widely, there is agreement that when ethical conflicts arise, wisdom may be critical in bringing about an optimal result. Here I will present recent empirical findings on wisdom and the ways careproviders may acquire and apply it, especially in ethical conflicts. The findings are not well-known and may seem counterintuitive; I selected them, in large part, for those reasons. A core challenge (...) may be to decide when to give patients standard care and when to make exceptions. In this issue of JCE, Baum-Baicker and Sisti discuss exceptions and Bursztajn and colleagues consider how these exceptions may be further validated as evidence-based treatments. (shrink)

In the lead article in this symposium issue, Edward Imwinkelried follows other scholars in distinguishing among three types of tasks for ethicists serving as expert witnesses: descriptive ; metaethical ; and normative. He finds agreement that the admissibility of descriptive or metaethical evidence rests upon the usual criteria of helpfulness and reliability. He breaks new ground in arguing that normative evidence typically relates to the judge's legislative rather than adjudicative function and therefore need not satisfy the usual standards for (...) admissibility in order to be considered. (shrink)

The last two decades have witnessed a wide-ranging and global discussion of the theory and structure of human and constitutional rights. This debate initially focused on the principle of proportionality and subsequently on the related ideas of the ‘culture of justification’ and the ‘right to justification.’ There is now a far-reaching agreement that both proportionality and justification in human and constitutional rights law are concerned with the reasonableness, alternatively the justification in terms of public reason, of the act under (...) consideration. Thus, reasonableness and/or public reason have assumed a, perhaps the, central place in the theory of human and constitutional rights. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Moral Responsibility in a Context of Scarcity:the Journey of a Haitian PhysicianPaul PierreAlmost all Haitian physicians have been involved in some sort of "social movement" at one point in their professional life. In a country characterized by a natural inclination to question authority, fighting the status quo of the ineffective, corrupt and disorganized [End Page 89] Haitian health system often appears to be the right thing to do.In 2002, (...) I played an active role in a large protest movement for better working conditions at the largest health facility in Port-au-Prince: the General Hospital (GH). Port-au-Prince is the capital and economic center of Haiti. It is home to close to a third of Haiti's ten million people. At that time, the situation at the GH facility was dire. All of the 400 beds at the GH were dirty. The staff was underpaid and unhappy. Drug and medical supply stock-outs were routine. Medical equipment was rarely maintained and only one of the six operating theatres in the surgery block was working. Unsupervised physicians in training (like me) were the main health care providers. Attending physicians were busy running their own private clinics, and most of them would come to the hospital solely to "recruit" the less poor patients for their clinics. As physicians-in-training, we had the responsibility of caring for the poor, but we had no means. We grew frustrated and angry witnessing our powerless patients losing legs, arms and their lives for lack of care. On many occasions, I had the parents of my patients buy the gloves that I would use to examine their sick relatives. I've seen patients fighting for the inheritance of medications left by others who had just passed away. There was no way for this hospital to fulfill its mission, and no way for its staff to deliver anything other than mediocre care. We could not accept that situation at such an early stage in our medical development, and so we refused to continue to work. We went on a strike, which completely paralyzed the delivery of care at the hospital for nearly two months. After intense negotiation, the strike ended with a signed agreement with the Minister of Health that addressed, more or less, the reasons of our movement. However, the implementation of the agreement was permanently delayed by other competing "state emergencies" including a general insurrection.At the time of our movement, I thought we were making history. After witnessing 11 "social movements" that similarly paralyzed the GH in the following decade for reasons identical to ours, I am now convinced that we were not. We were temporary actors performing in the cynical play of scarcity on permanent display in Port-au-Prince. The social movement that we started ended up hurting the very same people that we were trying to help.Extending access to heath care to poor people seemed to me at that time to be too complicated and too expensive for an unorganized state like Haiti. I realized that local protests could, at best, influence the allocation of local resources. But so-called local resources are so limited in "resource-limited" countries. Haiti spends only $40 U.S. dollars per capita for health care. This is not enough for good care. The options we were provided were not real ones—since all of them would end in more suffering. The case of providing health care to poor people needed to be approached differently.I was born in Port-au-Prince at the same general hospital in which I would later work. I am the third of four children, and the first male child in my family. My father made me understand very clearly that my first responsibility was for my siblings. My sisters made me understand equally clearly that I had no authority over any of them. I ended up with a lot of responsibility but with very little authority. The few of us who completed school, entered university, studied abroad and "emerged" were considered, to some extent, responsible for the others—the ones who couldn't go to school, university, or abroad, the ones who had "sunk... (shrink)

Since the millennium, first person accounts of experience have been accepted as philosophically valid, potentially useful sources of information about the nature of mind and self. Several Vedic sciences rely on such first person accounts to discuss experience and consciousness. This paper shows that their insights define the information structure of experience in agreement with a scientific theory of mind fulfilling all presently known philosophical and scientific conditions. Experience has two separate components, its information content, and a separate ‘ (...) class='Hi'>witness aspect’, which can reflect on all forms of experience, and with training be strengthened until its power of reflection identifies it as the innermost aspect of ‘self’. The Vedic sciences, Sankhya, Yoga and Vedanta develop these themes. Sankhya identifies the different aspects of experience, outer and inner; Yoga practices lead the mind to inner states without information content (samadhi) in which the experience of the witness (sakshi) is strengthened and deepened. Vedanta states the nature of the ‘self’ is to know itself directly without intermediary. All this requires the witness to have a singular loop structure. The information structure of experience therefore has two aspects, information content plus a singular loop endowing it with a subjective sense of ‘Self’. (shrink)

The phenomenon of corruption is a cancer that affects our country and that it is necessary to eradicate; This dilutes the opportunities for economic and social development, privileging the single conjunction of particular interests, political actors in non-legal agreements for their own benefit, which lead to acts of corruption. Recent studies indicate that the level of corruption present in a political system is directly related to the type of institutional structure that defines it (Boehm and Lambsdorff, 2009), as well as (...) the ineffectiveness of the control organisms (Casar, 2015; Cárdenas, 2010, Rojas, 2010, Carbonell, 2009, Restrepo, 2004), which requires citizen action to combat corruption (Sandoval, 2010, Villanueva, 2006). This work, focuses our attention on the federal public administration, presenting as a proposal to empower the citizen action in the fight against corruption and in the National Anticorruption System; the figure of Whistleblowers or generator of citizen alert, based on two fundamental principles: i) recognizing the citizen's obligation to report acts of corruption and ii) the granting by the authority of witness protection. These two actions will result in two important results: i) Consolidate the citizen's complaint to inform society about acts of corruption and ii) and the exercise of freedom of information so that society is able to be informed about acts of corruption. These actions will allow promoting and consolidating a culture of reporting acts of corruption that may constitute a crime as a fundamental pillar in the National Anticorruption System in Mexico. (shrink)

The Peripatetic treatise Peri pneumatos has recently received a great deal of scholarly attention. Some authors, predominantly A. Bos and R. Ferwerda, try to prove that the treatise is a genuine work of Aristotle and all the theories advanced in the text can be ultimately explained by references to this or that Aristotelian doctrine. Quite on the contrary, P. Gregoric, O. Lewis and M. Kuhar are firmly convinced that the treatise contains some physiological ideas introduced after Aristotle and are inclined (...) to support the traditional dating of the treatise to the time after Praxagoras of Cos. Largely in agreement with the latter proposition, in the present study I tentatively place this earliest and unique witness of the discussions on the source of growth and nourishment of the so-called connate pneuma in the context of the Peripatetic tradition of the Early Hellenistic period. The treatise is translated into the Russian for the first time. (shrink)

Jordan acceded to the WTO in 1999. In its accession Jordan agreed, for example, to reduce tariffs on imported products and open its services market; it also modified its intellectual property regime. Jordan enjoyed special and differential treatment in few areas and was not able to designate olive oil as a good eligible for special safeguards. The WTO agreements required fundamental changes in the domestic laws and regulations of Jordan. The article concludes by arguing that Jordan’s accession to the WTO (...) was a lengthy and costly process. Jordan agreed to an arduous package of legal and economic reforms. Given that Jordan agreed to greater commitments compared to the obligations of the original WTO members, the multilateral trading system witnessed an accession saga. (shrink)

In this article, I extract Mary Shepherd's social epistemology primarily from her attack on Hume's dismissive account of miracle reports. On my reading, she adopts a nonreductionist position on testimony, arguing that the hearer is both caused and justified to regard testimonies as true by default, that is, in the absence of any undefeated defeater. In contrast to Humean reductionism, we do not need to provide positive evidence for the truth of the testified proposition, for instance, by appealing to the (...) observed reliability of the speaker or speakers generally. In fleshing out her account, I clarify why her nonreductionism does not lead Shepherd to question our epistemic autonomy—the idea that we are supposed to draw our own conclusions. Indeed, I argue that it is precisely her commitment to epistemic autonomy that explains why, despite following Reid's similar account of testimony, she emphatically denies that we could justify metaphysical principles by appealing to common sense or universal agreement among people. Relatedly, I suggest that Shepherd thinks that while we have an a priori right to trust testimonies about events (whether ordinary or extraordinary) that we have not witnessed ourselves, we should never base our philosophical judgments simply on others' authority. (shrink)

This is the second in a series of three papers that charts the history of the Lenz–Ising model (commonly called just the Ising model in the physics literature) in considerable detail, from its invention in the early 1920s to its recognition as an important tool in the study of phase transitions by the late 1960s. By focusing on the development in physicists’ perception of the model’s ability to yield physical insight—in contrast to the more technical perspective in previous historical accounts, (...) for example, Brush (Rev Modern Phys 39: 883–893, 1967) and Hoddeson et al. (Out of the Crystal Maze. Chapters from the History of Solid-State Physics. Oxford University Press, New York, pp. 489–616, 1992)—the series aims to cover and explain in depth why this model went from relative obscurity to a prominent position in modern physics, and to examine the consequences of this change. In the present paper, which is self-contained, I deal with the development from the early 1950s to the 1960s and document that this period witnessed a major change in the perception of the model: In the 1950s it was not in the cards that the model was to become a pivotal tool of theoretical physics in the following decade. In fact, I show, based upon recollections and research papers, that many of the physicists in the 1950s interested in understanding phase transitions saw the model as irrelevant for this endeavor because it oversimplifies the nature of the microscopic constituents of the physical systems exhibiting phase transitions. However, one group, Cyril Domb’s in London, held a more positive view during this decade. To bring out the basis for their view, I analyze in detail their motivation and work. In the last part of the paper I document that the model was seen as much more physically relevant in the early 1960s and examine the development that led to this change in perception. I argue that the main factor behind the change was the realization of the surprising and striking agreement between aspects of the model, notably its critical behavior, and empirical features of the physical phenomena. (shrink)

If I had to live on a desert island and could only bring three books with me, what three books would they be? That is a tough decision! The last thirty years has witnessed a real boom in normative political theory/philosophy. But if I had to choose just three books to take with me to read on a desert island they would be the three books noted below. I think each of these books are engaging projects and each has made (...) an important contribution to their respective fields. Furthermore, my attraction to these books does not stem from any agreement with their conclusions (though I am sympathetic to the concerns that motivate the projects). In fact, I disagree with a great deal of what these authors argue (that is part of my attraction to them!). These three books have had a formative impact on my own intellectual development and research interests in the past few years. (shrink)

Our response to representational art can be called "aesthetic" even if we are not "detached from cognitive and moral matters." for the pleasure we receive from "huckleberry finn" (dickie's example) is not based on its historical or sociological accuracy, Or on our agreement with its moral statements. We enjoy and value the novel because of its wit and irony, Which subvert and so transcend its cognitive and moral truths.

The dissertation under comment is a contribution to the area of Set Theory concerned with the interactions between the method of Forcing and the so-called Large Cardinal axioms.The dissertation is divided into two thematic blocks. In Block I we analyze the large-cardinal hierarchy between the first supercompact cardinal and Vopěnka’s Principle. In turn, Block II is devoted to the investigation of some problems arising from Singular Cardinal Combinatorics.We commence Part I by investigating the Identity Crisis phenomenon in the region comprised (...) between the first supercompact cardinal and Vopěnka’s Principle. As a result, we generalize Magidor’s classical theorems [2] to this higher region of the large-cardinal hierarchy. Also, our analysis allows to settle all the questions that were left open in [1]. Finally, we conclude Part I by presenting a general theory of preservation of $C^{}$ -extendible cardinals under class forcing iterations. From this analysis we derive several applications. For instance, our arguments are used to show that an extendible cardinal is consistent with “ $^{\mathrm {HOD}}<\lambda ^+$, for every regular cardinal $\lambda $.” In particular, if Woodin’s HOD Conjecture holds, and therefore it is provable in ZFC + “There exists an extendible cardinal” that above the first extendible cardinal every singular cardinal $\lambda $ is singular in HOD and $^{\textrm {{HOD}}}=\lambda ^+$, there may still be no agreement at all between V and HOD about successors of regular cardinals.In Part II and Part III we analyse the relationship between the Singular Cardinal Hypothesis with other relevant combinatorial principles at the level of successors of singular cardinals. Two of these are the Tree Property and the Reflection of Stationary sets, which are central in Infinite Combinatorics.Specifically, Part II is devoted to prove the consistency of the Tree Property at both $\kappa ^+$ and $\kappa ^{++}$, whenever $\kappa $ is a strong limit singular cardinal witnessing an arbitrary failure of the SCH. This generalizes the main result of [3] in two senses: it allows arbitrary cofinalities for $\kappa $ and arbitrary failures for the SCH.In the last part of the dissertation we introduce the notion of $\Sigma $ -Prikry forcing. This new concept allows an abstract and uniform approach to the theory of Prikry-type forcings and encompasses several classical examples of Prikry-type forcing notions, such as the classical Prikry forcing, the Gitik-Sharon poset, or the Extender Based Prikry forcing, among many others.Our motivation in this part of the dissertation is to prove an iteration theorem at the level of the successor of a singular cardinal. Specifically, we aim for a theorem asserting that every $\kappa ^{++}$ -length iteration with support of size $\leq \kappa $ has the $\kappa ^{++}$ -cc, provided the iterates belong to a relevant class of $\kappa ^{++}$ -cc forcings. While there are a myriad of works on this vein for regular cardinals, this contrasts with the dearth of investigations in the parallel context of singular cardinals. Our main contribution is the proof that such a result is available whenever the class of forcings under consideration is the family of $\Sigma $ -Prikry forcings. Finally, and as an application, we prove that it is consistent—modulo large cardinals—the existence of a strong limit cardinal $\kappa $ with countable cofinality such that $\mathrm {SCH}_\kappa $ fails and every finite family of stationary subsets of $\kappa ^+$ reflects simultaneously. (shrink)