In 1616, the Holy Congregation for the Index prohibited the printing and reading of Copernicus’s On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres on the grounds that heliocentrism contradicted the Holy Scriptures. According to Johannes Kepler, “To study the heavens is to know God as creator.” Moreover, “Since we astronomers are priests of the highest God in regard to the book of nature, it befits us to be thoughtful, not of the glory of our minds, but rather, above else, of the (...) glory of God.” There is some precedent for such claims in John Calvin’s conception of the creation as a “Theatre of God’s glory” with its corollary of the so-called “two books”. Kepler’s defence of Copernican heliocentrism relies upon the distinction between the Book of Nature from the Book of Scripture. Building upon the soteriological foundations laid by Martin Luther, Kepler the astronomer-theologian also seeks to sharpen the distinction between a “visible” and an “invisible” heaven, with significant consequences for astronomical physics. The new astronomy is profoundly implicated in sixteenth-century theological controversies. (shrink)

From Greco-Roman antiquity through to European enlightenment, philosophy and religious thought were inseparably interwoven. This book explores intellectual worlds of Abrahamic religious traditions, their approaches to scriptural hermeneutics, and their interaction over many centuries on common ground of inheritance of classical Greek philosophy.

ABSTRACT. Richard Hooker’s (1554-1600) adaptation of classical logos theology is exceptional and indeed quite original for its extended application of the principles of Neoplatonic apophatic theology to the concrete institutional issues of a particular time and place—the aftermath of the Elizabethan Religious Settlement of 1559. Indeed, his sustained effort to explore the underlying connections of urgent political and constitutional concerns with the highest discourse of hidden divine realities—the knitting together of Neoplatonic theology and Reformation politics—is perhaps the defining characteristic of (...) Hooker’s distinctive mode of thought. Hooker’s ontology adheres to a Proclean logic of procession and reversion (processio and redditus) mediated by Aquinas’s formulation of the so-called 'lex divinitatis' whereby the originative principle of law remains simple and self-identical as an Eternal Law while it emanates manifold, derivative and dependent species of law, preeminently in the Natural Law accessible to human reason and Divine Law revealed through the Sacred Oracles of Scripture. For Hooker, therefore, ‘all thinges’—including even the Elizabethan constitution in Church and Commonwealth, are God’s offspring: ‘they are in him as effects in their highest cause, he likewise actuallie is in them, the assistance and influence of his deitie is theire life.’. (shrink)

Richard Hooker explained and defended the Elizabethan religious and political settlement, and shaped the self-understanding of the Church of England for generations. This Companion offers a comprehensive and systematic introduction to Hooker’s life, works, thought, reputation, and influence.

Peter Martyr Vermigli's distinctive blend of humanism, hebraism, and scholasticism constitutes a unique contribution to the scriptural hermeneutics of the Reformation. The Companion consists of 24 essays addressing the reformer’s international career, exegetical method, biblical commentaries, major theological topics, and later influence.

This chapter discusses the theological affinity between the Elizabethan church and Peter Martyr Vermigli, the Italian reformer who spent his later career in Zurich. Vermigli’s thought did not simply migrate from the continent to England. The discussion notes that Vermigli’s English experience as an exile was formative for the development of his political theology and that the English monarchy left an imprint on his subsequent Old Testament commentaries on the subject of kingship. Scottish Covenanters and English puritans in the early (...) seventeenth century nonetheless continued to find the work of Zurich reformers useful for refuting episcopacy. If the political theology of Vermigli was agreeable to the Elizabethan church, conformists associated Calvinism with political sedition on the grounds that reformation in Geneva was born out of revolution. (shrink)

The classic study, which establishes a sound theological base for the future of philosophical science.

This book explores issues at the core of modern linguistics and cognitive science. Why are all languages similar in some ways and in others utterly different? Why do languages change and change variably? How did the human capacity for language evolve, and how far did it do so as an innate ability? Simon Kirby looks at these questions from a broad perspective, arguing that they can be studied together. The author begins by examining how far the universal properties of (...) language may be explained by examining the way it is used, and how far by the way it is structured. He then considers what insights may be gained by combining functional and formal approaches. In doing so he develops a way of treating language as an adaptive system, in which its communicative and formal roles are both crucial and complementary. In order to test the effectiveness of competing theories and explanations, Simon Kirby develops computational models to show what universals emerge given a particular theory of language use or acquisition. He presents here both the methodology and the results. Function, Selection, and Innateness is important for its argument, its methodology, and its conclusions. It is a powerful demonstration of the value of looking at language as an adaptive system and goes to the heart of current debates on the evolution and nature of language. (shrink)

In what ways should we include future humanoid robots, and other kinds of artificial agents, in our moral universe? We consider the Organic view, which maintains that artificial humanoid agents, based on current computational technologies, could not count as full-blooded moral agents, nor as appropriate targets of intrinsic moral concern. On this view, artificial humanoids lack certain key properties of biological organisms, which preclude them from having full moral status. Computationally controlled systems, however advanced in their cognitive or informational capacities, (...) are, it is proposed, unlikely to possess sentience and hence will fail to be able to exercise the kind of empathic rationality that is a prerequisite for being a moral agent. The organic view also argues that sentience and teleology require biologically based forms of self-organization and autonomous self-maintenance. The organic view may not be correct, but at least it needs to be taken seriously in the future development of the field of Machine Ethics. (shrink)

I compare a ‘realist’ with a ‘social–relational’ perspective on our judgments of the moral status of artificial agents (AAs). I develop a realist position according to which the moral status of a being—particularly in relation to moral patiency attribution—is closely bound up with that being’s ability to experience states of conscious satisfaction or suffering (CSS). For a realist, both moral status and experiential capacity are objective properties of agents. A social relationist denies the existence of any such objective properties in (...) the case of either moral status or consciousness, suggesting that the determination of such properties rests solely upon social attribution or consensus. A wide variety of social interactions between us and various kinds of artificial agent will no doubt proliferate in future generations, and the social–relational view may well be right that the appearance of CSS features in such artificial beings will make moral role attribution socially prevalent in human–AA relations. But there is still the question of what actual CSS states a given AA is capable of undergoing, independently of the appearances. This is not just a matter of changes in the structure of social existence that seem inevitable as human–AA interaction becomes more prevalent. The social world is itself enabled and constrained by the physical world, and by the biological features of living social participants. Properties analogous to certain key features in biological CSS are what need to be present for nonbiological CSS. Working out the details of such features will be an objective scientific inquiry. (shrink)

Philosophy &Public Affairs, Volume 52, Issue 4, Page 500-531, Fall 2024.

This article explores Derrida's suggestion in Of Grammatology that deconstruction might be considered a positive science. The implication here is that ‘no outside of text’ does not evoke an enclosure whose limits can't be breached, an enclosure that discovers human exceptionalism in linguistic and technological capacities. Instead, this sense of a system and its involvements (différance) is already entangled in any ‘atom’ of its expression, whereby ‘no outside of text’ can be read as ‘no outside of Nature’. The logic that (...) informs and justifies the conventional separations between nature and culture, ideation and matter, and human and non-human, are thereby confounded; the dimensions of efficacy, as well as the vexed question of intention appear as non-local (systemic); and the very notion of language – what it is and how it works – is distributed in ways that give rise to the same quandaries that surround the quantum problematic. Indeed, at the end of this meditation the difference between the humanities and the sciences, especially in its current configuration as the impasse of ‘the two cultures’, can no longer be sustained. (shrink)

Is it possible to prepare oneself to become a Christian? For Kierkegaard, there is no straightforward answer to this question, especially since such a transition depends upon a divine activity that is outside the realm of human control. Despite the challenge that this question poses, Kierkegaard's writings do provide us with a way to respond, and this response will be the subject matter of this article. Following an analysis of his position, this article will conclude that, although Kierkegaard recognizes that (...) there are precedent ways of existing that are more conducive to becoming a Christian, it is not helpful to describe them as preparatory. (shrink)

This article provides a response to John Perry and Sarah Lane Ritchie's article, “Magnets Magic, and Other Anomalies: In Defense of Methodological Naturalism.” In so doing, it provides a defense of some of the arguments I made in my article, “Should a Christian Adopt Methodological Naturalism?” I begin by addressing some of the confusion about my position. However, it is not simply my intention to address confusions. There remain some fundamental differences between my position and Perry and Ritchie's. It is (...) on these differences that I wish to focus––differences that enable me to maintain my critique of methodological naturalism without falling prey to the problems they raise. Constructively, I advance the argument that the Christian scientist should be open to the possibility of theology‐engaged science, as well as the science‐engaged theology that Perry and Ritchie advocate. (shrink)

This opening article will offer a brief introduction to what it means to understand accountability as a virtue. To do so, I first propose a definition of the condition of accountability, which I go on to distinguish from responsibility. Based on this definition, I then present an account of the corresponding virtue of accountability.

New materialisms argue for a more science-friendly humanities, ventilating questions about methodology and subject matter and the importance of the non-human. However, these new sites of attention - climate, biology, affect, geology, animals and objects - tend to leverage their difference against language and the discursive. Similarly, questions about ontology have come to eclipse, and even eschew, those of epistemology. While this collection of essays is in kinship with this radical shake-up of how and what we study, the aim is (...) to re-navigate what constitutes materiality. These efforts are encapsulated by a rewriting of the Derridean axiom, 'there is no outside text' as 'there is no outside nature.' What if nature has always been literate, numerate, social? And what happens to 'the human' if its exceptional identity and status is conceded quantum, non-local and ecological implication? (shrink)

This chapter examines Thoreau’s experiences on Mt. Katahdin, vis-à-vis exposure science and wilderness therapy. A close reading of Thoreau’s account suggests the experience had a profound effect on him, emotionally and philosophically, an effect that is relevant to environmental exposure and eco-vulnerability in the contexts of the COVID-19 pandemic and climate change. Thoreau’s experience on that mountain presented to him an aspect of wilderness antithetical to the romantic, transcendentalist notions he previously held and ultimately led to more nuanced, therapeutic depictions (...) found in works like “Walking” and Walden. That such a reconciliation was possible for Thoreau suggests a privileged insulation from trauma not afforded to many. It also indicates the value of both philosophical contemplation and wilderness therapy to promote psychological resilience and adaptability. The author argues philosophers should begin to engage conceptually and normatively with exposure, vulnerability, and resilience. (shrink)

Bianchi, Stanley, and Sutander argue in an insightful, cogent manner for the consideration of harm reduction as an ethically-defensible, non-paternal management approach for capable persons...

Anthropology diffracted : originary humanicity -- Just figures?: forensic clairvoyance, mathematics, and the language question -- Enumerating language : "The unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics" -- Natural convers(at)ions : or, what if culture was really nature all along? -- (Con)founding "the human" : rethinking the incest taboo -- Culpability and the double-cross : Irigaray with Merleau-Ponty.

The “high school algebra” laws of exponentiation fail in the ordinal arithmetic of sets that generalizes the arithmetic of the von Neumann ordinals. The situation can be remedied by using an alternative arithmetic of sets, based on the Zermelo ordinals, where the high school laws hold. In fact the Zermelo arithmetic of sets is uniquely characterized by its satisfying the high school laws together with basic properties of addition and multiplication. We also show how in both arithmetics the behavior of (...) exponentiation depends on whether the empty set is an element of the base. (shrink)

This paper offers a targeted five-point critique of the current debate about the problem of basic equality. First, it argues that the debate should be refocussed away from any particular concept(ion) of basic equality to a more agnostic proposition about the possibility of establishing equality in any basic moral property. Second, it re-articulates the problem in terms of grounding relations rather than supervenience. Third, it argues that proponents of predominant approach to solving this problem have failed to properly distinguish between (...) two different non-scalar properties defined in terms of scalar properties: ‘range properties’ and ‘bare properties’. Once disambiguated it is clear as to why such an approach must fail. However, this critique does direct our attention to a possible alternative strategy, that is, grounding our equality upon a ‘relative property’. (shrink)

It is often challenging for mental health‐care providers and health organizations to perform their various roles and to meet their varied obligations. In complex mental health‐care circumstances the concurrent application of relevant ethical principles and values often leads to the emergence of completing obligations that need to be carefully weighed and balanced in the making of care‐related decisions. Although some clinical circumstances, such as those potentially triggering the duty to warn, are adequately guided by existing rules based on legal precedents, (...) there is a gap in decision‐making support in other mental health‐care domains. This article proposes that a set of targeted, decision‐making approaches be developed to assist in the handling of specific, challenging circumstances. By way of illustration, two novel approaches are introduced; that is, choosing to work within a moral relational space of optimal therapeutic engagement (at the micro level of clinical practice), and the use of a health policy development approach that instantiates deliberative engagement (at the meso and macro levels of health organization). (shrink)

Critical-care decision making is highly complex, given the need for health care providers and organizations to consider, and constructively respond to, the diverse interests and perspectives of a variety of legitimate stakeholders. Insights derived from an identified set of ethics-related considerations have the potential to meaningfully inform inclusive and deliberative policy development that aims to optimally balance the competing obligations that arise in this challenging, clinical decision-making domain. A potential, constructive outcome of such policy engagement is the collaborative development of (...) an as-fair-as-possible dispute resolution process that incorporates an appropriated-justified, defensible critical-care obligation threshold. (shrink)