This essay analyzes Theodosius Dobzhansky’s famous article, “Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution,” in which he presents some of his best arguments for evolution. I contend that all of Dobzhansky’s arguments hinge upon sectarian claims about God’s nature, actions, purposes, or duties. Moreover, Dobzhansky’s theology manifests several tensions, both in the epistemic justification of his theological claims and in their collective coherence. I note that other prominent biologists—such as Mayr, Dawkins, Eldredge, Ayala, de Beer, Futuyma, (...) and Gould—also use theology-laden arguments. I recommend increased analysis of the justification, complexity, and coherence of this theology. (shrink)

This entry examines a set of ancient Chinese texts – with their associated literary and ideological tendencies – that had come to be seen as distinctive by the early Han period. This set constitutes one of the standard referents of “Daoism,” a word whose difficulties command attention in their own right. The ancient writers we could label “Daoists” were united by no single text, founder, agenda, or concept; grouped together, they show tendencies towards dissidence, paradox, and humor that distinguish them (...) from moralistic and technocratic rivals. These writers engaged a variety of themes and practices familiar from the early Chinese religious environment; alongside the eccentricities of Daoist writers themselves, the distinctiveness of this environment makes it challenging to put them in philosophical dialogue with other religious traditions. Buddhist uses of the Daoist heritage illustrate its potential relevance to a range of other religious perspectives. (shrink)

_Human Dignity in Bioethics _brings together a collection of essays that rigorously examine the concept of human dignity from its metaphysical foundations to its polemical deployment in bioethical controversies. The volume falls into three parts, beginning with meta-level perspectives and moving to concrete applications. Part 1 analyzes human dignity through a worldview lens, exploring the source and meaning of human dignity from naturalist, postmodernist, Protestant, and Catholic vantages, respectively, letting each side explain and defend its own conception. Part 2 moves (...) from metaphysical moorings to key areas of macro-level influence: international politics, American law, and biological science. These chapters examine the legitimacy of the concept of dignity in documents by international political bodies, the role of dignity in American jurisprudence, and the implications—and challenges—for dignity posed by Darwinism. Part 3 shifts from macro-level topics to concrete applications by examining the rhetoric of human dignity in specific controversies: embryonic stem cell research, abortion, human-animal chimeras, euthanasia and palliative care, psychotropic drugs, and assisted reproductive technologies. Each chapter analyzes the rhetorical use of ‘human dignity’ by opposing camps, assessing the utility of the concept and whether a different concept or approach can be a _more_ productive means of framing or guiding the debate. (shrink)

Darwinian Evolution and Classical Liberalism brings together a collection of new essays that examine the multifaceted ferment between Darwinian biology and classical liberalism.

Although scholars have paid careful attention to the naturalistic content of the Origin, less focus has been given to Darwin’s strategic deployment of methodological naturalism in the volume. A close inspection shows that he did not use methodological naturalism statically in the six editions of the Origin; instead, he strategically and progressively invoked methodological naturalism in the six editions of the Origin in order to enhance the persuasiveness of his theory and to marginalize special creation from the scientific discussion. In (...) particular, Darwin’s explicit use of methodological naturalism in later editions of the Origin was animated less by epistemic reasons and more by expedient ones. Thus, while Darwin personally may have had sound epistemic grounds for methodological naturalism, his increasing deployment of the method in the Origin seems to have been mainly for the purpose of winning converts to his theory and ostracizing special creation rather than making a strong empirical and philosophical case per se for his position. (shrink)

In The Evolution-Creation Struggle, Michael Ruse seeks to answer, ‘Why is there so much controversy surrounding evolutionary theory?’ He does so by tracing the historical development of the theory and the two major reactions to it. These major reactions, for and against, are not just views about science, but full blooded ‘rival religions.’ They each have a system of origins, morality, and eschatology. So the conflict over evolutionary theory persists because it is a clash between incompatible worldviews. This review praises (...) Ruse’s analysis on a number of points but also argues that he stumbles in three ways. First, he fails to explain that a key aspect of the origins debate concerns disagreement about the definition of science. Second, Ruse improperly uses his own definition of science, with little argument, in order to rule competing views out of science. Third, Ruse misrepresents the epistemology of non-Darwinians as relying on faith, emotion, and mystery instead of evidence and reason. (shrink)

Neo-Confucianism is a philosophically sophisticated tradition weaving classical Confucianism together with themes from Buddhism and Daoism. It began in China around the eleventh century CE, played a leading role in East Asian cultures over the last millennium, and has had a profound influence on modern Chinese society. -/- Based on the latest scholarship but presented in accessible language, Neo-Confucianism: A Philosophical Introduction is organized around themes that are central in Neo-Confucian philosophy, including the structure of the cosmos, human nature, ways (...) of knowing, personal cultivation, and approaches to governance. The authors thus accomplish two things at once: they present the Neo-Confucians in their own, distinctive terms; and they enable contemporary readers to grasp what is at stake in the great Neo-Confucian debates. (shrink)

When we speak, we mean more than we say. In this book Stephen C. Levinson explains some general processes that underlie presumptions in communication.

The book's significance is two-fold: it argues for a new stage in the development of contemporary Confucian philosophy, and it demonstrates the value to Western ...

This essay examines Darwin's positiva use of theology in the first edition of the Origin of Species in three steps. First, the essay analyses the Origin's theological language about God's accessibility, honesty, methods of creating, relationship to natural laws and lack of responsibility for natural suffering; the essay contends that Darwin utilized positiva theology in order to help justify descent with modification and to attack special creation. Second, the essay offers critical analysis of this theology, drawing in part on Darwin's (...) mature ruminations to suggest that, from an epistemic point of view, the Origin's positiva theology manifests several internal tensions. Finally, the essay reflects on the relative epistemic importance of positiva theology in the Origin's overall case for evolution. The essay concludes that this theology served as a handmaiden and accomplice to Darwin's science. (shrink)

Confucian political philosophy has recently emerged as a vibrant area of thought both in China and around the globe. This book provides an accessible introduction to the main perspectives and topics being debated today, and shows why Progressive Confucianism is a particularly promising approach. Students of political theory or contemporary politics will learn that far from being confined to a museum, contemporary Confucianism is both responding to current challenges and offering insights from which we can all learn. The Progressive Confucianism (...) defended here takes key ideas of the twentieth-century Confucian philosopher Mou Zongsan as its point of departure for exploring issues like political authority and legitimacy, the rule of law, human rights, civility, and social justice. The result is anti-authoritarian without abandoning the ideas of virtue and harmony; it preserves the key values Confucians find in ritual and hierarchy without giving in to oppression or domination. A central goal of the book is to present Progressive Confucianism in such a way as to make its insights manifest to non-Confucians, be they philosophers or simply citizens interested in the potential contributions of Chinese thinking to our emerging, shared world. (shrink)

This volume presents the fruits of an extended dialogue among American and Chinese philosophers concerning the relations between virtue ethics and the Confucian tradition. Based on recent advances in English-language scholarship on and translation of Confucian philosophy, the book demonstrates that cross-tradition stimulus, challenge, and learning are now eminently possible. Anyone interested in the role of virtue in contemporary moral philosophy, in Chinese thought, or in the future possibilities for cross-tradition philosophizing will find much to engage with in the twenty (...) essays collected here. (shrink)

What should we make of claims by members of other groups to have moralities different from our own? Human Rights in Chinese Thought gives an extended answer to this question in the first study of its kind. It integrates a full account of the development of Chinese rights discourse - reaching back to important, though neglected, origins of that discourse in 17th and 18th century Confucianism - with philosophical consideration of how various communities should respond to contemporary Chinese claims about (...) the uniqueness of their human rights concepts. The book elaborates a plausible kind of moral pluralism and demonstrates that Chinese ideas of human rights do indeed have distinctive characteristics, but it nonetheless argues for the importance and promise of cross-cultural moral engagement. (shrink)

This book was written primarily as a contribution to the field, but its plan excellently suits it for use as a text in courses in metaphysics, types of ...

Those aspects of language use that are crucial to an understanding of language as a system, and especially to an understanding of meaning, are the acknowledged concern of linguistic pragmatics. Yet until now much of the work in this field has not been easily accessible to the student, and was often written at an intimidating level of technicality. In this textbook, however, Dr Levinson has provided a lucid and integrative analysis of the central topics in pragmatics - deixis, implicature, presupposition, (...) speech acts, and conversational structure. A central concern of the book is the relation between pragmatics and semantics, and Dr Levinson shows clearly how a pragmatic approach can resolve some of the problems semantics have been confronting and simplifying semantic analyses. The complexity of these issues is not disguised, but the exposition is always clear and supported by helpful exemplification. The detailed analyses of selected topics give the student a clear view of the empirical rigour demanded by the study of linguistic pragmatics, but Dr Levinson never loses sight of the rich diversity of the subject. An introduction and conclusion relate pragmatics to other fields in linguistics and other disciplines concerned with language usage - psychology, philosophy, anthropology and literature. Many students in these disciplines, as well as students of linguistics, will find this a valuable textbook. (shrink)

The core niche for language use is in verbal interaction, involving the rapid exchange of turns at talking. This paper reviews the extensive literature about this system, adding new statistical analyses of behavioral data where they have been missing, demonstrating that turn-taking has the systematic properties originally noted by Sacks et al. (1974 ; hereafter SSJ). This system poses some significant puzzles for current theories of language processing: the gaps between turns are short (of the order of 200 ms), but (...) the latencies involved in language production are much longer (over 600 ms). This seems to imply that participants in conversation must predict (or ‘project’ as SSJ have it) the end of the current speaker’s turn in order to prepare their response in advance. This in turn implies some overlap between production and comprehension despite their use of common processing resources. Collecting together what is known behaviorally and experimentally about the system, the space for systematic explanations of language processing for conversation can be significantly narrowed, and we sketch some first model of the mental processes involved for the participant preparing to speak next. (shrink)

"Growing Moral engages its readers to reflect on and to practice the teachings of Confucianism in the contemporary world. It draws on the whole history of Confucianism, focusing on three thinkers from the classical era and two from the Neo-Confucian era (Zhu Xi and Wang Yangming. In addition to laying out the fundamental teachings of Confucianism, it highlights the enduring and strikingly relevant lessons that Confucianism offers contemporary readers. At its core, this book builds a case for modern Confucianism as (...) a practical way to grow toward more harmonious lives together through reflection, ritual, and compassion; it can help us find balance and joy within our complex and too-often frenetic modern lives. Individual chapter explain how and why to be filial, follow rituals, and cultivate our sprouts of morality; as well as exploring Confucian approaches to reading, music-making, reflection, and socio-political engagement. Overall, the book presents a progressive vision of Confucianism that addresses historical shortcomings within the tradition concerning gender and other forms of hierarchy"--. (shrink)

My goal in this paper 1 is, first, to collect together a number of themes and observations that have usually been kept apart, locked up in their respective disciplines. When these are brought together, some general and far reaching implications become really rather clear. In particular, I want to make a case for the implicit coherence of these themes in the idea that.

Ineffability, the degree to which percepts or concepts resist linguistic coding, is a fairly unexplored nook of cognitive science. Although philosophical preoccupations with qualia or nonconceptual content certainly touch upon the area, there has been little systematic thought and hardly any empirical work in recent years on the subject. We argue that ineffability is an important domain for the cognitive sciences. For examining differential ineffability across the senses may be able to tell us important things about how the mind works, (...) how different modalities talk to one another, and how language does, or does not, interact with other mental faculties. (shrink)

In June of 2008, the International Society for Comparative Studies of Chinese and Western Philosophy (ISCWP) convened its third Constructive Engagement conference, on the theme of “Comparative Philosophy Methodology.” During the opening speeches, Prof. Dunhua ZHAO, Chair of the Philosophy Department at Peking University, challenged the conference’s participants to put forward a minimal definition of “comparative philosophy” and a statement of its methods. Based on the papers from the conference and the extensive discussion that ensued, during my closing reflections at (...) the end of the conference I offered a tentative synthesis of the conference’s conclusions. That summary has already been published on-line as part of the bi-annual ISCWP newsletter (Angle 2008). In this brief essay, I recapitulate the themes of my earlier summary and expand, in my own voice, on some of the key points. (shrink)

Classical cognitive science was launched on the premise that the architecture of human cognition is uniform and universal across the species. This premise is biologically impossible and is being actively undermined by, for example, imaging genomics. Anthropology (including archaeology, biological anthropology, linguistics, and cultural anthropology) is, in contrast, largely concerned with the diversification of human culture, language, and biology across time and space—it belongs fundamentally to the evolutionary sciences. The new cognitive sciences that will emerge from the interactions with the (...) biological sciences will focus on variation and diversity, opening the door for rapprochement with anthropology. (shrink)

Responds to the reply by L. T. Hoshmand and J. Martin to S. C. Yanchar and K. B. Kristensen's comments on Hoshmand and Martin's proposal for a naturalistic epistemological approach to psychological science. Hoshmand and Martin argue that in Yanchar and Kristensen's stance toward some aspects of their proposal, they have attributed to Hoshmand and Martin a relationship between theory, method, and data that they do not hold. According to Hoshmand and Martin, in making their case Yanchar and Kristensen have (...) objected to empirical means of evaluation, and essentially undermined their own argument. The authors clarify their position by responding to these claims. 2012 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)

Comments on L. T. Hoshmand & J. Martin's (see record 1995-28533-001) proposal for providing unity in psychological science. Hoshmand and Martin suggest that psychology may derive its own naturalized epistemology by studying and describing the activities in which psychologists are currently engaged, find successful, and how it is that they historically arrived at these practices. While Hoshmand and Martin's notion that an historico-descriptive analysis may be helpful for the study of psychology is not rejected, it is argued that a critical (...) examination of the theoretical bases of psychological research programs, as well as the theoretical assumptions of the historico-descriptive method itself, must precede its employment. (shrink)

Varieties of Ethical Reflection brings together new cultural and religious perspectives—drawn from non-Western, primarily Asian, philosophical sources—to globalize the contemporary discussion of theoretical and applied ethics.

Translations of Chinese writing on human rights from throughout the twentieth century, with introductions.

The essay begins from Alan Gewirth's influential account of human rights, and specifically with his argument that the human right to political participation can only be fulfilled by competitive, liberal democracy. I show that his argument rests on empirical, rather than conceptual grounds, which opens the possibility that in China, alternative forms of participation may be legitimate or even superior. An examination of the theory and contemporary practice of 'democratic centralism' shows that while it does not now adequately support the (...) right to political participation, a reformed version could. I focus in particular on the roles that could be played by consultative institutions, looking both to recent Chinese proposals and to analogues currently existing in Japan. I conclude that a reformed democratic centralism may well be the objective toward which Chinese people should strive. (shrink)

Data science is characterized by engaging heterogeneous data to tackle real world questions and problems. But data science has no data of its own and must seek it within real world domains. We call this search for data “prospecting” and argue that the dynamics of prospecting are pervasive in, even characteristic of, data science. Prospecting aims to render the data, knowledge, expertise, and practices of worldly domains available and tractable to data science method and epistemology. Prospecting precedes data synthesis, analysis, (...) or visualization, and is constituted by the upstream work of discovering disordered or inaccessible data resources, thereafter to be ordered and rendered available for computation. Through this work, data science positions itself in the middle of all things—capable of engaging this, that, or any domain—and thus prospecting is a key driver of data science’s ongoing formation as a universal science. (shrink)

On February 14, 2017, Joseph Chan and Stephen Angle convened a Roundtable on the Future of Confucian Political Philosophy at the University of Hong Kong. Eight invited speakers each offered thoughts on the main topic, followed by discussion among the panelists and responses to questions from the audience. This transcript has been reviewed and edited by the main participants. Much of the discussion revolves around the relations and tensions between Confucian political philosophy as academic theory-construction and the lived realities (...) of citizens in the modern world, especially in East Asia. How is Confucian theorizing connected to Confucian activism? Another central concern is democracy—as value or as institution, as necessary in pluralistic societies or as problematic monopolizer of political discourse. We also discuss translation, republicanism, meritocracy, the proposals of Jiang Qing and Daniel Bell, and the role of Confucianism in China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and South Korea. (shrink)

Confucius (551–479 BCE) is the Latinized name of Kong Qiu, best known in Chinese as Kongzi (Master Kong). Only partially successful in his public career, Confucius' private teaching inaugurated an era of reflectiveness and helped to define core elements of Chinese civilization. Subsequent generations of students built on his initial formulations to develop one of the world's great philosophical traditions, which in English we call “Confucianism”; various terms are used in Chinese, including Ru jia (the Scholars' School) and Dao xue (...) (the Learning of the Way). While later Confucian thinkers would develop elaborate frameworks of metaphysics, mind, and epistemology, Confucius' own teachings concentrated on ethics, politics, social values, and personal improvement. These teachings and the key terms in which they are phrased remained touchstones for the tradition ever after, and the Confucian tradition became absolutely central to what it meant to be Chinese. Given the scope of China and its civilization, it is no exaggeration to say that Confucius is among the most influential of humanity's thinkers. (shrink)

An overview of Zhu Xi's moral psychology, with a special focus on the metaphysical underpinnings and the relations between heartmind (xin), emotions (qing), and nature (xing). The authors explain how Zhu uses his account to balance the demand for independent standards of assessment with his commitment to ethical norms that virtuous agents can embrace wholeheartedly.