This book focuses on how 'cult rhetoric' affects our perceptions of new religious movements (NRMs). 'Cult' Rhetoric in the 21st Century explores contemporary understandings of the term 'cult' by bringing together a range of scholars from multiple disciplines, including sociology, anthropology, psychology, and religious studies. The book provides a renewed discussion of 'new religious movements', whilst also considering recent approaches toward a nuanced study of contemporary religion. Topics explored include online religions, political 'cults', 'apostate' testimony and the current 'othered' position (...) of the study of minority religions. (shrink)

Hobbes' philosophy is one of the high points of a century of great philosophical achievement and Leviathan is recognized as one of the great classics of political theory. But the response from Hobbes's contemporaries to his secular analysis of society demonstrated the challenging nature of his ideas. This collection of many of the major contemporary responses to his thought by leading figures, mostly never republished, provides an outstanding source for assessing his immediate impact and the long-term importance of his work.

This volume inaugurates a new critical edition of the writings of the great English philosopher and sage Francis Bacon - the first such complete edition for more than a hundred years. It contains six of Bacon's Latin scientific works, each accompanied by entirely new facing-page translations which, together with the extensive introduction and commentaries, offer fresh insights into one of the great minds of the early seventeenth century.

Each title in the "Key Issues" series aims to set the work in its historical context. In this collection of contemporary responses to "Leviathan", attention is focused on its critics who attacked Hobbes's moral, political and religious ideas in a series of pamphlets and short books.

Using student self-reported cheating admissions and answers from a hypothetical cheating scenario, this paper analyzes the effects of individual and situational factors on potential cheating behavior. Results confirm several conclusions about student factors that are related to cheating. The probability of cheating is associated with younger students, lower GPAs, alcohol consumption, fraternity/sorority membership, and having cheated in high school. Student perceptions of the certainty and severity of punishment appear to have a negative and significant impact on the probability of cheating (...) on in-class assignments. Students who report a belief that cheating is never acceptable appear to be significantly less likely to cheat in any circumstance. This study illustrates the context-dependent nature of academic dishonesty, and the associated difficulty in understanding the relationships between measurable factors and cheating behavior. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Secret History of Emotion: From Aristotle's ‘Rhetoric’ to Modern Brain ScienceMichael J. HydeThe Secret History of Emotion: From Aristotle's ‘Rhetoric’ to Modern Brain Science. Daniel M. Gross. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. Pp. x + 194. $35.00, Hardcover.The twofold goal of this book is clearly stated by its author: "to reconstitute by way of critical intellectual history a deeply nuanced, rhetorical understanding of emotion that prevailed (...) until the triumph of psychophysiology; second, to show by way of literary and philosophical example how this rhetorical perspective helps us read anew the emotional complex of modernity, whether early or late" (8). Gross' appreciation of the function of emotion emphasizes a phenomenological orientation that is inspired by Martin Heidegger's unpublished 1924 lecture course on Aristotle's Rhetoric. Gross recently co-edited with Ansgar Kemmann a book of original essays dedicated to a critical assessment of this lecture course (Gross and Kemmann 2006). In concluding her contribution to the book, the well-known Renaissance scholar Nancy S. Struever maintains that the course "remains, arguably, the best twentieth-century reading of Aristotle's Rhetoric" (Struever 2006: 127). Gross advances this reading with his creative and insightful assessment of his topic.This advance unfolds as Gross, abiding by phenomenology's well-known critique of the matter, takes issue with the reductive psychophysiology of emotion that Descartes first proposed and that informs latter-day sciences of the mind and the brain. Gross turns to the research program of the distinguished cognitive scientist Antonio Damasio as a way of arguing "how brain science of emotion goes awry when it blunders into social fact" (29). The reductionism of science, in other words, misses the forest for the trees. Admitting that Damasio is open to inquiries outside the boundaries of neurobiology, Gross nevertheless takes particular issue with Damasio's model for such a project: Edward O. Wilson's, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge. Indeed, Wilson never gives rhetoric a nod when he acknowledges the worth of the humanities in his book.This slight, coming from Wilson, Damasio, and other scientists, fuels Gross's enthusiasm for turning to Aristotle's analysis of the pathe in book two of the Rhetoric. With Aristotle's discussion of "anger" in mind, for example, Gross emphasizes how we live in "a contoured world of emotional investments, where some people have significantly more liabilities than others" (3). [End Page 326]The point warrants elaboration: "The contours of our emotional world have been shaped by institutions such as slavery and poverty that simply afford some people greater emotional range than others, as they are shaped by publicity that has nothing to do with the inherent values of each human life and everything to do with technologies of social recognition and blindness" (4). Gross links this Aristotelian based social-psychological insight with such early modern philosophers, psychologists, and cultural critics as Thomas Hobbes, David Hume, William Perfect, and then with such contemporary intellectuals as Judith Butler. Gross' discussion of this linkage enables him to argue a key point in his overall project: the constitutive power of emotions depends not on how the social passions originate in a moral sense equally shared by all, but rather on the "uneven distribution" of these passions in our social and political lives.Gross makes much of how the rhetoric of this uneven distribution is at work in such particular cases as Aristotle's apathetic slave, Seneca's angry tyrant, Hobbes's resentful preacher, Sarah Fielding's humble hero, and Adam Smith's compassionate spectator. Gross's intellectual acumen shines as he weaves together these cases and expands on their implications for developing a rhetorical understanding of emotion. For example, in chapter three ("Virtues of Passivity in the English Civil War"), Gross offers a critical assessment of Michael Walzer's classic The Revolution of the Saints: A Study in the Origins of Radical Politics in order to show how the emotional makeup of passivity, too often "relegated to a diminished femininity" (87), not only informs the virtue of humility, but also helps it serve rhetorically "the most dramatic revolutionary ends" (110). Additional extended case studies emphasize the specific emotions of apathy, pride, pity... (shrink)

The reply to Kanterian offers a rebuttal of his central criticisms. It reaffirms the difference between Kant's arguments in the Aesthetic and at B 148-9; it rejects the alleged error of logic in Fischer's (and my) arguments; and it rejects Kanterian's reading of passages in the Preface (A xx-xxii) and of the Amphiboly. Beyond these specific points Kanterian assumes that Kant's project in the first Critique cannot be understood as a and so begs the question at issue.

There is no consensus on the legitimacy of Chelsea Manning’s and Edward Snowden’s secret-revealing activities. Some see them as courageous acts of whistleblowing; to others they seem wanton acts of self-aggrandizement; still others find them traitorous acts of defiance. We can gain some clarity on these cases, I believe, if we consider them against the backdrop of Leslie Macfarlane’s “Justifying Political Disobedience.” After characterizing political disobedience, Macfarlane analyzes the possible justifiability of a politically disobedient act in terms of the (...) act’s aim, the political obligations it rejects, its means, and its consequences. I show how this analysis can be used, not as a formula for determining the justifiability of acts of political disobedience, but rather as a procedure to isolate and to order the considerations that bear on this justifiability. (shrink)

This is the fourth volume in our five volume history of western philosophy of religion. It covers the nineteenth century, and includes chapters on: Fichte; Schleiermacher; Hegel; Schelling; Schopenhauer; Comte; Newman; Emerson; Feuerbach; Mill; Darwin; Kierkegaard; Marx; Engels; Dilthey; Edward Caird; Nietzche; Royce; Freud; and Durkheim.

Trendelenburg argued that Kant's arguments in support of transcendental idealism ignored the possibility that space and time are both ideal and real. Recently, Graham Bird has claimed that Trendelenburg (unlike his contemporary Kuno Fischer) misrepresented Kant, confusing two senses of . I defend Trendelenburg's : the ideas of space and time, as a priori and necessary, are ideal, but this does not exclude their validity in the noumenal realm. This undermines transcendental idealism. Bird's attempt to show that the Analytic (...) considers, but rejects, the alternative fails: an epistemological reading makes Kant accept the alternative, while an ontological reading makes him incoherent. As I demonstrate, Trendelenburg acknowledged the ambiguity of , focusing on the transcendental, not the empirical sense. Unlike Fischer, Bird denies Kant's commitment to things-in-themselves in favour of a descriptivist, non-ontological reading of transcendental idealism as an inventory of . But neither Bird's descriptivism, nor Fischer's commitment to things-in-themselves, answers Trendelenburg's sceptical worry about transcendental idealism. (shrink)

Contemplating Suicide: The Language and Ethnics of Self Harm By Gavin J. Fairbairn Routledge, 1995. Pp. xxx. ISBN 415?10606. £12.95(pbk). Religious Transformation in Western Society. The End of Happiness By Harvie Ferguson, Routledge, 1992. Pp. xvi + 269. ISBN 0?415?02574?5. £XX.xx. Feminism and the Self: The Web of Identity By Morwenna Griffiths Routledge, 1995. Pp. 191. ISBN 0?415?09821?1. £12.99 (pbk). Faith, Scepticism and Personal Identity. A Festschrift for Terence Penelhum Edited by J.J. Macintosh and H. A. Meynell University of Calgary (...) Press, 1994. Pp. vii + 304. CAN$27.95. The Shape of Space (second edition) By Graham Nerlich Cambridge University Press, 1994. ISBN 0?521?45645?2. Logical Learning Theory: A Human Teleology and its Empirical Support By Joseph F. Rychlak University of Nebraska Press, 1994. Pp. 387. ISBN 0?8032?3904?1. £32.95 Philosophical Idealism and Christian Belief By Alan P.F. Sell University of Wales Press, 1995. Pp. x + 338. (shrink)

Humanism has appeared intermittently in the nursing literature as a concept that can be used in understanding nursing. I return to the concept in response to noticing the term appearing in the context of health humanities, where it is loosely associated both with humanities and being humane. I review the usage and critiques of humanism in both nursing and medical literature and then re‐evaluate what the idea of humanism might hold for nursing, trying to avoid the traps of an over‐determination (...) of the human subject, or dichotomizing nursing as art or science, technology or caring. I draw on writings on humanism primarily from Emmanuel Levinas and Edward Said to emphasize strands in humanism of obligation towards others and of critical discernment within history and culture directed towards democratic practices. I discuss in passing the strong association in the UK particularly between humanism and scientism as a note of caution about the plurality of the term humanism. I conclude that humanism is a tradition that does offer productive ways of thinking about nursing with the proviso that it ought to be treated carefully as a problematic tradition and not as a new essence for nursing. (shrink)

This paper is a response to William Lane Craig's criticisms of my previous paper "Uncaused Beginnings". I argue that Craig's criticisms do not inflict any damage on the arguments of that earlier paper.

The copious literature on the work of artist Robert Smithson has made very little of the many parallels between the inventor of earthworks and the nineteenth-century author of pataphysics, despite the established fact that the artist read and made notes from Alfred Jarry’s Dr. Faustroll (1898) while working on the Spiral Jetty in 1970, which undoubtedly influenced the subsequent Broken Circle &/ Spiral Hill (1971, Emmen). Given the insightful literature reassessing Jarry’s influence on twentieth-century artists including Marcel Duchamp, John Cage (...) and Rodney Graham, a consideration of Smithson’s spiral earthworks in connection with Jarry is long overdue. In contrast to prevailing art research practices today, Smithson’s work is much more aligned with the pataphysical pursuit of ‘imaginary solutions’ that examine ‘the laws governing exceptions’ and describe ‘a universe which can be – and perhaps should be – envisaged in place of the traditional one’. Art historian Jack Burnham’s interprets Smithson’s earthworks as a ‘time-bound web of man-nature interactions … didactic exercises … [that] show a desperate need for environmental sensibility’. In this respect, the work of both Jarry and Smithson can provide a useful corrective to an overly rationalistic approach to art research, offering the field – and contemporary art in general – potentially valuable tools for forms of practice that challenge rather than adopt conventional academic models and epistemological constructs. (shrink)

We reply to various arguments by Otavio Bueno and Edward Zalta (‘Object Theory and Modal Meinongianism’) against Modal Meinongianism, including that it presupposes, but cannot maintain, a unique denotation for names of fictional characters, and that it is not generalizable to higher-order objects. We individuate the crucial difference between Modal Meinongianism and Object Theory in the former’s resorting to an apparatus of worlds, possible and impossible, for the representational purposes for which the latter resorts to a distinction between two (...) kinds of predication, exemplification and encoding. We show that encoding has fewer forerunners in the history of philosophy than Bueno and Zalta want, and that there’s a reason why the notion has been found baffling by some. (shrink)

Inspired by the philosopher Graham Parkes, this collection provides a distinctive study of aesthetics and the climate crisis. Engaging with Continental European and East Asian traditions, it challenges our definition of self in the West and asks us to re-evaluate our conventional perspectives. Through a valuable and systematic treatment of the thought of Parkes, The Wandering Dance in the Philosophy of Graham Parkes makes the case that a restoration of the intimate relation of self and nature is indispensable (...) in understanding our place in the order of things and achieving balance in the world. (shrink)

The central thesis of this book is that “there are perfectly general grounds on which [the author] can dismiss the possibility of a dialectically effective ontological argument [for God’s existence]”. Since there is no other purpose ontological arguments can achieve, they are “completely worthless”.

Ethics and Modality calls for a reevaluation of standard views of modality. I argue that, instead of understanding de re modal talk as tracking the modal properties of things in themselves, we must recognize the importance of prior conceptual priorities and interests in shaping our de re modal judgments. A consequence of this reevaluation is that de re modal claims are indeterminate in that there can be disagreement over a claim without either side having made any factual, definitional or logical (...) mistake. According to the standard view, necessities of identity are among the most secure of de re modalities. I show how determinations of whether Hesperus is Phosphorus, or Dr. Jekyll is Mr. Hyde can be disputed without either side falling into error. Disagreements are often ended by identifying a mistake underlying one or other of the opposing views, but indeterminacy undermines the chances for such principled resolution of disagreements concerning de re modal judgments. ;This reevaluation has important practical ramifications. I argue that the notion of loss, which has great ethical and legal significance, relies on a de re modal analysis. De re modal indeterminacy threatens our ability to defend those commonplace ethical and legal judgments that rely on the modally grounded notion of loss. It is possible for disputants to agree on all relevant facts, on the concepts being deployed, on logical principles and even on matters of ethical theory, and yet still, because of modal indeterminacy, find nothing to resolve their disagreement over an alleged loss. This is troubling when we allege that an act has resulted in a loss in order to justify moral condemnation, demands for compensation and the imposition of punishment. I outline some possible responses to these difficulties. Some options preserve a notion of loss, however I do not find these conservative responses promising. I argue that abandoning commonsense ideas about compensation and doing without the notion of loss can preserve what really matters in our everyday ethical and legal thinking. (shrink)

A researcher at the Yale Modernism Lab, Elyse Graham, raises the question of why the early twentieth century literary review The Egoist had such troubling selling, despite its stellar contributors. She puts the blame on regulars Dora Marsden and Richard Aldington. I offer an alternative hypothesis.

Damis is a character in, and his memoirs the putative source of, Philostratus' Life of Apollonius of Tyana. Many scholars have doubted the existence of these memoirs, some the very existence of the man. Against the latter party Graham Anderson has advanced an ingenious argument, which attempts to prove that the Damis whose existence has been doubted is identical with a bearer of the same name to whom existence has hardly ever been ascribed. His evidence comprises: Lucian's dialogue Zeus (...) the Tragedian, in which a certain Damis appears as the Epicurean tormentor of the popular divinities; a tale now extant in mediaeval Persian, in which a philosopher named Dini performs a similar function; the testimony of Origen that Moiragenes numbered among the men seduced by Apollonius ‘the illustrious Euphrates and a certain Epicurean’ . Between these reports he detects the following parallels. (shrink)

The Nature of God explores a perennial problem in the philosophy of religion.

Richard Sylvan (né Routley) was one of Australasia's most prolific and systematic philosophers. Though known for his innovative work in logic and metaphysics, the astonishing breadth of his philosophical endeavours included almost all reaches of philosophy. Taking the view that very basic assumptions of mainstream philosophy were fundamentally mistaken, he sought radical change across a wide range of theories. However, his view of the centrality of logic and recognition of the possibilities opened up by logical innovation in the fundamental areas (...) of metaphysics resulted in his working primarily in these two, closely connected fields. It is this work in logic and metaphysics that is the main focus of what follows. (shrink)

This revised and considerably expanded 2nd edition brings together a wide range of topics, including modal, tense, conditional, intuitionist, many-valued, paraconsistent, relevant, and fuzzy logics. Part 1, on propositional logic, is the old Introduction, but contains much new material. Part 2 is entirely new, and covers quantification and identity for all the logics in Part 1. The material is unified by the underlying theme of world semantics. All of the topics are explained clearly using devices such as tableau proofs, and (...) their relation to current philosophical issues and debates are discussed. Students with a basic understanding of classical logic will find this book an invaluable introduction to an area that has become of central importance in both logic and philosophy. It will also interest people working in mathematics and computer science who wish to know about the area. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Scottish Philosophy after the Enlightenment by Gordon GrahamDeborah BoyleGRAHAM, Gordon. Scottish Philosophy after the Enlightenment. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2022. xvii + 254 pp. Cloth, $110.00Histories of Scottish philosophy typically focus on the school of "common sense" from the eighteenth century, beginning with Francis Hutcheson and ending with Dugald Stewart. As Gordon Graham notes in the preface to this volume, nineteenth-century Scottish philosophy is "an area of (...) the history of philosophy that has generally gone almost entirely unexplored." His collection of eleven standalone essays (only one of which has been previously published) argues that something recognizable as "Scottish philosophy" continued into the nineteenth century—although Graham thinks it ended, then, too—and suggests conceptions of Scottish philosophy that go beyond the old trope of "common sense."Unusually for a work in the history of philosophy, the first chapter is autobiographical. Graham recalls that as an undergraduate studying moral philosophy at St. Andrews in 1968, the only Scottish philosopher he was assigned to read was Hume, whose work was taught in the ahistorical manner that dominated philosophy at that time, and that upon his appointment to the Regius Chair of Moral Philosophy at Aberdeen in 1995 he found little appreciation for the university's most famous former professor, Thomas Reid. Thus began Graham's establishment of the Reid Project at the University of Aberdeen (later the Centre for the Study of Scottish Philosophy and now the Institute for the Study of Scottish Philosophy), the founding of the Journal of Scottish Philosophy, and his editorship of several book series on Scottish philosophy. The story of Graham's scholarship over the years is really the story of the recovery of the history of Scottish philosophy after its near-total neglect in the twentieth century.Graham seems wary of the contextualist turn that historians of philosophy have embraced since around the 1980s, which he likens to "antiquarianism," but at the same time he notes that our current philosophical interests are "not an infallible or even an especially reliable guide to what is intellectually significant" from the past. His solution is to look for intellectual "trajectories" in the history of philosophy—although not with the Whiggish view that these culminate in the present—and to locate particular figures within those trajectories. Thus he is especially interested in identifying the various themes—not just "common sense"— [End Page 551] that can unite the work of different philosophers born and working in Scotland in order to provide a more expansive account of Scottish philosophy.Scottish Philosophy after the Enlightenment provides a close look at the lives and work of major figures of this period, with a chapter devoted to each: William Hamilton (chapter 2), James Frederick Ferrier (chapter 3), Alexander Bain (chapter 4), Thomas Carlyle (chapter 5), Alexander Campbell Fraser (chapter 9), and Andrew Seth Pringle-Pattison (chapter 10). Although Graham argues that Pringle-Pattison's work marks the culmination and end of distinctively Scottish philosophy, he devotes the final chapter to the work of twentieth-century philosopher John McMurray on the grounds that McMurray's conception of human agency is rooted in Scottish debates from the previous two centuries over realism and idealism (chapter 11). Along the way, the book helpfully introduces other thinkers currently much less well known, such as Edward Caird, Henry Calderwood, Henry Jones, James Hutchison Stirling, John Tulloch, and John Veitch.Instead of thinking of Scottish philosophy as simply equivalent to common sense philosophy, Graham offers various alternative conceptions of Scottish philosophy, characterized as various "trajectories" that can be seen as originating in the eighteenth century and developing through the nineteenth: as a concern with realism and idealism that developed in the nineteenth century into responses (whether critical or favorable) to Hegelianism (chapter 6); as a prolonged conversation about the relationship between science and philosophy and the possibility of progress in the scientific study of the mind (chapter 7); and as the continuation of eighteenth-century post-Humean Scottish philosophers' aim of defending theism, even in the face of Darwin's findings (chapters 8 and 9). Presenting Scottish philosophy through these different lenses is highly illuminating and makes a persuasive case for the need for further... (shrink)

Based on Michel Foucault's 1978 and 1979 lectures at the Collège de France on governmental rationalities and his 1977 interview regarding his work on imprisonment, this volume is the long-awaited sequel to Power/Knowledge.