There is growing evidence that some individuals engage in both self-harm and aggression during the course of their lifetime. The co-occurrence of self-harm and aggression is termed dual-harm. Individuals who engage in dual-harm may represent a high-risk group with unique characteristics and pattern of harmful behaviours. Nevertheless, there is an absence of clinical guidelines for the treatment and prevention of dual-harm and a lack of agreed theoretical framework that accounts for why people may engage in this behaviour. The present work (...) aimed to address this gap in the literature by providing a narrative review of previous research of self-harm, aggression and dual-harm, and through doing so, presenting an evidence-based theory of dual-harm – the cognitive-emotional model of dual-harm. This model draws from previous studies and theories, including the General Aggression Model, diathesis-stress models and emotional dysregulation theories. The cognitive-emotional model highlights the potential distal, proximal and feedback processes of dual-harm, the role of personality style and the possible emotional regulation and interpersonal functions of this behaviour. In line with our theory, various clinical and research implications for dual-harm are suggested, including hypotheses to be tested by future studies. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to explore the spiritually formative experiences of fifteen female seminary spouses who participated in a phenomenological research study. Graduate theological education is not limited to married, male students. Seminaries are diverse educational institutions that equip married and single students, as well as men and women from every country in the world for gospel ministry. Because of this broad population in theological education, the qualitative proposals in this essay are not generalizable to all schools, students, (...) and settings equally, but the perspectives of these seminary spouses are useful in cultivating a robustly holistic education for students who are married during their academic pursuits. It is the intent here to explore how theology can crossover from the academy to the home so that it is experienced in marriage. The goal then is to equip students, professors, and administrators to actively nurture the faith formation of the second-person of the ministry dyad. In order for these stakeholders to understand how to nurture this faith formation of the seminary spouse, we must first hear and understand the experiences of these wives as they share their reflections on these formational years as a part of their husband's education. (shrink)

The implicit social contract between large companies and their employees has been recently revised to emphasize workforce flexibility and the financial responsibility of individual employees for their own employment and benefits-related decisions. The most recent aspect of this social contract to be significantly changed is health care benefits. On the basis of in-depth case studies of health benefits purchasing at 15 large United States employers, the authors found that the reported use of a purchasing technique called managed competitionhas enabled firms (...) to bring health benefits purchasing in line with other elements of the revised social contract. An important minority of companies in our study appear to have retained a different, “employer responsibility” approach toward employee health benefits, leading them to move more gradually to managed competition purchasing and refrain from instituting heavy premium cost sharing or cutting coverage for their employees. These findings are preliminary and deserve further study as to their generalizability and persistence. (shrink)

Deontic logic ought to be fundamental to ethical theory and the theory of practical reasoning, but, for various reasons, it hasn’t been. James Forrester faults the standard systems themselves; so, in place of standard deontic logic, he proposes a new deontic logic that should, he thinks, serve moral philosophy more adequately.

Forrester eloquently argues his new system of deontic logic (a special branch of logic involved with obligation and permission) pitting it against standard systems and fitting it into a general logic of practical reasoning. He manages all this with a comprehensive discussion of the general principles of deontics, the semantics of "should" and "ought to do" in standard deontic logic, and a map of what he thinks the logic ought to do to achieve moral realism. Paper edition (unseen), $24.95. Annotation (...) copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR. (shrink)

Three recent books offer alternative views of hunting: Matt Cartmill’s A View to A Death in the Morning (Cartmill, 1993), James Swan’s In Defense of Hunting (Swan 1995). and Forrest Wood’s The Delights and Dilemmas of Hunting (Wood, 1997). First, I argue that Cartmill’s claim of continuity of kind between animals and persons is both overstated and logically disconnected from the hunting/anti-hunting debate. Second, I argue that Cartmill’s claim that the suffering of sentient animals is somehow intrinsically undesirable exhibits (...) an unjustified prejudice toward middle-sized organisms. (shrink)

A book of readings in Western intellectual history focusing on the role of reason in human action. Contents:^ Plato: Myth of the Cave; Plato: ^IThe Four Virtues; Aristotle: Knowledge of Causes; Aristotle: The Types of Governments; Epicurus: Epicureanism; Epictetus: Stoicism; St. Augustine: The Platonist; St. Augustine: The Nature of Sources of Evil; St. Thomas Aquinas: The Four Laws; St. Thomas Aquinas: The Nature of the Soul; Pico: The Oration on the Dignity of Man; John Calvin: Reason, Sin and Illumination; St. (...) Teresa of Avila: Interior Castle; Rene Descartes: Pens,s ; Thomas Hobbes: The State of Nature; John Locke: The State of Nature; Alexander Pope: Essay on Man; David Hume: Impressions and Ideas; Voltaire: Candide; Immanuel Kant: Space and Time; Immanuel Kant: The Good Will; Edmund Burke: Revolution in France; James Madison: The Federal Government; Soren Kierkegaard: Subjective Truth; Fyodor Dostoevsky: The Grand Inquisitor; Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels: Communist Manifesto; Friedrich Nietzsche: The Will to Power; William James: Pragmatism; William James: Philosophical Temperaments; Sigmund Freud: The Ego and the Id; Ludwig Wittgenstein: Later Theory; Jean-Paul Sartre: Existentialism; Carol Gilligan: Women's Place in Man's World; Appendix: Programmed Text on Epistemology. (shrink)

As political theorists explore work beyond traditional workplaces, how should we understand the vast class of insecure, informal, and unsalaried workers whose existence defies traditional categories of employment? In asking this question, I revisit the political theory of the Marxist feminist and cofounder of the International Wages for Housework movement, Selma James, to explore her “internationalism of the unwaged” and her writings on wagelessness. An example of political theory in service of struggle, James’s internationalism was widely circulated in (...) anticolonial, Black radical, and autonomous Marxist circles in the 1970s. In this article, I argue that it was grounded in three intertwined and mutually reinforcing arguments: an account of how capitalist life is spatially divided into distinct workplaces; an anticapitalist theory of identity that explains social difference as maintained by the international division of labor and labor market hierarchies; and a diagnosis of work organization viewed from the perspective of the wageless worker. I trace how James developed these arguments about the spatial division of labor, hierarchies of identity, and internationalist political struggle and how her view of the common exploitation and division of workers formed the basis of a class-struggle identity politics. Her political theory was an important contribution to women’s international thought and transnational feminist critiques of global forms of domination and exploitation. It also offers a critique of capitalism’s organization of the displacement of work and workers and an account of wagelessness as a work situation, both of which illuminate capitalist organization of work and wageless life today. (shrink)

This paper is a book review of "An Aristotelian Realist Philosophy of Mathematics: Mathematics as the Science of Quantity and Structure" by James Franklin.

In “Gentle Murder, Or The Adverbial Samaritan”, James William Forrester presents what he describes as “the most powerful version yet put forward” of Lennart Åqvist's Good Samaritan paradox in deontic logic. Forrester suggests that the paradox may make it necessary to reject the standard deontic inference principle. This desperate conclusion, as Forrester acknowledges, would imply that all of standard deontic logic “must be in a bad way”. But Forrester's “paradox” is not nearly so deep or intractable as he maintains.

Deontic logic ought to be fundamental to ethical theory and the theory of practical reasoning, but, for various reasons, it hasn’t been. James Forrester faults the standard systems themselves; so, in place of standard deontic logic, he proposes a new deontic logic that should, he thinks, serve moral philosophy more adequately.

James Wm. Forrester, Being Good and Being Logical. Philosophical Groundwork for a New Deontic Logic. Armonk and London, M.E. Sharpe, 1996. Pp.x+332.

Child psychologist Mallory James returns to Moonglade, the Australian plantation where she was raised, to care for her beloved uncle Robert, who has had a heart attack. Having left the area years earlier after being betrayed by her fiancâe, Jason Cartwright, Mallory is shocked and dismayed to find that Jason and his decidedly disturbed twin sister, Jessica, have been hired on at her uncle's estate. Her longtime friend and occasional adversary, Blaine Forrester, is also nearby. As Mallory settles back (...) into her old home, she can't help but begin to love Jason's feisty young daughter, Ivy. She and Blaine begin to wander down the path of romance, but it's obvious that their happiness won't come easily. (shrink)

The Gifford Lectures were established in 1885 at the universities of St Andrews, Glasgow, Aberdeen and Edinburgh to promote the discussion of 'Natural Theology in the widest sense of the term - in other words, the knowledge of God', and some of the world's most influential thinkers have delivered them. The 1901–2 lectures given in Edinburgh by American philosopher William James are considered by many to be the greatest in the series. The lectures were published in book form in (...) 1902 and have been reprinted many times. James, who was educated in the United States and Europe, and spent much of his career teaching philosophy at Harvard, was very influential in the development of modern psychology, and in these twenty lectures he explores the personal experience of religion. Some of the topics include religion and neurology, 'the sick soul', saintliness, and mysticism. (shrink)

Between 1860-1920 a number of distinguished Scottish theologians grappled with the problems of reconciling a biblical faith with current philosophical and theological trends. Alan Sell has selected eight of these: John Kennedy of Dingwall ; Robert Flint ; John Caird ; A. B. Bruce ; James Iverach ; James Orr ; D. W. Forrest ; and James Denney. The book is not only of historical interest; many of the issues confronted by these scholars are also of contemporary (...) interest. Professor James Torrance comments: 'This study is invaluable in keeping alive the authentic tradition that Scotland has produced great theologians,... but perhaps supremely in the period covered by this eminently readable book.'. (shrink)

From the $700 billion bailout of the banking industry to president Barack Obama’s $787 billion stimulus package to the highly controversial passage of federal health-care reform, conservatives and concerned citizens alike have grown increasingly fearful of big government. Enter Nobel Prize–winning economist and political theorist F. A. Hayek, whose passionate warning against empowering states with greater economic control, The Road to Serfdom, became an overnight sensation last summer when it was endorsed by Glenn Beck. The book has since sold over (...) 150,000 copies. The latest entry in the University of Chicago Press’s series of newly edited editions of Hayek’s works, The Constitution of Liberty is, like Serfdom, just as relevant to our present moment. The book is considered Hayek’s classic statement on the ideals of freedom and liberty, ideals that he believes have guided—and must continue to guide—the growth of Western civilization. Here Hayek defends the principles of a free society, casting a skeptical eye on the growth of the welfare state and examining the challenges to freedom posed by an ever expanding government—as well as its corrosive effect on the creation, preservation, and utilization of knowledge. In opposition to those who call for the state to play a greater role in society, Hayek puts forward a nuanced argument for prudence. Guided by this quality, he elegantly demonstrates that a free market system in a democratic polity—under the rule of law and with strong constitutional protections of individual rights—represents the best chance for the continuing existence of liberty. Striking a balance between skepticism and hope, Hayek’s profound insights are timelier and more welcome than ever before. This definitive edition of The Constitution of Liberty will give a new generation the opportunity to learn from his enduring wisdom. (shrink)

The past few decades have seen an explosion of research on causal reasoning in philosophy, computer science, and statistics, as well as descriptive work in psychology. In Causation with a Human Face, James Woodward integrates these lines of research and argues for an understanding of how each can inform the other: normative ideas can suggest interesting experiments, while descriptive results can suggest important normative concepts. Woodward's overall framework builds on the interventionist treatment of causation that he developed in Making (...) Things Happen. Normative ideas discussed include proposals about the role of invariant or stable relationships in successful causal reasoning and the notion of proportionality. He argues that these normative ideas are reflected in the causal judgments that people actually make as a descriptive matter. Woodward also discusses the common philosophical practice-particularly salient in philosophical accounts of causation--of appealing to intuitions or judgments about cases in support of philosophical theses. He explores how, properly understood, such appeals are not different in principle from appeals to results from empirical research, and demonstrates how they may serve as a useful source of information about causal cognition. (shrink)

Constitutionalism in an Age of Diversity James Tully. these ambassadors from Haida Gwaii conciliate the goods which appear irreconcilable to us? To discover the answer, and learn our way around on this strange common ground, we need to ...

Is there a world beyond the senses? Can we perceive future events before they occur? Is it possible to communicate with others without need of our complex sensory-perceptual apparatus that has evolved over hundreds of millions of years? Can our minds/souls/personalities leave our bodies and operate with all the knowledge and information-processing ability that is normally dependent upon the physical brain? Do our personalities survive physical death?

Peter Brian Herrenden Birks 1941-2004Hugh Redwald Dacre 1914-2003William Hugh Clifford Frend 1916-2005John Andrew Gallagher 1919-1980Philip Grierson 1910-2006Stuart Newton Hampshire 1914-2004William McKane 1921-2004John Malcolm Sabine Pasley 1926-2004Benjamin John Pimlott 1945-2004Robert Duguid Forrest Pring-Mill 1925-2005John Edgar Stevens 1921-2002Peter Strawson 1919-2006Henry William Rawson Wade 1918-2004Alan Harold Williams 1927-2005Bernard Arthur Owen Williams 1929-2003John James Wymer 1928-2006.

Today democracy is both exalted as the "best means to realize human rights" and seen as weakened because of globalization and delegation of authority beyond the nation-state. In this provocative book, James Bohman argues that democracies face a period of renewal and transformation and that democracy itself needs redefinition according to a new transnational ideal. Democracy, he writes, should be rethought in the plural; it should no longer be understood as rule by the people, singular, with a specific territorial (...) identification and connotation, but as rule by peoples, across national boundaries. Bohman shows that this new conception of transnational democracy requires reexamination of such fundamental ideas as the people, the public, citizenship, human rights, and federalism, and he argues that it offers a feasible approach to realizing democracy in a globalized world.In his account, Bohman establishes the conceptual foundations of transnational democracy by examining in detail current theories of democracy beyond the nation-state and offers a deliberative alternative. He considers the importance of communicative freedom in the transnational public sphere, human rights as the normative basis of transnational democracy, and the European Union as a transnational polity. Finally, he examines the relationship between peace and democracy, concluding that peace requires democratization on interacting state and suprastate levels. (shrink)

Few can imagine a world without telephones or televisions; many depend on computers and the Internet as part of daily life. Without scientific theory, these developments would not have been possible. In this exceptionally clear and engaging introduction to philosophy of science, James Ladyman explores the philosophical questions that arise when we reflect on the nature of the scientific method and the knowledge it produces. He discusses whether fundamental philosophical questions about knowledge and reality might be answered by science, (...) and considers in detail the debate between realists and antirealists about the extent of scientific knowledge. Along the way, central topics in philosophy of science, such as the demarcation of science from non-science, induction, confirmation and falsification, the relationship between theory and observation and relativism are all addressed. Important and complex current debates over underdetermination, inference to the best explaination and the implications of radical theory change are clarified and clearly explained for those new to the subject. (shrink)

Why does one theory "succeed" while another, possibly clearer interpretation, fails? By exploring two observationally equivalent yet conceptually incompatible views of quantum mechanics, James T. Cushing shows how historical contingency can be crucial to determining a theory's construction and its position among competing views. Since the late 1920s, the theory formulated by Niels Bohr and his colleagues at Copenhagen has been the dominant interpretation of quantum mechanics. Yet an alternative interpretation, rooted in the work of Louis de Broglie in (...) the early 1920s and reformulated and extended by David Bohm in the 1950s, equally well explains the observational data. Through a detailed historical and sociological study of the physicists who developed different theories of quantum mechanics, the debates within and between opposing camps, and the receptions given to each theory, Cushing shows that despite the preeminence of the Copenhagen view, the Bohm interpretation cannot be ignored. Cushing contends that the Copenhagen interpretation became widely accepted not because it is a better explanation of subatomic phenomena than is Bohm's, but because it happened to appear first. Focusing on the philosophical, social, and cultural forces that shaped one of the most important developments in modern physics, this provocative book examines the role that timing can play in the establishment of theory and explanation. (shrink)

From Bishop Wilberforce in the 1860s to the advocates of "creation science" today, defenders of traditional mores have condemned Darwin's theory of evolution as a threat to society's values. Darwin's defenders, like Stephen Jay Gould, have usually replied that there is no conflict between science and religion--that values and biological facts occupy separate realms. But as James Rachels points out in this thought-provoking study, Darwin himself would disagree with Gould. Darwin, who had once planned on being a clergyman, was (...) convinced that natural selection overthrew our age-old religious beliefs. Created from Animals offers a provocative look at how Darwinian evolution undermines many tenets of traditional philosophy and religion. James Rachels begins by examining Darwin's own life and work, presenting an astonishingly vivid and compressed biography. We see Darwin's studies of the psychological links in evolution (such as emotions in dogs, and the "mental powers" of worms), and how he addressed the moral implications of his work, especially in his concern for the welfare of animals. Rachels goes on to present a lively and accessible survey of the controversies that followed in Darwin's wake, ranging from Herbert Spencer's Social Darwinism to Edward O. Wilson's sociobiology, and discusses how the work of such influential intellects as Descartes, Hume, Kant, T.H. Huxley, Henri Bergson, B.F. Skinner, and Stephen Jay Gould has contributed to--or been overthrown by--evolutionary science. Western philosophy and religion, Rachels argues, have been shaken by the implications of Darwin's work, most notably the controversial idea that humans are simply a more complex kind of animal. Rachels assesses a number of studies that suggest how closely humans are linked to other primates in behavior, and then goes on to show how this idea undercuts the work of many prominent philosophers. Kant's famous argument that suicide reduces one to the level of an animal, for instance, is meaningless if humans are, in fact, animals. Indeed, humanity's membership in the animal kingdom calls into question the classic notions of human dignity and the sacredness of human life. What we need now, Rachels contends, is a philosophy that does not discriminate between different species, one that addresses each being on an individual basis. With this sweeping survey of the arguments, the philosophers, and the deep implications surrounding Darwinism, Rachels lays the foundations for a new view of morality. Vibrantly written and provocatively argued, Created from Animals offers a new perspective on issues ranging from suicide to euthanasia to animal rights. (shrink)