Marxism was central to the understanding of South Africa’s struggle for freedom. This article provides a critical analysis of Marxist literature on South Africa since the 1970s, drawing out its relevance for contemporary analyses of the post-apartheid state and for radical politics today. It suggests that while the literature offered important insights into the character of the apartheid state, it failed to provide a critical appraisal of the state per se. Moreover, the capturing of state power by the liberation movement (...) was not grounded in an understanding of the oppressive character of the state-form. The undermining of mainstream Marxism under neo-liberalizing conditions in post-apartheid South Africa has opened up the prospects for anti-statist radical libertarian thinking (including autonomist Marxism), and this thinking is consistent with the practices of certain autonomist popular politics currently emerging. Social theorizing on South Africa has had a complex relationship with Marxism. This article is interested in drawing on this experience in an effort to understand its implications for the ‘new’ South Africa where, 20 years after apartheid’s formal ending, social transformation remains caught in the logic not of Marxism but neo-liberalizing capitalism. (shrink)

This essay offers an interrogation of Leadership-as-Practice in the context of MacIntyre’s Three Rival Versions of Moral Inquiry. LAP is a constructionist leadership approach that rationalizes leadership as the co-creation of embodied leadership practices in organizations, and we argue that its theoretical and philosophical foundations are best aligned with a genealogist version of moral enquiry. We contend that LAP’s theoretical assumptions and implications place it in opposition to traditionalist and encyclopaedist moral philosophies and that application of LAP without an appreciation (...) for our argument poses challenges for practitioners as it diminishes their ability to learn from opposing perspectives. We argue for an appreciation of diverse moral viewpoints and discouragement of coercive moral practices from any competing perspective. While the philosophy undergirding LAP may encourage moral relativism and possible conflicts in principled beliefs, we offer LAP may strengthen organizational members cognitively and emotionally, bringing greater long-term benefit for the organization. (shrink)

Setting the stage -- Relationality in contemporary theology -- Separateness in classical physics -- Entanglement in quantum physics -- Philosophical perspectives -- Entanglement, theologically speaking.

In my comments, I address two issues that are important but not central to the paper under review here. First, I present a reading of the postphenomenological concept of multistability by going back to Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the primacy of perception. I conclude that assertions affirming the multistability of technologies should not be seen as merely empirical. Second, I address the adequacy of using the language of ‘empirical’ and ‘transcendental’ as a means to categorize exclusionary approaches in philosophy of technology.

BackgroundIn December 2014, China announced that only voluntarily donated organs from citizens would be used for transplantation after January 1, 2015. Many medical professionals worldwide believe that China has stopped using organs from death-row prisoners.DiscussionIn the present article, we briefly review the historical development of organ procurement from death-row prisoners in China and comprehensively analyze the social-political background and the legal basis of the announcement. The announcement was not accompanied by any change in organ sourcing legislations or regulations. As a (...) fact, the use of prisoner organs remains legal in China. Even after January 2015, key Chinese transplant officials have repeatedly stated that death-row prisoners have the same right as regular citizens to “voluntarily donate” organs. This perpetuates an unethical organ procurement system in ongoing violation of international standards.ConclusionsOrgan sourcing from death-row prisoners has not stopped in China. The 2014 announcement refers to the intention to stop the use of organs illegally harvested without the consent of the prisoners. Prisoner organs procured with “consent” are now simply labelled as “voluntarily donations from citizens”. The semantic switch may whitewash sourcing from both death-row prisoners and prisoners of conscience. China can gain credibility only by enacting new legislation prohibiting use of prisoner organs and by making its organ sourcing system open to international inspections. Until international ethical standards are transparently met, sanctions should remain. (shrink)

History is composed of a web of innumerable interacting causal chains, many of which are composed of millions of discrete events. The complexity of history puts us in a position of having knowledge of only a minuscule portion of the consequences of any event, actual or proposed. Our almost complete lack of knowledge of the data necessary to know if an event is gratuitous makes it very likely that we would be mistaken about a very large number of events. The (...) complexity of history, therefore, poses a significant challenge to certain types of evidential arguments from evil that begin with our observations of evils that appear to be gratuitous. (shrink)

The Abrahamic faiths of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam are typically recognized as the world’s major monotheistic religions. However, African Traditional Religion is, despite often including lesser spirits and gods, a monotheistic religion with numerous adherents in sub-Saharan Africa; it includes the idea of a single most powerful God responsible for the creation and sustenance of everything else. This Element focuses on drawing attention to this major world religion that has been much neglected by scholars around the globe, particularly those working (...) in the West or Northern Hemisphere. It accomplishes this primarily by bringing it into conversation with topics in the Anglo-American philosophy of religion. (shrink)

This work provides a text and an extended study of those fragments of Heraclitus' philosophical utterances whose subject is the world as a whole rather than man and his part in it. Professor Kirk discusses fully the fragments which he finds genuine and treats in passing others that were generally accepted as genuine but here considered paraphrased or spurious. In securing his text, Professor Kirk has taken into account all the ancient testimonies, and in his critical work he (...) attached particular importance to the context in which each fragment is set. To each he gives a selective apparatus, a literal translation and and an extended commentary in which problems of textual and philosophical criticism are discussed. Ancient accounts of Heraclitus were inadequate and misleading, and as Kirk wrote, understanding was often hindered by excessive dogmatism and a selective use of the fragments. Professor Kirk's method is critical and objective, and his 1954 work marks a significant advance in the study of Presocratic thought. (shrink)

Among the entities that can be mentally or linguistically represented are mental and linguistic representations themselves. That is, we can think and talk about speech and thought. This phenomenon is known as metarepresentation. An example is "Authors believe that people read books." -/- In this book François Recanati discusses the structure of metarepresentation from a variety of perspectives. According to him, metarepresentations have a dual structure: their content includes the content of the object-representation (people reading books) as well as the (...) "meta" part (the authors' belief). Rejecting the view that the object representation is mentioned rather than used, Recanati claims that since metarepresentations carry the content of the object representation, they must be about whatever the object representation is about. Metarepresentations are fundamentally transparent because they work by simulating the representation they are about. -/- Topics covered in this wide-ranging work include the analysis of belief reports and talk about fiction, world shifting, opacity and substitutivity, quotation, the relation between direct and indirect discourse, context shifting, semantic pretense, and deference in language and thought. (shrink)

In this paper, I seek to contribute to post-phenomenological descriptions of human-technological relations and the intentionalities exhibited in them by focusingon the intentionality exhibited in the use of a cochlear implant. To do so, I will use concepts developed by Don Ihde and further extended by Peter-Paul Verbeek to show that while post-phenomenological categories illuminate the intentional relationship of a cochlear implant wearer to her world, this relationship defies easy categorization. An examination of successful functioning with a cochlear implant will (...) reveal a distinct form of technological embodiment and intentionality that confirms and extends previous post-phenomenological analyses. (shrink)

Herein, I clarify my concern regarding Raelin’s Leadership-as-Practice and argue that inconsistent moral philosophies undermine the veracity of leadership theory, especially more recent democratic, shared, collective, and practice oriented theories; that this problem seems to be proliferating in the social sciences, and that this is especially concerning in socio-psychologically oriented theories. I contend that the moral foundations of L-A-P remain philosophically disquieting, unless it is understood as excluding moral agents other than those of a genealogical tradition, and that such exclusionary (...) consequences in practice may lead to moral disengagement, which might then lead to cognitive dissonance and even self-harm. (shrink)

The question of whether or not to partition data for the purposes of inferring phylogenetic hypotheses remains controversial. Opinions have been especially divided since Kluge's (1989, Systematic Zoology 38, 7–25) claim that data partitioning violates the requirement of total evidence (RTE). Unfortunately, advocacy for or against the RTE has not been based on accurate portrayals of the requirement. The RTE is a basic maxim for non-deductive inference, stipulating that evidence must be considered if it has relevance to an inference. Evidence (...) is relevant if it has a positive or negative effect on a given conclusion. In the case of ℈partitioned’ phylogenetic inferences, the RTE is violated, and the basis for rational belief in any conclusion is compromised, unless it is shown that the partitions are evidentially irrelevant to one another. The goal of phylogenetic systematics is to hypothesize past causal conditions to account for observed shared similarities among two or more species. Such inferences are non-deductive, necessitating consideration of the RTE. Some phylogeneticists claim the parsimony criterion as justification for the RTE. There is no relation between the two – parsimony is a relation between a hypothesis and causal question(s). Parsimony does not dictate the content of premises prior to an inference. ℈Taxonomic congruence,’ ℈supertrees,’ and ℈conditional combination’ methods violate the RTE. Taxonomic congruence and supertree methods also fail to achieve the intended goal of phylogenetic inference, such that ℈consensus trees’ and ℈supertrees’ lack an empirical basis. ℈Conditional combination’ is problematic because hypotheses derived from partitioned data cannot be compared – a causal hypothesis inferred to account for a set of effects only has relevance to those effects, not any comparative relevance to other causal hypotheses. A similar problem arises in the comparisons of hypotheses derived from different causal theories. (shrink)

The Axiology of Theism The existential question about God asks whether God exists, but the axiology of theism addresses the question of what value-impact, if any, God’s existence does have on our world and its inhabitants. There are two prominent answers to the axiological question about God. Pro-theism is the view that God’s … Continue reading The Axiology of Theism →.

The formal definition of species as explanatory hypotheses presented by Fitzhugh is emended. A species is an explanatory account of the occurrences of the same character among gonochoristic or cross-fertilizing hermaphroditic individuals by way of character origin and subsequent fixation during tokogeny. In addition to species, biological systematics also employs hypotheses that are ontogenetic, tokogenetic, intraspecific, and phylogenetic, each of which provides explanatory hypotheses for distinctly different classes of causal questions. It is suggested that species hypotheses can not be applied (...) to organisms with obligate asexual, parthenogenetic, and self-fertilizing modes of reproduction. Hypotheses explaining shared characters among such organisms are, instead, strictly phylogenetic. Several implications of this emended definition are examined, especially the relations between species, intraspecific, and phylogenetic hypotheses, as well as the limitations of species names to be applied to temporally different characters within populations. (shrink)

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The topic of the sublime is making a return to contemporary discourse on aesthetics and cognition. In Sublime Understanding, Kirk Pillow makes sublimity the center of an alternative conception of aesthetic response and interpretation. He draws an aesthetics of sublimity from Kant's Critique of Judgment, bolsters it with help from Hegel, and establishes its place in a broadened conception of human understanding. He argues that sublime reflection provides a model for an interpretive response to the uncanny Other outside our (...) conceptual grasp; it advances our sense-making pursuits but eschews unified, conceptual determination. Thus "sublime understanding" is the always partial, indeterminate grasping of contextual wholes through which we make sense of the uncanny particular in both art and the lived world.The book is divided into three parts. In the first two parts, Pillow presents insightful reinterpretations of Kant's and Hegel's aesthetics. In the third part he develops his own model of an aestheticized understanding, which illuminates contemporary discussions of metaphor and interpretation, while bridging Anglo-American and continental treatments of these issues. The presentation is a model of clear and well-crafted exposition, exemplifying the practice of aesthetically reflective sublime understanding that it articulates. (shrink)

The history of emotions is notably fraught with semantic anxiety, and a great deal of ink has been spilt in attempts to clarify emotion terminology, with respect to both historical and contemporary usage. Because the 16th century is both a momentous time of linguistic change for European languages, and often for some reason neglected by historians of emotion trying to tell a longer story about emotion terminology, this article provides an overview of how 16th-century lexicons and prominent humanist authors handle (...) the basic Latin emotion terms affectus and passio. It suggests further that 16th-century usage confounds Thomas Dixon’s assertion that “classical Christian” usage consists of a generally firm distinction between the two terms. (shrink)

Debates about the metaphysical compatibility between miracles and natural laws often appear to prejudge the issue by either adopting or rejecting a strong physicalist thesis (the idea that the physical is all that exists). The operative component of physicalism is a causal closure principle: that every caused event is a physically caused event. If physicalism and this strong causal closure principle are accepted, then supernatural interventions are rules out ’tout court’, while rejecting physicalism gives miracles metaphysical carte blanche. This paper (...) argues for a more moderate version of physicalism that respects important physicalist intuitions about causal closure while allowing for miracles’ logical possibility. A recent proposal for a specific mechanism for the production of miracles (Larmer 1996d) is criticized and rejected. In its place, two separate mechanisms (suitable for deterministic and indeterministic worlds, respectively) are proposed that do conform to a more moderate. (shrink)

Framing systematics as a field consistent with scientific inquiry entails that inferences of phylogenetic hypotheses have the goal of producing accounts of past causal events that explain differentially shared characters among organisms. Linking observations of characters to inferences occurs by way of why-questions implied by data matrices. Because of their form, why-questions require the use of common-cause theories. Such theories in phylogenetic inferences include natural selection and genetic drift. Selection or drift can explain ‘morphological’ characters but selection cannot be causally (...) applied to sequences since fitness differences cannot be directly associated with individual nucleotides or amino acids. The relation of selection to sequence data is by way of downward or top-down causation from those phenotypes upon which selection occurs. The application of phylogenetic inference to explain sequence data is thus restricted to instances where drift is the relevant theory; those nucleotides or amino acids that can be explained via downward causation are precluded from inclusion in the data matrix. The restrictions on the inclusion of sequence data in phylogenetic inferences equally apply to species hypotheses, precluding the more restrictive approach known as DNA barcoding. Not being able to discern drift and selection as relevant causal mechanisms can severely constrain the inclusion and explanations of sequence data. Implications of such exclusion are discussed in relation to the requirement of total evidence. (shrink)

Morality after Calvin' examines the development of ethical thought in the Reformed tradition immediately following the death of Calvin. The book explores a previously unstudied work of Theodore Beza, the Cato Censorius Christianus (1591). When read in conjunction with the works and correspondence of Beza and his colleagues (Simon Goulart, Lambert Daneau, Peter Martyr Vermigli, among others), the poems of the Cato reveal the theoretical underpinnings of the disciplinary activity during the period. Kirk M. Summers shows how the moral (...) fervor of the latter half of the sixteenth century had its genesis in a well-formulated theology that viewed a Christian's sanctification as a process of restoration to an original order created by God. 00. (shrink)

The reformed tradition on moral virtue -- Barth's objections -- Objections overcome -- The shape of reformed virtue after Barth -- Living out the reformed virtues.

Denton and Hockx present thirteen essays treating a variety of literary organizations from China's Republican era. Interdisciplinary in approach, the essays are primarily concerned with describing and analyzing the social and cultural complexity of literary groupings and the role of these social formations in literary production of the period.

The journey of the Wycliffe Global Alliance is an example of how some paradigm shifts are influencing leading in mission. Since Christianity is both an agent and product of globalization, its beliefs have spread from one source to another, crossing religious, linguistic and cultural contexts. As a result, there are polycentric or multiple centres of influence since Christianity has homes within a diversity of contexts. This carries with it various implications including how partnering in mission needs to be deconceptualized through (...) greater emphasis on friendship. In order for this to happen as a missiological principle, third spaces may need to be created. Viewed against the backdrop of church and mission agency leadership, structures may be ‘stuck in the Industrial Era’. Therefore, the stage is set for exploring how these and other themes influence leadership in God’s mission. (shrink)

Bruce Russell has classified evidential arguments from evil into four types, one of which is the type-4 argument. Rather than begin with observations of evils that appear to be gratuitous, type-4 arguments simply begin with observations of evils. The next step, and the heart of a type-4 argument, is an abductive inference (inference to the best explanation) from those observations, to the conclusion that there is gratuitous evil. Reflection upon the consequential complexity of history, however, reveals that we have no (...) objective grounds for making the key, abductive inference, thus, all type-4 arguments from evil fail. (shrink)

_ Source: _Volume 36, Issue 1, pp 5 - 34 The purpose of this paper is to consider the role of the emotions in the _Ecclesiastes_ as they come to bear on Erasmus’ understanding of teaching and learning in the context of the Christian sermon and the relationship between the preacher and the congregation. The emotions do not only feature in Erasmus’ attempts to adjudicate the manner in which it is incumbent upon the preacher to _move_ the congregation, but a (...) specifically Christian sort of affectivity governs the way in which Erasmus imagines the preacher to be learned, and thus also to teach. As a result of its breadth and depth in covering an array of topics relevant to cultivating learned piety in the context of Christian preaching, the _Ecclesiastes_ represents the most detailed treatment Erasmus offered of the importance of emotion in numerous areas of Christian thought and life. And without close attention to the affective aspects of Erasmus’ ideal method of teaching and preaching, one simply cannot provide an adequate account of the humanist’s theological program of learned piety. (shrink)

This paper provides a narratological analysis of Lucan's Bellum Civile, focusing on the role of internal and external narratees . In particular it treats Pompey and Caesar in the roles of narrator and reader, respectively. An important passage characterizes the external narratees of the Bellum Civile as astonished by the events of the epic, and indeed unwilling to believe the historical fact of Pompey's defeat as Pharsalia. Similarly, characters within the epic repeatedly refuse to believe Pompey's narrations. Pompey's failure as (...) a general is, therefore, underscored by his failure as a narrator. Even in his death, Pompey becomes a text that, when read by passersby, will not gain credence. Caesar, by contrast, is a reader. By reading texts selectively he constructs for himself a noble past, a sure future, and epic fame. When he is called upon to create a narrative himself , his narrative, too, is disbelieved. But Caesar, unlike Pompey, anticipates and reacts positively to the failure of his narrative to convince. The story that Lucan presents is constructed as unbelievable. It is a text of ruin, of that which specifically cannot be narrated. For epic narration has at its core the rescue of events, people, and places from oblivion. An epic of ruin is, therefore, a contradiction in terms. Thus, the Bellum Civile succeeds by its very failure to convince, recreating in its unbelievable narrative the failure of events themselves. (shrink)