A scholarly edition of a work by David Hume. The edition presents an authoritative text, together with an introduction, commentary notes, and scholarly apparatus.

Divided into eight sections, each with introductory essays, the selections offer rich and detailed insights into a diverse multinational philosophical landscape. Revealed in this pathbreaking work is the way in which traditional philosophical issues related to ethics, metaphysics, and epistemology, for instance, take on specific forms in Africa's postcolonial struggles. Much of its moral, political, and social philosophy is concerned with the turbulent processes of embracing modern identities while protecting ancient cultures.

From early sage philosophers to Leopold Senghor of Senegal and Steve Biko of South Africa, African thinking has challenged the way we think. As we enter a new millenium, the perspectives provided in this volume offer wise and refreshing alternatives to problems of self and society, culture, aesthetics, metaphysics and religion. Out of Africa always something new, and in these pages contemporary problems of cross-cultural cognition and post-coloniality are not only addressed, but also enacted. The reader witnesses the collision and (...) the coalescence of cultures in the writings of philosophers from Africa. (shrink)

Rid and Wendler propose the development of a Patient Preference Predictor (PPP), an actuarial model for predicting incapacitated patient’s life-sustaining treatment preferences across a wide range of end-of-life scenarios. An actuarial approach to end-of-life decision making has enormous potential, but transferring the logic of actuarial prediction to end-of-life decision making raises several conceptual complexities and logistical problems that need further consideration. Actuarial models have proven effective in targeted prediction tasks, but no evidence supports their effectiveness in the kind of broad (...) spectrum prediction task that is the proposed goal of the PPP. We argue that a more focused approach, targeting specific medical conditions and generating treatment predictions based on the preferences of individuals with actual disease experience, is both more firmly grounded in past research and is a more prudent initial strategy for exploring the efficacy of actuarial prediction in end-of-life decision making. (shrink)

This article explores the influence of Stoicism and religion on Adam Smith. While other commentators have argued either that the main influence on Smith was Stoicism or that it was religion, the two influences have not been explicitly linked. In this article I attempt to make such a link, arguing that Smith can be seen as belonging to the strand of Christian Stoicism chiefly associated with his teacher, Francis Hutcheson. Finally, some comments are made about the implications of this interpretation (...) for current understanding of the work of Adam Smith. (shrink)

Standard defences of preservationism, and of the intrinsic value of nature more generally, are vulnerable to at least three objections. The first of these comes from social constructivism, the second from the claim that it is incoherent to argue that nature is both 'other' and something with which we can feel unity, whilst the third links defences of nature to authoritarian objectivism and dangerously misanthropic normative dichotomies which set pure nature against impure humanity. I argue that all these objections may (...) be answered by recasting the relationship between man and nature into a tripartite spectrum of ontological form between nature and artifact, with the key question being the extent to which nature has been humanised in accordance with certain modes of strongly instrumental rationality, these in turn being defined by reference to the split between abstract reason and natural feeling which was exacerbated by specific elements in the Enlightenment period. This new model may grant normative force by linking external nature to a broader conception of human psychological wellbeing than that offered by the quantitatively orientated models of human rationality and agency. (shrink)

This collection of 11 studies provides a new discussion of Lucretius' History of the Human Mankind and of other topics (Lucretius' explanation of sleep, dreams and optical illusions) in relationship to other philosophical and scientific doctrines of Antiquity.

This paper is an examination of the Christology and Pneumatology that C. S. Lewis read from the apparent prefiguring of elements of the Incarnation‐Resurrection narrative in religious myths, and also his assertion that the incarnation‐resurrection narrative operates on us both as fact and myth. After an initial examination of the term myth and mythopoeia, Lewis' writings on the myth that became reality are discussed along with examples of prefigurement. Through his understanding of natural theology and his cautious respect for human (...) imagination and in contrast to his earlier deference for the conclusions of the Victorian religionist and social anthropologist James George Frazer, Lewis came to regard these prefigurements as the work of the Holy Spirit – intimations of God's salvific action in Christ – though Lewis' orthodoxy saw human imagination as flawed through original sin. This leads us to ask three questions: first, how do these prefigured ideas come to be in these myths and how do these intimations, splintered fragments of the true light, relate to Lewis' understanding of Christ as the light of the world; second, how does the Incarnation‐Resurrection narrative act/operate on us as a myth, whether spoken or read ; and third, is there internal evidence for a mythopoeic interpretation within the Incarnation‐Resurrection narrative? Our conclusions can be illustrated by a brief examination of Lewis' own Christian myth – Aslan from The Chronicles of Narnia– originally written for a Christian audience but now read by mainly non‐Christian/post‐Christian children and adults. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to explore in the light of recent scientific discoveries, coupled with a return to biblical orthodoxy, the question of the Fall, and the apparent intergenerational conditions of original sin. This is the human condition – East of Eden. Invoking Darwin's theory of evolution through natural selection from random mutation as a means of repudiating the existence of original sin can no longer be sustained, scientifically; the biology of horizontal gene transfer, transgenerational epigenetics, accelerated evolution (...) and biological plasticity has rendered Darwinism grounded in a Naturalistic methodology an inadequate explanation. If humanity is ‘born this way’ – mired in sin – have we condemned ourselves and our children to this status? How does this affect the relationship between biology and free will, between a form of predestination and decision-making? Therefore, this paper is towards an understanding of the ontology of the original, or first, sin, and is a biblical and scientific exploration of postlapsarian humanity's self-willed state, ‘East of Eden.’. (shrink)

A numerical classification was performed on 69 elements with 54 chemicaland physicochemical properties. The elements fell into clusters in closeaccord with the electron shell s-, p- andd-blocks. The f-block elements were not included forlack of sufficiently complete data. The successive periods ofs- and p-block elements appeared in an ovalconfiguration, with d-block elements lying to one side. Morethan three axes were required to give good representation of thevariation, although the interpretation of the higher axes is difficult.Only 15 properties were scorable for (...) the noble gases, but despite thepaucity of properties reflecting chemical reactivity, analysis of the 69elements on these properties still showed the major features seen fromthe full set. (shrink)