Abstractabstract:John B. Cobb, Jr., is one of the most influential Christian theologians of the past fifty years. Having written from an interdisciplinary lens, engaging economics, education, biology, and beyond, Cobb is not the typical theologian. One of Cobb's earliest concerns is the environmental crisis, having written the first single-author book on the subject in 1972. Cobb recognized early on that the environmental crisis was systemic, pervading modernity in both thought and culture, and sought to approach the problem as such. This (...) paper explores Cobb's religious and philosophical arguments regarding the environmental crisis. The first section identifies theological (anthropocentrism) and philosophical (substance-based thinking) assumptions that impede serious awareness of the environmental crisis. Here, Cobb's alternatives are presented in the quest for a more responsive worldview. Second, because environmental issues are pervasive in our modes of thinking, reconsidering education becomes a promising avenue in forming an ecological civilization. This section explores Cobb's detestation of the current education system in the West that idolizes isolated, fragmented disciplines. Instead, Cobb suggests the creation of a holistic, post-disciplinary approach. Finally, Cobb's legacy for the common good concludes this paper by supplying examples of his impact on the creation of an ecological civilization. (shrink)

Property undoubtedly has a central place in arrangements surrounding social life, a place so central that some writers have claimed that it is impossible to imagine anything which could be called a society without some property institution. A moment's thought suggests that property is a key element of an economic system, a major concern of the legal system, and a focus of political dispute. But the long‐standing recognition of the importance of property was often coupled with taking many aspects of (...) it for granted, particularly with respect to the possible justification of private property. The development of a specialized literature has occurred in the last forty years, to the extent that Becker has suggested that aspects of the theory of property cannot be developed any further. (An excellent essay by Dan‐Cohen, 2001 shows that Becker's comment may have been premature. Dan‐Cohen explores the relationship between ownership and the boundaries of the self.) This is not, of course, to say that nothing valuable or important had been said about property in the history of political and social thought: nothing could be further from the truth. But much of the political theory of property has been embedded in works with more comprehensive ambitions in political philosophy: Locke's Two Treatises of Government and Hegel's Philosophy of Right are obvious examples. The coherence of such theories of property is clearly dependent – to an extent which may be disputed – on the wider philosophical framework in which they are embedded. Again, the relevance of such theories to contemporary normative analysis depends – again, to a disputable degree – on the compatibility of the economic and political institutions envisaged by their authors with plausible contemporary applicability. (shrink)

Ai Weiwei is an installation artist who enjoyed great acclaim in the West after having absented himself from China, his homeland. He owes his global recognition to his dual identity as an artist/di...

Relevant propositional dynamic logics have been sporadically discussed in the broader context of modal relevant logics, but have not come up for sustained investigation until recently. In this paper, we develop a philosophical motivation for these systems, and present some new results suggested by the proposed motivation. Among these, we’ll show how to adapt some recent work to show that the extensions of relevant logics by the extensional truth constants \ are complete with respect to a natural class of ternary (...) relation models to show a similar result for the constant-free versions of the logic. In addition, we prove that the logics in question satisfy the variable sharing property, vindicating the claim that they really are relevant logics. (shrink)

The second edition of Andrew Skinner's essays has been updated to take account of his latest thinking on Adam Smith's system of social and moral science and his experience of teaching Smith to a student audience. The material from the first edition has been extensively rewritten in the light of recent scholarship, and four new essays have been included. Each essay can be read as a self-contained unit, supported by a full bibliography and notes; the book as a whole (...) expounds a single coherent argument which demonstrates how Smith's works are inter-related. (shrink)

For more than three decades, research into the psycholinguistics of pronoun interpretation has argued that hearers use various interpretation ‘preferences’ or ‘strategies’ that are associated with specific linguistic properties of antecedent expressions. This focus is a departure from the type of approach outlined in Hobbs , who argues that the mechanisms supporting pronoun interpretation are driven predominantly by semantics, world knowledge and inference, with particular attention to how these are used to establish the coherence of a discourse. On the basis (...) of three new experimental studies, we evaluate a coherence-driven analysis with respect to four previously proposed interpretation biases—based on grammatical role parallelism, thematic roles, implicit causality, and subjecthood—and argue that the coherence-driven analysis can explain the underlying source of the biases and predict in what contexts evidence for each will surface. The results further suggest that pronoun interpretation is incrementally influenced by probabilistic expectations that hearers have regarding what coherence relations are likely to ensue, together with their expectations about what entities will be mentioned next, which, crucially, are conditioned on those coherence relations. (shrink)

Andrew Cooper presents the first systematic study of Kant's account of natural history. Cooper contends that Kant made a decisive contribution to one of the most explosive and understudied revolutions in the history of science: the addition of time to the frame in which explanations are required, sought, and justified in natural science. Through addressing a wide range of Kant's works, Cooper challenges the claim that Kant's theory of science denies a developmental conception of nature and argues instead that (...) it establishes a method by which natural historians can genuinely dispute historical claims and potentially come to consensus. This method, Cooper argues, can be used to expose serious flaws in Kant's own historical reasoning, including the formation and defence of his racist views. The book will be valuable to philosophers seeking to discern both the power and limitations of Kant's theory of science, and to historians of science working on the fractured landscape of eighteenth-century Newtonianism. (shrink)

This article provides an account of the value of privacy in securing the republican aims of self-government and conditions of non-domination. It describes how loss of privacy might lead to subjugation to dominating power. The republican concept of domination provides the foundation of a broad and coherent account of the value of privacy. One that encompasses circumstances in which the subject suffers interference as a result of the loss, is aware that he has suffered a loss of privacy, but suffers (...) no subsequent interference and is unaware that he has suffered any loss of privacy, and suffers no subsequent interference. Liberal accounts explain the value of privacy in the first two circumstances by pointing to the possible effect of the loss on the autonomy of the subject, but because they focus on autonomy are unable to explain why privacy is valuable where an agent is unaware of the loss. The republican account provided here explains why loss is harmful in all three circumstances. The final part of the article argues that because privacy is a pre-requisite for effective participation in political life, and republicans consider such participation to be the essence of self-government and the means through which a polity can secure conditions of freedom, in a republican democracy individual privacy will be seen as a collective good. (shrink)

The debate has continued in these terms to the present day. In Like-Minded, Andrew Sneddon argues that "reason" and "passion" do not satisfactorily capture all the important options for explaining the psychological foundations of morality.

Chapter One THE MAN-APES A Lesson for Thomas Hobbes Probably the most exciting development in modern anthropology is the discovery of the australopithecines ...

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Gambling with God: The Use of the Lot by the Moravian Brethren in the Eighteenth CenturyElisabeth SommerThe use of the lot in decision-making marks the Moravian Brethren as peculiar in eighteenth-century Europe. Their belief that the lot represented the true will of Christ stands at odds with a century which had inherited a changing world view in which a strong confidence in the power of human reason gradually replaced (...) the assumption of God’s providential power. 1 Historian Andrew Fix has traced this intellectual shift as it affected the seventeenth-century Dutch Collegiants, who moved from a spiritualist to a rationalist approach to religious questions. The Moravian Brethren, known in Europe as the Renewed Unity of the Brethren, resisted the triumph of reason over revelation into the late eighteenth century. In this they reflected the general hostility toward the emphasis on science and reason to which George Becker has pointed as a hallmark of the Halle Pietists. 2 This similarity is not surprising given the fact that the Brethren were very much a part of the later Pietist movement and had strong ties with Halle during the formative years of the Unity. Count Nicholas Ludwig von Zinzendorf, the dominant influence in the development of the new Unity, attended the Pädegogium at Halle from 1710 to 1716 and modeled his initial projects on his estate after similar ones in Halle. 3Halle preceded the Brethren in a struggle over the role of reason in spiritual life. In the 1740s the philosophy of Christian Wolff (and hence also of Leibniz) [End Page 267] became popular among many at Halle, despite his having been removed from the faculty in 1722. Although the Halle Pietists did not reject science and reason out of hand, some among the faculty had perceived a distinct threat to faith from Wolff’s particular focus. 4 Through his view of reason as the divine source of human knowledge, Wolff shifted the ultimate test of religious insight from revelation to reason. 5 This same decade saw the Brethren’s piety reach a height of intensely emotional, even sensual, expression. This may have prevented Wolffian ideas from extending their influence into the Unity at that time. By the 1790s, however, it became clear that, at least among many of the lay members of the Unity, the Enlightenment stress on the primacy of reason was winning. Just as the Collegiants had come to view “free prophecy” as a function of human reason, several of the Brethren ultimately saw the lot as something open to human manipulation and objected to its use, arguing that decisions were best left simply to “brotherly reason.” 6Although the emphasis on reason invaded the Unity later than it entered Halle, they shared traits that made them vulnerable. In both cases piety was linked to behavior and a certain level of indoctrination. The tendency to drill young people in proper belief and conduct created a climate in which rival ideas could prove quite seductive. 7 A study of the Unity’s use of the lot and its place within their spiritual life over the course of the century reveals this process. It also reveals something of the nature of authority within the Unity since the change was driven by the laity, while the leadership struggled, largely in vain, to maintain the old order. Most importantly, the debate over the use of the lot shows the dynamics of changing ideas outside of the realm of the university and seminary. This allows a view of the impact of practical concerns and individual desires on intellectual change and illuminates the relationship between abstract ideas and social reality.The Unity of the Brethren began as a gathering of Protestant exiles who settled on the Saxon estate of Count von Zinzendorf in 1722. There they founded the village of Herrnhut, and in 1727, under Zinzendorf’s watchful eye, they drew up a set of village statutes in which they sought to preserve its character as a community “built by the living God and a work of his almighty hand.” 8 Their vision of a godly community resulted in a fusion of spiritual authority with economic and domestic authority... (shrink)

ABSTRACTIn his account of public reason Rawls assumes that some facts ought to be treated as ‘fixed’, or beyond reasonable disagreement. These include, for him, facts upon which there is a scientif...

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 9.1 (2002) 55-59 [Access article in PDF] One Stage Is Not Enough Andrew W. Young and Karel W. de Pauw Keywords: delusions, Cotard delusion, Capgras delusion, cognitive neuropsychiatry. WE WELCOME THE OPPORTUNITY to offer our reflections on Philip Gerrans' interesting paper. Our opinion is that on fundamental issues we agree quite a bit—but there are clear differences when it comes to details.The most basic (...) issue concerns the nature of the enterprise. Like Gerrans, we think that it is possible to create testable accounts of the formation and maintenance of what would otherwise seem bizarre and inexplicable delusions, and that these accounts should be grounded in theoretical models of factors that underpin our everyday perception and reasoning. This general approach certainly forms part of what has been called cognitive neuropsychiatry. However, we disagree with Gerrans in that we see cognitive neuropsychiatry as an attempt to draw on the underlying logic of cognitive neuropsychology, rather than (as Gerrans implies) its current methods. The underlying logic of cognitive neuropsychological approaches has been to try to understand the effects of brain injury in terms of disruption of different components of theoretical models of normal abilities. In this approach, a model of normal performance is tested by its ability to account for the effects of brain injury. Where the model of normal performance also provides a convincing account of brain injury it is retained, and when it fails to account for effects of brain injury, it is revised or abandoned. In cognitive neuropsychiatry, the key theoretical move has been to argue that an adequate model of normal performance should be able to account for any disordered pattern (Ellis and Young 1990). The same logic of seeking to explain disordered performance by reference to models of normal function is then attempted, but for disorders that would usually fall within the province of psychiatry.In our opinion, however, cognitive neuropsychiatry will not simply involve importing the methods of cognitive neuropsychology into the new domain; they will need to be developed and adapted to fit the new agenda (Young 2000).In cognitive neuropsychology, progress has often come from the careful investigation of people with stable, selective deficits of fundamental cognitive functions involved in sensory analysis, memory, and verbal or motor output. In contrast, delusional beliefs can be relatively unstable; often they are only held for a few weeks or even days. When the delusions change, patients may modify or abandon them as suddenly as they seemed to form them, or they may give them up much more slowly and reluctantly. At the very least, this creates difficulties in the timing of investigations and in interpreting the relation of deficits and symptoms, which may be recorded on separate dates. These methodological problems [End Page 55] are exacerbated by the fact that deficits linked to complex abnormal experiences such as delusions may be multifaceted and diffuse, even when the delusions themselves have a specific content or theme. Such complications do not invalidate cognitive neuropsychiatry, but they do mean it will need to develop its own methods for dealing with them and making appropriate inferences.One of the key complexities that has surfaced already involves the idea that delusional beliefs might reflect the interaction of two or more contributory factors. Gerrans discusses a particular variant of this idea, which had been suggested by Young and Leafhead (1996) as an approach to understanding the Cotard delusion: The Cotard delusion represents a depressed person's attempt to account for abnormal perceptual experiences. It follows that the delusion is based on an unfortunate interaction between different contributory factors. One set of factors creates the abnormal perceptual experiences, which are characterised by lack of emotional responses and feelings of emptiness, depersonalisation and derealisation. The other factors result in a misinterpretation of these perceptual changes, in which the patients' depressed moods lead them correctly to attribute the changes to themselves, but to exaggerate their consequences. (Young and Leafhead, 1996, 166) Gerrans describes this as a two-stage account, but argues that a one-stage account based only on abnormal perceptual... (shrink)

Andrew Davis; Ability and Learning, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 22, Issue 1, 30 May 2006, Pages 45–55, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9752.1988.t.

Recent history makes clear that the quantum leaps being made in technology are the leading edge of a groundswell of paradigm shifts taking place in science, politics, economics, social institutions, and the expression of cultural values. Indeed it is the simultaneity and interdependence of these changes occurring in every dimension of human experience and endeavor that makes the present so historically distinctive. The essays gathered here give voice to perspectives on the always improvised relationship between technology and cultural values from (...) Africa, the Americas, Asia, Australia, Europe, and the Pacific. Contributors: Syed Muhammad Naquib Al-Attas, Roger T. Ames,Yoko Arisaka, Carl Becker, Francesca Bray, James Buchanan, Arindam Chakrabarti, Frank W. Derringh, Rolf Elberfeld, Charles Ess, Andrew Feenberg, Susantha Goonatilake, H. Jiuan Heng, Peter Hershock, Thomas P. Kasulis, George Khushf, David Farrell Krell, Joel J. Kupperman, William R. LaFleur, Lois Ann Lorentzen, David Loy, Joseph Margolis, Hans-Georg Möller, Robert Cummings Neville, Peimin Ni, Monica Atieno Opole, Kuruvilla Pandikattu SJ, Helen Petrovsky, Ramon Sentmartí, Kristin Shrader-Frechette, Vasanthi Srinivasan, Marietta Stepaniants, Vyacheslav S. Stiopin, Henk ten Have, Paul B.Thompson, Mary Tiles, David B.Wong. (shrink)

This contribution to part 4 of the Common Knowledge symposium “Fuzzy Studies: On the Consequence of Blur” shows how the reputedly radical position that history is not about eternal truths but about the creative construction of a convincing narrative of past events is not an argument of recent vintage. In the days when postmodernism was a technical term used mainly by scholars of art and architecture—and indeed, decades before then—professional historians were grappling with the incapacity of facts to write themselves (...) into a universally satisfying, single version of history. Successive presidents of the American Historical Association such as Andrew Dickson White, Carl Becker, Charles Beard, and William McNeill admitted that writing history is a desperate attempt at pattern recognition in a fuzzy discipline. Pattern recognition is a tool, valuable as a stage in historical thinking, but destined ultimately to come undone. What remains, then, is fuzzy thinking. It can be a good thing, the article concludes, to let our thinking about history remain a blur or, at least, to bear in mind that any patterns we recognize in the past are liable to dissolve under a different light. (shrink)

Explores the concept of historical intermittency in 5 recent French philosophers. Andrew Gibson engages with five recent and contemporary French philosophers, Badiou, Jambet, Lardreau, Francoise Proust and Ranciere, who each produce a post-Hegelian philosophy of history founded on an assertion of the intermittency of historical value. Gibson explores this `anti-schematics of historical reason' and its implication for politics, ethics and aesthetics in a wide range of modern intellectual contexts, finding its necessary complement and most powerful expression in a wealth (...) of modern art, chiefly modern literature. The result is a sustained reflection on the possible character of a contemporary philosophy of history and an important contribution to our knowledge of contemporary French philosophy. (shrink)

_Plato_ explores the thought of a man who, in a literary career of fifty years, generated ideas that have pervaded history from antiquity to today. After laying out the basics of Plato’s intellectual development and considering his complex relationship with Socrates, Andrew Mason offers a thematic approach to help readers navigate through an often challenging body of work. Throughout, this concise volume traces the development of continuing themes in Plato’s dialogues and considers the relevance of these themes for modern (...) thought. Drawing on recent scholarship, this engaging introduction offers the ideal, up-to-date overview of a figure who remains essential reading in western history and philosophy. (shrink)

A number of egalitarians have reached the conclusion that inequalities are just provided that they are the outcome of holding people appropriately responsible for their choices, and that only inequalities which can be traced back to the circumstances in which people happen to find themselves are objectionable. But this form of egalitarianism needs to be supplemented with an account of when it is appropriate to hold people responsible for their choices that is properly sensitive to the profound effects of socialisation. (...) Two of the most promising attempts to develop such an account-those of Ronald Dworkin and John Roemer-are found to be problematic in the light of a range of cases where gender socialisation influences values and aspirations. (shrink)

Background:Nurses’ collegiality is topical because patient care is complicated, requiring shared knowledge and working methods. Nurses’ collaboration has been supported by a number of different working models, but there has been less focus on ethics.Aim:This study aimed to develop nurses’ collegiality guidelines using the Delphi method.Method:Two online panels of Finnish experts, with 35 and 40 members, used the four-step Delphi method in December 2013 and January 2014. They reformulated the items of nurses’ collegiality identified by the literature and rated based (...) on validity and importance. Content analysis and descriptive statistical methods were used to analyze the data, and the nurses’ collegiality guidelines were formulated.Ethical considerations:Organizational approval was received, and an informed consent was obtained from all participants. Information about the voluntary nature of participation was provided.Results:During the first Delphi panel round, a number of items were reformulated and added, resulting in 32 reformulated items. As a result of the second round, 8 of the 32 items scored an agreement rate of more than 75%, with the most rated item being collegiality means that professionals respect each other. The item with second highest rating was collegiality has a common objective: what is best for patients, followed by the third highest which was professional ethics is the basis of collegiality.Conclusion:Nurses’ collegiality and its content are well recognized in clinical practice but seldom studied. Collegiality can be supported by guidelines, and nurses working in clinical practice, together with teachers and managers, have shared responsibilities to support and develop it. More research in different nursing environments is needed to improve understanding of the content and practice of nursing collegiality. (shrink)

Yarkoni recommends that psychology researchers should take care to align their statistical models to the verbal theories they are studying and testing. This principle applies not just to qualitative theories in psychology but also to more quantitative sciences: there, too, mismatch between open-ended theories and specific statistical models have led to confusion.