Information is the fourth core element of public health legal preparedness and of legal preparedness for public health emergencies specifically. Clearly, the creation, transmittal, and application of information are vital to all public health endeavors. The critical significance of information grows exponentially as the complexity and scale of public threats increase.Only a small body of organized information on public health law existed before the 21st century: a series of landmark books published beginning in 1926 by Tobey, Grad, and Wing ; (...) model public health laws published as early as 1907; systematic reviews of original research studies published in the 1990s; and a small but growing number of articles published in public health journals and law reviews.With the new century came new public health law programs and activities at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in public health professional associations, and in numerous non-profit and academic organizations. (shrink)

Information is the fourth core element of public health legal preparedness and of legal preparedness for public health emergencies specifically. Clearly, the creation, transmittal, and application of information are vital to all public health endeavors. The critical significance of information grows exponentially as the complexity and scale of public threats increase.Only a small body of organized information on public health law existed before the 21st century: a series of landmark books published beginning in 1926 by Tobey, Grad, and Wing ; (...) model public health laws published as early as 1907; systematic reviews of original research studies published in the 1990s; and a small but growing number of articles published in public health journals and law reviews.With the new century came new public health law programs and activities at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in public health professional associations, and in numerous non-profit and academic organizations. (shrink)

V.1 Re-establishing an initial union among philosophy, science, and wisdom by recovering our understanding of philosophy, science : how philosophy, science, is, and always has been, chiefly a study of the one and the many -- v.2. An introduction to ragamuffin Thomism.

There is a moral phenomenon of “Secondary Permissibility” in which an otherwise morally impermissible option is made morally permissible by the presence of another option. In this paper I explain how this phenomenon works and argue that understanding how it works suggests a new model for the structure of the ethics of harming.

It would be useful to have a category of extensive-form games whose isomorphisms specify equivalences between games. Since working with entire games is too large a project for a single paper, I begin here with preforms, where a “preform” is a rooted tree together with choices and information sets. In particular, this paper first defines the category \, whose objects are “functioned trees”, which are specially designed to be incorporated into preforms. I show that \ is isomorphic to the full (...) subcategory of \ whose objects are converging arborescences. Then the paper defines the category \, whose objects are “node-and-choice preforms”, each of which consists of a node set, a choice set, and an operator mapping node-choice pairs to nodes. I characterize the \ isomorphisms, define a forgetful functor from \ to \, and show that \ is equivalent to the full subcategory of \ whose objects are perfect-information preforms. The paper also shows that many game-theoretic entities can be derived from preforms, and that these entities are well-behaved with respect to \ morphisms and isomorphisms. (shrink)

Jorge J. E. Gracia, was born in Cuba in 1942. At age 19, he escaped Cuba and arrived in the United States. In 2019, 58 years later, in a nation which, prior to his arrival in North America, had no major Latino cultural presence in higher education and philosophy, Gracia rose to hold the Samuel P. Capen Chair and State University of New York at Buffalo Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Comparative Literature. In this position, he became the leading figure (...) to institutionalize Latin American philosophy in the U.S. academy and an internationally-renowned scholar in medieval philosophy. Jorge J. E. Gracia died in the United States on July 13, 2021. In this paper the author shows that what properly explains the philosophical and adult-personal life of Gracia is the Thomistic principle of virtual quantity. He contends that the only way to understand Gracia’s personal and philosophical life is to grasp this life as one of an organizational psychologist pursuing perfect self-realization in action and understanding: someone chiefly interested in intellectually grasping precisely how organizational wholes (including his own psyche) become united and divided, and operate when so united and divided. (shrink)

Through extensive textual analysis, this book concludes that the prevailing opinion about the nature of modern and contemporary philosophy is wrong. It maintains that almost all modern and contemporary philosophy is deconstructed, secularized, Augustinian theology, not philosophy. The work is divided into eight chapters, a guest Foreword by Herbert I. London notes, bibliography, and an index. Chapter 1 considers Cartesian thought, Hobbes, and Newton. Chapter 2 examines Locke, Berkeley, and Hume. Chapter 3 investigates Lessing and Rousseau. Chapters 4 and 5 (...) treat Kant. Chapters 6 and 7 deal with Hegel. Chapter 8 concludes that a lack of philosophical and historical experience coupled with a widespread inability to read philosophical texts according to the intention of the author causes us to mistake secularized theology for philosophy and is a main cause for the decline of contemporary universities. (shrink)

A central aspect of the computational theory of vision developed by Marr and his coworkers is the use made of contingent regularities in the physical environment to explain how the visual system determines the shape and location of objects in the world on the basis of the spatial organization of the retinal image. Marr (1982) refers to these environmental regularities as “natural constraints” and “physical assumptions.” In this paper I am concerned with recent arguments concerning the implications of this feature (...) of Marr’s theory for understanding psychological explanation. Burge (1986) claims that Marr’s use of natural constraints shows the theory to be nonindividualistic, in the sense that the individuation of psychological states depends essentially on the objects and conditions of the world external to the subject. While it does capture an important aspect of Marr’s theory, Burge’s account is misleadingly incomplete. To see this it is useful to compare the issue of individualism with the question whether the theory is compatible with methodological solipsism as a research strategy. (shrink)

In the past few decades, scholars have offered positive, normative, and most recently, interpretive theories of contract law. These theories have proceeded primarily from deontological and consequentialist premises. In A Theory of Contract Law: Empirical Understandings and Moral Psychology, Professor Peter A. Alces confronts the leading interpretive theories of contract and demonstrates their interpretive doctrinal failures. Professor Alces presents the leading canonical cases that inform the extant theories of Contract law in both their historical and transactional contexts and, argues (...) that moral psychology provides a better explanation for the contract doctrine than do alternative comprehensive interpretive approaches. (shrink)

This book challenges the presupposition among professional philosophers that René Descartes is the Father of Modern Philosophy. It demonstrates by intensive textual analysis of Descartes's _Discourse_ and _Meditations_ that he inaugurated a new type of sophistry rather than a new way of conducting philosophy. Transcendental Sophistry is a synthesis of Renaissance humanism and Christian theology, especially the theology of creation. This striking re-evaluation of the achievement of Descartes opens the history of Western philosophy to radical reinterpretation.

Peter Kwasniewski shows that St. Thomas contemplates the nature of ecstasy at key stages in the development of his thought and that it plays a crucial role in his doctrine of love. St. Thomas recognized that all love involves ecstatic transcendence, whether it be the creature's self-oblation to the Creator, the reverence of an inferior for a superior, a superior's generosity toward an inferior, or the mutual affection and help of equals joined in friendship. Love of persons for their (...) own sake generates an ecstatic love in which the self is borne as a gift to another subject by sharing a common life aspiring to common goods. Kwasniewski also examines Aquinas on the question of whether or not God experiences ecstasy, and if so, in what ways. (shrink)

Through a radical reinterpretation of classical philosophy as an organizational psychology, The Moral Psychology of St. Thomas: An Introduction to Ragamuffin Ethics just as radically reinterprets St. Thomas Aquinas's moral teaching to be a behavioristic psychology chiefly designed to synthesize right reason and right pleasure to help a person excel at living life as a whole. In the process of so doing, this work demonstrates how the skill of prudential living is a necessary condition for becoming a grand master of (...) leadership in any and every profession. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that, while there are real tensions between phenomenology and critique, it makes a significant difference what we understand phenomenology to be, and that on a good understanding there is room for a project that is genuinely both critical and phenomenological. I will focus on four areas of tension: the eidetic character of phenomenology as opposed to the concrete character of critique; the transcendental orientation of phenomenology as opposed to social and political orientation of critique; the (...) descriptive nature of phenomenology as opposed to the normative nature of critique; and the possibly “naïve” character of phenomenology with respect to the shaping of phenomena by social forces. In each case, I will not try to show that there is no space between phenomenology and critique; rather, I suggest that the tension between the two can be mitigated to allow for a critical phenomenology. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS 489 universe enjoys as an ordered whole. What happens if the model does not present a universal order, as seems to have been the case for the last three centuries? Should we then remove the corresponding perfection from our idea of universe's perfection? Or is there some metaphysical reason for asserting that the universe is an ordered whole, regardless of any particular model? If the latter, it (...) would be interesting to have at least a sketch of how we would arrive at this position. On the whole, certainly, the book provides an invaluable overview of the Thomistic universe for anyone working on Aquinas's cosmology, metaphysics, or even ethics. Blanchette is to be commended for his clear and orderly presentation of the material, especially the many subdivisions within the chapters. The quotations of Thomistic texts are almost all in English, well translated by Banchette himself. The placing of key phrases in Latin within parentheses helps in some measure to overcome the lack of the original text in the footnotes. Finally, the book's selected bibliography as well as its indices (index of names, analytical index, and index of citations) render the book an even more useful tool. The Catholic University ofAmerica Washington, D.C. DAVID M. GALLAGHER Freedom and Creation in Three Traditions. By DAVID B. BURRELL, C.S.C. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1993. Pp. xi + 225. $29.95 (cloth). According to the author, this book, Freedom and Creation in Three Traditions, is a comparative work designed "to illustrate the worth of explicitly tradition-directed inquiry, as well as the fruitfulness of comparative inquires in philosophical theory" (6). In addition, among other things, the author contends that, "because the pressure of comparative perspectives demands that we mine hitherto unsuspected reaches of what we have thought we know," not only the author but also the "traditional disciplines of philosophy and theology may each be enriched by the forays of such inquiry" (6). Specifically, the three traditions to which Burrell is referring are the Jewish, Islamic, and Christian; and, as the title of this book suggests, the central topics of consideration used as the basis for a comparison among these traditions are the respective notions of freedom and creation. In order to achieve his goals, Burrell places his discussion within the general context of the notion of creation, which, as he rightly observes, "is notoriously difficult to classify" (7). In so doing, he divides the work into nine chapters; which he entitles as follows: 1) "The Context: Creation"; 2) "On 490 BOOK REVIEWS Characterizing the Creator"; 3) "On Characterizing Creation"; 4) "On Characterizing the Relation: Jewish, Christian, Muslim"; 5) "God's Acting in the World God Creates"; 6) "Creatures Acting in a Created World"; 7) "On the Relations between the Two Actors"; 8) "Sin and Redemption"; 9) "The God Realized in Renewed Creation." Having placed his discussion within the general context of the notion of creation, Burrell begins his analysis by comparing and contrasting this notion in St. Thomas and Moses Maimonides vis-a-vis the necessitarianism of Aristotle as interpreted by lbn Sina. In so doing, Burrell stresses that what predominates in both Maimonides and Aquinas is a notion of God as a "free originator" of all creation not in relation to an "exegesis of the opening chapters of Genesis" but in relation "to the rest of the Bible and the subsequent tradition of Judaism and Christianity" (12). This "distillation" having been noted, Burrell then examines the distinctive features of the notion of creation as this is influenced by the "faith assertion " of the three respective religious traditions-Jewish, Christian, and Islamic. Within Judaism Burrell finds emphasis placed upon the need to interpret creation against the background of the "covenant" with Israel (19). In Aquinas and Barth he understands this activity to be interpreted against the background of the relation of the Father to His Eternal Word (19-21); and within Islam he finds the regulating theme in the conviction of God's absolute sovereignty vis-a-vis the created order. In chapter 2, Burrell goes into more precise detail regarding the specific ways in which God is characterized as a creator within the... (shrink)

This article considers the nature of Marxism as a species of Enlightenment Utopian Socialism, the relation of both these to a denial of nature of common sense properly understood. It argues that underlying all species of Enlightenment Utopian Socialism are psychological principles that deny the reality of evidently known first principles of understanding that are measures of truth in all forms of psychologically healthy human knowing and reasoning. In addition, it maintains that, as a result of these essentially anarchic psychological (...) first principles inherent in its nature, any attempt to apply any species of Utopian Socialism to develop healthy social organizations and cultural institutions—such as forms of human communication and educational and political instittions—is doomed to fail. Utopian Socialism will always destroy common sense in whatever it infects with its disordered habits of understanding and reasoning. (shrink)

In this paper I sketch an account of moral blame and blameworthiness. I begin by clarifying what I take blame to be and explaining how blameworthiness is to be analyzed in terms of it. I then consider different accounts of the conditions of blameworthiness and, in the end, settle on one according to which a person is blameworthy for φ-ing just in case, in φ-ing, she violates one of a particular class of moral requirements governing the attitudes we bear, and (...) our mental orientation, toward people and other objects of significant moral worth. These requirements embody the moral stricture that we accord to these others a sufficient level of respect, one that their moral worth demands. This is a familiar theme which has its roots in P. F. Strawson’s pioneering views on moral responsibility. My development of it leads me to the conclusion that acting wrongly is not a condition of blameworthiness: violating a moral requirement to perform, or refrain from performing, an action is neither necessary nor sufficient for being blameworthy. All we are ever blameworthy for, I will argue, are certain aspects of our mental bearing toward others. We can be said to be blameworthy for our actions only derivatively, in the sense that those actions are the natural manifestations of the things for which we are strictly speaking blameworthy. (shrink)

THINK Currency. THINK Relevancy. THINK Critically. THINK Critically is a cutting-edge, self-reflective guide for improving critical thinking skills through careful analysis, reasoned inference, and thoughtful evaluation of contemporary culture and ideas. An engaging visual design developed with extensive student feedback and 15-page chapters makesTHINK Critically the textbook your students will actually read. It delivers the core concepts of critical thinking in a way they can easily understand. Additionally, engaging examples and masterful exercises help students learn to clarify ideas, analyze arguments, (...) and evaluate reasoning. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: What is a ‘Tolerant Society’? Respect and Appreciation of Difference Alternatives for Education Notes References.

Emerging neuroscientific insights are changing our understanding of what it means to be human. The resulting reconceptualization continues to impact law and the fit between law and morality. This book takes account of those developments and suggests that normative theory, particularly in its non-instrumental iterations, will be challenged, most profoundly. If we are, as the science suggests, nothing more than the coincidence of mechanical forces, then law and normative theory that depend on the immaterial and that would draw distinctions between (...) the "mental" or "emotional" and the more manifestly physical are misguided, so misguided that they would actually undermine human thriving. Indeed, they already do. The ramifications of that conclusion are profound. Trialectic posits and investigates the impact of those ramifications on law. (shrink)

Many health care decisions depend not only upon medical facts, but also on value judgments—patient goals and preferences. Until recent decades, patients relied on doctors to tell them what to do. Then ethicists and others convinced clinicians to adopt a paradigm shift in medical practice, to recognize patient autonomy, by orienting decision making toward the unique goals of individual patients. Unfortunately, current medical practice often falls short of empowering patients. In this article, we reflect on whether the current state of (...) medical decision making effectively promotes patients' health care goals. We base our reflections, in part, on research in which we observed physicians making earnest efforts to partner with patients in making treatment decisions, but still struggling to empower patients—failing to communicate clearly to patients about decision-relevant information, overwhelming patients with irrelevant information, overlooking when patients' emotions made it hard to engage in choices, and making recommendations before discussing patients' goals. (shrink)

In the fiftieth anniversary of this book’s first release, Winch’s argument remains as crucial as ever. Originally published in 1958, _The Idea of a Social Science and Its Relation to Philosophy_ was a landmark exploration of the social sciences, written at a time when that field was still young and had not yet joined the Humanities and the Natural Sciences as the third great domain of the Academy. A passionate defender of the importance of philosophy to a full understanding of (...) 'society' against those who would deem it an irrelevant 'ivory towers' pursuit, Winch draws from the works of such thinkers as Ludwig Wittgenstein, J.S. Mill and Max Weber to make his case. In so doing he addresses the possibility and practice of a comprehensive 'science of society'. (shrink)

My chief aim in this article is to call upon the research of some exceptional scholars to make some refinements to Étienne Gilson’s teaching about the nature of Christian philosophy. In the process of so doing, I also aim to make as comprehensible as I can why Gilson, from 1931 through the rest of his academic life, had so much difficulty making intelligible to himself and to others precisely what he had meant by the term ‘Christian Philosophy.”.

We suggest that the emerging field of the conservation humanities can play a valuable role in biodiversity protection in Papua New Guinea (PNG), where most land remains under collective customary clan ownership. As a first step to mobilising this scholarly field in PNG and to support capacity development for PNG humanities academics, we conducted a landscape review of PNG humanities teaching and research relating to biodiversity conservation and customary land rights. We conducted a systematic literature review, a PNG teaching programme (...) review, and a series of online workshops between the authors (10 PNG-based, 7 UK-based). We found a small but notable amount of PNG research and teaching focused on biodiversity conservation or customary land rights. This included explicit discussion of these topics in 8 of 156 PNG-authored humanities texts published 2010-2020 and related teaching content in the curricula of several different humanities-based programmes. We discuss current barriers to PNG academic development. The growth of fully fledged in-country conservation humanities will require a joint collaborative effort by PNG researchers, who are best placed to carry out such work, and researchers from abroad who can access resources to support the process. (shrink)

Waar de een zijn leven geeft voor een goed geweten, haalt de ander zijn schouders erover op. Het geweten: een achterhaald begrip of hard toe aan herwaardering?

The author makes an attempt to show why (1) Darwin’s teaching in The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection and The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex cannot be “scientific” in a modern, classical, or any, sense and that, consequently, in them, (2) Darwin did not scientifically prove the reality of evolution of species. He claims that, while the question of the origin of genera and species is principally and primarily a metaphysical problem, Darwin’s ignorance (...) of the nature of philosophy and metaphysics and the complexity of the problem of the nature of genera and species caused him mistakenly to frame this metaphysical problem as one of physics, more precisely as one of biology, which Darwin reduced to a natural history of living, physical beings. (shrink)

This edition of Studia Gilsoniana inaugurates submission of articles on economic science based upon pre-modern principles of philosophy/science. Today, many journals address the intersection of economics and philosophy. Their contributors include practicing economists, economic historians, economist-philosophers, philosopher-economists, and economic methodologists. Research in this interdisciplinary field began to appear in the 1970s and later took shape in the 1980s with the appearance of its specialized academic journals. Today, the intersection of economics and philosophy is a vibrant area of inquiry and research. (...) Books and journal pages are replete with references to classical philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle and their contributions to economic science. However, stronger connections need to be made related to the application of economic principles from the past to the present based upon enduring pre-modern principles of science. This is precisely what this inaugural issue celebrates. (shrink)

It was a little over ten years ago, 1967–8, that H. D. Lewis delivered the first series of Gifford lectures, The Elusive Mind, in the University of Edinburgh. It was my privilege that year to be an auditor in the Seminar at King's College that Professor Lewis was conducting with his students in the area of this topic. I had already read the works in which, in the midst of neo-orthodox and existentialist religious movements, he had devoted himself to critical (...) valuation of those doctrines - witness his Morals and the New Theology, and Morals and Revelation. This earlier work prepared for a comprehensive interpretation of religious experience in his book in 1960: Our Experience of God. (shrink)

First published in 1990. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

While Aristotle’s and St. Thomas’s teachings about economics are often ridiculed today, this article argues that actually what they had to say about this issue, especially about the nature of sound currency, backed up by force of law, is quite profound. According to both of them, sound money plays an essential role in the preserving commutative justice within States. By so doing, it preserves communication between talented people who make qualitatively unequal contributions to a State’s continued existence and welfare.

The chief aim of this article is to show that St. Thomas Aquinas’s Fourth Way of demonstrating God’s existence can only be made precisely intelligible by comprehending it as a real, generic whole in light of its specific organizational principles. Considered as a real, generic whole, this argument is one from effect to cause (from a real order of more or less perfectly existing generic, specific, and individual beings [habens esse] more or less perfectly possessing generic, specific, and individual ways (...) of being within qualitatively different, hierarchical, orders of existence to a first cause of this order of perfections). In addition, this article maintains that, to comprehend this complicated argument, readers mush be familiar with philosophical principles that St. Thomas repeatedly uses throughout his major works, but with which most of his contemporary students tend to be unfamiliar. Consequently, a secondary aim of this paper is to introduce readers unfamiliar with them to some of these principle so that they may be able better to comprehend what St. Thomas is saying in this demonstration and in other teachings of his as well. (shrink)