Although the Psalms may have originated primarily within the liturgical life of ancient Israel and Judah, they were nonetheless appropriated, preserved, and transmitted as instruction for the faithful.

Throughout the New Testament, the Gospel stories, the sayings of Jesus, and the writings of Paul not only teach a way of life that requires individuals to be moral but they demonstrate how. In biblical studies, character ethics has been one of the fastest-growing areas of interest. Whereas ethics usually studies rules of behavior, character ethics focuses on how people are formed to be moral agents in the world. Here editor Robert Brawley presents the most up-to-date academic work in New (...) Testament character ethics, covering topics throughout the Gospels and Paul, as well as focusing on the essential topics of forgiveness, reconciliation, politics, and peacemaking. In addition to Brawley, contributors are C. Clifton Black, Neil Elliott, Jens Herzer, L. Ann Jervis, Sylvia C. Keesmat, Jae Won Lee, J. Clinton McCann Jr., Elna Mouton, C. Drew Smith, Glen Stassen, Willard M. Swartley, Allen Verhey, and Jinseong Woo. (shrink)

Recent empirical work calls into question the so-called Simple View that an agent who A’s intentionally intends to A. In experimental studies, ordinary speakers frequently assent to claims that, in certain cases, agents who knowingly behave wrongly intentionally bring about the harm they do; yet the speakers tend to deny that it was the intention of those agents to cause the harm. This paper reports two additional studies that at first appear to support the original ones, but argues that in (...) fact, the evidence of all the studies considered is best understood in terms of the Simple View. (shrink)

The articles in the present collection deal with the religious dimension of the problem of free will. All of the papers also have implications for broader philosophical and theological issues, and will thus be of interest to a wide variety of scholars, both religious and secular. Together they provide a historical and contemporary overview of problems in the theology of freedom, together with recent work by some important philosophers in the field aimed at resolving those problems. The chapters are divided (...) into four sections. The first addresses central issues about the nature of free will and how free will relates to theological topics such as theological fatalism and the problem of evil. The second section focuses on historical debates about free will and theism, but with an eye toward how those historical discussions can be brought into discussion with contemporary debates. The third section aims to address and understand divine freedom, while the final section explores implications of the doctrine of divine omnicausality. (shrink)

Libertarian treatments of free will face the objection that an uncaused human decision would lack full explanation, and hence violate the principle of sufficient reason. It is argued that this difficulty can be overcome if God, as creator, wills that I decide as I do, since my decision could then be explained in terms of his will, which must be for the best. It is further argued that this view does not make God the author of evil in any damaging (...) sense. Neither does it impugn my freedom. God’s creative activity does not put in place any secondary causes that determine my decision; and his will does not stand as an independent determining condition either, since it is fully expressed in my decision alone. (shrink)

In a recent issue of Analysis I gave a critique of some arguments made by Di Nucci concerning the so-called Simple View – the view that an agent performs an action intentionally only if he intends so to act. In turn Di Nucci offers a reply that concentrates on two points. The first has to do with a group of examples, one having to do with waking a flatmate, and the others with routine actions such as shifting gears while driving. (...) I rejected these examples, arguing that it is not at all obvious that in them the Simple View is violated. Additionally, I pointed out that these are not cases of agents doing something they thought they could not do, and so have no direct bearing on the issues of practical rationality that motivate Bratman's treatment of the Simple View, which Di Nucci is concerned to defend . Di Nucci accepts this second point. He claims, however, that I failed to understand the dialectic of his argument. …. (shrink)

Over the past 50 years, rock music has been the prime mover of an emergent national recording industry in Australia. In this study, which has two parts, we survey record labels, recording techniques and forms, and the music that was bought and sold. Part One narrates the emergence of modern record production, the rise of rock music, and the development of a local recording industry in Australia between 1945 and 1970. Part Two (to be published in Thesis Eleven 110) recounts (...) the rise and fall of Australian local, regional and national rock music cultures and the ebb and flow of independent labels and their labyrinthine relations to the transatlantic centre of the world-system of the rock music industry. In particular, we focus on four aspects: technological change, infrastructure, business logistics/markets, and musical production/repertoire. Since the digital revolution started eating away firstly and most conspicuously at the recording industry, the 50 years from 1945 to 1995 can now more clearly be seen as the rise and fall of rock music and its major technological form, the vinyl record. This is why we call it ‘the vinyl age’. This story has not been told in full previously, and this two-part article is a first step to bridge this gap in the historical and cultural sociology of popular music. (shrink)

Libertarian treatments of free will face the objection that an uncaused human decision would lack full explanation, and hence violate the principle of sufficient reason. It is argued that this difficulty can be overcome if God, as creator, wills that I decide as I do, since my decision could then be explained in terms of his will, which must be for the best. It is further argued that this view does not make God the author of evil in any damaging (...) sense. Neither does it impugn my freedom. God’s creative activity does not put in place any secondary causes that determine my decision; and his will does not stand as an independent determining condition either, since it is fully expressed in my decision alone. (shrink)

Creation and the Sovereignty of God brings fresh insight to a defense of God.

Some authors reject what they call the "Simple View"---i.e., the principle that anyone who A's intentionally intends to A. My purpose here is to defend this principle. Rejecting the Simple View, I shall claim, forces us to assign to other mental states the functional role of intention: that of providing settled objectives to guide deliberation and action. A likely result is either that entities will be multiplied, or that the resultant account will invite reassertion of reductionist theories. In any case, (...) the account must drive a wedge between intention and practical rationality, by forbidding agents to intend goals it is rational to seek. Worse yet, the states it "substitutes" for intention turn out to be subject to the same constraints that prompted the substitution, and hence are indistinguishable from intention in the very respect in which they are alleged to differ. Thus, I shall argue, there is no evidence to justify such supposed distinctions, and the Simple View is to be preferred. (shrink)

To readers familiar with action theory as it was done thirty years ago, this book will strike a familiar chord. It presents an account of action of the sort that typified the ordinary language movement: fundamentally logical-behaviorist in its theory of mind, negatively disposed toward mental acts, anti-causalist in its account of explanation by reasons, and compatibilistic in its view of freedom. The object is to show that the ordinary concept of action is secured at the observational level, and so (...) is not endangered by causal accounts of mental or neurological antecedents of behavior. (shrink)

This paper examines the relationship between God and those universals that characterize his nature. It is argued that God has sovereignty over his nature, even though he is not self-creating, and does not give rise to the universals that characterize his nature by any act of intellection. Rather, God is himself an act of rational willing in which all that is has its existence. Because the act that is God is one of free will, he has sovereignty over the features (...) it displays, which include all that characterizes his nature. (shrink)

Recent views on practical rationality harmonize well with a fundamentally Kantian conception of the foundations of morality. Rationality in practical thinking is not a matter of valid reasoning, or of foIlowing maximization principles. From an agent-centered perspective, it consists in observing certain standards of consistency. In themselves, these standards lack the force of duties, hence there can be no irresolvable conflict between rationality and morality. Furthermore, the Kantian test of universalization for maxims of action may be scen as adapting agent-centered (...) standards of consistency to the task of specifying moral duties, so that objective rationality and morality are one and the same. (shrink)

Most philosophers of action have seen little or no connection between the individuation of action and questions of freedom and responsibility. Is this a mistake? According to a recent suggestion by Fred Dretske it may be. Dretske views overt actions not as observable events with a distinctive sort of causal history, but rather as causal sequences, in which a distinctive sort of inner cause produces the appropriate outcome. So when Jimmy voluntarily wiggles his ears, the motion of his ears is (...) not his action; it is only a component of the action, its result. The entire action consists in an event-causal sequence wherein an inner event C causes the result: it is C’s causing the motion of Jimmy’s ears. (shrink)

Recent views on practical rationality harmonize well with a fundamentally Kantian conception of the foundations of morality. Rationality in practical thinking is not a matter of valid reasoning, or of foIlowing maximization principles. From an agent-centered perspective, it consists in observing certain standards of consistency. In themselves, these standards lack the force of duties, hence there can be no irresolvable conflict between rationality and morality. Furthermore, the Kantian test of universalization for maxims of action may be scen as adapting agent-centered (...) standards of consistency to the task of specifying moral duties, so that objective rationality and morality are one and the same. (shrink)

(No abstract is available for this citation).

This book comprises eleven essays in the philosophy of action, six of which were previously published. The book has a fairly extensive index. The essays are arranged in four groups. The first group contains two essays on the individuation of action. The second contains four essays that argue for the view that what makes an event an action is, not how it is caused, but that it is, or begins with, a volition, “an intrinsically actional” mental event. The third contains (...) three essays that defend the view that free and responsible action is incompatible with determinism, largely by arguing for a noncausal account of reasons explanation of action. The final group contains two essays on intention formation and rationality; the first argues that it is sometimes rational to form intentions that are inconsistent with each other or with one’s beliefs; the second argues that an important sort of practical reasoning has as its conclusion the forming of an intention for action, rather than the adopting of a belief as to what one should do. (shrink)

Over the past 50 years, rock music has been the prime mover of an emergent national recording industry in Australia. This is a story in turn of increasing size, complexity, diversity, and sophistication, before its ultimate decline into the 21st century. This story has not been told in full previously and this article is a first step to make good this gap in the historical and cultural sociology of popular music. In this study, which has two parts, we survey record (...) labels, recording techniques and forms, and the music that was bought and sold. In Part One we chronicled the emergence of modern record production, the rise of rock music, and the development of a local recording industry in Australia between 1945 and 1970. In Part Two we narrate the rise and fall of Australian local, regional and national rock music cultures and the ebb and flow of independent labels and their labyrinthine relations to the transatlantic centre of the world-system of rock music industry. In particular we focus on four aspects: 1) technological change: the dominance of the vinyl album in the 1970s but its eventual usurpation by cassettes and then compact discs before the ultimate decline of all formats in the rise of the internet and the i-pod; 2) infrastructure: the development of the recording industry as a system of recording studios and record factories; as a system of impresarios and musician management; and also as a system that integrates performance circuits, radio, television, film, and eventually computer, product placement, advertising, and promotion through the cultivation and manipulation of taste markets in consumer culture etc.; 3) business logistics and markets: the tracking of the record labels, their struggles for markets and copyright control, local and global; and 4) musical production and repertoire. Since the digital revolution started eating away firstly and most conspicuously at the recording industry, the 50 years from 1945 to 1995 can now more clearly be seen as the rise and fall of rock music and its major technological form, the vinyl record. This is why we call it ‘the vinyl age’. (shrink)

People who inject drugs are often the target of stigma that puts this already at-risk group at greater risk of harm. Past research has shown that holding stigmatizing views of people who inject drugs increases risky behaviors and is a barrier to their engagement in important medical and public health interventions. One explanation is that the negativity surrounding the group causes increased levels of anticipated emotional exhaustion, discouraging positive engagement. However, there has been minimal research focused on addressing this negativity (...) to reduce levels of held stigma against people who inject drugs. We hypothesized that giving people an imagined positive contact exercise about people who inject would lead to a reduction in stigma, since exposure to positive empathy may create new mental associations between stigmatized groups and more positive emotions and experiences. Secondarily, we hypothesized that positive empathy strategies would be more effective than traditional informational or learning based techniques, and that the latter would be more effective than a control condition. Our sample consisted of 375 participants recruited online. Participants were assigned to one of three study conditions: a positive empathy condition, an informational learning condition, or a control condition, and completed a posttest social distance measure. Results demonstrated that subjects exposed to the positive empathy stigma reduction condition experienced a significant reduction in held stigma while participants exposed to traditional informational learning techniques showed no significant reduction in held stigma. Positive empathy-based stigma interventions should be further researched as a promising avenue to reduce the effects of drug-related stigma. (shrink)

According to one view of english nominals, imperfect nominals designate facts, and perfect nominals, events. it is argued here that this is mistaken. of imperfect nominals only "that"-clauses are fact designators; imperfect gerundive nominals are to be classed with perfect nominals as event designators. there are, however, two conceptions of events, arising from two different conceptions of time. the events designated by imperfect gerundives are to be conceived as spread out in time, divisible into parts, and such that the same (...) event may receive multiple descriptions. the events named by perfect nominals differ. they persist through time, rather than being extended in it, they do not divide into temporal parts, and obey strict conditions of identity. this position is argued for on the basis of linguistic evidence, as well as analysis of the conceptions of time involved. implications of the view for a number of philosophical problems are pointed out and briefly explored. (shrink)