D. Z. Phillips holds that we cannot ask a general philosophical question about the existence of God because we discover what it means for God to exist only from within particular linguistic contexts, especially those of prayer and worship. This raises the suspicion that God’s existence therefore depends on a particular language-use, as does the existence of cultural objects like prices or the equator. The article suggests that Phillips’s position overlooks the peculiar status of other persons in our discourse, and (...) the part they play in establishing a basic sense of “existence.” Closer consideration of this aspect of our language-use can take us beyond the limits of Phillips’s approach, and reopen the question of God’s existence in a strong sense. (shrink)

D. Z. Phillips holds that we cannot ask a general philosophical question about the existence of God because we discover what it means for God to exist only from within particular linguistic contexts, especially those of prayer and worship. This raises the suspicion that God’s existence therefore depends on a particular language-use, as does the existence of cultural objects like prices or the equator. The article suggests that Phillips’s position overlooks the peculiar status of other persons in our discourse, and (...) the part they play in establishing a basic sense of “existence.” Closer consideration of this aspect of our language-use can take us beyond the limits of Phillips’s approach, and reopen the question of God’s existence in a strong sense. (shrink)

Introduction: Schools have become a primary setting for providing mental health care to youths in the U.S. School-based interventions have proliferated, but their effects on mental health and academic outcomes remain understudied. In this study we will implement and evaluate the effects of a flexible multidiagnostic treatment called Modular Approach to Therapy for Children with Anxiety, Depression, Trauma, or Conduct Problems on students' mental health and academic outcomes.Methods and Analysis: This is an assessor-blind randomized controlled effectiveness trial conducted across five (...) school districts. School clinicians are randomized to either MATCH or usual care treatment conditions. The target sample includes 168 youths referred for mental health services and presenting with elevated symptoms of anxiety, depression, trauma, and/or conduct problems. Clinicians randomly assigned to MATCH or UC treat the youths who are assigned to them through normal school referral procedures. The project will evaluate the effectiveness of MATCH compared to UC on youths' mental health and school related outcomes and assess whether changes in school outcomes are mediated by changes in youth mental health.Ethics and Dissemination: This study was approved by the Harvard University Institutional Review Board. We plan to publish the findings in peer-reviewed journals and present them at academic conferences.Clinical Trial Registration:ClinicalTrials.gov ID: NCT02877875. Registered on August 24, 2016. (shrink)

Is helping those whose subsistence needs are not meet a matter of charity or an obligation? What role should ordinary citizens of developed nations play? In a globalized world, the causes, connections, and responsibilities become complicated. Agriculture subsidies that keep food prices low for many in relatively rich countries may, for example, negatively impact poor farmers in developing countries. Students in Ethics/Philosophy 352 report on their project examining whether, and to what extent, a true obligation to aid exists.

Jaynes's maximum entropy principle (MEP) is analyzed by considering in detail a recent controversy. Emphasis is placed on the inductive logical interpretation of “probability” and the concept of “total knowledge.” The relation of the MEP to relative frequencies is discussed, and a possible realm of its fruitful application is noted.

My interlocutor is anyone who denies peisonhood to the embryo on the grounds that a human person can exist only in conscious activity and that in the absence of consciousness a person cannot exist at all. I probe personal consciousness to the point at which the distinction between the being and the consciousness of the human person appears, and argue on the basis of this distinction that the being of a person can exist in the absence of any consciousness. I (...) proceed to argue that it is not only entirely possible for the embryo to be a human person, but that, given the embodied peisonhood of us human beings, this is the only reasonable assumption which we can make. Keywords: human embryo, personhood, being, consciousness, embodiment CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)

Religion as illustion / Ludwig Feuerbach -- Against proofs in religion / S2ren Kierkegaard -- Evil and a finite God / John Stuart Mill -- Mysticism : The will to believe / William James -- Religion versus the religious / John Dewey -- Cosmic teleology / F.R. Tennant -- Revelation and its mode / William Temple -- The existence of God / Bertrand Russell & F.C. Copleston -- The eternal thou / Martin Buber --. - Two types of (...) philosophy of religion : Existential analyses and religious symbols / Paul Tillich -- On death and the mystical / Ludwig Wittgenstein -- The formally possible doctrines of God : Time, death and everlasting life / Charles Hartshorne -- Personal survival and the idea of another world / H.H. Price -- An empiricist's view of the nature of religious belief / R.B. Braithwaite -- A form of religious naturalism / John Herman Randall -- Gods. (shrink)

In this essay, I try to advance the reception of Karol Wojtyła’s seminal essay “Subjectivity and the Irreducible in Man.” In particular I try to understand and to think through the distinction that he makes between the “personalist” and the “cosmological” image of man. I unpack Wojtyła’s concept of subjectivity, which underlies all that he says about the personalist image of man. I give particular attention to all that he says about the unity formed by the two images. I then (...) proceed to apply Wojtyła’s analysis to a certain cosmological challenge to a personalist understanding of man: it is the challenge that comes from looking at the immensity of the cosmos and at the infinitesimal smallness of man in it and of thinking that man is swallowed up in this immensity and obliterated in his importance. I argue that precisely the subjectivity of the person implies that there is in each person an “infinite abyss of existence” so that each person is in reality his or her own whole and is no mere part of the cosmic whole but is incommensurable with it. (shrink)

My interlocutor is Locke with his reduction of person to personal consciousness. This reduction is a main reason preventing people from acknowledging the personhood of the earliest human embryo, which lacks all personal consciousness. I show that Catholic Christians who live the sacramental life of the Church have reason to think that they are, as persons, vastly more than what they experience themselves to be, for they believe that the sacraments work effects in them as persons that can only be (...) believed but that cannot be experienced within themselves in this life. I also show that Christians and non-Christians alike have an experience of moral good and evil in themselves that implies that they are, as moral persons, far more than they find in their conscious self-presence. It is, therefore, natural to think that if my being as person so far exceeds my consciousness, I may well have once existed as person even before the awakening of consciousness. (shrink)

In the course of his polemic against Kant’s moral philosophy, Scheler was led to depreciate moral obligation and its place in the existence of persons. This depreciation is part of a larger anti-authoritarian strain in his personalism. I attempt to retrieve certain truths about moral obligation that tend to get lost in Scheler: moral obligation is not merely “medicinal” but has a place at the highest levels of moral life; the freedom of persons is lived in an incomparable way in (...) responding to moral obligation; obligation and obedience even have an indispensable place in the existence of Christians. Drawing on the studies of Scheler by Rudolf Otto, Karol Wojtyla, Hans Urs von Balthasar, and Dietrich von Hildebrand, I show how Scheler’s personalism is corrected and enhanced once we distance ourselves from his anti-authoritarian animus against obligation and restore obligation to its place in the existence of persons. (shrink)

Central to the Cowdin-Tuohey paper is the concept of a moral authority proper to medical practitioners. Much as I agree with the authors in refusing to degrade doctors to the status of mere technicians, I argue that one does not succeed in retrieving the moral dimension of medical practice by investing doctors with moral authority. I show that none of the cases brought forth by Cowdin-Tuohey really amounts to a case of moral authority. Then I try to explain why no (...) such cases can be found. Developing an insight that is common to all the major moral thinkers in the philosophia perennis, I show that doctors are professionally competent with respect only to a part of the human good; morally wise persons are competent with respect to that which makes man good as man. I try to show why it follows that a) professional expertise has no natural tendency to pass over into moral understanding, and that b) doctor and non-doctor alike start from the same point in developing their understanding of medical morality. It follows that the authors fail in their attempt to de-center the moral magisterium of the Church by setting up centers of moral authority outside of the Church. (shrink)

In this article I explain various points of contact between Newman and the Catholic philosophical tradition. I begin with Newman’s personalism as it is found in the Grammar of Assent, especially in the distinction between notional and real assent, and in the distinction between formal and informal inference. Then I proceed to Newman’s personalism as it is found in his teaching on conscience and on doctrinal development. I then consider Newman as proto-phenomenologist and also as an Augustinian thinker. Finally, I (...) discuss Newman’s teaching on moral and intellectual virtue in The Idea of a University. If I had to pick one utterance of Newman that epitomizes his philosophical thought in a way that engages Catholic philosophers, I would pick the motto of the Grammar of Assent: “Non in dialectica complacuit Deo salvum facere populum tuum.”. (shrink)

Recently it has been shown that the classical “stick and ball” viewpoint of molecules is inconsistent with quantum theory (QT). We suggest an unusual reconciliation: The QT state is not a physical property, but instead reflects our state of knowledge about observable aspects of “reality.” We show how this perspective is nevertheless objective. Applied to molecules, the view permits “structure” to exist only when observable evidence is compatible with this feature. Typically one must replace the a priori model (in particular, (...) the dynamical generator) with one consistent with the evidence. We show that such “structure” is stable in the context of first-order perturbation theory. We also indicate how dynamics can be inferred from scattering data—a process alternative to postulating (field-theoretic) models for “environment.”. (shrink)

A highly abstracted theory of measurement is synthesized from classical measurement theory, fuzzy set theory, generalized information theory, and predicate calculus. The theory does not require specific truth value concepts, nor does it specify what subsets of the reals can be observed, thus avoiding the usual fundamental difficulties. Problems such as the definition of systems, the significance of observations, numerical scales and observables, etc. are examined. The general logico-algebraic approach to quantum/classical physics is justified as a special case of measurement (...) theory. (shrink)

F.A. Hayek studied at the University of Vienna, where he became both a Doctor of Law and a Doctor of Political Science. After several years in the Austrian civil service, he was made the first diector of the Austrian Institute for Business Cycle Research. In 1931 he was appointed Tooke Professor of Economics and Statistics at the London School of Economics, and in 1950 he went to the University of Chicago as Professor of Social and Moral Sciences. He returned to (...) Europe in 1962, to the chair of Economics at the University of Freiburg, where he became Professor Emeritus in 1967. The holder of numerous honorary doctorates, and a member of the British Academy, Hayek was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics in 1974. He was created Companion of Honour in 1984. He is the author of some fifteen books, including _Prices and Production, The Pure Theory of Capital, The Road to Serfdom, The Counter-Revolution of Science, The Sensory Order, The Constitution of Liberty, _ _Law, Legislation and Liberty_, and _The Fatal Conceit_. (shrink)

John Locke:When we set before our eyes a round globe of uniform colour, v.g. gold, alabaster or jet, it is certain that the idea thereby imprinted in our mind is of a flat circle, variously shadowed, with several degrees of light and brightness coming to our eyes. But we having, by use, been accustomed to perceive what kind of appearance convex bodies are wont to make in us, what alterations are made in the reflections of light by the difference (...) of the sensible figures of bodies: the judgment presently, by an habitual custom, alters the appearances into their causes.H.H. Price:…. a distant hillside which is full of protuberances, and slopes upwards at quite a gentle angle, will appear flat and vertical….. This means that the sense-datum, the colour expanse which we sense, actually is flat and vertical. (shrink)

John Locke:When we set before our eyes a round globe of uniform colour, v.g. gold, alabaster or jet, it is certain that the idea thereby imprinted in our mind is of a flat circle, variously shadowed, with several degrees of light and brightness coming to our eyes. But we having, by use, been accustomed to perceive what kind of appearance convex bodies are wont to make in us, what alterations are made in the reflections of light by the difference (...) of the sensible figures of bodies: the judgment presently, by an habitual custom, alters the appearances into their causes.H.H. Price:…. a distant hillside which is full of protuberances, and slopes upwards at quite a gentle angle, will appear flat and vertical….. This means that the sense-datum, the colour expanse which we sense, actually is flat and vertical. (shrink)

This anthology contains ten selections on the philosophy of religion, all of which were written by English-speaking analytic philosophers. The opening selection contains the contributions of Antony Flew, R. M. Hare, and Basil Mitchell to the University discussion on theology and falsification. This first selection, written in 1951, establishes the basic problematic for the book, as indeed it has for much of the discussion of religion among analytic philosophers during the last twenty years. The next three chapters in the book (...) contain articles by I. M. Crombie, John Hick, and R. B. Braithwaite which further develop the question of the falsifiability of religious statements. These are followed by articles by J. L. Mackie and Alvin Plantinga which give contrary interpretations regarding the impact of the existence of evil upon the credibility of religious assertions. The remaining chapters contain discussions of religious belief by D. Z. Phillips and H. H. Price, and of the possibility of deciding the question of the existence of God by R. W. Hepburn and Terence Penelhum. The editor provides a helpful introduction which shows the relationships between the various articles and underscores the main contributions of each. The editor also provides a useful and ample bibliography of English-language books and articles on the philosophy of religion, most of them by analytic philosophers. The bibliography is arranged according to the subject-matter covered in the text. This is a representative and useful anthology of the analytic philosophy of religion. It makes clear what are the major questions which interest analytic philosophers of religion, what procedures these thinkers use to try to answer these questions, and what some of their answers are. The editor suggests that if there is a single lesson to be learned from his anthology, it is that the philosophy of religion demands both philosophical competence and a sympathetic understanding of the religious subject-matter. Another lesson one could easily draw from this collection is that the strength of analytic philosophy of religion lies in its logical exactitude and clarity of expression, while a major weakness is its neglect of the wealth of data regarding religion provided by phenomenology, the history of religions, and the social sciences.--H. F. (shrink)

Hegel on Logic and Religion is a collection of previously published essays which have been arranged under three general headings: “Logic,” “Logic Applied,” and “Christianity.” It proposes a Hegelian response to Lessing’s well-known rejection of the claim of Christian apologetics to provide an adequate “rational theology.” Such apologetics held that the reliability of the historical testimony to Christ’s miracles and resurrection is cogent evidence to warrant claims for his divinity. Lessing concedes the assertions of historical veracity but denies their cogency (...) for drawing rational conclusions about divinity. There is, he argues an “ugly broad ditch” separating the necessary truths of reason from the contingent truths of history. Lessing’s attack, moreover, did more than strike at the heart of traditional Christian apologetics. It also rendered a central project of the German Enlightenment problematic. Thinkers such as Mendelssohn held that metaphysics could provide a new rational basis for the claims of historical religion. So—according to Lessing—whether one approached historical faith from the perspective of a metaphysical system, or began on the opposite site side and used history as evidence for conceptions of divinity, one was brought to a halt before the “ugly, broad ditch.”. (shrink)