Jerry L. Walls, the author of books on hell and heaven, completes his tour of the afterlife with a philosophical and theological exploration and defense of purgatory, the traditional teaching that most Christians require a period of postmortem cleansing and purging of their sinful dispositions and imperfections before they will be fully made ready for heaven. He examines Protestant objections to the doctrine and shows that the doctrine of purgatory has been construed in different ways, some of which are (...) fully compatible with Protestant theology. In particular, while purgatory has often been understood as matter of punishment in order to make satisfaction for sins that have not been fully remitted, it can also be seen as the completion of the sanctification process, an account of the doctrine that is fully consistent with the Protestant doctrine of justification by faith. Purgatory assumes not only continuity of personal identity but also gradual moral and spiritual growth between death and resurrection. Different theories of personal identity are examined and assessed in light of these assumptions. Walls also shows that the traditional doctrine of purgatory is not understood as a second chance for salvation, but goes on to argue that it should be modified to allow for postmortem repentance. He concludes with an examination of C.S. Lewis's writings on purgatory, and suggests that Lewis can be a model for evangelicals and other Protestants to engage the doctrine of purgatory in a way that is true to their theology. (shrink)

Jerry L. Walls argues that the doctrine of heaven is ripe for serious reconsideration. He contends not only that the orthodox view of heaven can be defended from objections commonly raised against it, but also that heaven is a powerful resource for addressing persistent philosophical problems, not the least of which concern the ground of morality and the meaning of life. Walls shows how heaven is integrally related to central Christian doctrines, particularly those related to salvation, and tackles the (...) difficult problem of why faith in Christ is necessary to save us from our sins. In addition, heaven is shown to illumine thorny problems of personal identity and to be an essential component of a satisfactory theodicy. Walls goes on to examine data from near-death experiences from the standpoint of some important recent work in epistemology and argues that they offer positive evidence for heaven. He concludes that we profoundly need to recover the hope of heaven in order to recover our very humanity. (shrink)

As a result of recent legislative developments and greater ease of accessibility, the Human Resources Manager (HRM) faces the challenge of not only maintaining records but also that of protecting employees from misuse of personal information contained in their individual personnel files. The widespread use of computers for maintaining employee records has resulted in new ethical dimensions and/or challenges for the HRM. Serious questions regarding accessibility to and dissemination of such personal information now confront the HRM. Unless policies are developed (...) by organizations for dealing with such questions, eventually government will mandate such policies in order to protect employee rights. (shrink)

Thinking about ultimate reality is becoming increasingly transreligious. This transreligious turn follows inevitably from the discovery of divine truths in multiple traditions. Global communications bring the full range of religious ideas and practices to anyone with access to the internet. Moreover, the growth of the "nones" and those who describe themselves as "spiritual but not religious" creates a pressing need for theological thinking not bound by prescribed doctrines and fixed rituals. This book responds to this vital need. The chapters in (...) this volume each examine the claim that if the aim of theology is to know and articulate all we can about the divine reality, and if revelations, enlightenments, and insights into that reality are not limited to a single tradition, then what is called for is a theology without confessional restrictions. In other words, a Theology Without Walls. To ground the project in examples, the volume provides emerging models of transreligious inquiry. It also includes sympathetic critics who raise valid concerns that such a theology must face. This is a book that will be of urgent interest to theologians, religious studies scholars, and philosophers of religion. It will be especially suitable for those interested in comparative theology, inter-religious and interfaith understanding, new trends in constructive theology, normative religious studies, and global philosophy of religion. (shrink)

Photography matters, writes Jerry Thompson, because of how it works -- not only as an artistic medium but also as a way of knowing. It matters because how we understand what photography is and how it works tell us something about how we understand anything. With these provocative observations, Thompson begins a wide-ranging and lucid meditation on why photography is unique among the picture-making arts. Thompson, a working photographer for forty years, constructs an argument that moves with natural logic (...) from Thomas Pynchon to Jonathan Swift to Plato to Emily Dickinson to detailed readings of photographs by Eugène Atget, Garry Winogrand, Marcia Due, Walker Evans, and Robert Frank. He questions Susan Sontag's assertion in On Photography that "nobody" can any longer imagine literate, authoritative, or transcendent photographs. He considers the money-fueled expansion of the market for photography, and he compares ambitious "meant-for-the-wall" photographs with smaller, quieter works. Forcefully and persuasively, Thompson argues for photography as a medium concerned with understanding the world we live in -- a medium whose business is not constructing fantasies pleasing to the eye or imagination but describing the world in the toughest and deepest way. (shrink)

In chapters 9 and 10 of their book Roman but Not Catholic, Kenneth Collins and Jerry Walls criticize the Roman Catholic positions on the Eucharist as a sacrifice and on the ministerial priesthood. I reply to their historical and theological objections, and defend the belief that the Eucharistic sacrifice, the Mass, is a re-presentation, or making present, of Jesus’s redemptive sacrifice on Calvary, and a key component in God’s incarnational strategy for redeeming us.

In their book, Roman but Not Catholic, Kenneth Collins and Jerry Walls make the case that certain beliefs central to the Roman Catholic faith are unreasonable. This article evaluates, from the point of view of Eastern Orthodoxy, some of the arguments Collins and Walls make. In particular, it argues first that Collins and Walls are correct to criticize John Henry Newman’s theory of the development of doctrine as a reason to accept otherwise insufficiently supported Catholic doctrines. Secondly, it offers (...) some points of clarification concerning the matter of sacred tradition and attempts to show the areas of agreement and disagreement between Eastern Orthodoxy and the position that Collins and Walls articulate. Thirdly, it argues that Collins and Walls rely on what is, from an Eastern Orthodox point of view, a questionable view about the interpretation of scripture by assuming without good reason that the clear meaning of scripture is equivalent to the literal interpretation. (shrink)

Preface 1 Introduction: The Persistence of the Attitudes 2 Individualism and Supervenience 3 Meaning Holism 4 Meaning and the World Order Epilogue Creation Myth Appendix Why There Still Has to be a Language of Thought Notes References Author Index.

A bedrock assumption made by cognitivist philosophers such as Noam Chomsky, and, more recently, Jerry Fodor and Steven Pinker is that the contexts within which children acquire a language inevitably exhibit a irremediable poverty of whatever stimuli are necessary to condition such acquisition and development. They argue that given this poverty, the basic rudiments of language must be innate; the task of the cognitivist is to theorize universal grammars, languages of thought, or language instincts to account for it. My (...) argument, however, is that this assumption is philosophically suspect in that it assumes an untenably Cartesian conception of "stimulus" which itself presupposes a rigid dualism of subject-user and context and hence confuses the underdetermination of stimulus for its lack. I argue that the former does in fact provide the necessary conditions for language acquisition. I then go on to develop a Wittgensteinian—Dennettian model within which underdetermination plays a key role. (shrink)

Introduction: Something on the State of the Art 1 I. Functionalism and Realism 1. Operationalism and Ordinary Language 35 2. The Appeal to Tacit Knowledge in Psychological Explanations 63 3. What Psychological States are Not 79 4. Three Cheers for Propositional Attitudes 100 II. Reduction and Unity of Science 5. Special Sciences 127 6. Computation and Reduction 146 III. Intensionality and Mental Representation 7. Propositional Attitudes 177 8. Tom Swift and His Procedural Grandmother 204 9. Methodological Solipsism Considered as a (...) Research Strategy in Cognitive Psychology 225 IV. Nativism 10. The Present Status of the Innateness Controversy 257 Notes 317. (shrink)

Classical neo-Darwinian explanations do not fully account for changes in biological forms, and new theories have emerged, primarily in maths and physics, that offer new approaches to the problem of the origin of life and phenomena of order in evolution. This volume focuses on the role of closure at various hierarchical levels as the catalyst between self-organization and selection. Participants addressed special areas of the closure problem such as autopoiesis and autocatalysis and function and selection, and semiosis. Presentations on physical (...) and mathematical modelling are included. The book seeks to clarify the role closure plays in explaining the emergence, development and evolution of structurally stable systems at the thermodynamic, chemical and biochemical, biological, psychological and cultural levels. (shrink)

This paper presents a way of thinking about how to respond to the pluralism of modern societies that avoids any commitment to contractualist norms of political justification. The argument developed appeals to the notion of a constitutional settlement. Constitutional settlements are complex on-going social practices that both express certain values to which political societies are committed and establish procedures for resolving disputes among members of these societies. As such, they are a product of both moral commitment and the balance of (...) power. The paper shows how constitutional settlements relate to issues of stability and non-subjugation in politics, and explains how they can ground a distinction between justice and legitimacy. (shrink)

In _Words, Deeds, Bodies_, Jerry H. Gill seeks to connect the thought of L. Wittgenstein, J. L. Austin, M. Merleau-Ponty, and M. Polanyi in relation to the intersection between language and embodiment.

In 1956, Melvin M. Rader started a tradition of exploring life's "enduring questions" via classic and contemporary philosophical readings. Jerry Gill upholds this tradition in the sixth edition of this respected introductory text that addresses such fundamental concepts of philosophy as rationalism, idealism, and the social contract.

This volume presents work that evolved out of the Third Conference on Situation Theory and Its Applications, held at Oiso, Japan, in November of 1991. The chapters presented in this volume continue the mathematical development of situation theory, including the introduction of a graphical notation; and the applications of situation theory discussed are wide-ranging, including topics in natural language semantics and philosophical logic, and exploring the use of information theory in the social sciences. The research presented in this volume reflects (...) a growing international and interdisciplinary activity of importance for many fields concerned with information. (shrink)

"Plato's Gift to Christianity is a book for all who seek to understand the beauty and depth of the Christian faith: for family discussions of values, virtues, and happiness; for educators who teach about the founding of Western Civilization and its basis of ethics; and especially for the Christian clergy who are not familiar with the Greek Classical and Platonic influence upon the making of Christianity. Dr. Ehrlich has presented here a most comprehensive study on the Platonic teachings adopted by (...) the New Testament and Early Church." --. (shrink)

This paper builds on London and Hart’s critique that Prahalad’s best-selling book prompted a unilateral effort to find a fortune at the bottom of the pyramid. Prahalad’s instrumental, firm-centered construction suggests, perhaps unintentionally, a buccaneering style of business enterprise devoted to capturing markets rather than enabling new socially entrepreneurial ventures for those otherwise trapped in conditions of extreme poverty. London and Hart reframe Prahalad’s insight into direct global business enterprise toward “creating a fortune with the base of the pyramid” rather (...) than at the BoP. This shift in language requires a recalibration of strategic focus, we argue, and will necessitate implementation of “moral imagination” to formulate new mental models that can frame the possibility of local entrepreneurs working collaboratively and discursively with development partners drawn from civil society, corporate, and government sectors. Successful partnerships will arise from interactive processes of emergent, co-creative learning within a shared problem domain or “community of practice”. We call attention to three related pluralist framings of situated learning within such communities of practice: decentered stakeholder networks; global action networks; and a focus on “faces and places” as a cognitive lens to humanize and locally situate diverse inhabitants within base of the pyramid partnership projects. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to present the essence of Ayn Rand's theory of rational egoism and to indicate how it is the only ethical theory that can provide a foundation for ethics in business. Justice, however, cannot be done to the breadth and depth of Rand's theory in so short a space as this article; consequently, I have provided the reader with a large number of references for further study. At minimum, Ayn Rand's theory, because of its originality (...) and challenge to establishment theories, should be included in all business ethics courses and discussions of business ethics. (shrink)

Trata-se do capítulo “Overdetermined Oedipus: Mommy, Daddy, and Me as Desiring-Machine” in: BUCHANAN, Ian. (Org). A Deleuzian Century?. Durham: Duke University Press, 1999. (N.T.).

This paper applies Wempe’s (2005, Business Ethics Quarterly 15(1), 113–135) boundary conditions that define the external and internal logics for contractarian business ethics theory, as a system of argumentation for evaluating current or prospective institutional arrangements for arriving at the “good life,” based on the principles and practices of social justice. It does so by showing that a more dynamic, process-oriented, and pluralist ‘dialogic twist’ to Donaldson and Dunfee’s (2003, ‘Social Contracts: sic et non’, in P. Heugens, H. van Oosterhout (...) and J. Vromen (eds.), The Social Institutions of Capitalism: Evolution and Design of Social Contracts (Cheltenham, UK, Edward Elgar Publishing, Ltd.) pp. 109–126; 1999, Ties that Bind: A Social Contracts Approach to Business Ethics (Boston, MA, Harvard Business School Press); 1995, Economics and Philosophy 11(1), 85–112; 1994, Academy of Management Review 19(2), 252–284.) integrated social contracting theory (ISCT) of economic ethics will further develop this promising and influential approach to moral reasoning, ethical decision-making, and stakeholder governance. This evolutionary, interactive learning-based model of ethical norm generation via dialogic stakeholder engagement is particularly appropriate within economic communities that are experiencing value conflict and pressures for institutional change. (shrink)

In _Words, Deeds, Bodies_, Jerry H. Gill seeks to connect the thought of L. Wittgenstein, J. L. Austin, M. Merleau-Ponty, and M. Polanyi in relation to the intersection between language and embodiment.