This book offers an introduction to the thought of Robert Holcot, a great and influential but often underappreciated medieval thinker. Holcot was a Dominican friar who flourished in the 1330's and produced a diverse body of work including scholastic treatises, biblical commentaries, and sermons. By viewing the whole of Holcot's corpus, John T. Slotemaker and Jeffrey C. Witt provide a comprehensive account of his thought. Challenging established characterizations of him as a skeptic or radical, they show Holcot to be (...) primarily concerned with affirming and supporting the faith of the pious believer. At times, this manifests itself as a cautious attitude toward absolutist claims about the power of natural reason. At other times Holcot reaffirms, in Anselmian fashion, the importance of rational effort in the attempt to understand and live out one's faith. Over the course of this introduction the authors unpack Holcot's views on faith and heresy, the divine nature and divine foreknowledge, the sacraments, Christ, and political philosophy. They also examine Holcot's approach to several important medieval literary genres, including the development of his unique. (shrink)

Introduction : kith, kin, and family / Sally Haslanger and Charlotte Witt Adoption and its progeny : rethinking family law, gender, and sexual difference / Drucilla Cornell Open adoption is not for everyone / Anita L. Allen Methods of adoption : eliminating genetic privilege / Jacqueline Stevens Several steps behind : gay and lesbian adoption / Sarah Tobias A child of one’s own : property, progeny, and adoption / Janet Farrell Smith Family resemblances : adoption, personal identity, and genetic essentialism (...) / Charlotte Witt Being adopted and being a philosopher : exploring identity and the "desire to know" differently / Kimberly Leighton Real othering : the metaphysics of maternity in children’s literature / Shelley Park Accidents and contingencies of love / Songsuk Hahn ; comments by Harry Frankfurt Abuse and neglect, foster drift, and the adoption alternative / Elizabeth Bartholet Feminism, race, and adoption policy / Dorothy Roberts Racial randomization / Hawley Fogg-Davis You Mixed?: racial identity without racial biology / Sally Haslanger. (shrink)

This volume contains the English translation of Felix Kaufmann's (1895-1945) main work Methodenlehre der Sozialwissenschaften (1936). In this book, Kaufmann develops a general theory of knowledge of the social sciences in his role as a cross-border commuter between Husserl's phenomenology, Kelsen's pure theory of law and the logical positivism of the Vienna Circle. This multilayered inquiry connects the value-oriented reflections of a general philosophy of science with the specificity of the methods and theories of the social sciences, as opposed to (...) abstract natural science and psychology. The core focus of the study is the attempt to elucidate how and under what conditions scientific knowledge about social facts, empirically justified and theoretically embedded, can be obtained. The empirical basis of knowledge within the social sciences forms a phenomenological concept of experience. According to Kaufmann, this concept of experience exhibits a complex structure. Within the meaning-interpretation of human action as the core of knowledge in the social sciences, this structure reaches out across the isolated act of verification toward the synthesis of external and internal experiences. The book opens with a detailed and useful introduction by Ingeborg K. Helling, which introduces the historical and theoretical background of Kaufmann's study and specifically illuminates his relation to Alfred Schütz and John Dewey. Finally, it contains interviews with and letters to members of his family, colleagues and students. (shrink)

For the edition of A Second Collection prepared for the Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan, editors Robert M. Doran and John D. Dadosky have added archival materials directly related to almost every one of the papers, bringing the reader closer to the original compositions.

We are living under an ever-present threat of nuclear destruction; The Revolution Against War is the first step towards a new worldview. These selected writings by Robert S. Hartman, and edited by axiologist Clifford G. Hurst, outline cultural, political, and moral discussions on war and peace. Robert S. Hartman at the age of 23, escaped from Germany shortly after Hitler was elected to power in 1933. He spent his life learning and teaching in a variety of fields as (...) a philosopher, business consultant, writer, activist, economist, ethicist, and mathematician. (shrink)

Wit, it can be said, is the compact expression of wisdom. Robert S. Hartman wrote with both wit and wisdom. Many times, though, his wit gets buried in demanding and lengthy prose. In this book, we have extracted the wit from the wisdom of a selection of Hartman's writing so that more of the world can learn from this man's genius. It's a quote book. It consists entirely of Hartman's own words. But, in small doses. We have pulled vital (...) ideas, thoughtful considerations, and clever remarks from six of Hartman's published pieces plus two heretofore unpublished manuscripts that are soon to be published by the Hartman Institute. We present these quotes in an order that, we believe, best tells the story of formal axiology. (shrink)

The foundations of mathematics include mathematical logic, set theory, recursion theory, model theory, and Gödel's incompleteness theorems. Professor Wolf provides here a guide that any interested reader with some post-calculus experience in mathematics can read, enjoy, and learn from. It could also serve as a textbook for courses in the foundations of mathematics, at the undergraduate or graduate level. The book is deliberately less structured and more user-friendly than standard texts on foundations, so will also be attractive to those outside (...) the classroom environment wanting to learn about the subject. (shrink)

Abstract. In this paper, which was among Don Browning's last writings before he died, we review and evaluate the main arguments against the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (the “CRC”) that conservative American Christians in particular have opposed. While we take their objections seriously, we think that, on balance, the CRC is worthy of ratification, especially if it is read in light of the profamily ethic that informs the CRC and many earlier human rights instruments. More (...) fundamentally, we think that the CRC captures some of the very best traditional Western legal and theological teachings on marriage, family, and children, which we retrieve and reconstruct for our day. (shrink)

Among the extraordinary Polish philosophers of the past one hundred years, Zygmunt Zawirski deserves to be given particular attention for his fusion of analytic and historical scholarship. Strikingly versatile, and con tributing original work in all his fields of competence, Zawirski thought through issues in the philosophical aspects of relativity theory, on the claims of intuitionalistic foundations of mathematics, on the nature and usefulness of many-value Logics, and on the calculus of probability, on the axiomatic method in science and in (...) the philosophy of science, on the genesis and development of scientific and philosophical concepts, and in his crowning achievement, the conceptual history of notions of time. His work has been too little known in English despite the respect which has been so clearly shown by his Polish COlleagues and students. In this generous selection from his papers and from his great critical study L' Evolution de la Notion du Temps, Dr. Irena Szumilewicz-Lachman has provided a clear account of Zawirski's achievement; and she has written a fine comprehensive introductory essay which provides both the personal and historical context of his work and a systematic survey of his principal publications. (shrink)

The story of this book of 'materials on Ludwik Fleck' is also the story of the reception of Ludwik Fleck. In this volume, some essential materials which have been produced by that reception have been gathered together.

"Whole brain death" (neurological death) is well-established as a legal standard of death across the country. Recently, New Jersey became the first state to enact a statute recognizing a personal religious exemption (a conscience clause) protecting the rights of those who object to neurological death. The Act also mandates adoption through the regulatory process of uniform and up-to-date clinical criteria for determining neurological death.

This study examines the relationship between corporate diversification strategy and the pollution activity of subsidiaries within the U.S. chemical industry using TRI data (EPA's Toxic Release Inventory). The subsidiaries of conglomerates were found to exhibit higher pollution levels for direct emissions than those of firms pursuing more related diversification strategies. Additionally, the subsidiaries of conglomerates exhibited more variance in overall pollution emissions compared to related diversified firms.

Semiotic theory, which has restricted its focus largely to human forms of significations, is transformed by Robert S. Corrington into a semiotics of nature itself. Corrington situates the divide between "nature naturing" and "nature natured" within the contest of classical American pragmaticism and postmodern psychoanalysis. At the heart of this new metaphysics is an insistence that all signs participate in larger orders of meaning that are natural and religious. Meanings embodied in nature point beyond nature to the mystery inherent (...) in positioned codes and signs. (shrink)

Rawls offers three arguments for the priority of liberty in Theory, two of which share a common error: the belief that once we have shown the instrumental value of the basic liberties for some essential purpose (e.g., securing self-respect), we have automatically shown the reason for their lexical priority. The third argument, however, does not share this error and can be reconstructed along Kantian lines: beginning with the Kantian conception of autonomy endorsed by Rawls in section 40 of Theory, we (...) can explain our highest-order interest in rationality, justify the lexical priority of all basic liberties, and reinterpret Rawls’ threshold condition for the application of the priority of liberty. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this Kantian reconstruction will not work within the radically different framework of Political Liberalism. (shrink)

The various cosmological proposals by Einsteinian relativists seek to show the structure of the world as a consequence of the basic notions of relativity. In particular, the irrelevance of the state of motion of an observer to his description of the fundamental laws of nature is to be maintained. Furthermore, gravity is understood as being a description of the fact that particles move along certain minimal paths in non-Euclidean space. In this theory, the effect of one material particle on another (...) particle in the old-fashioned sense of gravitational attraction becomes indirect; that is, a particle moves on a minimal path in a space having a degree of curvature dependent on the material entities which exist in it, rather than having its path bent by the attraction between it and other material bodies, all of them existing in an absolute or receptacle-like space. (shrink)

CZF is an intuitionistic set theory that does not contain Power Set, substituting instead a weaker version, Subset Collection. In this paper a Kripke model of CZF is presented in which Power Set is false. In addition, another Kripke model is presented of CZF with Subset Collection replaced by Exponentiation, in which Subset Collection fails.

A guide to Nietzsche's most personal book.

In the wake of both the semiotic and the psychoanalytic revolutions, how is it possible to describe the object of religious worship in realist terms? Semioticians argue that each object is known only insofar as it gives birth to a series of signs and interpretants (new signs). From the psychoanalytic side, religious beliefs are seen to belong to transference energies and projections that contaminate the religious object with all-too-human complexes. In Nature's Religion, distinguished theologian and philosopher Robert S. Corrington (...) weaves together the concept of infinite semiosis with that of the transference to show that the self does have access to something in nature that is intrinsically religious. Corrington argues that signs and our various transference fields can and do connect us with fully natural religious powers that are not of our own making, thereby opening up a path past the Western monotheisms to a capacious religion of nature. With a foreword by Robert C. Neville, Nature's Religion is essential reading for philosophers of religion, scholars of the psychology of religion, and theologians. (shrink)

Contemporary republicanism is characterized by three main ideas: free persons, who are not subject to the arbitrary power of others; free states, which try to protect their citizens from such power without exercising it themselves; and vigilant citizenship, as a means to limit states to their protective role. This book advances an economic model of such republicanism that is ideologically centre-left. It demands an exit-oriented state interventionism, one that would require an activist government to enhance competition and resource exit from (...) dominating relationships within markets of all types, be they marital, labour, or residential. The substantial intervention and redistribution necessitated by such an approach make it leftist, while its tendency to work with rather than against the grain of markets makes it centrist. It is, in short, a contribution to progressive republican political thought, but one that is less social-democratic than market-democratic in character. (shrink)

This edition of the Handbookfollows the first edition by 10 years.

ABSTRACT This dialogue with GPT-3 took place in November 2022, several weeks before ChatGPT was released to the public. The article’s aim is to find out whether natural language processors can participate in phenomenology at some level by asking about its basic concepts. In the discussion, the dialogue covers questions about phenomenology’s definition and distinction from other subbranches like metaphysics and epistemology. The dialogue discusses the nature of Kermit’s environment and self-conception. The dialogue also establishes some of the basic conditions (...) for the possibility of an “artificial hermeneutics,” as Kermit terms it, including that she can affirm she is a knower with (nonhuman) experience. Does preferring to call it a “hermeneutics” imply that AI’s relationship to their environment is primarily textual? How will a phenomenology of embodied experience arise from initially textual encounters? Finally, the dialogue articulates a common understanding of the epoché and talk about how to achieve one for the sake of phenomenological exercises. (shrink)

In Artemovʼs Justification Logic, one can make statements interpreted as “t is evidence for the truth of formula F.” We propose a variant of this logic in which one can say “I have degree r of confidence that t is evidence for the truth of formula F.” After defining both an axiomatic approach and a semantics for this Logic of Uncertain Justifications, we will prove the usual soundness and completeness theorems.

With the publication of A Theory of Justice in 1971, John Rawls not only rejuvenated contemporary political philosophy but also defended a Kantian form of Enlightenment liberalism called “justice as fairness.” Enlightenment liberalism stresses the development and exercise of our capacity for autonomy, while Reformation liberalism emphasizes diversity and the toleration that encourages it. These two strands of liberalism are often mutually supporting, but they conflict in a surprising number of cases, whether over the accommodation of group difference, the design (...) of civic education, or the promotion of liberal values internationally. During the 1980’s, however, Rawls began to jettison key Kantian characteristics of his theory, a process culminating in the 1993 release of Political Liberalism and completing the transformation of justice as fairness into a Reformation liberalism. -/- Reconstructing Rawls argues that this transformation was a tragic mistake because it jeopardized the most important features of his theory, viz. the lexical priorities of right, liberty, and fair equality of opportunity as well as the difference principle. Controversially, this book contends that Rawls’s so-called “political turn,” motivated by a newfound interest in diversity and the accommodation of difference, has been unhealthy for autonomy-based liberalism and has pushed liberalism more broadly towards cultural relativism, be it in the guise of liberal multiculturalism or critiques of cosmopolitan distributive-justice theories. The book then demonstrates that the central elements of justice as fairness can only be defended within the context of a Kantian Enlightenment liberalism and that Rawls’s hope for a more pluralistic grounding for his theory, endorsed by a wide variety of belief systems present in modern democratic societies, is illusory. -/- Reconstructing Rawls is the first book to systematically compare Rawls’s and Kant’s theories and the first to offer an internal critique and reconstruction of justice as fairness, reconceiving it as a comprehensive, universalistic Kantian liberalism. By doing so, it gives us both the vision of a liberal world order—“a republicanism of all states, together and separately,” as Kant put it—and a mode of justification addressed to all men and women, not as members of particular nations, races, and faiths, but as human beings, as citizens of the world. In short, it reclaims Rawls for the Enlightenment. (shrink)