In recent years, two important books by Yoram Cohen and Matthew Rutz have marked significant progress in research on the archives of Late Bronze Age Emar in northwestern Syria. Both of them approach Emar by way of its scribes. Cohen undertakes a systematic review of all named scribes identified in texts associated with Emar, while Rutz narrows his object to the building that yielded by far the largest number of excavated tablets. This work is foundational to future work on the (...) Emar texts even as it calls for cautious consideration. (shrink)

As a stress test of experimenter demand effects, we run an experiment where subjects can physically destroy coupons awarded to them. About one subject out of three does. Giving money back to the experimenter is possible in a separate task but is more consistent with an experimenter demand effect than an explanation based on altruism towards the experimenter. A measure of sensitivity to social pressure helps predict destruction when social information is provided.

Fleming, Daniel J; Ryan, Thomas Three recent phrases of Pope Francis warrant attention and guide this article. First, there is his call for 'witnesses of God's love' in his tribute to modern martyrs. The second is 'the pedagogy of grace' and the work of the Spirit explained in 'Amoris Laetitia'. Third, from the same document, we find his discussion of accompaniment in the process of moral discernment within the church. With these as guideposts and drawing on recent studies (...) in moral philosophy and psychology, this article unfolds in five steps: setting the scene; witness in relation to moral understanding and intersubjectivity; intersubjectivity and conscience; a pedagogy of grace: Holy Spirit and nonbelievers; and a pedagogy of grace in relation to moral development. (shrink)

On 19 June 2019, Victoria's 'Voluntary Assisted Dying' Act came into effect. The Act makes legal two interventions at the end of life. In most cases, it allows a doctor to prescribe a patient who meets certain criteria with a lethal substance, which it is supposed a patient will take at a time and place of their choosing to end their life. In rarer cases, where a patient is unable to ingest the lethal substance, it also allows for a doctor (...) to administer such a substance to the same end. In the Victorian legislation these interventions have been given the umbrella term of 'Voluntary Assisted Dying'. In Catholic ethics, as in most bioethical frameworks, these acts are referred to as physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia. (shrink)

The view that complexity increases in evolution is uncontroversial, yet little is known about the possible causes of such a trend. One hypothesis, the Zero Force Evolutionary Law (ZFEL), predicts a strong drive toward complexity, although such a tendency can be overwhelmed by selection and constraints. In the absence of strong opposition, heritable variation accumulates and complexity increases. In order to investigate this claim, we evaluate the gross morphological complexity of laboratory mutants in Drosophila melanogaster, which represent organisms that arise (...) in a context where selective forces are greatly reduced. Complexity was measured with respect to part types, shape, and color over two independent focal levels. Compared to the wild type, we find that D. melanogaster mutants are significantly more complex. When the parts of mutants are categorized by degree of constraint, we find that weakly constrained parts are significantly more complex than more constrained parts. These results support the ZFEL hypothesis. They also represent a first step in establishing the domain of application of the ZFEL and show one way in which a larger empirical investigation of the principle might proceed. (shrink)

The phenomenon of conscience as articulated in Roman Catholic moral theology has at least three dimensions: a fundamental and universal call to moral goodness; the search for moral truth; and a commitment to act in a particular way. Recent moral theology has tended to focus on the latter two dimensions, but there has been a strong call from Thomas Ryan for attention to the first dimension of conscience, especially its constitution in ‘horizontal relationality’. In this article I respond to Ryan's (...) call, and demonstrate that the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas can show how the experience of conscience is constituted in horizontal relationality, as well as that it supports an understanding of conscience as a universal call to responsibility. Correlatively, and perhaps more significantly, the introduction of Levinas’ philosophy into the discussion of conscience sheds light on a significant aspect of this call to moral responsibility. This highlights that the Roman Catholic understanding of conscience has ethical consequences for theology more broadly considered in terms of understanding why it is impossible to set aside considerations of responsibility in the search for truth. (shrink)

Daniel Defoe’s fictional autobiographies often contain a puritanical conversion narrative, but Colonel Jack’s narrator is unique in his problematized relationship to Christian conversion. Alert to the negative implications of mercenary conversion, Defoe presents in Colonel Jack a hero who not only revels in his complex ploys to evade the law, but explicitly rejects conversion to Christianity at several points in the narrative. By reading Colonel Jack alongside narratives of European enslavement and incarceration, I suggest that in this text Defoe (...) deliberately reproduces the form of the popular Barbary captivity narrative. This subgenre of narrative portrays conversion as a force to be resisted, informs Jack’s reluctance to embrace Christianity, and ultimately suggests that living in a Christian nation may actually be a hindrance to conversion, making Catholic South America a milieu more conducive to the protagonist’s religious transformation than Protestant Virginia. (shrink)

Daniel Defoe’s fictional autobiographies often contain a puritanical conversion narrative, but Colonel Jack’s narrator is unique in his problematized relationship to Christian conversion. Alert to the negative implications of mercenary conversion, Defoe presents in Colonel Jack a hero who not only revels in his complex ploys to evade the law, but explicitly rejects conversion to Christianity at several points in the narrative. By reading Colonel Jack alongside narratives of European enslavement and incarceration, I suggest that in this text Defoe (...) deliberately reproduces the form of the popular Barbary captivity narrative. This subgenre of narrative portrays conversion as a force to be resisted, informs Jack’s reluctance to embrace Christianity, and ultimately suggests that living in a Christian nation may actually be a hindrance to conversion, making Catholic South America a milieu more conducive to the protagonist’s religious transformation than Protestant Virginia. (shrink)

Norman Daniels, who has written extensively on population health, once sighed that medical care is simply “the ambulance waiting at the bottom of the cliff” (Daniels 2008, 79). At the bottom of Dan...

Book Reviews in this article Baptism and Resurrection: Studies in Pauline Theology against its Graeco‐Roman Background. By A.J.M. Wedderburn. Meaning and Truth in 2 Corinthians. By Frances Young and David Ford. Jesus and God in Paul's Eschatology. By L. Joseph Kreitzer. The Acts of the Apostles : By Hans Conzelmann. The Genesis of Christology: Foundations for a Theology of the New Testament. By Petr Pokorny. The Incarnation of God: An Introduction to Hegel's Theological Thought as Prolegomena to a Future Christology. (...) By Hans Küng, translated by J.R. Stephenson. The Incarnation: Collected Essays in Christology. By Brian Hebblethwaite. Models for God: Theology for an Ecological, Nuclear Age. By Sallie McFague. Pp. xv, 224, London, SCM Press, 1987, £8.50 Symbol and Sacrament: A Contemporary Sacramental Theology. By Michael G. Lawler. The Sacrifice We Offer: The Tridentine Dogma and its Reinterpretation. By David N. Power. New Eucharistic Prayers: An Ecumenical Study of their Development and Structure. Edited by Frank C. Senn. To Join Together: The Rite of Marriage. By Kenneth W. Stevenson. Company of Voices: Daily Prayer and the People of God. By George Guiver. The Long‐Legged Fly. By Don Cupitt. Approaches to Auschwitz. By Richard L. Rubenstein and John K. Roth. Natural Law and Justice. By Lloyd L. Weinreb. Christian Morality: The Word Becomes Flesh. By Josef Fuchs S.J., translated by Brian McNeil. Medicine in Contemporary Society: King's College Studies 1986–87. Edited by Peter Byrne. Military Ethics: Guidelines for Peace and War. By N. Fotion and G. Elfstrom. Choice: The Essential Element in Human Action. By Alan Donagan. Persons and Personality: A Contemporary Inquiry. Edited by Arthur Peacocke and Grant Gillet. The Rationality of Emotion. By Ronald de Sousa. The Psychology of Personality: An Epistemological Inquiry. By James T. Lamiell. Aesthetics: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Art. By Anne Sheppard. The Ascetic Element in Culture and Criticism. By Geoffrey Gait Harpham. Electric Language: A Philosophical Study of Word Processing. By Michael Heim. Education and Philosophical Anthropology: Toward a New View of Man for the Humanities and English. By David Holbrook. Evolution and the Humanities. By David Holbrook. Further Studies in Philosophical Anthropology. By David Holbrook. Women in Western Political Philosophy. Edited by Ellen Kennedy and Susan Mendus. The Light of the Soul: Theories of Ideas in Leibniz, Malebranche and Descartes. By Nicholas Jolley. Arnauld and the Cartesian Philosophy of Ideas. By Stephen M. Nadler. Later Medieval Philosophy : An Introduction. By John Marenbon. Either/Or. By Søren Kierkegaard, translated by Howard and Edna Hong, Princeton University Press, 1987: Vol. One, Wittgenstein. By A.C. Grayling. Questions on Wittgenstein. By Rudolf Haller. The False Prison: A Study of the Development of Wittgenstein's Philosophy. By David Pears, Oxford, Clarendon Press. Vol. One, The Later Wittgenstein: The Emergence of a New Philosophical Method. By S. Stephen Hilmy. Knowledge of God: Calvin, Einstein and Polanyi. By Iain Paul. Conceptual Change and Religious Practice with Special Reference to Jews in Britain and Israel. By Janice Williams. The World's Religions. Edited by Stewart Sutherland, Leslie Houlden, Peter Clarke and Friedhelm Hardy. Religions in Conversation: Christian Identity and Religious Pluralism. By Michael Barnes. Theravāda Buddhism, A Social History from Ancient Benares to Modem Colombo. By Richard Gombrich. Mahāyāna Buddhism, The Doctrinal Foundations. By Paul Williams. Hinduism in Great Britain: The Perpetuation of Religion in an Alien Cultural Milieu. Edited by Richard Burghart. The Way of the Black Messiah. By Theo Witvliet. The Meaning of Religious Conversion in Africa. By Cyril C. Okorocha. Common Ground: Christianity, African Religion and Philosophy. By Emmanuel K. Twesigye. Islamic Spirituality I: Foundations. Edited by Seyyed Hossein Nasr. The Great Cosmic Mother: Rediscovering the Religion of the Earth. By Monica Sjöö and Barbara Mor. Judaism and Christianity in the Age of Constantine. By J. Neusner. Language and the Worship of the Church. Edited by David Jasper and R.C.D. Jasper. The Urban Character of Christian Worship: The Origins, Development and Meaning of Stational Liturgy. By John E. Baldovin. Leontii Presbyteri Constantinopolitani Homiliae. Edited by Cornells Datema and Pauline Allen. Law, Sex and Christian Society in Medieval Europe. By James A. Brundage. Melchior Hoffman: Social Unrest and Apocalyptic Visions in the Age of Reformation. By Klaus D Alonso de Zorita: RoyalJudge and Christian Humanist, 1512–1585. By Ralph H. Vigil. Pedro Moya de Contreras: Catholic Reform and Royal Power in New Spain, 1571–1591. By Stafford Poole. Archbishop William Laud. By Charles Carlton. The Social History of Religion in Scotland since 1730. By Callum G. Brown. Pastors and Pluralism in Württemberg, 1918–1933. By David J. Diephouse. The Churches and the Third Reich, Vol. One: Preliminary History and the Time of Illusions, 1918–1934. By Klaus Scholder. Reforming Fundamentalism. Fuller Seminary and the New Evangelicalism. By George M. Marsden. The Hellenistic Philosophers Vol. II: Greek and Latin Texts with Notes and Bibliography. By A.A. Long and D.N. Sedley. Prayers of the Eucharist: Early and Reformed. Edited by R.C.D. Jasper and G. J. Cuming. The Way of Paradox: Spiritual Life as Taught by Meister Eckhart. By Cyprian Smith. Meister Eckhart: The Man from whom God Hid Nothing. Edited by Ursula Fleming. The Spiritual Exercises of St Ignatius Loyola: A New Translation. Translated by Elisabeth Meier Tetlow. Courtfield and the Vaughans: An English Catholic Inheritance. By Mary Vaughan. Trinity College, Washington D.C.: The First Eighty Years, 1897–1977. By Columba Mullaly. John Henry Newman on the Idea of Church. By Edward Jeremy Miller. Journey from Paradise: Aft Athos and the Interior Life. By Ralph Harper. (shrink)

It is common to hear talk of the aim of belief and to find philosophers appealing to that aim for numerous explanatory purposes. What belief 's aim explains depends, of course, on what that aim is. Many hold that it is somehow related to truth, but there are various ways in which one might specify belief 's aim using the notion of truth. In this article, by considering whether they can account for belief 's standard of correctness and the epistemic (...) norms governing belief, I argue against certain prominent specifications of belief 's aim given in terms of truth, and advance a neglected alternative. (shrink)

The _Physics_ is a foundational work of western philosophy, and the crucial one for understanding Aristotle's views on matter, form, essence, causation, movement, space, and time. This richly annotated, scrupulously accurate, and consistent translation makes it available to a contemporary English reader as no other does—in part because it fits together seamlessly with other closely associated works in the New Hackett Aristotle series, such as the _Metaphysics_, _De Anima_, and forthcoming _De Caelo_ and _On Coming to Be and Passing Away_. (...) Eventually the series will include all of Aristotle's works. Sequentially numbered endnotes provide the information most needed at each juncture, while a detailed Index of Terms indicates places where focused discussion of key notions occurs. An illuminating general Introduction describes the book that lies ahead, explaining what sort of work it is and what sorts of evidence it relies on. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In this paper I examine some of the issues surrounding the moral status of the therapy known as ‘deprogramming’. I argue against the extreme view that all deprogrammings are morally impermissible. In certain instances deprogramming is morally justified because it is quite capable of restoring the conditions needed for the exercise of autonomy. The view of autonomy I am following is that constructed by Gerald Dworkin, wherein two conditions must be met in describing a person as autonomous—authenticity and procedural (...) independence. Autonomy of another type, described by Dworkin as authenticity plus substantive independence, may be lost by persons involved in cults but in those instances deprogramming as reconstructed in this paper is not a morally justified measure. (shrink)

1. What is it according to Berkeley for bodies to exist in the mind? Maybe no simple or single answer to this question fits everything that he says about it in the Principles and Dialogues , but I think he gives or suggests an answer in Principles section 49 that he may have to give or be willing to accept across the board. The trouble is that this answer comes with a fairly high price.

Critical development and food studies scholars argue that the current food security paradigm is emblematic of a ‘New Green Revolution’, characterized by agricultural intensification, increasing reliance on biotechnology, deepening global markets, and depeasantization. High-profile examples of this model are not hard to find. Less examined, however, are food-security programs that appear to work at cross-purposes with this model. Drawing on the case of Feed the Future in Guatemala, I show how USAID engages in activities that valorize ancestral crops, subsistence production, (...) and agroecological practices. Rather than the result of macro-level planning—of either the New Green Revolution or a greener reform regime—I argue that nonconforming food security projects can be traced to individual actors and their interactions on the ground. I draw on an ‘interface approach’ (Long 1990 ), focusing on the lifeworlds of development workers, their interfaces with each other, and with the to-be-developed. Doing so reveals how food security projects are significantly shaped by the relationships and interests of development actors enmeshed in particular organizational and national settings. This research contributes a fresh perspective on the food security paradigm and its role within the ‘corporate food regime’. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Rhetorical Investigations: Studies in Ordinary Language Criticism, and: Ordinary Language Criticism: Literary Thinking after Cavell after WittgensteinRichard FlemingRhetorical Investigations: Studies in Ordinary Language Criticism, by Walter Jost; 368 pp. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2004, $55.00. Ordinary Language Criticism: Literary Thinking after Cavell after Wittgenstein, edited by Kenneth Dauber and Walter Jost; 353 pp. Evansville: Northwestern University Press, 2003, $29.95 paper.On the question of ordinary language criticism and (...) philosophy, "Who pleases whom?" Judging by many of the articles, essays, and books of the last decade the answer might be: almost nobody pleases anyone. Whether in appreciation or incomprehension of its importance and substance, renewed efforts at understanding, redirections of thinking, and disappointments and frustrations with the [End Page 209] subject-matter are prevalent when ordinary language is the topic of discussion. These two recent books tend to strengthen this assessment. Rhetorical Investigations is a sustained effort to "revisit" and "rethink" grammatical (conceptual) reflections on ordinary language and literature; and in so doing provide a "reinvention" of characteristics of literary theory through an extensive and detailed consideration of the work of Robert Frost. Although sometimes overreaching in its efforts (particularly when discussing logic), it imaginatively uses rhetoric and ordinary language concerns as a means of direction and focus for new, explanatory discussions in literary—philosophical analysis. Ordinary Language Criticism (part of the general series, "Rethinking Theory," edited by Gary Saul Morson) is a diverse and uneven collection of fifteen articles concerning and using ordinary language interests, several of which (R. M. Berry, Garry L. Hagberg, Richard Eldridge, Gerald L. Bruns) valuably repay the diligence needed to discover them in 350 plus pages. The text includes an editors' introduction that voices the wish to "return criticism to its grounds in the 'ordinary' or natural language we all speak" and (unsuccessfully but lustily) pronounces and explains "ordinary language criticism" as a new yet traditional area of study. ("New" in that it takes "as its point of departure" the ordinary language philosophy of Wittgenstein, and "traditional" in that "all criticism is really ordinary language criticism.") The editors further undertake in this introduction the endeavor to sketch something of a program for the book, meant to show connected promptings among the various writings, whereas the specific authors themselves settle down quickly and separately to a critical work at hand without particular references to each other. Both of these texts, like others in this field of study before, valuably raise questions and apprehensions of what use there is in talk about ordinary language. The best of such material provides provocations for thinking that are to be found nowhere else. The worst of such books and articles is that they prejudice sensible people against the study of the ordinary.Can one conceive of something to say about these two books that the authors and the current readers haven't already heard or of which they can be profitably reminded? It certainly would not be wise to presume such a grand stand. This is a large question to which only a small answer might be given here. Setting aside the perhaps undiscussable differences of what we each see of primary importance in the primary texts and how best to read them, one issue and difference of understanding, specific and plain enough to state briefly, perhaps usefully does arise. It is a lack of a clear sense of the "ordinary," its distinctiveness, its implications; and thereby a continuation of many of the confusions that have inhabited philosophical and literary writing before and after Wittgenstein turned his attention to the matter. Is this not partly why frustrations of understanding, disagreements in thinking, and displeasures in discussion remain pervasive and unrelenting?This difficulty and difference with such work can only prove worthwhile introducing, however, against a background of agreement over the centrality [End Page 210] of a cluster of issues, of which three might be specified: a first agreement concerns the sensitivity or fear that something is being missed or remains unintelligible in the culture about the ordinary; a respect for the ordinary is a needed, often unnoticed beginning of our reflections. Rhetorical Investigations importantly develops its analyses from such a perspective (Jost's... (shrink)

1. ‘“But aren't you saying that all that happens is that he moans, and that there is nothing behind it?” I am saying that there is nothing behind the moaning ’ . This passage seems to me to epitomize a conception of the mind and its relation to the body found in the later work of Wittgenstein. It will be convenient to write as if this is his view of the mind. He suggests elsewhere that he is not advancing philosophical (...) theses in his later work; so maybe this view is not a philosophical thesis in some relevant sense; or maybe Wittgenstein is not wholly consistent; or maybe he puts it forward only dialectically, and in other philosophical contexts would have espoused other views of the mind as much as he espouses this one. In any case, what does this one amount to? ‘There is nothing behind the moaning.’ What does this mean? (shrink)

1. Happiness, then and now -- Happiness, eudaimonia, and practical reasoning -- Happiness as eudaimonia -- Happiness and virtuous activity -- New directions from old debates -- 2. Happiness then: the sufficiency debate -- Aristotle's case against the sufficiency thesis -- 3. Happiness now: rethinking the self -- Socrates' case for the sufficiency thesis -- Epictetus and the stoic self -- The Stoics' case for the sufficiency thesis -- The embodied conception of the self -- The embodied conception and psychological (...) well-being -- The Stoics' case against the embodied conception. (shrink)

Sometimes it takes years of debate for philosophers to discover what it is they really disagree about. Sometimes they talk past each other in long series of books and articles, never guessing at the root disagreement that divides them. But occasionally a day comes when something happens to coax the cat out of the bag. "Aha!" one philosopher exclaims to another, "so that's why you've been disagreeing with me, misunderstanding me, resisting my conclusions, puzzling me all these years!".