Many modes of religious expression and experience have a markedly aesthetic component, even though aesthetic delight itself often appears to be free of moral or religious interests. In this ground-breaking work, Frank Burch Brown shows how aesthetics, no less than ethics, can play a central role in the study of religion and in the practice of theology.

The music most pertinent to Lent often engages and stretches us in ways that, while intimately connected with faith, can nonetheless be difficult to put into words or to accommodate within Sunday worship. Yet faith shaped by worship and Scripture informs the very capacity to hear—and be changed by—vital resonances in such music.

"Good Taste, Bad Taste, and Christian Taste is essential reading for students and scholars of religion and theology, pastors and church-goers, liturgists, and church musicians and artists."--Jacket.

What should we do with statues and place‐names memorializing people who committed human‐rights abuses linked to slavery and postslavery racism? In this article, I draw on UN principles of transitional justice to address this question. I propose that a successful approach should meet principles of transitional justice recognized by the United Nations, including affirming rights to justice, truth, reparations, and guarantees of nonrecurrence of human rights violations. I discuss four strategies for handling contested heritage, examining strengths and weaknesses of each (...) strategy. Examples from Bristol, England, highlight common challenges and positive lessons. (shrink)

In recent years, campaigns across the globe have called for the removal of objects symbolic of white supremacy. This paper examines the ethics of altering or removing such objects. Do these strategies sanitize history, destroy heritage and suppress freedom of speech? Or are they important steps towards justice? Does removing monuments and renaming schools reflect a lack of parity and unfairly erase local identities? Or can it sometimes be morally required, as an expression of respect for the memories of people (...) who endured past injustices; a recognition of this history's ongoing legacies; and a repudiation of unjust social hierarchies? (shrink)

In an influential paper, James Lenman argues that consequentialism can provide no basis for ethical guidance, because we are irredeemably ignorant of most of the consequences of our actions. If our ignorance of distant consequences is great, he says, we can have little reason to recommend one action over another on consequentialist grounds. In this article, I show that for reasons to do with statistical theory, the cluelessness objection is too pessimistic. We have good reason to believe that certain patterns (...) of action will tend to have better consequences, and we have good reason to recommend acting in accordance with strategies based on those advantageous patterns. I close by saying something about the strategies that this argument should lead us to favour. (shrink)

The concept of biodiversity has played a central role within conservation biology over the last thirty years. Precisely how it should be understood, however, is a matter of ongoing debate. In this paper we defend what we call a classic multidimensional conception of biodiversity. We begin by introducing two arguments for eliminating the concept of biodiversity from conservation biology, both of which have been put forward in a recent paper by Santana. The first argument is against the concept’s scientific usefulness. (...) The other is against its value as a target of conservation. We show that neither of these objections is successful against the classic multidimensional conception of biodiversity. Biodiversity thus understood is important from a scientific perspective, because it plays important explanatory roles within contemporary ecology. Moreover, although it does not encompass all valuable features of the natural world, this does not show that we should abandon it as a target of conservation. Instead, biodiversity should be conceived as one of many grounds of value associated with ecosystems. This is consistent with concluding that a central aim of conservationists should be to protect biodiversity. (shrink)

Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 55, Issue 6, Page 935-948, December 2021.

How can philosophy expand to be a discipline via which young people from diverse backgrounds feel they can make a direct and positive contribution to their communities? In this chapter I suggest some creative methods by which philosophers can support community-led change. Collaborators and I have been developing the approaches described here through work on issues of racial justice, but they can be applied to campaigns or public debate on any topic. Developing more community-led, socially engaged methods has the potential (...) to make philosophy a more attractive discipline for young people from diverse backgrounds who are keen to use their skills to make a positive difference to their communities. (shrink)

Drawing on findings from the study of prejudice and prejudice reduction, we identify a number of mechanisms through which religious communities may influence the intergroup attitudes of their members. We hypothesize that religious participation could in principle either reduce or promote prejudice with respect to any given target group. A religious community’s influence on intergroup attitudes will depend upon the specific beliefs, attitudes, and practices found within the community, as well as on interactions between the religious community and the larger (...) social environment in which it is embedded. Basing our proposals on findings from the literature on prejudice formation and prejudice reduction allows us to outline useful directions for future studies of religion and prejudice. (shrink)

The deductive system in Boole's Laws of Thought (LT) involves both an algebra, which we call proto-Boolean, and a "general method in Logic" making use of that algebra. Our object is to elucidate these two components of Boole's system, to prove his principal results, and to draw some conclusions not explicit in LT. We also discuss some examples of incoherence in LT; these mask the genius of Boole's design and account for much of the puzzled and disparaging commentary LT has (...) received. Our evaluation of Boole's logical system does not differ substantially from that advanced in Hailperin's exhaustive study, Boole's Logic and Probability. Unlike the latter work, however, we make direct use of the polynomials native to LT rather than appealing to formalisms such as multisets and rings. (shrink)

In 1952, Quine showed that the problem of reducing a propositional formula to a simplest normal equivalent can be solved in two steps, viz., (i) express the given formula, Φ, equivalently as the disjunction of all its prime implicants, and (ii) find all non-redundant disjunctions of the latter that are equivalent to Φ (Quine 1952). However, it seems not generally known that an ingenious form of the same two-step process was published by Hugh McColl in 1878.

This book presents detailed discussions from leading intercultural philosophers, arguing for and against the priority of immanence in Chinese thought and the validity of Western interpretations that attempt to import conceptions of transcendence. The authors pay close attention to contemporary debates generated from critical analysis of transcendence and immanence, including discussions of apophasis, critical theory, post-secular conceptions of society, phenomenological approaches to transcendence, possible-world models, and questions of practice and application. This book aims to explore alternative conceptions of transcendence that (...) either call the tradition in the West into question, or discover from within Western metaphysics a thoroughly dialectical way of thinking about immanence and transcendence. (shrink)

This chapter describes the potential far‐reaching consequences of contemplative higher education for the fields of science and medicine.

This Special Issue commemorates the 60th anniversary of Business & Society with nine rigorous literature reviews that address important societal problems and provide opportunities for theory development in the business and society field; in this introduction we present an overview of the Special Issue. With the theme “Building on Its Past,” the nine articles address a host of contemporary issues, including climate change, wicked problems, business and human rights, human health, certifications standards, the governance of artificial intelligence, stakeholder engagement, stakeholder (...) theory, and corporate political activity. Together, these reviews offer a wealth of suggested themes, theories and approaches that can drive our research forward for the next decades in business and society research and practice. Using the lens of a miner-prospector continuum to categorize the diversity of articles within this special issue, a common theme emerges across the portfolio of reviews: they all call for a more systemic and integrative perspective toward studying the complex interactions that link business and society actors and issues. Building on these findings, we encourage future scholars to fill long-standing researched gaps through a more open systems approach, which supports both contextually sensitive and multi-level and multi-disciplinary approaches to address grand societal challenges. We conclude with specific suggestions as to how business and society scholars might use an open systems approach, including embracing methodologies to address complex causal pathways, theorizing with a view towards spanning external and internal elements of an organization, and reflecting on the temporal and spatial dynamics of complex systems. (shrink)