Any conceptual investigation into a given phenomenon may fail in several ways. It may be, for instance, inconsistent, too inclusive or exclusive, or even materially inappropriate. In a recent reply, Michel Croce raises all of these objections to what I have called a “balanced account of expertise” (2018). First, he claims there is a “compromising tension” between two basic components of my account (cf. sect. 3.1). This would be the charge of inconsistency, as Croce states, “Quast cannot have his cake (...) and eat it too” (Croce 2019, 29). Second, he finds my proposal too exclusive (cf. sect. 3.2), because in his view a number of intuitive experts do not fulfill the proposed characteristics. And, third, Croce claims that two characteristics of my account should be kept apart and define different kinds of expertise rather than expertise as such (cf. sect. 3.3). This would be the charge of material inappropriateness. The aim of this article is to answer these charges. More exactly, I attempt to demonstrate that these objections are flawed because they are based on an inadequate understanding of the framework I proposed. I will concentrate on these main objections. (shrink)

In this paper, we set out to inquire into how exactly testimony is and should be placed within the framework of virtue epistemology, and more specifically within Ernest Sosa’s exposition and defense thereof. We begin this inquiry (in Sect. 3.2) by formulating conditions of adequacy that can be extracted from recent criticisms of virtue epistemological approaches more generally. In Sect. 3.3, we reconstruct two branches of Sosa’s treatment of testimony, with respect to which we point out problems of inner coherence (...) and compatibility. We won’t stop there but then go on to see first (in Sect. 3.4) whether and, if so, how the two branches can be balanced out within the architecture of Sosa’s theory of knowledge. And second (in Sect. 3.5), we offer and outline a more comprehensive account that solves not just the problems formulated at the outset, but also a number of problems identified along the way. (shrink)

Wittgenstein wrote: “No supposition seems to me more natural than that there is no process in the brain correlated with associating or with thinking; so that it would be impossible to read off thought-processes from brain processes.” In general, he rejects what he calls “psycho-physical parallelism.” In Sect. 1, I explain Wittgenstein’s position on this topic and how his followers defend it. In Sect. 2, I argue against Wittgenstein, contending that there is “thought” in a wider sense and that it (...) can be “manifested” without expression. Thought does not need to be ordinarily expressed or even expressible, and it can be read off from the brain, provided one has sufficient technology, data, and understanding of the subject’s interaction with the environment. In Sect. 3, I offer results from brain-science in support of my claims. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 41.3 (2003) 419-420 [Access article in PDF] Martin Mulsow. Moderne aus dem Untergrund: Radikale Frühaufklärung in Deutschland, 1680-1720. Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 2002. Pp. x + 514. Paper, € 58.00.This is a marvelous, detailed, textured study of a large number of minor works and minor figures that developed and transmitted many of the elements of modern philosophy in early modern Germany. Many of (...) the texts were written in Latin, and only some were published. One should not teach the philosophy of the Enlightenment from Hazard or Cassirer without attention to these figures, whom they did not know. Now we know where our heroes like Lessing, Hume, and Kant got many of their fundamental ideas.Martin Mulsow ends this book with ten theses. The first holds that most of the authors discussed were radicalized in a multi-layered process, not simply from the reading of Hobbes, Spinoza, Bayle, or Toland. For example, one could take the role of an opponent in an academic disputation, and bit by bit begin to believe one's unorthodox role. Or one could be provoked by ultra-orthodox opponents to explore the opposite of what they believed. Some authors evolved into and out of radical positions over the course of their lives.Further theses contend that small, trusted circles of friends were often the enabling condition in which unorthodox views were first expressed and then hammered out. Irony, satire, humor, paradox, and ambivalence played key roles. It is often difficult to tell whether some of these texts were serious or intended as jokes, and perhaps the authors did not always know themselves. Some radical ideas were spread simply by curious erudites who assembled collections and bibliographies of radical manuscripts and texts without believing them.Mulsow shows how people wrote on controversial topics in coded scholarly language. Spinozism was discussed under the rubrics of Platonism and Stoicism; the sovereignty of the people was considered in terms of the lex regia; and Biblical criticism became code for the physicians' rejection of the materiality of the soul. Thus philosophical discourse can be found where one might least expect it in legal, philological, historical, and scientific debates. The numerous case studies that the author assembles amount to philosophical microhistory.Substantial chapters deal with various aspects of the intellectual stew that emerged from the bubbling pot of Jews and Socinians and other Christian sects that were semi-tolerated in the Netherlands. Unlike any construction of moderate and radical positions as opposed and at odds, Mulsow shows how they were often intertwined. The destruction of Christian Platonism, the paradoxical development of Enlightenment ideas out of anti-humanism, and the uses of so-called eclecticism in philosophy made possible the assembly of modern philosophical positions.In yet another paradox, many of these writers belong to what has been called the "conservative Enlightenment," intending only to temporize and draw the teeth of the political and philosophical radicals, and yet their writings systematized and transmitted the ideas of the radicals, opening the way to further radicality. It is a perennial weakness of the skeptics and proto-liberals like Gundling that they defended freedom of thought and libertas philosophandi even where it would undermine the ideas and institutions in which they believed.Most of the philosophically radical positions began as critiques of theological positions, and this is one reason why it is ever more apparent that one cannot understand the rise of modern philosophy without a close acquaintance with early modern theology. None of the early modern philosophers we are trying to understand was ignorant of the many levels of theological debate. There are numerous connections to later times: for example, a seventeenth-century debate over political theology anticipated Carl Schmitt's twentieth-century rediscovery of this topos.Mulsow places the Enlightened ideas of Locke and Newton in the context of their basis in the theology of anti-Trinitarian Socinians and Arians such as Samuel Crell. This was as important to many who radicalized it as the Spinozism credited with spawning the radical... (shrink)

The "decapitated of Fourni". A medical-legal and palaeopathological reexamination The two decapitated human skeletons discovered in 1960 in a bothros connected to the clearing of the latrines of the Maison de Fourni at Delos were published in 1973 (Études déliennes [BCH Suppl. I], p. 173-181) and have since led to divergent interpretations. They are here subjected to a new anthropolical study and, for the first time, to a palaeopathological examination, which leads to unexpected conclusions. Firstly, both victimes would have been (...) feminine. Secondly, the date of their beheading as provided by C-14 analysis is much higher than that proposed based on the historical context. The execution was preceded by a period of shackling and restraint. Finally, the bodies were thrown into a cesspool still in use. This episode cannot be connected to a precise event or social context. Nevertheless, this killing recalls more the ritual killing of a sect than a capital execution. (shrink)

Atheists in general need share no particular political or metaphysical views, but atheists of the most modern, Western, militant sort, escaping from a merely nihilistic mind-set, are usually humanists of an especially triumphalist kind. In this paper I offer a critical analysis and partial history of their claims, suggesting that they are members of a distinctively Christian heretical sect, formed in reaction to equally heretical forms of monotheistic idolatry.

This study explored the impact of African indigenous spirituality on African indigenous churches (AICs), particularly in the Zimbabwean context, a special focus was on the Johane Masowe Chishanu (JMC) religious movement spirituality. The spirituality of the JMC religious movement is examined by cross-examining its denigration of the centrality of the Bible, the historical Jesus and the temple gathering as the movement appropriates and re-socialises traditional African shrines for religious gatherings. Thus, the following questions are raised in this study: is the (...) appropriation and resocialisation of African traditional shrines, the denigration of the Bible and the disregarding of the historical Jesus for salvation by the JMC a conscious or unconscious move? If it is a conscious move, the follow-up question is: what motivates the JMC religious movement to regard such religious shrines, whilst disregarding the Bible and Jesus for its spirituality and, because of this, does the JMC religious movement retain the label ‘a Christian church’ or has become a sect? Contribution: While majority of African scholars were celebrating the proliferation of Christianity in the continent as evidenced by an unremitting mushrooming of African Indigenous Churches, some Zimbabwean scholars were categorizing Johane Masowe Chishanu church a sect. Therefore, this article examine the veracity and provenances of the Johane Masowe Chishanu church-sect dichotomy in Zimbabwe. (shrink)

In Practicing Safe Sects F. LeRon Shults provides scientific and philosophical resources for having “the talk” about religious reproduction: where do gods come from – and what are the costs of bearing them in our culturally pluralistic, ecologically fragile environment?

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist-Christian Studies 20 (2000) 287-292 [Access article in PDF] Book Review Original Tao: Inward Training and the Foundations of Taoist Mysticism Laughing at the Tao: Debates Among Buddhists and Taoists in Medieval China Taoist Tradition and Change: The Story of the Complete Perfection Sect in Hong Kong Lord of the Three in One: The Spread of a Cult in Southeast China Original Tao: Inward Training and the Foundations (...) of Taoist Mysticism. By Harold D. Roth. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999. xv + 275 pp. Laughing at the Tao: Debates Among Buddhists and Taoists in Medieval China. By Livia Kohn. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995. xii + 281 pp. Taoist Tradition and Change: The Story of the Complete Perfection Sect in Hong Kong. By Bartholomew P. M. Tsui. Hong Kong: Chinese Study Centre on Chinese Religion and Culture, 1991. 207 pp. Lord of the Three in One: The Spread of a Cult in Southeast China. By Kenneth Dean. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998. xii + 406 pp. Buddhism in China has many forms: sometimes functioning as a foreign object provoking attraction, rivalry, or persecution, and at other times being so integrated that it epitomized or completed Chinese culture. Although the elite monastic community maintained its distinctive Buddhist identity throughout its history, the story of the various forms of popular appropriation of Buddhist elements beyond the monastic [End Page 287] walls is just beginning to be studied. Probably the most important arena where Buddhism became part of Chinese culture is its mixture with Daoist practice, but only in the 1990s have Daoist studies evolved to the point where the Buddhist presence can be traced and evaluated. The four books listed above are among a shelf-full of new studies on Daoism that offer resources for exploring the complex relationships among Buddhism, Daoism, and Chinese culture.The study of the Inner Training by Harold Roth clarifies a core practice within early Daoism that was later integrated--usually without acknowledgment--as a central practice by both Confucianists and Buddhists, especially Ch'an. In contrast, the definitive study by Livia Kohn of the Xiaodao lun shows a carefully constructed Buddhist attack on Daoist scriptures. During the last millennium, the two most influential integrations of the three religions--Daoism, Buddhism, and Confucianism--were achieved by Wang Chong-yang (1113-1170) and Lin Zhao-en (1517-1598). Bartholomew Tsui offers an important field study of the liturgical practices of the contemporary followers of Wang as embodied in Hong Kong temples of Quanzhen (Complete Perfection) Daoism, while Kenneth Dean provides a massive field report of over one thousand temples of the Xiajiao movement in contemporary Fujian Province that revere the teachings of Lin Zhao-en as Lord of the Three-in-One. All four books provide rich materials for reflecting on interreligious encounter in China.The archaeological discovery of lost Chinese texts has made clear that the Lao-tzu is no earlier than the beginning of the third century b.C.E. and did not exist at the time of Confucius. Harold Roth's book argues that earlier than the book of Lao-tzu there was a movement of internal cultivation that was first expressed in two fourth-century b.C.E. texts, the first seven chapters of Chuang-tzu and a text found among the seventy-six texts in the Kuan-tzu that Roth calls Inner Training. Roth proposes that this latter text constitutes the "original Tao" in the sense that it is the core practice embodied in those thinkers who were grouped together by later historians. Roth observes that the earliest identification of a Daoist school (daojia) by Ssu-ma T'an about 110 b.C.E. emphasized techniques or practices, "not the philosophies that developed along with them and that support them.... Techniques must be seen as a way to define pre... (shrink)

Christianity began as a little-known Jewish sect, but rose within 300 years to dominate the civilised world. It owed its rise in part to inspired moral leadership, but also to its success in assimilating, criticising and developing the philosophies of the day, which offered rationally approved life-styles and moral directives. Without abandoning their allegiance to their founder and to Holy Scripture, Christians could therefore present their faith as a 'new philosophy'. This book, which is written for non-specialist readers, provides a (...) concise conspectus of the emergence of philosophy among the Greeks; an account of its continuance in early Christian times, and its influence on early Christian thought, especially in formulating the doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation; and finally a brief critical assessment of the philosophy of St Augustine - arguably the greatest philosopher of the first millennium. (shrink)

How does emigration affect access to and struggles for power in sending states? For competing groups in the homeland, emigration presents a contradiction: demographic losses but possible economic gains. Wins and losses from this trade-off evolve with shifts in who migrates, to where, and when. I illustrate these relationships in the case of Lebanon since 1860, focusing on the balance of power among sectarian communities. The country’s first migratory wave concentrated material benefits and population deficits in the Christian community. (...) It also encouraged subsequent emigration that, over time, involved more Muslim Lebanese, as well. Such broadening diffused the profits of labor abroad. Due to changes in destinations and historical circumstances, however, many of these migrants remained more connected to their homeland. This aided social mobility for their communities without sapping resident strength. Outmigration thereby helped redistribute human and material resources among sects, and hence created the demographic and material foundations of the competition for power. (shrink)

Music is considered an indispensable feature for almost all religions. Christianity emerges as one of the most important religious traditions in which music is involved in rituals and social life. Among the Christian sects, there are different practices in terms of using music. American Christianity was the scene of religious awakening in the 18th and 19th centuries. One of the most important reflections of this process took place in the field of music. American Christianity has given particular importance (...) to music in the experience of religious awakening since the 18th and 19th centuries. At the end of the 19th century, traditional Christian hymns have largely been altered or abandoned. Baptist, Methodist, Lutheran and Pentecostal churches have played a role in the transformation and spread of Christian music. This process has emerged as new genre hymns and later as Gospel music. There are some similar and seperated points among the new music genres. The musical instruments which they use, melody structures, the places they are performed, their improvisation or rules and their poetic features are among these points. With the introduction of these two genres and some local cultural factors, music genres have emerged as secular in style but which may have religious content. Regardless of whether it is secular or religious music, these genres have used religious terminology in their lyrics. At the same time, there are some similarities at the point of the musicians who perform these music. Blouse and Jazz are considered as the two most prominent and international examples. (shrink)

The Church of the Mother of God meets all the criteria used by religious scholars in the research of different confessional manifestations of religious organizations themselves. Here we have a clearly defined understanding of God as the creator and the industrialist, the Christian Trinity is added with a special reverence to the Mother of God, a clearly depicted liturgical practice with a certain absolutization and sacralization with the places of appearances of the Mother of God, we have a fixed (...) hierarchical structure of the Church, three times the rosary, and others. So this is the Church, not a sect, as Orthodox communities want to see the goddesses. (shrink)

Paul uses the word ἑνότης twice in Ephesians, and quite strangely, those are the only two places where the feminine noun features in the whole of the New Testament. In the two passages where they appear, they both relate to invisible unity, the unity of the Spirit that produces a common faith and knowledge of the Son of God – εἰς τὴν ἑνότητα τῆς πίστεως καὶ τῆς ἐπιγνώσεως τοῦ υἱοῦ τοῦ Θεοῦ. Such unity suggests that ecumenism amongst Christian denominations (...) is not only a possibility, it is also a necessity as far as we all profess one Christ. This unity is however far from ecclesiological unionism. Considering that the church appears weak from the outside when its diverse lines of doctrine, sacraments and ministerial ethics are emphasised. This suggests that a reasonable antidote would be the emphasis on the philosophy of unity amidst our diversity especially to the hearing of non-Christians.Contribution: This study makes firm the belief that Christianity is formed on divergent traditions that produced various strands of practices, which in turn produce different Christian sects and denominations, and a reverse is not possible. It then suggests a bonding in faith through the invisibility of henotic unity, which the pericope suggests. This will help the church to amass a stronger defence politically and structurally against rival religions and social organisations even in the midst of doctrinal differences. (shrink)

Abstract: It is the aim of this paper to establish a temporal and cultural link between entheogen-use1 in Classical mystery cults and their possible use in a segment of the early Christian Gnostic Church. As early Christianity was heavily influenced by the Classical world in which it first developed, it is essential to examine the evidence of entheogen-use within Classical mystery cults, and explore their possible influence on the development of Christian ritual. We will first present textual evidence (...) from the New Testament and Nag Hammadi Library (NHL) that indicate possible use of ritual entheogens. Next we will examine entheogen-use by some of the main religious sects of the ancient Mediterranean world as part of their liturgical practice between c. fifth century BCE and the third century CE. Then we will show that the different schools of philosophical thought examined were quite fluid, and that there was considerable overlap among schools with respect to several key philosophies and practices. Ultimately the subject of entheogen-use in the Classical world necessarily falls into the realm of plausible speculation mainly due to the lack of primary sources. However, should the entheogenic hypothesis2 prove to be correct, it promises to be quite useful in future research and in the translation of original documents. (shrink)

“A Common Word Between Us,” an open letter from Muslim scholars to Christian leaders, is the most developed effort at Muslim-Christian reconciliation to date. Endorsed by well-known Muslim scholars from diverse sects and backgrounds, the letter emphasizes the central role of love of God and the Golden Rule in both religions and cites the catastrophic consequences of conflict. The signatories frame a norm of interreligious covenant for constructive collaborations, present their argument as an authoritative Islamic position, and (...) effectively reject the clash-of-civilizations narrative. Using game-theory models to articulate strategic challenges facing interreligious initiatives, this essay argues that a norm of interreligious covenant can potentially produce successful collective action in situations resembling both coordination and prisoner's dilemma games, depending on the success of norm entrepreneurship. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:John Locke's Christianity by Diego LucciBenjamin HillDiego Lucci. John Locke's Christianity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Pp. 244. Hardback, $99.99.Diego Lucci's John Locke's Christianity is a fabulous work of scholarship—meticulously researched, well argued, and judicious. It should be required reading for everyone interested in John Locke's thought.In the introduction, Lucci aligns himself with John Dunn (The Political Thought of John Locke: An Historical Account of the Argument of (...) the "Two Treaties of Government" [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969]), John Colman (John Locke's Moral Philosophy [Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1983]), and Victor Nuovo (John Locke: The Philosopher as Christian Virtuoso [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017]), who believe that Locke was a "Christian philosopher" whose "theological concerns, interests, and ideas indeed pervade his philosophical, political, and moral thought" (5, emphasis in the original). John Locke's Christianity, however, is not a book that defends that thesis. It is much more focused and does, basically, just what its title advertises—it provides a systemic and detailed analysis of Locke's core Christian beliefs, and a very excellent one at that.The book is structured around two pillars. The first, consisting of chapters 1–3, involves a contextualized analysis of Locke's theological writings, particularly The Reasonableness of Christianity and Adversaria Theologica. This analysis is then used to reconstruct Locke's conception of the fundamentals of Christianity. The second pillar, consisting of chapters 4–6, then uses this reconstruction to explain puzzling features of Locke's engagements with personal identity, the Trinity, and religious toleration. Lucci's reconstruction of the fundamentals of Locke's Christian beliefs are novel, interesting, and compelling. Furthermore, he uncovers details that materially affect the interpretations of Locke's philosophical accounts of persons and religious toleration, so much so that many popular interpretations begin to look strained after reading Lucci's analysis. Philosophers unaccustomed to considering the theological basis of Locke's account of persons or the Christian significance of religious toleration will now need to engage with Lucci's accounts.Locke famously offered a succinct conception of Christianity: to be a Christian is to believe that Jesus was the Messiah. Lucci shows that this conception, though economical, was by no means thin. At its core was the idea of a moralist soteriology. The promise of eternal life for those who accepted Jesus as the Messiah (and who also strove to follow the law of nature) was vital to morality, in Locke's eyes, because it was only with such an inducement that depraved humans would have firm reason to try to follow the law of nature. In Locke's eyes, Christianity, and only Christianity, offered this inducement to followers of the laws of faith and the laws of nature because of the resurrection of Christ. Lucci's moralist soteriological understanding of Locke's conception of the fundamentals of Christianity differs significantly, for example, from Nuovo's presentation of it ("Locke's Christology as a Key to Understanding His Philosophy," in The Philosophy of John Locke, ed. Peter Anstey [London: Routledge, 2003], 129–53), in which Nuovo identifies Locke's Christology as "the central and organizing principle of his theology" (129).Lucci also provides an excellent answer to one of the enduring questions about Locke's Christianity: was he a Socinian or an Arminian? Against the common view that he is somewhere between the two by being a bit of both, Lucci argues that Locke was in fact neither a Socinian nor an Arminian; Locke rather maintained a unique, irenic position [End Page 331] that may have overlapped somewhat with Socianism and Arminianism but owed nothing to either. Locke's moralist soteriology, along with some of his other Christian beliefs, look like Socinian and Arminian doctrines, admits Lucci. But many of his other beliefs did not, especially, Lucci says, those concerning original sin, satisfaction, and atonement (96–105). This was because Locke's theological beliefs were formed by neither commitment nor opposition to any particular sect, but rather by his careful, plain, and simple reading of the Gospels (50). Locke had no problem with adopting the views of theologians when their positions were revealed through Scripture... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Japan Society for Buddhist-Christian Studies 2005 Annual MeetingPaul SwansonThe 2005 meetings of the Japan Society for Buddhist-Christian Studies focused on the theme "Personal and Impersonal Aspects of the Absolute" and were divided into two venues, with a preliminary panel at the nineteenth World Congress of the International Association for the History of Religions (IAHR) in Tokyo, March 24–30, and the regular annual meeting held in Kyoto on (...) July 19–21. At both meetings, the same four papers by JSBCS members were presented, in English at the World Congress and in Japanese at the regular meeting of the Society.The topic summary for the IAHR panel read as follows:In general, the Christian God is said to be transcendental and personal, but the Buddhist dharma is said to be immanent and impersonal. God, Christ, and Holy Spirit in the New Testament, however, have an immanent transcendent side, and it is impersonal on the immanence side. There is also a transcendent immanence side of the Buddhist Tathagata, and it is personal on the transcendent side. On the one hand, the three major personalistic monotheisms that originated in the Middle East traditionally understood the teachings of other religions as incomplete. On the other hand, in Buddhism other religions are looked down on as "other ways," unable to bring about final liberation (ADK IX). It is said that in the case of the personalistic religions, there is risk of spiritual attachment because God reveals His absolute divine will to believers through prophets; in the case of Buddhism, practitioners are urged to seek their own enlightenment and even, in some early sutras, to use critical reasoning. However, even in Buddhism the thoughts of the founders of the sects have authority. It is important to re-examine the meaning of God and dharma from the perspective of the human personality structure.Chaired by Watanabe Manabu, the IAHR panel consisted of the following four paper presentations:1. Hanaoka Eiko, "Absolute Infinite Openness in Christianity and Buddhism." The origin of a personal God in Christianity and impersonal "emptiness" or "absolute nothingness" in Buddhism are both personal and also impersonal [End Page 183] as an "absolute infinite openness." The self-awareness of absolute infinite openness is the self-awareness of the experience of the most personal dimension, and always simultaneously of the most impersonal dimension. It is that impersonal dimension that this paper investigates.2. Takemura Makio, "On the Significance of Buddha in Buddhism." Buddhism has a view of the Absolute that is comparatively unique. The Absolute is not found in the absolute in contrast to the relative. It is always found in the identity of the absolute and the relative, that is, the identity of any conditioned dharma (samskrita) and the ultimate unconditioned nature (asamskrita) as emptiness (sunyata), or the activity of jnana and the tathata or dharmata. In other words, the individuality or personality of Buddha and the universality or impersonality of tathata are never separated. The ultimate nature does not exist only by itself, and a buddha is one of many buddhas, even if people believe the Buddha as absolute. In Buddhism, buddhas as personal are filled with great compassion and work hard to guide people to become Buddha. They never judge people's guilt. Why is this so? This paper attempts to analyze the reasons in terms of questions such as whether or not the personality of the Absolute is rooted on emptiness, whether the Absolute is one or not, and so forth.3. Tanaka Yutaka, "God as the Locus of the World and the Ground of Human Freedom." This paper critically discusses Nishitani Keiji's arguments of "The Personal and the Impersonal in Religion" in his Religion and Nothingness. Comparing the Christian tradition of speculative mysticism or "panentheism" with the Zen Buddhist philosophy of "Nothingness," the paper seeks to show that God as the locus of the cosmos is the transcendental ground of human freedom and subjectivity.4. Yagi Seiichi, "Impersonal God in the New Testament." In the Pauline epistles and Johannine literature, the key words of a theology that indicates the oneness of divine-human activity can be identified: God working in us, as an expression of mutual... (shrink)

Decision-making under normative uncertainty requires an agent to aggregate the assessments of options given by rival normative theories into a single assessment that tells her what to do in light of her uncertainty. But what if the assessments of rival theories differ not just in their content but in their structure -- e.g., some are merely ordinal while others are cardinal? This paper describes and evaluates three general approaches to this "problem of structural diversity": structural enrichment, structural depletion, and multi-stage (...) aggregation. All three approaches have notable drawbacks, but I tentatively defend multi-stage aggregation as least bad of the three. (shrink)

Kants Musikästhetik wird weithin unterschätzt. Dabei bietet sie die entscheidenden Ansätze zur Befreiung der Musik aus den Fängen der Nachahmungsästhetik, wie sie vor allem E.T.A.Hoffman kongenial umgesetzt hat.

Les disciplines historiques, littéraires et philosophiques font un emploi abondant des catégories historiographiques. Parmi celles-ci, les termes en ismes sont très fréquents pour référer à une doctrine, un courant artistique, une idéologie ou des événements spécifiques. On fait cependant remarquer que ces désignations posent de nombreux problèmes d’interprétation. En particulier, que l’origine exacte d’une catégorie est souvent méconnue et que sa signification est plus équivoque qu’on ne le croit habituellement. La formation d’un terme en isme s’explique souvent dans un contexte (...) polémique et sert à condamner ou critiquer plutôt qu’à comprendre une pensée, un mouvement ou des faits historiques. Les catégories d’athéisme, de classicisme ou de féminisme en sont de bons exemples. Le présent volume vise à contribuer à l’étude critique des catégories historiographiques et des notions en isme en s’attardant à l’époque moderne (XVI e XVIII e siècles). Il s’agit d’un moment clef de l’histoire européenne pendant laquelle nombre de ces notions apparaissent ou pour laquelle l’historiographie en a fait un emploi abondant. Les chapitres en examinent la valeur théorique par rapport à une origine ou des usages, et déterminent de quelles manières elles contribuent à l’interprétation de l’histoire, de la littérature ou de la philosophie, de la Renaissance jusqu’à la Révolution française. (shrink)

The principle that rational agents should maximize expected utility or choiceworthiness is intuitively plausible in many ordinary cases of decision-making under uncertainty. But it is less plausible in cases of extreme, low-probability risk (like Pascal's Mugging), and intolerably paradoxical in cases like the St. Petersburg and Pasadena games. In this paper I show that, under certain conditions, stochastic dominance reasoning can capture most of the plausible implications of expectational reasoning while avoiding most of its pitfalls. Specifically, given sufficient background uncertainty (...) about the choiceworthiness of one's options, many expectation-maximizing gambles that do not stochastically dominate their alternatives "in a vacuum" become stochastically dominant in virtue of that background uncertainty. But, even under these conditions, stochastic dominance will not require agents to accept options whose expectational superiority depends on sufficiently small probabilities of extreme payoffs. The sort of background uncertainty on which these results depend looks unavoidable for any agent who measures the choiceworthiness of her options in part by the total amount of value in the resulting world. At least for such agents, then, stochastic dominance offers a plausible general principle of choice under uncertainty that can explain more of the apparent rational constraints on such choices than has previously been recognized. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The 2005 Meeting of the Society for Buddhist-Christian StudiesFrances S. Adeney, SecretaryThe annual meeting of the Society for Buddhist-Christian Studies was held in Philadelphia on November 18, 2005. The theme of the program was visual and aural expressions in Christianity and Buddhism and their relationship to religious practice.The focus of the first session was visual images of sacred art. Victoria Scarlett presented the paper "The Iconography of (...) Compassion: Visualizing Guanyin and the Virgin Mary." She noted that meditation exercises that explore visual imagery can mediate the experience of the holy in both Buddhism and Christianity. By comparing and contrasting the images of Guanyin and the Virgin Mary through both commentary and slides, she pointed toward the qualities of compassion, healing, empathy, generosity, and selfless love presented in both Buddhism and Christianity. Scarlett stressed the role of visualization in generating compassion and taking responsibility for cultivating and living the devotional life. Engaging the religious imagination in those visual ways, she said, can help us generate compassion in our world today.Alice Keefe presented the second paper, "The Visual Dimension of Religion in Comparative Perspective." She challenged the assumption that visual experience is a derived or secondary aspect of religious life. As Tibetan Buddhism clearly shows, through its depiction of Buddhas, lamas, bodisattvas, and deities, the divine is form as well as formless. In Christian Orthodox traditions, the icon is viewed as material and glory, the transcendent visible to the human eye. Visual images in both Buddhist and Christian traditions indicate the possibility of transformation as one imagines one's own body as a body of light.Keefe challenged us to bring the centrality of the visual in Buddhism and some portions of Christianity into our academic discussion. Western thinkers present the body in opposition to the spiritual, sometimes understanding images as idolatrous. We assume that the generative locus of meaning is in the subjective consciousness and seek out ideas, ignoring the body. However, communicating an idea is not the [End Page 181] object of visual attention to an icon—rather, it involves the constitution of a self in relation to others. Through practices that activate the visual dimension of religions, we come to know ourselves as part of a pantheon of beings.Rita Gross responded to both papers, focusing on the biases of Western religion in the study of Buddhism. The prohibition of idolatry in Western religion has been identified with the sense of sight, rather than hearing or the use of words. Furthermore, idolatry is always a category defined by outsiders, Gross asserted. People who use the sense of sight to reach beyond themselves to the sacred know what they are doing. The papers and visual images presented gave the attendees insight into how that might happen in Buddhism and Christianity.Michael Monhart and Jisho Shizuka opened the second session with their presentation of "Chanting as Practice: Japanese Shingon Buddhist Sutra Chant." After a brief history of the Shingon sect, the presenters focused on a central aspect of Shingon chanting practice: a realization of one's inherent Buddha-nature in this life. Through activating the mysteries of the ritual activities of the body, voice, and mind, chanting develops the specific connection between Buddha-nature and human nature. An explanation of the chanting itself—its modes, patterns, and energies—led to the conclusion that sound and word become reality through their use by the practitioner of ritual, a conclusion that was demonstrated by the chanting of three sutras.Bill McJohn and Joseph Anderson next presented their work, "The Aural Dimension of Religion: Chanting Psalms in Gregorian Chant." McJohn focused on the history of chanting the Psalter, beginning in the monasteries of the fourth century. Singing the Psalms was motivated by a desire to pray constantly, and as the monastic communities developed, a practice of working through the 150 psalms developed. A shorter version, which eventually became the rosary, also developed. Anderson noted that the recitation of the Psalms is the analog to Buddhist chanting of the sutras. One is actually speaking as the Christ in recitation of the Psalms. Both also find a balance between time and timelessness as they are re-created in different ways... (shrink)

What kind of animals are human beings? And how do our visions of the human shape our theories of social action and institutions? In Moral, Believing Animals>, Christian Smith advances a creative theory of human persons and culture that offers innovative, challenging answers to these and other fundamental questions in sociological, cultural, and religious theory. Smith suggests that human beings have a peculiar set of capacities and proclivities that distinguishes them significantly from other animals on this planet. Despite the (...) vast differences in humanity between cultures and across history, no matter how differently people narrate their lives and histories, there remains an underlying structure of human personhood that helps to order human culture, history, and narration. Drawing on important recent insights in moral philosophy, epistemology, and narrative studies, Smith argues that humans are animals who have an inescapable moral and spiritual dimension. They cannot avoid a fundamental moral orientation in life and this, says Smith, has profound consequences for how sociology must study human beings. (shrink)

This paper provides an introductory review of the theory of judgment aggregation. It introduces the paradoxes of majority voting that originally motivated the field, explains several key results on the impossibility of propositionwise judgment aggregation, presents a pedagogical proof of one of those results, discusses escape routes from the impossibility and relates judgment aggregation to some other salient aggregation problems, such as preference aggregation, abstract aggregation and probability aggregation. The present illustrative rather than exhaustive review is intended to give readers (...) new to the field of judgment aggregation a sense of this rapidly growing research area. (shrink)

Keine ausführliche Beschreibung für "Ethik und Technik" verfügbar.

Suppose you perform two actions. The first imposes a risk of harm that, on its own, would be excessive; but the second reduces the risk of harm by a corresponding amount. By pairing the two actions together to form a set of actions that is risk-neutral, can you thereby make your overall course of conduct permissible? This question is theoretically interesting, because the answer is apparently: sometimes Yes, sometimes No. It is also practically important, because it bears on the moral (...) status of practices such as offsetting personal greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. In this article we propose a criterion for distinguishing between cases where pairing risk-increasing and risk-reducing actions makes each action permissible, and those where it does not: the Principle of Aggregate Risk-Imposition. We work towards this by considering a range of examples that illustrate various illegitimate ways of pairing risk-increasing actions with risk-reducing ones, and asking what goes wrong in each case. We then use this criterion to evaluate GHG offsetting. Is offsetting a legitimate way of removing the risk-imposition associated with GHG emissions, or not? Controversially, we argue that this turns out to depend on the form that the offsetting takes. (shrink)

Longtermists claim that what we ought to do is mainly determined by how our actions might affect the very long-run future. A natural objection to longtermism is that these effects may be nearly impossible to predict — perhaps so close to impossible that, despite the astronomical importance of the far future, the expected value of our present actions is mainly determined by near-term considerations. This paper aims to precisify and evaluate one version of this epistemic objection to longtermism. To that (...) end, I develop two simple models for comparing ‘longtermist’ and ‘neartermist’ interventions, incorporating the idea that it is harder to make a predictable difference to the further future. These models yield mixed conclusions: if we simply aim to maximize expected value, and don’t mind premising our choices on minuscule probabilities of astronomical payoffs, the case for longtermism looks robust. But on some prima facie plausible empirical worldviews, the expectational superiority of longtermist interventions depends heavily on these ‘Pascalian’ probabilities. So the case for longtermism may depend either on plausible but non-obvious empirical claims or on a tolerance for Pascalian fanaticism. (shrink)

Contrary to a widespread belief, this book establishes that ontological and epistemological reductionism stand or fall together.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 39.2 (2001) 296-297 [Access article in PDF] Locke, John. The Reasonableness of Christianity. Edited by John C. Higgins-Biddle. The Clarendon Edition of the Works of John Locke. Oxford: Oxford University Press, The Clarendon Press, 1999. Pp. cxxxix + 261. Cloth, $95.00. John C. Higgins-Biddle's new edition of the work Locke published anonymously in 1695 is another fine entry in the Clarendon series. It (...) is the first critical edition and the only one to include the revisions Locke made in a personal copy. Higgins-Biddle provides a set of Locke's manuscripts related to the text (including manuscript indices), a table of Biblical references, and a bibliography. In his meticulously researched introduction, Higgins-Biddle sets out the background and main themes of The Reasonableness by considering the controversies that surrounded it, particularly the accusations of Deism, Socinianism, and Hobbism.Locke's title is apt to mislead contemporary readers by encouraging them to expect a rationalistic defense of religious belief. What we have instead is a treatise largely devoted to discovering the basic beliefs one must hold in order to be a Christian. Christianity is 'reasonable' according to Locke because its fundamental doctrines are perspicuous and accessible to all, not because it is in every respect rationally demonstrable. Locke argues that belief in two propositions, viz., that God exists and that Jesus Christ is the Messiah, is sufficient to make one a Christian. Early critics, as Higgins-Biddle shows, mistakenly took this to mean that other doctrines, especially that of the Trinity, formed no part of Locke's brand of Christianity. Instead, Locke suggests that although belief in the fundamental doctrines is sufficient to make one a Christian, one is subsequently obligated to receive "all the parts of Divine Revelation, with a docility and disposition prepared to imbrace" (169). Locke grants, however, that a Christian may be ignorant of or even disbelieve a large portion of scriptural truths. His failure to specify which particular 'truths' he had in mind seems to have led to the charge of Socinianism, which persists to the present day.It is not clear what this charge amounts to, and Higgins-Biddle does a fine job of sorting through the religious controversies of Locke's age. One core plank of Socinianism or Unitarianism seems to have been the denial of the Trinity. Nowhere in The Reasonableness does Locke so much as mention that doctrine; however, his position does make it a secondary one, since assent to it is not required of all Christians. What is most important here is the continuity between Locke's project in this work and his thoughts on toleration. The chief aim of those who, like Locke, advocated the 'way of fundamentals' was to achieve toleration for non-conformist religious sects and to make possible a more harmonious and unified Church of England.Locke is often regarded as a founding father of English Deism, a view Locke understood as entailing the denial of all religious claims except those supported by natural theology. But Locke himself saw The Reasonableness as partly directed against the temptation to reject the claims of revelation. Such claims can be objects of faith, accepted by virtue of Biblical authority. Opposition to Deism is particularly evident in Chapter XIV, where Locke argues for the necessity of Christ as saviour. Locke admits that we cannot know what 'transactions' there were between God and Christ, but claims [End Page 296] that it would be presumptuous to reject a doctrine simply because we cannot fully comprehend it.It is not for its role in these controversies alone that The Reasonableness is to be valued. Locke also has much to say that is relevant to his moral philosophy. In the Essay, Locke had claimed that ethics admits of demonstration, yet he never managed to produce such a demonstration, despite repeated requests. Locke defends his omission in the penultimate chapter of the present work by suggesting that scripture reveals the natural law, allowing us to forego the difficult work of demonstrating it. Furthermore, most people lack the leisure or... (shrink)

Spacetime as we know and love it is lost in most approaches to quantum gravity. For many of these approaches, as inchoate and incomplete as they may be, one of the main challenges is to relate what they take to be the fundamental non-spatiotemporal structure of the world back to the classical spacetime of GR. The present essay investigates how spacetime is lost and how it may be regained in one major approach to quantum gravity, loop quantum gravity.

Some moral theorists argue that innocent beneficiaries of wrongdoing may have special remedial duties to address the hardships suffered by the victims of the wrongdoing. These arguments generally aim to simply motivate the idea that being a beneficiary can provide an independent ground for charging agents with remedial duties to the victims of wrongdoing. Consequently, they have neglected contexts in which it is implausible to charge beneficiaries with remedial duties to the victims of wrongdoing, thereby failing to explore the limits (...) of the benefiting relation in detail. Our aim in this article is to identify a criterion to distinguish contexts in which innocent beneficiaries plausibly bear remedial duties to the victims of wrongdoing from those in which they do not. We argue that innocent beneficiaries incur special duties to the victims of wrongdoing if and only if receiving and retaining the benefits sustains wrongful harm. We develop this criterion by identifying and explicating two general modes of sustaining wrongful harm. We also show that our criterion offers a general explanation for why some innocent beneficiaries incur a special duty to the victims of wrongdoing while others do not. By sustaining wrongful harm, beneficiaries-with-duties contribute to wrongful harm, and we ordinarily have relatively stringent moral requirements against contributing to wrongful harm. On our account, innocently benefiting from wrongdoing _per se_ does not generate duties to the victims of wrongdoing. Rather, beneficiaries acquire such duties because their receipt and retention of the benefits of wrongdoing contribute to the persistence of the wrongful harm suffered by the victim. We conclude by showing that our proposed criterion also illuminates why there can be reasonable disagreement about whether beneficiaries have a duty to victims in some social contexts. (shrink)

Christian Georg Martin offers an argumentative reconstruction of the whole work, reading it as a critical ontology, namely as the attempt to abstract from all presuppositions and to immanently unfold conceptual determinations characterizing ...

Some moral theorists argue that being an innocent beneficiary of significant harms inflicted by others may be sufficient to ground special duties to address the hardships suffered by the victims, at least when it is impossible to extract compensation from those who perpetrated the harm. This idea has been applied to climate change in the form of the beneficiary-pays principle. Other philosophers, however, are quite sceptical about beneficiary pays. Our aim in this article is to examine their critiques. We conclude (...) that, while they have made important points, the principle remains worthy of further development and exploration. Our purpose in engaging with these critiques is constructive — we aim to formulate beneficiary pays in ways that would give it a plausible role in allocating the cost of addressing human-induced climate change, while acknowledging that some understandings of the principle would make it unsuitable for this purpose. (shrink)

This book examines the epistemic function of perception and the relation between language and conceptual thought, and provides new ways of conceptualizing the Buddhist defense of the reflexivity thesis of consciousness: namely, that each cognitive event is to be understood as involving a pre-reflective implicit awareness of its own occurrence.

Abstinence from meat has been a subject of much controversy and friction from the dawn of Christian history. Relatively widespread in the early Church, it was praised when it formed part of a temporary ascetic fasting regimen, but condemned if it amounted to a permanent rejection of animal flesh, as it would be associated with heretical ideas found in various dissident groups, gnostic sects, and pagan philosophical schools. Nevertheless, several patristic authors put forth a number of compelling arguments (...) in defense of a meatless diet, all of which would be revisited by future generations of Christian thinkers. Laying the emphasis upon the ethical incentives for abstaining from animal flesh, as well as upon enduring ambivalent attitudes toward vegetarian dietary practices, this article offers a brief overview of abstinence from meat throughout Christian history. (shrink)

Abstract:Organizational justice is a behavioral science concept that refers to the perception of fairness of the past treatment of the employees within an organization held by the employees of that organization. These subjective perceptions of fairness have been empirically shown to be related to 1) attitudinal changes in job satisfaction, organizational commitment and managerial trust beliefs; 2) behavioral changes in task performance activities and ancillary extra-task efforts to assist group members and improve group methods; 3) numerical changes in the quantity, (...) quality and efficiency of divisional outputs; and—though this is far more tentative—4) eventual changes in the competitive advantage and financial performance of the full organization. The authors propose that these constructs can be applied to all stakeholders, rather than just to the current employees of the firm, and that objective determinations of fairness by the managers can be related to subjective perceptions of fairness by the stakeholders that will result in the sequential series of attitudinal, behavioral and numerical changes that will lead to performance improvements. In short, the authors propose a normative stakeholder theory of the firm, based upon ethical principles, that will have testable descriptive hypotheses derived from the behavioral constructs. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:On Deconstructing Life-Worlds: Buddhism, Christianity, CultureRoger CorlessOn Deconstructing Life-Worlds: Buddhism, Christianity, Culture. By Robert Magliola. Preface by Edith Wyschogrod. American Academy of Religion Cultural Criticism Series, edited by Cleo McNelly Kearns, Number 3. Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1997. xxii + 202 pp.How does one review a deconstructionist book—a book that seeks not only to discuss deconstruction but to be deconstructionist, a book that simultaneously takes books seriously and mocks (...) both the author and the reader for imagining there could ever be such a thing as a book, a something that is written and then read, a writing that says that everything is Writing but that all Writing/writing is written under erasure and so is (as p. 202 explicitly, self-reflexively proclaims itself) an empty page that is, by that very emptiness, marked? Derrida derides the Introduction, for, he asks (without speaking, parlant avec dénégations, denying that he is expressing denials) what is being Introduced? What do we think we are doing when we lead a reader into (introducere) something that is not there to be lead into until a reader is lead or leads himself or herself into it? Do we not, thus, need an Introduction to the Introduction, and another Introduction to that Introduction, a regressus ad infinitum introductionum? Edith Wyschogrod writes a Preface. Does she mean us to think that the book has a Face, and that it therefore needs a pre-Face? Does she think that she/we face toward the book, or does the book face toward her/us, or does/do she/we both together face toward the putative subject matter, which itself has two faces, Buddhism and Christianity? And who am I, the reviewer?This cannot be a review (a looking-over), but it might be a re-view (a looking-again), which informs (in-forms, incarnates) itself so that you, dear Introducer of Yourself, can review (look over) your presuppositions about Buddhism, Christianity, life-worlds, and reality in general, and re-view them (re-visit them, look again at them) so as to reform (re-view, see-again, as formless, and thus re-form) them.One draws a circle, says Charles Fort, beginning anywhere. So let us open the book at random. On page 84 we find: “Taiwan has over 25,000 students studying in the United States, the largest foreign contingent in American universities.” This aggressively logocentric sentence is provided with a footnote: “Statistic of 1987. Since then, the proportion of Chinese from the People’ [sic] Republic has become much more noticeable.” Hmm—a little typo, but nevertheless we are, to our surprise, deep in the overheated hotel conference rooms of the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion. So, why are we told this? It is part of a section that cuts (“Lt. sect-, cut”, we are reminded on p. 175) across (cross-hatches) Magliola’s life/lives run/runs (Curriculum Vitae, Curricula Vitae, Curricula Vitae Novae, Curricula Vitarum, as the chapter headings have it) as an academic, a Catholic, an almost-priest, a Buddhist meditator, a husband, a divorcé, an Italian, an American, [End Page 216] a resident of Taiwan. All these spill out from the overstuffed closet of Magliola’s life/lives, which, without warning, he opens upon us and then sits among the salade challenging the reader to become bricoleur. But if we do, we feel we have missed the point. Or we have seen the point—which is just as bad.Crosshatch: that’s the theme, I think. Cross, “X” (both the Roman character “eks” and the Greek character “chi”), crucifix, saltire, cross-religions, cross-cultures, cross-countries, cross-country, crossing-out (rature), and finally, revelation by relationis oppositio under/through four forks (“Il ne s’écrit que sous la grille des quatre fourches”—p. 177, quoting Derrida).Magliola is on this cross, he is cross (angry/mad), he is crucified by it, he hopes to cross over by means of it. “This book is not written for the arrived by the arrived” (p. xix), yet he is “on the water, not at sea” (p. xx).It may not be incorrect to say that the book is in... (shrink)

The first impacts of climate change have become evident and are expected to increase dramatically over the next decades. Thus, it becomes more and more pressing to decide who has to compensate those people who suffer from negative impacts of climate change but have neither contributed to the problem nor possess the resources to cope with the consequences. Since the frequently invoked Polluter Pays Principle cannot account for all climate-related harm, I will take a closer look at the much more (...) controversial Beneficiary Pays Principle. It is argued that, appropriately qualified, the Beneficiary Pays Principle can help to identify additional duty-bearers. Based on these results, I briefly comment on three different policy options to generate funds for compensation. (shrink)