Technical advances in genome editing methods raise the question how autonomy should figure in theological ethical debates about genetic enhancements. Thinking primarily of the parents’ reproductive autonomy, several secular and theological thinkers argue parents should be allowed to ‘enhance’ an embryo genetically. Jürgen Habermas’s critique of enhancements in the name of the child’s autonomy, meanwhile, has been met with a critique of autonomy in theology. This article argues that theological views about God’s relationship to the creature provide strong theological grounds (...) for a new appropriation of autonomy. A liberal maximisation of individual choice is to be viewed critically, but more recent discourses on relational autonomy see certain forms of vulnerability contribute to a communal understanding of autonomy. This view dovetails with Habermas’s argument, according to which enhancements create too strong a temptation towards overly directive parenting—less in modifying an embryo than in the ensuing relationship to the child. (shrink)

In De ciuitate Dei (ciu.), Augustine famously calls people with disabilities created on purpose by an absolutely competent God (16.8). On the whole, however, Augustine's views on disabilities in ciu. are often misunderstood. The statement about the creation of people with disabilities is part of a discussion of the theodicy question that implies that the goodness of people with disabilities is not open to experience and must be accepted on faith. This negative background assumption results from Augustine's view that dignity (...) emerges from the embodied beauty, rationality, and utility of the ensouled body (22). Augustine gives several examples of how disabilities reduce dignity along with these dimensions, as “deformity defeats beauty” (19.4). In eternal salvation, however, disabilities will be removed (22). Martyrs will perhaps retain scars in heaven, but these particular scars will be of such a kind that there is “not deformitas in them, but dignitas” (22.19). If in the resurrection for eternal life God removes congenital disabilities that God created so competently, what is their purpose in the first place? Augustine regards disabilities as temporal embodied warnings of eternal corporeal punishment (21.8). As a concluding perspective, the alternative view of disabilities by the Apostle Paul will be considered. (shrink)

The development of Barth's ethics from the First Epistle to the Romans to Church Dogmatics I/1 -- The ethics of the doctrine of God in Church Dogmatics II/2 -- The ethics of the doctrine of creation in Church Dogmatics III/4 -- The foundations of ethics in the doctrine of reconciliation in Church Dogmatics IV -- Perspectives: responsibility and faith in the Triune God.

Analyzes the poem "On Nature" by Parmenides, arguing that is actually a philosophical argument disguised as Homer-like mythological journey. Original.

In this paper, we analyse how GPS-based navigation systems are transforming some of our intellectual virtues and then suggest two strategies to improve our practices regarding the use of such epistemic tools. We start by outlining the two main approaches in virtue epistemology, namely virtue reliabilism and virtue responsibilism. We then discuss how navigation systems can undermine five epistemic virtues, namely memory, perception, attention, intellectual autonomy, and intellectual carefulness. We end by considering two possible interlinked ways of trying to remedy (...) this situation: [i] redesigning the epistemic tool to improve the epistemic virtues of memory, perception, and attention; and [ii] the cultivation of cognitive diligence for wayfinding tasks scaffolding intellectual autonomy and carefulness. (shrink)

Should I believe something if and only if it’s true? Many philosophers have objected to this kind of truth norm, on the grounds that it’s not the case that one ought to believe all the truths. For example, some truths are too complex to believe; others are too trivial to be worth believing. Philosophers who defend truth norms often respond to this problem by reformulating truth norms in ways that do not entail that one ought to believe all the truths. (...) Many of these attempts at reformulation, I’ll argue, have been missteps. A number of these different reformulations are incapable of carrying out a central role a truth norm is meant to play, that of explaining justification. The truth norm I’ll defend, however, avoids the implausible results of a prescription to believe all the truths, but doesn’t thereby fail to explain justification. This norm, introduced by Conor McHugh, states that if one has some doxastic attitude about p—i.e. if one believes, disbelieves, or suspends judgement about whether p—then one ought to believe that p if and only if p is true. (shrink)

In this paper, we investigate the trust-based mechanisms underlying the relationship between ethical leadership and followers’ organisational citizenship behaviours (OCBs). Based on three-wave survey data obtained from 184 employees and their supervisors, we find that ethical leadership leads to higher levels of both affective and cognitive trust. In addition, we find support for a three-path mediational model, where cognitive trust and affective trust, in turn, mediate the relationship between ethical leadership and follower OCBs. That is to say, we found that (...) ethical leadership leads to the development of cognitive trust, which subsequently influences the development of affective trust. Affective trust, in turn, induces followers to exhibit OCBs as a means of reciprocating the leader’s favourable behaviour. Our findings suggest that both affective and cognitive trust plays an important role in the social exchange processes that underlie the relationship between ethical leadership and the discretionary behaviour of followers. (shrink)

John Rawls argues that it is possible to describe a suitably defined initial situation from which to form reliable judgements about justice. In this initial situation, rational persons are deprived of information that is . It is rational, Rawls argues, for persons choosing principles of justice from this standpoint to be guided by the maximin rule. Critics, however, argue that (i) the maximin rule is not the appropriate decision rule for Rawls's choice position; (ii) the maximin argument relies upon an (...) imprecise account of the satisfactory minimum to be secured under the maximin rule; or that (iii) Rawls relies upon unrealistic assumptions about diminishing marginal value. These critics, I will suggest, argue from a number of assumptions that are confused or false. The satisfactory minimum that choosers in the original position seek to achieve is not a minimum level of primary goods, nor is the satisfactory minimum sought under the maximin rule supplied by the difference principle. I will argue that the maximin argument is more robust than has generally been recognized and that this argument performs a number of important functions in clarifying the nature and implications of Rawls's argument for justice as fairness. (shrink)

We seem to be responsible for our beliefs in a distinctively epistemic way. We often hold each other to account for the beliefs that we hold. We do this by criticising other believers as ‘gullible’ or ‘biased’, and by trying to persuade others to revise their beliefs. But responsibility for belief looks hard to understand because we seem to lack control over our beliefs. In this paper, I argue that we can make progress in our understanding of responsibility for belief (...) by thinking about it in parallel with another kind of responsibility: legal responsibility for criminal negligence. Specifically, I argue that that a popular account of responsibility for belief, which grounds it in belief’s reasons-responsiveness, faces a problem analogous to one faced by H.L.A. Hart’s influential capacity-based account of culpability. This points towards a more promising account of responsibility of belief, though, if we draw on accounts of negligence that improve on Hart’s. Broadly speaking, the account of negligence that improves on Hart’s account grounds culpability in a concern for others’ interests, whereas my account of epistemic responsibility grounds responsibility for belief in a concern for the truth. (shrink)

Early German Romanticism sought to respond to a comprehensive sense of spiritual crisis that characterised the late eighteenth century. The study demonstrates how the Romantics sought to bring together the new post-Kantian idealist philosophy with the inheritance of the realist Platonic-Christian tradition. With idealism they continued to champion the individual, while from Platonism they took the notion that all reality, including the self, participated in absolute being. This insight was expressed, not in the language of theology or philosophy, but through (...) aesthetics, which recognised the potentiality of all creation, including artistic creation, to disclose the divine. In explicating the religious vision of Romanticism, this study offers a new historical appreciation of the movement, and furthermore demonstrates its importance for our understanding of religion today. (shrink)

A lavishly decorated handbook of medicine was conceived for the lay public on topics such as human health, healing, medicine, and household management.

A LARGE NUMBER OF PEOPLE, ancient and modern alike, have always found in Socrates what seemed to them a suspicious, if not actually repugnant, aspect. This aspect, to put the point first in crude terms, is his devotion to philosophy, which presupposes an apparently unshakable faith in reason, in the power of understanding to secure goodness, and in the power of goodness to provide us with happiness.

The American Journal of Bioethics, Volume 11, Issue 11, Page 22-23, November 2011.

This article discusses Xenophanes' “cloud astro-physics”. It analyses and explains all heavenly and meteorological phenomena in terms of clouds. It provides a view of this newer Xenophanes, who is now being recognized as an important philosopher-scientist in his own right and a crucial figure in the development of critical thought about human knowledge and its objects in the next generation of Presocratic thinkers. Xenophanes' account has been preserved in Aëtius, the doxographic compendium reconstructed by Hermann Diels late in the nineteenth (...) century mainly from two sources that show extensive parallelism: pseudo-Plutarch Placita Philosophorum or Epitome of Physical Opinions ; and Ioannes Stobaeus' Eclogae Physicae or Physical Extracts. In the Stobaeus version, which is also the one printed in the standard edition of the Pre-socratics. (shrink)

We prove the following Main Theorem: $ZF + AD + V = L(R) \Rightarrow DC$ . As a corollary we have that $\operatorname{Con}(ZF + AD) \Rightarrow \operatorname{Con}(ZF + AD + DC)$ . Combined with the result of Woodin that $\operatorname{Con}(ZF + AD) \Rightarrow \operatorname{Con}(ZF + AD + \neg AC^\omega)$ it follows that DC (as well as AC ω ) is independent relative to ZF + AD. It is finally shown (jointly with H. Woodin) that ZF + AD + ¬ DC (...) R , where DC R is DC restricted to reals, implies the consistency of ZF + AD + DC, in fact implies R # (i.e. the sharp of L(R)) exists. (shrink)

Let the chain antichain principle (CAC) be the statement that each partial order on $\mathbb{N}$ possesses an infinite chain or an infinite antichain. Chong, Slaman, and Yang recently proved using forcing over nonstandard models of arithmetic that CAC is $\Pi^1_1$-conservative over $\text{RCA}_0+\Pi^0_1\text{-CP}$ and so in particular that CAC does not imply $\Sigma^0_2$-induction. We provide here a different purely syntactical and constructive proof of the statement that CAC (even together with WKL) does not imply $\Sigma^0_2$-induction. In detail we show using a (...) refinement of Howard's ordinal analysis of bar recursion that $\text{WKL}_0^\omega+\text{CAC}$ is $\Pi^0_2$-conservative over PRA and that one can extract primitive recursive realizers for such statements. Moreover, our proof is finitary in the sense of Hilbert's program. CAC implies that every sequence of $\mathbb{R}$ has a monotone subsequence. This Bolzano-Weierstraß}-like principle is commonly used in proofs. Our result makes it possible to extract primitive recursive terms from such proofs. We also discuss the Erdős-Moser principle, which—taken together with CAC—is equivalent to $\text{RT}^2_2$. (shrink)

Paul Horwich has argued that Kripke's Wittgenstein's 'sceptical challenge' to the notion of meaning and rule-following only gets going if an 'inflationary' conception of truth is presupposed, and he develops a 'use-theoretic' conception of meaning which he claims is immune to Kripke's Wittgenstein's sceptical attack. I argue that even if we grant Horwich his 'deflationary' conception of truth, that is not enough to undermine Kripke's Wittgenstein's sceptical argument. Moreover, Horwich's own 'use-theoretic' account of meaning actually falls prey to that sceptical (...) challenge. (publisher). (shrink)

In the work of interpreting Parmenides we have witnessed in the ’sixties and ’seventies, in English language scholarship, that rarest of phenomena in the study of ancient philosophy, the emergence of a consensus. Four interpretive theses now seem quite widely shared: Parmenides deliberately suppresses the subject of esti, “is,” or einai, “to be,” in his statement of the two “routes” in B2, his intention being to allow the subject to become gradually specified as the argument unfolds. The negative route, ouk (...) esti, “is not,” or mē einai, “not to be,” is banned because sentences that adhere to it fail to refer to actual entities—the latter to be understood broadly, as will shortly be stated in thesis. The argument does not depend on a confusion between the “is” of predication and the “is” of existence. In the relevant contexts, esti and einai involve a “fused” or “veridical” use of the verb “to be”; in other words, esti or einai have the force of “is actual” or “obtains,” or “is the case,” envisaging a variable subject x that ranges over states-of-affairs. (shrink)

§1. I will start with a quick definition of descriptive set theory: It is the study of the structure of definable sets and functions in separable completely metrizable spaces. Such spaces are usually called Polish spaces. Typical examples are ℝn, ℂn, Hilbert space and more generally all separable Banach spaces, the Cantor space 2ℕ, the Baire space ℕℕ, the infinite symmetric group S∞, the unitary group, the group of measure preserving transformations of the unit interval, etc.In this theory sets are (...) classified in hierarchies according to the complexity of their definitions and the structure of sets in each level of these hierarchies is systematically analyzed. In the beginning we have the Borel sets in Polish spaces, obtained by starting with the open sets and closing under the operations of complementation and countable unions, and the corresponding Borel hierarchy. After this come the projective sets, obtained by starting with the Borel sets and closing under the operations of complementation and projection, and the corresponding projective hierarchy.There are also transfinite extensions of the projective hierarchy and even much more complex definable sets studied in descriptive set theory, but I will restrict myself here to Borel and projective sets, in fact just those at the first level of the projective hierarchy, i.e., the Borel (), analytic () and coanalytic () sets. (shrink)

'A wonderfully assured and utterly riveting biography that captures not only the much-maligned Machiavelli, but also the spirit of his time and place. A monumental achievement.' - Jessie Childs, author of God's Traitors. 'A notorious fiend', 'generally odious', 'he seems hideous, and so he is.' Thanks to the invidious reputation of his most famous work, The Prince, Niccolò Machiavelli exerts a unique hold over the popular imagination. But was Machiavelli as sinister as he is often thought to be? Might he (...) not have been an infinitely more sympathetic figure, prone to political missteps, professional failures and personal dramas? Alexander Lee reveals the man behind the myth, following him from cradle to grave, from his father's penury and the abuse he suffered at a teacher's hands, to his marriage and his many affairs (with both men and women), to his political triumphs and, ultimately, his fall from grace and exile. In doing so, Lee uncovers hitherto unobserved connections between Machiavelli's life and thought. He also reveals the world through which Machiavelli moved: from the great halls of Renaissance Florence to the court of the Borgia pope, Alexander VI, from the dungeons of the Stinche prison to the Rucellai gardens, where he would begin work on some of his last great works. As much a portrait of an age as of a uniquely engaging man, Lee's gripping and definitive biography takes the reader into Machiavelli's world - and his work - more completely than ever before. (shrink)

In this paper I will argue that Crispin Wright’s defence of the claim that the truth about intention is judgement-dependent is unstable because it can serve also to establish that the truth about shape is judgement-dependent, thereby violating his constraint that in developing the distinction between judgement-independent and judgement-dependent subject matters we have to be driven by the assumption that colour and shape will fall on different sides of the divide.

In his 1982 book Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language, Saul Kripke develops a famous argument that purports to show that there are no facts about what we mean by the expressions of our language: ascriptions of meaning, such as “Jones means addition by ‘+’” or Smith means green by ‘green’”, are according to Kripke’s Wittgenstein neither true nor false. Kripke’s Wittgenstein thus argues for a form of non-factualism about ascriptions of meaning: ascriptions of meaning do not purport to state (...) facts. Define semantic realism to be the view that ascriptions of meaning are apt to be assessed in terms of truth and falsity, and are, at least in some instances, true. Semantic realism, thus defined, is a form of cognitivism about semantic judgement, according to which judgements ascribing meaning express beliefs, states apt for assessment in terms of truth and falsity. Kripke’s Wittgenstein thus argues against semantic realism, and in favour of a form of semantic non-cognitivism.1 En route to semantic non-cognitivism, Kripke’s Wittgenstein argues against dispositionalist theories of meaning, which hold something roughly along the lines of the following: Jones means magpie by “magpie” if and only if Jones is disposed to apply “magpie” to magpies in ideal conditions (where the ideal conditions can be specified in terms that don’t presuppose the notion of meaning, and are such that in those conditions Jones applies “magpie” to a thing if and only if that thing is a magpie). (shrink)

ONE of the central characteristics of Plato's later metaphysics is his view that Forms can participate in other Forms. At least part of what the Sophist demonstrates is that though not every Form participates in every other, every Form participates in some Forms, and that there are some Forms in which all Forms participate. This paper considers some of the reasons for this development, and some of the issues raised by it.

Traditionally, writing is viewed as a code that stands in one-to-one correspondence to spoken language, which is therefore also viewed as a code. However, this is a delusion, which is shared by educators and has serious consequences for cognition, both on individual and on social levels. Natural linguistic signs characteristic for the activity of languaging and their symbolizations are ontologically different phenomena; speech and writing belong to experiential domains of different dynamics. These dynamics impact differently on the linguistic/behavioral strategies of (...) individuals and communities, viewed as second- and third-order living systems operating in a consensual domain as structure-determined systems. Failure to acknowledge this contributes to the spread of functional illiteracy in modern societies, which may lead to cognitive/communicative dysfunction. Technology-enhanced new literacies challenge the value of traditional written culture, raising questions about the relationship between speech and writing and their roles in human evolution. (shrink)

The American Journal of Bioethics, Volume 12, Issue 8, Page 15-17, August 2012.

This paper addresses the strength of Ramsey's theorem for pairs ($RT^2_2$) over a weak base theory from the perspective of 'proof mining'. Let $RT^{2-}_2$ denote Ramsey's theorem for pairs where the coloring is given by an explicit term involving only numeric variables. We add this principle to a weak base theory that includes weak König's Lemma and a substantial amount of $\Sigma^0_1$-induction (enough to prove the totality of all primitive recursive functions but not of all primitive recursive functionals). In the (...) resulting theory we show the extractability of primitive recursive programs and uniform bounds from proofs of $\forall\exists$-theorems. There are two components of this work. The first component is a general proof-theoretic result, due to the second author, that establishes conservation results for restricted principles of choice and comprehension over primitive recursive arithmetic PRA as well as a method for the extraction of primitive recursive bounds from proofs based on such principles. The second component is the main novelty of the paper: it is shown that a proof of Ramsey's theorem due to Erdős and Rado can be formalized using these restricted principles. So from the perspective of proof unwinding the computational content of concrete proofs based on $RT^2_2$ the computational complexity will, in most practical cases, not go beyond primitive recursive complexity. This even is the case when the theorem to be proved has function parameters f and the proof uses instances of $RT^2_2$ that are primitive recursive in f. (shrink)

The American Journal of Bioethics, Volume 11, Issue 6, Page 41-42, June 2011.

The aim of this paper is to determine the logical and computational strength of instances of the Bolzano-Weierstraß principle and a weak variant of it.We show that BW is instance-wise equivalent to the weak König’s lemma for Σ01-trees . This means that from every bounded sequence of reals one can compute an infinite Σ01-0/1-tree, such that each infinite branch of it yields an accumulation point and vice versa. Especially, this shows that the degrees d ≫ 0′ are exactly those containing (...) an accumulation point for all bounded computable sequences.Let BWweak be the principle stating that every bounded sequence of real numbers contains a Cauchy subsequence . We show that BWweak is instance-wise equivalent to the cohesive principle and—using this—obtain a classification of the computational and logical strength of BWweak. Especially we show that BWweak does not solve the halting problem and does not lead to more than primitive recursive growth. Therefore it is strictly weaker than BW. We also discuss possible uses of BWweak. © 2011 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim. (shrink)

The role of possible worlds in philosophy is hard to overestimate. Nevertheless, their nature and existence is very controversial. This is particularly serious, since their standard applications depend on there being sufficiently many of them. The paper develops an account of possible worlds on which it is particularly easy to believe in their existence: an account of possible worlds as pleonastic entities. Pleonastic entities are entities whose existence can be validly inferred from statements that neither refer to nor quantify over (...) them as a matter of conceptual necessity. Definitions are proposed that ensure that this is the case for possible worlds. (shrink)

Die Untersuchung analysiert deswegen nach einem einleitenden Vorschlag zur Bestimmung des Verhältnisses von Logik und Metaphysik im Anschluss an Leibniz Baumgartens Erkenntnistheorie in ihrer charakteristischen Komplementarität von Ästhetik und Logik, die das gesamte Feld aller möglichen Gewissheit, d. h. des Bewusstseins der Wahrheit der verschiedensten Erkenntnisse, abdecken. Darüber hinaus erörtert sie auch deren mögliche Gegenstände, nämlich die Beschaffenheit der Dinge, wie sie das Wissen Gottes als eine ideale Metaphysik enthielte. Auf der Grundlage einer Ontologie teilweise unbestimmer aktualer Existenz kommt Baumgarten (...) zu einer kosmologischen Theorie monadischer Bewegtheit aller körperlichen Dinge. Sie führt zu einer Psychologie des Erkennens und Handelns, aus der ein indeterministischer Begriff menschlicher Willensfreiheit folgt, die auch von Gottes Allwissen nicht beschränkt wird. (shrink)

In this paper we study with proof-theoretic methods the function(al) s provably recursive relative to Ramsey's theorem for pairs and the cohesive principle (COH). Our main result on COH is that the type 2 functional provably recursive from $RCA_0 + COH + \Pi _1^0 - CP$ are primitive recursive. This also provides a uniform method to extract bounds from proofs that use these principles. As a consequence we obtain a new proof of the fact that $WKL_0 + \Pi _1^0 - (...) CP + COH$ is $\Pi _1^0 $ -conservative over PRA. Recent work of the first author showed that $\Pi _1^0 + CP + COH$ is equivalent to a weak variant of the Bolzano-Weierstraß principle. This makes it possible to use our results to analyze not only combinatorial but also analytical proofs. For Ramsey's theorem for pairs and two colors $\left( {RT_2^2 } \right)$ we obtain the upper bounded that the type 2 functionals provable recursive relative to $RCA_0 + \sum\nolimits_2^0 {IA + RT_2^2 } $ are in T₁. This is the fragment of Gödel's system T containing only type 1 recursion—roughly speaking it consists of functions of Ackermann type. With this we also obtain a uniform method for the extraction of T₁-bounds from proofs that use RT2..... Moreover, this yields a new proof of the fact that $WKL_0 + \sum\nolimits_2^0 {IA} + RT_2^2 $ is $\Pi _1^0 $ -conservative over $RCA_0 + \sum\nolimits_2^0 { - IA} $ . The results are obtained in two steps: in the first step a term including Skolem functions for the above principles is extracted from a given proof. This is done using Gödel's functional interpretation. After this the term is normalized, such that only specific instances of the Skolem functions are used. In the second step this term is interpreted using $\Pi _1^0 $ -comprehension. The comprehension is then eliminated in favor of induction using either elimination of monotone Skolem functions (for COH) or Howard's ordinal analysis of bar recursion (for $RT_2^2 $. (shrink)