1 Evidence-based policy requires researchers to provide the answers to ecological questions that are of interest to policy makers. To find out what those questions are in the UK, representatives from 28 organizations involved in policy, together with scientists from 10 academic institutions, were asked to generate a list of questions from their organizations. 2 During a 2-day workshop the initial list of 1003 questions generated from consulting at least 654 policy makers and academics was used as a basis for (...) generating a short list of 100 questions of significant policy relevance. Short-listing was decided on the basis of the preferences of the representatives from the policy-led organizations. 3 The areas covered included most major issues of environmental concern in the UK, including agriculture, marine fisheries, climate change, ecosystem function and land management. 4 The most striking outcome was the preference for general questions rather than narrow ones. The reason is that policy is driven by broad issues rather than specific ones. In contrast, scientists are frequently best equipped to answer specific questions. This means that it may be necessary to extract the underpinning specific question before researchers can proceed. 5 Synthesis and applications. Greater communication between policy makers and scientists is required in order to ensure that applied ecologists are dealing with issues in a way that can feed into policy. It is particularly important that applied ecologists emphasize the generic value of their work wherever possible. (shrink)

Art is without doubt a powerful agent in determining how nature appears to us. Andrew Forge describes seeing tree leaves in sunlight, and ‘thinking Pissarro’. ‘I am wrapped round by Impressionism and the leaves look like brush strokes’. To Harold Osborne, once one has been impressed by Van Gogh's painting of certain objects, ‘it is difficult ever again to see the objects uninfluenced by Van Gogh's vision of them’.

Art is without doubt a powerful agent in determining how nature appears to us. Andrew Forge describes seeing tree leaves in sunlight, and ‘thinking Pissarro’. ‘I am wrapped round by Impressionism and the leaves look like brush strokes’. To Harold Osborne, once one has been impressed by Van Gogh's painting of certain objects, ‘it is difficult ever again to see the objects uninfluenced by Van Gogh's vision of them’.

Judgments of direct comparisons, probabilities, proportions, and ranks can all be considered referent-specific judgments, for which a good estimate requires a target to be compared against...

"The French philosopher Nicolas Malebranche popularized the doctrine of occasionalism in the late seventeenth century. Occasionalism is the thesis that God alone is the true cause of everything that happens in the world, and created substances are merely "occasional causes." This doctrine was originally developed in medieval Islamic theology, and was widely rejected in the works of Christian authors in medieval Europe. Yet despite its heterodoxy, occasionalism was revived starting in the 1660s by French and Dutch followers of the philosophy (...) of René Descartes. Since the 1970s, there has been a growing body of literature on Malebranche and occasionalism. There has also been new work on the Cartesian occasionalists before Malebranche - including Arnold Geulincx, Geraud de Cordemoy and Louis de la Forge. But to date there has not been a systematic, book-length study of the reasoning that led Cartesian thinkers to adopt occasionalism, and the relationship of their arguments to Descartes' own views. This book expands on recent scholarship, to provide the first comprehensive account of seventeenth century occasionalism. Part I contrasts occasionalism with a theory of divine providence developed by Thomas Aquinas, in response to medieval occasionalists; it shows that Descartes' philosophy is compatible with Aquinas' theory, on which God "concurs" in all the actions of created beings. Part 2 reconstructs the arguments of Cartesians - such as Cordemoy and a Forge - who used Cartesian physics to argue for occasionalism. Finally, it shows how Malebranche's case for occasionalism combines philosophical theology with Cartesian metaphysics and mechanistic science"--. (shrink)

This collection explores, in Adorno's description, `philosophy directed against philosophy'. The essays cover all aspects of Benjamin's writings, from his early work in the philosophy of art and language, through to the concept of history. The experience of time and the destruction of false continuity are identified as the key themes in Benjamin's understanding of history.

I explore the main features and historical pedigree of antimodern environmental declinism, a prominent family of contemporary critiques that ascribes responsibility for environmental ills to the legacy of the Scientific revolution or “modernity” more generally. I argue that each of its three central oppositions are part of a long-standing rhetorical tradition, and are neither unique nor unprecedented. I stress the communicative, narrative, persuasive, and political nature of the environmental project, rather than its claims to have arrived at an objective description (...) of unprecedented ecological damage in late modernity. This view is perhaps less convincing to an audience looking for certainty in an age of science, but it is more faithful to the attenuated, mediated ways in which we experience and make sense of the world around us. (shrink)

On the eve of the 2016 election, which ushered in the Trump era, an article by Alan Jacobs in Harper's Magazine lamented the decline of the Christian public intellectual and noted the need for such figures today—what Jacobs describes as the "'Where Is Our Reinhold Niebuhr?' Problem." Jacobs has in mind the Christian social and political thinkers of the early and mid-twentieth century, such as Niebuhr, T. S. Eliot, C. S. Lewis, "and their fellow travelers," who were willing to challenge (...) the prevailing social order of the time. He characterizes Christian public intellectuals—what others might call public theologians—as follows: "They should be intellectuals who speak the language of other intellectuals, including the... (shrink)

In a seventeenth-century English landscape populated with towering political and philosophical figures like Hobbes, Harrington, Cromwell, Milton, and Locke, William Penn remains in many ways a man apart. Yet despite being widely neglected by scholars, he was a sophisticated political thinker who contributed mightily to the theory and practice of religious liberty in the early modern Atlantic world. In this long-awaited intellectual biography of William Penn, Andrew R. Murphy presents a nuanced portrait of this remarkable entrepreneur, philosopher, Quaker, and (...) politician.Liberty, Conscience, and Toleration focuses on the major political episodes that attracted William Penn's sustained attention as a political thinker and actor: the controversy over the Second Conventicle Act, the Popish Plot and Exclusion Crisis, the founding and settlement of Pennsylvania, and the contentious reign of James II. Through a careful examination of writings published in the midst of the religious and political conflicts of Restoration and Revolutionary England, Murphy contextualizes the development of Penn's thought in England and America, illuminating the mutual interconnections between Penn's political thought and his colonizing venture in America. An early advocate of representative institutions and religious freedom, William Penn remains a singular figure in the history of liberty of conscience. His political theorizing provides a window into the increasingly vocal, organized, and philosophically sophisticated tolerationist movement that gained strength over the second half of the seventeenth century. Not only did Penn attempt to articulate principles of religious liberty as a Quaker in England, but he actually governed an American polity and experienced firsthand the complex relationship between political theory and political practice. Murphy's insightful analysis shows Penn's ongoing significance to the broader study of Anglo-American political theory and practice, ultimately pointing scholars toward a new way of understanding the enterprise of political theory itself. (shrink)

This collection explores, in Adorno's description, `philosophy directed against philosophy'. The essays cover all aspects of Benjamin's writings, from his early work in the philosophy of art and language, through to the concept of history. The experience of time and the destruction of false continuity are identified as the key themes in Benjamin's understanding of history.

Every ten years United States congressional districts are drawn, physically constructing political representation based on domicile. Why do we do it this way? Is territorial representation consistent with the broader normative ends of political representation). ;In section one I argue that territorial constituencies were never intended to represent local "communities of interest." Instead, physical proximity between voters was necessary to achieve the normative aims of representative government in a large nation. I begin in 13 th century England, and proceed through (...) the political theory of Hobbes, Locke, Montesquieu, Burke, the Federalists and their critics. I also provide a novel interpretation of Federalist 10. ;In sum, territory was a habit of mind for the founders of the United States, and thus there were no explicit reasons given for using territory. The silence of territory as a definer of electoral constituencies has continued to the present day. I argue that the continued silence about territorial constituencies constitutes a substantial breech of legitimacy. ;In the second section , I argue that "constituency definition" is a normatively rich institution and how constituencies are defined ought not to be determined by interested third parties. I argue that Hanna Pitkin incorrectly conflated "political representation" and "legitimacy." I argue that citizen consent to constituency definition is a central part of legitimating any representative government. Finally, I argue that there are no persuasive normative arguments for territorial constituencies today. Justifying territorial constituencies on the normative claim that "communities of interest" ought to define constituencies for political representation is simply unpersuasive. If one believes such particularity ought to be represented in one branch of the national legislature, then other kinds of particularity---race, ideology, class, et al---simply dominate. ;In section three I argue against "particularity" for electoral constituencies. I conclude with a thought experiment: randomly assign voters into 435 national, electoral constituencies for life. Having established that the concept of "constituency" is itself normatively robust and separable from "electoral systems," I argue that important considerations of "voice," can be introduced through novel means of reform. (shrink)

Novel ecosystems represent the challenge of the Anthropocene epoch on a local scale. In an age where human agency is the defining ecological factor, ecological discourse and practice finds itself in its own “non-analog” conditions. In this context, good work can be an important place for developing answers to these questions. The fields of ecological practice, such as restoration and management, with their characteristic orientation toward objectives, lack a substantive understanding of what good work entails. Consequently, these fields are unable (...) to articulate what distinguishes moral and immoral human interventions in the nonhuman world and they turn instead to ambiguous categories such as “natural,” “historic,” and “pre-disturbance” for benchmarks. In contrast, a substantive conception of good work can name and clarify the sorts of intentions and behaviors that characterize positive human intervention in ecosystems, rather than simply rejecting those that are apparently “unnatural” or “novel.” From a phenomenological perspective, good ecological work demands accountability not only for the kinds of ecosystems we create or restore, but ultimately for the meanings we construct for our world and for ourselves. (shrink)

Despite a large and multifaceted effort to understand the vast landscape of phenotypic data, their current form inhibits productive data analysis. The lack of a community-wide, consensus-based, human- and machine-interpretable language for describing phenotypes and their genomic and environmental contexts is perhaps the most pressing scientific bottleneck to integration across many key fields in biology, including genomics, systems biology, development, medicine, evolution, ecology, and systematics. Here we survey the current phenomics landscape, including data resources and handling, and the progress that (...) has been made to accurately capture relevant data descriptions for phenotypes. We present an example of the kind of integration across domains that computable phenotypes would enable, and we call upon the broader biology community, publishers, and relevant funding agencies to support efforts to surmount today's data barriers and facilitate analytical reproducibility. (shrink)

SummaryThis article examines the disputes amongst Irish Presbyterians about the teaching of moral philosophy by Professor John Ferrie in the college department of the Royal Belfast Academical Institution in the early nineteenth century and the substantive philosophical and theological issues that were raised. These issues have largely been ignored by Irish historians, but a discussion of them is of general relevance to historians of ideas as they illuminate a series of broader questions about the definition and development of Scottish philosophy. (...) These are represented in the move from two philosophers who had strong connections with Irish Presbyterianism—Francis Hutcheson, the early eighteenth-century moral sense philosopher and theological moderate from County Down, and James McCosh, nineteenth-century exponent of modified Common Sense philosophy at Queen's College Belfast and a committed evangelical. In particular, this article addresses three important themes—the definition and character of ‘the Scottish philosophy’, the relationship between evangelicalism and Common Sense philosophy, and the process of development and adaptation that occurred in eighteenth-century Scottish thought during the first half of the nineteenth century. (shrink)

This paper is the first of a two-part reexamination of causation in Descartes's physics. Some scholars ? including Gary Hatfield and Daniel Garber ? take Descartes to be a `partial' Occasionalist, who thinks that God alone is the cause of all natural motion. Contra this interpretation, I agree with literature that links Descartes to the Thomistic theory of divine concurrence. This paper surveys this literature, and argues that it has failed to provide an interpretation of Descartes's view that both distinguishes (...) his position from that of his later, Occasionalist followers and is consistent with his broader metaphysical commitments. I provide an analysis that tries to address these problems with earlier `Concurentist' readings of Descartes. On my analysis, Occasionalism entails that created substances do not have intrinsic active causal powers. As I read him, Descartes thinks that bodies have active causal powers that are partly grounded in their intrinsic natures. But I argue ? pace a recent account by Tad Schmaltz ? that Descartes also thinks that God immediately causes all motion in the created world. On the picture that emerges, Descartes's position is both continuous with, and a subtle departure from, the Thomisitic theory of divine concurrence. (shrink)

Using a dataset of corporate philanthropic gifts of $1 million or more, we examine the influence of corporate donors on the performance of recipient non-profit organizations. We find that corporate donors positively influence NPO performance, specifically in the form of higher revenues per employee, program ratios, and fundraising returns. We find little evidence that large foundation or individual donors similarly enhance organizational performance. In additional analysis, we find that large corporate donations matter when the corporation is more likely to have (...) influence over the recipient NPO. These findings suggest that corporate donors provide the monitoring and expertise needed to enhance organizational performance beyond simply providing funding to NPOs. Our results are robust to a two-stage model and propensity score matching to address endogeneity concerns. While prior research has examined the effect of corporate philanthropy on donor organization performance, we contribute to the literature by examining whether corporate philanthropy also improves recipient organization performance. (shrink)

"In the United States, we try to comfort ourselves with the belief that this country, as the leading world power and industrial democracy, is different from the rest of the world--that we have solved our day-to-day problems. Such optimism--undergirded with the best of intentions--obscures the reality of the social problems that remain among us. To name only a few, these include violence, drugs, and other crime illiteracy, homelessness, and poverty and the rising rate of illegitimacy in our society. "A vigorous (...) debate over these issues, which are of such pressing concern, is taking place now in our country. It largely concerns the means we should use to address them: What is the proper role of the government in solving these problems without depriving individuals of their right to shape their own destinies?" --from the Introduction by Andrew R. Cecil. (shrink)

Fully named _Discourse on the Method for Reasoning Well and for Seeking Truth in the Sciences_, this work offers the most complete presentation and defense of René Descartes’ method of intellectual inquiry— a method that greatly influenced both philosophical and scientific reasoning in the early modern world. Descartes’s timeless ideas strike an uncommon balance of novelty and familiarity, offering arguments concerning knowledge, science, and metaphysics that are as compelling in the 21st century as they were in the 17th. Ian Johnston’s (...) new translation of the original French text is modern, clear, and thoroughly annotated, ideal for readers unfamiliar with Descartes’ intellectual context. An approachable introduction engages both the historical and the philosophical aspects of the text, enabling the reader to interpret this easily misunderstood work within Descartes’ larger project. This edition joins Broadview’s growing list of affordable classic texts from the philosophical canon, adapted from Andrew Bailey’s popular anthology series _First Philosophy_. (shrink)

Considered a foundational text in modern philosophy, the _Meditations on First Philosophy_ presents numerous powerful arguments that to this day influence debates in epistemology, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of religion. This new translation incorporates revisions from the second Latin edition and the later French translation to make Descartes’ reasoning as lucid and engaging as possible. Also included in this edition is a brief introduction to Descartes and the _Meditations_, revised and expanded from Andrew Bailey’s acclaimed anthology, (...) _First Philosophy_. The introduction helps the reader to understand the context and purpose of Descartes’ project without over-explaining his arguments. (shrink)

In this article, I explore the relationship between moderation and toleration in early modern England by focusing on William Penn’s 1685 A Perswasive to Moderation. This work, published by Penn in support of James II’s campaign to implement toleration in England by royal decree, explicitly linked moderation and the campaign for liberty of conscience in which Penn had participated for nearly two decades, in both England and America. More broadly, I show how Penn’s Perswasive entered into an ongoing debate over (...) the concept of moderation itself: during the 1680s, a number of authors explored the meanings and limits of moderation, tying it to contested debates in ecclesiastical affairs, civil and religious liberty, and ethical discourse. Yet the aspirations of James II to secure liberty of conscience for the realm’s dissenters failed spectacularly in the Revolution of 1688, and Penn suffered deep public embarrassment (along with significant legal jeopardy) due to his association with that effort. The article closes with some specific reflections on Penn’s Perswasive as well as more general comments on the importance of attending to the practical, historically contingent ways in which moderation discourses unfold. (shrink)

This article explores the founding of Pennsylvania as a window into the complex relationship between political theory and political practice. I argue that this founding illustrates both the importance and the limits of political theory to the study of political life. On the one hand, theorizing new societies is vitally important, because founding documents give shape to the aspirations of both founders and citizens. In this case, the founder's plans for his colony were the product of a great deal of (...) political theorizing, grounded in Penn's Quakerism and his active role in English religious and political life. But theory's importance to the study of actual foundings (and, I argue, politics more generally) is inherently limited, as well, since the colony's theoretical foundations were themselves evolving and unstable, and the translation of ideas into practice is only ever partial. After a careful consideration of the many founding documents produced by Penn between spring 1681 and summer 1682, and a close examination of developments in Pennsylvania from late 1682 through Penn's departure in summer 1684, I close by reflecting on what the case of Pennsylvania might tell us about the broader study of political theory and political practice. I suggest that we need a more flexible understanding of what political theory 'is' if we want to make sense of thinkers like Penn who theorized out of their deep involvement in the thick of actual governing. (shrink)

This book reconsiders the meaning of modernism across the globe, stretching beyond both the Western modernist canon and the literary-heavy scope of the field to a broader cultural consideration of global modernisms and modernity. Through the use of masks as a thematic focus, the volume challenges popular assumptions about what modernism looks like, what modernity is, and how each of these ideas are produced within a historical moment.