I present a general theory for the initial domestication of plants and animals that is based on niche construction theory and incorporates several behavioral ecological concepts, including central-place provisioning, resource catchment, resource ownership and defensibility, and traditional ecological knowledge. This theory provides an alternative to, and replacement for, current explanations, including diet breadth models of optimal foraging theory, that are based on an outmoded concept of asymmetrical adaptation and that attempt to explain domestication as an adaptive response to resource imbalance (...) resulting from either environmental decline or human population growth. The small-scale human societies that first domesticated plants and animals share a number of basic interrelated attributes that when considered as an integrated and coherent set of behaviors provide the context for explaining initial domestication not as an adaptive response to an adverse environmental shift or to human population growth or packing but rather as the result of deliberate human enhancement of resource-rich environments in situations where evidence of resource imbalance is absent. (shrink)

Responding to volatile criticisms frequently leveled at Leo Strauss and those he influenced, the prominent contributors to this volume demonstrate the profound influence that Strauss and his students have exerted on American liberal democracy and contemporary political thought. By stressing the enduring vitality of classic books and by articulating the theoretical and practical flaws of relativism and historicism, the contributors argue that Strauss and the Straussians have identified fundamental crises of modernity and liberal democracy.

In this multi-faceted volume, Christian and other religiously committed theorists find themselves at an uneasy point in history—between premodernity, modernity, and postmodernity—where disciplines and methods, cultural and linguistic traditions, and religious commitments tangle and cross. Here, leading theorists explore the state of the art of the contemporary hermeneutical terrain. As they address the work of Gadamer, Ricoeur, and Derrida, the essays collected in this wide-ranging work engage key themes in philosophical hermeneutics, hermeneutics and religion, hermeneutics and the other arts, hermeneutics (...) and literature, and hermeneutics and ethics. Readers will find lively exchanges and reflections that meet the intellectual and philosophical challenges posed by hermeneutics at the crossroads. Contributors are Bruce Ellis Benson, Christina Bieber Lake, John D. Caputo, Eduardo J. Echeverria, Benne Faber, Norman Lillegard, Roger Lundin, Brian McCrea, James K. A. Smith, Michael VanderWeele, Kevin Vanhoozer, and Nicholas Wolterstorff. (shrink)

Michael A. PetersBeijing Normal UniversityMy deepest condolences to Pepe, Dom and Marcus and to Jim’s grandchildren. Tina and I spent a lot of time at the Marshall family home, often attending dinn...

This collection of essays argues that any valid theory of the modern should—indeed must—reckon with the medieval. Offering a much-needed correction to theorists such as Hans Blumenberg, who in his _Legitimacy of the Modern Age_ describes the “modern age” as a complete departure from the Middle Ages, these essays forcefully show that thinkers from Adorno to Žižek have repeatedly drawn from medieval sources to theorize modernity. To forget the medieval, or to discount its continued effect on contemporary thought, is to (...) neglect the responsibilities of periodization. In _The Legitimacy of the Middle Ages_, modernists and medievalists, as well as scholars specializing in eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and twentieth-century comparative literature, offer a new history of theory and philosophy through essays on secularization and periodization, Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism, Heidegger’s scholasticism, and Adorno’s nominalist aesthetics. One essay illustrates the workings of medieval mysticism in the writing of Freud’s most famous patient, Daniel Paul Schreber, author of _Memoirs of My Nervous Illness_. Another looks at Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s _Empire_, a theoretical synthesis whose conscientious medievalism was the subject of much polemic in the post-9/11 era, a time in which premodernity itself was perceived as a threat to western values. The collection concludes with an afterword by Fredric Jameson, a theorist of postmodernism who has engaged with the medieval throughout his career. _Contributors_: Charles D. Blanton, Andrew Cole, Kathleen Davis, Michael Hardt, Bruce Holsinger, Fredric Jameson, Ethan Knapp, Erin Labbie, Jed Rasula, D. Vance Smith, Michael Uebel. (shrink)

Rather than "transitional," the American interwar years constituted a contiguous and seminal era during which the social, religious, and aesthetic consequences of a changed environment, modernity, became powerful forces in shaping the patterns in recent popular culture. Increased literacy and affluence, media technologies, and changes in work and leisure encouraged a mass marketplace of ideas. Popular intellectuals, namely D. W. Griffith, Bruce Barton, John B. Watson, Edward Bernays, Harry Emerson Fosdick, Edward L. Bernays, George Creel, Pearl Buck, John Steinbeck, (...) and Gilbert Selders helped Americans reimagine entire areas of existence for the new context. They illuminate important cultural shifts regarding the nature of self in a rationalized, urban world, the legitimacy of religion in the shadow of skeptical empiricism, and the qualities and social role of art in the age of science, alienation, and political apathy. ;Many of our persistent forms of popular expression can be understood as cultural exchanges over the problem of modernity, evidence of the obtuse ways in which modernism has affected the general culture. Griffith's mawkish melodrama is, upon serious scrutiny, deeply informed by modern fears of personal anomie, naturalism, and the aloof power of the new state. New concepts of "personality" and the "masses," based on behavioristic assumptions, envisioned both self and society as malleable and helped mitigate feelings of alienation with promises of empowerment and self-transformation. With Fosdick and Barton, mainstream Protestantism absorbed "positive thinking" and therapeutic conceptions of religion's role in modern life, and in the process redefined the nature of God, self, and the Church, Buck and Steinbeck reshaped melodramatic formulae into response to modern tensions with a blend of brutal naturalism and sentimental romanticism, a vision of an embattled "human spirit." In these thinkers, we can see Americans confronting the century's most compelling issues, disorder, naturalism, scientism, and relativism. Each phenomenon was a way of admitting modern change while imagining techniques for manipulating it. The relentless pursuit in popular culture for social connectedness, mastery of environment, spiritual assurance, managerial order, and personal power can best be understood as multifarious compensatory strategies for our ambivalence with modernity. (shrink)

Can we legitimately speak of ethicsexperts? Recent literature in philosophy and medical ethics addresses this important question but does not offer a satisfactory answer. Part of the problem is the absence of an examination of what it means to be an expert in general. I therefore begin by reviewing my analysis of expertise which appeared earlier in this journal. We speak of two kinds of experts: persons whose expertise is in virtue of what theyknow (epistemic expertise), or what theydo (performative (...) expertise). Applying this analysis to the domain of ethics, I argue that we may speak of ethical expertise in three epistemic senses: a) expertise indescriptive ethics, b) expertise inmetaethics, c) expertise innormative ethics, and in a performative sense: d) expertise inliving a good life. I conclude with a brief description of some social roles of ethics experts. (shrink)

Three forms of implicit knowledge are presented (functional, structural, and procedural). These forms differ in the way they are made explicit and hence in how they are represented by the individual. We suggest that the framework presented by Dienes & Perner does not account for these differences.

Abstract“Clinical ethics consultants” have been practicing in the United States for about 50 years. Most of the earliest consultants—the “pioneers”—were “outsiders” when they first appeared at patients' bedsides and in the clinic. However, if they were outsiders initially, they acclimated to the clinical setting and became “insiders” very quickly. Moreover, there was some tension between traditional academics and those doing applied ethics about whether there was sufficient “critical distance” for appropriate reflection about the complex medical ethics dilemmas of the day (...) if one were involved in the decision making. Again, the pioneers deflected concerns by identifying and instituting safeguards to assure professional objectivity in clinical ethics consultation services. One might suggest that in moving inside and establishing normative practices, the pioneer clinical ethics consultants anticipated adoption of their routines and professionalization of the field. (shrink)

As clinical ethics consultants move toward professionalization, the process of certifying individual consultants or accrediting programs will be discussed and debated. With certification, some entity must be established or ordained to oversee the standards and procedures. If the process evolves like other professions, it seems plausible that it will eventually include a written examination to evaluate the core knowledge competencies that individual practitioners should possess to meet peer practice standards. The American Society for Bioethics and Humanities has published core knowledge (...) competencies for many years that are accepted by experts as the prevailing standard. Probably any written examination will be based upon the ASBH core knowledge competencies. However, much remains to be done before any examination may be offered. In particular, it seems likely that a recognized examining board must create and validate examination questions and structure the examination so as to establish meaningful, defensible parameters after dealing with such challenging questions as: Should the certifying examination be multiple choice or short-answer essay? How should the test be graded? What should the pass rate be? How may the examination be best administered? To advance the field of health care ethics consultation, thought leaders should start to focus on the written examination possibilities, to date unaddressed carefully in the literature. Examination models—both objective and written—must be explored as a viable strategy about how the field of health care ethics consultations can grow toward professionalization. (shrink)

Experts play an important role in society, but there has been little investigation about the nature of expertise. I argue that there are two kinds of experts: those whose expertise is a function of what theyknow (epistemic expertise), or what theydo (performative expertise). Epistemic expertise is the capacity to provide strong justifications for a range of propositions in a domain, while performative expertise is the capacity to perform a skill well according to the rules and virtues of a practice. Both (...) epistemic and performative experts may legitimately disagree with one another, and the two senses are conceptually and logically distinct. (shrink)

Uses real-life examples and five basic moral principles to encourage teens to make the right choices in various situations related to friends, family, school, and relationships.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:AQUINAS AS POSTLIBERAL THEOWGIAN BRUCE D. MARSHALL St. Olaf Oollege Northfield, Minnesota, 1JHE PURPOSE of this essay is to discuss the relation between Thomas Aquinas' account of religious and heological truth and a " posrtliberal " one sruch rus that sketched in George Lindbeck's The Nature of Doctrine. Most reviewers assume that Lindbeck's.app:voach is on this point incompatible with the mainstream of the tmdition, and Colman O'Neill, writing (...) :in The Thomist symposium on Lindbeck's book, thinks it oontradicts Aquinas in particular. This paper presents the case to the contr:ary. Afte'I." outlining O'Neill's problem, it argues thart he mis11eads Lindbeck 'and,.at greater length, that Aquinas''S views on t:ruth :are, as Lindbeck affirms, compatible with postliberal emphases. I O'Neill's basic problem with Lindbeck's: "cultural linguistic " understanding of truth is thwt Lindbeck " would clearly have us puTify [Christi.an] language by ridding it of extra-linguistic accretions-in particular the intrusion of reference to objective reality. In the end the only thing that matters is scriptural discourse verified by action." 1 Lindbeck may not intend this " purification," 2 but whatever the intention, his 1 Colman E. O'Neill, "The Rule Theory of Doctrine and Propositional Truth," The Thomist 49 (1985), p. 422. 2 So Lindbeck writes: "The great strength of a cognitive-propositional theory of religion is that •.. it admits the possibility of [ontological] truth claims, and a crucial theological challenge to a cultural-linguistic approach is whether it also can do so." The Nature of Doctrine: Religion a,nd Theology in a, Postlibera,l Age (hereafter ND), (Philadelphia, 1984), pp. 63-4. 353 854 BRUCE D. MARSHALL view of •religious truth entails a raidical rejection of 1any claim that Christian beliefs!are onto1ogioally true, in other words, tha;t they rre£er or correspond •to reality. The reruson rllor this putative entailment lies in Lindbeck's manifest oontention (to be explained below) that truth claims in any l'eligion, including Christianity, are subject to 1a twofold criterion of coherence: they must fit wirth the wider linguistic (especially scriptural) paradigms of the 11eligion, and also with a range of practices appropriate to the belief the truth of which is being claimed. But, says O'Neill, Christian beliefs are not true because they cohere with anything, they are true (like all true propositions) "because of their reference to the real." a By introducing ;an irreducible element of coherence into his interpl'etation of Christian truth claims, Lindbeck inevitably " attaches to the ·term ' propositional truth '.a purely pra.gmatic signification," so that " a quite precise philosophical option has: been ma.de in faV'or of the moral or pragmatic definition of truth." 4 O'NeiiH'is point is that " ontological " or " propositional " truth has here been equa,ted with nothing more than the con£ormity of one's life to the patterns narrated in the!biblical story (O'Nei1l's "·scriptural dis-·oourse verified by 1action "), •such tha;t " no claims to objective truth" need be made for the story or any a.ssociated beliefs.5 Tihis, O'Neill alleges, is ·a " novel definition of ontological truth." 6 We ought to!'eject this novelty in favor of the under- •standing of Christian beliefs and their truth articulated by 'Ihomas Aquinas, whel"e it is firmly maintained against " the moral or pmgmatic definition of truth " that " propositions are true because of their I"eference ·to.the real." In order to undevstand the issues ·raised by O'Neill's criticism, it is important to bear in mind the distinction-often made but often overlooked ais well-between truth :and justis O'Neill, "Propositional Truth," p. 430. 4 O'Neill, "Propositional Truth," p. 429. 5 O'Neill," Propositional Truth," p. 420. 6 O'Neill, "Propositional Truth," p. 431. AQUINAS AS POSTLIBERAL THEOLOGIAN 355 fica.tion. The very isisue of what it means to say that propositions 1 are true can be distinguished from the issue of ho,w one justifies, warrants, or tests the truth of propositions. So, for example, one might maintain that in regard to propositions, "true" should be defined as "oorresponds to reality," or perhaps "fitly expresses experience," or perhaps "is... (shrink)

Explores the impact of expert witnessing on the integrity of forensic scientific information. Complaints on the behavior of expert witnesses; Factors stimulating the susceptibility of experts to abandon their scientific integrity; Implications of the reliance of expert witnesses on ethics codes.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:THOMAS, THOMISMS, AND TRUTH BRUCE D. MARSHALL Saint Olaf College Northfield, Minnesota I HE GREAT, as Hegel's dictum has it, condemn the rest f us to the task of understanding them. We take our evenge upon the great, especialy upon great thinkers, by enlisting them for our own purposes, as our supporters and defenders in conflicts perhaps quite different from those in which they themselves were engaged. Thomas (...) Aquinas was a master, virtually without peer, at the intellectual enlistment of the great, and he himself has been perhaps as widely and variously recruited as any of those to whom he devoted his own attentions. When we enlist Thomas for our own purposes with some consistency and success, the result is a " Thomism," of which there have been many, sometimes quite conflicting varieties. My article " Aquinas as Postliberal Theologian " does not propose anything so developed as a Thomism, but perhaps at most a fragment of one.1 In their responses to it, Frederick J. Crosson and Louis 1 The Thomist 53 (1989) : 353-402. The interpretation of Thomas proposed there bears a family resemblance to that of some recent Thomisms and so is not wholly without precedent. Cf. Michel Corbin, Le chemin de la theologie chez Thomas D'Aquin (Paris: Beauchesne, 1974); Otto Herman Pesch, Die Theologie der Rechtfertigung bei Martin Luther und Thomas von Aquin (Mainz: Matthias-Grunewald-Verlag, 1967) ; idem, Thomas von Aquin: Grenze und Grosse mittelalterlichen Theologie, 2nd ed. (Mainz: MatthiasGrunewald -Verlag, 1989); Gerhard Ludwig Muller, "Hebt das Sola-FidePrinzip die Moglichkeit einer naturlichen Theologie auf? Eine Ruckfrage bei Thomas von Aquin," Catholica 40 (1986) : 59-96; Victor Preller, Divine Science and the Science of God (Princeton: University Press, 1967). Reference to these Thomisms should not, of course, be taken to constitute agreement with any particular claim one of them may make. 499 500 BRUCE D. MARSHALL Roy, O.P., argue that as a piece of Thomism-as the enlistment of Thomas in defense and support of a particular contemporary view of truth, meaning, and epistemic justification-it is at best unpromising. In so doing, they indicate, at least in part, what views on these matters they think Thomas can plausibly be enlisted to support, that is, the sort of Thomism they find more convincing. Great thinkers are not, however, defenseless against our efforts to recruit them for our ends. Especially in the case of one whose thought is as ramified, precise, and historically distant as is that of Thomas Aquinas, these efforts are likely to meet with some resistance. (Indeed, we will be inclined to distrust them if they claim not to.) We may even find ourselves compelled to refashion our own ends in order not to forgo plausible appeal to his precedent and support. Sometimes different Thomisms will no doubt include purposes distant enough from Thomas's own (as best we can grasp them) that it may be impossible to adjudicate conflicts between them by appeal to his texts. But in many cases it ought to be possible to decide reasonably between competing Thomisms (that is, to decide which more plausibly enlists Thomas for its own purposes) by assessing the amount and type of resistance each meets from the text of Thomas (of course this includes the possibility that competition between Thomisms reflects unresolved conflict within Thomas's own thought). In the present case the prospect of reasonable adjudication seems much increased by the fact that the large issues with which it is concerned -truth, meaning, and justification-tend to coalesce around what seems to be a straightforward matter of fact: whether Thomas taught that persons without Christian faith, and especially pre-Christian philosophers, knew, or were even able to know, God. Crosson and Roy both argue that the implausibility of my interpretation of Aquinas on these larger issues-the linking of a comprehensively coherentist account of justification an~ a contextualist account of meaning to Thomas's correspondence notion of truth-is especially clear in its attribution to Thomas of a posi- THOMA$, THOMISMS, AND TRUTH 501 tion he manifestly rejects: that a pre-Christian philosopher like Aristotle did not, and indeed could not, know God. This seems obvious to most modern Thomisms, which, however... (shrink)

Questions concerning issues in Christology in Conflict are addressed. James Buckley’s attention to Barth’s metaphysical account and Rahner’s notion of Jesus as Realsysmbol are highlighted and clarified. Criticisms by Robert Krieg are briefly discussed and answered. Finally, though Rahner’s transcendental account of the person of Jesus is shown to lead to certain logical inconsistencies, it is argued, nevertheless, that his christology, though internally incoherent, is valuable.

The function of meiotic recombination has remained controversial, despite recent inroads into mechanisms. Ideas concerning a possible role of recombination in the elimination or efficient incorporation of mutations have been backed by theoretical studies but have lacked empirical support. Recent investigations into the basis for local variations in recombination frequency in yeast have uncovered a strong association between recombination initiation sites and transcriptional regulatory sequences. Other recent studies indicate a strong correlation between transcription and mutation rates in yeast genes. Taken (...) together, these data imply that distributions of recombination and mutation frequencies may be strongly correlated. This suggests that recombination may be targeted to genomic sites of high mutation frequency; such a ‘mutation‐tracking’ function would clearly aid in the shuffling of mutations to break up unfavorable and create favorable allelic combinations. Moreover, recent insights into the mechanism of gene conversion in yeast reveal a very strong inherent bias in favor of alleles on the non‐initiating homolog. Combined with mutation tracking, these findings suggest a novel and general mechanism by which allelic gene conversion may act to eliminate mutations. (shrink)

Foreword -- 1. The War Within -- 2. The Cult of Experience -- 3. The Long March -- 4. America's Transformers -- 5. American Restoration -- 6. Twenty-twenty Vision -- Acknowledgments.

Following the introduction, the book provides an overview of energy use patterns in the aggregate U.S. building population.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS God and Creation in Christian Theology: Tyranny or Empowerment? By KATHRYN TANNER. Oxford and New York: Basil Blackwell, 1988. Pp. viii + 196. $39.95 (hardbound). In describing the role of the human will in salvation, Thomas Aquinas remarks that justification indeed requires an act of human free choice, namely one which takes place when God "infuses the gift of justifying grace in such a way that he (...) simultaneously moves the free will (liberum arbitrium) to accept the gift of grace" (Summa theologiae I-II, 113, 3, c). When they encounter this sort of remark in Aquinas-and parallel remarks can he found across the whole ecumenical tradition of Christian theology-contemporary theologians may well be puzzled by two thirig~..One is Aquinas's evident conviction that an utterly robust view of God's power and sovereignty (such that whatever God wills to happen, happens) is fully compatible with the ascription of genuine and ineradicable freedom to human beings. But perhaps even more striking is the fact that Aquinas apparently takes this compatibility, so problematic for much of modern theology, to be obvious: it occasions no visible perplexity, appeal to mystery, or lengthy explanation, but is simply invoked in passing to help deal with the theological issue under discussion. In this powerfully argued and provocative book, Kathryn Tanner undertakes to clear up both of these perplexities. She develops an original and richly textured account of how Christian thinkers could and can maintain uncompromising accounts of both divine sovereignty and creaturely independence and freedom without falling into incoherence, and she also explains how what was once obvious now so easily seems bafHing. Tanner begins by arguing that the coherence of Christian claims about God and creatures can best be displayed by an explicitly secondorder analysis which aims to lay bare the rules governing well-formed Christian discourse, rather than by constructing a first-order ontological and metaphysical account of the relationship between God and the world. The book explicitly concentrates, " not on what theologians are talking about, but on.the way they are saying it " (p. 11). Tanner undertakes this " semantic ascent," which. she articulates with considerable nuance, partly in order to proceed in a way congruent with powerful recent developments in philosophy (European as well as Anglo8 ~1 BOOK REVIEWS American) and theology, but more basically because she thinks the issue itself demands this kind of treatment. However available in their own right, accounts of the relations between God and creatures cast in first-order metaphysical language are, theologians of quite different conviction have often maintained, veiled in a certain inevitable obscurity which limits their explanatory value; one cannot " reconcile God's agency with the creature's active powers through any material explanation of the actual mechanism found in some ' causal joint ' between the two" (p. 26; Thomas's way of putting this point, as Tanner is aware, is to say that we have no modus significandi for descriptions in divinis [see p. 12]). By contrast, the rules for coherent Christian discourse about God and creatures, if we can find any, can be stated with comparative clarity and precision: they will be straightforward directives to speak in certain ways and not in others. Moreover, the problems in speaking coherently about divine power and the contingent independence of creatures are not confined to a particular scheme of firstorder theological concepts and judgments but recur across a wide range of differing schemes; correlatively, if we can isolate second-order rules for Christian discourse about God and creatures those rules " may structure very different theological schemes, schemes distinguished by their first-order claims by vocabulary, philosophical frames of reference etc." (p. 29). Tanner's project, then, is a certain kind of transcendental argument: she wants to show "how it is possible for Christians to affirm certain statements while holding on to others that seem to conflict with them" (p. 20). If rules which govern apparently conflicting statements about God and creatures in Christian discourse can in fact be isolated, and it can be shown how they are followed by Christian theologians, then, Tanner argues, the project will have succeeded; the coherence of Christian discourse about God and creatures will have been displayed... (shrink)

One of the gaps in the current international marketing literature is in the area of consumer ethics. Using a sample drawn from Japanese consumers, this study investigates these individuals' reported ethical ideology and their perception of a number of different ethical situations in the realm of consumer behavior. Comparisons are then made across several demographic characteristics. The results reveal differences which provide theoretical support for expanded research in the area of cross-cultural/cross-national consumer ethics and highlight the need for managers to (...) consider possible differences in the ethical behavior of consumers when entering a new international market. In addition, this study extends current knowledge in international marketing ethics by utilizing a research design and survey instruments similar to previous studies on consumer ethics. (shrink)

The principles for universal reading models proposed by Frost correspond to developmental theories, in which neurocognitive constraints and cultural experiences shape development. We question his contention that Hebrew word identification is fundamentally about roots, excluding verbal and nominal word-pattern morphemes; and we propose that readers use all information available in stimuli, adjusting for volume and usefulness.

If how we envisage substances prepares the trajectory of our behavior towards them, art objects, substantial through the manner of their fashioning, can reorderhow we comport ourselves in a world that is not for us, to the extent that what we call by the name of “world” cannot be apprehended as the price paid for humanavarice when confronting a global plenitude sacrificed, always, to the scale of our need for it. To frustrate that desolation, we must enrich our view of (...) things, andthis essay examines the thinking of Merleau-Ponty and Virginia Woolf at the service of that imperative. (shrink)

We used a retrospective survey to model the patterns of appraisal, motivation, and coping that uniquely correspond with 12 positive emotions (affection/love, amusement, awe, challenge/det...

The “therapeutic obligation” is a physician’s duty to provide his patients with what he believes is the best available treatment. We begin by discussing some prominent formulations of the obligation before raising two related considerations against those formulations. First, they do not make sense of cases where doctors are permitted to provide suboptimal care. Second, they give incorrect results in cases where doctors are choosing treatments in challenging epistemic environments. We then propose and defend an account of the therapeutic obligation (...) that solves the problems that undermined previous efforts at formulating the TO. We conclude by considering how apparent problems with our proposal actually rest on difficulties with informed consent. (shrink)