(1996). Access without impact: The mass media in postwar Japanese political culture. The European Legacy: Vol. 1, Fourth International Conference of the International Society for the study of European Ideas, pp. 786-790.

Philosophy long sought to set knowledge on a firm foundation, through derivation of indubitable truths by infallible rules. For want of such truths and rules, the enterprise foundered. Nevertheless, foundationalism's heirs continue their forbears' quest, seeking security against epistemic misfortune, while their detractors typically espouse unbridled coherentism or facile relativism. Maintaining that neither stance is tenable, Catherine Elgin devises a via media between the absolute and the arbitrary, reconceiving the nature, goals, and methods of epistemology. In Considered Judgment, she argues (...) for a reconception that takes reflective equilibrium as the standard of rational acceptability. A system of thought is in reflective equilibrium when its components are reasonable in light of one another, and the account they comprise is reasonable in light of our antecedent convictions about the subject it concerns.Many epistemologists now concede that certainty is a chimerical goal. But they continue to accept the traditional conception of epistemology's problematic. Elgin suggests that in abandoning the quest for certainty we gain opportunities for a broader epistemological purview--one that comprehends the arts and does justice to the sciences. She contends that metaphor, fiction, emotion, and exemplification often advance understanding in science as well as in art. The range of epistemology is broader and more variegated than is usually recognized. Tenable systems of thought are neither absolute nor arbitrary. Although they afford no guarantees, they are good in the way of belief. (shrink)

This paper discusses the normative ethical theory of the business firm advanced principally by William E. Evan and R. Edward Freeman. According to their stakeholder theory, the firm should be managed for the benefit of its stakeholders: indeed, management has a fiduciary obligation to stakeholders to act as their agent. In this paper I seek to clarify the theory by discussing the concept of a stakeholder and by distinguishing stakeholder theory from two varieties of stockholder theory-I call them ‘pure’ and (...) ‘tinged.’ I argue that the distinctive claims of stakeholder theory, as contrasted with tinged stockholder theories, have been inadequately supported by argument. (shrink)

Current debate on business ethics in Australia continues apace as the excesses of the 1980s are exposed. Codes of Ethics have been a high profile instrument in the American business scene. A survey of Australia''s largest business corporations reveals a different situation. Codes are not as commonly used, tend to refer to legal requirements and do not have as high a profile within the corporation. Given the changing legal framework in Australia a greater role for Codes of Ethics may emerge.

In this paper I consider several versions of the argument from evil against the existence of a God who is omniscient, omnipotent and wholly good and raise some objections to them. Then I offer my own version of the argument from evil that says that if God exists, nothing happens that he should have prevented from happening and that he should have prevented the brutal rape and murder of a certain little girl if he exists. Since it was not prevented, (...) God does not exist. My conclusion rests on the claim that no outweighing good was served by allowing that murder, or any other instance of comparable evil, to occur. I take up the objection that my argument moves illicitly from apparently pointless suffering to the claim that there is reason to believe that there is pointless suffering. I offer an example to show that the existence of apparently pointless suffering counts to some extent against the existence of God and to show that no basic belief that God exists that rests on certain sorts of grounds can remain justified in the face of apparently pointless suffering. (shrink)

The brain and body need to adapt constantly to changing social and physical environments. A key mechanism for this adaptation is the ‘stress response’, which is necessary and not negative in and of itself. The term ‘stress’, however, is ambiguous and has acquired negative connotations. We argue that the concept of allostasis can be used instead to describe the mechanisms employed to achieve stability of homeostatic systems through active intervention (adaptive plasticity). In the context of allostasis, resilience denotes the ability (...) of an organism to respond to stressors in the environment by means of the appropriate engagement and efficient termination of allostatic responses. In this review, we discuss the neurobiological and organismal factors that modulate resilience, such as growth factors, chaperone molecules and circadian rhythms, and highlight its consequences for cognition and behavior. (shrink)

Concentrating on the era when American academic philosophy was nearly equated with Harvard, the ideas, lives, and social milieu of Pierce, James, Royce, Whitehead, and others are critically analyzed.

Rorty’s Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature hoped that the profession of philosophy would collapse, that philosophy’s style of reasoning would be transformed, and that analytic philosophy would be overturned. This essay looks at the 40 years since the book’s publication, and argues that the discipline has become more professionalized, that its style of reasoning is the same, and that analysis still flourishes.

Continuing his quest to bring American philosophy back to its roots, Bruce Wilshire connects the work of such thinkers as Thoreau, Emerson, Dewey, and James with Native American beliefs and practices. His search is not for exact parallels, but rather for fundamental affinities between the equally "organismic" thought systems of indigenous peoples and classic American philosophers. Wilshire gives particular emphasis to the affinities between Black Elk’s view of the hoop of the world and Emerson’s notion of horizon, and also (...) between a shaman’s healing practices and James’s ideas of pure experience, willingness to believe, and a pluralistic universe. As these connections come into focus, the book shows how European phenomenology was inspired and influenced by the classic American philosophers, whose own work reveals the inspiration and influence of indigenous thought. Wilshire’s book also reveals how artificial are the walls that separate the sciences and the humanities in academia, and that separate Continental from Anglo-American thought within the single discipline of philosophy. (shrink)

This paper has been superseded by chapter 3 of my book "God, the Best, and Evil" (OUP 2008). The chapter concerns God's choices in cases in which God has infinitely many better and better options.

Two main questions are addressed: (1) What standard defines the nonmoral good for humans, the prudentially rational life? (2) How is this standard applied in guiding and in assessing lives? The standard presented is “The Worthwhileness Principle,” which asserts that if one’s life situation is sufficiently fortunate, the aim is to maximize worthwhileness, the net balance of benefits over costs; but if one’s life situation is chronically, and substantially unfortunate, the aim is to minimize nonworthwhileness, the net balance of costs (...) over benefits. The principle is based on a two-sided, positivity and negativity, or cost-and-benefit-centered viewpoint, rather than a one-sided, good-centered viewpoint. Specifically, it includes negative ends, harms to be avoided, negative means, resource costs to be minimized, and negative luck, misfortune, unfortunate lives.Regarding the second question, the standard is applied prospectively in guiding lives and activities by means of prudential deliberation, prudential habits, and prudential spontaneity. It is applied retrospectively in assessing whole or partial lives using the Worthwhileness Scale. (shrink)

I argue that if deliberation is incompatible with (fore)knowing what one is going to do at the time of the deliberation, then God cannot deliberate. However, this thesis cannot be used to show either that God cannot act intentionally or that human persons cannot deliberate. Further, I have suggested that though omniscience is incompatible with deliberation, it is not incompatible with either some speculation or knowing something on the grounds of inference.

Plagiarism strikes at the heart of academe, eroding the fundamental value of academic research. Recent evidence suggests that acts of plagiarism and awareness of these acts are on the rise in academia. To address this issue, a vein of research has emerged in recent years exploring plagiarism as an area of academic inquiry. In this new academic subject, case studies and analysis have been one of the most influential methodologies employed. Case studies provide a venue where acts of plagiarism can (...) be discussed and analyzed in a constructive manner, and that is the primary purpose of this article. Unlike previous studies, however, we focus on the role of the publisher, a key player in dealing with acts of plagiarism, but one who has received little attention in the academic literature. Specifically, we examine how an academic publisher addressed allegations of plagiarism and how the publisher’s decision-making affected the outcome. We analyze the case by applying the guidelines from different frameworks and ethical theory and develop recommendations from the lessons evidenced, the second main objective of our article. This analysis advances the dialog on academic plagiarism by exploring the role of the publisher from a deontological perspective of ethical absolutism. (shrink)

This paper addresses a line of argument in Hume's Enquiry, Section X Part 2 -- specifically, on pp.121-222 of Selby-Bigge's edition. In September 2021 I read it for the first time in several decades, and realized that the argument is seriously flawed. Although I cannot recommend that anyone else read it in its current state, perhaps by the end of 2021 I'll be in a position upload a revised version of the paper to this site.

The current paradigm in medicine generally distinguishes between genetic and environmental causes of disease. Although the word paradigm has become a commonplace, the theories of Thomas Kuhn have not received much attention in the journals of medicine. Kuhn's structuralist method differs radically from the daily activities of the scientific method itself. Using linguistic theory, this essay offers a structuralist reading of Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Our purpose is to highlight the similarities between these structuralist models of science (...) and language. In part, we focus on the logic that enables Kuhn to assert the priority of perception over interpretation in the history of science. To illustrate some of these issues, we refer to the distinction between environmental and genetic causes of disease. While the activity of scientific research results in the revision of concepts in science, the production of significant differences that shape our knowledge is in part a social and linguistic process. (shrink)

Two objections have been raised against the re-creationist thesis that the individual human person can be re-created after death. The objection that the re-created person would not be the same person as the deceased because he would lack spatial-temporal continuity with that person I answer by showing that spatial-temporal continuity with that person is not a necessary condition for all cases of personal identity. To the objection that the decision to call the re-created individual the same as the deceased either (...) uses criteria like memory which themselves presuppose bodily continuity or is merely an unjustified convention, I show that these criteria do not presuppose continuity, and through a decision is called for, it is not an unjustifiable or arbitrary decision. (shrink)

In the course of his readings, Krajewski explores the complex relationship between truth-telling and lying, being and non-being, clarity and obscurity, the fixed and the unstable, the extraordinary and the commonplace. Underlying these dichotomies is an even more fundamental opposition between two approaches to language and discourse. One is the way of philosophy and linguistics, where the objective is to reduce language to its purest logical form. The other is the way of hermeneutics and rhetoric, where the aim is to (...) preserve the multifariousness of discourse as it occurs concretely in everyday life. Krajewski's goal throughout is to underscore the extent to which understanding is not a private but a social act. (shrink)

The result of a lifetime of research and contemplation on global phenomena, this book explores the idea of humanity in the modern age of globalization. Tracking the idea in the historical, philosophical, legal, and political realms, this is a concise and illuminating look at a concept that has defined the twentieth century.

Marx begins his Eighteenth Brumaire by attributing to Hegel the remark that "all facts and personages of great importance in world history occur, as it were, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce." Marx has stung us here with another of his famous inversions. For Hegel, in the passage in question, describes repetition in world history as a mark of ratification, sanctifying what has happened. He has not "forgotten" to add, the first time (...) as tragedy, the second as farce; for such an addition would utterly contradict what he is saying. Actually, Marx borrowed the whole tragedy-farce notion from comments by Engels in a letter dated December 3, 1851. Marx has, however, held fast to Hegel's formulations about man being free only when he comprehends his history. (shrink)

Babolin, one of the foremost Italian interpreters of modern German philosophy with a special interest in the direct analysis of the rapport Man/god, self/other than self, has written a close and persuasive account of the German theologian Guardini as a thinker concerned with ‘Otherness’. The methodology, as in his 1965 volume Essere e Alterità in Martin Buber is copious but precise, with a gratifying clear distinction between what the author has added to the chiefly Italo-German tradition of criticism and his (...) own review of that tradition, which is contained in the first section of the book. The second chapter contains an exhaustive review of the theory of ‘polar opposition’ axiomatised in Guardini’s Der Gegensatz which was published in 1925, just two years after Buber’s Ich und Du. Babolin’s third section covers ‘Otherness’ in Guardini’s Welt und Person, published in 1939. (shrink)

Despite the popularity of equality as a political value, egalitarianism as a political theory has never, I think, been fully or successfully defended. I aim in this paper to begin the defense of such a view. The egalitarianism I have in mind has as its ideal a condition of equal wellbeing for all persons at the highest possible level of well-being, i.e. maximum equal well-being. Egalitarianism holds that society should be arranged so as to promote and maintain this state. Defending (...) such a view involves, as I see it, three tasks. First, the ideal I have Just mentioned must be made clearer and more specific and its implications for the distribution of particular goods such as material possessions and liberty must be revealed. Second, positive arguments must be given in support of an equal distribution of well-being as a requirement of morality and Justice. And, thirdly, arguments to the effect that there are Just or Justified inequalities which seriously outweigh the claims of equality must be rebutted. (shrink)