The Roman Catholic teaching on peace and war, as found in the documents of the universal church and of the American bishops, is found to be consistent with traditional Catholic approaches to ethical theory, eschatology, and ecclesiology. Mediation in ethical theory recognizes that the gospel is mediated through reason and the sciences to particular conclusions and insists on the importance of structures and institutions. An eschatology recognizing the tension between the now and the not yet argues against both pacifism and (...) a noncritical acceptance of the status quo. Catholic ecclesiology has traditionally accepted a pluralism of specific approaches in social ethics and understands the prophetic role of the church within such a "big" ecclesiology. (shrink)

This volume explores whether the concept of the common good might be retrieved and become central in contemporary religious social thought. Contributors include: Charles C. West, John J. Collins, Ralph McInerny; J. Philip Wogaman, Charles E. Curran, Richard John Neuhaus, Dennis P. McCann, Ernest Bartell, Michael Novak, Charles K. Wilber, John W. Cooper, Gar Alperovitz, Richard T. DeGeorge, Gerald Cavanagh, William J. Cunningham, Peter Mann, Bette Jean Bullert and David Vogel. Co-published with the Notre Dame Center (...) for Ethics and Religious Values in Business. (shrink)

This article concerns the prescriptive function of decision analysis. Consider an agent who must choose an action yielding welfare that varies with an unknown state of nature. It is often asserted that such an agent should adhere to consistency axioms which imply that behavior can be represented as maximization of expected utility. However, our agent is not concerned the consistency of his behavior across hypothetical choice sets. He only wants to make a reasonable choice from the choice set that he (...) actually faces. Hence, I reason that prescriptions for decision making should respect actuality. That is, they should promote welfare maximization in the choice problem the agent actually faces. Any choice respecting weak and stochastic dominance is rational from the actualist perspective. (shrink)

This book interrogates the nature and state of African American citizenship through the prism of Social Contract Theory. Challenging the United States’ commitment to African American citizenship, this book explores the idea of Social Nullification, the decision to reject, revoke and re-define the social contract with a state and society. Charles F. Peterson surveys the history of Social Contract Theory, examines Nullification as political and legal theory, argues public policy as a measure of the state’s commitment to the contractarian (...) relationship and frames the writings and activism of Martin R. Delany, Ida B. Wells-Barnett and the African American Reparations Movement as examples of Social Nullification and challenges to the terms of Black life in America. (shrink)

We characterize Δ20-categoricity in Boolean algebras and linear orderings under some extra effectiveness conditions. We begin with a study of the relativized notion in these structures.

As time passed, I discovered with surprise that the important role I assigned to literature was not recognized by everyone.iThis essay constitutes one aspect of an overall project to spell out the implications for the literary arts of Wittgenstein's systematic distinction between acts of description that carry truth values and acts of expression that display states of mind and feeling but do not describe them. My full case will require a book. That is good news for me but bad news (...) for the present reader, since I feel I have to offer a painfully brief version of my overall theoretical position as a backdrop for what I will say about appreciation. Expressions elicit or solicit attunement rather than propose .. (shrink)

" -- Dr. Daniel Gardner, Cornell University Medical College Charles Stevens, a prominent neurobiologist who originally trained as a biophysicist (with George Uhlenbeck and Mark Kac), wrote this book almost by accident.

Review of the paper mentioned in the title.

The present book is intended to help students overcome difficulties by presenting Jaspers' thoughts in comparatively clear and straightforward fashion. While it denies that philosophy is "practical" in any cheap and obvious sense, it follows Jaspers in attempting to avoid the otiose and emphasize the relevance of philosophy to matters of ultimate concern. Those who wish a more theoretical and systematic presentation may well call to mind that, as Heidegger's followers express it, Jaspers, like Kierkegaard- and to some extent Sartre- (...) quite deliberately spurned the "ontological" in favor of the "ontic.". (shrink)

Econometric analysis of discrete choice has made considerable use of random utility models to interpret observed choice behavior. Much empirical research concerns choice problems in which persons act with partial knowledge of the utilities of the feasible actions. Economists use random expected utility models to analyze such choice problems. A common practice is to specify fully the expectations that persons hold, in which case choice analysis reduces to inference on preferences alone. However, the expectations assumptions made in empirical research rarely (...) have much foundation. To enable more credible research, this paper considers inference when one specifies a set of expectations that decision makers may plausibly hold. I first pose the idea in abstraction and then specialize to binary response with linear utilities, where the analysis is particularly straightforward. I initially assume that decision makers possess unique subjective probability distributions on the states of nature and make choices that maximize expected utility. I later consider the possibility that persons place only partial probabilistic structure on the states of nature and make undominated choices. (shrink)

Although his work and life have been well documented, John Dewey's role in the postwar peace movement has been generally overlooked. In America's Peace-Minded Educator, the authors take a close look at John Dewey's many undertakings on behalf of world peace.

This book examines the strengths and weaknesses of four salient epistemological orientations in the field – positivism, relativism, interpretivism, and intersubjectivism – to identify the characteristics of a theoretically-informed epistemology for social science.

In a survey of information theory and some of its implications, Warren Weaver has proposed a distinction between engineering noise and semantic noise. Ordinary Spanish usage reflects this distinction quite neatly. If A speaks to B and B responds with no entiendo, it means ‘I have not heard your words, because of interfering sound or lack of attention; please transmit the same message again’; if he responds with no comprendo, it means ‘I heard you all right, but what I heard (...) doesn't make sense; please paraphrase or explain.’ Channel noise, thus, is the responsible factor when that which leaves a transmitter is not that which reaches the receiver; semantic noise is a discrepancy between the codes used by transmitter and receiver. (shrink)

Cutting below tho verbal forms of literature in search of the deep lying philosophy of the mas is a procedure destined both to deepen and interest the mind. Mr. Kruger has chosen, from the pages of John Milton, a passage provocative of thought in that it links with Molinism the name of this great artist of literature.