The self-other asymmetry is a prominent and important feature of common-sense morality. It is also a feature that does not find a home in standard versions of act-utilitarianism. Theodore Sider has attempted to make a place for it by constructing a novel version of utilitarianism that incorporates the asymmetry into its framework. So far as I know, it is the best attempt to bring the two together. I argue, however, that Sider's ingenious attempt fails. I also offer a diagnosis that (...) explains why no theory that remains recognizably act-utilitarian can successfully incorporate the asymmetry. (shrink)

The volumes published in the series "Beiträge zur Altertumskunde" comprise monographs, collective volumes, editions, translations and commentaries on various topics from the fields of Greek and Latin Philology, Ancient History, Archeology, Ancient Philosophy as well as Classical Reception Studies. The series thus offers indispensable research tools for a wide range of disciplines related to Ancient Studies.

The problem of how a mixture of chemicals can spontaneously transform themselves into even a simple living organism remains one of the great outstanding challenges to science. Various primordial soup theories have been proposed in which chemical self- organization brings about the required level of complexity. Major conceptual obstacles remain, however, such as the emergence of the genetic code, and the “chicken-and-egg” problem concerning which came first: nucleic acids or proteins. Currently fashionable is the so-called RNA world theory, which casts (...) RNA in the role of both chicken and egg. Other theories assume that protein chemistry and even clay crystal life came before nucleic acids. To be fully successful, a theory of biogenesis has to explain not merely the emergence of molecular replication and chemical complexity, but the crucial information content and information processing capabilities of the living cell. (shrink)

This is Chapter 5 of my Commonsense Consequentialism: Wherein Morality Meets Rationality. In this chapter, I argue that those who wish to accommodate typical instances of supererogation and agent-centered options must deny that moral reasons are morally overriding and accept both that the reason that agents have to promote their own self-interest is a non-moral reason and that this reason can, and sometimes does, prevent the moral reason that they have to sacrifice their self-interest so as to do more to (...) promote the interests of others from generating a moral requirement. Furthermore, I argue that given that an act’s deontic status of both moral and non-moral reasons, the consequentialist must adopt dual-ranking act-consequentialism. I then defend dual-ranking act-consequentialism against a number of objections. (shrink)

Excerpt from The Harmonial Philosophy: A Compendium and Digest of the Works of Andrew Jackson Davis, the Seer of Poughkeepsie His Natural and Divine Revelations, Great Harmonia, Spiritual Inter course, Answers to ever-recurring Questions, Inner Life, Summer. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst (...) repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works. (shrink)

Stephen Davies taught philosophy at the University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand. His research specialty is the philosophy of art. He is a former President of the American Society for Aesthetics. His books include Definitions of Art (Cornell UP, 1991), Musical Meaning and Expression (Cornell UP, 1994), Musical Works and Performances (Clarendon, 2001), Themes in the Philosophy of Music (OUP, 2003), Philosophical Perspectives on Art (OUP, 2007), Musical Understandings and Other Essays on the Philosophy of Music (OUP, 2011), The Artful (...) Species: Aesthetics, Art, and Evolution (OUP, 2012), The Philosophy of Art (Wiley-Blackwell, 2016 second ed.), and Adornment: What Self-decorations Tells Us about Who We Are, (Bloomsbury Academic, 2020). (shrink)

Contains fourteen essays and an introduction addressing the main areas of scholarly interest for Richard W. Davis, Professor Emeritus, Washington University, St Louis Questions how individuals envision the public good in modern Britain and how, through religious and moral beliefs, coupled with wisdom and political savvy, they can improve the public good through the ever-changing nineteenth century political institutions Essays range from studies of local electoral politics and parliamentary reform campaign to national political party organization, high politics and the (...) role religion and empire played in the creation of national policy Examines the influence of individuals on the political process through their professional work in historical and philosophical writing, journalism and missionary work at home and abroad Provides new original research in the area of modern British political history together in Parliamentary History. (shrink)

A Scientific Approach The facts detailed in this briefing are the results of scientific exploration of terror networks and sacred values and their association to political violence. The research is sponsored by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research and the National Science Foundation.

In this interview, professor Davis discusses the evolution of his career and research interests as a philosopher-economist and gives his perspective on a number of important issues in the field. He argues that historians and methodologists of economics should be engaged in the practice of economics, and that historians should be more open to philosophical analysis of the content of economic ideas. He suggests that the history of recent economics is a particularly fruitful and important area for research exactly (...) because it is an open-ended story that is very relevant to understanding the underlying concerns and concepts of contemporary economics. He discusses his engagement with heterodox economics schools, and their engagement with a rapidly changing mainstream economics. He argues that the theory of the individual is “the central philosophical issue in economics” and discusses his extensive contributions to the issue. (shrink)

This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.

Heidegger's writings are among the most formidable in recent philosophy. The pivotal concepts of his thought are for many the source of both fascination and frustration. Yet any student of philosophy needs to become acquainted with Heidegger's thought. "Martin Heidegger: Key Concepts" is designed to facilitate this. Each chapter introduces and explains a key Heideggerian concept, or a cluster of closely related concepts. Together, the chapters cover the full range of Heidegger's thought in its early, middle, and later phases.

The poetry and journalistic essays of Katherine Tillman often appeared in publications sponsored by the American Methodist church. Collected together for the first time, her works speak to the struggles and triumphs of African-American women.

This article investigates the moderating effects of organizational social consciousness on the natural environmental competency and innovativeness relationship. Organizational social consciousness reflects the organization’s awareness of its place and contribution to the larger system in which it exists and is developed through an organization’s social responsibility, ethics, culture, corporate values, and the view of its stakeholders. Through our study of key strategic decision makers from organizations located in the USA, we operationalize organizational social consciousness and demonstrate the efficacy of this (...) construct in relation to the organizational-level constructs of environmental management competency and innovativeness. Our results reveal that organizational social consciousness positively strengthens the natural environmental competency to organizational innovativeness relationship. (shrink)

Humanism offers students a clear and lucid introductory guide to the complexities of Humanism, one of the most contentious and divisive of artistic or literary concepts. Showing how the concept has evolved since the Renaissance period, Davies discusses humanism in the context of the rise of Fascism, the onset of World War II, the Holocaust, and their aftermath. Humanism provides basic definitions and concepts, a critique of the religion of humanity, and necessary background on religious, sexual and political themes of (...) modern life and thought, while enlightening the debate between humanism, modernism and antihumanism through the writings and works of such key figures as Pico Erasmus, Milton, Nietzsche, and Foucault. (shrink)

Novelty—the value of saying something new—appears to be a good-making feature of a philosophical contribution. Beyond this, however, novelty functions as a metric of success. This paper challenges the presumption and expectation that a successful philosophical contribution will be a novel one. As I show, the pursuit of novelty is neither as desirable nor as feasible as it might initially seem.

This paper argues that Heidegger’s deconstruction of metaphysics lends itself to an environmental ethic of non-violent ‘dwelling’. I trace the instrumental mode of ‘being-in-the-world’ to the beginning of Western metaphysics in ancient Greece. The root of the problem is the technological understanding of things as objects and truth as objectivity. Heidegger indicates a more primordial understanding of truth as ‘event’. For Heidegger, the emergence of a non-instrumental way of life depends upon the extent to which the technological ‘framing’ of nature (...) nature is clearly perceived. I suggest that while Heidegger’s post-foundational ethic does indeed envision a non-instrumental relation to nature, it remains unclear how such an alternative way of life may be politically achieved. (shrink)

I argue that Sider's view does succeed in accommodating the kind of maximization he is after, according to which the agent is required to maximize overall welfare with the single exception of his own welfare. I then argue that Splawn's argument highlights some interesting and important ways in which Sider's view fail to capture basic common-sense intuitions concerning the self-other asymmetry, but offer a different diagnosis of the source of the problem.

This work intends to apprehend and emphasize the contribution of image-processing techniques and computer vision in the treatment of clay-based material known in Meknes region. One of the various characteristics used to describe clay in a qualitative manner is porosity, as it is considered one of the properties that with “kill or cure” effectiveness. For this purpose, we use scanning electron microscopy images, as they are considered the most powerful tool for characterising the quality of the microscopic pore (...) structure of porous materials. We present various existing methods of segmentation, as we are interested only in pore regions. The results show good matching between physical estimation and Voronoi diagram-based porosity estimation. (shrink)

This review article critiques Stephen Davies' The Artful Species: Aesthetics, Art, and Evolution.

This book presents a collection of contemporary discourses that reconsider the relationship of democracy as a political ideology and American ideal and education as the foundation of preparing democratic citizens in America.

One of postmodernism's toughest challenges to Christian thought is its wholesale rejection of metaphysics. This profound book meets the challenge squarely, offering a surer foundation for the idea of being and a new theological perspective of supreme relevance to today's world. In a brilliant turn of postmodern thought itself, Oliver Davies argues for a renewal of metaphysics based on a dynamic new understanding of ontology as narrative and performance. His repairing of the Western metaphysical tradition is grounded both in the (...) divine self-naming in Exodus -- which, for the rabbis, identified God's presence in the world with God's compassionate acts -- and in the compassionate resistance of Etty Hillesum and Edith Stein to the violence of the Holocaust. Building on a new metaphysics of compassion that is attentive to the deepest histories of the contemporary world, Davies offers a renewed systematic theology focused on divine speech and God's compassionate relation to human culture. (shrink)

This essay considers how current theories of narrative inform how we read the complexities of the relationship among Abraham, Sarah, and Hagar in Gen. 16.4-5. It argues that, while we may no longer have access to the oral counter narrative of Gen. 16.4-5, deconstructive criticism, which–among other things – teaches us that a text can be most revealing in those places in which it is most notably silent, may allow for a possible recovery of the oral, unrecorded narrative of the (...) servant Hagar. (shrink)

This edited collection brings together world-leading authors writing about a wide range of issues related to responsibility and healthcare, and from a variety of perspectives. Alongside a comprehensive introduction by the editors outlining the scope of the relevant debates, the volume contains 14 chapters, split into four sections. This volume pushes forward a number of important debates on responsibility and its role in contemporary healthcare. -/- The first and second groups of chapters focus, respectively, on (a) the potential justification and (...) (b) nature of 'responsibility-sensitive' policies in healthcare provision; in other words, policies that would hold some patients responsible for their ill health via differences in treatment. These sections include empirically-informed work on public opinion, chapters linking responsibility in healthcare with ongoing debates around criminal responsibility, and new conceptual and theoretical work on the details of responsibility-sensitive policies. -/- The third set of chapters turns in a more detailed way to the issues of whether, and how, we can be responsible for our health, presenting novel challenges and questions for those who would advocate responsibility-sensitive policies in healthcare. -/- Finally, questions of responsibility in medicine do not end with those receiving treatment. The fourth group of chapters broadens the volume's focus to think about responsibility of individuals other than patients, including medical professionals and policymakers, including specific consideration of the role of responsibility during pandemics. (shrink)

The equation P = NP concerns algorithms for deciding membership in sets. The consensus is that P ≠ NP, although some prominent experts guess otherwise.

This groundbreaking book is the first to provide a critical overview of the relationship between contemporary ceramics and curatorial practice in museum culture. Ceramic objects form a major part of museum collections, with connections to anthropology, archaeology and other disciplines that engage with the cultural and social history of humankind. In recent years museums have provided the impetus for cutting-edge artistic practice, either as a response to particular collections, or as part of exhibitions. But the question of how museums have (...) staged contemporary ceramics and how ceramic artists respond to museum collections has not been the subject of published research to date. This book examines how ceramic artists have, over the last decade, begun to animate museum collections in new ways, and reflects on the impact that these new initiatives have had in the broad context of visual culture. Ceramics in the Expanded Field is the culmination of a three-year AHRC funded project, and reflects its major findings. It brings together leading international voices in the field of ceramics, research undertaken throughout the project and papers delivered at the concluding conference. By examining the benefits and constraints of interventions and the dialogue between ceramics and museological practice, this book will bring focus to an area of museology that has not yet been theorized, and will contribute to policy debates and art practice. (shrink)