. A review of community participation in school governance: An emerging culture in Australian education. British Journal of Educational Studies: Vol. 41, No. 2, pp. 134-149.

In this paper, I attempt to explain one of the most controversial views attributed to the Stoic Chrysippus: that the impossible can follow from the possible. My solution finds in Chrysippus a distinction later made by the medieval logician John Buridan: that between being possible (there being a state of affairs that may occur) and being possibly-true (there being some proposition whose truth-conditions are that state of affairs). Buridan and Chrysippus have radically opposing views on the nature of propositions. What (...) their conceptions share is the conclusion that at least some propositions must be contingent beings. They argue for this while maintaining a rigorous commitment to the view that propositions are strictly bivalent. In 2. I explain the Chrysippean passage in terms of a distinction Buridan makes explicitly. In 3. I show how the distinction follows implicitly from the Stoic theory of quantification. In 4. I compare the modality with other aspects of Stoic logic. In 5. I discuss how the distinction behaves in the future tense. (shrink)

Pain may appear to undermine the radically intentionalist view that the phenomenal character of any experience is entirely constituted by its representational content. That appearance is illusory. After categorizing versions of pain intentionalism along two dimensions, I argue that an 'objectivist' and 'non-mentalist' version is the most promising, if it can withstand two objections concerning what we say when in pain, and the distinctiveness of pain. I rebut these objections, in a way available to both opponents of and adherents to (...) the view that experiential content is entirely conceptual. (shrink)

Dictionary of Viśiṣṭādvaita school in Hindu philosophy.

This Paper Offers A New Interpretation of Phaedo 96a–103a. Plato has devoted the dialogue up to this point to a series of arguments for the claim that the soul is immortal. However, one of the characters, Cebes, insists that so far nothing more has been established than that the soul is durable, divine, and in existence before the incarnation of birth. What is needed is something more ambitious: a proof that the soul is not such as to pass out of (...) existence. According to Socrates’s initial response to Cebes at 95e8–96a1, giving such a demonstration requires a thorough investigation into “the reason for coming to be and passing away in general” (ὅλως γὰϱ δεῖ πεϱὶ γενέσεως ϰαὶ Φθοϱᾶς τὴν αἰτίαν διαπϱαγματεύσασθαι .. (shrink)

The papers in this volume bring together a number of scholars working on topics ranging from contemporary ethics to the history of philosophy. This wide scope reflects the comprehensive nature of Dietrich von Hildebrand's philosophic vision. His career includes foundational works on such subjects as ethics, philosophical method, aesthetics, and the nature of love. One struggles to imagine how Hildebrand managed to fit all this into a life that also includes extensive anti-Nazi political activism during World War II. Within this (...) broad scope of Hildebrand's work, one finds a number of important philosophical problems that beg for further development, such as his conception of personal existence, his rich and pluralistic conception of beauty, or his distinction between person and personality. In several places, however, the development of Hildebrand's thought must involve a correction or even an outright challenge to his reasoning. Each of these papers does just this, applying the insights of Hildebrand to a number of diverse philosophical problems, while also advancing and challenging his thought in various ways. Despite this wide diversity, three central issues appear again and again in these papers, and represent some of Hildebrand's most important contributions to philosophy: (i) his method of phenomenological realism, (ii) his conception of value and value-response, and (iii) his personalism. I want to provide here a brief sketch of these three areas to orient the reader before approaching the more technical details of each essay. (shrink)

Contemporary bioethical theory relies upon the concept of informed consent to protect against abuses of patient autonomy. Due to the complexity of the informed consent process, however, many patients rely more on their trust in their health care providers than they do upon their own ability to decide whether or not to give informed consent. Reformation theologian John Calvin placed a strong emphasis on the decision-maker's duty to respect the trust that others repose in the decision-maker. In keeping with Calvin's (...) concept of the duty to honor that trust, bioethics would do well to complement its current emphasis on informed consent with an emphasis on the protection of patient trust. (shrink)

This paper looks at a recent exchange concerning the human nature of Christ and the Christological anthropology of Thomas F. Torrance. In this exchange, Oliver Crisp and Christopher Woznicki offer competing readings of Torrance’s Christological anthropology. Crisp argues for a concretist understanding of Christ’s human nature while Woznicki offers an abstractist metaphysic. This paper will look at this exchange in conversation with Torrance’s work and recent work in group ontology, offering a third way forward between the impasse of Crisp’s concretism (...) and Woznicki’s abstractism which I call communal participation and argue is more in line with Torrance’s own understanding. Keywords: Christological anthropology; human nature; group ontology; participation; vicarious humanity; T. F. Torrance. (shrink)

Simon Blackburn objects that Wittgenstein's private language argument overlooks the possibility that a private linguist can equip himself with a criterion of correctness by confirming generalizations about the patterns in which his private sensations occur. Crispin Wright responds that appropriate generalizations would be too few to be interesting. But I show that Wright's calculations are upset by his failure to appreciate both the richness of the data and the range of theories that would be available to the private linguist.