Recent defenders of the Christian doctrine of eternal damnation have appealed to what I call the “No Guarantee Doctrine” (NG)—the doctrine that not evenGod can ensure both (a) that every person who is saved freely chooses to be saved and (b) that all are saved. Thomas Talbott challenges NG on the groundsthat anyone who is truly free will have no motive to reject God and will infallibly choose salvation. In response to critics of Talbott, I argue that in order toavoid (...) Talbott ’s critique of NG, its defenders must adopt a view of human freedom in which there is a random element in choice. And if free choice involvessuch an element, then it is within God’s power to achieve a mathematical guarantee of freely chosen salvation for all. Thus, NG must be rejected. (shrink)

Recently, Eric Yang and Stephen Davis have defended what they call the separationist view of hell against an objection leveled by Jeremy Gwiazda by invoking the concept of hard-heartedness as an account of why some would eternally choose to remain in hell. Gwiazda’s objection to the separationist view of hell is an instance of a broader strategy of objection invoked by other universalists to argue that God could guarantee universal salvation while respecting libertarian freedom—an objection that Kronen and I (...) have dubbed the Infinite Opportunity Argument. Yang’s and Davis’s reply to Gwiazda thus amounts to a response to the Infinite Opportunity Argument, and the merits of their reply bear on the feasibility of the freedom-respecting version of universalism that the argument supports. I argue that the kind of hard-heartedness that must be posited in order to derail the Infinite Opportunity Argument—the kind of absolute hard-heartedness that Yang and Davis explicitly invoke—suffers significant problems that prevent it from posing a serious challenge to freedom-respecting universalism. (shrink)

God gave Scripture to his people for many reasons. Two of the most important are the subversive and the therapeutic. This article concentrates on the former. All humans are blind to the extent of their alienation from God, others, and themselves. Christians have begun the process of salvation, part of which includes growth in theocentric self-awareness, and God uses Scripture to promote this growth. Christians, however, face a formidable challenge at this point, because in our remaining sin, we can also (...) distort Scripture for sinful purposes. As a result, God has to use Scripture subversively and indirectly in order to enable Christians to read the Bible to promote the healing of inward deepening. A case for this agenda will be made from the Bible itself and the Christian tradition. (shrink)

Antoine Arnauld is well known as a passionate defender of Jansenism, specifically Jansen’s view on the relation between freedom and grace. Jansen and, early in his career Arnauld, advance compatibilist views of human freedom. The heart of their theories is that salvation depends on both the irresistible grace of God and the free acts of created things. Yet, in Arnauld’s mature writings, his position on freedom seems to undergo a significant shift. And, by 1689, his account of freedom no longer (...) seems Jansenist. In this paper, we offer an interpretation of Arnauld’s mature view on freedom, with a focus on his claim that freedom requires a “power to the opposite.” In order to see what he means by this, we look to several under-examined texts in his corpus for clues about how he understands the related topics of “infallible determination,” habit, and primo-primi motus. We argue that Arnauld’s mature view on freedom should be understood as libertarian. (shrink)

After rejecting substance dualism, some naturalists embrace patternism. It states that persons are bodies and that bodies are material machines running abstract person programs. Following Aristotle, these person programs are souls. Patternists adopt four-dimensionalist theories of persistence: Bodies are 3D stages of 4D lives. Patternism permits at least six types of life after death. It permits quantum immortality, teleportation, salvation through advanced technology, promotion out of a simulated reality, computational monadology, and the revision theory of resurrection.

In arecent article, Michael Murray critiques several versions of universalism-that is, the doctrine that in the end all persons are saved. Of particular interest to Murray is Thomas Talbott’s version of universalism (called SU1 by Murray), which puts forward a strategy for ensuring universal salvation that purports to preserve the autonomy of the creatures saved. Murray argues that, on the contrary, the approach put forward in SU1 is not autonomy-preserving at all. I argue that this approach preserves the autonomy of (...) the creature at least as well as the approach posited by the traditional doctrine of hell. Since SU1 clearly does more to preserve the well-being of the creature, it follows that, on the assumption that God loves all His creatures, SU1 is preferable to the doctrine of hell. (shrink)

The limits and secularity of political life have been signature themes of modern Augustinianism, often couched in non-theological language of realism and the role of religion in public life. In dialogue with Gilbert Meilaender, this article inverts and theologizes that interest by asking how Augustinian pilgrims might characterize the positive relation of political history to saving history and the ways in which political action in time might teach us something about the nature of salvation that comes to us from beyond (...) history. This relation of continuity and discontinuity eludes dogmatic formulation, but the goal of the present article is to see where a shared Augustinianism and a shared commitment to aspects of the liberal political tradition might find illuminating disagreement. (shrink)

Pantheism claims: (1) there exists an all-inclusive unity; and (2) that unity is divine. I review three current and scientifically viable ontologies to see how pantheism can be developed in each. They are: (1) materialism; (2) Platonism; and (3) class-theoretic Pythagoreanism. I show how each ontology has an all-inclusive unity. I check the degree to which that unity is: eternal, infinite, complex, necessary, plentiful, self-representative, holy. I show how each ontology solves the problem of evil (its theodicy) and provides for (...) salvation (its soteriology). I conclude that Platonism and Pythagoreanism have the most divine all-inclusive unities. They support sophisticated contemporary pantheisms. (Published Online February 17 2004). (shrink)

Eric Voegelin and Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy provide an interesting and important contrast in their Augustinian diagnoses of modernity and the role of revolution and faith in salvation in history. For Eric Voegelin the desolation of modern humanity springs from its unreal elevation of the self – its Gnostic inheritance – and its immanentization of God and the eschaton into history and progress. In keeping with this is the moderns’ failure to appreciate that the symbolic order required for a fulfilling (...) human community and experience relies upon the necessity of maintaining God as a beyond in relation to society, man and world. Rosenstock-Huessy is also concerned that the failure of the moderns to understand the sign and significance of God is disastrous. And like Voegelin he is deeply opposed to modern Gnosticism and the pathologies that emerge from it, but Rosenstock-Huessy is also interested in something that is not Voegelin’s primary concern – mainly the role of providence in history. (shrink)

Eric Voegelin and Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy provide an interesting and important contrast in their Augustinian diagnoses of modernity and the role of revolution and faith in salvation in history. For Eric Voegelin the desolation of modern humanity springs from its unreal elevation of the self – its Gnostic inheritance – and its immanentization of God and the eschaton into history and progress. In keeping with this is the moderns’ failure to appreciate that the symbolic order required for a fulfilling (...) human community and experience relies upon the necessity of maintaining God as a beyond in relation to society, man and world. Rosenstock-Huessy is also concerned that the failure of the moderns to understand the sign and significance of God is disastrous. And like Voegelin he is deeply opposed to modern Gnosticism and the pathologies that emerge from it, but Rosenstock-Huessy is also interested in something that is not Voegelin’s primary concern – mainly the role of providence in history. (shrink)

The second part of the book discusses the Platonic Forms as an aspect of an increasingly rational culture.

Preface -- Introduction -- How to value democracy -- Paper stones, the ethics of participation -- Philosophers-citizens -- Superdeliberators -- What is it like to be a citizen? -- Democracy's ethics of belief -- The division of democratic labor -- Representing principles -- Democratic complicity -- Not in my name, macrodemocratic design.

There have been times in the history of ethical theory, especially in this century, when moral realism was down, but it was never out. The appeal of this doctrine for many moral philosophers is apparently so strong that there are always supporters in its corner who seek to resuscitate the view. The attraction is obvious: moral realism purports to provide a precious philosophical good, viz., objectivity and all that this involves, including right answers to (most) moral questions, and the possibility (...) of knowing those answers. In the last decade, moral realism has re-entered the philosophical ring in powerful-looking naturalistic form. ln this paper we provide a dialectical overview: we situate the new wave position itself, and also our objections to it, in the context of the evolving program of philosophical naturalism in 20th century analytic philosophy. We seek to show that although this new contender might initially look like championship material, it succumbs to punches surprisingly similar to those that knocked out the old-fashioned versions of naturalist moral realism. (shrink)

The law of desire has been proposed in several forms, but its essential claim is that agents always act on their strongest proximal action motivation. This law has threatening consequences for human freedom, insofar as it greatly limits agents’ ability to do otherwise given their motivational state. It has proven difficult to formulate a version that escapes counterexamples and some categorically deny its truth. Noticeable by its absence in the literature is any attempt to provide an argument for the law (...) of desire – I propose such an argument here. It is noted that Sripada's “divided mind” theory of willpower provides a counterexample to the version of the law of desire my argument defends, but I note that a reformulated version of the law of desire survives this critique. I conclude that there is a serious case for the law of desire, and note the broader implications of this. (shrink)

This book uncovers a logical structure that is common to many, if not all, of the kinds posited by scientific taxonomies. Specification relations, such as those holding between determinates and determinables (determination), are central to this logical investigation of kinds. The species–genus relation is a familiar specification relation for substantival kinds, but this book focuses on adjectival kinds—whose instances are properties—instead. Determination relations are then used to structure kinds at the same level of abstraction into property spaces, which in turn (...) leads to a theory for individuating properties (tropes). These determination relations are contrasted with realization relations, the latter being the favored way of understanding the connection between the mental and the physical. Particular attention is given to the distinction between multiple realizability and multiple determination, and it is argued that determination and realization are mutually exclusive. The claim that multiple realizability entails various senses of autonomy is defended from various reductionist challenges. These theories of determination and realization then provide general standards for establishing the autonomy of the special sciences or, conversely, their reduction. (shrink)

How did the value of freedom become so closely associated with the institution of the market? Why did the idea of market freedom hold so little appeal before the modern period and how can we explain its rise to dominance? In The Invention of Market Freedom, Eric MacGilvray addresses these questions by contrasting the market conception of freedom with the republican view that it displaced. After analyzing the ethical core and exploring the conceptual complexity of republican freedom, MacGilvray shows (...) how this way of thinking was confronted with, altered in response to, and finally overcome by the rise of modern market societies. By learning to see market freedom as something that was invented, we can become more alert to the ways in which the appeal to freedom shapes and distorts our thinking about politics. (shrink)

In a large and impressive body of published work, Quayshawn Spencer has meticulously articulated and defended a metaphysical project aimed at resuscitating a biological conception of race—one free from many of the pitfalls of biological essentialism. If successful, such a project would be highly rewarding, since it would provide a compelling response to philosophers who have denied the genuine existence of race while avoiding the very dangers that they sought to avoid. The aim of this paper is to subject those (...) moves to careful scrutiny and thereby appraise the prospects for a new biologism about race. (shrink)

It is often said that the same particles can simultaneously make up two or more material objects that differ in kind and in their mental, biological and other qualitative properties. Others wonder how objects made of the same parts in the same arrangement and surroundings could differ in these ways. I clarify this worry and show that attempts to dismiss or solve it miss its point. At most one can argue that it is a problem we can live with.

The primary argument against mereological singularism—the view that definite plural noun phrases like ‘the students’ refer to “set-like entities”—is that it is ultimately incoherent. The most forceful form of this charge is due to Barry Schein, who argues that singularists must accept a certain comprehension principle which entails the existence of things having the contradictory property of being both atomic and non-atomic. The purpose of this paper is to defuse Schein’s argument, by noting three necessary and independently motivated restrictions on (...) the metalinguistic predicates ‘atom’ and ‘non-atom’: both are sort, property, and context-relative. With these restrictions in place, Schein’s problematic assumption becomes evident: his presumed singularist analysis of ‘non-atom’ conflates the metalanguage with the meta-metalanguage, i.e. the language used to talk about the metalanguage. (shrink)

We develop a framework for understanding how lack of clarity in business press coverage of corporate social responsibility functions as a mediated and emergent form of strategic ambiguity. Many stakeholders expect CSR to exhibit clarity, consistency, and discursive closure. But stakeholders also expect CSR to conform to varying degrees of both formal and substantive rationality. These diverse expectations conflict with each other and change over time. A content analysis of press coverage in Denmark suggests that the business media reflect and (...) amplify the ambiguity generated by these shifting demands. We propose that this very public lack of discursive closure provides strategic advantages to CSR stakeholders by rendering the concept of CSR adaptable, resilient, and meaningful to diverse interests. From this perspective, strategic ambiguity emerges from a relational and mediated process, not from the direct intentions of individual stakeholders. Our framework suggests that CSR is best understood not as a clear or consistent agenda, but rather as a forum for sensemaking, diversity of opinion, and debate over the conflicting social norms and expectations attached to corporate activity. (shrink)

To date, emotion research has primarily focused on the experience and display of the emoter. However, of equal, if not more, importance is how such displays impact and guide the behavior of an observer. We incorporate a functionalist framework of emotion to examine the development of differential responding to discrete emotion, theorize on what may facilitate its development, and hypothesize the functions that may underlie such behavioral responses. Although our review is focused primarily on development, the theoretical and methodological ideas (...) laid out are relevant for researchers of emotion at all ages. (shrink)

Thought: A Journal of Philosophy, EarlyView.

In this philosophy classic, which was first published in 1951, E. R. Dodds takes on the traditional view of Greek culture as a triumph of rationalism. Using the analytical tools of modern anthropology and psychology, Dodds asks, "Why should we attribute to the ancient Greeks an immunity from 'primitive' modes of thought which we do not find in any society open to our direct observation?" Praised by reviewers as "an event in modern Greek scholarship" and "a book which it would (...) be difficult to over-praise," _The Greeks and the Irrational _was Volume 25 of the Sather Classical Lectures series. (shrink)

In On the Psychotheology of Everyday Life, Eric Santner puts Sigmund Freud in dialogue with his contemporary Franz Rosenzweig in the service of reimagining ethical and political life.

This book analyzes crucial episodes in the history of American higher education in order to discover the best way to rescue the humanities. It urges apologists to stop focusing on the humanistic disciplines as inculcators of poorly defined skills and envisions a globalized approach to education based on humanistic masterworks.

Statt von einem Guattari-Effekt auf Deleuze muss man von einem Guattari-Deleuze-Effekt sprechen, um ein wechselseitiges Einwirken in einem gemeinsamen Projekt zu beschreiben, das mit dem Herausgehen aus der klassischen Psychoanalyse beginnt und in den Umbau der Philosophie in der Öffnung auf ihr Außen mündet. Dieser Umbau lässt das Paradigma der Interpretation ebenso hinter sich wie jenes der Struktur. In der Kritik an Lacan vollziehen Deleuze und Guattari die Abkehr vom Postulat des Primats der Sprache als Struktur und eines durch sie (...) immer schon konstituierten und vom Realen ebenso wie von kollektiven Individuationsprozessen abgeschnittenen Subjekts. Die heterogenen Ausdrucksmaterien Hjelmslevs, die das Aufbrechen der Opposition von Sprachzeichen und Materie ermöglichen sowie die Konzepte der Wunschmaschine und mehr noch des Gefüges eröffnen den Weg hin zu einem Politisch-Werden der Philosophie als Wiederaneignung der Produktionsmittel kollektiver Subjektivität. In order to understand the collaborators' mutual impact in a joint project that began with Deleuze and Guattari's transgression of classical psychoanalysis and advanced to their complete remodeling of philosophy, the notion of a »Guattari-Deleuze-effect« is more adequate than the presumption an unilateral »Guattari-effect« upon Deleuze. Furthermore, Deleuze's and Guattari's concerted efforts leave the paradigms of »interpretation« and »structure« behind; in their critique of Lacan, Deleuze and Guattari turn away from the primate of language as structure and the postulate of an always already constituted subject that is cut off both from the real and from collective processes of individuation. Finally, the concept of a heterogeneous »matter of expression,« which, borrowed from Hjelmslev, allows opening up the opposition between linguistic sign and matter, as well as the concepts of »desiring-machine« and »assemblage«, clear the way towards a becoming-political of philosophy, understood as reappropriation of collective subjectivity's means of production. (shrink)

This paper describes a way of creating and maintaining a `dynamic encyclopedia', i.e., an encyclopedia whose entries can be improved and updated on a continual basis without requiring the production of an entire new edition. Such an encyclopedia is therefore responsive to new developments and new research. We discuss our implementation of a dynamic encyclopedia and the problems that we had to solve along the way. We also discuss ways of automating the administration of the encyclopedia.

This paper summarizes paired courses, a technique that is being used to incorporate the benefits of liberal arts into the business curriculum. This technique pairs a required business course with a liberal arts course that students take concurrently during a semester. The courses have overlapping themes and activities to build specific competencies that are desired by organizations, such as communication, critical thinking and problem solving, emotional intelligence, and organizational professionalism. These competencies are identified by exploring national surveys and conducting a (...) local survey of business professionals. The paired courses utilize a variety of exercises with the ultimate goals of building desired workplace-related skills in students and improving their practical reasoning ability. The exercises do this by strengthening students’ analytical thinking, understanding of multiple framing, and reflective exploration of meaning through various techniques. Many of the activities are explained in detail with some additional resources provided. Teachers can utilize the same activities or adapt them to their classroom. (shrink)