A key consideration in the selection of these eight titles was the scarcity of the original editions - most have never been reprinted and should therefore supplement existing library holdings of 17th and 18th century British thought. The only title published more recently, Luce's definitive biography of Berkeley, was selected because of its exceptional importance for modern scholarship - here it is included with a new introduction by David Berman.

The Repugnant Conclusion served an important purpose in catalyzing and inspiring the pioneering stage of population ethics research. We believe, however, that the Repugnant Conclusion now receives too much focus. Avoiding the Repugnant Conclusion should no longer be the central goal driving population ethics research, despite its importance to the fundamental accomplishments of the existing literature.

Ted Shotter's founding of the London Medical Group 50 years ago in 1963 had several far reaching implications for medical ethics, as other papers in this issue indicate. Most significant for the joint authors of this short paper was his founding of the quarterly Journal of Medical Ethics in 1975, with Alastair Campbell as its first editor-in-chief. In 1980 Raanan Gillon began his 20-year editorship . Gillon was succeeded in 2001 by Julian Savulescu, followed by John Harris and Soren (...) Holm in 2004, with Julian Savulescu starting his second and current term in 2011. In 2000 an additional special edition of the JME, Medical Humanities , was published, under the founding joint editorship of Martyn Evans and David Greaves. In 2003 Jane Macnaughton succeeded David Greaves as joint editor. Deborah Kirklin, under whose auspices MH became an independent journal, took over in 2008, and she was succeeded in 2013 by Sue Eckstein. This short paper offers reminiscences and reflections from the two journals’ various editors.From the start the JME was committed to clearly expressed reasoned discussion of ethical issues arising from or related to medical practice and research. In particular, both Edward Shotter and Alastair Campbell, each a cleric , were at pains to make clear that the JME was not a religious journal and that it had no sort of partisan axe to grind.Campbell's appointment as founding editor was something of a surprise, as the original intention had been to appoint a medical doctor, who could be expected to know medical practice from the inside. However, in 1972 Campbell, a Joint Secretary of the Edinburgh Medical Group, had published Moral dilemmas in medicine. …. (shrink)

Whitehead had a place for God in his comprehensive cosmological vision, and his theism has long attracted interest from some Christian theologians. But Whitehead's ideas have much wider use. Some Buddhists have found help in articulating their nontheistic vision and relating it to the current world of thought and action. In this book religious writers in seven different traditions articulate how they can benefit from Whitehead's work. So this volume demonstrates that various features of his thought can (...) contribute to many communities. According to his followers, Whitehead shows that the deepest convictions and commitments of the major religious communities can be complementary rather than in conflict. Readers of this book will see how that plays out in some detail. A Whiteheadian Hindu can recognize the truth in a Whiteheadian Judaism, and both can appreciate the insights of Chinese Whiteheadians committed to their classical thinking. Perhaps a new day in interreligious understanding has come. (shrink)

Much public policy analysis requires us to place a monetary value on the bad- ness of a premature human death. Currently dominant approaches to determining this ‘value of a life’ focus exclusively on the ‘self-regarding’ value of life — that is, the value of a person’s life to the person whose death is in question — and altogether ignore effects on other people. This procedure would be justified if, as seems intuitively plausible, other-regarding effects were negligible in comparison with self-regarding (...) ones. I argue that in the light of the issue of overpopulation, that intuitively plausible condition is at best highly questionable. Unless the world is in fact underpopulated, the social disvalue of a premature death is likely to be significantly lower than the current estimates. (shrink)

The debate between substantivalists and relationists about spacetime was given a new lease of life approximately twenty years ago, when John Earman and John Norton published an argument for the conclusion that, in the light of general relativity, substantivalism is untenable. Responses to Earman and Norton’s argument generated a proliferation of ‘substantivalisms’, and a debate between them that was, to the ears of at least some, distinctively metaphysical in character.

In I'd Rather Be Dead Than Be a Girl, John Marcus Sweeney explains a threefold thesis of a study that language influences how human beings perceive reality, that the development of theoretical constructs can help explain resistances to and possibilities for inclusive language, and that the implementation of inclusive language is an important goal for religious education." "The study begins with a description of the problem to be considered, that is, the role of sexist language in perpetuating sexual discrimination. (...) Beginning in the third chapter, insights from Alfred North Whitehead's philosophy of organism, Benjamin Lee Whorf's principle of linguistic relativity, and Jean Piaget's genetic epistemology are used to investigate the stubbornness of sexist linguistic habits and the bases for developing inclusive linguistic habits. Finally, inclusive language is shown to be important for religious education, and some strategies for implementing inclusive language are presented."--Jacket. (shrink)

This collection of essays explores the metaphysical thesis that the living world is not made up of substantial particles or things, as has often been assumed, but is rather constituted by processes. The biological domain is organised as an interdependent hierarchy of processes, which are stabilised and actively maintained at different timescales. Even entities that intuitively appear to be paradigms of things, such as organisms, are actually better understood as processes. Unlike previous attempts to articulate processual views of biology, which (...) have tended to use Alfred North Whitehead’s panpsychist metaphysics as a foundation, this book takes a naturalistic approach to metaphysics. It submits that the main motivations for replacing an ontology of substances with one of processes are to be found in the empirical findings of science. Biology provides compelling reasons for thinking that the living realm is fundamentally dynamic, and that the existence of things is always conditional on the existence of processes. The phenomenon of life cries out for theories that prioritise processes over things, and it suggests that the central explanandum of biology is not change but rather stability, or more precisely, stability attained through constant change. This edited volume brings together philosophers of science and metaphysicians interested in exploring the consequences of a processual philosophy of biology. The contributors draw on an extremely wide range of biological case studies, and employ a process perspective to cast new light on a number of traditional philosophical problems, such as identity, persistence, and individuality. (shrink)

From a discussion of Einstein’s theories to an analysis of meaning, the philosopher offers a fascinating collection of essays on a wide range of topics. This is a collection of many of Whitehead’s papers that are scattered elsewhere. It was the penultimate book he published, and represents his mature thoughts on many topics. Philosophical Library has done a great service by publishing a representative collection of his writings on the subjects of Philosophy, Education and Science. The portion on Philosophy (...) includes five papers: “Immortality”, “Mathematics and the Good”, “Process and Reality”, “John Dewey and His Influence” and the “Analysis of Meaning.” The first three chapters consist of Whitehead’s personal reflections illumined by flashes of his lively humor. They are picturesque and amusing. The remainder of the book consists of chapters on Philosophy, Education, and Science. They cover in depth his positions on many scientific and philosophical matters in an extraordinarily unified way. The final section of the book is devoted to excellent surveys of Geometry and Mathematics as well as a paper on Einstein’s theories. (shrink)

Pure Land Buddhism ascribes to Amida some of the roles ascribed to God by Whitehead. The failure of Whiteheadians to clarify how God can play these roles also leaves doubtful the claim of Pure Land Buddhism. On the other hand, Whitehead’s emphasis on perpetual perishing reinforces the original Buddhist teaching of impermanence and together they provide the basic insight for authentic life.

William James’s interest in psychical research is often treated as something of an anomaly. The fact that James took "that large group of debatable phenomena designated by such terms as ’mesmeric,’ ’psychical,’ and ’spiritualistic,’" seriously as a legitimate area of scientific inquiry seems slightly bemusing to our contemporary jaded ears. As a result, his writings collected in Essays in Psychical Research tend to be marginalized, even ignored by most serious James scholars. But American pragmatist communication theorist John Durham Peters, (...) in his innovative philosophical and cultural history of communication, Speaking into the Air, provides the key to a new appreciation of this oft-neglected work by asserting that, for James, "the question of communication was one of our time’s questions of faith." By this Peters means that James’s investigations were not simply about whether communication with the dead via mediums was scientifically possible but also and more fundamentally about the desire for authentic person-to-person or soul-to-soul connection across distances. As Peters reads James, the question of communication is fundamentally a religious one, involving issues of hope, trust, faith, and interpretation; James’s "concern was never to rule out the possibility of contact with the inhuman– beast or God." Why? Because of the difference that it made, the effects that it had. (shrink)

We explore Shelah's model‐theoretic dividing line methodology. In particular, we discuss how problems in model theory motivated new techniques in model theory, for example classifying theories by their potential (consistently with Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory with the axiom of choice (ZFC)) spectrum of cardinals in which there is a universal model. Two other examples are the study (with Malliaris) of the Keisler order leading to a new ZFC result on cardinal invariants and attempts to clarify the “main gap” by reducing the (...) dependence of certain versions on (highly independent) cardinal arithmetic. (shrink)

A cross-cultural comparsion of creativity that introduces Neo-Confucian discourse as a sophisticated dialogue partner with modern western speculative philosophy and theology.

Recovering from its obsession with the computer in the 1990's psychology realised that minds come with bodies, something that Whitehead had pointed out in the 1920's. However, the problem of how the mind and body are linked remained. Bisemiotics solves it.

The thesis of this paper is that our understanding of life, as reflected in the biological and medical sciences but also in our everyday transactions, has been hampered by an inappropriate metaphysics. The metaphysics that has dominated Western philosophy, and that currently shapes most understanding of life and the life sciences, sees the world as composed of things and their properties. While these things appear to undergo all kinds of changes, it has often been supposed that this amounts to no (...) more than a change in the spatial relations of their unchanging parts. From antiquity, however, there has been a rival to this view, the process ontology, associated in antiquity with the fragmentary surviving writings of Heraclitus. In the last century it has been especially associated with the work of the British metaphysician and logician, Alfred North Whitehead. For process ontology, what most fundamentally exists is change, or process. What we are tempted to think of as constant things are in reality merely temporary stabilities in this constant flux of change, eddies in the flux of process. My main claim in this paper will be that a metaphysics of this latter kind is the only kind adequate to making sense of the living world. After explaining in more detail, the differences between these ontological views, I shall illustrate the advantages of a process ontology with reference to the category of organism. Finally I shall explore some further implications of a process ontology for biology and for philosophy. (shrink)

Introduction I. The Aim: Defining Whitehead's Categories of Existence Ontology is the study of being or beings. But what is being? Which are the beings? ...

This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction Subjectivity Space‐Time Valuation.