The charges of fideism and relativism have long been leveled against Wittgensteinian philosophy of religion. However, the philosopher most influenced by Wittgenstein's understanding of religion, D. Z. Phillips, is guilty of neither fideism nor conceptual scheming. The contribution of Wittgenstein to an understanding of religious belief is much more nuanced than critics generally appreciate. Likewise, the relationship of Wittgenstein's philosophy to that of Davidson and to pragmatism, especially in its Rortyan manifestations, is shown to be friendlier than is often recognized.

Death is the destiny we all share, and this will not change. Yet the way we die, which had remained the same for many generations, has changed drastically in a relatively short time for those in developed countries with access to healthcare. For generations, if people were lucky enough to reach old age, not having died in infancy or childhood, in childbirth, in war, or by accident, they would take to bed, surrounded by loved ones who cared for them, and (...) fade into death. Most likely, they would have seen their parents and grandparents die the same way, and so this manner of dying would be familiar: it was part of the natural cycle of life. Now less than 25 per cent of Americans die at home, having reached much older ages than people would have dreamed of in past generations, often after surviving many illnesses and even diseases that would have been terminal for their grandparents. We are fortunate to live (and die) today, supported by myriad scientific, medical, and technological advancements, however we also face new problems as a result of the new way in which we die. We can no longer anticipate a peaceful waning at home with family. We know our lives will likely end in hospitals likely after we have endured grueling treatments to prolong life. We have to decide what decisions we want our loved ones, or care-givers, to make when we cannot choose for ourselves. We have to think about whether in any circumstances we would seek physician-assisted death. We know we face other questions as well, but we may not even know where to start. In the face of these decisions, we can feel daunted and afraid. The best remedy is information and planning. In this book, Gregory Eastwood - a physician who has cared for dying patients, served as an ethics consultant, and taught end of life issues to medical and other health profession students - draws from his substantial experience with patients and families to provide the information that will help us think clearly about the choices and issues we will face at the end of our own lives, and when faced with the deaths of our loved ones. With sensitivity and profound insight, Eastwood guides us through all the important questions about death and dying in straightforward, clear language, enhanced by real-life stories. Throughout, he shows us how we can take ownership of the way we want to die, when we must die, and feel more in control as death approaches. (shrink)

Five experiments investigated how people use categories to make inductions about objects whose categorisation is uncertain. Normatively, they should consider all the categories the object might be in and use a weighted combination of information from all the categories: bet-hedging. The experiments presented people with simple, artificial categories and asked them to make an induction about a new object that was most likely in one category but possibly in another. The results showed that the majority of people focused on the (...) most likely category in making inductions, although there was a group of consistently normative responders who used information from both categories (about 25% of our college population). Across experiments the overall pattern of results suggests that performance in the task is improved not by understanding the underlying principles of bet-hedging but by increasing the likelihood that multiple categories are in working memory at the time of the induction. We discuss implications for improving everyday inductions. (shrink)

This work is essentially an attempt to refute the theory of legal positivism, and at the same time to advance the author's own somewhat unique formulation of natural law theory. Though Juha-Pekka Rentto makes a comprehensive and almost eclectic use of authors as diverse as, for example, Thomas Aquinas and Lawrence Kohlberg, he seems determined to approach legal philosophy from the natural law tradition, while adding a few notable exceptions of his own. In his opinion, natural law theories which attempt (...) to build a system on some one first principle ignore the practical importance of natural law. In fact, he will go on to say later that "rule-like principles are otiose in that they either are against the appropriate reasons for action, or they add nothing to them". His own via media involves an interesting twist on Finnis's theory of practical reason. (shrink)

Righteous Indignation explores the philosophy of Christian anger—for example what anger is, what it means for God to be angry, and when anger is morally appropriate. The contributors examine several dimensions of the topic, including divine wrath, imprecatory psalms, and the proper place of anger in the life of Christians today.

The Philosophy of Forgiveness, Volume IV: Christian Perspectives on Forgiveness is a collection of essays that explores different Christian views on forgiveness. Each essay takes up a different topic, such as the nature of divine forgiveness, the basis for forgiving our enemies, and the limits of forgiveness. In some chapters, the views of different philosophers and theologians are explored, figures such as St. John Climacus, Bonaventure, and Nietzsche. In other chapters, the concept of forgiveness is analyzed in light of historical (...) events, such as the Nickel Mines shooting, the Charleston shooting, and the Armenian genocide. The contributors to the volume come from different backgrounds, including philosophy, theology, and psychology. The essays are written for scholars in the humanities, social sciences, and theology, as well as graduate students and upper-division undergraduate students. (shrink)

This work is essentially a history of the scholastic conception of dialectica from Garlandus Compotista to William Ockham, with an eye to rendering intelligible the puzzling nature of late medieval treatises on logical obligations. Such treatises seem to countenance violations of fundamental and indisputable logical rules, for example, that a disjunction is false if both of its disjuncts are false. In large part to explain this apparent surd development in medieval logic, Eleonore Stump has collected into a single volume twelve (...) separately published essays. Together they form an interesting and convincing argument. (shrink)

Six experiments investigated variables predicted to influence subjects’ tendency to classify items by a single property instead of overall similarity, following the paradigm of Norenzayan et al., who found that European Americans tended to give more “logical” rule-based responses. However, in five experiments with Mechanical Turk subjects and undergraduates at an American university, we found a consistent preference for similarity-based responding. A sixth experiment with Korean undergraduates revealed an effect of instructions, also reported by Norenzayan et al., in which classification (...) instructions led to majority rule-based responding but similarity instructions led to overall similarity grouping. Our American subjects showed no such difference and used similarity more overall. We conclude that Americans do not have a preference for rule responding in classification and discuss the differences between tasks that reliably show strong rule or unidimensional preferences in contrast to this classification paradigm. (shrink)

Christine Korsgaard argues for the moral status of animals and our obligations to them. She grounds this obligation on the notion that we share a common identity, our animal nature, with them and that animal pain represents a public reason that binds us; nevertheless, her distinctive attempt to enlist Kantian arguments to account for our obligations to animals has a startling implication that she fails to adequately consider: that we have direct duties to plants as well.

Leave No Trace (LNT) has become the official education and outreach policy for managing recreational use in parks and wilderness areas throughout the United States. It is based on seven core principles that seek to minimize impacts from backcountry recreational activities such as hiking, climbing, and camping. In this paper, we review the history and current practice of Leave No Trace in the United States, including its complex role in the global political economy of outdoor recreation. We conclude by suggesting (...) a new framework for building on the successes of Leave No Trace, while moving beyond its self-imposed limitations, and recapturing wilderness recreation as a more collaborative, participatory, productive, democratic, and radical form of political action. (shrink)

This paper explores the scriptural and theological reasons given by Jehovah's Witnesses (JWs) to refuse blood transfusions. Julian Savulescu and Richard W Momeyer argue that informed consent should be based on rational beliefs and that the refusal of blood transfusions by JWs is irrational, but after examining the reasons given by JWs, I challenge the claim that JW beliefs are irrational. I also question whether we should give up the traditional notion of informed consent.

For two principal reasons, this is a welcome translation of Thomas Aquinas's treatment of faith. First, it is one of the very few English translations of Aquinas that has heeded Aquinas's own sage advice on translating--preserve the sense of the original but adapt its style to suit the language into which it is being translated. Most anglophone translators make Aquinas appear as if he concocted a highly technical language to impress his brother Dominicans. Jordan, on the other hand, rightly understands (...) that while Aquinas uses words and phrases in very precise ways, he never does so at the expense of their common, ordinary meanings. In fact, Aquinas's precise language is unintelligible without its being seen as rooted in ordinary language and naturally developed through the philosophical and theological traditions he inherited. Thus, by avoiding the obscure Latinate English that plagues other translations and, instead, rendering Thomas into felicitous English with due attention to the sources, Jordan's translation well reflects the accessibility of the original. (shrink)

When a structure or class of structures admits an unbounded induction, we can do arithmetic on the stages of that induction: if only bounded inductions are admitted, then clearly each inductively definable relation can be defined using a finite explicit expression. Is the converse true? We examine evidence that the converse is true, in positive elementary induction . We present a stronger conjecture involving the language L consisting of all L∞ω formulas with a finite number of variables, and examine a (...) combinatorial property equivalent to “all L-definable relations are elementary”. (shrink)

The proper interpretation of Hume’s argument against miracles in Section 10 of An Inquiry concerning Human Understanding has been heavily debated. In this paper, I argue that Hume’s main argument has the intended conclusion that there can never be a sufficient justification for believing that a miracle has occurred on the basis of testimony sufficient to make it a basis for a religion. I also consider and argue against other common readings.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a middle ground in the debate over religious exemptions from measles vaccination requirements. It attempts to strike a balance between public health concerns on the one hand and religious objections on the other that avoids two equally serious errors: making religious liberty an absolute and disregarding religious beliefs altogether. Some think that the issue is straightforward: science has spoken and the benefits to public health outweigh any other concerns. The safety of the (...) community, they say, demands that everybody be vaccinated so that measles outbreaks can be prevented, but such voices often ignore the freedom of religion, which is a mistake. Using Martha Nussbaum’s work on religious liberty, this paper claims that the exemptions should be preserved if a certain level of vaccination rates can be maintained. (shrink)