In this paper I propose to examine the cognitive status of mystical experience. There are, I think, three distinct but overlapping sorts of religious experience. In the first place, there are two kinds of mystical experience. The extrovertive or nature mystic identifies himself with a world which is both transfigured and one. The introvertive mystic withdraws from the world and, after stripping the mind of concepts and images, experiences union with something which can be described as an undifferentiated unity. Introvertive (...) mysticism is a more important phenomenon than extrovertive mysticism. Numinous experiences are complex experiences involving dread, awe, wonder, and fascination. One finds oneself confronted with something which is radically unlike ordinary objects. Before its overwhelming majesty and power, one is nothing but dust and ashes. In contrasting oneself with its uncanny beauty and goodness, one experiences one's own uncleanness and ugliness. The experiences bound up with the devotional life of the ordinary believer are also religious in character. Nevertheless these more ordinary experiences should, I think, be distinguished both from numinous experiences and from mystical experiences, for they do not appear to involve the sense of immediate presence which characterises the latter. (shrink)

The falsifiability of theistic assertions no longer appears to be the burning issue it once was, and perhaps this is all to the good. For one thing, it was never entirely clear just what demand was being made of the theist. In this paper I shall not discuss the nature or legitimacy of the falsification requirement as applied to theistic assertions. Instead I shall argue that some of the reasons which have been offered to show that these assertions are not (...) falsifiable are by no means conclusive. Since the most plausible bit of anti-theistic evidence is the existence of evil, it would seem to be legitimate for us to devote our attention to arguments which are designed to show that the theist does not allow the presence of evil to count against his claims. (shrink)

How do certain social conflicts come to fall within the law? How does the law come to have its space? I argue that law emerged in British Honduras through a structure of racial differentiation. The law arrived as a mode of ordering space, bodies, and justice that realizes an immanent structure of racial difference. Racial difference thus founds the space of law. To advance this argument, I examine the record of the first criminal trial prosecuted in the place now called (...) southern Belize—for the murder of an unnamed Indigenous woman by an enslaved Black man. Through an analysis of the trial record that draws upon Jameson’s reading of Greimas’s semiotic method, I show that the standing of the trial, as well as the evaluation of evidence, hinge upon the delineation and operation of racial categories. While British colonialism has ended, these categories persist. (shrink)

The past forty years or so have witnessed a renaissance in the philosophy of religion. New tools (modal logic, probability theory, and so on) and new historical research have prompted many thinkers to take a fresh look at old topics (God’s existence, the problem of evil, faith and reason, and the like). Moreover, sophisticated examinations of contentious new issues, such as the problem of religious diversity or the role of emotions and other non-evidential factors in shaping rationally held religious beliefs, (...) have also emerged. Addressing the need for an authoritative reference work to make sense of this rapidly growing and ever more complex corpus of scholarly literature, Philosophy of Religion is a new title in the Routledge Major Works series, Critical Concepts in Philosophy. Edited by a leading scholar, it is a four-volume collection which brings together key examples of the most important recent work, together with carefully selected historical pieces needed to understand them. Volume I focuses on concepts of the divine while Volume II explores arguments for and against the existence of a divine reality, with special attention to the problem of evil, the problem of divine hiddenness, and the case for naturalism. Volume III and the first part of Volume IV are devoted to broadly epistemic issues: the cognitive value of religious experience; the proper role of evidence in the formation of religious belief; the nature of justified religious belief; and pragmatic arguments for religious belief. The remainder of Volume IV introduces some of the best recent work on religious diversity, tolerance, and the public role of religion in a pluralistic society. The Philosophy of Religion is fully indexed and has a comprehensive introduction, newly written by the editor, which places the material in its historical and intellectual context. It is an essential work of reference and is destined to be valued by scholars and students as a vital one-stop research resource. Available now at a special introductory price. This price is applicable until 3 months after publication. For more information, please contact us ( [email protected] ). (shrink)

Part I argues that ontological arguments, like other classical proofs of the existence of God, are parts of larger arguments in which they are embedded. These larger arguments include reasons supporting the proofs’ premises and responses to them, and to the proofs’ claims to validity and non-circularity, since, in the final analysis, our assessment of the proofs will express our best judgment of the cumulative force of all the considerations bearing on their overall adequacy. Part II illustrates these points by (...) examining contemporary defences of, and attacks on, one of the ontological argument’s central premises, namely, that God’s existence is logically possible. (shrink)

The doctrine of the spiritual senses has played a significant role in the history of Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox spirituality. What has been largely unremarked is that the doctrine also played a significant role in classical Protestant thought, and that analogous concepts can be found in Indian theism. In spite of the doctrine’s significance, however, the only analytic philosopher to consider it has been Nelson Pike. I will argue that his treatment is inadequate, show how the development of the (...) doctrine in Puritan thought and spirituality fills a serious lacuna in Pike’s treatment, and conclude with some suggestions as to where the discussion should go next. (shrink)

Recent students of mysticism have sharply distinguished monistic from theistic mysticism. The former is more or less identified with the empty consciousness experience and the latter with the love mysticism of such figures as Bernard of Clairvaux. I argue that a sharp distinction between the two is unwarranted. Western medieval mystics, for example, combined the apophatic theology of Dionysius the Areopagite with the erotic imagery of the mystical marriage. Their experiences were clearly theistic but integrally incorporated ”monistic moments’. I conclude (...) by discussing Nelson Pike’s claim that these monistic moments were themselves phenomenologically theistic. (shrink)

According to Jonathan Edwards, “consciousness and being are the same thing exactly.” “Nothing has any existence anywhere else…but either in created or uncreated consciousness”. The physical world, therefore, has no independent reality. “…the existence of all corporeal things is only ideas”. “The material universe exists only in the mind,” i.e., “it is absolutely dependent on the conception of the mind for its existence, and does not exist as spirits do…”. More accurately, “The substance of all bodies is the infinitely exact (...) and precise and perfectly stable idea in God’s mind together with His stable will that the same shall gradually be communicated to us and to other minds according to certain fixed and exact established methods and laws…”. (shrink)

The monotheistic religions that valorize love typically believe that their love for God should be extended to God's creatures and, in particular, to one's fellow human beings. Yet, in practice, the love of the Christian or Muslim or Hindu monotheist doesn't always extend to the love of the religious other. Precisely how, then, should the adherents of the major monotheistic religions respond to the obvious diversity of these religions? The arguments of philosophical theology largely depend on what John Henry Newman (...) called our "illative sense" or faculty of informal reasoning. Even the most fully developed illative sense can vary from one person to another, however. As a consequence, Christian, Muslim, and Hindu monotheists are unlikely to fully agree on matters of philosophical theology. I argue that this precludes neither mutual respect, though, nor a rational adherence to the philosophical and theological views of one's own tradition. (shrink)

Richard Gale has mounted the most effective attack on religious experience’s cognitive credentials in recent decades. This article explains why I am nonetheless not persuaded by it. I argue that: (1) Contrary to Gale, mystical experiences do take an objective accusative, and are therefore presumptively cognitive. (2) The tests for the veridicality of religious experience are more like those for sense experiences than Gale allows. (3) Gale’s “big” or “deep” disanalogy (viz., that “there are no analogous dimensions [to space-time] in (...) which the apparent object of a religious experience could be housed” and, as a result, no way to distinguish between religious experiences that are of numerically one and the same religious object and religious experiences “that are of merely qualitatively similar ones”) is not as devastating as he thinks. (4) Gale’s critique of my and Alston’s attempt to defuse attacks on the cognitively of religious experience by appealing to categoreal differences between the apparent objects of religious experience and sense experience is unsuccessful. (shrink)

Section I argues that theistic religions incorporate metaphysical systems and that these systems are explanatory. Section II defends these claims against D. Z. Phillips ''s objections to the epistemic realism and correspondence theory of truth which they imply. I conclude by raising questions about the status of Phillips ''s own project.

Eric Wielenberg and I agree that basic moral truths are necessarily true. But Wielenberg thinks that, because these truths are necessary, they require no explanation, and I do not: some basic moral truths are not self-explanatory. I argue that Wielenberg’s reasons for thinking that my justification of that claim is inadequate are ultimately unconvincing.

Rowe argues that if for every good world there is a better, then God is not morally perfect since no matter what world God were to create he could have done better than he did. I contend that Rowe’s argument doesn’t do justice to the role grace plays in the theist’s doctrine of creation, and respond to five new criticisms of my position that Rowe offers in Can God be Free?

In a series of influential articles published in the 1980s, Thomas Morris argued that the most promising approach to many issues in the philosophy of religion is “perfect being theology.” A philosopher who adopts it begins by construing God as a maximally perfect being and then fills the conception in by using his or her modal intuitions and intuitions concerning what properties are and are not perfections. While I am sympathetic with Morris’s program, two aspects seem problematic. More justification is (...) needed for construing God as a maximally perfect being, and the appeal to intuitions needs more support than Morris provides for it. I will comment on both difficulties. (shrink)

I distinguish between a causeless being, An essentially causeless being, And a logically necessary being, And argue that only a logically necessary being can provide an adequate answer to the question, "why do contingent and dependent beings exist?" I also argue that recent attempts to show that if a being is essentially causeless, It is logically necessary, Are unsound.

Rowe argues that if for every good world there is a better, then God is not morally perfect since no matter what world God were to create he could have done better than he did. I contend that Rowe’s argument doesn’t do justice to the role grace plays in the theist’s doctrine of creation, and respond to five new criticisms of my position that Rowe offers in Can God be Free?

Theism maintains that God is a moralagent. Classical Christian theism also maintains that God is unable tosin. The latter claim is entailed by the proposition that the being whois God is essentially God, and this proposition is one which would beendorsed by all or most classical theologians. It would thus appearthat the claim that God is unable to sin is an important, if notfundamental, part of classical Christian theism. It follows that, at acrucial point, classical Christian theism is incompatible with (...) theassumption that moral agency logically involves the ability to sin -an assumption which is an essential part of the free will defense asthat defense is normally presented. Since (as I suggested earlier) theuse of the free will defense also plays a very important role in clas-sical Christian theism, classical Christian theism would appear toexhibit a major incoherance. While the difficulty can be overcome byemploying a modified version of the free will defense, the modifiedversion is not as attractive as the original. (shrink)

This article examines Sally Wainwright's Happy Valley (BBC1, 2014–2016) in the context of recent feminist attempts to theorise the idea of a maternal subject. Happy Valley, a police series set in an economically disadvantaged community in West Yorkshire, has been seen as expanding the genre of British social realism, in its focus on strong Northern women, by giving it ‘a female voice’ (Gorton, 2016: 73). I argue that its challenge is more substantial. Both the tradition of British social realism (...) on which the series draws, and the neoliberal narratives of the family which formed the discursive context of its production, I argue, are founded on a social imaginary in which the mother is seen as responsible for the production of the selves of others, but cannot herself be a subject. The series itself, however, places at its centre an active, articulate, mobile and angry maternal subject. In so doing, it radically contests both a tradition of British social realism rooted in male nostalgia and more recent neoliberal narratives of maternal guilt and lifestyle choice. It does this through a more fundamental contestation: of the wider cultural narratives about selfhood and the maternal that underpin both. Its reflective maternal subject, whose narrative journey involves acceptance of an irrecoverable loss, anger and guilt as a crucial aspect of subjectivity, and who embodies an ethics of relationality, is a figure impossible in conventional accounts of subject and nation. She can be understood, however, in terms of recent feminist theories of the maternal. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:WAiINWRIGHT, MARI'.rAIN, AND AQUINAS ON TRANSCENDENT EXPERIENCES1 Lours RoY, O.:P. Boston College Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts WHAT COULD ALLOW thoo1ogiianis to s1ay that rbrtanJScendent expmiences we, exiplicitly or implicitly, expenienoos of God? To ooswieir tMs question fully, one would ihavie Ibo ooga;ge in :two d:iisltmot mqumi1es. Fiirsit, religious, moml, iand psyoho101 giical icristeci:a 1are required in the evtalurution of concrete oases. They ctan he found in rthe grerut spi:ritUJal wriitings (...) of humankind. Secood, one mustt have reOOUTISe to ep;iisttemo1ogiica:l :and thieo1ogiaa1 foru.ndmbions if one wianits 1to 1an.swer tb.ie questtion in. its generality. ln,thJi:s a:riticle, I shall not preserut 1tihe religious, moral, 1and psychofogica1 criteria, because I sihou1d Jrike to OOiilCelllb:iaJte on mrueillecrtUJal prohliems invohiimg tihe sooond kmd of ·consideration. I shiaill use ais 1a ISl'bar:bing-pomt 1a book on mys:ticism written by Wiilliiam J. W1ainwcight. Turr tihe purposes of ttihis ess:ay, "trlanJScenidelllt experiences" wiilil. mean whmt W1affin:WI"ight calls " mystical experienoos " or " uniJtM"Y srbrubeis." 2 The phvase wi:ll. ailso inclUJde Otito'1s " nu:minoUJs etpeirieinces," Mrusforw's " peak expeme:nces" and, vecy hrorudJy, wll experiences that do not :focus on 1a, specific tidea :but afiectively open up to the mySltery wll:uich enoompas1ses hruman li£e. 1 I am grateful to the members of the Boston Theological Society for their questions and comments on the initial version of this essay. 2See his definition, in Mysticism: A. Study of Its Nature, Cognitive Value and Moral Implications (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1981), IS. The rest of his first chapter offers a good discussion of problems of typology as well as of the distinction between descriptions and interpretations of mystical experiences. Unfortunately I cannot take account of this interesting discussion in the limits of this paper. 655 656 LOUIS ROY, O.P. In conrtending thrut my:stical experieTIJces ihav;e nnetic v:al,idity if they are ra speciiaI kind of perception, W ainw~igrhit tries to 'Settle an 1:epis1temo10-gicra1l is1sue; ill downplaying "doctrina1l con-.sideration:s" and iJn rejeobing ",a thieo1ogical op~nion whioh cannoit he esbaiblished ihy philosoplhi1oal rea1s10n," 3 he suggesit,s 1bhat his oolJJ!teTIJtiion can 1and should he 1supp01rted only by philosophioal a11gumelJJ!t1s. In thi'S esisay, I intend 1to ques1truon thi:s two.fo1d 1tlhesis of Wwinwrrtiight'1s 1and to explore an albernartive. Wa:inwright, whose manner of dea1ing wirbh iinitellectuaJ proh1ems 1acoo,rds with \the p11esent-day main lme in Ang1o-American philosophy of re1i§ion,4 non:ebheless pays metiiculou:s a.trbention Ito neoscho1a1s1tic theori!es of mys1tiioism in Chapter 4 of his hook. Such 1an a;t1t:empt 1at serious diJalogue is of specia,l :intel'es1t since :i:t illu:stria1tes the diffioulty of finding a mee1ting ground for three qUJite different scho1w1·Jy wo,rlds: the p0:s1t-rpie1t~st one, wihich I regard a,s W,ruinwr.ighit'·s, modern sohoilais1t1icrsm, and Thomas Aquinas. A1though W1a1inwr1igh1t does not refer 1 to the lat:ter's views on the.topic, these views nev:erthe1e:s,s de:serve examination bo1th 1a1s the sou11oe of neoscho:iJa,stic 1theorie1s and 1as conti :ia:sting in 1s1 evera1 111espects wiith,them. The first pa~t of my paper will sketch three of the intellec1tuaJ contexits in which triam:soendefll!t experi!enoes may be discussed. The second part will highlight some features of Aquinrus's episitmnology and theo1ogy of gmce which whll enable us fo dertel'ITl!iDJe 1 at whait levels of cogn:iition experienceis of 1t11amiscendence should be s]tua1ted 1 and in what 1s1ense they may rbe s1aid to he experielll!ceis of God. 'Iihe third rpart wm presie111t how Thomais envisages the role of love :in 1the affective knowledge tha1t rbe1ieviers i;eceiive of God. F1inailly, the fomlth pamt will indicrabe the modial~ty of such lmowledge, namely, the dimect a1iva:renerss of orur aets and fee1ings of 1ove. a Wainwright, 162-163 and 180. 4 Exemplified by such authors as John Hick, Stephen Katz, Ninian Smart, Walter T. Stace, R. C. Zaehner. TRANSCENDENT EXPERIENCES 657 I. Three lnterprretative Contexts Since Schleiermadher, moist German... (shrink)

Many believe that objective morality requires a theistic foundation. I maintain that there are sui generis objective ethical facts that do not reduce to natural or supernatural facts. On my view, objective morality does not require an external foundation of any kind. After explaining my view, I defend it against a variety of objections posed by William Wainwright, William Lane Craig, and J. P. Moreland.

A scholarly edition of Volume 1 of The Clarendon Edition of the Works of John Locke: A Paraphrase and Notes on the Epistles of St. Paul: Corinthians, Romans, Ephesians by Arthur Wainwright. The edition presents an authoritative text, together with an introduction, commentary notes, and scholarly apparatus.

In Part I of this paper, I argued that the mystical experiences of Teresa of Avila are well explained by the anthropological theory of I. M. Lewis. In Part II, I discuss how the causal gap between the social circumstances identified by Lewis and individual phenomenology can be filled in. I then show that Lewis's theory, thus supplemented, is a genuine competitor to the theistic understanding of mystical experience, and that it is much more strongly confirmed by the available evidence (...) than the latter view. If that is right, then Alston and Wainwright, among others, are mistaken in claiming that science cannot offer serious competition to theism in this arena. (shrink)

In Part I of this paper, I took up a challenge posed by Alston , Wainwright , Yandell , and other theists who hold the rather natural view that mystical experiences provide perceptual contact with God, roughly on a par with the access sense experience affords to the natural world. These theists recognize, at the same time, that the plausibility of this view would be significantly compromised by the possibility of scientifically explaining mystical experiences – especially if a scientific (...) explanation were incompatible with, ruled out, or made unlikely the supposition that God has anything special to do with the occurrences of these experiences. (shrink)

In this paper I respond to criticisms of the book Can God Be Free? set forth by Bruce Russell, William Wainwright, Klaas Kraay, and Michael Almeida.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:THE INCOMMUNICABILITY OF HUMAN PERSONS JOHN F. CROSBY, III Franciscan University of Steubenville Steubenville, Ohio I PROPOSE TO explore the idea that persons do not exist as replaceable specimens of or as mere instances of an ideal or type, but rather exist in some sense for their own sakes, each existing as incommunicably his or her own.1 I undertake this study in the conviction that the incommunicability of persons (...) is profoundly characteristic for them precisely as persons, and has a major role to play in any philosophy of the person. And there is an entirely different reason which attracts me to this subject. I think that most of what I have to say here can find acceptance across a broad spectrum of philosophical positions. At a time when thinkers are increasingly suspicious of universally valid truth about man, when many of them think that a vision of man is proper only to some tradition and valid only within that tradition and not beyond it, one can offer a salutary challenge to one's contemporaries by showing a centrally important truth about persons which, as I say, can be accepted by philosophers coming from the most various points of view. Suppose that you were to minimalize the death of someone by saying that at least the human species did not die with him or her, as if the immortality of the species more than compensated for the mortality of this individual : everyone understands that you would thereby radically depersonalize the deceased. Or suppose that you were grieving over the death of someone dear to you, and a friend tried to comfort you with the thought that the 1 My thanks to Josef Seifert, William Frank, Damian Fedoryka, and Katryna Fedoryka for their comments on earlier drafts of this study. The text of this article forms Chapter Two of my book, Essay on Personal Selfhood, which is close to completion. 403 404 JOHN F. CROSBY, III particular excellences of the deceased, which awakened your love, also exist in other human beings who are still living, as if you could continue to love in them what you had loved in the deceased. Again, everyone understands that if you treat people having excellences as if they were replaceable specimens of those excellences, then you lose your grip on them as persons. But why is this? Why is personhood driven out of human beings as soon as their species-membership, or their particular excellences, are thought to predominate in them? What is that incommunicability of each person which is obscured as soon as persons are thought to be only specimens? One commonly thinks that this aspect of personal selfhood has been recognized only in modern thought; in fact it was recognized already by St. Thomas Aquinas. Creatura autem rationalis divinae providentiae substat sicut secundum se gubernata et provisa, non solum propter speciem, ut aliae corruptibiles creaturae : quia individuum quod gubernatur solum propter speciem, non gubernatur propter seipsum; creatura autem rationalis propter seipsam gubernatur, ut ex dictis manifestum est. Sic igitur solae rationales creaturae directionem a Deo ad suos actus accipiunt non solum propter speciem, sed secundum individuum.2 Notice that Aquinas teaches here the metaphysical ultimacy of personal incommunicability; it exists even before God in the sense 2 " Now, a rational creature exists under divine providence as a being governed and provided for in himself, and not simply for the sake of his species, as is the case with other corruptible creatures. For the individual that is governed only for the sake of the species is not governed for its own sake, but the rational creature is governed for his own sake, as is clear from what we have said (ch. 112). And so, only rational creatures receive direction from God in their acts, not only for the species, but for the individual." Summa Contra Gentiles, III, ch. 113 (Bourke translation). By the way, Chapters 111-114 of Book III seem to me to constitute the most " personalist " passage' in the entire corpus of St. Thomas. The modern reader sees to his amazement that St. Thomas here has already made his own the Kantian idea that each person in a sense exists for his... (shrink)

Toni Morrison suggests that storytelling is a highly effective way of structuring knowledge, and that the harnessing of a clever allegory, the search for well-patterned language is a constant, provocative engagement with the contemporary world. This article considers the ways poetry, imagination, and well-patterned language are utilized in the philosophies of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Rorty, and Leonard Harris. The author notes that there are apparent similarities between Rorty and Harris, but one should also notice that there are significant differences (...) in these two philosophical positions. The author ultimately argues that Harris's move toward poetry and well-patterned language is extremely powerful and needed if people wish to move beyond a well-established set of values and norms. Harris prods us to tell thought-provoking, engaging stories—to intricately tuck knowledge into allegory and well-patterned language—but do it without being an apologist for the prevailing bourgeois liberal democratic tradition. In this manner, the harnessing of metaphor and clever allegory, the creative engagement with poetry and well-patterned language (in philosophy) is a provocative means of engaging the oppression, dispossession, and immiseration of the contemporary world. (shrink)

In his attempt to explain and draw together disparate aspects of the tradition of the virtues MacIntyre develops a complex and specific concept that he terms a practice. By a practice he means to describe certain types of activities in which excellences can be pursued and that offer those engaged in a practice access to the goods internal to that practice.Sellman and Wainwright have both suggested that there are advantages to be had in understanding nursing as a practice in (...) this MacIntyrean sense. This paper suggests that nursing should be considered as a particular type of MacIntyrean practice, and I have used the term a professional practice to identify this species.This paper also considers some of the implications of such a perspective and suggests that one benefit of thinking of nursing as a professional practice is that it may offer a route by which the virtues necessary for nursing can be identified. (shrink)

Introduction: Over the past twenty-five years the sporting body has been studied in a myriad of ways including via a range of feminist frameworks (Hall 1996; Lowe 1998; Markula 2003; George 2005; Hargreaves 2007) and gender-sensitive lenses (e.g. McKay 1994; Aoki 1996; Woodward 2008). Despite this developing corpus, studies of sport only rarely engage in depth with the ‘flesh’ of the lived sporting and exercizing body (Wainwright and Turner 2003; Allen-Collinson 2009) at least from a phenomenological angle, and in (...) relation to female embodiment. It seems that a more corporeally-grounded, phenomenological perspective on women’s sporting embodiment would be a welcome addition to extant studies. In this chapter I suggest that employing a feminist phenomenological framework can provide a powerful lens through which to explore the subjective, richly-textured, lived-body experiences of sport and exercise. Phenomenology of course offers only one of a multiplicity of avenues to investigate the body in sport, and this chapter provides just a small glimpse of its possibilities. To-date studies of sporting experience employing a phenomenological theoretical framework remain surprisingly under-developed (Kerry and Armour 2000), as do those using its ethnomethodological offspring (Coates 1999; Burke et al. 2008). Further, as Fisher (2000) notes, the significance of the interaction between phenomenology and feminism has only relatively recently begun to be explored. It seems timely, therefore, to address this intriguing, potentially productive, but sometimes uneasy nexus, focusing upon female running embodiment in this case. (shrink)

This study examines the use of a video news release in a specific story. Press coverage and editorial criticism in the case showed that journalists do not articulate sufficiently how the news owners' sway, through institutional controls, can lead to a hegemony of expedient action in the newsroom. Critical self-reflection by news workers will better enable journalists to ethically deliberate news choices that balance their responsibilities to owners, peers, and the public.

On the scale of decades and centuries, ongoingscience is reconfigured into human history that must be interpreted. So I concluded two decades back: "Progressively reforming and developing theories are erected over observations.... This leads at a larger scale to progressively reforming and developing narrative models.... The story is ever reforming" (pp. 338 — 39). I faced the future with hopes and fears about the escalating powers of science for good and evil, finding it simultaneously powerless for the meaningful guidance of (...) life, the classical province of religion. So now„having turned the millennium, what's new in the story? If I had to give a sound-bite answer (as we now must do with the media), my reply would be: increasing concern about human uniqueness and human respon-. (shrink)

This symposium examines insurrectionist ethics, the brainchild of Leonard Harris. The position does not stem from one key source; it was born out of Harris’s philosophical interaction with various philosophers over an extended period, including thinkers as diverse as David Walker, Karl Marx, Edward Wilmot Blyden, Alain Locke, and Angela Davis. The driving questions are: What counts as justified protest? Do slaves have a moral duty to insurrect? What character traits and modes to resistance are most conducive to liberation and (...) the amelioration of oppressive material conditions? Insurrectionist ethics is meant to address such questions. This symposium attempts to locate insurrectionist ethics in the work .. (shrink)

D2.1 (PL models and assignments) i. A PL model is a pair M = 〈DM, ·M〉 such that (a) DM is a non-empty set, and (b) ·M maps each A ∈ Con to AM ∈ DM, and each B ∈ Prdn to BM  (DM)n. ii. GM = {g| g: Var  DM} is the set of M-assignments. For any g ∈ GM, u ∈ Var, d ∈ DM, g[u/d] := (g\{u, g(u)})  {u, d} is the u-to-d alternative to (...) g. (shrink)

UPDATE WITH NOMINAL CENTERING (UCδ) D1.0 (UCδ types) The set of UCδ types Θ is the smallest set such that: i. t, δ, s ∈ Θ ii. (ab) ∈ Θ, if a, b ∈ Θ D1.1 (UCδ basic terms). For each a ∈ Θ, a set of a-constants Cona and a-variables Vara, incl.: Conδ = {a, b, c} Var(sδ) = {x, y, z}.

We study the effect of transaction costs (e.g., a trading fee or a transaction tax, like the Tobin tax) on the aggregation of private information in financial markets. We analyze a financial market à la Glosten and Milgrom, in which informed and uninformed traders trade in sequence with a market maker. Traders have to pay a cost in order to trade. We show that, eventually, all informed traders decide not to trade, independently of their private information, i.e., an informational cascade (...) occurs. We replicated our financial market in the laboratory. We found that, in the experiment, informational cascades occur when the theory suggests they should. Nevertheless, the ability of the price to aggregate private information is not significantly affected. (JEL C92, D8, G14). (shrink)

Few discussions of environmental conservation continue long without reaching the question "Why?", and the answers are seldom elaborated for long without reaching the question of values. What we wish to conserve depends on what we value. What we ought to conserve depends on what we ought to value. Environmental ethics is entwined with values carried by nature. What is of value there? How are values to be discovered and judged? That is a philosophical question.