The purpose of the present paper is to formulate and resolve a certain puzzle surrounding God's existence and the standard attributes traditionally assigned to God.
In a recent symposium on Descartes' ontological argument, Norman Malcolm has restated a rather ingenious version of St Anse1m's ontological argument. 1 The purpose of the present paper is to assess the merits of this particular version of the ontological argument.
Externalism, Naturalism, Mathematics, Ontology, Personal Identity, Time and Tense, The Metaphysics of Reference, The Metaphysics of Properties, Conceivability, The Physical, and Theoretical Identity, and Actualism- these are some of the central issues addressed in the essays of this fifteenth volume devoted to metaphysics. Essays discussing metaphysics from some of the foremost academics in philosophy. Topics include Ontology, Personal Identity, the metaphysics of reference, and the metaphysics of properties.
_Philosophical Perspectives, _an annual, aims to publish original essays by the foremost thinkers in their fields, with each volume confined to a main area of philosophical research. Original essays by the foremost thinkers and academics of philosophy discussing the philosophy of language and mind Some of the main topics include demonstratives and anaphora, meaning and naming, belief and privileged access, modality, concepts and time, and paradox.
One of the contemporary results of Germany’s memorial conundrum is the rise of its “counter-monuments”: brazen, painfully self-conscious memorial spaces conceived to challenge the very premises of their being. On the former site of Hamburg’s greatest synagogue, at Bornplatz, Margrit Kahl has assembled an intricate mosaic tracing the complex lines of the synagogue’s roof construction: a palimpsest for a building and community that no longer exist. Norbert Radermacher bathes a guilty landscape in Berlin’s Neukölln neighborhood with the inscribed light of (...) its past. Alfred Hrdlicka began a monument in Hamburg to counter—and thereby neutralize—an indestructible Nazi monument nearby. In a suburb of Hamburg, Jochen Gerz and Esther Shalev-Gerz have erected a black pillar against fascism and for peace designed to disappear altogether over time. The very heart of Berlin, former site of the gestapo headquarters, remains a great, gaping wound as politicians, artists, and various committees forever debate the most appropriate memorial for this site.4 4. The long-burning debate surrounding projected memorials, to the Gestapo-Gelände in particular, continues to exemplify both the German memorial conundrum and the state’s painstaking attempts to articulate it. For an excellent documentation of the process, see Topographie des Terrors: Gestapo, SS und Reichssicherheitshauptamt auf dem “Prinz-Albrecht-Gelände,” ed. Reinhard Rürup . For a shorter account, see James E. Young, “The Topography of German Memory,” The Journal of Art 1 : 30. James E. Young is assistant professor of English and Judaic studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He is the author of Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust: Narrative and the Consequences of Interpretation and The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning in Europe, Israel, and America , from which this essay is drawn. He is also the curator of “The Art of Memory,” an exhibition at the Jewish Museum of New York. (shrink)
Can transcendence be both philosophical and religious? Do philosophers and theologians conceive of the same thing when they think and talk about transcendence? Philosophy and religion have understood transcendence and other matters of faith differently, but both the language and concepts of religion, including transcendence, reside at the core of postmodern philosophy. Transcendence in Philosophy and Religion considers whether it is possible to analyze religious transcendence in a philosophical manner, and if so, whether there is a way for phenomenology to (...) think transcendence directly. Attention is devoted to the role of French philosophy, particularly the work of Levinas, Ricoeur, Derrida, and Marion, in defining recent debates in the philosophy of religion and posing new ways of thinking about religious experience in a postmodern world. (shrink)
Deductive Irrationality examines and critiques economic rationalism by assessing the work of influential political philosophers and economic theorists such as Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Adam Smith, Friedrich Hayek, Gunnar Myrdal, and John F. Muth. It is one of the first serious attempts to investigate the dominant sub-fields in economic theory through the lens of political philosophy.
The increasing secularization of political thought between the mid-seventeenth and mid-nineteenth centuries has often been noted, but rarely described in detail. The contributors to this volume consider the significance of the relationship between religious beliefs, dogma and secular ideas in British political philosophy from Thomas Hobbes to J.S. Mill. During this period, Britain experienced the advance of natural science, the spread of education and other social improvements, and reforms in the political realm. These changes forced religion to account for itself (...) and to justify its existence, both as a social institution and as a collection of fundamental articles of belief about the world and its operations. This book, originally published in 1990, conveys the crucial importance of the association between religion, secularization and political thought. (shrink)
1857. After the fire of mutiny has swept through British India, young Lieutenant Victor Narraway arrives at a battered military base at Cawnpore. It is just two weeks before Christmas, but no one is able to celebrate: they have been betrayed. A soldier under arrest for dereliction of duty has killed a guard and escaped to join the rebels, taking crucial information that led to the massacre of nine men on patrol. Someone must have helped him, and medical orderly John (...) Tallis is the only man unaccounted for at the time. He is now on trial for his life, and Narraway is commanded to defend him. Narraway knows that his is an impossible task. The British Army needs justice to be carried out in full, and there seems no doubt of Tallis's guilt. But Narraway cannot see any motive for his actions. Will an innocent man hang before Christmas? (shrink)
Current discussions of business ethics usually only consider deontological and utilitarian approaches. What is missing is a discussion of traditional teleology, often referred to as virtue ethics. While deontology and teleology are useful, they both suffer insufficiencies. Traditional teleology, while deontological in many respects, does not object to utilitarian style calculations as long as they are contained within a moral framework that is not utilitarian in its origin. It contains the best of both approaches and can be used to focus (...) on the individual''s role within an organization. More work is needed in exposing students and faculty to traditional teleology and its place in business ethic''s discussions. (shrink)
This article reviews empirical research of corporate social performance using Kinder, Lydenberg, Domini social ratings data through 2011. The review synthesizes 100 empirical studies, noting consistencies and inconsistencies among studies examining similar constructs. Notable consistencies were that, although accounting measures of financial performance were a positive outcome of CSP, the same was not often true of stock returns. Also, demographics of top management teams increased CSP strengths, but did not reduce concerns, whereas organizational decentralization reduced CSP concerns. Notable inconsistencies were (...) that CEO demographics were not as often related to CSP as were TMT demographics, indicating that managerial discretion may be an important mitigating factor shaping managerial effects on CSP. Also, although CSP for some organizations seemed influenced by institutional pressures, other organizations appeared to be less influenced, perhaps suggesting that some organizations are more able than others to resist institutional pressures. Future research should attempt to probe observed consistencies and inconsistencies, and to test the boundaries of observed relationships, toward a disciplined program of middle-range theory development. (shrink)
Let κ denote a regular uncountable cardinal and NS the normal ideal of nonstationary subsets of κ. Our results concern the well-known open question whether NS fails to be κ + -saturated, i.e., are there κ + stationary subsets of κ with pairwise intersections nonstationary? Our first observation is: Theorem. NS is κ + -saturated iff for every normal ideal J on κ there is a stationary set $A \subseteq \kappa$ such that $J = NS \mid A = \{X \subseteq (...) \kappa:X \cap A \in NS\}$ . Turning our attention to large cardinals, we extend the usual (weak) Mahlo hierarchy to define "greatly Mahlo" cardinals and obtain the following: Theorem. If κ is greatly Mahlo then NS is not κ + -saturated. Theorem. If κ is ordinal Π 1 1 -indescribable (e.g., weakly compact), ethereal (e.g., subtle), or carries a κ-saturated ideal, then κ is greatly Mahlo. Moreover, there is a stationary set of greatly Mahlo cardinals below any ordinal Π 1 1 -indescribable cardinal. These methods apply to other normal ideals as well; e.g., the subtle ideal on an ineffable cardinal κ is not κ + -saturated. (shrink)
