In my book God’s Call1 I gave an historical account of the debate within twentieth century analytic philosophy between moral realism and expressivism. Moral realism is the view that moral properties like goodness or cruelty exist independently of our making judgements that things have such properties. Such judgements are, on this theory, objectively true when the things referred to have the specified properties and objectively false when they do not. Expressivism is the view that when a person makes a moral (...) judgment, she is expressing emotion or desire or will. I used the term ‘orectic’ to refer to these mental states, because we do not have in English a sufficiently general term. In God’s Call, I started with a moral realist whom I called a ‘platonist’, G. E. Moore, and then I traced the argument through the emotivists, A. J. Ayer and Charles Stevenson, and the prescriptivist, R. M. Hare, and Iris Murdoch, whom I called a ‘humble platonist’, and J. L. Mackie’s ‘error theory’, and John McDowell, whose theory I call ‘disposition theory’, and David Brink, the ‘new-wave realist’, and Allan Gibbard, who calls his own theory ‘ norm expressivism ’. My project was to collect together the concessions that the two sides of the debate have made to each other over the course of this history, and then to construct a position which molds these concessions into a single coherent theory. I called this theory ‘prescriptive realism’. (shrink)

JOHN E. MURDOCH AND EDITH DUDLEY SYLLA INTRODUCTION Conferences and colloquia are held and their results often published, but very rarely is any account ...

This paper explores the notions of hope and how individual patient autonomy can trump carefully reasoned ethical concerns and policies intended to regulate stem cell transplants. We argue that the same limits of knowledge that inform arguments to restrain and regulate unproven treatments might also undermine our ability to comprehensively dismiss or condemn them. Incautiously or indiscriminately reasoned policies and attitudes may drive critical information and data underground, impel patients away from working with clinical researchers, and tread needlessly on hope, (...) the essential motivator of patients, advocates and researchers alike. We offer recommendations to clinicians and health care providers to help balance the discourse with individuals seeking treatment while guarding against fraud, misconception, and patient harm. (shrink)

Divine Command defends the thesis that what makes something morally obligatory is that God commands it, and what makes something morally forbidden is that God forbids it. John E. Hare successfully defends a version of divine command theory, but also shows that there is considerable overlap with some versions of natural law theory. Hare engages with a number of Christian theologians, most especially Karl Barth, and extends into a discussion of divine command within Judaism and Islam. The work concludes (...) by examining recent work in evolutionary psychology, and argues that thinking of our moral obligations as produced by divine command offers us some help in seeing how a moral conscience could develop in a way that is evolutionarily stable. (shrink)

Our scientific concepts generally are in the melting-pot. They are all infected by relativity. This is as true in psychology and philosophy as in the physical sciences. In each case we must be willing to reconstruct our concepts on the basis of new evidence. Psychology has too long been hampered by a false tradition, and incidentally it has dragged philosophy with it into the slough of subjectivism. Brilliant discoveries in the realms of physiology and pathology throw new light on many (...) of the fundamental concepts of psychology, spite of the fact that the investigators themselves have sometimes been misled by the old tradition. We are here concerned with their data, not with their theories. The evidence, as I interpret it, gives the death-blow to the old subjectivistic psychology. As regards sensations, the evidence shows, on the one hand, that their character is independent of consciousness; but, on the other hand, it equally disproves the assumption that the sense-qualities exist in the physical world just as we know them and independently of the organism. The evidence further shows that the centers of the central nervous system constitute a hierarchy of energy patterns, not storehouses or factories of content, sensational or imaginal. The content is due to lines of motion, connecting those energy patterns with the sense-organs. The processes of selection. (shrink)

Author John E. Rexine expounds on the theologies of the great Roman thinkers Plato and Cicero in this essay.

This essay tracks the movement in Édouard Glissant’s work from thinking relationality as creolisation to Relation as such, to a globalised sense of cultural contact and transformation he ca...

In partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Counselling Psychology, Department of Educational Psychology.

Gain new understanding ofwhat constitutes excellence in teaching. Learn what thousands of teachers who have been recognized for educational excellence—and who have been recipients of such teaching awards—believe make up the fabric of success in the classroom. Noted experts gathered thousands of insights directly from these educators and placed them within the context of history and research. Inspiring and informative, this book sheds new light on the components of excellence in education that are both definable and intangible.