Religion, spirituality, and contemporary shamanic practice in Scotland : exploring the relationships -- The impacts of transformational cultural change on religion and spirituality -- Seeking a new definition of religion -- What is shamanism? -- A case study of three shamanic practice groups in Scotland -- Exploring connections between cross-cultural shamanic elements and neo-shamanic expressions in Scotland : interviews, participant observation, and analysis -- Applying Hervieu-Lger's analytical model of religion to reveal a lineage of spirituality, not belief, in the shamanic (...) chain of memory -- Patterns, conclusions, and resulting issues -- Seeing differently : a new paradigm of spirituality and religion. (shrink)

Conceptual engineering and conceptual ethics are branches of philosophy concerned with questions about how to assess and ameliorate our representational devices (such as concepts and words). It's a part of philosophy concerned with questions about which concepts we should use (and why), how concepts can be improved, when concepts should be abandoned, and how proposals for amelioration can be implemented. Central parts of the history of philosophy have engaged with these issues, but the focus of this volume is on applications (...) to work in contemporary philosophy of language and mind, epistemology, gender and race theory, ethics, philosophy of science, and philosophical logic. This is the first volume devoted entirely to conceptual engineering and conceptual ethics. The volume explores the possibilities, benefits, problems, and applications of conceptual engineering and conceptual ethics. It consists of twenty chapters written by leading philosophers. (shrink)

Merleau-Ponty and a Phenomenology of PTSD begins from the premise that trauma can be better treated if it is better understood. To that end, this book builds a prismatic account of trauma, encompassing neuroscience, psychology, and phenomenology in order to establish that trauma is an embodied, adaptive response to a world without meaning.

Review of John Burgess' and Gideon Rosen's A Subject with no Object.

Which concepts should we use to think and talk about the world and to do all of the other things that mental and linguistic representation facilitates? This is the guiding question of the field that we call ‘conceptual ethics’. Conceptual ethics is not often discussed as its own systematic branch of normative theory. A case can nevertheless be made that the field is already quite active, with contributions coming in from areas as diverse as fundamental metaphysics and social/political philosophy. In (...) this pair of papers, we try to unify the field, reflecting on its basic nature, structure, and methodology. (shrink)

Which concepts should we use to think and talk about the world, and to do all of the other things that mental and linguistic representation facilitates? This is the guiding question of the field that we call ‘conceptual ethics’. Conceptual ethics is not often discussed as its own systematic branch of normative theory. A case can nevertheless be made that the field is already quite active, with contributions coming in from areas as diverse as fundamental metaphysics and social/political philosophy. In (...) this pair of papers, we try to unify the field, reflecting on its basic nature, structure, and methodology. (shrink)

In [2] John Burgess describes predicative versions of Frege's logic and poses the problem of finding their exact arithmetical strength. I prove here that PV, the simplest such theory, is equivalent to Robinson's arithmetical theory Q.

In the United States, combat veterans are overwhelmingly male. It was not until 2013 that the ban preventing women from serving in combat was removed by then-Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, and not until 2016 that women could choose to enlist in Army Ranger School or become a Navy SEAL. Currently, only 6 percent of the veteran population in the United States is female. Why, then, choose combat trauma to show the ways in which our understanding of PTSD is problematically (...) sexist? Why argue that combat trauma is a feminist issue when there are types of trauma that impact women more directly?Combat trauma has proven to be difficult to understand and to... (shrink)

John Burgess in a 2004 paper combined plural logic and a new version of the idea of limitation of size to give an elegant motivation of the axioms of ZFC set theory. His proposal is meant to improve on earlier work by Paul Bernays in two ways. I argue that both attempted improvements fail. I am grateful to Philip Welch, two anonymous referees, and especially Ignacio Jané for written comments on earlier versions of this paper, which have led to (...) substantial improvements. Thanks also to the participants in a discussion group at the University of Bristol, where an earlier version was presented. (shrink)

We do not always survive trauma. Elie Wiesel said of Primo Levi, a holocaust survivor who committed suicide at age sixty-seven, “[he] died at Auschwitz forty years earlier.” Though Levi physically survived the holocaust, psychically he did not. And yet, there are countless stories of incredible triumph over trauma. What makes survival possible? What seems to separate those who recover from those who do not—at least in part—is the capacity and opportunity for adaptation. Adaptation is the phenomenon whereby the subject (...) is able to make use of one or more coping mechanisms in order to adjust to traumatic disruption. In this paper I argue that narrative is an especially useful tool for adapting to trauma because it addresses that which is so disruptive about trauma: the inability to process the traumatic event. (shrink)

Coined by Jonathan Shay, a clinician who works with combat veterans, the term ‘moral injury’ refers to an injury that occurs when one’s moral beliefs are betrayed. Shay developed the term to capture the shame and guilt of veterans he saw in his clinical practice. Since then, debates about moral injury have centered around the ‘what’ and the ‘who’ of moral injury. Clinicians universally acknowledge the challenge of treating moral injuries. I will argue that this is in part because there (...) is an essential piece of the theoretical construct that has been left behind. Namely, when veterans are morally injured, they are not only haunted by what they have done but also by the specter of a world without morals. (shrink)

In the final chapter of their book A Subject With No Object, John Burgess and Gideon Rosen raise the question of the value of the nominalistic reconstructions of mathematics that have been put forward in recent years, asking specifically what this body of work is good for. The authors conclude that these reconstructions are all inferior to current versions of mathematics (or science) and make no advances in science. This paper investigates the reasoning that led to such a negative (...) appraisal, and it produces a rebuttal to this reasoning. I am grateful to the following mathematicians who were kind enough to provide me with their thoughts about nonstandard analysis: Martin Davis, Laura Chihara, Ted Chihara, Steve Galovich, Bonnie Gold, and especially Roger Simons, whose comments about an earlier version of this paper were very helpful. Thanks also go to two referees for their useful suggestions and criticisms of an earlier version of this paper. (shrink)

John P. Burgess is the John N. Woodhull Professor of Philosophy at Princeton University. He obtained his Ph.D. from the Logic and Methodology program at the University of California at Berkeley under the supervision of Jack H. Silver with a thesis on descriptive set theory. He is a very distinguished and influential philosopher of mathematics. He has written several books: A Subject with No Object (with G. Rosen, Oxford University Press, 1997), Computability and Logic (with G. Boolos and R. (...) Jeffrey, 5th ed., Cambridge University Press, 2007), Fixing Frege (Princeton University Press, 2005), Mathematics, Models, and Modality (Cambridge University Press, 2007), Philosophical Logic (Princeton University Press, 2009), Truth (with A. G. Burgess, Princeton University Press, 2011), Saul Kripke: Puzzles & Mysteries (Polity Press, 2012), Rigor & Structure (Oxford University Press, 2015), and Set Theory (Cambridge Elements, Forthcoming). In this interview, Professor Burgess talks about how his interests in mathematics and philosophy developed and relate to each other. He then answers questions about specific themes of his philosophical work, with a focus on issues pertaining to philosophy of mathematics. (shrink)

This paper addresses John Burgess's answer to the ‘Benacerraf Problem’: How could we come justifiably to believe anything implying that there are numbers, given that it does not make sense to ascribe location or causal powers to numbers? Burgess responds that we should look at how mathematicians come to accept: There are prime numbers greater than 1010That, according to Burgess, is how one can come justifiably to believe something implying that there are numbers. This paper investigates what (...) lies behind Burgess's answer and ends up as a rebuttal to Burgess's reasoning. (shrink)

In placing education at the centre, as The Main Enterprise of the World, Philip Kitcher has undertaken a monumental task. He has come to the field of philosophy of education captivated by the importance of its substantive preoccupations for the advancement of democratic aims. Accordingly, his book argues that the most salient obstruction to preparing citizens who will contribute to society is the seeming irreconcilability of the demands of industry, on the one hand, and of students’ personal growth, on the (...) other. In spite of his desire to accommodate diverse accounts of the human good, and his recognition of the formative role of culture, broadly conceived, there are strains in his account of human fulfilment deriving from the disjunction of the self and others. It is not evident, on his Deweyan onto-epistemology, that there is adequate attention to the imprint on an individual, and on the beliefs they come to form, of proximal social groups. The nature of the balance between ‘in-group’ and ‘out-group’ influences, between those that are near and those that are far, can profoundly affect the plausibility of Kitcher's account of a socially based sense of fulfilment. (shrink)

This is the first systematic survey of modern nominalistic reconstructions of mathematics, and for this reason alone it should be read by everyone interested in the philosophy of mathematics and, more generally, in questions concerning abstract entities. In the bulk of the book, the authors sketch a common formal framework for nominalistic reconstructions, outline three major strategies such reconstructions can follow, and locate proposals in the literature with respect to these strategies. The discussion is presented with admirable precision and clarity, (...) and should be accessible even to readers with only minimal background in logic and mathematics. There will be many who will turn directly to these pages and use them as a brief manual on the state of the art of nominalism in mathematics. But the most intriguing parts of this elegant book—at least in my view—are the introduction and the conclusion, where the authors examine the significance of reconstructive nominalism. (shrink)

This paper considers the implications of precautionary restrictions against technologies, in the context of the potential for creating and sustaining rumours. It focuses on the restriction against mobile phone use at petrol stations, based on the rumour that a spark might cause an explosion. Rumours have been substantiated by precautionary usage warnings from mobile phone manufacturers, petrol station usage restrictions, and a general lack of technical understanding. Petrol station employees have themselves spread the rumour about alleged incidents, filling the information (...) gap about the basis for the restriction. (shrink)

While we are commonly told that the distinctive method of mathematics is rigorous proof, and that the special topic of mathematics is abstract structure, there has been no agreement among mathematicians, logicians, or philosophers as to just what either of these assertions means. John P. Burgess clarifies the nature of mathematical rigor and of mathematical structure, and above all of the relation between the two, taking into account some of the latest developments in mathematics, including the rise of experimental (...) mathematics on the one hand and computerized formal proofs on the other hand. Along the way, a great many historical developments in mathematics, philosophy, and logic are surveyed. Yet very little in the way of background knowledge on the part of the reader is presupposed. (shrink)

The question, "Which modal logic is the right one for logical necessity?," divides into two questions, one about model-theoretic validity, the other about proof-theoretic demonstrability. The arguments of Halldén and others that the right validity argument is S5, and the right demonstrability logic includes S4, are reviewed, and certain common objections are argued to be fallacious. A new argument, based on work of Supecki and Bryll, is presented for the claim that the right demonstrability logic must be contained in S5, (...) and a more speculative argument for the claim that it does not include S4.2 is also presented. (shrink)

This article discusses the important and influential views of John Burgess on the nature of mathematical rigour and John Norton on the nature of thought experiments. Their accounts turn out to be surprisingly similar in spite of different subject matters. Among other things both require a reconstruction of the initial proof or thought experiment in order to officially evaluate them, even though we almost never do this in practice. The views of each are plausible and seem to solve interesting (...) problems. However, both have problems and would seem not able to do justice to some interesting examples. They fail in similar ways. More pluralistic accounts of proof and of thought experiment could embrace aspects of each, while rejecting their claims to universality. An ideal account (not provided here) would contribute to _explanation_ and _understanding_ as well as evidence. These are important topics for future work. (shrink)

Maughn Rollins Gregory and Meghan Jane Laverty’s Gareth B. Matthews, The Child’s Philosopher explores the Philosophy for Children movement, and the way the work of Gareth B. Matthews carried forward its key components. In this paper, I consider the impact of Matthews’ embeddedness within a Western philosophical tradition, even as he strives mightily to propose a broad-minded approach to P4C. I draw upon the work of Amasa Philip Ndofirepi to explore the tensions and possibilities in reconciling Western and non-Western approaches (...) to P4C. I argue that the social contexts of culture, ethnicity, and nationality can serve to broaden P4C curricula and pedagogy, making it fit for schools in a liberal democratic society. (shrink)

In Michael Stingl argues that the legalization of euthanasia can be made reasonable social policy only in the context of healthcare reform to deliver primary- and community-based care. Stingl accepts that euthanasia and that includes not only pain, but He is not worried The failure of the healthcare system to adequately respond to the needs of people who are suffering with chronic or terminal conditions may lead competent people to elect euthanasia. Stingl argues that it is the institutionalization of care (...) for dying people that reduces their ability to find meaning in prolonged life, and thereby makes it more attractive to consider ending one's life sooner. Options such as palliative care at home that significantly improve quality of life and make euthanasia less attractive are currently only available to those who can privately subsidize healthcare services. If an emphasis is placed on community-based initiatives and well-supported self-help, then there would be less inequality of healthcare and the voluntariness of choices, including euthanasia, would be more equal for all people under the healthcare system. (shrink)

Democratic deliberation places the burden of self‐governance on its citizens to provide mutual justifying reasons (Gutmann & Thompson, 1996). This article concerns the limiting effect that group identity has on the efficacy of democratic deliberation for equality in education. Under conditions of a powerful majority, deliberation can be repressive and discriminatory. Issues of white flight and race‐based admissions serve to illustrate the bias of which deliberation is capable when it fails to substantively take group identity into account. As forms of (...) Gilbert's (1994) plural subjects, identity group members holding the group identity can experience agency as the freedom to believe together with members of their group. I argue that attending to how group members acquire group beliefs through trust is a reasonable accommodation of group identity in deliberation. (shrink)

Charles Mills posits an epistemology of ignorance that underwrites the complicity of Whites, or people of Western European descent, as signatories of the racial contract. There is prevailing discourse about the complicity of White persons in perpetuating racism and whether they can experience epistemic injustice. In this paper, the claim to hermeneutical injustice, in particular, makes a further assertion that moral blameworthiness is mitigated for a subcategory of White Americans because of being socialized into a White-dominant culture of caste-based Afroscepticism. (...) I argue, based on Pierce’s conceptualization of doubt, as against Descartes, that Afroscepticism is a totalizing belief system predicated on a racial group-based social epistemology and maintains a settled stance of questioning the commensurate citizenship of Blacks or American descendants of slaves. These perceived social costs warrant educational interventions that can dismantle its reasoning architecture. White Afroscepticism poses a barrier to the teacher’s efforts to cultivate the democratic habitus in students; however, educator preparation that takes its existence into account can build on the standard classroom practices of critical social justice that promote equity, critical multicultural education, and critical thinking. (shrink)

Dummett's case against platonism rests on arguments concerning the acquisition and manifestation of knowledge of meaning. Dummett's arguments are here criticized from a viewpoint less Davidsonian than Chomskian. Dummett's case against formalism is obscure because in its prescriptive considerations are not clearly separated from descriptive. Dummett's implicit value judgments are here made explicit and questioned. ?Combat Revisionism!? Chairman Mao.