Training on the Law of armed conflict employs different rationales to motivate soldiers and to induce their compliance with LOAC rules. Of these, none is as controversial, or as potentially...

A recent movement within political philosophy called luck egalitarianism has attempted to synthesize the right’s regard for responsibility with the left’s concern for equality. The original motivation for subscribing to luck egalitarianism stems from the belief that one’s success in life ought to reflect one’s own choices and not brute luck. Luck egalitarian theorists differ in the decision procedures that they propose, but they share in common the general approach that we ought to equalize individuals with respect to brute luck (...) so that differences in distribution are only a consequence of the responsible choices that individuals make. I intend to show that through the application of its own distributive procedures, the interpersonal luck egalitarian approach actually undermines its original motivation by making the lives of individuals subject to brute luck. I propose two alternative methods that the luck egalitarian could use to prevent the problems suffered by the interpersonal luck egalitarian standard. (shrink)

Although Lynn White, jr. is best known for the critical aspects of his disputed 1967 essay, “The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis,” this article combines archival research and findings from his lesser-known publications in an attempt to reconcile his thought on democracy with the Earth Charter and its assertion that “we are one human family and one Earth Community with a common destiny” . Humanity is first and foremost, White believed, part of a “spiritual democracy of all God's creatures” (...) in which humans and nonhumans should treat each other with mutual compassion and courtesy. It is argued that the Christian, animal-inclusive “biodemocracy” envisioned by White is both compatible with, and potentially in conflict with, the tenets of the Earth Charter. This article also considers further implications of these findings for the larger fields of ecotheology and religion and ecology. (shrink)

This essay introduces the themes that motivate the three articles that follow. Their common aim is to explore the connections between the Earth Charter and the concept of biodemocracy with the intention of highlighting ways of thinking about the relationship between science, religion, and the environment in the twenty-first century. Informed by the science of ecology and written by scholars of religion, the articles included here seek to integrate movements and ideas as diverse as postmodern thought, the much-debated thought of (...) Lynn White, jr. , and the synergy emerging between the Earth Charter and Journey of the Universe. (shrink)

In recent decades, scholars of Buddhist philosophy have frequently treated the Trisvabhāvanirdeśa, or “Teaching of the Three Natures,” attributed to Vasubandhu, as an authentic and authoritative representation of that celebrated thinker’s mature work within the Yogācāra tradition. However, serious questions may be posed concerning the status and authority of the TSN within Yogācāra, its true authorship, and the relation of its contents to trends in early Yogācāra thought. In the present article, we review the actual state of our knowledge of (...) the TSN’s possible origins, considering, too, the implications this may have for contemporary treatments thereof. (shrink)

Getting Emotional -- Constructing Discourse -- Telling and Remembering -- Inviting Emotional Tellings -- Eliciting Feelings -- (re)formulating Emotionality -- Managing Emotionality and Distress -- Being Negative -- Reflecting Back, Moving Forward.

Thanks to the international celebrity of the present Dalai Lama, Tibetan Buddhism is attracting more attention than at any time in its history. Although there have been numerous specialist studies of individual Tibetan texts, however, no scholarly work has as yet done justice to the rich variety of types of Tibetan discourse. This book fills this lacuna, bringing to bear the best methodological insights of the contemporary human sciences, and at the same time conveying to non-specialist readers an impression of (...) the broad domain of Tibetan religious and philosophical thought. Ranging widely over the immense corpus of Tibetan literature, Kapstein brilliantly illuminates many of the distinctive Tibetan contributions and points out some of the insights. (shrink)

This essay is a response to the article “Some Foundational Factors for Promoting Human Flourishing.” It offers a broader discussion of flourishing beyond foundational concerns and involves an integration of social science and the humanities.

Paradox is a complex notion that has assumed a diverse range of forms within philosophy, and Søren Kierkegaard contributes one of the more interesting variations by employing a fairy tale to introduce what he identifies as the absolute paradox of the Incarnation. Despite this, more recent discussion on paradox has given little attention to Kierkegaard and has largely bracketed out any interaction with paradox that does not fit within the general analytic framework. In this paper, I evaluate the different characterizations (...) of paradox offered by Kierkegaard and representative thinkers in the analytic tradition. I argue that the non-bracketing of Kierkegaard’s fairy tale as a valid form of paradox discourse not only provides a fuller account of paradox but also offers a critique of the attempt to exclude any form of paradox from philosophical discussion that does not already conform to the restrictions of the analytic approach. (shrink)

In accord with the theme of the present volume on , it is not so much the aim of this essay to provide a detailed account of particular lines of argument, as it is to suggest something of the manner in which so-called 'Buddhist idealism' unfolded as a tradition not just for Buddhists, but within Indian philosophy more generally. Seen from this perspective, Buddhist idealism remained a current within Indian philosophy long after the demise of Buddhism in India, in about (...) the twelfth century, and endured in some respects at least until the Mughal age, when the last thinker to be examined here, the Jain teacher Yaśovijaya, was active. (shrink)

The project of comparing Stoicism and Buddhism may appear to be an improbable one. While the latter determines that we strive for an enlightenment that contributes to the liberation of all living beings, the doctrines of the former would seem to entail that this is impossible. Though both strongly affirm principles of causality and cyclicity in the constitution of the world, Buddhism apparently grants considerably more freedom of human agency than does Stoicism. Their conception of eternal return in the strict (...) and literal sense is foreign to the Buddhist notion of the bodhisattva's ongoing spiritual progress through numberless lives. These distinctions, moreover, sometimes issue in markedly different ethical orientations: the Buddhist elevation of compassion in the constellation of cardinal virtues finds its Stoic pendant in a more restrained attitude of commiseration. (shrink)

Though Stcherbatsky was eager to present Buddhist logic as broadly consistent with an early twentieth‐century European vision of philosophical research as critical reason unbridled by the presuppositions of religion, this was certainly not the sole source of the tension found in his words. There were at least three major trends in relation to this problematic that can be identified within Buddhist textual traditions. This chapter explores somewhat the elaboration of these alternatives, both in traditional Buddhist and in contemporary academic writings. (...) Against those who have held, however, that the available evidence does not permit us to conclude that there was any interesting relationship between the Buddhist pramāna tradition and those Buddhist intellectual practices that we might characterize as “spiritual exercise,” the author would argue that the very presence of contestation about this within the tradition itself sufficiently demonstrates that the possibilities of such a relationship were well understood. (shrink)

Anthropology of Consciousness, Volume 33, Issue 1, Page 63-78, Spring 2022.

The philosophical debate concerning political exchange has largely been confined to debating the desirability of vote trading; where individuals can sell their votes or buy votes from others. However, I show that the vote credit systems prevalent in public choice theory entirely avoid the common objections to political exchange that afflict vote trading proposals. Namely, vote credit systems avoid equality concerns and inalienability concerns. I offer an alternative critique to formal mechanisms that encourage political exchange by drawing on the role (...) that impartiality and impartial moral judgements play in democratic and electoral institutions. (shrink)

The ability to quickly and accurately recognise emotional states is adaptive for numerous social functions. Although body movements are a potentially crucial cue for inferring emotions, few studies have studied the perception of body movements made in naturalistic emotional states. The current research focuses on the use of body movement information in the perception of fear expressed by targets in a virtual heights paradigm. Across three studies, participants made judgments about the emotional states of others based on motion-capture body movement (...) recordings of those individuals actively engaged in walking a virtual plank at ground-level or 80 stories above a city street. Results indicated that participants were reliably able to differentiate between height and non-height conditions (Studies 1 & 2), were more likely to spontaneously describe target behaviour in the height condition as fearful (Study 2) and their fear estimates were highly calibrated with the fear ratings from the targets (Studies 1-3). Findings show that VR height scenarios can induce fearful behaviour and that people can perceive fear in minimal representations of body movement. (shrink)

Early Buddhism was not interested in questions about existence and the nature of God, considering these unimportant in relation to the question of the release from earthly suffering which is at the heart of Buddhist soteriology. Later Buddhist thought considered theism incompatible with Buddhist doctrine, but at the same time Buddhism developed a dimension of devotion that resembled theistic faith. Conscious of their different religious heritage, Buddhist thinkers in more recent times have nevertheless embraced dialogue with monotheistic religions, emphasizing their (...) common ethical preoccupations, while retaining the non-theistic viewpoint of traditional Buddhism. (shrink)

Organ donations after cardiac death account for about 20 percent of all vital-organ transplantations in the United States. This article evaluates DCDs in light of the Catholic moral tradition. Certain premortem interventions commonly associated with DCDs are morally impermissible even though the injuries they inflict on the patient are ostensibly inconsequential. More importantly, the criteria used for expeditiously assaying circulatory death—criteria which enhance the effectiveness of DCDs—do not always guarantee that the donor is actually deceased. Unless DCD protocols attend to (...) these ethical problems, Catholic hospitals are obliged to abandon the practice. (shrink)

Catholic theologians after Trent saw the Protestant teaching about the remnants of original sin in the justified as one of the ‘chief ’ errors of Protestant soteriology. Martin Luther, John Calvin, Martin Chemnitz, and many Protestant theologians believed that a view of concupiscence as sinful, strictly speaking, did away with any reliance on good works. This conviction also clarified the Christian’s dependence on the imputed righteousness of Christ. Catholic theologians condemned this position as detracting from the work of Christ who (...) takes away the sins of the world. The rejection of this teaching—and the affirmation of Trent’s statement that original sin is taken away and that the justified at baptism is without stain or ‘immaculate’ before God—is essential for understanding Catholic opposition to Protestant soteriology. Two Spanish Dominican Thomists, Domingo de Soto and Bartolomé de Medina, rejected the Protestant teaching on imputation in part because of its connection with the view on the remnants of original sin in the justified. Adrian and Peter van Walenburch, brothers who served as auxiliary bishops of Cologne in the second half of the seventeenth century, argued that the Protestants of their time now agreed with the Catholic Church on a number of soteriological points. They also drew upon some of their post–Tridentine predecessors to offer a Catholic account of the imputation of Christ’s righteousness. Nonetheless, the issue of sin in the justified remained a point of serious controversy. (shrink)

What is the nature and function of mental representations in cognitive science, and in human language in particular? How do they come into existence and interact, and how is the information attributed to them stored in and retrieved from the human mind? Some theories treat constructions as primitive entities used for structure-building, central in both production and comprehension, while other theories only admit construction-like entities as devices to map the structure into semantics or to relate them to specific morphophonological exponents. (...) In this positional piece, we seek to elucidate areas of commonality across what have traditionally been divergent approaches to the role of constructions in language. Here we outline a robust specification of the differences in how chunks of structure containing information are treated in the two main approaches, and we seek to offer a path toward a more unified theoretical stance. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook Jahrgang: 2016 Heft: 1 Seiten: 159-186.

Emerging adult newlywed couples often experience many demands on their time, and three common problems may surface as couples try to balance these demands—problems related to finances, sleep, and sex. We used two waves of dyadic data from 1,001 emerging adult newlywed couples to identify four dyadic latent profiles from husbands’ and wives’ financial management behaviors, sexual satisfaction, and sleep quality: Flounderers, Financially Challenged Lovers, Drowsy Budgeters, and Flourishers. We then examined how husbands’ and wives’ marital satisfaction, in relation to (...) profile membership, varied at a later wave. We found that Financially Challenged Lovers and Flourishers had significantly higher marital satisfaction than Drowsy Budgeters and Flounderers. Whereas, Financially Challenged Lovers and Flourishers did not differ in terms of marital satisfaction, Drowsy Budgeters seemed to have slightly higher marital satisfaction than Flounderers for wives only. However, we did not find evidence that these connections meaningfully differed by sex. Implications for the efforts of clinicians and educators are discussed. (shrink)

This article brings media ecology into conversation with Alfred North Whitehead's philosophy of organism in an effort to lure the former beyond its normally anthropocentric orientation. The article is divided into two parts. Part 1 spells out the way Whitehead's approach can aid media ecology in developing a less anthropocentric theory of communication. Part 2 engages more specifically with Mark B. N. Hansen's Feed-Forward: On the Future of Twenty-First-Century Media. Hansen's work is an example of the exciting new directions opened (...) up for media theory by Whitehead's panexperientialist ontology, but I argue that Hansen's attempt to "invert" Whitehead's theory of perception is based on a terminological confusion. (shrink)

This essay draws together the disciplines of race theory, artificial intelligence, and phenomenology to engage the issue of racism as a learned phenomenon. More specifically, it centres on a comparison between robots and humans with respect to becoming racist. The purpose of this comparison is to illustrate the complex interconnections between racism, ontology, and learning. The essay begins with a discussion of race and racism that identifies both fundamentally as social realities. With this account, the essay draws on Hubert Dreyfus’ (...) critical phenomenological work on artificial intelligence to outline several limitations for robots becoming racist. Next, the essay turns to the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty as an ontological alternative for describing human beings and how racism is learned through habit and skill acquisition. In the end, it is suggested that this investigation not only provides an insightful glimpse into racism as a learned phenomenon, but also invites further discussion on how such racism may be confronted when it is viewed not simply as a cognitive issue, but rather as an issue of embodiment. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Illusions of KnowingMatthew T. Kapstein (bio)Knowing Illusion: Bringing a Tibetan Debate into Contemporary Discourse, Volume I: A Philosophical History of the Debate, and Volume II: Translations. By The Yakherds ( José Cabezón, Ryan Conlon, Thomas Doctor, Douglas Duckworth, Jed Forman, Jay Garfield, John Powers, Sonam Thakchöe, Tashi Tsering, and Geshé Yeshes Thabkhas). New York: Oxford University Press, 2020.Metaphysics is a subject much more curious than useful, the knowledge of (...) which, like that of a sunken reef, serves chiefly to enable us to keep clear of it.Charles S. Peirce, "How to Make Our Ideas Clear"I. The Elusive Way to the MiddleKnowing Illusion: Bringing a Tibetan Debate into Contemporary Discourse is the fruit of collaborative efforts by the Yakherds, a group of scholars stemming from the earlier Cowherds, in which two of the present herdsmen—Sonam Thakchöe and Jay Garfield—were active as well.1 In moving from the broad issues of Buddhist philosophy that occupied the Cowherds to a tightly focused study of a particular debate in Tibet, the group has parted from the gentle cattle of the Indian plains to tend more rugged Himalayan stock. The present work, in two volumes, offers an exceptionally lucid guide to some of the main lines of Madhyamaka thought in Tibet and the disputes that these engendered. It constitutes an essential contribution to our knowledge of the philosophical traditions of Tibetan Buddhism, but, beyond this, merits the attention of those focusing on their Indian background and on Buddhist philosophies more generally. Indeed, Knowing Illusion is among the rare works in this area that may be profitably taken up by philosophers who are not specifically concerned with Buddhist or other Asian ways of thought, but who may wish to explore approaches beyond those of the Euro-American tradition to some of the central topics of philosophy overall: truth and falsehood, knowledge and ignorance, existence and illusion, belief and argument. Of the many interesting [End Page 1023] questions raised in Knowing Illusion, whether from the perspective of specialized Tibetan Buddhist Studies or of philosophy more broadly, only a sample can be addressed in the space of this review.The unifying thread in Knowing Illusion is a series of written disputes that were provoked by a fifteenth-century teacher belonging to the Sakyapa order of Tibetan Buddhism, Taktsang Sherab Rinchen (1405–1477), in his treatise titled Freedom from Extremes Accomplished through Comprehensive Knowledge of Philosophy (hereinafter Comprehensive Knowledge of Philosophy).2 Central to these debates was the challenge of squaring the Madhyamaka philosophy of Nāgārjuna (second century c.e.), whose teaching of ultimate emptiness (śūnyatā) seemed to undermine most—perhaps all—claims to knowledge, with the positive theory of knowledge (pramāṇa) advanced by Dignāga (fifth century c.e.) and Dharmakīrti (sixth century c.e.). The problem had already preoccupied Indian Buddhist thinkers, including philosophers Bhāviveka (sixth century c.e.) and Śāntarakṣita (eighth century c.e.), who sought to harmonize the insights of Madhyamaka with those of the pramāṇa school, and Dharmakīrti's contemporary Candrakīrti, whose trenchant interpretations of Nāgārjuna appeared to undermine the entire project of a 'theory of knowledge'.3 In Tibet, thinkers of the former camp came to be known as proponents of Svātantrika-Mādhyamika (so-called because they affirmed that emptiness could be established through positive proof, svatantra), while those allied with Candrakīrti were said to follow Prāsaṅgika-Mādhyamika (who allowed only indirect proof, reductio ad absurdum, or prasaṅga).4The debate reemerged forcefully in Tibet, and not merely as a historical exercise, in tandem with the expansion of monastic colleges there during the twelfth century, as Tibetan teachers increasingly elaborated original perspectives on the Indian classics. Many aspects of the Svātantrika/Prāsaṅgika split were co. (shrink)

Mammalian hibernation is characterized by profound reductions in metabolism, oxygen consumption and heart rate. As a result, the animal enters a state of suspended animation where core body temperatures can plummet as low as −2.9°C. Not only can hibernating mammals survive these physiological extremes, but they also return to a normothermic state of activity without reperfusion injury or other ill effects. This review examines recent findings on the genes, proteins and small molecules that control the induction and maintenance of hibernation (...) in mammals. The molecular events involved with remodeling metabolism, inducing hypothermia and maintaining organ function are discussed and considered with respect to analogous processes in non‐hibernating mammals such as mice and humans. The advent of sequenced genomes from three distantly related hibernators, a bat, hedgehog and ground squirrel, provides additional opportunities for molecular biologists to explore the mechanistic aspects of this biological adaptation in greater detail. BioEssays 29:431–440, 2007. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

In this paper, I offer a reading of Søren Kierkegaard's Climacean works (Fragments and Postscript) in which I focus on their specific dissimilarities, but also on the important dialectical relationship between them. My central claim is that when we consider Kierkegaard's larger project in his authorship to encourage believers to practice a Christian existence characterized by tension, we begin to see the crucial shared role these works play for Kierkegaard's purposes. To begin, I outline the theological and polemical background to (...) Kierkegaard's account of Christian existence by focusing on one of the central existential dualities in his thought, namely that of grace and works. In order to avoid falling into one extreme or the other, Kierkegaard argues for an account of faith as restlessness, which I identify as crucial to the Christian life. With this framework, I turn to Fragments and Postscript to draw out their respective emphases on gift and task, and I follow this with a discussion of how the dialectical relation between these emphases fulfills and upholds the account of tension that we have developed. (shrink)

This essay develops the argument that Søren Kierkegaard’s text “The Mirror of the Word” can serve as a valuable resource for addressing the problem of poor reading habits of students enrolled in introductory ethics courses. Although Kierkegaard writes this text as a way of challenging his Danish contemporaries to read the Bible in a proper manner, it can nevertheless apply to reading ethics texts in that the underlying point Kierkegaard makes is the importance of reading in such a fashion that (...) one fosters inwardness and subjectivity in relation to what is read. After introducing Kierkegaard’s text and three requirements for reading that he outlines therein, the significance of these requirements is drawn out by pointing to several concrete examples of how they have proven successful in introductory ethics courses. To conclude, the case is made that Kierkegaard’s requirements measure up well against a sampling of the relevant research on deep learning and deep reading. (shrink)

This essay develops the argument that Søren Kierkegaard’s text “The Mirror of the Word” can serve as a valuable resource for addressing the problem of poor reading habits of students enrolled in introductory ethics courses. Although Kierkegaard writes this text as a way of challenging his Danish contemporaries to read the Bible in a proper manner, it can nevertheless apply to reading ethics texts in that the underlying point Kierkegaard makes is the importance of reading in such a fashion that (...) one fosters inwardness and subjectivity in relation to what is read. After introducing Kierkegaard’s text and three requirements for reading that he outlines therein, the significance of these requirements is drawn out by pointing to several concrete examples of how they have proven successful in introductory ethics courses. To conclude, the case is made that Kierkegaard’s requirements measure up well against a sampling of the relevant research on deep learning and deep reading. (shrink)

Compatibilist accounts of free will and moral responsibility seem susceptible to the problem of manipulation. Powerful manipulators might induce elements into a person's psychology in such a way that deterministically produces action. The manipulators might also ensure that the person meets some compatibilist sufficient conditions for moral responsibility. The manipulated agent seems intuitively not morally responsible despite meeting the compatibilist sufficient conditions. Thus these conditions are deemed to be not sufficient for moral responsibility. One way to respond is to point (...) out that there is an important sense in which the induced elements that the agent acts upon are not her own. This response is important for two reasons. First manipulation cases feature largely in arguments for incompatibilism. By proposing ownership conditions, compatibilists provide a way of answering incompatibilists. Second, manipulation cases have been used to argue that moral responsibility is essentially historical. Ownership conditions have been used to cash out in just what sense this is so. In this paper I will consider the relational account of ownership provided by Ishtiyaque Haji and Stephaan Cuypers. I argue that their proposal is problematic for two reasons. First I provide cases in which it yields counterintuitive results. Secondly, and more importantly, I argue that part of their account, initial authenticity, is vacuous. I then consider two ways of repairing their account. (shrink)

Research shows the experience of awe is associated with a variety of benefits ranging from increased well-being and prosocial behavior to enhanced cognition. The adaptive purpose of awe, however, is elusive. In this article, we aim to show that the current framework used to conceptualize awe points towards higher-order cognition as the key adaptive function. This goes against past evolutionary positions that posit social benefits or unidimensional behavioral adaptations. In the second half of the article, we highlight a distinct cognitive (...) advantage of awe. The literature connecting awe and cognition is surveyed and used to develop a view that situates awe as a critical component in the cognitive success of the human species. (shrink)

About Padmasambhava: Historical Narratives and Later Transformations of Guru Rinpoche, edited by Geoffrey Samuel and Jamyang Oliphant. Garuda Verlag, 2020. 299 pp. Pb CHF 39,80. ISBN-13: 9783906139364.