Preeminent psychoanalyst Mortimer Ostow believes that early childhood emotional attachments form the cognitive underpinnings of spiritual experience and religious motivation. His hypothesis, which is verifiable, relies on psychological and neurobiological evidence but is respectful of the human need for spiritual value. Ostow begins by classifying the three parts of the spiritual experience: awe, Spirituality proper, and mysticism. After he pinpoints the psychological origins of these feelings in infancy, he discusses the foundations of religious sentiment and practice and (...) the brain processes associated with spiritual experience. He then focuses on spirituality's relationship to mood regulation, and the role of negative spirituality in fostering religious fundamentalism and demonic possession. Ostow concludes with an analysis of an essay by the psychoanalyst Donald M. Marcus, who recounts his own spiritual experience during a Native American-style "vision quest" in the woods. Marcus's account demonstrates the constructive potential of spirituality and the way in which spirituality retrieves and recapitulates feelings of attachment to the mother. Persuasively and brilliantly argued, _Spirit, Mind, and Brain_ brings the disciplines of religion, behavorial neuroscience, and philosophy to bear on a groundbreaking new method for understanding religious ritual and belief. (shrink)

This volume charts the development of political thought between 1517-1625. Drawing on a wide range of sources from Europe and beyond, it offers a new reading of early modern political thought, making connections between Christian Europe and the Muslim societies that lay to its south and east.

Prologue: retrospective and prospective -- The ethics of enough -- Real and apparent goods -- Wrong desires: pleasure, money, fame, and power -- Right desires: the totum bonum and its constituents -- Fundamental errors in moral philosophy -- Necessary but not sufficient -- Epilogue: transcultural ethics.

'We will overcome it [and] I hope in the years to come, everyone will be able to take pride in how they responded to this challenge, and those who come after us will say the Britons of this generation were as strong as any' Her Majesty The Queen The Coronavirus pandemic forced the great British people to dig to the very depths of their resolve. It was during this crisis, the gravest crisis the country has faced since the Second World (...) War, that members of the Greatest Generation - Tom Moore, Dame Vera Lynn, the Queen - proved vital reminders of the self-effacing stoicism required in times of emergency; to summon our 'Blitz spirit' and to 'Keep Calm and Carry On'. Taking twelve qualities of the wartime generation, including fellowship, courage and integrity, and drawing on personal interviews with over two hundred Second World War veterans - from SAS officers to London firewomen to Dame Vera herself - Guidance from the Greatest shows us how we can improve our individual character and our collective approach to life. Guidance from the Greatest reminds us of all that is great about Britain and shows how we can build upon that greatness for the future. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Human Liberty and Human Nature in the Works of Faustus Socinus and His ReadersSarah MortimerI.Few issues were more hotly contested by early modern theologians than the extent of human liberty and its implications for both religion and society. In the Protestant world, the sixteenth century saw increasingly strident statements of mankind's bondage to sin and the importance of God's eternal decree of predestination, but the concept of human moral (...) responsibility still had its defenders. One influential proponent of human liberty was Faustus Socinus (1539–1604), the Italian scholar known most commonly today for his denial of the trinity. Yet the central theme of his theology was his insistence that Christian virtues must be carried out voluntarily; it was from this principle that his more heterodox ideas flowed. He made a sharp distinction between natural and voluntary action, and argued that the practice of Christianity must be an act of human will, not one to which men were drawn by nature. Separating Christianity from the natural order, Socinus argued that eternal life awaited those who chose to follow the law of Christ rather than the natural law. His argument challenged the Protestant commitment to the unity of natural and divine law and it opened up conceptual space for voluntary action outside the natural law. In this article, I shall sketch the Socinian position on human liberty and Christianity, and suggest how and why the Italian's ideas were developed by Protestants in the early seventeenth century. His readers included the eminent Dutch scholar Hugo [End Page 191] Grotius (1583–1645), and the exchange between Grotius and the Socinians reveals the concern on both sides to explain the relationship between human liberty, Christianity, and natural law.Socinus' life, like his theology, began within the reform movement in Italy and ended among the marginalised anti-trinitarians in Poland. Born of a long line of Italian jurists, he shared both his family's legal interests and their critical approach to the Catholic Church. In his youth he had been a courtier in Florence but his increasingly critical attitude towards Catholicism—and the death of his patron Grand-Duke Cosimo I—resulted in his departure from Italy in 1574. After a period in Basel he found a home among the Polish Anabaptists at Rakow, a young and precarious community which he helped to sustain through his advice and through the tracts which he penned on their behalf.1 During these years, he was also able to develop his own interpretation of Christianity, and to explain it in numerous works issuing from the community's press. Although his ideas generated a lively debate from the start, both in Poland and Germany, it was only after his death that they began to be absorbed into the mainstream of European intellectual discussions. Socinus' theological ideas had their attractions for some Protestant readers, but they became entangled with more political questions and their implications for civil life began to cause serious alarm. For this reason my focus will be upon the responses of Dutch and German readers, particularly Hugo Grotius and Johan Crell (1590–1633), both of whom addressed the civil as well as the theological aspects of Socinus' legacy. First, however, I shall draw out the salient points from Socinus' rich and complex theology, paying particular attention to his understanding of human liberty. Unlike his orthodox Protestant contemporaries, Socinus believed that liberty was the precondition for virtue.Socinus shared with the broader Christian humanist tradition the belief that Christ demanded works as well as faith from his followers. Christians must follow the pattern of ethical living laid down by their master; like Erasmus before him, and like the Italian exiles he met in Basel, Socinus saw Christianity as a religion of action.2 For this reason, he was determined to protect the liberty and capacity of each individual to act virtuously, and therefore to defend what he understood as human free will. It was, he felt, [End Page 192] a pressing task, for these qualities were being undermined by his contemporaries and particularly by those on the Protestant side. Most Protestants followed Luther's belief, expressed most forcefully in De Servo Arbitrio (1525... (shrink)

Early intervention aims to identify children or families at risk of poor health, and take preventative measures at an early stage, when intervention is more likely to succeed. EI is concerned with the just distribution of “life chances,” so that all children are given fair opportunity to realize their potential and lead a good life; EI policy design, therefore, invokes ethical questions about the balance of responsibilities between the state, society, and individuals in addressing inequalities. We analyze a corpus of (...) EI policy guidance to investigate explicit and implicit ethical arguments about who should be held morally responsible for safeguarding child health and well-being. We examine the implications of these claims and explore what it would mean to put the proposed policies into practice. We conclude with some remarks about the useful role that philosophical analysis can play in EI policy development. (shrink)

Treating such issues as animal sex, species politics, environmental justice, lesbian space and "gay" ghettos, AIDS literatures, and queer nationalities, this lively collection asks important questions at the intersections of sexuality and environmental studies. Contributors from a wide range of disciplines present a focused engagement with the critical, philosophical, and political dimensions of sex and nature. These discussions are particularly relevant to current debates in many disciplines, including environmental studies, queer theory, critical race theory, philosophy, literary criticism, and politics. As (...) a whole, Queer Ecologies stands as a powerful corrective to views that equate "natural" with "straight" while "queer" is held to be against nature. (shrink)

For the purposes of this paper, realism is defined as the belief that in visual perception there is a direct perception of material bodies existing in space external to the perceiver's body. Most contemporary positivists and analytical philosophers are realists in this sense. Included in this classification would be all those who argue from the character of seen relations of bodies to the uniformity view of causation; those who oppose public to private experience; those who believe that one can point (...) to facts; those who believe in the real existence of objects like extended solid tables and chairs; and those who distinguish in terms of verifiability between judgments of color and judgments of value. (shrink)

Hesperides Press are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.

This book, first published in 1936, divides into roughly two parts: a re-examination of historical material; and a positive theory of causation suggested by the results of this re-examination. The historical study discloses an ambiguity in the meanings of causation and determinism; it discloses also that this ambiguity is transferred to the meaning of freedom.

ABSTRACT The political works of Adam Blackwood offer a powerful defence of absolute monarchy, and one which explicitly sets political power within a religious framework. Critiquing the resistance theories of his contemporaries, Blackwood was sceptical about the political value of natural law and of any appeal to popular sovereignty, at least in contemporary Europe. Blackwood was deeply troubled by the way Christianity was being used to justify resistance, often in Protestant texts that aligned Christianity and natural law, and he insisted (...) that true Christianity taught obedience. Though he has often been likened to his contemporary Jean Bodin, a closer examination of Blackwood’s writing reveals significant differences, especially on the linked issues of natural law, the value of historical argument, and religion. For Blackwood, sovereign power in general had to be underpinned by religion, the one constant in a world of diverse and mutable social practices, and its particular, local manifestation had to be understood historically, as the product of conquest and force. Aware of the potential tensions between Catholic Christianity and monarchical authority, Blackwood also developed a distinctive piety in an attempt to bolster the alliance he advocated between religious and political authority. (shrink)

Prior scholarly approaches to meaningful work have largely fallen into two camps. One focuses on identifying how work can contribute to a meaningful life. The other studies the antecedents and outcomes of workers experiencing their work as meaningful. Neither of these approaches, however, captures what people look for when they seek meaningful work—or so I argue. In this paper, I give a new, commitment-based account of meaningful work by focusing on the reasons people have to choose meaningful work over other (...) options. I draw on philosopher Ruth Chang’s account of voluntarist reasons (reasons that arise from an act of the will) to argue that commitments can create distinctive reasons to pursue certain work. It is the presence of these distinctive reasons that makes work meaningful. (shrink)

el derecho, la razón y la emoción tienen una larga, estrecha y complicada relación en la historia de la filosofía y de la justicia. Esta discusión sugiere que el derecho gana legitimidad y eficacia cuando une la razón con la emoción, que la razón y la emoción humana son los valores rectores de cualquier sistema jurídico justo, que todos los sistemas jurídicos dicen ser justos y que todos los sistemas jurídicos y todos los académicos del derecho hacen uso de estas (...) ideas, ya sea que las reconozcan o no. Este artículo busca aclarar los conceptos “derecho”, “razón”, “emoción”, “justicia”, “eficacia” y “Estado de derecho”, con el fin de comprender mejor cómo se relacionan entre ellos y así establecer la agenda para un mayor diálogo entre los mismos. Para lo anterior, el primer paso sería considerar cómo estas palabras han sido y deberían usarse para una mejor comprensión y un eventual mejoramiento del derecho y la sociedad. Razón y emoción son los pilares gemelos del derecho, que hacen que este último sea legítimo, justo y eficaz cuando se toman debidamente en cuenta. Nadie puede entender correctamente el derecho sin hacer referencia tanto a la emoción humana como al propósito con el que el derecho existe para servir, que es el bienestar racional de todos y cada uno de los miembros de la sociedad. (shrink)