In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist-Christian Studies 23 (2003) 61-66 [Access article in PDF] Retracing Buddhist Encounters Ursula King University of Bristol My aim is a modest one—to retrace earlier experiences of encounters with Buddhism and share my thoughts with others. I am not writing as a "dual practitioner," nor do I philosophize about "double belonging," its possibility or impossibility. Neither do I intend to write in an academic, objectifying mode of thought. (...) It is not even about my ongoing personal journey, as journeys seem to imply participation in a continuing process. What I am going to describe are more unconnected encounters, years apart, rather than an ongoing journey, perhaps more like Grace Burford's "postcards" than any of the other accounts submitted.I first caught a glimpse, no more, of Buddhist thought in my early teens, in one of my school history books, and was both puzzled and intrigued to see Buddhism described as "more of a philosophy than a religion." What could that possibly mean, and how could I find out more about this so very different religious thought from the East of which our teacher spoke so highly? Later I learned more, but not much, in comparative religion classes and philosophy of religion courses during my university studies in the fifties and sixties, and from reading Henri de Lubac's book on the Amida Buddha and his study on the encounter between Buddhism and the West, a pioneering but little known work written in 1952, just before the expansion of Buddhism into the West really took off. I also saw Buddhist monks and rituals in some of the documentary films (with Arnold Toynbee as a narrator) I used in a world religions class taught almost forty years ago. But none of this really prepared me for meeting Buddhist people and Buddhist culture in Asian lands, all unpredictably more diverse and appealing than any description found in Western books.When I lived with my family in New Delhi from 1965 to 1970, I met a Buddhist monk from Cambodia who had founded a vihara outside New Delhi open to people of all faiths, and it is there that I first encountered and took part in Buddhist meditation, worship, and festivals, but what attracted me most and left an indelible impression were the profoundly moving spirit of wisdom and compassion and acts of loving kindness that I experienced again and again and that moved me deeply to the core. Such experiences are so alive and vivid, so rich in texture and memory traces that they can feed thoughts and attitudes for the rest of one's life, but they are never fully captured in clever intellectual and philosophical abstractions, however [End Page 61] powerful the argument in which they are clothed. It is for this reason that I always value and cherish the richness of lived experience and participation, even in its often contradictory and profoundly ambivalent nature, more than any finely honed intellectual points concerning profoundly metaphysical insights about ultimate reality or absolute truth claims. In this sense I am perhaps more a practitioner realizing the relational, contingent nature of any and all positions rather than an absolutist thinker wanting to defend one system of thought over another.Soon my personal contacts with Buddhists in India grew through meeting different Tibetan monks, and some Tibetan nuns too, and through visits to the newly founded Tibet House in New Delhi. But most of all I was deeply touched by an early visit to the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala, probably in March 1966, in the company of an American Sacred Heart nun, Mother Adele Fiske from Manhattan College, who was fitting in this visit while officially undertaking research on the Ambedkhar Buddhists, the leatherworker converts from an outcaste background, some of whom I also met on different occasions. The personal visit to the Dalai Lama in an intimate setting was a high point of my life, as (with the help of an interpreter) we spent about an hour and a half discussing the Christian understanding of the Holy Spirit in comparison to the Buddhist idea of prajnaparamita, of ultimate wisdom. I wished I... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist-Christian Dialogue:Looking Back, Looking Ahead, and Listening Ever More DeeplySallie B. KingI was asked to give a brief overview of the subject of the Buddhist-Christian dialogue, looking back over its history and looking ahead to its future. I begin with two caveats. First, of necessity, this account will be very general and I will paint with a very broad brush. I cannot speak to the many variations and exceptions (...) to many, if not all, of the general statements that I make. Second, inevitably, this account will also be very subjective. It will especially be colored by my visits in recent years to Sri Lanka, Thailand, and Taiwan.the dialogue on religious thoughtLooking back over the history of the Buddhist-Christian dialogue, one notices a pattern that is regularly remarked upon: Christians show a lot more interest in dialogue with Buddhists than Buddhists show in dialogue with Christians. This is especially the case with respect to dialogue regarding each other’s religious thought.1 Sometimes Christians observe this fact with dismay, or with the implication that there is something wrong with the Buddhist side because of this lack of interest. There is a sense among some Christians that Buddhists should be more interested in learning from Christianity on the level of religious thought. I would like to address this idea that Buddhists should be more interested in learning from Christianity on the level of religious thought.First, several people have noted that the place and function of religious thought in Buddhism are rather different than their place and function in Christianity. For example, as Rita Gross has pointed out, some forms of Buddhist meditation have no reference to Buddhist thought at all—especially some Theravada practices such as mindfulness and choiceless awareness—whereas neither she (at least, at that time) nor I can think of any Christian meditation that doesn’t reference God or Jesus.2Again, Rita Gross has stated that for Christians to take at least some Buddhist thoughts and practices seriously, they needn’t give up necessarily any of their own fundamental doctrinal commitments, whereas the reverse is not the case.3 That is, a [End Page 7] Buddhist who wanted to take Christian thought seriously would almost immediately come face-to-face with Christianity’s theism. They likely would be unable to proceed, since accepting theism would require them to forego the whole edifice of Buddhist thought.Here I must demur. It is true that Christianity’s theism and Buddhism’s nontheism give fundamentally different foundations to their respective worldviews. But surely there are some elements of Christian thought and practice that Buddhists could absorb from Christianity without a fundamental reorientation. Some examples of ideas in Christianity that seem unthreatening to the foundations of Buddhism, yet potentially growth-inspiring for Buddhism in dialogue, come readily to mind. For example, as the relative place of laypeople shifts within modernizing Buddhism, a great deal might be learned from Christian thought on church and community. Again, Christian thought that contemplates realization of the Kingdom of God here and now might be of interest to those Taiwanese Buddhists who speak of a “Pure Land on Earth.” Even in the (semi-)ontological area, Christian thought on Spirit or pneuma might make for a potentially enriching dialogical partner for Buddhists, with their ideas on Buddha nature, Tathagatagarbha and Dharmakaya. The two sets of thinking on Natural Law could be a place of mutual learning. And many of the parables of Jesus have the power to cause people to see things in a new way, regardless of world-view. There is much that Buddhists could absorb from Christians while maintaining their basic worldview. Yet it remains true that it is hard to see much evidence of Buddhists absorbing anything substantial from Christian religious thought.I think that at this point in the Buddhist-Christian dialogue, we can say that the Buddhists have voted with their feet. Buddhist dialoguers are not ignorant of Christian religious thought. There have been some rather deep Buddhist studies, for example, of Jesus and of Christian mystics.4 However, it seems clear that they haven’t, as a rule, found anything there that has... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist-Christian Studies 20 (2000) 127-150 [Access article in PDF] They Who Burned Themselves for Peace: Quaker and Buddhist Self-Immolators during the Vietnam War Sallie B. KingJames Madison UniversityNhat Chi Mai was a lay disciple of Thich Nhat Hanh and member of the Order of Interbeing, an Engaged Buddhist order founded by Nhat Hanh. On May 16, 1967, Vesak, the celebration of the birth of the Buddha, she burned (...) herself to death outside the Tu Nghiem Temple, a nunnery. An idealistic young student with much to live for, she sacrificed herself in an effort to bring the war to an end. In a letter to the U.S. government she wrote, I offer my body as a torch to dissipate the dark to waken love among men to give peace to Vietnam the one who burns herself for peace. 1In her farewell letter to Thich Nhat Hanh she wrote, "Thay, don't worry too much. We will have peace soon." 2On November 2, 1965, Norman Morrison, a devout Quaker and ardent pacifist, drove from Baltimore to Washington and burned himself to death at the Pentagon, at a spot estimated to be 40 to 100 feet from the window of Robert S. McNamara, then Secretary of Defense and one of the chief American prosecutors of the war. Shortly before his death, he wrote to his wife, "For weeks even months I have been praying only that I be shown what I must do. This morning with no warning I was shown.... Know that I love thee but must act...." 3 Morrison took his baby daughter, Emily, along with him and held her in his arms as he prepared for his act. Somehow--accounts differ as to how it happened--she was separated from her father before the flames engulfed him and she emerged entirely unharmed, though her clothing smelled strongly of the kerosene with which Morrison had soaked himself. 4There were others who burned themselves to death during the war in Vietnam. The venerable Buddhist monk Thich Quang Duc was the first. On June 11, 1963, [End Page 127] at a downtown crossroads in Saigon, he sat in the lotus posture and, in a state of meditative control, burned himself to death in protest of the Diem regime's repression of the Buddhist religion. Many Vietnamese Buddhist monks and nuns followed his example; I do not know all their names, or exactly how many they were.In America, to my knowledge, eight people burned themselves to death during the war. Two were Quakers: Norman Morrison and Alice Herz. Roger LaPorte, a former Trappist seminarian who had become a Catholic worker, burned himself to death one week after Norman Morrison. The others were: Hiroko Hayasaki, a Japanese-American Buddhist; Erik Thoen, a student of Zen Buddhism; another university student, George Winne; a high school student, Ronald Brazee; and Florence Beaumont, described as a "housewife." A number of others attempted self-immolation but survived. 5In this paper I will focus upon the self-immolations of Norman Morrison and Nhat Chi Mai. I will also have a few comments on Thich Quang Duc. My remarks are intended, however, to have relevance to all the Buddhist and Quaker self-immolators. 6Let us now consider in more detail some of the features of the self-immolations of Norman Morrison and Nhat Chi Mai, and some of the issues they pose to the Quaker and Buddhist communities, respectively. Precipitating Events While neither act was the result of a moment's impulse, we still would do well to ask what events most proximately precipitated the two self-immolations. In Norman Morrison's case, the precipitating events were two. The morning of the day he immolated himself he read a report of the American bombing of a village in Vietnam. Paris Match had published an interview with a French priest, recuperating in a Saigon clinic, who had witnessed and survived the bombing raid. The priest said, "I have seen my faithful burned up in napalm.... I have seen... (shrink)

Many people experience feelings of inferiority in their life. The concept of striving to avoid inferiority is a belief associated with the unwanted fear of being overlooked, missing out on opportunities for advancement, and active rejection. This study examined the effect of striving to avoid inferiority on mental health and well-being. We hypothesized that striving to avoid inferiority would modify the relationship among socioeconomic status, mental health, and well-being, therefore examined the effect of striving to avoid inferiority on the relationship (...) between annual income, mental health, and well-being. The participants were 491 adults. The results indicated that insecure striving in competition with others positively correlated with depression, anxiety, and stress, whereas secure non-striving in acceptance of inferiority positively correlated with the satisfaction with life and negatively correlated with depression. The effect of striving to avoid inferiority on the relationship among annual income, mental health, and well-being indicated that SNS affected the relationships between annual income and well-being, annual income and depression, income and anxiety, and the interaction between IS and SNS. Moreover, the relationship between income and stress was influenced by SNS and the interaction between IS and SNS. These results indicated that SNS or the interaction between IS and SNS were the only variables regulating the relationship among annual income, mental health, and well-being. These findings suggested that accepting feelings of inferiority or striving to avoid inferiority influences the mental health and well-being of people. (shrink)

Followers of Wittgenstein allegedly once held that a meaningful claim to know that p could only be made if there was some doubt about the truth of p. The correct response to this thesis involved appealing to the distinction between the semantic content of a sentence and features attaching to its use. It is inappropriate to assert a knowledge-claim unless someone in the audience has doubt about what the speaker claims to know. But this fact has nothing to do with (...) the semantic content of knowledgeascriptions; it is entirely explicable by appeal to pragmatic facts about felicitous assertion. (shrink)

Just as humans can draw conclusions responsibly or irresponsibly, so too can computers. Machine learning systems that have been trained on data sets that include irresponsible judgments are likely to yield irresponsible predictions as outputs. In this paper I focus on a particular kind of inference a computer system might make: identification of the intentions with which a person acted on the basis of photographic evidence. Such inferences are liable to be morally objectionable, because of a way in which they (...) are presumptuous. After elaborating this moral concern, I explore the possibility that carefully procuring the training data for image recognition systems could ensure that the systems avoid the problem. The lesson of this paper extends beyond just the particular case of image recognition systems and the challenge of responsibly identifying a person’s intentions. Reflection on this particular case demonstrates the importance (as well as the difficulty) of evaluating machine learning systems and their training data from the standpoint of moral considerations that are not encompassed by ordinary assessments of predictive accuracy. (shrink)

Avia Pasternak’s book makes a significant contribution to our understanding of citizen responsibility for historical wrongs. This review nevertheless offers some scepticism about resting citizen liability exclusively on the idea of intentional participation. It argues that the necessity of the state possessing continuing legal responsibility over time is so intrinsic to the function of statehood that the question of citizen liability should be seen as part of the general theory of political obligation. So seen, fair play duties provide a more (...) plausible general ground for citizen liability, even when adapted to unjust regimes. The model of intentional participation may by contrast harbour a muted connection between the ideas of blameworthiness and responsibility that the book in the main wishes to deny. And the practical problems of resting responsibility on intentional participation alone are substantial. Pasternak’s major contribution, untouched by this critique, is to explain how the special obligations undertaken by intentional citizenship strengthen and extend beyond that more foundational duty of responsible citizens. (shrink)

Despite increasing interests and urgent needs for quality end-of-life care, there is no exact definition of what is the interval referred to as end of life or what end-of-life care is. The purpose of this article is to report our examination of terms related to end-of-life care and define end-of-life care from nursing ethics perspectives. Current terms related to end-of-life care, such as terminal care, hospice care, and palliative care, are based on a medical model and are restrictive in terms (...) of diagnosis and prognosis. Using codes of ethics for nurses as a framework, we attempt to identify people to whom nurses are responsible to provide end-of-life care and develop a definition of end-of-life care that is more inclusive and applicable to a broader range of people who would benefit from end-of-life care by nurses and other health-care providers. (shrink)

Reproduction of the original: Theology and the Social Consciousness by Henry Churchill King.

A self-fulfilling prophecy is, roughly, a prediction that brings about its own truth. Although true predictions are hard to fault, self-fulfilling prophecies are often regarded with suspicion. In this article, we vindicate this suspicion by explaining what self-fulfilling prophecies are and what is problematic about them, paying special attention to how their problems are exacerbated through automated prediction. Our descriptive account of self-fulfilling prophecies articulates the four elements that define them. Based on this account, we begin our critique by showing (...) that typical self-fulfilling prophecies arise due to mistakes about the relationship between a prediction and its object. Such mistakes—along with other mistakes in predicting or in the larger practical endeavor—are easily overlooked when the predictions turn out true. Thus we note that self-fulfilling prophecies prompt no error signals; truth shrouds their mistakes from humans and machines alike. Consequently, self-fulfilling prophecies create several obstacles to accountability for the outcomes they produce. We conclude our critique by showing how failures of accountability, and the associated failures to make corrections, explain the connection between self-fulfilling prophecies and feedback loops. By analyzing the complex relationships between accuracy and other evaluatively significant features of predictions, this article sheds light both on the special case of self-fulfilling prophecies and on the ethics of prediction more generally. (shrink)

Semantics is the discipline that studies linguistic meaning generally, and the qualification ‘formal’ indicates something about the sorts of techniques used in investigating linguistic meaning. More specifically, formal semantics is the discipline that employs techniques from symbolic logic, mathematics, and mathematical logic to produce precisely characterized theories of meaning for natural languages or artificial languages. Formal semantics as we know it first arose in the twentieth century. It was made possible by certain developments in logic during that period. This article (...) chronicles those developments and how they led to the development of formal semantics. (shrink)

"The fixed person for fixed duties, who in older societies was such a godsend, in the future ill be a public danger." Twenty years ago, a single legal metaphor accurately captured the role that American society accorded to physicians. The physician was "c- tain of the ship." Physicians were in charge of the clinic, the Operating room, and the health care team, responsible - and held accountabl- for all that happened within the scope of their supervision. This grant of responsibility (...) carried with it a corresponding grant of authority; like the ship's captain, the physician was answerable to no one regarding the practice of his art. However compelling the metaphor, few would disagree that the mandate accorded to the medical profession by society is changing. As a result of pressures from a number of diverse directions - including technological advances, the development of new health professionals, changes in health care financing and delivery, the recent emphasis on consumer choice and patients' rights - what our society expects phy- cians to do and to be is different now. The purpose of this volume is to examine and evaluate the conceptual foundations and the moral imp- cations of that difference. Each of the twelve essays of this volume assesses the current and future validity of the "captain of the ship" metaphor from a different perspective. The essays are grouped into four sections. In Section I, Russell Maulitz explores the physician's role historically. (shrink)

This is the first investigation of timekeeping by the sun and stars and the regulation of the astronomically-defined times of Muslim prayer. The study is based on over 500 medieval astronomical manuscripts first identified by the author. A second volume and third volume, also published by Brill, deals with astronomical instruments for timekeeping and other computing devices.

The “beyond a reasonable doubt” standard of proof, currently used in criminal trials, is notoriously vague and undermotivated. This paper discusses two popular strategies for justifying our choice of a particular precise interpretation of the standard: the “ratio-to-standard strategy” identifies a desired ratio of trial outcomes and then argues that a certain standard is the one that we can expect to produce our desired ratio, while the “utilities-to-standard strategy” identifies utilities for trial outcomes and then argues that a certain standard (...) maximizes expected utility. I argue that both strategies fail on their own terms, by requiring us to perform calculations that we simply cannot perform. No version of either strategy can be performed by jurors or legislators in our actual epistemic position, in which, since we do not know which of the defendants in our trial system are genuinely innocent and which are genuinely guilty, we cannot determine the extent to which our trial system tends to produce evidence that misleadingly incriminates the innocent or misleadingly exonerates the guilty. But we would need to determine this in order to perform the calculations required by any possible version of the ratio-to-standard or utilities-to-standard strategies. I then suggest some empirical reasons to be pessimistic about the evidence produced by our actual trial system. The upshot is that the “beyond a reasonable doubt” standard lacks a clear interpretation and rationale, nor do we have a promising way to identify an alternative. This is the trouble with standards of proof. (shrink)

Philosophical work on testimony has flourished in recent years. Testimony roughly involves a source affirming or stating something in an attempt to transfer information to one or more persons. It is often said that the topic of testimony has been neglected throughout most of the history of philosophy, aside from contributions by David Hume (1711–1776) and Thomas Reid (1710–1796).1 True as this may be, Hume and Reid aren’t the only ones who deserve a tip of the hat for recognizing the (...) importance of testimony: St. Augustine of Hippo (354–430) affirms the place of testimony in human cognition, at least in his later writings. (shrink)

This is the first investigation of one of the main interests of astronomy in Islamic civilization, namely, timekeeping by the sun and stars and the regulation of the astronomically-defined times of Muslim prayer. The study is based on over 500 medieval astronomical manuscripts first identified by the author, now preserved in libraries all over the world and originally from the entire Islamic world from the Maghrib to Central Asia and the Yemen.

This book has a wonderful introduction and afterword by Marjorie Hewitt Suchocki. From beginning to end, this tri-authored work offers an integrated treatment of process theology, pneumology, and ecclesiology for the benefit of local Christian congregations.Among the three voices at work in this book, John Cobb provides an important primer on Whitehead's views of possibilities, experience, and relationships. Opening each of the book's three parts, Cobb both lays the groundwork and provides a strong framing for pneumology on the basis of (...) Whiteheadian thought. The frame for the Spirit is a broad one, calling for diversity and spontaneity. Lest the spiritual become too ethereal, Cobb reminds us of Whitehead's emphasis on experience and responsiveness to the world around us. Our freedom involves a self-determination that actualizes our own happiness and our contribution to others (111). Cobb's sections build a frame for the sections written by Epperly and Nancarrow, and they also encourage continued reading of Whitehead. (However, the book's lack of an index or a resource page for this kind of growth is a shortcoming.)Epperly offers in each of the book's three sections efforts at honing the concept of spirituality. As a concept, spirituality is in danger of a vacuousness that has no leverage in the life experience of the practitioner. Epperly does not succumb. He explicates important conduits of the spirit: embodiment, imagination, affirmative awareness, and compassion. Epperly provides a definition of spirituality as an adventurous journey of compassion. Spirituality is less a state of being and more of an exploration or a becoming as one relates to the surrounding world. He works the definition of spirituality with a prism-like beauty over the course of the three sections, integrating important persons from various cultures and inviting the reader to imagine their own spiritual past and potential future contributions.In each of the three sections, Nancarrow brings ecclesiology into the mix, thus making the book an essential for pastors who care about the pragmatics of process in the community of a local congregation. Nancarrow's chapters might be best characterized as how-to chapters helping church folk revisit the routines of liturgy, small groups, and the sacrament of communion. He encourages specific practices to engage liturgy, freshen perception, and potentially awaken hearts that can grow dull in rote practices of worship. Discernment and group work receives step-by-step attention. It is not lost on the reader that Nancarrow means to connect the care of facilitation in groups to the group's experience of the Spirit's call. Quite deftly, he closes the book with attention to the sacrament of communion in which “imagination, intellect, will, memory, emotion, sensation, and physicality are all engaged” (137).In short, The Call of the Spirit does more than talk about the Spirit. The book provides a philosophy and theology for practicing into the Spirit and helping others do the same. The authors believe in the readers’ intellect, deep-seated compassion, and commitment to the communities from which the adventure might play out in the most profound ways. (shrink)

This article offers a reading of Sartre's phenomenological ontology in light of the pre-modern understanding of ‘transcendentals’ as universal properties and predicates of all determinate beings. Drawing on Sartre's transcendental account of nothingness in his early critique of Husserl as well as his discussion of ‘determination as negation’ in Being and Nothingness, this article argues that Sartre's universal predicate of ‘the not’ (le non) could be understood in a similar light to the medieval scholastic conception of transcendentals. But whereas the (...) scholastics saw the transcendental properties of oneness, truth, and goodness as reflections of God's divine perfections, Sartre's predicate of the ‘not’ operates as an atheistic transcendental which signifies the non-being of God – that God is not. By comparing Sartre's phenomenological ontology to medieval theological metaphysics, this article not only highlights the atheist underpinnings of Sartre's entire ontological schema in Being and Nothingness but also offers a new way of interpreting Sartre as a systematic transcendental metaphysician. (shrink)

This article offers a reading of the “transcendental” character of Alain Badiou’s and Giorgio Agamben’s ontologies. While neither Badiou nor Agamben are “transcendental” philosophers in the Kantian sense, this article argues that their respective projects of ontology both recover aspects of the “classical” conception of the transcendentals. Not unlike how pre-modern philosophers conceived of oneness, truth and goodness as transcendental properties of all things, both Badiou’s and Agamben’s ontologies present various structures which can be universally predicated of all being. However, (...) as opposed to the essentialist or even theological tendencies of traditional metaphysics, Badiou’s and Agamben’s ontologies are committedly “inessential” and atheistic at their very core. By replacing the divine names of the one, the true and the good in traditional metaphysics with a new yet quasi-classical transcendental notion of “the void” as a universal predicate of all beings, Badiou’s and Agamben’s works may be regarded as projects that go beyond both the pre-Kantian “theological” and the post-Kantian “subjective” conceptions of transcendental philosophy, thereby marking a new development in the history of western metaphysics. (shrink)

In a recent issue of this journal, Vandermassen suggested that feminists should include sexual selection theory and evolutionary psychology in a unifying theory of human nature. In response, this article aims to offer some insight into the development of sexual selection theory, to caution against Vandermassen's unreserved assimilation and to promote the opposite ongoing integration — an inclusion of gender perspectives into evolutionary biology. In society today, opinions about maintaining traditional sex roles are often put forward on the basis of (...) what is natural and how animals behave. However, the natural sciences have proved to be pervaded by gendered values and interests; Darwin's theory of sexual selection has been criticized for being male biased, and partly due to the unwillingness of Darwin's scientific contemporaries to accept female choice, research has been overwhelmingly focused on males. More recently, theory has become less gender biased and research has come to include a large variety of issues not present in the first version of the theory. However, there is a need to increase the awareness of gender bias in order to develop a gender-neutral evolutionary biology. (shrink)

The term intersectionality, which is generally attributed to Kimberlé Crenshaw, began as a metaphorical and conceptual tool used to highlight the inability of a single-axis framework to capture the lived experiences of black women. Whilst many disciplines have used the ‘tools’ of intersectionality before 1989, modern day usage of the term is usually associated with Crenshaw’s specific approach. The development of Crenshaw’s intersectionality, originated from the failure of both feminist and anti-racist discourse; to represent and capture the specificity of the (...) discrimination faced by black women. This failure resulted from an inability to identify the multiple grounds which constitute an... (shrink)

Biology is instrumental in establishing and perpetuating societal norms of gender and sexuality, owing to its afforded authoritative role in formulating beliefs about what is “natural”. However, philosophers, historians, and sociologists of science have shown how conceptions of gender and sexuality pervade the supposedly objective knowledge produced by the natural sciences. For example, in describing animal relationships, biologists sometimes use the metaphor of marriage, which brings with it conceptions of both cuckoldry and male ownership of female partners. These conceptions have (...) often led researchers to overlook female behavior and adaptations, such as female initiation of mating. Such social norms and ideologies influence both theories and research in biology. Social norms of gender and sexuality also influence school cultures. Although awareness of gender issues has had a major impact in Sweden during recent years, the interventions conducted have been based on a heteronormative understanding of sex; this has rendered sexual norms a non-prioritized issue and thereby rendered non-heterosexuals invisible in teaching and textbooks. Since this research was published in 2007 and 2009, norm critical pedagogics have been included in the Swedish National Agency for Education’s guidelines for teaching. This inclusion represents one way to tackle the recurring problem of heterosexuality being described as a naturalized “normal” behavior and homosexuals, bisexuals and transsexuals being described from a heteronormative perspective. In this paper, I employ gender and queer perspectives to scrutinize how animal sexual behavior is described and explained in Swedish biology textbooks. The analysis is based in gender and queer theory, feminist science studies, and evolutionary biology. The article begins with an outline a discussion of my theoretical framework, relating gender and queer perspectives on evolutionary biology to a discussion of queer methodology. I then scrutinize some empirical examples drawn from five contemporary biology textbooks used in secondary schools (by students aged 16-18 years old). Finally, I discuss the implications of the textbooks’ representations of animal sexual behavior, the problems of and need for a “textbook-version”, and providing examples of what an inclusive approach to biology education might look like. (shrink)

In her paper “Radical Externalism”, Amia Srinivasan argues that externalism about epistemic justification should be preferred to internalism by those who hold a “radical” worldview (according to which pernicious ideology distorts our evidence and belief‐forming processes). I share Srinivasan's radical worldview, but do not agree that externalism is the preferable approach in light of the worldview we share. Here I argue that cases informed by this worldview can intuitively support precisely the internalist view that Srinivasan challenges, offer two such cases, (...) and explain away the externalist‐friendly intuitions that Srinivasan's cases solicit. I then articulate and defend a “radical” internalism, arguing that internalists’ aversion to epistemic hubris and emphasis on subjecting one's beliefs to critical scrutiny are especially attractive in realistic cases involving multiple intersecting axes of oppression—that is, precisely the sort of case that permeates our social world. I also argue that externalism's lack of interest in action‐guiding principles leaves it with little to offer us in the fight against epistemic oppression. (shrink)

Irish literature after Yeats and Joyce, from the 1920s onwards, includes texts which have been the subject of much contention. For a start how should Irish literature be defined: as works which have been written in Irish or as works written in Englsih by the Irish? It is a period in whichideas of Ireland--of people, community, and nation--have been both created and reflected, and in which conceptions of a distinct Irish identity have been articulated, defended, and challenged; a period which (...) has its origins in a time of intense political turmoil. `after Yeats and Joyce' alsosuggests the immense influence of these two writers on the style, stances, and preoccupations of twentieth-century Irish literature. Neil Corcoran focuses his chapter on various themes such as `the Big House', the rural and provincial, with reference to authors from Kinsella and Beckett to WilliamTrevor, Seamus Heaney, and Mary Lavin, providing a lucid and far-reaching introduction to modern Irish writing. (shrink)

This is a paper about the nature of snobbery and the undermining import of a charge of snobbery. On my account, snobs sincerely attempt to identify and correctly evaluate the aesthetically relevant features of an object, but they get things wrong, and their getting things wrong is explained by the fact that they under-value that which they associate with being lower-class. We can see the need for this account by reflecting on examples, and can distinguish it from existing accounts of (...) snobbery by thinking about when and why evidence of snobbery constitutes higher-order evidence against one’s aesthetic judgements. Existing accounts either are consistent with snobs’ aesthetic judgements being flawless, and thus not undermined by evidence of snobbery, or they imply that the canonical reasoning-process for arriving at aesthetic judgements has been bypassed altogether. On my account, by contrast, snobbery does not bypass the canonical aesthetic reasoning-process but distorts it in systematic and predictable ways. (shrink)

This article offers a comparative reading of the ontologies of David Bentley Hart and Jean-Paul Sartre as well as their respective appeals to phenomenology as a philosophical method. While it may seem odd to compare one of the twentieth century’s most celebrated atheists with one of contemporary Christianity’s most highly-acclaimed critics of atheism, this article shows that there are many surprising parallels between the ontological outlooks of Hart and Sartre, namely their conceptions of God as the unity of being and (...) consciousness and their accounts of human consciousness as a desire to ‘become God’. By examining the similarities and differences between Sartre’s and Hart’s philosophical and theological works, this article seeks to highlight the phenomenological aspects of Hart’s theological outlook and consider how Hart’s appeal to the phenomenological analysis of intentional consciousness in his theological work can illuminate our understanding of the ongoing engagements between theology and phenomenology. (shrink)

The information‐transference account of teaching takes it to be a process in which information is transferred from one person's mind to another's. Augustine argues that this is impossible, since in order to understand something the person who understands must come to see why it is so, and that is an internal episode of awareness that isn't caused by an outside source. Augustine's insight here is contrasted with the contemporary view, following Wittgenstein, that learning is a matter of conformity to rules (...) (public norms). The case is made that teaching and learning pose philosophical problems that contemporary theories don't address, and a brief examination of Searle's Chinese Room example suggests that its plausibility derives from Augustine's insight that mere rule‐following behavior isn't enough to explain the phenomenon of understanding at the heart of knowledge. A reconstruction of Augustine's epistemological claims, divorced from his discredited views in the philosophy of language, is also provided. (shrink)

This article seeks to consider the compatibility between the doctrine of the Trinity and the theory of the transcendental properties by offering a consideration of the notion of the ‘gift’ as a transcendental term. In particular, this article presents a re-reading of John Milbank’s influential theology of the gift through Colin Gunton’s project of developing ‘trinitarian transcendentals’. In addition to showing how Milbank’s notion of the gift could be systematically understood in terms of what Gunton calls a ‘trinitarianly developed transcendental’ (...) which nonetheless avoids many of the problems found in Gunton’s original project, this article argues understanding ‘gift’ as a transcendental term can not only provide us with new ways of reconceiving the relationship between the philosophy of transcendental properties and various traditional doctrines, it can moreover show us how the traditional and biblical names of the Holy Spirit as ‘the Gift’ and the Son as ‘the Word’ can offer new ways of developing distinctively trinitarian accounts of metaphysics. (shrink)

Background Despite the implementation of codes and declarations of medical research ethics, unethical behavior is still reported among researchers. Most of the medical faculties have included topics related to medical research ethics and developed ethical committees; yet, in some cases, unethical behaviors are still observed, and many obstacles are still conferring to applying these guidelines. Methods This cross-sectional questionnaire-based study was conducted by interviewing randomly selected 331 Lebanese physicians across Lebanon, to assess their awareness, knowledge and attitudes on practice regarding (...) international and national research ethics guidelines and scientific misconduct and misbehaviors. Results Our results revealed that although majority of participants declared familiar with ethical principles governing research that involves human subjects, the overall mean score achieved on their knowledge questions was 46%. Only 27.4% are aware of the presence of the Lebanese National Consultative Committee on Ethics, with only half of them aware of its functions and only 25.7% know about the charter of ethics and guiding principles of scientific research in Lebanon. Significant higher levels of research ethics knowledge were recorded among Ph.D. degree-holding subjects, higher university positions as in professors, research ethics trainings-attendees, and physicians with prior research experience. A significant correlation was observed between knowledge of research ethics principles and positive attitudes toward research ethics principles. Noteworthy, we found that more than one third of participants have reported witnessing scientific misconduct and misbehaviors at some period of their careers. Conclusions The presence of low mean awareness levels regarding research ethical principles among the study population of physicians and high levels of perception of scientific misconduct raises concern on the importance of implementing proper training for physicians on research ethics. (shrink)

Marcus Tullius Cicero (106 BC-43 BC) was a Roman statesman, lawyer, political theorist, philosopher, and Roman constitutionalist. He is widely considered one of Rome's greatest orators and prose stylists. He is generally perceived to be one of the most versatile minds of ancient Rome. He introduced the Romans to the chief schools of Greek philosophy and created a Latin philosophical vocabulary, distinguishing himself as a linguist, translator, and philosopher. An impressive orator and successful lawyer, he probably thought his political career (...) his most important achievement. Today, he is appreciated primarily for his humanism and philosophical and political writings. Although a great master of Latin rhetoric and composition, Cicero was not Roman in the traditional sense, and was quite self-conscious of this for his entire life. He was declared a "righteous pagan" by the early Catholic Church, and therefore many of his works were deemed worthy of preservation. Saint Augustine and others quoted liberally from his works On the Republic and On the Laws, and it is due to this that we are able to recreate much of the work from the surviving fragments. (shrink)

Using the exemplary case of 19th-century American state penitentiaries, the authors explore penitentiary control from the perspective of sensing agents who navigate a controlled sensory ecology – the prison, as structured by institutional rules, differential power relations, and architectural plans. Moving beyond Foucault’s Discipline and Punish and Goffman’s Asylums, they stress a pragmatist approach to understanding human sensing and explain inmates’ creativity under constraints. Employing wardens’ disciplinary journals and other secondary reports, the article emphasizes three theoretical issues that explain why (...) Panoptical prisons’ attempts to control sense experiences can sometimes fail: architectural designs that inadequately negotiate the contradictory demands of visual and acoustic control; inmates’ active mobilization of perceptible objects as means of resistance; and power differences between prison authorities and inmates that prevent actors from sharing a common sensory field. The authors’ overarching goal is to advance, via pragmatism, a sensory analysis of institutional control. (shrink)

Experiments in particle physics have hitherto failed to produce any significant evidence for the many explicit models of physics beyond the Standard Model (BSM) that had been proposed over the past decades. As a result, physicists have increasingly turned to model-independent strategies as tools in searching for a wide range of possible BSM effects. In this paper, we describe the Standard Model Effective Field Theory (SM-EFT) and analyse it in the context of the philosophical discussions about models, theories, and (bottom-up) (...) effective field theories. We find that while the SM-EFT is a quantum field theory, assisting experimentalists in searching for deviations from the SM, in its general form it lacks some of the characteristic features of models. Those features only come into play if put in by hand or prompted by empirical evidence for deviations. Employing different philosophical approaches to models, we argue that the case study suggests not to take a view on models that is overly permissive because it blurs the lines between the different stages of the SM-EFT research strategies and glosses over particle physicists' motivations for undertaking this bottom-up approach in the first place. Looking at EFTs from the perspective of modelling does not require taking a stance on some specific brand of realism or taking sides in the debate between reduction and emergence into which EFTs have recently been embedded. (shrink)

G. A. Cohen conceptualizes socialism as luck egalitarianism constrained by a community principle. The latter mitigates certain inequalities to achieve a shared common life. This article explores the plausibility of the community constraint on inequality in light of two related problems. First, if it is voluntary, it fails as a response to “the abandonment objection” to luck egalitarianism, as it would not guarantee imprudent people sufficient resources to avoid deprivation and to function as equal citizens in a democratic society. Contra (...) Cohenite socialism, this appears unjust. Second, if it is instead enforced, coercive equalization beyond sufficiency-constrained luck egalitarianism, which is possibly necessary to achieve a shared common life, seems to require unjustified restrictions on liberty. I therefore argue that the constraint is most plausibly specified as requiring enforcement of sufficiency and only voluntary equalization thereafter. I also note, skeptically, why this constraint might be morally preferable to a purely sufficientarian alternative. (shrink)

Our paper studies the anatomy of the discovery of the Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider and its influence on the broader model landscape of particle physics. We investigate the phases of this discovery, which led to a crucial reconfiguration of the model landscape of elementary particle physics and eventually to a confirmation of the standard model. A keyword search of preprints covering the electroweak symmetry breaking sector of particle physics, along with an examination of physicists own understanding of (...) the discovery as documented in semiannual conferences, has allowed us an empirical investigation of its model dynamics. From our analyses we draw two main philosophical lessons concerning the nature of scientific reasoning in a complex experimental and theoretical environment. For one, from a confirmation standpoint, some SM alternatives could be considered even more confirmed by the Higgs discovery than the SM. Nevertheless, the SM largely remains the commonly accepted account of EWSB. We present criteria for comparing degrees of confirmation and expose some limits of a purely logical approach to understanding the Higgs discovery as a victory for the SM. Second, we understand the persistence of SM alternatives in the face of disfavourable evidence by borrowing the Lakatosian concept of a research programme, where the core idea behind a group of models survives, while other aspects adapt to incoming data. In order to apply this framework to the model landscape of EWSB, we must introduce a new category of research programme, the model-group, and we test its viability using the example of composite Higgs models. (shrink)

The idea of artificial intelligence for social good is gaining traction within information societies in general and the AI community in particular. It has the potential to tackle social problems through the development of AI-based solutions. Yet, to date, there is only limited understanding of what makes AI socially good in theory, what counts as AI4SG in practice, and how to reproduce its initial successes in terms of policies. This article addresses this gap by identifying seven ethical factors that are (...) essential for future AI4SG initiatives. The analysis is supported by 27 case examples of AI4SG projects. Some of these factors are almost entirely novel to AI, while the significance of other factors is heightened by the use of AI. From each of these factors, corresponding best practices are formulated which, subject to context and balance, may serve as preliminary guidelines to ensure that well-designed AI is more likely to serve the social good. (shrink)

The idea that Buddhism played a key role in the development of New Confucianism has long prevailed in academia, but it is not until recent years that such an idea has been critically studied through a series of monographs, mainly published by Brill. This book is one of the excellent works concerning such an important topic. Unlike other works which focus on the possible influence of specific Buddhist schools on individual New Confucian thinkers, The Awakening of Faith and New Confucian (...) Philosophy stresses the relationship between a specific Buddhist 'classic,' the Treatise on Awakening Mahāyāna Faith or Dasheng qixin lun 大乘起信論, and New Confucianism as a whole. This makes for a very in-depth discussion.Including the... (shrink)

In this article I argue that if conscience, working properly, involves some form of ‘moral tug’, then this is incompatible with the state of ‘quiescence’ put forward as a central element of Eleonore Stump’s account of repentance. Quiescence is also a key notion for Stump’s theodicy in Wandering in the Darkness and Stump’s thesis in her book, Atonement. Quiescence is about an inactive, or neutral, or stationary, state of the will prior to turning to the good, or God, through receiving (...) God’s saving grace. But if God exerts a non–coercive pressure on people through their conscience to turn to him, and turn from evil, then this drawing towards the good, or tugging away from evil, can only be yielded to, or resisted. There is no neutral state. I give examples of language such as being ‘bound’ to obey one’s conscience, which seem to reflect such non–coercive pressure. I conclude by commenting on free will. (shrink)

Artificial intelligence (AI) and its introduction into clinical pathways presents an array of ethical issues that are being discussed in the JME. 1–7 The development of AI technologies that can produce text that will pass plagiarism detectors 8 and are capable of appearing to be written by a human author 9 present new issues for medical ethics. One set of worries concerns authorship and whether it will now be possible to know that an author or student in fact produced submitted (...) work. That seems likely to be a general worry for secondary and higher education, as well as for all academic journals. Thus far generative AI chatbots do not seem to be able to produce a fully referenced and well-argued ethics article, but they probably could generate a blog or student essay that would... (shrink)

Environmental destruction has contributed to climate change, a contemporary threat to the survival of the human race. Currently, many young people across the world are increasingly and actively involved in climate action, because of the realisation that climate change will disproportionately affect them. Kenya is adversely affected by climate change, with erratic and unpredictable rainfall patterns now being the norm. Given that the youth make up a large segment of the Kenyan population, they are well placed to contribute efficaciously to (...) combating climate change. This article relied on both primary and secondary sources of data. Interviews, participant observations, focus group discussions, articles, books and archival material were used to generate data. Purposive and snowball sampling techniques were used to get key informants. Data were analysed thematically as per the topic under study. The article focuses on how the Sengwer indigenous community created environmental awareness and utilised their epistemological approaches to ensure a conscious mindset amongst the youth on the sustainability of the environment. In this article, we argue that the complex social systems that have religious underpinnings in traditional society play a critical role in ensuring that young people are environmentally conscious. Religion facilitates knowledge acquisition amongst the youth and shapes their understanding and consciousness of the environment. The findings indicate that indigenous communities had an effective system of ensuring that young people are conscious of their environment.Contribution: This article seeks to contribute to an instauration of indigenous knowledges and epistemologies on environmental issues. It proffers for a holistic approach of incorporating indigenous ways of creating environmental consciousness and awareness amongst the youth. (shrink)

Contemporary critical theory and black studies have witnessed a surge in theoretical accounts of “blackness” as “nothingness”. Drawing on the work of the poet and cultural theorist Fred Moten, this article offers a reading of this recent postulation of blackness as “nothingness” in light of some of the similar theoretical endeavors in post-Kantian European philosophy. By comparing Moten’s “paraontological” conception of nothingness to Heidegger’s self-nihilating nothing, Sartre’s relative nothingness, as well as Schelling’s notion of absolute nothingness, this article argues that (...) Moten’s paraontology presents a more robust and systematic conception of nothingness than those of Heidegger, Sartre, and Schelling. By way of this comparison with these “canonical” accounts from European philosophy, this article highlights not only the unique features of Moten’s sophisticated formulation of nothingness, but also some of unacknowledged presumptions and prejudices of traditional metaphysics which Moten’s work calls into question. (shrink)

Ida B. Wells (1862?1931) was a considerable figure in her day. But she has not been accorded posthumous acclaim in parallel. This oversight is either just, or an unprecedented historical falsification ? enabled largely through unhappy, gendered misperception. African?American thought for long turned round dispute between accommodation (Washington) and protest (Du Bois) as forms of leadership. Yet this contrast may mislead. First, Washington was more white placeman than black leader. Second, Du Bois, more than anyone, helped diminish, even extinguish, the (...) Wellsian intellectual legacy. If Wells?s arguments (on violence) have critical significance, and Washington?s are insubstantial and time?serving, then the important struggle within African?American leadership may come to be relocated within the protest tradition ? as between Du Bois (romantic Pan?Africanist) and Wells (universal defender of human rights), both recovered by the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and 1970s, Wells possibly more fittingly. (shrink)

The present survey was voluntarily and anonymously completed by 2,196 students enrolled in business courses at the University of Southern Mississippi. The intent of the survey was to determine whether or not age or gender played a role in a person''s perception of proper ethical conduct.The findings suggests that gender is a significant factor in the determination of ethical conduct and that females are more ethical than males in their perception of business ethical situations.

These new translations of two treatises dealing with the possibility and nature of knowledge in the face of skeptical challenges are the first to be rendered from the Latin critical edition, the first to be made specifically with a philosophical audience in mind, and the first to be translated by a scholar with expertise in both modern epistemology and philosophy of language.

This article offers a reading of Jean-Paul Sartre’s phenomenology in light of Jean-Luc Marion’s more recent phenomenology. It may seem odd to compare Sartre to Marion, given that Sartre is well-known for his avowed atheism and his account of intentionality while Marion is primarily known for his work on religious phenomena and counter-intentionality. However, this article shows that there are many ways in which Sartre anticipates Marion’s work on phenomenological reduction and excessive phenomenality. By reading Sartre’s phenomenology in light of (...) Marion’s, and particularly Sartre’s analysis of the viscous slime in Being and Nothingness in relation to Marion’s account of ‘saturated phenomena’, this article presents a fresh interpretation of Sartre as a phenomenologist who has invaluable insights not only on the structures of consciousness and phenomenality, but also for the contemporary theoretical interest in the relationship between human and nonhuman entities. (shrink)

Many anti-obesity policies face a variety of ethical objections. We consider one kind of anti-obesity policy — modifications to food assistance programs meant to improve participants' diet — and one kind of criticism of these policies, that they are inequitable. We take as our example the recent, unsuccessful effort by New York State to exclude sweetened beverages from the items eligible for purchase in New York City with Supplemental Nutrition Support Program assistance. We distinguish two equity-based ethical objections that were (...) made to the sweetened beverage exclusion, and analyze these objections in terms of the theoretical notions of distributive equality and social equality. First, the sweetened beverage exclusion is unfair or violates distributive equality because it restricts the consumer choice of SNAP participants relative to non-participants. Second, it is disrespectful or violates social equality to prohibit SNAP participants from purchasing sweetened beverages with food stamps. We conclude that neither equity-based ethical objection is decisive, and that the proposed exclusion of sugar-sweetened beverages is not a violation of either distributive or social equality. (shrink)

Recent philosophy has witnessed a renewed interest in the works and ideas of Henri Bergson (1859–1941). But while contemporary scholarship has sought to rehabilitate Bergson’s insights on time, memory, consciousness, and human freedom, comparatively little attention has been paid to Bergson’s relationship to pantheism. By revisiting the ‘pantheism’ controversy surrounding Bergsonian philosophy during Bergson’s lifetime, this article argues that the panentheistic notion of ‘being-in-God’ can serve as an illuminating framework for the interpretation of Bergson’s philosophy. By examining the ‘pantheist’ readings (...) of Bergson and comparing and contrasting Bergson’s philosophy of life with Spinoza’s panentheistic metaphysics, this paper shows that an account of ‘being-in-Life’ is key to Bergson’s metaphysical outlook as well as his account of philosophy as a practice of ‘intuitive’ thinking. In so doing, this paper highlights some of the implicit religious motifs not only in Bergson’s metaphysical outlook but also in his conception of the task of philosophy. (shrink)

My research focuses on the moral evaluation of people’s motivations. A popular recent view in Philosophy is that good people are motivated by the considerations that make actions morally right (the “right-making features”). For example, this view entails that a Black Lives Matter protester can be a good person if she is motivated to engage in protest by the thought that it will bring about equality, or justice, since this is what makes engaging in protest morally right. But this view (...) entails that the protester cannot be a good person if she engages in protest because it is morally right. I think that this is a serious mistake. My view is that it is good to be explicitly committed to acting rightly and motivated by the moral rightness of one’s actions. More specifically, I explore the nature and defend the value of a complex state that I call "trying to act rightly". This comprises (a) wanting to act rightly, (b) thinking about which actions are right, and (c) doing the things that you think are right, because they are right. The three papers of my Dissertation each make part of the case for trying to act rightly. My first paper, “Praiseworthy Motivations”, addresses the view that it is good to be motivated by the right-making features but not good to be motivated to act rightly. I argue that this view rests on poorly-drawn comparison cases that are not genuine minimal pairs, and that well-constructed cases show these two types of motivation to be equally good. I address the worry that trying to act rightly leads people with false moral beliefs to act wrongly, by noting that this also applies to motivation by right-making features, since people can be motivated by a right-making feature while being mistaken about which acts have this feature. I then argue that we should distinguish carefully between motivations, actions, and beliefs when evaluating these well-meaning but morally mistaken agents. The second paper, “We Can Have Our Buck and Pass It, Too”, addresses the view that the fact that an act is morally right is not a genuine reason to perform it, and that our reasons for action are instead provided by the right-making features. I argue that this view rests on a confused picture of moral metaphysics, which would rule out any case in which one reason to perform an act is partially metaphysically constituted by another fact that is also a reason to perform the same act – as, for example, when a salad both is healthy and contains vegetables. I then sketch an alternative picture of moral metaphysics, on which genuine reasons for action can be metaphysically related to one another. My third paper, “Accidentally Doing the Right Thing”, uses general reflections on the nature of deliberate action and its relationship to praiseworthiness to argue that someone is only praiseworthy for acting rightly if she was trying to act rightly. I apply this idea to the philosophical debate on moral worth, defending the Kantian view that actions have moral worth just in case they are instances of someone’s trying to act rightly and succeeding. This is a radical departure from the most popular contemporary view on moral worth, and requires a re-evaluation of the main case discussed in this literature: that of Huckleberry Finn. (shrink)