Often created by colonial societies characterized by violence and oppression, historical artefacts such as monuments are increasingly under criticism for perpetuating violent attitudes. While the links between artefacts and society are well understood, there has been little work that finds the opportunity for resistance to violence in these artefacts themselves. Developing a ‘spectrum of violence’ for artefacts, I argue that ambiguous artefacts move us towards non-violence by provoking critique, while absolute artefacts move us away from it by stilling critique. Applying (...) this spectrum to a discussion of a graffitied New York monument in 2020, I propose that the act of ‘refacement’ can turn absolute artefacts into ambiguous ones. In so doing, the artefacts that once upheld colonial values might be transformed to resist them. This paper offers a timely exploration of monuments and violence, and seeks to better understand how cultural artefacts can lay the foundations for a non-violent future. (shrink)

What do we really know? What are we in relation to the world around us? Here, the acclaimed playwright and novelist takes on the great questions of his career—and of our lives Humankind, scientists agree, is an insignificant speck in the impersonal vastness of the universe. But what would that universe be like if we were not here to say something about it? Would there be numbers if there were no one to count them? Would the universe even be vast, (...) without the fact of our smallness to give it scale? With wit, charm, and brilliance, this epic work of philosophy sets out to make sense of our place in the scheme of things. Our contact with the world around us, Michael Frayn shows, is always fleeting and indeterminate, yet we have nevertheless had to fashion a comprehensible universe in which action is possible. But how do we distinguish our subjective experience from what is objectively true and knowable? Surveying the spectrum of philosophical concerns from the existence of space and time to relativity and language, Frayn attempts to resolve what he calls “the oldest mystery”: the world is what we make of it. In which case, though, what are we? All of Frayn’s novels and plays have grappled with these essential questions; in this book he confronts them head-on. (shrink)

The twentieth century saw the rise of hermeneutics, the philosophical interpretation of texts, and eventually the application of its insights to metaphorical “texts” such as individual and group identities. It also saw the rise of modern environmentalism, which evolved through various stages in which it came to realize that many of its key concerns—“wilderness” and “nature” among them—are contested territory that are viewed differently by different people. Understanding nature requires science and ecology to be sure, but it also requires a (...) sensitivity to history, culture, and narrative. Thus, understanding nature is a fundamentally hermeneutic task. Interpreting Nature brings together leading voices at the intersection of these two increasingly important philosophical discussions: philosophical hermeneutics and environmental philosophy. The resulting field, environmental hermeneutics, provides the center of gravity for a collection of essays that grapple with one of the most compelling issues of our time: how do humans relate to nature? Adopting a broad and inclusive view of “the environment, Interpreting Nature takes up restoration and preservation, natural and built environments, the social construction of nature and nature as it imposes itself beyond our categories, and much more. The rich diversity of contributions illustrates the remarkable fecundity of hermeneutic resources applied to environmental issues. Taken together, the various contributions to this collection mark the arrival of environmental hermeneutics as a distinct field of study. (shrink)

In mainstream analytic epistemology, Reformed theology has made its presence prominently felt in Reformed epistemology, the view of religious belief according to which religious beliefs can be properly basic and warranted when formed by the proper functioning of the sensus divinitatis, an inborn capacity or faculty for belief in God that can be prompted to generate certain religious beliefs when presented with things (e.g., certain majestic aspects of creation). A major competitor to Reformed epistemology is Wittgensteinian quasi-fideism, a position drawn (...) from the epistemology of Wittgenstein’s On Certainty, according to which some foundational religious commitments are not properly basic beliefs but some kind of apodictic, unshakeable certainties that form part of the structure of one’s rationality and worldview. I argue that the Reformed tradition has contained elements of quasi-fideism at least as far back as Calvin’s account of faith from the Institutes of the Christian Religion, book 3, chapter 2. (shrink)

How can we think about things in the outside world? There is still no widely accepted theory of how mental representations get their meaning. In light of pioneering research, Nicholas Shea develops a naturalistic account of the nature of mental representation with a firm focus on the subpersonal representations that pervade the cognitive sciences.

Anselm’s Proslogion argument is fascinating, important, and notoriously difficult. Many introductions to the argument are either as difficult as the original (such as those that use modal concepts to explain it) or are unfaithful to it. This paper presents an accessible introduction, faithful to the original, which breaks the argument down into four basic components: “That-Than-Which-a-Greater Cannot-be-Conceived,” “From Conceptual Existence to Real Existence,” “From Real Existence to Necessary Existence,” and “‘That-Than-Which-a-Greater Cannot-be-Conceived’ as God.”.

Modern environmentalism has come to realize that many of its key concerns "wilderness" and "nature" among them are contested territory, viewed differently by different people. Understanding nature requires science and ecology, to be sure, but it also requires a sensitivity tom, history, culture, and narrative. Thus, understanding nature is a fundamentally hermeneutic task.

Using a new model focused on four core capacities-intellectual complexity, social location, empathetic accountability, and motivated action--Teaching Civic Engagement explores the significance of religious studies in fostering a vibrant, just, and democratic civic order.In the first section of the book, contributors detail this theoretical model and offer an initial application to the sources and methods that already define much teaching in the disciplines of religious studies and theology. A second section offers chapters focused on specific strategies for teaching civic engagement (...) in religion classrooms, including traditional textual studies, reflective writing, community-based learning, field trips, media analysis, ethnographic methods, direct community engagement and a reflective practice of "ascetic withdrawal." The final section of the volume explores theoretical issues, including the delimitation of the "civic" as a category, connections between local and global in the civic project, the question of political advocacy in the classroom, and the role of normative commitments.Collectively these chapters illustrate the real possibility of connecting the scholarly study of religion with the societies in which we, our students, and our institutions exist. The contributing authors model new ways of engaging questions of civic belonging and social activism in the religion classroom, belying the stereotype of the ivory tower intellectual. (shrink)

This is a book about the meanings of words and how they can combine to form larger meaningful units, as well as how they can fail to combine when the ...

This article examines the changing scope and method of ecumenical public theology from the World Missionary Conference of 1910 until the present. Most changes were made in response to the changing ideological and political contexts. The collapse of liberalism and the social gospel was followed by a type of confessional ethics which arose directly out of the German Church Struggle. In opposition to this there emerged a realist ecumenical social ethics, much indebted to Reinhold Niebuhr, and of Ronald Preston. This (...) type of public theology and its distinctive ‘middle axiom’ method are examined and contrasted with the more recent public theologies which were influenced by liberation theology and grassroots movements. It is suggested that the ending of the Cold War and the fundamental changes that have taken place since September 11 2001 present a radically new kind of challenge to public theology. (shrink)

This paper argues that throughout the Cold War, the Colombian Left focused on building local power in the countryside, and abandoned the burgeoning urban working class, much of it informal, unwaged and unorganised, to the Right. Yet at every turn, landlords linked to local and regional political machines and military and police officials blocked or reversed reforms designed to modernise the countryside, as government-subsidised agro-industrial development replaced smallholding. Then, in successive conjunctures, landlords and their allies, including cocaine exporters from whom (...) they were increasingly inseparable after 1985, augmented their political power through dynamic counterinsurgent paramilitary movements based in provincial cities and towns. This made democracy impossible, led to a new feudalism characterised by parcellised sovereignties, and upheld, into the twenty-first century, the semi-authoritarian parliamentary system that has ruled Colombia since the 1880s. (shrink)

A clearly written, authoritative introduction to Taylor's work.

This volume is about abstract objects and the ways we refer to them in natural language. Asher develops a semantical and metaphysical analysis of these entities in two stages. The first reflects the rich ontology of abstract objects necessitated by the forms of language in which we think and speak. A second level of analysis maps the ontology of natural language metaphysics onto a sparser domain--a more systematic realm of abstract objects that are fully analyzed. This second level reflects the (...) commitments of real metaphysics. The models for these commitments assign truth conditions to natural language discourse. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR. (shrink)

The article develops and extends the theory of Glenn Kessler (Frege, Mill and the foundations of arithmetic, Journal of Philosophy 77, 1980) that a (cardinal) number is a relation between a heap and a unit-making property that structures the heap. For example, the relation between some swan body mass and "being a swan on the lake" could be 4.

Part One of this paper is a case against classical mereology and for Heyting mereology. This case proceeds by first undermining the appeal of classical mereology and then showing how it fails to cohere with our intuitions about a measure of quantity. Part Two shows how Heyting mereology provides an account of sets and classes without resort to any nonmereological primitive.

How exactly does logic work? What makes some arguments valid and others not? What does a faithful use of logic look like? In this introduction to logic, philosopher Forrest Baird considers the basic building blocks of human reason, including types of arguments, fallacies, syllogisms, symbols, and proofs, all of which are demonstrated with exercises for students throughout.

A book of readings in Western intellectual history focusing on the role of reason in human action. Contents:^ Plato: Myth of the Cave; Plato: ^IThe Four Virtues; Aristotle: Knowledge of Causes; Aristotle: The Types of Governments; Epicurus: Epicureanism; Epictetus: Stoicism; St. Augustine: The Platonist; St. Augustine: The Nature of Sources of Evil; St. Thomas Aquinas: The Four Laws; St. Thomas Aquinas: The Nature of the Soul; Pico: The Oration on the Dignity of Man; John Calvin: Reason, Sin and Illumination; St. (...) Teresa of Avila: Interior Castle; Rene Descartes: Pens,s ; Thomas Hobbes: The State of Nature; John Locke: The State of Nature; Alexander Pope: Essay on Man; David Hume: Impressions and Ideas; Voltaire: Candide; Immanuel Kant: Space and Time; Immanuel Kant: The Good Will; Edmund Burke: Revolution in France; James Madison: The Federal Government; Soren Kierkegaard: Subjective Truth; Fyodor Dostoevsky: The Grand Inquisitor; Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels: Communist Manifesto; Friedrich Nietzsche: The Will to Power; William James: Pragmatism; William James: Philosophical Temperaments; Sigmund Freud: The Ego and the Id; Ludwig Wittgenstein: Later Theory; Jean-Paul Sartre: Existentialism; Carol Gilligan: Women's Place in Man's World; Appendix: Programmed Text on Epistemology. (shrink)

This fascinating anthology of classic philosophical readings provides clear translations of the most important Greek philosophers and some of their Roman followers, key influences on the development of Western civilization.This book begins with the fragmentary statements of the Pre-Socratics, moves through the all-embracing systems of Plato and Aristotle, and culminates in the practical advice of the Hellenistic writers.For anyone interested in owning a collection of clearly translated philosophical works.

Christian thought on the resolution of conflicts rests on a strong predisposition against violence and a determination to discourage outbreaks of violence, limit the means used, and bring the conflict to as speedy an end as possible. Less attention has been given to the psychological and social roots of violence, the moments of transition from violence to diplomacy and reconciliation, and alternative ways of conflict resolution. These three areas are explored with special reference to the use of sanctions, the WCC’s (...) Programme to Overcome Violence, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa, Gandhian Satyagraha, and the Northern Ireland Peace Process. Such measures should be judged against the same criteria as are used in relation to violence and war. (shrink)

The authors explore the history of experiments in economics, provide examples of different types of experiments and show that the growing use of experimental methods is transforming economics into an empirical science.

Because of the lack of a meaningful international response to global warming, geoengineering has emerged as a potential technological response to climate change. But, thus far, little attention has been given to how religion impacts our understanding of geoengineering. I defend the need to incorporate theological reflection in the conversation of geoengineering by investigating how geoengineering proposals contain an implicit anthropology. A significant framework for our assessment of geoengineering is the balance of human capability and fallibility—a balance that is at (...) the center of theological and religious interpretations of the meaning of the human condition. Similarly, geoengineering challenges our past understandings of theological anthropology. (shrink)

This essay investigates the correlation between theological investigations of culture and those of the natural world. A fruitful question emerges when reflecting on how theological thinking resides between these subjects: how does our theological reflection on art meaningfully inform our consideration of nature? The path to exploring this question takes the form of questioning three different works of art: Willem Moreelse’s A Portrait of a Scholar, Francis Bacon’s Landscape,and Joseph Beuys’ Lightning with Stag in Its Glare. Exploring the interconnection between (...) these works, a hermeneutical mediation between art, place, and the spiritual is suggested. (shrink)

In ‘The Tollgate Principles for the Governance of Geoengineering’, Stephen M. Gardiner and Augustin Fragnière develop a holistic framework for geoengineering governance, pointing out the importance...

In a theological understanding of nature, what is the significance of herons? This article reflects on the question of herons by first describing how bird migration can be included in a theological approach to nature. To explore the theological meaning of migration, theology must model nature as defined by the idea of 'emplacement'. Next, it investigates how the migration of herons challenges and complements our sense of dwelling by detailing the different ways that herons are emplaced as migratory birds. It (...) concludes by offering three insights into the place of herons in a philosophical theology of nature. First, migrating herons and other non-human animals penetrate into nature as both radically particular creatures and anonymously general ones. Second, herons push us to understand the theological meaning of the otherness of Otherness. Third, non-human animals remind us to move beyond solipsistic views of our emplacement. Together with a general description of the elements of emplacement that are added by the migration of herons, we see how we are theologically influenced by the 'intimate distance' of herons. (shrink)

Proposals to make us smarter than the greatest geniuses or to add thousands of years to our life spans seem fit only for the spam folder or trash can. And yet this is what contemporary advocates of radical enhancement offer in all seriousness. They present a variety of technologies and therapies that will expand our capacities far beyond what is currently possible for human beings. In _Humanity's End,_ Nicholas Agar argues against radical enhancement, describing its destructive consequences. Agar examines (...) the proposals of four prominent radical enhancers: Ray Kurzweil, who argues that technology will enable our escape from human biology; Aubrey de Grey, who calls for anti-aging therapies that will achieve "longevity escape velocity"; Nick Bostrom, who defends the morality and rationality of enhancement; and James Hughes, who envisions a harmonious democracy of the enhanced and the unenhanced. Agar argues that the outcomes of radical enhancement could be darker than the rosy futures described by these thinkers. The most dramatic means of enhancing our cognitive powers could in fact kill us; the radical extension of our life span could eliminate experiences of great value from our lives; and a situation in which some humans are radically enhanced and others are not could lead to tyranny of posthumans over humans. (shrink)

In this provocative book, philosopher Nicholas Agar defends the idea that parents should be allowed to enhance their children’s characteristics. Gets away from fears of a Huxleyan ‘Brave New World’ or a return to the fascist eugenics of the past Written from a philosophically and scientifically informed point of view Considers real contemporary cases of parents choosing what kind of child to have Uses ‘moral images’ as a way to get readers with no background in philosophy to think about (...) moral dilemmas Provides an authoritative account of the science involved, making the book suitable for readers with no knowledge of genetics Creates a moral framework for assessing all new technologies. (shrink)

There is a tension in Santayana's ontological system, one that is generated by the interactions of his doctrine of existence, doctrine of systematization, and critical agnosticism on the infinity of material substance. From and, in conjunction with what will be called the expansionist postulate, an infinite material expansion is generated, one that is in conflict with. This tension is remediated by a coherentist proposal regarding Santayanan existence, the relevant feature of which is that existents at distinct orders of organization are (...) in symmetrical dependence relations. "Metaphysical coherentism," which has recently been described as "one of the least explored areas in contemporary... (shrink)