This chapter contains sections titled: Scandalous Research in the Twentieth Century Basic Principles of Research Ethics Respect for Persons Beneficence Justice Conclusion.

We have seen important work on questions such as: whether there is a uniquely female approach to ethics, whether ethics should be par.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Rhetoric and AngerKenneth S. Zagacki and Patrick A. Boleyn-FitzgeraldSince most believe anger can be either good or bad, rhetors face a moral problem of determining when anger is appropriate and when it is not. They face a corresponding rhetorical problem in deciding when and how to express anger and determining the role that it might play in public discourse, with specific audiences and in particular rhetorical situations. (...) Rhetorical scholars have catalogued whole genres of angry rhetoric—apocalyptic genres, jeremiads, the demonizing rhetoric of religious and political leaders—wherein the rhetorical display of anger is explained in terms of situational conventions and cultural norms.1 Yet these scholars have not easily resolved the moral problems associated with angry rhetoric. Aristotle suggested the earliest and most obvious solutions to these problems. In the Nicomachean Ethics, he outlines a typology for discerning the moral limits of anger and, by implication, angry rhetoric. And in Book II of the Rhetoric he asserts that the orator needs to know the structure of emotions like anger and how to intensify and dissipate them. Or, in other words, the orator must know how to make it reasonable to be angry. Some contemporary philosophers have gone further, suggesting that a failure to feel and express anger in public betrays an insufficient concern for justice and self respect.In this essay, we follow Aristotle in arguing that anger is sometimes the emotion we expect people to feel or the rhetorical response we expect them to display and evoke in others. But we also challenge part of Aristotle's argument by asking: "Even when angry rhetoric would appear to be a reasonable, morally appropriate response, is there a way in which rhetors might manage anger in their public discourse in order to achieve ends which are both morally and pragmatically productive?" The answer, we propose, lies in what we call "non-angry" rhetoric, which involves transforming and reflecting upon anger in public discourse. Because such rhetoric often promotes noble ends such as reconciliation and forgiveness, it is at least morally permissible and more likely morally virtuous.2 In order to establish these claims, our analysis focuses on the case of Nelson Mandela and his "Address to the Interfaith Commissioning Service for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission."3 In this speech, Mandela, as our [End Page 290] analysis demonstrates, managed anger and turned it into an object of reflection, thereby illustrating what opportunities for reconciliation and democratic deliberation would look like during the difficult period attending the political transition in South Africa in general and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) hearings in particular. His "Address" exemplified a unique moment when the rhetoric and the ethics of anger came together in a public performance. While acknowledging the understandable anger of blacks, Mandela (who may in fact have harbored considerable anger himself) simultaneously suggested that by engendering a less hostile social-political context, in which participants maintained their self-respect without necessarily sacrificing justice, a new democratic community could emerge. This would be a community where, as he described it, individuals began to reconcile with and no longer persecute one another. As Aristotle might explain, the purpose of Mandela's speech was to manage the anger of blacks, so that they would then be able to deliberate properly about the issues before the TRC and about the larger democratic transition. As the philosopher Eugene Garver says, the particular passions Aristotle chooses to explore in the Rhetoric serve a role necessary for the kind of public, political decision making he assigns to rhetoric. These emotions serve to integrate—or segregate, as the case may be—"distinct individuals into a deliberative or judging body, or demos" (1994, 131).What we are recommending, then, is that rhetoric encompasses both considerations of moral desert as well as broader moral concerns. While there are times when individuals seem to deserve our angry rhetoric, it may not be justified from a broader moral perspective, especially when the goal is the good of the state or the community—viz., if angry rhetoric leads to the violent dissolution of democratic community. Ultimately, we argue that the moral constitution of political, deliberative communities must be viewed in terms... (shrink)

A close look at the rhetoric in America's recent welfare‐reform debate has both surprising and important implications for political philosophy. Political philosophers typically presume that opponents of redistribution are motivated by considerations other than equality. Recent arguments for welfare reform, however, have been formulated in a manner consistent with most contemporary egalitarian theories. This result should make us question either the political relevance of egalitarian ideals or the adequacy of those theories of equality.

In recent years philosophers and bioethicists have given considerable attention to the concept of care. Thus we have seen important work on questions such as: whether there is a uniquely female approach to ethics, whether ethics should be partial or impartial, and whether care must be supplemented by justice. Despite this valuable and extensive work, however, some important distinctions have gone largely undiscussed. This paper tries to fill a gap left in our understanding of the concept of care itself by (...) distinguishing between compassion and two kinds of pity. While all three are kinds of caring, we should not give them similar moral evaluations. Consequently, the distinction between compassion and different kinds of pity gives us an important insight into the question of whether we can consider care a virtue for health care professionals. (shrink)

The Theological Consequence is of a more scandalous nature for Catholic ‘insiders’—the literate laity etc.etc.—than is the ‘mere’ ‘Humanist’ one. The pair together can to ‘Evangalisation’ no good at all.The Eminence, who on the BBC programme looks slightly comic. is, when one reflects a very disquieting figure indeed. So: A squib is comic: a serious one is, serious.Note the ‘BBC Panorama’ presentations have been seen in Australia, and so, possibly, in other countries in which this Journal is read.

Christ’s name is often taken in vain, but not in this book title. It is at once a prayer and a cry of anguish. Robinson was deputed to deal with the whole abuse problem in the Archdiocese of Sydney and knows horrid things at first hand: abuse and clerical cover-ups, both.Bishop Robinson’s book is practical—if perhaps at the time of publication unduly sanguine. He calls, in chapter 13 for ‘A New Council for a New Church’ to enable to get the (...) problem of sexual abuse fixed and for the Church to get out of its self-constructed ‘prison of the past’.See Confronting Power and Sex in the Catholic Church: Reclaiming the Spirit of Jesus, Melbourne, Garrett Publishing 2007: reviewed in Sophia, vol.47, pp.231–239 in 2008. See page 119 and passim. The authoritarian Church to date has not squarely faced, and not by any means fixed, the sexual abuse problem. It can do this, Robinson argues, only if it changes both its ways and its structures. Such a change, Robinson suggests, could happen if there we. (shrink)

Despite the great promise that service learning has shown and the attention paid to it by educators, it is not commonly taken up in the courses or discussions of ethicists. But service learning should concern ethicists (especially applied ethicists) if it should concern anyone: ethicists frequently devote their courses and studies to questions of social responsibility and service learning provides a unique opportunity for students and teachers to fulfill that responsibility. After rehearsing several arguments for the basis of social responsibility, (...) the author relates these arguments to the duties of ethics teachers and ethics students and discusses the practical question of how to incorporate service learning into ethics classes. After recounting in detail his own attempt to do so, the author analyses a student survey from the course and summarizes the benefits and problems with his course’s implementation of service learning. Though students frequently found their service opportunity emotionally challenging, the author argues that the results of the class are encouraging. (shrink)

In this companion volume to the national public television documentary of the same name, interviews of philosophy luminaries expose the relevance of philosophy to everyday life.

© 2017. The American Astronomical Society. All rights reserved.We present new observations of the low-mass companion to HD 984 taken with the Gemini Planet Imager as a part of the GPI Exoplanet Survey campaign. Images of HD 984 B were obtained in the J and H bands. Combined with archival epochs from 2012 and 2014, we fit the first orbit to the companion to find an 18 au orbit with a 68% confidence interval between 14 and 28 au, an eccentricity (...) of 0.18 with a 68% confidence interval between 0.05 and 0.47, and an inclination of 119°with a 68% confidence interval between 114°and 125°. To address the considerable spectral covariance in both spectra, we present a method of splitting the spectra into low and high frequencies to analyze the spectral structure at different spatial frequencies with the proper spectral noise correlation. Using the split spectra, we compare them to known spectral types using field brown dwarf and low-mass star spectra and find a best-fit match of a field gravity M6.5 ±1.5 spectral type with a corresponding temperature of K. Photometry of the companion yields a luminosity of log=2.88 ± 0.07 dex with DUSTY models. Mass estimates, again from DUSTY models, find an age-dependent mass of 34 ±1 to 95 ±4 M Jup. These results are consistent with previous measurements of the object. (shrink)

This paper constructs a theory of Christian forgiveness and argues that contemporary philosophical analyses of forgiveness have failed to capture its essential character. First, I provide a summary of the general view of forgiveness developed by contemporary philosophers (e.g., Jeffrie Murphy, Jean Hampton, Patrick Boleyn-Fitzgerald, Paul Hughes, Margaret Holmgren, Trudy Govier, Joanna North, Robert Roberts, and Charles Griswold). Second, I highlight the central differences between these general contemporary views and a genuine Christian conception of forgiveness. Finally, I (...) argue that two reasons for these irreconcilable differences are the following: first, contemporary philosophical analyses have evered the virtue of forgivingness from central Christian virtues, particularly the moral virtue of temperance and the theological virtue of charity; and second, contemporary philosophical analyses’ paradigmatic case does not (and cannot) take into account the proper tri-personal Christian context (i.e., God, victim, and offender) within which Christian forgiveness must be understood. (shrink)

Patrick Olivelle’s two volumes presenting first the four oldest dharmasūtras, in updated and refurbished editions and new translations, and next his critical edition and translation of the Mānavadharmaśāstra are both meticulous works of fundamental scholarship that will stand as the normative forms of these five texts for decades to come. Olivelle’s contributions as an editor in each volume are very different, and these contributions are examined and discussed in some detail, particularly in the case of the critical edition of (...) the Manu, which presents a number of important issues of lower and higher textual criticism. In the case of the sūtra volume, the discussion turns to a general comparison of Olivelle’s translations of the sūtras to Bühler’s and then to a closer examination of Olivelle’s translational policies for the word dharma and two words in particular used by the sūtras to describe the good of doing dharma, kṣema and niḥśreyasa. In the discussion of the edition of Manu, particular attention is given to his assembly, analysis, and presentation of the fifty-three witnesses used for the new edition of the Manu. Following that, there is a discussion of the nature of the tradition that gave rise to the text and used it, a discussion that calls into question some of Olivelle’s basic conclusions about the formation and development of the text of the Manu śāstra. (shrink)

Few concepts are more central to ethics than love, but none is more subject to false consolation. This 1999 book explores several theological, philosophical and literary accounts of love, focusing on how it relates to matters such as self-interest and self-sacrifice, and invulnerability and immortality. Timothy Jackson first considers key aspects of what the Bible says about love, then he further examines the meaning of love and sacrifice through a close reading of novels by Fitzgerald and Hemingway. Lastly, he (...) evaluates how love constrains, and is constrained by, other traditional moral concepts. Throughout, Jackson defends the moral priority of what the Christian tradition calls 'agape'. He argues that a proper understanding of agapic love rejects both moral relativism and the comfort of believing that good people cannot be harmed, or that God causally necessitates every historical action and event. When love is thus disconsoled, it neither fears death nor despises life. (shrink)

This richly textured book bridges analytic and hermeneutic and phenomenological philosophy of science. It features unique resources for students of the philosophy and history of quantum mechanics and the Copenhagen Interpretation, cognitive theory and the psychology of perception, the history and philosophy of art, and the pragmatic and historical relationships between religion and science.

00 Drawing on the phenomenological tradition in the philosophy of science and philosophy of nature, Patrick Heelan concludes that perception is a cognitive, ...

A structural analogy is pointed out between a check hermeneutically developed phenomenological description, based on Husserl, of the process of perceptual cognition on the one hand and quantum mechanical measurement on the other hand. In Husserl's analytic phase of the cognition process, the 'intentionality-structure' of the subject/object union prior to predication of a local object is an entangled symmetry-making state, and this entanglement is broken in the synthetic phase when the particular local object is constituted under the influence of an (...) iota ('inner horizon') and the 'facticity' of the local world ('outer horizon'). Replacing 'perceptual cognition' by 'measurement' and 'subject' by 'expert subject using a measuring device' the analogy of a formal quantum structure is extended to the conscious structure of all empirical cognition. This is laid out in three theses: about perception, about classical measurement, and about quantum measurement. The results point to the need for research into the quantum structure of the physical embodiment of human cognition. (shrink)

Why a hermeneutical philosophy of the natural sciences? It is necessary to address the philosophic crisis of realism vs relativism in the natural sciences. This crisis is seen as a part of the cultural crisis that Husserl and Heidegger identified and attributed to the hegemonic role of theoretical and calculative thought in Western societies. The role of theory is addressed using the hermeneutical circle to probe the origin of theoretic meaning in scientific cultural praxes. This is studied in Galileo's discovery (...) of the phases of Venus; the practice of measurement; the different theories and practices of space perception; the historicality and temporality of scientific research communities which ground paradigm change; and the process of discovery. The paper draws particularly from the work of Heidegger. Though envisaging all science and scholarship, the highlighted theme is research in the natural sciences. (shrink)

Quantum mechanics has raised in an acute form three problems which go to the heart of man's relationship with nature through experimental science: (r) the public objectivity of science, that is, its value as a universal science for all investigators; (2) the empirical objectivity of scientific objects, that is, man's ability to construct a precise or causal spatio-temporal model of microscopic systems; and finally (3), the formal objectivity of science, that is, its value as an expression of what nature is (...) independently of its being an object of human knowledge. These are three aspects of what is generally called the "crisis of objec tivity" or the "crisis of realism" in modern physics. This crisis is. studied in the light of Werner Heisenberg's work. Heisenberg was one of the architects of quantum mechanics, and we have chosen his writings as the principal source-material for this study. Among physicists of the microscopic domain, no one except perhaps Bohr has expressed himself so abundantly and so profoundly on the philosophy of science as Heisenberg. His writings, both technical and non-technical, show an awareness of the mysterious element in scientific knowledge, far from the facile positivism of Bohr and others of his contemporaries. The mystery of human knowledge and human SUbjectivity is for him an abiding source of wonder. (shrink)

Patrick Aidan Heelan’s The Observable offers the reader a completely articulated development of his 1965 philosophy of quantum physics, Quantum Mechanics and Objectivity. In this previously unpublished study dating back more than a half a century, Heelan brings his background as both a physicist and a philosopher to his reflections on Werner Heisenberg’s physical philosophy. Including considerably broader connections to the contributions of Niels Bohr, Wolfgang Pauli, and Albert Einstein, this study also reflects Heelan’s experience in Eugene Wigner’s laboratory (...) at Princeton along with his reflections on working with Erwin Schrödinger dating from Heelan’s years at the Institute for Advanced Cosmology in Dublin. A contribution to continental philosophy of science, the phenomenological and hermeneutic resources applied in this book to the physical and ontological paradoxes of quantum physics, especially in connection with laboratory science and measurement, theory and model making, will enrich students of the history of science as well as those interested in different approaches to the historiography of science. University courses in the philosophy of physics will find this book indispensable as a resource and invaluable for courses in the history of science. (shrink)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1917 edition. Excerpt:... (6) Columns for Discount on Purchases and Discount on Notes on the same side of the Cash Book; (c) Columns for Discount on Sales and Cash Sales on the debit side of the Cash Book; (d) Departmental columns in the Sales Book and in the Purchase Book. (...) Controlling Accounts.--The addition of special columns in books of original entry makes possible the keeping of Controlling Accounts. The most common examples of such accounts are Accounts Receivable account and Accounts Payable account. These summary accounts, respectively, displace individual customers' and creditors' accounts in the Ledger. The customers' accounts are then segregated in another book called the Sales Ledger or Customers' Ledger, while the creditors' accounts are kept in the Purchase or Creditors' Ledger. The original Ledger, now much reduced in size, is called the General Ledger. The Trial Balance now refers to the accounts in the General Ledger. It is evident that the task of taking a Trial Balance is greatly simplified because so many fewer accounts are involved. A Schedule of Accounts Receivable is then prepared, consisting of the balances found in the Sales Ledger, and its total must agree with the balance of the Accounts Receivable account shown in the Trial Balance. A similar Schedule of Accounts Payable, made up of all the balances in the Purchase Ledger, is prepared, and it must agree with the balance of the Accounts Payable account of the General Ledger." The Balance Sheet.--In the more elementary part of the text, the student learned how to prepare a Statement of Assets and Liabilities for the purpose of disclosing the net capital of an enterprise. In the present chapter he was shown how to prepare a similar statement, the Balance Sheet. For all practical... (shrink)

. How does the doctrine of double effect apply to business decisions to sell products which may be harmful to consumers? Lawrence Masek believes that some authors have misapplied the doctrine to this type of decision and, as a consequence, have committed themselves to placing unwarranted constraints on businesses. Seeking to correct this mistake, Masek presents his account of how the doctrine applies here, an account which is rather permissive but which, he claims, nevertheless preserves the virtues of the doctrine. (...) It will be seen, though, that his attempt to loosen these putatively unnecessary constraints by appealing to consumer autonomy and an intuition about the morality of producing harmful products leaves the doctrine of double effect irrelevant to this type of decision. His argument that the doctrine is less restrictive in this context than others suppose leads ultimately to the conclusion that the doctrine does not constrain this kind of business decision at all. (shrink)

Heisenberg, in constructing quantum mechanics, explicitly followed certain principles exemplified, as he believed, in Einstein's construction of the special theory of relativity which for him was the paradigm for radical theoretic change in physics. These were the principles of scientific realism, stability of background knowledge, E-observability, contextual re-interpretation, pragmatic continuity, model continuity, simplicity. Fifty years later, in retrospect, Heisenberg added the following two: a principle of non-proliferation of competing theories - scientific revolutions are not a legitimate goal of physics - (...) and a principle of tenacity - existing theories are to be conserved as far as possible. The conservative as well as the revolutionary potential of these principles is then discussed. A more penetrating philosophical criticism of these principles is postponed. (shrink)

The aim of this dissertation is to develop a theory of hope which accounts for the two senses in which hoping is, or should be, practical. The first sense concerns the need to make hopes realizable, while the second captures hope's ability to sustain us and foster growth. My argument is that a pragmatic theory of hope, previously undeveloped, provides a compelling explanation of hope's practicality. In particular, such a theory emphasizes three dimensions of the life of hope--particular hopes, habits (...) of hope, and hopefulness--the interweaving of which accounts for hope's practicality. ;In the Introduction, I discuss the need for a practical theory of hope and then sketch key pragmatic ideas used throughout the dissertation. These include pragmatism's commitment to contextualism as well as the means-end continuum. In Chapters I and II, I discuss the first sense of hope's practicality, i.e., its realizability. I situate hope in the context of the human being as an interactive biological organism, highlighting the roles of intelligence and habits, as well as that of the self understood as the reconstructive dynamic of the organism. I then discuss particular hopes by focusing on their ends, understood as future goods which are arduous but nevertheless possible to realize. Chapter II focuses on habits of hope as the primary means to the realization of particular hopes. I consider three such habits, persistence, resourcefulness, and courage. ;Habits of hope also play an important role in the development of hopefulness. In Chapter III, I discuss the nature of hopefulness, contrasting it with despair and examining how it contributes to the second sense of hope's practicality. I argue that we can develop hopefulness as the regnant habit of the self, nurturing and sustaining us as we meet life's trials. The social nature of hopefulness is emphasized through examples drawn from Stephen King's "Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption" and John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath. Both works show how hopefulness develops through close interpersonal relationships. ;Chapter IV closes the discussion by highlighting the conditioned nature of hope, pragmatically conceived. I consider alternate theories which focus on unconditioned hopes, but argue that these theories undermine hope's practicality. They transform its conditioned transcendence into an unconditioned transcendence, thereby undermining hope's realizability. (shrink)

IN A recent work I have attempted to show that visual space tends to have a Euclidean geometrical structure only when the environment is filled with a repetitive pattern of regularly faceted objects carpentered to exhibit simple standard Euclidean shapes, and tends to have a hyperbolic structure when vision is deprived of these clues. I conclude that visual perception--and by analogy, all perception--is hermeneutic as well as causal: it responds to structures in the flow of optical energy, but the character (...) of its response is also hermeneutical, that is, it has the capacity to "read" the appropriate structures in the World, and to form perceptual judgments of the World about which these "speak." The clues that are "read" perceptually as giving a Euclidean visual space are engineered objects, such as streets and buildings with repetitive architectural elements. These scientific artifacts of human culture belong to a family of readable technologies central to the phenomenological and existential-hermeneutical analysis of natural science. (shrink)

Two hundred years ago, Friedrich Schleiermacher took critical issue with Immanuel Kant's intellectual notion of intuition as applied to human nature (Wellmon 2006). He found it necessary to modify—"hermeneutically," as he said—Kant's notion of anthropology by enabling it to include as human the new and strange human tribes Captain Cook found in the Pacific South Seas. A similar hermeneutic move is necessary if physics is to include the local contextual empirical syntheses of relativity and quantum physics. In this hermeneutical revision (...) the synthesis is formed around the notion of a Hilbert Vector Space as the universal grammar of physics, adding to it the dynamic of the Schrödinger equation, and representing empirical "observables" by projection operators that map the subspaces of definite measurable values. Among the set of observable projection operators, some pairs share the same subspace, commute with one another, and share a common laboratory setting. Other pairs do not share this property and are described as being mutually complementary. Complementary symmetries introduce into the discursive language of physics the commonsense notion of contextuality. The new synthesis, proposed by Eugene Wigner, John von Neumann, and (in his own way) Paul Dirac, brought physics into the community of common language and established it as a work of general human achievement. 1. (shrink)

The structure of the universe and of most objects in it is determined by a small number of physical constants. It can be shown that only a limited range of values for each of these constants is compatible with the existence of human life. The fact that we are able to exist--but just barely--calls for an explanation. In the last fifteen years, an "anthropic principle" has been proposed as a possible scientific explanation of the fortuitous features of our world. This (...) type of explanation focuses on ways in which the presence of human beings guarantees that conditions in the early universe be suitable for the eventual development of intelligent life. In its strongest form, the anthropic principle is teleological: the universe is habitable precisely so that humans can evolve in it. ;Many issues surrounding the principle and its role in contemporary cosmology have been widely misunderstood by physicists and philosophers alike. My project is to clarify the nature of the principle and to criticize its value as a scientific claim. In chapters 1 and 2, I discuss the principle's historical background, and differentiate between several distinct ideas often misleadingly categorized as "anthropic." In chapter 3, after considering the principle's scientific justification, I conclude that it is neither essentially anthropic nor capable of predictive success. In chapter 4, I argue that the principle has little, if any, explanatory power, even in its teleological form. Having put fourth a number of criticisms of the principle as a scientific principle, in the final chapter I look at the possibility of construing it in a theistic context. Although the principle is not usually considered a religious principle, its resemblance to premises used in traditional theistic arguments from design suggests that it may be more defensible if thought of in a theistic context. (shrink)

Husserl argues in the Crisis that the prevalent tradition of positive science in his time had a philosophical core, called by him "Galilean science", that mistook the quest for objective theory with the quest for truth. Husserl is here referring to Gottingen science of the Golden Years. For Husserl, theory "grows" out of the "soil" of the prescientific, that is, pretheoretical, life-world. Scientific truth finally is to be sought not in theory but rather in the pragmatic-perceptual praxes of measurement. Husserl (...) is faulted for taking measuring processes to be "infinitely perfectible". The dependence of new scientific phenomena on the existence of prior "prescientific" inductive praxis is analyzed, also Husserl's residual objectivism and failure to appreciate the hermeneutic character of measurement. Though not a scientific (theory-)realist, neither was he an instrumentalist, but he was a scientific (phenomena-)realist. (shrink)

It has been argued that killing persons is wrong because it deprives them of future experiences. Some opponents of abortion argue that the same apples to potential persons—fetuses, zygotes, embryos, etc.—so that to destroy them is as wrong as killing a person. Phil Gosselin rejects this position, employing the reductio argument that if it were so, contraception would be equally wrong, since it destroys potential persons that are gamete pairs. I argue in this paper that Gosselin’s position on the ontological (...) status of the “victim” of contraception, the gamete pair, is flawed in such a way that his conclusion that there is no morally relevant difference between what is destroyed by abortion and what is destroyed by contraception fails. A gamete pair is ontologically different from a fetus; “victims” of contraception and victims of abortion are not significantly analogous, and the reductio that depends upon their similarity for its force is unsuccessful. (shrink)

Quantum-mechanical event descriptions are context-dependent descriptions. The role of quantum (nondistributive) logic is in the partial ordering of contexts rather than in the ordering of quantum-mechanical events. Moreover, the kind of quantum logic displayed by quantum mechanics can be easily inferred from the general notion of contextuality used in ordinary language. The formalizable core of Bohr's notion of complementarity is the type of context dependence discussed in this paper.

Agnosticism has been largely passed over in the literature on Theism. This paper lays out an affirmative case for the agnostic position. Tapping into the classical arguments about the paradoxical qualities of ‘omni’ principles it argues that the agnostic position is ultimately more tenable than either Theism or Atheism. In the first part it regards the paradoxes of omnipotence and their replies strictly logically, declaring them to be true antimonies. In the second part it argues that classic arguments for belief (...) before proof run afoul of additional paradoxes and require the rejection of the most basic logical principles to accept. (shrink)

Agnosticism has been largely passed over in the literature on Theism. This paper lays out an affirmative case for the agnostic position. Tapping into the classical arguments about the paradoxical qualities of ‘omni’ principles it argues that the agnostic position is ultimately more tenable than either Theism or Atheism. In the first part it regards the paradoxes of omnipotence and their replies strictly logically, declaring them to be true antimonies. In the second part it argues that classic arguments for belief (...) before proof run afoul of additional paradoxes and require the rejection of the most basic logical principles to accept. (shrink)

Hermeneutics, or interpretation, is concerned with the generation, transmission, and acceptance of meaning within the lifeworld, and was the original method of the human sciences stemming, from F. Schleiermacher and W. Dilthey. The `hermeneutic philosophy' refers mostly to Heidegger. This paper addresses natural science from the perspective of Heidegger's analysis of meaning and interpretation. Its purpose is to incorporate into the philosophy of science those aspects of historicality, culture, and tradition that are absent from the traditional analysis of theory and (...) explanation, to re-orient the current discussion about scientific realism around the hermeneutics of meaning and truth in science, and to establish some relationship between the current philosophy of natural science and hermeneutical philosophy. The paper has particular relevance to the history and social studies of science and technology. (shrink)

Hermeneutics, or interpretation, is concerned with the generation, transmission, and acceptance of meaning within the lifeworld, and was the original method of the human sciences stemming, from F. Schleiermacher and W. Dilthey. The `hermeneutic philosophy' refers mostly to Heidegger. This paper addresses natural science from the perspective of Heidegger's analysis of meaning and interpretation. Its purpose is to incorporate into the philosophy of science those aspects of historicality, culture, and tradition that are absent from the traditional analysis of theory and (...) explanation, to re-orient the current discussion about scientific realism around the hermeneutics of meaning and truth in science, and to establish some relationship between the current philosophy of natural science and hermeneutical philosophy. The paper has particular relevance to the history and social studies of science and technology. (shrink)