Like Kravchenko, we build on Maturana’s bio-logic and the view that language is the “outcome of the evolution of observers.” Yet, Kravchenko offers a narrow “linguistic” reading of Maturana. On our wider view, Kravchenko’s work is criticized for limiting use of “languaging” to aspects of observing that leave out how sensibility and activity inform human practices. Stephen Cowley & Rasmus Gahrn-Andersen.

This volume explores the construction of an ethics for news media that is global in reach and impact.

Karl Barth and the displacement of natural law in contemporary Protestant theology -- Development of the natural-law tradition through the high Middle Ages -- John Calvin and the natural knowledge of God the Creator -- Peter Martyr Vermigli and the natural knowledge of God the Creator -- Natural law in the thought of Johannes Althusius -- Francis Turretin and the natural knowledge of God the Creator.

This is a biography of the works of Richard Price, 1723-1791, one of the leading radical intellectuals of the late-18th century. By profession a dissenting minister, he was also a mathematician, a political pamphleteer, particularly on the American and French Revolutions, and a moral philosopher.

Modern Hume scholarship is still divided into two major camps when it comes to the issue of causation. There are those scholars who interpret Hume as a causal anti-realist, and there are those who interpret him as a causal realist. In my paper, I argue that there is an overwhelming amount of evidence – especially textual evidence – that should lead us to read Hume as being a causal anti-realist. That is to say, one who believes that cause and effect (...) relations are felt and known in the mind of the perceiver alone; not in objects themselves. I then attempt to settle, at least partially, the ‘two definitions of cause dispute’ that was brought about by Hume’s giving us not one, but two non-equivalent and non-substitutable definitions of the cause and effect relation. (shrink)

In this dissertation, I will examine the problem of theological fatalism in St. Augustine and, specifically, whether or not Augustine was philosophically justified in his belief that his views on divine grace and human freedom could be harmonized. As is well-known, beginning with his second response To Simplician (ca. 396) and continuing through his works against the semi-Pelagians (ca. 426-429), Augustine espoused the Pauline doctrine of all-inclusive grace: that the fallen will’s ability to accomplish the good is totally a function (...) of God’s elective grace. What, then, does the fallen will do to work out its own salvation? There is the further issue of how to reconcile Augustine’s rather extreme emphasis on grace in his later works with the more balanced picture we receive in his sermones ad populum, written throughout his forty-year preaching career. In many of these sermons, even those written during the Pelagian controversy, Augustine is careful to leave space for both divine and human initiative in the process of our justification within the totus Christus, or ‘whole Christ.’ How we can understand Augustine in his role as doctor gratiae and as preacher of human freedom will be a major inquiry of this dissertation.The most serious obstacle to moving forward on these problems has been and remains the essentialist interpretation of Augustine’s Trinitarian theology by most commentators. On their interpretation, Augustine thought that there were no real distinctions within the Trinity, with each of the three divine persons and their actions sharing in the absolute unity of the divine essence. Holding this interpretation not only does away with the distinctness of each of the persons, but also requires all of God’s different powers and attributes, including willing and foreknowing, to be coalesced into one another without distinction in the divine essence. God’s foreknowledge is thereby identified with God’s will, which necessarily leads to theological fatalism: God would have to will everything that He foreknows, and God would have to foreknow everything that He wills. Since God is omniscient, He wills everything that will happen, including the future willings of the fallen human will.It cannot be denied that there are texts in the Augustinian corpus that seem to point to a reading of the Trinity as absolutely simple. But this study will endeavor to show that there are also other largely overlooked texts in On the Trinity, the Confessions, and his Commentaries on the Literal Interpretation of Genesis (among others) that argue for various distinctions within the Trinity to make sense of the relation between Creator and creature, and the differences between the divine processions of generation/spiration, and the act of creation. These texts will be shown to parallel very closely the position of the Eastern Orthodox Christian tradition, which consistently uses the real distinction between God’s essential being and energetic activities (also known as the essence-energy distinction) to avoid the problem of theological fatalism. This rich theological and philosophical tradition, from the time of the fourth-century Greek Fathers to the Byzantine tradition that followed, differs less with Augustine concerning the essentials of Trinitarian theology and its practical implications for solving the problem of making human freedom and divine grace compatible than has been hitherto thought. (shrink)

Social sciences research is entrenched with particular values, beliefs, norms, and practices that students, faculty, and researchers reproduce over time. In this article, the author argues for extending what counts as research within the social sciences to be more inclusive of differing methodologies and writing genres. Using personal narrative, diaries, and poetry, the author demonstrates unconventional ways of thinking about, doing, and writing research. He situates his personal experiences as a Ghanaian/American student within relevant literature to illuminate the merging of (...) his home cultural values with those of the academic community and the contradictions and struggles associated with this process. Ultimately, the story portrays the journey of a graduate student as he challenges traditional research norms to open up spaces for underrepresented students to feel more at home within academe. (shrink)

This paper is a conceptual essay rooted in two basic observations. First, felt dignity—the subjective sense people have of their own autonomy and self-worth—ultimately emerges from, and is thus most evident in the connective space between people. Second, stories are everyday works of art that afford unique insight into the subtle complexities of the socio-emotional realities of work. Building on these observations, we describe how personal stories about episodes of interpersonal connections and disconnections at work—moments in which we feel mutual (...) appreciation and empowerment or a sense of separation and distancing from another—can help us better understand the felt experience of dignity at work. In attending to such personal stories as art, we become more attuned to their felt, aesthetic qualities, which then helps us develop a more holistic and visceral appreciation of how actors experience, make sense of, and claim felt dignity. In support of our ideas, we present a few illustrative story excerpts and briefly consider how a select few aesthetic qualities—the way the stories’ elements are configured, the stories’ acuity or sharpness, and their rawness—enhance the felt impact of the stories and help to remind us of their and the storytellers’ intrinsic value. (shrink)

The Free Discussion between Richard Price and Joseph Priestley (1778) originated as a correspondence between the two after the publication of Priestley's Disquisitions on Matter and Spirit, his most important philosophical work (1777). At the time it was thought remarkable that a controversey such as this could be conducted so amicably, but then the two were close friends. Nevertheless their philosophical, as opposed to their oft mentioned political views, were at opposite ends of a spectrum.

The present research seeks to better understand research conditions in laboratory research, with special attention paid to the informed consent process and experimenter characteristics. The first study tested the impact of language perspective and experimenter demeanor upon participant retention of the informed consent information, attitudes toward the research project, and performance on experimental tasks. The second study examined the impact of experimenter attire. Across the two studies, our results suggest that there was no impact of language perspective, whereas the number (...) of other participants in the laboratory, experimenter attire, and experimenter demeanor influence participant behaviors in the laboratory. (shrink)

This is a comprehensive reference source on 18th-century authors writing in the English language about philosophical ideas and issues. It features authors taken from 1689 through to the mid-19th century, the period beginning with John Locke and ending with Dugald Stewart. The word philosophical is used in a wide, 18th-century sense. Therefore, the Dictionary includes epistemology, ethics, aesthetics, education, politics, rhetoric, science, medicine, biology, geology, chemistry and theology.

This book symposium on Jason Holt’s Kinetic Beauty: The Philosophical Aesthetics of Sport includes commentaries from Stephen Mumford, John E. MacKinnon and Andrew Edgar with replies from Holt.

Mitochondrial replacement techniques have the potential to allow prospective parents who are at risk of passing on debilitating or even life-threatening mitochondrial disorders to have healthy children to whom they are genetically related. Ethical concerns have however been raised about these techniques. This article focuses on one aspect of the ethical debate, the question of whether there is any moral difference between the two types of MRT proposed: Pronuclear Transfer and Maternal Spindle Transfer. It examines how questions of identity impact (...) on the ethical evaluation of each technique and argues that there is an important difference between the two. PNT, it is argued, is a form of therapy based on embryo modification while MST is, instead, an instance of selective reproduction. The article's main ethical conclusion is that, in some circumstances, there is a stronger obligation to use PNT than MST. (shrink)

Book reviewed in this article: The Abuse of Casuistry: A History of Moral Reasoning. By Albert R. Jonsen and Stephen Toulmin.

Lockdown measures in response to the COVID-19 pandemic involve placing huge burdens on some members of society for the sake of benefiting other members of society. How should we decide when these policies are permissible? Many writers propose we should address this question using cost-benefit analysis, a broadly consequentialist approach. We argue for an alternative non-consequentialist approach, grounded in contractualist moral theorising. The first section sets up key issues in the ethics of lockdown, and sketches the apparent appeal of addressing (...) these problems in a CBA frame. The second section argues that CBA fundamentally distorts the normative landscape in two ways: first, in principle, it allows very many morally trivial preferences—say, for a coffee—might outweigh morally weighty life-and-death concerns; second, it is insensitive to the core moral distinction between victims and vectors of disease. The third section sketches our non-consequentialist alternative, grounded in Thomas Scanlon’s contractualist moral theory. On this account, the ethics of self-defence implies a strong default presumption in favour of a highly restrictive, universal lockdown policy: we then ask whether there are alternatives to such a policy which are justifiable to all affected parties, paying particular attention to the complaints of those most burdened by policy. In the fourth section, we defend our contractualist approach against the charge that it is impractical or counterintuitive, noting that actual CBAs face similar, or worse, challenges. (shrink)

The search for a worldwide environmental ethic is linked to the increase in environmental concern since (particularly) the 1960s, and the recognition that environmental problems can have a global i...To date, insufficient work has been carried out on how children view living organisms in the environment. In this study a large number of conversations were audio-taped and transcribed while primar...

In recent years, the argument from inductive risk against value free science has enjoyed a revival. This paper investigates and clarifies this argument through means of a case-study: neonicitinoid research. Sect. 1 argues that the argument from inductive risk is best conceptualised as a claim about scientists’ communicative obligations. Sect. 2 then shows why this argument is inapplicable to “public communication”. Sect. 3 outlines non-epistemic reasons why non-epistemic values should not play a role in public communicative contexts. Sect. 4 analyses (...) the implications of these arguments both for the specific case of neonicitinoid research and for understanding the limits of the argument from inductive risk. Sect. 5 sketches the broader implications of my claims for understanding the “Value Free Ideal” for science. (shrink)

In a recent paper, Gregor Betz has defended the value-free ideal: “the justification of scientific findings should not be based on non-epistemic values”against the methodological critique, by reference to the work of the International Panel on Climate Change . This paper argues that Betz’s defence is unsuccessful. First, Betz’s argument is sketched, and it is shown that the IPCC does not avoid the need to “translate” claims. In Section 2, it is argued that Betz mischaracterises the force of the methodological (...) critique. Section 3 shows why the methodological critique still applies to the work of the IPCC even on a refined version of Betz’s argument. Section 4 then considers an alternative way of defending the work of the IPCC which is in-line with, but does not clearly vindicate, the value-free ideal. (shrink)

Winnipeg's North End has informed the Canadian mythology and influenced the national psyche. The North End also divides and defines the city of Winnipeg, shaping its politics and sense of identity. In these photographs, taken between the mid-1970s and the mid-1990s, John Paskievich set out to explore the North End he knew in his youth. What he found were traces of it, captured in the stillness in which the past still lingers and in the dignity and singularity of its (...) inhabitants. (shrink)

The most comprehensive collection of essays on Descartes' scientific writings ever published, this volume offers a detailed reassessment of Descartes' scientific work and its bearing on his philosophy. The 35 essays, written by some of the world's leading scholars, cover topics as diverse as optics, cosmology and medicine, and will be of vital interest to all historians of philosophy or science.