Let W be a recursively enumerable vector space over a recursive ordered field. We show the Turing equivalence of the following sets: the set of all tuples of vectors in W which are linearly dependent; the set of all tuples of vectors in W whose convex closures contain the zero vector; and the set of all pairs of tuples in W such that the convex closure of X intersects the convex closure of Y. We also form the analogous sets consisting (...) of tuples with given numbers of elements, and prove similar results on the Turing equivalence of these. (shrink)

Nietzsche was famously an atheist, despite coming from a strongly Protestant family. This heritage influenced much of his thought, but was it in fact the very thing that led him to his atheism? This work provides a radical re-assessment of Protestantism by documenting and extrapolating Nietzsche's view that Christianity dies from the head down. That is, through Protestantism's inherent anarchy. In this book, Nietzsche is put into conversation with the initiatives of several powerful thinking writers; Luther, Boehme, Leibniz, and Lessing. (...) Using Nietzsche as a critical guide to the evolution of Protestant thinking, each is shown to violate, warp, or ignore gospel injunctions, and otherwise pose hazards to the primacy of Christian ethics. Demonstrating that a responsible understanding of Protestantism as a historical movement needs to engage with its inherent flaws, this is a text that will engage scholars of philosophy, theology, and religious studies alike. (shrink)

Several scholars, including Martin Hengel, R. Alan Culpepper, and Richard Bauckham, have argued that Papias had knowledge of the Gospel of John on the grounds that Papias’s prologue lists six of Jesus’s disciples in the same order that they are named in the Gospel of John: Andrew, Peter, Philip, Thomas, James, and John. In “A Note on Papias’s Knowledge of the Fourth Gospel” (JBL 129 [2010]: 793–794), Jake H. O’Connell presents a statistical analysis of this argument, according to which (...) the probability of this correspondence occurring by chance is lower than 1%. O’Connell concludes that it is more than 99% probable that this correspondence is the result of Papias copying John, rather than chance. I show that O’Connell’s analysis contains multiple mistakes, both substantive and mathematical: it ignores relevant evidence, overstates the correspondence between John and Papias, wrongly assumes that if Papias did not know John he ordered the disciples randomly, and conflates the probability of A given B with the probability of B given A. In discussing these errors, I aim to inform both Johannine scholarship and the use of probabilistic methods in historical reasoning. (shrink)

The notorious but: unimpeachably corroborated case of Pavlov's mice raises, in capsule form, a variety of fascinating issues with far-reaching ramifications in several directions, but with particularly serious implications, several of which are well worth restating and pondering further (cf. Sebeóle 1977b: 192-201), both for the foundations and research methodology of contemporary semiotics.

This paper will examine the topic of identity in Roman Catholicism from the perspective of topics contained in or absent from mission statements of 25 Catholic health care institutions. In particular, I will look at these from the perspective of social justice as well as how this and other topics such as human dignity, the sanctity of life, stewardship, pastoral care and the likelihood of mergers with other institutions will affect the healing ministry of Catholic health care providers. The article (...) will conclude that there are three key dimensions to Catholic health care: leadership in advocating reform of the current health care system, care for the marginalized and under-insured, and the provision of pastoral care in all institutions. (shrink)

Beginning with a Cuban Catholic ritual in Miami, this book takes readers on a momentous theoretical journey toward a new understanding of religion.

Non-epistemic values play important roles in classificatory practice, such that philosophical accounts of kinds and classification should be able to accommodate them. Available accounts fail to do so, however. Our aim is to fill this lacuna by showing how non-epistemic values feature in scientific classification, and how they can be incorporated into a philosophical theory of classification and kinds. To achieve this, we present a novel account of kinds and classification, discuss examples from biological classification where non-epistemic values play decisive (...) roles, and show how this account accommodates the role of non-epistemic values. (shrink)

This work argues for the need to close the gap between the fields of the philosophy of religion and religious studies. Thomas A. Lewis takes up what, in recent years, has often been seen as a fundamental reason for excluding religious ethics and philosophy of religion from religious studies: their explicit normativity. Against this presupposition, Lewis argues that normativity is pervasive--not unique to ethics and philosophy of religion--and therefore not a reason to exclude them from religious studies. He bridges (...) more philosophical and historical subfields by arguing for the importance of history to the philosophy of religion. He considers the future of religious ethics, explaining that the field as whole should learn from the methodological developments associated with recent work in comparative religious ethics and 'comparative religious ethics' should no longer be conceived as a distinct subfield. The concluding chapter engages broader, post-9/11 arguments about the importance of studying religion, arguing that prominent contemporary notions of 'religious literacy' actually hinder our ability to grasp the significance of religion and impact in the world today. (shrink)

Capacitarianism says that an agent can be non-derivatively blameworthy for wrongdoing if at the time of their conduct the agent lacked awareness of the wrong-making features of their conduct but had the capacity to be aware of those features. In this paper, I raise three objections to capacitarianism in relation to its verdict of the culpability of so-called “slips” and use these objections to support a rival (“accessibility internalist”) view which requires awareness of wrong-making features for non-derivative blameworthiness. The objections (...) are that (1) the rival internalist view is just as capable of explaining the culpability of paradigm cases of slips; (2) there are some cases of slips without dispositional awareness of wrong-making features that capacitarians wrongly deem culpable; and (3) capacitarianism cannot adequately ground the reasonable expectation to avoid slips (as Fernando Rudy-Hiller has argued). I then argue that an internalist can simultaneously ground a reasonable expectation to avoid slips and account for slips’ culpability by pointing to the satisfaction of a novel epistemic condition: it is (dispositionally) obvious to the slipping agent that they need to pay enough attention to what they are doing, and how to pay enough attention, to reliably achieve the goal that they have set out to achieve. (shrink)

Natural kinds are often contrasted with other kinds of scientific kinds, especially functional kinds, because of a presumed categorical difference in explanatory value: supposedly, natural kinds can ground explanations, while other kinds of kinds cannot. I argue against this view of natural kinds by examining a particular type of explanation—mechanistic explanation—and showing that functional kinds do the same work there as traditionally recognized natural kinds are supposed to do in “standard” scientific explanations. Breaking down this categorical distinction between traditional natural (...) kinds and other kinds of kinds, I argue, delivers two goods: It provides us with a view of natural kindhood that does justice to the epistemic roles of kinds in scientific explanations. And it allows us to solve a problem that HPC theory, currently one of the more popular accounts of natural kindhood, confronts. (shrink)

Present-day thought on the notion of species is troubled by a mistaken understanding of the nature of the issue: while the species problem is commonly understood as concerning the epistemology and ontology of one single scientific concept, I argue that in fact there are multiple distinct concepts at stake. An approach to the species problem is presented that interprets the term ‘species’ as the placeholder for four distinct scientific concepts, each having its own role in biological theory, and an explanation (...) is given of the concepts involved. To illustrate how these concepts are commonly conflated, two widely accepted ideas on species are criticized: species individualism and species pluralism. I argue that by failing to distinguish between the four concepts and their particular roles in contemporary biological theory, these ideas stand in the way of a final resolution of the species problem. (shrink)

Natural kinds are often contrasted with other kinds of scientific kinds, especially functional kinds, because of a presumed categorical difference in explanatory value: supposedly, natural kinds can ground explanations, while other kinds of kinds cannot. I argue against this view of natural kinds by examining a particular type of explanation—mechanistic explanation—and showing that functional kinds do the same work there as traditionally recognized natural kinds are supposed to do in “standard” scientific explanations. Breaking down this categorical distinction between traditional natural (...) kinds and other kinds of kinds, I argue, delivers two goods: It provides us with a view of natural kindhood that does justice to the epistemic roles of kinds in scientific explanations. And it allows us to solve a problem that HPC theory, currently one of the more popular accounts of natural kindhood, confronts. (shrink)

Recent ethnographic studies of lived ethics, such as those of Leela Prasad and Saba Mahmood, present valuable opportunities for comparative religious ethics. This essay argues that developments in philosophical and religious ethics over the last three decades have supported a strong interest in thick descriptions of what it means to be human. This anthropological turn has thereby laid important groundwork for the encounter between these scholars and new ethnographic studies. Nonetheless, an encounter it is. Each side brings novel questions to (...) the other. The second part of the essay focuses on one of these questions: How, exactly, are these ethnographic studies to inform normative reflection on ethical questions? (shrink)

In Civic Liberalism, prominent political theorist Thomas A. Spragens, Jr. asserts that most versions of democratic ideals—libertarianism, liberal egalitarianism, difference liberalism, and the liberalism of fear—lead our polity significantly astray. Spragens offers another alternative. He argues that we should recover the multiple and complex aspirations found within the tradition of democratic liberalism and integrate them into a more compelling public philosophy for our time—or what he calls civic liberalism.

"Unabridged and unaltered republication of the work originally published ... in 1950." Bibliographical footnotes.

In this target article we question the assumption that perception is divided into separate domains of vision, hearing, touch, taste, and smell. We review implications of this assumption for theories of perception and for our understanding of ambient energy arrays (e.g., the optic and acoustic arrays) that are available to perceptual systems. We analyze three hypotheses about relations between ambient arrays and physical reality: (1) that there is an ambiguous relation between ambient energy arrays and physical reality, (2) that there (...) is a unique relation between individual energy arrays and physical reality, and (3) that there is a redundant but unambiguous relation, within or across arrays, between energy arrays and physical reality. This is followed by a review of the physics of motion, focusing on the existence and status of referents for physical motion. Our review indicates that it is not possible, in principle, for there to be a unique relation between physical motion and the structure of individual energy arrays. We argue that physical motion relative to different referents is specified only in the global array, which consists of higher-order relations across different forms of energy. The existence of specificity in the global array is consistent with the idea of direct perception, and so poses a challenge to traditional, inference-based theories of perception and cognition. However, it also presents a challenge to much of the ecological approach to perception and action, which has accepted the assumption of separate senses. (shrink)

Attending closely to Hegel's social, political, and intellectual context, the book begins with Hegel's early concerns with a modern civil religion in the ...

What are the primary characteristics that define what it means to be human? And what happens to those characteristics in the face of technology past, present, and future? The three essays in Image, by leading philosophers of religion Mark Taylor, Mary-Jane Rubenstein, and Thomas Carlson, play at this intersection of the human and the technological, building out from Heidegger's notion that humans master the world by picturing or representing the real.Taylor's essay traces a history of capitalism, dwelling on the (...) lack of humility, particularly in the face of our own mortality, that is the persistent failure of humans, before turning to art as a possible way to bring us back to earth and recover humility before it is too late. Rubenstein zeroes in on the delusions of imaginative conquest associated with space travel. Through a genealogy of the modern "view from space" from the iconic Earth rise photo of 1968 up to the new privatized American space race, Rubenstein provides an analysis of the perils of the one-world and the false unity it projects. In his essay, Carlson takes as his starting point the surveillance capitalism of facial recognition technology. He dives deep into Heidegger to meditate on the elimination of individuals through totalizing gestures and the relationship between such elimination and our encounters with mortality. Each of these essays, in its own way, reflects on the nature of imagination, the character of technological vision in contemporary culture, and the implications of these for the kinds of sociality and love that condition our human experience. (shrink)

While evolutionary thinking is increasingly becoming popular in fields of investigation outside the biological sciences, it remains unclear how helpful it is there and whether it actually yields good explanations of the phenomena under study. Here we examine the ontology of a recent approach to applying evolutionary thinking outside biology, the generalized Darwinism approach proposed by Geoffrey Hodgson and Thorbjørn Knudsen. We examine the ontology of populations in biology and in GD, and argue that biological evolutionary theory sets ontological criteria (...) that GD fails to meet. We suggest two options to revise the population concept in GD: reformulating the concept in terms of inheritance and reproduction such that it comes to pick out individuals similar to evolving populations, or trying to build an adequate population concept on a principle of differential retention instead of differential reproduction. 1 Introduction2 Generalized Darwinism2.1 What is generalized Darwinism?2.2 Darwinian principles3 The Ontology of Generalized Darwinism: What Are Populations?3.1 The population concept of generalized Darwinism3.2 The population concept in evolutionary theory4 Locating Evolving Systems in Generalized Darwinism5 Conclusion. (shrink)

This essay offers a diagnosis of what may be at stake in the current preoccupation with defining science‐based educational research. The diagnosis unfolds in several readings: The first is a charitable and considerate appraisal that draws attention to the fact that advocating experimental methods as important to a science of educational research is not an inherently evil thing to do. Subsequent readings are grimmer, suggesting more deleterious consequences of the science‐based research movement for the entire enterprise of educational practice and (...) research. The central thesis of the essay is that making arguments about method and science the focal point in the current quarrel may be largely beside the point. Instead, educational researchers should join the political and public conversation about the place of educational science in society and about how science is both implicated in and confronts the politics of what counts as knowledge. (shrink)

Building on influential work in virtue ethics, this collection of essays examines the categories of self, person, and anthropology as foci for comparative analysis. The papers unite reflections on theory and method with descriptive work that addresses thinkers from the modern West, Christian and Jewish Late Antiquity, early China, and other settings. The introduction sets out central methodological issues that are subsequently taken up in each essay, including the origin of the categories through which comparison proceeds, the status of these (...) categories in the process of comparison, and the goals of comparison. In considering the question of goals, the introduction draws connections between comparative study and historical study within one tradition. Both types of analysis can bridge the gap between historical and normative work by attending to the ways in which the questions a scholar asks - not just the answers found - vary from one context to another. (shrink)

Organizational ecology is commonly seen as a Darwinian research program that seeks to explain the diversity of organizational structures, properties and behaviors as the product of selection in past social environments in a similar manner as evolutionary biology seeks to explain the forms, properties and behaviors of organisms as consequences of selection in past natural environments. We argue that this explanatory strategy does not succeed because organizational ecology theory lacks an evolutionary mechanism that could be identified as the principal cause (...) of organizational diversity. The “evolution” of organizational populations by means of selection, which organizational ecologists put forward as the mechanism responsible for the extant diversity of organizational forms, is not evolution in any proper sense, because organizational populations do not have what it takes to participate in evolutionary processes. This implies that organizational ecology is not a Darwinian research program and that it cannot explain organizational diversity. (shrink)

Examines the relationship between the question of God and the destiny of metaphysics. Concept of the end of metaphysics; Ambiguous relation between phenomenology and metaphysics; Return of special metaphysics in phenomenology; Phenomenological figure of God. Examines the relationship between the question of God and the destiny of metaphysics. Concept of the end of metaphysics; Ambiguous relation between phenomenology and metaphysics; Return of special metaphysics in phenomenology; Phenomenological figure of God.

This article discuses the unexpectedly firm stance professed by John Paul II on the provision of artificial nutrition and hydration to patients who are in a persistent vegetative state, and its implications on previously held standards of judging medical treatments. The traditional ordinary/extraordinary care distinction is assessed in light of complexities of the recent allocution as well as its impact on Catholic individuals and in Catholic health care facilities. Shannon concludes that the papal allocution infers that the average Catholic patient (...) is incapable of making proper judgments about their own care. Shannon sees the preservation of life at all costs as at least highly troubling, if not as a radical move against the Catholic medical ethics tradition. (shrink)

It is clear from this brief analysis that Sartre the Existentialist is alive and well, even as a self-proclaimed Marxist. In his later work he fuses Marxism with Existentialism, giving to the former a strong dose of individuality which has been prescribed by Western humanists for decades. Thus far I have given only the bare outline of Sartre's view. It needs to be followed up with a further analysis of his stand on groups and classes, which takes up the bulk (...) of theCritique. But the essential direction of his work is already clear. Sartre reminds us that the contradictions of the dialectic first live in the minds and careers of individuals. He finds Marxist literature fraught with the view that man is inert in the historical process, and he hopes that his work helps to correct this failure. It remains to be seen how much impact Sartre's challenge to Marxist dogmatism will have both on his fellow Marxists, who are no doubt uncomfortable with his brand of Marxism, and on the Western liberal who is both attracted to and repulsed by Marx. (shrink)

I provide indestructibility results for large cardinals consistent with V = L, such as weakly compact, indescribable and strongly unfoldable cardinals. The Main Theorem shows that any strongly unfoldable cardinal κ can be made indestructible by <κ-closed. κ-proper forcing. This class of posets includes for instance all <κ-closed posets that are either κ -c.c, or ≤κ-strategically closed as well as finite iterations of such posets. Since strongly unfoldable cardinals strengthen both indescribable and weakly compact cardinals, the Main Theorem therefore makes (...) these two large cardinal notions similarly indestructible. Finally. I apply the Main Theorem forcing extension preserving all strongly unfoldable cardinals in which every strongly unfoldable cardinal κ is indestructible by <κ-closed. κ-proper forcing. (shrink)