I argue that Anselmians ought to abandon traditional Anselmianism in favor of Moderate Anselmianism. Moderate Anselmianism advances the view that a being x = God iff for every essential property P of x, it is secondarily necessary that x has P, for most essential properties of x, it is not primarily necessary that x has P and the essential properties of x include omnipotence, omniscience, perfect goodness and necessary existence. Traditional Anselmians have no cogent response (...) to most a priori atheological arguments. But a priori atheological arguments present no serious problem for moderate Anselmians. Unlike traditional Anselmianism, Moderate Anselmianism explains why a priori atheological arguments can be convincing and nonetheless illusory. (shrink)

"Co-publication agreement between China Social Sciences Press (China) and Paths International Ltd (UK)"--Colophon.

Popular Traditions, Folklore and Politics The article studies how the "language" of folk traditions and folklore continues to be a tried-and-tested means for the representation and propagation of political concepts and ideas. The author notes transformations in the significance of folklore and folk traditions in historically changing both political and socio-cultural contexts. Attention is drawn to the significance of folklore in the nation-forming thinking of the 19th century, the place of honour accorded to it as an expression of the working (...) people during the period of socialism, and its contradictory perception in the post-socialist context today. (shrink)

Examines the relevance of empirical studies of responsibility judgments for traditional philosophical concerns about free will and moral responsibility. We argue that experimental philosophy is relevant to the traditional debates, but that setting up experiments and interpreting data in just the right way is no less difficult than negotiating traditional philosophical arguments. Both routes are valuable, but so far neither promises a way to secure significant agreement among the competing parties. To illustrate, we focus on three sorts (...) of issues. For illustration, we discuss an error theory for incompatibilist intuitions proposed by Eddy Nahmias and colleagues, the role that empirical studies might have in the assessment of manipulation arguments for incompatibilism, and the suggestion that empirical studies reveal that core criteria for moral responsibility ought not to be applied invariantly across different sorts of cases. (shrink)

A generalized traditional Western world view is compared with a generalized traditional American Indian world view in respect to the practical relations implied by either to nature. The Western tradition pictures nature as material, mechanical, and devoid of spirit, while the American Indian tradition pictures nature throughout as an extended family or society of living, ensouled beings. The former picture invites unrestrained exploitation of nonhuman nature, while the latter provides the foundations for ethical restraint in relation to nonhuman (...) nature. This conclusion is defended against disclaimers by Calvin Martin and Tom Regan. (shrink)

The chapter begins by introducing the problem of free will and moral responsibility and the standard terminology used to frame it in the philosophical context. It turns to the contributions of experimental philosophy and the prospects for the use of this methodology in the area. People believe that experimental philosophy is relevant to the traditional debates. The chapter discusses an error theory for incompatibilist intuitions proposed by Eddy nahmias and colleagues, and the role that empirical studies might have in (...) the assessment of manipulation arguments for incompatibilism. It also presents the suggestion that empirical studies reveal that core criteria for moral responsibility ought not to be applied invariantly across different sorts of cases. A number of philosophers argue that the results of surveys provide confirming evidence for a meta‐view about moral theories, variantism. (shrink)

We all face death, but how many of us are actually ready for it? Whether our own death or that of a loved one comes first, how prepared are we, spiritually or practically? In Preparing to Die, Andrew Holecek presents a wide array of resources to help the reader address this unfinished business. Part One shows how to prepare one's mind and how to help others, before, during, and after death. The author explains how spiritual preparation for death can completely (...) transform our relationship to the end of life, dissolving our fear and helping us to feel open and receptive to letting go in the dying process. Daily meditation practices, the stages of dying and how to work with them, and after-death experiences are all detailed in ways that will be particularly helpful for those with an interest in Tibetan Buddhism and in Tibetan approaches to conscious dying. Part Two addresses the practical issues that surround death. Experts in grief, hospice, the funeral business, and the medical and legal issues of death contribute chapters to prepare the reader for every practical concern, including advance directives, green funerals, the signs of death, warnings about the funeral industry, the stages of grief, and practical care for the dying. Part Three contains heart-advice from twenty of the best-known Tibetan Buddhist masters now teaching in the West. These brief interviews provide words of solace and wisdom to guide the dying and their caregivers during this challenging time. Preparing to Die is for anyone interested in learning how to prepare for death from a Buddhist perspective, both spiritually and practically. It is also for those who want to learn how to help someone else who is dying, both during the time of illness and death as well as after death. (shrink)

Wiredu’s call for democracy by consensus is illustrated by his description of traditional African consensual rationality. This description contains the attribution of immanence to African consensual rationality. This paper objects to this doctrine of immanence. More importantly, the doctrine of immanence has led to the attribution of pure rationality to traditional African consensual practices. With reference to Aristotle’s three components of persuasion, I object to deliberation as purely rational and impervious to extraneous factors. I further argue that it (...) is because deliberation is not always perfectly rational that the process of consensus can suffer three forms of social conformity: conformity to dominant players, to numerical opinion majority, and to group-centrism. These forms of conformity mean that a consensus task order could lead to decisions of more inclusive value, but not necessarily decisions of more epistemic value. The concept of agonistic inquiry is employed to tackle what I see as the dangers of conformity and complacency in the project of inclusivity, and this is to strike a crucial balance between too-consensual and purely adversarial forms of deliberation. (shrink)

Of all the things we do and say, most will never be repeated or reproduced. Once in a while, however, an idea or a practice generates a chain of transmission that covers more distance through space and time than any individual person ever could. What makes such transmission chains possible? For two centuries, the dominant view was that humans owe their cultural prosperity to their powers of imitation. In this view, modern cultures exist because the people who carry them are (...) gifted at remembering, storing and reproducing information. How Traditions Live and Die proposes an alternative to this standard view. What makes traditions live is not a general-purpose imitation capacity. Cultural transmission is partial, selective, often unfaithful. Some traditions live on in spite of this, because they tap into widespread and basic cognitive preferences. These attractive traditions spread, not by being better retained or more accurately transferred, but because they are transmitted over and over. This theory is used to shed light on various puzzles of cultural change and to explain the special relation that links the human species to its cultures. Morin combines recent work in cognitive anthropology with new advances in quantitative cultural history, to map and predict the diffusion of traditions. This book is both an introduction and an accessible alternative to contemporary theories of cultural evolution. (shrink)

Explores the history, significance, and future of tradition as a whole. This book reveals the importance of tradition to social and political institutions, technology, science, literature, religion, and scholarship.

Articles in this volume, orginally presented at the 1998 Symposium Hellenisticum in Lille, discuss theological questions that were central to the doctrines of the dominant schools in the Hellenistic age, such as the existence of the gods, their nature, and their concern for humankind.

In this paper, I give an account and critique of what I call ‘Traditional Islamic Exclusivism’ – a specific Islamic interpretation of religious exclusivism. This Islamic version of religious exclusivism rests on exclusivist attitudes towards truth, epistemic justification and salvation. After giving an account of Traditional Islamic Exclusivism by explaining its theological roots in the Qur’an and ahadith, I proceed to critique it. I do so by arguing that Islamic epistemic exclusivism, which forms the main core of (...) class='Hi'>Traditional Islamic Exclusivism, is implausible. This criticism subsequently opens up further lines of criticism and discussion of both salvific and alethic exclusivism in an Islamic context. I conclude with some remarks about the implications and significance of my criticisms of Traditional Islamic Exclusivism. (shrink)

One recent trend in contemporary epistemology is to study the way in which the concept of knowledge is actually applied in everyday settings. This approach has inspired an exciting new spirit of collaboration between experimental philosophers and traditional epistemologists, who have begun using the techniques of the social sciences to investigate the factors that influence ordinary judgments about knowledge attribution. This paper provides an overview of some of the results these researchers have uncovered, suggesting that in addition to traditionally (...) considered factors like evidence and justification, a number of important non-truth-conducive factors play significant roles in determining when people ascribe knowledge. The present review focuses on four non-traditional factors: pragmatic load (in relation to contextualism and interest-relative invariantism), moral judgment, performance errors, and demographic variation. (shrink)

Aristotle said that induction (epagōgē) is a proceeding from particulars to a universal, and the definition has been conventional ever since. But there is an ambiguity here. Induction in the Scholastic and the (so-called) Humean tradition has presumed that Aristotle meant going from particular statements to universal statements. But the alternate view, namely that Aristotle meant going from particular things to universal ideas, prevailed all through antiquity and then again from the time of Francis Bacon until the mid-nineteenth century. Recent (...) scholarship is so steeped in the first-mentioned tradition that we have virtually forgotten the other. In this essay McCaskey seeks to recover that alternate tradition, a tradition whose leading theoreticians were William Whewell, Francis Bacon, Socrates, and in fact Aristotle himself. The examination is both historical and philosophical. The first part of the essay fills out the history. The latter part examines the most mature of the philosophies in the Socratic tradition, specifically Bacon’s and Whewell’s. After tracing out this tradition, McCaskey shows how this alternate view of induction is indeed employed in science, as exemplified by several instances taken from actual scientific practice. In this manner, McCaskey proposes to us that the Humean problem of induction is merely an artifact of a bad conception of induction and that a return to the Socratic conception might be warranted. (shrink)

Essentialism is widely regarded as a mistaken view of biological kinds, such as species. After recounting why (sections 2-3), we provide a brief survey of the chief responses to the “death of essentialism” in the philosophy of biology (section 4). We then develop one of these responses, the claim that biological kinds are homeostatic property clusters (sections 5-6) illustrating this view with several novel examples (section 7). Although this view was first expressed 20 years ago, and has received recent discussion (...) and critique, it remains underdeveloped and is often misrepresented by its critics (section 8). (shrink)

Current debates about the integration of traditional and academic ecological knowledge struggle with a dilemma of division and assimilation. On the one hand, the emphasis on differences between traditional and academic perspectives has been criticized as creating an artificial divide that brands TEK as “non-scientific” and contributes to its marginalization. On the other hand, there has been increased concern about inadequate assimilation of Indigenous and other traditional perspectives into scientific practices that disregards the holistic nature and values (...) of TEK. The aim of this article is to develop a practice-based account of the epistemic relations between TEK and AEK that avoids both horns of the dilemma. While relations between TEK and AEK are often described in terms of the “holistic” nature of the former and the “mechanistic” character of the latter, we argue that a simple holism–mechanism divide misrepresents the epistemic resources of both TEK and AEK. Based on the literature on mechanistic explanations in philosophy of science, we argue that holders of TEK are perfectly capable of identifying mechanisms that underlie ecological phenomena while AEK often relies on non-mechanistic strategies of dealing with ecological complexity. Instead of generic characterizations of knowledge systems as either mechanistic or holistic, we propose to approach epistemic relations between knowledge systems by analyzing their heuristics in practice. (shrink)

Tradition and revelation are often seen as opposites: tradition is viewed as being secondary and reactionary to revelation which is a one-off gift from God. Drawing on examples from Christian history, Judaism, Islam, and the classical world, this book challenges these definitions and presents a controversial examination of the effect history and cultural development has on religious belief: its narratives and art. David Brown pays close attention to the nature of the relationship between historical and imaginative truth, and focuses on (...) the way stories from the Bible have not stood still but are subject to imaginative 'rewriting'. This rewriting is explained as a natural consequence of the interaction between religion and history: God speaks to humanity through the imagination, and human imagination is influenced by historical context. It is the imagination that ensures that religion continues to develop in new and challenging ways. (shrink)

The article is devoted to an analysis of Carpathian-Balkan studies conducted by the Russian Academy of Sciences since 2006. The Slovak tradition is an important one, as it displays characteristics which are common to the Carpathian region as a whole. Furthermore, there are a number of Carpathian-South Slavic and Carpathian-Balkan parallels in terminology and related phenomena in folk culture.

John Darling; Progressive, Traditional and Radical: a re-alignment, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 12, Issue 1, 30 May 2006, Pages 157–166, https://.

Recent scholarship has focused attention on the difficulties that evil, suffering, and tragic conflict present to religious belief and moral life. Thinkers have drawn upon many important historical figures, with one significant exception - Augustine. At the same time, there has been a renaissance of work on Augustine, but little discussion of either his work on evil or his influence on contemporary thought. This book fills these gaps. It explores the 'family biography' of the Augustinian tradition by looking at Augustine's (...) work and its development in the writings of Hannah Arendt and Reinhold Niebuhr. Mathewes argues that the Augustinian tradition offers us a powerful, though commonly misconstrued, proposal for understanding and responding to evil's challenges. The book casts new light on Augustine, Niebuhr, and Arendt, as well as on the problem of evil, the nature of tradition, and the role of theological and ethical discourse in contemporary thought. (shrink)

Cultural evolution depends on both innovation (the creation of new cultural variants by accident or design) and high-fidelity transmission (which preserves our accumulated knowledge and allows the storage of normative conventions). What is required is an overarching theory encompassing both dimensions, specifying the psychological motivations and mechanisms involved. The bifocal stance theory (BST) of cultural evolution proposes that the co-existence of innovative change and stable tradition results from our ability to adopt different motivational stances flexibly during social learning and transmission. (...) We argue that the ways in which instrumental and ritual stances are adopted in cultural transmission influence the nature and degree of copying fidelity and thus also patterns of cultural spread and stability at a population level over time. BST creates a unifying framework for interpreting the findings of otherwise seemingly disparate areas of enquiry, including social learning, cumulative culture, overimitation, and ritual performance. We discuss the implications of BST for competing by-product accounts which assume that faithful copying is merely a side-effect of instrumental learning and action parsing. We also set out a novel “cultural action framework” bringing to light aspects of social learning that have been relatively neglected by behavioural ecologists and evolutionary psychologists and establishing a roadmap for future research on this topic. The BST framework sheds new light on the cognitive underpinnings of cumulative cultural change, selection, and spread within an encompassing evolutionary framework. (shrink)

Tradition und Traditionsbruch gehören zu den entscheidenden Herausforderungen in einer beschleunigt zusammenwachsenden Welt. Sollen beide Seiten nicht in einem unfriedlichen Antagonismus verharren, so ist Prämissentransparenz und Grenzbestimmung der je eigenen und fremden Argumente gefragt. In der Auseinandersetzung mit klassischen Quellen der europäischen und außereuropäischen Philosophiegeschichte soll der vorliegende Band zeigen, daß Selbstkritik und Selbstaffirmation in allen Weltphilosophien nur mehr zwei entgegengesetzte Reaktionen auf eine von innen oder von außen gefährdete Identität zum Ausdruck bringen. Skepsis und Dogmatik betreffen darum nicht allein (...) den Kern der abendländischen Annäherungen, sondern sie treffen den Nerv aller Weltphilosophien gleichermaßen. Skeptisch-kritische Positionen prägen ebenso die buddhistische, taoistische und islamische Philosophie; spekulativ-systematische Ansätze finden ihren Niederschlag in der islamischen, der hinduistischen wie auch der europäischen Philosophie; rationalistische und analytische Strömungen lassen sich in allen genannten philosophischen Traditionen ausfindig machen. Leitend ist darum die gemeinsame Frage: Wie ist Identitätskonstruktion in Traditionen möglich, ohne dogmatisch zu werden, und wie können Relativität und Skepsis ihre produktive Funktion entfalten, ohne auf die Universalität der Werte (wie etwa der Menschenrechte) verzichten zu müssen? (shrink)

Retrospect and prospect for contemporary Chinese thought -- Resolving the tension between tradition and modernity : reflections on the May Fourth cultural tide -- The May Fourth tide and modernity -- Radicalism in the cultural movement of the twentieth century -- Modern Chinese culture and the difficulties of Confucian learning -- Liang Shuming's early view of Oriental and Western culture -- The establishment and development of Feng Youlan's view of culture -- A reflection on the new school of principle and (...) thoughts on modernity -- Confucian thought and the world of modern East Asia -- Confucian ethics and China's modernisation -- East Asian tradition according to modernisation theory -- A sense of predicament and inter-dependency -- Liang Shuming and Max Weber on Chinese culture -- Values, authority, tradition and Chinese philosophy -- The difficulty of undertaking national studies research in the nineties : the problem of the national studies fever and research into traditional culture -- The value and status of traditional Chinese culture. (shrink)

Mythology about Africa still persists. It served colonial interests to portray African natives as "savages" with no history and their indigenous institutions as "backward and primitive." Therefore, colonialism was "good" for them as it "civilized" them and freed them from their "terrible and despotic" traditional rulers. Of course, much of this mythology has been tossed into the trash bin. African natives not only had history but also viable traditional institutions which enabled them to survive through the centuries. Ghana, (...) Mali, Songhai and Great Zimbabwe were empires they built that lasted for centuries. Nor were their rulers terrible and despotic. Chiefs and kings were held accountable at all times and removed from office for dereliction of duty-not after every four or so years. However, mythology about Africa still persists-this time among Africa's own post colonial leaders! Believing that African natives had no history, no viable institutions, and no knowledge of such concepts as "democracy," "accountability" and "rule of law," the post colonial leadership imposed on their people alien systems and ideologies that have led to the ruination of Africa. The continent is littered with the putrid carcasses of these imported systems. Sankofa is the only route to take for Africa's salvation. The solutions needed to extricate Africa from its current economic malaise and political miasma are already embedded in its own traditional institutions and heritage. And the leadership should just "go back and get them.". (shrink)

In this paper, I develop a new interpretation of Quine’s epistemology in the hopes of clarifying the relationship between naturalized epistemology and traditional epistemology. Quine’s naturalized epistemology is commonly criticized on the grounds that it amounts to giving up on traditional epistemological projects in favor of projects in natural science. But, I argue, this criticism rests on a mistaken interpretation of Quine’s epistemology. This is because Quine’s naturalized epistemology retains an important meliorative component; part of its aim is (...) to improve our systems of beliefs. Quine’s approach emphasizes improving our beliefs by engaging in conceptual clarification, which is a central part of both traditional and naturalized epistemology, as well as, on Quine’s conception, scientific inquiry. Thus, I argue, a central task of naturalized epistemology is to clarify science from within. Once this is properly understood, it is evident that Quine’s naturalized epistemology constitutes a re-orientation, rather than a wholesale rejection, of the projects of traditional epistemology. (shrink)

Philosophers and theologians acknowledge that "fideism" is difficult to define but rarely agree on what the best characterization of the term is. In this article, I investigate the history of use of "fideism" to explore why its meaning has been so contested and thus why it has not always been helpful for resolving philosophical problems. I trace the use of the term from its origins in French theology to its current uses in philosophy and theology, concluding that "fideism" is helpful (...) in resolving philosophical problems only when philosophers scrupulously acknowledge the tradition of use that informs their understanding of the word. (shrink)

"Sport, Tradition and Freedom" entails a philosophical examination of the relationship between traditions of rationality and understandings of freedom in sport. Chapter One introduces the ideas of freedom and virtue. Chapter Two involves a critical and historical exploration of the traditions of conservatism, liberalism and Marxism and the effects that these traditions have had on accounts of freedom in sport. Chapter Three examines the issue of freedom in sport from a social critical-formalist perspective, particularly addressing the influence that the process (...) of commodification in advanced capitalism has had on sport. It also endeavours to suggest that the virtues, as explained by Alisdair Maclntyre, are important to the protection of formal freedom in sport, from the effects of advanced capitalism. Chapter Four examines the link between the modern liberal tradition and the virtue tradition. This link is made via the ideas of self-determination and authentic social unions which both traditions share. This chapter also investigates the influence that these various traditions have had on the framing and solution to issues in sport, using the drug issue as a paradigm case. The conclusion suggests that it may be profitable to explore the rationality of less dominant traditions in society when investigating sport. Inquiry revealed that many traditions of understanding in sport rely heavily on elements from political traditions in society. Freedom in sport has been linked to conservative notions of a craft, to liberal notions of play and the independent individual and to accounts of freedom which support the dominant capitalist institutions of society. The examination by social critical theorists of the freedom of authentic social practices and the location of this freedom in the formal rules of sport, provided an alternative to these previous explanations which had located freedom in either the attitude of the player or the economic institutions of society. On the formalist view of sport, freedom is located in the pursuit of gratuitous difficulty, which the rules of sport make possible. The protection of this freedom from social abrogation involves virtue, the formation of authentic social unions, and judgement in sporting participation. The concluding chapter suggested that the protection of formal freedom and the importance of judgement and "seeing without illusion" in sport is critical to issues such as feminism, professionalism and creativity in sport. (shrink)

What constitutes numerically one and the same tradition diachronically, at different times? This question is the focus of often violent dispute in societies. Is it capable of a rational resolution? Many accounts attempt that resolution with a diagnosis of ambiguity of the disputed concept-Islam, Marxism, or democracy for example. The diagnosis offered is in terms of vagueness, namely the vague criteria for sameness or similarity of central beliefs and practices.

Several arguments attempt to show that if traditional, acquaintance-based epistemic internalism is true, we cannot have foundational justification for believing falsehoods. I examine some of those arguments and find them wanting. Nevertheless, an infallibilist position about foundational justification is highly plausible: prima facie, much more plausible than moderate foundationalism. I conclude with some remarks about the dialectical position we infallibilists find ourselves in with respect to arguing for our preferred view and some considerations regarding how infallibilists should develop their (...) account of infallible foundational justification. In particular, I provide an account of how propositions that moderate foundationalists claim are foundationally justified derive their epistemic support from infallibly known propositions. This is possible when a foundational proposition is coarsely-grained enough to correspond to determinable properties exemplified in experience or determinate properties that a subject insufficiently attends to; one may have inferential justification derived from such a basis when a more finely-grained proposition includes in its content one of the ways that the foundational proposition could be true. (shrink)

With contributions by some of the best and most significant contemporary Korean philosophers, this important volume provides an overview of the different debates, problems, figures and periods that make up traditional Korean Buddhist and Confucian thought. The book highlights the richness and diversity of Korean philosophy as a vital and ongoing philosophical endeavour.

Spiritual Traditions and the Virtues provides a philosophical appreciation of the spiritual life, showing how a certain conception of spiritual well-being, rooted in Thomas Aquinas's account of the virtues, can generate a distinctive vision of human life, and the possibilities for spiritual fulfilment.

Istanbul is home to a multimillion dollar transnational music industry, which every year produces thousands of digital music recordings, including widely distributed film and television show soundtracks. Today, this centralized industry is responding to a growing global demand for Turkish, Kurdish, and other Anatolian ethnic language productions, and every year, many of its top-selling records incorporate elaborately orchestrated arrangements of rural folksongs. What accounts for the continuing demand for traditional music in local and diasporic markets? How is tradition produced (...) in twenty-first century digital recording studios, and is there a "digital aesthetics" to contemporary recordings of traditional music? -/- In Digital Tradition: Arrangement and Labor in Istanbul's Recording Studio Culture, author Eliot Bates answers these questions and more with a case study into the contemporary practices of recording traditional music in Istanbul. Bates provides an ethnography of Turkish recording studios, of arrangers and engineers, studio musicianship and digital audio workstation kinesthetics. Digital Traditions investigates the moments when tradition is arranged, and how arrangement is simultaneously a set of technological capabilities, limitations and choices: a form of musical practice that desocializes the ensemble and generates an extended network of social relations, resulting in aesthetic art objects that come to be associated with a range of affective and symbolic meanings. Rich with visual analysis and drawing on Science & Technology Studies theories and methods, Digital Traditions sets a new standard for the study of recorded music. Scholars and general readers of ethnomusicology, Middle Eastern studies, folklore and science and technology studies are sure to find Digital Traditions an essential addition to their library. (shrink)

Tradition has been disparaged as a conceptual category that should be jettisoned in the development process. It is thought to be capable of hindering the use of reason which is thought to be the primary mover of development. This thinking has its root in the Enlightenment rationalisations, especially as championed by the philosophes, Rene Descartes, and Immanuel Kant. Conservatives, such as Edmund Burke, contrarily, are of the opinion that tradition is a valuable resource for society because they regard tradition as (...) the accumulated wisdom of the past. This paper argues that, even though the Enlightenment and conservative thinkers differ in their conceptions of the value of tradition, they misconceived what tradition entails because they failed to pay attention to its dynamics and consequently could not put its values in proper focus. The paper considers tradition as a relevant imperative in development attempts and, therefore, suggests a conception of tradition that makes it a dynamic and useful phenomenon. (shrink)