Some defenders of legal abortion claim that even if the human fetus is a human being with the same right to life as an adult, abortion is not necessarily morally impermissible. They argue that abortion can be considered a form of indirect killing that results from the refusal to provide life support through one’s own body, which another person has no right to receive. While Catholic moral theology does not require people to donate organs against their will, this principle does (...) not justify direct abortion. (shrink)

The plan of this book -- The problem of animal pain -- The Bayesian argument from animal pain -- Is there really a problem? the challenge of neo-cartesianism -- There is a problem. the defeat of neo-cartesianism -- The saint-making theodicy I:Negative phase -- The saint-making theodicy II:Positive phase -- Animal saints -- Animal afterlife.

In this article, we examine in detail the New Atheists' most serious argument for the conclusion that God does not exist, namely, Richard Dawkins's Ultimate 747 Gambit. Dawkins relies upon a strong explanatory principle involving simplicity. We systematically inspect the various kinds of simplicity that Dawkins may invoke. Finding his crucial premises false on any common conception of simplicity, we conclude that Dawkins has not given good reason to think God does not exist.

In the massive plot twist at the end of BioShock Infinite, the writers beautifully put forth a hypothesis that individuals might exist in more than one possible world. In philosophy, the idea that an individual can exist in more than one world is called transworld identity. An important rival to transworld identity theory is counterpart theory, the idea that individuals cannot exist in more than one possible world and are therefore “world bound.” Modal realism is the thesis according to which (...) there is an infinite number of possible worlds that really exist in the most robust sense, relative to themselves. The world of Columbia is one possible world. The world of Rapture is another possible world. Both the actualist and the possibilist agree on these claims. Most important to the themes present in BioShock, transworld individuality has profound implications for differing notions of freedom. (shrink)

How well is the field of political studies doing and where is it headed? Such questions are examined and answered in this broad world overview of political science, along with the advances and shortcomings, as well as the recommended prescriptions for the future decades of the new century. The book includes three world regional assessments of the discipline, along with an in-depth survey of various sub-disciplinary fields and a concluding critical essay on the future of political studies. This is the (...) final volume in a book series on the development of political science, created in 2000 by Research Committee 33 of the International Political Science Association (IPSA) on the study of political science as a discipline. Contents include: Political Science in Three Asian Democracies: Disaffected (Japan), Third-Wave (Korea), and Fledgling (China) * Political Science in Europe: Its Development as a Discipline * Political Science in North America and Other Continents: Is There a Genuinely Int. (shrink)

Your perspective on life can be your power or your prison. It can serve your anxiety, your stress, and your depression, or it can support your peace, your courage, and your growth. Trent Shelton, one of the most groundbreaking and dynamic teachers of our time, wants to help you chart your path to a new perspective. Protect Your Peace offers tools to reshape your mindset and redefine the meaning you find in your life-tools that he knows can work for (...) you, because he has used them himself to transform his own life. In these pages, Trent outlines nine essential principles to help you: · Protect your energy from the things that drain it · Protect your mind from the things that distract you · Protect your soul from the things that don't fulfill you You'll learn simple strategies for setting clear boundaries, disconnecting from negativity, honing your vision and your focus, and bringing your life into alignment with your true power and purpose-with Trent as your straight-talking, profoundly inspiring guide who's with you every step of the way. Trent lets you know in no uncertain terms that there is a war on-a war for your worth. The toughest battle in it is the one you're fighting within yourself. And Protect Your Peace gives you a road map to victory. (shrink)

Abstracts of each chapter may be found by typing in your browser search bar, "Jeremy Horne, Managing Complexity Through Social Intelligence: Foundations of the Modern Organic Corporatist State", going to the Springer Publishing website and reading the abstracts for each chapter.

EigentumEigentum und VerteilungsgerechtigkeitGerechtigkeitVerteilungsgerechtigkeit bilden wichtige Grundkonzepte der WirtschaftsethikWirtschaftsethik. Während Verteilungsgerechtigkeit einen normativen Begriff darstellt, der unsere Ideen darüber zusammenfasst, welche Güter in einer Wirtschafts- und GesellschaftsordnungGesellschaftGesellschaftsordnung wem aufgrund welcher PrinzipienPrinzip(ien)Eigentumsprinzip zukommen sollen, ist Eigentum ein eher deskriptiver Begriff: er beschreibt einen bestehenden (meist rechtlich greifbaren) Anspruch einer Person auf die exklusive Nutzung eines Objekts. Rein deskriptiv ist aber auch er nicht; im Grunde beruht unser Eigentumsbegriff auf stark normativ eingefärbten Vorstellungen darüber, was für ein gelingendes menschliches Leben zählt und wie (...) wir uns eine gut funktionierende sozialeOrdnungsoziale Gemeinschaft vorstellen. (shrink)

This volume provides new insights on lying and (intentionally) misleading in and out of the courtroom, a timely topic for scholarship and society. Not all deceptive statements are lies; not every lie under oath amounts to perjury---but what are the relevant criteria? Taxonomies of falsehood based on illocutionary force, utterance context and speakers' intentions have been debated by linguists, moral philosophers, social psychologists and cognitive scientists. Legal scholars have examined the boundary between actual perjury and garden-variety lies. The fourteen previously (...) unpublished essays in this book apply theoretical and empirical tools to delineate the landscape of falsehood, half-truth, perjury, and verbal manipulation, including puffery, bluffing, and bullshit. The papers in this collection address conceptual and ethical aspects of lying vs. misleading and the correlation of this opposition with the Gricean pragmatic distinction between what is said and what is implicated. The questions of truth and lies addressed in this volume have long engaged the attention of scholars in linguistics, philosophy, psychology, cognitive science, organizational research, and the law, and researchers from all these fields will find this book of interest. (shrink)

This paper illustrates the relevance of Foucault’s analysis of neoliberal governance for a critical understanding of recent transformations in individual and social life in the United States, particularly in terms of how the realms of the public and the private and the personal and the political are understood and practiced. The central aim of neoliberal governmentality (“the conduct of conduct”) is the strategic creation of social conditions that encourage and necessitate the production of Homo economicus, a historically specific form of (...) subjectivity constituted as a free and autonomous “atom” of self-interest. The neoliberal subject is an individual who is morally responsible for navigating the social realm using rational choice and cost-benefit calculations grounded on market-based principles to the exclusion of all other ethical values and social interests. While the more traditional forms of domination and exploitation characteristic of sovereign and disciplinary forms of power remain evident in our ”globalized” world, the effects of subjectification produced at the level of everyday life through the neoliberal “conduct of conduct” recommend that we recognize and invent new forms of critique and ethical subjectivation that constitute resistance to its specific dangers. (shrink)

In the late first and early second millennia, mainland Southeast Asians created sophisticated techniques to accurately and efficiently render Pali into local vernaculars, including Burmese, Khmer, Khün, Lanna, Lao, Lü, Mon, and Siamese. These techniques for vernacular reading, parallel to approaches for reading Latin in medieval Europe and Literary Sinitic in Japan, Korea, and Vietnam, led to the development of bitexts that contained a mix of Pali and vernacular material. Such bitexts, arranged in both interlinear and interphrasal formats, gradually allowed (...) second-millennium Southeast Asian writers to sprout a vernacular literature from the established branches of Pali genres. Bitexts themselves formed the basis for a new literary style that stemmed from the techniques of vernacular reading, a style that set the standard for belles-lettres until the early twentieth century. The spread of Pali-vernacular bitexts in Southeast Asia allowed for the literary elevation of the vernacular without renouncing the cosmopolitan idiom of Pali. To support these arguments, this article draws on some of the earliest examples of bitexts in Central Thailand and Northern Thailand. These include a hitherto undeciphered form of manuscript annotation in seventeenth- to nineteenth-century Siam; two of the oldest palm-leaf documents surviving in any Tai language, from sixteenth-century Lanna; and the oldest known Pali-Siamese literary work, thought to be composed in 1482. These bitexts provide detailed evidence for vernacular reading and the emergence of vernacular literature in mainland Southeast Asian in general and Thailand in particular. (shrink)

Few concepts have been considered as essential to the theory of knowledge and rational belief as that of evidence. The simplest theory which accounts for this is evidentialism, the view that epistemic justification for belief--the kind of justification typically taken to be required for knowledge--is determined solely by considerations pertaining to one's evidence. In this ground-breaking book, leading epistemologists from across the spectrum challenge and refine evidentialism, sometimes suggesting that it needs to be expanded in quite surprising directions. Following this, (...) the twin pillars of contemporary evidentialism--Earl Conee and Richard Feldman--respond to each essay. This engaging debate covers a vast number of issues, and will illuminate and inform. (shrink)

Introduction: Religious experience in modernity : faith itself as the "unknown God" -- Fides qua creditur : the Enlightenment mind and the theology of the heart -- Within the bounds of reason alone : the subjective justification of religious belief in the thought of Immanuel Kant -- Schleiermacher's "higher order Pietism" : subjectivity and Protestant liberal thought -- Søren Kierkegaard and the paradox of faith : subjectivity in Christian existentialism -- Subjectivity and religious belief in Anglo-American revivalism : Jonathan Edwards (...) and John Wesley -- Subjectivity and religious belief in Anglo-American revivalism : George Whitefield and Charles G. Finney. (shrink)

Epistemological realists have long struggled to explain perceptual error without introducing a tertium quid between perceivers and physical objects. Two leading realist philosophers, Thomas Reid and Everett Hall, agreed in denying that mental entities are the immediate objects of perceptions of the external world, but each relied upon strange metaphysical entities of his own in the construction of a realist philosophy of perception. Reid added ‘visible figures’ to sensory impressions and specific sorts of mental events, while Hall utilized an array (...) of ways that he maintained properties may participate in the world. This paper assesses each realist's attempt to explain perceptual relativity and illusion without contradicting either the science of his time or the structure of common sense. (shrink)

This collection of 22 newly-commissioned essays presents cutting-edge work on skeptical theistic responses to the problem of evil and the persistent objections that such responses invite.

If knowing requires believing on the basis of evidence that entails what’s believed, we have hardly any knowledge at all. Hence the near-universal acceptance of fallibilism in epistemology: if it's true that "we are all fallibilists now" (Siegel 1997: 164), that's because denying that one can know on the basis of non-entailing evidence1is, it seems, not an option if we're to preserve the very strong appearance that we do know many things (Cohen 1988: 91). Hence the significance of concessive knowledge (...) attributions (CKAs) (Rysiew 2001)—i.e., sentences of the form 'S knows that p, but it's possible that q' (where q entails not-p). To many, utterances of such sentences sound very odd indeed. According to David Lewis (1996: 550), however, such sentences are merely "overt, explicit" statements of fallibilism; if so, their seeming incoherence suggests that, contrary to our everyday epistemic pretensions, "knowledge must be by definition infallible" after all (ibid.: 549). -/- Recently Jason Stanley (2005) has defended fallibilism against the Lewisian worry that overtly fallibilistic speech is incoherent. According yo Stanley, CKAs are not just odd-sounding: in most cases, they are simply false. But this doesn't impugn fallibilism. Insofar as the odd-sounding utterances Lewis cites state the fallibilist idea, the latter portion thereof ('S cannot eliminate a certain possibility in which not-p', e.g.) expresses the idea that the subject's evidence doesn't entail what's (allegedly) known (hence, the negation of any contrary propositions). According to Stanley, however, this is not the best reading of the possibility clauses CKAs contain. On the correct account of the latter, while the sentences Lewis cites are almost always self-contradictory, they don't capture the fallibilist idea after all. Here, we argue that the sentences in question do express precisely the fallibilist idea, but argue that Lewis has nonetheless failed to raise a problem for the latter. In addition, we respond to worries that the resulting view of the semantics of epistemic possibility statements has certain unacceptable consequences. (shrink)

Fallibilism in epistemology is neither identical to nor unrelated to the ordinary notion of fallibility. In ordinary life we are forced to the conclusion that human beings are prone to error. The epistemological doctrine of fallibilism, though, is about the consistency of holding that humans have knowledge while admitting certain limitations in human ways of knowing. As will be seen, making the content of the basic intuition more precise is both somewhat contentious and the key to an adequate definition of (...) fallibilism. Before moving on to this project I will address a few preliminary issues. Then, after canvassing some prevailing views I will address two concerns. First, I will address the concern that prevailing views do not adequately take into account fallible knowledge of necessary truths and are thus not fully general accounts of fallible knowledge. Second, I will address probabilistic accounts of fallibilism. I will suggest that a simple, adequate account of fallibilism is possible. (shrink)

The thesis of this short paper is that skeptical theism does not look very plausible from the perspective of a common sense epistemology. A corollary of this isthat anyone who finds common sense epistemology plausible and is attracted to skeptical theism has some work to do to show that they can form a plausiblewhole. The dialectical situation is that to the degree that this argument is a strong one, to that same degree (at least) the theorist who would like to (...) combinecommon sense epistemology with skeptical theism has some work to do. (shrink)