This book offers a comprehensive introduction to the thought of Chicago Divinity School theologian Bernard Meland. Tyron Inbody places Meland's theology within the development of the liberal tradition. He argues that Meland was a precursor of liberal developments in epistemology -- especially in his view of how experience, language, and culture are related. Inbody explores the extent to which Meland was both representative and critical of process theology. He concludes with an assessment of Meland's contribution to postliberal (...) theology. Inbody's work not only sheds light on the work of this important but neglected thinker, but is in its own right a contribution to empirical theology, theological epistemology, process theology, and the history of liberal theology in North America. (shrink)

The essay is a response to the papers written by Nancy Frankenberry and Charley Hardwick in the March 1987 issue of Zygon. Questions are raised about whether Wieman's theology is functionalist in the way described by Frankenberry and whether Hardwick's proposal to establish the logical possibility of naturalism as a framework for an existential interpretation of the Christian message is satisfactory. The most basic question raised by both papers is whether Wieman's theology is fully empirical when viewed from the point (...) of view of the radical empiricist. (shrink)

Idealism is the view that reality is fundamentally mental. Idealism has been influential historically, but it has been neglected in contemporary metaphysical debate. This volume of 17 essays by leading philosophers rectifies the situation.

The critics in this volume raise several important challenges to the modal normativist position developed in Norms and Necessity, including whether the relation I claim holds between semantic rules and necessity claims generates spurious claims of metaphysical necessity, whether the view is circular (implicitly relying on a more 'robust' form of modal realism), and whether it conflicts with truth-conditional semantics. They also raise probing questions about how it compares to other views of modality, including a Lewisian view and an essentialist (...) view. In these replies, I respond to these challenges in ways that precisify the relevant understanding of ‘semantic rules' and the forms they can take, that make clearer the direction of explanation in modal normativism in ways that show the view doesn't rely on a more ‘robust’ form of modal realism, and that give reason for thinking that there is actually no conflict between modal normativism and truth-conditional semantics. I also aim to give a fuller assessment of how it compares to other approaches to modality, including an essentialist approach. (shrink)

Organ donation after the circulatory determination of death requires the permanent cessation of circulation while organ donation after the brain determination of death requires the irreversible cessation of brain functions. The unified brain-based determination of death connects the brain and circulatory death criteria for circulatory death determination in organ donation as follows: permanent cessation of systemic circulation causes permanent cessation of brain circulation which causes permanent cessation of brain perfusion which causes permanent cessation of brain function. The relevant circulation that (...) must cease in circulatory death determination is that to the brain. Eliminating brain circulation from the donor ECMO organ perfusion circuit in thoracoabdominal NRP protocols satisfies the unified brain-based determination of death but only if the complete cessation of brain circulation can be proved. Despite its medical and physiologic rationale, the unified brain-based determination of death remains inconsistent with the Uniform Determination of Death Act. (shrink)

Austin takes on the problem of other minds, of how to respond to the question ‘how do you know?’, if this question is raised with regard to the thoughts, feelings, sensations, minds of other creatures. This problem has traditionally been understood as the problem of justifying our belief in the existence of other minds. Austin argues that believing in other persons, in authority and testimony, is an essential part of the act of communicating, and as such is an irreducible part (...) of our experience. While we can state certain advantages of communicative performances, there is no justification for our doing them as such. (shrink)

Cultural narratives shape how we think about the world, including how we decide when the end of life begins. Hospice care has become an integral part of the end‐of‐life care in the United States, but as it has grown, its policies and practices have also imposed cultural narratives, like those associated with the “six‐month rule” that the majority of the end of life takes place in the final six months of life. This idea is embedded in policies for a range (...) of care practices and reimbursement processes, even though six months is not always a meaningful marker. In the case of people living with advanced dementia, six months is both too early in the trajectory to facilitate conversations and too late in the trajectory to ensure decision‐making capacity. This essay encourages scholars and policy‐makers to consider how cultural narratives may limit what they think is possible in care for people living with dementia. (shrink)

James Shaw has written an excellent book on Wittgenstein’s rule-following considerations. It manages to provide fresh perspectives on a topic on which it seemed.

More than two hundred years after the publication of his seminal The World as Will and Representation, Arthur Schopenhauer's influence is still felt in philosophy and beyond. As one of the most readable and central philosophers of the 19th century, his work inspired the most influential thinkers and artists of his time, including Nietzsche, Freud, and Wagner. Though known primarily as a herald of philosophical pessimism, the full range of his contributions is displayed here in a collection of thirty-one essays (...) on the forefront of Schopenhauer scholarship. Essays written by contemporary Schopenhauer scholars explore his central notions, including the will, empirical knowledge, and the sublime, and widens to the interplay of ethics and religion with Schopenhauer's philosophy. Authors confront difficult aspects of Schopenhauer's work and legacy--for example, the extent to which Schopenhauer adopted ideas from his predecessors compared to how much was original and visionary in his central claim that reality is a blind, senseless "will," the effectiveness of his philosophy in the field of scientific explanation and extrasensory phenomena, and the role of beauty and sublimity in his outlook. Essays also challenge prevailing assumptions about Schopenhauer by exploring the fundamental role of compassion in his moral theory, the Hindu, Christian, and Buddhist aspects of his philosophy, and the importance of asceticism in his views on the meaning of life. The collection is an internationally constituted work that reflects upon Schopenhauer's philosophy with authors presently working across the globe. It demonstrates fully the richness of Schopenhauer's work and his lasting impact on philosophy and psychoanalysis, as well as upon music, the visual arts, and literature. (shrink)

Austin attacks the view that language is referential, based on the simplistic division of utterances into the ‘descriptive’ and ‘evaluative’, using his notion of performative utterances. Such utterances, in the appropriate circumstances, are neither descriptive nor evaluative, but count as actions, i.e., create the situation rather than describing or reporting on it. In saying ‘I promise to go’ one is making a promise, not stating that one is making it. A performative promise is not, and does not involve, the statement (...) that one is promising. It is an act of a distinctive sort, the very sort named by the performative verb. And, according to Austin, making explicit what one is doing is not describing what one is doing or stating that one is doing it. (shrink)

Criticises G. E. Moore’s highly influential proposal that ascriptions of agent ability implying freedom of choice or action, what the agent could do, are analyzable as conditional statements regarding what the agent would do under certain circumstances. Austin objects against Moore that some uses of ‘if’ are non-conditional and goes on to examine the uses of these non-conditional cases. Moore’s proposal also lies at the heart of some compatibilist theories of free will and determinism. Austin argues determinism to be a (...) pseudo-problem, so long as it remains a notion that is not itself clear cut. (shrink)

Intellectual character education has been primarily expressed in terms of educating for intellectual virtues (EFIV). This aim of teaching intellectual virtues has received some challenges, such as how it fails to articulate adequate action guidance through exemplarist pedagogy, and how it neglects the pervasiveness of intellectual vice among students. To respond to these challenges, this paper considers the aim of educating against intellectual vices (EAIV) – teaching students not to develop intellectual vices or weakening those that they have already developed (...) – which comes with the emergence of vice epistemology. More specifically, I look at how negative epistemic exemplars can be used as a classroom strategy for EAIV, and demonstrate how this could address the aforementioned weaknesses of EFIV. (shrink)

In The Force of Nonviolence, Judith Butler presents five key interventions to the field of nonviolence philosophy: (1) a critique of social contract theory for the way it imagines human beings as independent, (2) an approach to nonviolence based in the preservation of life within a context of social action, (3) the advancement of Butler’s alternative framework of equal grievability, (4) the claim that violence is difficult to define independently of social context, and (5) a Freudian analysis of the death (...) drive that offers a strategy for disrupting violence. In response to each of these interventions, this article argues that: (1) social contract theory is a heuristic for justifying the existence of a state, (2) Gandhi’s concept of truth provides a more comprehensive approach to nonviolence that concerns the whole self and all beings, (3) a concept of function would make a better guide to human responsibility, (4) violence can be defined independently of social framework, and (5) without reliance on the concept of a death drive, there are nonviolent remedies for social attitudes of aggression as found in the work of Jane Addams and William James. (shrink)

"Intuition" has perhaps been the least understood and the most abused term in philosophy. It is often the term used when one has no plausible explanation for the source of a given belief or opinion. According to some sceptics, it is understood only in terms of what it is not, and it is not any of the better understood means for acquiring knowledge. In mathematics the term has also unfortunately been used in this way. Thus, intuition is sometimes portrayed as (...) if it were the Third Eye, something only mathematical "mystics", like Ramanujan, possess. In mathematics the notion has also been used in a host of other senses: by "intuitive" one might mean informal, or non-rigourous, or visual, or holistic, or incomplete, or perhaps even convincing in spite of lack of proof. My aim in this book is to sweep all of this aside, to argue that there is a perfectly coherent, philosophically respectable notion of mathematical intuition according to which intuition is a condition necessary for mathemati cal knowledge. I shall argue that mathematical intuition is not any special or mysterious kind of faculty, and that it is possible to make progress in the philosophical analysis of this notion. This kind of undertaking has a precedent in the philosophy of Kant. While I shall be mostly developing ideas about intuition due to Edmund Husser! there will be a kind of Kantian argument underlying the entire book. (shrink)

In 12 narratives, medical workers from Afghanistan, Darfur, Gaza, Iraq, Israel, Myanmar, and Ukraine describe the day-to-day challenges of providing quality medical care in austere conflict zones. Faced with severe shortages of supplies, overwhelmed by sick and injured civilians and soldiers, and subject to constant attacks on medical personnel and facilities, the contributors to this collection confront difficult dilemmas of justice, medical impartiality, neutrality, burnout, and moral injury as they struggle to fulfill their duties as medical professionals, military officers, and (...) conscientious citizens. (shrink)

This research aimed to show the political stance of the Muslim majority represented by the Ministry of Religious Affairs of the Republic of Indonesia (MoRA RI) towards non-Muslim leadership through the translation of the Qur’an. It examined the differences in the translation of the Qur’an based on the theory of translation as a political act. A total of 19 phrases or collocated words ittahaza awliya were found in the corpus of the Qur’an. The researchers approached the study with a critical (...) discourse analysis approach, and conducted contrastive analysis on translations of these collocated words in four editions of translations of the Qur’an published officially by MoRA RI from 1965 to 2019. The results proved that interference in translation of the collocation ittaḥaẓa awliya is caused by the influence of the source text, and that the political situation and ideology influenced the translation of the Qur’an in Indonesia. The political direction of the Indonesian government, especially MoRA RI, tended to provide more opportunities for non-Muslims to become leaders today, as seen in the 2019 edition. While the translation edition published before tended to close the possibility of non-Muslims becoming leaders. This finding shows the government’s stance on democracy for non-Muslims, which according to previous research findings has declined with the rise of Islamic populism in Indonesia.Contribution: This article provides an explanation of one side of the difficulty of translating collocation [ittaḥaẓa awliya] in the Qur’an and at the same time shows the political direction of the government of the Republic of Indonesia regarding the politics of non-Muslim leadership. (shrink)

What does it mean to be a good thinker? Which virtues work together in someone who possesses good intellectual character? Although recent research on virtues has highlighted the benefits of individual intellectual virtues, being an excellent thinker is likely a function of possessing multiple intellectual virtues. Specifically, a good thinker would both recognize one’s intellectual shortcomings and possess an eagerness to learn driven by virtues such as love of knowledge, curiosity, and open-mindedness. Good intellectual character may only successfully manifest when (...) individuals possess not just one or a few intellectual virtues, but a larger set of such virtues to different degrees. However, little is currently known about what combination of virtues are necessary for good thinking. We argue that it is important to identify and clarify the nature of the good thinker and outline a profile methodology for achieving this goal. This approach characterizes the good thinker in terms of a profile of multiple intellectual virtues. Understanding this profile can allow greater insight into the extent to which people possess such a profile, and the potential for societal benefits of educating for these qualities. (shrink)

Speech categories are defined by multiple acoustic dimensions and their boundaries are generally fuzzy and ambiguous in part because listeners often give differential weighting to these cue dimensions during phonetic categorization. This study explored how a listener's perception of a speaker's socio-indexical and personality characteristics influences the listener's perceptual cue weighting. In a matched-guise study, three groups of listeners classified a series of gender-neutral /b/-/p/ continua that vary in VOT and F0 at the onset of the following vowel. Listeners were (...) assigned to one of three prompt conditions and rated the talker in terms of vocal gender prototypicality, attractiveness, friendliness, confidence, trustworthiness, and gayness. Male listeners and listeners who saw a male face showed less reliance on VOT compared to listeners in the other conditions. Listeners' visual evaluation of the talker also affected their weighting of VOT and onset F0 cues, although the effects of facial impressions differ depending on the gender of the listener. The results demonstrate that individual differences in perceptual cue weighting are modulated by the listener's gender and his/her subjective evaluation of the talker. These findings lend support for exemplar-based models of speech perception and production where socio-indexical features are encoded as a part of the episodic traces in the listeners' mental lexicon. This study also shed light on the relationship between individual variation in cue weighting and community-level sound change by demonstrating that VOT and onset F0 co-variation in North American English has acquired a certain degree of socio-indexical significance. (shrink)

In circulation, T cells are spherical with selectin enriched dynamic microvilli protruding from the surface. Following extravasation, these microvilli serve another role, continuously surveying their environment for antigen in the form of peptide‐MHC (pMHC) expressed on the surface of antigen presenting cells (APCs). Upon recognition of their cognate pMHC, the microvilli are initially stabilized and then flatten into F‐actin dependent microclusters as the T cell spreads over the APC. Within 1–5 min, clathrin is recruited by the ESCRT‐0 component Hrs to (...) mediate release of T cell receptor (TCR) loaded vesicles directly from the plasma membrane by clathrin and ESCRT‐mediated ectocytosis (CEME). After 5‐10 min, Hrs is displaced by the endocytic clathrin adaptor epsin‐1 to induce clathrin‐mediated trans‐endocytosis (CMTE) of TCR‐pMHC conjugates. Here we discuss some of the functional properties of the clathrin machinery which enables it to control these topologically opposite modes of membrane transfer at the immunological synapse, and how this might be regulated during T cell activation. (shrink)

Both trolleys and war leave innocent victims to suffer death and injury. Trolley problems accounting for the injured, and not only the dead, tease out intuitions about liability that enhance our understanding of the obligation to provide compensation and medical care to civilian victims of war. Like many trolley victims, civilians in war may suffer justifiable, excusable, or negligent harms that demand compensation. Chief among these is collateral harm befalling civilians. Collateral harm is endemic to war and comprises permissible but (...) unavoidable death or injury following necessary and proportionate military operations. Although state armies sometimes offer condolence payments for civilian death, injury, and property loss, they deny liability. Instead, they use compensation to enhance counterinsurgency efforts and assuage feelings of agent regret. As part of the medical rules of eligibility, Coalition forces in Iraq and Afghanistan also provided medical care to victims of collateral harm. However, they denied care to similarly sick or injured civilians. While compensation is often justified to cure the harm civilians suffer, the differential use of medical resources is not. Rather, medical care remains subject to the principle of beneficence and medical need. The duty to provide civilian healthcare in war, particularly in wars of humanitarian intervention, is far-reaching and imposes significant costs that military and medical ethics are yet to recognize. (shrink)

In diesem Beitrag diskutieren drei interdisziplinär ausgebildete Akademiker, die als klinisch tätige Ethiker auch viele Jahre Erfahrungen mit Gesundheitssystemen in verschiedenen Ländern haben, die Frage nach dem Kern klinisch-ethischer Expertise: der niederländische Mediziner und Philosoph Henk ten Have, Direktor des Center for Healthcare Ethics in Pittsburgh, USA, der deutsche Theologe und Philosoph Norbert Steinkamp, Professor für theologisch-ethische Grundlagen sozialprofessionellen Handelns an der katholischen Hochschule für Sozialwesen in Berlin, der 12 Jahre die klinische Ethik der Universitätsklinik Nijmegen, Niederlande, geleitet hat, sowie (...) der niederländische Philosoph und Historiker Bert Gordijn, Direktor des Institute of Ethics der Dublin City University, Irland, Präsident der International Association of Education in Ethics und u. a. Herausgeber von Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy. (shrink)

Drees makes a strong case for the importance of the humanities in the university, providing an excellent resource for anyone in the Western Academy. Its usefulness for those who want to work outside the West is limited, however, because he does not engage with literature that challenges its methods and disciplines. If we are to have a positive global impact, we need to do more than clarify existing boundaries, we need to blur them, beginning with an examination of inherent biases (...) reflected in its history, structure, and content. This article focuses on one critique, a decolonial critique of the Western view that ontology precedes epistemology (an external reality produces knowledge). Outside the modern Western Academy, epistemologies create ontologies (epistemic creations/stories about the world give us a sense of the world and its materiality). I describe a relational understanding of knowledge and how this changes our understanding of the humanities and our epistemic responsibilities. (shrink)

Seeking to better understand how nonprofit organizations (NPOs) manage hybridity, we investigated what distinguishes NPOs that combine multiple logics in productive and unproductive ways. We collected and analyzed data from six case studies of NPOs delivering social services in Australia. Our findings reveal that organizational members of NPOs take a _perspective_ on their hybrid nature which comprises four elements: motivational framing, actor engagement, resourcing attitude, and governance orientation. NPOs that combine multiple logics in productive and unproductive ways, respectively, are distinguished (...) by (1) a compelling or confused motivational framing for combining logics; (2) actors having active and shared, or passive and isolated, engagement with multiple logics; (3) attitudes toward resourcing multiple logics that are either coherent or competitive; and (4) a governance orientation toward multiple logics as opportunities to leverage or problems to resist. Our findings contribute to the literature by deepening understanding of the interplay between complex constellations of multiple logics in NPOs, including religious and professional logics. We also develop a model of organizational perspectives on hybridity and their implications for distinguishing NPOs that productively harness tensions between logics. (shrink)

In this paper I consider various shifts in my research and understanding stimulated by seeking how to combat social ecological crises connected to modern economies. The discussion and critical reflections are structured around five papers that were submitted to Environmental Values in an open call to address my work. A common aspect is the move away from neoclassical environmental economics, and its reductionist monetary valuation, to a more realist theory and multiple methods. This relates to my work on environmental ethics, (...) plural values, stated preference validity and deliberative monetary valuation. Expanding beyond the narrow confines of mainstream orthodoxy has involved exploring a range of other disciplines (e.g. applied philosophy, social psychology, human geography, political science, social anthropology, history of thought and philosophy of science) and learning from this literature to rethink economics and develop social ecological economics. A broad range of subjects are covered here, including: personal responsibility, social practice, psychology of the individual, participatory processes, value (intrinsic, instrumental and relational), Nature–society relationships and interdependencies, critical realism and the conduct of unifying interdisciplinary science. I end with a series of comments concerning the failings of orthodox economics and the conduct of scientific research for social ecological transformation. (shrink)

A biblical approach to reconciling God’s sovereignty with creaturely responsibility should avoid the extremes of global occasionalism and completely autonomous creatures. This paper evaluates the standard intermediary solutions offered by conservationists and concurrentists. It argues that while each contributes insights which a satisfactory account should retain, none is fully adequate. Even Leibniz’s sophisticated response, which accounts for providence, miracles, and moral responsibility, unacceptably abridges creaturely power to implement decisions. My alternative proposal seeks to explain how creatures can retain full responsibility (...) for their actions even though God reserves the right to override creaturely power with His greater power. (shrink)

Social scientific reasoning (SSR) is essential to social science education and to a democratic society as a whole. Students are challenged to analyze and reason about social problems such as social inequality, crime, and poverty. However, students experience difficulties with SSR. This study addresses the research question: Which design principles can guide teachers in designing lessons that promote social scientific reasoning? In this design-based research, four social science teachers employed a conceptualization of SSR and its levels together with three initial (...) design principles to develop curriculum materials and activities. These design principles and curriculum materials were piloted in two secondary education classes (9th and 10th grades) and evaluated by four social science teachers, four social science teacher educators and 90 students. The study produced six design principles that can promote students’ SSR. In combination with the curriculum materials, those design principles can help develop teachers’ pedagogical content knowledge and guide the design of tasks and units that develop SSR. (shrink)

El presente artículo trata de superar la división entre una epistemología de virtudes confiabilista y otra responsabilista. En su lugar se presenta una visión orgánica del conocimiento humano. La visión orgánica –también denominada pre-cismática- articula aspectos confiabilistas y responsabilistas. Finalmente se discute un nuevo concepto: felicidad epistémica, que se justifica desde la perspectiva agentiva del conocimiento. Así, se sostiene que parece razonable pensar que el conocimiento es un tipo de acción cuyo fin último es la felicidad. Esta felicidad se puede (...) obtener por vía negativa –al no obtener una verdad pero sí una mejora de la situación epistémica- o por vía positiva, esto es, cuando se da en el blanco de la verdad. (shrink)

Ray and Cooper (2024) present a clear and compelling argument for giving greater prioritization to environmental injustice in the work we do as bioethicists. Their discussion of justice and vulnera...

Clinical ethics consultants provide a range of services in hospital settings and in teaching environments. Training to achieve the skills needed to meet the expectations of employers comes in various forms, ranging from on-the-job training to formal fellowship training programs. We surveyed graduates of clinical ethics fellowships to evaluate their self-reported preparedness for their first job after fellowship training. The results indicated several areas of need, including greater exposure to program-building skills, quality improvement skills, and approaches to working with members (...) of higher administration. These data will be of use to educators as well as to fellows who advocate for elements of training in preparation for their first position. (shrink)

The following text is a translation of Semyon Frank’s “L’intuition fondamentale de Bergson” published in Henri Bergson: Essais et témoignages inédits, edited by Albert Béguin and Pierre Thévenaz, Neuchâtel: Éditions de la Baconnière, 1941. In this article, Frank addresses Bergson’s notion of intuition, his anti-intellectualism, his mysticism, his closeness to Lebensphilosophie, the notion of lived experience, the distinction between intuition as pure contemplation and intuition as living knowledge, the distinction between cognition of the atemporal essence of reality and cognition of (...) the world of becoming, pragmatism, the disinterested and open intuitive spiritual attitude vs the utilitarian attitude of social groups closed in on themselves, the transrational vs the irrational, spiritual life, psychic life, the Absolute, and the temporal flux. The article contains criticisms of Bergson on the issues of time and intuition: the durée, the intuitive time, is incomprehensible without an atemporal foundation. Therefore, according to Frank, Plato was correct—contra Bergson—to define time as the moving image of eternity. And, if there is such an atemporal foundation, then, contrary to what Bergson seems to think, intuition as living knowledge cannot be the sole mode of intuition. Moreover, unlike what Bergson appears to think, an intuition of the Absolute would be an intuition of the transrational rather than of the irrational. The translation is preceded by an introduction tracing the genesis of the article, which was commissioned by the Swiss philosopher Pierre Thévenaz. (shrink)

The passivity is for many the key of Michel Henry’s phenomenology. Ricoeur, ‘Soi-même comme un autre’, recognizes that, in Henry’s work, passivity is a witness to alterity taking this concept out of ties of the speculative speech. On the other side, Marion being, however, aware of it, as stated in his essay ‘La chair ou la donation de soi’ argues that essence ‘sentante’ is prior to ‘l’épreuve de soi’. I’ll try to disclose further in this work that essence ‘sentante’ is (...) the passivity itself. Thus more than witnessing (Ricoeur) or appropriating (Marion), the others and the limits are data of affective life in three passivity levels, ranging from sensations, feelings and affections. (shrink)