Libertarians such as J.R. Lucas have abandoned traditional Christian doctrines because they cannot reconcile them with the freedom of the will. Traditional Christian thinkers such as Augustine have repudiated libertarianism because they cannot reconcile it with the dogmas of the Faith. In Free Will and the Christian Faith, W.S. Anglin demonstrates that free will and traditional Christianity are ineed compatible. He examines, and solves, puzzles about the relationships between free will and omnipotence, omniscience, and God's goodness, using the idea of (...) free will to answer the question of why God allows evil, and presenting arguments that link free will to eternal life and to the nature of revelation. Topics covered include the meaning of life, the soul and Lesbegue measure, and strategies for discerning the voice of God. (shrink)

Managing ethical behavior is a one of the most pervasive and complex problems facing business organizations today. Employees' decisions to behave ethically or unethically are influenced by a myriad of individual and situational factors. Background, personality, decision history, managerial philosophy, and reinforcement are but a few of the factors which have been identified by researchers as determinants of employees' behavior when faced with ethical dilemmas. The literature related to ethical behavior is reviewed in this article, and a model for understanding (...) ethical behavior in business organizations is proposed. It is concluded that managing ethics in business organizations requires that managers engage in a concentrated effort which involves espousing ethics, behaving ethically, developing screening mechanisms, providing ethical training, creating ethics units and reinforcing ethical behavior. (shrink)

The traditional doctrine of God's universal causality holds that God directly causes all entities distinct from himself, including all creaturely actions. But can our actions be free in the strong, libertarian sense if they are directly caused by God? W. Matthews Grant argues that free creaturely acts have dual sources, God and the free creaturely agent, and are ultimately up to both in a way that leaves all the standard conditions for libertarian freedom satisfied. Offering a comprehensive alternative to existing (...) approaches for combining theism and libertarian freedom, he proposes new solutions for reconciling libertarian freedom with robust accounts of God's providence, grace, and predestination. He also addresses the problem of moral evil without the commonly employed Free Will Defense. Written for analytic philosophers and theologians, Grant's approach can be characterized as “neo-scholastic” as well as “analytic,” since many of the positions defended are inspired by, consonant with, and develop resources drawn from the scholastic tradition, especially Aquinas. (shrink)

'superb' -Tom Stoneham, Oxford MagazineA. W. Moore argues in this bold and unusual book that it is possible to think about the world from no point of view. His argument involves discussion of a very wide range of fundamental philosophical issues, including the nature of persons, the subject-matter of mathematics, realism and anti-realism, value, the inexpressible, and God. The result is a powerful critique of our own finitude. 'imaginative, original, and ambitious' Robert Brandom, Times Literary Supplement.

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be (...) preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. To ensure a quality reading experience, this work has been proofread and republished using a format that seamlessly blends the original graphical elements with text in an easy-to-read typeface. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

Nanotechnology, as with many technologies before it, places a strain on existing legislation and poses a challenge to all administrative agencies tasked with regulating technology-based products. It is easy to see how statutory schemes become outdated, as our ability to understand and affect the world progresses. In this article, we address the regulatory problems that nanotechnology posses for the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) classification structure for ‘‘drugs’’ and ‘‘devices.’’ The last major modification to these terms was in 1976, with (...) the enactment of the Medical Device Amendments. There are serious practical differences for a classification as a drug or device in terms of time to market and research. Drugs are classified, primarily, as acting by ‘‘chemical action.’’ We lay out some legal, philosophic, and scientific tools that serve to provide a useful, as well as legally and scientifically faithful, distinction between drugs and devices for the purpose of regulatory classification. These issues we raise are worth the consideration of anyone who is interested in the regulation of nano-products or other novel technologies. (shrink)

William Ernest Johnson was a renowned British logician and economist, and also a fellow of King's College, Cambridge. Originally published in 1921, this book forms the first of a three-volume series by Johnson relating to 'the whole field of logic as ordinarily understood'. The series is widely regarded as Johnson's greatest achievement, making a significant contribution to the tradition of philosophical logic. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in Johnson's theories, philosophy and the historical development (...) of logic. (shrink)

This volume, which is part of the Clarendon Aristotle Series, offers a clear and faithful new translation of Books II to IV of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, accompanied by an analytical commentary focusing on philosophical issues. In Books II to IV, Aristotle gives his account of virtue of character in general and of the principal virtues individually, topics of central interest both to his ethical theory and to modern ethical theorists. Consequently major themes of the commentary are connections on the one (...) hand with other relevant Aristotelian texts and on the other with modern writings, both text-related and thematic. Since the main aim of the volume is to make Aristotle's thought as accessible as possible to readers who do not know Greek, considerable care is taken to elucidate both his technical vocabulary and significant features of his Greek idiom. C. C. W. Taylor also provides systematic comparisons with other translations into English and other languages, and frequent references to other commentaries, ancient, medieval, and modern. These features make the work useful to other scholars in the field as well as to students of philosophy, both undergraduate and graduate.In view of the widespread contemporary interest in the topic of virtue, the volume should appeal to students of ethics and to any reader who is concerned to see how fundamental questions of life and conduct were approached in a culture significantly different from our own. (shrink)

Via a reading of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian and a critical appraisal of Foucault’s break with historical materialism, W. Oliver Baker finds, at the limits of the new materialisms, space for a new post-humanist critical materialism that sees utopia not in post-human assemblages, but in the abolition of colonial and capitalist structures that condition those assemblages in the first place.

Professor Strawson's paper is refreshing in content as well as refreshingly intemperate. It is salutary to be reminded that even the Type Identity Theory does not entail physicalism as that doctrine is usually understood (since c-fiber firings are not by definition purely physical). And it's fun to consider versions of panpsychism. I can see why Strawson finds his position hard to classify (p. 7), and I sympathize. In my title I have cast my own vote for '?-ism' on the grounds (...) that any familiar label would be either misleading or unwieldy. My main purpose here is to assess Strawson's case for panpsychism and then to offer some objections to panpsychism, but first I want to answer an interesting and serious charge he makes against me. (shrink)

We report two experiments on temporal reasoning with problems, such as: John has cleaned the house. John is taking a shower. John is going to read the paper. Mary always does the dishes when John cleans the house. Mary always drinks her coffee when John reads the paper. What for Mary is the relation between doing the dishes and drinking coffee? The experiments showed that problems such as this one, which require one mental model, elicited correct answers more often than (...) did those requiring multiple models (e.g. with the second premise modified to "John has taken a shower", so that the order between the events in the first two premises is not fixed). These multiple-model problems, in turn, elicited more correct answers than did multiple-model problems with no valid answers (e.g. with the second premise modified to "John has taken a shower", and the fifth premise modified to "Mary always drinks her coffee when John takes a shower"). One-model problems were also solved more quickly than multiple-model problems, which were solved more quickly than problems with no valid answers. These results corroborated the predictions of the mental model theory of reasoning. (shrink)

It is customary to identify transcendental philosophy as the distinctive and original invention of Immanuel Kant. Certainly this was a view that Kant himself did much to encourage. But this chapter argues that traces of the transcendental strategy can be found already among the ancients. One such ancient precedent is associated with the Stoic doctrine of oikeiosis. It is argued that oikeiosis is best understood as a form of normative orientation associated with 'being at home ' in one's body and (...) environment, and that it involves a distinctive form of ontological self-consciousness. This chapter assesses the merits of Stoic claims that oikeiosis figures as a condition on the possibility of desire, pleasure, and even perception, and the chapter considers the case for describing these arguments as examples of transcendental investigation. (shrink)

Emile Durkheim is widely lauded as one of the founding fathers of modern Sociology and for his substantial contribution to the sociology of education. This set brings some of his most important writings on the subject together for the first time.