It was easier to make a revolution than to write 600 to 800 laws to create a market economy.Jiri Dienstbier, Foreign Minister of Czechoslovakia (1990)[I]t would be as absurd to argue that the distribution of property must never be modified by law as it would be to argue that the distribution of political power must never bechanged.Morris Cohen (1927)The takings clause of the United States Constitution requires government to pay compensation when private property is taken for public use. When government (...) regulates, but does not physically seize, property, the Supreme Court of the United States has had trouble defining when individuals have been deprived of property rights so as to give them a right to compensation. The takings clause serves “to bar Government from forcing some people alone to bear public burdens that, in all fairness and justice, should be borne by the public as a whole.” To determine when a regulation amounts to a “taking” of property requiring compensation, the Court has rightly stated that the ultimate question is whether the burden of regulation has been unfairly placed on a small class of individuals rather than the public at large. To answer this question, the Court has identified a variety of factors to consider, including the character of the governmental action, (whether the regulation effects a permanent physical invasion, destroys a core property right, or is intended to prevent public harm), whether the regulation interferes with reasonable investment-backed expectations, and the extent of the diminution in value of the property (particularly whether the regulation deprives the owner of any economically viable use of the property). (shrink)

This important collection of essays details some of the more significant methodological and philosophical differences that have separated the two traditions, as ...

ABSTRACTThis article uses Gadamer’s concept of play as a common lens through which both traditional church liturgy and imaginative evangelical practices of engaging with God can be understood. The category of play encompasses processes which exhibit a back-and-forth motion and functions in Gadamer’s aesthetics to describe the relationship between artwork and viewer. Through an aesthetics of play, Gadamer accounts for the presence of truth in art. As I demonstrate in this paper, liturgy displays the playful characteristics of artwork, allowing for (...) a theologically realist interpretation of divine presence. The final part of this paper considers the imaginative evangelical practices described by anthropologist T. M. Luhrmann, which I refer to as God-play. I argue that there is an unexpected commonality between God-play and traditional liturgy in the form of a functional similarity between the two and propose that God-play may be regarded as liturgy-like practice that has not been traditionalised. My evaluati... (shrink)

This chapter sketches some of the difficulties involved in defining analytic and continental philosophy, but begins to elaborate an argument for the centrality of methodology to the 'divide'.

This article proposes a new approach to employing Maurice Merleau-Ponty's philosophy in the philosophy of religion. Rather than finding a latent theology in Merleau-Ponty – as some interpreters do – this article argues that Merleau-Ponty's later ontology can provide the basis for a philosophical anthropology which can help us understand why human beings are drawn to religion and how this is expressed in affective and ritual practice. This ontology can help us to understand the notion of freedom as it applies (...) to affective, embodied, and ritual religious practices and begins to sketch out how freedom might be understood in light of embodiment. (shrink)

One major success of studying neural cell development in tissue culture has been the discovery of the O‐2A cell. This bipotential cell generates oligodendrocytes or, under certain conditions, a type of astrocyte. This essay considers the evidence that the characteristic properties demonstrated by the O‐2A cells in vitro are an accurate reflection of oligodendrocyte development in vivo.

The last half-century of religious studies scholarship has seen the diminishing importance of belief as a concept of analysis. The putative inaccessibility of beliefs and the concept’s Western Christian provenance has led many scholars of religion to reject the concept. Recent years have seen attempts to rehabilitate the concept of belief, including Kevin Schilbrack’s 2014 Philosophy and the Study of Religions. Schilbrack proposes that by engaging with contemporary philosophical reflection on belief—specifically dispositionalist and interpretationist theories—the traditional critiques of belief can (...) be overcome. The purpose of this paper is to further develop this approach by proposing an additional, currently overlooked, element of belief—its affectivity. This approach builds on current research from enactivist cognitive science and avoids the objections traditionally levelled at belief, while enabling a more sophisticated analysis of power dynamics in religion. (shrink)

Ten years ago there was little talk about adding “professionalism” to the medical curriculum. Educators seemed to believe that professionalism was like the studs of a building—the occupants assume them to be present, supporting and defining the space in which they live or work, but no one talks much about them. Similarly, educators assumed that professional values would just “happen,” as trainees spent years working with mentors and role models, as had presumably been the case in the past. To continue (...) the metaphor, when educators did discuss ethics and values, they tended to focus more on external building codes than on the nature of construction materials. Building codes are designed to ensure the public's safety by establishing procedures and standards. Likewise, the “new” bioethics of autonomy and informed consent that entered the medical curriculum in the 1970s and 1980s was oriented primarily toward protecting human rights by codification. In fact, educators explicitly warned students against acting on their personal or professional values in a misguided way—that is, in the absence of adequate ethical constraints, a type of behavior that came to be labeled, pejoratively, as paternalism. (shrink)

Introduction to the special issue, "Belief, Reconsidered".

This article presents a new approach to understanding ritual: embodied world construction. Informed by phenomenology and a philosophy of embodiment, this approach argues that rituals can (re)shape the structure of an individual's perceptual world. Ritual participation transforms how the world appears for an individual through the inculcation of new perceptual habits, enabling the perception of objects and properties which could not previously be apprehended. This theory is then applied to two case studies from an existing ethnographic study of North American (...) evangelicalism, indicating how the theory of embodied world construction can shed new light on how individuals are shaped by ritual practice. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Philosophy of religion has recently made a turn to lived religion, an approach which seeks to understand lived religion as it is experienced concretely by individual practitioners. However, this turn to lived religion has seen limited engagement with the notion of belonging. Belonging here refers to the felt sense of being part of a group – of insidership – along with the development of positive social ties and mutual affective concern. It is my contention in this paper that reflection (...) on this experience of belonging can improve our understanding of lived religion. In particular, I argue that human beings have an affective need to belong – a fundamental and affective need for belonging and positive social relationship which is felt in the body and rooted in human biology and evolutionary history. This paper makes the case for the affective need to belong, before examining its implications for understanding religion. It finds that the affectivity of belonging is capable of raising the affective salience of certain in-group beliefs, as well as creating affective hurdles to dissent, and in so doing can help to explain processes of religion conversion, sustained religious adherence, and religious disaffiliation. (shrink)

Mastery imagery (i.e., images of being in control and coping in difficult situations) is used to regulate anxiety. The ability to image this content is associated with trait confidence and anxiety, but research examining mastery imagery ability's association with confidence and anxiety in response to a stressful event is scant. The present study examined whether trait mastery imagery ability mediated the relationship between confidence and anxiety, and the subsequent associations on performance in response to an acute psychological stress. Participants (N= (...) 130; 55% male;Mage= 19.94 years;SD= 1.07 years) completed assessments of mastery imagery ability and engaged in a standardized acute psychological stress task. Immediately prior to the task, confidence, cognitive and somatic anxiety intensity, and interpretation of anxiety symptoms regarding the task were assessed. Path analyses supported a model whereby mastery imagery ability mediated the relationship between confidence and cognitive and somatic anxiety interpretation. Greater mastery imagery ability and confidence were both directly associated with better performance on the stress task. Mastery imagery ability may help individuals experience more facilitative anxiety and perform better during stressful tasks. Improving mastery imagery ability by enhancing self-confidence may help individuals successfully cope with anxiety elicited during stressful situations. (shrink)

Robert Coles' sentiment characterizes well the moral tenor of medical education today. Indeed, medical educators are frequently “seized by spasms of genuine moral awareness,” as they try to cope with the massive social and economic problems that face medical schools and teaching hospitals. The perception among educators that we currently fail to adequately teach several core aspects of doctoring, including professional values and behavior, constitutes one such spasm. In this case, the proposed remedy has generated considerable enthusiasm, but whether the (...) “core competencies” curriculum will make a difference, or simply “accommodate to the prevailing rhythms of the world we inhabit,” remains to be seen. (shrink)

Among medieval Aristotelians, William of Ockham defends a minimalist account of artifacts, assigning to statues and houses and beds a unity that is merely spatial or locational rather than metaphysical. Thus, in contrast to his predecessors, Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus, he denies that artifacts become such by means of an advening ‘artificial form’ or ‘form of the whole’ or any change that might tempt us to say that we are dealing with a new thing (res). Rather, he understands (...) artifacts as per accidens composites of parts that differ, but not so much that only divine power could unite them, as in the matter and form of a proper substance. For Ockham, artifacts are essentially rearrangements, via human agency, of already existing things, like the clay shaped by a sculptor into a statue or the stick and bristles and string one might fashion into a broom. Ockham does not think that a new thing is thereby created, although his emphasis on the contribution of human artisans seems to leave questions about the ontological status of their agency open. In any case, there are no such things as natural statues, any more than substances created by human artifice. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS 497 Both theologians and philosophers need to see a completely integrated treatment of both rational and faith aspects of Aquinas's theology of creation. To this end, more work on theology as science also would be helpful. Emery's treatment of the end and subject of a science is not quite neoplatonic enough. His presentation of the subject of theology forces God, its subject in the Summa theologiae, on (...) earlier texts of Albert (49) and Aquinas (302). In I Sent. Aquinas says the subject is ens divinum, "being as related to the divine," which is much wider than God, who is the end but not subject oftheology. His model is Avicenna's ens commune as the subject of a metaphysics with God as its end. More work also must be done on the articles of faith, part of the subject of theology for Albert; but theology's proper principles for Aquinas. How primordial the articles are, and the interplay of reason and faith in knowing them, are still unresolved issues. In sum, one hopes this fine book by Fr. Emery will be the first of many helping give Thomism the new look it deserves. Centerfor Tlwmistic Studies Houston, TX R. E. HOUSER Relation als Vergleich: Die Relationstheorie des Johannes Buridan im Kontext seines Denkens und der Scholastik. By ROLF SCHONBERGER. Studien und Texte zur Geistesgeschichte des Mittelalters, Band 43. Leiden/New York/Koln: E. J. Brill, 1994. Pp. 489. $108.75 (cloth). This book is a revised version of the author's 1990 Habilitationsschrift at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitat in Munich. It aims to articulate the theory of relations developed by the noted Parisian philosopher, John Buridan (ca. 1295-1358), "in connection with the extensive scholastic discussion of this problem," and, in particular, to show how the same arguments were advanced or refuted by different philosophers from "fundamentally different starting points" (ix, 59). This stems from the author's working hypothesis that the medieval debate on the nature of relations proceeded dialectically, and that Buridan's contribution to it can be better understood by taking its argumentative context into consideration. The scope of the book is wide-ranging, to say the least. Readers expecting a book about Buridan's theory of relations will find the title somewhat misleading, however, since background material and a survey of the "scholastic context" of Buridan's theory fill up the first 372 pages, with the author's presentation and discussion of the theory itself limited to the final 498 BOOK REVIEWS 75. Furthermore, the author seems to regard the relevance of the former discussion to the latter as self-evident. This is fine where the connections are fairly uncontroversial, as in the case of William of Ockham, but where they are less so, as in the cases 0f Giles of Rome, Henry of Ghent, Meister Eckhart, Durand of St. Pour~ain, and Peter John Olivi, one is left in the dark about why separate chapters are devoted to each. Giles and Olivi are not even mentioned in the chapters on Buridan. Henry and Durand make one appearance each, both in the course of the trivial observation that unlike in their theories, "consideration of the doctrine of the Trinity plays no role in Buridan's theory of relations" (399). Eckhart is mentioned a few times, but in terms so speculative as to be useless for the general reader. For example, the author finds Jan Pinborg's characterization of Buridan as a someone who "took the arbitrariness of language seriously" to be "of course... too microscopic " (393). The reason is that Pinborg allegedly failed to see the radicalization of conventionality in the fourteenth century in terms of an "epochal shift" from "the symbolic and quasi-naturalistic conception of language in the early Middle Ages," a conception that, the author parenthetically notes, "is perhaps still to be found (or further strengthened) in Bonaventure or Meister Eckhart" (ibid.). But even bracketing the question of how this description fits the latter authors, the Buridan story is more complex than this. Buridan does emphasize that spoken and written expressions signify conventionally, but he never abandons the Aristotelian/Boethian tripartite conception of language, according to which concepts are said to... (shrink)

As a typical subject, you experience a variety of paradigmatically temporal phenomena. Looking out of the window in the English summer, you can see leaves swaying in the breeze and hear the pitter-patter of raindrops steadily increasing against the window. In discussions of temporal experience, and through reflecting on examples such as those offered, two phenomenological claims are widely – though not unequivocally – accepted: firstly, you perceptually experience motion and change; secondly, while more than a momentary state of affairs (...) is presented in your ongoing perceptual experience, that which is presented nonetheless seems to be of a quite limited temporal extent. These two claims are frequently tied to the notion of the specious present. However, there has recently been a push back against the supposed link between perceived motion and the specious present. I argue that there are two ways of understanding this link, and while one has recently been the target of criticism, the other withstands such criticism. My overarching aim is to clarify the notion of the specious present through a discussion of the notion’s origins, in addition to recent criticism directed at the notion, with the hope of reframing how contemporary debates proceed. (shrink)

I argue that the social dimension of alienation, as discussed by Williams and Railton, has been underappreciated. The lesson typically drawn from their exchange is that moral theory poses a threat to the internal integrity of the agent, but there is a parallel risk that moral theory will implicitly construe agents as constitutively alienated from one another. I argue that a satisfying account of agency will need to make room for what I call ‘genuine ethical contact’ with others, both as (...) concrete objects in the world external to ourselves and as subjects who can recognize us reciprocally. (shrink)

I am grateful that someone whose work I greatly admire could be the philosopher to so eloquently and succinctly cut to the heart of the problem that I posed in the previous issue of Deleuze Studies. James Williams' critical reply leaves me, prima facie, confronted by a stark alternative: either I have misunderstood Deleuze, or I have illustrated problems and lacunae in Deleuze. I will suggest, however, that this is a false alternative, and that Williams' and my divergent accounts of (...) The Logic of Sense – and even Deleuze's oeuvre as a whole – is better understood as a situation of ‘both/and’ rather than ‘either/or’, and hence that my interpretation of Deleuze isn't wrong, but necessarily iconoclastic. (shrink)

At the core of pragmatism is the idea of an active projection of experience into the future. William James’s contribution to pragmatism included an emphasis on emotions in the apprehension of possible futures and related processes. After presenting a summary of Jamesian pragmatism, and especially the significance of emotions in it, the article notes the reception of James’s writings in Europe and their influence on European intellectual developments. Max Weber, for instance, studied James closely. He treated James’s approach to (...) religion as a negative example. While Emile Durkheim rejected the individualist approach of James, he nevertheless found much of value in James’s conceptualization of religious experience, including its emotional underpinnings. Discussion below explores the neglected Jamesian quality of Durkheim’s account of religion. It is noted in conclusion that the more recent sociological neglect of James and the failure to appreciate his particular approach in pragmatism, coincided with the rise of Freudian psychology in the early decades of the twentieth century. (shrink)

William James is remembered as the philosopher of pragmatism, but he was principally the founder of modern scientific psychology. During the period of his most intense scientific involvement James developed a trenchant critique of science. This was not a rejection of science but an attempt to identify limitations of the contemporary conceptualization of science. In particular, James emphasized the failure of science to understand its basis in human emotions. James developed a scientific theory of emotions in which the importance (...) of emotion in cognition and decision-making is central. James’ appreciation of the significance of emotions in science has continuing value. Nevertheless, his characterization of science in terms of its method introduces tensions in his account that an emphasis on the social dimensions of science, which he implicitly acknowledged, tends to resolve. (shrink)

The concept of self-interest is core to modern understandings of individual desire and need. It is also central in the concept of homo economicus and, in a variety of forms, underpins economic science. The critical discussion of the notion of self-interest in William Hazlitt, An Essay on the Principles of Human Action ([1805] 1969), remains unknown in sociology and economics even though it resolves a number of key problems associated with the concept and makes an original, indeed, unique contribution (...) to action theory. In particular, Hazlitt shows that the basis on which an individual pursues their own interest is identical with their sympathy with the interests of others. Hazlitt shows that a clear distinction between self and other cannot be sustained, and that an individual is as remote from their future self as they are from any other person. Even the `sexual appetite' Hazlitt shows cannot be understood in terms of simple self-interest as it is stimulated and consummated through mental and reciprocal capacities. These and related aspects of Hazlitt's Principles are set out below, and their relevance for an understanding of self-interested action and self-formation is demonstrated. (shrink)

Scholars who mention the turn to Aristotelian virtue ethics in the Mid-Twentieth Century tend to cite G. E. M. Anscombe’s famous ‘complaint’, and sometimes Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue. It is less usual to write of Roger Scruton. Placed in the context of Bernard Williams and John Casey’s works – at the intersection of moral philosophy and the philosophy of the emotions – Scruton’s theory of the imagination is shown to concern the rationality of moral attitudes. In short, it concerns virtue (...) ethics. Of broader interest, following Scruton’s arguments, his aesthetics may be conceived as concerning stores of moral knowledge; this is by virtue of the sensuous conditioning of the thought-content of moral judgement. The centrality of imitation to Aristotelian ethics, in other words, finds its concomitant in the object of imitation as the artwork. It is my view that Scruton’s work, Art and Imagination (his PhD thesis of 1973), is an attempt to provide a framework for the judgement involved in virtue ethics, concerning both intentionality and object. (shrink)

Peter Abelard (1079–1142 ce) was the most wide‐ranging philosopher of the twelfth century. He quickly established himself as a leading teacher of logic in and near Paris shortly after 1100. After his affair with Heloise, and his subsequent castration, Abelard became a monk, but he returned to teaching in the Paris schools until 1140, when his work was condemned by a Church Council at Sens. His logical writings were based around discussion of the “Old Logic”: Porphyry's Isagoge, aristotle'S Categories and (...) On Interpretation and boethius'S textbook on topical inference. They comprise a freestanding Dialectica (“Logic”; probably c.1116), a set of commentaries (known as the Logica [Ingredientibus], c. 1119) and a later (c. 1125) commentary on the Isagoge (Logica Nostrorum Petititoni Sociorum or Glossulae). In a work Abelard called his Theologia, issued in three main versions (between 1120 and c.1134), he attempted a logical analysis of trinitarian relations and explored the philosophical problems surrounding God's claims to omnipotence and omniscience. The Collationes (“Debates,” also known as “Dialogue between a Christian, a Philosopher and a Jew”; probably c.1130) present a rational investigation into the nature of the highest good, in which the Christian and the Philosopher (who seems to be modeled on a philosopher of pagan antiquity) are remarkably in agreement. The unfinished Scito teipsum (“Know thyself,” also known as the “Ethics”; c.1138) analyses moral action. (shrink)