The contemporary interest in spiritual experience has some theological and ethical ambiguity. To what extent does it reflect genuine engagement with the sacred, to what extent is it dabbling in experience without adequate interpretation or moral commitment? Jonathan Edwards faced similar challenges in his sermons on 1 Cor 13, "Charity and Its Fruits". Alasdair Maclntyre and Pierre Hadot have explored the constitutive role of practices in forming of virtues and transmitting a way of life. Their writings help show the continuing (...) relevance of the spiritual practices that Edwards advocated, particularly self-examination, healing by contraries, and solidarity. (shrink)

The contemporary interest in spiritual experience has some theological and ethical ambiguity. To what extent does it reflect genuine engagement with the sacred, to what extent is it dabbling in experience without adequate interpretation or moral commitment? Jonathan Edwards faced similar challenges in his sermons on 1 Cor 13, Charity and Its Fruits. Alasdair MacIntyre and Pierre Hadot have explored the constitutive role of practices in forming of virtues and transmitting a way of life. Their writings help show the continuing (...) relevance of the spiritual practices that Edwards advocated, particularly self‐examination, healing by contraries, and solidarity. (shrink)

The definition, assessment, predictive validity, demographic correlates, and promotion of critical thinking at the college level are addressed in this article. Although the definitions of critical thinking vary substantially, a common theme is the linkage of conclusions to relevant evidence. Assessment measures range from quasi-standardized instruments to informal class assessment and include both generic and subject-specific formats. Although critical thinking potentially serves both as a predictor of college success and as a criterion of suceess, its greater utility may be as (...) a predictor. nonetheless, the college experience in general and critical thinking courses in particular offer some promise for promoting critical thinking. However, efforts to infuse critical thinking activities into subject-specific courses have produced marginal improvement in critical thinking. (shrink)

Reprinted in James The Will to Believe and Other Essays.

Fitelson and McCarthy have proposed an accuracy measure for confidence orders which favors probability measures and Dempster-Shafer belief functions as accounts of degrees of belief and excludes ranking functions. Their accuracy measure only penalizes mistakes in confidence comparisons. We propose an alternative accuracy measure that also rewards correct confidence comparisons. Thus we conform to both of William James’ maxims: “Believe truth! Shun error!” We combine the two maxims, penalties and rewards, into one criterion that we call prioritized accuracy optimization. (...) That is, PAO punishes wrong comparisons and rewards right comparisons. And it requires to prioritize being right und avoiding to be wrong in a specific way. Thus PAO is both, a scoring rule and a decision rule. It turns out that precisely confidence orders representable by two-sided ranking functions satisfy PAO. The point is not to argue that PAO is the better accuracy goal. The point is only that ranking theory can also be supported by accuracy considerations. Thus, those considerations by themselves cannot decide about rational formats for degrees of belief, but are part and parcel of an overall normative assessment of those formats. (shrink)

Normal 0 false false false MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 During the Philippine-American War of 1899-1902, the United States Army’s most difficult, and renowned, counterinsurgency campaign was waged on the island of Samar. The Samareño insurgents had a well developed infrastructure and were merciless with those who collaborated with the Americans. The Samarnons made extensive use of the island’s rough terrain with heavy forest cover, and raised funds from the island’s hemp merchants. The Americans defeated the insurgents by separating them from the population. This (...) was achieved through food restrictions, a strict policy of non-neutrality forcing the people to choose between them or the insurgents, by concentrating the population in camps, by providing benefits to those who cooperated with them, and through skillful use of intelligence to dismantle the insurgent infrastructure. This campaign may have been an excellent demonstration of the principles of counterinsurgency warfare but it inflicted substantial abuses upon the Samarnons and caused long term damage to the island’s economy. Given the atrocities associated with the campaign, and its detrimental effects upon the island’s economy, one must truly wonder if it provides lessons worth learning. (shrink)

I have before me a letter dated January 5, 2000 from Bradford Wilson, the executive director of the NAS. It begins, “I really enjoyed your contribution to the recent symposium in the January issue of First Things, so much so that I’ve also decided to invite you to join the NAS. Many of your fellow contributors including Robert George, Jeffrey Satinover, and Father Neuhaus are among our current members, and I think you’d find it well worth your while if (...) you joined ranks with us yourself.”. (shrink)

A compelling collection of the life-changing writings of William James William James—psychologist, philosopher, and spiritual seeker—is one of those rare writers who can speak directly and powerfully to anyone about life’s meaning and worth, and whose ideas change not only how people think but how they live. The thinker who helped found the philosophy of pragmatism and inspire Alcoholics Anonymous, James famously asked, “is life worth living?” Bringing together many of his best and most popular essays, (...) talks, and other writings, this anthology presents James’s answer to that and other existential questions, in his own unique manner—caring, humorous, eloquent, incisive, humble, and forever on the trail of the “ever not quite.” Here we meet a James perfectly attuned to the concerns of today—one who argues for human freedom, articulates a healthy-minded psychology, urges us to explore the stream of consciousness, presents a new definition of truth based on its practical consequences, and never forecloses the possibility of mystical transcendence. Introduced by John Kaag and Jonathan van Belle, these compelling and accessible selections reveal why James is one of the great guides to the business of living. (shrink)

Why should I take care of my aging parents? How far will morality require me to sacrifice for this cause? I will study these questions from the perspectives of Confucianism and rule‐consequentialism. Confucians believe that the continuity of families and the interactions between members of different generations can enhance the integrity of society in the long run. However, since Confucianism may impose extreme demands on its followers, this theory may be problematic. In this paper, I argue that despite its demands, (...) the Confucian doctrines are defensible and are worth upholding. To explain my view, I draw upon rule‐consequentialism and explain how the rule‐consequentialist analysis complements and enhances the Confucian claims. I believe that the consequentialist conception of Confucianism can provide a useful resource for responding to the moral challenge of population aging in the current state of the world. (shrink)

Several of William James' finest essays are brought together in this collection, including his spiritual masterwork The Will to Believe, and his famous lecture concerning immortality. The Will to Believe was first delivered as a lengthy lecture by William James in 1896. Following a strong reception, it was later published as a distinct book in its own right. Setting out to defend the right of individuals to be religious irrespective of pure logic and reason, the lecture highlights many (...) of the proven advantages conferred by the belief in a guiding divine force. The benefits of belief to the believer are thus noted. James deftly cites many real life examples to prove his points - noting that many tasks or duties require confidence, he notes how individuals can perform and surmount difficulties if they believe in the divine. For such persons to abandon faith would therefore be irrational, as their religious beliefs have helped them in life. This argument is closely aligned with James' personal philosophical alignment with pragmatism. The Will to Believe also contains arguments in favor of persons having their own free will. James contested simply that as he believed in his own free will, he had it. As well as this, we hear several philosophical arguments in which James discusses the merits of empiricism versus absolutism. Other essays in this compendium include 'Is Life Worth Living?' and 'The Dilemma of Determinism'. In these and other writings, James demonstrates a superb command of philosophical principles and theoretical daring, at various times explaining and refuting established discussions on the subjects. The final essay in this edition, Human Immortality, sees James object to the notion that humans cannot be immortal if their bodies and minds are separated due to death. He objects to the assertion that human thought is concluded if the brain ceases to function, noting that human consciousness exists with the world and may philosophically have a life of its own. Notable for both his psychological and philosophical ideas, William James would author numerous lectures and books surrounding both subjects. The importance of spiritualism to the human being, the permanence of the spirit, and its effects on the thought processes, is but one area in which James distinguished himself. (shrink)

The war against war is going to be no holiday excursion or camping party. The military feelings are too deeply grounded to abdicate their place among our ideals until better substitutes are offered than the glory and shame that come to nations as well as to individuals from the ups and downs of politics and the vicissitudes of trade. There is something highly paradoxical in the modern man's relation to war. Ask all our millions, north and south, whether they would (...) vote now (were such a thing possible) to have our war for the Union expunged from history, and the record of a peaceful transition to the present time substituted for that of its marches and battles, and probably hardly a handful of eccentrics would say yes. Those ancestors, those efforts, those memories and legends, are the most ideal part of what we now own together, a sacred spiritual possession worth more than all the blood poured out. Yet ask those same people whether they would be willing, in cold blood, to start another civil war now to gain another similar possession, and not one man or woman would vote for the proposition. In modern eyes, precious though wars may be they must not be waged solely for the sake of the ideal harvest. Only when forced upon one, is a war now thought permissible. -/- It was not thus in ancient times. The earlier men were hunting men, and to hunt a neighboring tribe, kill the males, loot the village and possess the females, was the most profitable, as well as the most exciting, way of living. Thus were the more martial tribes selected, and in chiefs and peoples a pure pugnacity and love of glory came to mingle with the more fundamental appetite for plunder. (shrink)

Most serious contemporary opposition to abortion is grounded on the belief that human fetuses are members of the same moral category as beings like us, and that the loss of any such life is one of the worst possible losses. Substance view theorists oppose abortion for this reason: in their view beings like us are essentially rational substances with inherent moral worth, and those who perform induced abortion fail to recognize this moral worth. In a recent series of (...) articles, Rob Lovering presents reductio‐style arguments against the substance view, in part arguing that it is inconsistent with our intuitions in rescue and spontaneous abortion cases. In a recent reply, Henrik Friberg‐Fernros argues that the substance view can evade these problematic implications because of a distinction between killing and letting die. According to this argument, the fetus’s right to life is a negative right not to be killed, not a positive right to be rescued, thus the anti‐abortion theorist who lets fetuses die acts acceptably. I argue this stance fails to recognize the inherent moral worth that the substance view contends fetuses possess. One who refrains from saving a person, or doesn’t care how many people she saves, cannot reasonably claim to value life. Furthermore, this stance is at odds with most contemporary anti‐abortion views that oppose induced abortions of both the killing and letting die variety. (shrink)

This essay takes a synthetic and critical approach to the scattered pieces of art criticism and aesthetic theory authored by Louis Althusser. Connecting these texts to his larger philosophical and political project, we argue that these reflections make an independent contribution to its worth and that they offer different perspectives on lingering theoretical problems. We piece together the insights that form the core of the Althusserian approach to aesthetics and show how these are formulated (in connection with the work (...) of Pierre Macherey as well as the dominant controversies of the time) and trace how their formulations take shape in relation to the work of different authors and artists. In addition to helping us better understand his overall project, Althusser’s aesthetic theory is, we argue, a powerful and original contribution to Marxist aesthetics. Specifically, it points us to the idea that we need to take aesthetic production seriously as a practice with its own specificity - one that has its own logics of determination, rituals of production, circulation, and consumption, one that commands effects that need to be theorized on their own terms. (shrink)

“Any writer worth his salt knows that what cannot be spoken is ultimately the thing worth speaking about; yet most often this humbling awareness is unsaid or covered up. There are some who have made it their business, however, to court failure and acknowledge defeat, to explore the impasse of words before silence. William Franke has created an anthology of such explorations, undertaken in poetry and prose, that stretches from Plato to the present. Whether the subject of (...) discourse is All or Nothing does not matter: the struggle of speech to name the unnameable is the same. This ambitious two-volume undertaking demonstrates a preoccupation as old as Western civilization itself: the limits of language and the virtue of being at a loss for words. How long we have been raiding the Inarticulate!” —Peter S. Hawkins, Boston University “Developments in critical theory during the past two decades have led to renewed interest in negative theology. Books like _Languages of the Unsayable_, _Negation and Theology_, _Derrida and Negative Theology _, and _The Otherness of God _ have signaled the resurgence of this ancient tradition. William Franke’s distinctive contribution is to provide the background and texts from which these recent developments have emerged.” —Mark Taylor, Williams College Apophasis has become a major topic in the humanities, particularly in philosophy, religion, and literature. This monumental two-volume anthology gathers together most of the important historical works on apophaticism and illustrates the diverse trajectories of apophatic discourse in ancient, modern, and postmodern times. William Franke provides a major introductory essay on apophaticism at the beginning of each volume, and shorter introductions to each anthology selection. The first volume, _Classic Formulations_, offers excerpts from Plato, Plotinus, Damascius, the Bible, Gregory of Nyssa, Augustine, Pseudo-Dionysius, Maimonides, Rumi, Thomas Aquinas, Marguerite Porete, Dante, Teresa of Ávila, John of the Cross, and more. (shrink)

“Any writer worth his salt knows that what cannot be spoken is ultimately the thing worth speaking about; yet most often this humbling awareness is unsaid or covered up. There are some who have made it their business, however, to court failure and acknowledge defeat, to explore the impasse of words before silence. William Franke has created an anthology of such explorations, undertaken in poetry and prose, that stretches from Plato to the present. Whether the subject of (...) discourse is All or Nothing does not matter: the struggle of speech to name the unnameable is the same. This ambitious two-volume undertaking demonstrates a preoccupation as old as Western civilization itself: the limits of language and the virtue of being at a loss for words. How long we have been raiding the Inarticulate!” —Peter S. Hawkins, Boston University “Developments in critical theory during the past two decades have led to renewed interest in negative theology. Books like _Languages of the Unsayable_, _Negation and Theology_, _Derrida and Negative Theology _, and _The Otherness of God _ have signaled the resurgence of this ancient tradition. William Franke’s distinctive contribution is to provide the background and texts from which these recent developments have emerged.” —Mark Taylor, Williams College Apophasis has become a major topic in the humanities, particularly in philosophy, religion, and literature. This monumental two-volume anthology gathers together most of the important historical works on apophaticism and illustrates the diverse trajectories of apophatic discourse in ancient, modern, and postmodern times. William Franke provides a major introductory essay on apophaticism at the beginning of each volume, and shorter introductions to each anthology selection. The second volume, _Modern and Contemporary Transformations_, contains texts by Hölderlin, Schelling, Kierkegaard, Dickinson, Rilke, Kafka, Rosenzweig, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Weil, Schoenberg, Adorno, Beckett, Celan, Levinas, Derrida, Marion, and more. (shrink)

Smail's "On Deep History and the Brain" is rightly critical of the functionalist fallacies that have plagued evolutionary theory, sociobiology, and evolutionary psychology. However, his attempt to improve on these efforts relies on functional explanations that themselves oversimplify the lessons of neuroscience. In addition, like explanations in evolutionary psychology, they are highly speculative and cannot be confirmed or disproved by evidence. Neuroscience research is too diverse to yield a single picture of brain functioning. Some recent developments in neuroscience research, however, (...) do suggest that cognitive processing provides a kind of “operating system” that can support a great diversity of cultural material. These developments include evidence of “top-down” processing in motor control, in visual processing, in speech recognition, and in “emotion regulation.” The constraints that such a system may place on cultural learning and transmission are worth investigating. At the same time, historians are well advised to remain wary of the pitfalls of functionalism. (shrink)

Foundations of a General Theory of Manifolds [Cantor, 1883], which I will refer to as the Grundlagen, is Cantor’s first work on the general theory of sets. It was a separate printing, with a preface and some footnotes added, of the fifth in a series of six papers under the title of “On infinite linear point manifolds”. I want to briefly describe some of the achievements of this great work. But at the same time, I want to discuss its connection (...) with the so-called paradoxes in set theory. There seems to be some agreement now that Cantor’s own understanding of the theory of transfinite numbers in that monograph did not contain an implicit contradiction; but there is less agreement about exactly why this is so and about the content of the theory itself. For various reasons, both historical and internal, the Grundlagen seems not to have been widely read compared to later works of Cantor, and to have been even less well understood. But even some of the more recent discussions of the work, while recognizing to some degree its unique character, misunderstand it on crucial points and fail to convey its true worth. (shrink)

Francisco de Vitoria is regularly included in the genealogy of humanitarian intervention. He is invoked as both historical precedent and legitimizing authority, which raises the question of his trans-historical relevance in contemporary debates on humanitarian intervention. This article argues that Vitoria's thinking about defending the innocent cannot be abstracted from his theology and remain coherent. Specifically, it argues that the illocutionary force of his position is entirely lost once it is separated from the belief that man is created in the (...) image of God. The article concludes by arguing that Vitoria's thought has little prescriptive value in contemporary debates. Nevertheless, his thought is still worth engaging because it is suggestive of the kinds of questions that contemporary scholars must pose and answer, albeit in the circumstances of their own time and place. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:88 Reviews EPISTEMOLOGY OFMODERNISM WILLIAM R. EVERDELL History/ St. Ann'sSchool Brooklyn, NY 11201, USA [email protected] Ann Banfield. The Phantom Table:Woolf,Fry,Russelland the Epistemology of Modernism. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge U.P., 2000. £35.00; US$49.95. In Virginia Woolf's difficult masterpiece, The Waves(1931),each of several separate interior monologues-"streams of consciousness" in the American critical idiom-is separated from the next by an interpolated "Interlude". The interior monologues are assigned co different characters, (...) bur the Interludes are rendered from no perspectiveat all, verymuch like the "Time Passes"chapter of Woolf's earlier and better known novel, Tothe Lighthouse (1927).The passive voice and the demonstrative and indefinite pronotms are essential, removing from the scene not only the characters' points of view, but the author's as well. Numbered among the consequences of the new twentieth-century technique of interior monologue, the Interludes can be accepted today as one more trick of literary "Modernism", but for Woolf it was new, and the task of preventing any of her Interludes from becoming just another report from the rypical "omniscient narrator" of Victorian fiction was one of the most demanding she ever set herself as a writer. Like her friend the Post-Impressionist critic Roger Fry, she wanted to analyze the world outside the self into its smallest sensible elements, then show human selvesasthey formed by accumulating the experience of these myriad, random, discontinuous components, and finally to recombine these components in their two kinds, selvesand sense-able things, into a meaningful whole-a work of art. Rejecting both the idealism of Bradley and the British philosophical generation of the 1890sand the naive positivist materialism coming out of the 1850s, Bertrand Russell eventually settled on an ontology most philosophers call "realist " in that it rejected the view that the world accessible to the senses was no more than a mental construct and considered it naive to assign the origin of subjectivity to matter. The material world was, Russell thought, actually external -"out there". He did think, however,that all we knew of the external world was what wassensed by the sensesand pictured by the mind. He alsoconcluded (in essayslike "The Relation of Sense-data to Physics"written in 1910-17)d1at both that world and what we knew of it was presented in very small parts, and Reviews 89 analyzable down to them, or, in other words, that both ontology and epistemology were atomized. Each mind, with its senses, occupied, he thought, one of an infinite number of occupied and unoccupied "perspectives", each of which Lmiquely focused che "sensibilia"-whatever was perceived in che external world-like a Leibnizian monad. Machemacicallogic, on which Russell set che highest store, would be able, he thought, to bring together perspectives by providing a minimal secof cruchswhich, though abscracc,were objective in che sense chaccheywere noc private and could be agreed to by all. Something similar though rougher mighc be done for chesensibilia in cheworld "ouc chere" by che science of physics. Did Virginia Woolflearn from Bertrand Russell?To a latcer-dayacademic ic sounds too urrerly improbable, for che simple reason (obvious to academics) chat anyone who has made icto the upper levelsof English literature must have chosen cheseparticular heights to scale because the trail was so blessedlyfreeof chosenasry mathematical burrs and logical reazles,and the air so filledwith che pure chatter of French phenomenologisrs, that no hiker would ever have to struggle with analytical philosophy again. Lessmetaphorically, the separation of departments of literature from those of philosophy has come so close to divorce chat few in U.S. English Departments can make head or cail of che graduate thesis that one of Russell's philosophy students wrote on F.H. Bradley, and fewer still can trace the term "objective correlative" used by thac student (who was in fact T. S. Eliot) back to an early work of Husserl. Meanwhile, ic is taken for granted by those in Philosophy that there are no ideas worth discussing in Woolf, or, indeed, in any other novelise,greacthough she may be, Lmlessone is to descend from ontology and epistemology to the foothills of ethics and politics, or worse, aesthetics. (Among... (shrink)

This paper offers a new critical evaluation of the Rawlsian model of global public reason (‘GPR’), focusing on its ability to serve as a normative standard for guiding international diplomacy and deliberation in matters of war. My thesis is that, where war is concerned, the model manifests two fatal weaknesses. First, because it demands extensive neutrality over the moral status of persons – and in particular over whether they possess equal basic worth or value – out of respect for (...) the beliefs of inegalitarian yet ‘decent’ societies, or ‘peoples’, Rawlsian GPR renders calculations of proportionality in war impossible. Second, because its content is provided by a conception of global justice (the so-called ‘Law of Peoples’) whose injunctions are addressed exclusively to peoples, as corporate agents, Rawlsian GPR pushes the moral evaluation of the independent wartime choices of individuals off the agenda of the global public forum altogether. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:James J. Gibson's Ecological Approach:Perceiving What ExistsWilliam M. Mace (bio)Environmental Philosophy and EpistemologyThe purpose of this paper is to help an audience attracted to environmental philosophy get to the core of Gibson's system in a compact form and to appreciate the necessity for an account of the environment in epistemology. I hope to show that Gibson's is a consistent and scientifically progressive account of knowing that gives the environment (...) its due and that this is not a simple matter of fiat but a call to extended scientific investigation. I want to stress that Gibson's work is scientifically progressive in the sense that it has consistently opened new avenues for research. If one could be assured tomorrow that Gibson was correct and his critics wrong, the ecological psychology enterprise would not have to be shut down with nothing left to do. The goal of the enterprise, certainly for Gibson, was not to be declared a winner but to open doors for discovery. Because Gibson has developed a theory of perceiving the environment, it would be worth exploring as an important topic for environmental philosophers covering a wide range of issues. It offers an intriguing, environmentally based, grounding for epistemology; it offers ways to deal [End Page 195] with practical issues within "pure science"; and it is open to reorganizing ways to conceptualize problems beyond epistemology.Gibson developed a richly articulated system that grew steadily over a period of 50 years, 1929 to 1979, which he devoted to "puzzling over" the "perplexities" of vision (1979, xiii). From Gibson's standpoint, knowledge begins with perception, and perception is perceiving the environment. The environment, for Gibson, is at least as essential as the brain to the existence and exercise of "the mind."As an empiricist, knowledge is based on perception for Gibson. But perception, at root, turns out to be perception of the environment. Entities like sense data and representations become "after the fact" curiosities for Gibson, and have no role to play in the foundations of perceptual experience and, a fortiori, knowledge. If Gibson is correct, then scientific accounts of perception must converge on environmental perception. A philosopher whose primary focus is epistemology, and who works within Gibson's system, would perforce be an environmental philosopher—not (first) because of a special concern for the environment, but because an adequate appreciation of relevant facts requires it. Of great importance to environmental philosophers is that Gibson not only provides an account of perceiving grounded in access to environmental properties, but he establishes a basis for perceiving this particular world as a specific arrangement of surfaces. The world we perceive, according to Gibson, is a connected, public world that we share. It is, again, the world, the logical individual world and not an abstraction. This is not an account of the experience of abstract shapes, distances, and motions. It is a system in which travelers can visit the pyramids and in which I can trip over your garbage.Is there a symmetric direction of influence? Just as a commitment to understanding knowledge scientifically and philosophically can lead one to focal considerations of the environment, could a deep concern for the environment as a value lead to the serious study of perception and, more broadly, epistemology? It seems entirely plausible. Gibson's is a "yin and yang" system of scientific complementarities beginning with animal and environment and extending to knowledge and value (in his concept of affordance). In each complementarity, the terms are differentiable but not entirely independent. Animals and their environments are different entities and should not be confused with one another, but they also are so [End Page 196] mutually dependent that one should not imagine a thorough account of one without the other. In like manner, objects and value (first through use) are not independently comprehensible in Gibson's system. This is a theme worthy of careful examination of detailed examples. I am not doing that in this paper, but hope that enough of the flavor of Gibson's work will come through to allow a reader to understand how one might be steered to epistemology from an initial concern with environment and values and... (shrink)

A serious and profound discussion of some of the more important problems of modern thought, readable and truly enjoyable. Wherever the reader turns he is captivated by the originality of thought and its applicability to contemporary events. This is a unique and distinguished book well worth the reader's time.

From Marcus Tullius Cicero’s philosophical writings, the author first draws out a modest network of ideas that informs his understanding of what it means to be a good man (vir bonus). Then, he finds in Cicero the idea of a befitting mutuality among four distinctively human capacities: a faculty for inquiry into and love for truth manifest in words and actions (reason); a disposition for the recognition of and attraction to things of worth beyond self-interest (the honorable); an acute (...) sense of one own spheres of responsibility along with facility for speaking and acting appropriately within them (appropriate action), and fostering and extending the bonds of mutual personal relations grounded in justice and benevolence (society). Against the background of deep commitments in modernity to hedonism and autonomous individualism, the author proposes a retrieval of the virtue of the honorable as an attractive alternative. (shrink)

In this essay I argue that sports at their best qualify as final ends, that is, as ends whose value is such that they ground not only the practices whose ends they are, but everything else we do as human agents. The argument I provide to support my thesis is derived from Harry Frankfurt's provocative work on the importance of the things we care about, more specifically, on his claim that it is by virtue of caring about things and practices, (...) really caring about them ? even loving them ? we are able to regard and treat them as final ends. Sports, I claim, are paradigmatic examples of practices cared about and loved in these deep ways, and as such deserve to be considered, rather than dismissed because of their supposed triviality, as one of those ends around which a life most worth living can be legitimately forged. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:St. John Henry Newman's Theory of Doctrinal Development and the Synodal Process:A Survey and Concrete ApplicationWilliam B. GoldinGood afternoon, Your Excellencies, Most Reverend bishops, and my brother priests. Firstly, please permit me to say that, while it is certainly an honor to have been invited to speak to you, for which I would like to express my gratitude to my own bishop and our host for this reunion, His (...) Excellency, Bishop Kevin W. Vann, it is also not a little bit daunting. To speak to such an erudite group of clerics, all of whom have a connection to our common alma mater and to the various celebrated universities in the Eternal City, brings back fond memories of my three years at the Casa Santa Maria. During that time, while I would occasionally have the opportunity to preach at Sunday Masses at the Casa, I was always keenly aware that I was not nearly as qualified to do so as many of my listeners. As such, I beg your pardon if I should fail to explain adequately any aspect of this lecture, and I would be grateful for any questions and/or corrections, theological or otherwise, that you may have afterwards.Let us begin with a prayer:In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. [End Page 21]Come, Holy Spirit, fill the hearts of thy faithful, and enkindle in them the fire of thy love. Send forth thy Spirit and they shall be created, and thou shalt renew the face of the earth.Let us pray.O God, who didst inspire thy faithful by the light of thy Holy Spirit, grant that, in the same Spirit we may be truly wise and ever more rejoice in His holy consolation.Through Christ our Lord.Amen.Vergine Immacolata... Aiutateci.Introduction: The Synod on Synodality and Speculation on Doctrinal ChangeIn the late autumn of 2021, Bishop Vann appointed me and my colleague, Mrs. Katie Dawson, our diocesan director of parish faith formation, as the coordinators for the Synod on Synodality in the Diocese of Orange. In this role, we were tasked with bringing to fruition the diocesan phase of the synodal consultation of the faithful here in Orange County. Since last autumn, we have labored to carry out the bishop's synodal plan for this diocese, and I must say that I have been pleasantly surprised with the manner in which the consultation took place, and in its results, notwithstanding my initial reservations both as to the scope of this particular synod and as to the potential risks inherent in such a universal survey. As we all know from diocesan and parochial life, "listening sessions" have a tendency to become "shouting sessions"; and as a thoroughgoing introvert myself, such sessions do not exactly bring joy to my heart. Thankfully, though, my fears were not realized, and the actual experience of our synodal process was almost altogether pleasant.Perhaps surprisingly, one of the fruits of our consultation, which we heard from the majority of the faithful, is their clear desire for doctrinal clarity in their faith journeys. The majority of the People of God in Orange County whom we surveyed do not want to see any doctrinal changes emerge from this synod that could be critiqued for being in serious discontinuity with the [End Page 22] solemnly defined magisterial teaching of the past. Regularly, they expressed to us that, if our "journeying together" is to be authentic and credible, then the continuity of our doctrinal teaching is a matter of no small importance. Indeed, the ability of many to take the Church's faith seriously depends on whether the doctrinal content of that faith seems solid and unshakeable. If the content of our faith can shift substantially in ways that mirror modern shifts in secular thinking, then people can easily critique our faith as being blown about by the winds of change, with no certitude whatsoever. If something taught by the Catholic Church can be true today and false tomorrow, then why is the Catholic Church's message worth listening to at all? What we heard from the overwhelming majority of... (shrink)

Introduction: characterizing ethical realismIt is useful to begin a survey of recent work on ethical realism with a look at current disputes over what makes a theory of ethics count as ‘realist’ in the first place. Nearly all characterizations of ethical realism include some version of the following two core claims: Ethical discourse is assertoric and descriptive: ethical claims purport to state ethical facts by attributing ethical properties to people, actions, institutions, etc., and are thus true or false depending on (...) whether their descriptions of things are accurate or not . 1 At least some ethical claims, when literally construed, are true in the above sense.Sayre-McCord maintains that these two conditions are necessary and sufficient to characterize ethical realism; others argue that further conditions must be added to yield ethical realism, or at least ‘paradigmatic’ or ‘robust’ ethical realism. Before turning to that, however, it is worth noting that some have recently denied that the above two conditions are even necessary for ethical realism. In probing new work on metaethical taxonomy, Miller argues that the core of ethical realism is simply the metaphysical commitment to objective ethical properties and facts, which is strictly independent of the semantic claims above. If one holds that there are objective facts about the wrongness of slavery, for example, then one ought to count as an ethical realist regardless of whatever views one might hold about the semantics of the contingent forms of discourse that have evolved among language users. Even if our ethical discourse turns out primarily to express conative states ), or all moral claims turn out to be false because …. (shrink)

My main thesis is that the necessary and its necessity are factual, or matters of fact, in the sense that they are realities on the same ontic plane or planes with any other beings there may be, physical, phenomenal, or Platonically transcendent, and are no more creatures of thought and speech than dogs and gravity are; if I think they are all physical actualities, this is only because I think everything is. I have a second thesis, however, which is that (...) the realities objectively characterized by necessity are "facts" in the more special sense in which we say it is a fact that the earth is round but not that the earth is a fact or that roundness is a fact. It is fashionable to declare that necessity and contingency pertain only to statements, judgments, or "propositions"; and though the popularity of this is due, I am afraid, to what is false in it, namely, its subjectivism, its philosophic force is due to a covert truth, that necessity can qualify nothing short of the states of affairs which make statements or judgments necessarily true. Any shifts that can avoid the admission of facts in general as first-class members of the universe can provide for what I shall say of necessary facts, but meanwhile the worth of the category will be so proving itself that I cannot foresee abandoning it, and it is all I shall be meaning hereinafter by the word "facts.". (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Acknowledgments References.

This book records almost 50 years' worth of developing and explaining a new way of thinking about behavior. It represents a journey more than a goal. I came to see that the science of behavior needed a new paradigm, and two sorts of changes were required. First, the old molecular view inherited from the nineteenth century, based on discrete responses and contiguity, had to be replaced by a view based on the dynamics of behavior. Behavior is manifestly process and (...) cannot be contained in little momentary packets. Behavior is flow and requires measures and theories that acknowledge its temporal extendedness. Such a new ("molar") view offers plausible and elegant explanations both of laboratory results and of phenomena in the everyday world. The molecular view falls short on both counts. (shrink)

The author sets out to respond to the student complaint that ‘Philosophy did not answer “the big questions”’, in particular the question ‘What is the meaning of life?’ The response first outlines and evaluates the most common religious answer, that human life is given a meaning by God who created us and informs us that this life is just the pilgrim way to the next eternal life in heaven. He then discusses the response that, from the point of view of (...) post-Darwinian science and the evolution of the universe and all that is in it, human life on Earth must be afforded no more meaning than the meaning we would give to a microscopic planaria or to some creature on another planet in a distant universe. All things including human creatures on Planet Earth just exist for a time and that is that. There is no plan or purpose. In the last sections the author outlines the view that it is we humans ourselves who give meaning to our lives by our choices of values or things that are worth pursuing and through our resulting sense of achievement or the opposite. Nevertheless the question ‘What is the meaning of life?’ can mean quite different things in different contexts, and so merit different if related answers. From one point of view one answer may lie in terms of the love of one human for another. (shrink)

We have extremely strong reasons for supposing that the exposure of infants, very often resulting in death, was common in many different parts of the Roman Empire, and that it had considerable demographic, economic and psychological effects. The evidence for the first of these propositions has been reviewed or alluded to in several recent publications.1 However, a thorough new study, covering the whole of Greek and Roman antiquity, would be worth while. In the meantime Donald Engels has declared that (...) in the Greek and Roman worlds the exposure of children was ‘of negligible importance’ , 112–20). (shrink)

It is well known that Sidgwick finished his examination of “the methods of ethics” in some difficulty. Just what that difficulty was and how he came to be in it, we shall see in due course. This paper is written in the conviction that what he was doing is worth looking at again in the context of contemporary discussion.

From the introductory chapter. The distinctions taken between the necessary and the contingent, in philosophical discussion no less than in common life, are ordinarily supposed to be so definitive and are permitted so deeply to influence our conceptions that it seems well worth one's while to examine them in their origin. And the Aristotelian system will best serve our purpose as a corpus vile for very obvious reasons. In the first place, Aristotle is the earliest systematic philosopher who essayed (...) to treat consistently of all the greater problems of life and thought, and whose works remain to be studied. His method, too, was such that, standing as he did just on the verge of formalism, the definitions which he attempted still bear definite traces of the purely functional meaning of those terms, while his formulation of their significance has led naturally to their solidification as objective facts in the world. For Aristotle was wont to preface his own conclusions by inquiring, rather superficially to be sure, into the psychology of the conceptions in question ; yet, while the inadequacy of his psychology is now admitted on all hands, the inferences as to fact which he deduced therefrom are even now in part accepted as conclusive. When one reflects upon it this state of the question strikes one as absurd. For this reason there appears to be the greater justification for an analysis of the presuppositions on which these conceptions rest. If one grants their validity, the conclusions and the resultant contradictions of the system must be accepted as ultimate. But I am convinced that Aristotle's presuppositions and his real problems were wholly unreconcilable with each other, and so his contradictions serve all the better to point out the direction in which their solution lay. Plato made the acute observation that surprise is the beginning of philosophy, and Aristotle appropriated and further applied the thought.' The full sweep of the truth contained in these words is vastly greater, however, than they knew. The feeling of wonder is indeed the point of departure for philosophy ; but what precisely does it mean? It indicates first of all that an old habit has been broken up. Old conceptions, like the proverbial old bottles, have become so surcharged with the new wine of meaning that they have burst. But to say this is to describe the phenomenon merely as A brute fact without according it any symbolic value. This state of surprise must acquire an ideal worth, an indicative function, if it is really to become the parent of philosophy. Briefly, then, we may say : surprise indicates the need of reconstructing our supposed facts. And this statement is to be taken at its full value, with all its implications, if philosophy is to be achieved.... (shrink)

This book is a fresh study of the fourth century B.C. Greek adventurer, writer, and student of Socrates, Xenophon. An innovating author of many guises, an important source for the history of his time, a wit and a philosopher, he no longer enjoys the reputation he once did. Suggesting that such a radical de-valuation is more a reflection on nineteenth- and twentieth-century attitudes and scholarship than on the worth of Xenophon, the author in this book attempts to reassert Xenophon’s (...) rightful position by offering a close, literary-historical reading of all of Xenophon’s writings and by focusing in this process on the alluring reticence and ironic subtlety many have often failed to appreciate before offering what turn out to be their too hasty criticisms. It is hoped that this study will help to bring about the realization that Xenophon, when properly read and read without preconceptions, may yet prove an invaluable guide to the development of Greek thought in general and the world of fourth-century Greece in particular. Xenophon emerges as one of the last great representatives of that civilization which reached its height in Athens, and it is in this context that he is best understood, not, as so often previously, against the Peloponnesian and especially Spartan background where he had friends and where he spent a long exile. (shrink)

The ongoing process of globalization calls out for novel forms of transnational liberal–democratic decision–making. In this spirit, David Held and a group of interlocutors (especially Daniele Archibugi) propose an ambitious model of “cosmopolitan democracy.” Although the proponents of cosmopolitan democracy are right to insist that transnational liberal democracy must avoid the dangers of an excessively centralized world–state, their own efforts to do so ultimately fail. The weaknesses of their ideas about the notion of the “rule of law“ generate unforeseen theoretical (...) difficulties for their account. Any transnational network of liberal–democratic governance worth defending will need to do a better job preserving a substantial quotient of traditional rule of law virtues. (shrink)

The will to believe.--Is life worth living?--The sentiment of rationality.--Reflex action and theism.--The dilemma of determinism.--The moral philosopher and the moral life.--Great men and their environment.--The importance of individuals.--On some Hegelisms.--What psychical research has accomplished.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Prufrock's Question and Roquentin's AnswerWilliam IrwinThere could not be two more different literary figures than the right-wing, religious T. S. Eliot and the left-wing, atheistic Jean-Paul Sartre. Yet there are striking connections between their first major publications, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1917) and Nausea (1938). Eliot was aware of and critical of Sartre, especially in the commentary on No Exit in The Cocktail Party, and, no (...) doubt, Sartre became aware of Eliot.1 But as far as can be gleaned, Sartre did not read Eliot's Prufrock, prior to the publication of Nausea, despite his connection to Adrienne Monnier, the French translator of the poem. Indeed Simone de Beauvoir documents the couple's reading habits in some detail in The Prime of Life, including their admiration for Hemingway and Faulkner during that time, but there is no mention of Eliot or Prufrock.2Both the poem and the novel present us with subjective, mood-laden impressions of the internal melancholic lives of their protagonists. Like Prufrock, Roquentin admits "My passion was dead."3Nausea is presented as a diary intended to be read by no one, and Prufrock is presented as a self-confession that no one is to hear. As Guido da Montefeltro in the poem's epigram is willing to speak to Dante because he believes Dante will never return to share what he has heard with the living, so Prufrock is solipsistically introspecting. The "you" of "Let us go then, you and I" is likely Prufrock addressing himself. But if it is addressed to another person, it can only be a reader who is as hopeless as he is, with no chance of return or redemption—only such a reader would really understand what is said. The final line of the poem "Till human voices wake us, and we drown" takes us back to the "patient etherized upon a table." Like Roquentin, Prufrock has taken himself and the reader [End Page 184] by proxy on an inner journey, a dream-like state in which the real and surreal come together.In the opening stanza of the poem, Prufrock describes his internal cityscape as including "Streets that follow like a tedious argument / Of insidious intent / To lead you to an overwhelming question... / Oh, do not ask, 'What is it?'" The question is mentioned twice more, but it is never articulated. Obviously it is an issue of great existential import concerning the meaning of life. Though Prufrock does not verbalize it, the question must be essentially Roquentin's question to himself: "Can you justify your existence then? Just a little?" (p. 177).As we shall see, even though Sartre's philosophy as developed in Nausea and crystallized in Being and Nothingness comes later and likely with no knowledge of Prufrock, the philosophy can still shed light on the poem—and in a way that in turn elucidates the philosophy.4IMeaning for Sartre is found in existence itself, emerging through the coloring and conceptualization of consciousness.5 While this does not necessarily imply the stereotypical existential view that life is bleak, meaningless, and possibly not worth living, this does nevertheless seem to be the conclusion that Roquentin draws early in Nausea. Consider this dark concern: "My existence began to worry me seriously. Was I not a simple spectre?" (p. 86). Early in the novel Roquentin concludes "Nothing happens while you live. The scenery changes, people come in and go out, that's all. There are no beginnings. Days are tacked on to days without rhyme or reason, an interminable, monotonous addition" (p. 39). This life as Roquentin describes it sounds eerily like the humdrum pointless existence of Prufrock, who has measured out his life with coffee spoons and spit out the butt-ends of his days and ways amidst the monotony of women who come and go talking of Michelangelo—a great man he resembles not at all.Later in the novel Roquentin admits "And it was true, I had always realized it; I hadn't the right to exist. I had appeared by chance, I existed like a stone, a plant or a microbe. My life put... (shrink)