Karl Rahner’s theory of fundamental option has been criticized in recent years due to a perceived discontinuity between categorical actions in history and their transcendental implications. Jean Porter, for example, argues that such a discontinuity undermines any usefulness of the theory for the moral life because it is unable to generate a substantive account of the life of virtue. This essay disputes such claims, arguing that Rahner’s reluctance to definitively connect particular actions with a positive or negative fundamental option is (...) simply in keeping with the Roman Catholic tradition of being tentative with regard to subjective judgments about the relationship between particular actions and the state of one’s soul. Further, it is argued that an examination of Rahner’s understanding of the unity of love of God and love of neighbor will serve to generate paradigmatic behaviors which are potential “sites” for a fundamental option. In this regard, the essay focuses on Rahner’s discussions of conscience and Ignatian discernment as well as on the relationship of fundamental option to “dying with Christ” or Christian witness. (shrink)

Jean Porter, a noted moral theologian, has argued that Karl Rahner’s influential theory of the fundamental option is of little practical use in actually attempting to live a holy and virtuous life. Thomas Aquinas’ account of the infused virtue of charity, she claims, offers a richer account of the Christian moral life and so is of greater practical use. This essay challenges this assertion by placing Rahner’s notion of fundamental option into dialogue with Thomistic caritas. It argues that the actions (...) that Porter takes to be characteristic of charity—itself a controversial proposition—are themselves in need of greater specification and so not as “concrete” as Porter would have one believe. Beneficence, almsgiving, and fraternal correction must be interpreted in light of diverse historical and cultural circumstances. Rahner recognizes this problem and so is legitimately hesitant to over-specify the demands of neighbor love. Further the Thomistic account of virtues with its commitment to the unity of the virtues is not able to resolve the problem of the “flawed saint” or the virtuous non-believer’s prospects for salvation in the way Rahner’s account can. Thus the Thomistic program is far less detailed than Porter suggests and it involves considerable theological and pastoral costs. (shrink)

This interdisciplinary and ecumenical collection of essays honors the transformative work of Margaret A. Farley, Gilbert L. Stark Professor of Christian Ethics at Yale Divinity School, using it as a starting point for reflection on the contribution of feminist method to theology and ethics. Through a variety of perspectives, contributors show that by resisting classical oppositions between “interpersonal” and “social” ethics and by insisting that social, economic, and political realities be taken seriously in considerations of justice, feminist concerns challenge the (...) very categories of Christian ethics. With essays ranging from sexual ethics to human rights, medical ethics to freedom, _A Just and True Love_ offers a broad perspective on the last twenty-five years of feminist innovation in Christian ethics and a glimpse of its global future, particularly in continents such as Africa. “This book brings together a number of the most prominent thinkers in Christian theology and ethics today in a justly deserved tribute to the work and influence of Margaret Farley. The essays explicitly acknowledge and engage Farley in various degrees; one comes away appreciating both the integrity of her work and its versatility.” —_Darlene Fozard Weaver, Villanova University _ “Inevitably while listening to or reading Margaret Farley, we find her refrain, ‘I want to ask all over again.’ Reexamining, reframing, and rethinking is Farley’s method of engaging anew human experience and relationality. The authors of these essays capture that method as they reconsider feminism and sexuality, love and freedom, justice and truth, contraception and women’s rights. Like her own work, they reset the ethical agenda to recapture a more loving truth. A very successful collection for a most admired colleague. Ryan and Linnane are to be congratulated!” —_James F. Keenan, S.J., Boston College_ “In_ A Just and True Love,_ a host of distinguished scholars consider fundamental themes of feminist theological ethics and their significance for global justice, the meaning of Christian love, creative casuistry, and truthful life in the Church. I can imagine no higher praise than to affirm that these authors have succeeded marvelously in doing exactly what they set out to do: to produce a volume worthy of the theological work and wisdom of Margaret Farley.” —_William Werpehowski, Villanova University_. (shrink)

A textbook on modal logic, intended for readers already acquainted with the elements of formal logic, containing nearly 500 exercises. Brian F. Chellas provides a systematic introduction to the principal ideas and results in contemporary treatments of modality, including theorems on completeness and decidability. Illustrative chapters focus on deontic logic and conditionality. Modality is a rapidly expanding branch of logic, and familiarity with the subject is now regarded as a necessary part of every philosopher's technical equipment. Chellas here offers (...) an up-to-date and reliable guide essential for the student. (shrink)

Recent theories of agency (sees to it that) of Nuel Belnap and Michael Perloff are examined, particularly in the context of an early proposal of the author.

This book contains seminal discussions of central issues in the philosophy of language, mathematics, mind, religion and time. Is common language conceptually prior to idiolectics? What is a theory of meaning? Does constructivism provide a satisfactory account of mathematics? What are indefinitely extensible concepts? Can we change the past? These are only some of the very important questions addressed here. Both the papers written by the contributors and Dummett's replies provide a great wealth of stimulating ideas for those who currently (...) do research in the respective areas touched upon without making the reading exceedingly tedious. This feature, common to most of the papers in this book, makes it possible to use the material presented in undergraduate courses at university level. (shrink)

Having gained some idea of what MacIntosh logics there are, we conclude this paper with a remark about the totality of them. Let theterritory of a rule or condition be the class of all modal logics that have the rule or satisfy the condition. What is MacIntosh territory, the class of all normal logics with the MacIntosh rule, like? What is its structure?

We define prenormal modal logics and show that S1, S1, S0.9, and S0.9 are Lewis versions of certain prenormal logics, determination and decidability for which are immediate. At the end we characterize Cresswell logics and ponder C. I. Lewis's idea of strict implication in S1.

In this article, the author explores a model of alternative medical education being pioneered at Loyola University Chicago Stritch School of Medicine. The five-year Global Health Fieldwork Fellowship track allows two students per year to complete an extra year of medical education while living and working in a free rural clinic in the jungle lowlands of Bolivia. This alternative curricular track is unique among other existing models in that it is longitudinally immersive for at least one full additional year of (...) medical education, grounded in clinical and service learning, and heavily focused upon global health and the social components of medicine. Studies have shown that both longitudinal alternative medical curricular tracks and short-term global health electives have long-term benefits upon the professional development of participants, suggesting that the GHFF is likely to do the same. The author also argues that the GHFF is an advantageous model of global health education compared to standard offerings and provides a unique curricular model by which to foster the development of social values—such as professionalism, advocacy, and social justice—that are widely considered lacking in today’s medical education. (shrink)

Abstract:Those interested in environmental protection are frequently motivated by the idea that environmental destruction is "bad" while environmental conservation is "good." In some cases, this is based merely on the anthropocentric instrumental value of the environment in relation to humans, but it seems more common that this motivation is generated by a belief that non-humans have intrinsic value, at least at some level of biotic organization. Yet, there is no basis for this claim that is not rooted in either theism (...) or some other form of arbitrary value judgement that, in a materialistic worldview, has no basis outside of the believer's mind. Thus, secular-based environmental ethics that do not rely on theistic or metaphysical assumptions can never be prescriptive; materialistic conservation ethics can never prescribe behavior, they can only describe the arbitrary and fundamentally meaningless values of the philosopher. (shrink)

In his paper Leblanc seeks to supplant traditional forms of semantic theory with truth-value analyses. I have tried, here, to extend the scope, if not the limits, of his results. But now, in closing, I wish to register some reservations about his notion of relevance.Leblanc eschews the customary semantic analysis of intensional languages — the so-called ‘possible worlds’ semantics — as making ‘metaphysical virtue out of logical necessity’. And so he would replace such accounts with ‘truth-value’ analyses. But, alas, these (...) theories are seen to have only limited application. Either all the atoms of a language must be evaluated by the functions in W in a truth-value ℋ 〈W, α, R〉, or the functions must be indexed. Because I share Leblanc's opinion that it ought to be that only the atoms of a theory are linguistically pertinent to it, I opt for the second alternative. Here, of course, things work out all right. But, as Leblanc notes, indexing the functions is equivalent to doing semantics in the usual way. In either case, new parameters are required for the evaluation of theories. So more than just the truth-values of a theory's atoms is relevant.My concern is with natural languages. It has long been recognized — though only more recently well articulated4 — that an adequate semantic analysis of such languages, with their indexical and intensional features, must relativize the notion of truth to various indices, viz., aspects of the contexts of utterance of sentences. It is clear that the truth-value of ‘If your feet hurt, then it may rain tomorrow’ depends on more than just the truth-values of its atoms: the speaker, hearer, place, and time of utterance of the sentence are at least to be included among the extra-linguistic features required for an evaluation of the sentence. Such indices thus provide various realizations of the notion of a possible world, and they are all relevant. (shrink)

Individuals typically resist changing their minds, but support for same-sex marriage increased from 35% to 61% between 2006-2016. What explains this anomaly?

Researchers commonly use long-term average production inequalities to characterize cross-cultural patterns in foraging divisions of labor, but little is known about how the strategies of individuals shape such inequalities. Here, we explore the factors that lead to daily variation in how much men produce relative to women among Martu, contemporary foragers of the Western Desert of Australia. We analyze variation in foraging decisions on temporary foraging camps and find that the percentage of total camp production provided by each gender varies (...) primarily as a function of men’s average bout successes with large, mobile prey. When men target large prey, either their success leads to a large proportional contribution to the daily harvest, or their failure results in no contribution. When both men and women target small reliable prey, production inequalities by gender are minimized. These results suggest that production inequalities among Martu emerge from stochastic variation in men’s foraging success on large prey measured against the backdrop of women’s consistent production of small, low-variance resources. (shrink)

Despite decades of research, we still lack a clear explanation for the emergence and persistence of inequality. Here we propose and evaluate a marginal utility of inequality hypothesis that nominates circumscription and environmental heterogeneity as independent, necessary conditions for the emergence of intragroup material inequality. After coupling the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample with newly generated data from remote sensing, we test predictions derived from this hypothesis using a multivariate generalized additive model that accounts for spatial and historical dependence as well as (...) subsistence mode. Our analyses show that the probability a society will be stratified increases significantly as a function of proxies of environmental heterogeneity and environmental circumscription. This supports the hypothesis that increasing environmental heterogeneity and circumscription drives the emergence and persistence of inequality among documented societies across the globe. We demonstrate how environmental heterogeneity and circumscription produce situations that limit individuals’ options so that some may find it in their best interest to give up some autonomy for material gain, while others may find it in their best interest to give up some material resources for another individual’s time or deference. These results support the marginal utility of inequality framework and enable future explorations of the ecological conditions that facilitate the emergence of intragroup inequality through time and across the globe. (shrink)

The U.S. stock market is one of the largest and most complex marketplaces in the global financial system. Over the past several decades, this market has evolved at multiple structural and temporal scales. New exchanges became active, and others stopped trading, regulations have been introduced and adapted, and technological innovations have pushed the pace of trading activity to blistering speeds. These developments have supported the growth of a rich machine-trading ecology that leads to qualitative differences in trading behavior at human (...) and machine time scales. We conduct a longitudinal analysis of comprehensive market data to quantify nonstationary dynamics throughout this system. We quantify the relationship between fluctuations in the number of active trading venues and realized opportunity costs experienced by market participants. We find that information asymmetries, in the form of quote dislocations, predict market-wide volatility indicators. Lastly, we uncover multiple micro-to-macro level pathways, including those exhibiting evidence of self-organized criticality. (shrink)

In the Tractatus, Wittgenstein advocates two major notational innovations in logic. First, identity is to be expressed by identity of the sign only, not by a sign for identity. Secondly, only one logical operator, called “N” by Wittgenstein, should be employed in the construction of compound formulas. We show that, despite claims to the contrary in the literature, both of these proposals can be realized, severally and jointly, in expressively complete systems of first-order logic. Building on early work of Hintikka’s, (...) we identify three ways in which the first notational convention can be implemented, show that two of these are compatible with the text of the Tractatus, and argue on systematic and historical grounds, adducing posthumous work of Ramsey’s, for one of these as Wittgenstein’s envisaged method. With respect to the second Tractarian proposal, we discuss how Wittgenstein distinguished between general and non-general propositions and argue that, claims to the contrary notwithstanding, an expressively adequate N-operator notation is implicit in the Tractatus when taken in its intellectual environment. We finally introduce a variety of sound and complete tableau calculi for first-order logics formulated in a Wittgensteinian notation. The first of these is based on the contemporary notion of logical truth as truth in all structures. The others take into account the Tractarian notion of logical truth as truth in all structures over one fixed universe of objects. Here the appropriate tableau rules depend on whether this universe is infinite or finite in size, and in the latter case on its exact finite cardinality. As it is obviously easy to express how propositions can be constructed by means of this operation and how propositions are not to be constructed by means of it, this must be capable of exact expression. 5.503. (shrink)

There is currently a debate over whether cognitive architecture is classical or connectionist in nature. One finds the following three comparisons between classical architecture and connectionist architecture made in the pro-connectionist literature in this debate: (1) connectionist architecture is neurally plausible and classical architecture is not; (2) connectionist architecture is far better suited to model pattern recognition capacities than is classical architecture; and (3) connectionist architecture is far better suited to model the acquisition of pattern recognition capacities by learning than (...) is classical architecture. If true, (1)–(3) would yield a compelling case against the view that cognitive architecture is classical, and would offer some reason to think that cognitive architecture may be connectionist. We first present the case for (1)–(3) in the very words of connectionist enthusiasts. We then argue that the currently available evidence fails to support any of (1)–(3). (shrink)

This paper proposes the ‘AGENCY model’ of conscious state attribution, according to which an entity's displaying certain relatively simple features (e.g. eyes, distinctive motions, interactive behavior) automatically triggers a disposition to attribute conscious states to that entity. To test the model's predictions, participants completed a speeded object/attribution task, in which they responded positively or negatively to attributions of mental properties (including conscious and non-conscious states) to different sorts of entities (insects, plants, artifacts, etc.). As predicted, participants responded positively to conscious (...) state attributions only for those entities that typically display the simple features identified in the AGENCY model (eyes, distinctive motion, interaction) and took longer to deny conscious states to those entities. (shrink)