This book features two old philosophical friends engaged in lively personal and intellectual conversations. Wary of any dogmatism, their dialogues explore the Big Bang and the joy of grandchildren, value theory and terrorism, God and art, metaphor and meaning, while assessing the thought of Robert S. Hartman, Alfred North Whitehead, Charles Hartshorne, H. Richard Niebuhr, and others.

In this article I express concern with the ideas of “perfect memory” and “objective immortality” as articulated by Charles Hartshorne. I borrow from the approach of J. J. Valberg, who explores “puzzles” such as the thought that all of our experience is a dream. I also explore what it might be like to live with an intense awareness of God’s presence.

The article examines Charles Hartshorne's claim that all events and values are given an "objective immortality" by being preserved in God's perfect memory. God's memory guarantees the meaningfulness of a fixed past, even when the past leaves no present trace on anything else. The article questions the physical basis of such a perfect memory in the structure of the universe, especially as entropy erodes the basis of information. Further, recent theories of memory, such as Gerald Edelman's, hold that memory changes (...) with each act of remembering. The analogy from human memory is therefore faulty. Hartshorne's view is stronger as eschatological metaphor than as sober ontology. (shrink)

This article consists in an autobiographical meditation on the Whiteheadian concepts of "linger" and "lure" as they relate to the past and future, respectively. It also examines the important experience of the presence of presence.

This article explores the ontological status of trees from a Whiteheadian panexperientialist viewpoint; it also explores how our relationship with trees affects who we are as human beings.

I seek in this paper to explore what might be meant by “the presence of God.” The sense of God’s presence, which never disappeared from the lives of many people, seems to be emerging quietly in the work of serious thinkers. Sometimes other terms, such as “spirit” or even “face,” hint at the issue. In later sections, I discuss the relevance of this issue to the thought of Alfred North Whitehead and others influenced by him. Finally, I discuss the reality (...) of trauma in human life and its implications for Whiteheadian thought and thought about the presence of God.I explore the sense we have ofpresence, something different from mind or body or objects or consciousness. We become aware of our own presence in the world and the unique and irreplaceable sense we have of our own presence. We become aware that sometimes we are more intensely present to other people than is normally the case. Then we begin to sense occasions when the other person becomes more intensely present to us. Some people search for a cosmic presence, hoping perhaps that we are not ultimately alone. (shrink)

Thomas Aquinas produced a voluminous body of work on moral theory, and much of that work is on virtue, particularly the status and value of the virtues as principles of virtuous acts, and the way in which a moral life can be organized around them schematically. Thomas Osborne presents Aquinas's account of virtue in its historical, philosophical and theological contexts, to show the reader what Aquinas himself wished to teach about virtue. His discussion makes the complexities of Aquinas's (...) moral thought accessible to readers despite the differences between Thomas's texts themselves, and the distance between our background assumptions and his. The book will be valuable for scholars and students in ethics, medieval philosophy, and theology. (shrink)

A critical but sympathetic treatment of Pierre Bayle.

" Our various cultures are symbolic environments or "spiritual ecologies" within which the Human Eros can thrive. This is how we inhabit the earth. Encircling and sustaining our cultural existence is nature.

the contrast and similarity between Rist and Macintyre can be better understood if we take into account their different interpretations of the Republic, especially their 1) descriptions of the primary problem faced by Plato, 2) their interpretation of Plato’s response to the problem, and 3) their evaluation of the contemporary relevance of the problem and his response. The differences and similarities between the views of MacIntyre and Rist on the Republic reflect much larger difference and similarities on the fundamental nature (...) of moral philosophy, the problem of relativism, and the importance of God for ethics. I have illustrated these similarities and differences in the context of their understanding of the problems faced by Plato, the nature and adequacy of his response, and the relevance of the response of later philosophical ethics. (shrink)

This book argues that Plato's Charmides presents a unitary but incomplete argument intended to lead its readers to substantive philosophical insights.

Books Reviewed in this Article: Towards a New Mysticism, Teilhard de Chardin and Eastern Religions. By Ursula King. Zen and the Bible: A Priest's Experience. By J.K. Kadowaki. Buddhism and Christianity, A Preface to Dialogue. By Georg Siegmund. Roman Catholicism: The Search for Relevance. By Bill McSweeney. The Church ‐ Maintained in Truth. By Hans Küng. The Communion of Saints. By Michael Perham. Identity and the Sacred: A Sketch for a New Social‐Scientific Theory of Religion. By Hans Mol. Sacrifice. Edited (...) by M.F.C. Bourdillon and Meyer Fortes. Theists and Atheists: A Typology of Non‐Belief By Thomas Molnar. Myth and Society in Ancient Greece. By Jean‐Pierre Vernant. The Alternative Tradition: Religion and the Rejection of Religion in the Ancient World. By James Thrower. Paulus im ältesten Christentum: Das Bild des Apostels and die Rezeption der paulinischen Theologie in der frühchristlichen Literatur bis Marcion. By Andreas Lindemann. Christ: the Christian Experience in the Modern World. By Edward Schillebeeckx. Interim Report on the Books “Jesus” and “Christ”. By Edward Schillebeeckx. Christologie im Präsens: Kritische Sichtung neuer Entwürfe. By Arno Schilson & Walter Kasper. Disput um Jesus and um Kirche. By Walter Kern. It is Not Lawful For Me To Fight: Early Christian Attitudes Toward War, Violence and the State. By Jean‐Michel Hornus. Byzantium and the Rise of Russia: A Study of Byzantino‐Russian Relations in the Fourteenth Century. By John Meyendorff. Reformation Principle and Practice: Essays in Honour of Arthur Geoffrey Dickens. Edited by Peter Newman Brooks. Adrianus Saravia. By Willem Nijenhuis. Rome and the Counter‐Reformation in Scandinavia, II. By Oskar Garstein. Winstanley the Digger: A Literary Analysis of Radical Ideas in the English Revolution. By T. Wilson Hayes. Perfect Fools. By John Saward. Lord Abbot of the Wilderness: The Life and Times of Bishop Salvado. By George Russo. St Edmund's House: The First Eighty Years. By Garrett Sweeney. Doubt and Religious Commitment: the Role of the Will in Newman's Thought. By M. Jaime Ferreira. The Philosophers: Their Lives and the Nature of Their Thought. By Ben‐Ami Scharfstein. Philosophies and Cultures. By Frederick C. Copleston. The Sceptical Feminist. By Janet Radcliffe Richards. Homosexuality and Ethics. Edited by Edward Batchelor, Jr. (shrink)

Thomas Alexander shows that the primary, guiding concern of Dewey's philosophy is his theory of aesthetic experience.

Conceptions of acceptability-based moral or political justification take it that authoritative acceptability constitutes, or contributes to, validity, or justification. There is no agreement as to what bar for authoritativeness such justification may employ. The paper engages the issue in relation to (i) the level of idealization that a bar for authoritativeness, ψ, imparts to a standard of acceptability-based justification, S, and (ii) the degree of discursive purchase of the discursive standing that S accords to people when it builds ψ. I (...) argue that (i) and (ii) are interdependent: high idealization values entail low discursive purchase, while high degrees of purchase require low idealization values. I then distinguish between alethic conceptions of justification that prioritize ends that commit to high idealization values, and recognitive conceptions that favour high discursive purchase. On this basis, I argue for a moderately recognitivist constraint on idealization. To render the recognitive discursive minimum available to relevant people at the site of justification, S should set ψ low enough so that it is a genuine option for actual people to reject relevant views in ways that S recognizes as authoritative. (shrink)

This paper explores the idea of robust discursive equality on which respect-based conceptions of justificatory reciprocity often draw. I distinguish between formal and substantive discursive equality and argue that if justificatory reciprocity requires that people be accorded formally equal discursive standing, robust discursive equality should not be construed as requiring standing that is equal substantively, or in terms of its discursive purchase. Still, robust discursive equality is purchase sensitive: it does not obtain when discursive standing is impermissibly unequal in purchase. (...) I then showcase different candidate conceptions of purchase justice, and draw conclusions about the substantive commitments of justificatory reciprocity. (shrink)

Moral and political forms of constructivism accord to people strong, “constitutive” forms of discursive standing and so build on, or express, a commitment to discursive respect. The paper explores dimensions of discursive respect, i.e., depth, scope, and purchase; it addresses tenuous interdependencies between them; on this basis, it identifies limitations of the idea of discursive respect and of constructivism. The task of locating discursive respect in the normative space defined by its three dimensions is partly, and importantly, an ethical task (...) that is beyond constructivism. Interdependencies between these dimensions call into question the possibility of a plausible and coherent form of discursive respect that is deep, inclusive in scope, and rich in purchase. This does not mean that we should reject discursive respect, or constructivism, for that matter. But it suggests that the task of reconciling the dimensions of discursive respect may not allow for widely shareable results. This task needs to be addressed on non-constructivist grounds. Accordingly, we have reasons to concede that constitutive forms of discursive standing are less fundamental in the order of justification than weaker, “derivative” forms, and this is so especially if we take constitutive standing to mark an important good. (shrink)

growing up in new mexico, I was passionate about geology, specifically paleontology. It led, in one adventure, to me being arrested by monks. While on a picnic with my parents at Jemez Springs, I had followed a beautiful Permian stratum, rich with crinoids and brachiopod shells, onto private land owned by The Servants of the Paraclete, a retreat for "whiskey priests."1 I was detained while one brother admonished me, kindly, and let me go, and even let me keep my specimens. (...) But the passion for the history of the earth and natural history in general remained. I was one of those kids who came late to the idea that what was taught at school and what I found of interest had any points of intersection, but I did come to... (shrink)

The paper challenges the view that public justification sits well with emancipatory and egalitarian intuitions. I distinguish between the depth, scope and the purchase of the discursive standing that such justification allocates, and situate within this matrix Rawls’s view of public justification. A standard objection to this view is that public justification should be more inclusive in scope. This is both plausible and problematic in emancipatory and egalitarian terms. If inclusive public justification allocates discursive standing that is rich in purchase, (...) as seems desirable in emancipatory terms, it may be unable to allocate equal standing to all relevant people. And if it is to allocate equal standing, then the equality of that standing should be construed in terms that allow for unequal discursive purchase. (shrink)

According to Rainer Forst, (i) moral and political claims must meet a requirement of reciprocal and general acceptability (RGA) while (ii) we are under a duty in engaged discursive practice to justify such claims to others, or be able to do so, on grounds that meet RGA. The paper critically engages this view. I argue that Forst builds a key component of RGA, i.e., reciprocity of reasons, on an idea of the reasonable that undermines both (i) and (ii): if RGA (...) builds on this idea, RGA is viciously regressive and a duty of justification to meet RGA fails to be agent transparent. This negative result opens the door for alternative conceptions of reciprocity and generality. I then suggest that a more promising conception of reciprocity and generality needs to build on an idea of the reasonable that helps to reconcile the emancipatory or protective aspirations of reciprocal and general justification with its egalitarian commitments. But this requires to downgrade RGA in the order of justification and to determine on prior, substantive grounds what level of discursive influence in reciprocal and general justification relevant agents ought to have. (shrink)

According to the “internal” conception (Quong), political liberalism aims to be publicly justifiable only to people who are reasonable in a special sense specified and advocated by political liberalism itself. One advantage of the internal conception allegedly is that it enables liberalism to avoid perfectionism. The paper takes issue with this view. It argues that once the internal conception is duly pitched at its fundamental, metatheoretical level and placed in its proper discursive context, it emerges that it comes at the (...) cost of public dogma. The paper examines this problem and argues that a plausible response to this problem is to go beyond the internal conception and adopt a more inclusive, dynamic conception. But this calls for a form of perfectionism. Thus, the internal conception of political liberalism, far from showing how liberalism can be had without perfectionism, effectively calls for perfectionism as a remedy for its problems. (shrink)

Public justification in political liberalism is often conceptualized in light of Rawls’s view of its role in a hypothetical well-ordered society as an ideal or idealizing form of justification that applies a putatively reasonable conception of political justice to political matters. But Rawls implicates a different idea of public justification in his doctrine of general reflective equilibrium. The paper engages this second, more fundamental idea. Public justification in this second sense is actualist and fundamental. It is actualist in that it (...) fully enfranchises actual reasonable citizens. It is fundamental in that political liberalism qualifies conceptions of political justice as reasonable to begin with only if they can be accepted coherently by actual reasonable citizens. Together, these features invite the long-standing concern that actualist political liberalism is objectionably exclusionary. I argue that the exclusion objection, while plausible, is more problematic in own right than it seems if actualist and fundamental public justification hypotheticalizes and discursive respect is compatible with substantive discursive inequality. This leaves proponents and critics of political liberalism with deeper questions about the nature of permissible discursive inequality in public justification. (shrink)

The paper advances a non-orthodox reading of political liberalism’s view of political legitimacy, the view of public political justification that comes with it, and the idea of the reasonable at the heart of these views. Political liberalism entails that full discursive standing should be accorded only to people who are reasonable in a substantive sense. As the paper argues, this renders political liberalism dogmatic and exclusivist at the level of arguments for or against normative theories of justice. Against that background, (...) the paper considers aspects of a more plausible, deeper and more inclusive idea of public political justification that builds on a thinner, potentially cosmopolitan idea of the reasonable. The paper considers what content such an idea may have, and identifies a method of inclusive abstraction through which it may be enriched in content to render it fruitful for the purposes of a justification of principles of political justice. But the move toward more depth and inclusiveness faces constructivism with two challenges. First, inclusivism about the scope of political justification might not be able to avoid dogmatism unless it invokes perfectionist considerations. And second, the authority and appeal of a fruitfully rich idea of the reasonable depends on whether the addressees of political justification already value wide acceptability. (shrink)

Contrary to some recent self-styled “linguistic pragmatists” who seek to dispense with the purportedly obsolete term “experience”. this essay attempts to show that pragmatism cannot cogently dispense with experience, understanding that term in its Deweyan sense as “culture” and not some sort of mentalistic perception or state. Focusing on Robert Brandom’s recent Perspectives on Pragmatism, I show how the very assumptions that Dewey meant to call into question with his “instrumentalist turn” in 1903 are enshrined in Brandom’s “new and improved” (...) form of pragmatism. Judged in terms of its pragmatic consequences, Brandom’s linguistic pragmatism returns to the well trodden paths and problems of analytic philosophy and not the radical approach that Dewey’s “cultural naturalism” (Dewey’s name for his philosophy) offers. The fundamental issue is not, I contend, between types of pragmatism at all but between conceptions of human nature and what a human life is. John Stuart Mill once said of Bentham that, for an empiricist, he had really very little experience, especially of human nature. I am afraid that the same judgment here is passed on those wishing to dispense with experience and somehow retain pragmatism. (shrink)

Three-dimensionalists , sometimes referred to as endurantists, think that objects persist through time by being “wholly present” at every time they exist. But what is it for something to be wholly present at a time? It is surprisingly difficult to say. The threedimensionalist is free, of course, to take ‘is wholly present at’ as one of her theory’s primitives, but this is problematic for at least one reason: some philosophers claim not to understand her primitive. Clearly the three-dimensionalist would be (...) better off if she could state her theory in terms accessible to all. We think she can. What is needed is a definition of ‘is wholly present at’ that all can understand. in this paper, we offer one. (shrink)

Internalism about epistemic justification (henceforth, ‘internalism’) says that a belief B is epistemically justified for S only if S is aware of some good-making feature of B, some feature that makes for B’s having positive epistemic status: e.g., evidence for B. Externalists with respect to epistemic justification (‘externalists’) deny this awareness requirement. Michael Bergmann has recently put this dilemma against internalism: awareness admits of a strong and a weak construal; given the strong construal, internalism is subject to debilitating regress troubles; (...) given the weak construal, internalism is unmotivated; either way, internalism is in serious trouble. I argue for two claims in this article. First, Bergmann’s dilemma argument is unmotivated: he’s given no good reason for accepting one of its crucial premises. And second, Bergmann’s dilemma argument is unsound: the crucial premise in question is false. (shrink)

The paper argues that applications of the principle that “ought” implies “can” (OIC) depend on normative considerations even if the link between “ought” and “can” is logical in nature. Thus, we should reject a common, “factualist” conception of OIC and endorse weak “normativism”. Even if we use OIC as the rule ““cannot” therefore “not ought””, applying OIC is not a mere matter of facts and logic, as factualists claim, but often draws on “proto-ideals” of moral agency.

Rainer Forst’s constructivism argues that a right to justification provides a reasonably non-rejectable foundation of justice. With an exemplary focus on his attempt to ground human rights, I argue that this right cannot provide such a foundation. To accord to others such a right is to include them in the scope of discursive respect. But it is reasonably contested whether we should accord to others equal discursive respect. It follows that Forst’s constructivism cannot ground human rights, or justice, categorically. At (...) best, it can ground them hypothetically. This opens the door wide for ethical foundations of human rights. (shrink)

This volume comprises essays presented to Alvin Plantinga on the occasion of his 70th birthday.

This paper presents an overview of the dimensions of unsafe motherhood, contrasting data from economically developed countries with some from developing countries. It addresses many common factors that shape unsafe motherhood, identifying medical, health system and societal causes, including women's powerlessness over their reproductive lives in particular as a feature of their dependent status in general. Drawing on perceptions of Jonathan Mann, it focuses on public health dimensions of maternity risks, and equates the role of bioethics in conscientious medical care (...) to that of human rights in public health care. The microethics of medical care translate into the macroethics of public health, but the transition compels some compromise of personal autonomy, a key feature of Western bioethics, in favour of societal analysis. Religiously‐based morality is seen to have shaped laws that contribute to unsafe motherhood. Now reformed in former colonizing countries of Europe, many such laws remain in effect in countries that emerged from colonial domination. UN conferences have defined the concept of ‘reproductive health’ as one that supports women's reproductive self‐determination, but restrictive abortion laws and practices epitomize the unjust constraints to which many women remain subject, resulting in their unsafe motherhood. Pregnant women can be legally compelled to give the resources of their bodies to the support of others, while fathers are not legally compellable to provide, for instance, bone‐marrow or blood donations for their children's survival. Women's unjust legal, political, economic and social powerlessness explains much unsafe motherhood and maternal mortality and morbidity. (shrink)