Several paleontologists have recently challenged the explanatory adequacy of the modern synthetic theory of evolution. Their position is that, contrary to the prevailing view that evolutionary change is gradual, the fossil record manifests long periods of species stasis punctuated by periods of rapid species formation. And, they argue, this punctuated equilibria pattern challenges the gradualist, adaptationist and extrapolationist assumptions of the modern synthetic theory of evolution and supports a hierarchical, non-extrapolationist view of evolution. In this paper I argue that the (...) challenge rests on an inadequate characterization of the modern synthetic theory and that, even accepting punctuated equilibria and an irreducible evolutionary hierarchy, the modern synthetic theory is adequate to explain evolutionary change at all levels of the hierarchy. (shrink)

The development of modern evolutionary ethics began shortly after the publication of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species by Natural Selection. Early discussions were plagued by several problems. First, evolutionary ethical explanations were dependent on group‐selection accounts of social behavior (especially the explanation of altruism). Second, they seem to violate the philosophical principle that “ought” statements cannot be derived from “is” statements alone (values cannot be derivedfrom facts alone). Third, evolutionary ethics appeared to be biologically deterministic, deemed incompatible with (...) the free will required for ethics to be possible. Fourth, social policies based on evolutionary theory (for example, eugenics in the early part of this century) seemed patently unethical. Sociobiology (which coalesced as a field of study with Edward O. Wilson's Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, 1975) addressed several of these problems and provided a rich framework and a new impetus for evolutionary ethics. The lingering problems were the philosophical is‐ought barrier and biological determinism. After tracing the early and more recent development of evolutionary ethics, I argue that the remaining problems can be surmounted and an incipient evolutionary ethics can be defended. Thoroughgoing evolutionaryethics must await theoretical developments in neurobiology and cognitive science. (shrink)

Benton Stidd has defended the position that punctuationists are not wrong about the inadequacy of the synthetic theory of evolution for explaining evolution. The thrust of his defense is that arguments to the contrary by Thompson involve a rational reconstruction along logical empiricist lines, which is insensitive to historical and social forces in a way that the Kuhnian Weltanschauung view that he espouses is not. I argue in this paper that Stidd has entirely misunderstood my arguments, that the soundness of (...) my arguments does not depend on acceptance of logical empiricism , and that Stidd fails to establish that punctuated equilibria is a new "paradigm". (shrink)

It is frequently argued that home birth is morally irresponsible because it involves the taking of risks on behalf of the fetus. Against this position, I argue three things. First, the fact that home birth involves risks does not necessarily entail that choosing or attending one is morally unacceptable, irresponsible or wrong. Second, parents have a prima facia prerogative to decide on behalf of their fetuses and children whether risks should be taken. While this prima facia prerogative can be overridden, (...) reasonable and widely accepted criteria for doing so are not met in the case of home birth. Third, since the current attitudes and behaviours of physicians with regard to home birth constitute a de facto morally and socially unjustifiable overriding of an informed parental decision, physician autonomy should be restricted so as to preserve the autonomy of the medical consumer. (shrink)

Several important analyses of the structure of evolutionary explanation have explicitly or implicitly required that historical laws be among the explanans statements. The required historical laws take the form of a generalization which relates some property or event to a developmental sequence of properties or events. The thesis of this paper is that historical laws of this kind are precluded by modern biological theory and, hence, analysis of evolutionary explanation within modern biology that require such laws are defective.

Although mathematical descriptions of the dynamics of system are widely employed in the physical sciences, they are employed infrequently in the biological sciences. The explanation for this usually appeals to the complexity of biological systems. I contend that quite the opposite is true and that such descriptions, in fact, enable complexity to be tamed. Moreover, in those areas in which mathematical descriptions have been used in the biological sciences, they provide a powerful vehicle for expanding our understanding of the systems (...) through an exploration of the mathematical models. Such investigations yield surprising information about the dynamics of the system some of which cannot be discovered through empirical investigation alone. (shrink)

Codes of conduct are a conspicuous feature of modern business organization, but doubts have been raised regarding their efficacy in ensuring high standards of behavior. Although some of the issues involved have been discussed at some length in the business ethics literature, the amount of systematic empirical evidence on the impact of codes is very limited. This paper seeks to make a contribution to that body of knowledge by studying the policies and procedures of a sample of banks which have (...) signed a statement on banking and the environment promulgated by the United Nations Development Programme. Although some differences are found when compared with a sample of banks which did not sign the Statement, they are not extensive. The implications of the findings, for codes of conduct and for future empirical studies, are then discussed. (shrink)

Transparency is the following (alleged) property of truth: if one possesses the concept of truth, then to assert, believe, inquire whether it is true that S just is to assert, believe, inquire whether S (and conversely). It might appear (as it did to Frege in 'Thoughts') that if truth ascriptions were transparent, then the truth predicate must be redundant; but the fact that some truth ascriptions are not transparent-for instance, those that quantify over, name, or describe the proposition(s) to which (...) truth is ascribed-shows that the truth predicate could not be redundant. It is argued that the apparent paradox is resolved by treating content as more basic than truth (and arguing, accordingly, that content cannot be explained, even in part, in terms of truth conditions). This strategy is illustrated by three candidate analyses, each of which treats the truth predicate as non-redundant but can, nevertheless, account for transparency. (shrink)

This book present interdisciplinary research in the social sciences and humanities by connecting seemingly disparate sources through a sensitivity to endangered human values. It links reflections on the contemporary relationship between art and technology in a post-modern context, seeing art in terms of crossing boundaries and exploring virtuality. It deals with the consequences of economics colonising other disciplines, in terms of the processes by which the social becomes the economic. Using Jantsch''s evolutionary paradigm, the concept of self-transcendence is seen as (...) crucial for the understanding of human beings and their social systems. Incorporating recent thinking from the natural sciences, the learning process can be conceived as the life and activity of all complex systems, including those once conceived as organisms, machines, cultures or economies. Without the societal embrace of scientific and technological development no collective or individual meaning can be assigned to the production of new knowledge. The book seeks to recognise the point where a collective learning process becomes the heart of productivity, and where the shift from the hegemony of material labour to immaterial labour becomes fundamental. The author brings new understandings of art, the social, and technology together, based on the idea that history is not a story told in separate physical, social and spiritual spaces and that the most fundamental problem of today is how to find some shared meaning in a fractured world. The author analyses, at a global level, the process of the co-production of scientific and social order, of culture and technology, of life sciences and economic and political regimes. It rightly identifies the rise of the role of knowledge and the move of capital into life sciences as a new stage in the history of capitalism: what we can qualify as cognitive capitalism or biocapitalism. In this new era of capitalism, what is being manufactured and sold are not just tangible and non-tangible goods, whose increasing importance, as the author shows, poses unsurmountable theoretical problems to the theoretical apparatus of economic science. The increasing mercantilisation of the world appears at the same time as a bio-power, i.e. a set of instruments creating and controlling different forms of life, forms of communication, standards of socialisation, education, the individual and collective imaginary, etc. More fundamentally, the encounter of life sciences and the information technology integrates and subjects the most essential mechanisms of biological and social reproduction to the logic of capital valorization. To understand the complexity of these changes and the ethical and philosophical questions that the development of technology and sciences poses to the future of mankind one must break through the disciplinary barriers delineating different disciplines in social sciences and those separating social sciences from natural sciences. Professor Matko Mestrovic manages to tackle this challenge not only because of his impressive and masterful knowledge of different disciplines in the social and natural sciences, but he does it also owing to his capacity for theoretical elaboration that allows him to lay the foundations of a new transdisciplinary paradigm. This is why his work can raise the awareness of the general public on two issues: on a global and profound vision of the challenges posed by the new millennium; and on the need for a radical theoretical innovation bringing into question the disciplinary certitudes in develop a social science able to better understand the movement and the ambiguity of history. - Carlo Vercellone, Universite de Paris 1, Pantheon-Sorbonne Mestrovic provides a unique insight into the often forgotten relation between economics on the one hand and arts and culture on the other, demonstrating that these adomains function as a total social facticity and not as separate, entirely independent elements thereof. In doing so he is dispelling the illusions about the disciplinary self-containdness of individual forms of knowledge and is relying on those paradigms of contemporary scientific thought whose aepistemiological programs are based on close cooperation and aopening up and not on the persuasion about one''s own positions and dispositions. - Prof. dr. Rade Kalanj, Redovni profesor na Odjelu za sociologiju. (shrink)

In answering the question “who is the subject of music,” we argue that it is a subject of excess and emergence, and we rely on the definition and development of these terms by Žižek and Björk. Such a subject is movement and activity; it exceeds the experiences, objects, others and symbolic order that make it who it is; and it emerges through desire and drive, and resonance and animation. We open with a brief discussion of Žižek’s subject of excess, which (...) we then relate to his approach to subjectivity in music. After an analysis of Björk’s music, centered on the piece “Black Lake” and from a perspective informed by Žižek’s account of subjectivity, we shift our attention to Björk’s thoughts on music in order to find elements that allow for the development of a subject of emergence. While the elements of excess and emergence are present in both accounts of the subject, Žižek’s and Björk’s respective focus on one of these concepts allow us to develop a fuller picture of subjectivity, particularly but not exclusively as it is engaged with in musical activities. (shrink)

About 6% of women in the world live in countries that ban all abortions, and 34% in countries that only allow abortion to preserve maternal life or health. In the USA, over the last decades—even before Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization overturned the federal right to abortion—various states have sought to restrict abortion access. Often times, this legislation has been advanced based on legislators’ personal moral values. At the bedside, in contrast, provision of abortion care should adhere to the (...) normative principles of medical ethics and reproductive justice, centreing patients and their individual reproductive intentions and desires. Abortion regulations, through their influence on patients and providers, may facilitate or impede such ethical care at the bedside. In this paper, we present a framework to model how abortion legislation should fit into the patient–provider relationship and to clarify the dynamics by which legislation may affect healthcare encounters. Our proposed framework serves as a tool to analyse the ethical impact of abortion regulations. We propose a model for assessing abortion policies based not on legislators’ or advocates’ individual moral claims, but on the shared, normative framework of clinical medical ethics. Through contrasting case studies, we demonstrate how a robust normative ethical framework can recentre patients and their reproductive needs. Our model is one way to account for—and safeguard—patients’ diverse viewpoints and needs in the development of abortion policy, and it can serve to ground narratives for advocacy by healthcare workers and their professional organisations. (shrink)

One version of the Problem of Divine Hiddenness is about people who are looking for God and are distressed about not finding him. Having in mind such distressed God-seekers, Blaise Pascal imagined Jesus telling them the following: “Take comfort; you would not seek me if you had not found me.” This is what I call the Pascalian Conditional of Hiddenness (PCH). In the first part of this paper, I argue that the PCH leads to a new interpretation of Pascal’s own (...) response to the problem, significantly different from Hick’s or Schellenberg’s interpretations of Pascal. In short: for any person who is distressed about not finding God, and who (for this reason) seriously considers the Argument from Hiddenness, the PCH would show that their own distress constitutes evidence that God is in fact not hidden to them (because this desire for God has been instigated in them by God himself). In the second part of the paper, I set aside the exegetical question and try to develop this original strategy as a contemporary response to one version of the Problem of Divine Hiddenness, which I call the “first-person problem.” I argue that the PCH strategy offers a plausibly actual story to respond to the first-person problem. As a result, even if we need to complement the PCH strategy with other more traditional strategies (in order to respond to other versions of the problem), the PCH strategy should plausibly be part of the complete true story about Divine Hiddenness. (shrink)

The alleged for-me-ness or mineness of conscious experience has been the topic of considerable debate in recent phenomenology and philosophy of mind. By considering a series of objections to the notion of for-me-ness, or to a properly robust construal of it, this paper attempts to clarify to what the notion is committed and to what it is not committed. This exercise results in the emergence of a relatively determinate and textured portrayal of for-me-ness as the authors conceive of it.

A group of philosophers suggests that a sense of mineness intrinsically contained in the phenomenal structure of all conscious experiences is a necessary condition for a subject to become aware of himself as the subject of his experiences i.e. self-awareness. On this view, consciousness necessarily entails phenomenal self-awareness. This paper argues that cases of delusions of thought insertion undermine this claim and that such a phenomenal feature plays little role in accounting for the most minimal type of self-awareness entailed by (...) phenomenal consciousness. First, I clarify the main view endorsing this claim i.e. the Self-Presentational View of Consciousness and formulate the challenge from thought insertion. After, I offer a systematic evaluation of all the strategies used by the advocates of this view to deal with this challenge. Finally, I conclude that most of these strategies are unsatisfactory for they rest in unwarranted premises, imprecisions about the agentive nature of cognitive experiences, and especially, lack of distinction between the different ways in which subjects can become aware of their own thoughts. (shrink)

After he has been condemned to death, Socrates spends a few minutes talking to the jurors before he is taken away. First, he rebukes those who voted against him for resorting to using the court to kill him when they could have waited and let nature do the same job very soon anyhow, for Socrates is an old man. He next contrasts the evils to which his accusers have resorted to his own unbending resolve never to resort to shameful actions, (...) even though in this case such things might have saved his life. Then he prophesies to those jurors that younger men will make their lives far more difficult than ever Socrates did, and thus strips from them any notion they may have had that they gained anything by condemning him. (shrink)

Classical commentary on the Mīmāṃsāsūtra, basic work of the Mimamsa school in Hindu philosophy by Jaimini.

Previous theoretical accounts have predicted that warfare and intergroup conflict are environmental factors that contribute to the emergence of a fast life-history strategy. However, this assumption has never been directly empirically tested. We examined youth who grew up in a territory that experienced violent intergroup conflict and compared them with a control group on various life-history measures: age of first sexual intercourse, mating behavior, desired timing of marriage and first reproduction and desired number of children. We also measured other characteristics (...) to explore the congruence between them and exposure to conflict. Participants from the postconflict society showed indications of faster life-history strategy: greater mating effort, a tendency to marry and have their first child sooner, and a larger desired number of children. Furthermore, interactions between exposure to conflict and participants’ sex were found: females from a postconflict society want to have their child earlier, and males have elevated short-term mating success. Finally, the exposure to violent conflict turned out to have congruent effects with economic poverty but not troublesome family relations. The findings are in accordance with life-history theory and show the adaptiveness of human behavior related to fitness optimization in hostile and dangerous environments. (shrink)

In the contemporary context of increasing inequality and various forms of segregation, this volume analyzes the transition to neoliberal politics in Santiago de Chile. Using an innovative methodological approach that combines georeferenced data and multi-stage cluster analysis, Méndez and Gayo study the old and new mechanisms of social reproduction among the upper middle class. In so doing, they not only capture the interconnections between macro- and microsocial dimensions such as urban dynamics, schooling demands, cultural repertoires and socio-spatial trajectories, but also (...) offer a detailed account of elite formation, intergenerational accumulation, and economic, cultural, and social inheritance dynamics. (shrink)

In evolutionary psychology, it is customary to measure life-history via psychometric inventories such as the Arizona Life History Battery. The validity of this approach has been questioned: it is argued that these measures are not congruent with biological life history events, such as the number of children, age at first birth, or pubertal timing. However, empirical data to test this critique are lacking. We therefore administered the ALHB to a convenience sample of young adults in Serbia. We also collected information (...) on psychosocial-biodemographic life history parameters closely related to biological life history traits: pubertal timing, onset of sexual behavior, short- and long-term mating, number of children, timing of reproduction, parenthood values, and environmental harshness. We found that correlations between these two sets of measures were rare, unsystematic, and mostly low in magnitude. Stable patterns of relations emerged only between the indicators of environmental conditions from both sets of measures. Furthermore, some ALHB indicators were found to be positively related with early fertility, which is incongruent with the conceptual foundation of ALHB. Finally, network analysis and factor analysis within each set of measures revealed different structures and that the hypothesis of unidimensionality, on which the ALHB was founded, cannot be applied to psychosocial-biodemographic life history indicators. Our results support the critique of ALHB as a set of measures lacking validity to capture biodemographic life-history parameters. ALHB measures are indeed relevant for understanding life-history variation, but they cannot be used as a substitute for specific life history characteristics. Our findings are a warning to researchers to use direct measures of biological events in order to measure life-history dynamics. (shrink)

The ancient Jewish law took a strict approach to medical relationships between Jews and non-Jews. The current study deals with the attitude of Amatus Lusitanus (1511–1568), a notable Portuguese Jewish physician towards treating gentiles. The Physician’s Oath of Lusitanus emphasises that as a doctor he treated people from varied faiths and socio-economic status. Lusitanus treated many non-Jews. For instance, he received an invitation from the municipality of Ragusa to serve as the town physician and he accepted this mission. In Anconare, (...) he was called upon to treat Jacoba del Monte, sister of Pope Julius III, and he also prescribed for Julius himself. Amatus Lusitanus was forced to leave his country because of the Portuguese inquisition and wandered in many countries. Despite the hostile religious attitude of his close surroundings, he did not retaliate against his patients and provided medical treatment indiscriminately. (shrink)

István Mészáros was one of the greatest political theorists of the twentieth century. Left unfinished at the time of his death, Beyond Leviathan is written on the magisterial scale of his previous book, Beyond Capital, and meant to complement that work. It focuses on the transcendence of the state, along with the transcendence of capital and alienated labor, while traversing the history of political theory from Plato to the present. Aristotle, More, Machiavelli, and Vico are only a few of the (...) thinkers discussed in depth. The larger objective of this work is no less than to develop a full-fledged critique of the state, in the Marxian tradition, and set against the critique of capital. Not only does it provide, for the first time, an-all-embracing Marxian theory of the state, it gives new political meaning to the notion of "the withering away of the state." In his definitive, final work, Mészáros seeks to illuminate the political preconditions for a society of substantive equality and substantive democracy. In his scholarly and personal introduction, John Bellamy Foster traces the gestation of this masterwork and its place in the history of political theory. (shrink)

There is an ongoing debate regarding the content of psychopathy, especially about the status of antisocial behavior and disinhibition characteristics as core psychopathy features. Psychopathic Personality Traits Scale (PPTS) represents a novel model of psychopathy based on core psychopathy markers such as Interpersonal manipulation, Egocentricity and Affective responsiveness. However, this model presupposes another narrow trait of psychopathy: cognitive responsiveness, which represents a lack of cognitive empathy. Since previous models of psychopathy do not depict this feature as a core psychopathy trait, (...) the goal of this study was to empirically evaluate if the lack of cognitive empathy is a narrow psychopathy trait or its correlate. The research was conducted on a community sample via online study (N=342; Mage=23.7 years; 31% males). Results showed that the correlations between Cognitive responsiveness and other psychopathy features were significantly lower than intercorrelations of other three traits. Factor analysis, conducted on PPTS items, provided a two-factor solution, where Cognitive responsiveness was yielded as a factor separate from other psychopathy indicators. Finally, the exploration of the shared latent space of psychopathy and cognitive empathy resulted in the two-factor solution where psychopathy and the lack of cognitive empathy were extracted as correlated but separate latent variables. The data clearly supported the former model. Research results showed that the lack of cognitive empathy should not be considered an indicator of psychopathy but its correlate. The findings emphasize the need to be cautious in conceptualization of the psychopathy construct. (shrink)

As John Bellamy Foster writes in his foreword to the present book, “István Mészáros is one of the greatest philosophers that the historical materialist tradition has yet produced. His work stands practically alone today in the depth of its analysis of Marx’s theory of alienation, the structural crisis of capital, the demise of Soviet-style post-revolutionary societies, and the necessary conditions of the transition to socialism. His dialectical inquiry into social structure and forms of consciousness—a systematic critique of the prevailing forms (...) of thought—is unequaled in our time.” Mészáros is the author of magisterial works like Beyond Capital and Social Structures of Forms of Consciousness, but his work can seem daunting to those unacquainted with his thought. Here, for the first time, is a concise and accessible overview of Mészáros’s ideas, designed by the author himself and covering the broad scope of his work, from the shortcomings of bourgeois economics to the degeneration of the capital system to the transition to socialism. (shrink)

Jean-Paul Sartre is a man who lived half his life in the limelight of extreme notoriety. An intellectual who already in 1945 had to protest against attempts aimed at institutionalizing the writer, turning his works into 'national goods', exclaiming: 'it is not pleasant to be treated in one's lifetime as a public monument'. What must be equally unpleasant is to be constantly subjected to abuse. And the fact is that no writer in his lifetime has been the target of so (...) many attacks, from the most varied and rather powerful quarters, as Jean-Paul Sartre. What are the reasons? How should we approach the work of this man, our contemporary? (shrink)

Recent work has demonstrated that the sense of agency is not only determined by efference-copy-based internal predictions and internal comparator mechanisms, but by a large variety of different internal and external cues. The study by Moore and colleagues [Moore, J. W., Wegner, D. M., & Haggard, P. . Modulating the sense of agency with external cues. Conscious and Cognition] aimed to provide further evidence for this view by demonstrating that external agency cues might outweigh or even substitute efferent signals to (...) install a basic registration of self-agency. Although the study contains some critical points that, so we argue, are central to a proper interpretation of the data, it hints at a new perspective on agency: optimal cue integration seems to be the key to a robust sense of agency. We here argue that this framework could allow integrating the findings of Moore and colleagues and other recent agency studies into a comprehensive picture of the sense of agency and its pathological disruptions. (shrink)

Comprehensive Hindi commentary on the Sāṅkhyakārikā, philosophical work of the Sankhya school in Hindu philosophy, by Īśvarakr̥ṣṇa.

In recommending a book like this, one is tempted to fall back on cliches such as 'brilliant insights', 'original perspectives', etc. The origina lity of this book is on a different plane. The problem of subject and object has been central to Western philo sophic thinking at least since the time of Descartes. So much so that many students of philosophy see it as the philosophical problem. In his Mundus Cognobilis and Mundus Causalis Mr. Mes offers an ontological-epistemological view, the (...) originality of which consists precisely in the fact that it is not an innovation. Rather, it seeks to put 'in order' the elements already at hand in such a way as to show the subject-object paradox to be non-existent where it seems to be significant and trivial where it really does occur. He has a new and interesting perspective both on what 'materialism' might mean and on how a 'scientific' view of the world has to be constructed. 'Energy-patterns' emerge as explanatory ulti mates, although there is no effort to arrive at any sort of ultimate meta physics. (shrink)

Contributed articles on epoch-making philosophical masterpiece of classical humanistics values and concentrated expression of the European renaissance ethics; translated into Tibetan.

Faced with the exponential development of Big Data and both its legal and economic repercussions, we are still slightly in the dark concerning the use of digital information. In the perpetual balance between confidentiality and transparency, this data will lead us to call into question how we understand certain paradigms, such as the Hippocratic Oath in medicine. As a consequence, a reflection on the study of the risks associated with the ethical issues surrounding the design and manipulation of this "massive (...) data" seems to be essential. This book provides a direction and ethical value to these significant volumes of data. It proposes an ethical analysis model and recommendations to better keep this data in check. This empirical and ethico-technical approach brings together the first aspects of a moral framework directed toward thought, conscience and the responsibility of citizens concerned by the use of data of a personal nature. Defines Big Data applications in health Presents the ethical value of the medical datasphere via the description of a model of an ethical analysis of Big Data Provides the recommendations and steps necessary for successful management and governance of personal health data Helps readers determine what conditions are essential for the development of the study of Big Data. (shrink)

Encounters in the Arts, Literature, and Philosophy focuses on chance and scripted encounters as sites of tensions and alliances where new forms, ideas, meanings, interpretations, and theories can emerge. By moving beyond the realm of traditional hermeneutics, Jérôme Brillaud and Virginie Greene have compiled a volume that vitally illustrates how reading encounters represented in artefacts, texts, and films is a vibrant and dynamic mode of encountering and interpreting. With contributions from esteemed academics such as Christie McDonald, Pierre Saint-Amand, Susan Suleiman, (...) and Jean-Jacques Nattiez, this book is a multidisciplinary collaboration between scholars from a range of disciplines including philosophy, literature, musicology and film studies. It uses examples chiefly from French culture and covers the Early Modern era to the twentieth century while providing a thorough and representative array of theoretical and hermeneutical approaches. (shrink)

Encounters in the Arts, Literature, and Philosophy focuses on chance and scripted encounters as sites of tensions and alliances where new forms, ideas, meanings, interpretations, and theories can emerge. By moving beyond the realm of traditional hermeneutics, Jérôme Brillaud and Virginie Greene have compiled a volume that vitally illustrates how reading encounters represented in artefacts, texts, and films is a vibrant and dynamic mode of encountering and interpreting. With contributions from esteemed academics such as Christie McDonald, Pierre Saint-Amand, Susan Suleiman, (...) and Jean-Jacques Nattiez, this book is a multidisciplinary collaboration between scholars from a range of disciplines including philosophy, literature, musicology and film studies. It uses examples chiefly from French culture and covers the Early Modern era to the twentieth century while providing a thorough and representative array of theoretical and hermeneutical approaches. (shrink)

While Kierkegaard’s philosophy focuses on concrete human existence, his thought has rarely been challenged regarding concrete and contemporary moral issues. This volume offers an overview of contemporary ethical issues from a Kierkegaardian perspective, deliberately taking him out of the sphere of Theology and Christian Ethics, and examining the ways in which his works can provide fruitful insight into questions which Kierkegaard certainly never himself envisaged, such as accepting refugees into our communities, understanding how we relate to social media, issues of (...) identity with regard to bioengineering or transgender identity, or problems of interreligious dialogue. The contributions in this volume, by international scholars, seek to address both the challenges and insights of Kierkegaard’s existential ethics for our contemporary societies, and its relation to topics of current interest in the field of moral philosophy. The volume is organized into three major sections: the first focusing on the relation between ethics and religion, a topic of primary importance with regard to the development of religious foundationalism and the challenges of dealing with diverse belief systems within our communities; the second on our understandings of ourselves and our relations to others with regard to issues of media and community; and the third targeting more specifically questions of identity, and the ways in which the developments of modern science impact identity construction. This work offers new paths for critically engaging with the moral issues of our times from an existential perspective. (shrink)

I have been dissatisfied with Walton’s make-believe model of appreciator engagement with fiction ever since my first encounter with it as a graduate student.1 What I have always objected to is not the suggestion that such engagement is broadly speaking imaginative; rather, it is the suggestion that it specifically involves de se imaginative activity on the part of appreciators. That is, while I concede that appreciators imagine (de re) of the fictional works they experience that they are thus and so, (...) I deny that they imagine (de se) experiencing an object that is thus and so.2 The main source of my dissatisfaction with the make-believe model is that it is phenomenologically unfamiliar; I have never been aware of de se imaginings of the requisite sort while appreciatively engaged with fiction.3 Of course, one could argue that it nevertheless occurs, albeit sub-consciously. But in order for this manoeuvre to be plausible, it would have to be established that there are appreciative phenomena that can only (or best) be explained by the supposition that appreciators engage in de se imagining, and which cannot be adequately explained by the supposition that they merely engage in de re imagining. Currie, for example, has argued that we need to make the former supposition in order to find a solution to the “problem of personality,” the problem of explaining why our emotional reactions to the plights of fictional characters often differ from our reactions to the similar plights of actual people.4 What I want to argue in this paper is that Currie’s defense of de se imaginative engagement is.. (shrink)

In video games, identification with avatars—virtual entities or characters driven by human behavior—has been shown to serve many interpersonal and intraindividual functions but our understanding of the psychological variables that influence players' avatar choices remains incomplete. The study presented in this paper tested whether players' preferred style of avatar creation is linked to the magnitude of self-perceived discrepancies between who they are, who they aspire to be, and who they think they should be. One-hundred-and-twenty-five undergraduate gamers indicated their preferred avatar (...) creation style and completed a values measure from three different perspectives: their actual, ideal, and ought selves. The average actual/ideal values discrepancy was greater among those who preferred idealized avatars vs. those who preferred realistic avatars. The average actual/ought values discrepancy was greater among those who preferred completely different avatars vs. those who preferred realistic avatars. These results, therefore, offer additional evidence that self-discrepancy theory is a useful framework for understanding avatar preferences. (shrink)

In this dissertation I re-assert the significance of the ancient Greek aphorism - ‘know thyself’: I identify the individual human self as the starting point and ubiquitous preamble of all epistemology and ontology. I argue that the primary feature of the way we find ourselves living is as an individual conscious bodily subject and this is the locus or starting point of all our possible knowledge. Although we find ourselves as individual subjects of experience and action we are not isolated; (...) rather we are always already with others as part of a wider world. I therefore propose a proto-ontology of ‘me, others, and world’ with corresponding interlocking modes of ‘individuality, intersubjectivity, and interdependence’. I argue that our direct knowing-by-being of our selves reveals some further primary facts about ourselves in terms of unity, compositionality, temporality, judgment, agency, and teleology. I acknowledge the phenomenological concept of pre-reflective self-awareness as an expression of the universal individuality of experience. However while some phenomenologists want to confine this mineness to the way that experience occurs, I argue that this mineness points to a more substantial knowing of ourselves as bodily subjects or selves. I claim that this human centered starting point becomes relevant or critical when we try to construct - or claim to have knowledge of - universal metaphysical theories such as scientism, which purports to be able to give a complete physicalist scientific picture of the world that sees nothing special in our individual first person perspectives. I argue that purely third personal objective scientific metaphysical theories have a blind spot in accounting for consciousness, which is what makes possible any theory whatsoever. Also since the twentieth century the results of physical science itself, notably quantum physics, seem, on some interpretations, to point to a reality that is not independent of individual observers. To alleviate these problems, I argue for a re-ordering of the priority of self and science. I reject strong forms of scientific realism and scientism in favour of a view that understands science as just one form of our human exploration of our world. Our knowing-by-being of ourselves is existentially and epistemically prior to any third-person knowledge and reflects our human cosmic significance as sources of explanatory knowledge and judgment. However, because our experience of ourselves is from within a wider world we should not expect to have a complete ontological picture of everything. Our limited ontological knowledge leaves us in a situation of subject and object duality but this is not a matter of dividing the world; rather it is a matter of recognizing our own situation. This can be seen as limiting, in that we are not in a position to know everything: but a proper understanding of ourselves liberates us from universalist doctrines and allows us to know ourselves as a source of nature’s self understanding from within. (shrink)

In an attempt to learn from COVID-19, this essay features six responses to the question: what did COVID-19 teach us, expose in us, or purge out of us when it comes to spiritual formation in Christ? Each response was written independently of the others by one of the coauthors. Diane J. Chandler focuses in on how COVID-19 exposed grievous inequities for ethnic groups in the American church and broader society. Kelly M. Kapic reminds us of the goodness of human finitude (...) and how COVID restrictions have forced many of us to embrace our limitations. Siang-Yang Tan reflects on eight lessons he has learned during this pandemic year in his role shepherding a local church. James C. Wilhoit calls us to consider the structures that are needed for local church leadership to make wise and godly decisions in times of crisis. Richard Peace draws our attention to what might be learned from the forced monasticism brought about by COVID-19 quarantines. Finally, Ruth Haley Barton pauses to consider the interdependence of human life that has been dramatically illustrated by this pandemic. While these six responses certainly do not exhaust all there is for the church to learn from COVID, we present them in the spirit of “O Lord, teach us what we do not see” and hope they will inspire your own reflections. (shrink)

The Glass Bees by Ernst Jünger was first published in Germany in 1957. It is a speculative fictional work that foretells much of what today is the reality of life in a technological society. Of particular import is his portrayal of the ambiguity of human character and moral guideposts that leave only power to mediate human relationships. These psychological and cultural symptoms can be traced to a society under the unremitting spell of the extension of technique. Headlines drawn from today (...) demonstrate that the portrayal was not overstated. (shrink)

In “The Desire Theory of Claim-Rights,” Brian Kierland presents an analysis of the concept of a claim-right according to which one person has a claim-right against another just in case there is a perfect correlation between (1) whether the second person has a duty owed to the first and (2) whether the first wants the second to do the act in question. I respond by suggesting that in certain cases, including a variant of the case of Ulysses and the Sirens, (...) the Desire Theory has seriously counter-intuitive implications. (shrink)