An introduction to Thomas Aquinas's theology of the One Creator God, this book provides a basic explanation of Aquinas's theology, while showing its compatibility with contemporary science and relevance to current theological issues.

In his last work, "Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology", Edmund Husserl formulated a radical new approach to phenomenological philosophy. Unlike his previous works, in the "Crisis" Husserl embedded this formulation in an ambitious reflection on the essence and value of the idea of rational thought and culture, a reflection that he considered to be an urgent necessity in light of the political, social, and intellectual crisis of the interwar period. In this book, James Dodd pursues an (...) interpretation of Husserl's text that emphasizes the importance of the problem of the origin of philosophy, as well as advances the thesis that, for Husserl, the "crisis of reason" is not a contingent historical event, but a permanent feature of a life in reason generally. (shrink)

According to the discovery model in the ontology of art, the facts concerning the ontological status of artworks are mind-independent and, hence, are facts about which the folk may be substantially ignorant or in error. In recent work Amie Thomasson has claimed that the most promising solution to the ‘ qua problem’—a problem concerning how the reference of a referring-expression is fixed—requires us to give up the discovery model. I argue that this claim is false. Thomasson's solution to the qua (...) problem—a hybrid descriptive/causal theory of reference-fixing—has a superior competitor, in the form of the account of reference-fixing suggested by Gareth Evans; and Evans's theory leaves the discovery model untouched. (shrink)

Two features of Paul Horwich's minimalist conception of truth (1990) make it stand out from the deflationary crowd. First, Horwich takes propositions to be the primary vehicles of truth (1990: 17-18, Ch. 6). Second, he claims that an explicit definition of truth applicable to propositions cannot be given (1990: 26-31), and hence that the meaning of 'true' can only be determined by our disposition to assent to the infinitely many (non-paradoxical) instances of the following schema: (E) The proposition that p (...) is true if and only if p (1990:38). In a recent article Donald Davidson (1996) provides an objection to the effect that these two features of Horwich's minimalism conspire to ruin it. In this brief note I aim to show that a convincing reply is available to the minimalist. (shrink)

The Church's traditional teaching on divine immutability is frequently criticized today by theologians belonging to a wide variety of nationalities and confessions. Such theologians are frequently united in singling out St. Thomas Aquinas as the best representative of the tradition that they are criticizing. Unfortunately, however, their criticism often involves a misrepresentation of St. Thomas' actual teaching on divine immutability. This book provides a clear, accurate, and detailed account of St. Thomas' teaching, presented in a way that allows St. Thomas (...) to speak to the problems and issues that are raised in contemporary theology regarding divine immutability. (shrink)

Taking as its point of departure a reflection on Abel Gance’s 1919 film J’accuse!, and drawing on George Bataille’s theory of sacrifice, as well as the work of the cultural historian Jay Winter, this paper argues that one of the legacies of the First World War in intellectual and cultural history is a deep skepticism regarding the relation between war and sacrifice. This skepticism, which has its roots in the struggle with the meaning of the war during the years 1914-1918, (...) retains its resonance today, however enduring and even inevitable its evocation may otherwise be in our understanding of the Great War and the conflicts endemic to European and world history since. (shrink)

This paper argues that a consideration of the problem of providing truthmakers for negative truths undermines truthmaker theory. Truthmaker theorists are presented with an uncomfortable dilemma. Either they must take up the challenge of providing truthmakers for negative truths, or else they must explain why negative truths are exceptions to the principle that every truth must have a truthmaker. The first horn is unattractive since the prospects of providing truthmakers for negative truths do not look good neither absences, nor totality (...) states of affairs, nor Graham Priest and J.C. Beall’s ‘polarities’ (Beall, 2000; Priest, 2000) are up to the job. The second horn, meanwhile, is problematic because restricting the truthmaker principle to atomic truths, or weakening it to the thesis that truth supervenes on being, undercuts truthmaker theory’s original motivation. The paper ends by arguing that truthmaker theory is, in any case, an under-motivated doctrine because the groundedness of truth can be explained without appeal to the truthmaker principle. This leaves us free to give the ommonsensical and deflationary explanation of negative truths that common-sense suggests. (shrink)

If one flips an unbiased coin a million times, there are 2 1,000,000 series of possible heads/tails sequences, any one of which might be the sequence that obtains, and each of which is equally likely to obtain. So it seems (1) 'If I had tossed a fair coin one million times, it might have landed heads every time' is true. But as several authors have pointed out, (2) 'If I had tossed a fair coin a million times, it wouldn't have (...) come up heads every time' will be counted as true in everyday contexts. And according to David Lewis' influential semantics for counterfactuals, (1) and (2) are contradictories. We have a puzzle. We must either (A) deny that (2) is true, (B) deny that (1) is true, or (C) deny that (1) and (2) are contradictories, thus rejecting Lewis' semantics. In this paper I discuss and criticize the proposals of David Lewis and more recently J. Robert G. Williams which solve the puzzle by taking option (B). I argue that we should opt for either (A) or (C). (shrink)

The financial crisis of 2008 raised the politics of regulation to a new level of practical and scholarly attention. We find that recent reforms in U.S. financial markets hinge on intellectual resources and new organizational actors that are missing from existing concepts of regulatory capture or business power. In particular, small advocacy groups have proven significantly more successful in opposing the financial services industry than existing theories predict. By maintaining the salience of reform goals, elaborating new analytic frameworks, and deploying (...) specialized expertise in post-enactment debates, smaller organizations have contributed to a diffuse but often decisive network of pro-reform actors. Through the rule-writing process for macroprudential supervision and derivatives trading, these small organizations coalesced with other groups to form a new stability alliance that has so far prevented industry groups from dominating financial regulation to the degree that occurred in earlier cases of regulatory reform. (shrink)

Chancy counterfactuals are a headache. Dylan Dodd (2009) presents an interesting argument against a certain general strategy for accounting for them, instances of which are found in the appendices to Lewis (1979) and in Williams (2008). I will argue (i) that Dodd’s understates the counterintuitiveness of the conclusions he can reach; (ii) that the counterintuitiveness can be thought of as an instance of more general oddities arising when we treat vagueness and indeterminacy in a classical setting; and (iii) (...) the underlying source of discontent which animates Dodd’s complains is to be found in a certain general constraint one might impose on conditionals—what I’ll call the counterfactual Ramsey bound. Unfortunately, the counterfactual Ramsey bound is just as problematic as its famous indicative cousin. The moral is that there’s no comfortable resting place in this area; for violations of the counterfactual Ramsey bound are going to lead to prima facie surprising results. (shrink)

This case study examines five dimensions of the 2007–2009 financial crisis in the United States: the devastating effects of the financial crisis on the U.S. economy, including unparalleled unemployment, massive declines in gross domestic product, and the prolonged mortgage foreclosure crisis; the multiple causes of the financial crisis and panic, such as the housing and bond bubbles, excessive leverage, lax financial regulation, disgraceful banking practices, and abysmal rating agency performance; the extraordinary efforts of the Federal Reserve, the Federal Reserve Bank (...) of New York, and the Department of the Treasury to stem the financial freefall triggered by the crisis and resuscitate financial institutions, the ethical implications of the unprecedented actions by government institutions to rescue financial institutions and drag the country back from the brink of global financial collapse, and the conduct of the various parties contributing to the financial crisis, such as the shoddy behavior of mortgage brokers, the massive securitization of mortgages into overly complex bonds, the excessive leverage of financial institutions, the disgraceful work of bond rating firms, the abysmal risk management systems employed by financial institutions, and the massive operations of the shadow banking and over-the-counter derivatives markets; and the major provisions of the Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act signed into law to in response to the financial crisis and for the purpose of correcting the egregious conduct of major financial institutions. (shrink)

Social scientists are often interested in understanding how the dynamics of social systems are driven by the behavior of individuals that make up those systems. However, this process is hindered by the difficulty of experimentally studying how individual behavioral tendencies lead to collective social dynamics in large groups of people interacting over time. In this study, we investigate the role of social influence, a process well studied at the individual level, on the puzzling nature of success for cultural products such (...) as books, movies, and music. Using a “multiple‐worlds” experimental design, we are able to isolate the causal effect of an individual‐level mechanism on collective social outcomes. We employ this design in a Web‐based experiment in which 2,930 participants listened to, rated, and downloaded 48 songs by up‐and‐coming bands. Surprisingly, despite relatively large differences in the demographics, behavior, and preferences of participants, the experimental results at both the individual and collective levels were similar to those found in Salganik, Dodds, and Watts (2006). Further, by comparing results from two distinct pools of participants, we are able to gain new insights into the role of individual behavior on collective outcomes. We conclude with a discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of Web‐based experiments to address questions of collective social dynamics. (shrink)

The aim of this index of pre-1500 Platonic manuscripts is to prepare for a complete reediting of a new edition of Plato's works. The project, which began over ten years ago, brings together in one collection microfilms of all the older extant manuscript material. The index first lists the manuscripts according to the libraries in which they are found, including the library shelf number. The second half of the index lists the manuscripts by dialogue. The need for a new edition (...) of the Platonic text is based--for the most part--on the findings of E. R. Dodds in his work on the Gorgias. Dodds discovered that the nineteenth-century textual scholars oversimplified matters by assuming that the extant manuscripts were handed down by scribes. Dodds has shown that as much editing was done as transcribing; hence, the manuscripts could include "extensive possible unsystematic contamination." Also, the nineteenth-century scholars erred in assuming a "fixed rule of evidence." Thus--of three manuscripts-two having similar readings would be accepted and the third considered erroneous. However, probability theory shows that the agreement of two against one will work seven out of eight times. But the eighth instant will have the single reading as the right one--with no way of telling which out of the eight instances will have the single reading as the original. This new and convenient index should enhance Platonic scholarship.--J. J. R. (shrink)

In this response, the Australian Health Ethics Committee (AHEC) indicates that it shares, and has strategies in place to address, the majority of the concerns identified by Susan Dodds. AHEC believes it is too early to assess the full impact of the National Statement on Ethical Conduct in Research Involving Humans (1999) or to call for a major review of the ethics committee process. While some Human Research Ethics Committees (HRECs) are over-stretched, the system is not on the verge of (...) collapse. (shrink)