This article reviews recent developments in health care law, focusing on the engagement of law as a partner in health care innovation. The article addresses: the history and contents of recent United States federal law restricting the use of genetic information by insurers and employers; the recent federal policy recommending routine HIV testing; the recent revision of federal policy regarding the funding of human embryonic stem cell research; the history, current status, and need for future attention to advance directives; the (...) recent emergence of medical–legal partnerships and their benefits for patients; the obesity epidemic and its implications for the child’s right to health under international conventions. (shrink)
This article reviews recent developments in health care law, focusing on controversy at the intersection of health care law and culture. The article addresses: emerging issues in federal regulatory oversight of the rapidly developing market in direct-to-consumer genetic testing, including questions about the role of government oversight and professional mediation of consumer choice; continuing controversies surrounding stem cell research and therapies and the implications of these controversies for healthcare institutions; a controversy in India arising at the intersection of abortion law (...) and the rights of the disabled but implicating a broader set of cross-cultural issues; and the education of U.S. health care providers and lawyers in the theory and practice of cultural competency. (shrink)
Recent work in philosophy could benefit from paying greater attention to empirical results from cognitive science involving judgments about the nature of our ordinary experience. This paper describes the way that experimental and theoretical results about the nature of ordinary judgments could—and should—inform certain sorts of enquiries in contemporary philosophy, using metaphysics as an exemplar, and hence defines a new way for experimental philosophy and cognitive science to contribute to traditional philosophical debates.
Causation is a deeply intuitive and familiar relation, gripped powerfully by common sense. Or so it seems. But as is typical in philosophy, deep intuitive familiarity has not led to any philosophical account of causation that is at once clean, precise, and widely agreed upon. Not for lack of trying: the last 30 years or so have seen dozens of attempts to provide such an account, and the pace of development is, if anything, accelerating. (See Collins, Hall and Paul (...) 2003a for a comprehensive sampling of the latest work.) It is safe to say that none has yet succeeded. It is also safe to say that the effort put into their development has yielded a wealth of insights into causation. And it is, arguably, from the study of causal preemption—cases that feature multiple competing candidates for the title of “cause” of some given effect—that the greatest such wealth has flowed. These cases come in a number of varieties: so-called early and late preemption, symmetric overdetermination, and trumping preemption. Collectively, they place extremely severe constraints on any philosophical account of causation that can successfully handle them. One of the lessons they have to teach, then, is a lesson about the form that a successful analysis of causation must have. There is a deeper lesson, a lesson about the nature of causation itself, or if you like, about the workings of our causal concept. It emerges from close study of the struggles that extant accounts face in trying to provide even remotely attractive treatments of causal preemption. It is this: There appears to be a significant and perhaps intractable tension between one strand in our thinking about causation—a strand that emphasizes the need for causes to be connected to their effects via intervening processes with the right intrinsic character—and another—one that emphasizes the claim that effects in some sense depend on their causes. By the end of this essay, this tension will be vividly apparent.. (shrink)
Research on positive psychology demonstrates that specific individual dispositions are associated with more desirable outcomes. The relationship of positive psychological constructs, however, has not been applied to the areas of business ethics and social responsibility. Using four constructs in two independent studies (hope and gratitude in Study 1, spirituality and generativity in Study 2), the relationship of these constructs to sensitivity to corporate social performance (CSCSP) were assessed. Results indicate that all four constructs significantly predicted CSCSP, though only hope and (...) gratitude interacted to impact CSCSP. Discussion focuses upon these findings, limitations of the study, and future avenues for research. (shrink)
In this personal narrative the author recounts his experiences teaching bioethics in Pakistan. He notes the different moral, cultural and legal environments of Pakistan as compared to the United States, and in particular, the ways in which subtle interpretations of Sharia law shape bioethical reflections as well as the biomedical legal environment. As he argues, any attempt to export models of bioethics from one country to another with no attention to social and cultural differences is a recipe for failure. To (...) presume that all ethical considerations are universal is to devalue moral traditions that differ from our own, and dismiss cultural values of other societies. (shrink)
This article reviews recent developments in health care law, focusing on the engagement of law as a partner in health care innovation. The article addresses: the history and contents of recent United States federal law restricting the use of genetic information by insurers and employers; the recent federal policy recommending routine HIV testing; the recent revision of federal policy regarding the funding of human embryonic stem cell research; the history, current status, and need for future attention to advance directives; the (...) recent emergence of medical–legal partnerships and their benefits for patients; the obesity epidemic and its implications for the child’s right to health under international conventions. (shrink)
Among the many philosophers who hold that causal facts1 are to be explained in terms of—or more ambitiously, shown to reduce to—facts about what happens, together with facts about the fundamental laws that govern what happens, the clear favorite is an approach that sees counterfactual dependence as the key to such explanation or reduction. The paradigm examples of causation, so advocates of this approach tell us, are examples in which events c and e—the cause and its effect—both occur, but: had (...) c not occurred, e would not have occurred either. From this starting point ideas proliferate in a vast profusion. But the remarkable disparity among these ideas should not obscure their common foundation. Neither should the diversity of opinion about the prospects for a philosophical analysis of causation obscure their importance. For even those philosophers who see these prospects as dim—perhaps because they suffer post-Quinean queasiness at the thought of any analysis of any concept of interest—can often be heard to say such things as that causal relations among events are somehow “a matter of” the patterns of counterfactual dependence to be found in them. It was not always so. Thirty-odd years ago, so-called “regularity” analyses (so-called, presumably, because they traced back to Hume’s well-known analysis of causation as constant conjunction) ruled the day, with Mackie’s Cement of the Universe embodying a classic statement. But they fell on hard times, both because of internal problems—which we will review in due course—and because dramatic improvements in philosophical understanding of counterfactuals made possible the emergence of a serious and potent rival: a counterfactual analysis of causation resting on foundations firm enough to be repel the kind of philosophical suspicion that had formerly warranted dismissal.. (shrink)
If an object has a property essentially, it has that property in every possible world according to which it exists.2 If an object has a property accidentally, it does not have that property in every possible world according to which it exists. Claims about an object’s essential or accidental properties are de re modal claims, and essential and accidental properties are de re modal properties. Take an object’s modal profile to specify its essential properties and the range of its accidental (...) properties. Note that “world” as I am using it is a term of art: a modal realist believes that there are many concrete worlds, while the actualist believes in only one concrete world, the actual world. The ersatzist is an actualist who takes nonactual possible worlds and their contents to be abstracta. Essentialism is the view that objects have properties essentially, but one should distinguish deep essentialism from shallow essentialism. Deep essentialists take the (nontrivial) essential properties of an object to determine its nature— such properties give sense to the idea that an object has a unique and distinctive character, and make it the case that an object has to be a certain way in order for it to be at all.3 As Stephen Yablo (1987, 297) describes it, the essence of a thing is “an assortment of properties in virtue of which it is the entity in question,” as well as “a measure of what is required for it to be that thing.” Intuitively, on the deep essentialist picture, an ordinary object has essential properties, and it must have its essential properties in order for it to exist. On this view, objects’ essential properties are absolute, i.e., are not determined by contexts of describing (or thinking, etc.) about the object, and truths about such properties are absolute truths.4 Shallow essentialists oppose deep essentialists: they reject the view that objects can be said to have essential properties independently of contexts of description or evaluation, and so substitute context-dependent truths for the deep essentialist’s context-independent ones.. (shrink)
If persons, cats and cellphones are not identical to the sums that constitute them, there seems to be a problem with symmetric causal overdetermination: anything the cat causes is also caused by her constitutive sums of microparticles, atoms, molecules, etc. But persons, cats and cellphones are not identical to the sums that constitute them. I argue that the problem of constitutive overdetermination is serious, in particular because of the problem of additivity: if there is constitutive overdetermination, there is a transfer (...) of energy, momentum, or some other conserved quantity from each overdetermining cause to the effect, but each quantity alone is sufficient to bring about the effect. If these conserved quantities are additive, constitutive overdetermination violates the laws. I then argue that constitutive overdetermination is an artifact of a flawed interpretation of the layered model of the world and propose a new interpretation. The argument is developed in the context of a discussion of the relations between objects, but there are obvious connections to debates in philosophy of mind, especially debates concerning mental causation. (shrink)
I argue for a property mereology and for mereological bundle theory. I then apply this theory to the one over many problem (universals) and puzzles concerning persistence and material constitution.
A leaf falls to the ground, wafting lazily on the afternoon breeze. Clouds move across the sky, and birds sing. Are these events governed by universal laws of nature, laws that apply everywhere without exception, subsuming events such as the falling of the leaf, the movement of the clouds and the singing of the birds? Are such laws part of a small set of fundamental laws, or descended from such a set, which govern everything there is in the world?
While skiing, Suzy falls and breaks her right wrist. The next day, she writes a philosophy paper. Her right wrist is broken, so she writes her paper using her left hand. (Assume, as seems plausible, that she isn’t dexterous enough to write it any other way, e.g., with her right foot.) She writes the paper, sends it off to a journal, and it is subsequently published. Is Suzy’s accident a cause of the publication of the paper?2 Of course not. Below, (...) I will show that none of the major contenders for a theory of events coupled with a theory of causation succeeds against examples like that of Suzy’s accident, and that the reason for this derives from an underlying tension between our beliefs about events and our goals for theories of causation. I will then argue that property instances should be taken, in the first instance, as the causal relata, and propose an analysis of causation that I call aspect causation. (shrink)
Stakeholder theory provides a framework for investigating the relationship between corporate social performance (CSP) and corporate financial performance. This relationship is investigated by examining how change in CSP is related to change in financial accounting measures. The findings provide some support for a tenet in stakeholder theory which asserts that the dominant stakeholder group, shareholders, financially benefit when management meets the demands of multiple stakeholders. Specifically, change in CSP was positively associated with growth in sales for the current and subsequent (...) year. This indicates that there are short-term benefits from improving CSP. Return on sales was significantly positively related to change in CSP for the third financial period, indicating that long-term financial benefits may exist when CSP is improved. (shrink)
In response to counterexamples involving late preemption, David Lewis (1986) revised his original (1973) counterfactual analysis of causation to include the notion of quasi-dependence. Jonardon Ganeri, Paul Noordhof and Murali Ramachandran (1998) argue that their ‘PCA*-analysis’ of causation solves the problem of late preemption and is superior to Lewis’s analysis. I show that neither quasi-dependence nor the PCA*-analysis solves the problem of late preemption.
Counterfactual analyses of causation can provide elegant analyses of many cases of causation. However, they fail to give intuitively correct analyses of cases involving a commonplace variety of late preemptive causation. I argue that a small emendation can solve the problem.
Quentin Smith has argued that the new tenseless theory of time is faced with insurmountable problems and should be abandoned in favour of the tensed theory of time. Smith;s main argument attacks the fundamental premise of the tenseless theory: that tenseless truth conditions for tokens of tensed sentences adequately capture the meaning of tensed sentences. His position is that tenseless truth conditions cannot explain the logical relations between tensed sentences, thus the tensed theory must be accepted. Against Smith, this paper (...) adopts an alternative approach to the explanation of the entailment relations between sentences which contain indexicals. The approach drops the reliance upon tokens and instead relies on the evaluation of sentence types with respect to a context rather than upon actual or possible utterances of tokens of the types. This (new) version of the tenseless theory of time can adequately explain the relevant entailment relations between tensed sentences. (shrink)
This essay redefines the crisis of historicism as a collapse of trust. Following Friedrich Jaeger, it suggests that this crisis should be understood, not as a crisis caused by historicist methods, but as a crisis faced by the classical historicist tradition of Ranke. The "nihilism" and "moral relativism" feared by Troeltsch's generation did not primarily refer to the view that moral universals did not exist; rather, they expressed that the historical justification of bildungsbürgerliche values offered by classical historicism did no (...) longer work. In Niklas Luhmann's vocabulary, this is to say that moral values could no longer be trusted on historical grounds. But when the "reduction of complexity" offered by classical historicism collapsed, Troeltsch's generation faced a justification problem: what other modes of justification, if any at all, were available in a time of increasing secularization and growing feelings of discontinuity with the past? In identifying the crisis of historicism with this moral justification problem, this essay helps explain why such debts of despair could be reached in the early-twentieth-century disputes over historicism. (shrink)
This paper discusses the economic impact and political consequences of ethical investing, with particular attention to the case of South Africa. The origins of ethical investing are examined, along with the institutions and strategies by which ethical investing operates today. Of immediate relevance to managers is a recent judicial decision upholding Baltimore's divestment ordinance. The discussion concludes with an assessment of the likely consequences of ethical investing for U.S. multinationals in Southern Africa.
I would like to discuss the ontological grounds for what I shall call phenomenal knowledge. This sort of knowledge is a species of subjective knowledge, and is a kind of knowledge that we, as conscious beings, are all intimately acquainted with. It’s the sort of knowledge which one gets by experiencing or being aware of the world, by knowing what it is like to see qualitative properties like redness, by knowing what it is like to be oneself, by knowing what (...) it is like to be here, and by knowing what it is like to be here now. In other words, it is knowledge we get by having a certain sort of subjective experience. My task in this paper is to explore the nature of the ontology of this subjective experience in the hopes of shedding light on some of the debates where issues involving phenomenal knowledge come into play. To do this, I will distinguish phenomenal knowledge from other sorts of knowledge, explore the ontology of subjective experience that gives rise to phenomenal knowledge, and discuss a way in which clarity about the ontology of the subjective experience that grounds phenomenal knowledge can affect related disputes about physicalism in the philosophy of mind and other sorts of disputes in metaphysics involving reductionism. I shall assume first that there is an ontological story to tell about what subjective experience is in the actual world, and that actual phenomenal knowledge is knowledge that is somehow metaphysically “grounded” or dependent upon on actual subjective experience. I shall restrict myself to the ontology of the actual world, as I am not a fan of using conceptual analysis to restrictively determine ontology (I am no Canberra planner, or anything like), and apart from this, my task is hard enough without bringing modal issues into the picture. We can start with some basic vocabulary and distinctions. Assume that there is an unbridgeable epistemic divide between phenomenal knowledge and objective (and scientific) knowledge. Phenomenal knowledge is irreducibly subjective, and call the resulting divide.... (shrink)
Søren Kierkegaard used his literary, philosophical, and theological voice to reintroduce Christianity to Christendom. In this effort, he repeatedly uses the Apostle Paul’s first letter to the church in Corinth. Though some have noted the importance of 1 Corinthians for Kierkegaard, they have not explained this importance nor this letter’s role in Kierkegaard’s corpus. This essay seeks to fill this gap in Kierkegaard scholarship by explaining the role this letter plays in Kierkegaard’s Climacean authorship. Paul’s battle with the (...) Corinthian view of wisdom and Kierkegaard’s battle with Hegelian philosophy, which seeks to go beyond faith through speculative thinking, share similarities that engender both their works. In their battles with their respective foes, both develop a Christocentric epistemology that displaces the import of human understanding and cognitive content with the person Jesus who inverts their opponents’ epistemic values by salvifically redefining wisdom and knowledge. This epistemology of a different kind is an offense, foolishness, and absurd to their opponents because it cannot be intellectually grasped by human understanding, but rather in and through the passion of faith, which places the individual in relation with Jesus. For both authors, this relation is the essential point for the Christian life. (shrink)
The purpose of Pope John Paul''s encyclicalCentesimus Annus (CA) is to propound the foundations of a just economic order and to sketch its essential characteristics. As such he essentially provides an orientation or moral compass for the political economy rather than a precise road map. This article first reviews the principal components of CA and then analyzes and evaluates its central contentions on both cultural and economic grounds.
"[A Commentary on Jean-Paul Sartre's Being and Nothingness] represents, I believe, a very important beginning of a deservingly serious effort to make the whole ...
Although Paul Ricoeur's writings are widely and appreciatively read by theologians, this is the first book to offer a full, sympathetic yet critical account of Ricoeur's theory of narrative interpretation and its contribution to theology. Unlike many previous studies of Ricoeur, Part I argues that Ricoeur's hermeneutics must be viewed in the light of his overall philosophical agenda, as a fusion and continuation of the unfinished projects of Kant and Heidegger. Particularly helpful is the focus on Ricoeur's recent narrative (...) theory as the context in which Ricoeur deals with problems of time and the creative imagination; and it becomes clear that narrative stands at the crossroads of Ricoeur's search for the meaning of human being as well as his search for the meaning of texts. Part II examines the potential of Ricoeur's narrative theory for resolving certain theological problems, such as the dichotomy betweens the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith. In so doing Vanhoozer relates Ricoeur's work to that of theologians such as Barth, Bultmann, Tillich, Pannenberg, Frei and Tracy. (shrink)
Impossible worlds are regarded with understandable suspicion by most philosophers. Here we are concerned with a modal argument which might seem to show that acknowledging their existence, or more particularly, the existence of some hypothetical (we do not say “possible”) world in which everything was the case, would have drastic effects, forcing us to conclude that everything is indeed the case—and not just in the hypothesized world in question. The argument is inspired by a metaphysical (rather than modal-logical) argument of (...)Paul Kabay’s which would have us accept this unpalatable conclusion, though its details bear a closer resemblance to a line of thought developed by Jc Beall, in response to which Graham Priest has made some philosophical moves which are echoed in our diagnosis of what goes wrong with the present modal argument. Logical points of some interest independent of the main issue arise along the way. (shrink)
Jacob Boehme, the seventeenth-century mystical philosopher, had a significant influence upon Paul Tillich. In this article I offer a reassessment of the relationship between these two thinkers by arguing for an orthodox interpretation of Boehme's doctrine of God that links him more closely with Tillich than recent commentators have suggested. Specifically, I show how Boehme and Tillich stand united against the heterodox Hegel in their presentation of a dynamic process of divinity's self-differentiation and reconciliation that completes itself apart from (...) history rather than within history. This move, I conclude, keeps Boehme and Tillich squarely within the realm of Christian orthodoxy. (Published Online April 7 2006). (shrink)
Kant's treatment of pure aesthetic judgement can ignore ugliness, since an analytic of the ugly, according to a recent essay by Paul Guyer, uncovers the aesthetic impurity of the criteria against which we judge ugliness. Free beauty, as Kant expounds it, does not admit a contrary, and hence a Kantian account of ugliness, such as Guyer's, must look elsewhere in order to scrabble together terms for its definition. Yet if we recognise the ugly by its unsuitability as an object (...) of pure contemplation, then we have made a disinterested judgement of free ugliness. The pleasure of the harmony of the faculties, which is a pleasure in the way the world and our faculties fit together, observes itself contradicted by ugliness. (shrink)
Presents a response to the Paul Burkett's review of the book ``Ecology and Historical Materialism.'' Overview of the book; Details of the criticisms presented by Burkett; Information on sociologist Karl Marx's theory of history.
In 'Religious Pluralism and the Divine: Another Look at John Hick's Neo-Kantian Proposal' ("Religious Studies", xxx, 1994) Paul Eddy argues against the ultimate ineffability of the Real, and claims that a neo-Kantian epistemology leads to a Feuerbachian non-realism. In response I stress (a) the impossibility of attributing to the Real the range of incompatible characteristics of its phenomenal (i.e. experienceable) manifestations, so that it must lie beyond the range of our human religious categories, and (b) the distinction, (...) which Eddy fails to observe, between grounds for believing in the Divine, and reasons for thinking that the Divine can be differently conceived and experienced. (shrink)
Feminism and Farming: A Response to Paul Thompson’s the Agrarian Vision Content Type Journal Article Pages 1-6 DOI 10.1007/s10806-011-9328-0 Authors Erin McKenna, Department of Philosophy, Pacific Lutheran University, Tacoma, WA, USA Journal Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics Online ISSN 1573-322X Print ISSN 1187-7863.
Taking inspiration from developments in neurocomputational modeling, Paul Church-land develops his positions in the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of science. Concerning the former, Churchland relaxes his eliminativism at various points and seems to endorse a traditional identity account of sensory qualia. Although he remains unsympathetic to folk psychology, he no longer seeks the elimination of normative epistemology, but rather its transformation to a philosophical enterprise informed by current developments in the relevant sciences. Churchland supplies suggestive discussions of (...) the character of knowledge, simplicity, explanation, theory, and conceptual change. Many of his treatments turn on his prototype activation model of neural representation, which looks to the notion of a 'prototype' as it is employed in the psychological literature on concept representation, however, this and other features of Churchland's neurocomputational program do not square well with some of his views about cross-scientific relations. (shrink)
First, this article provides a survey of the kind of relationship that existed between Kepler and the Jesuits. Afterwards, it is pondered upon the likelihood of their having been in direct contact with each other while Kepler lived in Prague. The second part of the article is devoted to an investigation into the correspondence between Kepler and Paul Guldin as an example. Thus, the paper describes the key issues of those letters and concludes from this Guldin's attitude to Kepler (...) and the resulting commitment to Kepler's affairs. Finally, the article examines whether the assumption that Kepler and Guldin later discontinued their correspondence intensionally is verifiable and plausible. (shrink)
: The following comments on Paul Root Wolpe's article "If I Am Only My Genes, What Am I? Genetic Essentialism and a Jewish Response" address (1) his presentation of the relationship between science and culture or religion as unimodal; (2) his misconception of the Jewish view of the physical corpus; and (3) his essential question of genetic determinism by examining the traditional Jewish view of the spiritual aspects of the human.
Over a long career of teaching and writing in the area of moral theology Charles E. Curran has experienced large areas of agreement with John Paul II on issues of social justice even while in other areas of personal and sexual issues the two are in serious disagreement. This phenomenon of agreement/disagreement has suggested to Curran that the pope is guilty of using a double methodology in his moral theological writing. Curran's book, The Moral Theology of Pope John (...) class='Hi'>Paul II, seeks to uncover and substantiate the root of their agreements and disagreements. This article seeks to evaluate Curran's theory. This analysis is done in two parts: first, an examination of the evidence that Curran presents to support his charge against the pope, and second, an examination of the alternative possibility that it is Curran who has the double methodology rather than the pope. (shrink)
Paul Helm's discussion of my book is a clear illustration of some of my central claims about Anglo-American philosophy of religion: he instantiates its undue preoccupation with beliefs, and its erasure of gender. In my reply I show how Helm conflates my objection to such preoccupation with the absurd claim that beliefs are unnecessary, and how he conflates philosophy of religion – even rationality itself – with its Anglo-American variants. He refuses to engage with the masculinism implicit both in (...) his selectivity and in the boundaries he seeks to maintain around the discipline; boundaries which, I argue, need to be opened up for philosophy of religion to flourish. (shrink)
Paul Boyer shared a Nobel Prize in 1997 for his work on the mechanism of ATP synthase. His earlier work, though (which contributed indirectly to his triumph), included major errors, both experimental and theoretical. Two benchmark cases offer insight into how scientists err and how they deal with error. Boyer's work also parallels and illustrates the emergence of bioenergetics in the second half of the twentieth century, rivaling achievements in evolution and molecular biology.
From the point of view of a saint's life, the article addresses the question of integrating holiness and business dealings. By analyzing the heavy involvement of Vincent de Paul, a seventeenth century French saint, in the world of finance and politics as he ministered to the poor of his day, the study attempts to show that it is both possible and beneficial to join together the world of business with that of a religiously inspired ethic. The spiritually grounded (...) manner in which Vincent de Paul approached his institutional tasks and the ways in which those endeavors gave body to his spirituality present an unitary, non-dualistic instance of how business and morality can interact. (shrink)
Stemming from two conferences, held in 1994, and 1996, Prophecy and Diplomacy: The Moral Doctrine of John Paul II explores the general orientations and the specific applications of the moral teaching of Pope John Paul II. The first part of the book places the Pope's moral theory within a broader theological framework, attempting to identify the overarching philosophical and theological attitudes that shape the Pope's fundamental moral perspective. In part two, the work studies the Pope's teaching in the (...) areas of applied ethics. Both the major lecturers and the respondents focus upon those areas of applied ethics that have provoked the greatest tension between the magisterium and the academy and between the Church and the state in the West. The volume concludes by presenting a homily that places the ethics of John Paul II within a spiritual framework of repentance and redemption. The Pope's moral teaching is not an academic survey of ethical themes. Nor is it a Pelagian call to human self-regeneration. The ultimate truth concerning human conduct and moral judgement emerges only with the proclamation of God's grace. (shrink)
Paul Ricoeur, em “O si-mesmo como outro” define sua perspectiva ética como “o desejo de viver bem com e para os outros em instituições justas”. Tal concepção possui uma tríplice estrutura, a saber: a ipseidade, a alteridade e a igualdade. Sendo apresentadas como a “estima de si”, a “solicitude” e a “justiça”, momentos determinantes para que se possa responder à pergunta sobre a identidade ética, norteadora de sua filosofia moral – “ quem é o sujeito capaz de imputação moral?”. (...) Por isso, cumpre ao presente artigo analisar cada um de seus elementos constitutivos a fim de compreender sua lógica interna, bem como ressaltar o viés aristotélico-teleológico da filosofia ricoeuriana. (shrink)
This is a study in the philosophy of social science. It takes the form of a comparative critique of three contemporary approaches: ordinary language philosophy, hermeneutics and critical theory, represented here respectively by Ludwig Wittgenstein, Paul Ricoeur and Jürgen Habermas. Part I is devoted to an exposition of these authors' views and of the traditions to which they belong. Its unifying thread is their common concern with language, a concern which nonetheless reveals important differences of approach. For whereas ordinary (...) language philosophers tend to treat linguistic activity as the ultimate object of inquiry, both Ricoeur and Habermas regard it as a medium which betrays more fundamental dimensions of human experience and the social world. Part II complements the exposition with a critical analysis of its central themes: the conceptualisation of action, the methodology of interpretation, and the theory of reference and truth. The author defends many aspects of the work of Ricoeur and Habermas, such as the emphasis on power and ideology, the strategy of depth interpretation, and the link between consensus and truth; but he argues that there are serious deficiencies and obscurities in their work. He proposes solutions to these difficulties and concludes with a sketch of a critical and rationally justified theory for the interpretation of action - a critical hermeneutics. (shrink)
We think recent work in linguistics tells against the traditional claim that a string of words like (1) Every girl pushed some truck has two readings, indicated by the following formal language sentences (with restricted quantifiers): (1a) [!x:Gx]["y:Ty]Pxy (1b) ["y:Ty][!x:Gx]Pxy. In our view, (1) does not have any b-reading in which ‘some truck’ has widest scope.1 The issue turns on details concerning syntactic transformations and terms like ‘every’. This illustrates an important point for the study of natural language: ambiguity hypotheses (...) are indeed hypotheses—i.e., theoretical claims to be justified in light of various considerations, not theses whose truth can be directly observed by speakers. (shrink)
The argument is a dialectical one. It is not a direct proof that the mind is something more than a machine, but a schema of disproof for any particular version of mechanism that may be put forward. If the mechanist maintains any specific thesis, I show that [146] a contradiction ensues. But only if. It depends on the mechanist making the first move and putting forward his claim for inspection. I do not think Benacerraf has quite taken the point. He (...) criticizes me both for "failing to notice" that my ability to show that the Gödel sentence of a formal system is true "depends very much on how he is given. (shrink)
Andrew Dobson charts Sartre's transformation from novelist and apolitical philosopher of existentialism, before the Second World War, to a committed defender of Marxism and Marxist method after it. Examining Sartre's post-war work in detail, he shows how the biographies of Baudelaire, Genet and Flaubert, often considered tangential to his main oeuvres, are in fact central to this defence of Marxism, and should therefore be read as acts of political commitment. Andrew Dobson's study is new in its use of posthumous sources, (...) including one of the first extended commentaries in English of Volume II of the Critique of dialectical reason, and in its insistence on reading Sartre's philosophical development as primarily politically motivated. It provides a clear reading of some of Sartre's less familiar works, situating them in an overarching social and political project. (shrink)
It is contended that Falk Wagner's famous charge that Tillich just posits the existence of the Unconditional without further argument overlooks the transcendental character of Tillich's early writings from the nineteen twenties. There the transcendental is utilized for legitimating the transcendent. Tillich's transcendental account resembles the ontological argument in that the question of the transcendent's existence is affirmed via an inquiry into the conceptual implications its concept harbours. In his later writings, Tillich's abandons this transcendentalism in favour of his 'critical (...) phenomenology'. The weaknesses of this version of phenomenology are brought out in a comparison with Husserlian phenomenology. Finally, a remedy for the weaknesses of Tillich's approach is suggested by drawing on current antifoundationalist thought. (shrink)
Let R be an epistemic rule of the simplest type: "Accept sentence s!" Assume that R is a basic rule we actually follow: Our accepting the sentence cannot be explained by our following more fundamental rules of sentence-acceptance. Assume furthermore that we feel rationally obliged to follow R; that is, we all agree on the correctness of the epistemic norm N which says: We ought to accept s.
A few years back, well-known skeptic Michael Shermer and I were speakers at Baylor’s The Nature of Nature conference. During evening refreshments, we discussed how we could generate funds for our respective causes—he to promote skepticism and debunk people like me, and me to promote intelligent design and debunk Darwinism (which underwrites Shermer’s brand of skepticism). We agreed that we should start a highly visible campaign against each other in which we argue the dangers of the other’s position. Having escalated (...) the conflict between us, we could then go to our natural constituencies and urge them to fund each of us against the other. Of course, nothing ever came of that conversation. But we had a chuckle. And both our causes have since done quite well financially. (shrink)
Reviews a collection of John Deely's articles. Deely is interested in the relationship between semiotics on the one hand, and the realism of Thomas Aquinas and John Poinsot on the other.
It is acknowledged that the study of metaphor is a key inflection in Ricœur’s heremeneutics. It is perhaps less well known that this study is concomittant with one of parables, which represents an equally noteworthy inflection in Ricœur’s contribution to Biblical hermeneutics. Some, however, use this concommitance to argue that the transfer of some theological presuppositions (as to the nature of language and the Truth) is facilitated by this and then do not hesitate to claim that the pages devoted to (...) tha analogia entis , in The Rule of Metaphor , are proof of the presence of dubious theological interests in the development of his theory of metaphor. To counter this devastating critique, this article draws from some analyses by Umberto Eco, which imply that the relation between analogia entis and metaphor are not epistemologically scandalous as well as Alain, who sketched out an interpretation of parables which is very close to Ricœur’s. (shrink)
Situating narrative: philosophical and theological context -- Ethical being: the storied self as moral agent -- Reconciled being: narrative and pardon -- Pedagogies of pardon in praxis -- Towards a narrative pedagogy of reconciliation -- Ricoeur's legacy: A Praxis of Peace.
Introduction: Context and hisotry -- Introducing the dailogue partners : Torrance and Feyerabend -- Torrance : theology cohabiting with natural science -- Torrance's proposal : a new objectivity -- Feyerabend's challenge : 'knowledge without foundations' -- Two excuses -- Coherence and language -- From foundations to spirals -- Conclusion.
