The principal aim of this paper is to present a construction method for nontotal extensional combinatory algebras. This is done in $\S2$ . In $\S0$ we give definitions of some basic notions for partial combinatory algebras from which the corresponding notions for (total) combinatory algebras are obtained as specializations. In $\S1$ we discuss some properties of nontotal extensional combinatory algebras in general. $\S2$ describes a "partial" variant of reflexive complete partial orders yielding nontotal extensional combinatory algebras. Finally, $\S3$ deals with (...) properties of the models constructed in $\S2$ , such as incompletability, having no total submodel and the pathological behaviour with respect to the interpretation of unsolvable λ-terms. (shrink)
This study sought to identify whether or not differences exist between the ethical decisions of male and female managers; and, if they do exist, to identify the areas in which differences occurred. An additional evaluation was conducted to determine how each perceived their counterpart would respond to the same ethical decision making situations.Data were collected from 50 male managers and 50 female managers by means of a self-administered questionnaire. Distinctive demographic characteristics were noted among the segments.
Who or what determines the right to die? Do advancing reproductive technologies change reproductive rights? What forces influence cultural standards of beauty? How do discipline, punishment, and torture reflect our attitudes about the human body? In this challenging new book, Jean Bethke Elshtain, a nationally recognized scholar in political science and philosophy, and J. Timothy Cloyd, a strong new voice in social and political science, have assembled a collection of thought-provoking essays on these issues written by some of the (...) finest minds of our day. (shrink)
One of America's foremost public intellectuals, Jean Bethke Elshtain has been on the frontlines in the most hotly contested and deeply divisive issues of our time. Now in Real Politics , Elshtain gives further proof of her willingness to speak her mind, courting disagreement and even censure from those who prefer their ideologies neat. At the center of Elshtain's work is a passionate concern with the relationship between political rhetoric and political action. For Elshtain, politics is a sphere of (...) concrete responsibility. Political speech should, therefore, approach the richness of actual lives and commitments rather than present impossible utopias. In her essays, Elshtain finds in the writings of Václav Havel, Hannah Arendt, and Albert Camus a language appropriate to the complexity of everyday life and politics, and she critiques philosophers and writers who distance us from a concrete, embodied world. She argues against those repressive strains within contemporary feminism which insist that families and even sexual differentiation are inherently oppressive. Along the way, she challenges an ideology of victimization that too often loses sight of individual victims in its pursuit of abstract goals. Elshtain reaffirms the quirky and by no means simple pleasures of small-town life as a microcosm of the human condition and considers the current crisis in American education and its consequences for democracy. Beyond exploring the details of political life over the past two decades, Real Politics advocates a via media politics that avoids unacceptable extremes and serves as a model for responsible political discourse. Throughout her diverse and insightful writings, Elshtain champions a civic philosophy that tends to the dignity of everyday life as a democratic imperative of the first order. "Jean Bethke Elshtain is a person of rare intellect. The moral wisdom that pervades these essays reminds us that when all is said and done politics is about the life and death of real people who are anything but abstractions. Her erudition is remarkable, but equally stunning is her eye for the significant. What she is so good at is helping us see the moral and political significance of the everyday."--Stanley Hauerwas, Duke University " Real Politics serves as a forceful reminder that Jean Elshtain has been dealing with the real world in twenty-five years of powerful essaying. Transcending ideological categories, she writes out of hope that human beings can enjoy those capacities of reason and faith which make them human. It is a pleasure to be reintroduced to her sustained intelligence."--Alan Wolfe, Boston University. (shrink)
Certain features of Richard Rorty's account of liberal irony have provoked serious moral criticisms from some of his peers. In particular, Rorty's claim that anything can be made to look good or bad by being redescribed has struck some philosophers, such as Richard Bernstein and Jean Bethke Elshtain, for instance, as morally outrageous. In this article, I examine these criticisms and clarify the meaning and implications of Rorty's position. I argue that a more careful reading of Rorty reveals that (...) his position is not morally objectionable or depraved. Instead, the idea that anything can be made to look good or bad by being redescribed is an important insight that fosters tolerance, moral imagination and novel self-creation. In the concluding sections of this article, I address as well possible tensions between Rorty's account of redescription and his endorsement of truthfulness and the role that his private–public split plays in alleviating these tensions. Key Words: contingency • democracy • irony • public–private distinction • redescription • Richard Rorty • self-creation • truthfulness. (shrink)
In an era in which certain arenas of scientific research have become increasingly controversial, this article critically evaluates what it means to “believe in science.” Many scientists today seem to claim a sovereign right to no political interference under the rubric of freedom. This article questions such a notion, and explores the dominance of science and the silencing of moral voices by undertaking two brief investigations—the first into National Socialist Germany, which insisted that it was defined by “applied biology,” and (...) the second into the world of contemporary American biomedicine. When all ethical barriers are eradicated, it seems that a will to power takes over—manifested in Nazi Germany’s vaunted scientific autonomy. In light of these sobering historical examples, this article reminds the reader that members of the public, including physicians, rightly deliberate about how to conscientiously order their lives together, and that part of that instrinsically political deliberation is to set limits to the ways medical science is applied and what scientists may do in pursuit of their goals. (shrink)
Though Bonhoeffer is usually thought to have been one of the architects of modern theology, he was also one of modernity's most penetrating critics. The author lays out Bonhoeffer's challenges to certain cherished modern assumptions by examining (1) his linkage of totalitarianism to the political utopianism that arose out of the French Revolution, (2) his fear of the nihilistic implications of the rationalists' notion of the sovereign self and of the modern tendency to view life as an end in itself, (...) and (3) his suspicion of all forms of moral absolutism, including the Kantian absolutizing of the duty to tell the truth. What emerges is a picture of Bonhoeffer as a theologian who coupled a keen sense of our creatureliness and limitation with a resolute belief in the activity of God in history, and of Bonhoeffer as an ethicist who generated a Christian relational ethics that offers an alternative to both the ethics of abstract principle and the ethics of intuitive situational response. (shrink)
Recent critics have called attention to the alienation of contemporary academics from broad currents of intellectual activity in public culture. The general complaint is that intellectuals are finding a professional home in institutions of higher learning, insulated from the concerns and interests of a wider reading audience. The demands of professional expertise do not encourage academics to work as public intellectuals or to take up social, literary, or political matters in imaginative and perspicuous ways. More problematic is the relative absence (...) of religion in the writings of those who aspire to work as public intellectuals. This essay reviews recent attempts by William Dean, Cornel West, Jean Bethke Elshtain, Stephen Carter, and Robin Lovin to remedy the problem of academic alienation and to address the place(s) of religion in American life. (shrink)
In his day, theologian Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971) was immensely influential - a public intellectual and author of many books who even appeared on the cover of Time magazine (in 1948). He was a realist in political philosophy, and his book The Irony of American History continues to speak directly to the question of American imperialism. The current international situation requires serious reflection of the kind at which Niebuhr excelled, and Niebuhr's thought has experienced something of a revival. Pundits and politicians (...) from James Fallows, Jean Bethke Elshtain, and David Brooks to Bill Moyers, and Senators John Danforth and Barack Obama all cite Niebuhr's work with approval. If Niebuhr is attractive as a tough-minded political realist, he is insufficiently orthodox for some Christian theologians and ethicists. In this book, Richard Crouter offers an accessible introduction to Niebuhr's religious and political thought, while attempting to discover how Niebuhr can appeal to persons belonging to opposing political and religious camps, and whether his uncanny ability to speak to atheists as well as believers is a strength or weakness. (shrink)
The following essay examines the temptations of ultimacy in 20th-century politics, namely, the urge to infuse temporal arrangements with transcendentalmeaning and purpose. This sets up an idolatry of the state or of political processes and brings to a halt the complex dialectic between immanence and transcendence, between what Bonhoeffer calls the “penultimate” and the “ultimate.” This dialogic encounter between claims, loyalties, purposes, and meaningsdefines the West at her best. When the window to transcendence is slammed shut and politics is subsequently (...) sacralized, the result is a politics that crusheshuman freedom in the name of a divinized ideological purpose. In addition to Bonhoeffer, the essay brings the work of Albert Camus to bear in analyzing thismatter and offering up a politics that is neither “too low” (simply a remedy for sin) nor that aims too high and thereby, paradoxically, descends into those hellson earth that were 20th-century totalitarian societies. (shrink)
Available Again! Long before the "shock and awe" campaign against Iraq in March 2003, debates swarmed around the justifications of the U.S.-led war to depose Saddam Hussein. While George W. Bush's administration declared a just war of necessity, opponents charged that it was a war of choice, and even opportunism. Behind the rhetoric lie vital questions: when is war just, and what means are acceptable even in the course of a just war? Originally published in 1991, in the wake of (...) the first war against Iraq, Just War Theory explores this essential dilemma. With a new preface by the editor, the essays in this indispensable collection move beyond the theoretical origins of just war theory to examine issues faced by military strategists, politicians, social theorists, and anyone concerned with the provocations and costs of military action. Popular wisdom once claimed that notions of just war would become obsolete with the onset of "total warfare," characterized by attacks on civilians and undiscriminating weapons of mass destruction. While the last decade has been ripe with brutality, just war theory is more critical than ever to the future of international relations and public discourse. This readable collection is an invaluable introduction to the debate. (shrink)
