In Part One Paul Helm provides a general discussion of these themes, seeking both to contextualize the debate and to engage with contemporary philosophical discussion of the relation between faith, reason and understanding. Part Two contains five case studies that illustrate the work of seminal figures in the tradition. They include treatments of Augustine on time and creation, Anselm on the ontological argument and the necessity of the atonement, Jonathan Edwards on the nature of personal identity and John Calvin and (...) the ’sensus divinitatis’, focusing on the way in which Calvin has been appealed to by contemporary reformed epistemology. (shrink)

Paul Helm investigates what religious faith is and what makes it reasonable.

Recently there has been a resurgence of philosophical interest in love, resulting in a wide variety of accounts. Central to most accounts of love is the notion of caring about your beloved for his sake. Yet such a notion needs to be carefully articulated in the context of providing an account of love, for it is clear that the kind of caring involved in love must be carefully distinguished from impersonal modes of concern for particular others for their sakes, such (...) as moral concern or concern grounded in compassion. That is, we might say, the kind of caring that is central to love must be somehow distinctly intimate. The trouble is to cash out these firm intuitions in a satisfactory way. (shrink)

Large-scale transnational land acquisition of agricultural land in the global south by rich corporations or countries raises challenging normative questions. In this article, the author critically examines and advocates a human rights approach to these questions. Mutually reinforcing, policies, governance and practice promote equitable and secure land tenure that in turn, strengthens other human rights, such as to employment, livelihood and food. Human rights therefore provide standards for evaluating processes and outcomes of transnational land acquisitions and, thus, for determining whether (...) they are ethically unacceptable land grabs. A variety of recent policy initiatives on the issue have evoked human rights, most centrally through the consultation and negotiation of the Voluntary Guidelines on the Responsible Governance of Tenure of Land, Fisheries and Forests concluded in 2012. However, a case of transnational land appropriation illustrates weak host and investor state enforcement of human rights, leaving the parties to in interaction with local groups in charge of protecting human rights. Generally, we have so far seen limited direct application of human rights by states in their governance of transnational land acquisition. Normative responses to transnational land acquisition—codes of conduct, principles of responsible agricultural investment or voluntary guidelines—do not in themselves secure necessary action and change. Applying human rights approaches one must therefore also analyze the material conditions, power relations and political processes that determine whether and how women and men can secure the human rights accountability of the corporations and governments that promote large-scale, transnational land acquisition in the global south. (shrink)

Addresses the concept of truth in Chinese Daoist philosophy and ritual. Through wide-ranging research into Daoist ritual, both in history and as it survives in the present day, shows that the concept of true reality that informs this tradition posits being as a paradox anchored in the inexistent Way"--Provided by publisher.

Love, Friendship, and the Self presents a reexamination of our common understanding of ourselves as persons in light of the phenomena of love and friendship. It argues that the individualism that is implicit in that understanding cannot be sustained if we are to understand the kind of distinctively personal intimacy that love and friendship essentially involve. For love is a matter of identifying with someone: sharing for his sake the concerns and values that make up his identity as the person (...) he is. Moreover, in friendship the friends share not only a concern for each other but also their activity, their lives, and even potentially their selves. By providing a detailed analysis of these notions, Bennett Helm argues for an understanding of persons as essentially social. (shrink)

Philosophical accounts of freedom typically fail to capture an important kind of freedom—freedom to change what one cares about—that is central to our understanding of what it is to be a person. This paper articulates this kind of freedom more clearly, distinguishing it from freedom of action and freedom of the will, and gives an account of how it is possible. Central to this account is an understanding of the role of emotions in determining what we value, thus motivating a (...) rethinking of the importance of emotions in the mental lives of persons. (shrink)

It is somewhat striking that two interrelated elements of Hume's account of causation have received so little attention in the secondary literature on the subject. The first is the distinction of causation into the natural and the philosophical relations: Although many have tried to give accounts of why Hume presents two definitions of causality, it is often not clear in these accounts that the one definition is of causality as a natural relation and the other is of causality as a (...) philosophical relation, where to make the contrast between these two kinds of relations we need to give a naturalistic account of natural relations and a normative account of philosophical relations. (That Hume intends this to be the contrast will be defended in more detail below.) The second element is that, in many cases of our inferences from cause to effect, "we must follow our taste and sentiment" (A Treatise of Human Nature [T], 103), where the appeal to taste here, as in morality and aesthetics, is not to be understood as up to the individual. Rather, Hume makes it clear both in Book 3 of the Treatise and in "Of the Standard of Taste" that there are standards to which our individual judgments (in morality, aesthetics, or causality) must conform. My purpose in this paper is to attempt to provide an interpretation of Hume's account of causality that brings these two elements explicitly into the foreground. This interpretation is, to a greater extent than usual, a reconstruction of Hume's account of our causal inferences, drawing, as I have indicated above, from a range of texts not normally associated with Hume's discussion of causality. As such, this interpretation should be considered as exploratory in nature, perhaps focussing too single-mindedly on these two elements in an attempt to make out as strong a case as possible for their relevance in understanding Hume's account of causal inference. (shrink)

My aim is to understand at least some of the non-instrumental reasons we can have for action in a way that can provide a satisfying non-egoist account of 'social actions' - actions undertaken for the sake of others. I do this in part by presenting, in terms of a discussion of the rationality of emotions, an account of what it is for something to have import to an agent . I then extend this account to include our caring about others (...) as agents, in part by revealing the way in which one's emotional and desiderative responsiveness to another agent one cares about must be sensitive to her cares, so that one comes to share her cares. The upshot is substantial revision in our understanding of agency, both in terms of our understanding of the role emotions play in our agency and in terms of a careful extension of the scope of practical rationality to include what I call a 'rationality of import'. (shrink)

We propose the FoodSmart City framework as a transdisciplinary avenue to promote sustainable seafood consumption. We argue that a change in human seafood consumption towards eating at lower trophic levels may be helped by discovering forgotten cultural practices and tapping into locally-sourced marine resources. We set out a framework of knowledge exchange and production between academia, businesses, and civil society to promote and assist healthy and ecologically sustainable living using digital tools and intangible cultural heritage while engaging with innovative chefs (...) and educationalists. The framework targets Dublin City, Ireland, but may potentially be replicated in other contexts. (shrink)

Disintegration and mechanisation.--Sacrifice and atonement.--Communion and the community.--The life-mass and the death-mass.--Life's clair-obscure.

To identify oneself with something is for it to be a source of meaning and worth in one's life. Normally such identification is constituted by a certain holistic rational pattern both in one's judgments and will and in one's emotions and desires. However, one's identity can be fragmented into conflicting sources of meaning when the pattern in one's judgments becomes disconnected from that in one's emotions. By analyzing these kinds of fragmentation, I articulate some of the rational connections there are (...) between emotional attitudes and evaluative judgments and so ultimately the kinds of accord or integrity that are possible for persons. (shrink)

Authenticity, it is plausible to suppose, is a feature of one's identity as a person---of one's sense of the kind of life worth living. Most attempts to explicate this notion of a person's identity do so in terms of an antecedent understanding of what it is for a person to value something. This is, I argue, a mistake: a concern is not intelligible as a value apart from the place it has within a larger identity that the value serves in (...) turn to constitute; to assume otherwise is to risk leaving out the very person whose identity these values allegedly constitute. By contrast, I offer an account of values as always already a part of one's identity. I do so by providing an analysis of values in terms of what I call 'person-focused emotions,' emotions like pride and shame. Such emotions, I argue, involve a commitment to the import of a person primarily and, only secondarily, to things valued, and in this way enable us to understand what it is to value these things *for the sake of* the person. The upshot is a more satisfying account of a person's identity and values, an account that can provide the necessary background for a more thorough investigation of authenticity. (shrink)

Rationality is the constitutive ideal of the mental. Therefore it is important to understand the sort of rationality at issue here. It is often assumed that rationality just is instrumental rationality, but this leaves us with too thin a notion of desire: Desires centrally involve the notion of things mattering or being significant, for their objects must normally be worth pursuing to the subject. Such significance is simply unintelligible in terms of instrumental rationality. Consequently, understanding significance and its rational connections (...) to desire and action is essential to understanding rationality as a constitutive ideal. In particular, it is a crucial step in vindicating the idea of animal thought. ;I argue that significance, as well as desire, must be understood in part in terms of the emotions. Many prominent theories of emotions illegitimately conceive of significance as conceptually prior to the capacity for having emotions, in that things can be significant to a creature that does not have any emotions at all. In contrast, I argue first that a creature must have the capacity for emotions in order to be a subject of significance because to be significant is in part to be a suitable object of emotions generally. Second, emotions are essentially feelings not because they "involve" bodily sensations but because they are a distinctive kind of awareness of the significance of the world to the subject; particular occurrent emotions therefore presuppose that things are already significant to the subject. Consequently, emotions and significance form a conceptual package, with neither being prior to the other: Significance and the emotions emerge together in a pattern of instrumental and non-instrumental rationality that can be articulated in terms of their interconnected explanatory roles. ;Being a subject of beliefs and desires therefore requires more than simply rationally mediated goal-directedness, as Dennett believes. Rather, it requires being open, through the emotions, to the significance of the world and to the reasons that significance provides for action. This conclusion is shown to have important ramifications for our understanding both of a minimal sense of agency and of what it is to be a person. (shrink)

It is widely held that Locke propounded a theory of personal identity in terms of consciousness and memory. By ‘theory’ here is meant a set of necessary and sufficient conditions indicating what personal identity consists in. It is also held that this theory is open to obvious and damaging objections, so much so that it has to be supplemented in terms of bodily continuity, either because memory alone is not sufficient, or because the concept of memory is itself dependent upon (...) considerations of bodily continuity. Alternatively it has been suggested that Locke's theory could be modified by allowing that for the purposes of personal identity ‘remember’ should be regarded as a transitive relation. So if A remembers the experiences of B but not those of C, and B remembers the experiences of C, then A, B and C can be regarded as belonging to the same unit of consciousness. (shrink)

Drawing from Goffman’s original observations on stigma and the consequences of interactions between the stigmatized and supportive or stigmatizing audiences, we conduct a 20-year review of the diverse literature on stigma to revisit the collective nature of stigmatization processes. We find that studies on stigma’s origins, responses, processes, and outcomes have diverged from Goffman’s relational view of stigma as they have overlooked important relational mechanisms explaining the processes of (de)stigmatization. We draw from those conclusions to justify the need to study (...) stigma as a collective phenomenon. We develop a relational perspective on stigma based on understanding how attributes are stigmatized (or not) by audiences in their interactions. We argue that to advance stigma research, it is necessary to build on Goffman’s theory to include the stigmatizers (i.e., the normal) and supporters (i.e., the wise); how they create, sustain, or remove stigma; and how they relate to the stigmatized (i.e., the targets). Accordingly, we provide a research agenda on stigma as a collective phenomenon that theorizes a relational perspective, proposes a typology of how audiences relate to stigmatization, and identifies patterns of relations between audiences. We thus offer a missing piece to existing accounts of stigma by focusing on the key role of audiences (i.e., stigmatizers or supporters of the stigmatized) rather than on the targets of stigma (i.e., the own). (shrink)

This book is open access under a CC BY license. The first of its kind, this 'Report' gives an overview of the humanities worldwide. Published as an Open Access title and based on an extensive literature review and enlightening interviews conducted with 90 humanities scholars across 40 countries, the book offers a first step in attempting to assess the state of the humanities globally. Its topics include the nature and value of the humanities, the challenge of globalisation, the opportunities offered (...) by the digital humanities, variations in funding patterns around the world, and the interaction between humanities and society. Despite the stereotypical view of humanists as scholars locked away in their ivory towers, the picture that emerges from this report is that they are deeply committed to the social value of their work and appreciate the long-term importance it has for addressing global challenges. The report will be of interest not only to researchers and students in the humanities themselves, but also to administrators and funders. (shrink)

This volume on anthropology and authority in the writings of Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) offers its reader nineteen timely discussions of two fundamental categories pertaining to the literary, philosophical, and theological production of this prominent 19th century Danish thinker, whose vast influence upon 20th century intellectual life continues to grow as the new millennium approaches. The volume's nineteen contributors - from Canada, Denmark, Great Britain, Holland, Hungary, Italy, and the United States - inquire into such complex problematics in Kierkegaard's oeuvre as (...) the interrelationship between the human, the divine, and the spiritual; between the secular and the Christian; between human and Christian love; between state and church institutions and the single individual of faith; and between this individual's concern for quality in civic and religious life and the quantitative forces of modern society's masses and crowds. Special attention is given to the indisputable authority of God, Christ, and the apostles as opposed to the debatable authority, or non-authority, of the author. Of particular interest is the nexus between Kierkegaard's existential and religious concerns, on the one hand, and his intricate textual conceptions, multifarious poetic strategies, and various means of pseudonymous and indirect communication, on the other. Between the covers of Anthropology and Authority some chapters seek to refine received knowledge of Kierkegaard in such disciplines as theology and moral philosophy. Conversely, other chapters submit rather postmodern critiques of the author's stylistic and rhetorical devices. A summary assessment of the nineteen contributions would fail to recognize this considerable methodological and theoretical diversity. Instead, the reader's access to the smorgasbord of insights has been facilitated by an introduction in which one of the American editors briefly outline the individual contributions on a general historical and intellectual background. Altogether, the probing insights of Anthropology and Authority go to the core of Søren Kierkegaard's authorship. Individual chapters either update previous responses to the many challenges presented by this work, or the chapters face new challenges and/or present critical challenges on their own. (shrink)