Coming out of mission efforts focused on evangelism, the rising Business as Mission movement stakes a claim to effective holistic mission by focusing on profit, evangelism, and development. Research indicates, however, that the development aspect of this `triple bottom line' is significantly weak. If, in fact, Business as Mission efforts were to incorporate the social and political dimensions of development, there would be great potential for a partnership with grassroots organizations to bring about deep-reaching social transformation.

Shepherd appears to endorse something like the following biconditonal regarding qualities and objects. □(An object, O, exists ↔ Some bundle of qualities, Q1, Q2, … Qn exists). There is a growing consensus in the secondary literature that she also takes the right side of this biconditional to ground the left side. I.e. Shepherd is a bundle theorist who takes an object to be nothing but a mass of qualities, or causal powers. I argue here that despite appearances, this interpretation reverses (...) Shepherd's actual view. I.e. I argue that for Shepherd qualities, or causal powers, are grounded in the intrinsic constitutions of objects. In the case of "external objects", these intrinsic constitutions are unknowable to us; in the case of "internal objects", we have direct knowledge of them. (shrink)

Lady Mary Shepherd holds that the relation of cause and effect consists of the combination of two objects to create a third object. She also holds that this account implies that causes are synchronous with their effects. There is a single instant in which the objects that are causes combine to create the object which is their effect. Hume argues that cause and effect cannot be synchronous because if they were then the entire chain of successive causes and effects would (...) all collapse into a single moment, and succession would not be possible. I argue that Shepherd has a ready, although implicit response, to Hume’s argument. Since causation is combination on Shepherd’s view, she is free to hold that there are times in between those instants in which combinations occur, during which times other, non-combinatory changes occur, which changes account for succession. (shrink)

William James is frequently considered one of America's most important philosophers, as well as a foundational thinker for the study of religion. Despite his reputation as the founder of pragmatism, he is rarely considered a serious philosopher or religious thinker. In this new interpretation David Lamberth argues that James's major contribution was to develop a systematic metaphysics of experience integrally related to his developing pluralistic and social religious ideas. Lamberth systematically interprets James's radically empiricist world-view and argues for an (...) early dating for his commitment to the metaphysics of radical empiricism. He offers a close reading of Varieties of Religious Experience; and concludes by connecting James's ideas about experience, pluralism and truth to current debates in philosophy, the philosophy of religion, and theology, suggesting James's functional, experiential metaphysics as a conceptual aid in bridging the social and interpretive with the immediate and concrete while avoiding naive realism. (shrink)

How do people attribute responsibility in situations where the contributions of multiple agents combine to produce a joint outcome? The prevalence of over-determination in such cases makes this a difficult problem for counterfactual theories of causal responsibility. In this article, we explore a general framework for assigning responsibility in multiple agent contexts. We draw on the structural model account of actual causation (e.g., Halpern & Pearl, 2005) and its extension to responsibility judgments (Chockler & Halpern, 2004). We review the main (...) theoretical and empirical issues that arise from this literature and propose a novel model of intuitive judgments of responsibility. This model is a function of both pivotality (whether an agent made a difference to the outcome) and criticality (how important the agent is perceived to be for the outcome, before any actions are taken). The model explains empirical results from previous studies and is supported by a new experiment that manipulates both pivotality and criticality. We also discuss possible extensions of this model to deal with a broader range of causal situations. Overall, our approach emphasizes the close interrelations between causality, counterfactuals, and responsibility attributions. (shrink)

Kant’s Inferentialism draws on a wide range of sources to present a reading of Kant’s theory of mental representation as a direct response to the challenges issued by Hume in A Treatise of Human Nature. Kant rejects the conclusions that Hume draws on the grounds that these are predicated on Hume’s theory of mental representation, which Kant refutes by presenting objections to Hume’s treatment of representations of complex states of affairs and the nature of judgment. In its place, Kant combines (...) an account of concepts as rules of inference with a detailed account of perception and of the self as the locus of conceptual norms to form a complete theory of human experience as an essentially rule-governed enterprise aimed at producing a representation of the world as a system of objects necessarily connected to one another via causal laws. This interpretation of the historical dialectic enriches our understanding of both Hume and Kant and brings to bear Kant’s insights into mental representation on contemporary debates in philosophy of mind. Kant’s version of inferentialism is both resistant to objections to contemporary accounts that cast these as forms of linguistic idealism, and serves as a remedy to misplaced Humean scientism about representation. (shrink)

For Shepherd, how many things exist? On the one hand, it looks like the answer is going to be many. It is a central tent of Shepherd's philosophical system that causation is a relation whereby two or more objects combine to create a third. Since there are many instances of this causal relation, there must be many objects in the world. On the other hand, there are several moments throughout her writing where Shepherd indicates that the distinction between causes and (...) effects is in some sense unreal, and that while the world appears to us to consist of many distinct objects interacting causally, really there is just one thing and its merely nominally distinct parts. I argue that Shepherd is an ontological pluralist, and the texts that appear to express a commitment to ontological monism are best understood as expressing ontological holism instead. (shrink)

People can be taught to manipulate symbols according to formal mathematical and logical rules. Cognitive scientists have traditionally viewed this capacity—the capacity for symbolic reasoning—as grounded in the ability to internally represent numbers, logical relationships, and mathematical rules in an abstract, amodal fashion. We present an alternative view, portraying symbolic reasoning as a special kind of embodied reasoning in which arithmetic and logical formulae, externally represented as notations, serve as targets for powerful perceptual and sensorimotor systems. Although symbolic reasoning often (...) conforms to abstract mathematical principles, it is typically implemented by perceptual and sensorimotor engagement with concrete environmental structures. (shrink)

Scholars working on Kant’s Anticipations of Perception generally attribute to him an argument that invalidly infers that objects have degrees of intensive magnitude from the premise that sensations do. I argue that this rests on an incorrect disambiguation of Kant’s use of Empfindung as referring to the mental states that are our sensings, rather than the objects that are thereby sensed. Kant’s real argument runs as follows. The difference between a representation of an empty region of space and/or time and (...) a representation of that same region as occupied by an object entails that, in addition to their extensive magnitude, objects must be represented as having a matter variable in intensive magnitude. Since it is the presence of sensation in a cognition that marks the difference between representing only the extensive magnitude of the object and the object as a whole, it is sensation that represents its intensive magnitude. (shrink)

A `slippery slope' argument in medical ethics is one that opposes itself to a new proposal on the grounds that it is not _per se_ intolerable but will lead to a situation that is. Lamb evaluates such arguments, demonstrating their centrality to the subject.

Understanding the distinction between impressions and ideas that Hume draws in the opening paragraphs of his A Treatise on Human Nature is essential for understanding much of Hume's philosophy. This, however, is a task that has been the cause of a good deal of controversy in the literature on Hume. I here argue that the significant philosophical and exegetical issues previous treatments of this distinction (such as the force and vivacity reading and the external-world reading) encounter are extremely problematic. I (...) propose an alternative reading of this distinction as being between original mental entities and copied mental entities. I argue that Hume takes himself to discover this distinction as that which underlies our pre-theoretical sorting of mental entities. Thus, while the Copy Principle is initially treated by Hume as a mere empirical fact, it later comes to play a more substantial explanatory role in his account of human nature. This reading makes Hume's distinction a more philosophically robust one, and avoids many of the exegetical difficulties of previous interpretations. (shrink)

Examining the emergence, in the inter-war years, of what came to be called 'Keynesian macroeconomics'. This study accepts the novelty of the latter, as represented by the IS-LM model, which in various forms came to dominate the sub-discipline for three decades. It argues, however, that this model did not represent a radical change in economic thinking but rather an extremely selective synthesis of those which had permeated the preceding literature, including Keynes's own contributions to it, not least the General Theory. (...) Hence the book questions the appropriateness of thinking of this development as the outcome of a 'Keynesian Revolution' in economic thought, partly because the most radical aspects of Keynes's own intended contribution were excluded from it, but mainly because IS-LM is better viewed as the end result of twenty years or more of intellectual development to which many others besides Keynes contributed. (shrink)

I here discuss Hegel's rule-following considerations as they are found in the first four chapters of his Phenomenology of Spirit. I begin by outlining a number of key premises in Hegel's argument that he adopts fairly straightforwardly from Kant's Transcendental Deduction. The most important of these is that the correctness or incorrectness of one's application of a rule must be recognizable as such to the rule-follower. Supplementing Hegel's text as needed, I then argue that it is possible for an experiencing (...) subject to follow a rule only where there is a community of individuals whose agreement can provide a standard for the correctness and incorrectness of his use. I further argue that a community must consist of members that are compresent, and thus that a collection of time-slices of an individual will not serve this purpose. I conclude by raising a potential problem for Hegel's account of rule-following concerning the correctness and incorrectness of the judgments of a community, and pointing to a possible line of response to this problem. (shrink)

In his, ‘Descartes' Ontology of Thought’, Alan Nelson presents, on Descartes' behalf, a compositional theory of mental representation according to which the content of any mental representation is either simple or is entirely constituted by a combination of innate simples. Here the simples are our ideas of God, thought, extension, and union. My objection will be that it is simply ludicrous to think that any four simples are adequate to the task of combining to constitute all of human thought, and (...) that the simples God, thought, extension, and union are particularly ill suited to it. (shrink)

In his contribution to the Journal of Medical Ethics, Joseph Mazor1 makes a logical case, based on the premises underlying his reasoning, for his article's primary thesis: he concludes that parents have the prerogative to determine the ‘best interests’ of their infant son in a circumcision decision. If the facts of the matter were ultimately no different from what he adduces, one could admit the soundness of his argument. But the paper is flawed by some questionable assumptions and grievous incompleteness.First, (...) the author insufficiently explores the profound implications of a serious equivocation in the term ‘circumcision’ that is common throughout the literature. He does superficially reference the article on ‘Circumcision’ in The Jewish Encyclopedia, which describes in detail the actual steps involved in brit milah versus brit periah.2 Despite this general allusion, though, he hardly discusses the matter further, as though the distinction were practically irrelevant. It does have fundamental import, however. Milah is merely a token clip of the very tip of the prepuce, which leaves most of the organ system intact. This was evidently the version practiced in biblical times under the old Abrahamic–Mosaic covenant, before the Talmudic guardians of Judaic ethnic and religious identity proposed a means to prevent Hellinising Jewish men from attempting foreskin restoration by stretching their remaining preputial tissue forward. The rabbis mandated the replacement of milah with the more drastic procedure of periah, a radical surgery that cuts and tears from the penis its entire covering, leaving the glans irreversibly denuded. Unlike traditional milah, the innovation of periah necessarily has significant adverse consequences .Second, Mazor concedes that circumcision might cause a ‘moderate’ reduction of sexual pleasure in the lad's …. (shrink)

Kant’s argument in the First Analogy for the permanence of substance has been cast as consisting of a simple quantifierscope mistake. Kant is portrayed as illicitly moving from a premise such as (1) at all times, there must exist some substance, to a conclusion such as (2) some particular substance must exist at all times. Examples meant to show that Kant makes this mistake feature substances coming into and out of existence, but doing so at overlapping times. I argue that (...) Kant offers an argument against this kind of example in the following passage. Kant’s claim is that, were substances to be created and destroyed as in the example, the appearances would then be related to two different times, in which existence flowed side by side, which is absurd. For there is only one time, in which all different times must not be placed simultaneously but only one after another (A188–9/B231–32). (shrink)

Um die Presse- und Meinungsfreiheit wird Tag für Tag gerungen - auch in Deutschland, wo sie im Grundgesetz verankert ist. Was darf man sagen? Wie weit geht die Meinungsfreiheit? Wo endet die Toleranz? Diese Fragen müssen immer wieder auf ein Neues beantwortet werden. Auch in der Demokratie wird die Meinungsfreiheit bedroht. Politscher Populismus und verrohte Kommunikation im Internet stellen das Grundrecht auf die Probe. Rechtsextremisten inszenieren sich als Opfer einer vermeintlichen Meinungsdiktatur, Hasskommentare zerstören die Streitkultur und provozieren neue Gesetze, die (...) im schlechtesten Fall ihrerseits die Meinungsfreiheit aushöhlen. Gut verständlich beschreiben Experten unterschiedlicher Disziplinen die Dimensionen und Herausforderungen der Meinungsfreiheit. Daraus ergibt sich eine facettenreiche Darstellung zu einem der großen Themen unserer Zeit. (shrink)

Populism has become one of the most intensely discussed topics in both public debate and academic research. So far there has been no systematic argumentation theoretic analysis of populism, however. This paper is intended to provide first steps towards such an analysis by giving a full argumentation theoretic reconstruction of the political manifesto of the German right-wing populist party “Alternative for Germany” (AfD). This allows to draw preliminary conclusions about the AfD’s argumentative strategy as exemplary for right-wing populism.

In this commentary on the recommendations of the Danish Council of Ethics (DCE) concerning criteria for death it is argued that whilst the DCE is correct in stressing the cultural aspects of death, its adoption of cardiac-oriented criteria raises several problems. There are problems with its notion of a 'death process', which purportedly begins with brain death and ends with cessation of cardiac function, and there are serious problems regarding its commitment to a cardiac-oriented definition whilst permitting transplantation when the (...) heart is still beating. (shrink)

This paper is a reply to proposals to base priority health-care decisions on public opinion surveys. Whilst it is recognised that current practice is less than satisfactory, it is argued here that basing health-care priorities on societal attitudes in this way is not a solution and does not provide a satisfactory basis for bringing democracy to the health service.

When the United States Supreme Court used the expression “with all deliberate speed” in the case Brown v. Board of Education, it did so presumably because of its vagueness. Many jurists, economists, linguists, and philosophers accordingly assume that vagueness can be strategically used to one’s advantage. Roy Sorensen has cast doubt on this assumption by strictly differentiating between vagueness and generality. Indeed, most arguments for the value of vagueness go through only when vagueness is confused with generality. Sorensen claims that (...) vagueness – correctly understood – has no function in law inter alia because judges lie systematically when confronted with borderline cases. I argue that both claims are wrong. First, judges do not need to resort to lying when adjudicating borderline cases, and even if they had to, this would not render vagueness useless. Secondly, vagueness has several important functions in law such as the reduction of decision costs and the delegation of power. Although many functions commonly attributed to the vagueness of legal expressions are in fact due to their generality or other semantic properties, vagueness has at least these two functions in law. (shrink)

David McNeill, a pioneer in the ongoing study of the relationship between gesture and language, here argues that gestures are active participants in both speaking and thinking. He posits that gestures are key ingredients in an “imagery-language dialectic” that fuels speech and thought. The smallest unit of this dialectic is the growth point, a snapshot of an utterance at its beginning psychological stage. In _Gesture and Thought,_ the central growth point comes from a Tweety Bird cartoon. Over the course (...) of twenty-five years, the McNeill Lab showed this cartoon to numerous subjects who spoke a variety of languages, and a fascinating pattern emerged. The shape and timing of gestures depends not only on what speakers see but on what they take to be distinctive; this, in turn, depends on the context. Those who remembered the same context saw the same distinctions and used similar gestures; those who forgot the context understood something different and changed gestures or used none at all. Thus, the gesture becomes part of the growth point—the building block of language and thought. _Gesture and Thought _is an ambitious project in the ongoing study of how we communicate and how language is connected to thought. (shrink)

This Presidential Address to the 2008 Annual Meeting of the William James Society pursues an overlooked avenue to understanding what James might have intended by his claim in Pragmatism to offer a “genetic theory of what is meant by truth.” The author argues that we can plausibly interpret this specific claim of James by appealing to Hermann Lotze’s conception of “genetic definition,” explicated in his 1874 Logik, which James read and annotated closely. The essay concludes by pursuing the implications of (...) this thesis for understanding Pragmatism, ‘truth’ in James, and truth and pragmatism in relation to James’s other philosophical commitments. (shrink)

In this classic, David Bohm was the first to offer us his causal interpretation of the quantum theory. _Causality and Chance in Modern Physics_ continues to make possible further insight into the meaning of the quantum theory and to suggest ways of extending the theory into new directions.

In _Panpsychism in the West_, the first comprehensive study of the subject, David Skrbina argues for the importance of panpsychism -- the theory that mind exists, in some form, in all living and nonliving things -- in consideration of the nature of consciousness and mind. Despite the recent advances in our knowledge of the brain and the increasing intricacy and sophistication of philosophical discussion, the nature of mind remains an enigma. Panpsychism, with its conception of mind as a general (...) phenomenon of nature, uniquely links being and mind. More than a theory of mind, it is a meta-theory -- a statement about theories of mind rather than a theory in itself. Panpsychism can parallel almost every current theory of mind; it simply holds that, no matter how one conceives of mind, such mind applies to all things. In addition, panpsychism is one of the most ancient and enduring concepts of philosophy, beginning with its pre-historical forms, animism and polytheism. Its adherents in the West have included important thinkers from the very beginning of Greek philosophy through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to the present. Skrbina argues that panpsychism is long overdue for detailed treatment, and with this book he proposes to add impetus to the discussion of panpsychism in serious philosophical inquiries. After a brief discussion of general issues surrounding philosophy of mind, he traces the panpsychist views of specific philosophers, from the ancient Greeks and early Renaissance naturalist philosophers through the likes of William James, Josiah Royce, and Charles Sanders Peirce -- always with a strong emphasis on the original texts. In his concluding chapter, "A Panpsychist World View," Skrbina assesses panpsychist arguments and puts them in a larger context. By demonstrating that there is panpsychist thinking in many major philosophers, Skrbina offers a radical challenge to the modern worldview, based as it is on a mechanistic cosmos of dead, insensate matter. _Panpsychism in the West _will be the standard work on this topic for years to come. (shrink)

Economic models of addiction are choice-based. These models push the choice paradigm too far by modeling addiction as rational, normative behavior. Heyman's target article provides a sensible alternative to this economic approach by emphasizing that addiction is characterized by ambivalence and a perceived loss of self control. However, matching may not be a satisfactory platform on which to build this alternative model. Matching experiments do not provide evidence of ambivalence or perceived loss of self control.

This paper examines the development of the concept of brain death and of the criteria necessary for its recognition. Competing formulations of brain death are assessed and the case for a ‘brainstem’ concept of death is argued. Attention is finally drawn to some of the ethical issues raised by the use of neurological criteria in the diagnosis of human death.

This paper argues that geography has a prominent, though at present underdeveloped, role to play in the moral education of young people. The need for geography teachers at all levels to engage students effectively with matters, themes and issues associated with 'supercomplex' environmental processes of various kinds, in a global context, requires the application of morally careful teaching. This is the case with respect to both the way selected content is handled in the classroom and the curriculum context in which (...) it is placed. These are arguments which reassert the prime importance of identifying the educational goals of geography programmes. The paper goes on to recommend the rediscovery by geography teachers of 'values education' strategies to allow students to engage in the dialectic between universals and relativities simultaneously. There are particular reasons why at school level the moral dimension of geography has been marginalised over recent years, and these are discussed in the paper. The paper also takes care to distinguish the promotion of environmental values and such like from educational values which require students to make judgements through the careful reading of information, argument and a propensity to reconsider what is right. The paper as a whole therefore considers the question of what geography is for. (shrink)

This book is written for researchers, students and professionals in areas including animal welfare ethics, animal behaviourists, veterinarians, veterinary nurses, animal welfare counsellors, animal trainers, and professionals and volunteers with an interest in animal welfare ethics. Several of the main areas of ethical inquiry concerning animals are introduced, explained and analysed. Inquiries also cover cultural traditions affecting the well being of animals, and discussions concerning the role of aesthetics in practices relevant to the welfare of animals. Unlike many books which (...) feature arguments about ethical theories this book includes elements of personal experience with animals. Although the author is an academic teaching within a university structure, he is also a professional animal trainer. (shrink)

This report explores the relationship between philosophy and medicine in the U.K. We note that medical training involves very little formal instruction in philosophy and ethics, and that, with few exceptions, philosophers in the U.K. do not contribute to the instruction of physicians or the philosophy of medicine. However, reviewing the problems arising out of recent developments within scientific medicine we find a pressing need for future philosophical analysis in the following areas: psychiatry, organ transplantation, abortion, euthanasia, experiments on living (...) subjects, consent, confidentiality, the relationship between medicine and political authority, and the provisions for social justice in medicine. (shrink)