The Historical Dictionary of New Age Movements is a reference manual presenting the key concepts, activities, groups, people, and overlapping domains of the contemporary spirituality known as New Age. The focus includes historical antecedents as well as contemporary strategies for change and survival that link the groups and movements variously identifiable within the New Age rubric as an increasingly emergent twenty-first century religiosity.

This collection by some of the leading scholars of Strauss's work is the first devoted to Strauss's thought regarding education. It seeks to address his conception of education as it applies to a range of his most important concepts, such as his views on the importance of revelation, his critique of modern democracy and the importance of modern classical education.

This book is the first comprehensive examination of the ethical parameters of paganism when considered as a world religion alongside Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism and Buddhism. The issues of evil, value and idolatry from a pagan perspective are analyzed as part of the Western ethical tradition from the Sophists and Platonic schools through the philosophers Spinoza, Hume, Kant and Nietzsche to such contemporary thinkers as Grayling, Mackie, MacIntyre, Habermas, Levinas, Santayana, et cetera From a more practical viewpoint, a delineation of (...) applied pagan ethics is then presented in connection with current moral issues such as same-sex union, recreational drugs, environmental awareness, abortion and terrorism. Finally, overviews of sectarian pagan ethics (Shinto, Santeria, Heathenism, Druidry, Romuva, Slavic, Kemeticism, Classical and Wicca) provide both the general and pagan reader with an understanding of the provocative range and differentiation of pagan ethical thought. The book approaches the Western ethical tradition as an historical development and a continuing dialogue. The novelty of this approach lies in its consideration of paganism as a legitimate voice of religious spirituality rather than a satanic aberration or ridiculous childish behavior. The book is aimed at both the contemporary Western pagan and anyone with an interest in the moral dilemmas of our times and the desire to engage in the global ethical discussion.Among the more important features of the book are its presentation of a re-evaluation of idolatry, the notion of the virtue value, the richness of the pagan tradition, and the expansion of Western ethics beyond its Christian heritage. (shrink)

The goal of the present set of studies is to explore the boundary conditions of category transfer in causal learning. Previous research has shown that people are capable of inducing categories based on causal learning input, and they often transfer these categories to new causal learning tasks. However, occasionally learners abandon the learned categories and induce new ones. Whereas previously it has been argued that transfer is only observed with essentialist categories in which the hidden properties are causally relevant for (...) the target effect in the transfer relation, we here propose an alternative explanation, the unbroken mechanism hypothesis. This hypothesis claims that categories are transferred from a previously learned causal relation to a new causal relation when learners assume a causal mechanism linking the two relations that is continuous and unbroken. The findings of two causal learning experiments support the unbroken mechanism hypothesis. (shrink)

This collection by some of the leading scholars of Strauss's work is the first devoted to Strauss's thought regarding education. It seeks to address his conception of education as it applies to a range of his most important concepts, such as his views on the importance of revelation, his critique of modern democracy and the importance of modern classical education.

The paper sets out and defends against criticism the claims argued for in the book A minimalist ontology of the natural world.

Review of Cambrige Companion to Modern Jewish Philosophy.

"Writing in a lively and refreshingly clear American English, Zimmerman provides an uncompromisingly honest and judicious account... of Heidegger’s views on technology and his involvement with National Socialism.... One of the most important books on Heidegger in recent years." —John D. Caputo "... superb... " —Thomas Sheehan, The New York Review of Books "... thorough and complex... " —Choice "... excellent guide to Heidegger as eco-philosopher." —Radical Philosophy "... engrossing, rich in substance... makes clear Heidegger's importance for the issue (...) of technology, ethics, and politics." —Religious Studies Review The relation between Martin Heidegger’s understanding of technology and his affiliation with and conception of National Socialism is the leading idea of this fascinating and revealing book. Zimmerman shows that the key to the relation between Heidegger’s philosophy and his politics was his concern with the nature of working and production. (shrink)

Challenges to Moral and Religious Belief contains fourteen original essays by philosophers, theologians, and social scientists on challenges to moral and religious belief from disagreement and evolution. Three main questions are addressed: Can one reasonably maintain one's moral and religious beliefs in the face of interpersonal disagreement with intellectual peers? Does disagreement about morality between a religious belief source, such as a sacred text, and a non-religious belief source, such as a society's moral intuitions, make it irrational to continue trusting (...) one or both of those belief sources? Should evolutionary accounts of the origins of our moral beliefs and our religious beliefs undermine our confidence in their veracity? This volume places challenges to moral belief side-by-side with challenges to religious belief, sets evolution-based challenges alongside disagreement-based challenges, and includes philosophical perspectives together with theological and social science perspectives, with the aim of cultivating insights and lines of inquiry that are easily missed within a single discipline or when these topics are treated in isolation. The result is a collection of essays--representing both skeptical and non-skeptical positions about morality and religion--that move these discussions forward in new and illuminating directions. -/- Contributors: Robert Audi, University of Notre Dame; Michael Bergmann, Purdue University; Sarah Brosnan, Georgia State University; William FitzPatrick, University of Rochester; John Hare, Yale University; Timothy P. Jackson, Emory University; Patrick Kain, Purdue University; Jordan Kiper, University of Connecticut; Dustin Locke, Claremont McKenna College; Charles Mathewes, University of Virginia; Mark C. Murphy, Georgetown University; John Pittard, Yale Divinity School; Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Duke University; Richard Sosis, University of Connecticut; Sharon Street, New York University; Joshua Thurow, University of Texas at San Antonio; Ralph Wedgwood, University of Southern California. (shrink)

In The System of Liberty: Themes in the History of Classical Liberalism, George H. Smith focuses his thematic approach regarding the study of classical liberal political philosophy on both natural-rights philosophers, in what Smith deems the “Lockean Paradigm,” and nineteenth-century utilitarian liberals. Smith does not merely provide an overview of the history of this theory—rather, he attempts to discover how and why liberal theory had faced major challenges in the nineteenth-century with regard to both its theoretical foundations and its level (...) of public support. Concluding, along with Herbert Spencer, that following positive results in innovation and in the economic sphere, which were achieved through the reduction of government power, “most people, seeing that these beneficial results had something to do with government, failed to differentiate between the repeal of onerous laws and the passing of new laws” (p. 213), Smith attempts to discover why liberals were unsuccessful in clai. (shrink)

Contingencies of the early nuclear arms race Content Type Journal Article Pages 1-23 DOI 10.1007/s11016-010-9495-z Authors S. S. Schweber, Department of the History of Science, Harvard University, Science Center 371, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA Alex Wellerstein, Department of the History of Science, Harvard University, Science Center 371, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA Ethan Pollock, Department of History, Box N, Brown University, Providence, RI 02912, USA Barton J. Bernstein, History Department, Building 200, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305-2024, USA Michael D. Gordin, (...) History Department, 305 Dickinson Hall, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544, USA Journal Metascience Online ISSN 1467-9981 Print ISSN 0815-0796. (shrink)

The similarities between the concept of cosmopolitanism and the concept of the world-state are, in some regards, fairly intuitive. At the very least, the theme of universalism is often seen as common to both. The precise form of a universalized ethical or political order, however, is not expressly conceptually determined by either cosmopolitanism or the world-state; both are susceptible to pluralist interpretations. Further, we cannot assume that an ethical concern will either motivate the creation of, or become a central policy (...) issue to, a world-state, in the way that a concern for moral universalism—sometimes referred to as ‘moral minimalism’—is inseparable from the cosmopolitan project more generally. Nor does cosmopolitanism have a necessary political component in the manner in which the world-state does. Nevertheless, we may assume that any form of global government should have some minimal degree of responsibility and concern for the welfare of all world-citizens. This paper considers Michael Walzer’s analysis of moral minimalism, and posits that this concept could form a common normativebasis for both moral cosmopolitanism and the reform of existing institutions of global governance, as well as having possible applications for the drafting of just policies for a potential world-state. (shrink)

_A testament to what it means to be liberal by one of the most prominent political philosophers of our era “Walzer is perhaps our foremost pilot on these rocky shoals. In his preface, he writes that this may be his last book. One hopes not.”—James Traub, _New York Times__ There was a time when liberalism was an ism like any other, but that time, writes Michael Walzer, is gone. “Liberal” now conveys not a specific ideology but a moral (...) stance, so the word is best conceived not as a noun but as an adjective—one is a “liberal democrat” or a “liberal nationalist.” Walzer itemizes the characteristics described by “liberal” in an inventory of his own deepest political and moral commitments—among other things, to the principle of equality, to the rule of law, and to a pluralism that is both political and cultural. Unabashedly asserting that liberalism comprises a universal set of values (“they must be universal,” he writes, “since they are under assault around the world”), Walzer reminds us in this inspiring book why those values are worth fighting for. (shrink)

(2000). Full transcript of inaugural AARST Science Policy Forum, New York Hilton, Friday 20 November 1998, 7?9 pm. Social Epistemology: Vol. 14, No. 2-3, pp. 131-180.

Theorizing in ecology and evolution often proceeds via the construction of multiple idealized models. To determine whether a theoretical result actually depends on core features of the models and is not an artifact of simplifying assumptions, theorists have developed the technique of robustness analysis, the examination of multiple models looking for common predictions. A striking example of robustness analysis in ecology is the discovery of the Volterra Principle, which describes the effect of general biocides in predator-prey systems. This paper details (...) the discovery of the Volterra Principle and the demonstration of its robustness. It considers the classical ecology literature on robustness and introduces two individual-based models of predation, which are used to further analyze the Volterra Principle. The paper also introduces a distinction between parameter robustness, structural robustness, and representational robustness, and demonstrates that the Volterra Principle exhibits all three kinds of robustness. *Received September 2006; revised May 2007. ‡Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the Australasian Association of Philosophy, the London School of Economics, and the University of Bristol. The authors wish to thank those audiences as well as Patrick Forber, Ken Waters, Deena Skolnick Weisberg, Uri Wilensky, and Bill Wimsatt for many helpful comments. Special thanks to Giacomo Sillari for his assistance in translating Volterra's original paper and his insightful thoughts about Volterra's aims and methods. Some of the research in this paper was supported by NSF grant SES-0620887 to MW. †To contact the authors, please write to: Michael Weisberg, Department of Philosophy, University of Pennsylvania, 433 Logan Hall, Philadelphia, PA 19104; e-mail: [email protected]; Kenneth Reisman, Pluribo, Inc., 100 Park Avenue, Suite 1600, New York, NY 10017; e-mail: [email protected]. (shrink)

Martin O'Shaughnessy _Jean Renoir_ Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2000 ISBN 0719050626 hb; 0719050634 pb 251 pp.

"Friendship, that pervasive, everyday, and subtle matter of our most intimate personal life, has rarely been accorded its due. Michael Pakaluk has retrieved the thoughts of our greatest thinkers on the subject and collected them into a handsome and handy volume.... A splendid book!" --M. M. Wartofsky, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, Baruch College, City University of New York.