This slender volume is a polemical work on two fronts. First and foremost, it is an attempt to distinguish sharply the aim of Aquinas from that of post-Cartesian rationalism with respect to the role of philosophical argumentation in establishing the existence of God. Cartesian rationalism holds that it is possible to articulate presuppositionless, universal, compelling, and purely philosophical reasons to justify a foundational belief in God. Velecky criticizes this view on Wittgensteinian grounds and holds that there are significant affinities between (...) Aquinas and Wittgenstein on the relationship between religious belief and philosophical justification. What counts as a good philosophical case for the existence of God is always relative to the existential situation of the inquirer. So-called proofs for the existence of God are really attempts to formulate corroborating intellectual grounds for a belief that one has already come to on the basis of God's self-revelation, faith, and personal encounter. Belief in the proposition "that God exists" is not a statement reporting the existence of an item encounterable in our normal experience or the conclusion of an argument, but rather expresses the adoption of an entirely distinct perspective on the whole of reality. So when Aquinas describes arguments for the existence of God as preambula fidei, he does not mean that they are prior to faith as epistemologically necessary conditions for belief, but rather that they are logically required by faith in a different sense. It must be possible to locate or refer to the object of religious belief within a universe of philosophical discourse; or, to put it another way, it must be possible to give some content to the notion of divinity. The function of Aquinas's arguments is thus to make the proposition Deum esse intelligible within the universe of broadly Aristotelian discourse. This is especially important if believers want to have any kind of conversation with nonbelievers. Velecky writes: "At the conclusion of the Five Arguments nothing more--and nothing less--has been achieved than that a reasonable philosophical case has been made for a topic of conversation between Christians and others about the basic characterization of something which is thought to be the transcendent cause of all beings and which has left some traces of its transcendence in the world we can experience". Velecky's Wittgensteinian reading of Aquinas is a welcome antidote to the more usual Cartesian reading. But while Velecky is careful to distinguish Aquinas from Wittgensteinian fideism, nevertheless his overall strategy comes dangerously close to pushing Aquinas too far in that direction; Aquinas is neither Cartesian nor Wittgensteinian. (shrink)

Clarke acknowledges in his collected essays that he is a "Thomistically inspired" metaphysician rather than simply "Thomistic," because his principal aim is the creative retrieval and completion of Aquinas's metaphysics in the light of contemporary thought. Self-styled Thomists will inevitably and justifiably contest some of Clarke's creative completions of Aquinas, preferring the original to the interpretation, yet they can learn from his efforts at retrieval. While Clarke claims that his main interest is not historical exposition, two early essays show him (...) eminently capable of such writing. One is a classic exposition of how Aquinas transformed the Aristotelian act-potency theory to do the work of explaining the metaphysical composition of esse and essentia within a Neoplatonically inspired participation schema wherein act is considered to be intrinsically unlimited. The second is a general account of participation in Aquinas which displays Clarke's early assimilation of this central theme and his deep grounding in the European scholarship that transformed the landscape of Thomism at the midpoint of this century. (shrink)

This book is the first installment in a projected three volume critical analysis and creative appropriation of Aquinas’s natural theology in Summa contra gentiles I–III. The target audience seems to be contemporary Anglo-American philosophers of religion. Kretzmann wants to promote a greater integration of philosophy and theology through the pursuit of a metaphysics of theism. He claims that theology and philosophy both offer versions of a “Grandest Unified Theory” and what he proposes in this volume is a theology from the (...) bottom up that will establish what can be known of God through reason alone, in order subsequently to pursue a metaphysics from the top down that will begin with God and show the relationship of everything else to God. (shrink)

In three experiments, subjects attempted to track multiple items as they moved independently and unpredictably about a display. Performance was not impaired when the items were briefly (but completely) occluded at various times during their motion, suggesting that occlusion is taken into account when computing enduring perceptual objecthood. Unimpaired performance required the presence of accretion and deletion cues along fixed contours at the occluding boundaries. Performance was impaired when items were present on the visual field at the same times and (...) to the same degrees as in the occlusion conditions, but disappeared and reappeared in ways which did not implicate the presence of occluding surfaces (e.g. by imploding and exploding into and out of existence, instead of accreting and deleting along a fixed contour). Unimpaired performance did not require visible occluders (i.e. Michotte’s tunnel effect) or globally consistent occluder positions. We discuss implications of these results for theories of objecthood in visual attention. (shrink)

What makes an object the same persisting individual over time? Philosophers and psychologists have both grappled with this question, but from different perspectives—philosophers conceptually analyzing the criteria for object persistence, and psychologists exploring the mental mechanisms that lead us to experience the world in terms of persisting objects. It is striking that the same themes populate explorations of persistence in these two very different fields—e.g. the roles of spatiotemporal continuity, persistence through property change, and cohesion violations. Such similarities may reflect (...) an underlying connection, in that psychological mechanisms of object persistence (especially relevant parts of mid-level visual object processing) may serve to underlie the intuitions about persistence that fuel metaphysical theories. This would be a way for cognitive science to join these two disparate fields, helping to explain the possible origins and reliability of some metaphysical intuitions, and perhaps leading to philosophical progress. (shrink)

The foundational principles of representative democracy are under attack globally. What we desperately need are enlightened and persuasive public intellectuals who can help us see through the fog of our fear, anger, and disillusionment, to find our rational political commitments again. One of these public intellectuals is undoubtedly Yuval Noah Harari, the bestselling author of three recent books – Sapiens, Homo Deus, and 21 Lessons for the 21st Century. Harari is also a frequent contributor in the popular press, and a (...) guest on shows, podcasts, panels, and as a keynote speaker. Add to all this that Harari is acting on his lofty academic ideals through ‘Sapienship’, a multidisciplinary organization he cofounded that advocates for global responsibility, clarifies the global conversation, and focuses attention on the most important global challenges. I single out Harari because I presume many readers will be familiar with his work. He is certainly one of the fastest rising stars of public intellectualism. Unfortunately, his work is undercut by the philosophical positions he put forth in his first bestselling book, Sapiens. In this review/critique I wish to show that in order for Harari advance a coherent political or ideological argument, he must first shore up his philosophical commitments. (shrink)

The notion that visual attention can operate over visual objects in addition to spatial locations has recently received much empirical support, but there has been relatively little empirical consideration of what can count as an `object' in the ®rst place. We have investi- gated this question in the context of the multiple object tracking paradigm, in which subjects must track a number of independently and unpredictably moving identical items in a ®eld of identical distractors. What types of feature clusters can (...) be tracked in this manner? In other words, what counts as an `object' in this task? We investigated this question with a technique we call target merging: we alter tracking displays so that distinct target and distractor loca- tions appear perceptually to be parts of the same object by merging pairs of items (one target with one distractor) in various ways ± for example, by connecting item locations with a simple line segment, by drawing the convex hull of the two items, and so forth. The data show that target merging makes the tracking task far more dif®cult to varying degrees depending on exactly how the items are merged. The effect is perceptually salient, involving in some conditions a total destruction of subjects' capacity to track multiple items. These studies provide strong evidence for the object-based nature of tracking, con®rming that in some contexts attention must be allocated to objects rather than arbitrary collections of features. In addition, the results begin to reveal the types of spatially organized scene components that can be independently attended as a function of properties such as connectedness, part struc- ture, and other types of perceptual grouping. q 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. (shrink)

Trading on non-public material information is fertile ground for a discussion of ethical behavior. The long-running legal tug-of-war over what constitutes illegal insider trading delivers challenges to regulatory authorities charged with detecting and enforcing the law, and is likely one of the reasons that prosecution of insider trading events remains rather uncommon. One can observe both increased volume in the equity and option markets and run-ups in the stock price prior to the announcement of the acquisitions; however, the detection of (...) illegal or unethical insider trading can be difficult. Given the legal uncertainty around insider trading and the circumstantial evidence from the trading activity, it is almost impossible to identify unethical insider trades unless there is a whistleblower or trades are large in size and impeccable in timing. Using call option trading around two merger announcements with similar firms that resulted in different ultimate treatment from the SEC, we illustrate the struggle regulators and prosecutors have with identifying and enforcing unethical insider trades. (shrink)

The aim of this essay is to give a high-level overview of Irenaeus’s beatific vision, and to suggest that for him, the beatific vision has a temporal dimension (now and future) and a dimension of degree (lesser now, greater in the future). His beatific vision is witnessed as it intersects with at least four main ideas in his writing—the Trinity, anthropology, resurrection, and his eschatology. Irenaeus famously held that ‘the glory of God is living man, and the life of man (...) is the vision of God’ (AH 4.20.7), which speaks to the reality of seeing God in the present, but he could also look forward in anticipation to beholding the face of God in the resurrected body in the new creation. What made the latter possible is the gradual beholding of God in the present that makes one prepared to see God’s glory in the future. Additionally, the visio Dei is Trinitarian. We behold God in Christ, since God the Father is invisible, and it is the Holy Spirit who prepares us incrementally to see God. (shrink)

Many professional philosophers are hesitant about “public philosophy”—unsure about what it is and how it’s done, and downright pessimistic about whether it is an important and valuable philosophical practice. In response to this hesitancy and in support of public philosophy, I argue that most of these philosophers already find at least one form of public philosophy important and valuable for the discipline and profession: teaching. I offer and defend a broad conception of public philosophy in order support this controversial claim. (...) I continue by briefly offering some reasons to think that public philosophy is of value for society generally (i.e., “the public”), and argue that we, as a profession, need to fully recognize our standing commitment to public-facing philosophical work; and to engage in serious discussion and debate to better examine the various types of public philosophy, clarify the broad range of public-facing activities, and encourage/reward further public work of value. (shrink)

This paper takes a unique approach to framing the political obligation social media companies like Twitter and Facebook have in a democratic society by casting the public sphere as a common-pool resource. Over the last decade or so much of our civic discourse has moved to social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. This paper argues that just as citizens have an obligation to one another, social media companies have an obligation to promote agonistic forms of civic, political discourse (...) through their algorithms. This algorithmic obligation that social media companies have must be reconciled with social media companies’ formulation of their fiduciary shareholder obligations. We posit that a commons based view of social media discourse allows these companies to make both a democratic health and fiduciary interest argument. (shrink)

In Volume Two of Ernest Fortin: Collected Essays, Fortin deals with the relationship between religion and civil society in a Christian context: that of an essentially nonpolitical but by no means entirely otherwordly religion, many of whose teachings were thought to be fundamentally at odds with the duties of citizenship. Sections focus upon Augustine and Aquinas, on Christianity and politics; natural law, natural rights, and social justice; and Leo Strauss and the revival of classical political philosophy. Fortin's treatment of these (...) and related themes betrays a keen awareness of one of the significant intellectual events of our time: the recovery of political philosophy as a legitimate academic discipline. (shrink)

Scholars working in philosophy of action still struggle with the freedom/determinism dichotomy that stretches back to Hellenist philosophy and the metaphysics that gave rise to it. Although that metaphysics has been repudiated in current philosophy of mind and cognitive science, the dichotomy still haunts these fields. As such, action is understood as distinct from movement, or motion. In early China, under a very different metaphysical paradigm, no such distinction is made. Instead, a notion of self-caused movement, or spontaneity, is elaborated. (...) In this article a general conception of spontaneity from early Daoism is explained, detailing its constituent aspects. Similar notions appeared from time to time in Western philosophy, and these instances are pursued, exploring how their instantiations differed from Daoist spontaneity and why. Based on these approximate examples of spontaneity and on early Daoist spontaneity, new criteria are postulated for a plausible theory of action that dispenses with presuppositions that eventuate in a freedom/determinism dichotomy, and instead the possibility is offered of a general model of action that can be applied smoothly across current philosophical and cognitive scientific subdisciplines. (shrink)

This chapter explores a way in which visual processing may involve innate constraints and attempts to show how such processing overcomes one enduring challenge to nativism. In particular, many challenges to nativist theories in other areas of cognitive psychology have focused on the later development of such abilities, and have argued that such development is in conflict with innate origins. Innateness, in these contexts, is seen as antidevelopmental, associated instead with static processes and principles. In contrast, certain perceptual models demonstrate (...) how the very same mental processes can both be innately specified and yet develop richly in response to experience with the environment. This process is entirely unmysterious, as shown in certain formal theories of visual perception, including those that appeal to spontaneous endogenous stimulation and those based on Bayesian inference. (shrink)

In cases in which many causes together bring about an effect, it is common to select some as particularly important. Philosophers since Mill have been pessimistic about analyzing this reasoning because of its variability and the multifarious causal and pragmatic details of how it works. I argue Mill was right to think these details matter but wrong that they preclude philosophical analysis of causal selection. I show that analyzing the pragmatic details of scientific debates about the important causes of the (...) Bhopal Gas Tragedy can illuminate causal reasoning about disasters and shed new light on causality and causal selection. (shrink)

Winner of the Schumpeter Prize, 2000 and Winner of the Smith Prize in Austrian Economics, 2000, this book explores how the limitations of human knowledge create both opportunities and problems in the modern economy. The growing field of evolutionary economics has developed as a result of the traditional failure of the discipline to explain certain phenomena that impact greatly on the economy. These are: *_Evolution_ - the impact on the economy of natural change over time *_Institutions_ - the impact on (...) the economy of government and/or company policy, rules and regulations *_Knowledge_ - the impact on the economy that is felt when new information becomes available _Knowledge, Institutions and Evolution in Economics _is a punchy overview of these topics and one that has become regarded as something of a modern classic that no serious social sciences academic or student should be without. (shrink)

Circumcision of males represents a surgical “vaccine“ against a wide variety of infections, adverse medical conditions and potentially fatal diseases over their lifetime, and also protects their sexual partners. In experienced hands, this common, inexpensive procedure is very safe, can be pain‐free and can be performed at any age. The benefits vastly outweigh risks. The enormous public health benefits include protection from urinary tract infections, sexually transmitted HIV, HPV, syphilis and chancroid, penile and prostate cancer, phimosis, thrush, and inflammatory dermatoses. (...) In women circumcision of the male partner provides substantial protection from cervical cancer and chlamydia. Circumcision has socio‐sexual benefits and reduces sexual problems with age. It has no adverse effect on penile sensitivity, function, or sensation during sexual arousal. Most women prefer the circumcised penis for appearance, hygiene and sex. Given the convincing epidemiological evidence and biological support, routine circumcision should be highly recommended by all health professionals. BioEssays 29:1147–1158, 2007. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

In this chapter I take up the question of how Aristotle understood the relationship between the contemplative life and the active life in contributing to human flourishing and to the political regime. While the connections between Aristotle’s ethics and politics are abundant, there exists a prevalent assumption in the inclusive/dominant debate concerning the interpretation of eudaimonia (human flourishing) that Aristotle’s Politics cannot or should not play a prominent role in helping to understand eudaimonia. On the ‘inclusivist’ reading, eudaimonia is understood (...) as being a composite of all human goods or virtues. On the ‘dominant’ reading, eudaimonia is understood as being a single dominant good, theōria (contemplation). With this chapter I offer a competing interpretation which is in some ways similar to the recent ‘all-inclusive’ reading, but which relies heavily on the connection between Aristotle’s ethics and politics in order to explain how theōria fits into humans’ composite and political nature. (shrink)

Despite utilitarianism’s status as one of the major ethical theories, historically it has largely been dismissed by theorists concerned with political obligation. The primary goal of this paper is to respond to the structural objections that have been leveled against utilitarian accounts of political obligation. In the process of responding to these objections I fi rst offer a sketch of a general account of “obligations” which the utilitarian can endorse. Secondly, I argue that anti-utilitarian theorists have missed an important ethical (...) distinction between “derivative” and “nonderivative” moral principles. The failure to make this distinction, as it relates to ‘political obligation,’ has not only brought about the categorical dismissal of utilitarian accounts it has also muddied the terms and goals of the debate generally. (shrink)

The primary purpose of this study is to identify differences in at­tainment of learning outcomes for ethics courses delivered using two distinct teaching approaches. The first approach uses a case based method in the context of applied moral issues within medical practice. The second approach surveys moral theories in the context of applied moral issues. Significant differences are found in the attainment of learner outcomes between the two groups. In particular, attainment of outcomes related to moral decision-making is higher in (...) those students who take the course with a case based method. In contrast, attainment of outcomes related to personal beliefs about applied moral issues is higher in those students who take an introductory ethics course surveying moral theories in the context of applied issues. Neither of these results is especially surprising. What may be surprising, however, is that students in the case-based course do not appear attain learner outcomes with regard to applied moral issues despite studying those issues in detail. Finally, the assessment tool developed and refined through this study may be of use for assessment in a variety of ethics courses. (shrink)