The author draws upon his experience in teaching courses in religion and science in Taiwan, as well as more traditional sources in the history of Chinese religions and the history of science in China, to discuss the relationship of religion and science in contemporary Taiwan. Various aspects of Chinese and Taiwanese understandings of both science and religion are discussed. It is suggested that the nexus for the science‐religion dialogue does not lie in a doctrine of creation, which is noticeably absent (...) in Buddhism and most Chinese religions, but rather in the human person who seeks personal health and wholeness, right relations with fellow human beings, and harmony with the cosmos. The author notes that many of these ideas are not unique to China and Taiwan and that in considering other cultures, our understanding of our own culture is enriched. (shrink)

The thought of Bernard Lonergan provides an epistemological position that is both true to the exigencies of modern science and yet open to the possibility of God and revealed religion. In this paper I outline Lonergan's “transcendental method,” which describes the basic pattern of operations involved in any act of human knowing, and discuss how Lonergan uses this cognitional theory as a basis for an epistemological position of critical realism. Then I explain how his approach handles some philosophical problems raised (...) by classical and modern science and show how his thought provides an intelligible link between the scientific and religious horizons. (shrink)

. Philosopher-theologian Bernard J. F. Lonergan defines emergence as the process in which “otherwise coincidental manifolds of lower conjugate acts invite the higher integration effected by higher conjugate forms” (Insight, [1957] 1992, 477). The meaning and implications of Lonergan’s concept of emergence are considered in the context of the problem of reductionism in the natural sciences. Examples are taken primarily from physics, chemistry, and biology.

Is reductionism simply a methodology that has allowed science to progress to its current state (methodological reductionism), or does this methodology indicate something more, that the material universe is determined in full by its smallest components (ontological or causal reductionism)? Such questions lie at the heart of much of the contemporary religion–science dialogue. In this essay I suggest that the position articulated by philosopher–theologian Bernard Lonergan is particularly suitable for dealing with these questions. For Lonergan, the criterion of the real (...) is simply its verified intelligibility and not its imaginability. Each of the various levels of reality, as studied in sciences such as physics, chemistry, biology, and sensitive and rational psychology, consists of an intelligible integration of what on the lower level would be simply random occurrences. The things studied by the various sciences (atoms, molecules, cellular organisms, animals, human persons, and so on) are intelligible unities, and no one level is somehow more real than any other. I argue that such a scheme, while seeming somewhat counterintuitive, is best able to deal with the multilayered reality of the contemporary physical and life sciences and provide an opening to the richness of the social sciences and the achievements of human culture. (shrink)

In this paper several problems are raised concerning Ian Barbour's four ways of interrelating science and religion—Conflict, Independence, Dialogue, and Integration—as put forward in such publications as his highly influential Religion in an Age of Science (1990) and widely adopted by other writers in this field. The authors argue that this taxonomy is not very useful or analytically helpful, especially to historians seeking to understand past engagements between science and religion.

Recent philosophical discussion about the relation between fiction and reality pays little attention to our moral involvement with literature. Frank Palmer's purpose is to investigate how our appreciation of literary works calls upon and develops our capacity for moral understanding. He explores a wide range of philosophical questions about the relation of art to morality, and challenges theories that he regards as incompatible with a humane view of literary art. Palmer considers, in particular, the extent to which the values (...) and moral concepts involved in our understanding of human beings can be said to enter into our understanding of, and response to, fictional characters. The scope of his discussion encompasses literary aesthetics, ethics, and epistemology, and he makes extensive reference to literary examples. (shrink)

Contemporary health care often lacks generosity of spirit, even when treatment is most efficient. Too many patients are left unhappy with how they are treated, and too many medical professionals feel estranged from the calling that drew them to medicine. Arthur W. Frank tells the stories of ill people, doctors, and nurses who are restoring generosity to medicine--generosity toward others and to themselves. The Renewal of Generosity evokes medicine as the face-to-face encounter that comes before and after diagnostics, pharmaceuticals, (...) and surgeries. Frank calls upon the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius, philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, and literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin to reflect on stories of ill people, doctors, and nurses who transform demoralized medicine into caring relationships. He presents their stories as a source of consolation for both ill and professional alike and as an impetus to changing medical systems. Frank shows how generosity is being renewed through dialogue that is more than the exchange of information. Dialogue is an ethic and an ideal for people on both sides of the medical encounter who want to offer more to those they meet and who want their own lives enriched in the process. The Renewal of Generosity views illness and medical work with grace and compassion, making an invaluable contribution to expanding our vision of suffering and healing. (shrink)

Die Idee zu der in diesem Band dokumentierten Tagung ist im Rahmen des disziplinübergreifenden Nachwuchswissenschaftsnetzwerkes THESIS entstanden. Der Dialog über die fachlichen und disziplinären Grenzen hinweg hat bei THESIS seit dessen Gründung im Jahre 1990 stets einen großen Raum eingenommen. Anderen Fächern Respekt und Interesse entgegenzubringen und sich nicht von stereotypen Vorurteilen leiten zu lassen, ist konstitutiver Bestandteil im Selbstverständnis des Netzwerkes. Selbstverständlich gibt es in einem solchen Verbund eine Reihe von Gelegenheiten (darunter auch den einen oder anderen entwicklungsfördernden Konflikt), (...) das eigene Bild vom Anderen und das andere Bild vom Eigenen zur Sprache zu bringen und zu hinterfragen. Auf der Basis dieser bestehenden Kommunikationsstrukturen trafen sich am 11. Oktober 2003 in Göttingen 12 junge Wissenschaftlerinnen und Wissenschaftler zwischen, über und auch auf den Grenzen ihrer eigenen Herkunftsdisziplinen, um den Trendbegriff [alpha]Transdisziplinarität" auf seine Substanz zu prüfen. (shrink)

In this book, Frank Griffel presents the most comprehensive examination to date of the life and thought of this important figure.

In this book, Frank Griffel presents the most comprehensive examination to date of the life and thought of this important figure.

In At the Will of the Body , Arthur Frank told the story of his own illnesses, heart attack and cancer. That book ended by describing the existence of a "remission society," whose members all live with some form of illness or disability. The Wounded Storyteller is their collective portrait. Ill people are more than victims of disease or patients of medicine they are wounded storytellers. People tell stories to make sense of their suffering when they turn their diseases (...) into stories, they find healing. Drawing on the work of authors such as Oliver Sacks, Anatole Broyard, Norman Cousins, and Audre Lorde, as well as from people he met during the years he spent among different illness groups, Frank recounts a stirring collection of illness stories, ranging from the well-known--Gilda Radner's battle with ovarian cancer--to the private testimonials of people with cancer, chronic fatigue syndrome, and disabilties. Their stories are more than accounts of personal suffering: they abound with moral choices and point to a social ethic. Frank identifies three basic narratives of illness in restitution, chaos, and quest. Restitution narratives anticipate getting well again and give prominence to the technology of cure. In chaos narratives, illness seems to stretch on forever, with no respite or redeeming insights. Quest narratives are about finding that insight as illness is transformed into a means for the ill person to become someone new. (shrink)

This article rebuts Ramsey's earlier theory, in 'Universals of Law and of Fact', of how laws of nature differ from other true generalisations. It argues that our laws are rules we use in judging 'if I meet an F I shall regard it as a G'. This temporal asymmetry is derived from that of cause and effect and used to distinguish what's past as what we can know about without knowing our present intentions.

First published in 2000. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

A complete collection of Frank Sibley's articles on philosophical aesthetics, this volume includes five, remarkable, hitherto unpublished papers written in Sibley's later years. It addresses many topics, among them the nature of aesthetic qualities versus non-aesthetic qualities, the relation of aesthetic description to aesthetic evaluation, the different levels of evaluation, and the objectivity of aesthetic judgement. The later papers constitute both a significant development of Sibley's individual approach to aesthetics, such as his discussion of the distinction between attributive and (...) predicative uses of adjectives and of the aesthetic significance of tastes and smells, a topic Sibley considered to be much neglected. (shrink)

Self-reflection, as the hallmark of the modern age, originates more profoundly with Dante than with Descartes. This book rewrites modern intellectual history, taking Dante’s lyrical language in Paradiso as enacting a Trinitarian self-reflexivity that gives a theological spin to the birth of the modern subject already with the Troubadours. Dante’s thought and work indicate an alternative modernity along the path not taken. This alternative shows up in Nicholas of Cusa’s conjectural science and in Giambattista Vico’s new science of imagination as (...) alternatives to positive empirical science. (shrink)

This collection introduces the reader to some of the most interesting current work on conditionals. Particular attention is paid to possible world semantics for conditionals, the role of conditional probability in helping us to understand conditionals, implicature and the material conditional, and subjunctive versus indicative conditionals. Contributors include V.H. Dudman, Dorothy Edgington, Nelson Goodman, H.P. Grice, David Lewis, and Robert Stalnaker.

The Metaphysical Club, a gathering of intellectuals in the 1870s associated with Harvard, is widely recognized as the crucible where pragmatism, America's distinctively original philosophy, was refined and proclaimed. Louis Menand's bestseller about the group was a dramatic publishing success. However, only three actual members - Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., Charles S. Peirce, and William James - appear in this book, alongside other thinkers such as John Dewey who were never in the Club. The Real Metaphysical Club tells the full (...) story of how this influential group shifted the course of philosophy in America. In addition to pioneering pragmatism, the group explored radical empiricism and idealism, and formulated personalism and process philosophy, equally important developments. This volume contains thirty-seven important writings dating from 1870 to 1885 by the real members of the Metaphysical Club. The first section centers on pragmatism and science; the second part collects writings of the lawyers; and the third part covers idealist and personalist philosophers. Many of these writings have never been reprinted before, and nothing like this impressive collection has ever been attempted. A general introduction provides a narrative history, and the editors' three introductions to the volume's sections vividly bring to life the intense meetings, sustained debates, and pioneering thought from the Metaphysical Club. (shrink)

The Jewish Philosophy Reader is the first comprehensive anthology of classic writings on Jewish philosophy from the Bible to postmodernism. The Reader is clearly divided into four separate parts: Foundations and First Principles, Medieval and Renaissance Jewish Philosophy, Modern Jewish Thought, and Contemporary Jewish Philosophy. Each part is clearly introduced by the editors. The readings featured are representative writings of each era listed above and are from the following major thinkers: Abrabanel, Baeck, Bergman, Borowitz, Buber, Cohen, Crescas, Fackenheim, Geiger, Gersonides, (...) Goodman, Graetz, Halevi, Hartman, Heschel, Hess, Hirsch, Ibn Ezra, Ibn Gabirol, Ibn Paquda, Kellner, Kook, Krochmal, Leibowitz, Levinas, Maimonides, Maybaum, Mendelssohn, Novak, Philo, Plaskow, Rosenzweig, Saadia, Scholem, Seeskin, Soloveitchik, Spinoza, Strauss, Wolf, Zunz. (shrink)

Als »Subjektphilosophie« hat man das neuzeitliche Denken insgesamt charakterisiert. Diese Auszeichnung verdankt das Subjekt der verwegenen Hoffnung, es eigne sich zum ultimativen Prinzip der Wissensbegründung. Das Interesse an einer Aufklärung seiner Struktur wurde dadurch jedoch in den Hintergrund gedrängt. Diese Struktur steht im Zentrum von Manfred Franks jüngstem Buch, das einen Blick auf die moderne Geschichte der Subjekttheorien mit Analysen der inneren Beschaffenheit und der Zeitlichkeit des Subjekts sowie seines Verhältnisses zur Intersubjektivität und einer Auseinandersetzung mit klassischen und neuesten analytischen (...) Theoriebildungen verbindet. Dem Begriff der Präreflexivität kommt dabei die Schlüsselrolle zu. (shrink)

English summary: »Selbstbestimmung« is a basic concept in the German ethical discourse, similar to »autonomy«, »liberty«, or »human dignity«. Even though this term is clearly in need of further definition, it has been barely addressed in the theological discourse. The contributions to this volume take a variety of approaches to the question of how we have to understand and interpret the concept of »self-determination« within the framework of theological ethics. In order to achieve this, the authors resort to the orientation (...) and perspectives of reality fostered by reformatory theology. Apart from a fundamental essay that in tracing the different facets of the term »self-determination« refers back to the theology of Martin Luther, the anthology contains a number of contributions from the field of applied ethics. German description: Der Begriff »Selbstbestimmung« gehort zu den Grundbegriffen der Ethik. Er begegnet in vielen aktuellen ethischen Diskursen Ahnlich haufig wie die Begriffe »Autonomie«, »Freiheit« oder »Menschenwuerde«. Trotz eines offensichtlichen Klarungsbedarfs hat sich die Theologie dieses Begriffs bisher noch kaum angenommen. Die Beitrage des vorliegenden Sammelbandes stellen sich in unterschiedlicher Perspektive der Frage, wie das Konzept »Selbstbestimmung« im Rahmen theologischer Ethik verstanden und inhaltlich gefuellt werden kann. Dafuer wird die Orientierungsleistung des von der reformatorischen Theologie gepragten Wirklichkeitsverstandnisses fruchtbar gemacht. Neben einem grundlegenden Aufsatz, der den Begriff »Selbstbestimmung« mit Hilfe von Impulsen aus der Theologie Martin Luthers entfaltet, stehen Aufsatze aus dem Bereich der angewandten Ethik. (shrink)

Frank Ramsey was the greatest of the remarkable generation of Cambridge philosophers and logicians which included G. E. Moore, Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Maynard Keynes. Before his tragically early death in 1930 at the age of twenty-six, he had done seminal work in mathematics and economics as well as in logic and philosophy. This volume, with a new and extensive introduction by D. H. Mellor, contains all Ramsey's previously published writings on philosophy and the foundations of mathematics. The (...) latter gives the definitive form and defence of the reduction of mathematics to logic undertaken in Russell and Whitehead's Principia Mathematica; the former includes the most profound and original studies of universals, truth, meaning, probability, knowledge, law and causation, all of which are still constantly referred to, and still essential reading for all serious students of these subjects. (shrink)

We attempt to extend the nominalistic project initiated in Hartry Field's Science Without Numbers to modern physical theories based in differential geometry.

First published in 2000. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

I argue that it may well be the case that space and time do not consist of points, indeed that they have no smallest parts. I examine two different approaches to such pointless spaces : a topological approach and a measure theoretic approach. I argue in favor of the measure theoretic approach.

An introduction to informal logic, critical thinking and rhetoric utilizing actual public discourse .

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Happiness in Premodern Judaism: Virtue, Knowledge, and Well-BeingDaniel H. FrankHava Tirosh-Samuelson. Happiness in Premodern Judaism: Virtue, Knowledge, and Well-Being. Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 2003. Pp. xi + 596. Cloth, $50.00.Franz Rosenzweig tried hard to convince the neoKantian Hermann Cohen of the merits of Zionism and the normalization it would bring to Jews and Jewish life. His attempt met with this response from Cohen: "Oho! So the gang (...) now wants to be happy, does it?" For those ignorant of the history of Jewish philosophy, one might imagine that Jewish philosophers, no less than their non-philosophical kinsmen, were so weighed down by the burdens of history and persecution that happiness could play no role in their theorizing. But happiness plays a key role in the history of Jewish moral and political philosophy, especially in the premodern period. Even Spinoza, the last of the medievals and the first of the moderns, the great critic of the rabbinic tradition and of Maimonides in particular, is concerned in his Ethics with identifying those activities that together constitute human well-being and the good life. Only lately, since the Enlightenment and Kant, has non-eudaimonism been a live option for Jewish thinkers. Only with the rise of (modern) Orthodoxy, and its predilection for construing goodness as rectitude and rule-following, has eudaimonism fallen out of favor. But with Tirosh-Samuelson's weighty volume on happiness in premodern Judaism, there can be no excuse in the future to imagine that all Jews are, or must be, closet Kantians, strict deontologists. To think otherwise seems to come close to taking on the classical (anti-Semitic) dichotomy of legalistic Judaism vs. spiritual Christianity. In it own way, Happiness in Premodern Judaism is a critique of such a one-sided, monochromatic view of Judaism, whether from the Christian or even from the Jewish side.Tirosh-Samuelson writes explicitly as an intellectual historian, rather than as a philosopher. She understands herself and her project as one that presents just the facts, without evaluating them. While one may cavil at a lost opportunity, in the present case this would be churlish, given the enormous erudition on display. After an introductory chapter outlining the foundational moral theories of Plato, Aristotle, and the Hellenistic philosophers, the text presents the (Greek-inspired) areteic wisdom literature of the Second Temple period, the teleological theocentrism of the rabbis, the Greco-Arabic Islamicate culture that nurtured Jewish philosophers from Saadia in the tenth century to Maimonides in the twelfth, the rabbinic and kabbalistic critiques of the philosophical ideal of happiness commencing [End Page 338] with the translation (into Hebrew) of Maimonides' Guide of the Perplexed at the beginning of the thirteenth century, and finally, very important and the focus of much recent scholarly work, the transformation of Jewish eudaimonism through direct contact with Christian Scholasticism and later with the humanist Renaissance. All in all, a millennium and a half of Jewish intellectual history is presented in a sober and scholarly way.Not surprisingly Maimonides plays a pivotal role in the story that Tirosh-Samuelson relates. A Janus-like figure, he represents the culmination and height of accommodation with Greek and Greco-Arabic philosophical culture. However, with the gradual worsening of the socio-economic condition of European Jewry in the thirteenth century, his accommodationism seemed traitorous, and as a result generations of thinkers, mystics and philosophers alike, strove to critically distance themselves from Maimonidean Aristotelianism. Tirosh-Samuelson is admirably clear in pointing out that such anti-Maimonidean tendencies are ill-characterized as anti-philosophical. Hasdai Crescas in the late-fourteenth and early-fifteenth centuries launched a massive critique of Maimonides' physics, metaphysics, and moral philosophy, but did so in as rigorous a manner as any philosopher would. The picture that enfolds over the course of the text is one of vigorous dialectic between partisans of 'alien' (Greek) wisdom and those who viewed such wisdom with considerable suspicion. Such a dialectic parallels, not surprisingly, developments in Christian philosophy.The trajectory of the story of premodern Jewish musings on happiness is from the centrality of reason and intellect, and the contemplative activity that is reason's preeminent actuality, to the primacy... (shrink)

In this paper, I derive a syntactic procedure for revising theories in propositional logic from considerations of indifference and informational economy (minimality). The procedure is very flexible. It allows us to make use of information about the relative epistemic merit (entrenchment) of the sentences in the theories whenever such information is available, and, unlike other procedures proposed in the literature, yields plausible results even for very simple entrenchment orderings.

Valuemetrics is an elaboration of Robert S. Hartman's innovative development in the application of an abstract system to the study of ethical problems. The system used for this purpose is a branch of logic called set theory. Set theory fulfills this role because goodness, the fundamental phenomenon of ethics, is defined axiomatically in terms of sets. The similarity of structure between certain elements of set theory and the various types and degrees of goodness makes mathematical accounting of goodness phenomena possible. (...) In the valuemetrics context, value judgments are considered as an assessment of the goodness of something. Therefore, the mathematical system for the accounting of goodness serves as a tool for objectively making many kinds of value judgments and possible attendant ethical decisions. One of the results of this conception, attributable to Hartman, is the birth of the science of ethics. The first half of the book elucidates the theory, terminology, and mathematical system used in valuemetrics, known as Hartmanean algebra. The second half is devoted to the application of this system to the measurement and development of a person's value vision, and the solution of various problems in ethics using the case study technique. Hartmanean algebra will resolve several types of problems such as the determination of right and wrong, good and bad; determining how to redress and amend instances of wrongs and badness; and how to determine when, if ever, wrongs and badness are justified. (shrink)

Historicism -- Time -- Interpretation -- Representation -- Reference -- Truth -- Meaning -- Presence -- Experience (I) -- Experience (II) -- Subjectivity -- Politics.