A controversy rages over the question of how should controversial topics be taught. Recent work has advanced the “epistemic criterion” as the resolution to this controversy. According to the epistemic criterion, a matter should be taught as controversial when contrary views can be entertained on the matter without the views being contrary to reason. When an issue is noncontroversial, according to the epistemic criterion, the correct position can be taught “directively,” with the teacher endorsing that position. When there (...) is a legitimate controversy, the view should be taught “nondirectively,” with the teacher remaining neutral. In response, Bryan Warnick and Spencer Smith argue that the proponents of the epistemic criterion fail to recognize the multidimensional nature of what it means to learn to be rational. Recognizing this complexity undermines the link between the epistemic status of the controversy and directiveness of one's teaching, suggesting more flexibility in how teachers approach controversial issues. It also implies the need for a new category of teaching, which Warnick and Smith call “soft-directive” teaching. (shrink)

A significant ontological commitment is required to sustain metaphysical realism—the view that there is a single, objective way the world is—in order to defend it from common sense objections. This involves presupposing the existence of properties (or tropes, or universals) and relations between them which define the objective structure of the world. This paper explores the grounds for accepting this ontological assumption and examines a sceptical argument which questions whether, having assumed the world is objectively divided into fundamental properties, we (...) could ever know which properties these are. It then assesses the responses available to the metaphysical realist, arguing that the sceptical difficulty cannot merely be dismissed by means of another assumption in the manner of radical scepticism, as David Lewis suggests, but that the sceptic's argument might be defused by the non-question-begging success of some form of strong scientific realism which links the predicates of our scientific theories directly to the fundamental properties the world contains. It remains unclear however whether this widely accepted metaphysical theory can find principled philosophical support. (shrink)

The controversy of neuroanatomy on the principal structure of the nervous systems, which took place at the end of the nineteenth century, is described. Two groups of scientists are identified: one that favoured the idea of a discrete cellular organization of the nervous tissue, and one that favoured a syncytial organization. These two interpretations arose from different histological techniques that produced conflicting pictures of the organization of the nervous tissue. In an experimental reexamination of the techniques used at the (...) end of the nineteenth century, the present study concerns the impact of these different histological procedures on the controversy about the principle nature of the nervous tissue. This controversy could not be resolved by neuroanatomy itself until the 1950s when electron microscopy was introduced into neurobiology. Thus, in a critical period of the conceptual development of neurosciences, neuroanatomy failed to establish a proper base for an interpretation of the functional morphology of nervous tissues. (shrink)

Apparent design breakthroughs in short-range missile defense systems such as Theater High-Altitude Air Defense have prompted questions about the legality of such systems under the 1972 Antiballistic Missile Treaty. Prominent physicists have used computer “footprint” methodology to prove that if engineered to specifications, THAAD might exceed ABM Treaty performance limits banning highly effective missile defense systems. In response, missile defense officials commissioned Sparta, Inc. to conduct secret research casting doubt on the validity of such findings. The substantial diplomatic issues at (...) stake and the interesting rhetorical dynamics involved in this dispute warrant close scholarly analysis. Attention to the iterative relationship between the interpenetrating spheres of public argument and scientific practice in this case yields novel insight about the processes in which technical knowledge of defense systems is forged and raises fresh issues for the “closure project” in science and technology controversy studies. (shrink)

The basic philosophical controversy regarding ordinary objects is: Do tables and chairs, sticks and stones, exist? This paper aims to do two things: first, to explain why how this can be a controversy at all, and second, to explain why this controversy has arisen so late in the history of philosophy. Section 1 begins by discussing why the 'obvious' sensory evidence in favor of ordinary objects is not taken to be decisive. It goes on to review the (...) standard arguments against the existence of ordinary objects – including those based on problems with causal redundancy, parsimony, co-location, sorites arguments, and the special composition question. Section 2 goes on to address what it is about the contemporary approach to metaphysics that invites and sustains this kind of controversy, and helps make evident why debates about ordinary objects lead so readily to debates in metametaphysics about the nature of metaphysics itself. (shrink)

The so-called Menschenpark-debate on genetic engineering—originating in 1999—turned out to be one of the most controversial and contentious debates in German philosophy. It is also regarded as the first manifestation of the struggle between Sloterdijk and Habermas. While Sloterdijk’s ideas had a significant impact on Habermas’s theory, Sloterdijk’s philosophy has been consistently ignored and dismissed until today due to two reasons. First, he was accused of advocating for fascist ideology. Second, philosophers from the same academic circles claimed that his method (...) does not meet academic standards. The debate therefore signifies a larger problem that concerns the methodological difference between analytic-Continental philosophies that work on a formal level and Continental philosophies that work with a tropological account experimenting with different non-formal philosophical expressions. I will carve out this distinction with respect to the Menschenpark-debate to argue that Sloterdijk is an integral part of our philosophical historical moment. (shrink)

Based on anthropological fieldwork among protesters against the Covid policy in Germany, this paper elaborates the symmetry of accusations made against each other by proponents and opponents of the state-imposed protection measures against the backdrop of an asymmetrical distribution of power. The social dynamics that emerged during the pandemic are often understood as the result of a knowledge controversy that most participants thus categorize as a media problem. A key finding of my research on protests against the German Covid (...) policy is that, as in my research on the controversy over mediumism, the controversy is about the agency of human and nonhuman actors and carried out to a great extent based on the same values on both sides, which at the same time accuse each other of not conforming to these values. The protesters are part of a heterogeneous minority that in large parts embodies the values of the majority and, in a way, exceeds them, i.e., a minority that is hypercritical and has extreme expectations about the values of the majority society – in this case: of solidarity, science, transparency, rationality, and coherence. From its marginal position, the minority develops a canny eye for the unfulfilled promises of the majority: its contradictions and conscious or unconscious double standards are perceived as bigotry against the backdrop of the aspiration to absence of contradiction. Therefore, this minority suspects that the motivations and goals behind the measures taken are other than just the protection of health, while the majority in turn see the minority’s commitment to society and democracy as (self-)deception and also suspect hidden motives and actors behind it. This mutual suspicion leads to a hysterical state of doubt and distrust, which is rooted in the nature of mediality. (shrink)

This paper offers a new way to make sense of disagreement expansion from a polylogical perspective by incorporating various places in addition to players and positions into the analysis. The concepts build on prior implicit ideas about disagreement space by suggesting how to more fully account for argumentative context, and its construction, in large-scale complex controversies. As a basis for our polylogical analysis, we use a New York Times news story reporting on an oil train explosion—a significant point in the (...) broader controversy over producing oil and gas via hydraulic fracturing. (shrink)

SummaryIn the 1940s a controversy developed between John H. Northrop (Nobel Laureate, 1946) and Max Delbrück (Nobel Laureate, 1969) on the formation of bacteriophage. From the historiography of molecular biology there emerges a picture of an obstinate Northrop who repudiated the ‘correct’ insights revealed by the experiments of Delbrück. The established reputation of Northrop confronts one with the question of why Delbrück's epoch-making experiments were not convincing for Northrop. It will be argued that this was a consequence of local (...) incommensurability between Northrop's physiological/chemical research style and Delbrück's bacteriological/genetic research style. The analysis of this controversy reveals the elements that made up these two research styles. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Controversy Between Schelling and Jacobi LEWIS S. FORD SCHELLING, ALONGWITH FICHTE, has suffered the fate of being labelled one of tIegel's predecessors. Richard Kroner provides the classic expression of this viewpoint in his monumental study, Von Kant bis Hegel, which examines Schelling's thought primarily for its contribution to Hegel's final synthesis.I In English we have Josiah Royce's sympathetic and lively account of Schelling's early romantic exuberance, regarded (...) as a transitional stage in the development of German idealism. 2 But this emphasis on the early ScheUing has led to an unfortunate neglect of his work subsequent to the break with Hegel in 1807. Schelling's romanticism, so ably documented by E. D. Hirsch, Jr., 3 can only be regarded as one phase in the total sweep of his thought, for, after the break with Hegel, Schelling produced at least three major works: the essay •ber das Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit,4 wrestling with the problem of evil and human freedom, the fragmentary Weltalter, 5 which in scope and dialectical intricacy should be compared with Hegel's Logic, and the Philosophie der Mythologie und Offenbarung, 6 furnishing a fundamental critique of the whole dialectical enterprise. Save for the essay on human freedom, however, none of these works were published during his lifetinm, as Schelling withdrew from the public eye after his controversies with Hegel and Jacobi. Thus the publishing histories of Schelling and Hegel are exactly reverse. Schelling rushed into print his early speculative gropings, while Hegel suppressed his/making the Ph~nomenologic des Geistes his first major publication. Then while Hegel's Logic and Encyclopedia were being publicly acclaimed, Schelling remained silent. This accident of history is largely responsible for the illusion that Schelling is the older of the two x (Tiibingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1921-24),2 vols. 2The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1892), Lecture VI, 164-189. Wordsworth and ScheUing, A Typological Study of Romanticism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1960),Yale Studies in English, Vol. CXLV. 4Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph yon Sehelling, Philosophische Untersuchungen i~berdas Wesen der menschlichen Freyheit und die damit zusaramenhdngenden Gegenstdnde, 1809. Reprinted in the Sdmmtliche Werke, Erste Abtheilung, VII. Band (Stuttgart und Augsburg: J. G. Cotta, 1856), 331-416. English translation by James Gutmann: Of Human Freedom (Chicago: Open Court, 1936). 5Three fragmentary versions of the Weltalter have been published. The Urfassungen of 1811 and 1813were edited by Manfrcd SehrSter and published as a separate Naehlassband to the M~nchener Jubildumsausgabe of the collected works: Die Weltalter, Fragmente (Munich: Biederstein, Leibniz, 1946). A later version is published in S.W. I: 8, pp. 195-344,which has been translated by Frederick de Wolfe Bolman, Jr. : The Ages of the World (NewYork: Columbia University Press, 1942). 6Philosophie der Mythologie is published in S.W. II: 1-2; Philosophie der Offenbarung in S.W. II: 3-4. These essays were first collected and published by Herman Nohl in Hegels theologische Jugendschriften (Tiibingen: 1907).T. M. Knox translated them into English, with an introduction by Richard Kroner: GeorgWilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Early Theological Writings (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948). [75] 76 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY thinkers (actually he was five years Hegel's junior), who retired from the philosophical scene after making his contribution to the Hegelian synthesis. Paul Tillich's doctoral dissertations s and Ernst Cassirer's studies in post-Kantian thought 9 made serious inroads on this conception, yet the iIInsion persisted. Their insistence on the importance of the later Schelling has been brilliantly sustained by two recent studies: Horst Fuhrmans's Schellings Philosophie der Weltalter1~and Walter Schulz's Die Vollendung des deutschen Idealismus in der Spdtphilosophie Schellings, ~ and we may hope that the conventional estimate of Schelling will be drastically revised. Fuhrmans has demonstrated that the split between the early and the later Schelling must be placed in the year 1806 when he came in contact with Franz yon Bander in Munich, who encouraged him to delve deeper into the theological and cosmological ramifications of Jacob Boehme's thought. TM The reorientation this caused is apparent in the essay on human freedom, published in 1809, but it was not fully exploited until the... (shrink)

From, at least, the mid-fourth century until the mid-fifth-century AD a controversy concerning a seemingly trivial fact engaged Christian scholars: when did Methuselah die? Although most of the major Latin fathers were drawn into the fray — and echoes of the debate continued in Latin exegesis for another five centuries — this controversy has escaped historians and is today unknown. So this paper has a double task. First, uncover from its remnants what we can know of this problem (...) that elicited much exertion on the part of Jerome and Augustine at its height, and was discussed urgently before them by Hilary of Poitiers , and after them by Eucherius of Lyons . Second, to examine some of the effects of this controversy on the Latin theology, and, in particular, the Latin church’s understanding of scripture. While any conscious awareness of the controversy itself has disappeared, many of the ideas which underwent development in the controversy, such as the notion of inerrancy and of the fundamental role of the Hebrew text, became part of the life-blood of Latin theology. (shrink)

: The mandate of the U.S. Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments required that the Committee take a position on the validity of retrospective moral judgments. However, throughout its period of operation, the Committee remained divided on the question of whether sound judgments of individual culpability and wrongdoing should be included in its Final Report. This essay examines the arguments that various committee members marshalled to support their opposing views on retrospective moral judgment and explains the significance of the (...) class='Hi'>controversy. (shrink)

This essay briefly evaluates the ongoing controversy between LIU Qingping and GUO Qiyong (and their followers) about the “moral heart ”of Confucianism in order to draw acomparison with Islamic ethics for mutual illumination of the two traditions.

Despite the reported limited success of conventional treatments and growing evidence of the effectiveness of adult bariatric surgery, weight loss operations for (morbidly) obese children and adolescents are still considered to be controversial by health care professionals and lay people alike. This paper describes an explorative, qualitative study involving obesity specialists, morbidly obese adolescents, and parents and identifies attitudes and normative beliefs regarding pediatric bariatric surgery. Views on the etiology of obesity—whether it should be considered primarily a medical condition or (...) more a psychosocial problem—seem to affect the specialists’ normative opinions concerning the acceptability of bariatric procedures as a treatment option, the parents’ feelings regarding both being able to influence their child’s health and their child being able to control their own condition, and the adolescents’ sense of competence and motivation for treatment. Moreover, parents and adolescents who saw obesity as something that they could influence themselves were more in favor of non-surgical treatment and vice versa. Conflicting attitudes and normative views—e.g., with regard to concepts of disease, personal influence on health, motivation, and the possibility of a careful informed consent procedure—play an important role in the acceptability of bariatric surgery for childhood obesity. (shrink)

The article concentrates on a key concept of the Fin de Siecle in Europe – namely, “dilettantism” and its connection with Czech Decadent literature. Dilettantism, as explained by Paul Bourget in his essay on Ernest Renan , is characterized by the individual’s refusal to forego any possible experience by adhering to a setmode of life. The “dilettante critic” originates in the idea of the “critic as artist” as developed by Oscar Wilde, who in turn is indebted to Pater’s conception of (...) the “aesthetic critic.” In dilettantism there are many pitfalls: the dilettante may be the perfect embodiment of the “Decadent” type with his Willenskrankheit, hypertrophied analysis, over-refinement, hyper-aestheticism, eclecticism, and sterility. Arnošt Procházka , for instance, applies the term “dilettante” to Andrea Sperelli , modelled on Huysmans’s Des Esseintes. The controversies over Dilettantism appear here as an expression of an exclusive concern with “life,” a concept that a cornerstone of philosophical debate of the period. (shrink)

Cancer is a chronic disease that causes the most deaths in the world, being a public health problem nowadays. Even though breast cancer affects the daily lives of patients, many women become resilient after the disease, decreasing the impact of the diagnosis. Based on a positive psychology approach, the concept of co-vitality arises understood as a set of socio-emotional competencies that enhance psychological adaptation. In this sense, emotional intelligence is one of the main protective factors associated with resilience. However, it (...) is not always as beneficial as it seems, and can lead to collateral effects on psychological adjustment. Given this controversy, this study aims to find the specific processes through which the dimensions of Perceived Emotional Intelligence can act as a risk or protective factor in the development of resilience. The total sample was 167 women, 46.7% were breast cancer survivors, and 53.3% were healthy controls. The selection of women with breast cancer carries out randomly, recruited through the Oncology Units. The sample completed measures of resilience and PEI, through Resilience Scale and TMMS-24. The results showed that breast cancer survivors showed higher age and greater levels of resilience and mood repair than healthy women. The mediation analysis revealed that breast cancer survival and PEI predicted 28% of the variance of resilience. The direct effects showed that emotional clarity and mood repair increased resilience levels. Although breast cancer did not predict resilience directly, it does through mood repair by an indirect process. Besides, the analysis showed that emotional attention played a role in vulnerability, decreasing mood repair, and resilience. These research support theories that point to a possible dark side of PEI, thus, a great level of emotional attention makes dark the positive effect of mood repair and personal growth if a clear perception of emotions does not complement it. These results provide empirical support concerning the need to work complementary each dimension of PEI to avoid unwanted effects on intrapersonal adjustment. (shrink)

How much should your confidence in your beliefs be shaken when you learn that others – perhaps 'epistemic peers' who seem as well-qualified as you are – hold beliefs contrary to yours? This article describes motivations that push different philosophers towards opposite answers to this question. It identifies a key theoretical principle that divides current writers on the epistemology of disagreement. It then examines arguments bearing on that principle, and on the wider issue. It ends by describing some outstanding questions (...) that thinking about this issue raises. (shrink)

A climactic piece in the controversy between rationalists & the advocates of sentiment.

There is a parallel between the debate between Gottlob Frege and David Hilbert at the turn of the twentieth century and at least some aspects of the current controversy over whether category theory provides the proper framework for structuralism in the philosophy of mathematics. The main issue, I think, concerns the place and interpretation of meta-mathematics in an algebraic or structuralist approach to mathematics. Can meta-mathematics itself be understood in algebraic or structural terms? Or is it an exception to (...) the slogan that mathematics is the science of structure? (shrink)

The boundary work approach has been established as one of the main ways to study controversies in science. However, it has been proposed that it does not meet the power dynamics of the scientific field sufficiently. This article concentrates on the intertwining of boundary work and power. It combines the boundary work approach developed by Thomas Gieryn and the analysis of power in the work of Pierre Bourdieu. Based on a literature review and an analysis of a controversy over (...) therapeutic touch, it finds four forms of boundary work: intradisciplinary, interdisciplinary, between science and society, and between science and other knowledge systems. The article shows how the different forms of boundary work reveal multiple power struggles, hierarchisations and tensions. The controversy appeared in Finnish nursing science when the Finnish Association of Sceptics gave its annual Humbug Award to a book on therapeutic touch. The book was based on a master’s thesis at the University of Tampere department of nursing science. The nursing scholars in the department reacted abruptly and banned certain books, which astonished the students, and a lively public debate followed. In the debate, nursing science was both defended and challenged. The framework of the study shows that the boundary work approach can be used to study different aspects of power. The article proposes that the framework could be used in other controversies as well to study the layers of power in boundary work. (shrink)

Critics of evolutionary psychology and sociobiology have advanced an adaptationists-as-right-wing-conspirators (ARC) hypothesis, suggesting that adaptationists use their research to support a right-wing political agenda. We report the first quantitative test of the ARC hypothesis based on an online survey of political and scientific attitudes among 168 US psychology Ph.D. students, 31 of whom self-identified as adaptationists and 137 others who identified with another non-adaptationist meta-theory. Results indicate that adaptationists are much less politically conservative than typical US citizens and no more (...) politically conservative than non-adaptationist graduate students. Also, contrary to the “adaptationists-as-pseudo-scientists” stereotype, adaptationists endorse more rigorous, progressive, quantitative scientific methods in the study of human behavior than non-adaptationists. (shrink)

tational background of dialectic: the structure of formal disputation. Formal disputation Perhaps the clearest, and surely historically the most prominent, ...

ABSTRACT This paper reveals David Hilbert’s position in the philosophy of mathematics, circa 1900, to be a form of non-eliminative structuralism, predating his formalism. I argue that Hilbert withstands the pressing objections put to him by Frege in the course of the Frege-Hilbert controversy in virtue of this early structuralist approach. To demonstrate that this historical position deserves contemporary attention I show that Hilbertian structuralism avoids a recent wave of objections against non-eliminative structuralists to the effect that they cannot (...) distinguish between structurally identical but importantly distinct mathematical objects, such as the complex roots of $-1$. (shrink)

The modern readings of the history of philosophy have led some scholars to attempt to reinvent or reconstruct the subject of metaphysics. These attempts had significant consequences on the Aristotelian model of metaphysics and its status as First Philosophy as listed by the ancient commentators, Alexander of Aphrodisias or Theophrastus. These new trends of philosophy also altered the dynamics of abstraction upon which Aristotle built a convincing theory of science according to the structures of discursive reasoning. The trend did not (...) begin until after what historians termed the “second beginning of metaphysics in the thirteenth century.” The current paper investigates the historical development and controversy surrounding the understanding of the two philosophical terms and the consequences of replacing metaphysics with ontology as the First Philosophy. (shrink)

When the sociobiology debate erupted in 1975, there were almost too many contributions to the heated exchanges between sociobiologists and their critics to count. In the fall of 1976, a Canadian educational film entitled _Sociobiology: Doing What Comes Naturally_ sparked further controversy due to its graphic visuals and outrageous narration. While critics claimed the film was a promotional tool to further the sociobiological agenda in educational settings, sociobiologists quickly distanced themselves from the film and, in turn, accused the critics (...) of consciously misrepresenting sociobiology by organizing showings of the film. Using audio, video, archival, and published sources, this paper explores the complicated history of _Sociobiology: Doing What Comes Naturally_ and demonstrates how the public debate about the film reflects the positions, polemics, and polarization of the sociobiology debate as a whole. (shrink)

This paper revisits the scholarly controversy about the nature of persuasion in Plato's Laws. So far scholars have identified the nature of this persuasion in often conflicting ways, e.g. from 'lying propaganda' and 'enchantment' to 'sermon preaching' , or even as 'rational persuasion' . Rather than proposing yet another identification, this paper shows that the nature of the persuasion envisioned by the Athenian lawgiver becomes evident once the divergent scholarly views are brought together into one idea. The seed to (...) this reconciliation was contained in the debate all along but has not been sufficiently fore-grounded. A close examination makes evident why such persuasion appears to different readers to be of a vastly different nature. It employs, indeed, a variety of linguistic means geared towards a variety of different people at different times in their lives. (shrink)

Turing’s much debated test has turned 70 and is still fairly controversial. His 1950 paper is seen as a complex and multilayered text, and key questions about it remain largely unanswered. Why did Turing select learning from experience as the best approach to achieve machine intelligence? Why did he spend several years working with chess playing as a task to illustrate and test for machine intelligence only to trade it out for conversational question-answering in 1950? Why did Turing refer to (...) gender imitation in a test for machine intelligence? In this article, I shall address these questions by unveiling social, historical and epistemological roots of the so-called Turing test. I will draw attention to a historical fact that has been only scarcely observed in the secondary literature thus far, namely that Turing’s 1950 test emerged out of a controversy over the cognitive capabilities of digital computers, most notably out of debates with physicist and computer pioneer Douglas Hartree, chemist and philosopher Michael Polanyi, and neurosurgeon Geoffrey Jefferson. Seen in its historical context, Turing’s 1950 paper can be understood as essentially a reply to a series of challenges posed to him by these thinkers arguing against his view that machines can think. Turing did propose gender learning and imitation as one of his various imitation tests for machine intelligence, and I argue here that this was done in response to Jefferson's suggestion that gendered behavior is causally related to the physiology of sex hormones. (shrink)

This paper revisits the scholarly controversy about the nature of persuasion in Plato’s Laws. So far scholars have identified the nature of this persuasion in often conflicting ways, e.g. from ‘lying propaganda’ and ‘enchantment’ to ‘sermon preaching’, or even as ‘rational persuasion’. Rather than proposing yet another identification, this paper shows that the nature of the persuasion envisioned by the Athenian lawgiver becomes evident once the divergent scholarly views are brought together into one idea. The seed to this reconciliation (...) was contained in the debate all along but has not been sufficiently fore-grounded. A close examination makes evident why such persuasion appears to different readers to be of a vastly different nature. It employs, indeed, a variety of linguistic means geared towards a variety of different people at different times in their lives. (shrink)

: Where there are cases of underdetermination in scientific controversies, such as the case of the molecular clock, scientists may direct the course and terms of dispute by playing off the multidimensional framework of theory evaluation. This is because assessment strategies themselves are underdetermined. Within the framework of assessment, there are a variety of trade-offs between different strategies as well as shifting emphases as specific strategies are given more or less weight in assessment situations. When a strategy is underdetermined, scientists (...) can change the dynamics of a controversy by making assessments using different combinations of evaluation strategies and/or weighting whatever strategies are in play in different ways. Following an underdetermination strategy does not end or resolve a scientific dispute. Consequently, manipulating underdetermination is a feature of controversy dynamics and not controversy closure. (shrink)

Researchers in developmental psychology have concluded that no significant differences exist between children raised by lesbians and gay men and those raised by heterosexuals. Although these scientific studies have attracted criticism, scrutiny has shown that they are actually epistemologically sounder than the body of knowledge that the critics themselves have developed in order to mount their case against lesbian and gay parenting. Nevertheless, to the extent that they are limited by a number of problematic assumptions structuring the paradigm within which (...) they have been conducted, the parenting studies are not a body of maximally objective knowledge. The same assumptions have also tended to inform legal discourse on lesbian and gay parenting. A paradigm shift away from questions about the goodness or badness of lesbian and gay parenting is overdue, both in sexuality-focused psychological research on child development and in the law’s approach to nonheterosexual parenting. (shrink)

The critique of capitalism is the bedrock on which rests the reputation of Frankfurt School critical theory. Though critical theory has often been heralded – or criticized and rejected – as a reformulation of Marxian theory for our times, its relation with the critique of political economy, and in particular the economic treatises, has barely been studied. Friedrich Pollock, who was Max Horkheimer’s lifelong friend and close associate at the Institute for Social Research, was responsible for all administrative and financial (...) questions, but he wrote few theoretical essays and Wiggershaus calls him ‘the last unknown member of the Frankfurt School’. Nevertheless this article asks whether not only has his influence on early critical theory been sorely underestimated, but also his impact on the late philosophies of Horkheimer, Adorno and Marcuse. (shrink)

The topic and practice of contemplative prayer has become a major controversy in Evangelical spirituality. For those critical of the spiritual formation movement in general, contemplative prayer is often raised as one obvious spiritual practice that is foreign to the Scriptures and a Christian world-view, and more akin to New Age and eastern religions. This paper is also critical of any approach to contemplation and contemplative prayer that is not grounded in the Christian Faith. However, I will argue that (...) the Nicene theology of the fourth century CE already addressed some of these concerns in its response to Origenic spirituality and, in turn, provided a theological correction to sub-Christian views of contemplation and contemplative prayer. Furthermore, this paper argues that a truly Christian approach to contemplative prayer can be made consistent with Christian theology and that the Scriptures actually teach a form of contemplation and contemplative prayer. (shrink)

1. The aim of my paper is to correct the longstanding misperception of the relationship between two key figures of the Irish intellectual milieu of the seventeenth / eighteenth century: the bishop...

ArgumentThis article examines the medical and political discussions regarding a controversial medicinal bark from Ecuador – cundurango – that was actively sponsored by the Ecuadorian government as a new botanical cure for cancer in the late nineteenth century United States and elsewhere. The article focuses on the commercial and diplomatic interests behind the public discussion and advertising techniques of this drug. It argues that diverse elements – including the struggle for positioning scientific societies and the disapproval of the capacities of (...) Ecuadorian doctors, US abolitionist history, regional and local political struggles – played a role in the quackery accusations against cundurango and its promoters. The development and international trade of this remedy offer interesting insights into the global history of drugs, particularly how medical knowledge was challenged during a period when scientific medicine was struggling for hegemony. It explores how newspapers expanded “the public interest” in a possible cancer cure. (shrink)