Proclus (c.412-485) once offered an argument that Christians took to stand against the Christian doctrine of creation ex nihilo based on the eternity of the world and God’s perfection. John Philoponus (c.490-570) objected to this on various grounds. Part of this discussion can shed light on contemporary issues in philosophical theology on divine perfection and creation. First I will examine Proclus’ dilemma and John Philoponus’ response. I will argue that Philoponus’ fails to rebut Proclus’ dilemma. The problem is that presentism (...) is incompatible with divine simplicity, timelessness, and a strong doctrine of immutability. From there I will look at how this discussion bears on contemporary understandings of divine perfection and creation, and argue that there are at least two possible ways contemporary philosophical theologians can try to get around the dilemma. One option is to adopt four-dimensional eternalism and maintain the traditional account of the divine perfections. I argue that this option suffers from difficulties that are not compatible with Christian belief. The other option is to keep presentism and modify the divine perfections. I argue that this option is possible and preferable since our understanding of the divine perfections must be modified in light of divine revelation and the incarnation. (shrink)

I argue that it is appropriate for adult recipients of personal care to feel and express gratitude whenever care providers are inspired partly by benevolence, and deliver a real benefit in a manner that conveys respect for the recipient. My focus on gratitude is consistent with important aspects of feminist ethics of care, including its attention to the particularities and vulnerabilities of caregivers and care recipients, and its concern with how relations of care are shaped by social hierarchies and public (...) institutions. In addition, it goes beyond the current preoccupations of care ethicists both by introducing gratitude as an important aspect of morally valuable relations of care and by stressing the significance of attending not only to the needs but also the capacities of recipients of care. (shrink)

This essay focuses attention on Polanyi’s 1946 book Science, Faith and Society as an early constructive philosophical effort to rehabilitate belief and show that it is integral to science. Particularly important is the opening chapter “Science and Reality,” which is Polanyi’s inaugural gambit directly to address the question about the nature of science in metaphysical terms. Polanyi’s metaphysical account of science affirms that fundamental beliefs of scientists, although largely not articulable, guide their effort to discern Gestalten to which they are (...) committed as elements of reality. However, real entities remain partially hidden and later inquiry may reveal indeterminate future manifestations. My discussion in this essay reviews thematically akin publications preceding Science, Faith and Society and some of Polanyi’s later writing that re-works ideas in his early book. I also suggest that Polanyi’s ideas in Science, Faith and Society were likely influenced by his work with Dorothy Emmet. (shrink)

A growing consensus in the philosophy and psychology of concepts is that while theories such as the prototype, exemplar, and theory theories successfully account for some instances of concept formation and application, none of them successfully accounts for all such instances. I argue against this ‘new consensus’ and show that the problem is, in fact, more severe: the explanatory force of each of these theories is limited even with respect to the phenomena often cited to support it, as each fails (...) to satisfy an important explanatory desideratum with respect to these phenomena. I argue that these explanatory shortcomings arise from a shared assumption on the part of these theories, namely, they take similarity judgements and application of causal knowledge to be discrete elements in a theory of concepts. I further propose that the same assumption carries over into alternative theories offered by proponents of the new consensus: pluralism, eliminativism, and hybrid theories. I put forth a sketch of an integrated model of concept formation and application, which rejects this shared assumption and satisfies the explanatory desiderata I discuss. I suggest that this model undermines the motivation for hybrid, pluralist, and eliminativist accounts of concepts. _1_ Introduction _2_ The Similarity-Based Approach and the Importance of Theory _2.1_ The similarity-based approach _2.2_ The selection desideratum _2.3_ Causal knowledge as satisfying the selection desideratum _3_ The Theory-Based Approach and the Importance of Similarity _3.1_ The theory-based approach _3.2_ The range desideratum _3.3_ Similarity as satisfying the range desideratum _4_ An Integrated Approach to Concepts _4.1_ An integrated model _4.2_ The integrated theory versus hybrid theories of concepts _5_ Conclusion. (shrink)

In this paper I shall consider an objection to divine temporality called “The Prisoner of Time” objection. I shall begin by distinguishing divine timelessness from divine temporality in order to clear up common misunderstandings and caricatures of divine temporality. From there I shall examine the prisoner of time objection and explain why the prisoner of time objection fails to be a problem for the Christian divine temporalist.

Feminist epistemology and feminist art theory are characterized by an opposition to modernity's separation of art, politics, and knowledge into three autonomous spheres. However, this opposition is not enough to distinguish them from other philosophies. In this paper I examine parallels between the two fields of inquiry in order to discover what makes them distinctively feminist. Feminist epistemology sees interconnections between knowledge and politics, feminist art theory sees connections between art and politics. We need to explore as well connections between (...) art and knowledge. Compared to feminist epistemology, feminist art theory has had much less exposure, and in this paper I emphasize what the former can learn from the latter. In particular, I suggest that feminist art can answer a call made by feminist theories of knowledge for a kind of transformative knowledge. If we focus on the features of activist art explored by feminist art theories, we see that feminist art is particularly suited to engage emotions as well as the intellect. It is an example of nonpropositional knowledge, and is interactive rather than striving to pass down lessons from above. Feminist art celebrates the power of art to “make strange” and to unsettle fixed identities which can transform our understanding of the world. There is a tendency in some feminist art theory to separate the more concrete work (rediscovering women artists, recognizing women's crafts as art forms, and investigating sexist imagery in art), from the theoretical project of reenvisioning the relations of art to its sociopolitical context. I conclude by arguing that without an awareness of the dialectical relationship between the concrete and the theoretical, feminist art theories run the risk of losing their feminist specificity. They would then amount to little more than abstract pronouncements of the interconnections between art, politics, and knowledge. We need to maintain the feminist specificity of feminist politics in our theories of art and knowledge, and I use examples throughout the essay, drawn particularly from feminist activist art, with this goal in mind. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Purity and Pollution: Resisting the Rehabilitation of a VirtueAmy Mullin“Purity” is a term used infrequently in contemporary academic literature. A survey of periodical indexes for the past ten years shows that references to purity occur predominantly in metallurgy. Purity is an increasingly important topic in anthropology, religious studies, and history, but it is a decidedly rare concern in philosophy. In my most recent search I found three references.Yet “purity” (...) was once a recurrent term in the philosophical tradition ranging from Plato through Augustine and Kant to Kierkegaard. Today when we encounter the many references to purity in the history of philosophy we too often filter them out. We assume either that “pure” is a generic term for good, or, in what seems a more knowing and sophisticated response, we read “pure” as a code term for chastity or sexual morality, the elimination, suppression or control of sexual desire. In both cases purity is written off either as a generic or as an old fashioned and rather embarrassing virtue. Hence it seems there is little reason for contemporary philosophical investigation into the rhetorical use of the language of purity and pollution.Three assumptions account for the lack of contemporary philosophical interest in the topic. First, it is assumed that purity is no longer a concern in twentieth-century philosophy. Second, purity in historical discourse is considered to be limited to a prudish or downright misogynist hostility to sex. Third and finally, it is assumed that the work historians and anthropologists have done recently into connections between purity beliefs and practices and social cohesion is irrelevant for philosophy. This is because purity in philosophy is supposed to be a resolutely individualist virtue, having little or nothing to do with unified and coherent communities.There are elements of truth to all three beliefs, but they also contain important distortions of the truth. As regards the first assumption, purity remains a concern in contemporary aesthetics, where it often means roughly something like a priori and apolitical; but I am interested in whether the concern with purity has survived in philosophies with ethical implications. [End Page 509] Here it is my contention that authenticity is the twentieth-century descendant of the virtue of purity.Second, there is much more to the rhetoric and practices of purity than concern with the sexual dimension of life, though this is a key aspect of most, and the beliefs and practices are often misogynist. There have been numerous anthropological documentations of ways in which purity beliefs, particularly an emphasis on sexual purity, are used to control women. Santi Rozario’s work, for instance, makes this point in her analysis of contemporary Bengali village life. 1 The connection between the language of purity and the practice of female circumcision, which I will not discuss in this paper, is in itself evidence enough of connections between purity beliefs and practices harmful to women. 2 However, I hope to show that there is more to purity than misogyny. Purity most basically is about order, both social and personal. 3My response to the second assumption, that purity masks an obsession with sexual control, indicates the source of my disagreement with the third, the contention that purity in philosophy is exclusively an individual virtue. Communal beliefs and practices associated with the language of purity and pollution are relevant to the philosophical treatment of purity because of the presence in both the practices and the philosophies of an interplay between social and personal order. As a result I believe an understanding of the dynamics of beliefs about purity in social practice can inform a philosophical concern with purity.First I investigate shifts in beliefs and practices concerning purity and pollution. I will concentrate on three models: ancient Greek (from the eighth to the third century BC), biblical to Talmudic Judaism (from the third century BC to the third century AD), and early Christian (from the first to the fifth century AD). These represent three traditions which have played a very significant role in shaping western civilization, theology, and philosophy. 4 They were also frequently interrelated in this period, as Christian and Jewish Platonists writing in Greek attest and of course as... (shrink)

This paper examines the interplay between conceptual structure and the evolution of scientific concepts, arguing that concepts are fundamentally ‘forward-looking’ constructs. Drawing on empirical studies of similarity and categorization, I explicate the way in which the conceptual taxonomy highlights the ‘relevant respects’ for similarity judgments involved in categorization. I then propose that this taxonomy provides some of the cognitive underpinnings of the ongoing development of scientific concepts. I use the concept synapse to illustrate my proposal, showing how conceptual taxonomy both (...) facilitates and constrains the accommodation of newly discovered phenomena. I end by briefly considering the implications of the proposed approach for a normative evaluation of scientific concepts. (shrink)

Similarity‐based theories of concepts have a broad intuitive appeal and have been successful in accounting for various phenomena related to the formation and application of concepts. Their adequacy as theories of concepts has been questioned, however, as similarity is often taken as too flexible, too unconstrained, to be explanatory of categorization. In this article, I propose an account of similarity that takes the “foil” against which the target items are measured as integral to the process of comparison, making the similarity (...) relation a fundamentally triadic one. I argue that this account delivers more internal constraints on the process of comparison than the traditional, dyadic account of similarity does. Finally, I propose that this account is advantageous for a similarity‐based theory of concepts, as it easily integrates with the notion of conceptual taxonomy and uses it to deliver additional constraints on categorization. On such a theory of concepts, the foil, whose variability is in large part responsible for the flexible nature of similarity judgements, is turned within the framework of conceptual taxonomy to the very element that constrains similarity judgements in categorization. Therefore, this notion of similarity mitigates the worry that similarity is too flexible to be explanatory of categorization. (shrink)

In a series of papers, Thomas P. Flint has posited that God the Son could become incarnate in any human person as long as certain conditions are met (Flint 2001a, 2001b). In a recent paper, he has argued that all saved human persons will one day become incarnated by the Son (Flint 2011). Flint claims that this is motivated by a combination of Molinism and orthodox Christology. I shall argue that this is unmotivated because it is condemned by orthodox Christology. (...) Flint has unknowingly articulated a version of the heresy called Origenism that is condemned by the Fifth Ecumenical Council. After arguing that Flint’s account is unmotivated because it is condemned, I shall offer some reflections and prolegomena on the relationship between contemporary analytic theology and the ecumenical creeds. (shrink)

In this essay, we consider questions arising from cases in which people request medical assistance in dying (MAiD) in unjust social circumstances. We develop our argument by asking two questions. First, can decisions made in the context of unjust social circumstance be meaningfully autonomous? We understand ‘unjust social circumstances’ to be circumstances in which people do not have meaningful access to the range of options to which they are entitled and ‘autonomy’ as self-governance in the service of personally meaningful goals, (...) values and commitments. People in these circumstances would choose otherwise, were conditions more just. We consider and reject arguments that the autonomy of people choosing death in the context of injustice is necessarily reduced, either by restricting their options for self-determination, through their internalisation of oppressive attitudes or by undermining their hope to the point that they despair.Second, should MAiD be available to people in such circumstances, even when a sound argument can be made that the agents in question are autonomous? In response, we use a harm reduction approach, arguing that even though such decisions are tragic, MAiD should be available. Our argument engages with relational theories of autonomy as well as recent criticism raised against them and is intended to be general in application, although it emerges in response to the Canadian legal regimen around MAiD, with a focus on recent changes in Canada’s eligibility criteria to qualify for MAiD. (shrink)

This review discusses recent work on foundational questions about concepts. The first of these questions is whether concepts are context-independent bodies of knowledge, or context-dependent constructs, created on the fly. The second question is whether concepts are abstract, amodal representations, or whether they are embedded within the sensory-motor system. I discuss these two questions in light of empirical data from psychology and neuroscience, as well as theoretical considerations, and examine their implications for theories of concepts.

We argue that there is a conflict among classical theism's commitments to divine simplicity, divine creative freedom, and omniscience. We start by defining key terms for the debate related to classical theism. Then we articulate a new argument, the Aloneness Argument, aiming to establish a conflict among these attributes. In broad outline, the argument proceeds as follows. Under classical theism, it's possible that God exists without anything apart from Him. Any knowledge God has in such a world would be wholly (...) intrinsic. But there are contingent truths in every world, including the world in which God exists alone. So, it's possible that God contingently has wholly intrinsic knowledge. But whatever is contingent and wholly intrinsic is an accident. So, God possibly has an accident. This is incompatible with classical theism. Finally, we consider and rebut several objections. (shrink)

The tension between external forces for better ethics in organizations, represented by legislation such as the Sarbanes–Oxley Act (SOX), and the call for internal forces represented by increased educational coverage, has never been as apparent. This study examines business school faculty attitudes about recent corporate ethics lapses, including opinions about root causes, potential solutions, and ethics coverage in their courses. In assessing root causes, faculty point to a failure of systems such as legal/professional and management (external) and declining personal values (...) (internal). We also found that faculty recommend external forces as a remedy more often than increased ethics educational coverage; we contextualize this finding with recent ethics education literature. We conclude by proposing that neither legislation nor ethics education alone are complete when addressing widespread unethical corporate acts and offer a multi-faceted approach to ethics educational opportunities. (shrink)

This paper draws on the notion of “objects of research” in psychology as clusters of phenomena (Feest in Philos Sci 84:1165–1176, 2017) to analyze the productive role of folk psychological concepts—and the operational definitions that arise from them—in the development of concepts in scientific psychology. Using the case study of similarity, I discuss the role of the folk psychological concept in the regimentation of different measures of similarity judgments. I propose that by giving rise to operational definitions that lead to (...) experimental dissociation on the one hand, and by providing the concept with unity on the other hand, the folk psychological concept generates a productive tension that facilitates empirical and theoretical development of the scientific concept. (shrink)

L'Odyssée, le plus ancien poème de la culture occidentale, met en scène la métamorphose qui change Ulysse en lui-même sous les yeux dessillés de ceux qui échouaient jusque-là à le reconnaître. Ulysse constitue ainsi la première d'une longue série de figures donnant corps à cette opération mystérieuse : le passage de l'existence en régime d'obscurité à l'existence "en personne", dans une forme de vérité. Que signifie un tel passage? Comment s'opère cette transition? Quelles formes cette idée d'existence en personne a-t-elle (...) pu revêtir dans la pensée occidentale? Claude Romano interroge les sources, y compris lointaines, de cette idée d' "existence en vérité" telle qu'elle sous-tend notamment l'idéal moderne d'authenticité personnelle, en retraçant la généalogie de cet idéal et en exhumant certaines de ses formes plus anciennes. Chemin faisant, le lecteur découvre différents types et régimes de discours, philosophique, mais aussi théologique, spirituel, rhétorique, littéraire, esthétique. Romano esquisse ainsi une histoire de la philosophie occidentale aux contours bien différents de ceux qu'on lui prête généralement : à l'écart des grandes métaphysiques du moi et de la subjectivité, il emprunte les chemins de traverse d'une enquête sur les formes de vie et les modes d'existence. (shrink)

Qu'est-ce qu'un enseignement? Une pensée? Qu'autorisent-ils? À la suite de Claire Brunet, Sandra Laugier et Frédérique Ildefonse qui dirigent ce volume, d'anciens étudiants, aujourd'hui chercheurs renommés ou plus discrets, creusent à travers le sillon de leur discipline ce que leur a permis l'enseignement de leur maître commune à l'École normale supérieure. Les amitiés intellectuelles s'y joignent. Ce que l'on appelle communément communication dans le monde académique devient texte. Tous, en creux, décrivent l'influence d'un enseignement, la liberté qu'il permet à des (...) esprits pour s'épanouir et nous laissent découvrir un portrait intellectuel d'une grande originalité. La pensée de Claude Imbert, philosophe, logicienne, longtemps directrice du département de philosophie de la rue d'Ulm, n'a pas les honneurs médiatiques français en sus des "académiques" d'usage. S'y prêterait-elle? Pourtant, la philosophe française est depuis plus de vingt ans lue, reçue et écoutée dans les universités du monde entier, des Etats-Unis à la Chine en passant par l'Amérique du Sud. Tous les textes rassemblés ici, comme autant de variations, sans jamais le dire, souhaitent contribuer à la reconnaissance de l'oeuvre. Un inédit "Ne rien oublier et tout apprendre" de la philosophe et un texte de Pascalle Monnier, écrivain, accompagnent le volume."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

Novel forms of matter, such as states made of gluons (glueballs), multiquark mesons or baryons and hybrid mesons are predicted by low energy QCD, for which several candidates have recently been identified. Searching for such exotic states of matter and studying their production and decay properties in detail has become a flourishing field at the experimental facilities now available or being built - e.g. BESIII in Beijing, BELLE II at SuperKEKB, GlueX at Jefferson Lab, PANDA at FAIR, J-PARC and in (...) the upgraded LHC experiments, in particular LHCb. A modern primer in the field is required so as to both revive and update the teaching of a new generation of researchers in the field of QCD. These lectures on hadron spectroscopy are intended for Master and PhD students and have been originally developed for a course delivered at the Stefan Meyer Institute of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. They are phenomenologically oriented and intended as complementary material for basic courses in particle and nuclear physics. The book describes the spectra of light and heavy mesons and baryons, and introduces the fundamental properties based on symmetries. Further, it derives multiplet structures, mixing angle, decay coupling constants, magnetic moments of baryons, and predictions for multiquark states and compares these with suitable experimental data. Basic methods of calculating decay angular distributions and determining masses and widths of resonances are also presented. The appendices provide students and newcomers to the field with the necessary background information, and include a set of problems and solutions. (shrink)

On connaît de Charles Larmore (1950), philosophe moral américain contemporain, ses célèbres objections à John Rawls, mais peu de travaux se concentrent sur sa philosophie : son réalisme moral, sa réhabilitation partielle de l'idéal d'authenticité, sa version du libéralisme politique ou encore à sa théorie normativiste du moi. Ce sont ces différents aspects de sa pensée que les études contenues dans ce volume, premier ouvrage entièrement consacré à l'oeuvre de Charles Larmore, interrogent et mettent en perspective. Un essai inédit du (...) philosophe américain ainsi qu'un débat entre Charles Larmore et Alain Renaut autour de la controverse réalisme-idéalisme y figurent également, en guise de conclusion. (shrink)

v. 1. 1737-1756, lettres 1-249 -- v. 2. 1757-1760, lettres 250-464 -- v. 3.1761-1774, lettres 465-720 -- v. 4. 1774-1800, lettres 721-855 -- v. 5. Quatre nouvelles lettres, errata, additions et modifications, lettres exclues de l'édition proprement dite, généalogies, liste des lettres, index et table des matières.

"Alexis de Tocqueville compte parmi le petit nombre de penseurs dont la réputation ne fait que s’affirmer avec le temps. Depuis la parution de sa Démocratie en Amérique, il y a près de deux siècles, des études innombrables ont souligné la justesse et la perspicacité de sa vision de l’histoire moderne. Dans ce livre, Claude Corbo met en lumière des aspects moins connus de l’homme et de l’œuvre, qu’il connaît de longue date. Au cours de son célèbre voyage de 1831-1832, (...) Tocqueville rencontre non seulement des citoyens de la jeune république américaine, mais aussi ceux qui ont pris figure de vaincus. Il prend le temps d’observer les Autochtones aussi bien en périphérie des villes qu’aux confins que constitue la Frontière. Du 23 août au 2 septembre 1831, visitant Montréal, Québec et les campagnes environnantes, il fait avec ravissement la connaissance des Canadiens français du Bas-Canada. Dans les deux cas, ses rencontres et ses observations lui inspirent des réflexions lucides et sombres à la fois. Des nations autochtones, il écrit sans ménagements: "La ruine de ces peuples a commencé du jour où les Européens ont abordé sur leurs rivages; elle a toujours continué depuis; elle achève de s’opérer de nos jours." Des Canadiens français, il se désole d’avouer que "ce ne sera jamais un peuple nombreux. Tout deviendra anglais autour de lui.""--Page 4 de la couverture. (shrink)

Up until today, the term linguistics has never figured in the title of any chair in the Collège de France. However, those having a rapport with language have not been lacking, among them those of “language and literature,” “history and philology” of various cultures, philology, although it does not study language itself, having recourse to it. There are four personalities to be kept in mind in the twentieth century: Abbé Rousselot, whose teaching of phonetics, although briefly, left a permanent mark (...) on his listeners; Mario Roques, who gave a course in the “Histoire du vocabulaire français” from 1937 to 1946; Roland Barthes, who rendered “Sémiologie littéraire” illustrious from 1976 to 1980; and M. Zemb, who two years ago was the first linguist in the modern sense to enter the Collège, with a chair of “Grammaire et pensée allemandes.”. (shrink)