Two essays on utilitarianism, written from opposite points of view, by J. J. C. Smart and Bernard Williams. In the first part of the book Professor Smart advocates a modern and sophisticated version of classical utilitarianism; he tries to formulate a consistent and persuasive elaboration of the doctrine that the rightness and wrongness of actions is determined solely by their consequences, and in particular their consequences for the sum total of human happiness. In Part II Bernard Williams offers a sustained (...) and vigorous critique of utilitarian assumptions, arguments and ideals. He finds inadequate the theory of action implied by utilitarianism, and he argues that utilitarianism fails to engage at a serious level with the real problems of moral and political philosophy, and fails to make sense of notions such as integrity, or even human happiness itself. This book should be of interest to welfare economists, political scientists and decision-theorists. (shrink)

Michael J. Zimmerman explores whether and how our ignorance about ourselves and our circumstances affects what our moral obligations and moral rights are. He rejects objective and subjective views of the nature of moral obligation, and presents a new case for a 'prospective' view.

J.N. Findlay was a South African philosopher who published from the late 1940s into the 1980s. He had a prestigious international academic career, holding many academic posts around the world. This article uses a textual comparative approach and focuses on Findlay’s Gifford Lecture at St Andrews University between 1965 and 1970. The objective of the article is to highlight the extent to which Findlay’s philosophical writings were influenced by Mahāyāna Buddhism. Although predominantly a Platonist, Findlay drew influence from Asian philosophy (...) and religion, particularly Mahāyāna Buddhism. In these lectures, he applies the metaphor of the Platonic Cave to investigate Hegelian and Husserlian approaches to knowledge. Though he was a leading Hegel and Husserl scholar, his reading of these two philosophers is strongly influenced by Mahāyāna Buddhism, resulting in a unique mystical interpretation of these two philosophers. Revisiting Findlay’s writings is significant for two reasons; firstly, he investigated Buddhism prior to the Asian religions being included in Religious Studies departments’ purview in South African universities, and secondly, his interpretation of two prominent Western philosophers along Buddhist lines provides an early attempt at decolonising the predominance of Western philosophical views of knowledge.Contribution: This contribution forms part of a larger collection of essays investigating philosophical works that have had a significant impact on the study of religion. This contribution investigates the Buddhist influence on J.N. Findlay’s philosophical readings of Husserl and Hegel. (shrink)

This manuscript reports on a landmark symposium on the ethical, legal and technical challenges of xenotransplantation in the UK. King’s College London, with endorsement from the British Transplantation Society (BTS), and the European Society of Organ Transplantation (ESOT), brought together a group of experts in xenotransplantation science, ethics and law to discuss the ethical, regulatory and technical challenges surrounding translating xenotransplantation into the clinical setting. The symposium was the first of its kind in the UK for 20 years. This paper (...) summarises the content of the expert lectures showcasing the progress which has been made in xenotransplantation including—the history of xenotransplantation, advances in gene edited animals and progress towards clinical xenotransplantation. We then set out the ethical and legal issues still to be resolved. Finally, we report the themes of the roundtable discussion highlighting areas of consensus and controversy. While the detail of the legal discussion was directed towards the UK, the principles and summary reported here are intended to be applicable to any jurisdiction seeking to implement clinical xenotransplantation. (shrink)

The seventeen seminal essays by Robert J. Gordon collected here, including three previously unpublished works, offer sharply etched views on the principal topics of macroeconomics - growth, inflation, and unemployment. The author re-examines their salient points in a uniquely creative, accessible introduction that serves on its own as an introduction to modern macroeconomics. Each of the four parts into which the essays are grouped also offers a new introduction. The papers in Part I explore different key aspects of the history, (...) theory, and measurement of productivity growth. The essays in Part II investigate the sources of business cycles and productivity fluctuations. Those in Part III cover the effects of supply shocks in macroeconomics. The final group presents empirical studies of the dynamics of inflation in the United States. The foreword by Nobel Laureate Robert M. Solow comments on the abiding importance of these essays drawn from 1968 to the present. (shrink)

Despite its uniform appearance, the cerebellar cortex is highly heterogeneous in terms of structure, genetics and physiology. Purkinje cells (PCs), the principal and sole output neurons of the cerebellar cortex, can be categorized into multiple populations that differentially express molecular markers and display distinctive physiological features. Such features include action potential rate, but also their propensity for synaptic and intrinsic plasticity. However, the precise molecular and genetic factors that correlate with the differential physiological properties of PCs remain elusive. In this (...) article, we provide a detailed overview of the cellular mechanisms that regulate PC activity and plasticity. We further perform a pathway analysis to highlight how molecular characteristics of specific PC populations may influence their physiology and plasticity mechanisms. (shrink)

Language, Duty, and Value Jonathan Dancy, J. M. E. Moravcsik James Opie Urmson, Edited by Jonathan Dancy, J. M. E. Moravcsik, and C. C. W. Taylor. reasons in general. This is freedom in the sense of acting on reasons, yet not those ...

J C Glass, W Johnson; Lakatosian Methodology and the Practical Implementation of a Liberal Notion of Education, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 25, I.

J. Gosling; II*—More Aristotelian Pleasures, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 74, Issue 1, 1 June 1974, Pages 15–34, https://doi.org/10.1093/aris.

In this essay I propose to offer some observations in due course on how Christian thought and practice in general might profit from a central theme in the theology of Rāmānuja, a Tamil Vaisnava Brahmin whose traditional date straddles the eleventh and twelfth centuries of the Christian era. The central theme I have in mind is expressed in Rāmānuja's view that the ‘world’ is the ‘body’ of Brahman or God. We shall go on to explain what this means, but let (...) me state first that my overall aim is to further inter-religious understanding, especially between Christian and Hindu points of view. In professing a concern for inter-religious dialogue I know that I reflect a longstanding interest of Professor H. D. Lewis. I shall seek to show that the Christian religion can profit both from the content and the method of Rāmānuja's body-of-God theology. To this end this essay is divided into two sections. Section I is the longer: it contains an analysis of what Rāmānuja did mean by his body-of-God theme – doubtless unfamiliar ground for most of the readers of this essay – and serves as a propaedeutic for what follows in section 2. In section 2 I shall attempt to ‘extrapolate’ Rāmānuja's thinking into a Christian context, with dialogue in mind. Section 2 cannot be appreciated for the promise I hope it holds out without the detail of the first section. (shrink)

The transits of Venus in 1761 and 1769 appear to mark the starting point of instrumental science in the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia). This essay examines the conditions that triggered and constituted instrumental and institutional science on Indonesian soil in the late eighteenth century. In 1765 the Reverend J. M. Mohr, whose wife had received a large inheritance, undertook to build a fully equipped private observatory in Batavia (now Jakarta). There he made several major astronomical and meteorological observations. Mohr’s (...) initiative inspired other Europeans living on Java around 1770 to start a scientific movement. Because of the lack of governmental and other support, it was not until 1778 that this offspring of the Dutch‐Indonesian Enlightenment became a reality. The Bataviaasch Genootschap van Kunsten en Wetenschappen tried from the beginning to put into effect the program Mohr had outlined. The members even bought his instruments from his widow, intending to continue his measurements. For a number of reasons, however, this instrumental program was more than the society could support. Around 1790 instrumental science in the former Dutch East Indies came to a standstill, not to be resumed for several decades. (shrink)

In the paper I offer a brief sketch of one of the sources of utilitarianism. Our biological ancestry is a matter of fact that is not altered by the way we describe ourselves. With philosophical theories it is otherwise. Utilitarianism can be described in ways that make it look as if it is as old as moral philosophy – as J. S. Mill thought it was. For my historical purposes, it is more useful to have an account that brings out (...) what is specific about Benthamism and its descendants. Let us try to make do with the following. First, utilitarianism asserts that the fundamental requirement of morality is that we are to maximize good, for everyone and not just for the agent. This basic principle presupposes that it makes sense to think of aggregating goods to make a total, and of comparing amounts of good thus aggregated. Second, the good to be brought about is located in feelings of pleasure, and the evil to be avoided in feelings of pain. These feelings have inherent value or disvalue regardless of how they are caused to exist and regardless of their own consequences. Third, all moral principles can be derived from the requirement that good be maximized. The principles involved in evaluating agents as well as in giving moral direction to action are nothing but applications of the basic principle. (shrink)

Despite a growing body of literature focused on understanding experiences of workplace dignity, attention has centered almost exclusively on employees with lower-level jobs. As a result, little is known about how workplace dignity and indignity are experienced by employees with middle- and upper-level jobs and how their experiences differ from those with lower-level jobs. We address these absences by interviewing employees from a diversity of lower-, middle-, and upper-level jobs about their experiences of indignity at work. We outline common dignity (...) threats, along with typical emotional responses and recourses employees use at each level. We find lower-level employees experience chronic dignity threats from being disrespected, devalued, demeaned, and dehumanized, to which their most typical response is endurance. Middle-level employees experience periodic dignity threats due to undermining of their work, confidence, and reputation. For them, the typical response is strategizing. Finally, on the rare occasions upper-level employees experience dignity threats, it usually is due to a disregard of their special expertise or denial of special rights, to which they respond by rising above. (shrink)

This volume contains invited and contributed papers delivered at a symposium on the occasion of Professor Glauber's 60th birthday. The papers, many of which are authored by world leaders in their fields, contain recent research work in quantum optics, statistical mechanics and high energy physics related to the pioneering work of Professor Roy Glauber; most contain original research material that is previously unpublished. The concepts of coherence, cooperativity and fluctuations in systems with many degrees of freedom are a common base (...) for all of Professor Glauber's research initiatives and, in fact, for much of contemporary physics. His role in shaping these cconcepts is reflected and honoured in the papers contained in this book. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Semiotica Jahrgang: 2017 Heft: 214 Seiten: 51-66.

“It has been our fate as a nation not to have ideologies,” Richard Hofstadter famously wrote, “but to be one.” Defining that “American ideology” or “American creed” obsessed scholars of the consensus era, who celebrated Americans’ allegiance to a limited liberal vocabulary of rights, freedoms, and markets. The cultural transformations begun in the 1960s seemed to question the very idea of a unitary culture or creed, but some historians responded by exploring alternative ideological founding myths to the liberal consensus. Over (...) the ensuing decades scholars mounted formidable efforts to support republicanism or millennial Christianity as challengers, but liberalism proved a resilient foe. And it seemed to have contemporary history on its side: during the Reagan revolution of the century's final decades the classic liberal combination of scaled-down government and free markets carried the day as Americans’ ideal if not their reality. The Lockean liberal tradition that Louis Hartz described a half-century earlier still appeared the only game in town, although scholars continued to argue over its terms, history, and boundaries. (shrink)

Let us call the Dependency Theses the view, first stated by Kant, that certain versions of the cosmological argument depend on the ontological argument. At least two different reasons have been given for the supposed dependence. Given the DT, some of Aquinas' views about God's essence, and about our knowledge of God's existence, can seem, at least at first, to be inconsistent. I consider two different ways of defending Aquinas against this suspicion of inconsistency. On the first defence, based on (...) a widespread understanding of his notion of ‘necessary being’, Aquinas' views fall outside the scope of the DT. The success of this defence is doubtful. There is, however, another defence to be found in Aquinas' work, one directed not to avoiding, but actually to rejecting, the DT. In this second defence, the DT is not a correct assessment even of those views that do fall within its scope. Its success means that Aquinas had available a principled refutation of the DT some five hundred years before it was first formulated. (shrink)

During the 1980's and the early 1990's South Africa experienced disturbing political violence of an unprecedented scope, intensity and nature. It was disturbing because it entailed acts of horrifying brutality, notably the ‘necklace' and the massacre, all of this against the background of ‘civilized' and measured com promise and negotiation. It stubbornly continued despite the unbanning of the liberation political organisations, and the holding of ‘free and fair' elections in April 1994. And it was unprecedented in a whole range of (...) ways, but mainly because of the fact that it was intracommunal, or black- on- black, violence. It was the first time that Black political organisations had turned on each other rather than their white oppressors. For our purposes, what is interesting is the range of responses emanating from South African social scientists in explaining this new phenomenon. Historically, explaining Black political violence in South Africa has had a difficult time of it. Starting with Pierre van den Berghe in 1962, predictions of imminent revolution against the apartheid regime have been so regularly and frequently proved wrong, that a whole industry has arisen in explaining quiescence rather than violence (P. van den Berghe, 1965). The first cluster of theories spawned by the 1976 schools uprising, as Frank Molteno noted in his 1979 review, were analytically disappointing, if not crudely racist. Subsequent overviews by Manganyi & du Toit in 1990, and Beinart in 1992 have born evidence of considerably greater sophistication (Molteno, F (1979).; Manganyi, N & A du Toit, (1990); Beinart, W (1992)). Nevertheless, as I shall show, most have remained within quite conventional theoretical and structuralist parameters. Many have their roots in the earlier dominant Marxism of the 1970's. In this sense they tend towards structural and class determinism, towards absolutist notions of power, and absolutist moral judgement of both apartheid and the individuals associated, however indirectly, with it. In consequence, Black incumbents of apartheid structures were inevitably depicted as willess and powerless puppets dancing to the tune of omnipotent White masters. In this context, it was wrong to talk of black- on- black violence, since one side of this equation, in reality, represented white interests. Much of this analysis also started from quite easy notions of the origins of violence. In this view it was sufficient to show (objective) conflicts of interest, or contra diction, in order to conclude that violence had been adequately explained. Against this background the more hermeneutic contribution by André du Toit to the debate stands out as theoretically innovative, nuanced and bold. This is not to say that it is with out problems. But I do wish to present a picture of a social theorist of considerable imagination and subtletly. Looking back over these theories, it would be tempting to say that the first category of structuralist accounts, should be supplemented with the second category of hermeneutic, accounts. But simply adding theoretically discrepant accounts together is too easy. It is only when the whole notion of structure, employed in the first category, is rethought in post-structuralist form, that an integration of the two elements becomes feasible. This paper follows a Giddensian line in pursuing this reconceptualization. S. Afr. J. Philos. Vol.20(1) 2001: 102-123. (shrink)

J Martin Stafford; John Wilson, Prophet of the Sane Society, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 13, Issue 1, 30 May 2006, Pages 169–186, https://doi.org.

This paper argues, based on Lewis’ claim that communication is a coordination game (Lewis in Minnesota studies in the philosophy of science, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, pp 3–35, 1975), that we can account for the communicative function of demonstratives without assuming that they semantically refer. The appeal of such a game theoretical version of the case for non-referentialism is that the communicative role of demonstratives can be accounted for without entering the cul de sac of trying to construct conventions (...) of ever-increasing complexity. Instead communication via demonstratives is explained with reference to the general, non-domain specific ability of human beings to solve games of coordination. Furthermore, there is empirical support for such a view. Judgments concerning demonstrative reference have been shown to be sensitive to judgments concerning common ground (Clark et al. in J Verb Learn Verb Behav 22:245–258, 1983), which is exactly what the non-referentialist account would predict. The game theoretical account also allows for an intuitively plausible, non-referentialist treatment of Speaks’ ‘trumping argument’ (Speaks in Philos Stud 174:709–734, 2017), as well as the Carnap/Agnew puzzle (Kaplan in Syntax Semant 9:221–43, 1970). (shrink)

The Carol J. Adams Reader gathers together Adams's foundational and recent articles in the fields of critical studies, animal studies, media studies, vegan studies, ecofeminism and feminism, as well as relevant interviews and conversations in which Adams identifies key concepts and new developments in her decades-long work. This volume, a companion to The Sexual Politics of Meat (Bloomsbury Revelations), offers insight into a variety of urgent issues for our contemporary world: Why do batterers harm animals? What is the relationship between (...) genocide and attitudes toward other animals? How do activism and theory feed each other? How do race, gender, and species categories interact in strengthening oppressive attitudes? In clear language, Adams identifies the often hidden aspects of cultural presumptions. The essays and conversations found here capture the decades-long energy and vision that continue to shape new ways of thinking about and responding to oppression. (shrink)

Introduction -- Knowing at the level of sympathy -- The drama of schooling/the schooling of drama -- The challenging world of educational leadership -- Cultivating a perspective on learning -- Building an ethical school -- Working within the geography of human development -- Foundational qualities of an ethical person -- The moral dimension of human resource development -- The ethics of teaching -- Cultivating a mature community -- The complexity of ethical living and learning.

A great deal of modern Protestant theology looks very much like an attempt to conduct a salvage operation which is designed to make clear how it is possible to retain belief in Jesus Christ, and at the same time remain intellectually honest. For the same sceptical challenge which faces the secular historian also faces the theologian. If Christians are correct in arguing that the locus of God's revelation to man is in Jesus of Nazareth, then in order to know about (...) this supposed revelation, it is necessary to know about a period of time in the past; it is necessary to know the history of the man's life and actions. Theologians are therefore faced with the question: how, if at all, is it possible to bridge the logical gap between statements describing what Jesus of Nazareth said and did, and statements describing the evidence for what Jesus of Nazareth said and did. The solution found to this question by theologians tends to be determined by their conscious and unconscious philosophical presuppositions; just as it did in the examples discussed above of secular critical philosophies of history. (shrink)