Thomas Reid is now recognized as one of the towering figures of the Enlightenment. Best known for his published writings on epistemology and moral theory, he was also an accomplished mathematician and natural philosopher, as an earlier volume of his manuscripts edited by Paul Wood for the Edinburgh Reid Edition, Thomas Reid on the Animate Creation, has shown. The Correspondence of Thomas Reid collects all of the known letters to and from Reid in a fully (...) annotated form. Letters already published by Sir William Hamilton and others have been reedited, and roughly half of the letters included appear in print for the first time. Writing in 1802, Reid's disciple and biographer Dugald Stewart doubted that Reid's correspondence &"would be generally interesting.&" This collection proves otherwise, for the letters illuminate virtually every aspect of Reid's life and career and, in some instances, provide us with invaluable evidence about activities otherwise undocumented in his manuscripts or published works. Through his correspondence we can trace Reid's relations with contemporaries such as David Hume and his colleagues at both King's College, Aberdeen, and the University of Glasgow, as well as his engagement with the most controversial philosophical, scientific, and political issues of his day. If anything, the letters assembled here serve as the starting point for understanding Reid and his place in the Enlightenment. (shrink)

This volume brings together for the first time a significant number of Reid's manuscript papers on natural history, physiology and materialist metaphysics. An important contribution not only to Reid studies but also to our understanding of eighteenth-century science and its context.

Largely due to the difficulty of observing behavior, empirical business ethics research relies heavily on the scenario methodology. While not disputing the usefulness of the technique, this paper highlights the importance of a careful assessment of the fit between the context of the situation described in the scenario and the knowledge and experience of the respondents. Based on a study of online auctions, we provide evidence that even respondents who have direct knowledge of the situation portrayed in the scenario may (...) develop significantly different assessments of the level of unethical behavior. Further, those assessments may be conditioned in different ways by the same moderating variables. We conclude that care should be exercised when recruiting respondents to choose only those who can be expected to understand the scenario in its true context and that separate analyses should be conducted for groups of respondents who have different perspectives within that context. (shrink)

Largely due to the difficulty of observing behavior, empirical business ethics research relies heavily on the scenario methodology. While not disputing the usefulness of the technique, this paper highlights the importance of a careful assessment of the fit between the context of the situation described in the scenario and the knowledge and experience of the respondents. Based on a study of online auctions, we provide evidence that even respondents who have direct knowledge of the situation portrayed in the scenario may (...) develop significantly different assessments of the level of unethical behavior. Further, those assessments may be conditioned in different ways by the same moderating variables. We conclude that care should be exercised when recruiting respondents to choose only those who can be expected to understand the scenario in its true context and that separate analyses should be conducted for groups of respondents who have different perspectives within that context. (shrink)

Classical Greece is famous for its athletic art, particularly the image of the nude male athlete. But how did the Greeks understand athletic beauty? Plato, Aristotle, Xenophon, and others discuss athletes’ beauty, while the educational ideal of kalokagathia conceptually connects athletic beauty with the good. More questions need to be answered, however, if we are to understand ancient athletic beauty. We need to ask ourselves what the Greeks appreciated when they looked at athletic bodies. What did those qualities mean to (...) them? In what way was it erotic? How did it differ for females and males? In this paper I argue that the beautiful athletic body is framed in ancient Greek thought, not just as an aesthetically pleasing image, but as an ideal expression of a certain kind of soul. (shrink)

Despite the increase in the acceptance of responsible investing in general, the global community is still witnessing unprecedented levels of practices that can only be categorized as “unsustainable”. It appears, then, that either the inroads made by the RI community have not kept up with the increase in unsustainable practices, or, that the RI process itself has been ineffective at producing meaningful change. The current study aims to investigate the practices used by pension plan sponsors to determine how they may (...) enable, or interfere with, the adoption of implementation of RI. We adopt Framing Theory, specifically the idea that particular frames find alignment when they resonate with their targets, by either bridging, extending, amplifying or transforming a domain. We extend research to include understudied practices by performing an analysis of 60 public pension funds in Canada. We find evidence of disconnect between the financial frame which dominates practices for compliance and evaluation, and the social frame of RI as a source of change. If the aim of RI is to produce long-term change, then a consideration of whether it aligns with extant practices is critical. We discover a variety of frame alignment tactics already employed in practice. We also find that, even within the dominant financial frame, opportunities for frame extension, amplification and transformation do exist, and examine how these are more possible depending on how the asset management structure is designed. (shrink)

The goal of this article is to counter a belief, still widely held in the secondary literature, that Anne Conway espoused a theory of monads. By exploring her views on the divisibility of both bodies and spirits, I argue that monads could not possibly exist in her system. In addition, by offering new evidence about the Latin translation of Conway's Principles and the possible authorship of its annotations, I argue that she never even suggested that there could be such things (...) as monads. Alongside this, I explore the theories of monads that did get developed by the philosophers closest to Conway—Henry More, Francis Mercury van Helmont, and Christian Knorr von Rosenroth—thereby further underlining Conway's originality and philosophical daring. (shrink)

Contemporary Roman Catholic ethics endeavors to take sin seriously by offering theologies of sin that emphasize it as a force and as a basic, personal orientation. Such efforts rightly counter the Catholic tradition's earlier reduction of sin to sins, and sins to external acts and moral culpability. But perhaps they go too far in this regard. By engaging Charles Curran, this study argues that inattention to sins undermines the theological referent of sin as a discourse that concerns more than moral (...) culpability, obscures God as the source of freedom and value, and neglects the way in which acts express and sustain sin and fashion a personal orientation. Drawing on the work of Jean Porter, the essay shows that attention to sins highlights the historicity, particularity, and provisionality of human acts because of the theological referent and analogical character of sin and sins. (shrink)

Apologies are morally significant with regard to their form, function, and freight. Nevertheless, little work in Christian ethics considers apologies. Philosophical and social scientific literature on apologies focuses on the conditions for making valid apologies and the efficacy of apologies in moral repair but ignores the import of apologies for the offender. This literature is ill equipped to specify the relation between persons and their moral failures, minimizes the difficulty of understanding our own moral failure, does not adequately treat the (...) relationship between explanation and apology, and neglects the way that apology making may comprise a process of moral repair for the offender. Relevant resources in Christian moral tradition can inform and enrich ethical consideration of apologies. (shrink)

Thomas Reid saw the three subjects of logic, rhetoric, and the fine arts as closely cohering aspects of one endeavor that he called the culture of the mind. This was a topic on which Reid lectured for many years in Glasgow, and this volume presents as near a reconstruction of these lectures as is now possible. Though virtually unknown today, this material in fact relates closely to Reid's published works and in particular to the late Essays on (...) the Intellectual Powers of Man and Essays on the Active Powers of Man. When composing these works, Reid drew primarily on his lectures on "pneumatology," which presented a theory of the mental powers, broadly conceived. These lectures were basic to the course on the culture of the mind that explained the cultivation of the mental powers. Although the Essays also included some elements from the material on the culture of the mind, the bulk of the latter was left in manuscript form, and Alexander Broadie's edition restores this important extension of Reid's overall work. In addition, this volume continues the attractive combination of manuscript material and published work, in this case Reid's important and well-known essay on Aristotle's logic. This text was corrupted in earlier editions of Reid's works and is now restored to the state in which Reid left it. This volume underscores Reid's great and growing significance, viewed both as a historical figure and as a philosopher. At the same time, it is of great interdisciplinary importance. While the material emerges directly from the core of Reid's philosophy, as now understood, it will appeal widely to people in literary, cultural, historical, and communications studies. In this regard, the present volume is a true fruit of the Scottish Enlightenment. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:204 Feminist Studies 46, no. 1. © 2020 by Feminist Studies, Inc. Blood on a Blackberry Darlene Taylor The road bends. In a place where a girl was snatched, no one says her name. They talk about the bloody slip, not the lost girl. The blacktop road curves there and drops. Can’t see what’s ahead so, I listen. Insects scratch their legs and wind their wings above their (...) backs. The road sounds safe. Every day I walk alone on the schoolhouse road, keeping my eyes on where I’m going, not where I’ve been. Bruises on my shoulder from carrying books and notebooks, pencils and crayons. Pebbles crunch. An engine grinds, brakes screech. I step into a cloud of pink dust and weeds. The sandy taste of road dust dries my tongue. Older boys, mean boys, cursing beer-drunk boys laugh and bluster—“Rusty Girl.” They drive fast. Their laughter fades. Feathers of a bent blue bird impale the road. Sun beats the crushed bird. Cutting through the tall, tall grass, I pick up a stick to warn. Songs and sticks have power over snakes. Bramble snaps. Wild berries squish under my feet. The ripe scent makes my belly grumble. Briar thorns prick my skin, making my fingertips bleed. Plucking handfuls, I eat. Blood on a blackberry ruins its taste. Pencils, crayons, books spill. Backwards I fall. Pages tear. Lessons brown like sugar, cinnamon, nutmeg. Blackberry stain. Thistles and nettles grate my legs and thighs. Coarse laughter, not from inside me. A boy, a laughing boy, a mean boy presses. Berry black stains my dress. A snake hisses. I run. Home. I kneel. Well water pumps, washing away sin. The sun burns through kitchen windows, warming, baking. I roll my purple-tipped fingers into my palms. Darlene Taylor 205 “Sweetchild,”grandmotherwillsay.“Smartgirl.Whatdid you learn today?” On the schoolhouse road.... (shrink)

As an intensive housing construction drive in the late 1950s began to provide separate apartments for millions of Soviet citizens, aesthetic experts envisioned the Soviet home as a potential site for the display of works of art and for amateur aesthetic production. In the context of de-Stalinization, reformist artists and aestheticians committed to the liberalization and modernization of Soviet artistic criteria, promoted the value of amateur art and even of home decorating in the formation of the new person who would (...) live under communism. They also pressed for affordable art and craft to be made available to ordinary people for their new homes. Thereby they would dwell in their new apartments surrounded by beauty in their everyday lives, and would thus, the experts argued, be brought closer to communist consciousness. Moreover sales of art to individual citizens would provide an alternative income stream to fund artists’ production. The possibility of private art consumption would therefore free artists to some extent from their reliance on state commissions and from the strict stylistic and thematic norms and hierarchies of Socialist Realism as established under Stalin. (shrink)

Self love is an inescapable problem for ethics, yet much of contemporary ethics is reluctant to offer any normative moral anthropologies. Instead, secular ethics and contemporary culture promote a norm of self-realization which is subjective and uncritical. Christian ethics also fails to address this problem directly, because it tends to investigate self love within the context of conflicts between the self's interests and those of her neighbors. Self Love and Christian Ethics argues for right self love as the solution of (...) proper self-relation that intersects with love for God and love for neighbor. Darlene Fozard Weaver explains that right self love entails a true self-understanding that is embodied in the person's concrete acts and relations. In making this argument, she calls upon ethicists to revisit ontological accounts of the self and to devote more attention to particular moral acts. (shrink)

In philosophy and in religious ethics, accounts of mercy are typically developed in relation to justice. The essays in this focus issue each insist on an integral connection between mercy and justice, yet each reconfigures that relationship by arguing that mercy is best understood as a normative response to others in their need. Defining mercy as our response to others’ need highlights the value of mercy as an effective public virtue, grounded in realism about the human condition and focused on (...) reparative and restorative action. (shrink)

Jennifer Herdt's Putting On Virtue argues for the theological and normative superiority of noncompetitive accounts of divine and human agency. Although such accounts affirm the indispensability and sovereignty of divine grace they also acknowledge human agents as active participants in their own moral change. Indeed, Herdt contends we cannot coherently describe the human telos as entailing a transformation of character without affirming that human agents meaningfully contribute to that change. Nevertheless, a recurrent worry in Putting On Virtue is that persons (...) may view their growth in virtue as a personal achievement and that the pleasure of positive self-regard will displace disinterested—and hence truly virtuous—moral aspiration. This discussion of Herdt's volume sympathetically canvasses her argument. It then looks briefly at the reflexive structure of human agency to consider the relationship between the human telos and the transformation of character, and to encourage a more generous attitude toward positive self-regard. (shrink)

Persons and actions in Christian ethics -- Disruption of proper relation with God and others : sin and sins -- Intimacy with God and self-relation -- Fidelity to God and moral acting -- Truthfulness before God and naming moral actions -- Reconciliation in God and Christian life.

This article examines the connections between a theory of redemption as indebtedness and the wider political/economic realities of indebtedness. In order to illustrate the argument the author demonstrates why it is necessary to even question the roots of theories since they too carry a wider agenda. The author contrasts a debt economy with an economy of love.

This article explores how insights and new knowledge were incorporated about narrative inquiry methodology, poverty, and deficit ways of thinking through a journey of mentorship. The experiences of a graduate student, as she journeys through the roles of a research assistant and graduate researcher, all the while being part of a positive mentorship experience, are relayed. The article describes the journey of an evolving researcher who becomes wakeful through the narrative inquiry methodology while engaged as a research assistant as well (...) as a graduate student alongside her supervisor. (shrink)

In the Eurowest pain is discursively framed as something that elides discourse and therefore is outside language. In this framing, pain, as outside language, is given asocial and ahistorical status understood to be beyond human construction. Indeed, played out in systems of belief and practice, pain acts as a medium for reciprocal relations with the metaphysical other since it too is understood as originating and sharing a part in the 'authentic' or 'real' from which the metaphysical, and therefore truth, is (...) understood to emerge. Understood as part of this domain, pain is linked to truth and therefore understood to be a means to truth; hence the use of torture to secure the truth. With this kind of discursive framing, this book works to make apparent the rhetorical play of pain demonstrating its social and political imperatives. (shrink)

'Political Bodies/Body Politic' draws on feminism, gender studies, and queer theory to examine how myth, symbol and ritual express belief systems. The book explores the operation of gender in a variety of social and historical contexts, ranging from feminist speculative fiction and systems of belief to popular culture and ancient historical texts. 'Political Bodies/Body Politic' makes an original contribution to religious and feminist studies in its examination of gender in human communication and belief systems.

'Political Bodies/Body Politic' draws on feminism, gender studies, and queer theory to examine how myth, symbol and ritual express belief systems. The book explores the operation of gender in a variety of social and historical contexts, ranging from feminist speculative fiction and systems of belief to popular culture and ancient historical texts. 'Political Bodies/Body Politic' makes an original contribution to religious and feminist studies in its examination of gender in human communication and belief systems.

Through the lens of her meandering faith journey, this essay reviews the work of the celebrated Canadian writer Gabrielle Roy. A metaphor Roy used in an interview, that of life as a prison and the artist as a bird singing between the bars, provides a common theme in the shifting religious attitudes of her writings. At times her attitude grows bitterly satirical, with a “broad steak of anti-clericalism” (The Cashier). But Roy’s spirituality shows through in how she was affected by (...) her two sisters’ illnesses and deaths. If a prison, life was still able to grant “sacramental moments” pointing to a “radiant world beyond this one.”. (shrink)

The paper explores Hegel's theory of language, from the Subjective Spirit book of his Encyclopedia. Hegel distinguishes between linguistic signs, as arbitrary signifiers and words, which occur when the signs are filled with thought or meaning. Words have greater objectivity than signs. The words of the positive, empirical sciences are taken up into Hegelian Science (system), affording it greater objectivity, which it, reciprocally re-confers on its linguistic contents.

The view that dominated the last century claims that ethical thought requires thinking of some things – e.g. pleasure, knowledge, virtue – as good “full stop,” or good simpliciter . Traditional Consequentialists, for instance, argue that moral evaluations of acts, motives, etc . are grounded in facts about the simple goodness of that which those things bring about. Similarly, some rational intuitionists think that claims about what one has reason to do are grounded in facts about what is good simpliciter (...) . Such a view gives rise to a set of semantic, metaphysical, and epistemological puzzles about the nature of good simpliciter . I argue that an Aristotelian approach to ethics reveals that ethical thought does not requires good simpliciter , that Aristotelian positions avoid charges of metaphysical and epistemological queerness, and that it gives a straightforward semantic analysis of key moral terms, e.g. morally good/bad and morally right/wrong. I then distinguish between two varieties of Aristotelianism. (shrink)

Most philosophers of emotion endorse a compound account of the emotions: emotions are wholes made of parts; or, as I prefer to put it, emotions are mental states that supervene on other (mental) states. The goal of this paper is to ascertain how the intentionality of these subvening members relates to the intentionality of the emotions. Towards this end, I proceed as follows. First, I discuss the problems with the account Justin D'Arms and Daniel Jacobson offer of the intentionality of (...) the emotions; I argue their account is fundamentally misguided by virtue of being motivated by a misunderstanding of the nature of propositional attitudes. Second, I argue against Peter Goldie's claim that an affective component of an emotion contributes to its intentionality. Third, I offer my own compound account of emotions. I argue (1) emotions are mental states that supervene on other mental states, (2) the mental states that constitute the subvenience base of emotion can have nonconceptual and/or conceptual representational content, and (3) an emotion's intentionality supervenes on (but is often not identical to) the intentionality of only one of its subvening members, specifically, the evaluative representation. (shrink)

As the Journal of Religious Ethics celebrates its 50th anniversary, higher education in the United States is in a period of upheaval. How does its changing landscape impact the ways we articulate the value of religious ethics? What do our students need from ethics coursework? Both the upheaval in higher education and recent critiques of higher education from religious ethicists highlight questions about the purposes and value of postsecondary education. This essay argues that an emphasis on the practice of ethical (...) reasoning speaks to legitimate public interests in higher education, serves undergraduate students' personal development and professional preparation, and provides an opportunity for dynamic engagement with religious ethics. (shrink)

Disasters arising from natural hazards affect millions of people every year, killing tens of thousands and causing major economics losses. They disproportionately affect poor people and poor countries and are a threat to the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals. A root cause is the vulnerability of communities to natural hazards, often associated with poverty, social and economic disadvantage, environmental exploitation, and insufficient awareness, information, and political interest. Too often, disaster risk is not factored into planning and management, despite the (...) ready availability of the necessary knowledge, tools and policy frameworks to reduce the risks. Moreover it is likely that global warning will increase the number and intensity of hazard events in future. Recognizing these issues, in 2005 Governments agreed on the landmark Hyogo Framework for Action, which seeks to achieve a substantial reduction in disaster losses by 2015. Progress is slow, however, and a greatly scaled-up effort will be needed to achieve this outcome and to avoid an unnecessarily risky and dangerous future for the countless communities worldwide. (shrink)

Althaus-Reid describes her work, Indecent Theology, as a reflection on sexuality from the perspective of an Argentinian liberation theology, critical queer theory and a theology of camp self-disclosure. As such, it is a diasporic, postcolonial theology concerned to critique accepted ideas of essentialism and to question theology's status as a universal discourse. Althaus-Reid responds to the suggestions and criticisms of the panel members and views her ongoing project as one of doing queer theology from a 'non-vanilla' Argentinian perspective (...) and with a vision for queer holiness in theology. (shrink)