Critics have challenged agricultural scientists to address concerns for environmental quality, farm size and structure, international justice, and the health and welfare of consumers and farm labor in research planning. The goal of this research was to determine what is and what could be done to consider value-laden knowledge relevant to these concerns in research planning. Descriptions of a state agricultural experiment station and of a hierarchy of inquiry that included applied systems analysis and reductionist approaches to science revealed the (...) goal-seeking and expert-centered nature of agricultural research. Value-laden and value-free knowledge of agricultural scientists and administrators were heavily represented in broad research goals such as increased productivity and efficiency. In addition, these goals were not evaluated at the levels of inquiry typically practiced by agricultural scientists. A soft systems methodology provided a more holistic level of inquiry that could facilitate consideration of value-laden and value-free knowledge of world views more diverse than those of agricultural scientists and administrators. Scientists could function as co-learners with other participants to identify issues and to conceptualize systems that are relevant to improving research planning. Moreover, researching the practice of soft systems offers opportunities for exploring systems ideas and holistic value theory in relation to agricultural research. (shrink)

The claim that faith is creative of its objects resides primarily in the conviction that the richness of the life of faith demands that it shall be subject only to its own laws. Its very diversity of expression is indication that it should not be fettered or confined by a restrictive model that outlaws the marvellously unexpected quality of its explorations. Yet that metaphor itself suggests caution; for exploration is necessarily of a territory that the explorer does not bring into (...) being by his voyage or journey. His travels have their own richness; thus Shackleton's famous boat journey has its place in the records of human endurance. But travel assumes a ground to be traversed, and the journey of Ernest Shackleton and the men who sailed with him was not conjured out of nothing, but an achievement made necessary as response to a situation that was itself in no sense of the explorer's contriving. Yet of course we are impatient with the suggestion that it was a mere, largely passive reaction to natural emergency, and only marginally regarded as humanly creative. (shrink)

In _The Body in Late-Capitalist USA_, Donald M. Lowe explores the varied social practices that code and construct the body. Arguing that our bodily lives are shaped by a complex of daily and ongoing practices—how we work, what we buy and consume—Lowe contends that as a result of the commodification of these and other social practices in the late-twentieth century, what we often understand to be the needs of the body are in fact means for capital accumulation. Moving beyond (...) studies of representations and images of the body, Lowe focuses on the intersection of body practices, language, and the Social to describe concretely the reality of a lived body. His strongly synthetic work brings together Marxist critique, semiotics, Foucaultian discourse analysis, and systems and communications theory to examine those practices that construct the body under late capitalism: habits of work and consumption, the ways we give birth and raise children, socialization, mental and physical healing, reconstructions and contestations of sexuality and gender. Lowe draws upon a wide range of sources, including government and labor studies and statistics, diagnostic and statistical manuals on mental illness, computer manuals, self-help books, and guides to work-related stress disorders, to illustrate the transformation of the body into a nexus of exchange value in postmodern society. (shrink)

Presents a collection of alphabetically-arranged entries that provide information on a wide range of topics related to philosophy, including ethics, religion, history, aesthetics, logic, metaphysics, from Aristotle and the Greek Academy, to modern concepts of feminist theory and philosophy of the mind.

Concept definitions applicable to human and non-human animals should be usable for both. Awareness is a state during which concepts of environment, self, and self in relation to environment result from complex brain analysis of sensory stimuli or constructs based on memory. There are several proposed categories of awareness. The widespread usage of the term conscious is 'not unconscious' so a conscious individual is an individual that has the capability to perceive and respond to sensory stimuli. It is confusing and (...) scientifically undesirable if conscious is also used to mean aware. Hence it is proposed that conscious should be used only as above. Fully functioning and adequately developed humans and members of many other animal species are sentient. Sentience means having the capacity, the level of awareness and cognitive ability, necessary to have feelings. The welfare of an individual is its state as regards its attempts to cope with its environment. This includes feelings, which are important coping mechanisms, and health. Since feelings involve awareness, there is overlap between welfare assessment and awareness assessment. Methods for assessing awareness, consciousness, sentience, and welfare and links to morality are briefly discussed. (shrink)

This editorial introduces the Journal of Consciousness Studies special issue on "Animal Consciousness". The 15 contributors and co-editors answer the question "How should we study animal consciousness scientifically?" in 500 words or fewer.

Applied ethics in the United States has been a story of vacillation between micro-ethical and macro-ethical reforms. The tragedy of Enron has caused another crisis of confidence in how to pursue these reforms. However, the current rush toward macro-ethical critique will succeed only i f it builds on the gains made by the micro-ethical movement. One without the other will be doomed to failure.

Drawing on convergent work in a broad range of disciplines, this article uses the tipping point paradigm to frame a new account of how early human ancestors may have first broken free from, as Bickerton calls it, the “prison of animal communication.” Under building pressure for an enhanced signaling system capable of supporting joint attentional-intentional activities, a cultural tradition of disambiguated indexical pointing, combined with increasingly sophisticated mindreading circuitry and prosocial tendencies, may have sparked the first in the series of (...) biocultural explosions that led from a simple protolanguage to fully modern human language. This account successfully integrates at least ten other competing hypotheses, and is shown to pass nine important tests that have been proposed for language origin scenarios of its type. (shrink)

Annotation Adapted from the renowned Encyclopedia of Philosophy and its Supplement, Philosophy and Ethics provides an authoritative one-stop resource on the most-studied questions in philosophy.

Loyal Rue suggests that religion is not about God as such but about the cultivation of personal and social well-being. Religion may employ cultural resources that include concepts of supernatural agencies, but religion's essential functionalities are not dependent on that particular resource. I largely endorse Rue's view of religion and employ Rue as a guide to thinking through its consequences for the future of Christianity. For Rue, two challenges face Christianity: the erosion of confidence in personal-god concepts and the ecological (...) crisis engulfing the planet. In the face of these twin momentous changes, I suggest ways in which certain cultural tropes in the Christian matrix will rise to the fore and others will erode. (shrink)

"Covers such topics as the nature of the God of theism, evidence and arguments supporting the existence of God, evidence and arguments challenging the existing of God, death and postdeath survival, and philosophy of religion's expanding horizons"--.

This volume serves as a primer to the study of philosophy, discussing some of the challenges from various forms of skepticism that philosophers have faced when, in the footsteps of Socrates, they have tried to gain knowledge. The primer also provides a sample of the diverse philosophical traditions that have developed through the centuries in different parts of the world.

Donald Broom argues that morality and the central components of religion are of great value, and presents two central ideas. He asserts that morality has a biological foundation and has evolved as a consequence of natural selection, and that religions are essentially the structures supporting morality. Many philosophers and theologians write about morality and its origins without reference to biological processes such as evolution. Likewise, biologists discuss phenomena of importance to human morality and religion without taking account of the (...) thoughts of others on these subjects. (shrink)

The Poetic Structure of the World is a major reconsideration of a crucial turning point in Western thought and culture: the heliocentric revolution of Copernicus and Kepler. Fernand Hallyn treats the work of these two figures not simply in terms of the history of science or astronomy, but as events embedded in a wider field of images, symbols, texts, and practices. These new representations of the universe, he insists, cannot be explained by recourse to explanations of "genius" or "intuition."Instead, Hallyn (...) investigates the problem of how new scientific hypotheses are actually formed and the complex way in which certain facts and not others are selected to support a particular theory. He contends that the scientific imagination is not fundamentally different from a mythic or poetic imagination and that the work of Copernicus and Kepler must be examined on the level of rhetorical structure. Hallyn shows the sun-centered universe to be inseparable from the aesthetic, epistemological, theological, and social imperatives of both neoplatonism and mannerism in the sixteenth centuryFernand Hallyn is a Professor in the Department of French Literature at the University of Ghent. Distributed for Zone Books. (shrink)

The Poetic Structure of the World is a major reconsideration of a crucial turning point in Western thought and culture: the heliocentric revolution of Copernicus and Kepler. Fernand Hallyn treats the work of these two figures not simply in terms of the history of science or astronomy, but as events embedded in a wider field of images, symbols, texts, and practices. These new representations of the universe, he insists, cannot be explained by recourse to explanations of "genius" or "intuition."Instead, Hallyn (...) investigates the problem of how new scientific hypotheses are actually formed and the complex way in which certain facts and not others are selected to support a particular theory. He contends that the scientific imagination is not fundamentally different from a mythic or poetic imagination and that the work of Copernicus and Kepler must be examined on the level of rhetorical structure. Hallyn shows the sun-centered universe to be inseparable from the aesthetic, epistemological, theological, and social imperatives of both neoplatonism and mannerism in the sixteenth centuryFernand Hallyn is a Professor in the Department of French Literature at the University of Ghent. Distributed for Zone Books. (shrink)

This essay advocates dual-inheritance theory for the renewal of Religious Studies. Not by Genes Alone , by Peter J. Richerson and Robert Boyd (2005), presents this approach in an admirably clear manner. To make my case, I survey the development of Religious Studies since the Enlightenment, with special attention to the American context. The historical survey brings us to the dawn of the twenty-first century, where Religious Studies is often unnecessarily limited to sui generis Religious Studies and its postmodern critics. (...) Neither approach engages regnant Darwinian theoretical frameworks of gene-culture coevolution productively. In this context, I situate the contributions of dual-inheritance theory as presented by Richerson and Boyd and offer examples of its utility for progress in Religious Studies, its ability to open cooperation across disciplinary boundaries, and its salutary demystification of religion as a culturally unique and coherent phenomenon. I conclude by addressing concerns scholars of religion might entertain regarding the issue of reductionism and how an emergent science of religion might contribute to the traditional concerns of religion-and-science dialogue as it has evolved in the English-speaking context. (shrink)

Human attitudes to animals have changed as non-humans have become more widely incorporated in the category of moral agents who deserve some respect. Parallels between the functioning of humans and non-humans have been made for thousands of years but the idea that the animals that we keep can suffer has spread recently. An improved understanding of motivation, cognition and the complexity of social behaviour in animals has led in the last 30 years to the rapid development of animal welfare science. (...) Early attempts to define welfare referred to individuals being in harmony with nature but the first usable definition incorporated feelings and health as part of attempts to cope with the environment. Others considered that welfare is only about feelings but it is argued that as feelings are mechanisms that have evolved they are a part of welfare rather than all of it. Most reviews of welfare now start with listing the needs of the animal, including needs to show certain behaviours. This approach has used sophisticated studies of what is important to animals and has replaced the earlier general guidelines described as freedoms. Many measures of welfare are now used and indicate how good or how poor the welfare is. Naturalness is not a part of the definition of welfare but explains why some needs exist. In recent years, welfare has become established as one of various criteria used to decide on whether a system is sustainable because members of the public will not accept systems that cause poor welfare. The study of welfare has become part of the scientific basis upon which important political decisions are made. (shrink)