This book challenges the widespread assumption of the incompatibility of evolution and the biological design argument. Kojonen analyzes the traditional arguments for incompatibility, and argues for salvaging the idea of design in a way that is fully compatible with evolutionary biology. Relating current views to their intellectual history, Kojonen steers a course that avoids common pitfalls such as the problems of the God of the gaps, the problem of natural evil, and the traditional Humean and Darwinian critiques. The resulting deconstruction (...) of the opposition between evolution and design has the potential to transform this important debate. (shrink)

This book is a lucid and readable account of Spinoza, Hume, Kant, Nietzsche, James, and Santayana, not only as contributors to present-day secularism, but as precursors of religious liberalism. Beck traces the theme of "secularism and human values" through these thinkers, though difficulties arise from the fact that they represent a radical divergence of philosophic interests, and in any case would hardly have recognized, much less defended, the particular variety of secularism and religious liberalism that has arisen in recent times, (...) and with which the author associates them.—T. E. V. (shrink)

In this paper, I analyzed the discussion on the principle of universalizability which took place in moral philosophy in 1970–1980s. In short, I see two main problems that attracted more attention than others. The first problem is an opposition of universalizability and generalization. M.G. Singer argued for generalization argument, and R.M. Hare defended universalizability thesis. Hare tried to refute Singer’s position, using methods of ordinary language philosophy, and claimed that in ethics generalization is useless and misleading. I have examined Singer’s (...) defense and concluded that he was right and Hare was mistaken. Consequently, generalization argument is better in clarification of the relationship between universality and morality than Hare’s doctrine of universalizability, and hence the universality of moral principles is not incompatible with the existence of exclusions. The second problem is the substantiation of the application of categorical imperative in the theory of relevant act descriptions and accurate understanding of the difference between maxims and non-maxims. In Generalization in Ethics, Singer drew attention to this theme and philosophers have proposed some suggestions to solve this problem. I describe ideas of H.J. Paton, H. Potter, O. O’Neill and M. Timmons. Paton coined the teleological-law theory. According to Potter, the best criterion for the relevant act descriptions is causal one. O’N eill suggested the inconsistency-of-intention theory. Timmons defended the causal-law theory. My claim is that the teleological-law theory and the causal-law theory fail to solve the relevant act descriptions problem and the causal criterion and the inconsistency-of-intention theory have their limits. From this, I conclude that these approaches cannot be the basis for clarifying the connection between universality and morality, in contrast to Singer’s approach, which, therefore, is better than others to clarify the nature of universality in morality. (shrink)