In this paper we offer a new argument for the existence of God. We contend that the laws of logic are metaphysically dependent on the existence of God, understood as a necessarily existent, personal, spiritual being; thus anyone who grants that there are laws of logic should also accept that there is a God. We argue that if our most natural intuitions about them are correct, and if they are to play the role in our intellectual activities that we take (...) them to play, then the laws of logic are best construed as necessarily existent thoughts -- more specifically, as divine thoughts about divine thoughts. We conclude by highlighting some implications for both theistic arguments and antitheistic arguments. (shrink)

Assuming AD + DC, we characterize the self-dual boldface pointclasses which are strictly larger than the pointclasses contained in them: these are exactly the clopen sets, the collections of all sets of Wadge rank [Formula: see text], and those of Wadge rank [Formula: see text] when ξ is limit.

We use Bayesian tools to assess Law’s skeptical argument against the historicity of Jesus. We clarify and endorse his sub-argument for the conclusion that there is good reason to be skeptical about the miracle claims of the New Testament. However, we dispute Law’s contamination principle that he claims entails that we should be skeptical about the existence of Jesus. There are problems with Law’s defense of his principle, and we show, more importantly, that it is not supported by Bayesian considerations. (...) Finally, we show that Law’s principle is false in the specific case of Jesus and thereby show, contrary to the main conclusion of Law’s argument, that biblical historians are entitled to remain confident that Jesus existed. (shrink)

A number of Christian philosophers, most recently Gary R. Habermas and William Lane Craig, have claimed that there is sufficient historical evidence to establish the resurrection of Jesus conceived as the transformation of Jesus’ corpse into a living supernatural body that possesses such extraordinary dispositional properties as the inability to ever die again. I argue that, given this conception of resurrection, our only source of potential evidence, the New Testament Easter traditions, cannot provide adequate information to enable us to establish (...) the historicity of the resurrection---even on the assumption that these traditions are completely historically reliable. (shrink)

New Takes in Film-Philosophy offers a space for the advancement of the film-philosophy debate by some of its major figures. Fifteen leading academics from Philosophy and Film Studies develop new approaches to film-philosophy, broaden theoretical analyses of the topic and map out problems and possibilities for its future. The collection examines theoretical issues about the relationship between film and philosophy; looks at the relationships film-philosophy has to other media such as photography and literature; and applies theoretical approaches to particular films (...) and directors. Written in a clear style that assumes no previous knowledge of any particular philosopher, this collection will appeal to advanced students and scholars in philosophy, film studies, cultural studies, media studies and the arts. _. (shrink)

Everyone knows what noise is. Or do they? Can we in fact say that one man's noise is another teenager's music? Is noise in fact only an auditory phenomenon or does it extend far beyond this realm? If our common definitions of noise are necessarily subjective and noise is not just unpleasant sound, then it merits a closer look (or listen). Greg Hainge sets out to define noise in this way, to find within it a series of operations common (...) across its multiple manifestations that allow us to apprehend it as something other than a highly subjective term that tells us very little. Examining a wide range of texts, including Sartre's novel Nausea and David Lynch's iconic films Eraserhead and Inland Empire, Hainge investigates some of the Twentieth Century's most infamous noisemongers to suggest that they're not that noisy after all; and it finds true noise in some surprising places. The result is a thrilling and illuminating study of sound and culture. (shrink)

Something has been going wrong on many college campuses in the last few years. Speakers are shouted down. Students and professors say they are walking on eggshells and are afraid to speak honestly. Rates of anxiety, depression, and suicide are rising--on campus as well as nationally. How did this happen? First Amendment expert Greg Lukianoff and social psychologist Jonathan Haidt show how the new problems on campus have their origins in three terrible ideas that have become increasingly woven into (...) American childhood and education: What doesn't kill you makes you weaker; always trust your feelings; and life is a battle between good people and evil people. These three Great Untruths contradict basic psychological principles about well-being and ancient wisdom from many cultures. Embracing these untruths--and the resulting culture of safetyism--interferes with young people's social, emotional, and intellectual development. It makes it harder for them to become autonomous adults who are able to navigate the bumpy road of life. Lukianoff and Haidt investigate the many social trends that have intersected to promote the spread of these untruths. They explore changes in childhood such as the rise of fearful parenting, the decline of unsupervised, child-directed play, and the new world of social media that has engulfed teenagers in the last decade. They examine changes on campus, including the corporatization of universities and the emergence of new ideas about identity and justice. They situate the conflicts on campus within the context of America's rapidly rising political polarization and dysfunction. This is a book for anyone who is confused by what is happening on college campuses today, or has children, or is concerned about the growing inability of Americans to live, work, and cooperate across party lines. (shrink)

Abstract 1 This paper makes a preliminary case for a central and radical claim. I begin with Bernard Williams? seldom-faced argument that integrity cannot be a moral virtue because it lacks two key ingredients of moral virtues, namely a characteristic thought and motivation. Whereas, for example, generosity involves the thought that another could use assistance, and the motivation to actually give assistance, integrity lacks these two things essential to morally excellent responses. I show that several maneuvers aimed at avoiding Williams? (...) challenge fail and that others are likely to remain unpersuasive. The paper concludes by offering an argument to the best explanation: Williams? important insight is best explained by the supposition that integrity is an epistemic virtue, and an epistemic virtue of a practical sort. (shrink)

In barely the space of one generation, Athens was transformed from a conventional city-state into something completely new--a region-state on a scale previously unthinkable. This book sets out to answer a seemingly simple question: How and when did the Athenian state attain the anomalous size that gave it such influence in Greek politics and culture in the classical period? Many scholars argue that Athens's incorporation of Attica was a gradual development, largely completed some two hundred years before the classical era. (...) Anderson, however, suggests that it is not until the late sixth century that we see the first systematic attempts by the Athenian polis to integrate all of Attica. Anderson first takes issue with the prevailing view of Cleisthenes' landmark political reforms of 508-7 b.c., arguing that they were animated by a more comprehensive vision of regional political community in Attica. The Athenians' strengthened the state by establishing institutional mechanisms that would allow inhabitants of the Attic periphery to participate as never before in the life of the center. The creation of a suitable physical setting for the new order was accompanied by religious, military, and symbolic innovations. Regional participation in Athenian affairs was stimulated by encouraging the Attic populace to imagine themselves, for the first time ever, as members of a single, like-minded, self-governing political community. Greg Anderson is Assistant Professor of Classics and History, University of Illinois at Chicago. (shrink)

Many people have claimed that integrity requires sticking to one's convictions come what may. Greg Scherkoske challenges this claim, arguing that it creates problems in distinguishing integrity from fanaticism, close-mindedness or mere inertia. Rather, integrity requires sticking to one's convictions to the extent that they are justifiable and likely to be correct. In contrast to traditional views of integrity, Scherkoske contends that it is an epistemic virtue intimately connected to what we know and have reason to believe, rather than (...) an essentially moral virtue connected to our values. He situates integrity in the context of shared cognitive and practical agency and shows that the relationship between integrity and impartial morality is not as antagonistic as many have thought - which has important implications for the 'integrity objection' to impartial moral theories. This original and provocative study will be of great interest to advanced students and scholars of ethics. (shrink)

Recent allegations of unethical decision-making by leaders in prominent business organizations have jeopardized the world's confidence in American business. The purpose of this research was to develop a measure of managerial moral judgment that can be used in future research and managerial assessment. The measure was patterned after the Defining Issues Test, a widely used general measure of moral judgment. With content validity as the goal, we aimed to sample the domain of managerial ethical situations by establishing links to dimensions (...) of managerial performance, as well as to the types of organizational justice issues managers encounter. Proposed scenarios were evaluated for realism by ethics officers and human resource managers. Results indicated that the new measure is reliable and correlates with a number of relevant variables in the hypothesized manner, demonstrating evidence of construct validity. Implications for future research and for human resources management are discussed. (shrink)

Stanley and Williamson reject Ryle's knowing‐how/knowing‐that distinction charging that it obstructs our understanding of human action. Incorrectly interpreting the distinction to imply that knowledge‐how is non‐propositional, they object that Ryle's argument for it is unsound and linguistic theory contradicts it. I show that they (and their interlocutors) misconstrue the distinction and Ryle's argument. Consequently, their objections fail. On my reading, Ryle's distinction pertains to, not knowledge, but an explanatory gap between explicit and implicit content, and his argument for it is (...) sound. I defend the distinction's necessity in explaining human action and show that it propels a fruitful explanatory program. (shrink)

introduction Rhetoric/Memory/Place Carole Blair, Greg Dickinson, and Brian L. Ott The story is told of the poet Simonides of Ceos who, after chanting a poem ...

Technological progress may eventually produce sophisticated robots with human-like traits that result in humans forming meaningful relationships with them. Such relationships would likely lead to a demand for human–artificial intelligence matrimony. U.S. Supreme Court decisions that expanded the definition of marriage to include interracial and same-sex couples, as well as those that have not extended marriage to polygamous relationships, provide guidance regarding the criteria that human–AI would have to meet to successfully assert a right to marry. Ultimately, robots will have (...) to possess certain characteristics of personhood to marry, including the capacity to contract and to engage in an intimate relationship. Alternatively, if AIs can simulate these abilities sufficiently, we may believe that they have these capacities. Even if AIs genuinely possess the capabilities necessary to enter into a marriage, it is social acceptance of intelligent non-humans as life partners that will likely influence legal development is this realm rather than personhood criteria. However, AIs are likely to face bias due to their “artificial” rather than biological nature. Yet, Peter Singer’s influential argument regarding speciesism in the context of animal rights implies that AIs with specific human-like qualities cannot be justifiably denied certain rights. (shrink)

Should organ transplants be given to patients who have waited the longest, or need it most urgently, or those whose survival prospects are the best? The rationing of health care is universal and inevitable, taking place in poor and affluent countries, in publicly funded and private health care systems. Someone must budget for as well as dispense health care whilst aging populations severely stretch the availability of resources. The Ethics of Health Care Rationing is a clear and much-needed introduction to (...) this increasingly important topic, considering and assessing the major ethical problems and dilemmas about the allocation, scarcity and rationing of health care. Beginning with a helpful overview of why rationing is an ethical problem, the authors examine the following key topics: What is the value of health? How can it be measured? What does it mean that a treatment is "good value for money"? What sort of distributive principles - utilitarian, egalitarian or prioritarian - should we rely on when thinking about health care rationing? Does rationing health care unfairly discriminate against the elderly and people with disabilities? Should patients be held responsible for their health? Why does the debate on responsibility for health lead to issues about socioeconomic status and social inequality? Throughout the book, examples from the US, UK and other countries are used to illustrate the ethical issues at stake. Additional features such as chapter summaries, annotated further reading and discussion questions make this an ideal starting point for students new to the subject, not only in philosophy but also in closely related fields such as politics, health economics, public health, medicine, nursing and social work. (shrink)

In an attempt to address the theoretical gap between linguistics and philosophy, a group of semanticists, calling itself the Generic Group, has worked to develop a common view of genericity. Their research has resulted in this book, which consists of a substantive introduction and eleven original articles on important aspects of the interpretation of generic expressions. The introduction provides a clear overview of the issues and synthesizes the major analytical approaches to them. Taken together, the papers that follow reflect the (...) current state of the art in the semantics of generics, and afford insight into various generic phenomena. (shrink)

This paper aims to contribute to a greater understanding of the theory of virtue ethics and its applications in the business arena. In contrast to other prominent approaches to ethics, virtue ethics provides a useful perspective in making sense of various business ethics issues with an emphasis on the moral character of the individuals and its transformational influences in driving ethical business conduct. Building on Geoff Moore’s :19–32, 2002; Bus Ethics Q 15:237–255, 2005; Bus Ethics Q 18:483–511, 2008) treatment of (...) Alasdair MacIntyre’s practice–institution schema, the paper discusses how individuals, as moral agents, can serve to promote virtuous business conduct and help foster a moral and ethical climate in the organization and in society at large. Using interview data from a broader study of the New Zealand wine industry as explanatory examples, the paper argues that while many companies’ sustainable practices are still largely market based, such excellent business practices are often driven by individuals’ moral and ethical pursuits. (shrink)

This paper highlights an important distinction underlying the possibility of inquiry, between first _identifying the subject of inquiry and ultimately _explaining it: that the former can be achieved before and without the latter is a presupposition of inquiry. I believe Aristotle is keenly aware of this in _Posterior Analytics, II.8, where he shows how a scientific demonstration can "manifest" a definition. I argue that such a demonstration consists of two sorts of syllogisms, one identifying the definiendum, the other explaining it. (...) Further, this distinction is tied in crucial ways to two others: between existence and essence, and between particular and universal. (shrink)

The article propounds a justification of public health interventionism grounded on personal health as an intermediate human end in the ethical domain, on an interpretation of Aristotle. This goes beyond the position taken by some liberals that health should be understood as a prudential good alone. A second, but independent, argument is advanced in the domain of the political, namely, that population health can be justified as a political value in its own right as a primary social good, following an (...) interpretation of John Rawls’s evolved understanding of such goods in his later works. The article sets the scene for these positions by highlighting how liberal theories focusing on freedom as non-interference, or making the harm principle the basis of legitimate public health interventions, undercut the capacity of the state to actively promote population health. The article points to theoretical resources on legitimacy and liberty—the ‘salient coordinator account’ of authority and freedom as non-domination—that may help avoid this risk. The role of reflective equilibrium incorporating incompletely theorized mid-level principles is emphasized to ensure that interventions are soundly justified. The application of these principles would ensure that interventions do not exceed the proper moral/political boundaries limiting the role of government. (shrink)

The stock market crash of 1987 had a profound effect on corporate Australia and the Australian community in general. The fall-out revealed that some of our most respected business figures had not been as ethical, or even as lawful, as we would have hoped. This impropriety produced in Australia an awakening to business ethics. Whilst many companies endeavoured to introduce ethical practices into their corporations, they perceived ethics as a way of minimising damage to the corporation and in some cases (...) as a means of competitive advantage. What was lost was the reason that one should embark on business ethics; and that is to make the society and corporate Australia a more ethical place in which to exist.This paper proposes a model based on 2 factors: commitment and partnerships, as a means of enabling corporate Australia to refocus attention on the main purpose of being inherently ethical in all that we do. This ethical model requires a commitment to partnerships with all stakeholders both internal and external in an attempt to enhance the level of ethical business practices that are contemplated and pursued within corporate Australia. Whilst the research agenda and the information collected is Australian-based, it is hoped that the ideas contained within this paper will have a wider appeal to corporations in similar cultural settings. (shrink)

It is argued that the English bare plural (an NP with plural head that lacks a determiner), in spite of its apparently diverse possibilities of interpretation, is optimally represented in the grammar as a unified phenomenon. The chief distinction to be dealt with is that between the generic use of the bare plural (as in Dogs bark) and its existential or indefinite plural use (as in He threw oranges at Alice). The difference between these uses is not to be accounted (...) for by an ambiguity in the NP itself, but rather by explicating how the context of the sentence acts on the bare plural to give rise to this distinction. A brief analysis is sketched in which bare plurals are treated in all instances as proper names of kinds of things. A subsidiary argument is that the null determiner is not to be regarded as the plural of the indefinite article a. (shrink)

I am grateful to Catharine Abell and Jonathan Gilmore for their comments and for the opportunity to think again about some important questions. Before I respond.

The idea that fictions may educate us is an old one, as is the view that they distort the truth and mislead us. While there is a long tradition of passionate assertion in this debate, systematic arguments are a recent development, and the idea of empirically testing is particularly novel. Our aim in this chapter is to provide clarity about what is at stake in this debate, what the options are, and how empirical work does or might bear on its (...) resolution. We distinguish between merely influencing people’s opinions and providing genuine learning, where the latter requires that the source of the change in opinion should be reliable. Other important ideas here are the extent to which authors of fiction may be considered to provide testimony, or something like it, and the possibility of recognizing an unstated purpose in the project of the fictional work. We ask whether fictions can furnish us not merely with ideas but with reasons for believing them, perhaps by constituting thought experiments. We consider whether the focus should be on understanding rather than on knowledge, and whether fictions can inform us about the qualities of another’s experiences. We briefly describe some experimental work of recent decades and suggest that the evidence for learning from fiction is currently meagre. (shrink)

Combining phenomenological insights from Brentano and Sartre, but also drawing on recent work on consciousness by analytic philosophers, this book defends the view that conscious states are reflexive, and necessarily so, i.e., that they have a built-in, implicit awareness of their own occurrence, such that the subject of a conscious state has an immediate, non-objectual acquaintance with it. As part of this investigation, the book also explores the relationship between reflexivity and the phenomenal, or what-it-is-like, dimension of conscious experience, defending (...) the innovative thesis that phenomenal character is constituted by the implicit self-awareness built into every conscious state. This account stands in marked contrast to most influential extant theories of phenomenal character, including qualia theories, according to which phenomenal character is a matter of having phenomenal sensations, and representationalism, according to which phenomenal character is constituted by representational content. (shrink)

This book introduces an important group of logics that have come to be known under the umbrella term 'susbstructural'. Substructural logics have independently led to significant developments in philosophy, computing and linguistics. _An Introduction to Substrucural Logics_ is the first book to systematically survey the new results and the significant impact that this class of logics has had on a wide range of fields.The following topics are covered: * Proof Theory * Propositional Structures * Frames * Decidability * Coda Both (...) students and professors of philosophy, computing, linguistics, and mathematics will find this to be an important addition to their reading. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:In Memoriam:Father Jacques DupuisGreg WattsTheologian Fr. Father Jacques Dupuis has died in Rome. The eighty-one-year-old Belgian Jesuit was one of the leading thinkers in interfaith dialogue. His thirty-six years studying and teaching in India greatly influenced his ideas. From 1960 to 1984, he was professor of systematic theology at the Jesuit-run theological faculty, now Vidyajyoti Institute of Religious Studies, in New Delhi. In 1984 he left India to become (...) professor of Christology at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome.Father Dupuis hit the headlines when his 1997 book Towards a Christian Theology of Religious Pluralism brought him into conflict with the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, and he was suspended from the Gregorian University. Following an investigation into his writings, the congregation issued a mild condemnation, complaining of some "ambiguities" in his work. His next book, Christianity and the Religions, which further developed his ideas about salvation and the way God is at work in other faiths, drew no reaction from the Congregation.One of his key ideas was that of different "paths of salvation" being consistent with the traditional Catholic teaching that Jesus is the Word of God and the savior of humanity. In an interview in London last September, Fr. Dupuis said, "Prior to the Second Vatican Council you had great theologians like Father de Lubac, Father Balthasar and others who began to speak of human values that were found in the other religious traditions. Before them, the theological evaluation of the other religious traditions was very negative. Father Karl Rahner spoke not of the natural endowments present in other religious traditions but of, as he called it, elements of divine truth and grace. All these other religious traditions are understood as conducive to salvation." Since the council, this view has been developing more and more. The official Church document which comes close to considering the other religious traditions as pathways of salvation for their followers is Dialogue and Proclamation in 1991. "It said that it is true that with sincere practice of their own religious traditions that the members of those traditions can answer positively God's call and thus receive divine salvation in Jesus Christ. Pope John Paul II has stressed very much and very clearly the universal presence of the Holy Spirit among non-Christians and in the religious traditions to which they belong."Greg WattsIndependent Catholic NewsCopyright © 2005 The University of Hawai'i Press... (shrink)

We are the funny organisms that make and follow rules. To understand us, one must understand what is it to institute and follow a rule, to perform correctly or in error. This question is more important than it might at first seem for linguistic meaning is constituted by rules that govern uses of expressions. For example, the fact that 'squid' is correctly applied to squid and incorrectly applied to cuttlefish is part of what makes 'squid' mean what it does. Philosophers (...) sometimes argue further that all representations are rule-governed so that a theory of representation must explain the possibility of misrepresentation. ;The rule-following problem makes an explanation of correctness surprisingly difficult. Philosophers have also not been clear on just what is the problem with rules. I provide a statement of the features of rules and the problems they drive. I then show that some well-known accounts of rule following---Kripke's, Wright's, Blackburn's---are inadequate. My formulation also shows that some favored theories of content---causal, evolutionary, interpretivist---are inadequate. ;Positively, I argue that an essentially social and irreducibly normative organization---a practice---solves the rule-following problem. Therefore, only participants in social practices can follow rules and thence traffic in linguistic meaning. Still, an account of the correctness of a linguistic performance is not yet an explanation of its representational content. I argue that linguistic content is constituted by correctness facts but also by the representational purport of expressions. I explain an expression's purport to represent naturalistically in terms of syndromes of psychological and behavioral symptoms. A theory of linguistic representation, then, must join the non-natural social facts that constitute correctness with the natural individualistic facts that constitute representational purport. ;Such a hybrid theory reveals that thought and language are not as intimately connected as philosophers assume. Whereas linguistic content constitutively partakes of the social organization that sets humans apart from other creatures, thought content involves only refinements of the psycho-behavioral syndromes that we share with most vertebrates. It follows that linguistic content and thought content cannot be explained one in terms of the other. (shrink)

Implication barrier theses deny that one can derive sentences of one type from sentences of another. Hume’s Law is an implication barrier thesis; it denies that one can derive an ‘ought’ (a normative sentence) from an ‘is’ (a descriptive sentence). Though Hume’s Law is controversial, some barrier theses are philosophical platitudes; in his Lectures on Logical Atomism, Bertrand Russell claims: You can never arrive at a general proposition by inference particular propositions alone. You will always have to have at least (...) one general proposition in your premises. (Russell, 1918, p. 206) We will refer to this claim—that one cannot derive general sentences from particular sentences—as Russell’s Law.1 A third barrier thesis claims that one cannot derive sentences about the future from sentences about the past or present. Hume’s endorsement of this barrier thesis is well-known: all inferences from experience suppose, as their foundation, that the future will resemble the past . . . if there be any suspicion that the course of nature may change, and that the past may be no rule for the future, all experience becomes useless, and can give rise to no inference or conclusion. It is impossible, therefore, that any argument from experience can prove this resemblance of the past to the future; since all these arguments are founded on the supposition of that resemblance. (Hume, EHU 4.21/37) We will refer to this barrier thesis as Hume’s Second Law. A fourth barrier thesis says that one cannot derive a necessary sentence from one about the actual world and we will refer to this last thesis Kant’s Law. Such implication barrier theses present a problem. (shrink)