Why be moral? -- Consequentialism -- Nonconsequentialism -- Reconciliation -- Morality and religion.

Using yet untapped resources from moral and political philosophy, this book seeks to answer the question of whether an all good God who is presumed to be all powerful is logically compatible with the degree and amount of moral and natural evil that exists in our world. It is widely held by theists and atheists alike that it may be logically impossible for an all good, all powerful God to create a world with moral agents like ourselves that does not (...) also have at least some moral evil in it. James P. Sterba focuses on the further question of whether God is logically compatible with the degree and amount of moral and natural evil that exists in our world. The negative answer he provides marks a new stage in the age-old debate about God's existence. (shrink)

James P. Sterba offers something that philosophers have long sought: an argument showing that morality is rationally required. Furthermore he argues that morality requires substantial equality. Even libertarian perspectives, which would seem to require minimal enforcement of morality, are shown to lead to a requirement of equality.

In this introduction, I summarize the main themes of my book, particularly those that my critics have focused on in their papers that follow. I also argue that I could not have reached the conclusions that I have if I hadn’t employed a peacemaking rather than a warmaking way of doing philosophy. I provide a characterization of a peacemaking way of doing philosophy and show how the conclusions of my book depend on doing philosophy in that way.

(1994). The rhetoric of science and the challenge of post‐liberal democracy. Social Epistemology: Vol. 8, Public Indifference to Population Issues, pp. 261-271.

So much of the work that we do as philosophers is published without much critical commentary from our colleagues. Only rarely do we have the chance to improve our work through the extensive critical analysis of our colleagues. That is why I am very grateful to have this opportunity to benefit from the valuable critical analysis that the contributors to this volume have directed at my practical reconciliation argument for making people just. While in this brief response I cannot hope (...) to discuss all the interesting points that my distinguished commentators Kurt Baier, Gerald Doppelt, James Fishkin, John Hospers, Alison Jaggar, Eric Mack, Jeffrey Reiman, Rosemarie Tong and Iris Young have raised, I will try to lay to rest at least some of their doubts concerning my practical reconciliation argument for making people just. (shrink)

In conversation, individuals work together to achieve communicative goals, complementing and aligning language and body with each other. An important emerging question is whether interlocutors entrain with one another equally across linguistic levels (e.g., lexical, syntactic, and semantic) and modalities (i.e., speech and gesture), or whether there are complementary patterns of behaviors, with some levels or modalities diverging and others converging in coordinated fashions. This study assesses how kinematic and linguistic entrainment interact with one another across levels of measurement, and (...) according to communicative context. We analyzed data from two matched corpora of dyadic interaction between—respectively—Danish and Norwegian native speakers engaged in affiliative conversations and task‐oriented conversations. We assessed linguistic entrainment at the lexical, syntactic, and semantic level, and kinetic alignment of the head and hands using video‐based motion tracking and dynamic time warping. We tested whether—across the two languages—linguistic alignment correlates with kinetic alignment, and whether these kinetic‐linguistic associations are modulated either by the type of conversation or by the language spoken. We found that kinetic entrainment was positively associated with low‐level linguistic (i.e., lexical) entrainment, while negatively associated with high‐level linguistic (i.e., semantic) entrainment, in a cross‐linguistically robust way. Our findings suggest that conversation makes use of a dynamic coordination of similarity and complementarity both between individuals as well as between different communicative modalities, and provides evidence for a multimodal, interpersonal synergy account of interaction. (shrink)

Among the distinguished contributors to the series are fellows of the Institute, past and present, Leonard E. Boyle, Jocelyn Hillgarth, Edouard Jeauneau, James K. McConica, M. Michèle Mulchahey, Joseph Owens, Walter H. Principe, James P. ...

In the historical situation out of which Paul wrote, his kerygma offers the people of God, now reconstituted through Jesus Christ, a world-consciousness and calls them to a world-mission to bring about the obedience of faith among all nations.

This paper describes an approach for reasoning in a dynamic domain with nondeterministic actions in which an agent’s beliefs correspond to the simplest, or most plausible, course of events consistent with the agent’s observations and beliefs. The account is based on an epistemic extension of the situation calculus, a first-order theory of reasoning about action that accommodates sensing actions. In particular, the account is based on a qualitative theory of nondeterminism. Our position is that for commonsense reasoning, the world is (...) most usefully regarded as deterministic, and that nondeterminism is an epistemic phenomenon, arising from an agent’s limited awareness and perception. The account offers several advantages: an agent has a set of categorical beliefs, yet can deal with equally-likely outcomes or with outcomes of differing plausibility. The agent maintains as its set of contingent beliefs the most plausible, or simplest, picture of the world, consistent with its beliefs and actions it believes it executed; yet it may modify these in light of later information. (shrink)

The Pursuit of Justice: A Personal Philosophical History is a collection of renowned scholar and philosopher James P. Sterba’s finest works - essays spanning the full spectrum of his illustrious career along with new scholarship on the enduring struggle for justice we face as a society, and as individuals in the modern world. That struggle, or pursuit, may be ongoing, but – as this book details – it has come a long way, and that progress, however frustrating it may (...) be to obtain and secure, is a testament to the work to which scholars like Sterba have devoted their lives and careers. (shrink)

It is likely that the system controlling speech has evolved from the one that controls feeding. However, the idea that frames and content are programmed independently by two different cortical areas is not plausible. Models of the speech control system must also take into account the need to coordinate the respiratory, laryngeal, and articulatory musculature.

Those who have had the benefit of a reasonably lengthy familiarity with the philosophy of religion, and more particularly with the God question, may be so kind to a speaker long in exile from philosophy and only recently returned, as to subscribe, initially at least, to the following rather enormous generalization: meaning and truth, which to most propositions are the twin forces by which they are maintained, turn out in the case of claims about God, to be the centrifugal forces (...) by which they disintegrate. In simpler language, the greater the amount of intelligible meaning that can be given to the idea of God, the less grounds there would appear to be for assuming let alone asserting, that God exists, at least as a being distinguishable from all the things in this empirical world which are the source of the range of meanings available to us; on the other hand, the more we insist that God exists, a being over and above the things that make up this empirical world the less the amount of commonly available meaning we appear to be able to apply to God. Or, to put this in a manner which might obviate an obvious objection to it; either everything we know is tout ensemble, God, and then nothing in the world that we know is distinctively divine; or else nothing in this world is God, and then nothing that we appear to be able to know is God. That same formulation will work, it should be noted, even if we substitute for ‘things in the world’, ‘an aspect or aspects of things in the world’. (shrink)

To be intelligible, the finite order of human experience, for Hegel, requires infinite absolute spirit. Flay and Kolb overlook this infinite in Hegel's thought. Notwithstanding their contextualist hints in interpreting Hegel they regard Hegel as even more of a foundationalist than the epistemological foundationalists. But the notion of ground in Hegel's Logic refutes this. Hegel's systemic holism is grounded in the prospective completed infinity of spirit beyond either Foundationalism or Anti-Foundationalism. In the absence of infinite spirit we are consigned to (...) an unnecessarily attenuated human finitude. The mutual career of the Hegelian finite and infinite however frees us from this prospect. (shrink)

For an American philosopher participating in a cultural exchangeprogram with the Soviet Union in 1964–65, a year spent in thePhilosophy Faculty of Moscow State University, studying and doingresearch in the history of Russian philosophy, provided manyinteresting insights – some of them surprising – into the theoryand practice of Marxism-Leninism and the nature of philosophicaleducation in Russia in the 1960s.