Pursuing the Forms: Equality and Excellence in Plato's Republic and Symposium -- Equality and Excellence in the Education of Cyrus -- Splendid Equality in the Nicomachean Ethics: Munificence -- How Excellence Bows to Equality in Aristotle's Politics -- First Among Equals: Philosophers, Statesmen, and Citizens in Spinoza's Democracy -- Excellence and Equality in Fénelon's Telemachus -- The Seductive Danger of Equality and Excellence: The Moderating Wisdom of Montesquieu's Science of Ovidian Metamorphosis -- Equality and Excellence in Rousseau's Emile, Book III (...) -- Hegel's Evaluation of Liberalism: Equality of Rights without Human Excellence -- Democracy, Nobility, and Freedom: The Political and Moral Aesthetics of Tocqueville -- Does Kierkegaard Have a Concept of Excellence? -- Nietzsche: The Indignity of Equality -- The Good and the Excellent: John Rawls's Egalitarian Liberalism. (shrink)

A wide-ranging collection of essays inspired by the memory of the cognitive psychologist John Macnamara.

Amidst the many voices clamoring to interpret the environmental crisis, some of the most important are the voices of religious traditions. Long before modernity's industrialism began the rape of Earth, premodern religious and philosophical traditions mediated to untold generations the wisdom of living as a part of nature. These traditions can illuminate and empower wiser ways of postmodern living. The original writings of Worldviews and Ecology creatively present and interpret worldviews of major religious and philosophical traditions on how humans can (...) live more sustainably on a fragile planet. Contributors include Charlene Spretnak, Larry Rasmussen, Noel Brown, Jay McDaniel, Tu Wei-Ming, Thomas Berry, David Ray Griffin, J. Baird Callicott, Eric Katz, Roger E. Timm, Robert A. White, Christopher Key Chapple, Brian Swimme, Brian Brown, Michael Tobias, Ralph Metzner, George Sessions, and Mary Evelyn Tucker and John Grim. Insights from traditions as diverse as Jain, Jewish, ecofeminist, deep ecology, Christian, Hindu, Bahai, and Whiteheadian will interest all who seek an honest analysis of what religious and philosophical traditions have to say to a modernity whose consciousness and conscience seems tragically narrow, the source of attitudes that imperil the biosphere. (shrink)

A collection of essays by prominent physicists, biologists, geneticists, zoologists, philosophers and other thinkers about the relationship between science and philosophy, particularly the teleological versus the mechanistic explanation of the universe.

Paper edition (unseen), $14.95. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR.

In this thorough compendium, nineteen accomplished scholars explore, in some manner the values they find inherent in the world, their nature, and revelence through the thought of Frederick Ferré. These essays, informed by the insights of Ferré and coming from manifold perspectives—ethics, philosophy, theology, and environmental studies, advance an ambitious challenge to current intellectual and scholarly fashions.

In this thorough compendium, nineteen accomplished scholars explore, in some manner the values they find inherent in the world, their nature, and revelence through the thought of Frederick FerrZ. These essays, informed by the insights of FerrZ and coming from manifold perspectives—ethics, philosophy, theology, and environmental studies, advance an ambitious challenge to current intellectual and scholarly fashions.

Maximization theory, which is borrowed from economics, provides techniques for predicing the behavior of animals - including humans. A theoretical behavioral space is constructed in which each point represents a given combination of various behavioral alternatives. With two alternatives - behavior A and behavior B - each point within the space represents a certain amount of time spent performing behavior A and a certain amount of time spent performing behavior B. A particular environmental situation can be described as a constraint (...) on available points (a circumscribed area) within the space. Maximization theory assumes that animals always choose the available point with the highest numerical value. The task of maximization theory is to assign to points in the behavioral space values that remain constant across various environmental situations; as those situations change, the point actually chosen is always the one with the highest assigned value. (shrink)

This book examines cultural recognition and the struggle for identity in America's schools. In particular, the contributing authors focus on the recognition and misrecognition as antagonistic cultural forces that work to shape, and at times distort identity.

"Romanticism, when attains a fullness of complexity..there occurs of the supernatural unique". http://philpapers.org/profile/112741.

This book sorts out the confusion created by the use of the term "postmodern" in relation to widely divergent theological positions. Four different types of postmodern theology are distinguished in the preface: constructive, deconstructive, liberationist, and conservative. Two forms of each type are discussed in the book. Writing from a constructive, postmodern perspective, the authors enter into dialogue with the deconstructive postmodernism of Mark C. Taylor and Jean-François Lyotard, with the liberationist postmodernism of Harvey Cox and Cornel West, and with (...) the conservative postmodernism of George William Rutler and John Paul II. (shrink)

This book assesses how Vatican II opened up the Catholic Church to encounter, dialogue, and engagement with other world religions. Opening with a contribution from the President of the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue, Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran, it next explores the impact, relevance, and promise of the Declaration Nostra Aetate before turning to consider how Vatican II in general has influenced interfaith dialogue and the intellectual and comparative study of world religions in the postconciliar decades, as well as the contribution (...) of particular past and present thinkers to the formation of current interreligious and comparative theological methods. Additionally, chapters consider interreligious dialogue vis-à-vis theological anthropology in conciliar documents; openness to the spiritual practices of other faith traditions as a way of encouraging positive interreligious encounter; the role of lay and new ecclesial movements in interreligious dialogue; and the development of Monastic Interreligious Dialogue. Finally, it includes a range of perspectives on the fruits and future of Vatican’s II’s opening to particular faiths such as Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism. (shrink)

It has recently been argued that our use of vague language poses an intractable problem for any account of content and communication on which (i) the things we assert are propositions and (ii) understanding an assertion requires recognizing which proposition the speaker asserted. John MacFarlane has argued that this problem concerning vague language is itself a species of an even more general problem for such traditional accounts – the problem posed by “felicitous” underspecification. Repurposing certain ideas from Allan Gibbard, (...) MacFarlane offers a novel theory of vagueness, plan-expressivism, as an account that can handle both vagueness and such underspecification in communication. -/- In this paper, I argue that despite its many virtues, plan-expressivism fails as a general account of meaning and communication. In particular, I show that when it comes to the problem of felicitous underspecification, plan-expressivism fares no better than the more traditional accounts of content and communication it is intended to replace. Along the way, I argue that the problem of felicitous underspecification puts considerable pressure on an assumption that is at the core of both plan-expressivism and the accounts of its more traditionalist rivals - namely, that in cases of successful linguistic communication, we must always be able to find something -- whether a propositional content or a conversational update -- that the speaker is intending to share with her audience. (shrink)

Abduction is or subsumes a process of inference. It entertains possible hypotheses and it chooses hypotheses for further scrutiny. There is a large literature on various aspects of non-symbolic, subconscious abduction. There is also a very active research community working on the symbolic (logical) characterisation of abduction, which typically treats it as a form of hypothetico-deductive reasoning. In this paper we start to bridge the gap between the symbolic and sub-symbolic approaches to abduction. We are interested in benefiting from developments (...) made by each community. In particular, we are interested in the ability of non-symbolic systems (neural networks) to learn from experience using efficient algorithms and to perform massively parallel computations of alternative abductive explanations. At the same time, we would like to benefit from the rigour and semantic clarity of symbolic logic. We present two approaches to dealing with abduction in neural networks. One of them uses Connectionist Modal Logic and a translation of Horn clauses into modal clauses to come up with a neural network ensemble that computes abductive explanations in a top-down fashion. The other combines neural-symbolic systems and abductive logic programming and proposes a neural architecture which performs a more systematic, bottom-up computation of alternative abductive explanations. Both approaches employ standard neural network architectures which are already known to be highly effective in practical learning applications. Differently from previous work in the area, our aim is to promote the integration of reasoning and learning in a way that the neural network provides the machinery for cognitive computation, inductive learning and hypothetical reasoning, while logic provides the rigour and explanation capability to the systems, facilitating the interaction with the outside world. Although it is left as future work to determine whether the structure of one of the proposed approaches is more amenable to learning than the other, we hope to have contributed to the development of the area by approaching it from the perspective of symbolic and sub-symbolic integration. (shrink)

This is my first book from Partridge International In Association with Penguin Random House in 2018. I wanted to enrich self through my creativity on selected topics as far as a Google Scholar.

The second volume of Ray Monk's biography of Bertrand Russell focuses on Russell's tragic and moving relationship with his first son John. It uses the relationship as a centerpoint to expound on Russell's public achievements, such as his political campaigning for peace.

Campbell, Ray This paper is an abbreviated version of a paper given at the National Colloquium for Catholic Bioethicists, Melbourne, 2012. That paper in turn was an abbreviated version of part of my doctoral thesis, The Human Act and Moral Responsibility, John Paul II Institute for Marriage and Family, Melbourne, 2011. The larger works give more of the context for this discussion and more examples.

Ataxia‐telangiectasia (A‐T), an inherited disorder giving radiation sensitivity and cancer‐proneness, is discussed in terms of a defect in ability to repair DNA damage. A new assay using damaged recombinant DNA molecules suggests that the fidelity of repair of DNA double‐strand breaks is reduced in an A‐T cell line. Specific chromosomal changes in some A‐T patients appear to be associated with cancer induction, and it is suggested that these could be linked to a DNA repair‐fidelity defect. However, a general correlation between (...) radiosensitivity and cancer‐proneness is difficult to establish at present, partly because of diversity in radiosensitivity in the normal population. (shrink)

Alfred Tarski's (1936) semantic account of the logical properties (logical consequence, logical truth and logical consistency) makes essential appeal to a distinction between logical and non-logical terms. John Etchemendy (1990) has recently argued that Tarski's account is inadequate for quite a number of different reasons. Among them is a brief argument which purports to show that Tarski's reliance on the distinction between logical and non-logical terms is in principle mistaken. According to Etchemendy, there are very simple (even first order) (...) languages for which no such distinction can be made. This is a surprising result, and an important one, if true. Since Tarski's account does indeed depend on such a distinction, Etchemendy's argument, if correct, would rule out definitively the received view on logical truth (as well as logical consequence and logical consistency). But his argument is not correct, and it is the job of this paper to show that. (shrink)

Cosmic rays have been a standard if mysterious phenomenon in astrophysics since the 1930s when experimental physicists first began to detect charged particles with Wilson cloud chambers and with Geiger counters and other electronic detectors. They found that energetic particles were detected even when no radioactive sources were nearby and inferred from the angles of the tracks in the cloud chambers that these particles were coming from the sky.

Joseph Beuys’ installation Plight forcefully avows of the Nazi genocide by means of negative presentation. The work culminates a collective artistic investigation of negative sculptural strategies for representing traumatic history, opened by the Nouveaux Réalistes under the impact of Alain Resnais’ documentary film Nuit et Brouillard. This article outlines this history and analyzes Plight in the context of the ‘after Auschwitz’ crisis of representation and traditional culture theorized by Theodor W. Adorno. For Adorno, Auschwitz demonstrated threats to autonomous subjectivity posed (...) by tendencies unfolding within the global social process of modernity itself. Reflecting on the fate of music, poetry and literature under these conditions, Adorno advocated a hermetic art of silence and dissonance, as exemplified by Paul Celan and above all Samuel Beckett. This article shows that in the visual arts, too, the genocidal violence of World War II was confronted with analogous strategies of indirection. In Plight, Beuys would successfully synthesize John Cage’s symbolic demolitions of traditional music and the investigations of negative presentation carried out in sculpture by Arman and Daniel Spoerri. (shrink)

Background: The factors influencing parents’ willingness to enroll their children in biobanks are poorly understood. This study sought to assess parents’ willingness to enroll their children, and their perceived benefits, concerns, and information needs under different consent and data-sharing scenarios, and to identify factors associated with willingness. Methods: This large, experimental survey of patients at the 11 eMERGE Network sites used a disproportionate stratified sampling scheme to enrich the sample with historically underrepresented groups. Participants were randomized to receive one of (...) three consent and data-sharing scenarios. Results: In total, 90,000 surveys were mailed and 13,000 individuals responded (15.8% response rate). 5737 respondents were parents of minor children. Overall, 55% (95% confidence interval 50–59%) of parents were willing to enroll their youngest minor child in a hypothetical biobank; willingness did not differ between consent and data-sharing scenarios. Lower educational attainment, higher religiosity, lower trust, worries about privacy, and attitudes about benefits, concerns, and information needs were independently associated with less willingness to allow their child to participate. Of parents who were willing to participate themselves, 25% were not willing to allow their child to participate. Being willing to participate but not willing to allow one’s child to participate was independently associated with multiple factors, including race, lower educational attainment, lower annual household income, public health care insurance, and higher religiosity. Conclusions: Fifty-five percent of parents were willing to allow their youngest minor child to participate in a hypothetical biobank. Building trust, protecting privacy, and addressing attitudes may increase enrollment and diversity in pediatric biobanks. (shrink)

Machine generated contents note: ch. 1 The Cry of Rachel -- Maritain's 1942 Marquette Aquinas Lecture -- Maritain's The Person and the Common Good -- Camus's The Plague -- ch. 2 Joy -- Being as the Good and the Eruption of Willing -- Being and Philosophical Psychology -- An Ordinary Knowledge of God and Metaphysics -- Metaphysics as Implicit Knowledge -- Being and the Intellectual Emotions -- ch. 3 Quandoque Evils -- Aquinas's Rationale for the Corruptible Order -- The Corruptible (...) Order and Quandoque Evils -- Bracketing Quandoque Evils between Goods -- A Caveat in Understanding the Subject of the Consequent Good -- The Effect of Human Providence upon the Frequency of Quandoque Evils -- ch. 4 Natural Corruptions -- Death as a Natural Corruption -- Natural Corruption as Nondefinitive -- Ambiguity of "Praeter Intentionem" and "Per Accidens" -- God and the Evil of Punishment (Poena) -- Other Interpretations -- Abraham and Isaac -- Conclusion -- ch. 5 Preliminaries to Aquinas and the Contemporary Discussion -- C.G. III, 71: "If Evil Exists, God Exists" -- William Rowe on Cosmological Reasoning -- De Ver. X, 12, ad 10m: "If not God from Justice, then God from Some Other Effect" -- Summary of Aquinas on the Existence of Evil -- A Strategy -- ch. 6 The Thomist and the Contemporary Discussion: Personalist Theodicies -- Marilyn McCord Adams and "Horrendous Evils" -- William Hasker: Personal Satisfaction and World Approval -- John Hick: Creation as a Gymnasium for the Development of Our Virtues -- David Ray Griffin and the Denial of Genuine Evils -- The Brothers Karamazov -- Thomistic "Natural Desires" of the Human Person -- ch. 7 The Thomist and the Contemporary Discussion: Cosmological Theodicies -- Diogenes Allen and Suffering as an Experience of God -- David Hume and Dialogues concerning Natural Religion, X and XI -- William Rowe and "Pointless Evils" -- J. L. Mackie and Further Objections to a Cosmological Theodicy -- Mackie's Fourth Criticism and Aquinas on the Causality of Human Choices -- Aquinas and Plantinga -- The Avoidance of Determinism -- The Avoidance of Divine Culpability -- A Thomistic Free Will Defense? -- Richard Swinburne: Nature as a Necessary Display Case for Our Knowledge of Good and Evil -- Bruce Reichenbach: Developing Plantinga and Swinburne -- ch. 8 Conclusion and Comparison to Brian Davies and Eleonore Stump -- Brian Davies's Apophatic Treatment of the Evil Problem -- Eleonore Stump and the Love of God -- The Consolation of Rachel. (shrink)

This paper analyzes what may have been a mistake by pianist Thelonious Monk playing a jazz solo in 1958. Even in a Monk composition designed for patterned mayhem, a note can sound out of pattern. We reframe the question of whether the note was a mistake and ask instead about how Monk handles the problem. Amazingly, he replays the note into a new pattern that resituates its jarring effect in retrospect. The mistake, or better, the mis-take , was “saved” by (...) subsequent notes. Our analysis, supported by reflections from jazz musicians and the philosopher John Dewey, encourages a reformulation of plans, takes, and mis-takes as categories for the interpretation of contingency, surprise, and repair in all human activities. A final section suggests that mistakes are essential to the practical plying and playing of knowledge into performances, particularly those that highlight learning. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Whisper Before You GoJohn K PettyDavid came with a bang.1A momentary prelude from a dysphonic chorus of pagers announce “Level 1 Pediatric Trauma—MVC ejected” before the abrupt crescendo of the trauma bay doors opening. He is maybe two. Maybe three–years–old. It is hard to tell when a child is strapped in, strapped down, nonverbal, intubated, and alone.The flight team speaks for him, “Four–year–old boy improperly restrained in a single–vehicle (...) crash into a ditch. He was partially ejected. He was unresponsive and pulseless at the scene. He got CPR and code drugs, and they got a pulse back. Emergency medical service (EMS) took him to the nearest hospital where they needled his chest, called for air transport, and scanned him up. He has been shocky for us since we picked him up. Glasgow Coma Scale (GCS) has been three the whole time. They said his head scan showed subarachnoid hemorrhage.”With the words of the flight team as background narrative, we get about doing our thing—hopefully more method and less madness. Bang, bang, bang! Check the tube. Vital signs. IV fluids. Place a chest tube. Hang the blood. Quick X–ray. Neuro exam—nothing. Get him off the board. Warm him up. Place the orogastric (OG) tube. Bang, bang, bang!The neurosurgery resident opens the CT scans from the other hospital. The brain and cervical spine scans show a disaster: some swelling and bleeding in the higher brain, but the worst damage is in the lower brain, brainstem, and top of the spinal cord. I have heard a neurosurgeon describe this pattern before as “internal decapitation.” Such language never makes it into the patient’s chart. For David the last two words of the neurosurgery consult note will eventually read, “Prognosis grim.”He remains unstable in the trauma bay. Inaction is death. We ultrasound his heart, abdomen, and pelvis. He has fluid that shouldn’t be around his heart. He is dying of the neuro injury we cannot control, but the pericardial fluid might be giving him shock, and we can control that. We can’t ignore the fluid. Shouldn’t ignore it. At least, wouldn’t ignore it. So, we bang up to the operating room. Squeezing blood. Spiking fluid. Oxygen tank and crash cart. Up we go.In the operating room, we do much and we do well. We release the fluid around the heart and find it was CPR, not heart injury that put it there. In the pericardial flash we get a view of the cardiac athlete, pounding like the 26th mile of the marathon. We explore the abdomen and find it swollen but innocent of an injury that would take his life. We place our lines and tubes as the neurosurgeons place theirs. If nothing else, we will be able to measure what lies ahead.“Good work, team,” and we bump the door on the way to the pediatric intensive care unit (PICU).The care in the PICU is more Apache brave than Gaelic knight—more bottles, fewer scissors. The curtains and carpets mute the tones. Our efforts continue, but I get a word that David’s father has arrived. He is sitting in a small, private waiting room off of the main PICU waiting room. The PICU staff colloquially refer to this as “the bad news room.” I take a seat next to a solitary man who is having the worst day of his life. His worst day so far.“I am Dr. Petty, and I am one of the doctors who is taking care of your son. I am very sorry about what has happened. Maybe you can tell me a little bit about what you understand is going on, and I’ll tell you what I know.” [End Page 17]He tells me that his wife was driving David back from her sister’s house, just the two of them. He doesn’t know what happened, but he got a call from the other hospital about the crash. His wife was badly hurt. He heard that David had died, but they got him back. Both were transferred up to the... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Whoa! JOHN SHOPTAW ONE A young man with gold hair in a coal-black robe and slippers was off to confront the Sun. But as he paced the hotel corridors, Ray could feel his step losing its jaunt. At this rate, he’d make it to nowhere in nothing flat. Just then, he noticed his old wall map thumbtacked over some double doors. How’d his Boys’ Life get out here? (...) He looked it over, the big fat world, cut open and stretched flat, like an elephant hide. The properties were green, purple and red, and the waters whitish blue. The Mercator-projected bottom was jagged with ice. The whole place was crawling with letters, like ants on a cake. The best part was the creatures: a long-armed squid suctioning a whale, sea lions sunning themselves. No. Seals. He bunched his brows. No. Hills. And game big as states, as nations: hippos in Africa’s watering holes, a beauty of a cheetah, its sights trained. Untacking and folding the map, Ray tucked it into his pocket and slid open the doors. He found himself in a dim cavern facing a motionless escalator. Its stairs were gold-plated, its balustrades brushed aluminum and its handrails hand-rubbed ostrich skin. He could see no end of stairs. It must be arion 27.1 spring/summer 2019 one unbroken flight to the Sun’s penthouse. But where was the down escalator? Beats him. He planted his slippers and clasped the rails. With a little lurch the escalator began its quickening glide. Now this was first-class. No huffing required. Simply the assumption of an attitude. Up ahead, the horizon gleamed ivory. 2 whoa! TWO The stairway teeth clamped shut and Ray was thrown into a hard glare. Sunblock and goggles— they’ll let you look into things—on your right, came a voice positively sunny. Ray slathered and goggled himself, and beheld by a high stone robed in emerald moss a trim figure in a sea-snail-purple sweatsuit and a broad-brimmed straw hat puttering about a humid sundial of wide-waking annuals and perennials— snowdrops, crocuses, daisies and daylilies, rice in flower and maize in silk, woozy jasmine and heady grapevines, a temperamental winter daphne, and tall in the motley midst the polar gnomon, an Indian turnsole or heliotrope, sweeping its shaft of shadow from one to the next minute marigold dot as the ambling photosynthesizer passed the fragrant hours of the zodiac. Batting away hummingbirds and honeybees, Ray waded through the flower bed toward Sol. Am I your heir? Can I have what I want? Sure, kid, name it. Ray glanced toward the honey-scented manure. A joyride? Sol sighed. It’s your funeral. Taking his time, he led Ray out to the dayport. What a letdown! Ray’d expected a futuristic heliumpowered sports coupe, or at least a souped-up solar Mustang. Not this gold-rimmed, pyrite-axled backward half-bucket with footpads! John Shoptaw 3 Dawn, meanwhile, with her practiced blush arched her horizon, and her pomegranate interiors yawned wide. The stars dispersed. Venus, her shell-blue and egg-white gauzes aswirl, gave Dawn a last long look above her handmirror’s crescent rim. Sol was watching moonshine evanesce from his glowing barndoors, which cracked in a spewing welding arc and then opened wide to reveal a dozen prompt and close-cropped Hours, coaxing a team of four mammoth pegasi yoked neck and neck and neck and neck, stoked with thick ambrosial plasma and snorting flame. As the nymphs hitched the tack to the chariot pole, the Sun, shaking his head, untied his flaring sunhat and knotted it under Ray’s chin. Lay off the whip and draw rein with a firm hand. They’ll fly by themselves with no help from you. But they’ll answer to Clover, Crocus, Peony, Sage. Steer clear of the straightaway. Bank the rig into a circumbendibus. But don’t, whatever you do... But Ray’s attention had drifted. The rampant quadrupeds hooved trails of sparks down the dayport door, their heavy fog blankets slid off, and they shook out their shoulder-wings. A pliant breeze sprang up from the East... (shrink)

Research on ethical leadership generally falls into two categories: one celebrates individual leaders and their ‘authentic’ personalities and virtuous stewardship of organizations; the other decries toxic leaders or individuals in positions of power who exhibit ‘dark’ personality traits or dubious morals. Somewhere between these extremes, leadership is ‘done’ by imperfect human beings who try to avoid violating their own ethical standards while at the same time navigating the realities of social and organizational life. This paper discusses the concept of ‘Moral (...) Recovery’ as an ethical leadership process that begins in moral failure, but enables eventual personal, organizational, and social change. It builds on the concept of ‘Moral Injury’ from the work of the psychiatrist Johnathan Shay and refers to the experiences of armed service personnel traumatized by experiences where either they, or their leaders, violated their own values. ‘Morally injured’ parties recover their sense of wellbeing through engaging with restorative communal actions which address the social causes of unethical practices. The process of Moral Recovery requires restorative communal actions which address the social causes of unethical practices. This paper will outline the concept of ‘Moral Recovery’ as a form of practical ethical leadership and change. It will illustrate its relevance to ethical leadership practice with reference to one high-profile case; Ray Anderson of Interface. As this paper is primarily conceptual, avenues for future research are identified, and implications for teaching practice are discussed. (shrink)

I will trace the history of western conceptions of soul and self from the ancient Greeks to the present. The story line that I will present is based mainly on material covered in two books by Ray Martin and myself: _The Naturalization of the Soul: Self and Personal Identity in the_.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Lost Sutras of Jesus: Unlocking the Ancient Wisdom of the Xian Monks, and: The Buddha's Gospel: A Buddhist Interpretation of Jesus' WordsJohn D'Arcy MayThe Lost Sutras of Jesus: Unlocking the Ancient Wisdom of the Xian Monks. Edited by Ray Riegert and Thomas Moore. London: Souvenir Press, 2004. 140 + xi pp.The Buddha's Gospel: A Buddhist Interpretation of Jesus' Words. By Lindsay Falvey. Adelaide: Institute for International Development, (...) 2002. 108 pp.Since Roy C. Amore's Two Masters, One Message (1987) revived the hypothesis of Buddhist influence on Christian origins and Hans-Joachim Klimkeit's research established links between Nestorian Christianity, Gnostic Manichaeism, and Mahayana Buddhism in Central Asia, there is scope for further reflection on commonalities between the two traditions over and above the purely doctrinal and philosophical. The two books under review, though intended for a general readership, are indications that interest in these matters is very much alive.Riegert and Moore preface their selection of texts with the story of Bishop Aleben (A-lo-pen), who travelled the Silk Road from Persia and was received with honour at the imperial capital of Xian (Chang-an) at the beginning of the Tang dynasty (635 CE). The emperor Taizong was sympathetic to what he called the "Luminous Religion," a Nestorian version of Christianity, possibly in Syriac, as presented by Aleben. It seems that these teachings were translated into Chinese in the form of sutras. One of them, preserved in stone as the Monument Sutra, features the cross rising from the lotus, the symbol chosen by Karl Reichelt for Tao-fung Shan, his Christian center in Buddhist style at Sha-tin outside Hong Kong, many centuries later. Thousands of Buddhist texts were preserved in the library cave at Dunhuang monastery, about one thousand miles west of Xian, where they were rediscovered by the Taoist priest Wang Yuanlu, who arrived there in the 1890s and became the self-appointed guardian of the scrolls.Included in this treasure trove were the Jesus Sutras, which are now scattered in museums and private collections, largely inaccessible to the public. But if the selection published here in a very elegant translation is anything to go by, they are [End Page 190] extremely significant religious documents with a spiritual value all their own. For the uninitiated, there is no way of checking the authenticity of these translations. The commentaries that accompany them could be slightly tendentious in that they nudge us in the direction of the editors' particular holistic worldview. But the texts themselves have a beauty and integrity that speaks for itself. They represent a Higher Dharma of perfect purity (p. 86), which, like a mirror, reflects the world with no trace of self: no desire, no action, no virtue, no truth (pp. 80–83, 126–129). The Jesus story is retold, and Jesus is portrayed as the teacher of this Higher Path. The sutras speak of One Spirit who is self-created, One God who is creator of the world, and One Lord, the Messiah who will return. There are prayers, too: "O Loving Father, Enlightened Son, Holy Spirit King"; "Lamb of Love and Bliss"; "O Holy Sage, Universal Lord, Messiah" (pp. 110–113). The texts obviously bear witness to a Buddhist-Christian dialogue much earlier and at a far deeper level than many would have thought possible. Whether they represent the religion of the future, as the editors suggest, remains to be seen.Lindsay Falvey's project of interpreting the canonical texts of Buddhism and Christianity in reference to one another has a similar orientation. In the course of agricultural development work in Thailand he came to realize "that the striking similarity between the two teachers may well be a seamless cloak of congruence beneath the mantle of culture and lore" (p. 13); the texts, in other words, may be quite literally translatable into one another's terms. Though aware that Q, the collection of Jesus' sayings that is supposed to have been available to the synoptic evangelists, is a hypothetical reconstruction, he still feels able to use a version of it as a basis for his experiment. He prefaces this with what he calls "A... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Lost Sutras of Jesus: Unlocking the Ancient Wisdom of the Xian Monks, and: The Buddha's Gospel: A Buddhist Interpretation of Jesus' WordsJohn D'Arcy MayThe Lost Sutras of Jesus: Unlocking the Ancient Wisdom of the Xian Monks. Edited by Ray Riegert and Thomas Moore. London: Souvenir Press, 2004. 140 + xi pp.The Buddha's Gospel: A Buddhist Interpretation of Jesus' Words. By Lindsay Falvey. Adelaide: Institute for International Development, (...) 2002. 108 pp.Since Roy C. Amore's Two Masters, One Message (1987) revived the hypothesis of Buddhist influence on Christian origins and Hans-Joachim Klimkeit's research established links between Nestorian Christianity, Gnostic Manichaeism, and Mahayana Buddhism in Central Asia, there is scope for further reflection on commonalities between the two traditions over and above the purely doctrinal and philosophical. The two books under review, though intended for a general readership, are indications that interest in these matters is very much alive.Riegert and Moore preface their selection of texts with the story of Bishop Aleben (A-lo-pen), who travelled the Silk Road from Persia and was received with honour at the imperial capital of Xian (Chang-an) at the beginning of the Tang dynasty (635 CE). The emperor Taizong was sympathetic to what he called the "Luminous Religion," a Nestorian version of Christianity, possibly in Syriac, as presented by Aleben. It seems that these teachings were translated into Chinese in the form of sutras. One of them, preserved in stone as the Monument Sutra, features the cross rising from the lotus, the symbol chosen by Karl Reichelt for Tao-fung Shan, his Christian center in Buddhist style at Sha-tin outside Hong Kong, many centuries later. Thousands of Buddhist texts were preserved in the library cave at Dunhuang monastery, about one thousand miles west of Xian, where they were rediscovered by the Taoist priest Wang Yuanlu, who arrived there in the 1890s and became the self-appointed guardian of the scrolls.Included in this treasure trove were the Jesus Sutras, which are now scattered in museums and private collections, largely inaccessible to the public. But if the selection published here in a very elegant translation is anything to go by, they are [End Page 190] extremely significant religious documents with a spiritual value all their own. For the uninitiated, there is no way of checking the authenticity of these translations. The commentaries that accompany them could be slightly tendentious in that they nudge us in the direction of the editors' particular holistic worldview. But the texts themselves have a beauty and integrity that speaks for itself. They represent a Higher Dharma of perfect purity (p. 86), which, like a mirror, reflects the world with no trace of self: no desire, no action, no virtue, no truth (pp. 80–83, 126–129). The Jesus story is retold, and Jesus is portrayed as the teacher of this Higher Path. The sutras speak of One Spirit who is self-created, One God who is creator of the world, and One Lord, the Messiah who will return. There are prayers, too: "O Loving Father, Enlightened Son, Holy Spirit King"; "Lamb of Love and Bliss"; "O Holy Sage, Universal Lord, Messiah" (pp. 110–113). The texts obviously bear witness to a Buddhist-Christian dialogue much earlier and at a far deeper level than many would have thought possible. Whether they represent the religion of the future, as the editors suggest, remains to be seen.Lindsay Falvey's project of interpreting the canonical texts of Buddhism and Christianity in reference to one another has a similar orientation. In the course of agricultural development work in Thailand he came to realize "that the striking similarity between the two teachers may well be a seamless cloak of congruence beneath the mantle of culture and lore" (p. 13); the texts, in other words, may be quite literally translatable into one another's terms. Though aware that Q, the collection of Jesus' sayings that is supposed to have been available to the synoptic evangelists, is a hypothetical reconstruction, he still feels able to use a version of it as a basis for his experiment. He prefaces this with what he calls "A... (shrink)

We propose the Selfish Goal model, which holds that a person's behavior is driven by psychological processes called goals that guide his or her behavior, at times in contradictory directions. Goals can operate both consciously and unconsciously, and when activated they can trigger downstream effects on a person's information processing and behavioral possibilities that promote only the attainment of goal end-states (and not necessarily the overall interests of the individual). Hence, goals influence a person as if the goals themselves were (...) selfish and interested only in their own completion. We argue that there is an evolutionary basis to believe that conscious goals evolved from unconscious and selfish forms of pursuit. This theoretical framework predicts the existence of unconscious goal processes capable of guiding behavior in the absence of conscious awareness and control (theautomaticity principle), the ability of the most motivating or active goal to constrain a person's information processing and behavior toward successful completion of that goal (thereconfiguration principle), structural similarities between conscious and unconscious goal pursuit (thesimilarity principle), and goal influences that produce apparent inconsistencies or counterintuitive behaviors in a person's behavior extended over time (theinconsistency principle). Thus, we argue that a person's behaviors are indirectly selected at the goal level but expressed (and comprehended) at the individual level. (shrink)

The social welfare functional approach to social choice theory fails to distinguish a genuine change in individual well-beings from a merely representational change due to the use of different measurement scales. A generalization of the concept of a social welfare functional is introduced that explicitly takes account of the scales that are used to measure well-beings so as to distinguish between these two kinds of changes. This generalization of the standard theoretical framework results in a more satisfactory formulation of welfarism, (...) the doctrine that social alternatives are evaluated and socially ranked solely in terms of the well-beings of the relevant individuals. This scale-dependent form of welfarism is axiomatized using this framework. The implications of this approach for characterizing classes of social welfare orderings are also considered. (shrink)

Does ethical content in organizational mission statements make a difference? Research regarding the effectiveness and results of mission statements is mixed. Krohe concluded that much of the good results do not come from the mission statements themselves but from the strategic re-education that happens in producing one. We attempted to discover whether universities that explicitly state their ethical orientation and vision in their mission statements had students with higher perceived character trait importance and activities that reinforce character than universities that (...) did not. While the faculty and administration may receive benefits from mission statement development through strategic re-education as Krohe suggested, do the statements influence the students at the university who may have had no role in its creation? Using a sample of senior business students at 16 universities we found that students at universities with ethical statements in their mission statements had significantly higher perceived character trait importance and character reinforcement than those at universities whose missions lacked ethical statements. This research suggests that schools that explicitly stated ethical content in their mission statements do influence student ethical orientation. (shrink)

The paper offers a new understanding of induction in the empirical sciences, one which assimilates it to induction in geometry rather than to statistical inference. To make the point a system of notions, essential to logically sound induction, is defined. Notable among them are arbitrary object and particular property. A second aim of the paper is to bring to light a largely neglected set of assumptions shared by both induction and deduction in the empirical sciences. This is made possible by (...) appealing to the logic of common nouns and applying it to the logic of natural-kind terms.This strategy yields a new insight into the concept of natural kinds. While the strategy reveals deep affinity between empirical induction and deduction it also reveals two problems peculiar to induction. This helps to explain the intuition that induction is the more problematic of the two. The paper does not set out ‘to solve the problem of induction’. 1The paper has benefited from the support and critical comments of several friends: Steven Davis, Kevin Dunbar, Anil Gupta, Michael Hallett, Ray Jackendoff and Storrs McCall. Two friends, however, deserve special thanks, Michael Makkai and Gonzalo Reyes. Many of the points made in the paper, otherwise unacknowledged, are due to their generosity and patience. In fact, the paper can be seen as an application of the logic of kinds on which Gonzalo Reyes has been working for several years. (shrink)

Safe and effective methods of preconception gender selection through flow cytometric separation of X- and Y-bearing sperm could greatly increase the use of gender selection by couples contemplating reproduction. Such a development raises ethical, legal, and social issues about the impact of such practices on offspring, on sex ratio imbalances, and on sexism and the status of women. This paper analyzes the competing interests in preconception gender selection, and concludes that its use to increase gender variety in a family, and (...) possibly for selecting the gender of firstborn, might in many instances be ethically acceptable. (shrink)

Our galaxy contains a remarkable "faster-than-light" object discovered only a few months ago by radio astronomers. The object, a blob of hot radio-emitting matter thrown off from gamma ray source GRS1915+105, was observed to separate from its larger parent object at an apparent speed of 1.25 times the velocity of light. The operant word here is "apparent". The faster-than-light separation speed (separation distance divided by time) is believed to be a consequence of the same relativistic illusion previously observed for radio (...) objects ejected by quasars. We will start with some facts about quasars. (shrink)