Stephen Cowley’s paper contends that the breaking of a formerly vital link between philosophy and theology has compromised the work of the Church of Scotland. To this end, he examines the connection between philosophy and theology in the work of John McLeod Campbell (1800–72), arguing that the link has either been neglected or significantly misrepresented. He demonstrates that Campbell ascribes a positive role to philosophy and reason in his work, a position partly drawn from rethinking the (...) views of his teacher, James Mylne (1757–1839). He goes on to show how Campbell’s rejection of legal metaphors in understanding the atonement may have developed from Mylne’s philosophical theology. The paper marks a break from the suggestion that Campbell’s conclusions in The Nature of the Atonement emerge primarily from an outworking of his pastoral experience in the light of a reading of Calvinist theologians. (shrink)

This article focuses on the anxiety about whether God loves one or not. In the author's nearly 30-year ministry, this pastoral difficulty continues to perplex and afflict. While the presenting problem is what in theological parlance is 'a lack of assurance', a side difficulty is the poor and incorrect doctrine of God often associated with this. A Baylor University Study in 2006 characterises the kind of God that different groups of Americans believe in. While the phrase 'a lack of assurance' (...) is a part of dogmatic parlance, and has fallen out of use, the feeling of not belonging to God can be overwhelming for people. This feeling may be overwhelming. This makes it a pastoral issue. This article suggests a pastoral response to this issue and a proposal for a clarification in the nature and character of God using the therapeutic theology of 19th-century Scottish minister-theologian John McLeod Campbell. (shrink)

The financial system is currently undergoing a revolution brought about by e-finance, digital convergence, new market entrants and government-encouraged competition. New market entrants such as Apple, Alibaba, Facebook and Google come from industries such as IT, retail, social media and telecoms, and, therefore, do not fit comfortably within traditional financial institutional structures. A functional perspective might provide more practical insights into this revolution; however, the functional perspective has had a limited impact. This paper will investigate the benefits and limitations of (...) financial functional analysis; probe the underpinning principles of sociology’s structural functional analysis; revisit Merton and Bodie’s six core financial functions in relation to new entrants in the financial landscape; and, finally, argue that in the new financial environment, functional analysis provides a more coherent and explanatory framework of the financial system for students and practitioners alike. (shrink)

Sustainable farming, and waysto achieve it, are important issues foragricultural policy. New Zealand provides aninteresting case for examining sustainableagriculture options because gene technologieshave not been commercially released and thereis a small but rapidly expanding organicsector. There is no strong governmentsubsidization of agriculture, so while policiesseem to favor both options to some degree,neither has been directly supported. Resultsfrom a survey of 656 farmers are used to revealthe intentions, environmental values, andfarming practices for organic, conventional,and GE intending farmers. The results show thatorganic (...) and conventional farmers are relativelysimilar but contrast to GE intending farmers,especially with respect to perceivedconsequences of each technology. While 75%of farmers have not yet made a commitmentto either technology, one fifth were GEintending and one quarter may become organic.Organic farmers have different attitudes tonature, matched in part by conventionalfarmers. In terms of policy for sustainableagriculture, the results suggest that organicand conventional farmers are incrementallymoving towards agroecological sustainabilitywhile GE intending farmers are committed tointensive production methods of which GEproducts are potentially important. GEintending farmers reject incrementalism infavor of a revolutionary technological fix forsustainability concerns in agriculture.Overall, the results show that there areclearly two different paradigms ofsustainability among farmers. Policies that areseeking to achieve sustainable agriculture needto address the tensions that span the differentparadigms. (shrink)

This article focuses on the anxiety about whether God loves one or not. In the author's nearly 30-year ministry, this pastoral difficulty continues to perplex and afflict. While the presenting problem is what in theological parlance is 'a lack of assurance', a side difficulty is the poor and incorrect doctrine of God often associated with this. A Baylor University Study in 2006 characterises the kind of God that different groups of Americans believe in. While the phrase 'a lack of assurance' (...) is a part of dogmatic parlance, and has fallen out of use, the feeling of not belonging to God can be overwhelming for people. This feeling may be overwhelming. This makes it a pastoral issue. This article suggests a pastoral response to this issue and a proposal for a clarification in the nature and character of God using the therapeutic theology of 19th-century Scottish minister-theologian John McLeod Campbell. (shrink)

Sensory experience seems to be the basis of our knowledge of mind-independent things. The puzzle is to understand how that can be: how does our sensory experience enable us to conceive of them as mind-independent? This book is a debate between two rival approaches to understanding the relationship between concepts and sensory experience.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 9.1 (2002) 35-39 [Access article in PDF] The Ownership of Thoughts John Campbell Keywords: schizophrenia, thought insertion, immunity to error through misidentification. SYDNEY SHOEMAKER FORMULATED a basic point about first-person, present-tense ascriptions of psychological states when he declared that they are, in general, immune to error through misidentification (Shoemaker 1984). Assuming Shoemaker's point to be correct, the puzzle it raises is this: how (...) are we to explain this datum? Why should it be that first-person, present-tense ascriptions of psychological states are immune to error through misidentification? One type of explanation is in terms of the meaning of the first person: that "I" just stands for whoever is the owner of these (demonstrated) psychological states (including any states being self-ascribed). I argued against this account of the first person in a number of places, and in favor of an alternative explanation of Shoemaker's datum. On the alternative explanation, the reason for the immunity is provided by an account of the ownership of psychological states, on which what makes a psychological state mine is the possibility of self-ascription of it by me (Campbell 1986, 1999a). Suppose we call this the Introspectionist explanation of the immunity to error through misidentification of present-tense self-ascriptions of psychological states. I do think, though, that the simple Introspectionist account is too simple an account of Shoemaker's datum (Campbell 1999a, 1999b). The reason is that there is a certain complexity in our notion of the ownership of a token thought. We cannot give a full account of our ordinary notion of the ownership of a thought simply in terms of the person who is capable of introspective knowledge of the thought. The reason is that there is another dimension to our ordinary notion of the ownership of a thought. We also think of the possessor of a thought as being the person who generated that very thought; we think of the owner of the thought as being the person who brought that particular token thought into existence, the person who formed it. Of course, that token thought may be a copying of someone else's idea; that other person may have influenced my formation of that particular thought. But the point remains that I play a special role in the production of my thoughts.Suppose we have a document bearing a signature and we ask, "Whose signature is that?" In this case we are asking about the authorship of the signature; we are asking who made those particular marks on that bit of paper. Of course, someone else can copy my signature, trying to make it look as if what they write was written by me. But for a particular piece of writing to be an authentic signature of mine, the thing has to be generated by me personally. I think it is helpful to bear in mind this aspect of the notion of the ownership of a signature, when we consider a certain complexity in the notion of the ownership of a thought—I mean, an occurrent, episodic [End Page 35] thought. There are, I am saying, two strands in the ordinary notion of the ownership of a thought, which we do not ordinarily have any reason to separate. First, there is the notion of the person who generated that particular thought, which we might think of on the model of the person who inscribed a particular signature. Of course, in generating a particular token thought, you may be subject to all sorts of influences. Perhaps your thought is derivative, largely shaped by others. Perhaps your thoughts are sometimes simply echoes of the things other people have said. Nonetheless, when we consider how your individual token thoughts are being brought about, you play a proximal role in their formation that no one else does. To give an analogy, suppose that I am taking notes at your dictation. Then there is a sense in which the contents of my notes are entirely determined by you. But there is also a sense in which the token sentences are being generated by... (shrink)

John Campbell investigates how consciousness of the world explains our ability to think about the world; how our ability to think about objects we can see depends on our capacity for conscious visual attention to those things. He illuminates classical problems about thought, reference, and experience by looking at the underlying psychological mechanisms on which conscious attention depends.

ABSTRACT We argue that in societies like our own the prevailing view that parents have both special responsibilities for and special rights over their children fails to give a proper understanding of the autonomy both of parents and of children. It is our claim that there is a logical priority of the separable interests of a child over the autonomy of its parents in the fulfilment of their special responsibilities for and the exercise of their special rights over their children. (...) However, we believe that in acknowledging the child as a distinct locus of interests appropriate weight can still be given to parental autonomy. In particular, since raising a child is a long‐term commitment which plays a central role in the life‐plans of many adults it will be a legitimate exercise of an adult's autonomy strongly to influence the future of any children involved in such a plan. Such influence will be quite separate from paternalistic concern for those children. But the logical priority of the child's interests will at the same time show why parents are not entitled to behave proprietorially toward their children, even when paternalistic concern is called for. (shrink)

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be (...) preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

D. M. Armstrong is an eminent Australian philosopher whose work over many years has dealt with such subjects as: the nature of possibility, concepts of the particular and the general, causes and laws of nature, and the nature of human consciousness. This collection of essays explores the many facets of Armstrong's work, concentrating on his more recent interests. There are four sections to the book: possibility and identity, universals, laws and causality, and philosophy of mind. The contributors comprise an international (...) group of philosophers from the United States, England and Australia. An interesting feature of the volume is that Armstrong himself has written responses to each of the essays. There is also a complete bibliography of Armstrong's writings. (shrink)

We can make a distinction between the conceptual role of the first person and the reference of the first person. By ‘conceptual role’ I mean the use that is made of the term: the kinds of procedures that we use in verifying judgements using the term and the kinds of actions we perform on the basis of judgements involving the term. In “Self-Notions,” Perry talks about conceptual role using the phrase, ‘epistemic/pragmatic relations’. He says there are “normally self-informative” ways of (...) getting information and “normally self-dependent” ways of acting. These ways of getting information about the self, and ways of acting dependent on the self, constitute what I am calling the conceptual role of the first person. Perry indeed says, “I believe that what is special about self-notions is that they are the normal repository of normally self-informative ways of perceiving, and the normal motivator of normally self-dependent ways of acting.”. (shrink)

In this book John Campbell shows that the general structural features of human thought can be seen as having their source in the distinctive ways in which we...

Our use of ‘I’, or something like it, is implicated in our self-regarding emotions, in the concern to survive, and so seems basic to ordinary human life. But why does that pattern of use require a referring term? Don't Lichtenberg's formulations show how we could have our ordinary pattern of use here without the first person? I argue that what explains our compulsion to regard the first person as a referring term is our ordinary causal thinking, which requires us to (...) find a persisting object as the mechanism that underpins the causal structure we naturally ascribe to the self. I thus argue against Peacocke's picture (2012), on which it's the cogito that explains one's knowledge of one's own existence. (shrink)

Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 71 (1997), 55-74, with a reply by Michael Martin.

"A blab droid is a robot with a body shaped like a pizza box, a pair of treads, and a smiley face. Guided by an onboard video camera, it roams hotel lobbies and conference centers, asking questions in the voice of a seven-year-old. "Can you help me?" "What is the worst thing you've ever done?" "Who in the world do you love most?" People pour their hearts out in response. This droid prompts the question of what we can hope from (...) social robots. Might they provide humanlike friendship? Philosopher John Campbell doesn't think so. He argues that, while a social robot can remember the details of a person's history better than some spouses can, it cannot empathize with the human mind, because it lacks the faculty for thinking in terms of singular causation. Causation in Psychology makes the case that singular causation is essential and unique to the human species. From the point of view of practical action, knowledge of what generally causes what is often all one needs. But humans are capable of more. We have a capacity to imagine singular causation. Unlike robots and nonhuman animals, we don't have to rely on axioms about pain to know how ongoing suffering is affecting someone's ability to make decisions, for example, and this knowledge is not a derivative of general rules. The capacity to imagine singular causation, Campbell contends, is a core element of human freedom and of the ability to empathize with human thoughts and feelings"--. (shrink)

But say you,surely there is nothing easier than to imagine trees,for instance,in a park, or books existing in a closet, and nobody by to perceive them. I answer, you may so, there is no dif?culty in it:but what is all this,I beseech you,more than framing in your mind certain ideas which you call books and trees, and at the same time omitting to frame the idea of anyone that may perceive them? But do you not yourself perceive or think of (...) them all the while? This therefore is nothing to the purpose: it only shows you have the power of imagining or forming ideas in your mind;but it doth not shew that you can conceive it possible, the objects of your thought may exist without the mind: to make out this, it is necessary that you conceive them existing unconceived or unthought of, which is a manifest repugnancy. (shrink)

It seems a compelling idea that experience of colour plays some role in our having concepts of the various colours, but in trying to explain the role experience plays the first thing we have to describe is what sort of colour experience matters here. I will argue that the kind of experience that matters is conscious attention to the colours of objects as an aspect of them on which direct intervention is selectively possible. As I will explain this idea, it (...) is a matter of being able to use experience to inform linguistic or conceptual thought about what would happen were there to be various interventions on an object. Against this background, I will review Locke’s fundamental argument that since we can change the colour of an almond by pounding it, there must be an error embodied in our ordinary concepts of colour: there is no such thing as intervening directly on the colour of an object. The analysis I present brings out the force of Locke’s argument. But I will propose a vindication of our commonsense conception of colour as an aspect of objects on which direct intervention is selectively possible. (shrink)

On a classical conception, knowing the sense of a proposition is knowing its truth-condition, rather than simply knowing how to verify the proposition, or how to find its implications (whether deductive implications or implications for action). But knowing the truth-condition of a proposition is not unrelated to your use of particular methods for verifying the proposition, or finding its implications. Rather, your knowledge of the truth-condition of the proposition has to justify the use of particular methods for verifying it, or (...) finding its implications. And your knowledge of the truth-condition of the proposition has to be what causes your use of particular methods for verifying it or finding its implications. So on a classical picture, we do not appeal to knowledge of sense only in explaining the informativeness of identities. We have to think of knowledge of sense as what causes, and justifies, your use of particular ways of verifying or finding the implications of a proposition. I argue that in the case of a perceptual demonstrative, like 'that star' or 'that mountain', it is conscious attention to the object that causes, and justifies, your use of particular ways of verifying or finding the implications of propositions involving the demonstrative. So conscious attention to the object is what constitutes your grasp of the sense of the demonstrative. This runs counter to the philosophical tradition since Locke, which takes it that the role of experience in understanding has to do solely with the verification of propositions. I argue that once we think of conscious attention as a pre-intentional acquaintance with the object itself, we can see how it is possible to think of understanding as consisting in knowledge of classical truth-conditions. (shrink)

Ned Block, John Campbell; Functional Role and Truth Conditions, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 88, Issue 1, 1 June 1988, Pages 273–292, https:/.

The history of postcolonial studies is a history of quarrels. Since its emergence in the late 1970s in the wake of Edward W. Said's Orientalism, a book with which many have quarrelled due to its daring conjoining of culture with imperialism, the fortunes of postcolonial thought have been shaped by ongoing wrangles between contrary positions. These conceptual quarrels, turning still, include: Marxist versus ‘culturalist’ postcolonialisms; diasporic theory versus nationalism; metropolitan versus ‘third world’; cosmopolitanism versus materialism; cultural studies versus the ‘English (...) department’; anglophone versus ‘native’ languages; poststructuralism versus tricontinentalism; globalization versus planetarity. Acknowledging that postcolonial studies is arguably one of the most critiqued and self-critical theoretical paradigms of recent decades, this essay considers the quarrel not simply as the product of divergent politics but as a crucial element of postcolonialism's ethical modus operandi. It ultimately both establishes the ethical agency of quarrels in postcolonial thought and looks ahead to the latest unfolding of key contentions in an ever-developing field. (shrink)

A concern for evidence can be viewed as a fundamental aspect of human existence. The biological structure of our bodies evolved during over thousands of years in which survival was predicated on a capacity to interpret small signs, such as crushed grass, smells, and sounds as evidence of the whereabouts of prey. The emergence of modern science and medicine was built on the ability to learn about what counted as evidence for what, and to observe it reliably. Evidence is information (...) that matters. Drinking a glass of water because one feels thirsty is not evidence, unless there is a suspicion of an underlying condition for which water intake is a symptom. Appraisal of evidence is a complex task. It relies on the... (shrink)