In this book, Joseph G. Morgan examines the career of Wesley Fishel, a political scientist who vigorously supported American intervention in the Vietnam War, which he deemed a "great, and tragic, American experiment." Morgan demonstrates how Fishel continued to champion the prospect of an independent South Vietnam, even when Vietnamese resistance and infighting among American and Vietnamese leaders undermined this effort. Morgan also analyzes how opponents of the war questioned Fishel's scholarly integrity and his academic collaboration with the (...) US government in implementing Cold War policies. (shrink)

Frédéric Bastiat was a member of the French liberal school, which thoroughly dominated economics in France from the beginning of the nineteenth century until the 1880’s and continued to exert a strong intellectual influence right up to the eve of World War One. He was neither the school’s founder, nor its most profound theorist, nor even the most consistent defender of the laissez-faire implications of its economic theories. He was however the most gifted expositor of its politico-economic doctrines, and as (...) such, is the economist associated with this school whose name evokes greatest recognition among contemporary Anglo-American economists. Thus I refer to “Bastiat’s school” In an earlier article, I detailed the profound influence that the French liberal school had on the development of nineteenth-century economic theory not only in France and other Continental countries, particularly Italy, Germany and Austria, but also in the United States, Great Britain and Australia.. In this article, I also criticized the attempts of a number of economists who were conversant with, if not sympathetic to, the French liberal school, including Joseph Schumpeter, Karl Pribram, and Peter Groenewegen, to explain its almost complete neglect by Anglo-American economists and historians of thought after World War One. Their explanations boiled down to three main claims. First, the leaders of the school succeeding its founder J.-B. (shrink)

For decades an array of scholars read Carl Schmitt's publications not only to understand his concepts and arguments but also to extrapolate from them the essence of his character and motivation. What was thereby surmised about the man was then, in turn, utilized in interpreting those very works. The result has been a half-century of diametrically opposed perspectives and claims whose contradictory nature greatly exceeded anything found among the scholarship of comparable controversial figures, such as Ernst Jünger and Martin Heidegger. (...) The gradual availability of parts of Schmitt's papers over the past decade definitely widened the evidentiary basis for such…. (shrink)

The French liberal school, the school of Frédéric Bastiat, thoroughly dominated economics in France for most of the nineteenth century. In addition, the school exercised a profound influence on the development of nineteenth-century economic theory outside France, particularly in countries such as Italy, Germany and Austria where its merits were recognized by eminent Continental marginalists including Böhm-Bawerk, Cassel, Wicksell and Pareto. In the United States, Great Britain and Australia, also, the school inspired a number of important economic theorists and (...) movements such as William Stanley Jevons and the American catallactic tradition. Yet despite its significant international influence, the school has been almost completely neglected by Englishspeaking economists and doctrinal scholars after World War One. In this paper, I suggest that the resolution of this puzzle lies in a conjunction of peculiar institutional and doctrinal circumstances that accompanied the professionalization of economics in France, Great Britain and the United States.L’école libérale française, celle de Frédéric Bastiat, domina totalement la pensée économique en France pendant une majeure partie du dixneuvième siècle. De plus, l’école exerça une influence profonde sur le développement de la théorie économique à l’extérieur de la France, en particulier dans des pays tels que l’Allemagne et l’Autriche. Dans ces pays, les mérites de l’école furent reconnus par des marginalistes continentaux aussi éminents que Böhm-Bawerk, Cassel, Wicksell et Pareto. L’école inspira aussi un nombre important d’économistes et de mouvements aux Etats-Unis, en Angleterre et en Australie tels que William Stanley Jevons et la tradition catallactique américaine. Néanmoins, en dépit de cette influence internationale, l’école a été presque totalement négligée par les économistes de langue anglaise et par les penseurs doctrinaux après la première guerre mondiale. Dans cet article, l’auteur suggère que la solution à cette énigme se trouve dans la conjonction de circonstances institutionnelles et doctrinales particulières qui accompagna la professionnalisation de l’économie en France, en Grande- Bretagne et aux Etats-Unis. (shrink)

Our planet is sick and perhaps on a tipping point of extinction. The causes are well known—global warming, the collapse of the world economy, human greed, and thermonuclear war—to name but a few agents at work in the contemporary world. America and China hold the world's destiny in their grip. How they will interact is unknown. What is known is that both civilizations have in their traditions the ways and means to reverse this approaching apocalypse. Each country is now passing (...) through cultural explosions. This article searches classical Chinese and American philosophy for concepts and social forms that can give shape to this era of upheaval. I have confidence in the genius of Confucius as well as that of certain great classical American philosophers. Read together they can help us come to deal with both the decay of established orders and the overwhelming novelty now sweeping through our consciousness. (shrink)

Our planet is sick and perhaps on a tipping point of extinction. The causes are well known—global warming, the collapse of the world economy, human greed, and thermonuclear war—to name but a few agents at work in the contemporary world. America and China hold the world’s destiny in their grip. How they will interact is unknown. What is known is that both civilizations have in their traditions the ways and means to reverse this approaching apocalypse. Each country is now passing (...) through cultural explosions. This article searches classical Chinese and American philosophy for concepts and social forms that can give shape to this era of upheaval. I have confidence in the genius of Confucius as well as that of certain great classical American philosophers. Read together they can help us come to deal with both the decay of established orders and the overwhelming novelty now sweeping through our consciousness. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Dependent Co-Origination and Universal IntersubjectivityJoseph A. Bracken, SJTwo essays in a recent issue of Buddhist-Christian Studies dealt with the topic "Buddhist and Christian Views of Community." The first essay, by Rita Gross, was a careful analysis of the way in which the separation of home and workplace in contemporary Western society has tended to reduce effective community life to the nuclear family and thus pose significant disadvantages to everyone (...) involved (not only mothers, fathers, and their children but also non–family members, friends, and neighbors) within the broader civic community.1 A consumer-oriented culture catering to individual needs and desires has arisen to compensate for the pervasive feeling of loneliness and emptiness created by the relative lack of significant interpersonal relationships. In the second essay Donald Mitchell recounted the origin and unexpected growth of the International Focolare movment of which he is a longtime member.2 He noted how the founder of the movement, Chiara Lubich, and her women friends found inspiration for living together and working for the poor and the homeless around them in what they saw as the self-giving love of the three divine persons of the Christian doctrine of the Trinity both for one another and for all their creatures. This movement over time broadened to include first Protestant members, then Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, and Hindus, all drawn by the goal of richer life in community along with group efforts to assist the underprivileged of this world.My own contribution to the topic of Buddhist and Christian views of community will focus on the same communitarian model of the doctrine of the Trinity that originally inspired Lubich and her followers in the years during and after World War II, but my remarks will be more philosophically oriented. Following the lead of the late Colin Gunton in his book The One, the Three and the Many,3 I will analyze the communitarian model of the Trinity for its value in setting forth a new paradigm for the relationship of the One and the Many. As Gunton perceptively notes in the early chapters of his book, Western civilization seems to be still preoccupied with a basically Platonic understanding of the One and the Many in which the One enjoys primacy over the Many as their transcendent principle of order and intelligibility.4 As a result, even though freedom and individual self-expression are theoretically prized in Western societies, in point of [End Page 3] fact there is a great deal of uniformity and even repression of individual differences so as to conform to the cultural standards imposed by some dominant individual or minority group within each society. In the end people seem to fear the threat to personal security represented by wide diversity and plurality more than they value their individual liberty.Looking to the doctrine of the Trinity set forth by the Greek-speaking fathers of the Church, however, Gunton finds a new paradigm for the One and the Many whereby the One is emergent out of the interplay of the Many with one another rather than transcendent over the Many as their necessary principle of order and intelligibility.5 The Many are defined by their internal relations to one another rather than by their common relation to an external One. The community thus achieved is a differentiated unity, not only tolerating differences of the Many among themselves, but even fostering those differences so as to produce in the end a more complex form of community. The application to the Christian doctrine of the Trinity is obvious. The three divine persons are strictly defined with respect to one another; each of them has no self-identity apart from relation to the other two persons. Yet together they co-constitute the reality of the one God, a richly differentiated rather than blandly homogeneous unity.6The application to human beings and their membership in various communities, of course, is not so obvious. But Gunton believes that three principles or "transcendentals" for the understanding of the relation of human beings with one another and with God are at hand, given careful study of this communitarian model of the Trinity: namely, perichoresis, substantiality or... (shrink)

The war in the DRC has resulted in one of the world’s worst humanitarian crisis with over 3.4 million displaced persons scattered throughout the country. An estimated 4 million people have died as a result of the war. The most pressing need to be addressed is the question of justice and accountability for these human rights atrocities in order to achieve a durable peace in the country and also in the Great Lakes region. It is particularly true in post-conflict (...) situations where justice systems have been either partially or completely destroyed, that national courts are not capable of arriving at a uniform stance, or willing to provide justice for atrocities in the immediate future. As a result, international justice seems to be a crucial and last resort that must continue to be fortified against efforts to undermine it. However, even if the ICC achieves its full potential, it faces a number of challenges. Firstly, it is realistically not able to address all situations in which national courts are unwilling or unable to prosecute perpetrators. Secondly, there are temporal and other jurisdictional limitations on what cases the ICC can hear. Accordingly, the ICC will only have the power to try people accused of the gravest human rights violations committed after 1 July 2002; the date the Rome Statute which established the ICC took effect. As a result, only a small number of individuals responsible for the atrocities committed will be tried by this Court. Thirdly, is the establishment, of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), one of the civilian institutions that emerged from the peace talks, meant to end impunity or to cover up gross violations of human rights committed in the DRC? It remains to be seen how it will function and interact with the courts. (shrink)

There is a growing body of empirical evidence which shows that infants and non-human primates have the ability to represent the mental states of other agents, i.e. that they possess a Theory of Mind. We will argue that this evidence also suggests that infants and non-human primates possess the concept of truth, which, as we will explain, is good news for primitivists about truth. First, we will offer a brief overview of alethic primitivism, focusing on Jamin Asay’s conceptual version of (...) the view. Next, we will survey relevant work on Theory of Mind which indicates that children younger than two and non-human primates are able to attribute false beliefs. Then, we will bring these false-belief data to bear on Asay’s form of primitivism, arguing that the data support two of the four distinctive theses of this view and offering some remarks about the empirical evaluability of the two remaining theses. We hope that our discussion will help to bridge the gap between psychological and philosophical inquiry and that it will encourage further empirical research on the cognitive significance of the concept of truth for humans and other thinking creatures. (shrink)

One of the greatest revolutions in mathematics occurred when Georg Cantor promulgated his theory of transfinite sets. This revolution is the subject of Joseph Dauben's important studythe most thorough yet writtenof the philosopher and mathematician who was once called a "corrupter of youth" for an innovation that is now a vital component of elementary school curricula.Set theory has been widely adopted in mathematics and philosophy, but the controversy surrounding it at the turn of the century remains of great (...) interest. Cantor's own faith in his theory was partly theological. His religious beliefs led him to expect paradoxes in any concept of the infinite, and he always retained his belief in the utter veracity of transfinite set theory. Later in his life, he was troubled by recurring attacks of severe depression. Dauben shows that these played an integral part in his understanding and defense of set theory. (shrink)

For decades the papal tradition has renounced the term ‘war’ as something around which to build an ethical approach. One can sympathize with this: resort to war seems the consequence of ethical failure and brings in its train a host of brutalities including rape, torture, and murder that harm both victims and perpetrators. But that view of ‘war’ is an incomplete representation of the possibilities of the uses of force to secure legitimate political goods. Thus the popes have struggled to (...) maintain a clear voice in the face of abject tragedies like the Russian invasion of Ukraine: on the one hand, Pope Francis condemns war in an almost absolute manner; on the other, he recognizes the legitimacy of Ukrainian defensive uses of force. In so doing, of course, he merely abides the so-called ‘just war theory’ he seems to have discarded. My contribution will focus on the current state of the just war in Catholic teaching. I will maintain the state remains where it has been since at least the middle of the twentieth century: skeptical about the capacity of states to judge in terms of international law, but cognizant of their right to defend themselves against ongoing aggression. (shrink)

H. L. A. Hart is heir and torch-bearer of a great tradition in the philosophy of law which is realist and unromantic in outlook. It regards the existence and content of the law as a matter of social fact whose connection with moral or any other values is contingent and precarious. His analysis of the concept of law is part of the enterprise of demythologising the law, of instilling rational critical attitudes to it. Right from his inaugural lecture in (...) Oxford he was anxious to dispel the philosophical mist which he found in both legal culture and legal theory. In recent years he has shown time and again how much the rejection of the moralizing myths which accumulated around the law is central to his whole outlook. His essays on “Bentham and the Demystification of the Law” and on “The Nightmare and the Noble Dream” showed him to be consciously sharing the Benthamite sense of the excessive veneration in which the law is held in Common Law countries, and its deleterious moral consequences. His fear that in recent years legal theory has lurched back in that direction, and his view that a major part of its role is to lay the conceptual foundation for a cool and potentially critical assessment of the law are evident. (shrink)

War: A Primer for Christians provides a concise introduction to the main approaches that Christians have taken toward war and examines each approach critically. Some Christians have supported their country's wars as crusades of good against evil. Others, as pacifists, have rejected participation in or support for any war. Still others have followed the just-war tradition in holding that it can be justifiable under some conditions to resort to war, but that then Christian love must limit the conduct of war. (...) In an updated preface and new afterword, Allen explores aspects of current international relations that have a special bearing on the context of war. “Joseph Allen’s War: A Primer for Christians is just that: a succinct, fair-minded, wonderfully reasoned, and accessible account of the major Christian traditions on war—Just War, Holy War, and the Pacifist renunciation of violence. His book is also a primer in the further sense, that it will prime the pump for further discussion and debate as to when wars are just and how a nation might keep the means employed under restraints.”—William F. May. (shrink)

Charles Sanders Peirce was born in September 1839 and died five months before the guns of August 1914. He is perhaps the most important mind the United States has ever produced. He made significant contributions throughout his life as a mathematician, astronomer, chemist, geodesist, surveyor, cartographer, metrologist, engineer, and inventor. He was a psychologist, a philologist, a lexicographer, a historian of science, a lifelong student of medicine, and, above all, a philosopher, whose special fields were logic and semiotics. He is (...) widely credited with being the founder of pragmatism. In terms of his importance as a philosopher and a scientist, he has been compared to Plato and Aristotle. He himself intended "to make a philosophy like that of Aristotle." Peirce was also a tormented and in many ways tragic figure. He suffered throughout his life from various ailments, including a painful facial neuralgia, and had wide swings of mood which frequently left him depressed to the state of inertia, and other times found him explosively violent. Despite his consistent belief that ideas could find meaning only if they "worked" in the world, he himself found it almost impossible to make satisfactory economic and social arrangements for himself. This brilliant scientist, this great philosopher, this astounding polymath was never able, throughout his long life, to find an academic post that would allow him to pursue his major interest, the study of logic, and thus also fulfill his destiny as America's greatest philosopher. Much of his work remained unpublished in his own time, and is only now finding publication in a coherent, chronologically organized edition. Even more astounding is that,despite many monographic studies, there has been no biography until now, almost eighty years after his death. Brent has studied the Peirce papers in detail and enriches his account with numerous quotations from letters by Peirce and by his friends. This is a fascinating account of a p. (shrink)

“Racial Justice Requires Ending the War on Drugs” is an impressively well evidenced argument for the need for drug reform. The authors outline how the war on drugs caus...

The Mahabharata, an Indian epic poem, describes a legendary war between two sides of a royal family. The epic’s plot involves numerous moral dilemmas that have intrigued and perplexed scholars of Indian literature. Many of these dilemmas revolve around a character named Krsna. Krsna is a divine incarnation and a self-proclaimed upholder of dharma, a system of social and religious duties central to Hindu ethics. Yet, during the war, Krsna repeatedly encourages his allies to use tactics that violate dharma. In (...) this paper, I try to make sense of Krsna’s actions by analyzing them in terms of categories from Western moral philosophy. I show that Krsna seems to embrace an ethical approach called consequentialism, but that his version of consequentialism differs from Western theories of consequentialism by seeing adherence to dharma as an intrinsic good. (shrink)

This paper examines the need for static dispositions within the basic ontology of the powers view of properties. To lend some focus, Neil Williams’s well developed case for static dispositions is considered. While his arguments are not necessarily intended to address fundamental ontology, they still provide a useful starting point, a springboard for diving into the deeper metaphysical waters of the dispositionalist approach. Within that ontological context, this paper contends that Williams’s arguments fail to establish the need to posit static (...) dispositions, or at least any sort not already well appreciated by advocates of the powers view. The paper then proceeds to suggest an alternative motivation for positing static dispositions, the success of which depends greatly on which ontological approach to objects is paired with the powers view. (shrink)

In contemporary philosophical debates in the United States "redefining pragmatism" has become the conventional way to flag significant philosophical contests and to launch large conceptual and programmatic changes. This book analyzes the contributions of such developments in light of the classic formulations of Charles S. Peirce and John Dewey and the interaction between pragmatism and analytic philosophy. American pragmatism was revived quite unexpectedly in the 1970s by Richard Rorty's philosophical heterodoxy and his running dispute with Hilary Putnam, who, like Rorty, (...) is a professed Deweyan. Reinventing Pragmatism examines the force of the new pragmatisms, from the emergence of Rorty's and Putnam's basic disagreements of the 1970s until the turn of the century. Joseph Margolis considers the revival of a movement generally thought to have ended by the 1950s as both a surprise and a turn of great importance. The quarrel between Rorty and Putnam obliged American philosophers, and eventually Eurocentric philosophy as a whole, to reconsider the direction of American and European philosophy, for instance in terms of competing accounts of realism and naturalism. (shrink)

Malice that cannot speak its name, cold-blooded but secret hostility, impotent desire, hidden rancor and spite--all cluster at the center of envy. Envy clouds thought, writes Joseph Epstein, clobbers generosity, precludes any hope of serenity, and ends in shriveling the heart. Of the seven deadly sins, he concludes, only envy is no fun at all. Writing in a conversational, erudite, self-deprecating style that wears its learning lightly, Epstein takes us on a stimulating tour of the many faces of envy. (...) He considers what great thinkers--such as John Rawls, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche--have written about envy; distinguishes between envy, yearning, jealousy, resentment, and schadenfreude ; and catalogs the many things that are enviable, including wealth, beauty, power, talent, knowledge and wisdom, extraordinary good luck, and youth. He looks at resentment in academia, where envy is mixed with snobbery, stirred by impotence, and played out against a background of cosmic injustice; and he offers a brilliant reading of Othello as a play more driven by Iago's envy than Othello's jealousy. He reveals that envy has a strong touch of malice behind it--the envious want to destroy the happiness of others. He suggests that envy of the astonishing success of Jews in Germany and Austria may have lurked behind the virulent anti-Semitism of the Nazis. As he proved in his best-selling Snobbery, Joseph Epstein has an unmatched ability to highlight our failings in a way that is thoughtful, provocative, and entertaining. If envy is no fun, Epstein's Envy is truly a joy to read. (shrink)

Ecology and sustainability are current narratives about the behavior of humans toward themselves and the environment. Ecology is defined as a science, and a philosophy of ecology has become a recognized domain of the philosophy of science. For some, sustainability is an accepted, important moral goal. In 2013, a Special Issue of the journal Sustainability dealt with many of the relevant issues. Unfortunately, the economic, ideological, and psychological barriers to ethical behavior and corresponding social action remain great as well (...) as obvious. In this paper, I propose that a new, non-standard and non-propositional logic of real processes, Logic in Reality (LIR) grounded in physics applies to the science and philosophy of these narratives and helps to explicate them. Given the ecological role of organizations and institutions, reference is often made to organizational or institutional logics as guides to ecological practice. This paper suggests that these logics are either too abstract or too informal to have an impact in a conflictual world. Recognition of the suggested new, transdisciplinary logical dimension of ecological processes may provide credibility and support to new initiatives in ecology and its philosophy. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The main cause of the crisis was the behavior of the banks—largely a result of misguided incentives unrestrained by good regulation. Conservative ideology, along with unrealistic economic models of perfect information, perfect competition, and perfect markets, fostered lax regulation, and campaign contributions helped the political process along. The banks misjudged risk, wildly overleveraged, and paid their executives handsomely for being short‐sighted; lax regulation let them get away with it—putting at risk the entire economy. The mortgage brokers neglected due diligence, (...) since they would not bear the risk of default once their mortgages had been securitized and sold to others. Others can be blamed: the ratings agencies that judged subprime securities as investment grade; the Fed, which contributed low interest rates; the Bush administration, whose Iraq war and tax cuts for the rich made low interest rates necessary. But low interest rates can be a boon; it was the financial institutions that turned them into a bust. (shrink)

The Bush administration's military war on terrorism is a blunt, ineffective, and unjust response to the threat posed to innocent civilians by terrorism. Decentralized terrorist networks can only be effectively fought by international cooperation among police and intelligence agencies representing diverse nation‐states, including ones with predominantly Islamic populations. The Bush administration's allegations of a global Islamist terrorist threat to the national interests of the United States misread the decentralized and complex nature of Islamist politics. Undoubtedly there exists a “combat fundamentalist” (...) element within Islamism. But the threat posed to U.S. citizens by Islamist terrorism neither necessitates nor justifies as a response massive military invasions of other nations. Not only does the Bush administration's war on alleged “terrorist states” violate the doctrine of just war, but in addition these wars arise from a new, unilateral, imperial foreign‐policy doctrine of “preventive wars.” Such a doctrine will isolate the United States from international institutions and long‐standing allies. The weakening of these institutions and alliances will only weaken the ability of the international community to deter terrorism. (shrink)

Drawing on examples from the history of warfare from the crusades to the present day, "The ethics of war" explores the limits and possibilities of the moral regulation of war. While resisting the commonly held view that 'war is hell', A.J. Coates focuses on the tensions which exist between war and morality. The argument is conducted from a just war standpoint, though the moral ambiguity and mixed record of that tradition is acknowledge and the dangers which an exaggerated view of (...) the justice or moral worth of war poses are underlined. In the first part, the broad image of the just war is compared with the competing images of realism, militarism and pacifism. In the second part, the moral issues associated both with the decision to go to war and with the manner in which war is conducted are explored. Was the allied decision to go to war in the Gulf premature? were economic sanctions a more effective and morally preferable option? was Britain justified in going to war over the Falklands? did the allied bombing of Germany in the Second World War constitute a war crime? should the IRA's claim to belligerent status be recognised? these questions and more are raised in this important book. (shrink)

Joseph Boyle discusses deontology, which derives precepts from moral principles, particularly making a case with reference to Alan Donagan's The Theory of Morality, which appeared the same year as Just and Unjust Wars.

This paper examines a central aspect of the relations between duration and quality of life by considering the moral right to voluntary euthanasia, and some aspects of the moral case for a legal right to euthanasia. Would widespread acceptance of a right to voluntary euthanasia lead to widespread changes in attitudes to life and death? Many of its advocates deny that, seeing it as a narrow right enabling people to avoid ending their life in great pain or total dependence, (...) or a vegetative state. I argue that the right cannot cogently be conceived as a narrow right, confined to very limited circumstances. It is based on the value of having the normative power to choose the time and manner of one's death. Its recognition will be accompanied by far reaching changes in culture and attitudes, and these changes will enrich people's life by enabling them to integrate their death as part of their lives. (shrink)

In two suras of the Quran a dialogue between Pharaoh and his council members is recorded after Moses performed miracles before them. The account in Q 7 is textually problematic, the version of Q 26 is smooth. After a brief survey of possible pre-Islamic precedents for the dialogue, this note explores the two nearly identical yet contradictory intraquranic parallels and the relationship between them, and surveys the harmonizing approaches of the classical exegetes as well as the critical attitudes of modern (...) scholars to the issue. Finally, the textual dynamic that caused the passage in Q 7 to change is reconstructed. An appendix examines the other minute differences between the two passages. (shrink)

The monarchic, and aristocratical, and popular partisans have been jointly laying their axes to the root of all government, and have in their turns proved each other absurd and inconvenient. In vain you tell me that artificial government is good, but that I fall out only with the abuse. The thing! the thing itself is the abuse! ~ Edmund Burke, 1756..

This article explores normative questions about what legal rights settled immigrants should have in liberal democratic states. It argues that liberal democratic justice, properly understood, greatly constrains the distinctions that can be made between citizens and residents. The longer people stay in a society, the stronger their moral claims become, and after a while they pass a threshold that entitles them to virtually the same legal status as citizens and eventually easy access to citizenship itself.

How far has the Darwinian revolution come? To what extent have evolutionary ideas penetrated into the social sciences and humanities? Are the “science wars” over? Or do whole blocs of disciplines face off over an unbridgeable epistemic gap? To answer questions like these, contributors to top journals in 22 disciplines were surveyed on their beliefs about human nature, culture, and science. More than 600 respondents completed the survey. Scoring patterns divided into two main sets of disciplines. Genetic influences were emphasized (...) in the evolutionary social sciences, evolutionary humanities, psychology, empirical study of the arts, philosophy, economics, and political science. Environmental influences were emphasized in most of the humanities disciplines and in anthropology, sociology, education, and women's or gender studies. Confidence in scientific explanation correlated positively with emphasizing genetic influences on behavior, and negatively with emphasizing environmental influences. Knowing the current actual landscape of belief should help scholars avoid sterile debates and ease the way toward fruitful collaborations with neighboring disciplines. (shrink)

Joseph Agassi One Palestine, Two Nations Many are the problems that beset the tragically war-torn and forlorn Palestine. The extant proposed solutions to them all are few. They all relate to the framework of the establishment or the re-establishment of one, two, or three states. Let me list them first regardless of their value.

Just war theory requires that a nation at war respect proportionality both before it goes to war, jus ad bellum, and in the way it fights a war, jus in bello. To respect proportionality is to know or estimate on good evidence that the whole war and the tactics used in the war will not generate more evil and harm and costs than they will generate good and help and benefits. This paper argues that the 2003–2004 U.S. war on Iraq (...) fails on both counts. It considers, in regard to jus ad bellum, the evils, harms, and costs that the war forces on the Iraqi military and civilians, the American military, and American and non-Iraqi civilians. It considers, under jus in bello, the evils, harms, and costs that the war forces on Iraqi civilians. On the proportionality standards for a just war, this war is a miserable failure. (shrink)

Just war theory requires that a nation at war respect proportionality both before it goes to war, jus ad bellum, and in the way it fights a war, jus in bello. To respect proportionality is to know or estimate on good evidence that the whole war and the tactics used in the war will not generate more evil and harm and costs than they will generate good and help and benefits. This paper argues that the 2003–2004 U.S. war on Iraq (...) fails on both counts. It considers, in regard to jus ad bellum, the evils, harms, and costs that the war forces on the Iraqi military and civilians, the American military, and American and non-Iraqi civilians. It considers, under jus in bello, the evils, harms, and costs that the war forces on Iraqi civilians. On the proportionality standards for a just war, this war is a miserable failure. (shrink)

Just war theory requires that a nation at war respect proportionality both before it goes to war, jus ad bellum, and in the way it fights a war, jus in bello. To respect proportionality is to know or estimate on good evidence that the whole war and the tactics used in the war will not generate more evil and harm and costs than they will generate good and help and benefits. This paper argues that the 2003–2004 U.S. war on Iraq (...) fails on both counts. It considers, in regard to jus ad bellum, the evils, harms, and costs that the war forces on the Iraqi military and civilians, the American military, and American and non-Iraqi civilians. It considers, under jus in bello, the evils, harms, and costs that the war forces on Iraqi civilians. On the proportionality standards for a just war, this war is a miserable failure. (shrink)