This volume explores numerous themes (including the influence of ethnography on religious education research and pedagogy, the interpretive approach to religious education, the relationship between research and classroom practice in religious education), providing a critique of contemporary religious education and exploring the implications of this critique for initial and continuing teacher education.

This new edition of Alexander Miller’s highly readable introduction to contemporary metaethics provides a critical overview of the main arguments and themes in twentieth- and twenty-first-century contemporary metaethics. Miller traces the development of contemporary debates in metaethics from their beginnings in the work of G. E. Moore up to the most recent arguments between naturalism and non-naturalism, cognitivism and non-cognitivism. From Moore’s attack on ethical naturalism, A. J. Ayer’s emotivism and Simon Blackburn’s quasi-realism to anti-realist and best opinion (...) accounts of moral truth and the non-reductionist naturalism of the ‘Cornell realists’, this book addresses all the key theories and ideas in this field. As well as revisiting the whole terrain with revised and updated guides to further reading, Miller also introduces major new sections on the revolutionary fictionalism of Richard Joyce and the hermeneutic fictionalism of Mark Kalderon. The new edition will continue to be essential reading for students, teachers and professional philosophers with an interest in contemporary metaethics. (shrink)

In this article, I explain how a variant of David Miller's argument concerning the language dependence of the accuracy of predictions can be applied to Joyce's notion of the accuracy of “estimates of numerical truth-values”. This leads to a potential problem for Joyce's accuracy-dominance-based argument for the conclusion that credences should obey the probability calculus.

In an essay recently published in this journal, Branden Fitelson argues that a variant of Miller’s argument for the language dependence of the accuracy of predictions can be applied to Joyce’s notion of accuracy of credences formulated in terms of scoring rules, resulting in a general potential problem for Joyce’s argument for probabilism. We argue that no relevant problem of the sort Fitelson supposes arises since his main theorem and his supporting arguments presuppose the validity of nonlinear (...) transformations of credence functions that Joyce’s theory, charitably construed, would identify as invalid on the basis of the principle of simple dominance. (shrink)

Philosophers and psychologists discuss new collaborative work in moral philosophy that draws on evolutionary psychology, cognitive science, and neuroscience. For much of the twentieth century, philosophy and science went their separate ways. In moral philosophy, fear of the so-called naturalistic fallacy kept moral philosophers from incorporating developments in biology and psychology. Since the 1990s, however, many philosophers have drawn on recent advances in cognitive psychology, brain science, and evolutionary psychology to inform their work. This collaborative trend is especially strong in (...) moral philosophy, and these volumes bring together some of the most innovative work by both philosophers and psychologists in this emerging interdisciplinary field. The contributors to volume 1 discuss recent work on the evolution of moral beliefs, attitudes, and emotions. Each chapter includes an essay, comments on the essay by other scholars, and a reply by the author of the original essay. Topics include a version of naturalism that avoids supposed fallacies, distinct neurocomputational systems for deontic reasoning, the evolutionary psychology of moral sentiments regarding incest, the sexual selection of moral virtues, the evolution of symbolic thought, and arguments both for and against innate morality. Taken together, the chapters demonstrate the value for both philosophy and psychology of collaborative efforts to understand the many complex aspects of morality. Contributors William Casebeer, Leda Cosmides, Oliver Curry, Michael Dietrich, Catherine Driscoll, Susan Dwyer, Owen Flanagan, Jerry Fodor, Gilbert Harman, Richard Joyce, Debra Lieberman, Ron Mallon, John Mikhail, Geoffrey Miller, Jesse Prinz, Peter Railton, Michael Ruse, Hagop Sarkissian, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Chandra Sekhar Sripada, Valerie Tiberius, John Tooby, Peter Tse, Kathleen Wallace, Arthur Wolf, David Wong. (shrink)

For much of the twentieth century, philosophy and science went their separate ways. In moral philosophy, fear of the so-called naturalistic fallacy kept moral philosophers from incorporating developments in biology and psychology. Since the 1990s, however, many philosophers have drawn on recent advances in cognitive psychology, brain science, and evolutionary psychology to inform their work. This collaborative trend is especially strong in moral philosophy, and these volumes bring together some of the most innovative work by both philosophers and psychologists in (...) this emerging interdisciplinary field. The contributors to volume 1 discuss recent work on the evolution of moral beliefs, attitudes, and emotions. Each chapter includes an essay, comments on the essay by other scholars, and a reply by the author of the original essay. Topics include a version of naturalism that avoids supposed fallacies, distinct neurocomputational systems for deontic reasoning, the evolutionary psychology of moral sentiments regarding incest, the sexual selection of moral virtues, the evolution of symbolic thought, and arguments both for and against innate morality. Taken together, the chapters demonstrate the value for both philosophy and psychology of collaborative efforts to understand the many complex aspects of morality. Contributors: William Casebeer, Leda Cosmides, Oliver Curry, Michael Dietrich, Catherine Driscoll, Susan Dwyer, Owen Flanagan, Jerry Fodor, Gilbert Harman, Richard Joyce, Debra Lieberman, Ron Mallon, John Mikhail, Geoffrey Miller, Jesse Prinz, Peter Railton, Michael Ruse, Hagop Sarkissian, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Chandra Sekhar Sripada, Valerie Tiberius, John Tooby, Peter Tse, Kathleen Wallace, Arthur Wolf, David Wong Walter Sinnott-Armstrong is Professor of Philosophy and Hardy Professor of Legal Studies at Dartmouth College. (shrink)

This book clarifies Husserl's notion of perceptual experience as "immediate" or "direct" with respect to its purported object, and outlines his theory of evidence. In particular, it focuses on Husserl's account of our perceptual experience of time, an aspect of perception rarely noted in', recent philosophical literature, yet which must be taken into consideration if an adequate account of perception is to be provided. Perhaps equally important, there is a new wave of work in phenomenology (and intentionality), reflecting a synthesis (...) of phenomenological and analytic philosophy, Miller's book is an important contribution to that "new wave," and has a significant bearing on contemporary issues in cognitive science. (shrink)

"Honesty is clearly an important virtue. Parents want to develop it in their children. Close relationships typically depend upon it. Employers value it in their employees. Yet philosophers have said almost nothing about the virtue of honesty in the past fifty years. This book aims to draw attention to this surprisingly neglected virtue. Part One looks at the concept of honesty. It takes up questions such as what does honesty involve, what are the motives of an honest person, how does (...) practical wisdom relate to honesty, and is there anything that connects all the different sides of honesty, including not lying, not stealing, not breaking promises, not misleading others, and not cheating. A central idea is that the honest person reliably does not intentionally distort the facts as she takes them to be. Part Two looks at the empirical psychology of honesty. It takes up the question of whether most people are honest, dishonest, or somewhere in-between. Drawing extensively on recent studies of cheating and lying in particular, the emerging model ends up implying that most of us have a long way to go to reach an honest character"--. (shrink)

There are, of course, many important differences between the deployment of cultural authority in the social context of second-century Christianity and that of twentieth-century academia. The editors of the Norton Anthology, for example, do not actively seek to suppress those voices which they exclude, nor are their principles for inclusion so narrowly defined as were the church fathers’. But the literary academy and its institutions developed from those of the Church and continue to wield a derivative, secular version of its (...) social and cultural authority. Since Matthew Arnold, the instutition of literature has been described in terms which liken its authority to that of religion, not only by outsiders—Woolf’s woman “divining the priest”—but by insiders who continue to employ the stances and language of religious authority; see, for instance, J. Hillis Miller’s credo in a recent issue of the ADE Bulletin: “I believe in the established canon of English and American literature and in the validity of the concept of privileged texts. I think it is more important to read Spenser, Shakespeare, or Milton than to read Borges in translation, or even, to say the truth, to read Virginia Woolf.”9 Such rhetoric suggests that the religious resonances in literary texts are not entirely figurative, a point brought out strikingly by revisionary religious figures in feminist texts. In her recent essay “ ‘The Blank Page’ and the Issues of Female Creativity,” Susan Gubar cites as some of the “many parables in an ongoing revisionary female theology” Florence Nightingale’s tentative prophecy that “the next Christ will perhaps be a female Christ,” H. D.’s blessed Lady carrying a “Bible of blank pages,” and Gertrude Stein’s celebration of The Mother of Us All.10 The revisionary female theology promoted in literary writing by women implicitly counters the patriarchal theology which is already inscribed in literature. The prophesied female Christ, blank Bible, and female Creator revise images familiar in the literary tradition, and, in contrast to earlier appropriations of religious imagery by Metaphysical, Pre-Raphaelite, and other poets, make visible the patriarchal preoccupations of literary “theology.” These voices, like the Gnostic voices recovered at Nag Hammadi, are only now being heard in chorus; and Pagels’ study of “the gnostic feminism” helps to illuminate some aspects of a cultural authority predicated on the suppression or domination of other voices. Christine Froula, associate professor of English at Yale University, is the author of A Guide to Ezra Pound’s “Selected Poems” and of the forthcoming “To Write Paradise”: Syle and Error in Pound’s Cantos. She is currently working on a book about literary authority in James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that a commitment to a very modest form of egalitarianism—equality between non-disabled human adults—implies fetal personhood. Since the most plausible bases for human value are in being human, or in a gradated property, and since the latter of which implies an inequality between non-disabled adult humans, I conclude that the most plausible basis for human equality is in being human—an attribute which fetuses have.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 39.3 (2005) 44-57 [Access article in PDF] Literary Biography: The Cinderella of Literary Studies Michael Benton There are no prizes for guessing who are the two ugly sisters: Criticism, the elder one, dominated literary studies for the first half of the twentieth century; theory, her younger sister, flounced to the fore in the second half. Meanwhile, 'Cinders,' who had been doing the chores for (...) centuries, has been magically transformed in recent times, decked out in new clothes by Richard Holmes, Claire Tomalin, Juliet Barker, Peter Ackroyd et al., and, as the millennium approached, celebrated and admired on all sides. At the start of the new century, literary biography remains in vogue. The bibliography that carries it forward is rolling, and there is no sign of it turning into a pumpkin. Why is Cinderella so popular?One obvious if superficial answer might be that literary biography is where literary people go who find the contemporary preoccupation with theory to be personally undernourishing and critically unenlightening; they would rather stay with the literary works themselves and with the lives, the minds, and the times that produced them. Yet it is not only literary biography that is thriving; life writing in general is the fastest-growing area of mainstream publishing, evidence for which can be seen in Waterstone's flagship store in London's Piccadilly, which devotes its prime ground-floor site to thousands of biographies. This commercial high profile is responding to an evident, if unfocused, need to look at other lives and understand them. Individual reasons for the popularity of biography range from prurient interest and hero worship to a, perhaps unrecognized, search for coherence and purpose in an age that is often disinclined either to accept institutional values or to respect traditional authority. The motives for this search usually include the desire for recognizable success, to which end the invention of a convincing identity is essential. Biographies offer models of how others live, face challenges, and cope with change; they are prime sites for studying ourselves. Curiously, this justification for biography as providing [End Page 44] a model for living was felt most strongly when this literary genre first emerged in the eighteenth century. The difference today is that the model has changed: Biography as a moral exemplum based upon Christian principles has been replaced in today's celebrity culture by the demand for models of success provided by public personalities. Nonetheless, whatever the range of satisfactions readers seek in biography, life writing offers, in one form or another, detailed pictures of widely different ways of living and amid these, perhaps, some clues to how an individual sense of identity might be shaped.Literary biographies (i.e., biographies of writers, not biographies with a particular literary quality) are a significant and, in some respects, a unique subgenre since they purport to offer access to the creative imagination. They have a long and distinguished history from Johnson and Boswell to the present day; they are sometimes written by other novelists (Elizabeth Gaskell on Charlotte Bronte, Peter Ackroyd on Dickens); and autobiographical writing may take the form of poetry (Wordsworth) or fiction (Joyce).1 Furthermore recent writing in this field has increasingly introduced elements of metabiography in books by Adam Sisman2 and Lucasta Miller.3 It is evident, therefore, that literary biography offers a rich and varied area of study that raises issues about the relationships among biography, history, fiction, and poetry that are fundamental to aesthetic education.Yet despite this promise, it has become a truism to declare that biography has failed to establish any theoretical foundations upon which to build. Backscheider quotes Ira Nadel's remark on the absence of "a sustained theoretical discussion of biography incorporating some of the more probing and original speculations about language, structure, and discourse that have dominated post-structuralist thought."4 She goes on to lament the poverty of criticism; the absence of a cultivated readership; the failure to engage even with the practical questions of selection, organization, or presentation; and indicates that readers of biography are too easily... (shrink)

All else being equal, most of us typically prefer to have positive experiences in the future rather than the past and negative experiences in the past rather than the future. Recent empirical evidence tends not only to support the idea that people have these preferences, but further, that people tend to prefer more painful experiences in their past rather than fewer in their future (and mutatis mutandis for pleasant experiences). Are such preferences rationally permissible, or are they, as time-neutralists contend, (...) rationally impermissible? And what is it that grounds their having the normative status that they do have? We consider two sorts of arguments regarding the normative status of future-biased preferences. The first appeals to the supposed arbitrariness of these preferences, and the second appeals to their upshot. We evaluate these arguments in light of the recent empirical research on future-bias. (shrink)

It is possible to wholly exist at multiple spatial locations at the same time. At least, if time travel is possible and objects endure, then such must be the case. To accommodate this possibility requires the introduction of a spatial analog of either relativising properties to times—relativising properties to spatial locations—or of relativising the manner of instantiation to times—relativising the manner of instantiation to spatial locations. It has been suggested, however, that introducing irreducibly spatially relativised or spatially adverbialised properties presents (...) some difficulties for the endurantist. I will consider an objection according to which embracing such spatially relativised properties could lead us to reject mereology altogether in favour of a metaphysics according to which objects are wholly present at every space-time point at which they exist. I argue that although such a view is coherent, there are some good reasons to reject it. Moreover, I argue that the endurantist can introduce spatially relativised or adverbialised properties without conceding that objects lack spatial parts. Such a strategy has the additional advantage that it allows the endurantist not only to explain time travel, but also to reconcile our competing intuitions about cases of fission. (shrink)

This article introduces a non‐cognitivist account of metaphysical explanation according to which the core function of judgements of the form ⌜x because y⌝ is not to state truth‐apt beliefs. Instead, their core function is to express attitudes of commitment to, and recommendation of the acceptance of certain norms governing interventional conduct at contexts.

Este trabajo surge a partir de la investigación general de las técnicas hidropónicas teniendo en cuenta sus ventajas y desventajas para de esta forma poder encontrar aquel factor determinante a través de una comparación de técnicas hidropónicas que permitan clasificarlas y escoger la mejor opción que genere menos impacto ambiental negativo y demuestre ser más productivo en los entornos urbanos. Adicionalmente, un factor determinante en las ciudades es su espacio limitado por lo que la mejor opción también deberá incluir un (...) óptimo manejo del espacio que permita a casi cualquier individuo poder aplicarlos desde su entorno sin recurrir a excesivas modificaciones. Como principal resultado se escogió a la Hidroponía recirculante como método predominante por los excelentes resultados que se obtienen con relación a los demás, adicionalmente, este puede ser fácilmente aplicado en los ambientes urbanos por su versatilidad y buen manejo de recursos. Palabras Clave: Hidroponia, ambiente, urbano, comparativa, técnicas, cultivo. Referencias [1]J. López, «La producción hidropónica de cultivos,» IDESIA, vol. 36, nº 2, pp. 139-141, 2018. [2]J. Lee, A. Rahman, J. Behrens, C. Brennan, B. Ham, H. Seok Kim, C. Won, S. Yun, H. Azam y M. Kwon, «Nutrient removal from hydroponic wastewater by a microbial consortium,» New Biotechnology, vol. 41, pp. 15-24, 2018. [3]H. Ku, C. Tiong, A. Suresh y B. Ong, «“Active” hydroponic greenhouse system to kick-start and augment reforestation program through carbon sequestration e an experimental and theoretical feasibility study,» Journal of Cleaner Production, vol. 129, pp. 637-646, 2016. [4]J. Beltrano y D. Gimenez, Cultivo en hidroponía, Buenos Aires: Universidad de la Plata, 2015. [5]L. Ramírez, M. Pérez, P. Jiménez, H. Giraldo y E. Gómez, «Evaluación preliminar de sistemas acuapónicos e hidropónicos en cama flotante para el cultivo de orégano,» Revista Facultad de Ciencias Básicas, vol. 7, nº 2, pp. 242-259, 2011. [6]S. Hosseinzadeh, D. Testai, M. BKheet y J. De Graeve, «Degradation of root exudates in closed hydroponic systems using UV/H2O2: Kinetic investigation, reaction pathways and cost analysis,» Science of the Total Environment, vol. 1, pp. 1-9, 2019. [7]N. Camarena, A. Rojas y M. Santos, «Fluoride bioaccumulation by hydroponic cultures of camellia,» Chemosphere, vol. 136, pp. 56-62, 2015. [8]W. Wang, Y. Ma, L. Fu, Y. Cui y M. Yaqoob, «Physical an mechanical properties of hydroponic lettuce for automatic harvesting,» Informatión processing in agriculture, vol. 1, pp. 2214-3173, 2020. [9]M. Zárate, Manual de Hidroponia, Coyoacán: Universidad Autónoma de Mexico, 2014. [10]S. Magwaza, L. Magwaza, A. Odindo y C. Buckley, «Partially treated domestic wastewater as a nutrient source for tomatoes grown in a hydroponic system: effect on nutrientabsorption and yield,» Heliyon, vol. 6, nº 12, pp. 2405-8440, 2020. [11]C. ARANO, «Hidroponía: Algunas paginas de historia,» Tecnología de Producción, nº 58, pp. 24-32, 2007. [12]G. Guzmán, Hidroponia en Casa: Una actividad familiar, Costa Rica: Ministerio de Agricultura y ganaderia, 2004. [13]J. Gilsanz, HIDROPONIA, Montevideo : Unidad de Comunicación y Transferencia de Tecnología, 2007. [14]C. Miller, «El debate de hidroponia orgánica: Perspectivas norteamericanas sobre si la producción hidropónica merece ser certificada como orgánica.,» Productores de Hortalizas, nº 6, pp. 36-38, 2017. [15]A. Herrera, «Manejo de la solución nutritiva en la producción de tomate en hidroponía,» Terra Latinoamericana, vol. 17, nº 3, pp. 221-229, 1999. [16]C. Espinal y D. Matulić, «Recirculating Aquaculture Technologies,» Biomedical and Life Sciences, pp. 35-76, 2020. [17]H. Resh, «Técnicas de cultivo con flujo laminar de nutrientes,» de Cultivos Hidroponicos, España, Mundi-Prensa, 2001, pp. 35-37. [18]P. Blanca y L. Teresa, «Sistemas recirculantes y su interés en el cutlivo de ornamentales,» Tecnología de producción, nº 35, pp. 34-36, 2006. [19]C. Magán, «Recirculación de las soluciones nutritivas, Manejo y Control Microbiologico,» InfoAgro, nº 2, pp. 1-2, 2016. [20]S. Goddek, A. Joyce, B. Kotzen y M. Dos-Santos, «Aquaponics and Global Food Challenges,» Aquaponics Food Production Systems. Springer, vol. 1, nº 1, pp. 3-17, 2019. [21]S. G. Verdoliva, D. Gwyn Jones, A. Detheridge y P. Robson, «Controlled comparisons between soil and hydroponic systems reveal increased water use efficiency and higher lycopene and β-carotene contents in hydroponically grown tomatoes,» Scientia Horticulturae, pp. 3002-4238, 2020. [22]A. Chaudhry y V. Mishra, «A Comparative Analysis of Vertical Agriculture Systems in Residential Apartments, » de 2019 Advances in Science and Engineering Technology International Conferences, Dubai, United Arab Emirates, United Arab Emirates, 2019. [23]T. Mazhar, G. Jianmin, L. Imran, S. Kashif, Q. Waqar, S. Sher y C. Jiedong, «Modern plant cultivation technologies in agriculture under controlled nvironment: a review on aeroponics,» Journal of Plant Interactions, vol. 13, nº 1, pp. 338-352, 2012. [24]K. Janiak, A. Jurga, J. Kuźma, W. Breś y M. Muszyński, «Surfactants effect on aeroponics and important mass balances of regenerative life support system – Lettuce case study,» Science of the Total Environment, vol. 718, nº137324, pp. 1-12, 2020. [25]F. Rahman, I. Jahan, R. Biplob, N. Farhin y J. Uddin, «Automated Aeroponics System for Indoor Farming using Arduino,» de 2018 Joint 7th International Conference on Informatics, Electronics & Vision and 2018 2nd International Conference on Imaging, Vision & Pattern Recognition, Kitakyushu, Japan, 2018. [26]M. Caldeyro Stajano, «La Hidroponía Simplificada como Tecnología apropiada, para implementar la Seguridad Alimentaria en la Agricultura Urbana.,» Cuadernos del CEAgro, nº 8, pp. 71-76, 2006. (shrink)

Gruber et al. (2022) and Buonomano and Rovelli (Forthcoming) aim to render Q18 consistent the picture of time delivered to us by physics, with the way time seems to us in experience. Their general approach is similar; they take the picture of our world given to us in physics, a picture on which there is no global “moving” present and hence no robust temporal flow, and attempt to explain why things nevertheless seem to us as they do, given that our (...) world is that way. In this, they follow in the footsteps of Hartle (2005), Callender (2017), and Ismael (2017), who argue that any information gathering system (an IGUS) will, in learning to navigate our world, represent the distinctions between past, present, and future, and represent their own changing trajectory through spacetime. While we are generally very sympathetic to this approach, there are several places where we disagree. (shrink)

Kaplan (1990; 2011) argues that there are no unspoken words. Hawthorne and Lepore (2011) put forward examples that purport to show that there can be such words. Here, I argue that Kaplan is correct, if we grant him a minor variation. While Hawthorne and Lepore might be right that there can be unspoken words, I will argue that they fail to show that there can be uninstantiated words.

Learned, exigent, original, and timely, Erik Roraback's The Power of the Impossible: On Community and the Creative Life presents authoritative readings of what important theorists from Spinoza to Bataille, Blanchot, Nancy, Žižek, and others have had to say about community and the individual, with sections along the way on how those theorists might lead us to approach work by Henry James, James Joyce, Ralph Ellison, Dante Alighieri, and, surprisingly, the great tennis player, Ivan Lendl. Roraback also develops on the (...) basis of his theorists his own persuasive concept of an impossible/possible global community yet to come that would facilitate individual creativity as well as contest the repressive hegemony of finance capitalism and technology, especially digital technology. (J. Hillis Miller, The University of California at Irvine). (shrink)

Bioethics, Volume 35, Issue 8, Page 779-786, October 2021.

Minimally, metaphysical realists hold that there exist some mind-independent entities. Metaphysical realists also hold that we can speak meaningfully or truthfully about mind-independent entities. Those who reject metaphysical realism deny one or more of these commitments. This Element aims to introduce the reader to the core commitments of metaphysical realism and to illustrate how these commitments have changed over time by surveying some of the main families of views that realism has been contrasted with: such as scepticism, idealism, and anti-realism.

Focusing specifically on Hegels analysis of Dutch genre painting in the Lectures on Aesthetics, Jason Miller argues that Hegel regards modern art not as a failure to convey the deepest interests of a culture or society, but as a welcome liberation of art in which it comes to reflect the diversity and complexity of human experience.

Presentists hold that only present things exist. But we all, presentists included, utter sentences that appear to involve quantification over non-present objects, and so we all, presentists included, seem to commit ourselves to such objects. Equally, we all, presentists included, take utterances of many past-tensed (and some future-tensed) sentences to be true. But if no past or future things exist, it’s hard to see how there can be anything that those utterances are about, which makes them true. This paper presents (...) a hitherto unexplored response to both problems: pretence fictionalism about the non-present. This view combines semantic factualism with psychological non-cognitivism. Sentences that appear to quantify over the non-present have propositional content and (almost all of) those propositions are false because the thing they are about – the non-present – does not exist. Nevertheless, when we utter such sentences we don’t thereby utter something false. Our utterances do not report the belief that the propositional content of the sentence uttered is true; rather, they express a non-cognitive attitude towards that content: namely an attitude of pretence. Hence by thinking various thoughts, and uttering various sentences we are, collectively, pretending as though things were (or will be) thus and so. (shrink)

Revisions of the King James Version of 1611 continued into the 20th and 21st centuries as literal or word-for-word translations. This development corresponds with a new age in Bible translation that started in the second half of the 20th century, which involves at least six changes in the philosophy of Bible translation. Firstly, Bible translation is characterised by interconfessional cooperation. Secondly, the plain meaning intended in the incipient texts is made accessible to readers. Thirdly, new critical editions of the Hebrew (...) and Greek incipient texts on the basis of new discoveries of texts are utilised. Fourthly, there is the tendency to remove archaic language to make versions intelligible. Fifthly, there is a tendency to use gendered and inclusive language. Sixthly, the move is from print communication, which can be typified as typographic interpretive culture, to electronic or media communication, which can be typified as digital-media interpretive culture, where sound and visuality become prominent as a contextual supplement to words. In the analysis it will be determined which of these aspects are reflected in the Revised Standard Version and its revisions as part of the linear emergence of the Tyndale–King James Version tradition. However, unlike the King James Version, the Revised Standard Version and its revisions failed to achieve widespread approval from satisfied readers, thus opening the door to alternative revisions.Contribution: Instead of viewing the Revised Standard Version and its revisions as new and independent from the Tyndale–King James Version tradition, it is demonstrated that they are a linear continuation of the emergence of the pre-20th century translation complex within this tradition without replicating the success of the King James Version. (shrink)

Due to the impact of biomedical technologies on human wellbeing, biomedical engineering presents discipline-specific ethical issues that can have global, economic, environmental, and societal consequences. Because ethics instruction is a component of accredited undergraduate engineering programs in the US, we developed an ethics assignment that provided biomedical engineering students with a framework for ethical decision-making and challenged them to critically reflect on ethical issues related to contemporary medical devices. Thematic analysis performed on student reflections (n = 73) addressed two research (...) questions: (i) what considerations do biomedical engineering undergraduates describe when asked to critically reflect on ethical issues related to contemporary medical devices; and (ii) how do students describe their participation in bioethical discussions? Students described design, economic factors, and empathy most frequently as considerations. Further, students reported confidence in their ability to engage in ethical discussion upon assignment completion. Overall, our analysis builds understanding of student attitudes and engagement to help inform future ethics curriculum development. (shrink)

Many philosophers are sympathetic to a perdurantist view of persistence. One challenge facing this view lies in its ability to ground prudential rationality. If, as many have thought, numerical identity over time is required to ground there being sui generis (i.e. non-instrumental) prudential reasons, then perdurantists can appeal only to instrumental reasons. The problem is that it is hard to see how, by appealing only to instrumental reasons, the perdurantist can vindicate the axiom of prudence: the axiom that any person-stage (...) has reason to promote the wellbeing of any other person-stage that is part of the same person as that stage. The claim that perdurantists cannot vindicate the axiom, and hence that the view should be rejected, is what we call the normative argument against perdurantism. In this paper we argue that purely instrumental rationality can ground the truth of this axiom, and hence that the normative argument against perdurantism fails. (shrink)

Neo-positivism is the view that metaphysical questions completely decompose into ordinary empirical questions that can be answered by scientific enquiry (empirical) or ordinary logical or modal questions, which can be answered by appeal to a metaphysically innocent modalism (modal innocence) or questions that are non-factual, that is questions that are such that the world does not provide the question with a determinate answer (nonfactualism). -/- There is much to like about this book. It forcefully, and at times compellingly, presents a (...) new vision of metaphysics. It forces us to re-engage with questions about what we are doing when we do metaphysics, and presents a startling different picture to many that have emerged in recent times. Rather than conceiving of metaphysics as the search for the fundamental joints of reality, or for those things that give rise to the non-fundamental things we see around us, it argues for a quite different approach. (shrink)

Autonomy, equality and freedom often appear to be significantly interrelated with one another. However, it has been a challenge to unite these concepts. This article attempts to take up the challenge and demonstrate how these interrelate: .

Karl Popper’s Objective Knowledge stands at the threshold of his last major philosophical phase, the period from his retirement from the London School of Economics in 1969 until his death in 1994. The two great books that he wrote before he came to London, Logik der Forschung and The Open Society and Its Enemies, contain much more than the innovations in the theory of scientific method and the theory of democracy for which they are famous. Logik der Forschung, translated into (...) English as The Logic of Scientific Discovery, is by no means just a tract, even a revolutionary one, on the methods of science, since about one third of the text is devoted to searchingly original treatments of the frequency theory of probability and of the interpretation of quantum mechanics, whilst the unpublished manuscript on which the book was based, Die beiden Grundprobleme der Erkenntnistheorie, at whose content it often hints, presents a wealth of significant material on the psychology of human learning and its biological context. Popper had, after all, been a student of Karl B¨uhler, and had absorbed the theories of problem solving developed within the W¨urzburg School. The Open Society and Its Enemies, for its part, is not so much a book defending democratic liberalism as a defence of democratic liberalism nestling within a book that discusses every other topic under the sun. It offers profound and provocative studies of the thought of Plato and Marx, an abundance of scholarly, if often controversial, historical interpretations of the work of Heraclitus, Aristotle, Hegel, J. S. Mill, Wittgenstein, Mannheim, and others, the elements of a new theory of rationality, and many elucidations of the workings of science that go beyond what is explicit in Logik der Forschung. One insight worth mentioning, since it is little known, is the clear recognition in section II of Chapter 11 that most important advances in science are revolutionary, not cumulative; a commonplace today perhaps, but one that many philosophers attribute to Kuhn. Another insight, also often forgotten, is the emphasis in Chapter 23 on the social character of science, which acts as the main custodian of its claim to objectivity. (shrink)

Forensic genomics now enables law enforcement agencies to undertake rapid and detailed analysis of suspect samples using a technique known as massively parallel sequencing (MPS), including information such as physical traits, biological ancestry, and medical conditions. This article discusses the implications of MPS and provides ethical analysis, drawing on the concept of joint rights applicable to genomic data, and the concept of collective moral responsibility (understood as joint moral responsibility) that are applicable to law enforcement investigations that utilize genomic data. (...) The widespread and unconstrained use of this technology without appropriate legal protections of individual moral rights and associated accountability mechanisms, could potentially not only involve violations of individual moral rights but also lead to an unacceptable shift in the balance of power between governments and the citizenry. We argue that in light of the rights of victims and the security benefits for society, there is a collective moral responsibility for individuals to submit their DNA to law enforcement and for MPS to be used where other, less invasive techniques are not effective. However, this application should be limited by legislation, including that any data obtained should be directly relevant to the investigation and should be destroyed at the conclusion of the investigation. (shrink)

This chapter presents a positive philosophy of male sexuality: one that is not rooted in so-called toxic masculinity and which is compatible with gender equality. I argue that, for such a sexuality to be possible, respect is the moral baseline. However, the status quo for male sexuality is shaped by white supremacy and heteronormativity. To resist these values, men must do more than merely cross some minimal moral threshold for permissible sex. Rather, they ought to develop a caring character so (...) that they would want to seek out their own and their partner’s (robust) sexual fulfillment. Men ought actively to develop ways to increase pleasure for themselves and their partners. (shrink)

This book undertakes a multifaceted and integrated examination of biometric identification, including the current state of the technology, how it is being used, the key ethical issues, and the implications for law and regulation. The five chapters examine the main forms of contemporary biometrics–fingerprint recognition, facial recognition and DNA identification– as well the integration of biometric data with other forms of personal data, analyses key ethical concepts in play, including privacy, individual autonomy, collective responsibility, and joint ownership rights, and proposes (...) a raft of principles to guide the regulation of biometrics in liberal democracies. Biometric identification technology is developing rapidly and being implemented more widely, along with other forms of information technology. As products, services and communication moves online, digital identity and security is becoming more important. Biometric identification facilitates this transition. Citizens now use biometrics to access a smartphone or obtain a passport; law enforcement agencies use biometrics in association with CCTV to identify a terrorist in a crowd, or identify a suspect via their fingerprints or DNA; and companies use biometrics to identify their customers and employees. In some cases the use of biometrics is governed by law, in others the technology has developed and been implemented so quickly that, perhaps because it has been viewed as a valuable security enhancement, laws regulating its use have often not been updated to reflect new applications. However, the technology associated with biometrics raises significant ethical problems, including in relation to individual privacy, ownership of biometric data, dual use and, more generally, as is illustrated by the increasing use of biometrics in authoritarian states such as China, the potential for unregulated biometrics to undermine fundamental principles of liberal democracy. Resolving these ethical problems is a vital step towards more effective regulation. (shrink)

My aim in this paper is to move toward a relational moral theory of harm through examination of a common yet underexplored form of child maltreatment: childhood psychological abuse. I draw on relational theory to consider agential, intrapersonal, and interpersonal ways in which relational harms develop and evolve both in intimate relationships and in conditions of oppression. I set forth three distinctive yet interconnected forms of relational harm that childhood psychological abuse causes: harm to the relational agency of individuals, harm (...) to the relationships individuals hold with themselves, especially with regard to how they respect, know, and trust themselves, and harm to interpersonal relationships of both a direct and indirect nature in present and future timeframes. I close by noting that while relationships can be the site of human brutality that destroys the relational self, paradoxically and promisingly, they also can be a primary means of the relational reconstitution of the self. Ultimately, relational analyses of the harms of childhood psychological abuse reveal several key elements of a relational theory of harm and demonstrate the significance of relational harms for moral philosophy. (shrink)

While the effect of humanitarian intervention on the recurrence and intensity of armed conflict in a crisis zone has received significant scholarly attention, there has been comparatively less work on the negative externalities of introducing peacekeeping forces into conflict regions. This article demonstrates that large foreign forces create one such externality, namely a previously non-existent demand for human trafficking. Using Kosovo, Haiti, and Sierra Leone as case studies, we suggest that the injection of comparatively wealthy soldiers incentivizes the creation of (...) criminal networks by illicit actors. We theorize further that the magnitude of increase in trafficking should be directly proportional to the size of the foreign force, with larger forces producing larger increases. We find that both hypotheses hold with varying levels of confidence across our three case studies. Despite the benevolent intent of peacekeeping missions, the possibility that they may contribute to human trafficking for the purpose of sexual exploitation runs counter to the spirit of such interventions. This is especially problematic given that trafficking rings, once established, may be adapted to provide weapons and narcotics, thereby planting the seed of further destabilization. (shrink)

This article extends Lemieux’s concern for the interdisciplinary tension between philosophy and sociology to the intradisciplinary tension within psychology between approaches to the study of children focusing on universal principles and approaches adopting a contextual lens. This tension arises both in how development is defined and in the methods chosen for its study. This tension is exemplified in terms of the recent American preoccupation with the Word Gap (WG), a supposed difference of 30 million words heard by socioeconomically diverse children (...) by the age of 4 that is blamed for educational disparities throughout the school years. The article discusses the political implications of WG discourse as it gives rise to the erasure of language practices of diverse Americans and obscures the role that the educational system plays in fostering a ‘one-size-fits-all’ instructional model. The article concludes with a discussion of attempts to combat the deficit model that the WG discourse reproduces. (shrink)

This book was written with three aims in mind. The first was to provide a reasonably concise account of Hume's social and political thought that might help students coming to it for the first time. The second aim was to say something about the relationship between philosophy and politics, with explicit attention to Hume, but implicit reference to a general issue. The third is to offer an integrated account of Hume's thought. The book accounts for the varying interpretation of the (...) conservative and liberalist traditions by arguing that the distinction between liberalism and conservatism had little application in mid-18th-century Britain. Hume's ideology contained elements that we should now identify as conservative and liberal respectively, and so by selective emphasis it is possible to make him seem a thoroughbred conservative or liberal according to choice. These two problems the relationship between Hume's philosophy and his politics, and the ideological character of his thought are pursued through the first and second parts of the book respectively. (shrink)

Shortly after John Andrew Rice, the eccentric classics professor and fire-brand advocate of progressive education, was dismissed from Rollins College for, among other things, teaching his students to “do as they please,”1 he drafted a sort of pedagogical manifesto announcing a new, and fundamentally new kind of, liberal arts school. The “Preliminary Announcement of Black Mountain College” describes this radical educational paradigm in largely contrarian terms, as the antithesis to traditional higher learning. This new college would be one without exams, (...) without grades and required courses, and without typical hierarchy of academic administration. Beyond this negative agenda, however, Rice makes one positive... (shrink)

Persistence realism is the view that ordinary sentences that we think and utter about persisting objects are often true. Persistence realism involves both a semantic claim, about what it would take for those sentences to be true, and an ontological claim about the way things are. According to persistence realism, given what it would take for persistence sentences to be true, and given the ontology of our world, often such sentences are true. According to persistence error-theory, they are not. This (...) Element considers several different views about the conditions under which those sentences are true. It argues for a view on which it is relatively easy to vindicate persistence realism, because all it takes is for the world to be the way it seems to us. Thereby it argues for the view that relations of numerical identity, or of being-part-of-the-same-object, are neither necessary nor sufficient for persistence realism. (shrink)

Children and pregnant women are often excluded from clinical research. This has resulted in a paucity of evidence on how medicines work for fetuses, neonates, infants, and adolescents. It also raises bioethics, scientific, and public health concerns. For over half a century, doctors have prescribed medicines to children largely on the basis of how they work in adults, despite children’s varied physiologies and differences in how their bodies absorb and metabolize drugs. Regulations and legislation have led to an increase in (...) the number of pediatric studies and to better drug labeling. However, children at all stages of their lives often remain “therapeutic orphans” owing to insufficient evidence about how medicines work for them. (shrink)

According to many contemporary metaphysicians, we ought to theorize in terms of grounding because of its promise to explicate the idea of reality having a layered structure. However, a tension emerges when one combines the layered structure view with the view that higher-level facts are not reducible to lower-level facts. This tension emerges from two problems. The first problem arises from the fact that grounding explanations entail true universal generalizations. In order to satisfy this constraint, we will face serious pressure (...) to make sure the entities involved in the grounded facts are appropriately connected to the entities involved in the grounding facts, otherwise the generalizations associated with those grounding claims will come out false. However, ensuring the appropriate connections seemingly leaves no way for the non-reductivist to fully squeeze out reference to higher-level entities as we descend the levels of ground. This threatens the result that some higher-level facts must be taken as fundamental, which the non-reductivist cannot accept. -/- I argue that we can resolve the tension by taking the connections at issue to be essentially true. We can call this view essentialist non-reductivism. One significant upshot of the argument is that we can see not only that essentialist non-reductivism successfully resolves the tension, but that in principle no better solution could be offered. (shrink)

Wittgenstein’s Private Language Argument holds that language requires rule-following, rule following requires the possibility of error, error is precluded in pure introspection, and inner mental life is known only by pure introspection, thus language cannot exist entirely within inner mental life. Fodor defends his Language of Thought program against the Private Language Argument with a dilemma: either privacy is so narrow that internal mental life can be known outside of introspection, or so broad that computer language serves as a counter-example. (...) I suggest that the developing field of artificial intelligence (deep learning neural networks) tends to vitiate Fodor’s defense and hence vindicate the Private Language Argument. The first horn of Fodor’s dilemma requires language to encompass genuinely internal mental life, i.e. non-projected intentional states, which are not exhibited in classical machine learning but only by deep learning neural networks (artificial intelligence). Such networks act as black boxes, however, whose state cannot be understood by tracking the changes in their supervenience bases without shared context, and that shared context introduces the possibility of error. The language of artificial intelligence is not private. (shrink)

If any area of current philosophy is so incendiary as to veer on violence, it is argument about a divide being’s existence. Hinman’s sober offering is possibly one of the most thorough apologetics in contemporary times, meriting serious consideration yet certain to draw fire. Since Darwin, the religious have taken up arms, both metaphorically and, in the case of World Trade Center and its imitators, literally. In turn, growing atheist movements reacted against such defensiveness. This upsurge in side-taking and regrouping (...) evidences a powerful human need for settling the issue. A peek at the arguments reveals a mess. One advantage of Hinman’s new work is that, among other goals, it attempts to order the mess. The work exudes care and some respect for the various perspectives. Its sheer breadth and depth of scholarship and capacity in articulating it attests the generally due respect of the many sides, which often exhibit the rational and irrational in one commentator. The central theme tying the various arguments together is that ideologies outside of the sciences’ themselves are informing science-based, evidential arguments about any divine’s existence. Many sides of the debate, including the monotheistic, are equally guilty. (shrink)

Gopal Sreenivasan’s new book, Emotion and Virtue, is an incredibly rich and impressive achievement. It is required reading for anyone working on issues related to character. In the spirit of book discussions in this journal, I will focus less on raising objections and more on exploring how the discussion could be extended in new directions or connected with related topics. The plan is to focus on four topics: (i) the scope of Sreenivasan’s project, (ii) his response to the situationist challenge, (...) (iii) some implications of his view for practical wisdom, and (iv) his account of virtue conflicts. (shrink)

Constitutional interpretation in Canada is dominated by the metaphor of the “living tree”. Living tree constitutional interpretation is usually defined in terms of its incompatibility with what is understood in Canada to be the central commitment of originalist interpretation: that the constitution is, in some sense, “frozen” at the moment of adoption. But the tenets of originalism that are used as a definitional contrast are not widely held by originalist constitutional scholars today, and are in fact expressly rejected in the (...) new originalist theories that have been developed principally in the United States over the past 20 years. There has not been a meaningful engagement in Canada with contemporary schools of originalist interpretation. The originalism rejected by the Supreme Court of Canada in 1985 , is not the new originalism, and a rejection of this new family of interpretive theories does not necessarily follow from the fact of the Supreme Court of Canada’s rejection of original intent originalism. Unfortunately, the Canadian courts have continued to affirm living tree constitutional doctrine and denounce originalism without providing much of an account of what they are accepting or rejecting. This paper is a prefatory study to an engagement with new originalist scholarship. I attempt a statement of the current commitments in Canadian living constitutional doctrine and, in passing, note the Supreme Court’s attitudes towards originalism. My purpose is to determine what the central commitments of living tree constitutional doctrine are, as a preliminary step towards a later study to determine the extent to which Canadian doctrine is truly incompatible with orginalist interpretation. I explore what I observe to be the four central commitments to living tree constitutionalism in Canada: the doctrine of progressive interpretation; the use of a purposive methodology in progressive interpretation; the absence of any necessary role for the original intent or meaning of framers in interpreting the constitution; and the presence of other constraints on judicial interpretation. (shrink)