This book offers the first sustained multi-disciplinary investigation of the question and status of ethics in light of the current "return to ethics" underway in a variety of critical fields. While the questions of ethics have become increasingly important in recent years for many fields within the humanities, there has been no single volume that seeks to address the emergence of this concern with ethics across the disciplinary spectrum. Given this lack in currently available critical and secondary texts, and also (...) the urgency of the issues addressed by the critics assembled here, the time is right for a collection of this nature. By assembling the work of nine critics from among these disciplines-including philosophy, women's studies, cultural studies, anthropology, literary studies, and history-this collection will help to frame the conversation on the status of ethics in the coming years. One of the great features of the book is the very high quality of work and the importance within the critical scene of many of its contributors. Contributors: Lowell Gallagher, Richard J. Golsan, David E. Johnson, Howard Marchitello, Kelly Oliver, Marshall Sahlins, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Tzvetan Todorov, Krzysztof Ziarek. (shrink)

Recently, bioethicists and the UNCRPD have advocated for supported medical decision-making on behalf of patients with intellectual disabilities. But what does supported decision-making really entail? One compelling framework is Anita Silvers and Leslie Francis’ mental prosthesis account, which envisions supported decision-making as a process in which trustees act as mere appendages for the patient’s will; the trustee provides the cognitive tools the patient requires to realize her conception of her own good. We argue that supported decision-making would be better (...) understood as a collaborative process, giving patients with intellectual disabilities the opportunity to make decisions in a respectful relationship with trusted others. We offer an alternative account of supported decision-making where the primary constraint is to protect the patient from domination by the trustee. This is advantageous in its preservation of the prospects for genuine collaboration, for the mental prosthesis approach ultimately reinforces a problematic ideal of isolated patient self-determination. (shrink)

The publication of John Knox's First Blast of the Trumpet in 1558 had engendered a radical debate about the public role of women and the nature of female authority and obedience. Howard was not the only author who attempted to refute Knox's tract. The Marian exile and future Bishop of London, John Aylmer, the Catholic Bishop of Ross, John Leslie, and the Catholic, Scottish lawyer, David Chambers, all published books disproving Knox's allegations about women's unfitness for rule. Richard (...) Bertie, husband of Catherine, Duchess of Suffolk, also prepared a manuscript refutation which was never published. The published works are moderately well known, and have been discussed elsewhere. This article concentrates on Howard's unpublished contribution to the Knox debate. The tract is important because of its length and detail, its conclusions regarding the potential role of aristocratic women, and because of Howard's personal reputation and aristocratic connections. The �Defense� was both eloquent and persuasive, analysing women's legal, historical and theological status within early modern society. Howard presented alternative interpretations of female stereotypes found in sermons and polemical writings. His commentaries on Genesis, Athalia, Jezebel and Deborah show how traditional biblical stories could be interpreted in radically differing ways, with profound implications for contemporary women. Because of the length of Howard's tract, this article can present only a summary of his main conclusions. His interpretation of the first three chapters of Genesis will be presented in rather more detail as an indication of the complexity of the early modern debate about women, and the dangers of trying to attach simplistic labels to individual attitudes. (shrink)

AbstrctSean Aas, Dana Howard, and Leslie Francis raise compelling and interesting objections to the definition of disability I defend in The Minority Body. In this paper, I reply to these objections and elaborate on my criticisms of the disability/impairment distinction.

The focus of this article is J. Leslie Mitchell’s Spartacus (1933), his fictional representation of the slave rebellion in ancient Rome led by the eponymous gladiator. The article begins by examining Mitchell’s contribution to debates over the role of the revolutionary writer in Left Review in the mid-1930s and his place in the British Left in this era, before going on to survey the ways in which the figure of Spartacus and the German Spartacists are represented across Mitchell’s oeuvre. (...) It then explores key source material utilized in the writing of the novel, as well as outlining comparisons between Mitchell’s representation of Spartacus and those of his fellow novelists Howard Fast and Arthur Koestler. Including close readings of Spartacus and informed by archival research and previously unpublished manuscript items, the article argues that at the same time as denouncing the cruelties of Roman rule, Spartacus also signals Mitchell’s passionate opposition to what he considered the violent histories of oppression suffered by the commons of the earth of all times, culminating in the capitalist crisis of Mitchell’s own period in the 1930s. Mitchell creates this effect of historical simultaneity by writing a work of myth-history – as opposed to historical realism or political propaganda – that employs the utopian legend of the Golden Age to inspire radical dissent against modern deprivation. (shrink)

The loss of the federally protected constitutional right to an abortion is a threat to the already tenuous autonomy of pregnant people, and may augur future challenges to their right to refuse unwanted obstetric interventions. Even before Roe’s demise, pregnancy led to constraints on autonomy evidenced by clinician-led legal incursions against patients who refused obstetric interventions. In Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the Supreme Court found that the right to liberty espoused in the Constitution does not extend to a (...) pregnant person’s right to an abortion. With Roe’s demise, the right to request specific types of care has been vitiated. The same argument underpinning that holding may now become ballast for attacks on the traditionally more robust right, the right to refuse. Here we discuss how the elevation of fetal and embryonic rights may lead to a cascade of medical intrusions and deprivations of liberty against pregnant persons, and offer an argument opposing these improprieties. (shrink)

This study invited curates and training incumbents attending a 3-day residential programme to function as a hermeneutical community engaging conversation between the Lucan post-resurrection narrative concerning the Road to Emmaus and the learning relationship in which they were engaged. Building on the SIFT approach to biblical hermeneutics the participants were invited to work in type-alike groups, structured first on the basis of the perceiving process and second on the basis of the judging process. This approach facilitated rich and varied insights (...) into the Emmaus Road narrative and into the theme of learning relationships. (shrink)

A comprehensive introduction to formal logic, Logic and Philosophy: A Modern Introduction is a rigorous yet accessible text, appropriate for students encountering the subject for the first time. Abundant, carefully crafted exercise sets accompanied by a clear, engaging exposition build to an exploration of sentential logic, first-order predicate logic, the theory of descriptions, identity, relations, set theory, modal logic, and Aristotelian logic. And as its title suggests, Logic and Philosophy is devoted not only to logic but also to the philosophical (...) debates that led to the development of the field. Much new material has been added for the 13th edition. An introduction to set theory and its relationship to logic and mathematics, including philosophical issues, is now part of Chapter 13. Chapter 15 is an introduction to modal logic and Kripke semantics, concluding with a discussion of philosophical problems with any logical accommodation of modalities. Instructors who do not wish to present proof methods will find chapters on truth trees for both sentential and first-order logic, and a presentation of trees for modal logic. Special features of this text include presentations of the history of logic, alternatives to traditional methods of conditional and indirect proof, and a discussion of semantic problems with universal and existential instantiations. Throughout, the authors are sensitive to philosophical issues that arise from the relationship between ordinary language, symbolic logic, and justifications for the syntax and semantics of the various symbolic languages. Discussions range from the justification of the truth table for the sentential rendering of if... then statements to semantic and syntactic paradoxes, including some troubling paradoxes that arise in ordinary language (e.g., the so-called hangman or surprise quiz paradox). Logic and Philosophy includes ample material for a one-semester or two-semester course and provides a thorough preparation for more advanced logic courses. (shrink)

We argue that Brandon and Carson's (1996) "The Indeterministic Character of Evolutionary Theory" fails to identify any indeterminism that would require evolutionary theory to be a statistical or probabilistic theory. Specifically, we argue that (1) their demonstration of a mechanism by which quantum indeterminism might "percolate up" to the biological level is irrelevant; (2) their argument that natural selection is indeterministic because it is inextricably connected with drift fails to join the issue with determinism; and (3) their view that experimental (...) methodology in botany assumes indeterminism is both false and incompatible with the commitment to discoverable causal mechanisms underlying biological processes. We remain convinced that the probabilism of the theory of evolution is epistemically, not ontologically, motivated. (shrink)

Psalm 73 is a challenging Psalm in which the Psalmist draws on rich imagery to juxtapose doctrine and experience and to juxtapose the goodness of God with divine retribution. Drawing on data provided by 15 theological educators within the Anglican Diocese of Cyprus and the Gulf, this study tests the thesis that the imagery of Psalm 73 will be perceived differently by sensing types and by intuitive types and that the issue ‘Is God really good to the upright?’ will be (...) judged differently by feeling types and by thinking types. The findings from this study are consistent with the broader hermeneutical theory that the psychological type profile of the reader, in terms of perceiving preference and judging preference, plays a formative part in shaping the interpretation of biblical material.Contribution: Situated within the reader-perspective approach to biblical hermeneutics, the SIFT method is concerned with identifying the influence of the psychological type of the reader in shaping the interpretation of text. The present study demonstrates that this theory holds true for the way in which theological educators read Psalm 73. (shrink)

The orderliness of the universe and the existence of human beings already provides some reason for believing that there is a God - as argued in Richard Swinburne's earlier book Is There a God? Swinburne now claims that it is probable that the main Christian doctrines about the nature of God and his actions in the world are true. In virtue of his omnipotence and perfect goodness, God must be a Trinity, live a human life in order to share our (...) suffering, and found a church which would enable him to tell all humans about this. It is also quite probable that he would provide his human life as an atonement for our wrongdoing, teach us how we should live and tell us his plans for our future after death. Among founders of religions, Jesus satisfies uniquely well the requirement of living the sort of human life which God would need to have lived. But to give us adequate reason to believe that Jesus was God, God would need to put his 'signature' on the life of Jesus by an act which he alone could do, for example raise him from the dead. There is adequate historical evidence that Jesus rose from the dead. The church which he founded gave plausible interpretations of his basic message. Therefore Christian doctrines are probably true. (shrink)

This is the penultimate draft of a paper originally presented at the Hart-Fuller at 50 conference, held at the NYU Law School in February 2008. A revised version will appear in the NYU Law Review. The paper seeks to clarify and assess HLA Hart's famous claim that legal positivism somehow involves a 'separation of law and morals.' The paper contends that Hart's 'separability thesis should not be confused with the 'social thesis,' with the 'sources thesis,' or with a methodological thesis (...) about jurisprudence. Hart's thesis denies the existence of necessary (conceptual) connections between law and morality. But that thesis is false: there are many necessary connections between law and morality, some of them conceptually significant. Among these is an important negative connection: law is of its nature morally fallible and morally risky. Lon Fuller emphasised the 'internal morality of law,' the 'morality that makes law possible'. Hart stressed that there is also an immorality that law makes possible. Law's nature is seen not only in its internal virtues, in legality, but also in its internal vices, in legalism. (shrink)

This study is situated within the newly emerging interest in the concept of grace as a legitimate topic for empirical enquiry, and draws on the theoretical framework provided by the SIFT approach to biblical hermeneutics, an approach rooted in reader-perspective hermeneutical theory and in Jungian psychological type theory. Data were draw from two one-day workshops with Anglican Readers (lay ministers). On each occasion the participants were invited to divide into three separate groups according to their preferences for sensing or intuition (...) (the two perceiving functions) and within these groups to explore the messages of grace in Matthew 6: 25–30 (Jesus’ invitation to look at the birds and to consider the lilies). The rich data gathered from these workshops generated insights into contemporary theologies of grace and also confirmed the hypothesis that biblical interpretation is shaped by the reader’s psychological type preference for sensing or for intuition. (shrink)

This paper describes the position of scientific realism and presents the basic lines of argument for the position. Simply put, scientific realism is the view that the aim of science is knowledge of the truth about observable and unobservable aspects of a mind-independent, objective reality. Scientific realism is supported by several distinct lines of argument. It derives from a non-anthropocentric conception of our place in the natural world, and it is grounded in the epistemology and metaphysics of common sense. Further, (...) the success of science entitles us to infer both the approximate truth of mature scientific theories and the truth-conduciveness of the methods of science. (shrink)

A case study provides the basis for consideration of the purpose of business ethics teaching, the importance of reflection and the evaluation of ethics teaching. The way in which personal reflection and an increased capacity for ethical action can be encouraged and openly identified as aims of the course is discussed. The paper considers changes in the design and delivery of the international management ethics and values course taught at the University of South Australia as part of the undergraduate management (...) degree in Australia, Singapore and Hong Kong. As a result of student and teaching staff responses, and course evaluations, the course design, teaching and assessment has moved steadily toward an aim which explicitly refers to behaviour, without losing the significant conceptual base. Ways in which opportunities can be provided to enhance the development of a reflective capability are considered, including narrative, role models, ethical reflection, journal‐keeping and practice. The changes required a change in assessment practice. The difficulties of assessing intention and commitment to ethical action, whether in an individual course or across the curriculum, are discussed. (shrink)

Intimate and medicalized, natural and technological, reproduction poses some of the most challenging ethical dilemmas of our time. This volume brings together scholars from multiple perspectives to address both traditional and novel questions about the rights and responsibilities of human reproducers, their caregivers, and the societies in which they live.

This article examines where Kant stands on the question of the redistribution of wealth and income both nationally and globally. Kant is rightly seen as a radical reformer of the world order from a political standpoint seeking a republican, federative worldwide system; can he also be seen as wanting to bring about an equally dramatic shift from an economic perspective? To answer this question we have first of all to address the question of whether he is an egalitarian or an (...) inegalitarian at the national level. Certainly there are certain social and material inequalities within a civil society Kant is prepared to accept and there are some he is not. This would imply that he would affirm certain inequalities at an international level and that there are others upon which he would recommend action. Thus the question arises as to whether or not it is appropriate for Kantians to regard the current enormous inequalities in wealth and income between individuals living in different parts of the globe as scandalous and in need of change. The paper throughout relates the problem of distributive justice within the state to the problem of distributive justice amongst states, arguing that this approach is warranted by Kant's own method. Particular attention is paid to how Kant's own approach to political philosophy may be deployed to underpin a change to a distinctive type of international distributive justice. (shrink)

This study applied psychographic segmentation theory to explore the psychological type profile of 1082 visitors to four cathedrals (three in England and one in Wales) and to set this profile alongside the published national normative data. Data provided by the Francis Psychological Type Scales demonstrated that among cathedral visitors there were more introverts (60%), sensing types (72%) and judging types (80%), with a balance between thinking types (49%) and feeling types (51%). Comparisons with the population norms demonstrated that extraverts and (...) perceiving types were significantly underrepresented among visitors to these four cathedrals. The implications of these findings are discussed for enhancing the visitor experience of those currently visiting and for attracting those psychological types currently less likely to visit. CONTRIBUTION: Situated within the science of cathedral studies, this article demonstrates (by means of applying psychographic segmentation theory and gathering data from four cathedrals) that extraverts and perceiving types were significantly under-represented among cathedral visitors. These data are important for understanding limitations on the reach of cathedrals within the wider community. (shrink)

La pensée conventionnaliste de l’environnement se heurte à un problème central : l’absence d’un ordre de grandeur écologiste qui obéisse à la même grammaire que les six autres. Cet article propose une piste afin de surmonter ce problème. Il s’agit d’envisager l’écologisme, non plus sous le modèle idéal de la cité, mais comme une critique du capitalisme. Dans cette perspective, les fondements théoriques et l’effectivité historique de la critique écologiste du capitalisme sont étudiés. Codes JEL : B5, N5, O13, O440, (...) P10, Q5. (shrink)

La pensée conventionnaliste de l’environnement se heurte à un problème central : l’absence d’un ordre de grandeur écologiste qui obéisse à la même grammaire que les six autres. Cet article propose une piste afin de surmonter ce problème. Il s’agit d’envisager l’écologisme, non plus sous le modèle idéal de la cité, mais comme une critique du capitalisme. Dans cette perspective, les fondements théoriques et l’effectivité historique de la critique écologiste du capitalisme sont étudiés. Codes JEL : B5, N5, O13, O440, (...) P10, Q5. (shrink)

This study examines the association between mystical experience, as captured by the Francis-Louden Mystical Orientation Scale, and psychological health, as captured by the Eysenckian three dimensional model of personality, among 329 students attending a state university in Turkey. The data reported no significant association between mystical orientation and psychoticism scores, and a small but significant positive association between mystical orientation and neuroticism scores, after controlling for sex differences. This finding suggests that there may be a small inverse association between mystical (...) experience and psychological health among students in Turkey. (shrink)

"Now we can join Gandhi and Tolstoy and nameless others who encountered this vigorous and invigorating book. Welcome to a company of radicals who believed we could and should stop eating non-human animals. They brought vegetarianism out of history and into the here and now." -- from the introductionEthical vegetarianism is no recent development, as this unrivaled historical anthology dramatizes. When it was first published 120 years ago, countless people read and endorsed The Ethics of Diet. But then it became (...) a rare book, hard to find even in libraries. For countless more readers, it is at last available again. In this classic of vegetarian writing, Howard Williams presents a line of thought, a continuous thread, a tradition, a catena of protestation against living on "Butchery." What he finds striking is the variety of the witnesses, the prophets of "Reformed Dietetics" who have "shrunk from the rgime of blood," including Gautama Buddha, Pythagoras, Plato, Hesiod, Epicurus, Seneca, Ovid, Thomas More, Montaigne, Mandeville, Pope, Voltaire, Swedenborg, Wesley, Rousseau, Shelley, Byron, Lamar-tine, Michelet, Bentham, Sinclair, Schopenhauer, and Thoreau. Their words are accompanied by the vigorous narrative voice of Williams himself, who put to rest, once and for all, the idea that vegetarianism is a fad. (shrink)

In any probabilistic theory, we say that a bipartite state ω on a composite system AB steers its marginal state ω B if, for any decomposition of ω B as a mixture ω B =∑ i p i β i of states β i on B, there exists an observable {a i } on A such that the conditional states $\omega_{B|a_{i}}$ are exactly the states β i . This is always so for pure bipartite states in quantum mechanics, a fact (...) first observed by Schrödinger in 1935. Here, we show that, for weakly self-dual state spaces (those isomorphic, but perhaps not canonically isomorphic, to their dual spaces), the assumption that every state of a system A is steered by some bipartite state of a composite AA consisting of two copies of A, amounts to the homogeneity of the state cone. If the state space is actually self-dual, and not just weakly so, this implies (via the Koecher-Vinberg Theorem) that it is the self-adjoint part of a formally real Jordan algebra, and hence, quite close to being quantum mechanical. (shrink)

Critical Reflections on Teacher Education argues that educational philosophy can improve the quality of teacher education programs in Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom. The book documents the ways in which the market model of education propagated by governments and outside agencies hastens the decline of philosophy of education and turns teachers into technicians in hierarchical school systems. A grounding in educational philosophy, however, enables future teachers to make informed and qualified judgements defining their professional lives. In a (...) clear and accessible style, Howard Woodhouse uses a combination of reasoned argument and narrative to show that educational philosophy, together with Indigenous knowledge systems, forms the basis of a climate change education capable of educating students about the central issue of our time. (shrink)

Giubilini and Minerva ask why birth should be a critical dividing line between acceptable and unacceptable reasons for terminating existence. Their argument is that birth does not change moral status in the sense that is relevant: the ability to be harmed by interruption of one's aims. Rather than question the plausibility of their position or the argument they give, we ask instead about the importance to scholarship or policy of publishing the article: does it to any extent make a novel (...) or needed addition to the literature? Giubilini and Minerva's argument is remarkably similar to one advanced by Michael Tooley in ‘Abortion and Infanticide,’ almost 40 years ago. There have been immense changes in the intervening 40 years: in the ability to diagnose conditions early in pregnancy, in genetics and in the availability of in vitro fertilization; in understanding of the capabilities of persons with disabilities; in law; in economic support and access to healthcare for pregnant women and their children; in social customs and arrangements; and even in philosophy, with developments in feminist thought, bioethics and cognitive science. Some of these changes have been for the better, but others, such as the unravelling of social safety nets, have arguably been for the worse. Any or all of these changes might give rise to moral reasons for the relevance of birth that were not available 40 years ago. These changes might also be relevant to the identification of cases, if any, in which ‘after-birth abortion’ might be considered. If context is relevant to the applicability of moral reasons—as for theorists of justice in the non-idealised world it surely should be—it is questionable whether a view of the birth-line that ignores contextualising change can be adequate. (shrink)

Presents findings from a survey conducted among 30,000 13-15 year olds throughout England and Wales, giving particular attention to social, personal and moral issues.