This research investigates the influence that consumers’ perceptions of retail business ethics have on their responses when retailers either create social discount spaces or do not. Using scenarios to imply these social practices and structural equation modeling to test the hypotheses among a sample of 689 respondents, the authors find that consumers’ perceptions of retail business ethics have positive effects on consumer loyalty, both directly and through consumer trust, as well as positive, strong influences on the retailer’s corporate social responsibility (...) and corporate reputation. Furthermore, consumers’ perceptions of retail business ethics exert a stronger effect on consumer trust in integrated social discount spaces, though social discount practices do not affect the link between such perceptions and loyalty. Compared with when the retailer does not offer discount space, collaborative and integrated social discount spaces have weaker effects on trust and loyalty to the retailer. These findings have several notable theoretical and practical implications. (shrink)

The essay is framed by conflict between Christianity and Darwinian science over the history of the world and the nature of human personhood. Evolutionary science narrates a long prehuman geological and biological history filled with vast amounts, kinds, and distributions of apparently random brutal and pointless suffering. It also strongly suggests that the first modern humans were morally primitive. This science seems to discredit Christianity's common meta-narrative of the Fall, understood as a story of Paradise Lost. The author contends (...) that this Augustinian story and its character of Adam as endowed with superhuman gifts, and yet as so fragile as to fall, as claimed, is implausible, at any rate, even apart from science. He proposes that Christians consider adopting a Supralapsarian metaphysics of divine purpose supported by the intuitions of Irenaeus, who depicted the first human beings as comparable to innocent, but morally undeveloped children. In this approach the existence of evils is part of the divine plan to "defeat" them in and through the Incarnation, Atonement, and Resurrection of Christ. Putting an "Irenaean Adam" in place of the "Augustinian" counterpart may not remove conflict with science completely, but at least reduces it, and leads to a Christian narrative that is more plausible, in the light of science. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that no strong doctrine of the Fall can undermine the propriety of epistemic self-trust. My argument proceeds by introducing a common type of philosophical methodology, known as reflective equilibrium. After a brief exposition of the method, I introduce a puzzle for someone engaged in the project of self-reflection after gaining a reason to distrust their epistemic selves on the basis of a construal of a doctrine of the Fall. I close by introducing the (...) worry as a formal argument and demonstrate the self-undermining nature of such an argument. (shrink)

Both literature and philosophy, as genres of writing, can enable us to address important ontological, epistemological and ethical questions. One author who makes it possible for readers to bridge these two genres is Albert Camus. Nowhere is this more evident than in Camus’ short novel, The Fall. The Fall, through the character and words of Jean‐Baptiste Clamence, prompts readers to reflect deeply on themselves, their motivations and commitments, and their relations with others. This paper discusses the origin and (...) structure of the book, identifies some of its key philosophical themes, and explores some of its educational implications. (shrink)

This paper provides a semantic analysis of English rise-fall-rise (RFR) intonation as a focus quantifier over assertable alternative propositions. I locate RFR meaning in the conventional implicature dimension, and propose that its effect is calculated late within a dynamic model. With a minimum of machinery, this account captures disambiguation and scalar effects, as well as interactions with other focus operators like ‘only’ and clefts. Double focus data further support the analysis, and lead to a rejection of Ward and Hirschberg’s (...) (Language 61:747–776, 1985) claim that RFR never disambiguates. Finally, I draw out connections between RFR and contrastive topic (CT) intonation (Büring, Linguist Philos 26:511–545, 2003), and show that RFR cannot simply be reduced to a sub-case of CT. (shrink)

This essay is framed by conflict between Christianity and Darwinian science over the history of the world and the nature of original human personhood. Evolutionary science narrates a long prehuman geological and biological history filled with vast amounts, kinds, and distributions of apparently random brutal and pointless suffering. It has also unveiled an original human person with animal psychosomatic heredity. This narrative seems to discredit Christianity's metanarrative of the Fall—Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained. The author contends that the Augustinian (...) story and its character of Adam are implausible, anyway, for reasons of theology and apologetics. He proposes that Christians adopt instead a Supralapsarian metaphysics of original human personhood and existence that grows from the intuitions of Irenaeus. The outcome will be improved Christian theology, more persuasive theodicy, and, above all, peace with Darwinian science. (shrink)

The story of the devil’s fall poses at least three separate philosophical puzzles, only two of which Anselm addressed. The first (Puzzle A) wonders how this angel could have committed a sin in the first place since he was created with a good will and good desires. A second puzzle (Puzzle B) consists of trying to explain why the devil cannot ever be forgiven for that first sin. According to Christian teaching, the devil is unable to “repent” (i.e., express (...) sorrow for) that first sin and thereby acquire forgiveness for it. Humans, by contrast, are portrayed as repeatedly sinning, repenting, and being forgiven. It is a mystery why no mechanism similar to that humans use for forgiveness is available to the devil. The final puzzle (Puzzle C) is slightly different. It wonders why the devil was never given a second chance. In daily life, most of us are given (and grant to others) second chances all the time. Given that the consequences of choosing incorrectly were in this case so disastrous and permanent, it seems inconceivable that a good God would permit one of His angels merely one chance to choose and thereby determine his eternal fate. And yet, despite this inconceivability, this is precisely the way the story is presented. Anselm addressed Puzzles A and B but never explicitly raised Puzzle C. I propose he failed to raise it because he conflated it with Puzzle B. In this paper, I first explain how he solved Puzzles A and B. I then go on to argue that Puzzle C does indeed constitute a separate puzzle that should not be conflated with Puzzle B. I then argue that the best (and perhaps only) way in which Anselm could solve Puzzle C is to appeal to a type of free will that conflicts with his solution to Puzzle A. As a result, I argue that there may be a latent contradiction in Anselm’s treatment of the devil’s sin unless an alternate solution to Puzzle C can be found. (shrink)

William Wood has importantly distinguished between a ‘hard problem’ and a ‘harder problem’ in explaining the devil's fall. He points out that previous attempts to explain Satan's sin have focused only on the former and cleverly argues that consumer preference theory, when applied to Anselm's account of Satan's sin, can solve the latter. In this article, I demonstrate that Wood's solution (i) undermines itself, (ii) fails to absolve God of the charge of being tyrannical, (iii) surreptitiously reintroduces the harder (...) problem, and (iv) eventually collapses back into the initial hard problem. I conclude by suggesting why one might nonetheless be motivated to distinguish between the two problems and what this implies about a belief in the devil's fall. (shrink)

Recently the intramural debate among Christians over the correct interpretation of Genesis 1 and the age of the earth has become heated between leaders of certain science-based ministries. A major point of contention revolves around the question of whether there was animal death before Adam and Eve’s first sin. Many young-earth proponents charge that if God allowed death before Adam and Eve sinned, then God would not be morally perfect. In this paper I propose and critique a logical argument from (...) these charges. First, I formulate a logical problem based on the claims of young-earth proponents. Next, I discuss several theistic interpretations of God’s moral perfection and explain how deontological and consequentialist interpretations are problematic. After this I discuss Aquinas’ interpretation of God’s moral perfection. Finally, I provide a solution to the problem of death before the fall using Aquinas’ interpretation. I conclude that it is not logically contradictory to believe that God is all-knowing, all-powerful, and all-good and that He created a world that initially contained animal death. (shrink)

Chinua Achebe, the contemporary Nigerian novelist, is considered as one of the prominent figures in African anti-colonial literature. What makes his works specific is the way he approaches the issues of colonization of Africa in an objective manner and through an innovative language which aims at providing a pathology; a pathological reading meant to draw on the pre-colonial and colonial history without any presumptions so as to present the readers with possible alternative African discourses in future. His first novel Things (...) Fall Apart can be taken as the best representative of such a penchant in Achebe. The present study seeks to approach Things Fall apart by reflecting on those discursive features which have provided the ground for constructing such a pathological reading and an alternative to the colonial discourse. To this end, some key terms introduced by Homi Bhabha and Mikhail Bakhtin such as ‘hybridity’, ‘otherness’ and ‘polyphony’, constitute the cornerstone of this study. Presumably, such an innovative reading of Achebe’s Things Fall Apart is to lead to a better understanding of his discourse and the efforts made by him to help the African readers figure out how to piece together what once fell apart; what they can rely on for building an independent future in the so-called postcolonial era. (shrink)

In this essay, “The Principle of Autonomy in Kant’s Moral Theory: Its Rise and Fall,” Pauline Kleingeld notes that Kant’s Principle of Autonomy, which played a central role in both the Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals and the Critique of Practical Reason, disappeared by the time of the Metaphysics of Morals. She argues that its disappearance is due to significant changes in Kant’s political philosophy. The Principle of Autonomy states that one ought to act as if one were (...) giving universal laws through one’s maxims. The criterion of just legislation that Kant accepted in the mid-1780s does not require any actual consent on the part of the citizens—genuine universality is sufficient for a law to be just. Hence, at that time, Kant could indeed explicate the criterion governing the moral permissibility of one’s maxims by drawing an analogy with the criterion governing the justice of political laws. In the Metaphysics of Morals and in other works in the 1790s, however, he added the further condition that laws must be given with the consent of the citizens. With this further condition, the moral criterion was no longer fully analogous to the criterion for political laws being just. Accordingly, Kleingeld argues, Kant dropped the Principle of Autonomy, which was firmly based on that analogy. (shrink)

Did post-Enlightenment philosophers reject the idea of original sin and hence the view that life is a quest for redemption from it? In Philosophical Myths of the Fall, Stephen Mulhall identifies and evaluates a surprising ethical-religious dimension in the work of three highly influential philosophers--Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein. He asks: Is the Christian idea of humanity as structurally flawed something that these three thinkers aim simply to criticize? Or do they, rather, end up by reproducing secular variants of the (...) same mythology? Mulhall argues that each, in different ways, develops a conception of human beings as in need of redemption: in their work, we appear to be not so much capable of or prone to error and fantasy, but instead structurally perverse, living in untruth. In this respect, their work is more closely aligned to the Christian perspective than to the mainstream of the Enlightenment. However, all three thinkers explicitly reject any religious understanding of human perversity; indeed, they regard the very understanding of human beings as originally sinful as central to that from which we must be redeemed. And yet each also reproduces central elements of that understanding in his own thinking; each recounts his own myth of our Fall, and holds out his own image of redemption. The book concludes by asking whether this indebtedness to religion brings these philosophers' thinking closer to, or instead forces it further away from, the truth of the human condition. (shrink)

Hud Hudson shows that apparently irreconcilable conflicts between science and religion often turn out to be misdescribed battles about negotiable philosophical assumptions. He defends an original Hypertime Hypothesis which reconciles the Christian doctrines of The Fall and Original Sin with reigning scientific orthodoxy.

The story of the fall and rise of Zahavi’s handicap principle is one of a battle between models. Early attempts at formal modeling produced negative results and, unsurprisingly, scepticism about the principle. A major change came in 1990 with Grafen’s production of coherent models of a handicap mechanism of honest signalling. This paper’s first claim is that acceptance of the principle, and its dissemination into other disciplines, has been driven principally by that, and subsequent modeling, rather than by empirical (...) results. Secondly, there is a vast literature on biological signalling but few studies that make all of the observations necessary to diagnose the handicap mechanism. My final claim is that many of the applications of costly signalling theory in other disciplines are conceptually confused. Misinterpretations of what is meant by costly signalling are common. Demonstrating that a signal is costly is insufficient and is not always necessary in order to prove that, and explain why, a signal is honest. In addition to the biological modelling of signals, there is an economic literature on the same subject. The two run in parallel in the sense that they have had little mutual interaction. Additionally, it is the biological modelling that has been picked up, and often misapplied, by other disciplines. (shrink)

The rise of applied biology was one of the most striking features of the biological sciences in the early 20th century. Strongly oriented toward agriculture, this was closely associated with the growth of a number of disciplines, notably, entomology and mycology. This period also saw a marked expansion of the English University system, and biology departments in the newly inaugurated civic universities took an early and leading role in the development of applied biology through their support of Economic Biology. This (...) sought explicitly to promote the application of biological knowledge to economically important problems and especially to agriculture. The impact of Economic Biology was felt most strongly within Zoology, where it became synonymous with entomology. The transience of Economic Biology belies its significance, for example, in providing a means for the expansion of biology at the civic universities. More broadly, it opened up new research and employment opportunities within the life sciences. In late Edwardian Britain, newly available state funds for agriculturally relevant biological disciplines transformed the life sciences. This paper examines the impact of these funds -- mobilized either under the 1909 Development Act, or under the auspices of colonial interests -- on Economic Biology and the institutionalization of applied biology. The rise and fall of Economic Biology casts new light on the way in which institutional and political alignments profoundly shaped the development of British biology. (shrink)

This article analyzes the evolution of Mersenne's views concerning the validity of Galileo's theory of acceleration. After publishing, in 1634, a treatise designed to present empirical evidence in favor of Galileo's odd-number law, Mersenne developed over the years the feeling that only the elaboration of a physical proof could provide sufficient confirmation of its validity. In the present article, I try to show that at the center of Mersenne's worries stood Galileo's assumption that a falling body had to pass in (...) its acceleration through infinite degrees of speed. His extensive discussions with, or his reading of, Descartes, Gassendi, Baliani, Fabri, Cazre, Deschamps, Le Tenneur, Huygens, and Torricelli led Mersenne to believe that the hypothesis of a passage through infinite degrees of speed was incompatible with any mechanistic explanation of free fall. (shrink)

By employing the theoretical template provided by agency theory, this article contributes a detailed clinical analysis of a large multinational Canada-headquartered telecommunications company, Nortel. Our analysis reveals a twenty-first century norm of usual suspects: a CEO whose compensation is well above those of his peers, a dysfunctional board of directors, acts of income smoothing to preserve the confidence of volatile investors, and revelations of financial irregularities followed by a downfall. In many ways, the spectacular rise and – sudden – (...) class='Hi'>fall of Nortel illustrates excesses of actors within, and contradictions of the system of corporate governance implied by the agency model. Furthermore, this case illustrates limitations of the agency framework in complex situations with short-term oriented investors. (shrink)

Michael Riordan, Lillian Hoddeson and Adrienne W. Kolb, Tunnel Visions: The Rise and Fall of the Superconducting Super Collider (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2015), xiii+448 pp.

The rise of applied biology was one of the most striking features of the biological sciences in the early 20th century. Strongly oriented toward agriculture, this was closely associated with the growth of a number of disciplines, notably, entomology and mycology. This period also saw a marked expansion of the English University system, and biology departments in the newly inaugurated civic universities took an early and leading role in the development of applied biology through their support of Economic Biology. This (...) sought explicitly to promote the application of biological knowledge to economically important problems and especially to agriculture. The impact of Economic Biology was felt most strongly within Zoology, where it became synonymous with entomology. The transience of Economic Biology belies its significance, for example, in providing a means for the expansion of biology at the civic universities. More broadly, it opened up new research and employment opportunities within the life sciences. In late Edwardian Britain, newly available state funds for agriculturally relevant biological disciplines transformed the life sciences. This paper examines the impact of these funds -- mobilized either under the 1909 Development Act, or under the auspices of colonial interests -- on Economic Biology and the institutionalization of applied biology. The rise and fall of Economic Biology casts new light on the way in which institutional and political alignments profoundly shaped the development of British biology. (shrink)

Beginning with an overview of Galileo's earliest work on free fall, the paper examines the relationship between experiment and theory in his study of motion in the period immediately before and after 1604. The possible role of experiment is assessed in relation to the manuscript evidence and by means of reconstructed experiments.

The collapse of the Soviet Empire led many to think that communism and perhaps socialism were no longer relevant to the modern world. _Hegel and Marx After the Fall of Communism _presents a balanced discussion for and against the validity of the arguments of two of the most important political philosophers of all time, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Karl Marx. David MacGregor reinterprets Hegel and Marx’s philosophies, setting out key events in their lives against a backdrop of historical (...) global events. In a new afterword, MacGregor brings his study up to date, examining Russia’s revival as a world power under Vladimir Putin as well as China’s ambitious development efforts. (shrink)

Montesquieu's Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur décadence (1733/1734) is a methodological exercise in causal explanation on the meso-level applied to the subject of the military rise and fall of Rome. Rome is described as a system with contingent initial conditions that have a strong path-determining effect. Contingent and plastic initial configurations become highly determining in their subsequent operation, thanks to self-reinforcing feedback loops. Montesquieu's method seems influenced by the ruthless commitment to efficient (...) causality and the reductionism of seventeenth-century mechanicist philosophy; but in contrast to these predecessors, he is more interested in dynamic processes than in unchangeable substances, and his use of efficient causality in the context of a system approach implies a form of holism that is lacking in his predecessors. The formal and conceptual analysis in this article is in many ways complementary with Paul Rahe's recent predominantly political analysis of the Considérations. At the same time, this article points to a problem in the works on the Enlightenment by Jonathan Israel: his account stresses a one-dimensional continuum consisting of Radical, Moderate and Counter-Enlightenment. This invites Israel to place the combined religious, political and philosophical views of each thinker on one of these three points. His scheme runs into trouble when a thinker with moderate religious and political views produces radical philosophical concepts. Montesquieu's Considérations is a case in point. (shrink)

During the 1970s, monetarism and the new classical macroeconomics ushered in an era of neoliberal economic policymaking. Keynesian economics was pushed aside. It was almost forgotten that when Keynesian thinking had dominated economic policymaking in the middle decades of the twentieth century, it had coincided with postwar economic reconstruction in both Europe and Japan, and the unprecedented prosperity and stable growth of the 1950s and 1960s. The global financial crisis of 2007-2009 and the recession that followed changed all that. Influential (...) voices in both academic economics and amongst policy-makers and commentators began to remind us how useful Keynesian ways of thinking could be, especially in coming to terms with our current economic predicaments. When politicians across the globe were confronted with economic crisis, they introduced pragmatic and workable measures that bore all the hallmarks of Keynesianism. This book is about the fall and rise of Keynesian economics.Eatwell and Milgate range widely across the landscape that defines their subject matter. They consider how powerful Keynesian ideas can be when applied to past and present economic problems. They show how helpful these ideas are in explaining why we came to find ourselves in the disorder we are in. They examine where and how the analytical and methodological foundations of conventional macroeconomic wisdom went wrong. They set out a blueprint for an alternative that provides a clearer, more consistent, and more applicable approach to understanding how markets work. They also highlight the interpretive shortcomings that have come to characterize Keynes scholarship itself. They do all of this within the context of a provocative reconsideration of some of the most pressing economic problems that confront financial markets and the global economy today. They conclude that Keynesian ideas are not just for crises, but for constructive economic policy making at all times. (shrink)

The fall of the Soviet Union is analysed in conceptual terms, drawing on Reinhart Koselleck’s Begriffsgeschichte. The author seeks to interpret the instrumental role of the concepts perestrojka, glasnost´, reform, revolution, socialist pluralism, and acceleration in the Soviet collapse. The semantics and pragmatics are related to a wider intellectual and political context, and the conceptual perspective is used to help explain the progress of events. The author argues that the common notion of the reform policy concepts as clichés is (...) not valid. (shrink)

This timely book provides a critical look at the profession's rise and subsequent fall.

The fall of the Berlin Wall in October 1989 bears a striking resonance with the biblical fracturing of the curtain in the Jerusalem temple. It presaged the death of the post-war dispensation of Church-state relations characterised by a Church that was, in the main, subservient, acquiescent and complicit to the apartheid regime in South Africa, as well as the oppressive one-party state regimes north of the Limpopo. As the Berlin Wall collapsed, the dispensation characterised by either neutrality or docility (...) and co-option of the Church to the Apartheid and Independent states gave way to the birth of a 'prophetic' Church, which would not only gain a new lease on life, but would become a robust interlocutor of the post-Cold War state. The latter is exemplified by historical signposts such as the Rustenburg Declaration, the Pastoral letter of the Zambia Catholic Bishops Conference and the Pastoral letter by the Catholic Bishops of Malawi, among others. This paper is an analytical desktop study, which will be based on the published literature. (shrink)

Is there more to? good science? than explaining novel facts? Social interaction within scientific communities plays a pivotal role in defining acceptable research practices. This article explores the connection between research outcomes and the socio-cultural environment they are constructed in by developing an agent-based computational model of scientific communities. Agent-to-agent interaction is added to a system of knowledge production inspired by the work of Lakatos on scientific research programs as an important factor guiding the actions of researchers. Simulation results show (...) that early in scientific inquiry, when there are new phenomena to explain, the research community is fragmented and scientists prefer to rely on their own talents in conducting research. Over time, consensus emerges in the form of a dominate research program which utilizes a mixture of past and concurrent approaches. This result illustrates Kuhn's notion of the rise and fall of scientific paradigms. (shrink)

In the ten years following the publication of Galileo Galilei's Discorsi e dimostrazioni matematiche intorno a due nuove scienze , the new science of motion was intensely debated in Italy, France and northern Europe. Although Galileo's theories were interpreted and reworked in a variety of ways, it is possible to identify some crucial issues on which the attention of natural philosophers converged, namely the possibility of complementing Galileo's theory of natural acceleration with a physical explanation of gravity; the legitimacy of (...) Galileo's methods of proof and of his theory of the composition of continuous magnitudes; and the adequacy of the experimental evidence in favor of his theory.Through his published works and his correspondence, Marin Mersenne contributed in a significant way to each of these discussions. In the following, I shall provide a sketch of Mersenne's multiple engagement with the new science of motion, while trying to account for his growing skepticism concerning Galileo's law of free fall. Whereas in the 1630s, Mersenne still firmly believed in the validity of this law and tried to devise experimental and mathematical proofs in its favor, in the 1640s he developed serious doubts regarding the possibility of constructing an exact science of motion. As we shall see, Mersenne's evolving attitude sheds an interesting light on his views concerning the relation between physics and mathematics.---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ----------------------------------------------------. (shrink)

This is a review of Raymond Martin and John Barresi's The Rise and Fall of Soul and Self: An Intellectual History of Personal Identity (Columbia University Press, 2006).

In this essay, I will scrutinize the differences between Galileo’s and Huygens’s demonstrations of free fall, which can be found respectively in the Discorsi and the Horologium, from a mathematical, representational and methodological perspective. I argue that more can be learnt from such an analysis than the thesis that Huygens re-styled Galilean mechanics which is a communis opinio. I shall argue that the differences in their approach on free fall highlight a significantly different mathematical and methodological outlook.

A history of the Atomic Bomb from Marie Curie to Hiroshima. “I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds” — Oppenheimer quoting the Bhagavad Gita after witnessing the successful demonstration of the atom bomb. The bomb, which killed an estimated 140,000 civilians in Hiroshima and destroyed the countryside for miles around, was one of the defining moments in world history. That mushroom cloud cast a terrifying shadow over the contemporary world and continues to do so today. But how could this (...) have happened? What led to the creation of such a weapon of mass destruction? From the moment scientists contemplated the destructive potential of splitting the atom, the role of science changed. Ethical and moral dilemmas faced all those who realized the implications of their research. Before the Fall-Out charts the chain of events from Marie Curie’s scientific breakthrough through the many colourful characters such as Einstein, Robert Oppenheimer and Lord Rutherford, whose discoveries contributed to the bomb. The story of the atomic bomb spans 50 years of prolific scientific innovation, turbulent politics, foreign affairs and world-changing history. Through personal stories of exile, indecision and soul-searching, to charges of collaboration, spying and deceit, Diana Preston presents the human side of an unstoppable programme with a lethal outcome. (shrink)

Psycholinguistics re-emerged in an almost explosive fashion during the 1950s and 1960s. It then underwent an equally abrupt decline as an independent sub-discipline. This paper charts this fall and identifies five general factors which, it is argued, were responsible for its demise. These are: (a) an uncompromisingly strong version of nativism; (b) a growing isolation of psycholinguistics from the body psychology; (c) a preference for formal theory over empirical data; (d) several abrupt modifications in the Standard Theory in linguistics; (...) and (e) a failure to appreciate the strong commitment to functionalism that characterizes experimental psychology. In short, what looked like a revolution two decades ago turned out to be merely a local reformation that occurred along side of and largely independent from the real revolution in the cognitive sciences. (shrink)

Galileo's refutation of the speed-distance law of fall in his Two New Sciences is routinely dismissed as a moment of confused argumentation. We urge that Galileo's argument correctly identified why the speed-distance law is untenable, failing only in its very last step. Using an ingenious combination of scaling and self-similarity arguments, Galileo found correctly that bodies, falling from rest according to this law, fall all distances in equal times. What he failed to recognize in the last step is (...) that this time is infinite, the result of an exponential dependence of distance on time. Instead, Galileo conflated it with the other motion that satisfies this ‘equal time’ property, instantaneous motion. (shrink)

Recent discussions on the political role of some 20th Century philosophers and their ideas, from Heidegger to Sartre and Lukacs, offer some new venues for our analysis of the similar role played by some of the classical figures in the history of modem philosophy. We have attempted to review some relevant aspects of Fichte’s philosophy, in particular as to their possible influence on the war supporting ideology created by German intellectuals at the outbreak of the World War I - so-called (...) ideas of Fall 1914.Des discussions récentes sur le rôle politique de certains philosophes du XXe siècle et de leurs idées, de Heidegger à Sartre et Lukacs, offrent de nouvelles avenues pour I’analyse du role similaire qu’auraient joué quelques figures classiques de I’histoire modeme de la philosophie. Nous nous sommes penché sur quelques aspects pertinents de la philosophie fichtéenne, en particulier sur ceux qui serapportent à son influence possible sur l’idéologie belliciste défendue par les intellectuels allemands au début de la Première Guerre mondiale, connue en tant qu’idées d’Automne 1914. (shrink)

Dionysius Lardner rose to prominence in the 1830s as a popular scientific writer, lecturer and British literary figure. He became popular by promoting the ideals of scientific self-education, technological progress, and the practical applicability of science. His rapid fall from public favour after 1840 partly resulted from his involvement in a marital scandal; prior to that scandal, however, his character had provoked satire, and his caution and even pessimism about some technological prospects had offended the confident hopes of the (...) audiences of that time, confident hopes which Lardner had helped to create. (shrink)

I have argued elsewhere that the traditional Augustinian account of the fall is conceptually defective. It offers causal explanations for the first instance of willing evil which violate affirmations of divine goodness and justice integral to Christian thought. Augustine is the most influential spokesperson for the conviction that the first human pair initiated fallenness on the earth by decisions and actions they took within time though indeed very near to time’s beginning. A supporting account, embellished imaginatively by the tradition, (...) enlarges the context to embrace a prior choice of evil by Satan early in his angelic career. The narrative structure of the Genesis tale of Adam and Eve, mistakenly read as a kind of history, converts easily into a doctrine of the fall as an event in time preceded and precipitated by other events in time regarded as its causes. The allure of this causal explanation arises from our natural wish to “understand” how the fall could occur. But by attributing the first sin to angelic or human pride, or collaterally to a supposed imperfection in the first humans as created, Augustine unwittingly shifts the ultimate responsibility for moral evil onto God. This makes creaturely freedom and responsibility into empty notions, thereby subverting the intentionality of the religious belief in fallenness. (shrink)

This essay is a critique of Derrida's ethical works, using Camus's last novella The Fall as a critical sounding board. It argues that a danger pertains to any such highly self-reflexive position as Derrida's: a danger that Camus identified in The Fall, and staged in his character, Jean-Baptiste Clamence. Clamence is a successful Parisian lawyer, on top of his personal and professional life, whose equanimity is troubled after he is the unwitting passer-by as a young woman suicides one (...) night on the Seine. After this time, he comes to consider all his former virtues as concealed vices. He also becomes acutely aware of what he terms the 'duplicity' of human beings as such. In Part I, I consider how Clamence's fall from innocence can be read 'with' Derrida's deconstructive registration of a 'double bind' pertaining to our standing vis-á-vis what he terms 'logocentrism'. I argue that Derrida's is a post-lapsarian philosophy, which challenges all attempts to construct closed conceptual systems that would confer an epistemic and/or moral certitude upon their expositors. In Part II, I then enter into a more detailed exposition of Derrida's 'later' works broaching friendship, the invitation, the gift, and other 'matters moral'. I read these texts in the light of an examination of what is involved, for Camus, in being a 'judge-penitent' (what Clamence in The Fall calls his profession). I suggest that Derrida runs the risk of a certain 'puritanism of difference' in his moral reflections, which defend the aporetic formulation: 'tout autre est tout autre' [every other is every bit other] (The Gift of Death). The problem is that, while Derrida's position allows one (everywhere) to say what one is against, it problematizes any affirmative moral stance. Like Clamence, who assumes the right to judge everyone else because he has subjected himself to a severe penitence, I suggest that we have a right to wonder whether Derrida's deconstructive critique of metaphysics can validate only endless repetitions of itself. Key Words: Camus • Derrida • ethics • The Fall • innocence • 'puritanism of difference. (shrink)

This article surveys the discursive turns of a conventional historical trope: the change in the valence of alcohol from happy to miserable. This change is commonly told as the story of a golden age of drinking and a fall into addiction . This fall is variously dated from the fifteenth to the late nineteenth centuries . Is this real historical change or only nominal change? Was alcoholism unknown in previous ages or has it always been around? Certain material (...) factors may have impeded the visibility of alcoholism. The theory of nominal change is involved with factors like conspiratorial behavior, the conditions of scientific knowledge , the baffles of categorization . Real change involves various facets of modernity and industrial capitalism: individualism and privacy, temperance, respectability, and rigid class formation, etcetera. But this shift is also a movement across class lines, from middle to lower-class drinkers. (shrink)

Researchers tracking social trends have discovered a remarkable labor-saving device called the computer. They sit down before the instrument, call up a search engine, enter a key word that they believe represents the trend, and count the number of articles aroused by that key word. They track these numbers over a period of time and even graph them. Those who dislike a certain concept are happy to report the concept's rise and fall. Such has occurred with two articles, one (...) of which appeared in CQ, reporting the rise and fall of medical futility. We are impressed with the power of this research methodology, which seems capable of eliminating concepts, even when our own more labor-intensive yet apparently less perceptive daily experience finds evidence of their existence all around us. (shrink)

© The Author 2017. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Scots Philosophical Association and the University of St Andrews. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com...The bold aim of Hud Hudson's remarkable book is to show that, for all we know, an unabashedly literal account of the Christian doctrines of The Fall and Original Sin is entirely compatible with a modern scientific worldview. This reconciliation occurs by means of the Hypertime Hypothesis—more on that later. Hudson (...) begins with a brief historical survey of how these doctrines, along with the doctrine of Original Guilt, have been understood. He then offers a short survey of how evidence from geology, palaeoanthropology, genetics, and evolutionary biology appears to count against them.In ch. 3, Hudson sets out some concessive strategies that have been developed by defenders of these doctrines to make them more palatable to the scientifically informed mind.... (shrink)

Over the past thirty years, the disappearance, if not the death, of the intellectual in France has been the focus of significant conversation and debate. Yet a good bit earlier, two writers who epitomized that very figure of the intellectual, Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, in works written after their bitter break, seemed to have already sensed this decline. The present essay explores what Camus's novel La Chute [The fall] and Sartre's autobiography Les Mots [The words] share thematically and, (...) in particular, how both works anticipate the fall of the French intellectual. (shrink)

"Here is a unique and penetrating postmodernist invitation to reread Pascal's Pensées. With a full control on two centuries of Pascalian hermeneutics, Sara Melzer leads her readers into a passionate quest far beyond the worn-out search for a paleontological reconstruction of the Pensées's hypothetical final form. She rightly and deeply understands Pascal's writing--écriture--as the complex story of the "Fall of Truth into language." Such a perspective gives to Pascal's fragments a rejuvenated life, a newness, a dramatic and powerful voice (...) for our own culture. In brief, a welcome breeze of fresh air in the Pascalian world!" --Edouard Morot-Sir, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill "By approaching Pascal's Pensées from the point of view of contemporary critical theory, Melzer sheds new light on this well-known work. Her argument is clear, lucid, and cogent. She has a firm grasp of the major issues at stake in debates among literary critics. I think this is an important work that will be of interest not only to Pascal specialists but also to people who work in the general area of literary theory.... One of the genuine strengths of the book is the author's ability to discern the theological implications of issues that preoccupy literary theorists. This is particularly important at a time when students of theology and religion are becoming more and more interested in literary theory. They will find this analysis of Pascal very suggestive." --Mark Taylor, Williams College. (shrink)

Reflecting on the fall or failure of sovereignty, this essay considers Derrida’s recent work under the heading of auto-immunity, and develops some consequences of that work, first of all in the political sphere (especially around democracy), but also some more general consequences around conceptuality itself.

City of Nineveh.—New parties in Israel.—Disorganization of Israel.—Zechariah’s Prophecy.—League against Judæa.—Sufferings of Judah.—Isaiah encouragesAhaz.—Fall of Damascus.—Religious character of Ahaz.—Sargon and the Philistines.—First invasion of Shalmaneser.—Revolt of Judah and of Ephraim.—Final transplanting of Israel.—Anticipations of Isaiah and Micah.—Decline of prophecy in Israel.—Rough dates of certain prophecies.

This paper examines the rise and fall of voluptuousness as a beauty ideal in mid- nineteenth century America. It argues that the rise and fall of the fuller figured woman can be traced to shifting economic, social, and medical beliefs that in turn, affected perceptions about fatness‟ relationship to class, morality, health, and beauty.