Otte :165–177, 2009) and Pruss :400–415, 2012) have produced counterexamples to Plantinga’s famous free will defence against the logical version of the problem of evil. The target of this criticism is the possibility of universal transworld depravity, which is crucial to Plantinga’s defence. In this paper, we argue that there is a simpler and more plausible free will defence that does not require the possibility of universal transworld depravity or the truth of counterfactuals of creaturely freedom. We assume only that (...) libertarianism is possibly true and that God’s existence is consistent with the existence of free agents who never go wrong. We conclude the paper by explaining how our defence may be able to succeed without assuming, in a way that is consistent with compatibilism. (shrink)
Has the diversity of corporate boards of directors improved? Should it? What role does diversity play in reducing corporate wrongdoing? Will diversity result in a more focused board of directors or more board autonomy? Examining the state of Tennessee as a case study, the authors collected data on the board composition of publicly traded corporations and compared those data to an original study conducted in 1995. Data indicate only a modest improvement in board diversity. This article discusses reasons for the (...) scarcity of women on boards and concludes that, to enhance strategic decisions, board membership should reflect the corporation''s consumer population. Thus, women are a critical but overlooked resource. Areas for future research are also considered. (shrink)
This paper applies Alain Badiou’s ethic-of-truths to the context of business ethics. Business ethics is redefined as self-regarding, aspirational, and internal to a given firm. Firms are defined as sites. The event is a radical innovation experienced by a given firm. Ethics emerges as the challenge of fidelity to the truths engendered by the event.
Perhaps Kierkegaard’s most notorious—though pseudonymous—claim is that truth is subjectivity. This claim is commonly elaborated to mean that faith is a “how” and not a “what” . I show through a discussion of examples taken from throughout Kierkegaard’s writings that Kierkegaard accepts a basic insight of Kant’s philosophy: each experience implicitly includes an underlying unity—the object—that does not itself appear. Both Kant and Kierkegaard emphasize the importance of a “continuity of impressions,” which gives experience its unified structure beyond changing superficial (...) appearances. I show that Kierkegaardian faith requires an object in just this Kantian sense: the object of faith does not directly appear but is implicitly present in all experience. For Kant, this type of object is not “beyond” experience but is posited by reason as the unity of experience as a whole. In this respect at least, Kierkegaard’s account of faith shows similarities not just with Kant’s practical philosophy but with his metaphysics as well. (shrink)
There is a sense in which poetry can re-inscribe humans in their natural surroundings, but language—even poetic language—is also always problematic. In conversation with and in response to recent works by David Abram, I will delineate at least two ways in which poetic language separates and distinguishes humans from nature. I also argue for the importance of what is implicit or invisible. Language is a mode of human responsibility for the world, not just a sign or result of being part (...) of it. (shrink)
I object to Merold Westphal’s characterization in Kierkegaard’s Concept of Faith of faith as “against reason.” I argue that Kierkegaard scholars emphasize the tension between faith and reason more than Kierkegaard does, affirming and perpetuating a broader antagonism in our own cultural climate. I suggest that the view of faith as “transforming vision” developed by M. Jamie Ferreira and others makes better sense of the different facets of faith pointed out by Westphal and the strengths of his account while avoiding (...) conceptual and practical problems with the account Westphal has recently offered. (shrink)
Discourse, Figure signifies an event. I mean this in a variety of ways. There has been a recent event: the publication of an English translation of Jean-François Lyotard’s first major book. Its translation is an event forty years delayed and signifies the closing of a major gap in the translation of Lyotard’s work. Of course, both “signify” and “event” are important words for Lyotard. Discourse, Figure’s goal is to “signify the other of signification” (2011, 13, emphasis his). The question of (...) the representability of events that concerns Lyotard throughout his career originates in Discourse, Figure. I use these two words to guide my review. First I outline the events of the book: its context and its argument. .. (shrink)
So far aesthetics has played a limited role in our understanding of business activity, focused mainly on evaluating product quality and the character qualities of the firm that produced them We draw on Heidegger’s fuller account of aesthetic value to show how a firm—like a work of art – can disclose the way human projects and technologies are already at work in a given context. In this way, we show that firms play an essential role in human self-understanding—a role that (...) Heidegger assigns primarily to works of art. We then apply the Heideggerian approach to the contemporary turn to artisanal products such as personalized handcrafts, craft beer and the “third wave” coffee movement. (shrink)
Does telling a story imply a fictional world in which that story takes place? In contemporary philosophy, “fictional worlds” are one solution to the problem of how there can be true and false judgments about fictional characters. Fictional-world accounts generally disregard whether facts are explicitly stated in the story or not; it is enough for them to be logically implied. And yet, as Ruth Lorand has observed, whether a fact is stated or merely implied changes the meaning of a story. (...) “Imagine that the original text contains the following sentence: ‘Daisy Miller is human and as such she was born to human parents.’ Wouldn’t.. (shrink)
It is commonplace to view the rigor of the mathematics in Euclid's Elements in the way an experienced teacher views the work of an earnest beginner: respectable relative to an early stage of development, but ultimately flawed. Given the close connection in content between Euclid's Elements and high-school geometry classes, this is understandable. Euclid, it seems, never realized what everyone who moves beyond elementary geometry into more advanced mathematics is now customarily taught: a fully rigorous proof cannot rely on geometric (...) intuition. In his arguments he seems to call illicitly upon our understanding of how objects like triangles and circles behave rather than grounding everything rigorously in axioms.Though widespread, the attitude is in a historical sense puzzling. For over two millenia, mathematicians of all levels studied the arguments in Elements and found nothing substantial missing. The book, on the contrary, represented the limit of mathematical explicitness. It served as the paradigm for careful and exact reasoning. How it could enjoy this reputation for so long is mysterious if careful and exact reasoning demands that all inferences be grounded in a modern axiomatic theory in the way Hilbert did in his famous Foundations of Geometry. By these standards, Euclid's work is deeply flawed. The holes in his arguments are not minor and excusable, but massive and cryptic.With his book Euclid and His Twentieth Century Rivals, Nathaniel Miller makes substantial progress in clearing this mystery up. The book is an explication of FG , a formal system of proof developed by Miller which reconstructs Euclid's deductions as essentially diagrammatic. The holes in Euclid's arguments are taken to appear precisely at those steps which are unintelligible without an accompanying geometric diagram. Interpreting the reasoning in the Elements in terms of a modern axiomatization , …. (shrink)
In this article, I focus on two moments of Nathaniel Kleitman's career, specifically that of his Mammoth Cave experiment in the 1930s and his consultation with the United States military in the 1940s–1950s. My interests in bringing these two moments of Kleitman's career together are to examine the role of nature and the social in his understanding of human sleep and the legacies these have engendered for sleep science and medicine in the present; more specifically, I am interested in (...) Kleitman's disallowance of napping in his scientific protocols, which may seem incidental until one apprehends the lack of napping as therapeutic treatment in modern sleep medicine. By forwarding a conception of historiography building on Raymond Williams’ “structures of feeling” and Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's philosophy of immanence, I show how the work of William Dement in the 1970s to found a medicine of sleep and the eclipse of biphasic sleeping patterns as a biological and social possibility is indebted to Kleitman's scientific work. The modification of sleep is also the modification of society itself; and, as Kleitman argued, the harnessing of nature can lead to the finer entrenchments of human nature and society. (shrink)
The cover image of Nathaniel Coleman’s Imagining and Making the World is a photo by Coleman of Carlo Scarpa’s Castelvecchio Museum renovation in Verona. It shows the skillful layering of elements from different eras assembled by Scarpa and the bridge that connects the upper floors of two buildings from different periods. Such skillful connecting of disparate things is rare. Yet this is what Coleman and his contributors have set out to do: connect architecture and utopia.Coleman himself seems to question (...) this enterprise. In his introduction he writes, “If the likelihood of achieving a utopian moment in architecture that is sustainable through time and occupation appears... unpromising, what possible claim could.. (shrink)
Two reasons are given for speaking of “reason” even where Kierkegaard’s pseudonym, Climacus, speaks of “understanding.” First, we are dealing with a significant contribution to a centuries-old discussion of an issue that goes by the name of “faith and reason.” Second, whereas Kant and Hegel sharply distinguish mere understanding from reason, no such distinction is at work in Kierkegaard’s text. At issue is the quite different distinction of unaided human reason and divine revelation. It is not just any notion of (...) reason that is the target of Kierkegaard’s critique, but an autonomous reason, independent of revelation, that claims hegemony over biblical faith in both its popular and academic forms. This hegemony expresses itself in both outright rejection of and radical reinterpretation of elements of biblical faith. (shrink)
Torporley's ‘Congestor analyticus’, completed in 1627 in the library of the Earl of Northumberland at Petworth, was seen by Rigaud in the 1830s among the mathematical manuscript collection of the Earl of Macclesfield. Torporley's additional copy of the introductory part, preserved at Sion College, has been used for the present report. Torporley's prime objective was the presentation of some of Harriot's work. His first example concerns a classical problem in number theory. The complete solution, by an inductive process based on (...) tables of differences, is given in a few folios of the British Library collection of Harriot manuscripts. Torporley's transcription and commentary contrast forcibly today with the immediate illuminating impact of Harriot's original. (shrink)
