The purpose of this paper is to articulate a new perspective on British multi-faith religious education that both complements and, in part, subsumes existing critiques. My argument, while controversial, is straightforward: it is that British religious education has misrepresented the nature of religion in efforts to commend itself as contributing to the social aims of education, as these are typically framed in liberal democratic societies. Contemporary multi-faith religious education is placed in context and its underlying theological and philosophical commitments identified (...) and criticised. It is concluded that current representations of religion in British religious education are limited in their capacity to challenge racism and religious intolerance, chiefly because they are conceptually ill equipped to develop respect for difference. (shrink)

In a recent article in this journal, Heidi Giannini (2017) has argued that the Christian doctrines of love and of hope require Christians to endorse universal, unconditional forgiveness, understood in terms of the renunciation of “negative reactive attitudes.” She also addresses criticisms of this interpretation. It is argued that Giannini has failed to provide a Christian justification for universal, unconditional forgiveness. Part of the problem is that she espouses a definition of forgiveness and an understanding of the nature of forgiveness (...) that, as a result of neglecting the teaching of the New Testament, exhibits a number of incoherencies and theological weaknesses. Her account is also vulnerable to philosophical and moral criticisms of a serious nature. (shrink)

This article considers the proposals of the final report of the Commission on Religious Education (CoRE 2018) and its controversial conclusion that the law should require religious education to include teaching about non-religious worldviews alongside religions, presumably in equal measure. Attention is given both to Trevor Cooling’s recent defence of CoRE’s proposals against already expressed criticisms and to additional criticisms, that of the abstract nature of a worldview as a highly ramified, philosophical concept, which is educationally ill-suited to the interests (...) and intellectual capabilities of many pupils, and that of the failure of the proposals to indicate in what ways they overcome current systemic weaknesses. It is concluded that religious education should not be reconceptualised as the study of religious and non-religious worldviews nor should it adopt a framework that construes religions primarily as worldviews. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to articulate a new perspective on British multi-faith religious education that both complements and, in part, subsumes existing critiques. My argument, while controversial, is straightforward: it is that British religious education has misrepresented the nature of religion in efforts to commend itself as contributing to the social aims of education, as these are typically framed in liberal democratic societies. Contemporary multi-faith religious education is placed in context and its underlying theological and philosophical commitments identified (...) and criticised. It is concluded that current representations of religion in British religious education are limited in their capacity to challenge racism and religious intolerance, chiefly because they are conceptually ill equipped to develop respect for difference. (shrink)

Patricia White has recently attempted to construct an ethically valid notion of forgiveness that will serve educational purposes and contribute to the moral development of pupils in schools. She distinguishes between a strict view that requires repentance before forgiveness, which she rejects, and a relaxed view that does not require repentance, which she endorses. In this reply I defend the strict view of forgiveness against her criticism and challenge the ethical propriety of the relaxed view. I shall argue that her (...) support for the relaxed view both runs counter to our deepest moral intuitions and serves to undermine the moral law and moral endeavour. (shrink)

Patricia White has recently attempted to construct an ethically valid notion of forgiveness that will serve educational purposes and contribute to the moral development of pupils in schools. She distinguishes between a strict view that requires repentance before forgiveness, which she rejects, and a relaxed view that does not require repentance, which she endorses. In this reply I defend the strict view of forgiveness against her criticism and challenge the ethical propriety of the relaxed view. I shall argue that her (...) support for the relaxed view both runs counter to our deepest moral intuitions and serves to undermine the moral law and moral endeavour. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to articulate a Christian model of social and political engagement and to illustrate its appropriateness and fruitfulness through its application to the post-conflict situation in Northern Ireland. The argument is structured around three propositions, the implications of which are explored in a final fourth section: (1) that political forgiveness is an inappropriate model of Christian social and political engagement; (2) that Christians should seek justice/ righteousness in the public realm; (3) that Christian commitment and (...) practice are contextual, and, consequently, the practice of righteousness in Northern Ireland must take account of and relate to the particular history of Northern Ireland; and finally (4) an account is provided of the form Christian righteousness could take in post-conflict Northern Ireland. (shrink)

Few studies have examined how trait emotion dysregulation relates to momentary affective experiences and the emotion regulation strategies people use in daily life. In the current study, 112 c...

Forty years ago the majority of prospective teachers in the UK pursued a four year degree course (B.Ed). The situation has now dramatically changed. Most qualified teachers are graduates who gain a...

Religious education in Wales has not until recently received attention as an important topic of educational analysis and discussion. The reason for this is that throughout the nineteenth and twenti...

In a recent article, L. Philip Barnes critiques the Commission on Religious Education (CoRE) Final Report by scrutinising its text and by responding to my interpretation of that text. His particular, but not exclusive, focus is CoRE’s proposal that the idea of worldview should be central to RE. His conclusion is that: ‘The collective force of these criticisms counsels against implementing the proposals of CoRE. Religious education needs to look elsewhere than to a worldview curriculum to overcome its (...) current travails’. This article responds by arguing that Barnes fails to justify his conclusion because his critique does not meet the standards of a fair and responsible treatment of his chosen focal texts. In particular, it misrepresents and misinterprets the CoRE Report and overlooks the alternative interpretation that I and others offered. (shrink)

Philip Kitcher has proposed a theory of explanation based on the notion of unification. Despite the genuine interest and power of the theory, I argue here that the theory suffers from a fatal deficiency: It is intrinsically unable to account for the asymmetric structure of explanation, and thus ultimately falls prey to a problem similar to the one which beset Hempel's D-N model. I conclude that Kitcher is wrong to claim that one can settle the issue of an argument's (...) explanatory force merely on the basis of considerations about the unifying power of the argument pattern the argument instantiates. (shrink)

There has been for some years a feeling in the philosophical world in this country that we have had enough of the unproductive working of the treadmill of linguistics and of the new logic and that Metaphysics is at least not criminal, and even justifiable; notable justifications of Metaphysics are Professor Emmet's The Nature of Metaphysical Thinking and Professor Barnes” The Philosophical Predicament . But what is Metaphysics about? That, it seems to me, is a question which has to (...) be looked into far more carefully than it has been, before we can think of justifying Metaphysics . “About the Whole” would appear to be the answer which no would-be metaphysician can avoid, however frightened he may be of being sent into a concentration camp by his Ayerian colleagues for giving it. What is this Whole and how is it to be got? Judging at least by most nineteenth-century metaphysics, it would seem that the Whole is some kind of totality , comparable, save in respect of comprehensiveness, to the totality say which Physics deals with, and that it is got by reflecting on the nature of any knowing and/or on all the branches of knowledge and their relations to each other; Metaphysics, we should conclude, is a synthesis or construct both crowning, and confirmed by, knowledge. (shrink)

Much of Barnes’s critique depends on a misunderstanding of my position and, where we do substantively disagree, Barnes’s arguments fail to take into account important distinctions. As a result, his arguments are not persuasive. In my reply, I begin by clarifying my position and then proceed to address specific points of disagreement, identifying those distinctions that Barnes needs to take into account in critiquing my view.

In this article I attempt to address three positions on forgiveness that could be encouraged in schools. They are the strict view defended by Philip Barnes, the relaxed view promoted by Patricia White and the idea of forgiving the unforgivable discussed by Jacques Derrida. I shall examine the tradition from which they emerge and explore some of their problems. This will lead me to a rehabilitation of what is other to that tradition (within and without)—an other that can (...) serve as a corrective to the problems of those positions. I shall conclude the article with an exposition of the radicalisation of the teaching of forgiveness if we focus on the perspective of the one who seeks forgiveness. (shrink)

In this article I attempt to address three positions on forgiveness that could be encouraged in schools. They are the strict view defended by Philip Barnes, the relaxed view promoted by Patricia White and the idea of forgiving the unforgivable discussed by Jacques Derrida. I shall examine the tradition from which they emerge and explore some of their problems. This will lead me to a rehabilitation of what is other to that tradition (within and without)—an other that can (...) serve as a corrective to the problems of those positions. I shall conclude the article with an exposition of the radicalisation of the teaching of forgiveness if we focus on the perspective of the one who seeks forgiveness. (shrink)

This paper examines the recent shift towards the dominance of the study of philosophy of religion, ethics and critical thinking within religious education in Britain. It explores the impact of the critical realist model, advocated by Andrew Wright and Philip Barnes, in response to prior models of phenomenological religious education, in order to expose the ways in which both approaches can lead to a distorted understanding of the nature of religion. Although the writing of Emmanuel Levinas has been (...) used in support of the critical realist model by Wright, I will consider how his and Slavoj Žižek's writings on the nature of religion might challenge the dominance of the critical realist approach and provide a conceptual framework through which it might be possible to develop an alternative approach to religious education that attends to the complexity, ambiguity and demanding nature of engaging with religious traditions. (shrink)

Philip Pettit offers a new insight into moral psychology. He shows that attachments such as love, and certain virtues such as honesty, require their characteristic behaviours not only as things actually are, but also in cases where things are different from how they actually are. He explores the implications of this idea for key moral issues.

In recent decades, economists have played an active role in shaping public policy by publicly recommending the adoption of certain policies. These recommendations are often based on normative assumptions that are not the product of economic analysis; nor are they shared by the laypeople to whom these recommendations are made. Inducing people to adopt public policies for reasons that are neither the product of expertise, nor shared by the people, is a form of manipulation that violates the ideals of a (...) liberal democratic society. Thus, the economists’ recommendations constitute an abuse of their expertise. (shrink)

This was the first cross-over book into the history of science written by an historian of economics. It shows how 'history of technology' can be integrated with the history of economic ideas. The analysis combines Cold War history with the history of postwar economics in America and later elsewhere, revealing that the Pax Americana had much to do with abstruse and formal doctrines such as linear programming and game theory. It links the literature on 'cyborg' to economics, an element missing (...) in literature to date. The treatment further calls into question the idea that economics has been immune to postmodern currents, arguing that neoclassical economics has participated in the deconstruction of the integral 'self'. Finally, it argues for an alliance of computational and institutional themes, and challenges the widespread impression that there is nothing else besides American neoclassical economic theory left standing after the demise of Marxism. (shrink)

More Heat Than Light is a history of how physics has drawn some inspiration from economics and also how economics has sought to emulate physics, especially with regard to the theory of value. It traces the development of the energy concept in Western physics and its subsequent effect upon the invention and promulgation of neoclassical economics. Any discussion of the standing of economics as a science must include the historical symbiosis between the two disciplines. Starting with the philosopher Emile Meyerson's (...) discussion of the relationship between notions of invariance and causality in the history of science, the book surveys the history of conservation principles in the Western discussion of motion. Recourse to the metaphors of the economy are frequent in physics, and the concepts of value, motion, and body reinforced each other throughout the development of both disciplines, especially with regard to practices of mathematical formalisation. However, in economics subsequent misuse of conservation principles led to serious blunders in the mathematical formalisation of economic theory. The book attempts to provide the reader with sufficient background in the history of physics in order to appreciate its theses. The discussion is technically detailed and complex, and familiarity with calculus is required. (shrink)

Since its publication in 1966, The Triumph of the Therapeutic has been hailed as a work of genuine brilliance, one of those books whose insights uncannily anticipate cultural developments and whose richness of argumentation reorients entire fields of inquiry. This special fortieth-anniversary edition of Philip Rieff’s masterpiece, the first volume in ISI Books’ new Background series, includes an introduction by Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn and essays on the text by historians Eugene McCarraher and Wilfred McClay and philosopher Stephen Gardner.

In this short, elegant book, Philip Kitcher distills the case for Darwinian evolutionary theory and its implications in a clear and forceful way. Kitcher shows how the alleged rivals to Darwinism, like Intelligent Design, are essentially scientifically bankrupt - and that scientific discoveries, including Darwin's, pose a genuine problem for religious faith, one that neither Darwin's opponents nor his militant defenders have satisfactorily resolved.

Based on a survey of editors, publishers and staff members of 300 newspapers, this work documents the ethical confusion in the American press in the wake of the Watergate scandal and the Pentagon Papers controversy. It provides an analytical and historical framework to show how the press reached this point and argues for an ethical audit to give publications an independent check on their moral condition.

Of course, as scholars have long known, this example has serious limitations. For one thing, a substantial form, as the scholastics understood it, is much more dynamic than a mere shape. For example, the substantial form of an oak tree somehow explains how and why an oak tree can do everything that it does. So the substantial form of an oak tree could not be something as simple or crude as its shape. Nevertheless, the example of the bronze statue does (...) have the virtue of illustrating one of the chief advantages of hylomorphism as a philosophy of the human person. Although we can talk about the bronze and the shape of the statue, respectively, it still seems correct to say that the statue is exactly one thing, not two things. Likewise, although we can talk about the matter and the form of a human being, the hylomorphist insists that a human being is exactly one thing, not two things accidentally conjoined. (shrink)

Is there a single right interpretation for such cultural phenomena as works of literature, visual artworks, works of music, the self, and legal and sacred texts? In these essays, almost all written especially for this volume, twenty leading philosophers pursue different answers to this question by examining the nature of interpretation and its objects and ideals. The fundamental conflict between positions that universally require the ideal of a single admissible interpretation and those that allow a multiplicity of some admissible interpretations (...) leads to a host of engrossing questions explored in these essays: Does multiplism invite interpretive anarchy? Can opposing interpretations be jointly defended? Should competition between contending interpretations be understood in terms of truth or reasonableness, appropriateness, aptness, or the like? Is interpretation itself an essentially contested concept? Does interpretive activity seek truth or aim at something else as well? Should one focus on interpretive acts rather than interpretations? Should admissible interpretations be fixed by locating intentions of a historical or hypothetical creator, or neither? What bearing does the fact of the historical situatedness of cultural entities have on their identities? The contributors are Annette Barnes, Noël Carroll, Stephen Davies, Susan Feagin, Alan Goldman, Charles Guignon, Chhanda Gupta, Garry Hagberg, Michael Krausz, Peter Lamarque, Jerrold Levinson, Joseph Margolis, Rex Martin, Jitendra Mohanty, David Novitz, Philip Percival, Torsten Pettersson, Robert Stecker, Laurent Stern, and Paul Thom. (shrink)

This paper reviews the history of psychological investigations of unconscious perception and summarizes the current status of experimental research in this area of investigation. The research findings described in the paper illustrate how it is possible to distinguish experimentally between conscious and unconscious perception. The most successful experimental strategy has been to show that a stimulus can have qualitatively different consequences on cognitive and affective reactions depending on whether it was consciously or unconsciously perceived. In addition, recent studies of patients (...) undergoing general anaesthesia have shown that the effects of stimuli perceived unconsciously during surgery can last for approximately 24 hours. Taken together, the results of these recent psychological investigations provide empirical support for the importance of unconsciously perceived information in determining cognitive and affective reactions. (shrink)

In The Paradox of Predictivism I tried to demonstrate that there is an intimate relationship between predictivism and epistemic pluralism. Here I respond to various published criticisms of some of the key points from Paradox from David Harker, Jarret Leplin, and Clark Glymour. Foci include my account of predictive novelty, the claim that predictivism has two roots, the prediction per se and predictive success, and my account of why Mendeleev’s predictions carried special weight in confirming the Periodic Law of the (...) Elements. (shrink)

The contemporary sociology of morality is a form of descriptive ethics that shrinks away from any sort of prescriptive ethics. Building on the moral philosophies of John Dewey, and also of Alasdair MacIntyre and Paul Ricoeur, and in dialogue with recent work by Stefan Bargheer, this article proposes a more ambitious program of critical social ethics that connects concerns with character and the common good but tempers them with attention to alienation and oppression.

Modern International Relations theory has consistently underestimated the depth of the problem of anarchy in world politics. Contemporary theories of globalisation bring this into bold relief. From this perspective, the complexity of transboundary networks and hierarchies, economic sectors, ethnic and religious ties, civil and cross-border wars, and internally disaggregated and transnationally connected state actors, leads to a complex and multidimensional restructuring of the global, the local and the uneven connections in between. We ought to abandon the idea of ‘high’ and (...) ‘low’ politics, ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ once and for all. This does not remove the problem of anarchy but rather deepens it, involving multidimensional tensions and contradictions variously described as ‘functional differentiation’, ‘multiscalarity’, ‘fragmegration’, disparate ‘landscapes’, the ‘new security dilemma’ and ‘neomedievalism’. Approaching anarchy from the perspective of plural competing claims to authority and power forces... (shrink)

This book develops a metaphysics which is missing when trust is ordered around economic theories and institutions.

Imaginative resistance refers to a perceived inability or unwillingness to enter into fictional worlds that portray deviant moralities (Gendler, 2000): we can all easily imagine that dragons exist, but many people feel incapable of imagining fictional worlds in which morality works differently. Although this phenomenon has received much attention from philosophers, no one has attempted to operationalize the construct in a self-report scale. In Study 1, we developed the Imaginative Resistance Scale (IRS), investigated its relationship to theoretically related constructs, and (...) confirmed its structure and reliability (rα = 0.92) in a large sample. In Study 2, we asked participants to rate scenarios expected to provoke imaginative resistance and predicted these ratings from the IRS and its validity measures. IRS scores accounted for variability in ease of imagining these scenarios over and above gender, political orientation, and three related measures. The results are discussed in terms of theories of imaginative resistance and directions for future research. (shrink)