Over ten years ago Professor A. E. Taylor pointed out that one of the most unfortunate effects of that philosophical conquest of England by Germany in the nineteenth century was the almost complete neglect of the great line of British moralists from Cumberland to Price. Little has been done since then to remedy this defect. There is a widespread study of Bishop Butler by students in our Universities, but as regards the other members of the series, there appear no signs (...) of a renaissance. The selections of Mr. Selby-Bigge are admirable, but they serve, as all selections from the authors of a period must, to focus attention on historical similarities, not to stimulate to an examination of individual philosophies. (shrink)
This volume examines themes that complicate the conventional economist's view of the world and thereby provide for a notably more complex, and humane, subject of study than the traditional Homo economicus. Written by economists and philosophers, these essays attempt to place neoclassical economic theory, especially conventional textbook micro-economic theory, in the broader context of other social sciences and modern economics. In doing so, the book aims to find the boundaries of economics and to define more sharply its relationship to other (...) kinds of inquiry. Though the widespread use of textbook microtheory in business, economic, and political analysis is a clear testament to its power, the restrictions and artificialities of neoclassical assumptions give cause for worry even to many economists. This book examines the extent to which the economist's paradigm - that man is characterized chiefly by self-interested goals and rational choice of means - is useful in studying traditional noneconomic fields such as philosophy, political theory, and rhetoric. It also looks at how insights from other disciplines are changing - and perhaps improving - the current practice of economics. (shrink)
The purpose of this study was to determine if an instrument could be developed to measure spiritual engagement. The study resulted in the Spiritual Engagement Instrument concept comprised of four factors that included the following: worship that explained 57.8% of the variance and Cronbach’s alpha of.94, meditation that explained 12.7% of the variance and Cronbach’s alpha of.96, fasting that explained 9.58% of the variance and Cronbach’s Alpha of.98, and rest that explained 5.16% of the variance and Cronbach’s alpha of.99. The (...) four factors together explain 85.24% of the variance. The four spiritual engagement scales within the Spiritual Engagement Instrument show significant correlation with other similar but different measures of spirituality, the Brief Multidimensional Measure of Religiousness/spirituality scale and Daily Spiritual Experience Scale, confirming convergent validity. A supplemental validation study was performed using CFA, p <.001, CFI =.98, TLI =.97, RMSEA =.06). This SpEI offers researchers a tool that might be used as a pre-/post-test measure in conjunction with a spiritual development program or to measure effects of the four factors of spiritual engagement with other social constructs such as job satisfaction, normative commitment, or leadership behaviors. Ethical behavior may be influenced by individual worldview and underlying religious practices, so the SpEI offers a validated instrument to study the cycle of behaviors, attitudes, and beliefs of spiritual practices that may influence ethics. (shrink)
ABSTRACT This article explores the relationship between Churchill’s view of Britain as the home of freedom and his broader conception of Western/european civilization. It considers: first, his attitude to Classical learning and culture; second, his experiences of European travel; and third, his attitude to the Bolsheviks as the barbaric antithesis of civilization. It is argued that his vision of the European future was linked both to his own experiences of free and civilized travel in the Nineteenth Century and a growing (...) scepticism about the speedier and more globalized locomotion of the Twentieth. Moreover, Churchill’s late-life commitment to the virtues of Classical learning, about which he had previously been sceptical, was connected to his post-WWII enthusiasm for European unity. He believed that a united Europe could act as a vehicle for spiritual and cultural values passed down from the ancient world which themselves had become a part of the continent’s Christian heritage. Although it has rightly been pointed out that Churchill was not a conventional religious believer, he still conceived ‘Christendom’ as a significant geopolitical space and he saw it as the spiritual inheritor of Greece and Rome. (shrink)
Philosophers’ intuitions about what constitutes autonomy are largely driven by the exemplars or paradigms that we recognize. There are indefinitely many exemplars, inasmuch as there are relatively private personae that serve as autonomy exemplars such as our parents, third grade teacher, or, for the megalomaniac, oneself. But among Western philosophers there are doubtless some exemplars that are widely shared and broadly influential. Philosophical exemplars include Socrates, Aristotle’s magnanimous man, Kant’s noumenal self that is perfectly attuned to the moral law, Mill’s (...) anti-authoritarian non-conformist, Marx’s manin-society, Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, and Sartre’s authentic youth who must decide whether to join the French resistance or stay at home for the sake of his mother. Exemplars from outside of philosophy include Antigone, Christ, Faust, Ibsen’s Enemy of the People, Winston Churchill, and even figures from popular culture such as the baseball player Ted Williams, the free spirited flower children of the 1960s, and practically any character that John Wayne ever played. (shrink)
Winston evaluates strategies that have been used by international human rights nongovernmental organizations in attempts to influence the behavior of multinational corporations.
In The Varieties of Reference, Gareth Evans argues that the content of perceptual experience is nonconceptual, in a sense I shall explain momentarily. More recently, in his book Mind and World, John McDowell has argued that the reasons Evans gives for this claim are not compelling and, moreover, that Evans’s view is a version of “the Myth of the Given”: More precisely, Evans’s view is alleged to suffer from the same sorts of problems that plague sense-datum theories of perception. In (...) particular, McDowell argues that perceptual experience must be within “the space of reasons,” that perception must be able to give us reasons for, that is, to justify, our beliefs about the world: And, according to him, no state that does not have conceptual content can be a reason for a belief. Now, there are many ways in which Evans’s basic idea, that perceptual content is nonconceptual, might be developed; some of these, I shall argue, would be vulnerable to the objections McDowell brings against him. But I shall also argue that there is a way of developing it that is not vulnerable to these objections. (shrink)
ADDRESS ETHICS WITHOUT PROPOSITIONS. By WINSTON H. F. BARNES 1 SYMPOSIUM : ARE ALL PHILOSOPHICAL QUESTIONS, QUESTIONS OF LANGUAGE I. By STUART HAMPSHIRE 31 II. By AUSTIN DUNAN JONES 49 III. By S. KORNER 63 SYMPOSIUM : THE EMOTIVE THEORY OF ETHICS. f. By RICHARD ROBINSON 79 II. ByH. J. PATON 107 III. ByR.C. CROSS 127 SYMPOSIUM : WHAT CAN LOGIC DO FOR PHILOSOPHY I. By K. K. POPPER 141 II. By WILLIAM KNEALE 155 III. By PROFESSOR A. (...) J. AYER 167 SYMPOSIUM : THINGS AND PERSONS. I. By PROFESSOR D. M. MACKINNON 179 II. By PROFESSOR H. A. HODGES 190 III. BY J. WISDOM 202. (shrink)
The equipoise requirement in clinical research demands that, if patients are to be randomly assigned to one of two interventions in a clinical trial, there must be genuine doubt about which is better. This reflects the traditional view that physicians must never knowingly compromise the care of their patients, even for the sake of future patients. Equipoise has proven to be deeply problematic, especially in the Third World. Some recent critics have argued against equipoise on the grounds that clinical research (...) is fundamentally distinct from clinical care, and thus should be governed by different norms. I argue against this "difference position," and instead take issue with the traditional, exclusively patient-centered account of physicians' obligations that equipoise presupposes. In place of this traditional view, I propose a Kantian test for the reasonable partiality that physicians should show their patients, focusing on its application in clinical research and medical education. (shrink)
: Most of the world now accepts the idea, first proposed four decades ago, that death means "brain death." But the idea has always been open to criticism because it doesn't square with all of our intuitions about death. In fact, none of the possible definitions of death quite works. Death, perhaps surprisingly, eludes definition, and "brain death" can be accepted only as a refinement of what is in fact a fuzzy concept.
ABSTRACT Those who wish to refute the view that it is worse to kill than to let die sometimes produce examples of cases in which an agent lets someone die but would be generally agreed to be no less reprehensible than if he had killed. It is argued that the examples produced typically possess a feature which makes their use in this context illegitimate, and that when modified to remove this feature, they provide support for the view which they were (...) designed to undermine. (shrink)
In this essay, Winston C. Thompson questions the rigidity of the boundary between ideal and nonideal theory, suggesting a porosity that allows elements of both to be brought to bear upon educational issues in singularly incisive ways. In the service of this goal, Thompson challenges and extends John Rawls's theory of justice as fairness, bringing it to bear upon education in our imperfect world. By showing that this representative work of ideal theory can be meaningfully supplemented and applied to (...) the nonideal fact of race, this essay suggests that recognition of nonideal circumstances and theorizing need not void ideal theory's value to philosophy of education. Instead, the field can engage both ideal and nonideal theory on previously unavailable questions and dimensions of educational justice toward productive ends. (shrink)
Although it is commonly assumed within schools that drama has a place within moral education, there is very little theory or analysis to support the assumption. This article sketches a theoretical framework to show how and in what ways drama can make a distinctive contribution to the field. Drawing upon Stenhouse (1975) it proposes a broad distinction between moral instruction and moral induction and analyses drama's potential contribution to both areas. In so doing, it draws links between the cultural practices (...) of the theatre and those of the drama classroom, analysing the moral potential of the dramatic experience through five theoretical lenses. These include the enacted nature of dramatic narrative; the association between drama and the learning of rules; the communal function of drama as a public artform; dialogue and dialogism in drama; and the relationship between emotion, reason and moral engagement in drama. (shrink)
It is widely held that there are no indigenous roots in China for the rule of law; it is an import from the West. The Chinese legal tradition, rather, is rule by law, as elaborated in ancient Legalist texts such as the Han Feizi. According to the conventional reading of these texts, law is amoral and an instrument in the hands of a central ruler who uses law to consolidate and maintain power. The ruler is the source of all law (...) and stands above the law, so that law, in the final analysis, is whatever pleases the ruler. This essay argues, to the contrary, that the instrumentalism of the Han Feizi is more sophisticated and more principled than the conventional reading acknowledges. It suggests that, by examining the text of the Han Feizi through the lens provided by American legal theorist Lon Fuller, we can detect an explicit articulation of what Fuller called the internal morality of law. The principles of this morality are elaborated and their importance explained. In this way, the Han Feizi is retrieved as a significant reference point for thinking about legal reform in China today. (shrink)
Richard Wolin, in his article 'Nazism and the Complicities of Hans-Georg Gadamer: Untruth and Method' ( New Republic , 15 May 2000, pp. 36-45), wrongly accuses Gadamer of being 'in complicity' with the Nazis. The present article in reply was rejected by the New Republic , but is printed here to show that Wolin in his article is misinformed and unfair. First, Wolin makes elementary factual errors, such as stating that Gadamer was born in Breslau instead of Marburg. He (...) relies on a highly questionable source, Teresa Orozco, as 'definitive'. He argues often by misconstruing the evidence and guilt by association. For instance, he associates Gadamer with Werner Jaeger, with whom he disagreed and had little contact. Finally,he misinterprets basic terms in Gadamer's hermeneutics, Vorurteil and authority, attributing to them the popular sense of these terms instead of their place in Gadamer's hermeneutics. Vorurteil , popularly translated as 'prejudice', but better rendered as 'prejudgment', refers to the prior knowledge that one needs in order to understand a situation or a text. In some cases, this is part of the inherited tradition. Authority refers to the respect one pays to those one recognizes as having more knowledge than oneself: one's doctor, or parent, or teacher, a judge, or certain texts. It is not an abject surrender to all authority but the necessary respect for authority in human relationships and in society in general. By misconstruing these terms, Wolin attempts to discredit Gadamer's general philosophy,not just to demonstrate a connection to the Nazis. At the end, his argument turns into a misinformed general political attack on Gadamer as an enemy of Enlightenment values. (shrink)
This article takes its lead from Iris Murdoch's argument that an education in beauty can be a training in the love of virtue. Yet the word ?beauty? is seldom used in contemporary educational discourse, even within the arts disciplines, where aesthetic considerations are integral to the learning process. I begin, therefore, with an examination of ideological reasons why this might be the case and propose that, largely through the legacy of Kant, the concept of beauty raises a number of complex (...) and conflicting problems for contemporary educators, making it strongly discordant with the current dominant ideology. As a result, the Arts' association with beauty remains muted in favour of a language of desirable social outcomes. I then proceed to draw upon recent publications by Elaine Scarry and Wendy Steiner to argue that, as Murdoch suggested, the experience of beauty itself can be seen as educational in an active, moral sense, without the need to resort to instrumentalist objectives outside of its domain. I do this with close reference to an early years Theatre in Education project that I evaluated in 2003; and by considering the work of Bill Shannon, a disabled dancer from Chicago. (shrink)
Richard Swinburne is one of the most distinguished philosophers of religion of our day. In this volume, many notable British and American philosophers unite to honor him and to discuss various topics to which he has contributed significantly. These include general topics in the philosophy of religion such as revelation, and faith and reason, and the specifically Christian doctrines of the Trinity, the Incarnation, and atonement. In the spirit of the movement which Swinburne spearheaded, the essays use analytic philosophical (...) methods to examine doctrines in particular religious traditions, expanding upon traditional discussions of theism. As such, this volume represents a field-report on the interaction of philosophy and Christian thought in the English-speaking world. Swinburne has himself contributed an individual and personal Intellectual Autobiography. (shrink)
Shakespeare wrote plays and young children are geniuses at playing. In March 2008 the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) launched Stand Up for Shakespeare, its manifesto for the teaching of Shakespeare in schools. Of its three stated principles—“Do it on your feet; see it live; start it earlier”—it is perhaps the third that is the most tantalizing. The company’s education department has done much over recent years to introduce key stage 2 children to a variety of his plays but has paid (...) less attention to children’s early years. In association with the University of Warwick, the company therefore commissioned a pilot project to introduce children as young as four and five years old to Shakespeare in order to .. (shrink)
Seeking beauty in education -- The meanings of beauty: a brief history -- Beauty as educational experience -- Beauty, education and the good society -- Beauty and creativity: examples from an arts curriculum -- Beauty in science and maths education -- Awakening beauty in education.
