Philosophy Commons^™

Justification And Ways Of Believing, Heimir Geirsson

Heimir Geirsson

One of the issues that has been hotly discussed in connection with the direct designation theory is whether or not coreferential names can be substituted salva veritate in epistemic contexts. Some direct designation theorists believe that they can be so substituted. Some direct designation theorists and all Fregeans and neo-Fregeans believe that they cannot be so substituted. Fregeans of various stripes have used their intuition against free substitution to argue against the direct designation theory. Some direct designation theorists have used the same intuitions to argue against the view that belief reports of simple declarative sentences can be accounted for …

Pyrrhonism Or Academic Skepticism? Friedrich Wilhelm Bierling’S ‘Reasonable Doubt’ In The Commentatio De Pyrrhonismo Historico (1724), Anton Matytsin

Anton Matytsin

No abstract provided.

The Significance Of John S. Mbiti's Works In The Study Of Pan-African Literature, Babacar Mbaye

Babacar Mbaye

No abstract provided.

The Problem Of Evil And The Grammar Of Goodness, Eric Wiland

Eric Wiland

Queer Enfleshment, Mary-Jane V. Rubenstein

Mary-Jane Rubenstein

No abstract provided.

The Matter With Pantheism: On Shepherds And Goat-Gods And Mountains And Monsters, Mary-Jane V. Rubenstein

Mary-Jane Rubenstein

No abstract provided.

Lost Expectations: On Derrida's Abraham, Mary-Jane V. Rubenstein

Mary-Jane Rubenstein

Transcendence Of Trauma.Pdf, Mary-Jane V. Rubenstein

Mary-Jane Rubenstein

No abstract provided.

Can One Love The Distant Other? Empathy, Affiliation, And Cosmopolitanism, Gregory R. Peterson

Gregory Peterson

An ongoing debate in political and moral philosophy concerns the nature of international obligations. While cosmopolitans argue that duties of justice are independent of national borders, statists argue otherwise, sometimes basing their account on the limitations of our empathic concern, a line of argument found much earlier in Adam Smith. Although critics argue that empathy is neither necessary nor sufficient for morality, and although statists imply that psychological limitations of the kind that would be based in empathy prevent the realization of commitments to distant others beyond humanitarian aid, I argue that both these views are incorrect. While the possession …

Hans Urs Von Balthasar: A Primer, Thomas V. Gourlay 402884

Thomas V. Gourlay

No abstract provided.

The New Mechanical Philosophy, Stuart Glennan

Stuart Glennan

The New Mechanical Philosophy argues for a new image of nature and of science--one that understands both natural and social phenomena to be the product of mechanisms, and that casts the work of science as an effort to discover and understand those mechanisms. Drawing on an expanding literature on mechanisms in physical, life, and social sciences, Stuart Glennan offers an account of the nature of mechanisms and of the models used to represent them. A key quality of mechanisms is that they are particulars - located at different places and times, with no one just like another. The crux of …

A Brush With Weimar Germany.Docx, Rowan Cahill

Rowan Cahill

Daredevil: Legal (And Moral?) Vigilante, Stephen E. Henderson

Stephen E Henderson

God And Eternal Boredom, Attila Tanyi, Vuko Andric

Attila Tanyi

Open-Mindedness As A Christian Virtue?, Jason Baehr

Jason Baehr

No abstract provided.

Contested Moralities: Animals And Moral Value In The Dear/Symanski Debate, William S. Lynn

William S. Lynn, PhD

Geography is experiencing a ‘moral turn’ in its research interests and practices. There is also a flourishing interest in animal geographies that intersects this turn, and is concurrent with wider scholarly efforts to reincorporate animals and nature into our ethical and social theories. This article intervenes in a dispute between Michael Dear and Richard Symanski. The dispute is over the culling of wild horses in Australia, and I intervene to explore how geography deepens our moral understanding of the animal/human dialectic. I begin by situating the inquiry into ethics and animals in geography. Next, I provide a synopsis of Dear …

A Balancing Act: Reading 'Amoris Laetitia', Peter Steinfels, Paige E. Hochschild, William L. Portier, Sandra A. Yocum, Dennis O'Brien

William L. Portier

Five religious scholars provide commentary on Amoris Laetitia (The Joy of Love), Pope Francis's 2016 apostolic exhortation on love in the family.

A Modus Vivendi? Sex, Marriage & The Church, William L. Portier, Nancy Dallavalle, Christopher C. Roberts, Tina Beattie, R. R. Reno, Patricia Hampl, Luke Timothy Johnson, Leslie Woodcock Tentler, Paul Baumann

William L. Portier

During the 1960s, nearly 80 percent of adult Americans were married. A recent analysis of U.S. census data reported that only 52 percent of adult Americans were married in 2009. That is the lowest percentage reported in the 100 years the Census Bureau has collected such information. The reasons for this dramatic cultural shift are well known: high rates of divorce; changing attitudes toward premarital sex; social acceptability of cohabitation; the weakening of the stigma surrounding out-of-wedlock births and single parenting; the postponement of marriage and children for academic or professional reasons.

Among those with only a high-school education or …

Here Come The Nones! Pluralism And Evangelization After Denominationalism And Americanism, William L. Portier

William L. Portier

This essay begins with a four-part overview of American Catholic history focused on the building and dissolution of an immigrant Catholic subculture. The final period, “Catholics and the Dynamics of Pluralism (1968-present)” leads naturally into a discussion of the demography of Catholics in the United States. Particular attention is given to the trend to disaffiliation among millennials and how best to interpret it. Pastoral and theological reflections on the demography of disaffiliation emphasize the need for the church in the United States to take on an evangelical form more suited to a pluralism that is post-denominational and post-Americanist, and how …

Monotheism, James F. Mcgrath

James F. McGrath

James McGrath's contribution to the forthcoming edition, Vocabulary for the Study of Religion.

Towards A New Mysticism By Ursula King, Philip Novak

Philip Novak

"Toward a New Mysticism is, in sum, a chronologically-oriented study of the development of Teilhard's new and evolutionist mysticism, with special attention given to surmises about the roles which Teilhard's years in the East and his readings in Asian philosophy and religion played in that development." ~ from the article

The Chun-Tzu, Philip Novak

Philip Novak

The question of personal immortality-life after death-has haunted us ever since human beings realized a basic fact of existence: everything that lives is going to die. Filippo Liverziani considers evidence for life after death; from the out-of-body journeys of mystics to the near-death experiences of ordinary people who reached the threshhold of the other side and returned to tell the tale. Compelling reading for anyone who has asked that timeless question: What happens when I die?

Mysticism, Enlightenment, And Morality, Philip Novak

Philip Novak

"Our outspoken anthropologist friend, Dr. A. Bharati, once remarked that if someone is a stinker before a mystical experience, he'll be a stinker afterwards .¹ The swami's observation stemmed from years spent among the holy men of India and , no doubt, from considerable personal experience. It is an exaggeration , of course, but we cannot dismiss his crucial point: it is quite possible to be a mystic and a stinker. If we refuse to take Bharati's word for it, we need only to examine the numerous recent accounts of the oafish behavior displayed by acclaimed mystic-teachers. Or we …

Jewish, Christian – Or What? Questions Of Self-Designation In The 'Ascension Of Isaiah', Meghan Henning, Tobias Nicklas

Meghan Henning

The Question of the “Parting of the Ways” between Jews and Christians has become a matter of debate again: is it really appropriate to speak about two more or less coherent groups going two different ways from a certain point in history – perhaps after Paul’s mission, after the destruction of the Second Temple (70 CE), or after the Bar-Kokhba War (132-135 CE)? Does the image of a tree with one root and two different trunks going into two different directions really fit what the extant sources tell us about the complexities of the past? Or shouldn’t we distinguish between …

Eternal Punishment As Paideia: The Ekphrasis Of Hell In The Apocalypse Of Peter And The Apocalypse Of Paul, Meghan Henning

Meghan Henning

Much of the history of scholarship on “hell” has been devoted to tracing genetic relationships between older texts and more recent ones, typically based upon generic elements or the specific features of hell’s landscape. This paper suggests a new direction for classics and New Testament study, focusing instead on the rhetorical function of hell in antiquity. This paper argues that the ancient conventions of descriptive rhetoric were at work in the depictions of Hell that we find in the Jewish and early Christian apocalypses. It begins with a definition of these rhetorical devices by examining the Progymnasmata as well as …

Educating Early Christians Through The Rhetoric Of Hell: 'Weeping And Gnashing Of Teeth' As 'Paideia' In Matthew And The Early Church, Meghan Henning

Meghan Henning

Meghan Henning explores the rhetorical function of the early Christian concept of hell, drawing connections to Greek and Roman systems of education, and examining texts from the Hebrew Bible, Greek and Latin literature, the New Testament, early Christian apocalypses and patristic authors. This work is a revised version of the author's Ph.D. dissertation, which was successfully defended at Emory University in 2013. It is included in the series Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament II. She writes, "Now that this work is finished, I am delighted to have the opportunity to thank those who have generously traveled with me on this …

Paralysis And Sexuality In Medical Literature And The 'Acts Of Peter', Meghan Henning

Meghan Henning

This paper focuses on the story of Peter’s daughter that is found in the Berlin Coptic papyrus BG 8502.4 and is associated with the apocryphal Acts of Peter. Research on the story of Peter’s daughter has primarily focused on its interpretation of the theme of chastity, or whether the story was originally included in the Acts of Peter. In the course of these investigations, scholars have taken for granted the curious assumption of the text that paralysis renders Peter’s daughter unfit for marriage, and thus safe from Ptolemy’s unwanted advances. This paper explores the underlying understandings of paralysis and sexuality …

The Catholic Enlightenment. The Forgotten History Of A Global Movement, Ulrich Lehner

Ulrich L. Lehner

No abstract provided.

Americanized Catholicism? A Response To Thomas Schärtl, Dennis M. Doyle

Dennis M. Doyle

I stand in fundamental agreement with what Thomas Schärtl has said in his article describing recent trends in US Catholicism. I am a lifelong Catholic and a lifelong Democrat. I felt personally distressed and discouraged by the support given to Mitt Romney and the Republicans by some leading US Catholic bishops. Most of this support may have technically passed the legal test of being nonpartisan, but undeniably it functioned in a partisan manner, as did the attacks launched on President Obama in the midst of a campaign to defend religious liberty. Schärtl’s analysis of these trends as reflecting marketing strategies …

Extraordinary Love In The Lives Of Lay People, Dennis M. Doyle

Dennis M. Doyle

The College Theology Society (CTS), initially called the Society of Catholic College Teachers of Sacred Doctrine, was founded mainly by religious and clergy in the early 1950s to support those who taught college-level theology to Catholics in non-seminary settings. Sometimes CTS, in comparison with another group, is said to be relatively more lay-oriented. What this actually means, I think, is that for the CTS, the college classroom, populated mainly by lay people, was the primary locus for carrying out the task of teaching theology. The main goal was to promote the religious formation of Catholic lay people. Given some of …