This thesis presents a methodology for comparing parables that takes seriously what we know about the way individuals and groups remember events and stories and about their oral transmission. It then uses the methodology to compare the six dominion parables in the Gospel of Thomas which are seen to have parallels in Matthew's gospel with their Matthean counterparts. The methodology looks at the parables as whole narratives within both their socio-historical and literary contexts before considering any metaphorical significance of individual (...) parts of the narrative. I argue that an analysis combining psychological and sociological studies on human memory, eyewitness testimony and oral transmission provides compelling evidence that we do not have available the tools we need to establish either Jesus's actual words or the trajectories through which they passed before entering written records. This is, however, no different to the kind of information we have about any other historical figure of his time. A memory studies approach does, however, indicate that the authors of the Gospels conveyed what they remembered to be the actual words and events rather than producing a version that was intentionally manipulated for theological ends. Concepts from four key works have been particularly influential in the investigation: William Arnal's understanding of why Thomas is structured as it is; Joachim Jeremias's contention that the Greek ὅμοιος + dative construction indicates that the comparandum of a simile is being compared to the whole circumstance being described rather than just the apparent comparatum; Stephen Patterson's perception of the effect of persecution on the canonical presentation of the Jesus events and the likely difference in socio-historical context between the canon and Thomas; and Ruben Zimmermann's methodology of parable analysis. The application of the methodology has resulted in new insights into the parables studied that are more sustainable from the text than those previously offered, especially with respect to Gos. Thom. 20, 96, 107, and 109. Its application also demonstrates that while de-contextualised parables are polyvalent, the contexts within which the texts under consideration are found put significant limits on how the gospel authors might have intended them to be understood. (shrink)

This essay is in three Parts. Part 1 surveys some ideas about what water is - as a substance in its own right, and as an entity of major significance and symbolic importance. Part 2 explores basic considerations about the value of nature and its components. Part 3 applies findings from Parts 1 and 2 to thinking about water, with reference to water management issues facing humanity today.

In this article we explore the implications that remuneration,in its various forms, might have for drug-user counselors. A longphilosophical tradition has it that financial reward and altruism aremutually exclusive. Our view is somewhat different. We argue, contrathat tradition, that although financial reward in the guise of eithercommercial profit or wages is not in and of itself morally pernicious,it does confront counselors with ethical hazards. These are hazardsagainst which those involved in drug-user counseling need to beespecially vigilant.

Nicholas Wolterstorff is well known as one of the founders of Reformed Epistemology, along with William Alston and Alvin Plantinga. I suspect, however, that his papers on epistemology and on philosophy of religion have not been as widely read as they should have been. I hope these volumes will rectify that. To those who are not interested in philosophy of religion, first I urge you to read those chapters on epistemology generally, and be persuaded that Wolterstorff has described a necessary (...) condition for belief entitlement. Then I suggest you draw the conclusion that you ought to be interested in philosophy of religion. Wolterstorff practises what he preaches: he is a model of self-referential consistency. (shrink)

While it is common in discussions of Islamic finance to translate 'riba' as interest, we wish to argue that it is better understood through the notion of usury since it was understood this way not just in the Christian Middle Ages but even at the time of Adam Smith in his 'The Wealth of Nations'. We also argue that the person responsible for changing attitudes towards usury was Jeremy Bentham, whose Defence of Usury would have a huge impact in shaping (...) a tendency not just to trivialize the notion of usury, but to promote a tendency in the West to divorce financial behaviour from ethical concerns. While their debate about usury has already attracted comment, it deserves to be placed within a larger context. Bentham's ideas would eventually lead to the abolition of the usury laws in Britain in 1854, making London the global financial centre that it still is today. One could argue that when Britain's law-makers first acknowledged the legitimacy of Islamic financial contracts in 2002, they were unwittingly recognizing the validity of a system of financial ethics that had in fact underpinned the European economy for more than six hundred years until its abolition. This chapter explores a parallel movement to Islamic finance in the European tradition. It is the fruit of collaboration between a historian of medieval Christian thought, and a philosopher concerned with contemporary financial ethics. (shrink)

The Environmental Humanities is an engaged, scholarly response to madness - an attempt to address the systemic pathology of a species disconnected from the conditions of its world. Becoming-with offers a metaphysics grounded in connection, challenging delusions of separation - the erroneous belief that it is somehow possible to exempt ourselves from Earth's ecological community. Donna Haraway tells us that '[i]f we appreciate the foolishness of human exceptionalism then we know that becoming is always becoming 'with', in a contact zone (...) where the outcome, where who is in the world, is at stake.' This image speaks directly to the life and death stakes of failing to recognise connectivity, feedback loops, interdependence and vulnerability. (shrink)

Cyberneticist and ecological philosopher Gregory Bateson is well known for his assertion that the basic unit of survival on earth is the organism-plus-environment, and so any organism that destroys its environment is committing suicide. In this paper I take this statement of interdependency not only to mean that the organism requires an environment to survive, but also that the organism is inseparable from the environment, and is itself an environment for others. Looking at the world from the perspective of the (...) Anthropocene reveals patterns of connection that bind flesh to earth, sea and sky on a multispecies planet. Atmospheric chemist Paul J. Crutzen coined the term 'Anthropocene' to describe a new geological age initiated by the human species where 'human activities have become so pervasive and profound that they rival the great forces of Nature'. Ben Dibley poetically observes that the Anthropocene 'vividly captures the folding of the human into the air, into the sea, the soil'. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that the problems solved by universals require not merely that we know they exist but that we know them by acquaintance. I begin by explicating this thesis of acquaintance with universals. I then show how it solves some familiar problems. After that I reply to the objection that something weaker will do such as David Lewis' distinction between natural and artificial classes of possibilia.

'Transdisciplinary Journeys in the Anthropocene' offers a new perspective on inter~ national environmental scholarship, focusing on the emotional and affective connections between human and nonhuman lives to reveal fresh connections between global issues of climate change, species extinction and colonisation. Combining the rhythm of road travel, interviews with local Aboriginal Elders and autobiographical storytelling, the book develops a new form of nature writing informed by concepts from posthumanism and the environmental humanities. It also highlights connections between the studied area and (...) the global environment, drawing conceptual links between the auto,ethnographic accounts and international issues. This book will be of great interest to scholars and postgraduates in environmental philosophy, cultural studies, postcolonial theory, Australian studies, anthropology, literary and place studies, ecocriticism, history and animal studies. 'Transdisciplinary Journeys in the Anthropocene' may also be beneficial to studies in nature writing, ecocriticism, environmental literature, postcolonial studies and Australian studies. (shrink)

Jason Stanley argues in his new book that propaganda is more prevalent within liberal democracies - and is of far greater concern - than is typically assumed. Indeed, Stanley suggests that the very idea that propaganda only proliferates within authoritarian regimes, which have ministries set aside for its production, is a central tenet of the propaganda of the West. Stanley's aim in this book is to outline the distinctive features of propaganda within a liberal democracy. On his account, the 'flawed (...) ideology' of vested and powerful interest groups undermines the genuinely valuable ideals at the heart of the democratic project; this is what he refers to as 'demagogic propaganda'. Although I am highly sceptical of the argumentative strategies Stanley employs, the book raises significant issues about the extent to which public debates in countries like the United States and Australia involve distorted conceptions of what democratic principles properly entail. Criticisms of the undemocratic and illiberal nature of political processes within liberal democracies are of course common on the left. Two key features set Stanley's work apart from much of that literature. First, he regards democratic principles as genuinely valuable and does not dismiss them as 'mere reactionary claptrap', as many in the New Left did forty years ago. Second, and more significantly, his intellectual background is highly unusual. Stanley is an analytic philosopher whose training was primarily in epistemology and formal semantics rather than in social theory or political philosophy. This is uncommon, since most analytic philosophers who are focused on epistemology and similar issues avoid political questions, a reticence of which Stanley does not approve. Indeed, the book is driven, as he says, by a profound sense of regret that analytic philosophy has surrendered many of its central questions to sociology and social theory. (shrink)

The casual visitor to Oslo, with little or no knowledge of Norway's recent history, could be forgiven for being unaware that per capita this is one of the wealthiest nations in the world. With its predominantly nineteenth-century streetscapes and the absence of large or monumental buildings, there is in fact little evidence, except for the recently built opera house on the harbour, that Oslo is the capital of a nation with the world's largest future fund. The latter, with assets worth (...) 185 per cent of the country's GDP, was built on rates of taxes on petroleum resources, that in some instances, were as high as eighty-five per cent. (shrink)

To what extent should the economic analysis of climate change be constrained by or evaluated against external ethical considerations? To what extent should it be subject to moral criticism? In determining appropriate responses to the challenges of climate change, governments and public policymakers have made great use of the tools of economics. Indeed, economic analysis and economic modelling have been central in such policy formation.2 These economic evaluations of and approaches to the problems posed by climate change in the end (...) rely for their efficacy on the pricing mechanism. The thought is that through the ascription of price - either via shadow pricing or the establishment of genuine markets - social goods will be allocated in such a way as to realise environmentally valuable outcomes; that is, outcomes in which the harms of climate change are mitigated. The success of such economic solutions is determined by the extent to which they realise environmental outcome that are better or more valuable than those that would have been realised by other strategies. Within environmental circles, over the past twenty years, disquiet has been expressed by many about the use of economic analysis to capture or adequately represent environmental values. (shrink)

Climate change is one of the most crucial problems facing the global community at the present time. Climate change will affect not only the well-being of future generations but the prospects of those who are currently alive. At the time of writing this introduction, news outlets across the world were reporting that global temperatures for February of this year showed an unprecedented upward spike.' According to NASA data, it was 1.35°C warmer than the average February during the baseline period of (...) 1950-1981. Even more disturbingly, this is the biggest temperature anomaly since records began in 1880. At the same time, Arctic sea-ice cover recorded its lowest ever February value. Many commentators in those reports spoke understandably of a climate emergency at our very doorstep. These alarming statistics illustrate the rapid changes occurring across the globe and demonstrate the urgency of the climate challenges that confront us. In responding to climate change and in formulating climate policy, economic analysis and economic solutions will undoubtedly be two of the key tools employed by policymakers. They will be central to the solutions that governments and other relevant institutional agencies develop to the challenge of climate change. Indeed climate economics has been at the heart of much of the recent policy debate. (shrink)

In 1247 Simon of Saint-Quentin compared Mongol song to the howling of wolves. Like Simon, authors writing about music from the late thirteenth to mid-sixteenth century often associate the singing of certain socio-linguistic groups with the vocalizations of animals. This article argues that these statements betray what Cary Wolfe has termed the discourse of animality. This discourse seeks through a process of alienation to define morally or theologically the Latin West's place in the world. Yet anthropomorphized animals in literature and (...) song often instruct human readers/listeners in social and moral conduct. What might it mean when singers take on the voices of animals in Giovanni da Cascia's 'Agnel son bianco' and Donato da Cascia's 'Lucida pecorella'? By tracing metaphorical references to sheep, goats, and wolves in classical Roman and medieval literature, the article offers new social and political readings of these two madrigals. (shrink)

Many think doing animal ethics demands we see moral humanism as a speciesist prejudice of the kind found with sexism and racism. The only serious case for this rests on the Argument from Marginal Cases. We find that argument to the point, but show that properly understood it supports humanism. Understanding why it does this lets us see how we ought to go on in animal ethics.

This book offers an original account of the good life in late modernity through a uniquely sociological lens. It considers the various ways that social and cultural factors can encourage or impede genuine efforts to live a good life by deconstructing the concepts of happiness and contentment within cultural narratives of the good life. Although empirical studies have dominated the discourse on happiness in recent decades, the emphasis on finding causal and correlational relationships has led to a field of research (...) that arguably lacks a reliable theoretical foundation. 'Deconstructing Happiness' offers a step toward developing that foundation by offering characteristically sociological perspectives on the contemporary fascination with happiness and well-being. In doing so, it seeks to understand the good life as a socially mediated experience rather than a purely personal or individually defined way of living. The outcome is a book on happiness, contentment and the good life that considers the influence of democracy, capitalism and progress while also focusing on the more theoretical challenges of self-knowledge, reason and interaction. (shrink)

This chapter is a case for the pantheist conception considered as a species of theism, rather than a rival to it. The starting point, the premise of the argument, is properly anthropomorphic metaphysics, which I propose as a rival to scientific naturalism; I begin, then, by stating my version of pantheism, by expounding PAM, and by sketching my argument.

Over the past 50 years, we have witnessed a revolution in the organisation and social understanding of elite sport. Elite sport has been commercialised. Top-level athletes have become professionals who often receive remarkable levels of income and sporting events, such as the World Cup, are multi-billion dollar exercises that attract enormous levels of sponsorship. Many sports, such as cricket, have been substantially revamped in order to make them more appealing to mass audiences and, accordingly, more beneficial to sponsors and many (...) clubs, such as Manchester United, have become corporations in their own right. (shrink)

We inhabit a world in which the market is a dominant institutional form of social organization. This influence is not without its critics, and there is considerable debate amongst political philosophers and policy-makers about whether the range of the market should expand or contract and, further, about the extent to which the market should be subject to constraints and government regulation. The expansion of the market into realms hitherto unknown is the theme of a number of recent books, including Michael (...) Sandel's What Money Can't Buy and Debra Satz's Why Some Things Should Not Be for Sale, which build on earlier work by, amongst others, Elizabeth Anderson, Margaret Jane Radin, and Michael Walzer. (shrink)

Noxious markets, inequality and social meanings In this thoughtful and timely book, Debra Satz provides a convincing justificatory framework for our ongoing discomfort at the intrusion of markets into many areas of our lives that hitherto had been free from commercial influence. Her central problem is the commodification of everyday life. We inhabit social worlds which are highly commodified and in which the market is often prescribed as a universal panacea for any social problem we confront. Yet despite such overt (...) marketisation in the culture at large, nonetheless there remains the widespread belief that there are some things that should not be for sale: the very thought of selling certain goods remains repugnant. Satz's task in this book is to explain why such misgivings are correct. How might we best account for the intuition that some things should not be for sale? At the heart of her tale is a concern with the inequality that markets often bring in their wake. (shrink)

Mark Blyth's 'Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea' is at heart a morality tale, or, more accurately, an account of two competing and diametrically opposed morality tales jostling to explain both the recent Global Financial Crisis that engulfed much of Europe in 2008 and the austerity policies that were implemented by most governments in that region in its aftermath. According to proponents of austerity, economic growth can only be achieved through reductions in state spending. Blyth argues with great passion (...) and intelligence that the austerity policies, which have involved severe cuts to government services and higher tax rates for average wage-earners, have not only caused great misery but are, in the end, economically counter-productive. (shrink)

Does the pursuit of ideals of global justice mean we must relinquish exclusive territorial rights and, in particular, exclusive resource rights? Cosmopolitans have assumed that it does. In this rich and thoughtful book, Cara Nine runs against the tide of much thinking on global justice and pursues the provocative suggestion that if we take territorial rights to be fundamental elements in a theory of global justice, then there will be circumstances where resource inequality can be justified. Nine does not so (...) much deny the claims of global justice, as assert the centrality of territory in any theory of a globally just world. (shrink)

Consider the following dilemma. If it is possible to identify the cause of a person's action and beliefs - causes that are outside the agent's own conscious reasoning - in what sense can we say that the person chooses what she does or she thinks? If the person did not consciously choose, then it is reasonable to ask whether she should be held morally responsible for any of the subsequent consequences of her actions. This is the general territory of the (...) puzzle that Neil Levy's thoughtful and elegantly written new book addresses. He explores what scientific advances in the study of consciousness might tell us about our capacity for choice and, hence, our responsibility for those choices. (shrink)

It is now more than six years since the Global Financial Crisis threatened to topple the banking systems of the Western world. Although a complete breakdown in the financial system was ultimately avoided, one consequence of the events of 2008 has been the biggest slump in economic activity since the Great Depression. Australia was, in the main, spared the economic damage that ravaged large parts of Europe, and there has been little discussion in these parts of the causes and social (...) effects of what the authors refer to as the 'Great Recession'. Somewhat surprisingly, on the evidence presented in this book it would seem that the Anglosphere at large is guilty of what the authors call the 'veil of complacency'. The book asserts that in those countries there is little concern for either the financial consequences or the victims of the crisis. Why should this be the case? Perhaps the Great Recession was not as bad as the headlines have suggested. (shrink)

Albert O. Hirschman was a development economist and political theorist whose work is essential reading for anyone interested in understanding how economic life figures in the political worlds we inhabit and the ways in which we give meaning to our lives in market-based societies. Perhaps best known for the distinction between 'exit' and 'voice', Hirschman was a prolific theorist who wrote about the role individual moral virtue and individual self-interest should play in economic activity, how economic growth in the developing (...) world might best be achieved, and the reactionary rhetoric of neo-conservative politicians in the late 1980s, to list but some of the areas he covered. Hirschman's writing was elegant; further, he understood the importance of the well-chosen word. He was, as this new biography by Jeremy Adelman shows, an economist for whom the essays of Montaigne were as important as the writings of Ricardo and Smith. (shrink)

This thesis is directed towards a philosophy of music by attention to conceptions and perceptions of space. I focus on melody and harmony, and do not emphasise rhythm, which, as far as I can tell, concerns time rather than space. I seek a metaphysical account of Western Classical music in the diatonic tradition. More specifically, my interest is in wordless, untitled music, often called 'absolute' music. My aim is to elucidate a spatial approach to the world combined with a curiosity (...) about the nature of the Pythagorean intervals. Thus one question I seek to answer is: What do the Pythagorean intervals import to music? In their original formulation by Pythagoras, and further, by Plato, their import seemed mystical and analogous to a 'harmony of the spheres.' In this spatial approach, the Pythagorean intervals are indicative of infinite depth. The faculty of hearing alone does not ordinarily spatially locate sources. Hearing is ordinarily combined with sight in order to spatially locate a sound. Yet we talk about music as if it were spatially located, that is, as if it were a visible object with a surface and themes or 'objects'. I explore the faculty of vision and consider in what ways the processes of vision might be similar to and distinct from audition. My source for this approach is David Marr's book 'Vision' and his theory of the 2 1/2-dimensional sketch. In a medium in which there is no spatial location, it is important to situate the listener. Newton solved the problem of location by demonstrating the effects of gravity. P. F. Strawson claims that an analogy of distance is required in hearing to situate the listener, that is, a sense of nearer to and further from a source or object that permits a perception of distance. I claim that in music, the key signature and the scalar relations of musical themes provide this analogy of distance. The works of Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Leibniz, and Newton are studied for their accounts of motion, bodies, and space. From these metaphysicians can be gleaned elements of music that include form, motion, timbre, dynamics, and attraction. By incorporating motion, I aim to show that although we may not know the true nature of space, we can learn from hearing music that space is perceptible in other than three dimensions. (shrink)

Invisible Hand accounts of the operations of the competitive market are often thought to have two implications for morality as it confronts economic life. First, explanations of agents economic activities eschew constitutive appeal to moral notions; and second, such moralism is pernicious insofar as it tends to undermine the operations of a socially valuable social process. This is the Mandevillean Conceit. The Conceit rests on an avarice-only reading of the profit-motive that is mistaken. The avarice-only reading is not the only (...) way of characterising the profit-motive, and there are some positive grounds for thinking the benefits of profit pursuit are better attributed to the "lucrephile", and not the avarice-only "lucrepath". (shrink)

This thesis seeks to show that the recorded thought of William Kingdon Clifford in the third quarter of the 19th C was not only relevant to scientific advancement but removed absolute certainty from any posited model of reality. The period during which Clifford worked was a turning point in humanity's understanding of the world. The two most significant developments of his time that Clifford used in his speculative metaphysic were the possibility of non-Euclidean geometries being abstract as opposed to abstruse, (...) and the evolutionary theory of Darwin. Clifford was foremost a geometer. However he had an insatiable desire to understand his world, which led to him becoming fluent in several languages, applying his geometrical skills to contemporary unsolved problems of physics, involving himself in speculative metaphysics. Clifford is recognised as being a highly gifted geometer. His thought was taken up by John Archibald Wheeler in the mid 20th C. Likewise Ernst Mach recognised the thought of Clifford. Although the thesis involves mathematics I make no claim to being a mathematician. It is Clifford's speculative metaphysic and how it relates to our understanding of consciousness and the nature of languages both formal and natural that is my particular interest. Because of this I explore the relationship between Clifford, Gottlob Frege and Ludwig Wittgenstein in most detail. However the understanding of the world must take into consideration the world in its entirety. (shrink)

Molinism attempts to resolve the incompatibility of divine foreknowledge and human libertarian freedom by the inclusion of the divine will into the solution. Moreover, middle knowledge is providentially useful under the Molinist model because of the way God uses it. This speaks of an integral link between the divine will and intellect that works in such a way as to provide a foreknowledge solution and, allegedly, the best view of providence. Nevertheless, there have been several anti-Molinist arguments by analogy which (...) suggest that the God presented in the Molinist model is a manipulator, and therefore something is lost or undermined in the libertarian freedom that Molinism purports to uphold through its model of foreknowledge and providence. This thesis examines the anti-Molinist charge of manipulation primarily by analysing how God uses information known through middle knowledge. The findings of the anti-Molinist arguments from analogy are reconstructed to form deductive arguments. These are evaluated against standard definitions of objectionable manipulation. It is concluded through analysis of these stronger, deductive arguments that divine providence under the Molinist model is a case of objectionable manipulation, one which many theists, classical or progressive, should find abhorrent. The effects of manipulation on ostensible libertarian freedom are then analysed, leading to the conclusion that Molinist-style manipulation results in a form of free-will compatibilism, ergo, the divine foreknowledge problem is not answered, nor is the result compatible with libertarian freedom. Given that it is close to a form of divine determinism, Molinism is then compared with Calvinism along several lines of criticism, namely whether such a God is good, loving and personal. (shrink)

If it is our aim to establish a world order in which nonviolence and peace prevail, then it is helpful - even essential - to understand the nature of violence. Many believe violence is such a fundamental expression of human nature that we will never be free of war. I wish to argue against this view. The analysis that follows will focus on these issues: defining violence; effects of violence; varieties of violence; causes and consequences of violence; and controlling violence.