v. 1. Medieval and early classical science.--v. 2. Classical and contemporary science.

This book is the first detailed reconstruction of the late work of John Rawls, who was perhaps the most influential philosopher of the twentieth century. Rawls's 1971 treatise, A Theory of Justice, stimulated an outpouring of commentary on 'justice-as-fairness,' his conception of justice for an ideal, self-contained, modern political society. Most of that commentary took Rawls to be defending welfare-state capitalism as found in Western Europe and the United States. Far less attention has been given to Rawls's 2001 book, Justice (...) as Fairness: A Restatement. In the Restatement, Rawls not only substantially reformulates the 'original position' argument for the two principles of justice-as-fairness but also repudiates capitalist regimes as possible embodiments. Edmundson further develops Rawls's non-ideal theory, which guides us when we find ourselves in a society that falls well short of justice. (shrink)

Contemporary thinkers who address the problem of causal relations generally favor Hume’s analysis, although some periodically manifest interest in Aristotle’s exposition as an important and viable alternative. Few, however, find among the many philosophers who came between Aristotle and Hume any worthwhile contributor to the development of this problematic. Some might note, for example, Nicholas of Autrecourt as a medieval precursor of Hume, but this merely keeps the discussion fluctuating between the same two poles. This essay aims to call attention (...) to a different and intermediate view, not hitherto noted, that was proposed in the High Middle Ages by Thomas Aquinas. It argues that Aquinas made a significant advance beyond Aristotle in his analysis of antecedent causation, and thereby made possible the certification of some elements in Hume’s analysis, without subscribing to its more extreme results. In so doing, moreover, Aquinas adumbrated some problems in contemporary analytic discussions of the causal relationships between events, and consequently may shed light on their solution. (shrink)

The use of mathematical models to support decision making is proliferating in both the public and private sectors. Advances in computer technology and greater opportunities to learn the appropriate techniques are extending modeling capabilities to more and more people. As powerful decision aids, models can be both beneficial or harmful. At present, few safeguards exist to prevent model builders or users from deliberately, carelessly, or recklessly manipulating data to further their own ends. Perhaps more importantly, few people understand or appreciate (...) that harm can be caused when builders or users fail to recognize the values and assumptions on which a model is based or fail to take into account all the groups who would be affected by a model's results. This volume provides a setting for a dialogue about ethics and shows the need to continue and define a vocabulary for exploring ethical concerns. It will become increasingly important for model builders and users to have a clear and strong code of ethics to guide them in making the ethical decisions they surely will have to face. (shrink)

Philosophy, despite its typical attitude of detachment and abstraction, has for most of its long history been engaged with the practical and mundane-seeming question of whether there is a duty to obey the law. As Matthew Kramer has recently summarized: “For centuries, political and legal theorists have pondered whether each person is under a general obligation of obedience to the legal norms of the society wherein he or she lives. The obligation at issue in those theorists' discussions is usually taken (...) to be prima-facie, comprehensively applicable, universally borne, and content-independent.” This essay is a commentary on the current state of discussion of this perennial philosophical topic. (shrink)

Rights come in various types - human, moral, civil, political and legal - and claims about who has a right, and to what, are often contested. What are rights? Are they timeless and universal, or merely conventional? How are they related to other morally significant values, such as well-being, autonomy, and community? Can animals have rights? Or fetuses? Do we have a right to do as we please so long as we do not harm others? This is the only accessible (...) and readable introduction to the history, logic, moral implications, and political tendencies of the idea of rights. It is organized chronologically and discusses important events, such as the French Revolution. As an undergraduate text it is well-suited to introductions to political philosophy, moral philosophy, and ethics. It could also be used in courses on political theory in departments of political science and government, and in courses on legal theory in law schools. (shrink)

A summary of basics for student and seminarian.

Darwin's greatest accomplishment was to show how life might be explained as the result of natural selection. But does Darwin's theory mean that life was unintended? William A. Dembski argues that it does not. In this book Dembski extends his theory of intelligent design. Building on his earlier work in The Design Inference (Cambridge, 1998), he defends that life must be the product of intelligent design. Critics of Dembski's work have argued that evolutionary algorithms show that life can be (...) explained apart from intelligence. But by employing powerful recent results from the No Free Lunch Theory, Dembski addresses and decisively refutes such claims. As the leading proponent of intelligent design, Dembski reveals a designer capable of originating the complexity and specificity found throughout the cosmos. Scientists and theologians alike will find this book of interest as it brings the question of creation firmly into the realm of scientific debate. (shrink)

The design inference uncovers intelligent causes by isolating their key trademark: specified events of small probability. Just about anything that happens is highly improbable, but when a highly improbable event is also specified undirected natural causes lose their explanatory power. Design inferences can be found in a range of scientific pursuits from forensic science to research into the origins of life to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. This challenging and provocative 1998 book shows how incomplete undirected causes are for science (...) and breathes new life into classical design arguments. It will be read with particular interest by philosophers of science and religion, other philosophers concerned with epistemology and logic, probability and complexity theorists, and statisticians. (shrink)

How is a legitimate state possible? Obedience, coercion and intrusion are three ideas that seem inseparable from all government and seem to render state authority presumptively illegitimate. This book exposes three fallacies inspired by these ideas and in doing so challenges assumptions shared by liberals, libertarians, cultural conservatives, moderates and Marxists. In three clear and tightly argued essays William Edmundson dispels these fallacies and shows that living in a just state remains a worthy ideal. This is an important book (...) for all philosophers, political scientists and legal theorists as well as other readers interested in the views of Rawls, Dworkin and Nozick, many of whose central ideas are subjected to rigorous critique. (shrink)

William Galston is a distinguished political philosopher whose work is informed by the experience of having also served from 1993–5 as President Clinton's Deputy Assistant for Domestic Policy. He is thus able to speak with an authority unique amongst political theorists about the implications of advancing certain moral and political values in practice. The foundational argument of this 2002 book is that liberalism is compatible with the value pluralism first espoused by Isaiah Berlin. William Galston defends a version (...) of value pluralism - liberal pluralism - and argues, against the contentions of John Gray and others, that it undergirds a kind of liberal politics that gives weight to the ability of individuals and groups to live their lives in accordance with their deepest beliefs about what gives meaning and purpose to life. (shrink)

The problem of Galileo's logical methodology has long interested scholars. In this volume William A. Wallace offers a solution that is completely unexpected, yet backed by convincing documentary evidence. His analysis starts with an early notebook Galileo wrote at Pisa, appropriating a Jesuit professor's exposition of the Posterior Analystics of Aristotle, and ends with one of the last letters Galileo wrote, stating that in logic he has been a Peripatetic all his life. Wallace's detective work unearths the complete logic (...) course from which the notebook was excerpted, then proceeds to show how its terminology and methodology continue to surface in Galileo's later writings in which he founds his new sciences of the heavens and of local motion. The result is a tour de force that commends itself not only to Galileo's scholars and to logicians, philosophers, and historians, but to anyone interested in the epistemic roots of modern science. (shrink)

As a young man Bill Adams travelled the world teaching US citizens abroad on behalf of a large state university on the East Coast. Back home he reflected that if there were answers to the great questions of life, then he’d not found them — not in India, in Europe, in China, or Japan. In time he came to see that his lifelong interest in how the mind works could be the clue to the meaning of life. Socrates had been (...) right all along: Know thyself. Adams now sets out a new reasoned argument, based on his experience as a cognitive psychologist and as a human being, to show why Socrates was right: the purpose of life is to recognize ourselves — in each other and in all things. The mind is looking for itself: that is how it works, that is what it does for a living. (shrink)

Journal of Political Philosophy, EarlyView.

The equal political liberties are among the basic first-principle liberties in John Rawls’s theory of Justice as fairness. Rawls insists, further, that the “fair value” of the political liberties must be guaranteed. Disavowing an interest in fair value is what disqualifies welfare-state capitalism as a possible realizer of Justice as fairness. Yet Rawls never gives a perspicuous statement of the reasoning in the original position for the fair-value guarantee. This article gathers up two distinct strands of Rawls’s argument, and presents (...) it in a straightforward sequence. Justice as fairness is contrasted to a competitor political conception of justice that is just like it but without the fair-value guarantee. A schema of the two-strand argument is presented in the Appendix. (shrink)

Anthony Freeman's article on transpersonal psychology cited Jorge Ferrer's criticism that while the field claims to be non-dualistic or 'post-Cartesian' (no subject -object or mind-body split), it is nevertheless hopelessly dualistic. . .Freeman proposes a way of salvation for transpersonal psychology by invoking Daniel Dennettapos;s concept of heterophenomenology, which is a third-person investigation of someone elseapos;s first-person experience (as reported). . .Freeman's proposal is a fine demonstration of lateral thinking, calling upon atheist Dennett in support of transpersonal and religious inquiry. (...) Unfortunately, it is a solution analogous to searching for lost keys under the lamppost where the light is better. (shrink)

The last half-century has seen a steady loss of confidence in the defensibility of a duty to obey the law — even a qualified, pro tanto duty to obey the laws of a just or nearly just state. Over roughly the same period, there has been increasing interest in virtue ethics as an alternative to the dominant consequentialist and deontological approaches to normative ethics. Curiously, these two tendencies have so far only just barely linked up. Although there has been discussion (...) of the question whether patriotism should be considered a virtue, and abstract discussion about the virtuous person’s relation to authority and justice in general, there has been little virtue-oriented discussion having specific reference to the kinds of difficulties that have motivated the ascendant skepticism about political obligation. This silence has persisted despite repeated calls for renewed work on “virtue politics”. This article proposes and defends a preliminary account of law-abidance (as contrasted to obedience) as a virtue. It argues that a virtue-theoretic account of our relation to the law offers advantages that are not contingent upon the independence or priority of the virtues with respect to consequentialist and deontological components of a complete moral theory. Chief among these advantages is the promise of an alternative to the deadlocked positions taken by apologists for the duty to obey the law and their philosophical-anarchist critics — positions which have tacitly been assumed to exhaust the viable possibilities. (shrink)

William Galston is a distinguished political philosopher whose work is informed by the experience of having also served from 1993–5 as President Clinton's Deputy Assistant for Domestic Policy. He is thus able to speak with an authority unique amongst political theorists about the implications of advancing certain moral and political values in practice. The foundational argument of this 2002 book is that liberalism is compatible with the value pluralism first espoused by Isaiah Berlin. William Galston defends a version (...) of value pluralism - liberal pluralism - and argues, against the contentions of John Gray and others, that it undergirds a kind of liberal politics that gives weight to the ability of individuals and groups to live their lives in accordance with their deepest beliefs about what gives meaning and purpose to life. (shrink)

Intelligent design begins with a seemingly innocuous question: Can objects, even if nothing is known about how they arose, exhibit features that reliably signal the action of an intelligent cause? To see what’s at stake, consider Mount Rushmore. The evidence for Mount Rushmore’s design is direct—eyewitnesses saw the sculptor Gutzon Borglum spend the better part of his life designing and building this structure. But what if there were no direct evidence for Mount Rushmore’s design? What if humans went extinct and (...) aliens, visiting the earth, discovered Mount Rushmore in substantially the same condition as it is now? (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to report some little-known aspects of sixteenth-century physics as these relate to the development of mechanics in the seventeenth century. The research herein reported grew out of a study on the mechanics of Domingo de Soto, a sixteenth-century Spanish scholastic,1 which has been concerned, in part, with examining critically Pierre Duhem's thesis that the English “Calculatores” of the fourteenth century were a primary source for Galileo's science.2 The conclusion to which this has come, thus (...) far, is that Duhem had important insights into the late medieval preparation for the modern science of mechanics, but that he left out many of the steps. And the steps are important, whether one holds for a continuity theory or a discontinuity theory vis-à-vis the connection between late medieval and early modern science. (shrink)

THE pervasive role of causality in the development of Galileo's science has been obscured largely by two factors. Philosophers who address the problem usually exhibit an anti-causal bias traceable to David Hume, and this disposes them to concentrate on passages in Galileo's writings that can be given a positivist interpretation. Historians are likewise selective in their treatment of his texts, for they tend to enforce sharp dichotomies between Galileo's earlier Latin compositions and his treatises in Italian, especially the two dialogues (...) of his later years for which he is justly famous. With this twofold reinforcement from philosophers and historians of science, one might think that the problem of causality in Galileo's science is whether or not the Italian physicist actually reasoned in causal terms such as those explained in Aristotle's Posterior Analytics. A large and influential school at the moment would say that this is the question, and that it is best answered in the negative: causal analysis played little or no role in the development of Galileo's science, and certainly less and less in his later years. Indeed, it was his rejection of Aristotle precisely on these grounds that merits for him the title, "Father of Modern Science," the canons of which science are almost diametrically opposite those of the science advocated by Greek peripatetics and medieval scholastics, before the onset of the modern era. (shrink)

The first systematic treatment of Karl Popper’s contribution to the philosophy of the social sciences.

What ethical principles should autonomous machines follow? How do we implement these principles, and how do we evaluate these implementations? These are some of the critical questions Vivek Nallur asks in his essay “Landscape of Machine Implemented Ethics (2020).” He provides a broad, insightful survey of answers to these questions, especially focused on the implementation question. In this commentary, I will first critically summarize the main themes and conclusions of Nallur’s essay and then expand upon the landscape that Nallur presents (...) by suggesting additional approaches to machine ethics. The approaches I discuss reflect normative ethical theories and need not be applied only to machines, although machine ethics is the focus here. The overall goal is to open up further questions and research possibilities as society searches for the best approach to machine ethics. (Due to an unfortunate miscommunication with the copy editor an important reference was omitted from this article. The reference that should be included is: Nallur, V. (2020). Landscape of Machine Implemented Ethics. Science and Engineering Ethics 26 (5):2381-2399.). (shrink)