Argumentum Ad Baculum,Aristotelian Civic Fear,or Praeteritio: Threats in Anti-Choice Letters

Argumentation - This essay investigates the rhetorical choices in archived letters to providers at a local abortion clinic through argumentum ad baculum and other fear appeal frames. Analysis of...     

Comparing the Argumentum Model of Topics to Other Contemporary Approaches to Argument Schemes: The Procedural and Material Components

This paper focuses on the inferential configuration of arguments, generally referred to as argument scheme. After outlining our approach, denominated Argumentum Model of Topics (AMT, see Rigotti and Greco Morasso 2006, 2009; Rigotti 2006, 2008, 2009), we compare it to other modern and contemporary approaches, to eventually illustrate some advantages offered by it. In spite of the evident connection with the tradition of topics, emerging also from AMT’s denomination, its involvement in the contemporary dialogue on argument schemes should not be overlooked. The model builds in particular on the theoretical and methodological perspective of pragma-dialectics in its extended version, reconciling dialectic and rhetoric; nevertheless, it also takes into account numerous other contributions to the study of argument schemes. Aiming at a representation of argument schemes able to monitor the inferential cohesion and completeness of arguments, AMT focuses on two components of argument scheme that could be distinguished, readapting pragma-dialectical terms, as procedural and material respectively. The procedural component is based on the semantic-ontological structure, which generates the inferential connection from which the logical form of the argument is derived. The material component integrates into the argument scheme the implicit and explicit premises bound to the contextual common ground (Rigotti 2006). In this paper, the comparison of the AMT to other approaches focuses on the inferential configuration of arguments and not on the typologies of argument schemes and on the principles they are based on, which the authors intend to tackle in a further paper.     

Women Philosophers in the Ancient Greek World: Donning the Mantle

This paper argues that there were women involved with philosophy on a fairly constant basis throughout Greek antiquity. It does so by tracing the lives and where extant the writings of these women. However, since the sources, both ancient and modern, from which we derive our knowledge about these women are so sexist and easily distort our view of these women and their accomplishments, the paper also discusses the manner in which their histories come down to us as well as the histories themselves. It discusses in detail the following women: the Pythagorean women philosophers of the 6th and 5th centuries B.C., Aspasia and Diotima of the 5th century B.C., Arete, Hipparchia, Pamphile and the women Epicureans—all from the 4th century B.C. the five logician daughters of a famous Stoic philosopher of the 3rd century B.C., and finally Hypatia who lived in the 4th century A.D.     

Locke and Whately on the Argumentum ad Hominem

This is an exploration of what Locke and Whately said about the Argumentatum ad Hominem, especially in the context of what they said about the other ad arguments, and with a view to ascertaining whether what they said lends support to the understanding of this argument implicit in Johnstone's thesis that all valid philosophical arguments are ad hominem. It is concluded that this support is forthcoming insofar as Locke and Whately had in mind an argument concerned with principles.The essay ends with a brief reformulation of Johnstone's generalization regarding philosophical arguments.     

Social Capital, Television, and the "Mean World": Trust, Optimism, and Civic Participation

Robert Putnam argues that much of the decline in social trust and civic engagement in the United States can be attributed to increased television viewing. People who watch a lot of television are likely to believe that the real world is as "mean" as the "television world," and hence withdraw their trust from other people and decline to participate in civic affairs. Using data from the GSS and other surveys, I show that it is not television that makes people less trusting, but optimism for the future that makes people more trusting. When measures of optimism were used as determinants of trust in the estimation of a simultaneous equation model, the effects of television vanished. There is no support for the argument that television makes us less trusting because of the content of the shows we watch, or for the argument that television makes us withdraw from civic engagement because of the amount of time consumed by viewing. In addition, no evidence for specific cohort effects was found.     

The Doomsday Argument and the Simulation Argument

The Doomsday Argument and the Simulation Argument share certain structural features, and hence are often discussed together (Bostrom 2003, Are you living in a computer simulation, Philosophical Quarterly, 53:243–255; Aranyosi 2004, The Doomsday Simulation Argument. Or why isn’t the end nigh, and you’re not living in a simulation, http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/190/; Richmond 2008, Doomsday, Bishop Ussher and simulated worlds, Ratio, 21:201–217; Bostrom and Kulczycki 2011 A patch for the Simulation Argument, Analysis, 71:54–61). Both are cases where reflecting on one’s location among a set of possibilities yields a counter-intuitive conclusion—in the first case that the end of humankind is closer than you initially thought, and in the second case that it is more likely than you initially thought that you are living in a computer simulation. Indeed, the two arguments do have some structural similarities. But there are also significant disanalogies between the two arguments, and I argue that these disanalogies mean that the Simulation Argument succeeds and the Doomsday Argument fails.     

论灵籤的产生与演变

灵籤属于占卜术中的一种,其基本特点是以诗歌为载体、以竹签为占具来占卜吉凶。灵籤的历史悠久,大约产生在唐代中后期,是中国古代占卜术逐渐趋向世俗化,占卜方法趋向简易化的产物。灵籤出现后,其主流继续沿着通俗明了的方向演化,宋代的一些灵籤就有了注解、断语等,明清时期又增加了典故、传说故事、释义、占验、上中下判语等等内容,并且出现根据百姓占卜需要而分门别类的籤谱。由于灵籤简便易行,逐渐成为中国影响最大的占卜形式之一。灵籤的演变从一个侧面反映了唐宋以来中国宗教信仰的世俗化的历史进程。     

Earth, Dream, and Healing: The Integration of Materia and Psyche in the Ancient World

Influenced by the methods and practices of Hippocrates, the Asclepius cult used herbal formulae and medicinal applications intricately connected with Asclepius cult rituals and worship. An understanding of the types of herb and medical applications surrounding their use by the cult aids understanding of the inner world and symbolism of ancient dreams.Jeffrey B. Pettis teaches in the field of New Testament Studies at Fordham University, New York City. His focus is the interpretation and use of ancient dreams in early Christianity and the Greco-Roman world. He has lived and traveled in Greece, Egypt and Turkey, studying the design and culture of ancient temples and the sanctuaries of Asclepius, the deity of the ancient dream cult. He received his Ph.D. from Union Seminary in 2004.     

传统与现代交织中的公民道德建设——郑州市公民道德素质调查

郑州作为河南省省会和全国区域性中心城市,其市民的道德素质与中部经济社会发展相关。通过调查,我们发现,郑州市民的道德状况表现为社会公德意识和职业道德感较强、家庭道德变化明显、诚信状况乐观等。同时,针对存在的问题,建议多管齐下、不断提升市民道德素质,包括,建立一套郑州市民道德素质样本,并制定相应的评价标准与考评体系,加强多种载体建设,有重点、分层次地做好道德规范的普及工作,政府主导着力解决好现实中存在的突出问题等。     

Civic religion in England: Traditions and transformations

As the religious diversity of English towns and cities has grown over the past thirty years due to the establishment in some places of sizeable communities of Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs, as well as other faiths, there have been important changes to local public religion. Traditional civic ceremonies, such as Remembrance Sunday, as well as new forms of civic celebration and commemoration, are now increasingly taking account of the diversity of faiths represented in Britain. This paper examines the consequences of religious diversity for English civic religion by looking at some of the traditions of civic ceremonies in England and at the way in which they have been transformed by the changing religious landscape of towns and cities. The paper also explores some of the dilemmas and questions that have emerged both for the Church of England as well as for the other faith communities when it comes to the design and delivery of civic ceremonies.     

Distributive Justice and Co-Operation in a World of Humans and Non-Humans: A Contractarian Argument for Drawing Non-Humans into the Sphere of Justice

Various arguments have been provided for drawing non-humans such as animals and artificial agents into the sphere of moral consideration. In this paper, I argue for a shift from an ontological to a social-philosophical approach: instead of asking what an entity is, we should try to conceptually grasp the quasi-social dimension of relations between non-humans and humans. This allows me to reconsider the problem of justice, in particular distributive justice. Engaging with the work of Rawls, I show that an expansion of the contractarian framework to non-humans causes an important problem for liberalism, but can be justified by a contractarian argument. Responding to Bell’s and Nussbaum’s comments on Rawls, I argue that we can justify drawing non-humans into the sphere of distributive justice by relying on the notion of a co-operative scheme. I discuss what co-operation between humans and non-humans can mean and the extent to which it depends on properties. I conclude that we need to imagine principles of ecological and technological distributive justice.     

Civic Education and the Good

It is argued that children need to learn about civic issues intheir education because certain virtues are required for a decently organisedsociety. It is also argued that the school has wide obligations to educate theyoung in civics because it is in their best interests. This is not seen asan encroachment on the privacy of the individual. It is explained that theschool has an obligation to impart knowledge to the young.     

从古代中国的天下一体化看当代全球化趋势

人是社会性的动物,所以社会化是人类历史发展的一个基本趋势。不同的社会化态势,在一定程度上决定了各个文明发展的不同路向。长期以来,人们形成了这样一个共识,就是在历史上,中国是一个封闭的社会,而西方则是一个开放的社会。这是西方中心论的观念在作怪。其实,由于交通阻隔,在漫长的历史长河中,世界上各个大的文明都是相对独立发展的。如果说中国是封闭的,那么可以说其他文明也是封闭的。笔者以为,中西的不同,更为实质的,并不在于封闭还是开放,而在于一统还是分治,也就是社会化态势的不同。学者们很早就注意到,与世界上其他国家相比,古代…