Pardoning Puritanism: Community,Character, and Forgiveness in the Work of Richard Baxter

The English Puritan Richard Baxter (1615–1691) developed an account of forgiveness that resonates with twentieth‐century virtue ethics. He understood forgiveness as one component of a larger disposition of character developed in community as human beings recognize themselves as sinful creatures engaged in complex relationships of dependency and responsibility, with both God and one another. In the midst of these relationships, persons experience divine and human forgiveness and discover opportunities to practice forgiveness in return. Baxter thus negotiated a distinctive relationship between Christian hope for reconciliation and more stereotypical Puritan emphases on punishment, civil order, and justice. At the same time that recent moral reflection allows us to raise questions about some features of Baxter's argument (such as his treatment of anger), his work provides important resources for correlating dispositions with concrete obligations, establishing a place for forgiveness in the public realm, and counterbalancing the modern emphasis on individual rights.     

A Cross-Cultural Reflection on Shusterman’s Suggestion of the “Transactional” Body

This short article explores the meaning of Shusterman’s “transactional body,” derived from his statement that the will is not a purely mental affair that is independent of physical modality but is always an interaction with its environment. While he appreciates the Deweyan interactional model, he develops the “transactional mode,” which he implies should expand the body-mind unity to the level of social and cultural conditions. Shusterman finds similar integrations and transactions among the mental, psychophysical and physical levels in Asian philosophical traditions. This article conducts a comparative study between his theory and Mencius’ understanding of the body. Within the discussion, the analysis of aesthetic experience explicated by Dewey and Shusterman is reviewed as the link to the comparison.     

RORTY ON REALISM AND CONSTRUCTIVISM

Abstract: This article argues that we can and should recognize the mind dependence, epistemic dependence, and social dependence of theories of mind‐independent reality, as opposed to Rorty, who thinks not even a constructivist theory of mind‐independent reality can be had. It accuses Rorty of creating an equivocation or “dualism of scheme and content” between causation and justification based on various “Davidsonian” irrelevancies, not to be confused with the actual Davidson. These include the Principle of Charity, the attack against conceptual schemes, the linguistification of social practice, intersubjectivism, and causal naturalism. It follows that realists and constructivists need neither follow Rorty's mischaracterizations nor succumb to his internal paradoxes.     

Creating cosmopolitans: the case for literature

A cosmopolitan education must help us identify with those who are unlike us. In Martha Nussbaum’s words, students must learn “enough to recognize common aims, aspirations, and values, and enough about these common ends to see how variously they are instantiated in the many cultures and their histories.” It is commonly thought that reading serious literature will play a significant role in this process. However, this claim is challenged by theorists we call sentimentalists, who claim that the goals of cosmopolitan education are better served by less sophisticated, overtly sentimental texts which take a certain moral framework as given and encourage straightforward emotional responses within the guidelines of that framework. This paper critiques the sentimentalists’ position, arguing that their conception of a ‘sentimental education’ is inadequate to prepare students for the increasingly diverse, complex, cosmopolitan world their fate it is to inhabit.     

Selling Yourself: Titmuss's Argument Against a Market in Blood

This article defends Richard Titmuss's argument, and PeterSinger's sympathetic support for it, against orthodoxphilosophical criticism. The article specifies thesense in which a market in blood is ``dehumanising' ashaving to do with a loss of ``imagined community' orsocial ``integration', and not with a loss of valued or``deeper' liberty. It separates two ``domino arguments'– the ``contamination of meaning' argument and the``erosion of motivation' argument which support, indifferent but interrelated ways, the claim that amarket in blood is ``imperialistic.' Concentrating onthe first domino argument the article considers theview that monetary and non-monetary meanings of thesame good can co-exist given the robustness of certainkinds of relationship and joint undertakings withinwhich gifts can figure. It argues that societalrelationships are vulnerable or permeable to theeffects of the market in a way that those constitutiveof the personal sphere are not.General, more broadly political questions remainunanswered but the core of Titmuss's original andchallenging argument remains and can be presented ina defensible form.     

Mackie on Practical Reason

I argue that John Mackie’s treatment of practical reason is both attractive and unjustly neglected. In particular, I argue that it is importantly different from, and much more plausible than, the kind of instrumentalist approach famously articulated by Bernard Williams. This matters for the interpretation of the arguments for Mackie’s most famous thesis: moral scepticism, the claim that there are no objective values. Richard Joyce has recently defended a version or variant of moral scepticism by invoking an instrumentalist theory like Williams’. I argue that this is a serious strategic mistake.

The structure of tradeoffs in model building

Despite their best efforts, scientists may be unable to construct models that simultaneously exemplify every theoretical virtue. One explanation for this is the existence of tradeoffs: relationships of attenuation that constrain the extent to which models can have such desirable qualities. In this paper, we characterize three types of tradeoffs theorists may confront. These characterizations are then used to examine the relationships between parameter precision and two types of generality. We show that several of these relationships exhibit tradeoffs and discuss what consequences those tradeoffs have for theoretical practice. John Matthewson and Michael Weisberg have contributed equally to this paper.     

Is Theism a Simple,and hence Probable,Explanation for the Universe?

Abstract

Richard Swinburne, in his The Existence of God (2004), presents a cosmological argument in defence of theism (Swinburne 1991: 119, 135). God, Swinburne argues, is more likely to bring about an ordered universe than other states (ibid.: 144, 299). To defend this view, Swinburne presents the following arguments: (1) That this ordered universe is a priori improbable (2004: 49, 150, 1991: 304 et seq.), given the stringent requirements for life (cf. also Leslie 2000: 12), and the Second Law of Thermodynamics (Giancoli 1990: 396); (2) That it seems as if this ordered universe can be explained by theism; (3) A theistic explanation for the universe is more probable because it is a simple explanation. To this end, Swinburne makes use of Bayes’ Theorem. Symbolically, this claim can be represented as (e) for the evidence of the existence of a complex universe, and (h) for a hypothesis. Swinburne’s argument is that theism has a higher prior probability, P(h_theism) > P(h_materialism), since theism is simpler than materialism. He concludes that P(e|h_theism) > P(e|h_materialism). In this paper I will address only this argument (3) above, and defend the view that it is false: theism is not simpler than materialism, nor it is more probably true. I conclude that theism is less probable than materialism, expressed by P(h_theism) < P(h_materialism) : 2/N(2n+1) < 1/n, where N is the number of possible universes and n the number of entities in existence.     

The smoked plastic screen: An alternative to the one-way mirror

A double thickness, smoked plastic screen is presented as an alternative to the one-way mirror. Relative to the glass mirror, the use of the plastic screen provides a safe, nondistracting, durable, light weight, and inexpensive method for unobserved viewing without an appreciable loss in light transmission.     

汉学视野中卫氏父子的《周易》译介与研究

本文试图通过回顾德国汉学家卫礼贤和卫德明父子在德语和英语世界对《周易》的翻译、介绍和研究,呈现他们独特的研究视角和鲜明的问题意识。他们把人生乃至人类的基本问题纳入《周易》文本的解读之中,同时试图在《周易》中寻找对中国心灵、智慧和文化思维的理解,在西方之外寻找更具普遍性的宇宙智慧。他们以自身独特的方式在西方文化世界中＂翻开＂了《周易》,其要旨不在于传播有关《周易》的确切知识,而是启发人们思考和探讨《周易》所蕴藏的文化与思想/思维可能性,从而对自身在当下的生存境遇进行精神的内省。