Richard Sorabji here takes time as his central theme, exploring fundamental questions about its nature: Is it real or an aspect of consciousness? Did it begin along with the universe? Can anything escape from it? Does it come in atomic chunks? In addressing these and myriad other issues, Sorabji engages in an illuminating discussion of early thought about time, ranging from Plato and Aristotle to Islamic, Christian, and Jewish medieval thinkers. Sorabji argues that the thought of these often negelected philosophers (...) about the subject is, in many cases, more complete than that of their more recent counterparts. “Splendid. . . . The canvas is vast, the picture animated, the painter nonpareil. . . . Sorabji’s work will encourage more adventurers to follow him to this fascinating new-found land.”—Jonathan Barnes, Times Literary Supplement “One of the most important works in the history of metaphysics to appear in English for a considerable time. No one concerned with the problems with which it deals either as a historian of ideas or as a philosopher can afford to neglect it.”—Donald MacKinnon, Scottish Journal of Theology “Unusually readable for such scholarly content, the book provides in rich and cogent terms a lively and well-balanced discussion of matters of concern to a wide academic audience.”— Choice. (shrink)

Based on a non-consequentialist ethical theory, this book critically examines the prevalent view that if a fetus has the moral standing of a person, it has a right to life and abortion is impermissible. Most discussion of abortion has assumed that this view is correct, and so has focused on the question of the personhood of the fetus. Kamm begins by considering in detail the permissibility of killing in non-abortion cases which are similar to abortion cases. She goes on to (...) consider the case for the permissibility of abortion in many types of pregnancies, including ones resulting from rape, voluntary pregnancy, and pregnancy resulting from a voluntary sex act, even if the fetus is considered a person. This argument emerges as part of a broader theory of creating new people responsibly. Kamm explores the implications of this argument for informed consent to abortion; responsibilities in pregnancy that is not aborted, and the significance of extra-uterine gestation devices for the permissibility of abortion. (shrink)

What is the purpose of art? What drives us to make it? Why do we value it? Nick Zangwill argues that the function of art is to have certain aesthetic properties in virtue of its non-aesthetic properties, and this function arises because of the artist's insight into the nature of these dependence relations and her intention to bring them about.

Recent years have seen substantial interest in, and experiments with, public participation in environmental and scientific research and decision-making. In this paper we explore a case of such citizen participation, a co-creation project that aimed to bring together citizens, researchers, and artists to bring about sustainable futures. Drawing on recent theories of the nature of expertise, we argue for the importance of understanding it as involving practices of care, attachment, and affect. In investigating how expertise is performed and negotiated (...) within this case, we find that expertise is distributed across the project, including in the work of organising it. This organisational work, in particular, often involves engagement with the moral imperatives of participation and with embodied and relational skills necessary to it. The analysis thus contributes to discussion of the ways in which different forms of expertise may be present in citizen participation in science, and to understanding the kinds of skills that are necessary for successfully supporting such participation. (shrink)

For Augustine, eternity holds a special significance, because understanding this concept correctly enabled him to understand God as he truly is: eternal, stable, unchangeable. For this reason, eternity is a key point in understanding how God created all things. God is eternal, and yet he created a world that is not eternal. How is this possible? Augustine attempts to answer this question, inter alia, in his extensive commentary on Genesis, De Genesi ad Litteram. Following the first chapter of Genesis, Augustine (...) presents God as the eternal being who speaks, acts, and knows everything, but who in no way diminishes itself in the process of creating the caelum et terram. This paper aims to present specifically the way Augustine understood divine eternity in the creation process. (shrink)

God is traditionally understood to be a perfect being who is the creator and sustainer of all that is. God's creative and sustaining activity is often thought to involve choosing a possible world for actualization. It is generally said that either there is (a) exactly one best of all possible worlds, or there are (b) infinitely many increasingly better worlds, or else there are (c) infinitely many unsurpassable worlds within God's power to actualize. On each view, critics have offered arguments (...) for atheism that turn on God's choice of a world. In what follows, I first discuss some background issues, and I then survey the contemporary literature on these arguments. (shrink)

The present work is intended once again to draw the attention of readers to the resources opened up by Spinoza for the elucidation of the classical problems of philosophy. Today these problems are too often taken to be merely verbal, so that answers to them so far as these are metaphysical are confidently claimed to be "nonsense. " My labours will, therefore, seem to minds thus committed to have been untimely and funda mentally futile. Untimely they may have been, but (...) unless also fu tile their untimeliness may render them the more exigent; and to judge them as futile is to claim a certainty not avaIlable to the honest sceptic. Vigorous attempts to discredit metaphysical investigation are no new thing, though the latest is, perhaps, the most thoroughgoing, and cer tainly the most self-confident. Yet it may well be argued that effective criticism of metaphysics is either itself a sort of metaphysics, or has for its foundation presuppositions that could only be metaphysically es tablished. "Naturam expellas furca, tamen usque recurret. " Metaphysics survives, and can only survive as a true philosophia perennis, as the catalyst of scepsis and schism - neither as inexorabie dogma "once for all de livered," nor as "a plant that cometh of the lust of the earth, without a formal seed. (shrink)

Cognitive advancement is not always a matter of acquiring new information. It often consists in reconfiguration--in reorganizing a domain so that hitherto overlooked or underemphasized features, patterns, opportunities, and resources come to light. Several modes of reconfiguration prominent in the arts--metaphor, fiction, exemplification, and perspective--play important roles in science as well. They do not perform the same roles as literal, descriptive, perspectiveless scientific truths. But to understand how science advances understanding, we need to appreciate the ineliminable cognitive contributions of non-literal, (...) non-descriptive symbols. (shrink)

The creation of QCD is one of greatest achievements in the history of science. It has radically changed our conception of the fundamental ontology of the physical world and its underlying dynamics. What it has discovered are more than new particles and a new force, but rather a deeper level of physical reality, a new kind of entities. Dynamically, the strong nuclear forces are no longer taken to be fundamental, but are relegated to the status of the un-cancelled residue (...) of far stronger long range force mediated by gluon. From a long term perspective, perhaps more important than these discoveries is that it breaks a new path to explore many novel features of an unknown layer of the physical world, such as instanton, the theta vacuum and effective energy. The notion of effective energy allows us to conceptualize the mysterious quantum number flow and hadronization. Although the metaphysical status of effective energy is not quite clear at this moment, but a window is open for conceptualizing the physical world that is in complex processes of transmutations in a unified way. (shrink)

The creation of cultural information by humans is an ability that requires to compound together different factors. Although information needs to be transmitted faithfully enough so to prevent errors, space must be left to create innovations at the same time. Individual trial and error is the principal source of innovations among all primate species, especially in emulative contexts, but it does not explain the quantity, quality or rapidity of human cultural production. On the other hand, imitation and (over)imitation explain (...) quite well faithful transmission and error control but do not explain the creation of cultural novelties nor the ratchet effect of human culture. To explain these latter components, we need a combination of trial and error in emulative contexts and (over)imitation. Here we suggest that this combination of the ability in creating innovations and transmitting them faithfully occurred for the first time during the Palaeolithic. In that time frame, we can detect the establishment of imitation as the main social learning strategy in the genus Homo. Adopting a niche construction (henceforth NC) paradigm, we propose that this combination became a social characteristic of Homo sapiens which ontogenetically happens when children reach the school age in modern humans. (shrink)

The creation narratives of Genesis 1 and 2 about “first things” need to be read, not simply within the personal context of our salvation, but within a universal context that encompasses the “last things” and “all things”.

Introduction -- Backgrounds -- Leaving Eden -- The case for evolution -- Three lines of critique -- That has its seeds within it -- Afterword.

Definitions of art tend to take the phenomenon at face value, with philosophers aspiring to accommodate their theories to the artistic facts no matter how bizarre. The result, as for instance in the work of Dickie, is a definition of art neutral on the questions whether any of it is any good, and why anyone would bother to produce it. Zangwill bucks this trend by insisting that the method of definition-and-counterexample that drives much of the field is out of date, (...) and by contending that any good theory of art should explain why making and appreciating it is worth our while. The result is an account of art that foregrounds aesthetic value while striving to show why art production and appreciation are rational activities.Zangwill sees the tradition he wishes to rebut as guided by the method of ‘extensional adequacy’, that is, ‘ … a theory of art that classifies as art all or most of the things we intuitively call “art”, and that excludes all or most of the things that we intuitively do not call “art” ’. This is jarring, since that tradition aims for intensional adequacy, as shown by the fact that a critic of a given theory is allowed to proffer hypothetical rather than just actual cases in aid of that critique. Zangwill's error does not, however, undermine the gravamen of his challenge, which is this. Insofar as we are after a theory of art rather than a description of the …. (shrink)

Karl Jaspers argued that academics must be prepared to accept, perhaps even to welcome, the fact that most students 'will learn next to nothing' from a university education. In this paper I shall argue that, while Jaspers' model is unpersuasive as an ideal and inaccurate as a description, there is an uncomfortable truth lurking behind his forthright but gloomy conclusion; viz., that university teaching pays little direct attention to the needs of the student in the wider world (i.e. to the (...) needs of the student qua employee or qua citizen or even qua rounded human being) and pays even less attention, or perhaps none at all, to the needs and expectations of third parties such as employers. In terms of the political context universities now find themselves in, this is an uncomfortable and embarrassing truth for faculty to admit, for it appears to epitomise a self-regarding and inward looking academy. Yet, despite this, perhaps it is a truth that academics should be prepared to accept, even to welcome. At least, in starting any serious discussion on the nature of a university education, it should be a truth we are prepared to admit. (shrink)

Presents a radically different yet complete explanation of the fossil record and the diversity of organic life. Answers the question of how man and other species originated.

A bold and visionary book that reveals the false and catastrophically damaging images at the root of the oppression of women and the rape of Earth's resources, ...

Through faith we understand that the worlds were made by the Word of God, so that things which are seen were not made of things which do appear By faith we understand that the universe was framed by God's command, so that the visible came forth from the invisible.