Religion and Philosophy

The North American Wildlife Conservation Model (NAM) is the driver of a strong anthropocentric stance, which has legalized an ongoing, annual exploitation of hundreds of millions of wild animals, who are killed in the United States through trapping, hunting and other lethal practices. Increasingly, the American public opposes the killing of wild animals for recreation, trophies and profit but has little—if any—knowledge of the Model. The purpose of this book is to empower the public with knowledge about the NAM’s insufficiencies and to help expedite the shift from lethal to compassionate conservation, an endeavour urgently needed particularly under the threats of climate change, human population growth and accelerating plant and animal species extinctions.

With a focus on trapping, this book exposes the NAM's belief in human supremacy and its consequences for wild animals and their ecosystems, the same value that is driving the ongoing global destruction of nature and accelerating species extinction. Motivated by a deep concern for wild animals who suffer and whose lives are extinguished each year by 'sportsmen and women', this book exposes the violent treatment of wild animals inherent in governmental-promoted hunting and trapping programs, while emphasizing the importance of empathy and compassion for other animals in conservation and in our lives.

At this moment of extreme political polarization in the U.S. which has the potential to threaten the very foundations of the state, Professor Michael DeArmey proposes a revised and updated Constitution. This enriched, reborn Constitution retains much of the current Constitution but also seeks to meliorate and indeed resolve entirely many of the seemingly intractable problems in American democracy. The rights of American citizens are revisited and expanded, and for the first time a wholly new Bill of Goods sets out government’s role in assisting in the necessities for life.

The book contains a careful defense of the proposed changes, including individual chapters focusing on the most controversial topics. Other chapters explore why a constitution is needed and survey the Federalist papers on Constitutional structure.  The book also examines the writings of Aristotle, John Adams’ Defence, and the correspondence of Madison and Jefferson.

Should religion and politics be kept apart? What should be the relationship between the church and the state? M.Y. Ciftci answers these questions by studying the most important event in the recent history of the Catholic Church: The Second Vatican Council (1962-65).

The book provides a new interpretation of the Council’s teaching on church-state relations to better appreciate its flaws and need for reform. By paying attention to the (often overlooked) importance given by the Council to the lay apostolate, it reveals how the Council did not reform, as is often thought, but retained a flawed conception of the laity’s role in politics. 

It then proposes a new framework for understanding church-state relations using the ressourcement method of returning to scripture and tradition, and by a critical dialogue with Oliver O’Donovan and various Protestant biblical scholars of the Powers in the New Testament. Ciftci shows how fruitful an self-consciously ecumenical approach can be for political theology. As most ressourcement theologians have overlooked political issues, and since ecumenical theology rarely touches on issues of church-state relations, this work makes an original contribution to the ressourcement project and to ecumenism. 

This book explores new societal paradigms related to current debates and discusses how we can confront aspects of those debates which do not fit into a traditional social model. It proposes a theoretical and reflective framework for understanding new social discourse, particularly related to issues of diversity, feminism, and liminal societies. The goal is to explore such issues via humanities-centered lens, rather than just sociological or psychological. Furthermore, the book adheres to the responsibility to generate a way of thinking related to a "new" way of manifesting for our society and generating a culture for the future.

This book investigates dispositions in grammatical-normative terms through a contrast between a naturalized paradigm and a Wittgenstein-inspired perspective. The book presents a conceptual analysis of the notion of disposition informed by Wittgenstein's and Ryle's philosophies to defend a normative notion of disposition.

The book opens with a presentation of the current naturalized paradigm on dispositions, focusing on its main presuppositions and limits. It then turns to the discussion of a Wittgensteinian-inspired dispositionalism of knowing and understanding, before filling the exegetical gap about Wittgenstein's own use of the notion of disposition. The author critically engages with the current paradigm using Ryle's notion of category mistake, before concluding with a presentation of some philosophical views where a notion of normative disposition is employed.

This book is essential reading for anyone searching for a new perspective on dispositions and will broaden the appeal of the Wittgensteinian tradition within contemporary analytic philosophy and, potentially, psychology as well.

This graduate textbook provides a basic introduction to experimental philosophy (x-phi). In nine chapters, different methods and tools used in X-Phi are explained, spanning quantitative vignette studies, interactive experiments, corpus analysis, psycholinguistic experiments as well as qualitative interview studies. Each chapter introduces a specific experimental method by means of a case study in an easily accessible way and covers the whole research process from the development of a research question to the interpretation of the data.

This book forms an important part of the current revival of the debate around the category of historical epistemology. The term “historical epistemology” designates a methodology or research program aimed at building a historically informed theory of knowledge and/or a history of science and technology that enhances its epistemological aspects. This book offers an original panorama of the French debate surrounding the emergence and consolidation of the intellectual program of historical epistemology over a period ranging from the end of the 19th century to the second half of the 20th century. The first section of this book sets out to reconstruct sociologically and historically the processes of circulation of ideas - both nationally and internationally - that constituted the conditions of possibility for the emergence of the very idea of historical epistemology in the French intellectual context. The second section aims instead to highlight the main theoretical positions - both epistemological and historiographical - that would make it possible to trace a relative unity of intent among the authors who make up the canon of historical epistemology (in their oppositional relationship to other intellectual trends). Particular attention is also paid to defining a “minor canon” of this tradition, represented by what is known as “mathematical thought”. The third part of the volume focuses instead on reconstructing the anthropological, sociological and political perspectives underlying the methodology employed by authors belonging to historical epistemology. The three parts combined make for a uniquely broad yet focused book that is of interest to historians, philosophers and scientists alike.

This book fills a major historical gap by investigating the role played by Jewish American organizations in the rescue, rehabilitation and reconstruction of Tunisia’s Jewish population during and after World War Two. Using a variety of archival sources to explore the intricacies of this intervention and the dynamics of interactions between these organizations and local Jewish leaders as well as Tunisian government officials, this book highlights that Jewish American organizations present in Tunisia during the wartime and postwar periods played a major role not only in the rescue and relief of the country’s Jewish victims of war and German occupation but also in their educational, vocational, and medical rehabilitation which aimed to prepare them for immigration to Palestine.

This volume is the first to articulate ethical foundations of transhumanism from perspectives focused on transhuman flourishing, as opposed to utilitarian or deontological approaches. Transhumanism is typically framed as a quest for “transcending biological limitations” and “unlocking human potential”—and thus perceived to be at odds with ethical conceptions of a “good life” that are substantively defined in terms of “human nature.” However, the concept of “human nature” is not a biological given but deeply bound up with metaphysical conceptions about what (trans)human futures are possible, desirable, and good. It invites ethical reflection on who we are, the value of embodiment and community to (trans)human existence, and who we might hope to become. The contributions collected in this volume offer a wide spectrum of visions for shaping the techno-progressive agenda of transhumanism in ethically grounded and socially responsible ways.

This book on the life and work of Josef Schächter, member of the Vienna Circle and Rabbi, covers all writings of his Viennese period until 1938. The works include his dissertation on Nicolai Hartmann, his monograph Prolegomena zu einer kritischen Grammatik inspired by Wittgenstein, his Introduction to Logic, and several articles on linguistic and analytic philosophy, ethics, and religion. It is an important source for anyone working on Schächter, Wittgenstein and/or the Vienna Circle. It provides students and researchers with a special contribution to the Jewish cultural history of Vienna before the Shoah.

This book discusses how scientific and other types of cognition make use of models, abduction, and explanatory reasoning in order to produce important, innovative, and possibly creative changes in theories and concepts. Gathering revised contributions presented at the international conference on Model-Based Reasoning (MBR023), held on June 7–9, 2023 in Rome, Italy, the book addresses various intertwined topics ranging from the epistemology and applications of models also concerning the problem of knowledge production and scientific methodology (information visualization, experimental methods, and design) to the analysis of their role in cognition, decision-making, also with respect to social implications. The problem of model-based cognition is also illustrated taking advantage of recent results regarding problem-solving, abduction, and logic, paying attention to a critique of the dominant and received approaches, to the aim of fostering new discussions and stimulate new ideas. All in all, the book provides researchers and graduate students in the fields of applied philosophy, epistemology, cognitive science, and artificial intelligence alike with an authoritative snapshot of the latest theories and applications of model-based reasoning.