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Paul in Israel's Story: Self and Community at the Cross

John L. Meech

The self has become a problem in postmodern thought, and this problem poses a sharp challenge for dialogue between Christians and others who tell different stories of self and community. A healthy ... More

The self has become a problem in postmodern thought, and this problem poses a sharp challenge for dialogue between Christians and others who tell different stories of self and community. A healthy suspicion of the self’s transcendence lets the self approach the other in humility, but what can create the community where the self and other can embrace? Paul was humbled before Christ, yet to embrace the crucified Christ in one community he had to retell his community’s story. Can the Church today repeat Paul’s costly embrace? Paul in Israel’s Story addresses the problem of the self in community in a theological hermeneutics that brings together recent biblical scholarship and constructive theology. Proponents and critics of the new perspective on Paul join philosophers in an ongoing conversation about selfhood. Paul’s story extends Paul Ricoeur’s “hermeneutics of the self” into stories of communities; hermeneutics deepens our sense of Paul’s “I have been crucified with Christ” and “Christ lives in me”. Linking hermeneutics with Paul’s story is a critical engagement with Rudolf Bultmann. Avoiding the stark either/or that can characterize critiques of Bultmann, the book reconceives demythologizing as an ongoing conversation about how to embrace the other from out of the past in one community. It concludes by situating the communal self in a contextual framework built on Jürgen Moltmann’s “community in Christ” and Robert Jenson’s pneumatology. This framework carries communal selfhood into interreligious and ecumenical dialogue, ecclesiology, and pneumatology. Just as retelling Israel’s story challenged Paul’s self-understanding, Paul in Israel’s Story challenges us to risk our reliable understandings of self and community to embrace Christ crucified and the other in Christ.Less

Models, Truth, and Realism

Barry Taylor

This book mounts an argument against one of the fundamental tenets of much contemporary philosophy, the idea that we can make sense of reality as existing objectively, independently of our capacities ... More

This book mounts an argument against one of the fundamental tenets of much contemporary philosophy, the idea that we can make sense of reality as existing objectively, independently of our capacities to come to know it. Part One argues that traditional realism can be explicated as a doctrine about truth — that truth is objective, that is, public, bivalent, and epistemically independent. Part Two argues that a form of Hilary Putnam’s model-theoretic argument demonstrates that no such notion of truth can be founded on the idea of correspondence, as explained in model-theoretic terms. Part Three argues that non-correspondence accounts of truth-truth as superassertibility or idealized rational acceptability, formal conceptions of truth, and Tarskian truth also fail to meet the criteria for objectivity. Along the way, it also dismisses the claims of the latter-day views of Putnam, and of similar views articulated by John McDowell, to constitute a new, less traditional, form of realism. The Coda bolsters some of the considerations advanced in Part Three in evaluating formal conceptions of truth, by assessing and rejecting the claims of Robert Brandom to have combined such an account of truth with a satisfactory account of semantic structure. The book concludes that there is no defensible notion of truth that preserves the theses of traditional realism, nor any extant position sufficiently true to the ideals of that doctrine to inherit its title. So the only question remaining is which form of antirealism to adopt.Less

Proceedings of the British Academy, Volume 161, Biographical Memoirs of Fellows, VIII

Ron Johnston (ed.)

This volume of the Proceedings of the British Academy looks at the lives and works of some of Britain's foremost scholars. The scholars featured in this volume are: John Lloyd Ackrill, Maurice ... More

This volume of the Proceedings of the British Academy looks at the lives and works of some of Britain's foremost scholars. The scholars featured in this volume are: John Lloyd Ackrill, Maurice Warwick Beresford, Malcolm MacNaughtan Bowie, Peter Astbury Brunt, Norman Rufus Colin Cohn, John Anthony Crook, Robert Rees Davies, David Fairweather Foxon, Terence Wilmot Hutchison, Philip James Jones, Michael Vincent Levey, John Macquarrie, Charles Francis Digby Moule, Anthony David Nuttall, Alan William Raitt, Joseph Burney Trapp, William Watson, and Bryan Ronald Wilson.Less

Proceedings of the British Academy, Volume 131, 2004 Lectures

P. J. Marshall (ed.)

This volume contains sixteen lectures given to the National Academy for the Humanities and Social Sciences in 2004. The topical issues debated in this volume include the patenting of AIDS drugs, the ... More

This volume contains sixteen lectures given to the National Academy for the Humanities and Social Sciences in 2004. The topical issues debated in this volume include the patenting of AIDS drugs, the future pensions crisis (a lecture given by the Governor of the Bank of England), Britain's universities, and Pan-Islam. There are studies of Shakespeare, Pope, Montaigne, Robert Graves, and William Faulkner. And there are lectures on the Inquisition, empires in history, and the journey towards spiritual fulfillment.Less

Citizenship Rights and Social Movements: A Comparative and Statistical Analysis

Joe Foweraker and Todd Landman

Collective action in modern history has come to be defined by people fighting for their rights. This study identifies the main connections made between collective action and individual rights, in ... More

Collective action in modern history has come to be defined by people fighting for their rights. This study identifies the main connections made between collective action and individual rights, in theory and history, and sets out to test them in the comparative context of modernising authoritarian regimes in Brazil, Chile, Mexico, and Spain. The study employs new evidence and innovative methods to illuminate the political relationship between social mobilisation and the language of rights, and shows that the fight for rights is fundamental to the achievement of democracy. In large measure it is this fight that will continue to decide the chances of democratic advance in the new millennium. This affirmation offers a direct challenge to the claims of Robert Putnam in Making Democracy Work, where democracy is seen to be the result of good behaviour in the form of the civic community. To the dismay of those peoples still aspiring to make democracy, Putnam's civicness may take centuries to accumulate. This book, in contrast, defend the political potency of the promise of rights, and argue that the bad behaviour of the fight for rights may achieve democracy in the space of one or two generations. The study demonstrates strong grounds for optimism, and constitutes a robust defence of democracy as the result of the collective struggle for individual rights. But the fight for rights is always conflictual and often dangerous, and the outcome is never certain. Successes are partial and reversible, and democratic advance tends to occur piecemeal, and against the odds.Less

The Practice of Value

Joseph Raz

R. Jay Wallace (ed.)

The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, which honor the American scholar, industrialist, and philanthropist Obert Clark Tanner, are presented annually at each of nine universities in the United States ... More

The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, which honor the American scholar, industrialist, and philanthropist Obert Clark Tanner, are presented annually at each of nine universities in the United States and Great Britain. They were established at the University of California, Berkeley, beginning in the 2000/1 academic year. This book is an exploration of a pervasive but puzzling aspect of our world: value. At the core of the book are the Tanner Lectures delivered at Berkeley in 2001 by the author, who has been one of the leading figures in moral and legal philosophy since the 1970s. His aim is to make sense of the dependence of value on social practice, without falling back on cultural relativism. In response, three philosophers, Christine Korsgaard, Robert Pippin, and Bernard Williams, offer different approaches to the subject. The book begins with an introduction by Jay Wallace, setting the scene for what follows, and ends with a response from the author to his commentators. The result is a debate about the relations between human values and human life.Less

Spirituality for the Skeptic: The Thoughtful Love of life

Robert C. Solomon

For most of my life, I have been dismissive of both spirituality and religion. I say this to make clear the perspective and the starting point of this book, this search. No doubt, many of my readers ... More

For most of my life, I have been dismissive of both spirituality and religion. I say this to make clear the perspective and the starting point of this book, this search. No doubt, many of my readers will think of me as simpleminded, trying to recover what I should have learned had I been rightly raised in the matrix of religion, ritual, and belief. Others, my friends from the field of science and most of my political friends, will think that I am benighted, or perhaps something of a sell out, for giving up my lifelong down‐to‐earth scientific, and admittedly hyperrational way of thinking about things. But if the very idea of spirituality seemed to me to be contaminated by sectarian religion and by uncritical and antiscientific thinking, my view of life, which manifested in my becoming a philosopher (it did not come from philosophy) pointed to something else. Spirituality is not just organized religion. Nor is it antiscience, unnatural or supernatural. There is a naturalized spirituality that I have always had a glimpse of, and this is what I want to pursue in this book.Less

Context and Content: Essays on Intentionality in Speech and Thought

Robert C. Stalnaker

A collection about the intentionality of speech acts and propositional attitudes. The chapters in the first section develop a framework for pragmatics—the study of the interaction of speech acts and ... More

A collection about the intentionality of speech acts and propositional attitudes. The chapters in the first section develop a framework for pragmatics—the study of the interaction of speech acts and the contexts in which they are performed. The framework is used to defend and apply a pragmatic conception of presupposition, to account for the role of indicative conditional statements in reasoning, and to solve some puzzles about statements of identity and existence. The chapters in the second section concern the semantics of the attribution of belief and other propositional attitudes. They attempt to reconcile the possible‐worlds analysis of propositional content with the phenomena, including de re belief attribution and the attribution of indexical or self‐locating belief. The chapters in the third section defend an externalist account of the contents of thought. It is argued that there is no reason to think a viable account of narrow content can be developed, and that none is needed to provide an adequate account of the role of intentional content in the explanation of behaviour and experience. The chapters in the fourth section discuss the relation between the content of thoughts and the forms in which content is represented and expressed. It is argued that the temptation to build linguistic structure into the content of thought should be resisted since it does not provide the material for an adequate solution to the problems that plague the possible‐worlds conception of proposition, such as the problem of logical omniscience.Less