Objections, Replies, and Further Refinements

2019 ◽  
pp. 289-336
Author(s):  
R. Zachary Manis
Keyword(s):  
Choice Model ◽  
Additional Component ◽  
Divine Presence ◽  
The Way

With the initial philosophical and theological case for the divine presence model in place, the author considers some objections, most of which the model can handle in the form introduced in the previous chapter, but one of which reveals the need for an additional component. First, the author considers the way that the divine presence model handles the biggest problems faced by its closest competitors, traditionalism and the choice model. He then turns to some challenges that are specific to the divine presence model’s way of understanding hell. In closing, he develops a variety of different hybrid views, which combine key elements of the divine presence model with other elements that are constitutive of one or more of the standard views. A number of such hybrid views are found in an inchoate form in the existing literature; the chapter briefly evaluates these, giving special attention to Talbott’s hybrid universalist model.

Sinners in the Presence of a Loving God

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. Zachary Manis
Keyword(s):  
Choice Model ◽  
Alternative View ◽  
Divine Presence ◽  
Divine Hiddenness ◽  
The Way

This book is a philosophical exploration of the various facets of the problem of hell, the reasons that the usual responses to the problem are unsatisfying, and the way that an adequate solution to the problem can be constructed. What drives discussion of the problem of hell, most fundamentally, is the question of why a perfectly good and loving God would consign anyone to eternal suffering in hell. Four main lines of response have been developed to answer it—viz., traditionalism, annihilationism, the choice model, and universalism—but, for different reasons, each of these standard options ends up being deficient in some crucial respect. The alternative view that the author defends in this book, the divine presence model, stands within the tradition that understands hell to be a state of eternal conscious suffering, but develops this idea in a way that is able to avoid the worst problems of its counterparts. The key idea is that the suffering of hell is not the result of any divine act that aims to inflict it, but rather the way that a sinful creature necessarily experiences the unmitigated presence of a holy God. Heaven and hell are not two “places” to which the saved and damned are consigned, respectively, but instead are two radically different ways that different persons will experience the same reality of God’s omnipresence once the barrier of divine hiddenness is finally removed.

Ronald Coase and the Difference between Markets and Firms

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Abraham A. Singer
Keyword(s):  
Transaction Cost ◽  
Economic Activity ◽  
Transaction Cost Economics ◽  
Theory Of The Firm ◽  
Tabular Form ◽  
Specific Investment ◽  
The Difference ◽  
Marginal Revolution ◽  
The Way

This chapter reviews the development of transaction cost economics and unpacks its theory of the firm. The chapter begins with the marginal revolution in economics and how it altered the way economists understood the corporation. It then reviews the work of Ronald Coase and Oliver Williamson, explaining how they provided a novel account of firms. Transaction cost economics emphasizes how firms use hierarchy and bureaucracy to overcome problems of opportunism and asset-specific investment to coordinate some types of economic activity more efficiently than markets can. The transaction cost account of the corporation’s productivity component is shown in tabular form in comparison with its historical forerunners reviewed in the previous chapter.

Understanding the Properties of “Numbers”

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Victor J. Katz ◽  
Karen Hunger Parshall
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Algebraic Systems ◽  
Modern Algebra ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Eighteenth And Nineteenth Centuries ◽  
The Way

This chapter looks at how mathematicians sought to understand the properties of “numbers” and in doing so pave the way for modern algebra. As mathematicians in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries struggled to understand what Fermat's alleged proof of his so-called “last theorem” might have been, they, as well as others motivated by issues other than Fermat's work, eventually came to extend the notion of “number.” And, they did this in much the same spirit that Évariste Galois had extended that of “domain of rationality” or field, that is, through the creation and analysis of whole new types of algebraic systems. This freedom to create and explore new systems—and new algebraic constructs like the determinants and matrices that were encountered in the previous chapter—became one of the hallmarks of the modern algebra that developed into the twentieth century.

Animal Death: Paolo Bacigalupi

2017 ◽  
pp. 133-180
Author(s):  
Brian Willems
Keyword(s):  
Short Circuit ◽  
Double Vision ◽  
Dialectical Structure ◽  
Award Winning ◽  
The Way

Paolo Bacigalupi’s Nebula award-winning novel The Windup Girl (2009) sets up a dialectical situation which it then disrupts. This is important for two reasons. First, dialectic formations are often also assemblages or networks, meaning that their constituent parts are defined by how they interact with each other rather than by the essence which is withdrawn from such interactions. In the previous chapter, symbiosis was seen as a powerful tool for change. However, the way it was described often bordered on a dialectical structure, as did the doubling of double-vision and the contradiction of crisis energy. The Windup Girl offers a different strategy, the short circuit. In brief, this means that one of the terms of a symbiosis disrupts the symbiosis. This disruption takes the form of spatial and temporal tensions, as described above and developed below.

Graham Young

2005 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Emsley
Keyword(s):  
Emotionally Disturbed ◽  
Disturbed Child ◽  
Single Parent Family ◽  
Sodium Tartrate ◽  
Potassium Tartrate ◽  
Thallium Poisoning ◽  
The One ◽  
Lethal Doses ◽  
The Way

The one multiple murderer whose name will for ever be linked to thallium is that of Graham Young. As we saw in the previous chapter, victims of thallium poisoning were generally thought to be suffering from some other condition and treated accordingly, so there was little in the way of evidence that we can use to follow the effect this metal had on them. In Young’s case there were several victims whose illnesses were carefully recorded and we can reconstruct the way that Young administered the poison, although it is difficult to deduce why he chose one person to die and not another. Young used two metal poisons: antimony and thallium, the former to punish, the latter to kill. With thallium acetate he murdered his stepmother, Molly Young, when he was a boy of 14, and later he murdered workmates Bob Egle and Fred Briggs. He fed antimony sodium tartrate or antimony potassium tartrate to all and sundry and thallium acetate in sub-lethal doses to some people. Altogether 13 people, and maybe more, felt the repressed wrath of Graham Young. Graham Young was born in the less-than-fashionable London suburb of Neasden on 7 September 1947 and his mother, Margaret, died of tuberculosis 15 weeks later on 23 December. His father, Fred Young, was obviously not capable of managing a single parent family and Graham was passed to Fred’s sister and her husband who lived nearby at 768 North Circular Road. Graham’s 8-year-old sister Winifred went to live with her grandmother. Despite the care of his aunt, baby Graham was already displaying a common outward sign of the emotionally disturbed child: excessive rocking to-and-fro in his cot. Whether his aunt could ever have supplied all the love of a mother is unlikely, especially as Graham taxed her patience by being a poor sleeper. Whatever chance of emotional stability he had was upset by his having to go to hospital for an operation on his ears. When his father found a new wife both Winifred and 3-year-old Graham went to live back home. By now Graham was a very withdrawn little boy and his childhood years were made even more miserable by his stepmother, whom he openly resented, and who returned his animosity.

Squaring Pragmatism with Linguistic Meaning

2020 ◽  
pp. 41-77
Author(s):  
John Collins
Keyword(s):  
Linguistic Meaning ◽  
The Third ◽  
Truth Conditional ◽  
The Way

This chapter has three major tasks. Firstly, I show how the conception of linguistic pragmatism on offer squares with certain features of standard truth-conditional approaches to meaning, especially as regards compositionality. Secondly, pace some recent semantic proposals, I argue that the properties of the Saxon genitive (e.g., Sally’s car) and adnominal adjectival attributions (e.g., red pen) are referentially open in the way I argued in the previous chapter. The third task involves sketching the kind of role I take syntax to play in fixing linguistic meaning and how the argument-adjunct distinction operates in regards to my core claims.

Mask

2019 ◽  
pp. 149-178
Author(s):  
Joe Moshenska
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Demonic Possession ◽  
The Way

This chapter begins with a wooden doll from the seventeenth century that is juxtaposed with the statues from Audley End considered in the previous chapter on the basis of their equally fixed, impassive visages. This feature is used to consider the way in which children, especially when at play, have been seen as troublingly masked, inscrutable, alien beings. It discusses accounts from the sixteenth century, notably John Harington’s, that recognize in play periods of vacant, blank, neutral time. It then proceeds to an extended reading of Bruegel’s painting Children’s Games, and especially a consideration of the reading of this work by the Nazi art historian Hans Sedlmayr. This painting, and Sedlmayr’s remarkable and deeply disquieting account, are seen as encapsulating the ways in which child’s play’s resistance to interpretation can provoke fear and horror--a possibility linked to the periodic association of children with witchcraft and demonic possession.

Disability Studies and the Destruction of Jerusalem

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julia Watts Belser
Keyword(s):  
Disability Studies ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Political ◽  
Cultural Logic ◽  
Gender Discourse ◽  
The Way

This chapter uses disability studies theory to analyze the political and cultural significations of the body amidst Roman conquest. Extending the insights of scholars who have examined way Roman colonial dominance reshapes Jewish gender discourse, it argues that imperial violence similarly restructures the way rabbinic narrative portrays the body. Bavli Gittin and Lamentations Rabbah both recount stories of Rabbi Tsadok, a celebrated priest who fasted for forty years in an attempt to avert the destruction of Jerusalem. In contrast to the beauty tales examined in the previous chapter, Rabbi Tsadok’s body is used to mark the visceral impact of Roman conquest—and to chronicle the enduring scar that catastrophe leaves upon the flesh. Yet even as these stories use disability to make visible the tremendous loss that destruction brings, they also resignify the cultural logic of imperial victory, emphasizing the subversive power of disabled Jewish flesh.

Public Budget Reform and Reform Failure in a Market Model

2001 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-69
Author(s):  
Matthew Andrews
Keyword(s):  
Public Choice ◽  
Choice Model ◽  
Current Paper ◽  
Market Model ◽  
Public Budget ◽  
The Public ◽  
Budget Reform ◽  
Two Factors ◽  
Budgeting Process ◽  
The Way

Abstract Budgeting theories have not been able to explain why reforms have a limited influence on the budgeting process [JOYCE, 1993]. The current paper proposes a market-based theory of budget reform, which combines the public choice model with new institutional dunking, in the spirit of authors like Kraan [1996]. The dieory unfolds into specific hypodieses about the way in which reform adoption is dependent on the authority of budgeting bureaucrats to adopt reforms, the level of reform acceptance among these bureaucrats and politicians, and the ability of bureaucrats to adopt the reforms. The first two factors, authority and acceptance, are argued to be more important than ability in influencing the level of budget reform adoption.

Prayer

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
George I. Mavrodes
Keyword(s):  
Speech Acts ◽  
Speech Act ◽  
Intentional State ◽  
Human Being ◽  
Divine Presence ◽  
Communicative Act ◽  
Petitionary Prayer ◽  
Divine Mercy ◽  
The Way

The concept of prayer is now most commonly applied to any sort of communication which is addressed to God. That is, prayer is that activity in which believers take themselves to be speaking to God. One may ask God to do something (petitionary prayer), but that need not be the only sort of content that prayer may have. There are prayers in which one thanks God for something, and others in which one praises God and expresses one’s adoration. A worshipper may also pray to express (or to make) a commitment to God, or to make a vow. Penitents pray to confess their sins, to express their repentance, and to ask for divine mercy and forgiveness. In general, any sort of speech-act which might be addressed by one human being to another could also be addressed to God, and thus be a prayer. Some such acts (such as, perhaps, commanding) might be thought inappropriate when addressed to God, but no doubt there can be inappropriate prayers. And some prayers may even be tentative and unsure about the existence of the addressee, prayers which might be thought of as beginning ‘O God, if there is a God…’. Some writers, principally from within a tradition of mysticism, also apply the notion of prayer in a somewhat broader sense – in, for example, expressions like ‘prayer of quiet’ and ‘prayer of union’. Here ‘prayer’ seems to mean any intentional state – worship, adoration, enjoyment of the divine presence and love, and so forth – which the worshipper believes to be associated with a genuine contact with the divine, regardless of whether it contains an element of communication addressed to God. In the sense of a communication addressed to the divine, prayer seems to fit best with the theistic religions, which construe God as a person, or as something like a person. Here the addressee is taken to be someone who is an appropriate recipient of a communicative act. The fit seems rather more awkward in those religions which construe the divine reality in impersonal terms. With reference to prayer in the theistic religions, a principal topic of philosophical interest involves the omniscience and benevolence of God – if he knows all my needs and desires, why inform him of them through prayer? And will he not satisfy all my needs regardless of whether I pray? If divine benevolence is conditional on prayer, it seems less than perfect. A response to the first question is to point out that not all speech-acts need be construed as conveying information; a response to the second is to argue that our having to ask for things on behalf of ourselves and others might make for a better world than if this were not the case. Another issue is the way in which God responds to prayer. Some argue that God responds through miracles; others suggest that God, knowing our future prayers, providentially created a world that would satisfy them – thus prayer causally influences earlier events.

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