Does Jesus Endorse Armed Self-Defense in Luke 22:36?

In Luke 22:36, Jesus instructs his disciples to buy swords. The best understanding of this passage is that Jesus is endorsing the carrying of weapons for personal protection. This article outlines the self-defense interpretation and defends it against several objections. I then argue that the injunction to buy a sword can be extended to gun ownership as a modern-day application. After making the scriptural case for gun ownership, I then sketch a brief philosophical argument for a strong moral right to gun ownership. Various theological, philosophical, and empirical objections are considered and found lacking.

Educating towards the prudent entrepreneurial self – an educational journey including agency and social awareness to handle the unknown

PurposeThis paper explores the idea of the prudent entrepreneurial self, through re-conceptualizing prudence into the domain of entrepreneurial education, to unite the two processes of becoming enterprising and entrepreneurial. It is argued that developing a capacity for prudence among graduates involves past, present and conjecture forms of knowledge that the authors find in the interplay between individuation and social awareness.Design/methodology/approachBuilding on Palmer's idea of wholeness, the authors discuss six poles of paradoxes in entrepreneurial education and in conjunction establish a philosophical argument for the idea of stimulating the development of prudence as fundamentally important to contemporary notions of entrepreneurial education.FindingsThe paper presents a model to develop a schema that moves students towards becoming prudent entrepreneurial selves. The model rests on two interrelated developmental processes – individuation and social awareness – conditional for developing the three forms of knowledge (past, present and conjecture) that makes up prudence where developing prudence is a means to handle or cope with the unknown.Research limitations/implicationsThis paper argues that for enterprise and entrepreneurship education to realize their potential contributions, both the relationships between each field and the overarching purpose that ties the fields together need to be rethought, and the poles of paradoxes need to be connected to further develop both fields and creating wholeness for the emerging scholarly discipline.Practical implicationsTo educate towards the prudent entrepreneurial self means educating towards an unknown end where student development aims to meet both the objectives of individual development and the growth in social awareness required to handle the changing nature of contemporary society.Originality/valueThis study philosophically conceives a united enterprise and entrepreneurship education landscape in which deeper student learning makes possible the notion of the prudent entrepreneurial self.

Educación en valores por medio del deporte. Una perspectiva filosófica basada en Søren Kierkegaard (Values education through sport. A philosophical perspective based on Søren Kierkegaard)

Educar en valor es un desafío ético que la sociedad tiene para promover los derechos humanos universales. En este contexto, tanto la filosofía, la ciencia y la pedagogía han contribuido a desarrollar metodologías que contribuyan en la formación moral de la ciudadanía. Algunas de ellas siguen una vía intelectual o directa sobre el tema, las cuales se enfocan en la conciencia y comprensión de los valores. Otras metodologías siguen una vía indirecta o emocional, la cual se enfoca en la experiencia y concreción del valor. Esta última vía ha sido fundamentada por el filósofo danés Søren Kierkegaard, quien establece que la comunicación ética ha de ser, principalmente, una comunicación basada en la experiencia. Aquel argumento filosófico realza la importancia de las actividades prácticas para la educación moral, de modo que se concluye que el deporte es un medio propicio para tal finalidad pedagógica. Abstract: Value education is an ethical challenge for society to promote universal human rights. In this context, philosophy, science and pedagogy have all contributed to the development of methodologies that contribute to the moral formation of citizens. Some of them follow an intellectual or direct approach to the subject, which focuses on the awareness and understanding of values. Other methodologies follow an indirect or emotional route, which focuses on the experience and concreteness of the value. The latter way has been substantiated by the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, who states that ethical communication has to be primarily a communication based on experience. This philosophical argument emphasises the importance of practical activities for moral education, which leads to the conclusion that sport is a suitable medium for this pedagogical purpose.

Quest for I (Intelligence) in AI (Artificial Intelligence): A Non-Elusive Attempt

This chapter essentially makes a non-elusive attempt in quest of ‘I’ (Intelligence) in ‘AI’ (Artificial Intelligence). In the year 1950, Alan Turing proposed “the imitation game” which was a gaming problem to make a very fundamental question — “can a machine think?”. The said article of Turing did not provide any tool to measure intelligence but produced a philosophical argument on the issue of intelligence. In 1950, Claude Shannon published a landmark paper on computer chess and rang the bell of the computer era. Over the past decades, there have been huge attempts to define and measure intelligence across the fields of cognitive psychology and AI. We critically appreciate these definitions and evaluation approaches in quest of intelligence, which can mimic the cognitive abilities of human intelligence. We arrive at the Cattell-Horn-Carroll (C–H–C) concept, which is a three-stratum theory for intelligence. The C–H–C theory of intelligence can be crudely approximated by deep meta-learning approach to integrate the representation power of deep learning into meta-learning. Thus we can combine crystallized intelligence with fluid intelligence, as they complement each other for robust learning, reasoning, and problem-solving in a generalized setup which can be a benchmark for flexible AI and eventually general AI. In far-reaching future to search for human-like intelligence in general AI, we may explore neuromorphic computing which is essentially based on biological neurons.

Hume's Rhetorical Strategy: Three Views

In the Fragment on Evil, Hume announces that he ‘shall not employ any rhetoric in a philosophical argument, where reason alone ought to be hearkened to’. To employ the rhetorical strategy, in the context of the Fragment, just is to ‘enumerate all the evils, incident to human life, and display them, with eloquence, in their proper colours’. However, in Part 11 of the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, Hume employs precisely this rhetorical strategy. I discuss three interpretations that might account for Hume's decision to employ the strategy in the Dialogues but not the Fragment. The heart of this discussion concerns the relationship between reason and rhetoric. The Dialogues can be understood as part of the education of Pamphilus. Consequently, the three interpretations align with three ways of understanding the roles that reason and rhetoric play in Hume's views on pedagogy and education (or more specifically, Philo's attitude towards the education of Pamphilus).

Candrakīrti’s Middle Way Philosophy

The Indian Buddhist philosopher Candrakīrti (c. 570–640) created a systematic and far-reaching interpretation of the central Madhyamaka (“Middle Way”) doctrine of emptiness (śūnyatā) that many in Tibet regard as the highest philosophical view and as essential to the attainment of awakening. His unique reading of the “two truths,” all in the self-portrayal of a faithful interpreter of Nāgārjuna, offered an austere interpretation of emptiness that redefined the awakened state and took effort to align with the Mahāyāna Buddhist path. His bivalent portrayal of “the world” portended a conservative approach to a Buddhist’s relationship to authoritative scripture and its trustworthy interpreter, Nāgārjuna, as well as reconceiving the role of philosophical argument within ordinary practices. As is the case with many Indian Buddhists, little is known about his life; he is placed historically on the basis of his references to somewhat better-known figures. His thoroughgoing critique of the emergent “valid cognition” (pramāṇa) tradition and rejection of the role of inference (anumāna), favoring instead argument by logical consequence (prasaṅga), for demonstrating emptiness put his views out of step with his time; his influence would be muted for several centuries. His eventual rise to the attention of Indian Buddhists set the stage for the transmission of his texts to Tibet, where his philosophy touched off widespread debates on the relationships between the ultimate truth of emptiness, valid ways of knowing it, the bodhisattva’s path in which it is embedded, and buddhahood. Candrakīrti’s views would eventually win the day, placing his so-called Prāsaṅgika school at the pinnacle of most Tibetan Buddhist doxographies.

Memes war

In order to analyse pictures shared in WhatsApp groups of Jair Bolsonaro supporters, I will explore the idea that the act of sending someone a picture through social media performs a speech act. Thus we can separate the utterance act (of sending the picture to the receiver in a certain context), the locutionary act (what is said through the pictorial content), the illocutionary act (what is done by uttering that pictorial content), and the perlocutionary act (of affecting the receiver). The pictures analysed were collected from January to September 2019, using the WhatsApp Monitor. My main philosophical argument will be in section 3, in which I develop the idea of pictorial speech acts and its conceptual bases. To understand the communicational role of pictures it is necessary to supplement picture theories (visual semantics) with a communicative act theory based on speech act (visual pragmatics). The development of the general outline of visual pragmatics is the main philosophical contribution envisaged in this paper. My last step it to argue that there are at least three forms of naivety that render the receivers prone to the uptake of the illocutionary act performed: aesthetic naivety, communicational naivety, and epistemic naivety.

“A Power which He Refused”

In Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan, as in other early modern treatises, a philosophical defense of the secular is coupled with a theological defense. In the case of Hobbes, his philosophical argument is made in parts I and II of Leviathan, and his theological argument is made in parts III and IV. The latter parts of Leviathan are of no interest to most late modern readers, but to early modern readers the opposite was the case. Many iconic texts in European history may owe most of their influence to forms of reasoning, and to blocs of text, that interest late modern readers the least. This chapter offers a reading of the Leviathan which centers upon Jesus’ words to Pilate: “My Kingdom is not of this world.” It is demonstrated here, for the first time, that there is more in Leviathan about the kingdom of Christ being “not of this world” than there is about Hobbes’s notorious “war of every one against every one”.

Marital Cakes and Conscientious Promises

The U.S. Supreme Court has recently been tasked with determining—both metaphorically and literally—whether in matters of marriage equality and religious freedom, those within society can have their cake and eat it too. This came to the fore in Masterpiece Cakeshop (2018). In most of scholarship which has followed, the respective parties’ rights in this case are parsed in terms of rights to religious expression and free speech (on the one hand), and a statutory right to non-discrimination (on the other). By approaching this matter through a primarily philosophical (rather than legal) lens, I aim to present a new perspective. Where cases involve same-sex marriage, it is argued that both sides are predicated upon religious or conscientious convictions. This is established through a philosophical argument, which examines the nature of the marital promise to love and seeks to demonstrate how this promise entails a characteristically religious sort of belief.