Capitalisms' Future: Alienation, Emancipation and Critique frames 21st century economic and social possibilities in a dialogue between two forms of critical social theory: Marx's critique of political economy that analyzes capitalism and the critique of political psychology that analyzes authoritarianism. Contributions from social theorists in sociology, philosophy, and cultural studies are brought together to dissect and critique capitalist crises, left-liberalism, left-Thatcherism, resistance to risk-pooling, idealist philosophy, undemocratic social character, status wages and authoritarian spectacles. Throughout, Marx's centrality to critical social theory is confirmed, both alone and in in powerful combination with Adorno, Durkheim, Dubois, Lacan, Veblen, Weber and others. This book outlines conjoined critiques of commodity-fetishism and authority fetishism as the emancipatory agenda of 21st century critical theory. Contributors are: Kevin S. Amidon, Graham Cassano, Tony A. Feldmann, Daniel Krier, Christian Lotz, Patrick Murray, David Norman Smith, Tony Smith, William J. Swart, and Mark P. Worrell.

Borders enclose and separate us. We assign to them tremendous significance. Along them we draw supposedly uncrossable boundaries within which we believe our individual identities begin and end, erecting the metaphysical dividing walls that enclose each one of us into numerically identical, numerically distinct, entities: persons. Do the borders between us - physical, psychological, neurological, causal, spatial, temporal, etc. - merit the metaphysical significance ordinarily accorded them? The central thesis of I Am You is that our borders do not signify boundaries between persons. We are all the same person. Variations on this heretical theme have been voiced periodically throughout the ages (the Upanishads, Averroes, Giordano Bruno, Josiah Royce, Schrodinger, Fred Hoyle, Freeman Dyson). In presenting his arguments, the author relies on detailed analyses of recent formal work on personal identity, especially that of Derek Parfit, Sydney Shoemaker, Robert Nozick, David Wiggins, Daniel C. Dennett and Thomas Nagel, while incorporating the views of Descartes, Leibniz, Wittgenstein, Schopenhauer, Kant, Husserl and Brouwer. His development of the implied moral theory is inspired by, and draws on, Rawls, Sidgwick, Kant and again Parfit. The traditional, commonsense view that we are each a separate person numerically identical to ourselves over time, i.e., that personal identity is closed under known individuating and identifying borders - what the author calls Closed Individualism - is shown to be incoherent. The demonstration that personal identity is not closed but open points collectively in one of two new directions: either there are no continuously existing, self-identical persons over time in the sense ordinarily understood - the sort of view developed by philosophers as diverse as Buddha, Hume and most recently Derek Parfit, what the author calls Empty Individualism - or else you are everyone, i.e., personal identity is not closed under known individuating and identifying borders, what the author calls Open Individualism. In making his case, the author:

- offers a new explanation both of consciousness and of self-consciousness

- constructs a new theory of Self

- explains psychopathologies (e.g. multiple personality disorder, schizophrenia)

- shows Open Individualism to be the best competing explanation of who we are

- provides the metaphysical foundations for global ethics.

The book is intended for philosophers and the philosophically inclined - physicists, mathematicians, psychiatrists, psychologists, linguists, computer scientists, economists, and communication theorists. It is accessible to graduate students and advanced undergraduates."

Progressive theorists and activists insist that contemporary capitalism is deeply flawed from a normative point of view. However, most accept the liberal egalitarian thesis that the serious shortcomings of market societies (financial excess, inequality, and so on) could be overcome with proper political regulation. Building on Marx's legacy, Tony Smith argues in Beyond Liberal Egalitarianism that advocates of this thesis (Rawls, Habermas, Stiglitz, et al.) lack an adequate concept of capital and the state. These theorists also fail to comprehend new developments in world history ensuring that the 'destructive' aspects of capitalism increasingly outweigh whatever 'creative' elements it might continue to possess. Smith concludes that a normative social theory adequate to the twenty-first century must explicitly and unequivocally embrace socialism.

Mathematical Theologies uncovers the lost history of Christianity's encounters with Pythagorean religious ideas before the Renaissance. David Albertson shows that the writings of Thierry of Chartres (d. 1157) and Nicholas of Cusa (d. 1464) represent a robust Christian Neopythagoreanism that reconceived the Trinity and the Incarnation within the framework of Greek number theory. Their sophisticated mathematical theologies challenge contemporary assumptions about the relation of religion and modern science. David Albertson surveys the slow formation of Neopythagorean theologies of the divine One from the Old Academy through Middle Platonism into the Middle Ages. Against this backdrop, Thierry of Chartres's writings stand out as the first authentic retrieval and incorporation of Neopythagoreanism within western Christianity. By reading Boethius and Augustine against the grain, Thierry reactivated a suppressed potential in ancient Christian traditions that harmonized the divine Word with notions of divine Number. Despite fame during his lifetime, Thierry's ideas remained well outside the medieval mainstream.Nicholas rediscovered anonymous fragments of Thierry and his medieval readers, and drew on them liberally in his first mystical treatise. Yet tensions among this collection of sources drove Cusanus to try to reconcile their competing understandings of Word and Number. Over three decades Nicholas eventually learned how to articulate traditional Christian dogmas within a Neopythagorean cosmology of mathematized nature - anticipating the situation of modern Christian thought after the seventeenth century. Mathematical Theologies skillfully guides readers through the newest scholarship on Pythagoreanism, the school of Chartres, and Cusanus, while revising some of the categories that have separated those fields in the past.

This volume provides the reader with an integrated overview of state-of-the-art research in philosophy and ethics of design in engineering and architecture. It contains twenty-five essays that focus on engineering designing in its traditional sense, on designing in novel engineering domains, including ICT, genetics, and nanotechnology, designing of socio-technical systems, and on architectural and environmental designing. Written for Faculty, PhD and Master's students in philosophy and ethics of technology, philosophy and ethics of architecture, management of technology, management of architecture.

The twenty-first-century business world has witnessed a series of large-scale scandals and outright fraud. New legislation aims to help identify future cases of fraud and stop the trend, but is it enough? How can people of faith balance the requirements of faith with the demands of economic life within an increasingly corrupted society? Why did so many people participate or choose to ignore downright fraud in the past and how can we start the business community on a path of recovery? These essays pursue these question and many others, including the meta-ethical foundations of vocation as a necessary step for business recovery. They maintain that what is taking place in businesses today is not just the loss of will to do good, but the loss of meaning, which ultimately demands more than what traditional business ethics and corporate social responsibility can offer. Combining creative biblical interpretation, Christian moral reflection, and business expertise, this book is thoughtful and thought-provoking look at how business leaders, professionals, and students can integrate a sense of calling into their careers and into the business world as a whole.

This book provides a detailed discussion of the theoretical and practical implications of the change driven by ICTs. Such a change is often much more profound than an emphasis on information technology and society can capture, for not only does it bring about ethical and policy vacuums that call for a new understanding of ethics, politics and law, but it also "re-ontologizes reality", as propounded by Luciano Floridi's philosophy and ethics of information. The informational turn is transforming our understanding of reality by challenging the conventional ways we have of thinking about our world and our identities in terms of stable and enduring structures and beliefs. The information age we inhabit brings to completion our self-understanding as informational systems that produce, process, and exchange information with other informational systems, in an environment that is itself made up of information. The present volume provides us with a better understanding of the normative nature and role of information, helping us to grasp the sense and extent to which informational resources serve as "constraining affordances" guiding our behaviours. It does so by delineating the background against which we build our beliefs about reality, make decisions, and behave, through our interactions with a multi-agent system that is increasingly dependent on ICTs. The book will be of interest to a vast audience, ranging from information technologists, ethicists, policy makers, social and legal scholars, and all those willing to embrace the following three tenets: we construct our world and ourselves informationally; by constructing our world and ourselves we thereby become aware of our limits; it is precisely these limits that make us become human beings.

A Frightening Love radically rethinks God and evil. It rejects theodicy and its impersonal conception of reason and morality. Faith survives evil through a miraculous love that resists philosophical rationalization. Authors criticised include Alvin Plantinga, Richard Swinburne, Marilyn McCord Adams, Peter van Inwagen, John Haldane, William Hasker.

The history of moral philosophy has been dominated by attempts to find and defend the correct moral principle or set of principles. However, over the last two decades the assumption that morality can and should be understood in terms of principles has come under attack from several quarters. The most radical attack has come from so-called moral particularists according to whom principles are at best useless and at worst a hindrance to successful moral reasoning and action. Why should - and how can - morality be based on principles? These are the leading questions of this book. Moral Principles offers a historically informed, in-depth examination of the current particularist/generalist debate and presents a novel account of the place of principles in our moral thought and action.

Bringing together the leading future figures in ethics broadly construed with essays ranging from metaethics and normative ethics to applied ethics and political philosophy, topics include new work on experimental philosophy, feminism, and global justice incorporating perspectives informed from historical and contemporary approaches alike.

The outsourcing of clinical trials to Latin America by the transnational innovative pharmaceutical industry began about twenty years ago. Using archival information and field work in Argentina, Brazil, Costa Rica, Mexico and Peru, the authors discuss the regulatory contexts and the ethical dimensions of human experimentation in the region. More than 80% of all clinical trials in the region take place in these countries, and the European Medicines Agency has defined them as priority countries in Latin America. The authors raise questions about the quality of data obtained from the trials and the violation of human rights during their implementation. Their findings are presented in this volume, the first in-depth analysis of clinical trials in the region.

Contributors seek to promote reasoned debate about emerging security threats and potential military responses.

R. M. Hare has brought together in this volume the best of his uncollected essays in moral philosophy, several of them previously unpublished or revised for this collection. They span the whole range of his ethical interests, from the most abstract to the most down-to-earth. The reader will find here the bases of his ethical theory in Kantian prescriptivism, utilitarianism, and the logic of imperatives, and will see that theory applied to issues of bioethics, medical ethics, business ethics, loyalty and obedience, and racism. The essays display the author's characteristic clarity and vigour; some of them are polemical, targeting particular opponents and rival theories. The volume provides a compelling demonstration of Hare's commitment to bringing together the theoretical and the practical in ethics.

Theories of generosity, or gift giving, are becoming increasingly important in recent work in philosophy and religion. Stephen Webb seeks to build on this renewed interest by surveying a distinctively modern and postmodern approach to the issue of generosity, and then developing a theological framework for it.

Transforming Exclusion is concerned with the interface between the study of religion & theology and issues surrounding exclusion. Religious beliefs can be important in shaping attitudes that can lead to the exploitation or marginalization of both humans and non-humans. At the same time, religious beliefs and practices have much to offer in transforming the world, creating a more equitable place for all who occupy it. At other times, the voices of members of religious communities are suppressed and marginalized by other more dominant religious or secular individuals or communities. This book addresses all of these aspects of social exclusion and aims to demonstrate that the study of theology and religion, in addressing religious communities and society more widely, have important contributions to make in creating a more just world. The issue of exclusion is engaged with from a range of different perspectives by scholars involved in fieldwork with religious communities, systematic, contextual and practical theologians, and practitioners involved in the preparation of individuals and groups for a range of ministries and professions.

Events such as the phone-hacking scandal, Wikileaks and the Mohammed cartoons controversy have placed ethics of media at the centre of current debates. Media are not only centralised institutions, but also technologies and means through which we sustain relationships with each other. We live with and in media, and this book sketches and critiques the normative contours of our intensely mediated worlds. What are the 'ethics' of media? What forms would we expect them to take? Do digital media create new ethical dilemmas and what is our responsibility as spectators/witnesses? Bringing together philosophers and media scholars and drawing on a range of contemporary case studies, the book highlights the diversity of competing answers to the question, 'is there an ethics of media?'

This is the first book to outline a basic philosophy of ecology using the standard categories of academic philosophy: metaphysics, axiology, epistemology, aesthetics, ethics, and political philosophy. The problems of global justice invariably involve ecological factors. Yet the science of ecology is itself imbued with philosophical questions. Therefore, studies in ecological justice, the sub-discipline of global justice that relates to the interaction of human and natural systems, should be preceded by the study of the philosophy of ecology. This book enables the reader to access a philosophy of ecology and shows how this philosophy is inherently normative and provides tools for securing ecological justice. The moral philosophy of ecology directly addresses the root cause of ecological and environmental injustice: the violation of fundamental human rights caused by the inequitable distribution of the benefits (economies) and costs (diseconomies) of industrialism. Philosophy of ecology thus has implications for human rights, pollution, poverty, unequal access to resources, sustainability, consumerism, land use, biodiversity, industrialization, energy policy, and other issues of social and global justice. This book offers an historical and interdisciplinary exegesis. The analysis is situated in the context of the Western intellectual tradition, and includes great thinkers in the history of ecological thinking in the West from the natural sciences, social sciences and humanities. Keller asks the big questions and surveys answers with remarkable detail. Here is an insightful analysis of contemporary, classical, and ancient thought, alike in the ecological sciences, the humanities, and economics, the roots and fruits of our concepts of nature and of being in the world. Keller is unexcelled in bridging the is/ought gap, bridging nature and culture, and in celebrating the richness of life, its pattern, process, and creativity on our wonderland Earth. Holmes Rolston, III University Distinguished Professor, Colorado State University Author of A New Environmental Ethics: The Next Millennium for Life on Earth (2012) Mentored by renowned ecologist Frank Golley and renowned philosopher Frederick Ferre, David Keller is well prepared to provide a deep history and a sweeping synthesis of the "idea of ecology"-including the metaphysical, epistemological, and ethical aspects of that idea, as well as the scientific. J. Baird Callicott University Distinguished Research Professor, University of North Texas Author of Thinking Like a Planet: The Land Ethic and the Earth Ethic (2013)

The western philosophical tradition, with its focus on universal concepts and a presumed neuter, but ultimately male subject, has only relatively recently become open to the question of alterity, in particular the alterity of woman as the other of man. The essays of this volume reflect in particular on the ethical implications of taking the feminine other into account. This necessitates a rethinking of the implicit structures of Western philosophy which continue to exclude women as subjects who contribute to the conceptualization of world and society. This volume, which gives voice to women philosophers, is a contribution to that task.

Evolutionary biology, ecology and ethics: at first glance, three different objects of research, three different worldviews and three different scientific communities. In reality, there are both structural and historical links between these disciplines. First, some topics are obviously common across the board. Second, the emerging need for environmental policy management has gradually but radically changed the relationship between these disciplines. Over the last decades in particular, there has emerged a need for an interconnecting meta-paradigm that integrates more strictly evolutionary studies, biodiversity studies and the ethical frameworks that are most appropriate for allowing a lasting co-evolution between natural and social systems. Today such a need is more than a mere luxury, it is an epistemological and practical necessity. "

This interdisciplinary work draws on research from psychology and behavioral economics to evaluate the plausibility of moral contract theory. In a compelling manner with implications for moral theory more broadly, the author s novel approach resolves a number of key contingencies in contractarianism and contractualism.
Acting in accordance with principles that we could all agree to under certain conditions requires that agents are capable of taking up the perspectives of others. Research in social and developmental psychology shows just how challenging this can be. The author discusses in detail what implications findings on perspective-taking have for contract theory. He concludes with cautious optimism that, despite our limitations, it lies within our power to become better at perspective-taking and to adopt a contractarian or contractualist mode of moral thinking. This does however require us to be much more attentive to the standpoints of others than we tend to be.
Contract theorists also assume that agents can be moved to comply with principles that would be the object of agreement, with some arguing they can be so moved out of their own interest. The book show that, in contrast to the suspicion of many philosophers, this idea is largely supported by research on the dynamics of trust and our ability to distinguish trustworthy from untrustworthy others. Bringing a welcome dose of realism to the debate on contract theory, the author shows the value of assessing moral theories from an empirical perspective."

Managing identity through biometric technology has become a routine and ubiquitous practice in recent years. From border control and asylum regulation to the management of social services and medical records, various fields are increasingly deploying biometric systems as a means of identity verification and authentication. The scope and nature of these systems are raising a host of concerns regarding the intensification of surveillance practices and the reduction of identity to a series of bio-data and algorithms.By analysing biometric systems as a biopolitical practice within the domain of borders, immigration and citizenship management, this book interrogates what is at stake in the merging of the body and technology for security and governance purposes. It draws on a number of critical theories, philosophies and empirical examples, offering a multi-level and timely analysis of the socio-political and ethical implications of biometric identity systems.

Autonomous cars, drones, and electronic surveillance systems are examples of technologies that raise serious ethical issues. In this analytic investigation, Martin Peterson articulates and defends five moral principles for addressing ethical issues related to new and existing technologies: the cost-benefit principle, the precautionary principle, the sustainability principle, the autonomy principle, and the fairness principle. It is primarily the method developed by Peterson for articulating and analyzing the five principles that is novel. He argues that geometric concepts such as points, lines, and planes can be put to work for clarifying the structure and scope of these and other moral principles. This geometric account is based on the Aristotelian dictum that like cases should be treated alike, meaning that the degree of similarity between different cases can be represented as a distance in moral space. The more similar a pair of cases are from a moral point of view, the closer is their location in moral space. A case that lies closer in moral space to a paradigm case for some principle p than to any paradigm for any other principle should be analyzed by applying principle p. The book also presents empirical results from a series of experimental studies in which experts (philosophers) and laypeople (engineering students) have been asked to apply the geometric method to fifteen real-world cases. The empirical findings indicate that experts and laypeople do in fact apply geometrically construed moral principles in roughly, but not exactly, the manner advocates of the geometric method believe they ought to be applied.