This book provides a comprehensive examination of the police role from within a broader philosophical context. Contending that the police are in the midst of an identity crisis that exacerbates unjustified law enforcement tactics, Luke William Hunt examines various major conceptions of the police-those seeing them as heroes, warriors, and guardians. The book looks at the police role considering the overarching societal goal of justice and seeks to present a synthetic theory that draws upon history, law, society, psychology, and philosophy. Each major conception of the police role is examined in light of how it affects the pursuit of justice, and how it may be contrary to seeking justice holistically and collectively. The book sets forth a conception of the police role that is consistent with the basic values of a constitutional democracy in the liberal tradition. Hunt's intent is that clarifying the police role will likewise elucidate any constraints upon policing strategies, including algorithmic strategies such as predictive policing. This book is essential reading for thoughtful policing and legal scholars as well as those interested in political philosophy, political theory, psychology, and related areas. Now more than ever, the nature of the police role is a philosophical topic that is relevant not just to police officials and social scientists, but to everyone.

In Evil and Many Worlds: A Free-Will Theodicy, William Hunt presents a unique approach to explaining how God and evil can coexist despite the abundance of moral and natural evils blighting our world, which imply that an omnibenevolent God is unlikely to exist. This theodicy is based upon Huw Everett III's many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, whereby reality is not what it intuitively seems; instead, it is a multiverse comprising a vast number of universes, and we simultaneously exist in many of them. This multiplicity of existence results in a balance of moral good and evil across the multiverse, and through this, the expression of free will-an attribute valued by both persons and God- flourishes. The theodicy explains the coexistence of God and natural evil through the necessity of an evolutionary process that ensures the emergence of free-willed persons. Notwithstanding this universal perspective of Creation, a resurrection possibility would mitigate individual suffering resulting from this divine holistic strategy. Hunt examines this possibility in light of the many-worlds interpretation.

God, Probability and Life after Death reveals its objective in its title, namely, to present an exploratory argument concerning the probability of human resurrection. The exploratory argument follows a probabilistic passage along an evidential trail to the discovery of the probability of life after death. It is a trail that the reader can personally engage with in order to reach their own conclusion and even introduce additional evidence they think relevant. The argument begins with the probability of the existence of God, and once a position is established on this issue, the argument becomes empowered for the next stage, which is to address the evidence for human resurrection, namely, the Resurrection of Jesus, near-death experiences and apparitions. The probabilistic relationship between the evidence and the resurrection hypothesis is critically examined throughout the book by engaging the potential views of an atheist and agnostic in addition to that of a theist. On this probabilistic journey, other issues relevant to the resurrection argument are introduced, such as personal identity and the possibility of resurrection given the nature of our world. Evidence and argument for a non-supernatural possibility for human resurrection are also considered. Significantly, the author does not assume the normal spiritual approach to human resurrection, when a disembodied soul leaves the body to continue a spiritual existence in a ghostly realm. Instead, a materialistic approach is taken, whereby the resurrected person survives in bodily form in a physical realm. The use of probability theory is intended to keep the evidential argument within the bounds of coherent reasoning. It also enables the argument to link one piece of evidence to the next in a probabilistic sequence that eventually leads to the conclusion that human resurrection is not only possible, it is also very likely.

This book provides a comprehensive examination of the police role from within a broader philosophical context. Contending that the police are in the midst of an identity crisis that exacerbates unjustified law enforcement tactics, Luke William Hunt examines various major conceptions of the police-those seeing them as heroes, warriors, and guardians. The book looks at the police role considering the overarching societal goal of justice and seeks to present a synthetic theory that draws upon history, law, society, psychology, and philosophy. Each major conception of the police role is examined in light of how it affects the pursuit of justice, and how it may be contrary to seeking justice holistically and collectively. The book sets forth a conception of the police role that is consistent with the basic values of a constitutional democracy in the liberal tradition. Hunt's intent is that clarifying the police role will likewise elucidate any constraints upon policing strategies, including algorithmic strategies such as predictive policing. This book is essential reading for thoughtful policing and legal scholars as well as those interested in political philosophy, political theory, psychology, and related areas. Now more than ever, the nature of the police role is a philosophical topic that is relevant not just to police officials and social scientists, but to everyone.

Individualism is arguably the most vital tenet of American national identity: American cultural heroes tend to be mavericks and nonconformists, and independence is the fulcrum of the American origin story. But in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, a number of American artists, writers, and educational philosophers cast imitation and emulation as central to the linked projects of imagining the self and consolidating the nation. Tracing continuities between literature, material culture, and pedagogical theory, William Huntting Howell uncovers an America that celebrated the virtues of humility, contingency, and connection to a complex whole over ambition and distinction. Against Self-Reliance revalues and rethinks what it meant to be repetitive, derivative or pointedly generic in the early republic and beyond. Howell draws on such varied sources as Benjamin Franklin's programs for moral reform, Phillis Wheatley's devotional poetry, David Rittenhouse's coins and astronomical machines, Benjamin Rush's psychological and political theory, Susanna Rowson's schoolbooks, and the novels of Charles Brockden Brown and Herman Melville to tease out patterns of dependence in early America. With its incisive critique of America's storied heroic individualism, Against Self-Reliance argues that the arts of dependence were-and are-critical to the project of American independence.