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*Fresh interpretations of the greatest philosophers on the nature of truth and speculative essays on truth in law, the arts, and science*
Payoffs in the Cloakroom is a spellbinding follow-up to Rubenstein and Ziewacz's critically acclaimed Three Bullets Sealed His Lips. Three Bullets brought to life new evidence on the 1945 murder of Michigan Senator Warren Hooper. Payoffs in the Cloakroom takes up where Three Bullets left off, unraveling a complex web of political corruption and dirty state politics. In the process, the authors demonstrate that Senator Hooper was murdered to prevent his grand jury testimony against republican boss Frank McKay, who was facing bribery charges. Making use of actual court proceeding, personal interviews, and newspaper accounts, and even a re-evaluation of police evidence, Rubenstein and Ziewacz tell a story that contains all the ingredients of first-class detective fiction—only in this instance, the story is based on fact. With chapter titles such as "Charlie and His Little Black Book," "I Never Dreamed Murder," and "Them Bones, Them Bones," the authors have, once again, provided a stimulating and absorbing account of one of the darker chapters of Michigan's political history.
Over many years of teaching philosophy and religion, author Paul Timothy Jensen has encountered questions on a wide range of philosophical and spiritual topics from college students, professional colleagues, and other adults. In Thinking about God Again, for the First Time, Jensen explores these questions in the form of imaginary conversations between an atheist and a Christian. Together, Alex and Chris ponder issues of enduring interest and importance: God’s possible existence; God’s possible love for humans; and the concepts of proof, morality, and evil. The conversations examine these and other closely related questions, seeking to state opposing viewpoints fairly and vigorously and engage the minds of readers. Jensen hopes to encourage others to think about God again or for the first time, fostering opportunities for civil conversation. This study presents a series of questions on topics in the realm of philosophy and religion, considered from the viewpoint of an atheist and a Christian.
In the first systematic study of the philosophy of Thomas Nagel, Alan Thomas discusses Nagel's contrast between the "subjective" and the "objective" points of view throughout the various areas of his wide ranging philosophy. Nagel's original and distinctive contrast between the subjective view and our aspiration to a "view from nowhere" within metaphysics structures the chapters of the book. A "new Humean" in epistemology, Nagel takes philosophical scepticism to be both irrefutable and yet to indicate a profound truth about our capacity for self-transcendence. The contrast between subjective and objective views is then considered in the case of the mind, where consciousness proves to be the ...
Introduction -- Absolutist morality -- Individual autonomy -- Reflective self-evaluation -- Unconditional love -- Strong evaluation -- Narrative unity -- Practical reason -- Inescapable reflection -- Necessary truthfulness -- Conclusion.
This book is a contribution to the ongoing conversation about value pluralism and its relation to political life. Its uniqueness lies in its insistence that the acceptance of value pluralism involves placing certain limitations on what is an acceptable form of government and what functions governments ought to be legitimately performing. In a new approach coined “nomocratic pluralism,” this volume argues that liberty under the rule of law, which is not merely liberty where the law is silent, is a key concept of liberty and cannot be subsumed by the other primary implications of the acceptance of value pluralism: that political communities must reject positive liberty as a political value, and place a high, but not absolute, priority on negative liberty as a political value. The concept of liberty under the rule of law is particularly suited to accommodate a great variety of individual and group conceptions of value and the moral good, and thus, along with negative liberty, should be a primary value for those who accept value pluralism.
The modern materialist approach to life has conspicuously failed to explain such central mind-related features of our world as consciousness, intentionality, meaning, and value. This failure to account for something so integral to nature as mind, argues philosopher Thomas Nagel, is a major problem, threatening to unravel the entire naturalistic world picture, extending to biology, evolutionary theory, and cosmology. Since minds are features of biological systems that have developed through evolution, the standard materialist version of evolutionary biology is fundamentally incomplete. And the cosmological history that led to the origin of life and the coming into existence of the conditions ...
An interdisciplinary book for scientists interested in the origin and existence of life in our universe, first published in 2007.
Consciousness lies at the core of being human. Therefore, to understand ourselves, we need a theory of consciousness. In Sisyphus's Boulder, Eric Dietrich and Valerie Hardcastle argue that we will never get such a theory because consciousness has an essential property that prevents it from ever being explained. Consequently, philosophical debates over materialism and dualism are a waste of time. Scientific explanations of consciousness fare no better. Scientists do study consciousness, and such investigations will continue to grow and advance. However, none of them will ever reveal what consciousness is. In addition, given the centrality of consciousness in philosophy, Dietrich and Hardcastle claim that philosophy itself needs to change. That the central problems of philosophy persist is actually a profound epistemic fact about humans. Philosophy, then, is a limit to what humans can understand. (Series A)