Time and Reality In American Philosophy. [REVIEW]Carroll D. W. Hildebrand -1988 -Idealistic Studies 18 (3):280-281.detailsTo understand modern philosophy, one must cross the bridge via David Hume and Immanuel Kant. This well applies to the current philosophical tendencies in American philosophy during the last decades of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth.
Four Reasonable Men. [REVIEW]Carroll D. W. Hildebrand -1986 -Idealistic Studies 16 (3):282-283.detailsThe purpose of the book is to reveal through biography, not philosophy, the essence of reasonableness. The author’s definition of reasonableness, while not excluding intelligence and learning, is “a settled disposition to guide one’s belief and conduct by the evidence. It is a bent of the will to order one’s thoughts by the relevant facts, to order one’s practice in the light of the values, to make reflective judgments the compass of one’s belief and action”.
The Concept of the Spiritual. [REVIEW]Carroll D. W. Hildebrand -1992 -Idealistic Studies 22 (3):262-263.detailsThis volume is propaganda for epistemic realism. Whether combined with monism or dualism, its consequences and conclusions for speculative philosophy raise difficult problems.
The Theory of Categories. [REVIEW]Carroll D. W. Hildebrand -1984 -Idealistic Studies 14 (1):88-90.detailsThese essays were dictated by Brentano during the last ten years of his life, between 1907 and 1917. They constitute a Neo-Aristotelian scholastic metaphysics. At best, they represent an atypical idealism expressed as a personal realism in the form of an epistemological monism with a qualitative dualism and a quantitative pluralism, a study in philosophia perennis.
Proposed codification of ethicacy in the publication process.Jo Ann Carland,James W. Carland &Carroll D. Aby -1992 -Journal of Business Ethics 11 (2):95 - 104.detailsThe pressure for publication is ever present in academe. Rules for submission are elucidated by conferences, proceedings and journals for the benefit of authors; however, the rules for reviewers and editors are not so well established or consistent. This treatise examines examples of abuse of the editorial process and points to a need for formal recognition of rules for review. The manuscript culminates with proposed Codes of Ethics for researchers, referees and editors and suggestions for improvement of the peer review (...) process. (shrink)
(1 other version)Wittgenstein and Moral Philosophy.PaulJohnston,D. Z. Phillips,Philip Shields &B. R. Tilghman -1989 -Journal of Religious Ethics 22 (2):407-431.detailsRecent books by PaulJohnston, D. Z. Phillips, Philip Shields, and B. R. Tilghman all depict Wittgenstein as centrally concerned with ethics, but they range from representing his main works as expressing and advocating a particular religious-ethical outlook to arguing that his work has no ethical content but aims primarily to clarify such logical distinctions as that between ethical and empirical judgments. All four books raise the question about the moral philosopher's proper role, and each suggests a rather different (...) answer. Via the discussion of these books, I argue that Wittgenstein's stress on diversity in the ways of human life, his notion of conceptual grammar, the idea of a perspicuous representation, his lifelong involvement with art and his suggestions about its connection with morality, and his preoccupation with aspect-seeing-all suggest new possibilities of rehabilitating the historically recurrent idea that the philosopher may be a moral sage. (shrink)
Rethinking Philosophy of Religion with Wittgenstein: Religious Diversities and Racism.Thomas D.Carroll -2025 - London: Bloomsbury Academic.detailsCan Wittgenstein's philosophy help us to see religious diversities? Thomas D.Carroll uses Wittgenstein's thoughts on religion and language to bring a cross-cultural perspective to philosophy of religion. Through a focus on Chinese philosophical and religious traditions and the intertwining of racism and religion in the United States,Carroll highlights two related features of Wittgenstein's philosophy: the relevance of contextual backgrounds to interpreting ways of life and the importance of reflecting on existential purposes in philosophical inquiry. Committed to (...) the essential task of expanding philosophy of religion,Carroll critically studies the term “religion” and goes beyond the traditional categories of belief to consider diverse religious phenomena such as rituals, practices, institutions, forms of belonging, and pragmatic forms of religious engagement. We see the value of paying close attention to social contexts and refusing to oversimplify interpretation of philosophical arguments. By demonstrating how Wittgenstein's ideas can enrich our understanding of the complex phenomenon of religion and the place it has in our lives, this inclusive and timely study asks us to rethink how we approach philosophy of religion. (shrink)
Contrasting approaches to a theory of learning.Timothy D.Johnston -1981 -Behavioral and Brain Sciences 4 (1):125-139.detailsThe general process view of learning, which guided research into learning for the first half of this century, has come under attack in recent years from several quarters. One form of criticism has come from proponents of the so-called biological boundaries approach to learning. These theorists have presented a variety of data showing that supposedly general laws of learning may in fact be limited in their applicability to different species and learning tasks, and they argue that the limitations are drawn (...) by the nature of each species' adaptation to the particular requirements of its natural environment. The biological boundaries approach has served an important critical function in the move away from general process learning theory, but it is limited in its ability to provide an alternative to the general process approach. In particular, the biological boundaries approach lacks generality, it is in some respects subservient to the general process tradition, and its ecological content is in too many cases limited toex post factoadaptive explanations of learning skills. A contrasting, ecological approach to learning, which can provide a true alternative to general process theory, is presented. The ecological approach begins by providing an ecological task description for naturally occurring instances of learning; this step answers the question:Whatdoes this animal learn to do? The next step is an analysis of the means by which learning occurs in the course of development, answering the question:Howdoes the animal learn to do this? On the basis of such analyses, local principles of adaptation are formulated to account for the learning abilities of individual species. More global principles are sought by generalization among these local principles and may form the basis for a general ecological theory of learning. (shrink)
The Professional Commitment: Issues and Ethics in Nursing.Carroll A. Quinn &Michael D. Smith -1987 - W B Saunders Company.detailsThis thought-provoking text explores the ethical dimensions of the professional nursing practice. The authors discuss important topics such as inter-professional relationships, collective action, nursing research, and educational requirements within the context of professional commitment. Providing a balance between an empirical and a philsophical framework, the book stimulates the reader to ponder, analyze and evaluate the professional and ethical aspects of these issues.
Propositions and propositional acts.D. K.Johnston -2009 -Canadian Journal of Philosophy 39 (3):pp. 435-462.detailsSuppose that John asks, ‘Is the window open?’ and Mary replies, ‘The window is open.’ Then John and Mary have produced two distinct utterances, and in doing so, they have performed two different kinds of speech act. But clearly there is something that these utterances have in common. According to the standard theory of speech acts, in these utterances different illocutionary forces have been applied to the same propositional content. Similarly, if John and Mary both believe that roses are red, (...) the same propositional content is attributed to their individual mental states.The propositional contents of utterances and beliefs have traditionally been identified with propositions. In turn, propositions have been characterized as language-independent particulars that can be re-identified in different contexts. In this article, I will argue that various phenomena that have hitherto been explained by propositions are better understood in terms of propositional acts. (shrink)
The natural history of fact.D. K.Johnston -2004 -Australasian Journal of Philosophy 82 (2):275 – 291.detailsThe article provides an example of the application of the techniques and results of historical linguistics to traditional problems in the philosophy of language. It takes as its starting point the dispute about the nature of facts that arose from the 1950 Aristotelian Society debate between J. L. Austin and P. F. Strawson. It is shown that, in some cases, expressions containing the noun fact refer to actions and events; while in other cases, such expressions do not have a referring (...) function at all. Thus, nothing corresponding to Strawson's 'pseudomaterial correlate' need be postulated in order to account for the reference of the noun fact. It is suggested that many philosophically problematic expressions may be better understood by tracing their historical evolution in natural language. (shrink)
Wittgenstein within the Philosophy of Religion.Thomas D.Carroll -2014 - New York: Palgrave-Macmillan.detailsThe commonly held view that Wittgensteinian philosophy of religion entails an irrationalist defense of religion known as 'fideism' loses plausibility when contrasted with recent scholarship on Wittgenstein's corpus, biography, and other sources. This book reevaluates the place of Wittgenstein in the philosophy of religion and charts a path forward for the subfield by advancing three themes. The first is that philosophers of religion should question received interpretations of philosophers, such as Wittgenstein, as well as the meanings of key terms used (...) in interpretations, such as 'fideism'. The second theme is that Wittgenstein's philosophy, across his corpus, pursues a particular end: a searching clarity or perspicuity. The third theme is that with the rise of various religious movements within societies and around the world in recent decades, philosophy of religion has important tasks in clarifying global conversations on living well amidst human diversities and contemplating philosophy as a vocation. (shrink)
The traditions of fideism.Thomas D.Carroll -2008 -Religious Studies 44 (1):1-22.detailsPhilosophers and theologians acknowledge that "fideism" is difficult to define but rarely agree on what the best characterization of the term is. In this article, I investigate the history of use of "fideism" to explore why its meaning has been so contested and thus why it has not always been helpful for resolving philosophical problems. I trace the use of the term from its origins in French theology to its current uses in philosophy and theology, concluding that "fideism" is helpful (...) in resolving philosophical problems only when philosophers scrupulously acknowledge the tradition of use that informs their understanding of the word. (shrink)
Wittgenstein and the Analects on the Ethics of Clarification.Thomas D.Carroll -2016 -Philosophy East and West 66 (4):1148-1167.detailsAt first glance, it might seem an odd pairing: the Analects and Wittgenstein. Comparison between a classical Chinese philosophical text, whose primary topics were the cultivation of xiao and he, and the corpus of an early to mid-twentieth-century Austrian philosopher, whose primary topics had to do with logic, language, and the nature of philosophy, does not obviously recommend itself. Yet, I contend in this article that there is much to be gained from careful comparison between these two very different pictures (...) of philosophy, particularly where it comes to the practices of clarifying that which is confused or obscured. This study will aid primarily in developing Wittgensteinian... (shrink)
Exploiting human and mouse transcriptomic data: Identification of circadian genes and pathways influencing health.Emma E. Laing,Jonathan D.Johnston,Carla S. Möller-Levet,Giselda Bucca,Colin P. Smith,Derk-Jan Dijk &Simon N. Archer -2015 -Bioessays 37 (5):544-556.detailsThe power of the application of bioinformatics across multiple publicly available transcriptomic data sets was explored. Using 19 human and mouse circadian transcriptomic data sets, we found that NR1D1 and NR1D2 which encode heme‐responsive nuclear receptors are the most rhythmic transcripts across sleep conditions and tissues suggesting that they are at the core of circadian rhythm generation. Analyzes of human transcriptomic data show that a core set of transcripts related to processes including immune function, glucocorticoid signalling, and lipid metabolism is (...) rhythmically expressed independently of the sleep‐wake cycle. We also identify key transcripts associated with transcription and translation that are disrupted by sleep manipulations, and through network analysis identify putative mechanisms underlying the adverse health outcomes associated with sleep disruption, such as diabetes and cancer. Comparative bioinformatics applied to existing and future data sets will be a powerful tool for the identification of core circadian‐ and sleep‐dependent molecules. (shrink)
The Problem of Relevance and the Future of Philosophy of Religion.Thomas D.Carroll -2016 -Metaphilosophy 47 (1):39-58.detailsDespite the growth in research in philosophy of religion over the past several decades, recent years have seen a number of critical studies of this subfield in an effort to redirect the methods and topics of inquiry. This article argues that in addition to problems of religious parochialism described by critics such as Wesley Wildman, the subfield is facing a problem of relevance. In responding to this problem, it suggests that philosophers of religion should do three things: first, be critically (...) self-aware about their aims of inquiry; second, investigate concepts used by other philosophers, scientists, and religious studies scholars to identify and dispel confusion about religions; and third, following the model of applied ethics, work to clarify concepts and advance arguments of contemporary practical urgency. (shrink)