bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Faith
Authors: Wolterstorff Nicholas P. 
Published: September 2018

Faith became a topic of discussion in the Western philosophical tradition on account of its prominence in the New Testament, where the having or taking up of faith is often urged by writers. The New Testament itself echoes both Hellenistic concepts of faith and older biblical traditions, specifically that of Abraham in the Book of Genesis.
The subsequent attention of philosophers has been focused primarily on three topics: the nature of faith, the connection between God’s goodness and human responsibility, and the relation of faith to reason. Discussions on the nature of faith, from Aquinas to Tillich, have tried to examine the subject in terms of whether it is a particular form of knowledge, virtue, trust and so on. Regarding divine goodness, the argument has primarily focused on the relationship between faith and free will, and whether lack of faith is the responsibility of the individual or of God. Concerning the relation between faith and reason, there are two quite separate issues: the relation of faith to theorizing, and the rationality of faith. Aquinas in particular argued that faith is a necessary prerequisite for reasoning and intellectual activity, while later, John Locke explored the relationship between faith, reason and rationality, and concluded that faith can be reached through reason. This latter viewpoint was later heavily criticized by Wittgenstein and his followers.
Goodness, perfect
Authors: Zagzebski Linda 
Published: September 2018

The concept of perfect goodness had a central place in ancient Greek and medieval philosophy, and is still frequently discussed in contemporary natural theology. Medieval philosophers adopted the idea from the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle, with the difference that they identified perfect goodness with a personal God. In ancient and medieval philosophy the concept is primarily a metaphysical one, since goodness was thought to be extensionally equivalent to being, but it is secondarily a moral concept referring to the distinctive sort of goodness appropriate to those beings that have wills. Thus it is fundamental to a long tradition on the metaphysical basis of value which lasted from Plato until at least the sixteenth century.
In Plato, perfect goodness is the Form of the Good, upon which everything that has being is ontologically and causally dependent. In Aristotle, the good is identified with the end or purpose of a natural being. The good is that towards which all things move for the fulfilment of their natures. By the time of Aquinas, medieval philosophers had identified the good in both the Platonic and Aristotelian senses with the Christian God and had argued that God is both the perfectly good creative source and the perfectly good end of all beings other than himself.
The concept of a perfectly good being in Christian philosophical theology faces two major kinds of difficulty. One is the problem that perfect goodness appears to be incompatible with the divine attributes of omnipotence and freedom of the divine will. And if a perfectly good being does not have a will that is free in a morally significant sense, that being seems to lack goodness in the moral sense of goodness. The second kind of problem is that the existence of a being who is both omnipotent and perfectly good seems to be incompatible with the existence of evil. In spite of these problems, there is a strong attraction to the idea of a perfectly good God in contemporary philosophical theology. The category of perfect goodness is therefore one of the most persistent of the concepts in the Platonic legacy.
Incarnation and Christology
Authors: van Inwagen Peter 
Published: September 2018

It is a central and essential dogma of Christianity that Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified in Judea during the procuratorship (ad 26–36) of Pontius Pilate, and God, the eternal and omnipresent creator of the universe, were in some very strong sense ‘one’. The department of Christian theology that is devoted to the study of the nature and implications of this ‘oneness’ is called Christology. Orthodox Christology (unlike certain heretical Christologies) sees this oneness as a oneness of person, as consisting in the co-presence of two natures, the divine and the human, in one person, Jesus Christ. To speak plainly, orthodox Christology holds that there is someone, Jesus Christ, who is both divine and human. Because God pre-existed and is superior to every human being, orthodox theologians have found it natural to speak of the union of the divine and human natures in the person of Jesus Christ as something that happened to the pre-existent divine nature: at a certain point in time, at the moment of the conception of Jesus, it ‘took on flesh’ or ‘became incarnate’; in the words of the Athanasian Creed, the union of the two natures was accomplished ‘not by conversion of the Godhead [divinitas] into flesh, but by taking of the manhood into God’. This event, and the continuing union it established, are called ‘the Incarnation’. The Incarnation was not, according to Christian teaching, undone by Christ’s death (his corpse – a human corpse – continued to be united with the divine nature by the same bond by which the living man had been united) or by his ‘Ascension’ (his ‘withdrawal’ from the everyday world of space and time forty days after the Resurrection), and it will never be undone: the Incarnation is eternal.
The primary statements of the dogma of the Incarnation are the Definition issued by the Council of Chalcedon (ad 451) and the Athanasian Creed (fifth century; its origins are obscure). The creed issued by the Council of Nicaea (ad 325) and the longer, revised version of this creed that is today used liturgically (and commonly called ‘the Nicene Creed’) contain nothing of substance that is not found in the two later statements.
Necessary being
Authors: Leftow Brian 
Published: September 2018

Many think that God is perfect, or free from defect, and that being able not to exist is a defect. These infer that God is not able not to exist – that is, that God exists necessarily. Some add that what makes God perfect also makes him exist necessarily, and so trace his necessity to his immateriality (Aristotle), eternity (Plotinus) or simplicity (Aquinas). Others trace God’s necessity to his relation to creatures (Ibn Sina, Anselm). Spinoza and Leibniz held that what makes God necessary explains his very existence.
Many have thought that if God exists necessarily, there is a sound ontological argument for God’s existence, or that if there is a sound ontological argument for God’s existence, God exists necessarily. But both claims are false. Some have used philosophical views of the nature of necessity – for example, that all necessity is conventional, a matter of how we choose to use words – to challenge God’s necessary existence. But the theories which best support these challenges have fallen from favour, and in fact, even if one accepts the theories, the challenges fail.
Niebuhr, Reinhold (1892–1971)
Authors: Marty Martin 
Published: September 2018

Reinhold Niebuhr is widely regarded as the foremost public theologian in twentieth-century America. A ‘public’ theologian is one who is responsive to the biblical tradition and responsible to the Christian Church, but who also responds to the social and political concerns of the world and seeks to effect change in that world. In the case of Niebuhr, this meant being attuned to life in the USA as it passed through times of prosperity, depression, war, cold war and cultural complacency. It also meant that he had to be as alert to the secular philosophy and expression of the times as to the biblical and creedal traditions of the Church, and he managed to correlate and connect these in ever-changing ways.
Niebuhr is known as a developer of a school of thought often called ‘Christian realism’. Though shaped first by the more optimistic liberal thought of his teachers’ generation, which stressed the immanence of God and the potential for goodness in human beings, Niebuhr came to witness to the otherness of God and the drastic limits of human potential. He even helped resurrect the term ‘original sin’ to describe the human condition, well aware that the term was scorned by most philosophers of his time. Yet over the decades, his realism came to be seen as so appropriate to descriptions of human actions, especially in situations of power, that he attracted a following far beyond Church communities. Niebuhr thus influenced both domestic and international policies. He was seen both as a self-critical theologian who uttered judgments on the Christian Church and the American nation, and as a theologian of the Cold War who issued devastating critiques of Soviet Communism. In the time before the Second World War, when most of the more notable Protestant clerics leaned towards pacifism, Niebuhr let his realistic vision and his opposition to totalitarian powers lead him to argue for ‘preparedness’ for war and to scold those who refused to see with him a need for military response to the threat of dictators.
Ritual
Authors: Wettstein Howard 
Published: September 2018

Ritual, present throughout human affairs and central to many religious and cultural traditions, presents perplexities. One important question concerns the worth of such repetition and fixety – for example, in prayer, in human interaction, sometimes even in eating and drinking. To consider prayer, why not encourage the direct expression of religious thought and affect – from the heart, as it were, rather than in prescribed ways? It is sometimes suggested, and tempting to suppose, that to regularize such expression is to constrict it, ultimately to demean it. It is difficult to locate value in such apparently unnecessary regulation of human affairs.
In the context of philosophy the question becomes striking. None of the prevailing approaches to ethics makes it easy to see how ritual might possess ethical value or figure crucially in the ethical life. Yet this is precisely how ritualized ways are often seen within communities of practitioners.
Open theism
Authors: Sanders John 
Published: September 2018

Open theism is the name for a model of God which emphasizes divine love and responsiveness to creatures. It arises from a family of theologies known as free-will theism which accentuate the divine gift of freedom to humans and hold that God does not micromanage the affairs of the world. The name open theism was coined in the 1990s by a group of philosophers and theologians in order to distinguish it within the free-will theistic family. God is ‘open’ to creatures in that God is affected by what creatures do and God genuinely interacts and enters into dynamic give-and-take relationships with creatures. These reciprocal relationships mean that God has a history which includes changing mental and emotional states. As a consequence, open theists affirm that God is temporal and everlasting rather than atemporal and timeless.
Open theists believe that God is omnipotent but chooses not to exercise tight control over creation. Instead, God grants to creatures great latitude to act within boundaries. Because God chooses to elicit our free collaboration in divine plans God takes risks that we will act in ways contrary to the divine intentions.
According to open theists the future is ‘open’ as well because it contains multiple possible futures that may or may not come about rather than solely one unalterable future. The future is not a blueprint or script but rather a set of possibilities, and God solicits the cooperation of creatures in order to bring some of these possibilities into existence. Since the future is not determined and humans have genuine free will, God does not know with certainty future contingent actions. Rather, God possesses ‘dynamic omniscience’ in which God has exhaustive knowledge of the past and present and understands what we call ‘the future’ as the possibilities which could occur along with any events God has determined to occur. Divine omniscience is dynamic in that God constantly acquires knowledge of which possible future actions creatures select to actualize. Open theists reject standard accounts of divine foreknowledge because they believe that they are incompatible with human freedom, they are of no value to God in terms of planning and acting in world affairs and they fail to correspond with the biblical portrayal of God.
Applied ethics
Authors: Almond Brenda 
Published: September 2018

Applied ethics is marked out from ethics in general by its special focus on issues of practical concern. It therefore includes medical ethics, environmental ethics, and evaluation of the social implications of scientific and technological change, as well as matters of policy in such areas as health care, business or journalism. It is also concerned with professional codes and responsibilities in such areas.
Typical of the issues discussed are abortion, euthanasia, personal relationships, the treatment of nonhuman animals, and matters of race and gender. Although sometimes treated in isolation, these issues are best discussed in the context of some more general questions which have been perennial preoccupations of philosophers, such as: How should we see the world and our place in it? What is the good life for the individual? What is the good society? In relation to these questions, applied ethics involves discussion of fundamental ethical theory, including utilitarianism, liberal rights theory and virtue ethics.
‘Applied ethics’ and ‘applied philosophy’ are sometimes used as synonyms, but applied philosophy is in fact broader, covering also such fields as law, education and art, and theoretical issues in artificial intelligence. These areas include philosophical problems – metaphysical and epistemological – that are not strictly ethical. Applied ethics may therefore be understood as focusing more closely on ethical questions. Nevertheless, many of the issues it treats do in fact involve other aspects of philosophy, medical ethics, for example, including such metaphysical themes as the nature of ’personhood’, or the definition of death.
Business ethics
Authors: Sorell Tom , Sandberg Joakim 
Published: September 2018

Business ethics is the application of ethical theories to activity within and between commercial enterprises, and between commercial enterprises and their broader environment. It is a wide range of activity, and no brief list can be made of the issues it raises. The safety of working practices; the fairness of recruitment; the transparency of financial accounting; the promptness of payments to suppliers; the degree of permissible aggression between competitors: all come within the range of the subject. So do relations between businesses and consumers, local communities, national governments, and ecosystems. Many, but not all, of these issues can be understood to bear on distinct, recognized groups with their own stakes in a business: employees, shareholders, consumers, and so on. The literature of business ethics tends to concentrate on ‘stakeholders’ – anyone who occupies a role within the business or who belongs to a recognized group outside the business that is affected by its activity – but not in every sort of business. Corporations are often discussed to the exclusion of medium-sized and small enterprises.
Ethical theories in business ethics come from a number of sources. Academic moral philosophy has contributed utilitarianism, Kantianism and Aristotelianism, as well as egoism and social contract theory. There are also ideas that originate in organized religion, in the manifestos of political activists, in the thoughts of certain tycoons with an interest in social engineering, and in the writings of management ‘gurus’. Recently, business ethics has been affected by the ending of the Cold War, and the breakdown of what were once command economies. These developments have encouraged enthusiasts for the market economy to advocate moral and political ideas consistent with capitalism, and the handing over to private companies of activity in certain countries that has long been reserved for the state. More recently still, multinational corporations have been recognized among many nonstate actors that have responsibilities in a new global order. International financial institutions – such as the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, and regional economic groupings, such as the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development – have also gained in prominence.
Deontological ethics
Authors: McNaughton David 
Published: September 2018

Deontology asserts that there are several distinct duties. Certain kinds of act are intrinsically right and other kinds intrinsically wrong. The rightness or wrongness of any particular act is thus not (or not wholly) determined by the goodness or badness of its consequences. Some ways of treating people, such as killing the innocent, are ruled out, even to prevent others doing worse deeds. Many deontologies leave agents considerable scope for developing their own lives in their own way; provided they breach no duty they are free to live as they see fit.
Deontology may not have the theoretical tidiness which many philosophers crave, but has some claim to represent everyday moral thought.
Deontological ethics
Authors: McNaughton David , Rawling Piers 
Published: September 2018

Deontology is often defined by contrasting it with one of its chief competitors, consequentialism. In its simplest form, consequentialism claims that we only have one moral duty: to do as much good as possible. Deontology (the word comes from the Greek deon meaning ‘one must’) denies this, and asserts that there are several distinct duties, not all of which depend for their status as duties on considerations of value alone.
Deontological duties are divided into two classes: constraints and duties of special relationship. The former govern the way we treat others regardless of our relationships to them. Some ways of treating people, such as torturing them, are ruled out, even to prevent others doing worse deeds. The latter govern our actions toward those to whom we stand in special relations such as friendship. You are required to do certain things for your friends, even if you could make the world better by abandoning them.
In addition to constraints and duties of relationship, some deontologists claim that there is a requirement to do good whenever there is no other duty more pressing. Others are less demanding, requiring only that we do some good in addition to fulfilling our other obligations. The least demanding deontology would incorporate no moral requirement to do good, and claim that provided we breach no duty we are permitted to live as we see fit.
Some deontologists attempt to justify the various duties they propose by appeal to some more fundamental and unifying principle(s). Other deontologists deny that such unifying justification is available. Deontologists, then, may agree about surface features, such as the extent of our duties, while disagreeing about the possibility of an underlying rationale.
Happiness
Authors: Griffin J.P. 
Published: September 2018

In ordinary use, the word ‘happiness’ has to do with one’s situation (one is fortunate) or with one’s state of mind (one is glad, cheerful) or, typically, with both. These two elements appear in different proportions on different occasions. If one is concerned with a long stretch of time (as in ‘a happy life’), one is likely to focus more on situation than on state of mind. If a short period of time, it is not uncommon to focus on states of mind.
By and large philosophers are more interested in long-term cases. One’s life is happy if one is content that life has brought one much of what one regards as important. There is a pull in these lifetime assessments towards a person’s objective situation and away from the person’s subjective responses. The important notion for ethics is ‘wellbeing’ – that is, a notion of what makes an individual life go well. ‘Happiness’ is important because many philosophers have thought that happiness is the only thing that contributes to wellbeing, or because they have used ‘happiness’ to mean the same as ‘wellbeing’.
What, then, makes a life go well? Some have thought that it was the presence of a positive feeling tone. Others have thought that it was having one’s desires fulfilled – either actual desires (as some would say) or informed desires (as others would say). It is unclear how stringent the requirement of ‘informed’ must be; if it is fairly stringent it can, in effect, require abandoning desire explanations and adopting instead an explanation in terms of a list of good-making features in human life.
Kantian ethics
Authors: O’Neill Onora , Timmermann Jens 
Published: September 2018

Kantian ethics originates in the ethical writings of Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), which remain the most influential attempt to vindicate universal ethical principles that respect the dignity and equality of human beings without relying on theological claims or a metaphysical conception of the good. Kant’s systematic, critical philosophy centres on an account of reasoning about action, that is practical reasoning, which he uses to derive principles of duty and virtue, a liberal and republican conception of justice with cosmopolitan scope, and an account of the relationship between morality and hope.
Numerous contemporary writers also advance views of ethics which they, and their critics, think of as Kantian. However, some contemporary work is remote from Kant’s philosophy on fundamental matters such as human freedom and practical reason. It converges with Kant’s ethics in claiming that we lack a substantive account of the good (so that teleological or consequentialist ethics are impossible), in taking a strong view of the fundamental equality of moral agents and the importance of universal principles of duty which spell out what it is to respect them, and in stressing an account of justice and rights with cosmopolitan scope.
Both Kant’s ethics and contemporary Kantian ethics have been widely criticized for preoccupation with rules and duties, and for lack of concern with virtues, happiness or personal relationships. However, these criticisms may apply more to certain strands within modern Kantian ethics than to Kant’s own ethics.
Life and death
Authors: Harris John 
Published: September 2018

Problems concerning life and death are among the most dramatic and intractable in philosophy and they feature in all fundamental areas of philosophical inquiry, especially ethics. Most basic is the problem of what account to give of the value of life itself. This problem has had two main dimensions. One has been the controversy over what precise account to give of death; this has revolved around the issue of whether death is, as it is commonly perceived, an evil, and premature death a tragedy. The other has been the equally puzzling question of how to explain the positive value of life, and to resolve the problem that the more rich we make our account of the value of life, the more the value of life, and hence the nature of the wrong done by killing someone, seems to vary with the quality of the life of the person concerned.
A second set of problems concerns the definition of death and appropriate criteria for death. Death, as the most extreme consequence of violence, also leads one into psychological discussions of aggression and into issues of political violence, terrorism, war and capital punishment in political philosophy. Third, there has been concern with a number of practical moral issues, including abortion and euthanasia. Finally, issues have arisen concerning the relation of the value of the life of persons to other sorts of lives, those of animals, for example, or the life and survival of the ecosystem itself.
This discussion will concentrate on the central themes of the value of life and the harm and wrong represented by death.