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De Jure Rigidity
Get PDFThe rigid designation of proper names and natural kind terms is the most well-known doctrine of Kripke’s Naming and Necessity (1981). On the basis of rigidity, Kripke has shown that proper names and natural kind terms do not refer via a description as argued by descriptivists. In response to Kripke several people have argued that all general terms could be interpreted rigidly, which would make the notion of rigidity trivial. This leads to the ‘rigidity problem’: the notion of rigidity cannot be used to argue against descriptivism anymore. I will show that the rigidity problem appears on a larger scale: firstly, because it appears independently of the trivialisation problem, secondly, because it appears for descriptions acting like singular terms as well. I will argue, however, that proper names and natural kind terms differ in an important manner from rigid descriptions. While the first are de jure rigid, the latter are de facto rigid. I will show that the rigidity problem indeed appears for de facto rigidity, but not for de jure rigidity, with the result that Kripke’s argument against descriptivism can withstand
Untold Stories: Gender-sensitive readings of the Syrian Uprising
Get PDFIn this new issue of Syria Studies, entitled “Untold Stories – Gender-sensitive readings of the Syrian Uprising,” we are pleased to share two samples of a new and promising approach to analysing and interpreting the narrative of war. It is an approach that is not only preoccupied with the human dimension of political conflict, but also one that seeks to shed light on the gender-specific nuances that permeate such dynamics. Indeed, it is now widely accepted that ideas of masculinity have had a significant impact on the way in which politics is understood and analysed, often skewing our perspective of what exactly is taking place. When applied to the realm of Syria studies, employing a more gender-sensitive approach can help us capture the stories that are often untold, or brushed aside; stories of women and men attempting to assert their identity in a political context that is often adamant at denying them this right
A long obedience in the same direction
Get PDFThis paper sets out to consider how to sustain long-term church growth in a Scottish suburban context and to consider what is a workable strategy for a mission-minded church today. Based on the experience of one minister’s ministry in one local church over 30 years, the paper sets out a number of principles that enabled the church to sustain significant growth over that period, and considers some basics that are all too easily overlooked
A long obedience in the same direction: A response to Malcolm Round
Get PDFReflections on the preceding pape
From Big Bang to heat death? Theological considerations concerning modern cosmological issues
Get PDFThis essay sets out to challenge the widespread assumption that scientific explanations for the creation and destiny of the universe are directly opposed to religious or theological explanations of the cosmos. It begins by exploring the cosmic geography of the peoples of the Ancient Near East and examining linguistic elements of the biblical creation stories in order to demonstrate that our modern concerns about understanding the cosmos are not necessarily the same as those of the biblical authors. It goes on to discuss current areas of debate – such as the existence of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, the concept of a multiverse, and the idea of ‘heat death’ as a potential end of the cosmos – and considers how far such concepts are compatible with Christian teaching.
(This paper was selected as the winning entry in the 2017 Fraser Essay Prize competition.
Harmful Dysfunction and Mental Illness: Why the latter is not the former
Get PDFIn his essay ‘The Concept of Mental Disorder’ (1992), Jerome C. Wakefield puts forth a hybrid account of mental disorder that relies on the concept of ‘harmful dysfunction’, wherein ‘harmful’ is a subjective value term determined by social norms, and ‘dysfunction’ is the objective value-neutral counterpart that denotes the failure of a mechanism to perform as evolutionarily intended. In this paper, I begin by laying out the kind of commitments Wakefield is wedded to, which will demonstrate that Wakefield’s ‘harmful dysfunction’ account of illness critically fails to unify accounts of physical and mental illness. I claim this because the concept of mental dysfunction itself is not value-neutral like Wakefield assumes and needs it to be, which makes the view unworkable when applied to mental disorder. In its place I propose a model of human flourishing that will account for many different models of mental functioning
“I feel like my body is me. I am my body”: Women, Healthy Lifestyles, and Instagram
Get PDFAlice Dobi
How to Be a Gricean Russellian
Get PDFAccording to many philosophers, many utterances of sentences contain unarticulated indexical expressions. In response to the problem of incompleteness, for instance, many Russellians hold that definite descriptions contain unarticulated indexical expressions which restrict the denotation of the description’s nominal. I argue that such unarticulated indexical expressions pose a problem for Griceans who wish to explain meaning in terms of speakers communicative intentions. Roughly, the problem is that if there are unarticulated indexical expressions, then speakers can’t rationally intend to have their audience entertain a single complete proposition by their utterance of a sentence.
Following Buchanan (2010), I suggest that the only way for the Gricean to meet this problem is to argue that often restricted proposition-types (and not propositions) are the objects of speakers communicative intentions. In particular, I argue that restricted proposition-types should be understood as proposition-types restricted by speakers’ actcoordinating intentions. In uttering a sentence speakers intend their audience to entertain any token proposition of their communicatively intended proposition-type; furthermore, speakers intend that the proposition the audience entertains by means of their utterance disposes them to act in coordination with the speakers intended action