What is Christian about Christian bioethics? The short answer to this question is that the Incarnation should shape the form and content of Christian bioethics. In explicating this answer it is argued that contemporary medicine is unwittingly embracing and implementing the transhumanist dream of transforming humans into posthumans. Contemporary medicine does not admit that there are any limits in principle to the extent to which it should intervene to improve the quality of human life. This largely inarticulate, yet ambitious, agenda (...) is derived first in late modernity's failed, but nonetheless ongoing, attempt to transform necessity into goodness, and second the loss of any viable concept of eternity, thereby stripping temporal existence of any normative significance. In short, medicine has become the vanguard of a profane attempt to save humankind by extracting data from flesh. In response, it is contended that an alternative Christian bioethics must be shaped by the Incarnation, the Word made flesh. This assertion does not entitle Christians to oppose the posthuman trajectory of contemporary medicine on the basis of any natural or biological essentialism. Rather, it is an evangelical witness to the grace of Christ's redemption instead of the work of self-transformation. It is Christ alone who thereby makes the vulnerability and mortality of finitude a gift and blessing. Specifically, it is maintained that the chasm separating necessity and goodness cannot be filled but only bridged through the suffering entailed in Christ's cross, and through Christ's resurrection eternity becomes the standard against which the temporal lives of human creatures are properly formed and measured. Consequently, Christian bioethics should help us become conformed to Christ rather than enabling selftransformation. (shrink)

(No abstract is available for this citation).

This essay on the social history of logic instruction considers the programmatic writings of Carnap/Neurath, but especially in the widely read book by Lillian Lieber, Mits, Wits and Logic, where Mits is the man in the street and Wits the woman in the street. In the ‘pre-Toulmin’ days it was seriously argued that the intense study of formal logic would create a more rational frame of mind and have many beneficial effects upon the social and political life. It arose from (...) the conviction that most metaphysical conundrums, religious and political problems and even fanaticism had their root in the irrationality of ordinary discourse, which had to be replaced by the more logical ‘ideal language’ of Principia Mathematica. The enthusiastic promotion of formal logic occurred at a time when it was widely thought that minds could be ‘made over’, ‘reprogrammed’ by proper intervention. This stands in stark contrast to the motivation for teaching informal logic and critical thinking, as it becomes apparent in a 1981 exchange between Ralph Johnson and Gerald Massey in Teaching Philosophy. Most of this essay focuses on Lillian Lieber, an earnest and enthusiastic advocate of the cause of formal logic, and on the reasons for the widespread conviction that, for the sake of peace and social harmony, formal logic should, if possible, be taught to every man, woman and child. (shrink)

: The study of perfection, progress and evolution is a central theme in the history of ideas. This thesis explores this theme seen and understood as part of a discourse in the new fields of anthropology, sociology and psychology in the nineteenth century. A particular focus is on the stance taken by philosophers, scientists and writers in the discussion of theories of human physical and mental evolution, as well as on their views concerning the nature of social progress and historical (...) change. The wisdom and feasibility of improving the human species is discussed alongside an analysis of new methods of investigating and measuring physical and mental attributes of the human organism.The instruments used to assess the development of mind, body and society are described, and are viewed as part of an increased emphasis on the use of technology as an integral part of modern life, and as a means toward the ordered gathering of information in social-scientific practice. An international perspective is taken by observing the way in which ideas about the physical and mental development of humankind was discussed in light and consequence of English and European scientific exploration in the Southern Hemisphere. Further, an evaluation is made of the manner of the spread of new thought in the social sciences from the intellectual and cultural 'centre' of England and Europe to the Anglo-European community located at the 'periphery' in Australia in the late nineteenth century. In particular the educative role played by the non-professional enthusiast as a pivotal conduit for the dissemination of these ideas is highlighted and linked back to a significant tradition of amateur scholarship as a central phenomenon in the study of the history of ideas. (shrink)

The exegesis of a famous work in social and political philosophy may be made interesting by explaining the problem that engaged its author. It may be made doubly interesting by applying the philosophy to a contemporary issue. That two-fold agenda, when successfully addressed, may also demonstrate the lasting value of the work and that the problem that it sought to investigate is in some sense perennial. This paper pursues such an agenda by supplying an exegesis of Karl Popper’s famous work (...) on social and political philosophy: The Open Society and Its Enemies. It uses a recently published collection of Popper’s previously unpublished or uncollected papers on social and political philosophy to elucidate the work’s themes, contents and problem situation. It also applies its central ideas to a contemporary issue: the referendum on so-called ‘Brexit’, held on 23rd June 2016, to decide whether the United Kingdom ought to remain a member of the European Union. The exegesis that is thereby supplied offers a third outcome of contemporary interest: an unqualified philosophical defence of ‘Brexit’. (shrink)