http://blog.talkingphilosophy.com/?p=8283

EXCERPT: [...] According to the information released to the public, there is evidence that Brown had close contact with Wilson, which is consistent with Wilson’s claim that Brown attacked him and tried to take his gun. Brown died a considerable distance from Wilson and this raises the legal and moral question of whether or not Wilson still had an “objectively reasonable” belief that Brown still presented a threat that could only be dealt with by lethal force. The grand jury decided that he did, which settles the legal aspect of the case. However, there is still the matter of the moral aspect—was Wilson actually warranted in killing Brown?

On the one hand, when one considers that Brown was unarmed and too far from Wilson to attack him, then it would be reasonable to consider that Wilson was not justified in killing Brown. On the other hand, if Brown appeared to be charging towards Wilson, then Wilson could be justified in shooting him. Since Wilson was not shot in the back, it does seem clear that Brown was facing Wilson—but facing someone is not the same thing as being a threat. Unfortunately, there is no video of the incident and the eye-witness reports conflict (and eye-witness reports, even given in all honesty, are not very reliable). Since Brown is dead, we only have Wilson’s side of the story. As such, one cannot be certain whether Wilson was justified or not, assuming a right to kill when one has an “objectively reasonable” belief that one is threatened.

This principle can, of course, be challenged. Some people take the principle to set a very low threshold—an officer just has to feel threatened in order to be warranted to use deadly force. This, as might be imagined, can be seen as a threshold that is too low. Some states do give citizens the same right (against other citizens) as shown in the various infamous stand your ground laws and these have proven rather problematic. Others take the view that the principle itself is reasonable—after all, it essentially expresses John Locke’s principle that force can be used to protect one’s life or the lives of the innocent. But, even if the principle is reasonable, there is also the question of whether or not it is applied correctly. My view is that the use of lethal force requires a comparable threat to justify it, on the principle of a proportional response. That said, one must also consider the practicalities of combat situations—it can be difficult to judge intent and the heat of a fight can easily change a person’s perceptions....

http://inthespaceofreasons.blogspot.com/...asons.html

EXCERPT: In response to a question from someone reading philosophy but not a philosopher (better: a poet).

The phrase comes from a paper (now published as a short book) called ‘Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind’ by Wilfrid Sellars, the mid C20 American philosopher. One question he addresses is whether knowledge has a foundation. His answer is that it does, it can be grounded in perceptual reports, but that these do not have a property sometimes expected of epistemic foundations: that they can be made independently of holistic considerations. They are not brute data in that sense. That, he suggests, is the ‘Myth of the Given’.

In building to that claim he comments:

"The essential point is that in characterizing an episode or a state as that of knowing, we are not giving an empirical description of that episode or state; we are placing it in the logical space of reasons, of justifying and being able to justify what one says." [Sellars EPM §36 italics added]...

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-development/

EXCERPT: Modern philosophy begins with Kant, and yet he marks the end of the “Modern” epoch (1600–1800 AD/CE) in the history of philosophy. The appearance of the Critique of Pure Reason in 1781 marks the end of the modern period and the beginning of something entirely new. Today his texts are read on all continents, and his thought has had a profound impact on nearly all subsequent philosophical discussions. The 2004 bicentennial of his death, for instance, was reflected in conferences in Austria, Canada, China, France, Germany, Hungary, Japan, Iran, Italy, Mexico, New Zealand, Paraguay, Poland, Portugal, Russia, Senegal, Spain, Sweden, Taiwan, and Turkey.

Like other watershed figures, Kant has contributed to the shape of world civilization, and the conceptualization we have of the world today. His practical ideas, such as the Categorical Imperative and its implications (1785), informed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), the Political and Economic Covenants (1966), and the International Criminal Court (2002). His exploration of natural sciences and his metaphysical ideas, particularly those of his pre-critical period (1747–1770), are stunning. Kant gave the first account of the evolutionary reciprocity of spacetime and momentum-energy, and formulated the first general law of free field radiation (1747). He suggested the conceptual solution of the three body problem, which emerges in the interplay of Earth, Moon, and Sun (1754). He was the first to construct a detailed evolutionary cosmology (1755). His ideas on biospherical dynamics allowed him to predict the rhythms of the monsoon and the oscillation of coastal winds (1755–1757). He suggested that the building blocks of matter are energy bubbles (1756)—an idea that is useful today in superstring theory in the guise of Calabi-Yau manifolds.

A number of recent findings have helped to shed more light on Kant's philosophical development.

First, in terms of science, it now appears that his metaphysics has withstood the test of time. While traditional scholars largely dismiss his holistic ontology prior to the Critique, innovations in the environmental and physical sciences have validated Kant's claims as realistic insights in the workings of nature. His evolutionary theory of the universe is now seen as “the essence of modern models” in cosmology (Coles 2001: 240), and his natural philosophy is seen as the last milestone of western philosophy prior to its “comedown” to skepticism (Hawking 2003, 166). In light of climate change, it stands to reason that Kant's grasp on biospherical dynamics and sustainable policies may well spur a philosophical return to Kant in the near future.

Second, in terms of religion, important recent scholarship indicates an ambivalence, if not dislike of Christianity—something that his early biographers, all of them Lutheran theologians, took pains to avoid revealing. Kant can be seen as defending pantheism, naturalism, evolution, cosmic expansion theory and holism, even when doing so was incompatible with an academic career.

In the 18th Century university system defending such views often led to dismissal and/or lack of promotion. Kant, himself, was always cautious when writing on such topics. In the context of censorship, writers tend to become circumspect. To avoid trouble, they may publish something anonymously; or they may make oblique remarks instead of direct statements; or they may have second thoughts and retract earlier statements. Kant did all three things. But, for later readers in increasingly secular ages, it is easy to miss Kant's subtleties and implications.

Third, in terms of culture, Kant's early views may be placed in a global rather than a purely Western context. Recent research suggests that key ideas of Kant's natural philosophy also have sources in Taoist, Buddhist, Hindu and Confucian thought, which were disseminated in continental Europe by Jesuits based in China, popularized by Leibniz and Wolff, and further developed by Wolff's Sinophile student Bilfinger. One example is the idea of dialectics that Bilfinger found in the Chinese classics, and which Kant encountered in the proceedings of the Russian academy. Importation and serious consideration of eastern thought was in its infancy during the end of the modern period, and Kant was unaware of the Far Eastern roots of the notions that influenced him. The historical irony is that he dismissed nonwestern cultures while being deeply influenced by their insights.

Scholars split Kant's development into stages:

1. the pre-critical period (1745–1770), during which Kant works within the tradition of Leibniz/Wolff and writes his impressive early works on natural phenomena;

2. “silent decade” (1770–1781), during which Kant refrained from publishing texts other than advertisements and endorsements for classes;

3. the critical period (1781–1791), which marks the time of insights or “the astonishing decade” (Beck 1969: 433) of his critical philosophy; and

4. the post-critical period (1798–1802), often cited as works of old age.

Recent studies indicate that Kant's philosophical development was far more unified (Schönfeld 2000), and, in terms of its stages, involved deeper continuities (Edwards 2000) than previously recognized. From the start, Kant was pushing quite a unique agenda. Recent scholarship contends Kant's earliest works are not only commensurate and continuous with his late claims, but also offer insight into some oddities of the critical period, such as the Third Analogy of the Critique. The new picture of Kant's development indicates that his intellectual trajectory was not as fractured and erratic as scholarship used to assume, and it also indicates that Kant was not a late bloomer, but, rather, that he was innovative from the start.

The following account covers Kant's development from his upbringing to the critical period. Its theme is his intellectual formation: the influences in his youth and education; his views on natural philosophy, ontology and cosmology shaped during his early adulthood; the questions subsequently pursued; and the historical fate of his answers....

http://www.theguardian.com/news/2014/nov...fe-in-hell

EXCERPT: A couple of years ago, a Chicago-based corporate-identity consultant Chris Herron gave himself the ultimate challenge: rebrand hell. It was half gag, half self-promotion, but Herron took the project seriously, considering what it would take for a place like hell to become a premier destination in the travel market. Herron decided that what hell needed was a complete brand overhaul. The new hell would feature no demons or devils, no tridents or lakes of fire. The brand name was rendered in a lower-case, bubbly blue font designed to evoke “instant accessibility and comfort”. The slogan, which was once “Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter Here”, would be “Simply Heavenly”. The joke was posted as a “case study” on Herron’s personal website and quickly went viral in the marketing blogosphere – a testament to the power of effective branding.

[...] My family belonged to a dwindling Baptist congregation in south-east Michigan, where Sunday mornings involved listening to our pastor preach something akin to the 1819 version of hell – a real diabolical place where sinners suffered for all eternity. [...] I was too young and sheltered to recognise this worldview as anachronistic. Even now as an adult, it’s difficult for me to hear biblical scholars such as Elaine Pagels refer to Satan as “an antiquarian relic of a superstitious age”, or to come across an aside, in a magazine or newspaper article, that claims the western world stopped believing in a literal hell during the Enlightenment. My parents often attributed chronic sins like alcoholism or adultery to “spiritual warfare”, (as in, “Let’s remember to pray for Larry, who’s struggling with spiritual warfare”) and taught me and my siblings that evil was a real force that was in all of us. Our dinner conversations sounded like something out of a Nathaniel Hawthorne novel.

According to Christian doctrine, all human beings, believers included, are sinners by nature. This essentially means that no one can get through life without committing at least one moral transgression. Although the “saved” are forgiven of their sins, they’re never cured. Even Paul the Apostle wrote, “Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners – of whom I am the worst.” According to this view, hell isn’t so much a penitentiary for degenerates as it is humanity’s default destination. But there’s a way out through accepting Christ’s atonement, which, in the Protestant tradition, involves saying the sinner’s prayer. For contemporary evangelicals, it’s solely this act that separates the sheep from the goats. I’ve heard more than one believer argue that Mother Teresa is in hell for not saying this prayer, while Jeffrey Dahmer, who supposedly accepted Christ weeks before his execution, is in heaven.

[...] Hell has changed a lot over the years. The Old Testament refers exclusively to sheol, the traditional Hebrew underworld, a place of stillness in which both the righteous and the unrighteous wander in shadows. There’s no fiery torment, no wailing or gnashing of teeth. In the New Testament, several writers refer to this place under its Greek name, hades. There’s also a number of passages about Gehenna, literally “the Valley of Hinnom”, which was a real area outside Jerusalem that served as the city dump. Fires burned there constantly, to incinerate the garbage; it was also a place where the bodies of criminals were burned. The Jewish rabbinical tradition envisioned Gehenna as a purgatorial place of atonement for the ungodly. Another Greek term, tartarus, appears only once, when the author of 1 Peter writes about the angel rebellion that took place before the creation of the world.

The most dramatic descriptions of hell come from the strain of apocalyptic literature that runs through the New Testament, as well as the Old Testament prophets. Apocalypticism was a worldview that arose during the 6th century BC, when Israel was under Syrian domination. It involved the belief that the present era, which was ruled by evil, would soon give way to a new age here on Earth in which God would restore justice and all evil-doers would be punished. The authors of Daniel and Ezekiel were apocalyptists – so was John of Patmos, the author of Revelation. It’s these authors who provide us with passages such as, “They will be tormented with burning sulfur in the presence of the holy angels and of the Lamb. And the smoke of their torment will rise for ever and ever.” This was a belief system born out of persecution. As Nietzsche noted in The Genealogy of Morals, these passages are essentially revenge fantasies, written by people who’d suffered horrible injustices and had no hope of retribution in this life.

I didn’t learn any of this at church. As a kid, it never occurred to me that Solomon and Daniel had drastically different views about the afterlife. Christian theology, as it has developed over the centuries, has functioned like a narrative gloss, smoothing the irregular collection of biblical literature into a cohesive story written by a single, divine author. As time went on, Satan, Lucifer and Beelzebub were consolidated into a single entity, the personification of all evil. Likewise sheol, Gehenna, hades and tartarus came to be understood as physical representations of the darkest place in the universe. By the time the King James Bible was published in the 16th century, each of these words was translated as simply “hell”.

The various depictions of hell over the centuries tend to mirror the earthly landscape of their age. Torture entered the conception of hell in the second century, when Christians were subjected to sadistic public spectacles. Roman interrogation methods included red-hot metal rods, whips and the rack. Dante’s Divine Comedy has traces of the feudal landscape of 14th-century Europe. Lower hell is depicted as a walled city with towers, ramparts, bridges and moats; fallen angels guard the citadel like knights. The Jesuits, who rose to prominence during a time of mass immigration and urban squalor, envisioned an inferno of thousands of diseased bodies “pressed together like grapes in a wine-press”. Today, biblical literalists believe hell exists outside of time and space, in some kind of spiritual fifth dimension. Contemporary evangelical churches don’t display paintings or stained glass renderings of hell. It’s no longer a popular subject of art. If hell is represented at all, it’s in pop culture, where it appears as either satirically gaudy – like animated Hieronymus Bosch – or else eerily banal. In Gary Larson’s comic The Far Side, Satan and his minions are depicted as bored corporate drones who deal with the scourge of the post-industrial Earth.

While I was attending Moody, the most controversial church in the Chicago area was Willow Creek Community Church, out in the north-west suburbs. I’d heard students raving about it – and others railing against it – ever since orientation week. [...] I wasn’t aware of it at the time, but Willow Creek was on the front lines of a movement some described as a “second Reformation”, with the potential to remake the Christian faith. Hybels was one of a handful of pastors who pioneered what would become known as the “seeker-friendly church,” a congregation targeting the vast population of Americans who had little to no experience of Christianity (“unchurched Harry and Mary,” in ministry lingo). The goal was to work out why these people were turned off by the gospel, and then to create a worship service that responded to their perceived needs.

Essentially, this is consumer-based management. (Hybels keeps a poster in his office that reads: “What is our business? Who is our customer? What does the customer consider value?”) During Willow Creek’s inception, Hybels – who studied business before entering the ministry – performed preliminary market research, surveying the unreligious in his community to find out why people weren’t going to church. Unsurprisingly, the most common responses were “church is boring”, “I don’t like being preached down to” and “it makes me feel guilty”. Harry and Mary were made uncomfortable by overt religious symbolism and archaic language. The solution was a more positive message: upbeat tunes, an emphasis on love and acceptance. Visitors wouldn’t be required to wear name tags or stand up and introduce themselves. Everything was designed for the visitor’s comfort and leisure.

It goes without saying that pastors who are trying to “sell” God won’t mention hell any more than a clothes ad will call attention to child labour. Under the new business model, hell became the sweatshop, the behind-the-scenes horror the consumer doesn’t want to know about. Once I became aware of what was missing at Willow Creek, it was almost a game to watch the ministers try to manoeuvre around the elephant in the room. One strategy was to place the focus on heaven, letting people mentally fill in the blank about the alternative. Another was to use contemporary, watered-down translations of the Bible, like The Message (reviled around Moody’s theology department, where it was better known as “The Mess”).

But away from the pulpit, these ministers were surprisingly traditional. In his book Honest to God? Hybels writes, “I hate thinking about it, teaching about it, and writing about it. But the plain truth is that hell is real and real people go there for eternity.” This raises the obvious question: how ethical is it to stand up each week before an audience who you believe are going to suffer for all of eternity, and not talk about hell because you “hate thinking about it,” or are afraid people will be offended?

At the same time, I realised that Hybels and like-minded pastors were responding to the problem we’d noticed down on Michigan Avenue. Most of my friends at Moody disagreed with their approach, but our only other option was to be the ranting voice in the wilderness. It was a hopeless effort, and we all knew it. People looked at our street evangelism team like we were Jesus freaks. (In fact, a number of passersby felt compelled to say as much.) Every Friday night, we’d ride back to campus on the subway in silence, each of us staring slack-faced at the crowd of people hooked up to MP3 players and engrossed in fashion magazines. Many of my friends were planning to leave the US after graduation to become missionaries to the developing world. Apparently it was easier to convince people of the existence of hell and the need for salvation in places like Uganda and Cambodia.

[...] Part of what made church such a powerful experience for me as a child and a young adult was that it was the one place where my own faults and failings were recognised and accepted, where people referred to themselves affectionately as “sinners”, where it was taken as a given that the person standing in the pews beside you was morally fallible, but still you held hands and lifted your voice with hers as you worshipped in song. This camaraderie came from a collective understanding of evil – a belief that each person harboured within them a potential for sin and deserved, despite it, divine grace. It’s this notion of shared fallibility that lent Hybels’s 9/11 sermon its power, as he suggested that his own longing for revenge was only a difference of degree – not of kind – from the acts of the terrorists. And it’s precisely this acknowledgement of collective guilt that makes it possible for a community to observe the core virtues of the faith: mercy, forgiveness, grace.

Like so many formerly oppositional institutions, the church is now becoming a symptom of the culture rather than an antidote to it, giving us one less place to turn for a sober counter-narrative to the simplistic story of moral progress that stretches from Silicon Valley to Madison Avenue. Hell may be an elastic concept, as varied as the thousands of malevolencies it has described throughout history, but it remains our most resilient metaphor for the evil both around and within us. True compassion is possible not because we are ignorant that life can be hell, but because we know that it can be....

...by goin shoppin early Saturday mornin

"A recently discovered form of carbon graphite – the material in pencil lead – has turned out to have a completely unexpected property which could revolutionise the development of green energy and electric cars.

Researchers have discovered that graphene allows positively charged hydrogen atoms or protons to pass through it despite being completely impermeable to all other gases, including hydrogen itself.

The implications of the discovery are immense as it could dramatically increase the efficiency of fuel cells, which generate electricity directly from hydrogen, the scientists said.

Professor Sir Andrei Geim received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2010 Professor
Sir Andrei Geim received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2010 (Getty)

The breakthrough raises the prospect of extracting hydrogen fuel from air and burning it as a carbon-free source of energy in a fuel cell to produce electricity and water with no damaging waste products.

“In the atmosphere there is a certain amount of hydrogen and this hydrogen will end up on the other side [of graphene] in a reservoir. Then you can use this hydrogen-collected reservoir to burn it in the same fuel cell and make electricity,” said Professor Sir Andrei Geim of Manchester University.

Ever since its discovery 10 years ago, graphene has astonished scientists. It is the thinnest known material, a million times thinner than human hair, yet more than 200 times stronger than steel, as well as being the world’s best conductor of electricity.

Until now, being permeable to protons was not considered a practical possibility, but an international team of scientists led by Sir Andre, who shares the 2010 Nobel Prize for his work on graphene, has shown that the one-atom thick crystal acts like a chemical filter. It allows the free passage of protons but forms an impenetrable barrier to other atoms and molecules.

“There have been three or four scientific papers before about the theoretical predictions for how easy or how hard it would be for a proton to go through graphene and these calculations give numbers that take billions and billions of years for a proton to go through this same membrane,” Sir Andrei said.

“It’s just so dense an electronic field it just doesn’t let anything through. But it’s a question of numbers, no more than that. This makes a difference between billions of years and a reasonable time for permeation. There is no magic,” he said."===http://www.independent.co.uk/news/scienc...85425.html

http://news.ufl.edu/archive/2014/11/proc...-fuel.html

RELEASE: Buck Rogers surely couldn’t have seen this one coming, but at NASA’s request, University of Florida researchers have figured out how to turn human waste -- yes, that kind -- into rocket fuel.

Adolescent jokes aside, the process finally makes useful something that until now has been collected to burn up on re-entry. What’s more, like so many other things developed for the space program, the process could well turn up on Earth, said Pratap Pullammanappallil, a UF associate professor of agricultural and biological engineering.

“It could be used on campus or around town, or anywhere, to convert waste into fuel,” Pullammanappallil said.

In 2006, NASA began making plans to build an inhabited facility on the moon’s surface between 2019 and 2024. As part of NASA’s moon-base goal, the agency wanted to reduce the weight of spacecraft leaving Earth. Historically, waste generated during spaceflight would not be used further. NASA stores it in containers until it’s loaded into space cargo vehicles that burn as they pass back through the Earth’s atmosphere. For future long-term missions, though, it would be impractical to bring all the stored waste back to Earth.

Dumping it on the moon’s surface is not an option, so the space agency entered into an agreement with UF to develop test ideas.

Pullammanappallil and then-graduate student Abhishek Dhoble accepted the challenge.

“We were trying to find out how much methane can be produced from uneaten food, food packaging and human waste,” said Pullammanappallil, a UF Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences faculty member and Dhoble’s adviser. “The idea was to see whether we could make enough fuel to launch rockets and not carry all the fuel and its weight from Earth for the return journey. Methane can be used to fuel the rockets. Enough methane can be produced to come back from the moon.”

NASA started by supplying the UF scientists with a packaged form of chemically produced human waste that also included simulated food waste, towels, wash cloths, clothing and packaging materials, Pullammanappallil said. He and Dhoble, now a doctoral student at the University of Illinois, ran laboratory tests to find out how much methane could be produced from the waste and how quickly.

They found the process could produce 290 liters of methane per crew per day, all produced in a week, Pullammanappallil said.

Their results led to the creation of an anaerobic digester process, which kills pathogens from human waste, and produces biogas -- a mixture of methane and carbon dioxide by breaking down organic matter in waste.

In earth-bound applications, that fuel could be used for heating, electricity generation or transportation.

The digestion process also would produce about 200 gallons of non-potable water annually from all the waste. That is water held within the organic matter, which is released as organic matter decomposes. Through electrolysis, the water can then be split into hydrogen and oxygen, and the astronauts can breathe oxygen as a back-up system. The exhaled carbon dioxide and hydrogen can be converted to methane and water in the process, he said.

The study was published last month in the journal Advances in Space Research.

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2...112414.php

RELEASE: Led by a University of Oklahoma professor, an international team of researchers has discovered the first evidence of milk consumption in the ancient dental calculus--a mineralized dental plaque--of humans in Europe and western Asia. The team found direct evidence of milk consumption preserved in human dental plaque from the Bronze Age to the present day.

"The study has far-reaching implications for understanding the relationship between human diet and evolution," said Christina Warinner, professor in the OU Department of Anthropology. "Dairy products are a very recent, post-Neolithic dietary innovation, and most of the world's population is unable to digest lactose, often developing the symptoms of lactose intolerance." Warinner led a group of researchers from the universities of York and Copenhagen, and the University College London.

Understanding how, where and when humans consumed milk products is a necessary link between human consumption and their livestock. The new research provides direct protein evidence that the milk of all three major dairy livestock--cattle, sheep and goats--has been consumed by human populations for at least 5,000 years. This corroborates previous evidence for milk fats identified on pottery and cooking utensils in early farming communities.

"The discovery of milk proteins in human dental calculus will allow scientists to unite these lines of evidence and compare the genetic traits and cultural behaviors of specific individuals who lived thousands of years ago," said Warinner.

- - - - - - -

A research article, "Direct evidence of milk consumption from ancient human dental calculus" has been published in Nature's Scientific Reports at http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/srep07104. The research was supported by the Swiss Foundation for Nutritional Research, the Zurich Maxi Foundation, the University of York's Centre for Chronic Diseases and Disorders (Wellcome Trust) and EUROTAST (EU Marie Curie).

For more information on this research, please contact Christina Warinner at christina.warinner@ou.edu or visit the OU Department of Anthropology website at http://LMAMR.org.