Progress and Historical Reflection in Philosophy

What is the epistemic significance of reflecting on a discipline’s past for making progress in that discipline? I assume that the answer to this question negatively correlates with that discipline’s degree of progress over time. If and only if a science is progressive, then what people think or argue in that discipline ceases to be up-to-date. In this paper, I will distinguish different dimensions of disciplinary progress and consequently argue that veritic progress, i.e. collective convergence to truth, is the most important dimension for disciplines with scientific ambitions. I will then argue that, on the one hand, veritic progress in philosophy is more significant than many current philosophers believe, but that, on the other hand, it also has severe limitations. I will offer an explanation of these limitations that suggests that the history of philosophy should play some role, though only a minor one, in systematic philosophy

Limit theorems for radial random walks on Euclidean spaces of high dimensions

Let $\nu\in M^1([0,\infty[)$ be a fixed probability measure. For each dimension $p\in \mathbb{N}$, let $(X_n^{p})_{n\geq1}$ be i.i.d. $\mathbb{R}^p$-valued random variables with radially symmetric distributions and radial distribution $\nu$. We investigate the distribution of the Euclidean length of $S_n^{p}:=X_1^{p}+...+ X_n^{p}$ for large parameters $n$ and $p$. Depending on the growth of the dimension $p=p_n$ we derive by the method of moments two complementary CLT's for the functional $|S_n^{p}|_2$ with normal limits, namely for $n/p_n \to \infty$ and $n/p_n \to 0$. Moreover, we present a CLT for the case $n/p_n \to c\in]0,\infty[$. Thereby we derive explicit formulas and asymptotic results for moments of radial distributed random variables on \b R^p. All limit theorems are considered also for orthogonal invariant random walks on the space \b M_{p,q}(\b R) of $p\times q$ matrices instead of \b R^p for $p\to \infty$ and some fixed dimension $q$

Global Human Thriving: A Christian Perspective

(excerpt) Talking about global human thriving from a decidedly religious point of view requires interpreting a particular religious tradition in light of today’s ubiquitous ecological, economic, and political challenges. One cannot any longer stay content with a monologic explanation of happenings based on an authoritarian, unilateral interpretation of holy writ and the wisdom of old, at least not according to the Christian perception of life and human responsibility, because global issues like climate change, water scarcity, and nuclear overkill—to mention only a few—indiscriminately threaten the continuation of all of life as known so far. These issues compel us to pursue the quest for human thriving as an interdisciplinary, transcultural, and inter-religious discourse in order to come to appropriate sustainable solutions. What can Christians contribute to this discourse

Wellness, Health, and Salvation : About the Religious Dimension of Contemporary Body-Mindedness

Alluding to the enormous investments in wellness, health, and anti-aging by affluent US society today the article focuses on the anthropological and religious implications of this phenomenon by stating that the pursuit of such caring for the body has superseded the quest for salvation. The first section provides a historical background analysis of how the contemporary semi-religious bodymindedness came about, while the second part analyses wellness, health, and salvation from a phenomenological point of view. It shows that any body image which does not address human frailty turns into something utterly inhumane while a religiously informed anthropology, in contrast, not only accepts frailty, dying, and death as realities of life but situates these experiences within a broader frame of reference and meaning thereby setting people free to leave behind at the proper time anxieties and worries about body-upkeep and to embrace life in the face of death

The Calling of Nursing

(excerpt) Baffled by the broad variety and diversity of nursing and unable to discover one single common thread of thought and discussion in the literature, I got desperate and finally turned to Dean Brown for help, hoping to get some viable direction. And, indeed, I did, yet of course not the way I expected. When I asked her if she would be so kind as to name me the standard instruction textbook used for nursing education and practice, she unhesitatingly replied: \u27There isn’t one. Because there are so many content areas in nursing, there is no one text that is considered the ultimate one that must be used by all.\u27 And when further asked about the \u27reference work for the history of nursing in the US\u27 her reply was: \u27I don’t think there is one most reliable source.\u27 So there I was, my puzzlement now confirmed by a knowledgeable authority