Nietzsche’s criticisms were directed against what he reckons as the progressive ‘moral’ disintegration of late 19 century Germany. He described morality as “the doctrine of the relations of supremacy (Herrschafts-Verhältnissen) under which the phenomenon of ‘life’ comes to be.” This definition, however, is broad and mired in ambiguity, and as will be pointed out later, escapes multitudinous ‘mo...

We argue for a naturalistic account for appraising scientific methods that carries non-trivial normative force. We develop our approach by comparison with Laudan’s (American Philosophical Quarterly 24:19–31, 1987, Philosophy of Science 57:20–33, 1990) “normative naturalism” based on correlating means (various scientific methods) with ends (e.g., reliability). We argue that such a meta-methodolo...

A Christmas season wouldn’t be complete without the annual complaint that the holiday has become too commercialized and that we need to put Christ back into Christmas, that he is the reason for the season. This gripe is not only misguided but has things backwards – Santa Claus is a better representative of the true spirit of Christmas than Jesus ever was or ever could be. As we will see, Christ...

The nature of the soul and its relationship to the body has always proved problematical for Christian philosophy. The source of the difficulty can be traced back to the efforts of the early Fathers to reconcile the essentially pagan concept of an immaterial and immortal soul with apostolic teachings about the after-life in which all the emphasis is placed upon the resurrection of the body. The ...