This chapter contains sections titled: Ho, Ho, History Arius and Theological Controversy The Council of Nicaea – a Jolly Occasion Float like an Acolyte, Sting like the See Does Theology Really Matter? Here Comes Santa Claus – into the Twenty‐First Century The Nicholas of History and the Santa of Faith?

High-level radioactive waste is not fundamentally different from all other pollutants having long life spans in the biosphere. Nevertheless, its management has been treated differently by policy makers in the United States as well as most other nations, who have chosen permanent isolation from the biosphere as the objective of high-level radioactive waste disposal policy. This policy is to be attained by burial deep within stable geologic formations. The fundamental justification for this policy choice has been provided by utilitarian ethical (...) analysis. It, in turn, has been supported primarily by assumptions, based on expert opinion, about the ultimate safety of geologic disposal. However, close analysis of these assumptions reveals that the safety of geologic disposal is highly uncertain. Moreover, factors such as the possibility for human intrusion into repository sites make it impossible to even guess at the ultimate consequences of any policy choice pertaining to the final disposal of high-level radioactive waste. I discuss why utilitarian ethics cannot be used to determine the efficacy of such policy choices. I then develop an alternative approach which is based on egalitarian principles of procedure and utilize it to explore policy proposals which promote justice and equity in the high-level radioactive waste management process. I argue that there are two possible solutions to the high-level radioactive waste dilemma: an amendment to the U.S. Constitution to create an institution to advocate on behalf of the interests of future generations and the active management of the waste in monitored, retrievable facilities in perpetuity. Of these two options, I find maintaining surveillance and vigilance in perpetuity to safeguard high-level radioactive waste to be preferable because of its political and ethical efficacy. (shrink)

Deleuze's theory of difference revolves around the idea that fusion and fission--the extreme external limits of functioning systems--represent the death of these systems. In order to maintain their duree, qualitative difference and change, systems internalize the external limits in conditions of repeated contraction and dilatation which constitute the inclusive disjunctive law of their function. This basic idea permits Deleuze to articulate an ontology of difference and repetition, a minoritarian theory of language and a version of materialist politics which support each (...) other and strengthen the cause of radical pluralism. Deleuze's ontology substitutes Difference for Being, introduces the intensive media of space and time, takes intensity to be the sentiendum of quality and extension, holds the synthesizing Ideas to be problematic and problem-setting multiplicities of differentiated elements, and argues that the repetition of the eternal return guarantees different/ciation by dissolving the identity of the "unity of apperception". The minoritarian theory of language is similarly constituted. The external limit of language, represented by self-referential and self-predicative elements, would be the death of language. On the other hand, watchwords and poetic utterances through their self-referentiality and self-predication makes language possible. The former attempt to fuse language and to overcode sign-regimes, whereas the latter highlight the interval, the "estrangement-effects" and the rhizomatic proliferation of lines of escape. Finally, the emancipatory interest which animates Deleuze's theory of difference is grounded on the notion "body without organs". The ontological, schizoanalytic and political appropriation of this immanent-transcendent referance, together with Deleuze's claim that it is the body without organs which renders possible "energetic" desire--both in paranoid and schizophrenic "arrangements"--crown this theory of difference with critical aspirations. (shrink)

The article analyzes the influence of German thought on Baron Friedrich von Hügel’s philosophy of religion. The activities of the British scholar in the networks of Catholic modernism are placed within the broader framework of the international discussion on religion around 1900. His religious universalism was shaped to a great extent by the encounter of German intellectuals from a liberal Protestant background, most notably by Rudolf Eucken, Ernst Troeltsch and Friedrich Naumann. This encounter, started during the 1890s, focussed on the (...) concepts of historical individuality and historical development. It took a new direction with the public role adopted by German intellectuals in the propaganda of the World War. Von Hügel’s often ignored treatise The German Soul reacted to the fusion of liberal religious thought with German nationalism as observed in Troeltsch and Naumann. His criticism of a lack of „international morality“ of German thought and his approach to identify the reason for this deficit in the Lutheran and idealistic tradition shed light on the ongoing discussions of a „Sonderweg“ of German thought. Von Hügel’s late attempts to promote Christianity as an anti-nationalist force remind of other more theological rejections of nationalism after the war. However, these attempts are not based on a strict theological or confessional rationale but try to continue the interconfessional and interdisciplinary discussion of the beginning of the century. This is revealed best by von Hügel’s close but not uncritical relationship to Troeltsch in the early 1920s. (shrink)

Die Überlieferung des Briefwechsels zwischen Christian Wolff (1679–1754) und Ernst Christoph von Manteuffel (1676–1749) ist ein singulärer Glücksfall. Die in der Universitätsbibliothek Leipzig aufbewahrten Bände enthalten den nahezu geschlossen und damit am umfangreichsten erhaltenen Briefwechsel in der Gesamtkorrespondenz Christian Wolffs. Die historisch-kritische Edition des Briefwechsels stellt Materialien bereit, die die Wolff- und Aufklärungsforschung auf eine neue Grundlage stellen. Der Briefwechsel erlaubt neben bisher unbekannten biographischen Details aus Wolffs Marburger Zeit und den ersten Jahren seines Wirkens nach der Rückkehr an die (...) Universität Halle Einblicke in Wolffs und Manteuffels Positionen innerhalb der politischen, philosophischen, theologischen und naturwissenschaftlichen Debatten der Zeit. Darüber hinaus eröffnet der Briefwechsel einen innovativen Einblick in die Funktionen eines wissenschaftspolitischen und epistolären Netzwerks, das von Graf Manteuffel zum Zwecke der europaweiten Verbreitung des Wolffianismus unterhalten und gepflegt wurde. Das Editionsprojekt wurde im Rahmen eines Kooperationsvertrags zwischen der Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg und der Sächsischen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Leipzig am Internationalen Zentrum für die Erforschung der europäischen Aufklärung (IZEA) der Universität Halle durchgeführt. ************ The survival of the correspondence between Christian Wolff (1679–1754) and Christoph von Manteuffel (1676–1749) is a singular piece of luck. The volumes preserved in Leipzig University Library contain the almost complete and thus largest surviving exchange of letters in all of Wolff’s correspondence. This historical-critical edition presents material which sets the study of Wolff and of the Enlightenment on a new footing. As well as previously unknown biographical details about Wolff’s time in Marburg and his first years of activity after his return to the University of Halle, it provides insights into Wolff’s and Manteuffel’s positions within the political, philosophical, theological and scientific debates of the period. In addition the correspondence opens up an innovative perspective on the functions of a scholarly political and epistolary network which Count Manteuffel maintained and nurtured in order to spread Wolffianism throughout Europe. The edition is part of a collaborative project between the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg and the Saxon Academy of Sciences, based at the Interdisciplinary Centre for European Enlightenment Studies at the University of Halle. (shrink)

Postural reflexes are essential for locomotion and postural stability, and may play an important role in the etiology of chronic back pain. It has recently been theoretically predicted, and with the help of unilateral perturbations of the trunk experimentally confirmed that the sensorimotor control must lower the reflex amplitude for increasing reflex delays to maintain spinal stability. The underlying neuromuscular mechanism for the compensation of postural perturbations, however, is not yet fully understood. In this study, we applied unilateral and bilateral (...) sudden external perturbations to the trunk of healthy subjects and measured the muscular activity and the movement onset of the trunk. We found that the onset of the trunk muscle activity is prior to, or coincident with, the onset of the trunk movement. Additionally, the results of our experiments imply that the muscular response mechanism integrates distant sensory information from both sides of the body. These findings rule out a simple monosynaptic stretch reflex in favor of a more complex polysynaptic postural reflex mechanism to compensate postural perturbations. Moreover, the previously predicted negative correlation between reflex delay and reflex gain was also confirmed for bilateral perturbations. (shrink)

My aim in this paper is to discuss the topicality of Merton’s thesis with a twofold meaning: as an idea which has its own place in the sociology of science and as an idea which is currently in its area of research. Merton asserts that the development of science in 17th century England was aided by the Puritan ethic. This does not means that science was caused by Puritanism, but only that Puritanism provided major support for the scientific activity. Because (...) secularization and integration were two complementary processes, the relationship between science and religion was not simple. I connect Merton’s thesis with Weber’s thesisabout Protestantism and capitalism and try to see it in the light of the cultural climate of its time. Finally, I argue that Merton offers a unified analysis of scienceas a social institution. (shrink)

COVID-19 confronted many people with an abrupt shift from their usual working environment to telework. This study explores which job characteristics are perceived as most crucial in this exceptional situation and how they differ from people’s previous working conditions. Additionally, we focus on job crafting as a response to this situation and how it is related to employees’ well-being. We conducted an online survey with N = 599 participants, of which 321 reported that they were telework newcomers. First, we asked (...) participants to indicate the three most important advantages and disadvantages they see in telework. The subsequent questionnaire contained a comprehensive measure of working conditions before and during the pandemic, job crafting behaviors, and indicators of well-being. Based on the qualitative answers, we identified three major advantages and disadvantages. Quantitative results indicate perceived changes in all job characteristics for telework newcomers. Concerning working conditions and well-being, job crafting activities that aim to increase structural and social resources are important mediators. The findings underline the need to design appropriate telework conditions and encourage job crafting activities to foster occupational well-being. (shrink)

One of the most considerable changes in the contemporary European educational mentality is a person's disconnection from spiritual life. Christian formation has been replaced with religious pluralism, in terms of syncretism influenced by global economic ideologies. Some consequences are low resilience and low spiritual resistance to contemporary challenges, associated with mental traumas or social behaviour deficits. Is it possible to restore the modern person's spiritual education? There is no evolution in the modern individual's social life without a horizon of spiritual (...) expectation and fulfilment, different from the strictly material one. Moreover, conscious education cannot deprive people of cultivating the spiritual part of their consciousness from which the real values of existence are born. A series of arguments for renewing the relation between school and the mature, Scripture-based Christian thinking in the spirit of the European pedagogy are revealed by the factual historical analyses. Both Eastern and Western European experiences have met after 13 years of evolving into two antagonist geopolitical spheres. Their lessons in the education field could be an appropriate model, academically applied at the cultural mentality and the European pedagogy level. CONTRIBUTION: With this study, I want to highlight the historical and conceptual frameworks of the Christian religious education meaning in the context of the rediscovery of Orthodox Christianity by the international theological culture in post-communism. Orthodox Christianity, forgotten in dictionaries and syntheses by the Western theological elite, brings in a spiritualisation of education according to the Lord Jesus Christ's Gospel and not of the ideological cultural interests. (shrink)

The following interview was conducted by Christian Diehm in the home of Arne Naess near Oslo, Norway, in December of 2001. At eighty-nine years of age, Naess was preparing for the English-language release of his latest book, Life’s Philosophy. We are pleased to provide a transcript of a large part of the conversations that spanned two afternoon dialogues.

Social Ethics raised growing interest within the last fife decades ofthe 20th century. Mainly conceived as social criticism and theory of social change as well, this discipline became a major factor particularly in those church circles where ways were sought to express actively and effectively what was called »Christian social responsibility«. In the course of historic developments during recent years, however, it has become questionable of wether or not this concept of Social Ethics still meets what is needed (...) to grant orientation in how to cope with problems that are caused by these developments in society. It therefore seems legitimate to evaluate the given concept of Social Ethics in order to find out to what extend its alteration is indicated. The essay proposes to seek an answer in the direction of conceiving Social Ethics as a shelter of different ethical approaches to scrutinise concrete developments in politics, economy and industry and their impacts on the conditions of living in society. (shrink)

The Companion is organized into two sections, each one of which reflects the developments of the Anglo-American Analytic and the Continental European philosophical traditions respectively. An appendix presents the main accomplishments of non-Western philosophies in the same time frame. Each section discusses the main movements and fields of the discipline throughout the century. The authors have maintained a balance between the historian's commitment to breadth and accuracy with the commitment of the systematic philosopher to the engaged point of view and (...) to critical reflection. The result is a distinctive reference book made up of a series of philosophical studies -an invaluable companion to anyone who is searching for a panoramic but also reliable and challenging presentation of the philosophical ideas which shaped the last century. (shrink)

The problem of social and cultural diversity has been a classic issue in the humanities and the social sciences throughout the entire human history. Starting with the 1970s academics were interested in a specific feature of this inter-cultural problem, namely how Western societies have understood and interpreted oriental societies through the period of imperial expansion. Even nowadays, some of the most complicated academic dialogues (and not only) are centered around the theories of post-colonialism and nationalism. The ‘subjects’ of these debates (...) are mainly the Middle Eastern states and the predominant variable is the region’s main religion, Islam. The Orient signifies a system of representations framed by political forces that brought the Orient into Western learning, Western consciousness, and Western empires. The Orient exists for the West, and is constructed by and in relation to the West. The critics of Orientalism consider this theory to be a manner of regularized (or Orientalized) writing, vision, and study, dominated by imperatives, perspectives, and ideological biases ostensibly suited to the Orient. This article proposes a brief introspection into the creation of alterity in Western literature and a review of the perspective offered by the best-known critic of this paradigm, Edward Said. (shrink)

Prism Adaptation is a useful method to study the mechanisms of sensorimotor adaptation. After-effects following adaptation to the prismatic deviation constitute the probe that adaptive mechanisms occurred, and current evidence suggests an involvement of the cerebellum at this level. Whether after-effects are transferable to another task is of great interest both for understanding the nature of sensorimotor transformations and for clinical purposes. However, the processes of transfer and their underlying neural substrates remain poorly understood. Transfer from throwing to pointing (...) is known to occur only in individuals who had previously reached a good level of expertise in throwing, not in novices. The aim of this study was to ascertain whether anodal stimulation of the cerebellum could boost after-effects transfer from throwing to pointing in novice participants. Healthy participants received anodal or sham transcranial direction current stimulation of the right cerebellum during a PA procedure involving a throwing task and were tested for transfer on a pointing task. Terminal errors and kinematic parameters were in the dependent variables for statistical analyses. Results showed that active stimulation had no significant beneficial effects on error reduction or throwing after-effects. Moreover, the overall magnitude of transfer to pointing did not change. Interestingly, we found a significant effect of the stimulation on the longitudinal evolution of pointing errors and on pointing kinematic parameters during transfer assessment. These results provide new insights on the implication of the cerebellum in transfer and on the possibility to use anodal tDCS to enhance cerebellar contribution during PA in further investigations. From a network approach, we suggest that cerebellum is part of a more complex circuitry responsible for the development of transfer which is likely embracing the primary motor cortex due to its role in motor memories consolidation. This paves the way for further work entailing multiple-sites stimulation to explore the role of M1-cerebellum dynamic interplay in transfer. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Reading BayleJohn Christian LaursenThomas M. Lennon. Reading Bayle. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999. Pp. xi + 202. Cloth, $60.00. Paper, $19.95.One of the more philosophically interesting things about Pierre Bayle is the difficulty of interpreting his work. A myriad of interpretations have been advanced, but "the whole is [still] a riddle, an enigma, an inexplicable mystery"—to apply David Hume's famous judgment about religion to Bayle's work. This (...) book proposes a Bakhtinian reading of Bayle's philosophical activity, which means that Bayle is understood as letting his interlocutors speak for themselves in an ongoing dialogue over which he does not have full control and in which no one "wins." Bakhtin thought that Dostoevsky was the first major author to do this, but Lennon shows that he was anticipated by Bayle.The discussion is broken up into sections on Bayle's views of integrity, authority, toleration, idolatry, and providence. Integrity turns out to be largely a matter of honesty and fairness in dialogue, and at times it sounds like Bayle is prefiguring Habermas and discourse ethics or recent Anglo-American theories of deliberative democracy.Bayle's view of authority emerges from his analysis of the fact/law (fait/droit) distinction. [End Page 278] This was part of larger debates among Jansenists, Jesuits, and other philosophers such as Arnauld and Malebranche. Here, Lennon's intimate knowledge of seventeenth-century philosophy is put to good use. He shows that in Bayle's hands the distinction cannot hold up, as questions of fact and law are always mutually dependent and each can undermine the other. The upshot is that in the absence of truths of fact or law, dialogue is all that we have. That is good, because history cannot be used as a tool of oppression or homogenization if dialogue must go on forever.Some of the claims about Bayle that are advanced here are debatable. That Bayle "treated everyone with dignity" (44) is simply not true of his treatment of millenarians and others that he thought were fanatics. Rather than extending "toleration almost without limit" (74), he was downright intolerant of such folks. Lennon suggests that Bayle may not have fully thought through the question of the conscientious persecutor (85n.). It would have been appropriate to mention Bayle's reflections on this matter in his last work, the Réponse aux questions d'un provincial.The book contains valuable accounts of aspects of Bayle's debates with Pierre Jurieu, in which it often emerges that there was no great gulf of principle between the two arch-enemies. Disagreements with Ruth Whelan and Elisabeth Labrousse add to the interest of Lennon's discussion.Idolatry is one of Bayle's chief targets, and he finds it above all in the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation. Lennon nicely shows how this amounts to Spinozism, which in turn explains Bayle's hostility to both Spinoza and Rome. Both stifle Bakhtinian dialogue.One very interesting section of the book is on lotteries, which have important theological and philosophical significance. Often-forgotten authors like Barbeyrac, Ricotier, and Leti are discussed on this issue. Insights here include the observation that "it is hard to imagine Bayle praying" (146). Indeed it is. Mention of work by I. Hont, T. Hochstrasser, and others on Barbeyrac would have made Lennon's case stronger.One major conclusion is that Bayle's notion of providence and the problem of evil comes down to dialogue as well: evil emerges because God prefers to engage in open-ended dialogue with his creatures, which allows evil even if that is not God's intention (167). On this reading, we have a Kantian Bayle: autonomy is Bayle's most cherished value (182).Lennon's final evaluation of Bayle's fideism is that it is philosophically unsatisfactory. Blind and nonrational reliance on Scripture is, to say the least, undermined by Bayle's inability to establish that God is its author or to found his own beliefs in any way other than education. But if anybody still thinks that Pierre Bayle was merely a compiler and not a philosopher in his own right, this book and a lot of the other recent... (shrink)

Approaches to quantum gravity often involve the disappearance of space and time at the fundamental level. The metaphysical consequences of this disappearance are profound, as is illustrated with David Lewis's analysis of modality. As Lewis's possible worlds are unified by the spatiotemporal relations among their parts, the non-fundamentality of spacetime---if borne out---suggests a serious problem for his analysis: his pluriverse, for all its ontological abundance, does not contain our world. Although the mere existence---as opposed to the fundamentality---of spacetime must (...) be recovered from the fundamental structure in order to guarantee the empirical coherence of the non-spatiotemporal fundamental theory, it does not suffice to salvage Lewis's theory of modality from the charge of rendering our actual world impossible. (shrink)

Many approaches to addressing labour injustices—shortfalls from minimally decent wages and working conditions— focus on how governments should orient themselves toward other states in which such phenomena take place, or to the firms that are involved with such practices. But of course the question of how to regard such labour practices must also be faced by individuals, and individual consumers of the goods that are produced through these practices in particular. Consumers have become increasingly aware of their connections to complex (...) global production processes that often involve such injustice. For example, activist campaigns have exposed wrongful harm in factories producing clothes, shoes and mobile phones and farms producing coffee, tea and cocoa. These campaigns have promoted the message to ordinary people that by becoming connected to unjust labour practices through their purchasing behaviour, they acquire special additional moral responsibilities to contribute to reforming such practices, or to address the hardships suffered by the victims of the wrongdoing that result from them. The moral significance of the responsibilities of individual consumers has not, however, received much analytical scrutiny. Why should we believe that there are such responsibilities? And if there are such responsibilities, what are their grounds? How stringent are the responsibilities triggered by such connections? Finally, what are the implications of such responsibilities—the courses of action that they prescribe or proscribe? The activists who assert special ethical responsibilities for consumers have promoted many particular courses of action, but have seldom articulated the grounds of these responsibilities or explained why they should be taken to be stringent. And moral and political theorists have not devoted much focussed attention to this issue. For the consumer who is concerned to act in a morally permissible way, this presents a troubling practical challenge regarding the goods they may (or may not) purchase, and the moral relevance of their consumption choices more generally. While we cannot address all of these pressing questions in this chapter, we try to make some headway with them by discussing two general approaches to the question of how individuals should conceive of their responsibilities with respect to such practices, taking as our starting point the recent work of the late Iris Marion Young—the most sustained treatment of this topic by a prominent political theorist. In a series of influential articles and a posthumously published book, Young articulated an approach to conceiving of individual responsibilities to address labour injustices—the social connection model—at home and abroad. She also argued that an alternative model—the liability model—which she claimed had dominated discourse on this topic, suffered from very serious flaws. In a critical vein, we will argue that Young’s arguments against the liability model are not convincing, and that the alternative she proposes is itself vulnerable to some damaging objections. We also find, however, that the liability model would need to be extended in various ways to provide an adequate account of individual responsibility to address shortfalls from minimally decent wages and working conditions, and we begin the task of sketching an extended framework. (shrink)

A considerable body of research supports the link between Machiavellianism and antisocial forms of behavior at work. Yet, meta-analytic findings and existing theory allude to a more complex story, whereby Machiavellian employees’ engagement in antisocial acts is likely to be simultaneously influenced by countervailing situational forces. To promote more nuanced, contextualized knowledge of high Machs’ antisocial tendencies at work, we developed and tested a social context model that describes how multiple situational factors may, at once, provoke _and_ constrain the tendency (...) of such individuals to engage in one notable form of antisocial behavior at work: social undermining. Specifically, we argue that Machiavellian employees likely experience competing motivations to undermine their colleagues as a result of two countervailing situational factors that are relevant to their self-interests: anticipated organizational change and perceptions of coworkers’ exchange quality. To develop our predictions, we draw on trait activation theory’s core assertion that employees’ behavior is multiply determined, such that trait–behavior relations stem from a complex interplay among diverse and potentially competing trait-relevant situational cues. The results of a three-wave, time-lagged survey supported our predictions that anticipated change would strengthen the positive relation between Machiavellianism and undermining, while perceptions of coworkers’ exchange quality would attenuate it. Additionally, the results supported our three-way interaction hypothesis that perceived coworker exchange quality would weaken the two-way interaction effect of Machiavellianism and anticipated organizational change on social undermining. We discuss the implications of our findings, as well as avenues for future research. (shrink)

Humans experience various phenomena as threats to their biophysical integrity. Airborne viruses, leaking radioactivity, or extreme weather conditions are three examples for this. In these scenarios the focus is not unilaterally directed towards the vulnerable body but also towards a world that can potentially become hazardous and out of balance. At the same time, technology comes into play, enabling us to access such an obtruding world including its activities, forces, and agents but also to shield humans and their vulnerable bodies (...) from potential injuries and harm. The contribution develops an approach to investigate human-technology-world relations based on Merleau-Ponty’s concept of _Enroulement_ unfolded in _The Visible and the Invisible_. This concept releases a non-linear, dynamic _multi-relationality_ in which world, human, and technology become relevant as situating as well as situated co-constitutors of such relations enveloped in a permanent process of coiling. We discuss our approach as an alternative to a linear relational perspective as found in the postphenomenological concept of technological mediation. With the approach of _Enroulement_ it becomes evident that the situated-situating world is more than something to be technologically mediated, while technology situated in the world but also co-constituting our world is more than a mediator. First, the article emphasizes the notion of the world based on Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology and in a critical examination of postphenomenological approaches. Second, it unfolds the concept of _Enroulement_ involving human, world, and technology. Third, it focuses on shielding technologies required by vulnerable bodies and an intervening world. Fourth, it illustrates the suggested approach with two examples in which humans and technologies are exposed to extreme forces and material activities: combat flying and dealing with radioactivity. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Environmental Impact Built Environment versus Environment?

The Continuum Companion to Ethics offers a definitive guide to a key area of contemporary philosophy. The book covers all the fundamental questions asked by meta-ethics and normative ethical theory - areas that have continued to attract interest historically as well as topics that have emerged more recently as active areas of research. Fourteen specially commissioned essays from an international team of experts reveal where important work continues to be done in the field and, most valuably, the exciting (...) new directions the field is taking. The Companion explores issues pertaining to moral methodology, moral realism, ethical expressivism, constructivism and the error theory, morality and practical reason, moral psychology, morality and religion, consequentialism, Kantian ethics, virtue ethics, feminist ethics, moral particularism, experimental ethics, and biology, evolution, and ethics. Featuring a series of indispensable research tools, including important technical terms in ethics, a historical chronology, an extensive overview of contemporary meta-ethics and normative ethical theory, a detailed list of internet resources for research in ethics, and a thorough list of recommended works for further study, this is the essential reference tool for anyone working in contemporary philosophical ethics. (shrink)

Remittances are private financial transfers from migrant workers back to their countries of origin. These are typically intra-household transfers from members of a family who have emigrated to those who have remained behind. The scale of such transfers throughout the world is very large, reaching $338 billion U.S. in 20081—several times the size of overseas development assistance (ODA) and larger even than foreign direct investment (FDI). The data on migration and remittances is too poor to warrant very firm conclusions about (...) their effects—actual or potential—on poverty and development in poorer countries. We will however, present reasons that make it plausible to believe that remittances can contribute to poverty-reduction and promote development in poorer countries. Our main aim, however, is not to engage in detail with empirical debates about the effects of these transfers, but to establish moral grounds for favorable tax treatment on remittances on the assumption that they do have positive effects on receiving countries. (shrink)

In a unique collection of essays and poems written in English, French, German and Russian (with a seasoning of Greek and Japanese), Constantine Shapiro explores fascinating universal questions and connections. Why, he asks, do so many people feel unhappy? Why do so many go to the doctor? Why is there so much criminality? Why is there international unrest? What is a healthy soul? In his investigation of these and other "Big Questions," the author examines such disparate areas as Japanese (...) kanji ideograms and personal character, spiritual ontology and science, Zeus and Christianity, objectivity and subjectivity in time and space, the nature of experience, and the flow of consciousness. The modern reader will find much to ponder in this second, expanded edition of Selected Writings. Also included are facsimiles of the typescript of Two Mathematical Problems and the Japanese translation of Transzendentale Musiklehre. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Concealed Influence of Custom: Hume’s “Treatise” from the Inside Out by Jay L. GarfieldJohn Christian LaursenJay L. Garfield. The Concealed Influence of Custom: Hume’s “Treatise” from the Inside Out. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. Pp. 302. Hardback. ISBN: 978-0-19-093340-1, $82. This book has at least two original and great merits. One is that it is one of the first in the Hume literature to be truly global. (...) The other is that it gives custom and habit the place they deserve in Hume’s philosophy. Concerning the first of these, I think it would be widely admitted that most of the study of Western philosophy is done in blissful ignorance of non-Western philosophy. We follow what our thinkers are doing, and pay little or no attention to the rest of the world. In contrast, this book peppers the footnotes, and even some of the text, with comparisons to Buddhist schools and figures such as Madhyamaka, Candrakirti, Nagarjuna, and the like. We are not used to the idea that Western philosophers may have drawn some of their ideas from non-Western philosophy, although we have long known that Pyrrho traveled to India and may have taken ideas from the gymnosophists, and that later philosophers like Bayle and Leibniz were very interested in Chinese ideas. In Hume’s case, it is possible that there was some influence through Pyrrho and his followers, or that these were simply parallel developments. The latter are still of philosophical interest because they show how similar philosophies can develop from different roots. Of course, one of the reasons that most of us cannot compare a figure like Hume to Indian or Chinese philosophy is that we do not know the languages and have not been trained in those areas. In this case, Jay Garfield is the author of many works on Indian philosophy, including Engaging Buddhism: Why it Matters to Philosophy (2015), so he has authority in the matter. A work like this, drawing attention to many similarities and parallels in philosophy, could be followed up by some methodological work on how to compare philosophies from such different intellectual traditions. What do the parallels mean? Are there any deeper or wider conclusions that we can make about parallels that appear in very different philosophical traditions? Is convergence of ideas a confidence builder in their solidity and truth, or rather a reminder of common human tendencies to fallacy? If philosophy is ever going to join the ranks of truly global human enterprises, it will have to ask and answer these questions about far-flung philosophical traditions. The main argument of this book is that Hume is best understood as a Pyrrhonian philosopher who maintains that the foundations of our knowledge, ethics, and political practices may be found only in custom and habit. Book 2 of Hume’s Treatise is the key, providing a social account of the passions and our constructions of ourselves. “Custom is essential to the story,” the author writes (82). Nature makes [End Page 179] us develop customs together that start from passions and sympathy, and are drawn together by the imagination. On the basis of these social constructions of most elements of our lives, by the end of the book, Garfield is talking about Hume’s place in the “communitarian tradition” (279–80). If Book 2 is read before Book 1, one will realize that what Hume says about reason and ontology in Book 1 is rooted in his theory of the passions in Book 2, and thus always social. What Hume is doing is more like philosophical psychology (or the psychology of philosophy?) than epistemology, metaphysics, or moral philosophy, according to Garfield. Hume is asking why we believe what we believe in epistemology, metaphysics, and moral philosophy, not proving that any of these beliefs are true. Taking the title of Hume’s Treatise seriously, it is a book about human nature, not about Hume’s understanding of those philosophical subfields. Hume’s work is more descriptive than prescriptive. We can learn from it how we live, not how we should live, which is a matter for the development of customs over time... (shrink)

In the climate ethics debate, scholars largely agree that individuals should promote institutions that ensure the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. This paper aims to establish that there are individual duties beyond compliance with and promotion of institutions. Duties of individuals to reduce their emissions are often objected to by arguing that an individual’s emissions do not make a morally relevant difference. We challenge this argument from inconsequentialism in two ways. We first show why the argument also seems to undermine (...) the case for duties to promote institutions that the arguments’ proponents endorse. Second, we argue that individuals ought to cut emissions if they exceed their fair share of emissions entitlements and, by emitting, contribute to climate-related harm. In response to inconsequentialism, we specify the notion of ‘contribution’ via the so-called NESS theory, according to which an act is causally relevant for and contributes to an outcome if it is a Necessary Element of a Set of conditions that is Sufficient for the outcome. After refuting two objections to our approach, we conclude by discussing how to deal with possible conflicts between duties to promote institutions and to reduce one’s emissions. (shrink)

Doctors hold coexisting ethical duties to avoid causing deliberate harm to their patients (non-maleficence), to act in patients’ best interests (beneficence), to respect patients’ right to self-determination (autonomy) and to ensure that costs and benefits are fairly distributed among patients (justice). In the context of non-directed altruistic kidney donations (NDAKD), doctors’ duties of autonomy and justice are in tension with those of non-maleficence and beneficence. This article examines these competing duties across three scenarios in which general practitioners (GPs) could promote (...) NDAKD to healthy adults. In the first—when a healthy adult patient prompts the GP to discuss NDAKD—the GP is ethically obligated to counsel the patient about NDAKD to respect their autonomy, yet this does not constitute any form of promotion of NDAKD. In the remaining scenarios, healthy adult patients are unaware of the possibility of NDAKD. In the second, it is ethically permissible for GPs to indirectly raise awareness of NDAKD among healthy adults by displaying recruitment campaign material to non-specified groups of patients in their waiting rooms. In the third, it is ethically impermissible for GPs to directly promote NDAKD to individual healthy adults by raising the possibility of NDAKD with such individuals. The major counterarguments raised against this position are problems with kinds of counselling that fail to reach expected professional standards, rather than problems with the ethical claims made in this article. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:William Durant the Younger and Conciliar TheoryConstantin FasoltWilliam Durant the Younger (c. 1266–1330) had a sharp mind, deep familiarity with the law of his times, and the practical experience necessary to understand exactly what was wrong with what he, like others, called “the state of the church.”1 He also had the ability to argue from principles to conclusions and the courage to state his conclusions in public—at least (...) until his superiors taught him to proceed with greater caution. The results were some rather radical ideas which reverberated through the later Middle Ages and beyond. They are contained in a long treatise on the reform of the church (Tractatus Maior), which he submitted to the council of Vienne in 1311, and a shorter one (Tractatus Minor), which he wrote at the council of Vienne while it was still in session and after having had what appears to have been an unpleasant encounter with Pope Clement V. The purpose of this article is to focus on the underlying significance of his ideas for our understanding of the conciliar movement and its place in European history.The significance of Durant’s ideas ought not to be confused with their influence. Influence is the historian’s term for the efficient causality of ideas. Modern science, according to a wide-spread commonplace, has taught us to [End Page 385] focus our attention on efficient causality to the exclusion of all other possibilities. Merely to take the notion of formal or final causality seriously is likely to create bewilderment and misunderstanding. The great interest historians take in tracing influence thus is perhaps a measure of the tribute they pay to modern science, but it is clear neither that such tribute is deserved nor that modern science wants it. That is at least one good reason why it may be worthwhile to deflect attention from whatever efficient causality (influence) Durant’s ideas may have exercised and focus it on their formal and final causes instead—on the questions what they were and where they led.2What, then, were Durant’s ideas? The treatise that he submitted to the council of Vienne in 1311 bristles with all sorts of complexities. But most of these are superficial. At bottom, it was founded on a few straightforward premises. These premises can be stated and counted in different ways, depending on how closely you want to look, the order in which you want to proceed, and the case you want to argue. For the purposes of this article they are best summed up in three propositions.The first was that actions are right only if they conform to the law of the church. There are many questions that would need to be answered in order to make this a workable principle. For example, what, precisely, is the law of the church? Is it limited to the Bible? If so, all of the Bible, including the Mosaic Law, or only parts of the Bible? Does it perhaps include conciliar canons and papal decretals as well? If so, which canons and which decretals? Are such canons and decretals human law or divine law? What is the relation between human law and divine law in the first place? Who decides the meaning of the law in case of doubts or contradictions? What if someone is ignorant of the law? And perhaps most important: how do you verify that conduct does in fact conform to the law? Durant struggled with those questions and with others like them. But none of the practical and theoretical difficulties they raised ever shook his conviction that they could be answered and that the solution was contained in the holy books and the canonical writings transmitted from antiquity. His entire work rests on one simple idea: to act rightly means to act in conformity with the laws established and transmitted from antiquity.3 And to [End Page 386] judge rightly means to judge actions by those laws.4 Those laws were old, good, and true. They were the real authorities; the people who applied them were merely their servants.The second proposition consisted of Durant’s conviction that the world had fallen away from... (shrink)

English summary: The contributions to this volume discuss the philosophical development of Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling (1775-1854) in the first half of the 19th century. In 1801, Schelling presented a broad concept for a systematic philosophy in which all of Nature and the whole spiritual world are understood as phenomena of one and the same principle. In 1809, he presented his Philosophical Inquiries into the Essence of Human Freedom, a conception that appears to contradict the system drafted in 1801. Schelling (...) scholars fiercely dispute over this phase between his philosophy of identity and his treatise on freedom. The contributions to this volume clearly show for the first time the development of Schelling's philosophy leading up to his treatise on freedom as a continuation of his earlier work. In this way, important issues concerning the development of Schelling's philosophy are clarified, and are of interest far beyond the narrower field of Schelling scholarship. German text. German description: Die Beitrage thematisieren die philosophische Entwicklung Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schellings (1775-1854) im ersten Jahrzehnt des 19. Jahrhunderts. Schelling hatte 1801 einen umfassenden Entwurf einer systematischen Philosophie vorgelegt, in dem die gesamte Natur und die gesamte Geisteswelt als Erscheinungen ein und desselben Prinzips verstanden werden. Im Jahre 1809 legte er mit der Schrift Philosophische Untersuchungen uber das Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit eine Konzeption vor, die dem Systementwurf von 1801 scheinbar widerspricht. In der Schelling-Forschung ist diese Entwicklungsphase zwischen Identitatsphilosophie und Freiheitsschrift heftig umstritten. Die Beitrage des Bandes machen nun erstmals die Entwicklung der Philosophie Schellings hin zur Freiheitsschrift als eine kontinuierliche Weiterentwicklung seines Ansatzes von 1801 deutlich. Damit kommt es zu einer Klarung wichtiger werkgeschichtlicher Entwicklungsprobleme in der Philosophie Schellings, die weit uber den engeren Bereich der Schelling-Forschung von Interesse sind. (shrink)

The guarantee of human dignity (article 1 paragraph 1 German Basic Law) requires the protection of the embryo’s identity and – in accordance with further requirements of article 2 paragraph 2 sentence 1 German Basic Law – the protection of its physical integrity. Every human being has, even in his earliest, prenatal stage of development, an unconditional right to be and remain a human being, derived from his dignity. In order to protect his right to species-specific development, the embryo must (...) also be protected from any dehumanization. This categorically excludes any mixing of its genetic material with animal genetic material. The self-purpose of the human being, already embedded in the embryo, makes it impossible to create it artificially for any other reason than to induce a pregnancy. It cannot simply be attributed by a third party to another purpose with a normative effect that negates its self-serving-functionality. If the human development potential of the embryo is reduced or destroyed by manipulation, this constitutes an impairment of its right to life (article 2 paragraph 2 sentence 1 1st alternative of the Basic Law), which can be justified neither by research interests nor by therapeutic long-term goals and which must be prohibited by the state in fulfillment of its duty to protect. In addition, the state must create a normative environment conducive to the developmental potential of the embryo. All human embryos, regardless of how they were created, are human beings who have a right to be given the legally secured chance to be born. To this end, embryo donation and surrogate motherhood, for example, must be legally permitted. All manipulative interventions from the outside into the fertilized human egg cell from the time of the nuclear fusion on, which do not already destroy life or development chances, are to be measured against the basic right of physical integrity (article 2 paragraph 2 sentence 1 2nd alternative of the Basic Law). Only life-supporting interventions or interventions beneficial to the health of the embryo are eligible for consent, and even these only to the extent that risks associated with them can be justified. (shrink)

While for a long time the study of medieval logic focused on editorial projects and reconstructions of central medieval doctrines such as the theories of signification, supposition, consequences, and obligations, nowadays the spectrum of analysis has broadened and is increasingly informed by modern logical research, whose perspective is then applied to medieval logic. Promoting this tendency, logicians and researchers concerned with semantics in the Gesellschaft für Philosophie des Mittelalters und der Renaissance (GPMR) founded a working group bringing together medieval (...) logic and modern applied logic. The present volume is a seminal document of these interests and activities. It analyzes theories in medieval logic which are useful for solving questions of recent logic and explains crucial parts of medieval logic, philosophy, and theology by applying techniques of present-day logic. (shrink)

Serious study of Peirce began some fifty years ago, in 1931, with the publication of the first of six volumes of the Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, edited by Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss. Arthur Burks added two volumes to that collection in 1958. In the meantime there had appeared, and continued to appear, several one-volume editions, namely those by Morris R. Cohen, Justus Buchler, Vincent Tomas, Philip P. Wiener, and Edward C. Moore. A new era in Peirce scholarship (...) began in 1975 with the appearance of the first of three important multi-volume editions: Charles Sanders Peirce: Contributions to “The Nation,” edited by Kenneth L. Ketner and James E. Cook ; The New Elements of Mathematics by Charles S. Peirce, edited by Carolyn Eisele ; and Charles Sanders Peirce: Complete Published Works, Including Selected Secondary Materials, the 149-microfiche collection edited by members of the Texas Tech University Institute for Studies in Pragmaticism. (shrink)

Two essential periods may be identified in the early stages of the history of vitamin D-resistant rickets. The first was the period during which a very well known deficiency disease, rickets, acquired a scientific status: this required the development of unifying principles to confer upon the newly developing science of pathology a doctrine without which it would have been condemned to remain a collection of unrelated facts with very little practical application. One first such unifying principle was provided by the (...) notion of hygiene; while the blanket explanations provided by this notion alone were much too general to enable rickets to achieve scientific status, it did point out the need to look for specific external causes for the disease and to examine the life-style and dietary habits of the patients. The second phase of the conceptualization of the disease was the assumption of a specific cause — that is, using concepts developed in the area of infectious diseases. This was made possible by fundamental similarities between deficiency and infectious diseases, in spite of their apparent differences. Both types of illness have some of the characteristics of what Georges Canguilhem calls the ontological representation of disease as opposed to dysharmonic representations, which primarily concern the endocrine diseases. It is precisely this shift from one to the other manner of perceiving ill health that enabled the identification of the vitamin D-resistant rickets. Conceptualization of the notion of vitamin D resistancy required that the conditions causing the disease be looked for within the organism rather than outside it; this was thus the first time that endocrine concepts were applied to studying the physiology of vitamin D.The history of resistant rickets therefore represents an interesting model for understanding the growth of biomedical knowledge. It allows the development of a number of more general ideas on the question of the relationship between biology and medicine and on the thorny problem of specificity in medical thinking. As far as this topic is concerned it can be seen that there was an ongoing exchange between medical and biological thinking during the initial period up until 1937, and that one could deny any such specificity in medical thinking during this same period. Albright, for example, used human diseases as spontaneously produced models for experimental biology. It was also more feasible for an experimental biologist to administer toxic doses than for a clinician to do so.What, then, if any, is the place of the specificity of medical thinking in this history? The fact that medicine is characterized not only by it ccognitive content78 but also by its final aim, which is to restore health, makes it necessary to take factors other than objective knowledge into consideration. This is particularly evident in two aspects of medicine, therapeutics and nosology, and in approaching the notion of pathological individuality.Therapeutic activity has a largely empirical approach. Many drugs, such as cod-liver oil, were discovered empirically. Treatment often in the past, and still now, has proceeded by trial and error, upon no established theoretical basis. At this level the relationship between biology and medicine is roughly comparable to that between science and technology79 \3- that is, it is impossible to reduce either therapeutics or technical activities to the simple application of basic science. In this sense, the application of vitamin D to vitamin-resistant rickets is quite typical. Further-more, in the case studied here, the therapeutic activity heralds a definite breaking away from the medicatrix naturae of conventional medicine dating back to ancient times, and it embodies a new concept of the organism and of disease: no longer can the diseased organism be thought of as merely having a perturbed equilibrium requiring restoration by means of a natural style of medicine. On the contrary, vitamin D resistance is an obstacle that indicates profound biological dysfunction, to be rectified only by means of an extremely aggressive and therefore dangerous therapy. The therapy thus serves to reveal the severity of the dysfunction, thereby leading inevitably to conceptual innovation. This sheds light on the theoretical innovations of which the therapeutic activity is capable.Therapeutic activity is also influenced by notions of health and illness, normal and pathological states, none of which may be determined entirely objectively. For example, the term healing as used by Albright in the case of resistant rickets that he described may be discussed in this light.Nosology, or the classification of diseases, depends largely on the description of clinical syndromes, which are themselves mainly based on subjective elements (discomfort, disability, or the extent of a patient's suffering). The advent of pathological anatomy at the beginning of the nineteenth century disrupted classification by introducing the concept of localized anatomical lesions81-and, hence, an element of material objectivity \3- into nosology. Radiological examination further complicated matters by enabling the equivalent of an autopsy on living matter. Lastly, biological examination complicated nosology by showing that biological anomalies may exist in human beings without necessarily leading to a pathological condition. Medical thinking can choose to combine all these elements to describe a disease, but can also separate them and retain only a few, or a single one, according to requirements - as did Albright.The notion of biological and pathological individuality is fundamental to the development of medical thinking. Whatever its theoretical origin, medical thinking has since ancient times incorporated the idea that each individual reacts differently to the same treatment and his own specific pathological tendencies. I mentioned earlier that in the history of vitamin D-resistant rickets the notion of rachitic tendency reflected this type of thinking. After 1937, this history progressed by successively separating new individual entities, affecting smaller and smaller groups of individuals in each case. In other words, the need to understand and to define individual illness more closely required the development of new concepts and the construction of new individual categories of disease linking these concepts to older clinical, radiological, and biochemical elements. (shrink)

Society and its social forms develop through the social interactions of various agents. The tempo of such transformations has increased over the last decades, which implies a growing mass of obsolete and dead social forms. One persisting social form whose death is overdue, given its effect on climate change, is fossil capitalism. This article introduces the term morphocide, which is defined as the active ending of social forms and denotes the deliberate dismantling of an existing system to promote the (...) growth of alternatives. Morphocide is discussed in relation to potential strategies for how fossil capitalism may be actively ended, where it is argued that the heart of fossil capitalism is in political bodies with regulatory power, and that it may be dismantled through a combination of political pressure, direct and legal action, and establishing viable alternatives that may be upscaled. (shrink)

Society and its social forms develop through the social interactions of various agents. The tempo of such transformations has increased over the last decades, which implies a growing mass of obsolete and dead social forms. One persisting social form whose death is overdue, given its effect on climate change, is fossil capitalism. This article introduces the term morphocide, which is defined as the active ending of social forms and denotes the deliberate dismantling of an existing system to promote the (...) growth of alternatives. Morphocide is discussed in relation to potential strategies for how fossil capitalism may be actively ended, where it is argued that the heart of fossil capitalism is in political bodies with regulatory power, and that it may be dismantled through a combination of political pressure, direct and legal action, and establishing viable alternatives that may be upscaled. (shrink)

The article examines the interpretation of the Scripture in Byzantine hymnography during the Great Lent. Some notable recent contributions focus on Andrew of Crete's and Romanos the Melodist's compositions, illustrating the hymnographic way of understanding the Scriptures. The author of this study presents a selection of stanzas from hymns of the Triodion that refer to the trees of Paradise. Hymnography perceives the trees in Genesis 2-3 in direct connection with the cross. Only rarely is the tree of life a metaphor (...) for Jesus, as the shadow of the tree of the cross is seldom a metaphor for protection. Another interesting aspect in relation to hymnography is the fact that it represents a type of intertextual exegesis of biblical texts. Hymnographers interpret passages from Genesis by using texts from Psalms, Prophets and especially from the New Testament, combining images and biblical texts in the depiction of liturgical moments. CONTRIBUTION: Compared with previous research, this article discusses some rare hymnographic interpretations. The analysis accentuates that the hymnic approach to the Scripture is a form of intertextual exegesis. (shrink)

BackgroundWhile neighborhood safety and stranger danger have been mostly canonized to play a part in parents’ physical activity avoidance, less is known about the impact of parental stress and perceived risk on children’s PA avoidance and consequently on children’s level of PA and wellbeing. Understanding the contributors to children’s wellbeing during pandemic disease is the first critical step in contributing to children’s health during epidemic diseases.MethodsThis study employed 276 healthy children, aged 10–12 years, and their parents. Data were collected (...) in October and November 2020, about 9 months after the local closing of schools due to the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic. Parents and children answered a separate set of questions. Besides the demographic information, the parents responded to questions on their stress level, perceived risk of COVID-19, and PA avoidance for children. Children responded to questions on their PA and wellbeing in the last week. Data were analyzed using SmartPLS and IBM SPSS 22.ResultsThe result of the study supported the four directional research hypotheses of the sequential study model. As hypothesized, parents’ stress and perceived risk levels of COVID-19 negatively affected children’s PA. The PA level was shown to predict children’s wellbeing and mental health. Housing type, parents’ job security, number of siblings, number of members living together in-home, and history of death or hospitalization of relatives or family members due to COVID-19 were found to be associated with parents’ stress and children’s mental health.ConclusionThis study sheds light on parents’ role in children’s wellbeing and mental health during the COVID-19 pandemic. Parents with higher stress and high restrictive behaviors might put their children at risk of mental disorders in the end. (shrink)

Theory‐of‐mind (ToM) is an integral part of social cognition, but how it develops remains a critical question. There is evidence that children can gain insight into ToM through experience, including language training and explanatory interactions. But this still leaves open the question of how children gain these insights—what processes drive this learning? We propose that analogical comparison is a key mechanism in the development of ToM. In Experiment 1, children were shown true‐ and false‐belief scenarios and prompted to engage in (...) multiple comparisons (e.g., belief vs. world). In Experiments 2a, 2b, and 3, children saw a series of true‐ and false‐belief events, varying in order and in their alignability. Across these experiments, we found that providing support for comparing true‐ and false‐belief scenarios led to increased performance on false‐belief tests. These findings show that analogical comparison can support ToM learning. (shrink)

The ``doctrinal paradox'' or ``discursive dilemma'' shows that propositionwise majority voting over the judgments held by multiple individuals on some interconnected propositions can lead to inconsistent collective judgments on these propositions. List and Pettit (2002) have proved that this paradox illustrates a more general impossibility theorem showing that there exists no aggregation procedure that generally produces consistent collective judgments and satisfies certain minimal conditions. Although the paradox and the theorem concern the aggregation of judgments rather than preferences, they invite comparison (...) with two established results on the aggregation of preferences: the Condorcet paradox and Arrow's impossibility theorem. We may ask whether the new impossibility theorem is a special case of Arrow's theorem, or whether there are interesting disanalogies between the two results. In this paper, we compare the two theorems, and show that they are not straightforward corollaries of each other. We further suggest that, while the framework of preference aggregation can be mapped into the framework of judgment aggregation, there exists no obvious reverse mapping. Finally, we address one particular minimal condition that is used in both theorems – an independence condition – and suggest that this condition points towards a unifying property underlying both impossibility results. (shrink)

Analogue experiments have attracted interest for their potential to shed light on inaccessible domains. For instance, ‘dumb holes’ in fluids and Bose–Einstein condensates, as analogues of black holes, have been promoted as means of confirming the existence of Hawking radiation in real black holes. We compare analogue experiments with other cases of experiment and simulation in physics. We argue—contra recent claims in the philosophical literature—that analogue experiments are not capable of confirming the existence of particular phenomena in inaccessible target (...) systems. As they must assume the physical adequacy of the modelling framework used to describe the inaccessible target system, arguments to the conclusion that analogue experiments can yield confirmation for phenomena in those target systems, such as Hawking radiation in black holes, beg the question. (shrink)

In his paper, Josh Hayes argues that inclination (ῥοπή) is the nature of each element. It is an active and passive principle that explains why the elements move to their proper places. Thus, according to Hayes, by introducing inclination in De Caelo IV 1, Aristotle posits a single explanatory factor that accounts for all elemental motions. By doing so, he answers the question, posed in Physics VIII 4, of what the cause of elemental motion is. In my comments, I (...) will contest these claims. Aristotle’s theory of elemental motion does not rely on a single explanatory factor; yet, it is not, as Hayes claims, incoherent. Instead, the different strands merely reflect the special nature of the elements. (shrink)

At the end of the 19th-century three technologies had emerged as sources of motive power for the automobile: steam, internal combustion, and electric motors. In 1900, in the United States and around the world, each of these powered a roughly equal number of automobiles. Thus, the early period of automobile development offers fertile ground for the study of technological path choice. At that time, it appeared that the electric motor was poised to become the dominant automotive technology. However, the internal (...) combustion engine achieved this status instead. Although a large number of studies have examined the history of the automobile with a view to determining the reasons for the emergence of the internal combustion engine as the dominant technology for the car engine, no consensus has emerged of what the critical factors were. A close reexamining of the history allows us to identify the years 1900-1904 as the period during which the automobile’s technological path was determined. A review of the conditions prevailing during this period and the stages of development of the sociotechnical systems in which each of the alternative automotive technologies was embedded helps us identify the aspiration for touring as the key factor fixing the path for the technological development of the automobile from that point on. (shrink)

_ Source: _Volume 9, Issue 3, pp 372 - 392 In this essay I revisit some anti-causalist arguments relating to reason-giving explanations of action put forth by numerous philosophers writing in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s in what Donald Davidson dismissively described as a ‘neo-Wittgensteinian current of small red books’. While chiefly remembered for subscribing to what has come to be called the ‘logical connection’ argument, the positions defended across these volumes are in fact as diverse as they are (...) subtle, united largely by a an anti-scientistic spirit which may reasonably be described as historicist. I argue that while Davidson’s causalist attack was motivated by an important explanatory insight borrowed from Hempel, it caused serious damage to the philosophy of action by effectively brushing over a number of vital distinctions made in the aforementioned works. In seeking to revive these I propose an approach to the theory of action explanation that rescues the anti-causalist baby from the historicist bathwater. (shrink)

In the first ever book-length treatment of David Hume's philosophy of action, Constantine Sandis brings together seemingly disparate aspects of Hume's work to present an understanding of human action that is much richer than previously assumed. Sandis showcases Hume's interconnected views on action and its causes by situating them within a wider vision of our human understanding of personal identity, causation, freedom, historical explanation, and morality. In so doing, he also relates key aspects of the emerging picture to contemporary concerns (...) within the philosophy of action and moral psychology, including debates between Humeans and anti-Humeans about both 'motivating' and 'normative' reasons. Character and Causation takes the form of a series of essays which collectively argue that Hume's overall project proceeds by way of a soft conceptual revisionism that emerges from his Copy Principle. This involves re-calibrating our philosophical ideas of all that agency involves to fit a scheme that more readily matches the range of impressions that human beings actually have. On such a reading, once we rid ourselves of a certain kind of metaphysical ambition we are left with a perfectly adequate account of how it is that people can act in character, freely, and for good reasons. The resulting picture is one that both unifies Hume's practical and theoretical philosophy and radically transforms contemporary philosophy of action for the better. (shrink)

My initial hope when I first saw Miller’s book was that here at least would be a work which satisfies the long standing need for a comprehensive introduction to contemporary metaethics which is accessible enough to be employed in advanced undergraduate courses and introductory graduate seminars. This hope was only partially realized, however, as Miller ends up oscillating between clear presentations of extant debates in the recent literature and his own extended attempts to determine where the truth of the matter (...) lies. The result is an interesting book that likely will appeal both to those looking for a classroom text in metaethics as well as to experts on the relevant issues. (shrink)

This collection of essays by leading philosophers of physics was first published in 2000, and offers philosophical perspectives on two of the central elements of modern physics, quantum theory and relativity. The topics examined include the notorious 'measurement problem' of quantum theory and the attempts to solve it by attributing extra values to physical quantities, the mysterious non-locality of quantum theory, the curious properties of spatial localization in relativistic quantum theories, and the problem of time in the search for a (...) theory of quantum gravity. Together the essays represent some of the last decade's research in philosophy of physics, particularly interestingly within the philosophy of quantum theory. (shrink)

The two Heisenberg Uncertainties (UR) entail an incompatibility between the two pairs of conjugated variables E, t and p, q. But incompatibility comes in two kinds, exclusive of one another. There is incompatibility defineable as: (p → − q) & (q→ − p) or defineable as [(p →− q) & (q →− p)] ↔ r. The former kind is unconditional, the latter conditional. The former, in accordance, is fact independent, and thus a matter of logic, the latter fact dependent, and (...) thus a matter of fact. The two types are therefore diametrically opposed. In spite of this, however, the existing derivations of the Uncertainties are shown here to entail both types of incompatibility simultaneously. Δ E Δ t ≥ h is known to derive from the quantum relation E = hν plus the Fourier relation Δ ν Δ t ≥ 1. And the Fourier relation assigns a logical incompatibility between Δ ν = 0, Δ t = 0. (Defining a repetitive phenomenon at an instant t → 0 is a self contradictory notion.) An incompatibility, therefore, which is fact independent and unconditional. How can one reconcile this with the fact that Δ EΔ t exists if and only if h > 0, which latter supposition is a factual truth, entailing that a Δ E = 0, Δ t = 0 incompatibility should itself be fact dependent? Are we to say that E and t are unconditionally incompatible (via Δ ν Δ t ≥ 1) on condition that E = hν is at all true? Hence, as presently standing, the UR express a self-contradicting type of incompatibility. To circumvent this undesirable result, I reinterpret E = hν as relating the energy with a period. Though only one such period. And not with frequency literally. (It is false that E = ν. It is true that E = ν times the quantum.) In this way, the literal concept of frequency does not enter as before, rendering Δ ν Δ t ≥ 1 inapplicable. So the above noted contradiction disappears. Nevertheless, the Uncertainties are derived. If energy is only to be defined over a period, momentum only over a distance (formerly a wavelength) resulting during such period, thus yielding quantized action of dimensions Et = pq, then energies will become indefinite at instants, momenta indefinite at points, leading, as demanded, to (symmetric!) Δ E Δ t = Δ p Δ q ≥ h’s. (shrink)

In this article, I analyse some pre-Humean arguments for and against tolerance by early eighteenth-century Scottish philosophers and theologians. I present these in dialogue with the Confession of Faith, which constituted the central doctrinal pillar of the Presbyterian Church of Scotland. The Kirk viewed tolerance rather suspiciously as a danger for its unity, and if the Confession asserted liberty of conscience against the Catholics, it insisted nevertheless on rigid boundaries. This created tensions which the theologians John Simson and Archibald (...) Campbell sought to exploit when they were attacked by Committees for Purity of Doctrine for suspicion of heresy. Simson’s and Campbell’s arguments for toleration revolved around issues of liberty of conscience, scripture interpretation and the necessity of open debate for the moral progress of mankind. George Turnbull and Francis Hutcheson, then, insisted on a moral core of religion and on limitations of the Church’s power. They showed more optimism than David Hume regarding our moral resources to overcome religion’s corruptive potential, under the condition that we are properly guided. (shrink)

The Euthyphro Dilemma is named after a particular exchange between Socrates and Euthyphro in Plato‟s dialogue Euthyphro. In a famous passage, Socrates asks, “Is the pious loved by the gods because it is pious, or is it pious because it is loved by the gods?” (Plato 1981: 10a), and proceeds to advance arguments which clearly favor the first of these two options (see PLATO). The primary interest in the Euthyphro Dilemma over the years, however, has primarily concerned the relationship (...) between God and morality in the monotheistic religious tradition, where God is taken to be omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent, having created the universe initially and still actively involved in it today. But as we will see at the end of this entry, there has also been a recent surge of interest in a version of the Dilemma which applies to so-called response-dependent accounts of normative properties in meta-ethics. (shrink)

Vann McGee has recently argued that Belnap’s criteria constrain the formal rules of classical natural deduction to uniquely determine the semantic values of the propositional logical connectives and quantifiers if the rules are taken to be open-ended, i.e., if they are truth-preserving within any mathematically possible extension of the original language. The main assumption of his argument is that for any class of models there is a mathematically possible language in which there is a sentence true in just those models. (...) I show that this assumption does not hold for the class of models of classical propositional logic. In particular, I show that the existence of non-normal models for negation undermines McGee’s argument. (shrink)

Due to Gӧdel’s incompleteness results, the categoricity of a sufficiently rich mathematical theory and the semantic completeness of its underlying logic are two mutually exclusive ideals. For first- and second-order logics we obtain one of them with the cost of losing the other. In addition, in both these logics the rules of deduction for their quantifiers are non-categorical. In this paper I examine two recent arguments –Warren (2020), Murzi and Topey (2021)– for the idea that the natural deduction rules for (...) the first-order universal quantifier are categorical, i.e., they uniquely determine its semantic intended meaning. Both of them make use of McGee’s open-endedness requirement and the second one uses in addition Garson’s (2013) local models for defining the validity of these rules. I argue that the success of both these arguments is relative to their semantic or infinitary assumptions, which could be easily discharged if the introduction rule for the universal quantifier is taken to be an infinitary rule, i.e. non-compact. Consequently, I reconsider the use of the ω-rule and I show that the addition of the ω-rule to the standard formalizations of first-order logic is categorical. In addition, I argue that the open-endedness requirement does not make the first-order Peano Arithmetic categorical and I advance an argument for its categoricity based on the inferential conservativity requirement. (shrink)