Why do people seemingly want to be scared by movies and feel pity for fictional characters when they avoid situations in real life that arouse these same negative emotions? Although the domain of relevant artworks encompasses far more than just tragedy, the general problem is typically called the paradox of tragedy. The paradox boils down to a simple question: If people avoid pain then why do people want to experience art that is painful? I discuss six popular solutions to the (...) paradox: conversion, control, compensatory, meta-response, catharsis, and rich experience theories. (shrink)

Photographs furnish evidence. This is true in both formal and informal contexts. The use of photographs as legal evidence goes back to the very earliest days of photography, and they have been used in American trials since around the time of the Civil War. Photographs may also serve as historical evidence (for example, about the Civil War). And they serve in informal contexts as evidence about all sorts of things, such as what we and our loved ones looked like in (...) the past. (shrink)

The most interesting and perilous issue at present in comparative religious ethics is comparative ethical judgment—when and how to judge others, if at all. There are understandable historical and conceptual reasons for the current tendency to prefer descriptive over normative work in comparative religious ethics. However, judging those we study is inescapable—it can be suppressed or marginalized but not eliminated. Therefore, the real question is how to judge others (and ourselves) well, not whether to judge. Instead of bringing supposedly universal (...) moral scoring systems to bear on reified "traditions" and "cultures," it would be better to focus on the precise details of particular practices, motifs, and theories in various settings, and compare them with an eye to substantive issues of current ethical concern. (shrink)

Social Postmodernism offers a transformative political vision and addresses the live questions in identity politics. The postmodern focus on race, sexuality and gender is sharpened by integrating the micro-social concerns of the social movements associated with these issues and macro-institutional and cultural analysis. Social Postmodernism brings together leading theorists to explore further the implications for the discourses of feminism, post-Marxian cultural studies, African-American, Gay, Latino/a and postcolonial studies.

Familiar questions about whether or how far to impose risks of harm for social benefit present a fundamental dilemma for contractualist moral theories. If contractualism allows objections by considering actual outcomes, it becomes difficult to justify the risks created by most public policy, leaving contractualism at odds with moral commonsense in much the way utilitarianism is. But if contractualism instead takes a fully form by considering only expected outcomes, it becomes unclear how it recommends something other than aggregative cost-benefit decision-making. (...) Focusing on T.M. Scanlon's version, this paper develops this basic choice of interpretation and recommends the ex ante version. The paper explains how contractualism is inconsistent with John Harsanyibad aggregationgood aggregation” that is both unavoidable and fully appropriate in public life. (shrink)

Are there normative reasons for love? More specifically, is it possible to rationally justify love? Or can we at best provide explanations for why we love? In Part I of this entry, I discuss the nature of love, theories of emotion, and what it takes to justify an attitude. In Part II, I provide an overview of the various positions one might take on the rational justification of love. I focus on the debate between defenders of the no-reasons view and (...) the reasons view. Along the way, I discuss the significance of falling in love, the problem of trading up, and the notion of irreplaceability. I evaluate attempts to justify love based on the intrinsic and the relational properties of the beloved. (shrink)

Classic inductive skepticism–the epistemological claim that we have no good reason to believe that the unobserved resembles the observed–is plausibly everyone’s lot, whether or not they embrace Hume’s metaphysical claim that distinct existents are “entirely loose and separate”. But contemporary advocates of a Humean metaphysic accept a metaphysical claim stronger than Hume’s own. I argue that their view plausibly gives rise to a radical inductive skepticism–according to which we are downright irrational in believing as we do about the unobserved–that we (...) don’t otherwise have reason to accept. The Metaphysical Neo-Humean is in an epistemological quagmire all her own. (shrink)

ABSTRACTJacques Rohault is often considered to be one of the most meticulous followers of Descartes. Despite this, Rohault’s natural philosophy lacks much of the metaphysical bulwark that typifies Cartesian treatises of the seventeenth century. Instead, Rohault’s work, as well as his popular weekly meetings, strongly emphasized rigorous observation and experimentation. Traditionally, this emphasis on experiment over metaphysics is seen as a pragmatic omission to avoid the perils associated with censorship and Cartesian metaphysics. However, I find that the lack of explicit (...) metaphysics has real consequences that play out in the role Rohault assigns to experimentation. To show this, I highlight several areas where he adopts a broad experimental methodology even though Descartes explicitly rejects the relevancy of experiment on metaphysical topics. I place special emphasis Rohault’s extensive experiment on the void. In short, Rohault’s experimentation was designed to prove, through experimental mea... (shrink)

Any analysis of "In the Company of Men" is forced to answer three questions of central importance to the ethics of humor: What does it mean to find sexist humor funny? What are the various sources of humor? And, can moral flaws with attempts at humor increase their humorousness? I argued that although merely finding a joke funny in a neutral context cannot tell you anything reliable about a person's beliefs, in context, a joke may reveal a great deal about (...) one’s social attitudes, or feelings of insecurity. Especially in its portrayal of Howard, the film exposes the role of insecurity as a source of humor. Not only can insecurity make one more prone to laugh, but it can also make someone seem funnier in some contexts. I contended that this shows that a strong version of the superiority theory of humor is clearly wrong. Furthermore, the disparate audience reactions to Chad's jokes showed that the morally sensitive who were aware of the purpose of his jokes would see them as ethically flawed. Rather than making the jokes more amusing, the fact that the jokes were considered to be ethically flawed made them less funny. Hence, immoralism is most likely false. (shrink)

By making use of a distinction between “making something happen” and “allowing it to happen,” a polluting act can be defined as making something happen with widely scattered externalized costs. Not all polluting acts are blameworthy, but we can investigate which polluting acts are sufficiently badly performed as to be blameworthy. This definition of polluting act permits us to justify the belief we often have that behavior concerning pollution may be blameworthy, even when we do not know whether the behavior (...) caused harm. (shrink)

This review of Kevin Schilbrack’s—Philosophy and the study of religions: a manifesto—is part of a review symposium featuring reviews by Andrew Irvine, J. Aaron Simmons, and James McLaughlin and a reply by Kevin Schilbrack.

A critical analysis and evaluation of Habermas' and Derrida's understanding of terrorism (in particular 9/11); some reflections on the role of philosophy and philosophers in the present age.

The Haunting, Directed by Robert Wise MGM/Argyle, 1963.

This chapter focuses on the ethical theories of the early modern philosophers Thomas Hobbes, Justus Lipsius, Descartes, Spinoza, Benjamin Whichcote, Lord Shaftesbury, and Samuel Clarke. The discussions include aspects of Hobbes' moral philosophy that posed a challenge for many philosophers of the second half of the seventeenth century who were committed to philosophy as a form of self-help; Lipsius and Descartes' appropriation of ancient and Hellenistic moral philosophy in connection with changing ideas about control of the passions and the happiest (...) and best life; and the maxim or epigram – a literary form used by moralists to counsel readers on how to best know and govern themselves. (shrink)

Jewish culture and universal perspectives.

The paper assumes a theoretical-empirical interface exists between top-down (structural concepts) and bottom-up (cognitive mechanisms and socio-cultural interactions) approaches to collective memory. Both deal with collaborative group accounts, material culture such as artefacts and representational re-descriptive technologies. Anthropology has shown how communal life was based on story telling, rituals, artefacts, routine practices constitutive of daily life representational re-descriptions and the reproduction of implicit and explicit emotional normative belief systems embedded in kinship and social network relations.

The US has found it hard to establish competition in the market for biologics, which are therapeutics derived from living cells. In the case of small-molecule drugs, the emergence of direct competition from generic drugs at the end of the exclusivity period has provided the impetus for price competition, leading to lower spending. In 2010, to spur competition in the biologics market, Congress created a simplified pathway for the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to approve comparable versions of biologic (...) drugs called biosimilars. Biosimilar competition in the US has nonetheless remained weaker than in European peer countries. For example, as of August 2020, there were 52 biosimilars available in Germany, and only 15 in the US.1 An important contributor to this “biosimilar gap” has been the fact that biosimilars to biologic blockbusters such as adalimumab (Humira) and etanercept (Enbrel) were only (or will only become) commercially available in the US several years after receiving FDA approval, while they were available in Europe years earlier.2 Through the end of 2021, it took biosimilars a median of 301 days between receiving FDA approval and becoming available for use.3 In one recent study, the median length of time between when a biologic drug was approved and when its first biosimilar was made available to US patients was 21.5 years.4 This paucity of competition has contributed to high US spending on biologics. According to the Department of Health and Human Services, in 2022 41% of US drug expenditures was spent on biologics, which represented 16% of US prescriptions.5. (shrink)

The following article is a response to Virginia Aspe’s “The Political Dilemmas of the Transformations of Mexico: A Philosophical Approach”. My aim is to discuss some ideas developed by Aspe Armella, pointing out, from the perspective of the history of Mexican philosophy, both the successes of her approach, as well as some aspects that deserve more debate.

Biological evolution allegedly requires a genealogical conception of species (i.e., that species are descent-based "historical entities" rather than similarity-based "natural kinds"). After considering David Hull's arguments for this view, this paper opts instead for individuating species primarily via genetic similarities, but in a way which avoids charges of "Essentialism". It is suggested that a genealogical conception of species actually derives from a biological version of Behaviorism plus an interrelated pair of confusions regarding evolution and identity. Current taxonomic method may favor (...) the genealogical conception, but evolutionary theory-- as well as genetics and molecular biology--count against it. (shrink)

Four main issues have occupied center stage in the analytic-cognitivist work on horror: (1) What is horror? (2) What is the appeal of horror? (3) How does it frighten audiences? and, (4) is it irrational to be scared of horror fiction?

Les recherches sur le cerveau et celles sur les structures sociales se touchent souvent mais cheminent indépendamment. On considère ici que des mécanismes biologiques et des pressions environnementales pour la survie ont façonné simultanément une intersection graduelle de ces deux registres, transformant les conditions de l’interaction sociale collaborative et des compétences en matière de communication. De cette manière, on peut identifier des « re-descriptions représentationnelles » qui sont propres à mieux rendre compte des pratiques.

The strongly resilient are able to quickly get over the loss of their beloved. This is not an entirely attractive capacity. In this paper, I argue that it is appropriate to be distressed about the fact that we might, quickly or slowly, get over the death of our loved ones. Moller argues that the principal problem with resilience is that it puts us in a defective epistemological position, one where we are no longer able to appreciate the significance of what (...) we have lost. Although I think this is a genuine concern, it does little to capture the source of our dismay at the prospect. The problem is not that not caring will make us blind to our beloved's past importance, but that we simply will no longer care for our beloved. The source of our dismay is captured nicely in a passage from Proust that Moller cites but quickly dismisses in two separate papers. My goal here is to defend something akin to the Proustian view that resilience amounts to a death of self. (shrink)

It seems natural to suppose that Artur Schnabel’s occasionally inaccurate performance of Beethoven’s Hammerklavier would have been even better had it been accurate throughout. In the present paper I defend this supposition against a sceptical argument which purports to show that we have no good reason to believe it. The sceptical argument, which draws on some plausible-seeming thoughts about aesthetic properties, concludes that, because we cannot know whether this or that (as-yet-unachieved) musical result is so much as possible, we have (...) no good reason to suppose that the accurate version of Schnabel’s performance should be preferred to Schnabel’s own. In attempting to defuse this sceptical argument, I open up, and begin to explore, some new and potentially interesting questions about musical creativity and about the species of rationality that it requires and exhibits. (shrink)

Controlled elicitation of linguistic and psycholinguistic experimental data facilitate strong inferences about phonological, syntactic, semantic and pragmatic structures and functions, yet neglect the ecological validity of responses. Ecological validity in this paper refers to whether data gathered under controlled conditions are commensurate with routine problem solving and language use in natural settings. All methods produce "white room" effects that compromise data gathering and analysis. Unexamined folk knowledge and experiences also guide the investigator s interpretation of data from field research, laboratories, (...) testing sessions, and target sentences. Story recall data from children in a combined second-third grade classroom and their narrative responses to cartoons without sound are used to illustrate ecological validity issues. The child's spontaneous, imaginative narratives about the story and cartoons resemble adult folk theory, and their semantic content reveal sociocultural knowledge essential for understanding subjects ' reasoning and information processing skills. (shrink)

Le Locataire ("The Tenant"), one of Polanski's lesser-known films, uses both an unreliable narrator and manipulates an unreliable audience to achieve its horror effect.