Adrian Kuzminski argues that Pyrrhonism, an ancient Greek philosophy, can best be understood as a Western form of Buddhism. Not only is its founder, Pyrrho, reported to have traveled to India and been influenced by contacts with Indian sages, but a close comparison of ancient Buddhist and Pyrrhonian texts suggests a common philosophical practice, seeking liberation through suspension of judgment with regard to beliefs about non-evident things.

There has been considerable discussion in the literature of one kind of identity problem that mathematical structuralism faces: the automorphism problem, in which the structure is unable to individuate the mathematical entities in its domain. Shapiro (Philos Math 16(3):285–309, 2008) has partly responded to these concerns. But I argue here that the theory faces an even more serious kind of identity problem, which the theory can’t overcome staying within its remit. I give two examples to make the point.

This essay aims to review and clarify an emerging consensus among philosophers of time: that belief in the passage of time is not a matter of illusion but rather the result of a variety of cognitive error. I argue that this error is best described in terms of psychological projection, properly understood. A close analysis of varieties of projection reveals how well this phenomenon accounts for belief in dynamic temporal passage and the objective becoming of events. A projectivist account of (...) belief in the passage of time is, in actuality, already predominant in contemporary philosophy of time; but the language of illusion still used by many theorists is hampering recognition of the nature of the solution as well as the recent progress towards consensus. (shrink)

The political psychologists Hatemi, Crabtree and Smith accuse orthodox moral foundations theory of predicting what is already intrinsic to the theory, namely that moral beliefs influence political decision-making. The authors argue that, first, political psychology must start from a position which treats political and moral beliefs as equals so as to avoid self-justificatory theorising, and second, that such an analysis provides stronger evidence for political attitudes predicting moral attitudes than vice versa. I take this empirical result as a starting point (...) to intervene in a debate in contemporary normative political theory which has, to my mind, become largely unwieldy: the political realism controversy. I advise the realists to ‘downplay’ the (thus far) inconclusive debate over realism’s metanormative standing in favour of a non-metanormative inquiry. Hatemi, Crabtree and Smith’s study makes for an excellent backdrop. It affirms the realist hypothesis that politics is in some relevant sense – a causal, psychological sense – prior to morality. (shrink)

Inferences from clinical research results to estimates of therapeutic effectiveness suffer due to various biases. I argue that predictions of medical effectiveness are prone to failure because current medical research overlooks the impacts of a particularly detrimental set of biases: meta-biases. Meta-biases are linked to higher-level characteristics of medical research and their effects are only observed when comparing sets of studies that share certain meta-level properties. I offer a model for correcting research results based on meta-research evidence, the bias dynamics (...) model, which employs regularly updated empirical bias coefficients to attenuate estimates of therapeutic effectiveness. (shrink)

There is a long history and growing evidence base that the use of drugs, such as anabolic-androgenic steroids, to enhance human performance is common amongst armed forces, including in Australia. We should not be surprised that this might have occurred for it has long been predicted by observers. It is a commonplace of many recent discussion of the future of warfare and future military technology to proclaim the imminent arrival of Super Soldiers, whose capacities are modified via drugs, digital technology (...) and genetic engineering, in ways that increase their performance exponentially. This is what some observers have referred to as the “Gladiator Model” wherein the aim is to create soldiers able to perform feats of which ordinary citizens are not capable. One key aspect of this “gladiator project” is the use of illicit drugs to enhance performance. Could we use drugs, such as steroids or amphetamines, to enhance performance? Should we use such drugs? In this paper we explore the ethics of creating Super Soldiers, and raise issues of consent, coercion and the extent to which such use is permitted or condemned by just war theory. We conclude that much will depend on the extent to which such use is harmful to the soldiers themselves and this is still an open question. (shrink)

A fair amount of recent scholarship has been concerned with correcting a supposedly wrong, but wide-spread, assessment of the consequences of the empirical falsification of Bell-type inequalities. In particular, it has been claimed that Bell-type inequalities follow from “locality tout court” without additional assumptions such as “realism” or “hidden variables”. However, this line of reasoning conflates restrictions on the spatio-temporal relation between causes and their effects (“locality”) and the assumption of a cause for every event (“causality”). It thus fails to (...) recognize a substantial restriction of the class of theories that is falsified through Bell-type inequalities. (shrink)

How to theorise religion in International Relations (IR)? Does the concept of post-secularity advance the debate on religion beyond the ‘return of religion’ and the crisis of secular reason? This article argues that the post-secular remains trapped in the logic of secularism. First, a new account is provided of the ‘secularist bias’ that characterises mainstream IR theory: (a) defining religion in either essentialist or epiphenomenal terms; (b) positing a series of ‘antagonistic binary opposites’ such as the secular versus the religious; (...) (c) de-sacralising and re-sacralising the public square. The article then analyses post-secularity, showing that it subordinates faith under secular reason and sacralises the ‘other’ by elevating difference into the sole transcendental term. Theorists of the post-secular such as Jürgen Habermas or William Connolly also equate secular modernity with metaphysical universalism, which they seek to replace with post-metaphysical pluralism. In contrast, the alternative that this article outlines is an international theory that develops the Christian realism of the English School in the direction of a metaphysical-political realism. Such a realism binds together reason with faith and envisions a ‘corporate’ association of peoples and nations beyond the secularist settlement of Westphalia that is centred on national states and transnational markets. By linking immanent values to transcendent principles, this approach can rethink religion in international affairs and help revive grand theory in IR. (shrink)

In this essay, I respond to Žižek's charges that my turns to biology risk naturalizing away key features of non-natural subjectivity à la German idealism and Lacanianism. The crux of this dispute between him and me concerns how close to or far from a life-science-based naturalism a materialist theory of the subject with allegiances to Kant, Hegel, Freud, and Lacan should be. I contend that materialism must be closer to naturalism than Žižek allows— while insisting simultaneously that the spontaneous naturalism (...) of the cutting edge of the life sciences isn’t the semi-reductive paradigm Žižek believes it to be. (shrink)

In Uncivil Unions, Adrian Daub presents a truly interdisciplinary look at the story of a generation of philosophers, poets, and intellectuals who turned away from theology, reason, common sense, and empirical observation to provide a purely ...

The rural/metropolitan/wilderness hybrid central to urban shrinkage directly challenges a commonly held belief that a city consists of a dense concentration of people living in a limited geographical area, one where the primary means of production is non-agricultural. In addition, the urban condition of shrinkage tests the dominant current of growth management that has guided urban design, development, and land use. In this essay we will explore how this hybrid presents an alternative to the production and realization of surplus value (...) that predominates throughout the contemporary landscape of neoliberal planetary urbanization. It will be argued that this process of urbanization is premised upon modalities of urban commoning, or practices that bring a variety of social and environmental struggles into relationship with each other, dismantling the apparatuses of capture that bring land-use and the collective energies animating available land under the control of capital. (shrink)

An important question in the philosophy of psychiatry is: what is the proper method of psychiatric diagnostic reasoning? Let us call this the Methodological Question. In this paper, I criticize the answer that proponents of phenomenological psychiatry have given to this question and present an alternative. I argue that their answer fails to meet several adequacy conditions for a theory of psychiatric diagnostic reasoning. I then show how my own answer to the Methodological Question – the Model-Based Account of diagnostic (...) reasoning – meets these adequacy conditions. I conclude that the Model-Based Account of diagnostic reasoning is preferable to the Phenomenological Account. (shrink)

Résumé Cet article examine la manière dont Jean Scot Érigène s’approprie et emploie de façon constructive l’anthropologie de Maxime le Confesseur. Il s’agit de montrer que la division en cinq parties de l’être, puisée dans l’ Ambiguum 41 de Maxime le Confesseur, constitue le cadre du Periphyseon. Selon l’auteur, la compréhension de l’être humain de Maxime le Confesseur comme « un atelier de création », comme la synthèse de tous les aspects de la création, comme un agent d’unification, fournit la (...) prémisse anthropologique pour la division dialectique du genre de la nature propre à Érigène. C’est dans le cadre de l’ontologie de Maxime centrée sur « l’homme comme un atelier de création » qu’Érigène a recours à la tradition des arts libéraux. Par conséquent, la division du genre de la nature comme un exercice dialectique doit être comprise dans le cadre de l’appropriation par Érigène de la division en cinq parties de l’être de Maxime le Confesseur, ainsi que de son corollaire, l’anthropologie de l’ officina omnium o. Le projet du Periphyseon est guidé par la possibilité qu’à travers l’application des arts, l’homme pourrait devenir l’ officina omnium, en dépit de la chute ; si la connaissance intellectuelle de la création peut être achevée, alors le retour de toute la création à l’unité de l’être humain intelligible et ultimement à celle de Dieu pourrait être garanti. (shrink)

Not only is Lacan’s repeatedly advanced assertion that Freud categorically denies the existence of unconscious affects a misleading oversimplification of Freud’s various ambivalent discussions of this issue—Lacan’s own circumnavigations around the topic of affect are much more nuanced and subtle than either he or many of his commentators often acknowledge. What’s more, such complexities aren’t confined solely to the tenth seminar of 1962-1963 devoted to a sustained discussion of anxiety, a seminar to which Lacan sometimes appeals in response to criticisms (...) according to which he reduces the psychoanalytic unconscious to the lifeless formal skeleton of pure linguistic-symbolic units alone. Through analyzing Lacan’s explorations of the distinction between signifiers and affects as articulated across the full span of le Séminaire, this essay seeks to complicate and problematize the standard picture of Lacan’s metapsychology of affective life. In so doing, it strives to clarify hitherto obscure remarks made about affects by Lacan as well as, through this work of clarification, to lay down foundational elements for the construction of a much more accurate and systematic rendition of a Lacanian theory of affects. (shrink)

ExcerptIntroduction Much of nineteenth- and twentieth-century philosophy proclaimed the end the metaphysics and the death of God. The German, French, and English strands of the Enlightenment were united in their suspicion of metaphysical theism. Figures as diverse as Comte, Marx, Spencer, Nietzsche, and Russell defended the absolute autonomy of atheist reason against religious faith. Following the rise of partisan ideologies that terrorized the West from 1789 to 1989, the downfall of the Soviet empire appeared to herald the “end of history” (...) and a global convergence toward liberal market democracy. Ideas of freedom and justice would henceforth…. (shrink)

Evidence suggests that self-focused attention and cognitive failures may have disruptive effects on the use of specific coping strategies in stressful situations. In this study the personality factors of private self-consciousness (dispositional self-attention) and cognitive failures were investigated in relation to coping processes in specific stressful episodes reported by 139 female nurses. Multiple regression analyses were run to test for personality predictors of problem-focused coping, emotion-focused coping, and suppression-coping strategies. In examining the relationship between personality factors and coping the possible (...) mediational role of subjects' appraisals (importance of the episode and perceptions of control) were investigated. The results showed significant negative correlations between self-attention and emotion-focused and problem-focused coping only in mixed controllability situations. A significant negative correlation between cognitive failures and suppression was similarly dependent on subjects' situation specific control appraisals. The specificity of these relationships is interpreted in terms of the different effects which self-focus, cognitive failures, and control appraisals have on attention. (shrink)

Hayden White’s Metahistory is best known for its “theory of tropes”; but Metahistory also put forward a distinct “theory of the historical work”, which has received rather less attention, and indeed has tended to be swallowed up by White’s tropology. This is a symptom of a wider problem, that the theory has been apprehended in paraphrase and synopsis rather than in the terms in which it was actually articulated. This paper seeks to redress these oversights through an exegetical analysis, embracing (...) the structure of the theory, its rhetoric, and its relationship to the “theory of tropes”. The results bring several surprises, not the least of them being that Metahistory’s well-known relativism was accompanied by a hidden naïve realism; and it is shown that the book’s anti-epistemological stance was unfounded. Nevertheless some of the theory’s main concepts remain fertile, and even its limitations are instructive. (shrink)