Burt's critique of using polygenic scores in social science conflates the “scientific costs” of sociogenomics with “sociopolitical and ethical” concerns. Furthermore, she paradoxically enlists recent advances in controlling for environmental confounding to argue such confounding is scientifically “intractable.” Disinterested social scientists should support ongoing efforts to improve this technology rather than obstructing progress and excusing genetically confounded research.

The essay theorizes the responsibilities moral agents may be said to have in relation to global structural social processes that have unjust consequences. How ought moral agents, whether individual or institutional, conceptualize their responsibilities in relation to global injustice? I propose a model of responsibility from social connection as an interpretation of obligations of justice arising from structural social processes. I use the example of justice in transnational processes of production, distribution and marketing of clothing to illustrate operations of structural (...) social processes that extend widely across regions of the world. The social connection model of responsibility says that all agents who contribute by their actions to the structural processes that produce injustice have responsibilities to work to remedy these injustices. I distinguish this model from a more standard model of responsibility, which I call a liability model. I specify five features of the social connection model of responsibility that distinguish it from the liability model: it does not isolate perpetrators; it judges background conditions of action; it is more forward looking than backward looking; its responsibility is essentially shared; and it can be discharged only through collective action. The final section of the essay begins to articulate parameters of reasoning that agents can use for thinking about their own action in relation to structural injustice. a Footnotesa Thanks to David Alexander, Daniel Drezner, David Owen, and Ellen Frankel Paul for comments on an earlier version of this essay. Thanks to David Newstone for research assistance. (shrink)

This paper develops and defends a revisionary fictionalist version of the ‘social connection model’ of responsibility. The social connection model has become a prominent account of responsibility in recent years but, as many critics have noted, has difficulty in providing an account of the connection required to generate responsibility which is sufficiently determinate and generates acceptable outcomes. In light of this problem, I first consider whether a fictionalist interpretation of Iris Marion Young’s articulation of the social connection model is (...) tenable. I show that no such re-interpretation is possible, as it runs against Young’s explicit aims. I then develop a more thoroughly revisionary fictionalist version of the social connection model. I argue that this form of responsibility fictionalism is able to account for the central aims of the social connection model without succumbing to the issues standard versions of the model face in grounding the attributions of responsibility it generates. Furthermore, I argue that attributions of responsibility can retain motivational force on this view. (shrink)

The scope of this investigation is to find out to what extent the style (Stil), for the young Nietzsche, consists of a means through which the philosopher accomplishes the supreme task of philosophy: the formation (Bildung). I start from the statement that the stylistic problem composes one of the main elements of the evaluation that the young philosopher makes of the German formation and culture (Kultur) of his time to, finally, present how Nietzsche finds in the extemporaneous character (...) of style and in the Schopenhauer's philosophy the way to overcome the barbarism (Barbarei). (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:When the Morally "Right" Thing to Do Is Difficult:Reflections on a True "Pastoral" Approach in John Paul II's Veritatis SplendorIrene AlexanderIn the moral life, there are situations in which it is difficult to know what is the right thing to do. On the other hand, there are types of moral actions in which no such intellectual difficulty exists, where the right thing to do is very clear, yet hesitation (...) or even rejection of the moral law arises because to persist in virtuous living seems too difficult. For example, as St. Augustine writes in his Confessions: "Lord, give me chastity, but not yet." Augustine is not unclear about what he ought to do, yet he perceives that there remains a real gap between the truth of the moral law and his own ability to live virtuously what love demands.Christian moral theology reveals that this "gap" is not at all unusual, nor even surprising. Given original sin and its effects on the human heart, man stands in genuine need of a redeemer. For this reason, the task of moral theology today cannot involve merely presenting the truth of the moral law, important as it is; it must empower the human heart to live it. I argue that, to inspire and transform hearts, moral theology must be presented within the biblical story of salvation and lead to a personal encounter with Christ. Indeed, this is precisely what the Second Vatican Council called for when it insisted that theologians take "special care" in the renewal of moral theology. The Council fathers insisted that, in its presentation, moral theology needs to be more deeply animated by Scripture, to integrate with dogmatic theology, and most of all, to find its place within the mystery of Christ.1 [End Page 333]In this paper, I would like to demonstrate how Pope John Paul II's insights in his 1993 encyclical Veritatis Splendor (VS) can aid in a pastoral approach to morally difficult situations.2 It is no secret that he wrote this encyclical to address the widespread dissent among Catholic moral theologians who dissented from the magisterium on difficult moral issues such as contraception, abortion, divorce, in vitro fertilization, and homosexuality by attempting to reinvent the foundational principles of morality, which led to a whole host of errors. Yet, even though one can prove demonstratively the truth of the moral law, there still remains the pastoral question: "But what am I to do, if remaining faithful is very difficult?" "What can I do when I cannot seem to rise to what love demands, or I am afraid of what love will cost me?" In this paper, I will share three key insights from his work that lead to an effective pastoral response: (1) to rediscover the purpose of living a moral life, (2) to recognize the missing human good in difficult circumstances, (3) to receive the fullness of sacramental grace. Whereas some theologians openly encourage dissent from the Church's moral teaching for "pastoral" reasons, John Paul II argues that there is nothing more "pastoral" than the power of sacramental grace.Rediscover Purpose: The Moral Life as a Call to Divine Intimacy and MissionIn his book Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action, Simon Sinek has powerfully argued that all great leaders lead by answering the most important question: why does this organization or company or rule exist? Great leaders inspire with the purpose. Not surprisingly, when it comes to the question "why should I follow the moral law?," Jesus Christ, in Matt 19, also leads the rich young man with the "why."In the encounter, Christ acknowledges the young man's predicament when he approaches him with the question, "Teacher, what good must I do to have eternal life?" Merely remaining obedient to the law as though it were nothing more than a checklist is not enough to satisfy the deep [End Page 334] longings of the young man's heart. John Paul II comments that "the young man's question is not so much about rules to be followed, but about the full meaning of life. This is in fact the aspiration at the heart... (shrink)

A major aim of the present study was to examine the relationship between time perspective, i.e., habitual ways of relating to the past, present, and future, and sleep quality. A second aim was to test a model by which the expected negative relationship between deviation from a balanced time perspective, a measure taking temporal biases across all three time frames into account, and life satisfaction was mediated by poor sleep quality. To these ends, a sample of young adults completed (...) a version of the Zimbardo Time Perspective Inventory, Pittsburg Sleep Quality Index, and the Satisfaction with Life Scale. A measure of chronotype was in addition included for control purposes. Bivariate analyses revealed that the S-ZTPI subscales Past Negative, Future Negative and Present Fatalistic were associated with poorer sleep quality, with significant associations in the opposite direction for Past Positive and Future Positive. However, DBTP was the strongest predictor of sleep quality, suggesting that time perspective biases have an additive effect on sleep quality. Regression analyses with PSQI as the dependent variable and all six ZTPI subscales as the predictors indicated that time perspective accounted for about 20% of the variance in sleep quality, with Past Negative, Past Positive, and Future Negative as the unique predictors. The results additionally confirmed a strong relationship between DBTP and life satisfaction. Finally, data were consistent with the hypothesis that the association of DBTP and life satisfaction is mediated, in part, by sleep quality. Taken together, the results confirmed a substantial link between time perspective sleep-related problems, factors that may have a negative impact on life satisfaction. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:La Métaphysique de Royce, avec un appendice de texts, publiée et préfacée par Miklos VetöDwayne Alexander TunstallGabriel Marcel La Métaphysique de Royce, avec un appendice de texts, publiée et préfacée par Miklos Vetö Paris L'Hartmattan, 2005xix + 250 pp.Gabriel Marcel's La Métaphysique de Royce (MR) is the most influential Continental interpretation of Josiah Royce's philosophy. Moreover, Marcel's monograph-length study of Royce's metaphysics remains the only significant work (...) on Royce's philosophy written in French. MR was originally published as a series of four articles in La Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale (May-June 1918 and January-April 1919) and published, in a slightly edited form, as a monograph by Aubier in 1945. The L'Hartmattan edition of Marcel's MR is, to my knowledge, the first edition of Marcel's MR to be published in any language since the publication of the English translation of MR in 1956 under the title, Royce's Metaphysics.1Because an English translation of MR is already available, this review will not examine Marcel's actual monograph in any significant detail. Rather, it will describe Vetö's preface and the texts comprising this book's appendices.Vetö's preface seeks to fulfill two aims: (1) to situate MR in its own historical context and (2) to convey its insights to a contemporary audience. Vetö fulfills the first aim by situating Royce's thought within the milieu of late nineteenth-century Anglo-American idealism and its reception of German idealism (pp. vii-viii). He also fulfills this aim by explaining how a young Marcel could have devoted an entire monograph to Royce's thought. As for fulfilling the second aim, Vetö admits that doing so will be difficult, since Royce's thought "attracts only very modest attention from philosophers and historians of philosophy outside of America" (p. vii). It seems that Vetö attempts to fulfill the second aim by concentrating on how Royce's thought influenced the development of Marcel's thought. Due to space constraints, I will describe only a few of the more insightful observations Vetö makes about Marcel's MR in his preface.One such insightful observation is Vetö's recognition that, unlike most formulations of the principle of individuation in the Western philosophic tradition, Royce's principle of individuation is essentially volitional. Following Marcel, Vetö explains how Royce does not think that an individual is definable, ontologically speaking, by its empirical qualities or by some logical designation of class membership. Royce thought that an individual cannot be defined apart from the communal and moral interests of the one who recognizes that individual (p. xi). In fact, the act of recognizing an individual is an act of love for Royce. What Royce regards as love is different than the common definitions of the term, however. Vetö reminds the reader that Roycean love involves the exclusive selection of an individual to be the object of one's attention. This means that whenever one exclusively attends to someone or something in the world, that someone or something becomes a genuine individual.2 [End Page 582]Another insightful observation is Vetö's recognition that Royce's conception of God as fellow-sufferer, indeed as the One who experiences our sufferings more intensely and meaningfully than we do, seems to anticipate Alfred North Whitehead's process philosophy and, to a greater extent, Charles Hartshorne's process theology (p. xiv).A third insightful observation is Vetö's description of how Royce's thought influenced the development of Marcel's thought. While Marcel writes that Royce's thought had only a negligible influence on the formation of his mature position on intersubjectivity in his author's preface to the English translation of his monograph in 1956, Vetö contends that Royce obviously played an important role in Marcel's early insights into the nature of intersubjectivity. This is especially true of Marcel's insights into intersubjectivity as they are articulated in the second part of his Metaphysical Journal (1927).3 In that work, Marcel notes how his own nascent existentialism, e.g., his distinction between being and having... (shrink)

A critique and provincialization of Western social science and Global Northern academia by the author of The Digital Coloniality of Power, exposing shared colonial and extractive rationalities and histories of research, higher education, digitalization and bioeconomy while proposing in the idea of BluesCollarship a sketch for an alternative culture of worlding and commoning knowledge work and for making care matter in research and higher education. In a discourse analysis and provincialization of research and higher education, a tradition of elitarian White (...) Collaredness in academia and in the social sciences in general is criticized and an alternative attitude towards the production, transfer and use of knowledge - BluesCollarship - is proposed. The latter is rooted in a different idea of what 'infrastructure' is and in practices of decoloniality. Noting the current political climate of propaganda and populism, the persistence of social inequalities as well as of racism and misogynism, it is proposed that how people give warrant for knowledge claims should be reviewed under different terms. A coherent theme is that there is a genealogical root for current neo-extractive and neo-colonial rationalities in the Athenian idea of oikos conflating family, household, and property. In taking a distinctly writerly approach - rather than giving ready-made answers - the book aims at permanently provoking readers at every turn to think further, as well as before-and-beyond what is written, but to do so in thinking together with Others. Thereby the book addresses scholars and students from across the social sciences who seek challenges to established ways of thinking in academia without simply replacing one canon for merely another. This book is for those who think of themselves as knowledge and cultural laborers in this age of precarization who seek to replace the university and cognitive capitalism with a pluriversity and an infrastructure build on knowledge and culture as fundamental value. (shrink)

Natural selection of specific protobiomonomers during abiogenic development of the prototype genetic code is hindered by the diversity of structural, spatial, and rotational isomers that have identical elemental composition and molecular mass (M), but can vary significantly in their physicochemical characteristics, such as the melting temperature Tm, the Tm:M ratio, and the solubility in water, due to different positions of atoms in the molecule. These parameters differ between cis- and trans-isomers of dicarboxylic acids, spatial monosaccharide isomers, and structural isomers of (...) α-, β-, and γ-amino acids. The stable planar heterocyclic molecules of the major nucleobases comprise four (C, H, N, O) or three (C, H, N) elements and contain a single –C=C bond and two nitrogen atoms in each heterocycle involved in C–N and C=N bonds. They exist as isomeric resonance hybrids of single and double bonds and as a mixture of tautomer forms due to the presence of –C=O and/or –NH2 side groups. They are thermostable, insoluble in water, and exhibit solid-state stability, which is of central importance for DNA molecules as carriers of genetic information. In M–Tm diagrams, proteinogenic amino acids and the corresponding codons are distributed fairly regularly relative to the distinct clusters of purine and pyrimidine bases, reflecting the correspondence between codons and amino acids that was established in different periods of genetic code development. The body of data on the evolution of the genetic code system indicates that the elemental composition and molecular structure of protobiomonomers, and their M, Tm, photostability, and aqueous solubility determined their selection in the emergence of the standard genetic code. (shrink)

The purpose of the paper is to analyze the interrelations between the notions of one’s own and the foreign in later Heidegger’s philosophy. It is pointed out that later Heidegger contextualized the notion of the world by the notion of home and its derivatives “homelessness” and “homecoming” that are of great value in his philosophy. The scrutiny proceeds from the study of the peculiarities of Heidegger’s approach to the problem of being that is considered to be the knot of his (...) philosophy. It is noted that Heidegger, having deserted the traditional ontology already in his early works, continued, nevertheless, using its terms including “being” for a long time and thereby in a way obscured the peculiarities of his approach. Only later Heidegger tried to reject the traditional concept of being as infinitely continuing state in favor of the concept of Ereignis that is usually translated as “appropriating event” or “event of appropriation”. Thus, according to Heidegger, being gives us beings as a whole by appropriating sense to them and thereby turning them into the familiar and accessible environment for dwelling. Just the “givenness” of beings as a whole makes them familiar, one’s own. Accordingly, the “dwelling” means for Heidegger not only the security, but also the intelligibility of the environment, whereas the homelessness means the latter’s uncanny incomprehensibility. It is emphasized that Heidegger’s interpretation of homelessness is closely connected with a standard theoretical model explaining the emergence of the private and public realms. According to this model, just the extension of family as the initial one’s own resulted in the turning of household into city-state that, having been specified by the image of one super-family, added the elements of the foreign to the initial state of society. (shrink)

The purpose of the research is to analyze the context, the essence, and the philosophical implications of Franz Rosenzweig's reconsideration of the ban on idolatry as an implication of pure monotheism. As often as not idolatry is defined generally as the adoration of some images that, representing deity, are considered to be autonomous and hereupon become the objects of worship. The study confines itself to the analysis of the significance of the ban on idolatry in Rosenzweig's interpretation of the concept (...) of difference that underlies his theoretical model of the Other. The consideration proceeds on the general assumption that the encounter of tradition with modernity is the factor that determines the radical change in the philosophies of societies under modernization. In this context, the ancient ban on idolatry means the rejection and prohibition of whatever representation as intricate mediation that is, in turn, the hallmark of modernity. However, according to Rosenzweig, idolatry is not the usage of images as the representations of the reputedly unrepresentable God, but the fixation on one image which would mean the arbitrary limitation of God's infinite freedom to reveal himself visually. This implies that the reconsidered ban on idolatry does not require the absolute prohibition of representation, but the latter should be construed as temporal. Such an approach prevents the identification of the representation of entity with this entity itself, the sign with the thing, and therefore prohibits self-referentiality. Rosenzweig's stance determines also his understanding of familiarity, unfamiliarity, and difference in art and translation. Rosenzweig's emphasis on the shocking influence of the defamiliarizing difference as the feature of the work of art correlates with his interpretation of the translation that should make stable shared senses unfamiliar. Thus, the reconsidered ban on idolatry underlies Rosenzweig's conception of the reconciliation between Jewish tradition and modernity. (shrink)

The article reviews the concepts of the multi-author book Society. National Strategy. War: Political and Strategic Lessons of the First World War. This collective research is notable for rich original scientific apparatus and methodological proficiency. Thus, the analysis of participating countries is conducted according to a single template, which includes: the state of pre-war society in all participating countries ; goals of engaging in war and expectations of the powerful and financial elites for the war ; assessment of how did (...) different strata of society find the war; the evolution of the morale of the people during the war; problems that arose during the war ; the evolution of women’s position in society during the war, the development of a broad segment of women-workers, the extension of emancipation as one of the positive results of the war; the outcome of the war for the country. Special attention is drawn to the pacifist nature of the ideology of the reviewed research, demonstration of deprivation and suffering of people in all countries. The book’s authors identify the main causes of the First World War: ambitions and inefficiency of the world’s elites, the lack of a coherent strategy. As the result, the USA, thanks to their strategy, received the maximum dividends with minimal participation. At the same time, it is noted that the context of research on the nature of war should be expanded to take into account the general competition of countries and civilizations. The authors comprehensively analyze the informational and propaganda activities of the participating countries and conclude that England’s activities in this field were the most effective. Based on the methodology of this collective research, the nature of a future world war, its potential participants and their goals can be considered. (shrink)

This is the second of two special issues, and the articles are grouped according to two themes: The previous, first issue featured articles that shared the theme Technologies and the Political, while this second issue is focused on the theme of Subjectivities. In this second, somewhat expanded, introduction, the “sky’s the limit.” This introduction canvasses various theoretical and conceptual-empricial perspectives that the articles of both issues touch on and further tries to open many doors through which readers are invited to (...) go on their own rather than give readymade answers. This introduction is written not only to give both an overview of some of the most important conceptual, methodological, and empirical contexts that the two special issues evoke but also to create invitations for many further conversations to be had from here on forward by beginning the interrogating and troubling of the intercourse between “science” and “science fiction”: beause all of this has happened before and will happen again. (shrink)

Over the course of the Progressive Era, revised scientific accounts of the connections between dust, germs, and disease recast debates over public health. The American School of Home Economics and other institutions affiliated with the emerging subfield of household bacteriology regarded detecting and eliminating pathogens as necessary means to achieve safer homes and communities. Although several historians have attributed the rise of early twentieth-century technocracy and the decline of grassroots health activism to germ theory, household bacteriology complicates this standard narrative. (...) Educators like Sophronia Maria Elliott (1854–1942) rejected the command-and-control tactics of the “new” public health and instead instructed women how to culture microorganisms and to measure the risks of infection within their surrounding environments using kitchen experiments. Household bacteriologists aspired to train “sanitary citizens” with the right and the duty to test for germs with everyday equipment, to prevent disease with effective housekeeping, and to advocate for policies and infrastructure to keep society well. (shrink)

The article focuses on juxtaposing the stances of Franz Rosenzweig and Emmanuel Levinas on the notion of the Other based on the metaphysical principles of modernity so as to expose the prerequisites for their attitude to metaphysics in whole. The peculiarity of the proposed approach is the analysis of the notions of the Other in Rosenzweig and Levinas from the perspective of Jacques Derrida’s philosophy. The scrutiny proceeds from the assumption that the national philosophies, having been considered as the specific (...) response to the effects of the encounter of societies to be modernized with the spreading modernity, for that very reason attach great importance to the construal of the Other. It is emphasized that the similarities between the national schools of philosophy indicate correlating the particular with the general as the paradigm for the comprehension of the Other, whereas the Jewish philosophy has previously conceptualized that paradigm by way of the opposition of “Athens and Jerusalem”. In an effort to assess the capabilities of the above-mentioned paradigm the analysis of the relevant range of problems is set into the wider context and they are considered in connection with the transition from essentialism to anti-essentialism that characterizes already the late modernity. It is disclosed that Rosenzweig’s stance was still essentialist, while Levinas tried to abandon the essentialist understanding of the Other, albeit he did not complete the transition to anti-essentialism. Levinas’ break with metaphysics was brought to a close by Derrida whose anti-essentialist stance on identity and difference radically diverges from the thinking that adheres to the “metaphysics of presence”. In the issue, Derrida who does not formally belong to the Jewish philosophy could afford to summarize Rozenzweig’s and Levinas’ approaches to the problem of the Other, and in so doing he makes a contribution to both general and Jewish philosophy. (shrink)

In this article, I consider the historical stages of development of nanotechnology in Russia as well as the political framework for this. It is shown that early federal nanotechnology programs in Russia date back to the 1990s and that since the mid-2000s, nanotechnology has attracted the increasing attention of government. I characterize the formation of the political landscape and the basic institutions for the promotion of nanotechnology in relation to the adoption of the Russian Federation president’s initiative “Strategy of Nanoindustry (...) Development” in 2007. The evaluative part of the article deals with three aspects: (a) bibliometric to assess Russian research output in nanotechnology, (b) scientific cadre to assess the research capacity of Russia in the long term, and (c) economical to consider the early results and prospects of the domestic nanoindustry. To construct the scientometric indicators, I used the Science Citation Index Expanded and some internal databases. The texts of program documents and available reports served as the source of economic information. (shrink)

This book makes trouble: it explores the reality that digital culture is largely an extension of an older coloniality of power of the global north. It suggests a line of inquiry for the social sciences to reflect on their own imperial role and develop a contemporary critical and pragmatic scope, shifting their gaze from problems to opportunities.

This is the first of two special issues and the articles are grouped according to two themes: This first issue will feature articles that share a theme we call Technologies and the Political, while the second issue will feature the theme Subjectivities. However, we could equally consider them exercises in provincialization in the (counter)factual register in the first issue, and by affective historiography as conceptual-empirical labor(atory) in the second issue. What we have generally asked of all authors is to consider (...) that the relation between science and society is often heavily influenced by and identified in the intermediary figurations portrayed in the genre of science fiction. (shrink)

The authors try to show that even Wittgensteinian definition of concept is not always sufficient to analyze what really happens in science. As a result, in addition to “concept” we propose “conception” as a new promising tool for philosophy of science. We provide a brief historical analysis of this term and reveal two main interpretations of “conception” in philosophy and scientific disciplines. In accordance with the first view, conception appears as either a “twin” of the concept, or a pair entity (...) to the concept. According to the second view, conception is a kind of “strange concept” that exists among “normal” concepts. Since conception is understood differently in sciences and philosophical systems, it is not possible to give a generalized definition of conception. That is, it is impossible to formulate this definition, so to speak, inductively. Moreover, even if it was possible, such a definition would not necessarily have to be automatically accepted by philosophy of science. That is why the introduction of a concept of conception was carried out through the analysis of a global process associated with the return of metaphysics to science. We define conception as a semantic construction denoting the unknown (and, possibly, fundamentally unknowable) and ensuring the possibility of working with this unknown (unknowable). By virtue of the way conception was introduced (conception is not a “generalization” of the interpretations available in specific sciences) many conceptions that are considered as conception in specific sciences turn out to not to be conceptions within this definition. Thus, the article interprets conception as a new possible tool of philosophy of science, which is aimed at understanding how specific sciences develop. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:David Hume to Alexander Dick: A New Letter Heiner Klemme Hume's letter to the well-known physician and sometime President of the Edinburgh Royal College of Physicians, Sir Alexander Dick (formerlyCunningham)(1703-1785),1 belongs toa series ofinteresting letters written by philosophers and historians of the Scottish Enlightenment to be found in the autograph-collection of the German chemist and historian of science Ludwig Darmstaedter (1846-1927). Although a catalogue has been published (...) which lists the items ofhis collection in 1909, some of its autographs have not been noticed by scholars. The only hitherto known letter from Hume to Dick was written in August 1760. However, Hume mentions Dick once in a letter of 1762. Although the letter of 1771 listed below does not contribute in any specific way to our knowledge of their relationship, it might be of general interest to students ofHume.?. Staatsbibliothek Preußischer Kulturbesitz Berlin (West) Signature: Sammlung Darmstaedter, 2a 1748 (1) [Address:] To Sir Alexander Dick Bar1 Dear Sir This will be deliverdtoyoubyMrPanton,5 whogoes offthe Endof this Week, to New York. I have us'd the Freedom ofintroducing him to you, both as he is a young Man of Merit, and as I thought it probable you might take the Oppertunity of writing to your Friend, Mr Smith, by so good ahand. Ifyou do, I shoudbegofyou to recommend the young Gentlemen to his Acquaintance; and you may safely mention him as a Man of Letters and a Man of Character. He is to settle in New York, and it is impossible but he must get acquainted with Mr Smith; but a Recommendation from so good an Authority as Yours, wou'd serve to Volume XVI Number 2 87 HEINER KLEMME [crossedout: probably]forwardtheirgood Correspondence, andconnect them much sooner with each other. I am Dear Sir Your most obedient and most humble EdinburghServant 18 of March 1771David Hume Philipps-Universität Marburg, F.R.G. 1.For details ofhis life and work see Leslie Stephen, ed., Dictionary ofNational Biography, Vol. 15 (London, 1888), 14a-14b. 2.Ludwig Darmstaedter, Verzeichnis der Autographensammlung (Berlin, 1909), esp. 167. The collection includes the very firstletter Hume wrote in March 1755 to Andrew Strahan, his printer. See my "'And Time does Justice to All the World': Ein unveröffentlichter Brief von David Hume an William Strahan," Journal of the History of Philosophy, forthcoming. Two further letters of Adam Smith to Thomas Cadell are to be published in Archiv für Geschichte derPhilosophie. 3.See R. Klibansky and E. C. Mossner, eds., New letters ofDavid Hume (Oxford, 1954; reprint, New York, 1983), 58-64. 4.See New Letters (above,?. 3), 68. 5.I have not been able to verify the identity ofthis person nor ofthe Mr. Smith mentioned below. 88Hume Studies... (shrink)

Can there be grounding without necessitation? Can a fact obtain wholly in virtue of metaphysically more fundamental facts, even though there are possible worlds at which the latter facts obtain but not the former? It is an orthodoxy in recent literature about the nature of grounding, and in first-order philosophical disputes about what grounds what, that the answer is no. I will argue that the correct answer is yes. I present two novel arguments against grounding necessitarianism, and show that grounding (...) contingentism is fully compatible with the various explanatory roles that grounding is widely thought to play. (shrink)

This paper maps the landscape for a range of views concerning the metaphysics of natural kinds. I consider a range of increasingly ontologically committed views concerning natural kinds and the possible arguments for them. I then ask how these relate to natural kind essentialism, arguing that essentialism requires commitment to kinds as entities. I conclude by examining the homeostatic property cluster view of kinds in the light of the general understanding of kinds developed.

Those who favour an ontology based on dispositions are thereby able to provide a dispositional essentialist account of the laws of nature. In part 1 of this paper I sketch the dispositional essentialist conception of properties and the concomitant account of laws. In part 2, I characterise various claims about the modal character of properties that fall under the heading ‘quidditism’ and which are consequences of the categoricalist view of properties, which is the alternative to the dispositional essentialist view. I (...) argue that quidditism should be rejected. In part 3, I address a criticism of a strong dispositional essentialist view, viz. that ‘structural’ (i.e. geometrical, numerical, spatial and temporal) properties must be regarded as categorical. (shrink)

I articulate a functional characterisation of the concept of evidence, according to which evidence is that which allows us to make inferences that extend our knowledge. This entails Williamson's equation of knowledge with evidence.

A counteridentical is a counterfactual with an identity statement in the antecedent. While counteridenticals generally seem non-trivial, most semantic theories for counterfactuals, when combined with the necessity of identity and distinctness, attribute vacuous truth conditions to such counterfactuals. In light of this, one could try to save the orthodox theories either by appealing to pragmatics or by denying that the antecedents of alleged counteridenticals really contain identity claims. Or one could reject the orthodox theory of counterfactuals in favor of a (...) hyperintensional semantics that accommodates non-trivial counterpossibles. In this paper, I argue that none of these approaches can account for all the peculiar features of counteridenticals. Instead, I propose a modified version of Lewis’s counterpart theory, which rejects the necessity of identity, and show that it can explain all the peculiar features of counteridenticals in a satisfactory way. I conclude by defending the plausibility of contingent identity from objections. (shrink)

This paper proposes and examines an answer to the special composition question—complex objects compress information about their parts. I start by defending fastenation for material objects and then extract from fastenation the idea that the conjoinment of parts establishes correlations among the locations and motions of those parts. I move from this to the proposal that entities are parts of some object when that object allows for the efficient, if lossy, compression of information about those parts.

In Bird 2001 I argued that a law that might seem to many to be contingent is in fact necessary. In short the argument is this. Given the existence of salt and water, Coulomb’s law of electrostatic attraction is sufficient to make the former dissolve in the latter. So any possible world in which salt failed to dissolve in water would be one in which Coulomb’s law is false. However, it is also the case that the existence of salt depends (...) on Coulomb’s law. If Coulomb’s law is false then salt cannot exist. So there is no possible world in which salt exists and in which it does not dissolve in water. (shrink)

Fine is widely thought to have refuted the simple modal account of essence, which takes the essential properties of a thing to be those it cannot exist without exemplifying. Yet, a number of philosophers have suggested resuscitating the simple modal account by appealing to distinctions akin to the distinction Lewis draws between sparse and abundant properties, treating only those in the former class as candidates for essentiality. I argue that ‘sparse modalism’ succumbs to counterexamples similar to those originally posed by (...) Fine, and fails to capture paradigmatic instances of essence involving abundant properties and relations. (shrink)

Effective altruism (EA) is a movement devoted to the idea of doing good in the most effective way possible. EA has been the target of a number of critiques. In this article, I focus on one prominent critique: that EA fails to acknowledge the importance of institutional change. One version of this critique claims that EA relies on an overly individualistic approach to ethics. Defenders of EA have objected that this charge either fails to identify a problem with EA's core (...) idea that each of us should do the most good we can, or makes unreasonable claims about what we should do. However, I argue that we can understand the critique in a way that is well motivated, and that can avoid these objections. (shrink)

In my 'Dispositions and Antidotes', The Philosophical Quarterly, 48 (1998), I raise an objection to the conditional analysis of dispositions, both in its simple formulation and in a more sophisticated version due to David Lewis, The Philosophical Quarterly, 47 (1997). The objection suggests that a disposition may be continuously present and the appropriate stimulus occur without the manifestation occurring, because some outside influence, an antidote, interferes. Gundersen in The Philosophical Quarterly, 50 (2000), argues that my objection rests on an equivocation (...) about which object possesses the disposition and more particularly on an equivocation about the context in which the events referred to take place, and that when the equivocation is resolved the counter-example disappears. I respond by showing that the counter-example does remain if we take contextual and mereological issues into account, and I conclude by remarking that the difference with Lewisdepends on whether certain features are seen as significant for the semanticsand metaphysics of dispositions or as merely characteristic of the pragmaticsof common usage. (shrink)

When we think about ethics, we normally focus on a particular sort of agent: the individual person. Some philosophers have argued that we should rethink the limits of what counts as an ethically relevant unit of agency by expanding outward, and claiming that groups of people can have normative reasons for action. In this paper, I explore whether we can go in the other direction. Are there sub‐personal beings who count as agents with their own reasons for action? In particular, (...) might the temporal parts of persons, beings like “me‐in‐my‐twenties,” be thought of as normative agents? This idea, I argue, has deep attractions, and deep, but surmountable, challenges. And if we do accept this idea, I argue, this can indirectly help to support the case for thinking that groups can have reasons for action. (shrink)

Jason Bowers and Meg Wallace have recently argued that those who hold that every individual instantiates a ‘haecceity’ are caught up in a Euthyphro-style dilemma when confronted with familiar cases of fission and fusion. Key to Bowers and Wallace’s dilemma are certain assumptions about the nature of metaphysical explanation and the explanatory commitments of belief in haecceities. However, I argue that the dilemma only arises due to a failure to distinguish between providing a metaphysical explanation of why a fact holds (...) vs. a metaphysical explanation of what it is for a fact to hold. In the process, I also shed light on the explanatory commitments of belief in haecceities. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:On Reviewing: A Response to Mary Ann StankiewiczRalph A. Smith, Professor EmeritusI very much appreciate the positive comments made by Mary Ann Stankiewicz in her review published in Studies in Art Education of my Readings in Discipline-Based Art Education: A Literature of Educational Reform.1 I was gratified to read that she believes the volume is a comprehensive and valuable guide that all art educators should own as a reference (...) source for the intellectual history of American art education in the late-twentieth century. Stankiewicz further notes my steadfastness in holding to a vision ofaesthetic education that is firmly rooted in the humanities and my forthrightness in acknowledging that a different choice of selections might well convey a somewhat different picture of Discipline-Based Art Education (DBAE). Between encomia, however, Stankiewicz raises questions about my editorial politics (that is, opportunities editors have to make selections they think are important) and my views about art education.The format of Stankiewicz's review was patterned after an essay in the volume by Frances Schoonmaker who discusses the professional preparation of teachers in terms of autobiography, school contexts, and scholarship. Accordingly, Stankiewicz recalls in some detail her own extensive participation in the Getty's educational venture in art education. And instead of referring to the Introduction's discussion of historical antecedents of DBAE she provides her own account of events that were contemporaneous with Getty's period of operation and refers to some currents of contemporary thinking. In other words, she does not give the kind of space to the book's contents that reviewers usually do.2 This prompted me to recall some material from the book's Introduction, which is followed by a sketch of the DBAE literature project that furnished the impetus for the volume and rejoinders to some of Stankiewicz's concerns.DBAE RememberedThe Getty Center for Education in the Arts (later renamed the Getty Education Institute for the Arts and eventually discontinued) flourished mainly in the 1980s and 1990s and proceeded under the banner of DBAE. The Getty's notion of DBAE supported a major trend that had been growing in the field since the mid-1950s. In this respect the Getty initiative was neither novel nor revolutionary. Yet by correcting an error of certain reform movements, namely those whose tendency was to bypass professionals in the field, it did constitute a significant venture. Getty officers perceived the field to be [End Page 93] moving in the direction of strengthening the content of art education with additional content that was believed requisite for an intelligent and sensitive engagement with works of art. In effect the Getty position argued that a well-developed sense of art is composed not just of the rudiments of artistic creation art but also those of a number of other relevant disciplines, for example the interrelated disciplines of art making, art history, art criticism, and aesthetics (usually understood as the philosophy of art). It was acknowledged that these were not the only disciplines relevant to art education, but they were considered to be basic. Nor was it believed that these disciplines should be taught as separate subjects; rather, they were meant to suggest content and useful modes of inquiry. As Stankiewicz notes, DBAE endorsed both the substantive and procedural dimensions of the cognitive revolution that was occurring in thinking about mind and learning. Indeed, mind building emerged as one of the major themes in the theory underlying the Getty approach.3Not surprisingly, the Getty approach had its critics. As pointed out in my "Afterthoughts,"the Getty initiative was contemporaneous with the increasing politicization of cultural and educational life.4 The critical literature produced in this climate — subscribing variously to postmodernism, multiculturalism, feminism, cultural studies, social reconstructionism, and deconstruction — was often by turns extreme, dense, and intimidating. It further tended to be skeptical of Western cultural values and traditions. I think it is fair to say that many in the field of art education were ill prepared to digest these writings or to be alert to some of their potential negative consequences. I mention just a few of these.For example, although developing an appreciation for hitherto unfamiliar cultures is... (shrink)

Is the nature of explanation a metaphysical issue? Or has it more to do with psychology and pragmatics? To put things in a different way: what are primary relata in an explanation? What sorts of thing explain what other sorts of thing? David Lewis identifies two senses of ‘explanation’ (Lewis 1986, 217–218). In the first sense, an explanation is an act of explaining. I shall call this the subjectivist sense, since its existence depends on some subject doing the explaining. Hence (...) it is people who, in this sense, explain things. In the second of his two senses, Lewis says, quoting Sylvain Bromberger, that one may properly ask of an explanation “Does anyone know it? Who thought of it first? Is it very complicated?” (Lewis 1986, 218; Bromberger 1965). In this second sense, no subject is needed, the explanation can remain unknown, perhaps for ever. So I call this the objectivist sense. (shrink)

This paper shows that the history of clinical medicine in the eighteenth century supports Paul Hoyningen-Huene’s thesis that there is a correlation between science and systematicity. For example, James Jurin’s assessment of the safety of variolation as a protection against smallpox adopted a systematic approach to the assessment of interventions in order to eliminate sources of cognitive bias that would compromise inquiry. Clinical medicine thereby became a science. I use this confirming instance to motivate a broader hypothesis, that systematicity is (...) a distinctive feature of science because systematicity is required by processes of knowledge generation that go beyond our everyday cognitive capacities, and these processes are required to produce knowledge of the kinds that science aims at. (shrink)