Vagueness is the study of concepts that admit borderline cases. The epistemology of vagueness concerns attitudes we should have towards propositions we know to be borderline. On this basis Andrew Bacon develops a new theory of vagueness in which vagueness is fundamentally a property of propositions, explicated in terms of its role in thought.

In this book about metaphysics the author defends a realistic view of universals, characterizing the notion of universal by considering language and logic, the idea of possibility, hierarchies of universals, and causation. He argues that neither language nor logic is a reliable guide to the nature of reality and that basic universals are the fundamental type of universal and are central to causation. All assertions and predications about the natural world are ultimately founded on these basic universals. A distinction is (...) drawn between unified particulars and arbitrary particulars ; unified particulars are the terms of causal relations and thus the real constituents of the world. The world is not made up of events but of unified particulars and basic universals. (shrink)

This Special Issue commemorates the 60th anniversary of Business & Society with nine rigorous literature reviews that address important societal problems and provide opportunities for theory development in the business and society field; in this introduction we present an overview of the Special Issue. With the theme “Building on Its Past,” the nine articles address a host of contemporary issues, including climate change, wicked problems, business and human rights, human health, certifications standards, the governance of artificial intelligence, stakeholder engagement, stakeholder (...) theory, and corporate political activity. Together, these reviews offer a wealth of suggested themes, theories and approaches that can drive our research forward for the next decades in business and society research and practice. Using the lens of a miner-prospector continuum to categorize the diversity of articles within this special issue, a common theme emerges across the portfolio of reviews: they all call for a more systemic and integrative perspective toward studying the complex interactions that link business and society actors and issues. Building on these findings, we encourage future scholars to fill long-standing researched gaps through a more open systems approach, which supports both contextually sensitive and multi-level and multi-disciplinary approaches to address grand societal challenges. We conclude with specific suggestions as to how business and society scholars might use an open systems approach, including embracing methodologies to address complex causal pathways, theorizing with a view towards spanning external and internal elements of an organization, and reflecting on the temporal and spatial dynamics of complex systems. (shrink)

This article discusses the emergence of a patenting culture in university science. Patenting culture is examined empirically in the context of the increasing commerciali zation of science, and theoretically within debates over scientific "credibility." The article explores the translation of academic credit into patents, and vice versa, and argues that this process raises new questions for our understanding of scientific recognition and of scientists' networks. In particular, the analysis suggests that scientists must move between two distinct social worlds to manage (...) the rewards that academic and patent cultures carry. (shrink)

The contributors to _Somaesthetics and Sport_ explore our embodied experiences of watching and playing sport, including sport’s beauty; the place of exercise in our sense of living a good life; and how we cope with pain and suffering.

Friedrich Schleiermacher is best known as the ''father of liberal Protestant theology,'' largely on the strength of his massive work of systematic theology, The Christian Faith. In this book, Andrew Dole presents a new account of Schleiermacher's theory of religion. Dole argues that Schleiermacher integrates the individualistic side of religion with a set of claims about its social dynamics, and that this takes place within a broader understanding of all events in the world as the product of a universal, (...) law-governed ''causal nexus.''. (shrink)

Decoherence results from the dissipative interaction between a quantum system and its environment. As the system and environment become entangled, the reduced density operator describing the system "decoheres" into a mixture (with the interference terms damped out). This formal result prompts some to exclaim that the measurement problem is solved. I will scrutinize this claim by examining how modal and relative-state interpretations can use decoherence. Although decoherence cannot rescue these interpretations from general metaphysical difficulties, decoherence may help these interpretations to (...) pick out a preferred basis. I will explore whether decoherence solves nagging technical problems associated with selecting a preferred basis. (shrink)

If good argument is virtuous, then fallacies are vicious. Yet fallacies cannot just be identified with vices, since vices are dispositional properties of agents whereas fallacies are types of argument. Rather, if the normativity of good argumentation is explicable in terms of virtues, we should expect the wrongness of fallacies to be explicable in terms of vices. This approach is defended through case studies of several fallacies, with particular emphasis on the ad hominem.

Critical Realism and Marxism addresses controversial debates, revealing a potentially fruitful relationship; deepening our understanding of the social world and contibuting towards eliminating barbarism in contemporary capitalism.

Eric Schwitzgebel, Fiery Cushman, and Joshua Rust have conducted a series of studies of the thought and behavior of professional ethicists. They have found no evidence that ethical reflection yields distinctive improvements in behavior. This work has been done on English-speaking ethicists. Philipp Schönegger and Johannes Wagner replicated one study with German-speaking professors. Their results are almost the same, except for finding that German-speaking ethicists were more likely to be vegetarian than non-ethicists. The present paper devises and evaluates eleven psychological (...) hypotheses (along with one from Schönegger and Wagner) aimed at explaining why ethical reflection might have motivational influence for this topic but not for others. Three hypotheses are judged to be plausible at this initial stage: generic emotional support, perception of cost as a source of emotional obstacles, and social categorization. (shrink)

In this paper, I draw a parallel between Søren Kierkegaard’s pseudonym Johannes Climacus and Jean-Luc Marion’s phenomenological account of revelation. By connecting Climacus’ notion of the paradox with Marion’s saturated phenomenon, I both defend what I see as similar in the two accounts and attack the clarity of Marion’s notion of saturated phenomenon. I first explicate Marion’s accusation of subject-centeredness against Husserl’s Cartesians Meditations which the transcendental ego receives from Descartes and Kant. I then look at how Marion uses this (...) to motivate his concept of the saturated phenomenon. Finally, I argue that Climacus’s paradox accomplishes the same in a more philosophical way. (shrink)

This paper discusses confidentiality as a routine issue of concern to British general practitioners participating in a qualitative study as well as in contemporaneous practice literature. While keen to reflect on routine issues, such as confidentiality, participants who professed a lack of expertise in medical ethics also perceived reluctance or inability to access educational resources or ethics support. Such lack of ability might include a perception of non-entitlement to access advice and support, a fear of criticism, or simply that resources (...) fail to be advertised. Participants' insights are set alongside a concurrent debate in the professional literature over whether problems with maintaining confidentiality should be rigorously discussed in a public forum. A preliminary suggestion is that confidentiality may be emblematic of the negotiation between academic and professional ethics. (shrink)

This study offers a new account of the development of Cartesian Occasionalism. The doctrine of Occasionalism - most famously advocated by Nicolas Malebranche - states that God alone is the cause of every event, and created substances are merely "occasional causes." In the years following René Descartes' death in 1650, several of his followers -- including Arnold Geulincx, Gerauld de Cordemoy and Louis de la Forge - argued for some version of this thesis. My study builds on recent scholarship about (...) these first Cartesian Occasionalists, the motives that led them and Malebranche to adopt Occasionalism, and the connections between Occasionalism and the views of Descartes. I analyze the doctrine of Occasionalism, and examine its relationship to Descartes' philosophy. I argue that Descartes' views in physics and metaphysics are consistent with the claim that corporeal substances have intrinsic causal powers, and reply to arguments by Gary Hatfield, Janet Broughton and Daniel Garber that purport to show otherwise. I examine how Occasionalism relates to several proposed problems with Descartes' claim that the human mind causally interacts with the human body, and argue that Occasionalism is not the "natural" solution to these problems. I conclude by canvassing the arguments of the earliest Cartesian Occasionalists. I argue Cartesian Occasionalism was neither an ad hoc solution to the mindbody problem, nor a logical consequence of Descartes' own views, but rather an attempt to extend and better systematize Cartesian philosophy. (shrink)

In a recent article, James Spiegel has suggested ways in which premortalism may bolster the free will defence in response to the logical problem of evil. Building on his presentation, this present article further reinforces the premortalist free will defence whilst also critiquing similarly related defences (such as the necessity of nomic regularity for significant freedom). Contrary to expectation, the premortalist defence is compatible with diverse accounts of divine knowledge (i.e., middle knowledge, dynamic omniscience, etc.) and does not present overly (...) problematic questions of identity if substance dualism is presupposed. More importantly, the premortalist free will defence raises critical questions of consent and agential contractualism that are often overlooked in the literature. Over against a consequentialist framework, the premortalist defence acknowledges the importance of treating the agent as an end in and of herself. Questions of eschatology naturally arise, and contra James Spiegel, this article will propose that universalism, the belief that eventually all will be saved, is nigh undeniable on a premortalist account, given perfect being theism. (shrink)

Here I will explore through a literature review three important but different ways in which skepticism has been developed. The first is that of the Gettier problem and its potentially skeptical implications for knowledge. The second is Agrippa’s Trilemma, in which the non-skeptic ostensibly struggles to develop a satisfactory account of epistemic justification. Third and lastly, there are brain-in-a-vat scenarios, as one attempts to meet the skeptic’s challenge of having knowledge of the external world. I conclude that the above are (...) important challenges while still maintaining that the non-skeptic has formulated responses worth our consideration. (shrink)

Plato’s Symposium offers an enticing range of topics for the critical-guide treatment of philosophical classics now in vogue. The current volume contains thirteen essays of consistently high quality devoted to such issues as the nature of erotic desire and its orientation toward the forms, the ethical question of how best to live in the pursuit of wisdom, Plato’s engagement with poetry, and his use of dramatic interaction between speakers to advance his philosophical agenda.An admirable feature of the volume is the (...) close attention that is paid to all parts of the Symposium. Many discussions of the dialogue focus exclusively on Socrates’s speech, but Destrée and Giannopoulou have taken care to avoid this narrowly... (shrink)

An overview of philosophical issues raised by musical performances and recordings.

Freedom of thought means freedom from social tyranny, the capacity to think for oneself, to encounter even shocking ideas without shrinking away from them. That aspiration is a core concern of the free speech tradition. It is not specifically concerned with law, but it explains some familiar aspects of the First Amendment law we actually have—aspects that the most prevalent theories of free speech fail to capture. It explains the prohibition of compelled speech, and can clarify the perennial puzzle of (...) why freedom of speech extends to art and literature. It also tells us something about the limits of legal regulation, and about the ethical obligations of private actors. (shrink)

Is pornography within the coverage of the First Amendment? A familiar argument claims that it is not. This argument reasons that the free speech principle protects the communication of ideas, which appeal to the reason ; pornography communicates no ideas and appeals to the passions rather than the reason ; therefore pornography is not protected by the free speech principle. This argument has been specified in different ways by different writers. The most prominent and careful of these are Frederick Schauer (...) and John Finnis. Both founder on the attempt to distinguish pornography from art, which both would protect. If art, film, and literature should be protected, then this protection should extend to the pornographic subsets of these genres. (shrink)

Antifertility vaccination is a proposed method of contraception that induces infertility through an immunological response to specific reproductive targets. The following essay analyzes several peer-reviewed articles to identify these potential targets and then determines the bioethical implications of vac­cine use through the lens of Thomistic personalism. Vaccines that intentionally utilize a contraceptive action violate the principles of totality, integrity, and inseparability; while vaccines that intentionally utilize a contragestive action additionally violate the principles of inviolability of human life and non-maleficence. An (...) exception may exist in cases where application is directed at the treatment of specific pathologies. These cases may be tolerated using the principle of double effect when certain conditions are met. Furthermore, the safeguarding of informed consent may prove problematic if contraception is integrated with established vaccine programs. (shrink)