A naturalistic theory of rationalization is defended against a fundamental objection. The theory claims that: The rationalizing relation can be fully analysed in causal explanatory terms. However, is rendered problematic by the fact that: Rationalizations exhibit a higher degree of intensionality than ordinary physical causal explanations. To show that can be maintained in the face of , I develop an account of on which and may be reconciled. ;The opening chapter gives an account of the intensionality of ordinary physical causal (...) explanations by developing a counterfactual analysis of causal relevance. Chapter II examines the nature and intensionality of rationalizations. It is argued that despite , a rationalization partly involves a causal relevance relation between its explanans and explanandum. ;In Chapter III, I consider an argument which implies that is false: Davidson's argument that there can be no psychophysical laws. An attempt is made to give a clear and compelling representation of this argument. As I interpret it, the argument depends on the alleged insolubility of the problem of causal deviance in action. ;Chapter IV develops a general theory of deviance according to which any functional system may produce output in a deviant way, and applies this theory to agents. A negative consequence of the theory is that an action may be performed in a deviant way even if the agent's intention causally explains the action . A positive consequence of the theory is that an action is performed in a non-deviant way just in case there is an appropriate causal explanation of why the agent's intention causes him to act. My specific suggestion is that an agent performs an action in a non-deviant way when and only when his intention causes him to act because he "knows how" to act in that way. ;In the last chapter, it is argued that our solution to the problem of deviance can be adapted to account for in causal explanatory terms. In this way and are reconciled. (shrink)

Someone may intend to build a squirrel house without having decided to do it, deliberated about it, formed an intention to do it, or reasoned about it. And despite his intention, he may never build a squirrel house, try to build one, or do anything whatever with the intention of getting a squirrel house built. Pure intending of this kind, intending that may occur without practical reasoning, action, or consequence, poses a problem if we want to give an account of (...) the concept of intention that does not invoke unanalysed episodes or attitudes like willing, mysterious acts of the will, or kinds of causation foreign to science. (shrink)

This paper explores the notion of reciprocity in the context of active pulmonary and laryngeal tuberculosis treatment and related control policies and practices. We seek to do three things: First, we sketch the background to contemporary global TB care and suggest that poverty is a key feature when considering the treatment of TB patients. We use two examples from TB care to explore the role of reciprocity: isolation and the use of novel TB drugs. Second, we explore alternative means of (...) justifying the use of reciprocity through appeal to different moral and political theoretical traditions. We suggest that each theory can be used to provide reasons to take reciprocity seriously as an independent moral concept, despite any other differences. Third, we explore general meanings and uses of the concept of reciprocity, with the primary intention of demonstrating that it cannot be simply reduced to other more frequently invoked moral concepts such as beneficence or justice. We argue that reciprocity can function as a mid-level principle in public health, and generally, captures a core social obligation arising once an individual or group is burdened as a result of acting for the benefit of others. We conclude that while more needs to be explored in relation to the theoretical justification and application of reciprocity, sufficient arguments can be made for it to be taken more seriously as a key principle within public health ethics and bioethics more generally. (shrink)

Attention to internal body sensations is practiced in most meditation traditions. Many traditions state that this practice results in increased awareness of internal body sensations, but scientific studies evaluating this claim are lacking. We predicted that experienced meditators would display performance superior to that of nonmeditators on heartbeat detection, a standard noninvasive measure of resting interoceptive awareness. We compared two groups of meditators (Tibetan Buddhist and Kundalini) to an age- and body mass index-matched group of nonmeditators. Contrary to our prediction, (...) we found no evidence that meditators were superior to nonmeditators in the heartbeat detection task, across several sessions and respiratory modulation conditions. Compared to nonmeditators, however, meditators consistently rated their interoceptive performance as superior and the difficulty of the task as easier. These results provide evidence against the notion that practicing attention to internal body sensations, a core feature of meditation, enhances the ability to sense the heartbeat at rest. (shrink)

Les révolutions et les mouvements de libération vis-à-vis des puissances coloniales et impériales posent d’emblée la question du « nous » qui porte ces revendications, écartelé entre régionalismes, nationalismes et panaméricanisme, panafricanisme ou panarabisme voire internationalisme, fragmenté entre plusieurs identités religieuses et ethnolinguistiques. Dans les moments de crise ou de « conjoncture fluide » où s’entrechoquent plusieurs horizons d’attente, les frontières de genre, de classe,...

This paper explores the social, legal, and political issues Wal-Mart faces in each of the three North American countries and suggests reasons for the quite significant differences. It also issues a call to Business and Society scholars to add prescriptive work to the already large body of descriptive work that has been collected.

This work examines Michel Foucault’s critique of the present, through his analysis of our hidden but still active historical legacies. His works from the Eighties are the beginning of what he called a “genealogy of the desiring subject,” in which he shows that practices such as confession—in its juridical, psychological, and religious forms—have largely dictated how we think about our ethical selves. This constrains our notions of ethics to legalistic forbidden/required dichotomies, and requires that we engage in a hermeneutics of (...) the self which consistently fails to discover its imagined authentic self, or to find the happiness and freedom promised by contemporary ethics. In order to think the modern self in different terms, Foucault’s later works analyzed Classical and Hellenistic ethical sources, emphasizing their distance from today. He hoped doing so would allow us to rethink our current assumptions about ethical matters, the truth of oneself, and the relation to others. While Foucault’s genealogical descriptions critically diagnosed contemporary ills such as these, he did not prescribe a cure, preferring to let his readers experiment with new practices of their own design. This work attempts such an experiment, supplying concrete solutions to our ethical ills, in order to help us improve, as well as understand, our ethical selves. To that end, this work demonstrates that a form of subjectivity based on Benedict Spinoza’s ethical and political works avoids the pitfalls of modern ethics as diagnosed by Foucault. Additionally, the practices of the self found in Spinoza can be used to directly counter and displace each central element of “desiring subjectivity,” and thus supplies the kind of effective positive move which should follow after genealogical critique. (shrink)

This book comprises two long chapters. The first chapter, entitled “The China syndrome, logical form, translation,” is a treatise on linguistic relativism with specific reference to Chinese language. It is not directly related to the title of the book, “Aristotle in China,” except by what it calls “the Aristotelian principle” implied in the “guidance and constraint hypothesis” of linguistic relativism. The writing of this chapter is motivated as a critical response to Angus Graham’s Disputers of the Tao, characterized by (...) Robert Wardy as adhering itself to the “ guidance and constraints hypothesis,” which means that the linguistic structure of a particular language is either guiding or giving constraint to a certain way of philosophical thinking. Chapter 1 traces this position back to B. Worf’s Language, Thought and Reality, which, on the basis of the Hopi language, propounds something similar to the guidance and constraint hypothesis. Then it shows the historical connection of this position to Levi-Bruhl’s Mentalité primitive and Von Humbolt’s monograph Lettre à M. Abel-Rémusat sur la nature des formes grammaticales en générale, et sur le genie de la langue chinois en particulier. For Robert Wardy, this hypothesis could be found also in philosophy of language, for example in Quine’s notion of “radical translation” and Davidson’s critique of it. It is also extended to sinology as in the case of French sinologists such as Granet and Gernet, who were under the influence of Humboldt’s legacy. (shrink)

The paper explores how the concepts of corporate social responsibility (CSR) and business ethics are perceived by business managers and business school professors/administrators in China, using interviews. The findings suggest that the perceptions of both concepts are tinged with cultural nuances. The study has implications for further developing business ethics research programs in the Chinese context and for crosscultural communications and management.

As educators, writers and public intellectuals, many of us share a sense of responsibility for reflecting on the worlds in which we live, with a view to transforming them for the common good, towar...

A starting point for this paper is that there is at least one concept of probability, call it epistemic probability, which can be identified with belief or some sort of idealised belief. If this identification is to be of any significance, then it needs to be shown that epistemic probability is a ‘true’ probability concept and is subject to those restrictions and requirements which relate and govern probabilities, which we call the probability calculus.The most rehearsed argument to establish the probability (...) calculus for epistemic probabilities is the Dutch Book Argument. There are two intuitions behind the DBA. The first is that if we can find some fine-grained behavioural measure of epistemic probability, then we may be able to show that epistemic probabilities obey the probability calculus by showing that the behaviour is of a kind which is, as a matter of necessity, subject to certain limitations and restrictions. (shrink)

Cognitive Science, Volume 46, Issue 2, February 2022.

Gathering an international team of scholars, The Companion to Freedom and Nature is the first book devoted exclusively to Paul Ricoeur’s Freedom and Nature. Covering important influences on Ricoeur’s early thought and connecting it to current issues in embodied cognition and the philosophy of will, the companion promotes a renewed appreciation of the contemporary relevance of this groundbreaking work.

“Every man his specialty” brings recent debates about dependency into the foreground of disability studies by looking at one modernist author, Samuel Beckett, whose characters are often disabled but who rely on each other for solace and support. Beckett’s plays explore the “abject dependence” of individuals for whom ontological and theological props have been removed and who must negotiate the passing of time in order as Estragon in Godot says, “to create the illusion we exist.

Econometric Theory and Methods International Edition provides a unified treatment of modern econometric theory and practical econometric methods. The geometrical approach to least squares is emphasized, as is the method of moments, which is used to motivate a wide variety of estimators and tests. Simulation methods, including the bootstrap, are introduced early and used extensively. The book deals with a large number of modern topics. In addition to bootstrap and Monte Carlo tests, these include sandwich covariance matrix estimators, artificial regressions, (...) estimating functions and the generalized method of moments, indirect inference, and kernel estimation. Every chapter incorporates numerous exercises, some theoretical, some empirical, and many involving simulation. (shrink)

Hermeneutics and Phenomenology in Paul Ricoeur: Between Text and Phenomenon calls attention to the dynamic interaction that takes place between hermeneutics and phenomenology in Ricoeur's thought. It could be said that Ricoeur's thought is placed under a twofold demand: between the rigor of the text and the requirements of the phenomenon. The rigor of the text calls for fidelity to what the text actually says, while the requirement of the phenomenon is established by the Husserlian call to return "to the (...) things themselves." These two demands are interwoven insofar as there is a hermeneutic component of the phenomenological attempt to go beyond the surface of things to their deeper meaning, just as there is a phenomenological component of the hermeneutic attempt to establish a critical distance toward the world to which we belong. For this reason, Ricoeur's thought involves a back and forth movement between the text and the phenomenon. Although this double movement was a theme of many of Ricoeur's essays in the middle of his career, the essays in this book suggest that hermeneutic phenomenology remains implicit throughout his work. The chapters aim to highlight, in much greater detail, how this back and forth movement between phenomenology and hermeneutics takes place with respect to many important philosophical themes, including the experience of the body, history, language, memory, personal identity, and intersubjectivity. (shrink)

A birth strike is a collective refusal to have children for political ends. It has been deployed by a wide array of political movements, from the resistance of Black people to plantation slavery to contemporary campaigns around climate change. Despite this, the tactic has received little attention from political theorists. Drawing on a range of perspectives – including empirical accounts of the birth strike, broader scholarship on the politics of strikes and Black feminist work on reproductive justice – this article (...) addresses the challenges and potentialities of the birth strike as a mode of political resistance. To this end, I delineate three different forms of the birth strike: the Malthusian, which focuses on directly addressing overpopulation; the sacrificial, which emphasises the self-directed suffering of the strike to force a change in policy; and, the defiant, which involves refusing pronatalist demands to maintain or increase the population rate. The Malthusian and sacrificial forms should be avoided since the former undermines reproductive justice and the latter reinforces the patriarchal association between womanhood and motherhood. By contrast, I defend the defiant form because it forges a space where people can make autonomous decisions about childbirth. (shrink)