This important new book by one of the world's leading political theorists boldly questions the moral justification for organizing our world as a territorial states-system and proposes major changes to states' sovereign powers.

As early-career neuroethicists, we come to the field of neuroethics at a unique moment: we are well-situated to consider nearly two decades of neuroethics scholarship and identify challenges that have persisted across time. But we are also looking squarely ahead, embarking on the next generation of exciting and productive neuroethics scholarship. In this article, we both reflect backwards and turn our gaze forward. First, we highlight criticisms of neuroethics, both from scholars within the field and outside it, that have focused (...) on speculation and lack of skepticism; the dearth of consideration of broader social issues such as justice and equality, both with regard to who speaks for neuroethics as a field and who benefits from its recommendations and findings; and the insufficient focus on the practical impact of our ethical work. Second, we embrace the concept of “translational neuroethics” to outline a vision for neuroethics that is integrated, inclusive, and impactful. Integration can help us identify more pertinent, real-world issues, and move away from speculation; inclusivity can help ensure that the questions we attend to are not merely relevant to a single subgroup but aim toward just distribution of benefits; and impact can help us think beyond guidelines and recommendations to focus on implementation. Our goal is for this call to action to help shape neuroethics into a discipline that develops rigorous research agendas through relationships with interdisciplinary partners, that is broadly inclusive and attends to issues beyond novel neurotechnologies, and that is devoted to the translation of scholarship into practice. (shrink)

Editorial Board: Karl P. Ameriks, Margaret Atherton, Frederick Beiser, Fabien Capeillères, Faustino Fabbianelli, Daniel Garber, Rudolf A. Makkreel, Steven Nadler, Alan Nelson, Christof Rapp, Ursula Renz, Wilhelm Schmidt-Biggemann, Denis Thouard, Paul Ziche, Günter Zöller The series publishes monographs and essay collections devoted to the history of philosophy as well as studies in the theory of writing the history of philosophy. A special emphasis is placed on the contextualization of philosophical historiography into the areas of the history of science, culture, and (...) the wider scope of intellectual history. (shrink)

Si la praxéologie mérite aujourd’hui notre attention, c’est parce qu’elle permet de remonter aux origines des « théories de l’action », des sociologies de l’action ou des philosophies de l’action qui ont marqué le xxe siècle. Que veut dire, au fond, étudier l’action, en proposer ensuite une théorie, à visée soit descriptive soit normative? Dans ce qui suit, on va étudier la question en compagnie de Tadeusz Kotarbiński (1886-1981), philosophe analytique, et de Harold Garfinkel (1917-2011), sociologue hétérodoxe. Ce texte défend (...) l’idée selon laquelle parmi les conséquences les plus marquantes du travail de Garfinkel se trouve la démystification de la « théorie de l’action », et que certaines intuitions similaires sont déjà très présentes chez Kotarbiński (dont les travaux sur l’action constituent, selon Garfinkel, un « échec extrêmement important »). La praxéologie chez les deux auteurs n’est pas une discipline, mais une façon de voir la pratique étudiée comme un tout, à l’instar des recherches menées par les théoriciens de la Gestalt. La dimension athéorique de l’étude de l’action humaine proposée ici permet d’espérer qu’un jour, les phénomènes qui nous entourent vont pouvoir être étudiés pour ce qu’ils sont, et non pas pour ce qu’une théorie élégante permet d’en dire. (shrink)

First-person reports are central to the study of subjective well-being in contemporary psychology, but there is much disagreement about exactly what sort of first-person reports should be used. This paper examines an influential proposal to replace all first-person reports of life satisfaction with introspective reports of affect. I argue against the reasoning behind this proposal, and propose instead a new strategy for deciding what measure is appropriate.

There are an increasing number of ways to enhance human abilities, characteristics, and performance. In recent years, the ethical debate on enhancement has focused mainly on the ethical evaluation of new enhancement technologies. Yet, the search for an adequate and shared understanding of enhancement has always remained an important part of the debate. It was initially undertaken with the intention of defining the ethical boundaries of enhancement, often by attempting to distinguish enhancements from medical treatments. One of the more recent (...) approaches comes from Julian Savulescu, Anders Sandberg, and Guy Kahane. With their welfarist account, they define enhancement in terms of its contribution to individual well-being: as any state of a person that increases the chances of living a good life in the given set of circumstances. The account aims to contribute both to a shared and clear understanding of enhancement and to answering the question of whether we should enhance in certain ways or not. I will argue that it cannot live up to either claim, in particular because of its inherent normativity and its failure to adequately define well-being. Nevertheless, it can make a valuable contribution to an ethics of enhancement. As I will show, the welfarist account refocuses the debate on a central value in health care: well-being, which can be a relevant aspect in assessing the permissibility of biomedical interventions – especially against the background of new bioethical challenges. To fulfil this function, however, a more differentiated understanding of well-being is needed. (shrink)

The concept of harm plays a central role in many philosophical discussions. There are numerous ethical theories, claims, and arguments that appeal to the concept of harm. However, some philosophers think that the concept of harm is not fit to play this role in philosophical theorizing. Bradley (2012) argues that the concept is problematic to such an extent that we should do away with it. Bradley is not the only philosopher who doubts this concept’s usefulness, although others make more modest (...) and suggestive skeptical claims. In this paper, I examine several claims in support of skepticism, which are explicitly embraced or hinted to in the literature. Some examples are the claims that the harm concept is defective and that harm is morally insignificant. Neither those claims nor others, I argue, yield a good case for skepticism about harm. (shrink)

This essay argues for the significance of visual sources in intellectual history, using a case study on the central importance of snuffboxes in eighteenth-century debates regarding politeness, commerce, virtue, and manners. It highlights the authors, artists and advertisers who celebrated snuff-taking in both verbal and visual texts as a positive symbol of elegance, sociability and the transformative effects of polite commerce. And it analyses the highly sophisticated texts of London satirists who challenged this practice as symbolising the corruption associated with (...) luxury and commerce. Challenges to this practice, which involved some of the century’s most brilliant pens, from Sir John Vanburgh to William Hogarth and James Gillray, have been neglected by intellectual historians because of a tendency to treat visual sources as illustrations, rather than as significant contributions to political theory and debate. This essay argues that such an approach has resulted in an impoverished intellectual history and that images – and even snuffboxes themselves, used in highly articulated ritual performances of politeness and satirised in highly gendered terms – should be regarded as ‘texts’ and ‘idioms’ in the politics of politeness and patronage. It highlights Cambridge school contextualism as a method by which such texts may be read productively. (shrink)

The volume aims to show the variety of research currents of the Lvov-Warsaw School and the ways in which these currents are developed today. The content of the book is divided into three parts: “Logic and Semiotics”, “Metaphysics and Ontology”, and “Psychology and Sociology”.

Executive Summary There is a general perception that biomedical research has not given the same attention to the health problems of women that it has given ...

We can understand implicit bias as a person’s disposition to evaluate members of a social group in a less favorable light than members of another social group, without intending to do so. If we understand it this way, we should not presuppose a one-size-fits-all answer to the question of how implicit cognitive states lead to skewed evaluations of other people. The focus of this paper is on implicit bias in considered decisions. It is argued that we have good reasons to (...) assume that imagination plays a vital role in decision making. If this assumption is correct, it offers an explanation for implicit bias in many considered decisions: Human beings who have been frequently exposed to stereotypes have stereotype-congruent expectations as part of their background knowledge. They feed into their imagination, sometimes without their awareness. This model would allow us to explain the key characteristics of implicit bias without recurring to any unconscious attitudes over and above such background knowledge. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to present a comparative analysis and reconstruction of the approach to social, moral, and institutional change in the theories of Adam Smith and Sophie de Grouchy. In their theories moral philosophy is inextricably linked with social thought. I also discuss the role of education and institutions in such a process. I argue that Smith's and de Grouchy's understanding of the roles of sympathy and institutions are strictly connected to the way they perceive the process (...) of social change. Both philosophers considered people as equals and equally capable of sympathizing with others. For both of them, sympathy is a key element in reconstructing how societies change. In my opinion, both these philosophers believe that such a change can be induced: in the case of de Grouchy, this would be done primarily by legislators. In the case of Smith, respected people are capable of initiating change and are subsequently followed by others. (shrink)

Recent scholarship increasingly defines Islamophobia as a form of racism. The possibility that Islamophobia could also manifest itself as religious or cultural bigotry is generally overlooked. This article argues that although anti-Islam bigotry is intertwined with anti-Muslim racism, the two are conceptually distinct. Making this distinction allows us to better analyze, unmask, and critically assess Islamophobia. The article conceptually explores the similarities and differences between anti-Muslim racism and anti-Islam bigotry. It finds that although anti-Islam bigotry implies a prejudicial rejection of (...) an essentialized idea of Islam, it understands religion or culture to be an individual choice and allows for the possibility that Muslims convert or assimilate. As such, it differs from anti-Muslim racism, which implies that the Muslim identity and the negative characteristics associated with Islam are innate and unchangeable. The article argues that contemporary Islamophobic political discourse in Europe is predominantly racist, although it hides behind a cloak of anti-Islam bigotry. (shrink)

The paper concerns a form of experiencing time which is specific for haiku poetry. Haiku is an expression of the momentary glimpse of time. Haiku poetry treats the moment uninstrumentally, neither as a result of the past nor as a transition to future deeds. Seen this way, the moment arises on the stream of time as a unique, existential experience. It is my attempt to explain the phenomenon of this experience of “now” as I explore the metaphors of “background”, “figure” (...) and “composition”. (shrink)

The Aporia of Rights is an exploration of the perplexities of human rights, and their inevitable and important intersection with the idea of citizenship. Written by political theorists and philosophers, essays canvass the complexities involved in any consideration of rights at this time. Yeatman and Birmingham show through this collection of works a space fora vital engagement with the politics of human rights.

Analytical jurisprudence and the legal mainstream perceive legal rights in an interactionist fashion, pursuant to a right-obligation duality. The Paper suggests that this is principally because legal positivism and the analytical Anglo-Saxon legal tradition ground their theories on logical positivism and the Wittgensteinian premise that meaning is produced and asserted in social use, i.e. both consensually and contextually. The paper suggests that there is a surplus of meaning which exists beyond social use and which cannot be conceptualized within the sociolinguistic (...) confines of Wittgenstein’s logic of language. This surplus of meaning corresponds to the essential core of legal rights, which, following Aristotle’s induction and philosophy of the essences, constitutes a necessary property and τὸ τί ἦν εἶναι of legal rights, namely a state of affairs or a state of being that cannot be altered without their necessary breach or, indeed, the negation of their very meaning. The Paper discusses the shortcomings of the Wittgensteinian approach and revisits the philosophical foundations of legal rights by employing Aristotle’s induction and theory of the essences, which the Paper connects to the phenomenological method and particularly Ricoeur’s hermeneutics and Husserl’s transcedental phenomenology. This is a process of abstraction and insight, which aspires to induce a rational revisiting of the general theory of legal rights and address the surplus of meaning that Wittgensteinian logic leaves semantically uncovered. (shrink)

Ce volume est le premier recueil publié par le réseau de recherches Gender in the European Town dirigé par Deborah Simonton, et financé par le Danish Research Council. Le volume rassemble les communications présentées lors du colloque de Turku en 2008. Le réseau se propose d’étudier l’influence du genre sur les espaces urbains et sa capacité à modifier la ville, en explorant la nature « subtile et changeante du pouvoir, du patriarcat et du privilège, à travers le prisme de la (...) ville, en concen... (shrink)

This paper analyses the criticisms put forward by the Scotists of the 17th century to Thomas Aquinas’ commentators on the subject of the intellect’s first object. What the intellect knows first, and what the extension of human cognition is, are questions that Aquinas addressed in several places in Summa theologiae, presenting conclusions which Scotus famously criticised. From the 15th century on, observed the tendency among Aquinas’ commentators to adjust themselves to Scotus’ opinion concerning this matter. The paper includes a collection (...) of the texts they mention and focuses on this ‘shift’ in the history of Aquinas’ readings. (shrink)

The interview is based on some thesis of Semir Zeki’s last book, Splendours and Miseries of the Brain. The founder of the International Institute of Neuroaesthetics (London 2001) wrote that a very different kind of knowledge can be acquired by the brain in the experience of art. It seems that he recognizes there can be a kind of “intelligence” in perception, while he writes about microcosciences of perception being located in the same areas where the information coming from the outside (...) is elaborated and perceived. He explains the distinction between inherited “concepts” and acquired synthetic “concepts” of the visual brain. The theory of acquired concepts could also help in explaining the problem of taste: it seems that what we like in our lives is determined by the result (the synthesis) of those probabilities coming from our acquired synthetic brain concepts. Thus there wouldn’t be any free will in our aesthetical and love choices. (shrink)

We have been researching the distinctive ethical issues raised by what we have called “the reset period,” when non-Covid services resumed alongside the continuing pandemic in the UK. In this commen...

Trends in moral psychology largely support the role that emotion plays in moral cognition with human lesion studies offering the most compelling evidence to date. Specifically, data from ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) patients on moral judgment tasks has suggested the necessity of having intact emotion to behave in morally appropriate ways. However, patients with vmPFC damage also have deficits in a variety of complex judgment and decision-making tasks, regardless of whether emotion is involved. This paper argues that a basic information (...) processing perspective of vmPFC functionality is a better interpretation of vmPFC patient deficits, specifically with the vmPFC being necessary for value assessment rather than being specific to emotion. (shrink)

Social consciousness – which amounts to something like ‘being woke’ – is a cognitive sensitivity to social injustices in one’s local environment and broader culture. From here, social consciousness can be accounted for in a variety of ways. Recently, it’s been suggested that we can understand social consciousness through the lens of moral encroachment. To be social consciousness, on this account, is to believe in accordance with the dictates of moral encroachment. After considering this account, I raise a few worries: (...) it involves controversial theoretical commitments, entails unintuitive verdicts in important cases, and appears to be too demanding. In light of these worries, I develop a new account of social consciousness as a morally virtuous cognitive disposition that manifests primarily in certain doxastic states. I argue that we should favor the virtue account because it weathers the worries that trouble the encroachment account, and better captures several important features of social consciousness. (shrink)

This paper seeks to make “racism” strange, by exploring its invocation in the sociolinguistic context of LGBTQI+ activism in Greece, where it is used in ways that may be jarring to anglophone readers. In my ongoing research on the conceptualisation of interwoven oppressions in Greek social movement contexts, I have been interested in understanding how the widespread use of the term “racism” as a superordinate category to reference forms of oppression not only based on “race,” “ethnicity,” and “citizenship” (e.g., racism, (...) nationalism, xenophobia) but also those based on gender, gender identity, and sexuality (e.g., sexism, transphobia, and homophobia) relates to the increased adoption of “intersectionality” in movement discourses. In ordinary parlance, this commonplace usage of “racism” as an “umbrella term” nevertheless retains its etymological link to “race,” while its scope is extended to other regimes of superiority/inferiority or privilege/oppression. If intersectionality presupposes that oppressions are ontologically multiple and analytically separable, the use of “racism” as an umbrella concept seems to point in the other direction, implying that all forms of oppression originate from a common source, have a similar ontological basis, or generate privilege for the same social agents, who deploy similar tactics vis-à-vis oppressed groups. My research examines how intersectionality—widely understood as a multi-axial theory of oppression, which contends that power relations are multiple, distinct, and irreducible to one another, yet converge simultaneously in the experiences of multiply oppressed social groups—relates to the use of “racism” as a struggle concept in Greek, but also in other languages commonly used in Greece, such as Albanian (racizmi) and Arabic (eunsuria). In this paper, I examine how these two vocabularies—of racism and intersectionality—are operative in movement discourses, but also how they shape, and are shaped by activists’ perceptions, analyses, and theories of oppression. (shrink)

Realism has been a central object of attention among analytical philosophers for some decades. Starting from analytical philosophy, the return of realism has spread into other contemporary philosophical traditions and given birth to new trends in current discussions, as for example in the debates about “new realism.” Discussions about realism focused on linguistic meaning, epistemology, metaphysics, theory of action and ethics. The implications for politics of discussion about realism in action theory and in ethics, however, are not much discussed. This (...) collection includes essay which address from different and complementary points of view the issue of the social and political relevance of philosophical debates on realism. (shrink)

The paper presents the main ideas of French conventionalism as represented by Duhem, Poincaré and Le Roy. Clarified are some misunderstandings and misinterpretations on which the negative opinion on conventionalism is usually based. Conventionalism is presented as a source of the antipositivistic breakthrough. It thus led to the most important discussions in 20th century philosophy of science, which tended to undermine epistemological fundamentalism. The influence of conventionalism is shown - on European philosophy and specifically on Polish philosophy, especially on works (...) of K. Ajdukiewicz and his followers. (shrink)