Suppose that state A wages war against state D. We want to know at least three things. First, does state A have a moral and legal justification for going to war? Second, what may and must those sta...

Mary Devereaux has suggested, in an overview of feminist aesthetics[1], that feminist aesthetics constitutes a revolutionary approach to the field: "aesthetics cannot simply 'add on' feminist theories as it might add new works by [ Nelson ] Goodman, Arthur Danto or George Dickie. To take feminism seriously involves rethinking our basic concepts and recasting the history of the discipline." In particular, feminist theory involves a rejection of "deeply entrenched assumptions about the universal value of art and aesthetic experience." Overthrowing (...) these assumptions "constitutes what art historian, Linda Nochlin, describes as a Kuhnian paradigm shift."[2] Near the end of her essay, Devereaux returns to this theme: "If feminism constitutes a new paradigm, then we may wish to ponder how far the old model of aesthetics and the new are commensurable. Is traditional aesthetics contingently or necessarily associated with patriarchy? Can the 'gender-neutral' aesthetics of the traditional model be reformed or must it be rejected?". (shrink)

Part I of this essay will examine how the interplay between philosophy and art over the past century is reflected in the aesthetic theories of four leading Twentieth century aestheticians: Walter Benjamin, Merleau-Ponty, Gilles Deleuze, Arthur Danto. The philosophers’ theories are linked to the developments in art most directly related to their respective approaches to problems in aesthetics. Part II will explore selected non-philosophical social and technological developments that are in the process of altering the course of contemporary art (...) today. Among these are globalization, the art market, social/political issues, popular culture, virtual reality, and new manifestations of the avant-garde. Key factors that warrant consideration for future developments in aesthetics are identified in the hope that today’s and future aestheticians will begin to consider what changes are required in aesthetics to address these new developments in art. (shrink)

Ripstein's lectures, which constitute the central texts of this book, focus on the two bodies of rules governing war: the jus ad bellum, which regulates resort to armed force, and the jus in bello, which sets forth rules governing the conduct of armed force and applies equally to all parties. The lectures argue that both sets of rules constitute prohibitions rather than permissions, and that recognizing them as distinctive prohibitions can reconcile the seeming tension between them. By understanding that the (...) central wrong of war is that war is the condition which force decides, Ripstein contends that the law and morality of war are in fact aligned; the rules governing the conduct of hostilities must apply equally to parties in the right and parties in the wrong in an armed conflict, because the prohibitions outlined in the rules governing war are prohibitions that restrain war. Ripstein's method of analysis and the substantive argument he puts forward offer an opportunity for rigorous critical engagement in subsequent essays by commentators Hathaway, Kutz, and McMahan, followed by a response from Ripstein. (shrink)

No single author presented Darwin with a more difficult question about his priority in discovering natural selection than the British comparative anatomist and paleontologist Richard Owen. Owen was arguably the most influential biologist in Great Britain in Darwin’s time. Darwin wanted his approbation for what he believed to be his own theory of natural selection. Unfortunately for Darwin, when Owen first commented in publication about Darwin’s theory of descent he was openly hostile. Darwin was taken off-guard. In private meetings and (...) correspondence prior to 1860 Owen had been nothing but polite and friendly, even helping Darwin in cataloguing and analyzing Darwin’s zoological specimens from the Beagle voyage. Every early indication predicted a life-long friendship and collaboration. But that was not to be. Owen followed his slashing review with a mounting campaign in the 1860s to denounce and discredit both Darwin and his small but ascendant circle of friends and supporters. But that was not enough for Owen. Starting in 1866, perhaps by now realizing Darwin had landed the big fish, Owen launched a new campaign, to claim the discovery of “Darwin’s theory” for himself. Darwin naturally fought back, mainly in the “Historical Sketch” that he prefaced to Origin starting in 1861. But when we peel back the layers of personal animus and escalating vituperation we discover in fact their quarrel was generated more by mutual misunderstanding than scientific disagreement. The battle ended only when Darwin finally penetrated to the crux of the matter and put an end to the rivalry in 1872, in the final version of the Sketch. (shrink)

Many Faculties of Education in the UK and elsewhere have ‘social justice’ written into their mission statements. But are they concerned by questions of social justice in education, or has the term become somewhat vacuous and devoid of substantive meaning? The present article subjects recent discourses about social justice in education to scrutiny and finds them wanting in various respects, in particular when juxtaposed with historical accounts of justice by philosophers such as Aristotle or Aquinas. Among the complaints made here (...) is that most educational accounts (a) make do with a ‘negative’ conception of social justice as focused on specific cases of injustices without any positive conception of what social justice means in its entirety, (b) foreground institutional justice at the expense of justice as a moral or civic virtue, (c) fail to connect the identification of justice or injustice to an account of phronesis or practical wisdom for integrating values, (d) shy away from associating social justice with the ‘common good’ and (e) fail to get to grips with some thorny normative questions about the role of justice in the ordering of goods in a hierarchy towards the highest good. Along the way, various remedies are suggested. (shrink)

A recent study by Olivieri et al, published in PLOS ONE, reports that between 2009 and 2015 a third of patients with thalassaemia in Canada’s largest hospital were switched from first-line licensed drugs to regimens of deferiprone, an unlicensed drug of unproven safety and efficacy. Based on retrospective data from patient records, the PLOS Study reports that patients treated with deferiprone, either as monotherapy or in combination with first-line drugs, suffered serious adverse effects. The data reported by Olivieri et al (...) give rise to a number of ethical issues. These ethical issues are identified, placed in historical context and analysed. For purposes of this analysis, reliance is placed on two core principles of research ethics, harm minimisation and informed consent, and also on the hospital’s mission statement. Then a mystery is explored: How and why did it happen that Toronto’s University Health Network treated large numbers of patients with an unlicensed drug over a period of many years? ‘Institutional conflict of interest’ is considered as a possible explanatory hypothesis. (shrink)

In this article I present a theory of what it is to be fair. I take my cue from Broome’s well known 1990 account of fairness. Broome’s basic thesis is that fairness is the proportional satisfaction of claims, and with this I am in at least partial agreement. But neither Broome nor anyone else (so far as I know) has laid down a theory of precisely what one must do in order to be fair. The theory offered here does just (...) this. (shrink)

Against Norton's claim that all thought experiments can be reduced to explicit arguments, I defend Brown's position that certain thought experiments yield a priori knowledge. They do this, I argue, not by allowing us to perceive “Platonic universals” (Brown), even though they may contain non-propositional components that are epistemically indispensable, but by helping to identify certain tacit presuppositions or “natural interpretations” (Feyerabend's term) that lead to a contradiction when the phenomenon is described in terms of them, and by suggesting a (...) new natural interpretation in terms of which the phenomenon can be redescribed free of contradiction. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to assess the impact of Big Data technologies for insurance ratemaking, with a special focus on motor products.The first part shows how statistics and insurance mechanisms adopted the same aggregate viewpoint. It made visible regularities that were invisible at the individual level, further supporting the classificatory approach of insurance and the assumption that all members of a class are identical risks. The second part focuses on the reversal of perspective currently occurring in data analysis (...) with predictive analytics, and how this conceptually contradicts the collective basis of insurance. The tremendous volume of data and the personalization promise through accurate individual prediction indeed deeply shakes the homogeneity hypothesis behind pooling. The third part attempts to assess the extent of this shift in motor insurance. Onboard devices that collect continuous driving behavioural data could import this new paradigm into these products. An examination of the current state of research on models with telematics data shows however that the epistemological leap, for now, has not happened. (shrink)

Arthur C. Danto's lucid introduction to the central topics of Western philosophical thought remains an unparalleled guide to problems in metaphysics and epistemology that have engaged philosophers for several millennia. Examining the work of Plato, Berkeley, Descartes, Hume, and Wittgenstein, Danto explores debates about empiricism, the mind/body problem, the nature of matter, and the status of language, consciousness, and scientific explanation. In a new preface to this edition he considers the current relationship between philosophy and the humanities.

This volume of translations unites three shorter works by Arthur Schopenhauer that expand on themes from his book The World as Will and Representation. In On the Fourfold Root he takes the principle of sufficient reason, which states that nothing is without a reason why it is, and shows how it covers different forms of explanation or ground that previous philosophers have tended to confuse. Schopenhauer regarded this study, which he first wrote as his doctoral dissertation, as an essential (...) preliminary to The World as Will. On Will in Nature examines contemporary scientific findings in search of corroboration of his thesis that processes in nature are all a species of striving towards ends; and On Vision and Colours defends an anti-Newtonian account of colour perception influenced by Goethe's famous colour theory. This is the first English edition to provide extensive editorial notes on the different published versions of these works. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Hidden Author: An Interpretation of Petronius’s SatyriconCecil W. WootenGian Biagio Conte. The Hidden Author: An Interpretation of Petronius’s Satyricon. Translated by Elaine Fantham. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1997. 236 pp. $35.The first four chapters of this book form a single unit since they deal with the same general thesis. In fact I can see no reason to divide this part of the (...) book into chapters except that (I suppose) they originally represented four different lectures in the Sather series. Two ideas are developed here. The first is that Encolpius has a tendency to impose literary models on reality. The second is that the “hidden author” is lurking behind Encolpius, laughing at him, and that the reader is “alerted by Petronius” (29) to interpret the text differently from the narrator. Thus, according to Gian Biagio Conte, a bond of complicity is created between the reader and the author, who “sets his traps and waits to laugh when his victim [Encolpius] falls into them” (27). Encolpius, therefore, is viewed as a “naive victim of events” (24), a man who wants to be a “sincere and trustworthy narrator” (24) but who cannot distinguish between fact and myth.The first of these ideas has been fully discussed elsewhere and is generally well accepted. I have discussed it myself (“Petronius, the Mime, and Rhetorical Education,” Helios 3 [1976] 67–74). I have problems with the second. First of all, I think that it is very risky to try to see a “hidden author” in a text where the narrator is different from the author. Moreover, Conte acknowledges that there is really not much difference between what has been called the “narrating I” and what he calls the “hidden author” (84). This makes me wonder what is the point of complicating the whole issue by positing a hidden author at all, especially since I do not find convincing the examples that he gives of instances when Petronius supposedly intervenes to alert the reader not to take Encolpius too seriously. When the latter, for example, describes Eumolpus in the art gallery as someone qui videretur nescio quid magnum promittere (83.7), does this really indicate a “narrator who is victim of his own illusions” (21)? Is this really an instance of the “hidden author” intervening in the text to give us an “advance notice of the deflation of the sublime” (21)? It seems to me that whatever discrepancy exists here can be explained by Beck’s observations, made long ago, concerning the difference between Encolpius the actor and Encolpius the narrator (see “Some Observations on the Narrative Technique of Petronius,” Phoenix 27 [1973] 42–61).Secondly, it has always seemed to me that it is Encolpius himself who consciously chooses to see his life in terms of literary models, simply because the patterns that he sees are more exciting than the reality which he experiences. Again, I myself have argued this point elsewhere (“Petronius and ‘Camp,’” Helios 11 [1984] 133–39). This, however, makes him a shaper of events, not a naive victim of them, and the reader smiles with Encolpius, not at him. Moreover, as regards the whole idea of literary models, Conte’s theory about the role of the “hidden author” seems to me to complicate the issue more than is necessary, or [End Page 304] is warranted. He says, for example, that Petronius wants to discredit, through parody, those forms of literature, such as the romance, from which Encolpius draws many of his models. On the other hand, he argues, strangely, that Petronius does not mean to devalue other genres, such as epic, from which (as Conte himself has so clearly shown) many of these models come: “the hidden author... constructs the story of Encolpius like a continuous parody of the tale of love and adventure. In turn, it is the function of Encolpius... to control relations with high epic and heroic literature and the high oratory studied in school” (37). However, as Conte himself points out (49), there are many similarities between the novels and declamations. Would it not be easier to assume that it is Encolpius who imposes the... (shrink)

Arthur Peacocke, eminent priest-scientist, has collected thirteen of his essays for this volume, Previously published in various academic journals and edited ...

The atom bomb that annihilated Hiroshima, Japan, on August 6, 1945, proved Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity. Mass became energy and the classic Western dialectic of three-dimensional space and linear time was displaced by the integrated concept of spacetime. On that day, modern physics also collided with the traditional Japanese understanding that space and time are interdependent phenomena. This collision speaks to conceptual parallels relating Buddhist thought, modern Japanese philosophy, phenomenology, and the physics of spacetime. The thirteenth-century Zen Buddhist monk (...) Dōgen said that all phenomena are made possible by the universal principle of emptiness and that our existence arises with each moment in what he termed Being-Time, where past, present, and future co-exist. The Japanese philosopher Nishida Kitarō, along with Tanabe Hajime and Watsuji Tetsurō, saw reality as a multi-dimensional field of space-in-time where the individual subject no longer stood apart from the objective world but instead arose dynamically as contingent activities rather than an autonomous thing. The German philosopher Martin Heidegger rejected the rational binary of subject and object in Western thought and grounded our “being” in phenomena that came from their temporal being-in-the-world rather than representing some preexisting objective reality. The physicist Albert Einstein radically rethought the dialectic of three-dimensional space and linear time, used to schematize the physical world in the West since antiquity, and theorized the relativity of spacetime, in which all phenomena occur in space in relation to their place in time. Interwoven, these intellectual threads stripped the bombing of Hiroshima of its historical inevitability. The story of human experience lost its customary sense of going somewhere predetermined and was revealed instead to be an endlessly discrete accumulation of moments that could go anywhere at every transient and directionless moment in time. (shrink)

Nastava iz prirodoslovnog područja danas se najčešće temelji na principima konstruktivizma prema kojima djeca trebaju biti aktivni sudionici procesa učenja i izgrađivati svoje znanje na temelju iskustva. Metode i sredstva korištena u nastavi prirodoslovnog područja moraju biti prilagođeni perceptivnim potrebama slijepe djece i djece s oštećenjima vida kako bi im se omogućilo aktivno sudjelovanje u procesu učenja. Cilj ovoga rada je opisati posljednje spoznaje o aktivnom i istraživačkom učenju slijepe djece i djece s oštećenjima vida u nastavi prirodoslovnog područja te (...) otkloniti postojeće zablude. Nadalje, rad predstavlja recentna istraživanja koja ukazuju na prilagođene uspješne i visokokvalitetne odgojno-obrazovne pristupe i metode. S obzirom na navedeno, sadržaj rada bit će od koristi nastavnicima iz prirodoslovnog područja, kao i istraživačima inkluzivnih učionica. (shrink)

Originally published in 1923, this book presents a study regarding the fundamental nature of ethical principles. The text constitutes an attempt to 'return to the Greek tradition in its method of studying ethics, the tradition of considering ethical questions in very close connection with politics'. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in philosophy and ethics.

This brief introduction to a special issue of Disputatio succinctly summarizes John Perry’s pluri-propositionalist reflexive framework and notes some potential applications to varieties of context-sensitivity.

The acclaimed social critic and author of the best-selling The Middle Mind presents a scathing assessment of modern detractors of science, citing the dangers of such figures as Malcolm Gladwell and Jonah Lehrer while posing a defense of the tradition of Romanticism.

Ronald Dworkin is one of the most frequently cited legal philosophers. His work, notably his attack on H. L. A. Hart's positivist theory of law, has received considerable attention, earning him praise as well as trenchant criticism. Instead of discussing the analytical validity of Dworkin's claims, though, we propose an alternative reading of his jurisprudential writings that emphasises their rhetorical nature. After delineating the rhetorical context of his work, we provide several illustrations of his use of rhetorical strategies and, with (...) the help of sentiment‐analysis techniques, emotional language. While resorting to classical rhetorical tactics, Dworkin's rhetoric, we argue, appealed to the emotional power of rights talk at a time when the notion of rights enjoyed greater resonance with his audience. (shrink)

We examine the number of normal measures a successor cardinal can carry, in universes in which the Axiom of Choice is false. When considering successors of singular cardinals, we establish relative consistency results assuming instances of supercompactness, together with the Ultrapower Axiom (introduced by Goldberg in [12]). When considering successors of regular cardinals, we establish relative consistency results only assuming the existence of one measurable cardinal. This allows for equiconsistencies.

We prove two theorems concerning indestructibility properties of the first two strongly compact cardinals when these cardinals are in addition the first two measurable cardinals. Starting from two supercompact cardinals $\kappa _1 < \kappa _2$, we force and construct a model in which $\kappa _1$ and $\kappa _2$ are both the first two strongly compact and first two measurable cardinals, $\kappa _1$ ’s strong compactness is fully indestructible, and $\kappa _2$ ’s strong compactness is indestructible under $\mathrm {Add}$ for any (...) ordinal $\delta $. This provides an answer to a strengthened version of a question of Sargsyan found in [17, Question 5]. We also investigate indestructibility properties that may occur when the first two strongly compact cardinals are not only the first two measurable cardinals, but also exhibit nontrivial degrees of supercompactness. (shrink)

The wisdom of life.--Counsels and maxims.--Religion and other essays.--The art of literature.--Studies in pessimism.

Unlimited pancomputationalism is the claim that every physical system implements every computational model simultaneously. Some philosophers argue that unlimited pancomputationalism renders implementation ‘trivial’ or ‘vacuous’, unsuitable for serious scientific work. A popular and natural reaction to this argument is to reject unlimited pancomputationalism. However, I argue that given certain assumptions about the nature of computational ascription, unlimited pancomputationalism does not entail that implementation is trivial. These assumptions concern the relativity and context sensitivity of computational ascription. Very roughly: relative to a (...) specific, contextually salient way of regarding a physical system computationally, the claim that that system implements a specific computational model is as non-trivial as one could reasonably want. (shrink)

Belief states are only contingently connected with the objects of belief. Burge's examples show that the same belief state can be associated with different objects of belief. Kripke's puzzle shows that the same object of belief can be associated with different belief states. Nevertheless, belief states can best be characterized by a subset of the propositions one believes, namely those one directly or immediately believes. The rest of the things one believes are believed indirectly, by virtue of one's direct beliefs. (...) This distinction sheds light on Kripke's puzzle, the problem of the contingent a priori, and the problem of logical omniscience. (shrink)

Virtue liberalism holds that the success of liberal politics and society depends on the citizenry possessing a set of liberal virtues, including traits like open-mindedness, toleration, and individual autonomy. Virtue liberalism is thus an ethically demanding conception of liberalism that is at odds with conceptions, like Rawlsian political liberalism andmodus vivendiliberalism, that attempt to minimize liberalism’s ethical impact in order to accommodate a greater range of ethical pluralism. Although he claims to be a Rawlsian political liberal, Richard Rorty’s pragmatic liberalism (...) is best understood as a version of virtue liberalism that, in particular, recommends a controversial civic virtue of irony for good liberal citizenship. Indeed, Rorty ultimately joins Dewey in conceiving of liberal democracy as a “way of life,” rather than merely a set of political relations that have a minimal effect on our characters or on the shape of our private commitments and projects. (shrink)