Philosophers have long been tempted by the idea that objects and properties are abstractions from the facts. But how is this abstraction supposed to go? If the objects and properties aren't 'already' there, how do the facts give rise to them? Jason Turner develops and defends a novel answer to this question: The facts are arranged in a quasi-geometric 'logical space', and objects and properties arise from different quasi-geometric structures in this space.

_Reconsiders the contemporary relevance of Schelling’s radical philosophical and religious ecology._.

With the proliferation of private standards many significant decisions regarding public health risks, food safety, and environmental impacts are increasingly taking place in the backstage of the global agro-food system. Using an analytical framework grounded in political economy, we explain the rise of private standards and specific actors – notably supermarkets – in the restructuring of agro-food networks. We argue that the global, political-economic, capitalist transformation – globalization – is a transition from a Fordist regime to a regime of flexible (...) accumulation (Harvey, 1989). We also argue that the standard making process of this new regulatory regime is increasingly moving from the front stage – where it is open to public debate and democratic decision-making bodies – to the backstage – where it is dominated by large supermarket procurement offices. We assert that transnational supermarket chains are increasingly controlling what food is grown where, how, and by whom. We also contend that the decision-making processes of transnational supermarket chains are typically “black-boxed.” The Euro-Retailer Produce Working Group (EUREP) is presented as a case of private governance by transnational supermarket chains. We conclude by examining the limitations and long-term efficacy of a system of private governance in the global agro-food system. (shrink)

This article reports results of a survey about employment and compensation models for clinical ethics consultants working in the United States and discusses the relevance of these results for the professionalization of clinical ethics. This project uses self-reported data from healthcare ethics consultants to estimate compensation across different employment models. The average full-time annualized salary of respondents with a clinical doctorate is $188,310.08 (SD=$88,556.67), $146,134.85 (SD=$55,485.63) for those with a non-clinical doctorate, and $113,625.00 (SD=$35,872.96) for those with a masters as (...) their highest degree. Pay differences across degree level and type were statistically significant (F = 3.43; p. (shrink)

Many Catholics have expressed hesitancy or resistance to being vaccinated for COVID-19, with magisterial authorities and influential Catholic organizations advocating divergent views regarding the moral liceity of the vaccines, the justification of vaccination mandates, and whether such mandates should include religious exemptions. We address each of these disputed points and argue that vaccination for COVID-19 falls within the definition of being an ordinary—and thereby morally obligatory—treatment. To that end, we offer a brief overview of the Catholic moral tradition regarding the (...) development of the distinction between ordinary and extraordinary treatment, show how the Church morally evaluates vaccination as a good act, and underline the importance of positive witnessing in supporting vaccination. (shrink)

Evolutionary discussions regarding the relationship between social status and fertility in the contemporary U.S. typically claim that the relationship is either negative or absent entirely. The published data on recent generations of Americans upon which such statements rest, however, are solid with respect to women but sparse and equivocal for men. In the current study, we investigate education and income in relation to age at first child, childlessness, and number of children for men and women in two samples—one of the (...) general American population and one of graduates of an elite American university. We find that increased education is strongly associated with delayed childbearing in both sexes and is also moderately associated with decreased completed or near-completed fertility. Women in the general population with higher adult income have fewer children, but this relationship does not hold within all educational groups, including our sample with elite educations. Higher-income men, however, do not have fewer children in the general population and in fact have lower childlessness rates. Further, higher income in men is positively associated with fertility among our sample with elite educations as well as within the general population among those with college educations. Such findings undermine simple statements on the relationship between status and fertility. (shrink)

The National Science Foundation's (NSF) role in, and influence on, the National Nanotechnology Initiative (NNI) can best be understood through an examination of the NSF's history. Because of the NSF's weakened position at its founding in 1950 and obstacles faced throughout its history, the NSF developed a discursive strategy that focuses on making a causal link between support for basic science and societal benefits, and an operational strategy focused on growing its constituency through infrastructural support. The hallmarks of both of (...) these strategies are present in the NNI. (shrink)

If chances are propensities, what reason do we have to expect them to be probabilities? I will offer a new answer to this question. It comes in two parts. First, I will defend an accuracy-centred account of what it is for a causal system to have precise propensities in the first place. Second, I will prove that, given some pretty weak assumptions about the nature of comparative causal dispositions, and some fairly standard assumptions about reasonable measures of inaccuracy, propensities must (...) be probabilities. (shrink)

"American criminal justice is a dysfunctional mess. The so-called Land of the Free imprisons more people than any other country in the world. Understanding why means focusing on color -- not only on black or white, but also on green. The problem is that nearly everyone involved in criminal justice faces bad incentives. "Injustice for All" systematically diagnoses why and where American criminal justice goes wrong, and offers functional proposals for reform. By changing who pays for what, how people are (...) appointed, how people are punished, and which things are criminalized, we can make the US a country which guarantees justice for all." --. (shrink)

Writings by Negri on the brief thaw in the cold winter of neoliberalism, Thatcherism, Reaganomics, and counterrevolution. Automation and information technology have transformed the organization of labor to such an extent that the processes of exploitation have moved beyond the labor class and now work upon society as a whole. If this displacement has destroyed the political primacy of the labor class, it has not, however, eliminated exploitation; rather, it has broadened it, implanting it within the given conditions of the (...) most diverse spheres of society. —from The Winter Is Over In late 1995, in opposition to the conservative agenda of Jacques Chirac and his prime minister Alain Juppé and their proposed widespread welfare cuts, French students rose up against their government; public sector workers, together with all the major trade unions, went on strike. When railway workers and Paris Metro personnel joined in the protests, France's public transportation system came to a halt. These extensive social upheavals, the likes of which had not been seen in France since 1968, found widespread public support and fuelled the creation of many political organizations. Chirac backed down from restructuring the public retirement system. Antonio Negri's The Winter is Over comes out of the glimmer of optimism created by the events of 1995, when the long, cold season of neoliberalism, Thatcherism, Reaganomics, reaction, and counterrevolution appeared to have run its course. Published in Italian in 1996, The Winter is Over brings together a series of articles, speeches, and other documents written by Negri between 1989 and 1995 at the threshold of this thaw. It offers a revealing and wide-reaching account of those years of change and brink-of-change, focusing on such topics as the networks of social production, the decline of “limp thought,” the end of applied socialism, the Gulf War, and, finally, Italy's transition to its so-called “Second Republic,” as seen by an exile. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:“Unauthorized Propositions”The Federalist Papers and Constituent PowerJason Frank (bio)The PEOPLE, who are the sovereigns of the State, possess a power to alter it when and in what way they please. To say otherwise is to make the thing created, greater than the power that created it.—Anonymous, Federal Gazette, March 18, 1789The we of the Constitution’s “We the People” was as much of an artificial construct as the Constitution itself, (...) it was its creature, not its creator.—Sheldon Wolin, The Presence of the PastIn Federalist No. 40, James Madison engaged the vexing question of whether the Philadelphia Convention of 1787 had been properly authorized “to frame and propose” the new Federal Constitution of the United States [83]. Madison explored there “the ground on which the Convention stood” [264], which he identified as the purportedly solid foundation of the people themselves [Morgan 272]. Federalist No. 40 offers a theoretically probing yet avowedly practical reflection on the availability of foundations and on dilemmas of popular authorization in times of constitutional crisis; it may be productively read as an exemplary eighteenth-century American reflection on a state of exception. As such, Federalist No. 40 provides helpful orientation to how the popular constitutionalism of the revolutionary and postrevolutionary years confronted and navigated—if never fully resolved—some of the most insistent paradoxes of modern democratic theory.In No. 40, Madison was preoccupied with the theoretical and historical dilemmas surrounding the eighteenth-century American conception of the people’s constituent power—that is, the ultimate power of the people to alter fundamental law “when and in what way they please.”1 However, in contrast to most contemporary theoretical approaches to constituent power—whether influenced by the political theology of Carl Schmitt or the immanentist optimism of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri—Madison’s navigation of the attending dilemmas of popular authorization resisted the turn to metaphysical abstraction and the appeal to a transcendent or immanent absolute. In his approach to the problem of constituent power, Madison insisted on the productive irreducibility of institutional mediation and the performative elicitation of a retrospective authorization by the people. While accepting the absence of a firm ground of legal authorization (the unbroken authority of law), Madison also rejected a wholly extralegal or unmediated appeal to the people themselves (the transcendental appeal to spirit beyond the letter of the law). Instead, he endorsed a political navigation of these dilemmas in medias res. Confronting [End Page 103] the dilemma of constituency—how does the people give birth to itself as a self-authorizing subject?—Madison shifted the register of discourse away from the formal and juridical and toward the informally ethicopolitical. Doing so, he was able to affirm a rupture in law while simultaneously enlisting another register of normative continuity. This essay outlines Madison’s productive encounter with these dilemmas in The Federalist, and suggests the relevance of his example for recent debates in democratic theory, too often captivated by the formal rubrics of “norm” and “exception.”1The government which [the Federalists] are so enthusiastically fond of is as yet an ideal phantom, a chimera, a mere theory detested and execrated by every true friend to government.—“One of the People,” Carlisle Gazette, January 9, 1788Madison wrote Federalist No. 40 as a response to widespread and persuasive Anti-Federalist claims that the Philadelphia Convention had exceeded the mandate granted to it by the Annapolis Convention of 1786 and the Congressional Act of 1787, both of which authorized the meeting of the Philadelphia Convention “for the sole and express purpose of revising the Articles of Confederation” [259]. While the Philadelphia Convention was, in Bruce Ackerman’s words, “expressly subordinated to existing institutions and procedures” [Ackerman 43], it had nonetheless produced an entirely new constitutional text and—theoretically more problematic for Madison—an entirely new procedure for its popular ratification [see also Ackerman and Katyal]. Under Article 13 of the Articles of Confederation, constitutional reform could come about only through the unanimous assent of the thirteen state legislatures.2 Under the Philadelphia Convention’s plan, the ratification of the proposed constitution would bypass the constituted power of the state legislatures and appeal instead to the... (shrink)

This essay argues that an account of vocation that ties one’s work with divine calling stands counter to the biblical witness of calling in the New Testament. Rather than calling to a particular profession, the biblical account of calling is to a unique way of living that is to exemplify the followers of Christ. Therefore, the re-enchantment of medicine is not accomplished when one makes the practice itself sacred simply by imagining it as one’s divine calling. Rather, the sacredness of (...) medicine is rooted in the character of the physician whose daily decisions and patient interactions are the outcomes of virtues inculcated in worship, prayer, Bible study, and all other practices that mark the life of faith. Thus, the practitioner avoiding burnout asks not “Am I called to be a physician?” but “How as a physician in the daily practice of medicine might I exemplify my calling to Christ-likeness?”. (shrink)

I argue that Hume’s characterization of the passions as “original existences” is shaped by his preoccupation with Stoicism, and is not (as most commentators suppose) a ridiculous or trifling remark. My argument has three parts. First, I show that Hume’s description of the passions as “original existences” is properly understood as part of his argument against the possibility of passions caused by reason alone (rational passions). Second, I establish that Hume was responding to the Stoics, who claimed that a rational (...) passion is caused by a special type of impression that accurately represents its cause—the divine reason administrating the cosmos—in virtue of resembling it. Third, I argue that Hume rejects the Stoics’ claim by appeal to the following feature of his general account of impressions and ideas: for Hume, ideas are exact “copies” or representations of the impressions that caused them, but simple impressions are “originals” that do not represent in virtue of resembling their external or physiological causes. On my reading of Hume, the ‘original existence’ passage therefore signals his rebuke of a key claim in the Stoics’ theory of rational passions. (shrink)

This primer of research on how television affects children and families is organized around the perceptions and insights of four ordinary families who are raising their children without any television in their homes. Readers will learn about the methods and findings of over 40 years of research on TV and, in the process, may change the way they look at television forever.

In 2006, young people were flocking to MySpace, discovering the joys of watching videos of cute animals on YouTube, and playing online games. Not many of them were watching network news on television; they got most of their information online. So when NBC and MIT launched iCue, an interactive learning venture that combined social networking, online video, and gaming in one multimedia educational site, it was perfectly in tune with the times. iCue was a surefire way for NBC to reach (...) younger viewers and for MIT to test innovative educational methods in the real world. But iCue was a failure: it never developed an audience and was canceled as if it were a sitcom with bad ratings. In _The More We Know_, Eric Klopfer and Jason Haas, both part of the MIT development team, describe the rise and fall of iCue and what it can teach us about new media, old media, education, and the challenges of innovating in educational media. Klopfer and Haas show that iCue was hampered by, among other things, an educational establishment focused on "teaching to the test," television producers uncomfortable with participatory media, and confusion about the market. But this is not just a cautionary tale; sometimes more can be learned from an interesting failure than a string of successes. Today's educational technology visionaries might keep this lesson in mind. (shrink)

In this paper I clarify a major affinity between Nietzsche and Spinoza that has been neglected in the literature—but that Nietzsche was aware of—namely a tendency to what I call etiology. Etiologies provide second- order explanations of some opponents’ first-order views, but not in order to decide first-order matters. The example I take up here is Nietzsche’s and Spinoza’s rejections of free will—and especially their etiologies concerning how we wrongly come to think that we may boast of such a capacity. (...) In working through the former (i.e., their rejections of free will) in order to make my central metaphilosophical point regarding the latter (i.e., their accounts of why we generally affirm that we have free will), I shed important new light on Nietzsche’s relation to Spinoza. I also further our understanding of what role such second-order accounts play within each of their larger projects on their own terms. (shrink)

The contemporary crisis of democracy has provoked a steady outpouring of popular and scholarly reflections diagnosing its underlying causes, assessing the nature of the threat, and envisioning diff...

More than 20 years ago, the pioneering pediatric ethicist William Bartholome wrote a fiery letter to the editor of this journal because he thought a recently published statement on pediatric assent, from the Committee on Bioethics of the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), showed insufficient respect for children. That AAP statement, like its 2016 update, asserts that pediatric assent should be solicited only when a child’s dissent will be honored. Bartholome objected that pediatricians should always solicit children’s assent and that (...) they should acknowledge and apologize when they treat children over their objections even when they must do so to promote children’s best interests. We think Bartholome was right. In this brief commentary, we elaborate on his perspective about the moral value of pediatric assent, and we suggest improvements to the corresponding clinical guidance. (shrink)

Supported decision making is a model of decision making in which an adult with impaired capacity enters freely into an agreement with a closely trusted person or persons (the “s...

This study investigates how a comparison between the Catholic theologian Edward Schillebeeckx's controversial reading of Thomist philosophy and the Tibetan Buddhist Gendun Chopel's challenge to the standard Geluk teaching of Tsongkhapa's Madhyamaka philosophy might assist in rethinking conceptions of religious knowledge. Jason M. VonWachenfeldt shows how Gendun Chopel's Madhyamaka approach to the questions of knowledge in light of cultural conventionality and historical contingency can possibly better inform a Christian theological response to similar questions of modern society. Utilizing a wide (...) variety of methodical approaches to establish an imaginary dialogue between these two thinkers, this comparison remains embodied in the thought and praxis of actual individuals, and yet still firmly embedded within the conversations and trajectories of their broader religious traditions. The final chapter constructively combines and contrasts the insights of both thinkers regarding the knowability of ultimate truth in order to develop new possible approaches to epistemology that assist the contemporary believer in avoiding the problematic nihilism of a purely subjectivist epistemology-which is so rampant in the contemporary "postmodern" milieu-while still always maintaining and sharpening the practitioner's humility towards discourses on metaphysics through the critical eye of a deconstructive apophaticism. (shrink)

Abstract:Despite his ridicule of Schelling, Nietzsche’s thought is in much greater proximity to Schelling’s philosophy than he realized. This essay explores this surprising and mutually illuminating relationship and concludes by arguing that this unexpected resonance exposes a sensibility, both fundamental and practical, to approach the reigning ecological crisis.

Returning to the Greek understanding of art to rethink its capacities, Creation and the Function of Art focuses on the relationship between techné and phusis (nature). Moving away from the theoretical Platonism which dominates contemporary understandings of art, this book instead reinvigorates Aristotelian causation. Beginning with the Greek topos and turning to insights from philosophy, pure mathematics, psychoanalysis and biology, Jason Tuckwell re-problematises techné in functional terms. This book examines the deviations at play within logical forms, the subject, and (...) upon phusis to better situate the role of the function in poiesis (art). In so doing, Tuckwell argues that art concerns a genuinely creative labour that cannot be resolved via an ontological or epistemological problem, but which instead constitutes an encounter with the problematic. As such, techné is shown to be a property of the living, of intelligence coupled to action, that not only enacts poiesis or art, but indicates a broader role for creative deviation in nature. (shrink)

This chapter focuses on one of the common fallacies in Western philosophy called 'division'. The fallacy of division occurs when one incorrectly infers that the characteristics, attributes, or features of the group as a whole will also be found in the individuals comprising the group. The easiest way to avoid this fallacy is never to assume that the characteristics, attributes, or features of the group as a whole will also be found in the individuals comprising the group. One must inspect (...) and evaluate the characteristics, attributes, or features of the whole separately from the parts of which the whole is comprised. Inferences from a whole to a part can be made, however, if additional assumptions are added to the argument that link together the property had by the whole with the property had by the part. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the attitudes and orientations of Hispanic business students regarding ethical and unethical actions as well as what rewards or punishments are considered appropriate for specific scenarios. A survey was developed using a 2 × 2 randomized experimental design to measure students’ ethical orientations and 38 items were developed to measure students’ attitudes regarding factors that can influence the decision to cheat or not to cheat. The results suggest that Hispanic business students are (...) predominantly concerned with the ethical dimension of an act relative to the outcome of the act. Also, contrary to previous studies findings, some Hispanic business students are likely to cheat on any type of graded work based on the reason for cheating rather than the type of graded work. The paper utilizes an established framework for measuring ethical attitudes and orientations. The study offers a preliminary inductive path towards a more in depth understanding of Hispanic business students which is a rapidly growing population segment whose influence will become more widespread in the coming decades. Some of the findings are not consistent with previous research that examined student bodies as a whole. This might suggest that student ethics researchers may be missing valuable information regarding differences between student body segments that can further inform our understanding of students’ ethical views. Further, this insight may provide an avenue for a more effective approach to guiding the ethical development of students. (shrink)

Over-the-counter drugs are ubiquitous in the US. Policymakers have long debated how to modernize the system for making determinations of safety and effectiveness and addressing safety issues with OTC drugs.

The Jewish tradition has important perspectives, history and wisdom that can contribute significantly to crucial contemporary healthcare deliberations. This book is an attempt to show how numerous classic Jewish texts and ideas have significant things to say about some of the most urgent debates in the world of medicine today, with the potential to significantly expand and benefit the field of bioethics. But this book is not only about applying classical Jewish values to bioethical dilemmas. It seeks to develop an (...) approach that is primarily informed by personal and communal obligations and social responsibilities. Jewish values focus on requirements, obligations, and commandments, and has thus sometimes been called an "Ethics of Responsibility," by advancing new relevant approaches that can encourage healthcare providers to remain dedicated to preventing harm and providing compassionate care to all, based on these inspiring and timeless values. Each chapter of this book explores questions such as: "Are we expected to risk our lives on behalf of others?" "When we can only help a limited number of people, how do we prioritize?" "What are the obligations and expectations of a society or government?" "Are issues of cultural sensitivity relevant in how we discharge our obligations to others?" "What should we do when obligations for others violate our own moral principles or commitments?" "Are there limits to how far one can be expected to go for others?" These and other issues are addressed in this book, as it attempts to describe a meaningful and compassionate Jewish bioethic of responsibility for our times. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that Maritain rejects any attempt to reduce ethics to a set of moral rules that can be derived from natural law. Rather, in his work we find a nuanced account of the virtue of prudence, which applies the precepts of the natural law to particular situations. We also find him insisting that the appropriate animation of ethical action springs not from the law, but from love. Maritain’s metaphysical existentialism leads him to insist that the natural (...) law is never sufficient to meet the exigencies of determining action. Accordingly, the authentically metaphysical basis of his ethics is thoroughly existential (in the Thomistic sense) and must include the prudential governance that guides human action, because an account of human nature and its ends only informs us of the range of possibilities for human goodness, without showing how to actually achieve them. In arguing for this claim I begin by situating Maritain’s ethical discussion in the context of his metaphysics. I then explore his understanding of natural law and its limitations when it comes to governing action. Finally, I explain the place of prudence as the virtue that applies the natural law to the particular. From this the role of existence and love as the interconnected basis for the foundations of ethics in Maritain’s thought is made clear. (shrink)

This paper investigates the fragmentation required of the philosophy of history in light of three key moments in its formation: German Idealism’s desire to see freedom realized in the world, the death of God, and the disasters of the twentieth century. I argue that Walter Benjamin and Maurice Blanchot respond to these threads of the philosophy of history with revolutionary imperatives that belong to no program or project, imperatives that both reorganize and destructure the work of education, affirmations of transience (...) and unmediated violence. I argue, following their lead, that any philosophy of history today must begin in a refusal of state power and the mediated violence of contemporary forms of community. (shrink)

This paper aims to situate Agamben’s treatment of the issue of community. It shows how Agamben departs from and supplements the French discourse on community through a critique of negativity; how the significance of community is measured against the society of the spectacle; and how the alienation from our linguistic being, which the spectacle effects, conditions a politics opposed to the State apparatus. Agamben’s coming community appropriates the dispossession and impropriety of contemporary human being in order to reconfigure the relation (...) of belonging and singularity. (shrink)

This paper examines Bataille’s role in the formation of the question of community, as developed by Nancy and Blanchot. The paper aims to situate the problematic status of Bataille’s influence—as both formative but ultimately insufficient—in his relation to Nietzsche and what Bataille understands as the experience of an irrecoverable loss. What it would mean to share such loss, what is at stake in bringing that experience to articulation, and what happens to those who endeavor to do so constitute the recalcitrant (...) elements in Bataille’s thought, which solicit but cannot sustain a renewal of the question of community. (shrink)

I develop an interdisciplinary framework for understanding the nature of agents and agency that is compatible with recent developments in the metaphysics of science and that also does justice to the mechanistic and normative characteristics of agents and agency as they are understood in moral philosophy, social psychology, neuroscience, robotics, and economics. The framework I develop is internal perspectivalist. That is to say, it counts agents as real in a perspective-dependent way, but not in a way that depends on an (...) external perspective. Whether or not something counts as an agent depends on whether it is able to have a certain kind of perspective. My approach differs from many others by treating possession of a perspective as more basic than the possession of agency, representational content/vehicles, cognition, intentions, goals, concepts, or mental or psychological states; these latter capabilities require the former, not the other way around. I explain what it means for a system to be able to have a perspective at all, beginning with simple cases in biology, and show how self-contained normative perspectives about proper function and control can emerge from mechanisms with relatively simple dynamics. I then describe how increasingly complex control architectures can become organized that allow for more complex perspectives that approach agency. Next, I provide my own account of the kind of perspective that is necessary for agency itself, the goal being to provide a reference against which other accounts can be compared. Finally, I introduce a crucial distinction that is necessary for understanding human agency: that between inclinational and committal agency, and venture a hypothesis about how the normative perspective underlying committal agency might be mechanistically realized. (shrink)

This paper approaches the experience of wonder phenomenologically. The account is descriptive. I suggest that in addition to the familiar treatments of wonder as constituted through a break with everyday involvement, on the one hand, and an awareness of the sheer fact of existence, on the other, the experience of wonder involves an intensification of the primary contact by which the world is given. That contact is prior to and presupposed by both our involvement with objects as implements of mediation (...) and our relation to others as persons. Because of that, wonder is depersonalizing and neutralizing, and so takes place outside any sense of ethical obligation. In contrast to efforts that aim at linking wonder and the good, I suggest that wonder is more aptly understood as making us deeper without making us better. (shrink)

In this essay I hope to make some new contributions to the philosophical opening occasioned by John Sallis’ articulation of an “elementology” more broadly and by his turn to Guo Xi’s exquisite Song Dynasty shan-shui scroll painting, Early Spring more particularly. I do so by bringing the remarkable writings by the American poet and thinker Gary Snyder, especially in relationship to his reading of the great Kamakura Zen Master Eihei Dōgen, directly into the fray of contemporary Continental discourses on the (...) elemental and the ecological. At the heart of this project is Snyder’s development of Dōgen’s elemental discourse of “mountains, rivers, and the great earth.” Like Sallis’ own efforts to recast language into a more elemental discourse, this essay will also focus on the manners of speaking specific to the philosophical and poetic self-presentation of the elements, including the relationship between the philosophical and the artistic as such. (shrink)