This essay explores the development of Simone Weil's conception of obedience across religious, political, and ethical contexts. By bringing together these strands of Weil's thought, it aims to illuminate some important connections in her treatment of obedience throughout these diverse topics. The author argues that Weil's political treatment of obedience is deeply influenced by ideas in Christian thought, and that this account is situated within an understanding of obedience in the natural world which is itself ethically loaded. Hence it (...) is suggested that Weil's account of obedience has something to offer philosophy today: namely, a conception of obedience which recognises the practical and ethical need for obeying others, but which is distinct from the mere submission to power. (shrink)

In a span of twenty years, two of the autocephalous churches of the Orthodox Christian world released documents addressing the social realities of contemporary life: the Russian Orthodox Church's Basis of the Social Concept (2000) and the Ecumenical Patriarch's For the Life of the World: Toward a Social Ethos of the Orthodox Church (2020). This article offers a side-by-side comparison and analysis of the documents’ treatments of matters of birth and death, including childbirth, abortion, miscarriage, end-of-life care, euthanasia, suicide, (...) and a vision of a good death. Detailed comparison demonstrates remarkable accord between the two churches on many of these matters. Differences of omission and emphasis appear to be indicative of contrasting demographic and historical situations, with the exception of one, notable divergence between the churches, all of which are discussed. The striking degree and depth of consonance between the documents offers potential for cooperation and unity as the two churches negotiate their conflicts while also seeking to guide their flocks and offer Orthodox Christian witness in an increasingly desacralized world. (shrink)

William Albert Crawford-Frost was a Canadian born philosopher who developed a unique form of idealism that he called the Philosophy of Integration. This he presented in 1906 in a book by that title which he described in the subtitle as An Explanation of the Universe and of the Christian Religion. What I have taken the liberty of calling his Fusion Philosophy is the metaphysical theory outlined in this work as explained and developed further in his two other books, (...) Old Dogma in a New Light, and A New Theory of Evolution, as well as in a number of shorter pamphlets. I am using the term “fusion” rather than “integration” partly to avoid the social and political emphasis which the latter word has since acquired. However, I am not at all unhappy that my term “fusion” calls to mind our developing nuclear technology since, as will be seen, it is an implication of Crawford-Frost’s idealism that the development and application of nuclear fission, as opposed to fusion, is quite literally nothing less than the work of the Devil. This makes Crawford-Frost’s philosophy of some interest to us today, though I think that his unique form of idealism is, in many ways, interesting in itself. (shrink)

Th is microhistorical case-study of the role of the Antifascist Front of Women of Yugoslavia in popularising New Year celebrations in the Serbian municipality of Čačak aims to examine the internalisation of the communist discourse through ritual practices serving to infiltrate the private life of the local community and to expand the Party’s support basis. In the first post-war years, the new authorities not only tolerated, but tacitly approved and aided celebrations of Christian holidays. Yet this policy changed radically (...) in 1948, when local mass organisations were instructed to replace winter holidays with New Year festivities, based on the Soviet model. These events bore an observably ideologised character, since New Year’s Day was not only supposed to mark the calendar year’s end, but also to symbolise the new beginning as a ubiquitous simulacrum for a new socialist society. The primary agents of this novel collective identity practice were women, champions of the socialist emancipation project, whereas the main channel for dissemination were children, which embedded this measure within the farsighted project of tempering a “new man.”. (shrink)

The Darwinian Revolution--the change in thinking sparked by Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species, which argued that all organisms including humans are the end product of a long, slow, natural process of evolution rather than the miraculous creation of an all-powerful God--is one of the truly momentous cultural events in Western Civilization. Darwinism as Religion is an innovative and exciting approach to this revolution through creative writing, showing how the theory of evolution as expressed by Darwin has, from the (...) first, functioned as a secular religion. Drawing on a deep understanding of both the science and the history, Michael Ruse surveys the naturalistic thinking about the origins of organisms, including the origins of humankind, as portrayed in novels and in poetry, taking the story from its beginnings in the Age of Enlightenment in the 18th century right up to the present. He shows that, contrary to the opinion of many historians of the era, there was indeed a revolution in thought and that the English naturalist Charles Darwin was at the heart of it. However, contrary also to what many think, this revolution was not primarily scientific as such, but more religious or metaphysical, as people were taken from the secure world of the Christian faith into a darker, more hostile world of evolutionism. In a fashion unusual for the history of ideas, Ruse turns to the novelists and poets of the period for inspiration and information. His book covers a wide range of creative writers - from novelists like Voltaire and poets like Erasmus Darwin in the eighteenth century, through the nineteenth century with novelists including Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Henry James and H. G. Wells and poets including Robert Browning, Alfred Tennyson, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson and Gerard Manley Hopkins, and on to the twentieth century with novelists including Edith Wharton, D. H. Lawrence, John Steinbeck, William Golding, Graham Greene, Ian McEwan and Marilynne Robinson, and poets including Robert Frost, Edna St Vincent Millay and Philip Appleman. Covering such topics as God, origins, humans, race and class, morality, sexuality, and sin and redemption, and written in an engaging manner and spiced with wry humor, Darwinism as Religion gives us an entirely fresh, engaging and provocative view of one of the cultural highpoints of Western thought. (shrink)

Can economics, which is based on the notion of individual optimization, really model individuals who have a sense of exteriority? This question, derived both from Marcel Mauss's sociological analysis of the social norm of gift-giving and from Emmanuel Levinas's phenomenological analysis of the idea of 'otherness,' leads to the problem of whether it is possible to model altruism with the tool of optimization. By investigating the ways in which economic theory can address this challenge, and by introducing a postulate of (...) methodological altruism following Levinas's theory of the constitution of subjectivity through otherness, this paper uncovers an alternative foundation for the very notion of optimizing calculation - no longer as a self-centered initiative, but rather as an other-centered response. This makes it possible to clarify the implicit content of usual economic individualism, and to see on the basis of which ethical arguments the economic method of optimization may be upheld. The paper studies the consequences of this renewed foundation of optimization for the organization of a fair and efficient interaction between altruists. (shrink)

When are we responsible for addressing the acute deprivations of others beyond state borders? One widely held view is that we are responsible for addressing or preventing acute deprivations insofar as we have contributed to them or are contributing to bringing them about. But how should agents who endorse this “contribution principle” of allocating responsibility yet are uncertain whether or how much they have contributed to some problem conceive of their responsibilities with respect to it? Legal systems adopt formal norms (...) that set the burden of proof, the standard of proof, and the constraints on admissible evidence, which help courts to apply liability rules in cases where there are significant evidential uncertainties. Applying principles for determining ethical responsibilities, too, require such norms. Their content, however, should be much different from that found in criminal and even civil legal settings, where the moral costs of falsely holding those responsible for bringing about some harm are more worrisome. Instead of demanding that an agent be shown to have contributed to some deprivation “beyond a reasonable doubt,” we should express a willingness to err in favor of the acutely deprived subjects, demanding that even those agents who merely suspect that they may have substantially contributed to these deprivations undertake efforts to address them. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Oberlin's First Philosopher* EDWARD H. MADDEN ASA MAHANWAS THE FroST president of Oberlin College (1835-50) and professor of moral philosophy--the usual pattern during these years of "academic orthodoxy" when Christianity was purveyed in American colleges as the philosophy.1 The orthodox professors argued philosophical points very little but rather "presented" and "illustrated" their basic truths. 2 In some ways Mahan fit the stereotype. He did not always probe deeply (...) into questions or always offer reasons for his conclusions. His books are full of phrases like "it could not be otherwise", "no one, it is presumed, will deny that", "it is intuitively evident", "everyone cannot but know", and so on. And he frequently cited other philosophers, as well as the Scriptures, as "authorities." He even cited lengthy passages from Jonathan Edwards whenever he could, even though he differed with Edwards on almost every major point f In more important ways Mahan, however, does not fit the stereotype. Unlike Francis Wayland and most of the other academic orthodoxy before 1850, he had read, and been influenced by, German and French philosophers as well as the Scottish realists. Mahan was particularly influenced by Kant and Cousin. An astute contemporary reviewer remarked that Mahan, like Cousin, was an eclectic. "His eclecticism degenerates sometimes into the merely aggressive, and he delights occasionally in strange and incongruous combinations of Kant, Coleridge, Cousin and himself, but showing here and there great vigor and acuteness, and very considerable philosophical ability." a The aggressiveness of Mahan also sets him apart from the rest of the orthodoxy. He was too fiery by temperament to pass up polemics and hence got to the heart of some basic philosophical problems. He attacked the Edwardian doctrine of determinism and was led, by the vigor of his attack, into what many nineteenth-century Christians considered heresy3 He attacked utilitarianism in all its forms, including Paley's, in a far more consistent and thorough fashion than Francis Wayland and the other followers of Scottish realism and English intuitionism. And first and foremost he vigorously attacked the moral philosophy of his colleague Charles Grandison Finney, famous evangelist, professor of theology, and president-to-be of Oberlin. The spiritedness of his criticisms frequently aroused the ire of his Oberlin colleagues, but the spirited- *Research for some of the material in this paper was made possible by a grant from the Penrose Fund of the AmericanPhilosophicalSociety. ~Cf. Herbert W. Schneider, A History o] American Philosophy (2nd ed.; New York: Columbia University Press, 1963),pp. 195-220; and Joseph L. Blau, Men and Movements in American Philosophy (New York: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1952). 2Cf. E. H. Madden, "Francis Wayland and the Limits of Moral Responsibility," Proceedings o] the American Philosophical Bociety, Vol. 106 (1962),pp. 348-359. *Quoted by R. S. Fletcher in his History o] Oberlin College (Oberlin, Ohio, 1943),II, 701. 4Fletcher, I, 223-231. [57] 58 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY hess fortunately was accompanied by a "considerable philosophical ability" that merits close attention. I Mahan's critique of Edwards appears in his Doctrine o] the Will, first published in 1844. According to Mahan, "Edwards stands convicted of a fundamental error in philosophy, an error which gives form and character to his whole workmthe confounding of the Will with the Sensibility, and thus confounding the characteristics of the phenomena of the former faculty with those of the phenomena of the latter." 5 The trouble is that the whole of Edwards' work "is constructed without an appeal to Consciousness, the only proper and authoritative tribunal of appeal in the case." 8 If we attend carefully to consciousness, said Mahan, we can distinguish volition from the strongest desire and hence must distinguish between the separate faculties of will as personal activity and sensation as mere passive impression. The latter does not "act," it merely "suffers." The will is the moving force in life and unless it can be shown that there is some necessary connection between will and sensation--which, in fact, cannot be done--then it follows that the will is free, that is, the source of "personal activity." Mahan's rejection of universal determinism, of course, entailed the rejection of the Calvinistic doctrine of election... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Wuthering Heights: The Romantic AscentMartha NussbaumI“If I were in heaven, Nelly,” she said, “I should be extremely miserable.”“I dreamt, once, that I was there.... [H]eaven did not seem to be my home; and I broke my heart with weeping to come back to earth; and the angels were so angry that they flung me out, into the middle of the heath on the top of Wuthering Heights, where I (...) woke sobbing for joy.” 1Cathy’s soul cannot live in the Christian heaven. For her soul, she explains, is the same as Heathcliff’s soul, and the heavenly soul of Linton is as different from theirs “as a moonbeam from lightning, or frost from fire” (p. 95). Much later, as she lies on her deathbed, now the wife of Edgar Linton, thinking the Linton thought that what she wants is an escape into “that glorious world” of paradise and peace, Heathcliff watches her with burning eyes. At last she calls to him:In her eagerness she rose and supported herself on the arm of the chair. At that earnest appeal he turned to her, looking absolutely desperate. His eyes, wide and wet, at last flashed fiercely on her; his breast heaved convulsively. An instant they held asunder, and then how they met I hardly saw, but Catherine made a spring, and he caught her, and they were locked in an embrace from which I thought my mistress would never be released alive: in fact, to my eyes, she seemed directly insensible. He flung himself into the nearest seat, and on my approaching hurriedly to ascertain if she had fainted, he gnashed at me, and foamed like a mad dog, and gathered her to him with greedy jealousy. I did not feel as if I were in the company of a creature of my own species: it appeared that he would not understand, though I spoke to him; so I stood off, and held my tongue, in great perplexity.(pp. 188–89) [End Page 362]Brontë’s description alludes to the imagery of the Christian ascent tradition. As in Augustine and Dante, love is a flame that animates the eyes, a lightning bolt that pierces the fog of our obtuse daily condition; as in that tradition, love’s energy causes the lover to leap away from the petty egoism of the daily into an ecstatic and mutually loving embrace. But we know we are far from the world of the Christian ascent, even its erotic Augustinian form. Cathy’s spring is not an upward, but a horizontal movement—not toward heaven, but toward her beloved moors and winds, severed from which she would find heaven miserable; not toward God but toward Heathcliff, the lover of her soul. Nor is there redemption into heaven in this work; there is, if anything, a redemption from a world dominated by the imagination of heaven, into a world that the pious Ellen Dean can recognize only as an animal world, a world inhabited by creatures of a different species, who probably do not understand language, so thoroughly are they identified with the energy of the body. A few hours after Cathy’s death Heathcliff, as Ellen Dean tells us, in a sudden “paroxysm of ungovernable passion,” dashes his head against the knotted trunk of a tree, splashing the bark with blood, “and, lifting up his eyes, howled, not like a man, but like a savage beast being goaded to death with knives and spears” (p. 197). It is in his world alone, it would seem, that flame is truly found. As Cathy said to Edgar Linton, “Your cold blood cannot be worked into a fever: your veins are full of ice-water; but mine are boiling, and the sight of such chillness makes them dance.”Brontë’s novel situates itself within a long tradition of writing about love and its ascent or purification. This tradition, inaugurated by Socrates’ description of the ladder of love in Plato’s Symposium, is continued by later Platonists, and radically reformulated by Christian thinkers, who stress, against Plato, the soul’s receptivity and vulnerability to the inscrutable operations of grace. In both the Platonic and... (shrink)

While there has been much discussion of whether AI systems could function as moral agents or acquire sentience, there has been relatively little discussion of whether AI systems could have free will. In this article, I sketch a framework for thinking about this question. I argue that, to determine whether an AI system has free will, we should not look for some mysterious property, expect its underlying algorithms to be indeterministic, or ask whether the system is unpredictable. Rather, we should (...) simply ask whether it is explanatorily indispensable to view the system as an intentional agent, with the capacity for choice between alternative possibilities and control over the resulting actions. If the answer is “yes”, then the system counts as having free will in a pragmatic and diagnostically useful sense. (shrink)

We agree with MacNeilage's claim that speech stems from a volitional vocalization pathway between the cingulate and the supplementary motor area (SMA). We add the vocal self- monitoring system as the first recruitment of the Broca-Wernicke circuit. SMA control for “frames” is supported by wrong consonant-vowel recurring utterance aphasia and an imaging study of quasi-reiterant speech. The role of Broca's area is questioned in the emergence of “content,” because a primary motor mapping, embodying peripheral constraints, seems sufficient. Finally, we reject (...) a uniquely peripheral account of speech emergence. (shrink)

Few studies have considered in detail the ethical issues surrounding research in which investigators ask community members to engage in research subject recruitment within their own communities. Peer-driven recruitment and its variants are useful for accessing and including certain populations in research, but also have the potential to undermine the ethical and scientific integrity of community-based research. This paper examines the ethical implications of utilizing community members as recruiters of human subjects in the context of PDR, as well as the (...) authors' experience with a variant of PDR in a research project in South Africa. The importance of situating PDR in a comprehensive community engagement process that is responsive to the constraints of science and local needs and interests is emphasized. The paper will have relevance to bioethicists, health researchers, and research regulators concerned about the appropriate use of peer-driven recruitment strategies in health research. (shrink)

Artificial Intelligence (AI) seems to be impacting all industry sectors, while becoming a motor for innovation. The diffusion of AI from the civilian sector to the defense sector, and AI’s dual-use potential has drawn attention from security and ethics scholars. With the publication of the ethical guideline Trustworthy AI by the European Union (EU), normative questions on the application of AI have been further evaluated. In order to draw conclusions on Trustworthy AI as a point of reference for responsible research (...) and development (R&D), we approach the diffusion of AI across both civilian and military spheres in the EU. We capture the extent of technological diffusion and derive European and German patent citation networks. Both networks indicate a low degree of diffusion of AI between civilian and defense sectors. A qualitative investigation of project descriptions of a research institute’s work in both civilian and military fields shows that military AI applications stress accuracy or robustness, while civilian AI reflects a focus on human-centric values. Our work represents a first approach by linking processes of technology diffusion with normative evaluations of R&D. (shrink)

In a recent paper on ‘The Many as One’, Lewis A. Kornhauser and Lawrence G. Sager look at an issue that we take to be of great importance in political theory. How far should groups in public life try to speak with one voice, and act with one mind? How far should public groups try to display what Ronald Dworkin calls integrity? We do not expect the many on the market to be integrated in this sense. But should we expect (...) integration among the many in the legislature, for example, or among the many on the courts? We agree with Kornhauser and Sager about a number of their claims but think that they miss out on important detail and do not achieve a fully general perspective on the issues raised. Our own contribution is in three sections. We address, first, the nature of the integrity challenge; second, the range of cases in which the challenge arises; and third, the question of whether public groups should be designed and required to meet that challenge. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Dr. Jacques L. and Martin Hide-a-Guerre: The Subject of New HistoricismStephen Bretzius (bio)Joel Fineman. The Subjectivity Effect in Western Literary Tradition: Essays Toward the Release of Shakespeare’s Will. Cambridge: MIT P, 1991. [SW]Stephen Greenblatt. Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture. New York: Routledge, 1990.Stephen Greenblatt. Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England. Berkeley: U of California P, 1988.The word ‘theory’ stems from the Greek (...) verb theorein. The noun belonging to it is theoria. Peculiar to these words is a lofty and mysterious meaning. The verb theorein grew out of the coalescing of two root words, thea and horao. Thea (cf. theater) is the outward look, the aspect, in which something shows itself.... The second root word in theorein, horao, means: to look at something attentively, to look it over, to view it closely. Thus it follows that theorein is thean horan, to look attentively on the outward appearance wherein what presences becomes visible and, through such sight—seeing—to linger with it.—Martin Heidegger, “Science and Reflection”Hamlet: ‘Sblood, there is something in this more than natural, if philosophy could find it out. A flourish.Guildenstern: There are the players.—Hamlet 2.2.366–681In setting forth Shakespeare’s unique role within an important institutional appropriation of the early modern theater by the postmodern university, together with a corresponding postmodern theory already shaping the early modern theater, a highly stylized early play like Romeo and Juliet is a good place to begin. For here, and from the beginning, the play unfolds outside (and therefore inside) the “deconstructed” binarisms characteristic of a certain poststructural literary theory generally—womb-tomb, light-dark, female-male, Capulet-Montague, waking-sleeping, all-nothing, lark-nightingale, love-hate, late-early, vice-virtue, poison-remedy, mercy-murder, wedding-funeral, dove-raven, fiend-angel, wolf-lamb, miss-mend, stand-stir, haste-destiny, and so on. 1 Here the nonbinary language [End Page 73] of the theater anticipates the “unlimited semiosis” of postmodern literary and cultural theory precisely by extending that nonbinary language to the opposition theater-theory, which the play also undermines. To cite only one particularly central example, literary criticism’s ongoing concerns with the cultural and ritualistic origins of tragedy are not just explored but explained—theorized—by the play’s self-conscious identification of Juliet as both “dove” (“So shows a snowy dove trooping with crows” [1.5.48]) and “lamb” (“Juliet! Fast, I warrant her, she. / Why, lamb! Why, lady!” [4.5.1–2]). The theatrical experience of the play’s “poor sacrifices” [5.3.318] is further related to the Catholic mass, out of which Shakespeare’s own tragic theater significantly evolves, by “Come Lammas Eve at night shall she be fourteen” [1.3.17] (Lammas [hlammas] hlaf ‘loaf, bread,’ maesse ‘mass’) and “God’s bread, it makes me mad!” [3.5.176]. 2 Redoubling this Christian context for sacrifice, a seasonal parallel in the myth of Persephone stolen away by Pluto shows through “Death lies on her like an untimely frost / Upon the sweetest flower of all the field” [4.5.28–29] and “O son, the night before thy wedding-day / Hath Death lain with thy wife” [35–36]. Within the same ongoing theorization of the play’s own theater, the “pomegranate tree” in Juliet’s “It was the nightingale, and not the lark... / Nightly she sings on yon pomegranate tree” [3.5.2–4] further joins Juliet to Persephone, Lady Capulet to Ceres, and “love-devouring death” [2.6.7] to Hades.From the play to the theory, then, influential critiques of performative discourse and its ritualistic origins in postsubjective (post-Lacanian) sacrifice are generated not only by the postmodern university, but also, in Romeo and Juliet, by the early modern theater. For the play, and not simply the theory, is already about the play—and autobiographical, from Montague’s “Away from light steals home my heavy son, / And private in his chamber pens himself” [1.1.137–38] through Juliet’s “Was ever book containing such vile matter / So fairly bound” [3.2.83–84] to Romeo’s frantic “get me ink and paper... (shrink)

I. Allgemeine werttheorie, psychologie des begehrens.--II. Grundzüge einer ethik.

This is a review of Andrei Marmor's book "Foundations of Institutional Reality", Oxford University Press, 2023.

When can or should citizenship be granted to prospective members of states? When can or should states withdraw citizenship from their existing members? In recent decades, political philosophers have paid considerable attention to the first question, but have generally neglected the second. There are of course good practical reasons for prioritizing the question of when citizenship should be granted—many individuals have a strong interest in acquiring citizenship in particular political communities, while many fewer are at risk of denationalization. Still, loss (...) of membership in a political community is a practice with a long history that continues to take place today. -/- Concerns about national security have recently led several liberal democratic states to pass, strengthen or consider legislation that would empower their governments to denationalize certain persons.] At the international level, formal norms governing denationalization are vague and generally toothless, and there are no international legal norms that restrict denationalization to citizens who hold another citizenship or wish to take up citizenship elsewhere (Worster, 2009). So it is important to determine whether there are conditions under which denationalization can be morally justified and, if so, what those conditions are. We shall argue that while denationalization is ordinarily impermissible, there is a class of crime committed by citizens that may render it not only permissible, but a fitting response on the part of the state. (shrink)

There exists a growing literature on the so-called physical Church-Turing thesis in a relativistic spacetime setting. The physical Church-Turing thesis is the conjecture that no computing device that is physically realizable can exceed the computational barriers of a Turing machine. By suggesting a concrete implementation of a beyond-Turing computer in a spacetime setting, Istvan Nemeti and Gyula David have shown how an appreciation of the physical Church-Turing thesis necessitates the confluence of mathematical, computational, physical, and indeed cosmological ideas. In this (...) essay, I will honour Istvan's seventieth birthday, as well as his longstanding interest in, and his seminal contributions to, this field going back to as early as 1987 by modestly proposing how the concrete implementation in Nemeti and D\'avid might be complemented by a quantum-information-theoretic communication protocol between the computing device and the logician who sets the beyond-Turing computer a task such as determining the consistency of Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory. This suggests that even the foundations of quantum theory and, ultimately, quantum gravity may play an important role in determining the validity of the physical Church-Turing thesis. (shrink)

This encyclopaedia entry studies the philosophy of Johann Christooh Sturm (1635 - 1704). Sturm was a philosopher, physicist, mathematician, and theologian. He corresponded with Leibniz and influenced Christian Wolff. This entry analyses Sturm's scientific method and his natural philosophy grounded in mechanism, occasionalism, and final causes. It shows Sturm's important role in seventeenth-century philosophy.

In this paper, I re-examine Barry Smith’s list of features of Austrian Philosophy in his Austrian philosophy. The legacy of Franz Brentano. Open Court, Chicago, 1994). I claim that the list properly applies only in a somewhat abbreviated form to all significant representatives of Austrian Philosophy. Moreover, Smith’s crucial thesis that the features of Austrian Philosophy are not shared by any German philosopher only holds if we compare Austrian Philosophy to a canonical list of German Philosophy II. This list, however, (...) was established in twentieth century as a result of historical misrepresentations. If we correct these misrepresentations, we obtain another list of hidden representatives called German Philosophy I. German Philosophy I is fundamentally identical to Austrian Philosophy, whereas German Philosophy II is entirely different from both Austrian Philosophy and German Philosophy I. Therefore, a slightly modified version of Smith’s Austrian Philosophy account still makes sense as a tool to position the proscientific and rational currents of Austrian Philosophy and German Philosophy I against the tendentially anti-scientific and irrational current of German Philosophy II. (shrink)

Probabilistic inference forms lead from point probabilities of the premises to interval probabilities of the conclusion. The probabilistic version of Modus Ponens, for example, licenses the inference from \({P(A) = \alpha}\) and \({P(B|A) = \beta}\) to \({P(B)\in [\alpha\beta, \alpha\beta + 1 - \alpha]}\) . We study generalized inference forms with three or more premises. The generalized Modus Ponens, for example, leads from \({P(A_{1}) = \alpha_{1}, \ldots, P(A_{n})= \alpha_{n}}\) and \({P(B|A_{1} \wedge \cdots \wedge A_{n}) = \beta}\) to an according interval for (...) P(B). We present the probability intervals for the conclusions of the generalized versions of Cut, Cautious Monotonicity, Modus Tollens, Bayes’ Theorem, and some SYSTEM O rules. Recently, Gilio has shown that generalized inference forms “degrade”—more premises lead to less precise conclusions, i.e., to wider probability intervals of the conclusion. We also study Adam’s probability preservation properties in generalized inference forms. Special attention is devoted to zero probabilities of the conditioning events. These zero probabilities often lead to different intervals in the coherence and the Kolmogorov approach. (shrink)

As work on practical wisdom and medicine accelerates, now is a good time to outline some important challenges that any approach to developing an account of this virtue faces. More specifically, I develop five challenges having to do with the existence and nature of practical wisdom, and whether it connects with objective and general normative truths. The main goal is to provide a guide to the challenges themselves and some of the options available for tackling them, rather than trying to (...) resolve them here. (shrink)

A central problem of democracy is the aggregation of divergent individual inputs into overall collective decisions. Social-choice-theoretic impossibility results famously demonstrate the intractability of a large class of such aggregation problems. This paper develops a taxonomy of two concepts of agreement, agreement at a substantive level and agreement at a meta-level, and discusses the escape-routes these concepts open up from the impossibility problems of social choice. Specifically, two contexts of democratic aggregation are addressed: first, the familiar context of preferences, and (...) second, the largely unexplored context of sets of judgments over multiple interconnected propositions. Drawing on some recent developments in social choice theory and democratic theory, I will defend the view that, when agreement is conceptualized in democratic theory and when it is sought in democratic practice, more emphasis should be placed on agreement at a meta-level than is commonly done. Finally, I will address the more general question to what extent it is acceptable for the stability of institutions for democratic aggregation to be dependent on specific empirical contingencies. (shrink)

I propose to apply a version of contextualism about knowledge to the special case that represents the topic of this volume. I begin by motivating my preferred version of contextualism, which may be labelled as conventionalist contextualism; here I start from a well-known problem that besets epistemic internalism (section I). Following this, I pose a problem for conventionalist contextualism and argue that it can be solved by invoking, first, the idea of what I shall call the lifewordly background of epistemic (...) justifi cation, an idea originating from Husserl and Wittgenstein, and, secondly, the associated notion of normality, to be found in Husserl (section II). Finally, I apply the resulting conception of justification to philosophical knowledge, particularly focussing on the special role of intuitions (section III). (shrink)

The task of this paper is to ground the notion of cyberethics of co-operation. The evolution of modern society has resulted in a shift from industrial society towards informational capitalism. This transformation is a multidimensional shift that affects all aspects of society. Hence also the ethical system of society is penetrated by the emergence of the knowledge society and ethical guidelines for the information age are needed. Ethical issues and conflicts in the knowledge society are connected to topics of ecological (...) and social sustainability. For information ethics and cyberethics, the sustainable design of society, social, and socio-technological systems is important. In this context the notions of sustainability and co-operation are discussed. Based on these categories, the approach of cyberethics of co-operation can be theoretically grounded. (shrink)

In Auseinandersetzung mit Positionen der gegenwartigen Handlungstheorie argumentiert das Buch fur die These, dass absichtliche Handlungen als Konklusionen praktischer Schlusse verstanden werden sollten. Motivierende Grunde lassen sich dann als Pramissen solcher Schlusse beschreiben; normative Urteile konnen als Ausdruck einer praktischen Schlussregel aufgefasst werden; und praktisches Wissen von dem, was man gerade tut, wird als Gestalt des Bewusstseins verstandlich, das konstitutiv zu solchem Schliessen gehort.

Purpose: Whereas ethical considerations on imaging techniques and interpretations of neuroimaging results flourish, there is not much work on their preconditions. In this paper, therefore, we discuss epistemological considerations on neuroimaging and their implications for neuroethics. Results: Neuroimaging uses indirect methods to generate data about surrogate parameters for mental processes, and there are many determinants influencing the results, including current hypotheses and the state of knowledge. This leads to an interdependence between hypotheses and data. Additionally, different levels of description are (...) involved, especially when experiments are designed to answer questions pertaining to broad concepts like the self, empathy or moral intentions. Interdisciplinary theoretical frameworks are needed to integrate findings from the life sciences and the humanities and to translate between them. While these epistemological issues are not specific for neuroimaging, there are some reasons why they are of special importance in this context: Due to their inferential proximity, 'neuro-images' seem to be self-evident, suggesting directness of observation and objectivity. This has to be critically discussed to prevent overinterpretation. Additionally, there is a high level of attention to neuroimaging, leading to a high frequency of presentation of neuroimaging data and making the critical examination of their epistemological properties even more pressing. Conclusions: Epistemological considerations are an important prerequisite for neuroethics. The presentation and communication of the results of neuroimaging studies, the potential generation of new phenomena and new 'dysfunctions' through neuroimaging, and the influence on central concepts at the foundations of ethics will be important future topics for this discipline. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: The Concept of the Standard of Living The Diverse Purposes of the Concept of the Standard of Living The Importance of Disagreement about the Standard of Living The Role of Education in the Standard of Living Social Primary Goods The Capabilities Approach Conceiving and Applying the Standard of Living.

Humans routinely make many decisions collectively, whether they choose a restaurant with friends, elect political leaders or decide actions to tackle international problems, such as climate change, that affect the future of the whole planet. We might be less aware of it, but group decisions are just as important to social animals as they are for us. Animal groups have to collectively decide about communal movements, activities, nesting sites and enterprises, such as cooperative breeding or hunting, that crucially affect their (...) survival and reproduction. While human group decisions have been studied for millennia, the study of animal group decisions is relatively young, but is now expanding rapidly. It emerges that group decisions in animals pose many similar questions to those in humans. The purpose of the present issue is to integrate and combine approaches in the social and natural sciences in an area in which theoretical challenges and research questions are often similar, and to introduce each discipline to the other’s key ideas, findings and successful methods. In order to make such an introduction as effective as possible, here, we briefly review conceptual similarities and differences between the sciences, and provide a guide to the present issue. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis article assesses whether the contemporary consensus of just war thinking to allow only for defence as just cause for war between states should also be applied to the practice of target...

Offers a philosophical critique of neoclassical and post-neoclassical economics.