Maurice Scott, an outstanding economics scholar associated for most of his career with Nuffield College Oxford, was involved in the revolution in economic thought of the 1960s and 1970s. His major work, A New View of Economic Growth, was coolly received. Scott, who wrote an autobiography, My Life, and a philosophical study entitled Peter's Journey: A Search for the True Purpose of Life, was elected Fellow of the British Academy in 1990. Obituary by Christopher Bliss FBA.

The normative notion of fittingness figures saliently in the work of a number of ethical theorists writing in the late nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries and has in recent years regained prominence, occupying an important place in the theoretical tool kits of a range of contemporary writers. Yet the notion remains strikingly undertheorized. This article offers a (partial) remedy. I proceed by canvassing a number of attempts to analyze the fittingness relation in other terms, arguing that none is fully adequate. In (...) explaining why various analyses of fittingness fail, I draw into relief certain of the relation’s constitutive features and spotlight some of its interesting and important connections to various other properties. Along the way, I highlight the relation’s relevance to a number of ongoing debates in normative and metanormative philosophy. I conclude by indicating some directions for further research. (shrink)

Psychiatrists such as Michael Fitzgerald, Christopher Gillberg and Yoshiki Ishisaka diagnosed Ludwig Wittgenstein posthumously with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). Taking this diagnosis into account, the present paper discusses how Wittgenstein's philosophy reveals his cognitive difficulties. Wittgenstein's grammatical inquiries are particularly investigated here, highlighting his misunderstandings concerning the use of words – specially, his misunderstandings concerning analogies, which he tended to interpret literally.

Moral judgments attempt to describe a reality that does not exist, so they are all false. This troubling view is known as the moral error theory. Christopher Cowie defends it against the most compelling counter-argument, the argument from analogy: Cowie shows that moral error theory does not compromise the practice of making epistemic judgments.

Lying to one’s patients is wrong. So obvious as to border on a platitude, this truism is one that bioethicists have heartily endorsed for several decades. Deception, the standard line holds, underc...

In July 2018, the Nuffield Council of Bioethics released its long-awaited report on heritable genome editing. The Nuffield report was notable for finding that HGE could be morally permissible, even in cases of human enhancement. In this paper, we summarise the findings of the Nuffield Council report, critically examine the guiding principles they endorse and suggest ways in which the guiding principles could be strengthened. While we support the approach taken by the Nuffield Council, we argue that detailed consideration of (...) the moral implications of genome editing yields much stronger conclusions than they draw. Rather than being merely ‘morally permissible’, many instances of genome editing will be moral imperatives. (shrink)

A cognitivist account of decision-making views choice behaviour as a serial process of deliberation and commitment, which is separate from perception and action. By contrast, recent work in embodied decision-making has argued that this account is incompatible with emerging neurophysiological data. We argue that this account has significant overlap with an embodied account of predictive processing, and that both can offer mutual development for the other. However, more importantly, by demonstrating this close connection we uncover an alternative perspective on the (...) nature of decision-making, and the mechanisms that underlie our choice behaviour. This alternative perspective allows us to respond to a challenge for predictive processing, which claims that the satisfaction of distal goal-states is underspecified. Answering this challenge requires the adoption of an embodied perspective. (shrink)

Recent technological and methodological changes in farming have led to an emerging set of claims about the role of digital technology in food production. Known as precision agriculture, the integration of digital management and surveillance technologies in farming is normatively presented as a revolutionary transformation. Proponents contend that machine learning, Big Data, and automation will create more accurate, efficient, transparent, and environmentally friendly food production, staving off both food insecurity and ecological ruin. This article contributes a critique of these rhetorical (...) and discursive claims to a growing body of critical literature on precision agriculture. It argues precision agriculture is less a revolution than an evolution, an effort to shore up and intensify the conventional farming system responsible for generating many of the social and environmental problems precision agriculture is presented as solving. While precision agriculture advocates portray it as a radical, even democratic epistemological break with the past, this paper locates truth claims surrounding datafication and algorithmic control in farming within deeper historical contexts of the capitalist rationalization of production and efforts to quantify and automate physical and mental labor. Abjuring the growing cultural tendency to treat algorithmic systems as revolutionary in favor of social and historical dimensions of precision agriculture, can help re-frame the discussion about its design and use around real, socially and ecologically oriented change in farming, and so ensure that the possibilities and benefits of precision agriculture are as evenly and effectively shared as possible. (shrink)

Arguments for some controversial positions in metaethics—typically moral scepticism or the moral error theory—are sometimes thought to overreach. They appear to entail sceptical or error‐theoretic views about non‐moral branches of thought in a sense that is costly or implausible. If this is true, those metaethical arguments should be rejected. This is the companions in guilt strategy in metaethics. In this article, the contemporary use of the companions in guilt strategy is explored and assessed. The methodology of the strategy is discussed, (...) and criteria for assessing specific instances of its use are identified. Prominent instances of its use in the contemporary literature are then examined. The focus is on those that take (a) epistemic judgment, (b) prudential judgment, and (c) mathematical judgment as “companions,” with a view to undermining the moral error theory and moral scepticism, respectively. (shrink)

Rational explanation of action out of emotion faces a number of challenges. The Wrong Explanation Challenge says that explaining action out of emotion by reference to a purpose rather than an emotion gets it wrong. The Redundancy Challenge says that if explanation of an action by reference to emotion is sufficient then rational explanation is redundant. And the No Further Justification Challenge says that there is no more to say, at the level of rational explanation, about why people act as (...) they do out of a particular emotion. Furthermore, even if these challenges can be addressed, there is a Problem of Expressive Action, since many actions out of emotion seem unpromising candidates for being guided by normative practical reasons of the prudential, instrumental, deontic or consequentialist sort. In response, I argue that many actions out of emotions should be understood as expressive actions guided by the agent's conception of normative practical reasons: specifically, their conception of expressive reasons. (shrink)

I will entertain and reject three arguments which putatively establish that the individuals produced through de-extinction ought to be the same species as the extinct population. Forms of these arguments have appeared previously in restoration ecology. The first is the weakest, the conceptual argument, that de-extinction will not be de-extinction if it does not re-create an extinct species. This is misguided as de-extinction technology is not unified by its aim to re-create extinct species but in its use of the remnants (...) of extinct populations as a resource. The second is the argument from authenticity; the populations produced by de-extinction technologies will be inauthentic if they are not of the extinct species and, therefore, will not be valuable. I argue authenticity is not required in conservation as the value of authenticity varies between people and cultures, and the novelty of de-extinct species will be equally desirable in many cases. The third argument is from retributive justice; we need the de-extinct population to have the same species identity as we owe a moral debt to the extinct population. I find the case for retributive justice unconvincing and argue that acting as if we have a duty to resurrect extinct species will result in a world with less species. Ultimately all the arguments that connect de-extinction technology to species identity fail, leaving us to consider a more complex calculus for the justification of de-extinction in conservation. (shrink)

A common view of how-possibly explanations in biology treats them as explanatorily incomplete. In addition to this interpretation of how-possibly explanation, I argue that there is another interpretation, one which features what I term “explanatory strategies.” This strategy-centered interpretation of how-possibly explanation centers on there being a different explanatory context within which how-possibly explanations are offered. I contend that, in conditions where this strategy context is recognized, how-possibly explanations can be understood as complete explanations. I defend this alternative interpretation by (...) analyzing the explanatory value of simple physical models the nineteenth century developmental biologist Wilhelm His constructed for animal development. (shrink)

Current discourse on human enhancement is strongly influenced by far-reaching, radical visions concerning the future of human corporeality and civilisation. These visions are most forcefully brought into the discussions by proponents of transhumanism, which constitutes both a worldview and a sociocultural movement that is increasingly influential in academia, industry and other sectors of society. Aiming to shed new light on our societies’ current fascination with human enhancement discourse, three narratives concerning the genesis of transhumanism and the attractiveness of this worldview (...) are presented. Such a historically interpretative approach may give rise to a new reflexive stance on current enhancement discourse. (shrink)

Over the last eighty years, studies in play have carved out a small, but increasingly significant, niche within the social sciences and a rich repository has been built which underscores the importance of play to social, cultural, and psychological development. The general point running through these works is a philosophical recognition that play should not be separated from the trappings of everyday life, but instead should be seen as one of the more primordial aspects of human existence. Gadamer is one (...) philosopher frequently associated with interest in play. In his magnum opus, Truth and Method (1960), Gadamer insisted the significance of play to human understanding is not merely recreational, but rather it discloses the full context of any given situation by promoting a freedom of possibilities within the horizon of one’s own life-world (i.e. the world directly and immediately experienced). As such, his philosophical analysis of play was essential to his overall project of philosophical hermeneutics as it can explain how meaning is not derived from something essential within a text, but rather considered from a full range of possibilities. There are good reasons to expand on that understanding of play within philosophical studies and we suggest one way to do so is to compare Gadamer’s treatment of play with similar ideas from thinkers often associated with other philosophical schools. Although there are other candidates (e.g. Wittgenstein’s language games) for such an analysis, we limit our comparison here to the notion of transaction, as treated by the American pragmatist John Dewey in his volume Knowing and the Known (co-authored with Arthur Bentley in 1949). Because Dewey tied his conception of transaction to an overarching philosophy of inquiry, we believe comparing it to Gadamer’s use of play can highlight the deep philosophical import of this concept to the understanding of philosophical inquiry. (shrink)

Chris Meek. Strong-Completeness and Faithfulness in Belief Networks.

In identifying intrinsic molecular chance and extrinsic adaptive pressures as the only causally relevant factors in the process of evolution, the theoretical perspective of the Modern Synthesis had a major impact on the perceived tenability of an ontology of dispositional properties. However, since the late 1970s, an increasing number of evolutionary biologists have challenged the descriptive and explanatory adequacy of this “chance alone, extrinsic only” understanding of evolutionary change. Because morphological studies of homology, convergence, and teratology have revealed a space (...) of possible forms and phylogenetic trajectories that is considerably more restricted than expected, evo-devo has focused on the causal contribution of intrinsic developmental processes to the course of evolution. Evo-devo’s investigation into the developmental structure of the modality of morphology – including both the possibility and impossibility of organismal form – has led to the utilisation of a number of dispositional concepts that emphasise the tendency of the evolutionary process to change along certain routes. In this sense, and in contrast to the perspective of the Modern Synthesis, evo-devo can be described as a “science of dispositions.” This chapter discusses the recent philosophical literature on dispositional properties in evo-devo, exploring debates about both the metaphysical and epistemological aspects of the central dispositional concepts utilised in contemporary evo-devo and addressing the epistemological question of how dispositional properties challenge existing explanatory models in evolutionary biology. (shrink)

Wittgenstein’s later works are full of questions about the timing and duration of mental phenomena. These questions are often awkward ones, and Wittgenstein seems to take their awkwardness to be philosophically revealing, but if we ask what it is that these questions reveal then different interpretations are possible. This paper suggests that there are at least six different ways in which the timing of mental phenomena can be awkward. By identifying these we can give sense to some of Wittgenstein’s more (...) cryptic remarks, and doing this enables us to clarify some obscure elements in his picture of the mind, including the distinction between sensations and feelings, and his account of the rational status of those processes out of which rule-following is built. (shrink)

Contemporary architecture is increasingly grounded in science and mathematics. Architectural discourse has shifted radically from the sometimes disorienting Derridean deconstruction, to engaging scientific terms such as fractals, chaos, complexity, nonlinearity, and evolving systems. That's where the architectural action is -- at least for cutting-edge architects and thinkers -- and every practicing architect and student needs to become conversant with these terms and know what they mean. Unfortunately, the vast majority of architecture faculty are unprepared to explain them to students, not (...) having had a scientific education themselves. Here is an architecture book by an architect/scientist, just in time to help architects in the new millennium. Alexander discusses many of the scientific terms arising in cutting-edge architecture, and explains them to those who don't have scientific training or advanced mathematical knowledge. We find discussions of the evolution of forms; the importance of process in design; iteration; genetic algorithms; sequences of transformations; different levels of scale (i.e. fractals); etc. They are explained here by an architect who is also a scientist, because he wants to change the way architects think and build. Alexander is not merely popularizing other scientists' results and making them accessible to architects: he is in fact presenting new and original scientific work that ties many of these concepts together in a way that will be useful to architects. (shrink)

Reports of anomalous experiences are to be found in all known societies, both historically and geographically. If these reports were accurate, they would constitute powerful evidence for the existence of paranormal forces. However, research into the fallibility of human memory suggests that we should be cautious in accepting such reports at face value. Experimental research has shown that eyewitness testimony is unreliable, including eyewitness testimony for anomalous events. The present paper also reviews recent research into susceptibility to false memories and (...) considers the relevance of such work for assessing reports of anomalous events. It is noted that a number of psychological variables that have been shown to correlate with susceptibility to false memories also correlate with the tendency to report paranormal and related anomalous experiences. Although attempts to show a direct link between tendency to report anomalous experiences and susceptibility to false memories have had only limited success to date, this may reflect the use of inappropriate measures. (shrink)

BackgroundEvaluation of decision-making capacity to consent to medical treatment has proved to be difficult in patients with dementia. Studies showed that physicians are often insufficiently trained in the evaluation of decision-making capacity. In this study, we present findings from a secondary analysis of a qualitative interviews with physicians. These interviews were initially used to assess usability of an instrument for the evaluation of decision-making capacity. By looking at difficult cases of decision-making capacity evaluation in patients with dementia, we provide recommendations (...) for such evaluations in clinical practice.MethodsWe used thematic coding to analyse physicians’ narratives of problematic decision-making capacity evaluations in patients with dementia to uncover challenging issues of decision-making capacity evaluation.ResultsIn this study, decision-making capacity evaluations in patients with dementia were mainly perceived as challenging when they pertained to treatment refusals and treatment unrelated circumstances, such as psychiatric consultation, advance directives, and new living arrangements. Furthermore, the physicians reported training needs regarding situation-independent challenges with decision-making capacity evaluation.ConclusionsUpon further examining self-reported training needs and challenging cases, we have developed recommendations to improve decision-making capacity evaluations in clinical practice. In these recommendations, we argue that being able to evaluate decision-making capacity is an integral part of the informed consent process. (shrink)

This chapter suggests that descriptive epidemiological studies like the Global Burden of Disease Study can usefully be divided into four tasks: describing individuals’ health states over time, assessing their health states under a range of counterfactual scenarios, summarizing the information collected, and then packaging it for presentation. The authors show that each of these tasks raises important and challenging ethical questions. They comment on some of the philosophical issues involved in measuring health states, attributing causes to health outcomes, choosing the (...) counterfactual against which to assess causes, aggregating and summarizing complex information across multiple domains, discounting, age-weighting, handling fetal deaths, measuring health inequalities, representing uncertainty, and assessing personal responsibility for health outcomes. (shrink)

Introduction by Ralph McInerny The essays in this volume, indebted in great part to Jacques Maritain and to other Neo-Thomists, represent a contribution to an understanding of beauty and the arts within the Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition. As such they constitute a different voice in present-day discussions on beauty and aesthetics, a voice which nonetheless shares with many of its contemporaries concern over questions such as the relationship between beauty and morality, public funding of the arts and their educational role, objective and (...) universal standards of what is beautiful. In the tradition in which the contributors of this volume reflect, beauty manifests itself in the order of the universe, an order that provides human reason with a window onto the transcendent. For Aristotle and Aquinas the natural order grounds both art and morality, and yet it is this very order which has been called into question by modern science and philosophy. Instead of pointing us to a suprahuman order, the beautiful then points to the order of human freedom and creativity. Reflection on the beautiful since the modern philosopher Immanuel Kant has thus often taken a subjectivistic turn. Because of the importance of beauty and art in human existence, in man's education and life as a moral and political being, an alternative should be sought to any reduction of the beautiful to a purely subjective experience or cultural construct. The Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition, in dialogue with modern and contemporary conceptions of the beautiful, provides us with just that alternative, and thus the essays herein represent a decisive step in the "journey for Thomistic aesthetics." THE CONTRIBUTORS: In addition to the editor, the contributors to the volume are: Brian J. Braman, Matthew Cuddeback, Christopher M. Cullen, S.J., Patrick Downey, Desmond J. FitzGerald, Donald Haggerty, Wayne H. Harter, Jeanne M. Heffernan, Thomas S. Hibbs, Gregory J. Kerr, Joseph W. Koterski, S.J., Daniel McInerny, Ralph McInerny, James P. Mesa, John F. Morris, Ralph Nelson, Katherine Anne Osenga, Carrie Rehak, Stephen Schloesser, S.J., Francis Slade, John G. Trapani, Jr., and Henk E. S. Woldring. ABOUT THE EDITOR: Alice Ramos is associate professor of philosophy at St. John's University. (shrink)

I argue that the best interpretation of the general theory of relativity has need of a causal entity, and causal structure that is not reducible to light cone structure. I suggest that this causal interpretation of GTR helps defeat a key premise in one of the most popular arguments for causal reductionism, viz., the argument from physics.

In this book, Christopher D. Rodkey asks how the brain worships and responds by engaging ideas from neurological science, philosophy, ritual theory, and religious education. The Synaptic Gospel will prove to be a useful theoretical tool for pastors, religious educators, youth ministers, church music professionals, and seminary students.

Within this paper I draw on short vignettes and quotes taken from a two-year ethnographic study of boxing to think through the continuing academic merit of the notion of the male preserve. This is an important task due to evidence of shifts in social patterns of gender that have developed since the idea was first proposed in the 1970s. In aligning theoretical contributions from Lefebvre and Butler to discussions of the male preserve, we are able to add nuance to our (...) understanding of how such social spaces are engrained with and produced by the lingering grasp of patriarchal narratives. In particular, by situating the male preserve within shifting social processes, whereby certain men’s power is increasingly undermined, I highlight the production of space within which narratives connecting men to violence, aggression, and physical power can be consumed, performed, and reified in a relatively unrestricted form. This specific case study contributes to gender theory as an illustration of a way in which we might explore and understand social enclaves where certain people are able to lay claim to space and power. As such, I argue that the notion of the male preserve is still a useful conceptual, theoretical, and political device, especially when considered as produced by the tyranny of gender power through the dramatic representation and reification of behaviors symbolically linked to patriarchal narrations of manhood. (shrink)

This chapter is a critical review of Amy Allen's book The Politics of Our Selves. It briefly reconstructs some of the book's impressive achievements: articulating a synthetic account of gendered subjectivity that accounts for both subjection and autonomy; imaginatively integrating poststructuralist and communicative theories; and, furthering important new interpretations of Butler, Foucault, and Habermas. It also raises critical concerns about Allen's project: her specific conception of autonomy and its justification; her suspicions of the notion of historical progress; her psychological explanation (...) of the continuing power of pernicious norms of gendered subjectivity; the usefulness of psychoanalysis for critical social theory; and, the role of cultural, structural, and materialist explanations and political strategies. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Development of Moral Theology: Five Strands by Charles E. CurranChristopher LibbyThe Development of Moral Theology: Five Strands Charles E. Curran washington, dc: georgetown university press, 2013. 306 pp. $29.95At least two entwined questions dominate Charles Curran’s The Development of Moral Theology: first, what differentiates Catholic moral theology from other approaches to Christian ethics, and second, how we should understand, evaluate, and appropriate that tradition in light of (...) its own pluralism and that of the broader society? Curran engages both of these concerns by critically tracing five historical strands that have shaped moral theology: sin, reconciliation, and the manuals of moral theology; Thomas Aquinas and the Thomistic tradition; natural law; the papal teaching office; and the Second Vatican Council.The bulk of Curran’s discussion consists of chapter-length treatments of each of these strands. This approach lends analytical clarity to a tradition with a varied, [End Page 219] complex history, and provides the foundation for his later synthetic, evaluative discussion. The first chapter is characteristic of the manner in which subsequent chapters proceed: Curran begins with biblical treatments of the rupturing effects of sin before moving on to the emergence of formalized approaches to dealing with sin via penitential processes and, later, the manuals of moral theology. Incorporated into this historical discussion are evaluative and prescriptive claims. For example, in contrast to the dynamic and rich biblical understanding of the nature of sin, Curran suggests that the manuals of moral theology both possess an insufficiently full understanding of the reality of sin and conversion and distort the meaning of sin by focusing on the objective act alone (24).The second through fourth chapters proceed in similar fashion, with critical readings of the varied history of each strand that underscore the internal pluralism of Catholic moral theology. Thus, chapter 2 shows that, while there is but one Thomas Aquinas, there are numerous Thomisms, and chapter 3 denies the presence of a unified, coherent theory of natural law, closing by arguing that this lack of coherence is synchronically discernible in contrasts between recent papal social and sexual teachings.Following a similar treatment of the papal teaching office in chapter 4, Curran discusses the significance of Vatican II in chapter 5 before offering a broad evaluation of his historical surveys in the conclusion. There he calls for Church hierarchy to be more forthright in its recognition of the tradition’s internal diversity, more open to dissent and disagreement, and receptive to the power of the Holy Spirit as the primary force enabling the Church as a people to live hopefully as mediating God’s presence in the world.There is much to be learned from Curran’s impressive knowledge of his tradition. This is a text that will be especially valuable to graduate students and scholars and teachers of Christian ethics; the chapters on Aquinas and the Thomistic tradition, natural law, and Vatican II will have a particularly wide appeal. Nevertheless, I fear the book is less than the sum of its very informative parts. The lack of an initial chapter establishing the meaning and significance of Curran’s study or of a conceptual framework to guide the reader in navigating deep and what are sure to many to be unfamiliar historical waters may leave some readers disoriented. Such a chapter would have been helpful in establishing a broader context for the study and identifying themes that arise repeatedly in the course of the discussion, for example: the nature of authority and dissent, the relationship between philosophy and theology, the relationship between truth and historical consciousness, and the nature of tradition as “living,” to name a few. As it is, such themes emerge only gradually for the reader, rendering engagement with the text as a whole a less rewarding experience than it might otherwise be. [End Page 220]Christopher LibbyMissouri Valley CollegeCopyright © 2015 Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)

Mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual.... From a photographic negative, for example, one can make any number of prints; to ask for the 'authentic' print makes no sense. But the instant the criterion of authenticity ceases to be applicable to artistic production, the total function of art is reversed. Instead of being based on ritual, it begins to be based on another practice–politics.Only a thoughtless observer could deny that correspondences come into play between (...) the world of modern technology and the archaic symbol-world of mythology.The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious... (shrink)

This article consists of five poems and an introductory essay. The poems are intended on the one hand to make a case for the currently underrated virtues of poetic formalism, i.e., for the revival of rhyme and meter as aspects of poetic practice. On the other they argue for a distinctly philosophical mode of poetry that embraces the values of conceptual or rational discourse as against a romantic-modernist conception premised on the intrinsic superiority of lyric, metaphor, symbol, analogy, and suchlike (...) touchstone values. These issues are laid out programmatically in the opening essay and developed in a more performative as well as formal way in the five poems. (shrink)

After reviewing some different indispensability arguments, I distinguish several different ways in which mathematics can make an important contribution to a scientific explanation. Once these contributions are highlighted it will be possible to see that indispensability arguments have little chance of convincing us of the existence of abstract objects, even though they may give us good reason to accept the truth of some mathematical claims. However, in the concluding part of this paper, I argue that even though there is a (...) valid indispensability argument for realism about some mathematical claims, this argument is problematic as it begs the question at issue. This challenge to indispensability arguments is then used to suggest that if mathematics is making these sorts of contributions to science, then it may be the case that mathematical claims receive some non-empirical support prior to their application in scientific explanation. (shrink)

Is flexibility or formality more useful for organizations that are pursuing improved performance? Organizational structure scholars offer opposing answers to this question, and empirical results have been mixed. Our study contributes to this research by describing a mediational model that links organizational flexibility to performance via opportunity exploitation. Specifically, we argue that flexible firms are able to exploit a greater number of opportunities, which, in turn, can improve performance. We also argue that the indirect effect of flexibility on performance via (...) opportunity exploitation is stronger when top executives display higher affective commitment for their firms, meaning that they have a positive emotional attachment to their firms. Top executives with higher affective commitment can mitigate the downsides experienced by the staff of flexible firms, such as uncertainty and negative affect, which improves the outcomes of flexibility. Drawing on a sample of 211 firms and their founders, we find support for our hypotheses. (shrink)

The first comparative study of Heidegger and Schelling, recognizing Schelling's place in post-Kantian GermanIdealism and his contribution to Heidegger's later thought.