R.G. Collingwood (1889-1943) was an English philosopher, historian and practicing archaeologist. His work, particularly in the philosophy of action and history, has been profoundly influential in the 20th and 21st century. Although the importance of his work is indisputable, this is the first book to consider how and why it actually matters. Giussepina D'oro considers the importance of Collingwood as a thinker who thinks kaleidoscopically and, unlike lots of contemporary philosophers, refuses to focus on narrow, technical interests but instead, observes (...) the whole world of thought. Why Collingwood Matters revives Collingwood's conception of the role and character of philosophical analysis and shows how it informs his understanding of the mind, what it means to act, and what it means to understand the past historically. It also argues for the relevance of his metaphilosophical approach to the challenge posed by the Anthropocene and the global environmental crisis. Both an elucidation of Collingwood's thought and a lively exploration of it's contemporary relevance, Why Collingwood Matters provides a much-needed examination of a 20th-century polymath. (shrink)

Opinion is divided about the certainty of the evidence base for gender-affirming medical interventions in youth. Proponents claim that these treatments are well supported, while critics claim the poor-quality evidence base warrants extreme caution. Psychotherapy is one of the only available alternatives to the gender-affirming approach. Discussion of the treatment of gender dysphoria in young people is generally framed in terms of two binary approaches: affirmation or conversion. Psychotherapy/exploratory therapy offers a treatment option that lies outside this binary, although it (...) is mistakenly conflated with conversion therapies. Psychotherapy does not impose restrictive gender stereotypes, as is sometimes claimed, but critically examines them. It empowers young people to develop creative solutions to their difficulties and promotes agency and autonomy. Importantly, an exploratory psychotherapeutic process can help to clarify whether gender dysphoria is a carrier for other psychological or social problems that may not be immediately apparent. Psychotherapy can therefore make a significant contribution to the optimal, ethical care of gender-dysphoric young people by ensuring that patients make appropriate, informed decisions about medical interventions which carry risks of harm and have a contested evidence base. (shrink)

Husserl und die transzendentale Intersubjektivität analyses the transcendental relevance of intersubjectivity, and argues that an intersubjective transformation of transcendental philosophy can already be found in phenomenology, especially in Husserl. Husserl eventually came to believe that an analysis of transcendental subjectivity was a conditio sine qua non for a phenomenological philosophy. Drawing on both published and unpublished manuscripts the book examines his reasons for this conviction and delivers a detailed analysis of his radical and complex concept of intersubjectivity, showing that precisely (...) his reflections on transcendental intersubjectivity are capable of clarifying his phenomenological core-concepts, thus making possible a new understanding of his philosophy. Against this background the book then attempts to establish to what extent the phenomenological approach to intersubjectivity can contribute to the current discussions of intersubjectivity. This is achieved through a systematic confrontation with the language-pragmatical positions of Apel and Habermas. Die Abhandlung untersucht die transzendentale Relevanz der Intersubjektivität und zeigt, daß eine intersubjektive Transformation der Transzendentalphilosophie schon innerhalb der Phänomenologie - besonders der Husserlschen - zu finden ist. Husserl gelangte zu der Auffassung, daß eine Analyse und Einbeziehung der transzendentalen Intersubjektivität als conditio sine qua non für eine phänomenologische Philosophie zu betrachten sei. Die Gründe, die Husserl zu dieser Überzeugung führten, werden herausgearbeitet. Dabei weist die Analyse des radikalen und komplexen Begriffs der Intersubjektivität auf, daß erst seine Überlegungen zur transzendentalen Intersubjektivität viele phänomenologische Grundbegriffe ins rechte Licht stellen können und darüber hinaus ein neues Grundverständnis seiner Phänomenologie ermöglichen. Vor diesem Hintergrund wird die Frage, inwieweit die Phänomenologie zur gegenwärtigen Intersubjektivitätsdiskussion beitragen kann, durch eine systematische Auseinandersetzung mit der sprachpragmatischen Intersubjektivitätstheorie von Apel und Habermas beantwortet. (shrink)

Kevin Liggieri, »Anthropotechnik«. Zur Geschichte eines umstrittenen Begriffs, Konstanz: Konstanz University Press 2020.

It has frequently been suggested that Rawls’s characteristic method of justification, a method crucially involving the notion of reflective equilibrium, is in some sense relativistic in its implications. No sustained development of this suggestion has been undertaken by those who advance it; likewise, no sustained attempt to refute this suggestion has been made by those who are otherwise sympathetic to Rawls’s account of justification. I here attempt to fill these gaps in the already extensive literature associated with the method of (...) reflective equilibrium. At below, I review claims that Rawls’s method has relativistic implications. I also attempt, for purposes of argument, to buttress these claims by citing remarks of Rawls which could be interpreted as relativistic in character. At below, I consider problems of political reasoning as these arise in societies which are ill- and well-ordered in Rawls’s sense. At below, I consider problems of political reasoning as these arise between the members of two or more well-ordered societies, each of which is regulated by a different conception of justice. I also there adapt Williams’s distinction between notional and real confrontations between incompatible systems of beliefs in order to distinguish two kinds of conflict with respect to fundamental political principles. Finally, I show how a notion of broad reflective equilibrium can be deployed in order to solve those problems of political adjudication which may arise between the members of societies which have distinct conceptions of justice. At this point it should be clear that Rawls’s method of justification is not, in intention at least, relativistic in its implications. (shrink)

Bainbridge’s well known “Ironies of Automation” Analysis, design and evaluation of man–machine systems. Elsevier, Amsterdam, pp 129–135, 1983. https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-08-029348-6.50026-9) laid out a set of fundamental criticisms surrounding the promises of automation that, even 30 years later, remain both relevant and, in many cases, intractable. Similarly, a set of ironies in technologies for sensor driven self-quantification is laid out here, spanning from instrumental problems in human factors design to much broader social problems. As with automation, these ironies stand in the way (...) of many of the promised benefits of these wearable technologies. It is argued here that without addressing these ironies now, the promises of wearables may not come to fruition, and instead users may experience outcomes that are opposite to those which the designers seek to afford, or, at the very least, those which consumers believe they are being offered. This paper describes four key ironies of sensor driven self-quantification: know more, know better versus no more, no better; greater self-control versus greater social control; well-being versus never being well enough; more choice versus erosion of choice. (shrink)

Journal of Mathematical Logic, Ahead of Print. Given a structure [math] and a stably embedded [math]-definable set [math], we prove tameness preservation results when enriching the induced structure on [math] by some further structure [math]. In particular, we show that if [math] and [math] are stable (respectively, superstable, [math]-stable), then so is the theory [math] of the enrichment of [math] by [math]. Assuming simplicity of [math], elimination of hyperimaginaries and a further condition on [math] related to the behavior of algebraic (...) closure, we also show that simplicity and NSOP1 pass from [math] to [math]. We then prove several applications for tame expansions of weakly minimal structures and, in particular, the group of integers. For example, we construct the first known examples of strictly stable expansions of [math]. More generally, we show that any stable (respectively, superstable, simple, NIP, NTP2, NSOP1) countable graph can be defined in a stable (respectively, superstable, simple, NIP, NTP2, NSOP1) expansion of [math] by some unary predicate [math]. (shrink)

In this theological tour de force D. Stephen Long addresses a key question in current theological debate: the conditions of the possibility of God-talk, along ...

A couple of decades after becoming a major area of both public and philosophical concern, animal ethics continues its inroads into main- stream consciousness. Increasingly, philosophers, ethicists, professionals who use animals, and the broader public confront specific ethical issues regarding human use of animals as well as more fundamental questions about animals’ moral status. A parallel, related development is the explo- sion of interest in animals’ mental lives, as seen in exciting new work in cognitive ethology and in the plethora (...) of movies, television commercials, and popular books featuring apparently intelligent animals. -/- As we approach the turn of the twenty-first century, philosophical animal ethics is an area of both increasing diversity and unrealized poten- tial – a thesis supported by this essay as a whole. Following up on an earlier philosophical review of animal ethics (but without that review’s focus on animal research), the present article provides an updated narrative – one that offers some perspective on where we have been, a more detailed account of where we are, and a projection of where we might go. Each of the three major sections offers material that one is unlikely to find in other reviews of animal ethics: the first by viewing familiar territory in a different light (advancing the thesis that the utility-versus-rights debate in animal ethics is much less important than is generally thought); the second by reviewing major recent works that are not very well-known (at least to nonspecialists); and the third by identifying important issues that have been largely neglected. (shrink)

Shepherdson [14] showed that for a discrete ordered ring I, I is a model of IOpen iff I is an integer part of a real closed ordered field. In this paper, we consider integer parts satisfying PA. We show that if a real closed ordered field R has an integer part I that is a nonstandard model of PA (or even IΣ₄), then R must be recursively saturated. In particular, the real closure of I, RC (I), is recursively saturated. We (...) also show that if R is a countable recursively saturated real closed ordered field, then there is an integer part I such that R = RC(I) and I is a nonstandard model of PA. (shrink)

This paper argues that the foundations of our knowledge are the bed-rock certainties of ordinary life, what may be called the Moorean truths. Beyond that are the well-established results within the empirical sciences, and whatever has been proved in the rational sciences of mathematics and logic. Otherwise there is only belief, which may be more or less rational. A moral drawn from this is that dogmatism should be moderated on all sides.

I welcome Mr Kennedy's general approach, but query whether the concept of consumerism is so closely applicable to medical care as he maintains. However, in particular aspects, especially the handling of complaints, his criticisms echo those made by the Patients Association. Finally, I detect some ground for hope in the more enlightened attitude creeping in to the eduction of the medical student.

The furore over the retention of organs at postmortem examination, without adequate consent, has led to a reassessment of the justification for, and circumstances surrounding, the retention of any human material after postmortem examinations and operations. This brings into focus the large amount of human material stored in various archives and museums, much of which is not identifiable and was accumulated many years ago, under unknown circumstances. Such anonymous archival material could be disposed of, used for teaching, used for research, (...) or remain in storage. We argue that there are no ethical grounds for disposing of the material, or for storing it in the absence of a teaching or research rationale. Nevertheless, with stringent safeguards, it can be used even in the absence of consent in research and teaching. Regulations are required to control the storage of all such human material, along the lines of regulations governing anatomy body bequests. (shrink)

We investigate the semantics of the logical systems obtained by introducing the modalities and into the family of substructural implication logics (including relevant, linear and intuitionistic implication). Then, in the spirit of the LDS (Labelled Deductive Systems) methodology, we "import" this semantics into the classical proof system KE. This leads to the formulation of a uniform labelled refutation system for the new logics which is a natural extension of a system for substructural implication developed by the first two authors in (...) a previous paper. (shrink)

"Some patients find it difficult to be in the present because they are stuck in the past; others, by contrast, struggle to remain connected with the past and are suspended in a so-called present that is effectively atemporal, that is out of time”.1 For psychoanalysts, the most profound and ultimately ethical way that we can help individuals, is by helping them know themselves. This involves discovering how they were shaped by their past and how their ongoing self-experience cannot be understood (...) in isolation from its constitutive contexts. Psychoanalysts help patients explore foundational questions such as: ‘Who am I?’ ‘How did I get here?’ ‘How am I implicated in my own suffering?’ ‘How can I grow and flourish and truly engage with my life?’. The answers to these questions emerge from a detailed exploration of the persons lived relational history, their current social and relational context and the political systems within which they are embedded. It is via this expansion of self-awareness that individuals can access agency and true freedom of choice. The clinical approach presented by Notini et al 2 is grounded in a completely different, radically decontextualised understanding of human experience. Their conceptualisation of Phoenix’s gender identity is ahistorical and atemporal: it is indeed ‘out of time’. For these authors, gender identity is assumed to be an immutable core essence, much like Ehrensaft’s3 ‘true gender self….there from birth’. It simply ‘is’. This is a …. (shrink)

Bribery has previously been viewed as a two-party transaction between the bribe-offerer and the bribe-taker. But there is a third party: the one who has a prior claim on the bribe-taker's loyalty. Breaking the first contract in response to the offer of a bribe is alienation of agency (a category that strictly includes bribes): alienation of agency is the additional immorality of bribery beyond any immorality of the act solicited by the bribe.

The question of whether our conscious experience is rich or sparse remains an enduring controversy in philosophy. The “overflow” account argues that perceptual consciousness is far richer than cognitive access: when perceiving a complex scene, subjects see more than they can report. This paper draws on aphantasia to propose a new argument in favor of overflow. First, it shows that opponents of overflow explain subjects’ performance in a change detection paradigm by appealing to a type of “internal imagery.” Second, it (...) provides empirical evidence to demonstrate that aphantasics are incapable of generating this imagery. However, aphantasics perform equally well in this task; and so the no-overflow account fails to explain their performance. This means that proponents of this view are committed to an unsupported view of perception. (shrink)

J. Angelo Corlett’s response to Leigh Turner defends the current practice of anonymous refereeing in scholarly journals. In reply to him: a slightly refined proposal for signed referees’ reports, with temporarily blind refereeing, would restore to the process of publication, in philosophy at least, the sense of responsibility for rational debate, cooperation, mutual criticism, and simple courtesy which is expected among colleagues in public academic relations, and would also allow more credit for the difficult task for refereeing. Personal observation of (...) the quality of referees’ reports suggests that a gathering of anecdotal evidence would show the need for reform. (shrink)