What can be understood of other cultures? And what can we learn about people in general from the study of other cultures? In the three closely related essays that constitute this book and which have already created considerable controversy in their original French versions, and been rewritten and expanded for this edition, Dan Sperber discusses these fundamental issues of anthropology. In the first essay he analyses the way in which anthropology is written and read. In the second, he offers a (...) novel rationalist alternative to cultural relativism, based on both anthropological and psychological arguments, and illustrated by his own fieldwork in Ethiopia. The third essay provides an assessment of the work of Lévi-Strauss, in which the arguments of the previous two essays are linked with an incisive critique of Lévi-Strauss' contribution to the study of cultural variation. (shrink)

Do carbon-offsetting schemes morally offset emissions? The moral equivalence thesis is the claim that the combination of emitting greenhouse gasses and offsetting those emissions is morally equivalent to not emitting at all. This thesis implies that in response to climate change, we need not make any lifestyle changes to reduce our emissions as long as we offset them. An influential argument in favor of this thesis is premised on two claims, one empirical and the other normative: (1) When you emit (...) + offset, the net result is the same as that of not emitting. (2) With emissions, the net result is what matters morally. I argue against both premises. The net result of emitting + offsetting is never equivalent to that of not emitting, and even if it were equivalent, the net result is not the only thing that matters morally. My conclusion is that although we should offset our emissions, avoiding emissions is morally preferable. This conclusion supports a stronger claim: that carbon offsets cannot relieve us of our duty to make significant lifestyle changes so as to reduce emissions and thus lesson our contribution to the harms of climate change. (shrink)

Richard Nisbett and Dov Cohen’s (1996) influential account of “cultures of honor” speculates that honor norms are a socially-adaptive deterrence strategy. This theory has been appealed to by multiple empirically-minded philosophers, and plays an important role in John Doris and Alexandra Plakias’ (2008) antirealist argument from disagreement. In this essay, I raise four objections to the Nisbett-Cohen deterrence thesis, and offer another theory of honor in its place that sees honor as an agonistic normative system regulating prestige competitions. Since my (...) account portrays honor norms as radically different from liberal ones, it actually strengthens Doris and Plakias’ case in some respects: cultures of honor are not merely superficially different from Western liberal ones. Nonetheless, the persistent appeal of honor’s principles, and their moral plausibility in certain contexts, suggests not antirealism, but pluralism—a reply on behalf of realism that itself has considerable empirical support. (shrink)

There has emerged in recent years the recognition that the characteristically Buddhist doctrine of svasa vitti 2 (‘apperception’, as I will render it for reasons to become clear presently) was vari...

It is widely recognized that prioritizing health care resources by their relative cost-effectiveness can result in lower priority for the treatment of disabled persons than otherwise similar non-disabled persons. I distinguish six different ways in which this discrimination against the disabled can occur. I then spell out and evaluate the following moral objections to this discrimination, most of which capture an aspect of its unethical character: it implies that disabled persons' lives are of lesser value than those of non-disabled persons; (...) it constitutes “double jeopardy” or violates Frances Kamm's non-linkage principle; it conflicts with equality of opportunity; it conflicts with fairness, which requires ignoring (some/most) differential impacts of treatment; it wrongly gives lower priority to disabled persons for equally effective treatment; it conflicts with giving all persons an equal chance to reach their full potential; and, it is in conflict with giving priority to the worse off. (shrink)

While much ink has been spilt over the political importance of speech, much less has been dedicated to the political importance of silence. This article seeks to fill that gap. We propose the need for a robust, democratic right to silence in public life and argue that there are politically salient epistemic reasons for recognising that right. We begin by defining what silence is and what a robust right to silence entails. We then argue that the right to silence offers (...) two politically salient epistemic benefits. The first is that, if the right to silence is maintained, we can avoid the epistemic harm that may be caused when an individual is compelled to lie in public. The second is that the right to silence can protect marginalised individuals against the epistemic injustices that may arise when others are likely to misconstrue their speech. (shrink)

This article challenges the consensus that silences about mental disorders are there to be broken. While silence in mental disorders can be painful, even deadly, the consensus rests on an oversimplified understanding of silence. Drawing upon accounts from depression and bipolar memoirs, this article names and analyses some salient experiences of silence in mood disorders. It does so with two goals in mind. The first is to show that mood disorders may involve several different kinds of lived experiences of silence. (...) This is important because even though silence is considered a promising objective symptom of depression, little has been written about lived experiences of silence in disorders that involve depression. The second is to argue against the fetishisation of breaking silence and the concomitant understandings of silence as an externally imposed and inherently negative phenomenon. This is important because some silences are not experienced as external and are even felt to be valuable, meaning that efforts to break them may be counterproductive. (shrink)

I distinguish between two kinds of sensorimotor expectations: agent- and object-active ones. Alva Noë's answer to the problem of how perception acquires volumetric content illicitly privileges agent-active expectations over object-active expectations, though the two are explanatorily on a par. Considerations which Noë draws upon concerning how organisms may ‘off-load’ internal processes onto the environment do not support his view that volumetric content depends on our embodiment; rather, they support a view of experience which is restrictive of the body's role in (...) perception. My objections undercut central arguments which Noë gives for his brand of enactivism. (shrink)

The paper proposes and defends the following characterization of response dependent property: a property is response-dependent iff there is a response-dependence biconditional for a concept signifying it which holds in virtue of the nature of the property. Finding out whether a property is such is to a large extent a posteriori matter. Finally, colors are response dependent: they are essentially tied to issuing the relevant experiences, so that having those experiences does give access to their, dispositional, nature. Finally, some important (...) contrary views are critically discussed in the paper. (shrink)

This article discusses the “aesthetics of existence” developed by Foucault in the late “ethical” stage of his work, aiming to clarify its complex significance through its relationships with ethics, critique, and, in particular, art as a model of self-invention. The main claims are that aesthetics of existence is a new type of self-formation molded by technologies inspired not only by the ancient ethical self-formation but also by modern art understood as creative self-production; thus, aesthetics of existence is an active form (...) of aesthetic education, in the particular sense of an ontological self-formation. To argue these claims, the author advances a line of analysis alternative to typical readings, which see it as related exclusively to the ancient “art of living” or its modern revival in the Nietzschean project of self-fashioning. The focus is instead on the Baudelairean and Kantian roots of Foucault’s work—modernity as a critical attitude and the transgressive art of the self of the dandy—as keys to understand the reframing by him of the art of living into a modern aesthetics of existence. This appears as a critical-transgressive invention of the self, which could contribute to constituting new subjectivities and alternative norms for the entire social body. (shrink)

Organizational citizenship behaviors (OCBs) are essential for effective organizational functioning. Decisions by employees to engage in these important discretionary behaviors are based on how they make sense of the organizational context. Using fairness heuristic theory, we tested two important OCB predictors: manager trustworthiness and interactional justice. In the process, we control for the effects of dispositional factors (propensity to trust) and for system-based organizational fairness (procedural and distributive justice). Results, based on surveys collected from 120 employee–supervisor dyads, indicate that manager (...) trustworthiness explains variance in OCBs over and above the variance accounted for by interactional fairness. Implications for theory and practice are discussed. (shrink)

The claim that photographs are fictionally incompetent (i.e. that they can only depict those particulars they are appropriately causally related to) is argued by Noël Carroll, Gregory Currie, and Nigel Warburton to be falsified by cinematic works of fiction. In response I firstly argue that it does not follow from cinema's having a capacity for the representation of ficta that photography has a capacity for the representation of ficta. Secondly, and inspired by the work of Roger Scruton, I develop an (...) account of how it is that cinema represents ficta on which this is fundamentally a matter of dramatic/theatrical representation. I argue that in cinematic fiction photography delivers a pre-existent representation of ficta rather than creating or generating fictional content. With this being so, the claim that photography is fictionally incompetent is compatible with cinematic fiction. 1. (shrink)

This panoramic survey provides a first point of entry into the fascinating richness and complexity of the Jewish philosophical, theological and Kabbalistic tradition. Beginning in the first century with the Hellenistic philosopher Philo, Fifty Key Jewish Thinkers traces the major intellectual events of the last two thousand years, including the growth of Medieval Jewish philosophy, the early modern mystics, the radicals, the Hasidic leaders, the Enlightenment and secular and religious Zionism. From Maimonides to Martin Buber, and from Baruch Spinoza to (...) Elie Wiesel, this volume carries the standard found in Fifty Key Contemporary Thinkers and is ideally suited for anyone interested in Jewish thought or history. (shrink)

This article addresses two controversial open questions in philosophical aesthetics: the nature and value of the aesthetic and of aesthetic experience when approached from the standpoint of ‘aesthetics of everyday life’ (AEL). Contrasting ‘strong’ AEL accounts that consider them radically different from those in the sphere of art, I claim that extending the realm and scope of aesthetics towards everyday life does not necessarily dispense with the concepts of the aesthetic and aesthetic experience as shaped in relation to the arts. (...) Drawing on ‘weak’ formulations of AEL and on theories that call attention to concepts of art different from modern ones, I defend a normative but open model of the aesthetic and aesthetic experience pertaining to both art and everyday life. This more integrative theoretical framework needs to include clear and consistent views of the aesthetic as well as of the self, intersubjectivity, and everyday life. (shrink)

Summary Kant's critique of corpuscular theory created a tabula rasa situation in natural philosophy and opened up a vast new field of research, particularly related to the study of heat, light, electricity and magnetism. ?rsted introduced Kantian epistemology in Scandinavia and made friends with J. W. Ritter, an outstanding experimenter who was the first to make dynamical philosophy productive. The ?rsted?Ritter partnership aimed at the construction of a cosmology based on dynamical philosophy as well as galvanic interpretations of the Lichtenberg (...) and Chladni patterns. It is suggested that Kantian critique and dynamical cosmology provided the framework within which ?rsted and Ritter made their epochal discoveries as well as their bold speculations. Finally, it is argued that the Romantics widened the scope of natural philosophy itself. (shrink)

A standard view about criminal law distinguishes between two kinds of offenses, “mala in se” and “mala prohibita.” This view also corresponds to a distinction between two bases for criminalization: certain acts should be criminalized because they are moral wrongs; other acts may be criminalized for the sake of promoting overall welfare. This paper aims to show two things: first, that allowing for criminalization for the sake of promoting welfare renders the category of wrongfulness crimes largely redundant. Second, and more (...) importantly, accepting welfare as a legitimate ground for criminalization implies a certain view about legitimate state action, which makes criminalization for wrongfulness more difficult to justify. If I am right, the view that keeps the two categories of criminalization as largely separate is untenable. I conclude with some remarks about the advantages of welfare as the basis for criminalization. (shrink)

Competent adults should be permitted to determine the course of their own lives. We may try to influence them. We may ask them, perhaps even implore them, to change their minds. But in the end, they are in charge of their lives. They get to choose their careers, whether and whom to marry, whether to exercise, and whether to have surgery.This emphasis on respect for patients’ autonomy may seem to imply that allowing patients to make their own decisions should always (...) take precedence over other considerations. Given this presumption, there has been almost no discussion in the medical literature or elsewhere about how important this value is and whether it should sometimes be balanced against and give way to other values. This absence of guidance is especially problematic in cases where respect for patient autonomy conflicts with promoting patients’ clinical interests. (shrink)

Critical notica (in Spanish) of *Relativism and Monadic Truth* (OUP 2009), by Cappelen and Hawthorne.

The theme of this book is the documentarian—what the documentarian is and how we can understand it as a concept. Working from the premise that the documentarian is a special—extended—sign, the book develops a model of a quadruple sign structure for-and-of the documentarian, growing out of enduring traditions in philosophy, semiotics, psychoanalysis, and documentary theory. Dan Geva investigates the intellectual premise that allows the documentarian to show itself as an extremely sophisticated, creative, and purposeful being-in-the-world—one that is both embedded in (...) its own history and able to manifest itself throughout its entire documentary life project, as a stand-alone conceptual phase in the history of ideas. (shrink)

I take a close look at Bernard Williams’s paper "Moral Luck," which put this notion on the philosophical agenda. Williams’s focal example is the painter Paul Gauguin. According to Williams, Gauguin’s morally dubious decision to desert his family so as to pursue an artistic career can be redeemed only by his partially fortuitous success as a painter. This is shown by the consideration that a successful Gauguin would not be able to regret his decision, whereas failure would have prompted regret. (...) I suggest that the best way to understand this claim is to see Gauguin’s decision to become an artist as a constitutive decision, which launches what for him proved to be a defining project. One cannot coherently regret the realization of such a project or the decision that gave rise to it because that would amount to wishing to be someone else: conditions of personal identity set the limits on the counterfactuals about ourselves that we can intelligibly entertain. However, not being able to regret the constitutive elements of one’s life is not the same as approving of these elements. So I disagree with Williams’s ultimate conclusion that the inability to regret a decision signals some justification for it, no matter how attenuated. (shrink)

It is natural to think of legal positivism and jurisprudential naturalism as intellectually allied ideas. Legal positivism is associated with the idea that law is a matter of social fact; naturalism is a philosophical tenet that, among other things suggests the importance of scientific findings and methods to philosophy. At the very least, there seems to be a close family resemblance between the two views. In this essay, I challenge this view from a naturalistic perspective. I show that the best-known (...) proponents of legal positivism in the twentieth century all rejected naturalism. I dedicate most of my discussion to H.L.A. Hart’s version of legal positivism, as it appears superficially friendly to naturalism. I show that throughout his career and in writings on a wide range of topics, Hart consistently argued against the applicability of the methods of science to the explanation of social phenomena. This is not a small matter: I argue that it is this anti-naturalistic stance that contributed to his descriptively faulty account of adjudication. After reviewing more briefly the work of other leading legal positivists, I argue in my conclusion that those seeking to advance a naturalistic approach to law should turn their backs of much of twentieth-century legal positivism, which in various guises has been hostile to naturalism. (shrink)

We integrate information from distinct domains, especially in metaphor. What sort of cognitive architecture underlies this kind of integration? Fodor (1983) argued that it involves nonmodular mechanisms. He also contended that the nonmodular mechanisms evolved from modular ones through a process of demodularization, a position elaborated by Mithen (1996). In this article, I defend Fodor and Mithen from criticisms offered by Sperber (1994). Sperber suggested that nonmodular mechanisms are unlikely to have evolved because an increasingly large database would incapacitate the (...) cognitive system due to combinatorial explosion and the frame problem. Moreover, he argued that nonmodular mechanisms are not required to explain our ability to integrate information. I argue that proponents of demodularization can respond to Sperber's criticisms by assuming that either an expanding database co-evolved with increasingly sophisticated search mechanisms or the cognitive system evolved along connectionist lines. Moreover, I argue that Sperber's modular account of conceptual integration fails to satisfy the criteria for modularity-namely, information encapsulation. (shrink)

Dan Strimpel makes a plea for calm in ethical debate.

There is much public focus in North America today on issues of corporate governance and ethics due mainly to the malpractice of several high profile corporate leaders and the negative impact of this on their corporation's stakeholders, employees and communities. This has caused a crisis of trust in the public and lead to much discussion on ways to prevent such unethical behavior by adopting new approaches through legislation and the structure of corporations. This article is not about introducing a new (...) approach to corporate ethics and governance as there is much change already taking place. The National Quality Institute in Canada offers a demonstrated and proven way, through the application of the Excellence Frameworks, of providing for good corporate guidance and ethical leadership practices. Organizations, which adopt a strategic focus on Excellence, attain great results and become healthy organizations, as their leaders understand the dynamic relationship and the balance that exists between "employees, customers, and stakeholders". These organizations build trust by acting responsibly. NQI works with many organizations in Canada that have a strategic leadership focus on organizational excellence utilizing the criteria in the NQI Canadian Excellence Frameworks for Quality and for Healthy Workplace. Organizations that take an integrated approach to Excellence also perform well in such areas as corporate social responsibility, employee health and customer satisfaction. This article has specific references to three organizations that have achieved Canada's prime recognition the Canada Awards for Excellence. (shrink)

Dharmakīrti, elaborating one of the Buddhist tradition's most complete defenses of rebirth, advanced some of this tradition's most explicitly formulated arguments for mind-body dualism. At the same time, Dharmakīrti himself may turn out to be vulnerable to some of the same kinds of arguments pressed against physicalists. It is revealing, then, that in arguing against physicalism himself, Dharmakīrti does not have available to him what some would judge to be more promising arguments for dualism (arguments, in particular, following Kant's 2nd (...) Critique) – and indeed, that these arguments actually cut against Dharmakīrti's own position. After elaborating and characterizing Dharmakīrti's case for rebirth, then, this article briefly considers an argument that Dharmakīrti cannot himself enlist for this purpose. (shrink)

This article aims to show why Sellars' critique of epistemic givenness has proven so apt in characterizing the philosophical problems that confront the project of Dignaga and Dharmakirti -- problem that result from the etent to whih these buddhists valorized "non-conceptual awareness.

Moral minds -- Fear morality -- Humanistic morality.

This article uses an economic narrative to examine the theoretical adequacy of applying humanitarian law to the regulation of the war on international terror. I will argue that problems inherent in collective action hinder the ability of this law to generate an optimal level of global security, and that the absence of the element of reciprocity lowers states’ compliance with it. The paper discusses factors such as audience costs, negative externalities of public conscience, NGOs’ activities, and the promotion of the (...) humanitarian approach toward humanitarian law in international bodies and courts as helping to mitigate these phenomena. A controversy between states concerning the application of humanitarian law to the war on international terror, however, might prevent these factors from offsetting the decline in the status of humanitarian law. Humanitarian law is therefore at risk of lapsing into irrelevance in this war. (shrink)

There are a class of moral virtues that have an intimate relationship with agential evaluation, following Gary Watson we can call these ‘second-order virtues,’ e.g., modesty, blind charity, being judgmental, etc. Julia Driver has argued that these virtues are distinguished by being virtues which require ignorance. Richard Y. Chappell and Helen Yetter-Chappell have argued that these virtues are distinguished by being virtues of salience. Aside from the disagreement about the distinguishing features of these virtues, there is an intrinsic interest in (...) the second-order virtues and vices. For these virtues and vices play an integral role in moral education and character formation. This paper seeks to deepen that discussion by examining a second-order vice, namely, the vice of being judgmental. I argue that being judgmental requires a salience structure which exhibits undue attention to the negative features of others (pace Jessie Munton). Modeling being judgmental as a vice of attention helps to unify the various characteristics of judgmental persons, namely, a tendency to excessive standing, excessive epitomization, and relational qualification. As an upshot, we receive another reason to adopt an attention model of the second-order virtues and vices. (shrink)

For Hume virtues are character traits that are useful and agreeable to ourselves and to others. Such traits are wide-ranging, from moral virtues such as benevolence to intellectual virtues such as courage of mind and penetration. This paper focuses on Hume’s account of the latter. I argue that Hume is a virtue epistemologist, principally interested in the role that intellectual character traits play in social interactions rather than in the justifiedness of particular beliefs. I shall argue that this interpretation is (...) consonant with his mitigated skepticism, and that it calls for a reappraisal of the marshalling of Hume and Reid into the contemporary debate between reductionists and non-reductionists with respect to the epistemology of testimony. (shrink)

A spiritual book written for--and by--someone who would otherwise never read a spiritual book, 10% HAPPIER is both a deadly serious and seriously funny look at mindfulness and meditation as the next big public health revolution.

Lisciandra poses a challenge for robustness analysis as applied to economic models. She argues that substituting tractability assumptions risks altering the main mathematical structure of the model, thereby preventing the possibility of meaningfully evaluating the same model under different assumptions. In such cases RA is argued to be inapplicable. However, Lisciandra is mistaken to take the goal of RA as keeping the mathematical properties of tractability assumptions intact. Instead, RA really aims to keep the modeling component while varying the corresponding (...) mathematical formulation. Thus, her argument concerning whether the associated mathematical properties of certain assumptions can be kept intact is irrelevant to the success of RA. Furthermore, we explicate and develop Lloyd’s account of “model robustness” to provide solutions to Lisciandra’s challenges. Our solutions are, namely, error analysis and independent empirical support. We conclude that although complex economic models do face potential dangers, there are solutions and robustness analysis need not be given up.. (shrink)