The search for increased productivity has led to a great many claims about how it might be accomplished. Nowhere have the claims been more brazen and yet less well supported empirically than those made on behalf of the technologies designed to support office work. The paper examines some of the arguments and claims made, suggesting that most of them are off target. While the new technologies may be of substantial value, the emphasis should beon increased effectiveness, not on greater efficiency. (...) Only then are the visions of the future likely to be fulfilled. (shrink)

[Open access] In this book symposium the author takes up questions from phenomenology, hermeneutics, ethical theory, and intellectual history raised by a group of scholarly interlocutors from a range of backgrounds. In the course of engaging with these issues, he discusses, inter alia, McDowell’s realism, Jonathon Lear’s work on the end of a world, Michael Oakeshott’s view of selfhood, Heidegger’s conception of Jemeinigkeit, Uexküll’s notion of Umwelt, and Gadamer’s hermeneutic conception of truth.

In this article, I respond to David McIvor’s and Lars Rensmann’s discussion of my recent book, The Politics of Repressed Guilt: The Tragedy of Austrian Silence (2018, Edinburgh University Press). Both invited me to clarify my use of Arendt in my conception of embodied reflective judgment. I argue for a stronger connection between judgment and emotions than Arendt because one can effectively shut down critical thinking if one uses defense mechanisms to repress feelings of guilt. In response to McIvor, (...) I discuss the idea of the “subject-in-outline” and “embodied reflective spaces” to overcome the guilt/defense complex to engender a reparative politics of justice. Finally, in response to Rensmann, I point out that the lingering culture of repressed guilt helps us explain the general conditions that contributed to the rise of the far and extremist right in Austria, which I develop further in my new book Analyzing the Far Right. (shrink)

David Miller is the foremost exponent of the purist critical rationalist doctrine and here presents his mature views, discussing the role that logic and argument play in the growth of knowledge, criticizing the common understanding of argument as an instrument of justification, persuasion or discovery and instead advocating the critical rationalist view that only criticism matters. Miller patiently and thoroughly undoes the damage done by those writers who attack critical rationalism by invoking the sterile mythology of induction and justification (...) that it seeks to sweep away. In addition his new material on the debate on verisimilitude is essential reading for all working in this field. (shrink)

Paul Virilio passed away on the 10th of September 2018. This article surveys his considerable legacy to cultural theory in order to locate a largely dormant contribution to questions of moral respo...

Derek Parfit claims that, at certain times and places, the metaphysical units he labels *'selves" may be thought of as the morally significant units (I.e., the objects of moral concern) for such things as resource distribution, moral responsibility, commitments, etc. But his concept of the self is problematic in important respects, and it remains unclear just why and how this entity should count as a moral unit in the first place. In developing a view I call *'Moderate Reductionism," I attempt (...) to resolve these worries, first by offering a clearer, more consistent account of what the concept of *'self ' should involve, and second by arguing for why selves should indeed be viewed as moral (and prudential) units. I then defend this view in detail from both *'conservative" and *'extreme" objections. (shrink)

This paper attempts to show how a reductionist approach to the metaphysics of personal identity might well be most compatible with a form of contractualism, not utilitarianism.

Evolution is frequently concentrated in bursts of rapid morphological change and speciation followed by long‐term stasis. We propose that this pattern of punctuated equilibria results from an evolutionary tug‐of‐war between host genomes and transposable elements (TEs) mediated through the epigenome. According to this hypothesis, epigenetic regulatory mechanisms (RNA interference, DNA methylation and histone modifications) maintain stasis by suppressing TE mobilization. However, physiological stress, induced by climate change or invasion of new habitats, disrupts epigenetic regulation and unleashes TEs. With their capacity (...) to drive non‐adaptive host evolution, mobilized TEs can restructure the genome and displace populations from adaptive peaks, thus providing an escape from stasis and generating genetic innovations required for rapid diversification. This “epi‐transposon hypothesis” can not only explain macroevolutionary tempo and mode, but may also resolve other long‐standing controversies, such as Wright's shifting balance theory, Mayr's peripheral isolates model, and McClintock's view of genome restructuring as an adaptive response to challenge. (shrink)

Ursula K. Le Guin’s classic work of anarchist literature, _The Dispossessed_ (1974), is preoccupied with the issue of imprisonment. This is hardly surprising given anarchism’s longstanding critical engagement with the prison as state apparatus. For classical anarchists, the prison represents one of the most vile and visible examples of state repression. However, while the abolition of prisons constitutes one of the fundamental goals of anarchism, the alternatives put forth by classical anarchist thinkers risk perpetuating the underlying power relations of carceral (...) justice by encouraging social shaming and the policing of norms. The anarchist society of _The Dispossessed_ uses these techniques to discourage the accumulation of power in order to create an egalitarian society. Unfortunately, these same techniques encourage a conformity that hinders other anarchist values, such as creativity and individual self-determination. In essence, the anarchist society depicted in the novel replaces the literal prison with a different form of imprisonment—the social prison, which continues the repressive function of the state through different means. By creating an “ambiguous” anarchist utopia, Le Guin anticipates the critiques of classical anarchism formulated by poststructural and postmodern anarchist theorists. These critiques are most evident in the theme of imprisonment that threads throughout the novel. (shrink)

This paper attempts to reconcile two ideas that seem fundamentally opposed to one another: the reality of the self and the doctrine of no-self. Buddhism offers a form of spiritual equanimity that turns on the denial of a self. Nonetheless, there seem to be good reasons to hold onto the reality of the self. The existence of a self enables us to account for praise and blame, the hopes for oneself that motivate actions, and attachments to the selves of others (...) in bonds of love and affection. I show how it may be possible to reconcile the reality of the self with a particular interpretation of the no-self doctrine by engaging with the work of thinkers from the phenomenological tradition such as Merleau-Ponty, Zahavi, Gallagher, and Petitmengin. (shrink)

Two recent studies by Parisi et al.1 and Ranz et al.,2 catalogue sex differences in gene expression across the whole genome of the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster. Both report striking associations of sex‐biased gene expression with the X chromosome. Genes with male‐biased expression are depauperate on the X chromosome, whereas genes with female‐biased expression show weaker evidence of being in excess. A number of evolutionary hypotheses for the expulsion or exclusion of male‐biased genes from the X chromosome have been suggested. (...) None is entirely consistent with the available evidence. BioEssays 25:739–741, 2003. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

Unabridged dictionaries are dangerous books. In their pages man’s evilest thoughts find means of expression. Terms denoting all that is foul or blasphemous or obscene are printed there for men, women and children to read and ponder. Such books should have their covers padlocked and be chained to reading desks, in the custody of responsible librarians, preferably church members in good standing. Permission to open such books should be granted only after careful inquiry as to which word a reader plans (...) to look up, and how he plans to use it. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Christian Ethics in a Technological Age by Brian BrockDavid W. GillChristian Ethics in a Technological Age Brian Brock Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2010. 408 pp. $34.00Brian Brock is a lecturer in moral and practical theology at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland, and the author of Singing the Ethos of God: On the Place of Christian Ethics in Scripture (Eerdmans, 2007). Christian Ethics in a Technological [End Page 188] (...) Age was originally Brock’s doctoral thesis at King’s College, London. Brock begins by highlighting and finding wanting the modern practice of “technology assessment” as epitomized in the establishment of the US Office of Technology Assessment in 1972. We live in a world, a milieu, of ever-multiplying new technologies and technological artifacts. “Technology assessment” attempts to evaluate their impacts as thoroughly as possible through scientific, managerial methods. Costs and benefits, benefits and harms, short-term and long-term, near and distant effects: how can we measure what we know and extrapolate to what we need to know?In part 1 Brock engages in some detail the thinking of Martin Heidegger, George Grant, and Michel Foucault on technology. Although Heidegger and Foucault in particular are not ultimate authorities for Brock, his chapters on their work provide a helpful philosophical critique of the inadequacies of today’s narrow managerial approaches to technological assessment. The real problems lie much deeper: in the ways technology reflects and restructures our whole way of thinking about life, materiality, subjects and objects, and means and ends.Having used Heidegger, Grant, and Foucault to unmask the complex reality of technology in the modern era, Brock turns in part 2 to Augustine, Karl Barth, and Bernd Wannenwetsch to try to build a Christian theological ethics of technology and work that will, in the end, provide a richer texture for our interactions with the questions raised by new technologies. In briefest terms, he argues that our questions and judgments about technology should arise within the church gathered for worship rather than within the management team gathered for measurement of effects. It could be said that in the former it is God who questions technology whereas in the latter technology and its servants constitute an implicit challenge to God and the world external to themselves.Brock’s study will be of particular interest to students of his primary six sources: Heidegger, Grant, Foucault, Augustine, Barth, and Wannenwetsch, whose ideas and quotations dominate the pages of this book. Without any doubt Christian Ethics in a Technological Age is a significant work that deserves careful consideration in graduate seminars and among specialists in the field; nonetheless, I have three criticisms. First, the work would have been much stronger if it demonstrated awareness and understanding of the work of Jacques Ellul, Carl Mitcham, Albert Borgmann, and other leading thinkers in this arena. Second, Brock’s writing style (long, complex Germanic sentence structures, eccentric vocabulary choices such as the recurrent use of “purchase”) gets in the way of successful communication—especially with the very managers and technologists he presumably would like to influence. Third, while sympathizing with his rejection of managerial formulas for analysis, some much more concrete and practical counsel on the implications of his position would have been [End Page 189] helpful. How do trust and trustworthiness get reestablished? How does a worshipping congregation hear God’s guidance about its particular engagements with technologies? We have some eloquent statements of the concepts but little by way of illustration or example.David W. GillGordon-Conwell Theological SeminaryCopyright © 2013 Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)

Despite the importance of linguistic disclosure for philosophical hermeneutics there has been a conspicuous lack of attention to the question of how linguistic disclosure actually works. I examine the mechanics of disclosure by drawing on Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics as well as Ricoeur’s concept of translation and his theory of metaphor. My claim is that the background horizon of the unsaid that differs between languages enables each to disclose different things. This situation underscores the importance of engaging in East-West comparative philosophy, (...) of philosophizing across what Ricoeur calls the radical “fold” (pli) in what can be thought and experienced. (shrink)

The interest in and enthusiasm for urban agriculture (UA) in urban communities, the non-profit sector, and governmental institutions has grown exponentially over the past decade. Part of the appeal of UA is its potential to improve the civic health of a community, advancing what some call food democracy. Yet despite the increasing presence of the language of civic agriculture or food democracy, UA organizations and practitioners often still focus on practical, shorter-term projects in an effort both to increase local involvement (...) and to attract funding from groups focused on quantifiable deliverables. As such, it seems difficult to move beyond the rhetoric of food democracy towards significant forms of popular participation and deliberation within particular communities. In this paper we provide a theoretical framework—deep democracy—that helps to contextualize nascent attempts at civic agriculture or food democracy within a broader struggle for democratic practices and relationships. We argue that urban agriculture efforts are well positioned to help citizens cultivate lasting relationships across lines of difference and amidst significant power differentials—relationships that could form the basis of a community’s collective capacity to shape its future. We analyze the theory of deep democracy through recent experiences with UA in Denver, Colorado, and we identify ways in which UA can extend its reach and impact by focusing more consciously on its political or civic potential. (shrink)

Modern industrialized populations lack the strong positive correlations between wealth and reproductive success that characterize most traditional societies. While modernization has brought about substantial increases in personal wealth, fertility in many developed countries has plummeted to the lowest levels in recorded human history. These phenomena contradict evolutionary and economic models of the family that assume increasing wealth reduces resource competition between offspring, favoring high fertility norms. Here, we review the hypothesis that cultural modernization may in fact establish unusually intense reproductive (...) trade-offs in wealthy relative to impoverished strata, favoring low fertility. We test this premise with British longitudinal data (the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children), exploring maternal self-perceptions of economic hardship in relation to increasing family size and actual socioeconomic status. Low-income and low-education-level mothers perceived the greatest economic costs associated with raising two versus one offspring. However, for all further increases to family size, reproduction appears most expensive for relatively wealthy and well-educated mothers. We discuss our results and review current literature on the long-term consequences of resource dilution in modern families. (shrink)

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In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Time, Will, and Purpose: Living Ideas from the Philosophy by Randall E. AuxierDavid W. RodickRandall E. Auxier Time, Will, and Purpose: Living Ideas from the Philosophy of Josiah Royce Chicago, Illinois: Open Court Press, 2013. 424 pages, incl. index.Randy Auxier’s long awaited book is a major milestone in Royce studies—a systematic tour de force engaging the entire course of Royce’s thought. Auxier’s goal is to achieve an all-round (...) reappraisal of Royce, setting the record straight about major misconceptions accrued throughout the course of Royce scholarship over the past 65 years—if not longer.One of the most significant events in Royce scholarship during the 20th Century was the appearance of John E. Smith’s Royce’s Social Infinite: The Community of Interpretation.1 As Auxier notes: “For the purposes for which it was intended, Smith’s book will never be surpassed in its excellence. Smith’s book is outstanding in numerous ways … but its clarity and brevity are high among its chief virtues” (13). The problem with Smith’s book, for Auxier, is that readers have used it for a purpose it was never intended to serve—that of a crutch or “shortcut to a full understanding of Royce” (13). This tendency has had a compounding effect: “[N]ot only scholarship, but scholarly consciousness about Royce is formed by Smith’s book” (14). [End Page 166]The shortcomings of Smith’s book are partly due lack of available historical information concerning the Peirce-Royce relationship at the time it was written: “The inferences about Peirce and Royce that Smith drew from the available resources were mostly warranted at the time, but they turned out to be only a drop in the pond, if not the ocean, of what was the case” (15–16). But the most damning consequence of Smith’s book is its claim that Royce’s thought underwent a decisive shift in its later stages: “[T]he all-important change in Royce’s conception of the Absolute consists in the shift from the idea that the Infinite thought is an all-embracing consciousness apprehending at a glance all truth … to the idea that the Infinite is actual as a well-ordered system … having a generally triadic form and involving a type of cognition called interpretation” (19).2 Once a bifurcation between the “early” and the “later” Royce is introduced, the tendency is to identify Royce’s “Peircean moment” of 1912 as the decisive point of rupture between the “two Royces”—an incorrect view stemming from the inability to take a longer view of the Peirce-Royce relationship:But our recognition of the intense, constant and long term character of their exchange also eliminates the supposition that that Royce took a sudden turn in 1912. It is not a “Peircean turn” due to some late discovery, it was an insight about how to use Peirce’s theory of signs (which Royce had known for years) as a tool for the application of his (long held) triadic theory of community. … Peirce did not save Royce from absolutism or turn him in any fundamentally new direction.(17)Failure to grasp the integral unity of Royce’s thought results in a tendency to miss the ethical basis of his philosophy—“ethics as first philosophy.” Unlike Smith, and others, who err toward the side of viewing Royce’s philosophical project as an epistemological attempt at a conception of knowledge warranted in terms of ability to provide truth and certainty, “Royce’s method is a hypothetical ontology … not aimed primarily at securing certainty or knowledge, but rather at maintaining intellectual norms … that govern clear thinking and facilitate intelligent practice and action” (23). Royce’s hypothetical ontology underscores the religious dimension of experience because practical, faith-based postulates are recognized as unavoidably intertwined in the process of knowing. Living in a universe of postulates requires formulating ideals as if they were ontologically constitutive; and acting in accordance with these ideals in a way that validates their existence—while recognizing the fallibility and risk of the entire enterprise. Royce’s argument amounts to saying “[W]ell no, we don’t get more than postulates, but don... (shrink)

‘I know the future is scary at times, sweetheart. But there’s just no escaping it’. Ernest Cline, Armada As I sit here on Planet Zoom during the global COVID-19 pandemic and try to figure out how t...

This book discusses the development of Edward Tolman's purposive behaviourism from the 1920s to the 1950s, highlighting the tension between his references to cognitive processes and the dominant behaviourist trends. It shows how Tolman incorporated concepts from European scholars, including Egon Brunswik and the Gestalt psychologists, to justify a more purposive form of behaviourism and how the theory evolved in response to the criticisms of his contemporaries. The manuscript also discusses Tolman's political activities, culminating in his role in the California (...) loyalty oath controversy in the 1950s. Tolman was involved in a number of progressive causes during his lifetime, activities that drew the attention of both state legislators in California and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. It treats Tolman's theoretical and political activities as emanating from the same source, a desire to understand the learning process in a scientific manner and to apply these concepts to improve the human condition. (shrink)

Ethical theories must include an account of the concept of a person. They also need a criterion of personal identity over time. This requirement is most needed in theories involving distributions of resources or questions of moral responsibility. For instance, in using ethical theories involving compensations of burdens, we must be able to keep track of the identities of persons earlier burdened in order to ensure that they are the same people who now are to receive the compensatory benefits. Similarly, (...) in order to attribute moral responsibility to someone for an act, we must be able to determine that that person is the same person as the person who performed the act. Unfortunately, ethical theories generally include a concept of a person and criteria of personal identity either as notions implied or presupposed by the already worked out theory, with little or no argument given in support of them. But both approaches are unsatisfactory, for each runs the risk of ignoring certain fundamental features of the way persons actually are. What is needed first is a plausible metaphysical account of persons and personal identity to which an ethical theory might then conform and apply. Derek Parfit has attempted to provide such an account in Reasons and Persons, where he argues for what he calls the reductionist view of persons and personal identity and then attempts to show how such a conception provides a metaphysical background that lends important partial support to utilitarianism. 1 But Parfit’s metaphysical view is neutral between two possible conceptions of personhood, and utilitarianism presupposes the truth of the more radical of the two conceptions, which precludes the possibility of there being a class of goods crucial to any plausible ethical theory. Utilitarianism thus presupposes a wildly implausible conception of persons, and so is itself implausible. (shrink)

In birds and frogs, species pairs retain the capacity to produce viable hybrids for tens of millions of years, an order of magnitude longer than mammals. What accounts for these differences in relative rates of pre- and postzygotic isolation? We propose that reproductive mode is a critically important but previously overlooked factor in the speciation process. Viviparity creates a post-fertilization arena for genomic conflicts absent in egg-laying species. With viviparity, conflict can arise between: mothers and embryos; sibling embryos in the (...) womb, and maternal and paternal genomes within individual embryos. Such intra- and intergenomic conflicts result in perpetual antagonistic coevolution, thereby accelerating interpopulation postzygotic isolation. In addition, by generating intrapopulation genetic incompatibility, viviparity-driven conflict favors polyandry and limits the potential for precopulatory divergence. Mammalian diversification is characterized by rapid evolution of incompatible feto-maternal interactions, asymmetrical postzygotic isolation, disproportionate effects of genomically-imprinted genes, and “F2 hybrid enhancement.” The viviparity-driven conflict hypothesis provides a parsimonious explanation for these patterns in mammalian evolution. BioEssays 22:938–946, 2000. © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. (shrink)

In this paper we study abstract elementary classes using infinitary logics and prove a number of results relating them. For example, if is an a.e.c. with Löwenheim–Skolem number κ then is closed under L∞,κ+-elementary equivalence. If κ=ω and has finite character then is closed under L∞,ω-elementary equivalence. Analogous results are established for . Galois types, saturation, and categoricity are also studied. We prove, for example, that if is finitary and λ-categorical for some infinite λ then there is some σLω1,ω such (...) that and contain precisely the same models of cardinality at least λ. (shrink)

Some psychiatrists believe that “demoralization syndrome” is a diagnosable cognitive disorder characterized in its extreme form by morbid existential distress. If they are right, then it should be an important part of our thinking about end of life decisionmaking. A demoralized patient would be unable to think reliably about the remainder of her life, and therefore incompetent to decide to commit physician‐assisted suicide.

While a number of classical pragmatists crafted their philosophies in conjunction with a careful study of Hegel's works, others saw their philosophies emerge in antagonism with proponents of Hegel. In this paper, we offer an instance of the latter case. Namely, we show that the impetus for Charles S. Peirce's early articulation and avowal of realism (the claim that some generals are real) was William Torrey Harris's claim that the formal laws of logic lacked universal validity. According to Harris, the (...) leading representative of Hegelism in the United States, the universal validity of the laws of logic rested on a nominalistic metaphysics that a Hegelian-realism showed to be false. In response to this charge, we articulate how Peirce's attempt to prove the universal validity of the laws of logic resulted in avowing a realism that differed from both nominalism and Harris's Hegelian-realism. (shrink)

Two experiments using a realistic version of the selection task examined the relationship between participants' probability estimates of finding a counter example and their selections. Experiment 1 used everyday categories in the context of a scenario to determine whether or not the number of instances in a category affected the estimated probability of a counter-example. Experiment 2 modified the scenario in order to alter participants' estimates of finding a specific counter-example. Unlike Kirby 1994a, but consistent with his proposals, both studies (...) showed that probability estimates significantly predicted selection. Overall results point to the value of understanding selections in terms of their subjective expected utility. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist-Christian Studies 25 (2005) 9-14 [Access article in PDF] Religious Identity and Openness in a Pluralistic World David W. Chappell Soka University Guiding Issues How do I understand my own identity as a religious person in light of the fact that I am open to the validity of the beliefs held by other traditions?Has my understanding of my own religious tradition been transformed, purified, and enriched by the (...) ways in which I have come to understand the other traditions?Have I been changed by the dialogue, or do I remain the same? What difference has the dialogue made in my life, personally or theologically?How would I respond to this topic from the point of view that I am a religious person engaged in a specific area of expertise (environment, philosophy, etc.)? Thesis The increased mobility and diversity of relationships in the contemporary world has often made religious identity a complex issue, hardening it for some people and diffusing it for others. But in either case, I wish to challenge the view that highlights beliefs as a key to defining identity and instead propose that many other factors might be more important, and that in religious life identity is a secondary issue. Being Christian I was born, baptized, and raised in the Christian tradition. My father was a United Church of Canada minister and I became a United Church of Canada minister, while my mother was a Baptist and my brother became a Baptist minister. Religious values were important in my upbringing and throughout my adult life. While I have maintained a concern for ultimate values, however, my own beliefs have undergone radical changes. I am sure that many in the Christian community would say that I am no longer a Christian, but I have never taken that view and have never taken the step to renounce my ordination as a Christian minister. Instead, I question the assumption that beliefs are the best way to define a religious life or religious identity. [End Page 9]In 1961 I had the good fortune to go to McGill University to study with Wilfred Smith, and from him I have learned not to focus on the "beliefs" of others—namely, intellectual constructs—but on the "faith" of others as much more encompassing and important. Some religious communities—like the Jain and the Confucian—do not care about one's beliefs, only about one's practice, both ritually and morally. Wilfred Smith called it orthopraxy, rather than orthodoxy, and it provides an alternative means of marking religious identity.Why should I feel bound by the efforts of Emperor Constantine when he convened a church council in 325 CE to define Christian identity or by subsequent efforts of church institutions to do the same? Today, my Christian identity is nurtured and expressed by a constellation of moral values and cosmic trust, of faith and actions, that are connected to the early Jesus movement, especially as articulated by John Dominic Crossan. Living as we do in the modern era, we have very different beliefs about history and cosmology from these early Christians, as John Robinson discussed forty years ago in his book Honest to God. My affection for Christian church life and the early Jesus movement involves other factors than the concerns of those who formed Christian creeds. The Trinitarian doctrine makes sense as a conglomeration made from the conceptualization of several historical experiences important in the early Christian community, but the Trinitarian concept does not clarify or enhance my contemporary experience.In spite of the Trinitarian formulation, I still honor and value the powerful and enduring influence of my Christian upbringing. As a result, I have not renounced the name "Christian" or my ordination as a Christian minister, even though I have grown increasingly away from them. I am still the second son of Lynsin and Mary Chappell. Even though my parents may seem to be dead and gone, they are still alive for me. I treasure them and I still live my life in their embrace, as well as in the embrace of the fellowship of... (shrink)

David Miller elegantly and provocatively reformulates critical rationalism—the revolutionary approach to epistemology advocated by Karl Popper—by answering its most important critics. He argues for an approach to rationality freed from the debilitating authoritarian dependence on reasons and justification. "Miller presents a particularly useful and stimulating account of critical rationalism. His work is both interesting and controversial... of interest to anyone with concerns in epistemology or the philosophy of science." —Canadian Philosophical Reviews.

In this paper I consider Derek Parfit’s attempt to respond to Rawls’ charge that utilitarianism ignores the distinction between persons. I proceed by arguing that there is a moderate form of reductionism about persons, one stressing the importance of what Parfit calls psychological connectedness, which can hold in different degrees both within one person and between distinct persons. In terms of this form of reductionism, against which Parfit’s arguments are ineffective, it is possible to resuscitate the Rawlsian charge that the (...) utilitarian maximizing approach to matters of distribution ignores something that is of moral relevance, viz., the difference between the degrees of connectedness that hold between different stages of the same person, and between that person and his nearest and dearest, and the lack of connectedness between that person and distant others who may be benefitted at his cost. To Parfit’s charge that reductionism sees the differences between persons as being ‘less deep’, I reply that the sense in which they are less deep is not at odds with their retaining their original moral importance, perhaps now better understood. (shrink)

Gadamer’s notion of dialogical truth relies on the claim that self and world “belong together” as aspects of a single, unitary phenomenon, one which is made manifest in language. This view has difficulty, however, accounting for that which is untruthful. To get past this obstacle I suggest that we turn to Nishida’s work, which shows how we can bring self and world together into a kind of harmony such that the cultivation of perception makes possible truthful expression.

Turkey's insistence on its European credentials, and its endeavours to join the European Union, provide an opportunity to reflect on what the European legacy means. While acknowledging the diverse contributors to Europe, and the extensive interactions with the rest of the world that have shaped European history and identity, this essay locates Europe's most important legacy—and measure—in the realm of ideas, especially the ideas we use to organise our experience and approach the challenges of the world. These ideas came to (...) fruition in the Enlightenment, and they provide an approach that is potentially liberating for peoples but uncomfortable for those with power, and those that aspire to power, including within Europe itself. The challenge for Turkey is to recognise that the EU is not necessarily the last word on ‘Europe,’ while continuing to engage creatively with the European legacy. (shrink)

Hegel's relationship to the Greek ideal of his day is well known: early in his career he saw the Greeks as an alternative to modernity, but by 1805 he had retreated from the Greek ideal, although he still admired the Greeks. Despite agreement that the Greeks played a central role in Hegel's thought, only a few commentators have offered an interpretation of Hegel's account of Greek ethical life. This dissertation presents just such an interpretation. ;I begin by situating Hegel's early (...) conception of Greece in the context of 18th- and 19th-century Romantic Hellenism. What emerges is a picture of Hegel as a thinker who appropriated the Romantic fascination with Greece for his own concerns, recasting the Hellenic ideal as an intersubjective one rather than an individualistic one. In recasting it, however, Hegel had to come to terms with a tension internal to the ideal understood intersubjectively; his famous retreat from Greece consequently occurred in part because his early conception of Greece was untenable. His mature works show the result of this transition on his conception of Greek ethical life: it is still an intersubjective ideal, but it has been refrained in order to emphasize the close relationship between subject and community which Hegel calls "beautiful individuality." I thus offer an interpretation of Hegel's account of Greece in which a weak form of subjectivity plays a central role. I then identify four forms of immediacy which Hegel criticized in Greek ethical life. He contends that they made Greek political life both normatively deficient and internally unstable, because they prevented Greek life from providing a context for the exercise of subjective particularity and subjective freedom. The penultimate chapter of the dissertation shows how Hegel thought these institutions developed in the history of Europe and how he thought the institutions of the modern state provide an adequate institutional sphere for the exercise of particularity. I close the dissertation by situating Hegel's critique of Greek ethical life within contemporary debates about particularity, arguing that a Hegelian politics preserves the laudable features of liberalism while answering some criticisms leveled against it. (shrink)

This paper focuses on one of the mainstays of Japanese psychiatrist and philosopher Kimura Bin’s (1931–2021) philosophical approach. Kimura’s work is characterized by the intersection of therapeutic, philosophical, and intercultural dimensions in ways that enable his clinical practice and philosophical investigations to mutually inform one another. I examine how this dialectic comes together with his conversion of ordinary Japanese words into philosophical concepts. Explicating the concepts Kimura deploys in developing a phenomenology of the self allows us to make new sense (...) of phenomena ranging from the process of individuation to the collective subjectivity of group life, from the breakdown of the self to its fuller realization. (shrink)

This essay critically develops Watsuji’s nondual ontology of the self. Watsuji shows that the self is constituted by its relational contact with others and by its immersion in a wider geo-cultural environment. Yet Watsuji himself had difficulty in smoothly bringing together and integrating these notions. By showing how these domains work together to constitute the self, I bring into view the unity at the ground of Watsuji’s thought and the implications of this account for key ideas in Heidegger’s philosophy and (...) for environmental ethics. (shrink)

Processes governing the creation, perception and production of spoken words are sensitive to the patterns of speech sounds in the language user’s lexicon. Generative linguistic theory suggests that listeners infer constraints on possible sound patterning from the lexicon and apply these constraints to all aspects of word use. In contrast, emergentist accounts suggest that these phonotactic constraints are a product of interactive associative mapping with items in the lexicon. To determine the degree to which phonotactic constraints are lexically mediated, we (...) observed the effects of learning new words that violate English phonotactic constraints on phonotactic perceptual repair processes in nonword consonant-consonant-vowel stimuli. Subjects who learned such words were less likely to “repair” illegal onset clusters and report them as legal ones. Effective connectivity analyses of MRI-constrained reconstructions of simultaneously collected magnetoencephalography and EEG data showed that these behavioral shifts were accompanied by changes in the strength of influences of lexical areas on acoustic-phonetic areas. These results strengthen the interpretation of previous results suggesting that phonotactic constraints on perception are produced by top-down lexical influences on speech processing. (shrink)