This paper examines the identity of Asian swamp buffalo (Bubalus bubalis) from different value orientations. Buffalo were introduced into Northern (Top End) Australia in the early nineteenth century. A team of transdisciplinary researchers, including an ethicist, has been engaged in field research on feral buffalo in Arnhem Land over the past three years. Using historical documents, literature review, field observations, interviews with key informants, and interaction with the Indigenous land owners, an understanding of the diverse views on the scientific, cultural, (...) and economic significance of buffalo was obtained. While the diverse stakeholders in buffalo exploitation and management have historically delivered divergent value orientations on the nature of the human–buffalo relationship, we argue that over time there is the possibility of values and ethical convergence. Such convergence is possible via transdisciplinary and transcultural agreement on the value stances that constitute the construction of the being or identity of buffalo in the face of the overwhelming need to manage population density and gross numbers. (shrink)

Yasha Rohwer and Emma Marris argue there is no prima facie duty to preserve genetic integrity; they contend, rather, that preserving the integrity of specific genomes is only a mean...

In this paper we 1. provide a natural deduction system for full first-order linear logic, 2. introduce Curry-Howard-style terms for this version of linear logic, 3. extend the notion of substitution of Curry-Howard terms for term variables, 4. define the reduction rules for the Curry-Howard terms and 5. outline a proof of the strong normalization for the full system of linear logic using a development of Girard's candidates for reducibility, thereby providing an alternative to Girard's proof using proof-nets.

My dissertation, “Love, Self-Constitution, and Practical Necessity,” offers an interpretation of love between people. Love is puzzling because it appears to involve essentially both rational and non-rational phenomena. We are accountable to those we love, so love seems to participate in forms of necessity, commitment, and expectation, which are associated with morality. But non-rational attitudes—forms of desire, attraction, and feeling—are also central to love. Consequently, love is not obviously based in rationality or inclination. In contrast to views that attempt to (...) fit love into existing models of practical reasoning, I argue that love participates in a unique form of practical necessity, different from both moral and psychological necessity, yet bearing resemblances to each. Distinctive to this type of practical necessity is a direct appeal to another particular person that cannot be delivered in third-personal terms—that is, a non-moral yet normative type of expectation on another person. This type of expectation is predominant in loving relationships, but can also make better sense of the experiences of humor and beauty, as well as attitudes like forgiveness, gratitude, and agent-regret. I treat Immanuel Kant’s discussion of the experience of beauty in the Critique of Judgment and Christine Korsgaard’s work on self-constitution as fruitful starting points for this account of love. I conclude that our loving relationships enable us to have distinctive personal selves, and provide support for this account of love by offering a complementary theory of grief. In Part One of the dissertation, I focus on two prominent approaches to love characteristic of the sentimentalist and rationalist traditions. I begin with the work of David Hume, which treats desire (understood as something like a simple impulse or craving) as the paradigmatic mental state, and emphasizes our personal and affective dimensions. Hume has the valuable insight that loving someone affects our sense of ourselves. But Hume’s view becomes unsatisfying when he claims that love is essentially enfeebling, implying that to love is to be passive toward and readily overcome by another person. While this indicates Hume’s awareness that love involves being open and receptive to another person, the problem is that love is also a demanding attitude. Hume lacks the conceptual resources to offer a nuanced view of the self, in which we can—with one attitude—be both demanding of and vulnerable to another person. Hume’s model of a desire-based deliberative process has recently been revived in Harry Frankfurt’s discussions on love and rationality. Frankfurt, however, goes beyond Hume’s picture of the self by introducing a notion of “identification,” which he offers to make sense of our apparent ability to commit ourselves decisively to certain projects or people. I argue that active powers like identification and commitment cannot be accommodated within any basically Humean moral psychology. Such abilities, and with them the possibility of love, depend on something closer to a Kantian conception of rational agency. I next focus on the work of Kant, who provides the substantial counterpart to Humean-inspired moral theories, but is not known for his insight into our emotional lives. In the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant divides love into “practical love”—what we experience when we are morally motivated to help someone—and “pathological love”—what we experience when we feel fond of something. But in reality, we experience love neither as a mere preference for another person, nor as something that generates the kind of demands that would be binding on any rational creature. David Velleman attempts to remedy the deficiency of Kant’s dichotomy. Velleman offers a Kantian theory in which he describes love and respect as two ends of a continuum of attitudes that it is morally appropriate to have toward people. Velleman’s view has the peculiar implication that everyone deserves the love of everyone else, and I argue that this is a fatal flaw. Like Kant and Velleman, Korsgaard characterizes personal love as involving the treatment of other people as Kantian ends-in-themselves to a heightened degree. Korsgaard, though, also contends that our individual identities depend upon our personal relationships, and I take this position seriously for the remainder of the dissertation. Ultimately, however, characterizations of loving relations as subsets of moral relations can account for the authority of the demands of love, but not its particularity. The major conclusion of Part One is that any attempt to understand love primarily on a model of practical reasoning with which we are already familiar is doomed to fail. Our experience of love calls for a theory of a unique type of practical necessity. In Part Two I take seriously the possibility that love is simultaneously inescapable (in something like the way morality is supposed to be), and yet ineluctably personal. In love, we experience an engagement with a person as essentially particular, rather than as an instance of a rational agent in general. To make sense of this direct attachment to an individual, I argue that love involves distinctive forms of expectation and disappointment. When those we love let us down, they hurt our feelings, which is not a response to a failed prediction, but nor is it a reaction to a moral insult or offense. According to Peter Strawson and Stephen Darwall, second-personal moral reactive attitudes (such as resentment) always have third-personal analogues (such as indignation). In contrast, I argue that the type of hurt feelings associated with love is a second-personal reactive attitude that does not have a third-personal corollary. I take this as evidence that the expectations involved in love are not objective in the way that the moral is objective. Nor, however, is love a matter of mere preference. On my interpretation, Kant introduces this different type of expectation in the Critique of Judgment. Whereas he characterizes moral judgments as universally communicable, judgments of beauty implicitly involve only second-personal address: I appeal to your direct experience with a particular object. This provides the conceptual space for an account of love according to which it involves a uniquely second-personal form of practical necessity. I contend that the second-personal addresses we make in love are appeals to strengthen the intimacy implicit in the loving relationship, and I identify three interrelated dimensions of that intimacy. First, those we love have the standing to interpret us in a constitutive manner. We fine-tune and make determinate the character of our concerns and interests in part by accepting the interpretations provided by those we love. In that way, the people we love have the normative power to constitute who we are. Second, we share a perspective with those we love in a way that is not reducible to or derivative of our independent perspectives. Loving someone centrally involves the activity of forming concerns together, and we do this in a mode best understood on the model of playing a spontaneous game or improvising music. Finally, being loved enables us to see ourselves as distinctive and special, because the concern those who love us have for us does not track the objective merit of our characteristics. These dimensions of the intimacy that characterizes a loving relationship reveal what it is that we appeal for in love, and how we are hurt when our appeals are rebuffed. In broad terms, this dissertation advocates the recognition of a non-moral yet normative type of expectation, which is predominant in loving relationships. Humor and beauty, too, make more sense when understood in terms of this non-moral yet normative type of expectation, as they involve appeals to others that are more than mere predictions of, but less than rational demands for, a certain kind of response. Introducing this alternative notion of expectation into the discourse of moral philosophy can shed light on other common attitudes that are clearly normative, but defy translation into objective, third-personal terms. Such attitudes include certain experiences of pride and shame, apology and forgiveness, the bestowing of mercy, gratitude, agent-regret, and perhaps a basic sense of trust we have in others. Ultimately, I situate love in respect to grief, which demonstrates my theory’s ability to make sense of related dimensions of our emotional lives. The people we love and grieve over give us a sense of who we are as distinctive, particular individuals, as the three interrelated dimensions of intimacy in loving relationships reveal. Consequently, grief is best understood as a type of practical disorientation—namely, a disorientation that involves the loss of the personal self. I present my account of grief against the type of account that would draw philosophical conclusions about the nature of love and grief from empirical psychological data alone. In particular, these data indicate that we recover quickly from the deaths of loved ones, and Dan Moller draws the philosophical conclusion that those we love fulfill certain roles in our lives and are replaceable. In contrast, I contend that while we should acknowledge the truth of the objective judgment, made in the third-person, that we will likely recover after the deaths of those we love, it does not follow that we must affirm such a claim from the internal perspective of one person who loves another. As a result, the case of love and grief supports a general claim concerning the proper work of moral philosophy, which is that the understanding of ourselves gained through empirical data is not a substitute for the normative conclusions that are revealed through first-personal reflections on our relationships. (shrink)

Wir rekonstruieren einen signifikanten Strang von Max Benses früher intellektueller Entwicklung über sein Verhältnis zu Oswald Spengler, David Hilbert und Heinrich Scholz. Nach einer kurzen Rekapitulation von Spenglers kulturrelativistischem Bild des Mathematischen folgen wir einigen Spuren der Spengler-Lektüre in Max Benses frühen Texten und zeigen, wie sich Bense unter dem Einfluss von Heinrich Scholz ab Ende der 1930er Jahre sukzessive von Spengler distanziert und schließlich ein Konzept ‚reiner Wissenschaft‘ ausbildet, wie es sich unter anderem in David Hilberts formalistischer (...) Mathematik Ausdruck verleiht. Die Verteidigung Hilberts gegen völkische Denker wie Max Steck ist einer der Schauplätze, auf denen Scholz und Bense gemeinsam ihren Weltanschauungsdissens zur NS-Wissenschaftsauffassung artikulieren, gleichwohl sind auch sie Teil des NS-Wissenschaftssystems. (shrink)

An account is given of the work on glacial phenomena in the English Lake District from the time of Adam Sedgwick until the mid-twentieth century, with emphasis on the nineteenth century. In the early years, the following theories were envisaged: 'diluvialism'; the theory of 'waves of translation'; the theory of 'ice rafting'; the 'glacial-submergence' hypothesis ; and the 'land-ice' theory. While it was quite easy to recognize ice action and the former existence of glaciers, it was difficult to work out (...) a persuasive sequence of events that would account satisfactorily for the great variety and quantity of evidence available, considering land-forms, and the distribution of moraines, tills, gravels, and glacial erratics. When the first systematic geological survey was being undertaken in the Lake District both local amateurs and the surveyors favoured the glacial-submergence theory, but there were problems about explaining the distribution of glacial erratics, and controversy developed as to whether this distribution was best explained in terms of floating icebergs or landice. The problem was difficult in that there was uncertainty as to how many glaciations there had been, though the preferred number was two, following the early observations in Wales by Andrew Ramsay, in Lancashire by Edward Hull and others, and by some Continental geologists, of two different tills, and one intermediate water-deposited unit. These seemed to have equivalents in the Lake District. However, the Scottish surveyors, under the influence of their theorist colleague, James Croll, with his astronomical explanation of ice ages, favoured multiple glaciations. Croll himself sought to apply the land-ice theory to explain the distribution of glacial erratics in the regions round the Lake District. James Geikie read widely in the Continental literature, and thought that the theory of several glaciations, developed by Albrecht Penck in the 1880s, on the basis of observations of the valleys and rivers terraces running north from the Alps, fitted well with Croll's theory. Thus the idea of a sequence of glaciations was applied to Britain with some success, partly as a result of Geikie's advocacy. But the evidence of such a sequence in the Lake District itself was by no means clear, and it was not developed for the region until the work of Frederick Trotter and Sidney Hollingworth . In the meantime, much geomorphological work on the form and formation of lakes and tarns had been done by the chief aficionado of Lakeland geology, Cambridge professor, John Marr. But he thought there might have been only one major glaciation. The paradox is that, for England, the glacial sequence has had to be worked out more by examination of deposits in the flatter southern regions, as much as in the mountains where the glaciers were formed and most active. In the Lakeland mountains, as in other parts of the world, the last glaciation has tended to remove or obscure the products of earlier glaciations. (shrink)

Kant frequently speaks as if all voluntary actions arise from our maxims as the subjective principles of our practical reason. But, as Michael Albrecht has pointed out, Kant also occasionally speaks as if it is only the rare person of “character” who acts according to principles or maxims. I argue that Kant’s seemingly contradictory claims on this front result from the fact that there are two fundamentally different ways that maxims of action can figure in the deliberation of the (...) agent: an agent can act on a maxim either because it promises agreeable results or because he deems it to be an intrinsically correct principle of action. Kant describes a maxim of the latter sort as “firm” and as indicative of “character” in the honorific sense. If the agent’s commitment to his maxim is instead conditional on its agreeable results, we can say he does not act “on principle” and in that sense does not act on maxims at all: rather than aiming at a set of results because the action that produces them conforms to his maxim, he acts according to his maxim because doing so promises (and only as long as it promises) the results he desires. Such an agent thus lacks the principled maxims of a person of character since his maxims are always for sale to the highest bidder. Kant allows that an evil person can approximate the ideal of a principled indifference to results, but claims that only morally good action can be wholly principled. This is also why maxims of action in conformity with duty can be acquired gradually through habituation whereas an authentically moral maxim must instead arise from a “revolution” in thought. (shrink)

Bhattacharyya, K. The Advaita concept of subjectivity.--Deutsch, E. Reflections on some aspects of the theory of rasa.--Nakamura, H. The dawn of modern thought in the East.--Organ, T. Causality, Indian and Greek.--Chatterjee, M. On types of classification.--Lacombe, O. Transcendental imagination.--Bahm, A. J. Standards for comparative philosophy.--Herring, H. Appearance, its significance and meaning in the history of philosophy.--Chang Chung-yuan. Pre-rational harmony in Heidegger's essential thinking and Chʼan thought.--Staal, J. F. Making sense of the Buddhist tetralemma.--Enomiya-Lassalle, H. M. The mysticism of Carl (...) class='Hi'>Albrecht and Zen.--Parrinder, G. The nature of mysticism.--Cairns, G. E. Axiological contributions of East and West to the spiritual development of mankind.--Mayeda, S. Śaṇkara's view of ethics.--Mercier, A. On peace.--Barlingay, S. S. A discussion of some aspects of Gaudapāda's philosophy. (shrink)

The article starts by observing a parallel between the identification of Christ's humanity and universal human nature, for which Harnack repudiates some church fathers, and David Strauss' claim, in his Life of Jesus, that the subject of the Incarnation must be all humanity. It is argued that this oppositional stance is indicative of fundamental philosophical and theological differences between the Tübingen School and the Ritschl School. Those differences, however, are then explained as emerging from what is ultimately a common (...) project of a radical form of historical theology. This project, it is argued, Ritschl took over from Baur while correcting it in crucial ways. Taken together, the two central theological schools of the 19th century thus illustrate the potential and the limits of christian theology within the historicist paradigm. (shrink)

Much of the sustained attention on pandemic preparedness has focused on the ethical justification for plans for the “crisis” phase of a surge when, despite augmentation efforts, the demand for life...

Moral Rights and Their Grounds offers a novel theory of rights based on two distinct views. The first--the value view of rights--argues that for a person to have a right is to be valuable in a certain way, or to have a value property. This special type of value is in turn identified by the reasons that others have for treating the right holder in certain ways, and that correlate with the value in question. David Alm then argues that (...) the familiar agency view of rights should be replaced with a different version according to which persons' rights, and thus at least in part their value, are based on their actions rather than their mere agency. This view, which Alm calls exercise-based rights, retains some of the most valuable features of the agency view while also defending it against common objections concerning right loss. This book presents a unique conception of exercise-based rights that will be of keen interest to ethicists, legal philosophers, and political philosophers interested in rights theory. (shrink)

In this paper I defend epistemic circularity by arguing that the “No Self-Support” principle (NSS) is false. This principle, ultimately due to Fumerton ( 1995 ), states that one cannot acquire a justified belief in the reliability of a source of belief by trusting that very source. I argue that NSS has the skeptical consequence that the trustworthiness of all of our sources ultimately depends upon the trustworthiness of certain fundamental sources – sources that we cannot justifiably believe to be (...) reliable. This is a problem, I claim, because if the trustworthiness of all of our sources depends upon sources that we should not believe to be reliable, then a reflective individual should not trust any of his sources at all. The hidden cost of rejecting epistemic circularity is thus the unacceptable skeptical thesis that reflective individuals like you and I have no justified beliefs whatsoever. (shrink)

I distinguish between two conceptually different kinds of physical space: a space of ordinary material bodies, which is the space of points at which I could imaginably place the tip of my finger, or the center of a billiard-ball, and a space of elementary physical determinables, which is the smallest space of points such that stipulating what is happening at each one of those points, at every time, amounts to an exhaustive physical history of the universe. In all classical physical (...) theories, these two spaces happen to coincide – and what we mean by calling a theory “classical”, and all we mean by calling a theory “classical”, is precisely that these two spaces coincide. But once the distinction between these two spaces in on the table, it becomes clear that there is no logical or conceptual reason why they must coincide – and it turns out that a very simple way of pulling them apart from one another gives us quantum mechanics. (shrink)

Inferential Internalists accept the Principle of Inferential Justification (PIJ), according to which one has justification for believing P on the basis of E only if one has justification for believing that E makes probable P. Richard Fumerton has defended PIJ by appeal to examples, and recently Adam Leite has argued that this principle is supported by considerations regarding the nature of responsible belief. In this paper, I defend a form of externalism against both arguments. This form of externalism recognizes what (...) I call the phenomenon of reflective defeat: if one is justified in not believing that E makes probable P, then this defeats whatever justification one has for believing P upon the basis of E. I argue that this modified version of externalism has the virtue of accommodating the intuitions that motivate internalism, without the cost of the vicious regress that makes internalism so unattractive. (shrink)

Tippett is often cast as a composer with a strong visionary streak, but what does that mean for a twentieth-century artist? In this multi-faceted study, David Clarke explores Tippett's complex creative imagination - its dialogue between a romantic's aspirations to the ideal and absolute, and a modernist's sceptical realism. He shows how the musical formations of works such as The Midsummer Marriage, King Priam, and The Vision of Saint Augustine resonate with the aesthetic and theoretical ideas of key figures (...) in modern Western culture - some known to have been influential to the composer, others not usually associated with him. Analyses of late works such as the Triple Concerto and Byzantium also speculate on Tippett's sexuality as a critical element in his creative and political consciousness. (shrink)

When patients are admitted to the hospital, they are generally expected to remain in or within close proximity to their assigned rooms in order to promote their safety and appropriate medical care. Although there are circumstances when patients may safely leave their hospital room or floor, guidance within the medical literature for the management of patient movement within the hospital are lacking. Excessive restrictions on patient movement may be seen as overly paternalistic, while lax requirements may interfere with high quality (...) care, patient safety and efficient hospital practice. As a result, guidance in the form of institutional policy is warranted. Such policy development should take into consideration the potential clinical, legal, and ethical concerns in balancing the competing values of patients’ preferences and respect for autonomy, while ensuring high quality, safe, and efficacious medical care. This paper will provide a framework for hospitals to create institution-specific patient movement policies that are fair, systematic, and transparent. (shrink)

Tribe, David Review of: On the nature being: A personal exploration into the origins of consciousness, by Geoffrey Collins, Geoffrey Collins and Creative Space Independent Publishing Platform, 2012-13. Amazon $US6 online.

The public forum has been connected to the functioning of democracy, expressive freedom, and the media's role in society. While the public forum's legal contours have been examined, the ethical foundation of the public forum has not. Relying on archival research, this article argues that ideas about the public forum can be traced to the pragmatism of Grenville Clark, who influenced ideas about the public forum through his work on the American Bar Association's Bill of Rights Committee.

In this paper, I consider the question of whether crime victims can be said to have a moral right to see their victimizers punished that could explain why they often feel wronged or cheated when the state fails to punish offenders. In the first part, I explain what I mean by a “right to punishment” and what it is for such a right to “explain” the frustrated crime victim’s reaction. In the second part, I distinguish such a right from a (...) Lockean-style right to punish, which is also shown incapable of providing the needed explanation. In the third part I argue that it is difficult to identify any benefit such that the right to punishment could plausibly be understood as a right to that benefit. I discuss two main candidates here: the vaguely Hegelian idea that punishment is itself some sort of restitution for the wrong done to the victim; and the idea, due to Victor Tadros, that punishment is a form of compensation for wrongdoing by contributing indirectly to protecting victims from future harm. In the final section, I suggest instead that the frustrated crime victim’s reaction, when justified, is best explained, not by the violation of any right to punishment, but rather by the state’s failure to treat the victim as an equal. (shrink)

_The Gift of Death_, Jacques Derrida’s most sustained consideration of religion, explores questions first introduced in his book _Given Time_ about the limits of the rational and responsible that one reaches in granting or accepting death, whether by sacrifice, murder, execution, or suicide. Derrida analyzes Czech philosopher Jan Patocka’s _Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History _and develops and compares his ideas to the works of Heidegger, Lévinas, and Kierkegaard. One of Derrida’s major works, _The Gift of Death_ resonates with (...) much of his earlier writing, and this highly anticipated second edition is greatly enhanced by David Wills’s updated translation. This new edition also features the first-ever English translation of Derrida’s _Literature in Secret_. In it, Derrida continues his discussion of the sacrifice of Isaac, which leads to bracing meditations on secrecy, forgiveness, literature, and democracy. He also offers a reading of Kafka’s _Letter to His Father_ and uses the story of the flood in Genesis as an embarkation point for a consideration of divine sovereignty. “An important contribution to the critical study of ethics that commends itself to philosophers, social scientists, scholars of religion... [and those] made curious by the controversy that so often attends Derrida.”—_Booklist_, on the first edition. (shrink)

According to the self-defense view, the moral justification of punishment is derived from the moral justification of an earlier threat of punishment for an offense. According to the forfeiture view, criminals can justly be punished because they have forfeited certain rights in virtue of their crimes. The paper defends three theses about these two views. (1) The self-defense view is false because the right to threaten retaliation is not independent of the right to carry out that threat. (2) A more (...) plausible account of the right to threaten says instead that the right to retaliate is primary to the right to threaten, and that the former right in turn arises because aggressors forfeit the right not to suffer retaliation. (3) The ?fair warning thesis,? according to which just punishment must be preceded by a threat, is less plausible than first appearances suggest and is therefore no serious obstacle to the view of threats described above. (shrink)

Atomism is defined as the view that the moral value of any object is ultimately determined by simple features whose contribution to the value of an object is always the same, independently of context. A morally fundamental feature, in a given context, is defined as one whose contribution in that context is determined by no other value fact. Three theses are defended, which together entail atomism: (1) All objects have their moral value ultimately in virtue of morally fundamental features; (2) (...) If a feature is morally fundamental, then its contribution is always the same; (3) Morally fundamental features are simple. (shrink)

In this paper I criticize the standard argument for deontological egalitarianism, understood as the thesis that there is a moral claim to have an equal share of well-being or whatever other good counts. That argument is based on the idea that equals should be treated equally. I connect the debate over egalitarianism with that over comparative justice. A common theme is a general skepticism against comparative claims. I argue (i) that there can be no claim to equality based simply on (...) the fact of equal worth as that fact itself does not have any value for the supposed claim holder; and (ii) intuitions that suggest otherwise can be explained away without appealing to comparative claims. (shrink)

O autor reexamina a crítica de Derrida à fenomenologia de Husserl de forma a mostrar como a sua coerência estrutural emerge não tanto de uma redução a uma doutrina particular, mas antes das exigências de uma concepção unitária, especificamente impostas pelas determinações epistemológicas e metafísicas da presença. PALAVRAS-CHAVE – Desconstrução. Derrida. Fenomenologia. Husserl. Presença. Significado. ABSTRACT – The author reexamines Derrida’s critique of Husserl’s phenomenology, so as to show how its structural coherency arises not so much from the reduction to (...) a particular doctrine, but rather from the demands of a unitary conception, specifically from the demands imposed by the epistemological and metaphysical determinations of presence. KEY WORDS – Deconstruction. Derrida. Husserl. Meaning. Phenomenology. Presence. (shrink)

Terry Eagleton is the foremost Marxist cultural theorist of our time. In the first book-length study of this highly influential figure, David Alderson provides detailed discussions of Eagleton's Marxism and his engagements with postmodernism, as well as an evaluation of his interventions in Irish Studies. Each of the chapters in this important intervention in current theoretical debates offers accessible contextualization of the key issues and provides detailed analyses of Eagleton's literary criticism. Alderson shows that the complex relations between nature, (...) culture and ideology, body, subjectivity and authority are at the heart of Eagleton's ethical and political concerns. He goes on to demonstrate that these relations inform the theorist's critical examinations of such literary works as Wuthering Heights and The Merchant of Venice, and his treatment of W.B. Yeats and Oscar Wilde. (shrink)

In this paper I discuss, on behalf of the materialist, a consideration against the modal or conceivability argument against materialism which was first voiced in the third lecture of Naming and Necessity. This consideration is based on intertheoretic identities, statements in which both terms flanking the identity sign are theoretical. I argue that the defender of the conceivability argument has trouble to account for the appearance of contingency in those types of necessary identities. In fact, intertheoretic identities pose a formidable (...) dilemma for the defender of the modal argument and actually force the antimaterialist to say more about the semantics of theoretical terms than is implicit in standard discussions of the argument. I myself consider several options in this regard, the upshot being, however, that none of the alternative semantics for theoretical terms available to the antimaterialist is good enough to achieve the twofold aim which her modal argument requires, namely, to account for the a posteriori necessity of identities of this sort and, at the same time, to preserve her antimaterialist argument. Finally, in the last part of the paper, I argue that my defense of materialism can withstand some worries coming from David Chalmers’ recent views on a priori scrutability. (shrink)

"Cet ouvrage propose de souligner le passage de l’être à la lettre en mettant l’accent sur la rupture avec l’ontologie. Il décrit le mouvement allant de l’un à l’autre dans une sorte de « séparation liante » (AHN, p. 185) qui n’implique guère de reniement – ni d’un côté ni de l’autre. Il ne propose pas de synthèse, mais une autre distribution d’accents. Dans un premier temps, l’auteur s’interroge : cette façon de penser conduit-elle Levinas « hors du champ de (...) la philosophie »? Puis il met Levinas « à l’épreuve de l’autre », en le confrontant – toujours à partir de la perspective judaïque – à des auteurs tel que Rosenzweig sur les questions de l’éducation, Meschonnic sur la modalité du sacré, Blanchot sur l’être Juif, Janicaud au sujet du tournant théologique qu’il aurait imprimé à la phénoménologie, ou encore Benny Lévy sur l’attachement marqué de Levinas au « grec », à savoir à la philosophie. Toutefois, l’originalité de l’ouvrage réside dans la comparaison à des auteurs beaucoup moins connus dans notre espace européen : à Leibovitz pour lequel le judaïsme est une « religion revendicative », assignant l’humain aux commandements ; à Israël Salanter – fondateur du Moussar à Kovno, en Lituanie ; au rav Soloveitchik sur la question de la halakha. Mais aussi à un penseur étonnant et tonique, Daniel Epstein qui nous a livré, en hébreu, une présentation magistrale, précise et en nuances."-- page 4 de couverture. (shrink)

Jean Gayon’s encounters with American evolutionary biologists and philosophers of biology affected his project of justifying the Darwinian research tradition. He challenged entrenched views about evolution in France by showing how the population-genetic theory of natural selectionSelection removed conceptual blockages that had thwarted the Darwinian research tradition. He taught his American colleagues how important French physiological genetics was to the DarwinismDarwinism of the modern evolutionary synthesis and, with Richard BurianBurian, Richard, stressed the compatibility of the Synthesis with postwar French molecular (...) geneticsMolecular genetics. His seamless integration of history and philosophy of biology helped create an international learned society in which historians and philosophers of biology work together (ISSHSPB). (shrink)