This article opens with a discussion of incarceration in the time of Covid 19. The story of one of the inmates in the high-security prison of Puente Grande leads us back to the beginning of the fifteen-year-long imprisonment of an innocent and, with it, to a complex narrative. The story concerns the use of the juridical concepts of delincuencia organizada, racketeering, and kidnapping. As a charge it has been repeatedly implemented in what has come to be called la fabricaciόn de (...) culpables in Mexico, Columbia, Argentina, and Brazil. Although the legal terminology changes, false incarceration is hardly limited to Central and South America. This is therefore a cautionary tale about how charges – and people – are framed, and how the latter are tried on social and corporate media, even before their official trials begin. (shrink)

This article reflects upon the state of the philosophical profession vis‐à‐vis a close reading of the hoax perpetrated against the International Journal of Badiou Studies in 2016. This hoax is not a subversive act of disciplinary criticism (as the hoaxers contend). Rather, it is a poorly disguised attempt to enforce a partisan and myopic conception of philosophy and to delegitimize an entire subfield of philosophical production—namely, continental philosophy. The hoax is symptomatic of a deeper problem that plagues the profession today: (...) the willingness exhibited by many philosophers to police the boundaries of the discipline by engaging in what we call “acts of force.” The prevalence of acts of force demonstrates that professional philosophy is shaped not only by the giving and taking of reasons but also by shopworn disciplinary tribalisms (for example, continental versus analytic) and asymmetrical power relations involving agents with unequal amounts of social, professional, and philosophical capital. (shrink)

Conceptually integrating Selfish Goal Theory with modern evolutionary psychology amplifies theoretical power. Inconsistency, a key principle of Selfish Goal Theory, illustrates this insight. Conflicting goals of seeking sexual variety and successful mate retention furnish one example. Siblings have evolved goals to cooperate and compete, a second example. Integrating Selfish Goal Theory with evolutionary theory can explain much inconsistent goal-directed behavior.

The essays in this volume continue in the trajectory established at the turn of the nineteenth century when the “new science” of psychology and professional interest in esoteric and “occult” phenomena converged and led to what Ellenberger refers to as the “discovery of the unconscious.” These essays span the interdisciplinary fields of theology, religious studies, and psychology “and/of/in dialogue with” religion with a specific focus on inquiries into the nature of self and consciousness, questions of “mysticism” and “mystical experience,” and (...) approaches to these areas from within a variety of depth psychological hermeneutic “keys.” While a number of these topics have been approached in the past in various capacities and from varying psychological perspectives, this volume’s unique contribution lies within the specifically depth psychological nature of the inquiry and, even more so, with its often underlying Jungian orientation. This move was only of partial intent on the part of the editors, but should be noted as marking what has now become a rare collaboration among scholars of religion and depth psychologists of a more analytical/Jungian “flavor.”. (shrink)

Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception (1945), written after his extensive research in psychology, anthropology, and the other social sciences and also after his intensive encounter with the thought of Husserl and Heidegger, is an attempt to leave those malevolent dualisms behind and replace them with a phenomenology that engages with beings as befits their essence and the conditions of their being: a phenomenology that no longer imposes on our experience a morally irresponsible and offensive ontology; a phenomenology that, instead, reminds us (...) of our responsibility as guardians of nature and life and brings to light very new possibilities for ethical life, community, and dwelling on the earth of this planet. (shrink)

Connecting influence and leadership, the professor of business ethics assumes a sacred moral vocation. Directed towards the student's role in the marketplace, the business ethics course enjoins consideration of the values of social responsibility for the human community in its political, economic, and familial manifestations.

A leading political theorist’s groundbreaking defense of ideal conceptions of justice in political philosophy Throughout the history of political philosophy and politics, there has been continual debate about the roles of idealism versus realism. For contemporary political philosophy, this debate manifests in notions of ideal theory versus nonideal theory. Nonideal thinkers shift their focus from theorizing about full social justice, asking instead which feasible institutional and political changes would make a society more just. Ideal thinkers, on the other hand, question (...) whether full justice is a standard that any society is likely ever to satisfy. And, if social justice is unrealistic, are attempts to understand it without value or importance, and merely utopian? Utopophobia argues against thinking that justice must be realistic, or that understanding justice is only valuable if it can be realized. David Estlund does not offer a particular theory of justice, nor does he assert that justice is indeed unrealizable—only that it could be, and this possibility upsets common ways of proceeding in political thought. Estlund engages critically with important strands in traditional and contemporary political philosophy that assume a sound theory of justice has the overriding, defining task of contributing practical guidance toward greater social justice. Along the way, he counters several tempting perspectives, including the view that inquiry in political philosophy could have significant value only as a guide to practical political action, and that understanding true justice would necessarily have practical value, at least as an ideal arrangement to be approximated. Demonstrating that unrealistic standards of justice can be both sound and valuable to understand, Utopophobia stands as a trenchant defense of ideal theory in political philosophy. (shrink)

A wide-ranging study of the central concepts in epistemology - belief, truth and knowledge. Professor Armstrong offers a dispositional account of general beliefs and of knowledge of general propositions. Belief about particular matters of fact are described as structures in the mind of the believer which represent or 'map' reality, while general beliefs are dispositions to extend the 'map' or introduce casual relations between portions of the map according to general rules. 'Knowledge' denotes the reliability of such beliefs as representations (...) of reality. Within this framework Professor Armstrong offers a distinctive account of many of the main questions in general epistemology - the relations between beliefs and language, the notions of proposition, concept and idea, the analysis of truth, the varieties of knowledge, and the way in which beleifs and knowledge are supported by reasons. The book as a whole if offered as a contribution to a naturalistic account of man. (shrink)

"My work has had nothing to do with gay liberation," Michel Foucault reportedly told an admirer in 1975. And indeed there is scarcely more than a passing mention of homosexuality in Foucault's scholarly writings. So why has Foucault, who died of AIDS in 1984, become a powerful source of both personal and political inspiration to an entire generation of gay activists? And why have his political philosophy and his personal life recently come under such withering, normalizing scrutiny by commentators as (...) diverse as Camille Paglia, Richard Mohr, Bruce Bawer, Roger Kimball, and biographer James Miller? David M. Halperin's Saint Foucault is an uncompromising and impassioned defense of the late French philosopher and historian as a galvanizing thinker whose career as a theorist and activist will continue to serve as a model for other gay intellectuals, activists, and scholars. A close reading of both Foucault and the increasing attacks on his life and work, it explains why straight liberals so often find in Foucault only counsels of despair on the subject of politics, whereas gay activists look to him not only for intellectual inspiration but also for a compelling example of political resistance. Halperin rescues Foucault from the endless nature-versus-nurture debate over the origins of homosexuality ("On this question I have absolutely nothing to say," Foucault himself once remarked) and argues that Foucault's decision to treat sexuality not as a biological or psychological drive but as an effect of discourse, as the product of modern systems of knowledge and power, represents a crucial political breakthrough for lesbians and gay men. Halperin explains how Foucault's radical vision of homosexuality as a strategic opportunity for self-transformation anticipated the new anti-assimilationist, anti-essentialist brand of sexual identity politics practiced by contemporary direct-action groups such as ACT UP. Halperin also offers the first synthetic account of Foucault's thinking about gay sex and the future of the lesbian and gay movement, as well as an up-to-the-minute summary of the most recent work in queer theory. "Where there is power, there is resistance," Michel Foucault wrote in The History of Sexuality, Volume I. Erudite, biting, and surprisingly moving, Saint Foucault represents Halperin's own resistance to what he views as the blatant and systematic misrepresentation of a crucial intellectual figure, a misrepresentation he sees as dramatic evidence of the continuing personal, professional, and scholarly vulnerability of all gay activists and intellectuals in the age of AIDS. (shrink)

This anthology brings together readings mainly from contemporary philosophers, but also from writers of the past two centuries, on the philosophy of mind. Some of the main questions addressed are: is a human being really a mind in relation to a body; if so, what exactly is this mind and how it is related to the body; and are there any grounds for supposing that the mind survives the disintegration of the body?

A growing number of technologies are currently being developed to improve and distribute thinking and decision-making. Rapid progress in brain-to-brain interfacing and swarming technologies promises to transform how we think about collective and collaborative cognitive tasks across domains, ranging from research to entertainment, and from therapeutics to military applications. As these tools continue to improve, we are prompted to monitor how they may affect our society on a broader level, but also how they may reshape our fundamental understanding of agency, (...) responsibility, and other key concepts of our moral landscape.In this paper we take a closer look at this class of technologies – Technologies for Collective Minds – to see not only how their implementation may react with commonly held moral values, but also how they challenge our underlying concepts of what constitutes collective or individual agency. We argue that prominent contemporary frameworks for understanding collective agency and responsibility are insufficient in terms of accurately describing the relationships enabled by Technologies for Collective Minds, and that they therefore risk obstructing ethical analysis of the implementation of these technologies in society. We propose a more multidimensional approach to better understand this set of technologies, and to facilitate future research on the ethics of Technologies for Collective Minds. (shrink)

This book is a critical introduction to code and software that develops an understanding of its social and philosophical implications in the digital age. Written specifically for people interested in the subject from a non-technical background, the book provides a lively and interesting analysis of these new media forms.

This text addresses the profound human questions of love and work. Beginning with a historical introduction, the author progresses through adaptive problems that humans face, and concludes by showing how evolutionary psychology encompasses all branches of psychology.

We are concerned with identifying by how much a finite cover of an 0-categorical structure differs from a sequence of free covers. The main results show that this is measured by automorphism groups which are nilpotent-by-abelian. In the language of covers, these results say that every finite cover can be decomposed naturally into linked, superlinked and free covers. The superlinked covers arise from covers over a different base, and to describe this properly we introduce the notion of a quasi-cover.These results (...) generalise results of the second author obtained in the case where the base of the cover is a grassmannian of a disintegrated set. They also give a complete proof of a statement of the second author extending this case to the case of a grassmannian of a modular set. To do this, we need to analyse the possible superlinked covers of such a set.We also give a combinatorial condition on the base of a cover which guarantees various chain conditions on finite covers over this base, and introduce a pregeometry which is useful in the analysis of finite covers with simple fibre groups. (shrink)

red and round. According to common sense, the red, round thing we see is the tomato itself. When we have a hallucinatory vision of a tomato, however, there may be present to us no red and round phys- ical object. Still, we use the words 'red' and 'round' to describe that situation as well, this time applying them to the visual experience itself. We say that we have a red, round visual image, or a visual experience of a red disk, (...) or some such. Because we see physical objects far more often than we hallucinate, we apply terms for color and shape to physical objects far more often than to visual experiences. Moreover, different theories of perception explain in different ways the applications such terms have to physical objects and to visual experiences. But whatever their frequency and explanation, it seems clear that both sorts of application occur. (shrink)

Background Over the last decades, the neurosciences, behavioral sciences, and the social sciences have all seen a rapid development of innovative research methods. The field of bioethics, however, has trailed behind in methodological innovation. Despite the so-called “empirical turn” in bioethics, research methodology for project development, data collection and analysis, and dissemination has remained largely restricted to surveys, interviews, and research papers. We have previously argued for a “Design Bioethics” approach to empirical bioethics methodology, which develops purpose-built methods for investigation (...) of bioethical concerns. In this paper we compare a research tool created using a design bioethics approach to a “methods-as-usual” approach in empirical bioethics. Methods Our study compared dimensions of engagement with a digital game we created, called “Tracing Tomorrow,” to a standard vignette survey. The two tools investigated the same subject matter, digital phenotyping for mental health, in a sample of 301 UK adolescents. Results Participants who played the game reported a greater sense of presence, emotional engagement, cognitive absorption, and mental health ethics insight, compared to participants who completed the vignette survey. Perceived authenticity and curiosity/motivation to learn more was equivalent for both methods. Conclusion The results of this study highlights the importance of purpose-built methodology for empirical bioethics research. (shrink)

Because metacognition consists in our having mental access to our cognitive states and mental states are conscious only when we are conscious of them in some suitable way, metacognition and consciousness shed important theoretical light on one another. Thus, our having metacognitive access to information carried by states that are not conscious helps con?rm the hypothesis that a mental state.

The Democratic Horizon offers us the project for the renewal of political liberalism through a response to hyperpluralism in the context of an emerging democratic ethos worldwide. While the book reads as a ringing endorsement of Political Liberalism, authored by John Rawls, it goes beyond that project in significant ways. In my view The Democratic Horizon represents something of a tour de force; a truly original contribution for those who recognize the imperative significance of our worldwide confrontation with the fact (...) of pluralism. (shrink)

What is it that we are conscious of when we are conscious of ourselves? Hume famously despaired of finding self, as against simply finding various impressions and ideas, when, as he put it, “I enter most intimately into what I call myself.” “When I turn my reflexion on myself, I never can perceive this self without some one or more perceptions; nor can I ever perceive any thing but the perceptions.”.

Iconicity refers to a resemblance between word form and meaning. Previous work has shown that iconic words are learned earlier and processed faster. Here, we examined whether iconic words are recognized better on a recognition memory task. We also manipulated the level at which items were encoded—with a focus on either their meaning or their form—in order to gain insight into the mechanism by which iconicity would affect memory. In comparison with non‐iconic words, iconic words were associated with a higher (...) false alarm rate, a lower d’ score, and a lower response criterion in Experiment 1. We did not observe any interaction between iconicity and encoding condition. To test the generalizability of these findings, we examined effects of iconicity in a recognition memory megastudy across 3880 items. After controlling for a variety of lexical and semantic variables, iconicity was predictive of more hits and false alarms, and a lower response criterion in this dataset. In Experiment 2, we examined whether these effects were due to increased feelings of familiarity for iconic items by including a familiar versus recollect decision. This experiment replicated the overall results of Experiment 1 and found that participants were more likely to categorize words that they had seen before as familiar (vs. recollected) if they were iconic. Together, these results demonstrate that iconicity has an effect on memory. We discuss implications for theories of iconicity. (shrink)

Right now, you are undergoing the conscious experience of reading this text, combined with a shifting background of sensory, emotional, and cognitive coloring. The conscious experience of the reading, together with the accompanying background feel of sensation, emotion, and thought, make up how things subjectively seem to you, how things appear, as best you can tell, from your own unique point of view. Consciousness is at once acutely familiar-it makes up the experienced moments of your waking (and perhaps your dreaming) (...) life. But consciousness also raises deep and interesting philosophical questions, questions about how any mere physical subject could produce such a wonder, and questions about how there could be a seemingly private and isolated spot of personal subjectivity in an objective, impersonal world. Perhaps the challenge of developing a satisfying theoretical understanding of consciousness is beyond us-we've reached the limits of what we can comprehend. Or maybe today's shortcomings are only temporary barriers to an illuminating theory of consciousness, one properly embedding it in our scientific worldview. And possibly we already have the resources for a satisfactory theory from the way we think about things in commonsense terms. This reader provides an entry point for considering these and related theoretical questions surrounding consciousness. This introductory section begins with a brief background survey of contemporary debates on consciousness. It then provides a characterization of the notion of consciousness at issue, and considers why consciousness understood this way might be theoretically problematic. It follows with a survey of some of the major theoretical positions on consciousness, and it closes with a synopsis of the sections of the book. (shrink)

The study of human behavior is severely hampered by logistical problems, ethical and legal constraints, and funding shortfalls. However, the biggest difficulty of conducting social and behavioral research is the extraordinary complexity of the study phenomena. In this article, we review the impact of complexity on research design, hypothesis testing, measurement, data analyses, reproducibility, and the communication of findings in psychological science. The systematic investigation of the world often requires different approaches because of the variability in complexity. Confirmatory testing, multi-factorial (...) designs, survey methods, large samples, and modeling are frequently needed to study complex social and behavioral topics. Complexity impedes the measurement of general constructs, the reproducibility of results and scientific reporting, and the general rigor of research. Many of the benchmarks established by classic work in physical science are not attainable in studies of more complex phenomena. Consequently, the standards used to evaluate scientific research should be tethered to the complexity of the study topic. (shrink)

Typically, common knowledge is taken as grounds for the acceptability of a claim, while appeals to popularity are seen as fallacious attempts to support a claim. This paper poses the question of whether there is any categorical difference between appeals to common knowledge and appeals to popular opinion as argumentative moves. In answering this question, I argue that appeals to common knowledge do not, on their own, provide adequate grounds for a claim’s acceptability.

This collection seeks to excavate the tradition of radical liberal class analysis, which predated and inspired Marx's reflections on class. Liberal class theory is distinctive because it regards relationship with the state as constitutive rather than just indicative of social class membership. Along with an introduction that frames the discussion historically and conceptually, Social Class and State Power provides readers with easy access to provocative texts from the early modern period to the present.

This critical note responds to Guiaşu and Tindale’s “Logical fallacies and invasion biology,” from our perspective as ecologists and philosophers of science engaged in debates about invasion biology and invasive species. We agree that “the level of charges and dismissals” surrounding these debates might be “unhealthy” and that “it will be very difficult for dialogues to move forward unless genuine attempts are made to understand the positions being held and to clarify the terms involved.” Although they raise several important scientific, (...) conceptual, and ethical issues at the foundations of invasion biology, we believe Guiaşu and Tindale’s attempts to clarify the debate were unsuccessful. Like some other critics of the field, they tend to misrepresent invasion biology by cherry-picking and constructing “straw people,” inaccurately portraying invasion biology, and thus failing to elevate the dialogue. In this critique, we clarify areas in the invasion biology literature misrepresented by Guiaşu and Tindale. We attempt to provide a more balanced view of areas of reasonable debate within invasion biology, including disputes about empirical evidence, diverse risk attitudes, and other diverse ethical commitments. (shrink)

(No abstract is available for this citation).

This long-awaited book sets out the implications of Habermas's theory of communicative action for moral theory. "Discourse ethics" attempts to reconstruct a moral point of view from which normative claims can be impartially judged. The theory of justice it develops replaces Kant's categorical imperative with a procedure of justification based on reasoned agreement among participants in practical discourse.Habermas connects communicative ethics to the theory of social action via an examination of research in the social psychology of moral and interpersonal development. (...) He aims to show that our basic moral intuitions spring from something deeper and more universal than contingent features of our tradition, namely from normative presuppositions of social interaction that belong to the repertoire of competent agents in any society. Jürgen Habermas is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Frankfurt. (shrink)

In Emerson and the Conduct of Life, David M. Robinson describes Ralph Waldo Emerson's evolution from mystic to pragmatist, stressing the importance of Emerson's undervalued later writing. Emerson's reputation has rested on the addresses and essays of the 1830s and 1840s, in which he propounded a version of transcendental idealism, and memorably portrayed moments of mystical insight. But Emerson's later writings suggest an increasing concern over the elusiveness of mysticism, and an increasing stress on ethical choice and practical power. (...) These works reveal Emerson as an ethical philosopher who stressed the spiritual value of human relations, work and social action. (shrink)

Theories of what it is for a mental state to be conscious must answer two questions. We must say how we're conscious of our conscious mental states. And we must explain why we seem to be conscious of them in a way that's immediate. Thomas Natsoulas distinguishes three strategies for explaining what it is for mental states to be conscious. I show that the differences among those strategies are due to the divergent answers they give to the foregoing questions. Natsoulas (...) finds most promising the strategy that amounts to the higher-order-thought hypothesis that I've defended elsewhere. But he raises a difficulty for it, which he thinks probably can be met only by modifying that strategy. I argue that this is unnecessary. The difficulty is a special case of a general question, the answer to which is independent of any issues about consciousness. So it's no part of a theory of consciousness to address the problem, much less solve it. Moreover, the difficulty seems to have intuitive force only given the picture that underlies the other two explanatory strategies, which both Natsoulas and I reject. (shrink)