This book is a systematic and constructive treatment of a number of traditional issues at the foundation of ethics, the possibility and nature of moral knowledge, the relationship between the moral point of view and a scientific or naturalistic world view, the nature of moral value and obligation, and the role of morality in a person's rational life plan. In striking contrast to many traditional authors and to other recent writers in the field, David Brink offers an integrated defense (...) of the objectivity of ethics. (shrink)

Plato's Cratylus is a brilliant but enigmatic dialogue. It bears on a topic, the relation of language to knowledge, which has never ceased to be of central philosophical importance, but tackles it in ways which at times look alien to us. In this reappraisal of the dialogue, Professor Sedley argues that the etymologies which take up well over half of it are not an embarrassing lapse or semi-private joke on Plato's part. On the contrary, if taken seriously as they should (...) be, they are the key to understanding both the dialogue itself and Plato's linguistic philosophy more broadly. The book's main argument is so formulated as to be intelligible to readers with no knowledge of Greek, and will have a significant impact both on the study of Plato and on the history of linguistic thought. (shrink)

This article develops an account of local epistemic practices on the basis of case studies from ethnobiology. I argue that current debates about objectivity often stand in the way of a more adequate understanding of local knowledge and ethnobiological practices in general. While local knowledge about the biological world often meets criteria for objectivity in philosophy of science, general debates about the objectivity of local knowledge can also obscure their unique epistemic features. In modification of Ian Hacking’s suggestion to discuss (...) “ground level questions” instead of objectivity, I propose an account that focuses on both epistemic virtues and vices of local epistemic practices. (shrink)

In an increasingly globalised world, economic and cultural imperatives can be seen as two of the most powerful forces shaping human behaviour. This book considers the relationship between economics and culture both as areas of intellectual discourse, and as systems of societal organisation. Adopting a broad definition of culture, it explores the economic dimensions of culture, and the cultural context of economics. The book is built on a foundation of value theory, developing the twin notions of economic and cultural value (...) as underlying principles for integrating the two fields. Ideas of cultural capital and sustainability are discussed, especially as means of analysing the particular problems of cultural heritage, drawing parallels with the treatment of natural capital in ecological economics. The book goes on to discuss the economics of creativity in the production of cultural goods and services; culture in economic development; the cultural industries; and cultural policy. (shrink)

Aristotle introduces the fourth cause, the teleological cause, in Physics II 3, based on the idea of something's being for the sake of a goal: the good to be achieved. The goal causes an activity to occur or an instrument to exist. They happen or exist because of some good that results from them. While Aristotle discerns teleological causation in a wide range of cases, these passages contain his key thought. Some things happen or exist because of some further good (...) they help to produce. Aristotle's use of the teleological cause constitutes one of the most distinctive aspects of his philosophy. Hypothetical necessity is appropriate in characterizing teleological causation. In the Physics, Aristotle compares craft and nature as teleological causes. Many philosophers reject his account of rational agents as acting on the basis of their sensitivity to what is in fact good for them. Many more will not accept Aristotle's account of teleological causation as applied to natures and organisms. (shrink)

Through examples of embodied and learning-centered pedagogy, we discuss transformative learning of transgressive topics. We begin with a taxonomy of types of learning our students undergo as they resolve inconsistencies among their pre-existing beliefs and the material they confront in our course on feminist ethics and epistemology. We then discuss ways to help students maximize their learning while confronting internal inconsistencies. While we focus on feminist topics, our approach is broad enough to be relevant to anyone teaching a transgressive or (...) controversial topic. (shrink)

In the aftermath of the Second World War the international institutional breakthroughs that occurred provided the momentum for decades of sustained economic growth and geopolitical stability sufficient for the transformation of the world economy, the shift from the cold war to a multipolar order, and the rise of new communication and network societies. However, what worked then does not work as well now, as gridlock freezes problem-solving capacity in global governance. The search for pathways through and beyond gridlock is a (...) hugely significant task – nationally and globally – if global governance is to be once again effective, responsive and fit for purpose. This article explores these issues and provides elements of a theory of global governance in order to begin to understand the challenges of the 21st century and how to surmount them. (shrink)

Imagine that you are the last human being. When you are gone, the only life remaining will be plants, microbes, invertebrates. For some reason, this thought runs through your head: Before I die, it sure would be fun to blow up the last remaining redwood. What, if anything, would be wrong with destroying that redwood? Destroying it won’t hurt any person, or even any sentient creature. It won’t hurt anything. So, what’s the problem? This chapter reflects on the possibility of (...) finding intrinsic value, objective value, incommensurate value, moral standing, and grounds for self-respect in the nonhuman natural world. (shrink)

This paper is the introduction to Function, Selection, and Design, consisting of the following sections: 1. Introduction 2. The Philosophical Problem 3. Recent Prehistory: The "State of the Art" in the 1960s 4. Wright and Cummins 5. Millikan 6. The Core Consensus and the Peripheral Disagreements 7. Unconclusion.

Uncut is a book about two kinds of paradoxes: paradoxes involving truth and its relatives, like the liar paradox, and paradoxes involving vagueness. There are lots of ways to look at these paradoxes, and lots of puzzles generated by them, and Uncut ignores most of this variety to focus on a single issue. That issue: do our words mean what they seem to mean, and if so, how can this be? I claim that our words do mean what they seem (...) to, and yet our language is not undermined by paradox. By developing a distinctive theory of meaning, I show how this can be. (shrink)

The important recent book by Schurz ( 2019 ) appreciates that the no-free-lunch theorems (NFL) have major implications for the problem of (meta) induction. Here I review the NFL theorems, emphasizing that they do not only concern the case where there is a uniform prior—they prove that there are “as many priors” (loosely speaking) for which any induction algorithm _A_ out-generalizes some induction algorithm _B_ as vice-versa. Importantly though, in addition to the NFL theorems, there are many _free lunch_ theorems. (...) In particular, the NFL theorems can only be used to compare the expected performance of an induction algorithm _A_, considered in isolation, with the expected performance of an induction algorithm _B_, considered in isolation. There is a rich set of free lunches which instead concern the statistical _correlations_ among the generalization errors of induction algorithms. As I describe, the meta-induction algorithms that Schurz advocates as a “solution to Hume’s problem” are simply examples of such a free lunch based on correlations among the generalization errors of induction algorithms. I end by pointing out that the prior that Schurz advocates, which is uniform over bit frequencies rather than bit patterns, is contradicted by thousands of experiments in statistical physics and by the great success of the maximum entropy procedure in inductive inference. (shrink)

This essay develops, within the terms of the recent New York Declaration, an account of the shared responsibility of states to refugees and of how the character of that responsibility effects the ways in which it can be fairly shared. However, it also moves beyond the question of the general obligations that states owe to refugees to consider ways in which refugee choices and refugee voice can be given appropriate standing with the global governance of refuge. It offers an argument (...) for the normative significance of refugee’s reasons for choosing states of asylum and linked this to consideration of a refugee matching system and to refugee quota trading conceived as responsibility-trading, before turning to the issue of the inclusion of refugee voice in relation to the justification of the norms of refugee governance and in relation to the institutions and practices of refugee governance through which those norms are given practical expression. (shrink)

Während seiner langjährigen Tätigkeit als Facharzt für Psychiatrie am Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust hat der Autor dieses Beitrags die Entwicklung der Gesundheitsfürsorge von Kindern mit Geschlechtsidentitätsstörung (»gender dysphoria«) aus nächster Nähe beobachtet. Der Beitrag entwickelt einige Hypothesen zu den soziokulturellen Faktoren für den plötzlichen, sprunghaften Anstieg der Zahl minderjähriger Patienten, bei denen Geschlechtsidentitätsstörungen diagnostiziert und die dann zur medikamentösen und operativen Geschlechtsumwandlung an spezialisierte Zentren überwiesen wurden, und schildert charakteristische Denkverbote in diesem Zusammenhang. Die beruflichen Bedingungen, die seinen (...) Text beeinflussten, und die weiteren Entwicklungen in der Tavistock-Klinik wie auch in seinem eigenen Leben erläutert der Autor schließlich in einem nachstehenden Kommentar zu seinem eigenen Text. (shrink)

At a time when secular liberalism is in crisis and when the civic contribution of religion is being re-assessed, the rich tradition of Christian political theology demands renewed attention. This book, based on the 2001 Bampton Lectures, explores the relationship of the church both to the state and civil institutions. Arguing that theological approaches to the state were often situated within the context of Christendom and are therefore outmoded, the author claims that a more differentiated approach can be developed by (...) attention to the concept of civil society. The book offers a critical assessment of the effect of the First Amendment in the USA and, in a concluding chapter, it defends the case for continuing disestablishment in England and Scotland. (shrink)

This chapter traces some connections between Karl Marx and British politics and culture in the nineteenth century. It outlines Marx’s engagement with Chartism, contemporary politics, and the International Association. It explores Marx’s attitude towards socialism in Britain, using Robert Owen as a case study. Marx’s balanced view of ‘utopian socialism’ includes a positive assessment of Owen’s critique of capitalism and his vision of future socialist society. Moreover, Marx excused certain weaknesses in Owen’s social theory as unavoidably reflecting the undeveloped historical (...) circumstances in which his intellectual formation had occurred. In addition, Marx credits Owen with a significant role in the histories of both ‘materialism’ and the cooperative movement. The chapter concludes with brief reflections on the need for accounts of Marx’s posthumous impact on British socialism in the nineteenth century to reflect an adequate appreciation of these various connections during his lifetime. (shrink)

The focus on translational research in clinical trials has the potential to generate clinically relevant genetic data that could have importance to patients. This raises challenging questions about communicating relevant genetic research results to individual patients. An exploratory pharmacogenetic analysis was conducted in the international ovarian cancer phase III trial, AGO-OVAR 16, which found that patients with clinically important germ-line BRCA1/2 mutations had improved progression-free survival prognosis. Mechanisms to communicate BRCA results were evaluated, because these findings may be beneficial to (...) patients and their families. Communicating individual BRCA results was not anticipated during clinical trial design. Consequently, options were not available for patients to indicate their preference for receiving their individual results when they signed pharmacogenetic informed consent. Differences in local requirements, clinical practice, and opinion regarding the ethical aspects of how to convey genetic results to patients are all potential barriers to returning individual BRCA results to patients. Communicating the aggregate BRCA result from this study provided clinical investigators with a mechanism to disseminate the overall study finding to patients while taking individual circumstances, local guidelines and clinical practice into account. This study illustrates the importance of increasing the clarity and scope of informed consent and the need for patient engagement to ensure clinical trial participants can indicate their preference regarding receipt of potentially important individual pharmacogenetic results. This study was registered in the NCT Clinical Trial Registry under NCT00866697 on March 19, 2009, following approval from participating ethics committees. (shrink)

Figures of Thought looks at how mathematical works can be read as texts and examines their textual strategies. David Reed offers the first sustained and critical attempt to find a consistent argument or narrative thread in mathematical texts. Reed selects mathematicians from a range of historical periods and compares their approaches to organizing and arguing texts, using an extended commentary on Euclid's Elements as a central structuring framework. He develops fascinating interpretations of mathematicians' work throughout history, from Descartes to (...) Hilbert, Kronecker, Dedekind, Weil and Grothendieck. Reed traces the implications of this approach to the understanding of the history and development of mathematics. (shrink)

Widescopism, as I call it, holds that names are synonymous with descriptions that are required to take wide scope over modal adverbs. Scott Soames has recently argued that Widescopism is false. He identifies an argument that is valid but which, he claims, a defender of Widescopism must say has true premises and a false conclusion. I argue, first, that a defender of Widescopism need not in fact say that the target arguments conclusion is false. Soames argument that she must confuses, (...) I claim, modal adverbs and modal predicates. I then argue that even if she did reject the conclusion, she could nonetheless hold that the target arguments first premise is ambiguous as between a true reading, on which the argument is invalid, and a false reading, on which the argument is valid. I conclude that Soames argument against Widescopism fails. (shrink)

I develop a Russellian representationalist account of size experience that draws importantly from contemporary vision science research on size perception. The core view is that size is experienced in ‘body-scaled’ units. So, an object might, say, be experienced as two eye-level units high. The view is sharpened in response to Thompson’s (forthcoming) Doubled Earth example. This example is presented by Thompson as part of an argument for a Fregean view of size experience. But I argue that the Russellian view I (...) develop handles the Doubled Earth example in a natural and illuminating way, thereby avoiding the need to posit irreducible experiential ‘modes of presentation’. I also address a kind of neo-Fregean ‘reference-fixing’ view of size experience, that shares features with the Russellian view developed. I give reasons for favoring the latter. Finally, I argue that Peacocke’s claim that spatial experience is ‘unit free’ is not persuasive. (shrink)

In his thoughtful defence of very modest moral enhancement, David DeGrazia1 makes the following assumption: ‘Behavioural improvement is highly desirable in the interest of making the world a better place and securing better lives for human beings and other sentient beings’. Later in the paper, he gives a list of some psychological characteristics that ‘all reasonable people can agree … represent moral defects’. I think I am a reasonable person, and I agree that most if not all items on (...) the lists do represent moral defects—I certainly would regard them as such in a close family member or friend. But if I were in the business of ‘making the world a better place and securing better lives for human beings and other sentient beings’, I would hesitate to prescribe moral enhancement for everyone with these acknowledged defects. A lot of good work, from removing tumours to negotiating treaties, may be best done by people with serious moral defects.For a simple consequentialist, a moral defect is just a trait that tends to make the world a worse place. Not being a consequentialist, I think that moral defects should be identified independently of their tendency to produce worse outcomes. For this reason, I think it's necessary to qualify DeGrazia's starting assumption—I think behavioural improvement may sometimes be undesirable if our goal is to make the world a better place. My reasons will be familiar to readers of Bernard Williams.As …. (shrink)

This article reviews the seven “visions” of evolution proposed by Depew and Weber , concluding that each posited relationship between natural selection and self-organization has suited different aims and approaches. In the second section of the article, we show that these seven viewpoints may be collapsed into three fundamentally different ones: natural selection drives evolution; self-organization drives evolution; and natural selection and self-organization are complementary aspects of the evolutionary process. We then argue that these three approaches are not mutually exclusive, (...) since each may apply to different stages of development of different systems. What emerges from our discussion is a more encompassing view: that self-organization proposes what natural selection disposes. (shrink)

Karl Popper developed a theory of deductive logic in the late 1940s. In his approach, logic is a metalinguistic theory of deducibility relations that are based on certain purely structural rules. Logical constants are then characterized in terms of deducibility relations. Characterizations of this kind are also called inferential definitions by Popper. In this paper, we expound his theory and elaborate some of his ideas and results that in some cases were only sketched by him. Our focus is on Popper's (...) notion of duality, his theory of modalities, and his treatment of different kinds of negation. This allows us to show how his works on logic anticipate some later developments and discussions in philosophical logic, pertaining to trivializing connectives, the duality of logical constants, dual-intuitionistic logic, the conservativeness of language extensions, the existence of a bi-intuitionistic logic, the non-logicality of minimal negation, and to the problem of logicality in general. (shrink)

How is it possible to respond emotionally to that which we believe is not the case? All of the many responses to this "paradox of fiction" make one or more of three important mistakes: (1) neglecting the context of believing, (2) assuming that belief is an all-or-nothing affair, and (3) assuming that if you believe that p then you cannot also reasonably believe that not-p. My thesis is that we react emotionally to stories because we do believe what stories tell (...) us – not fictionally-believe, not make-believe, but believe in the ordinary way in which we believe anything at all. (shrink)

In an article in an earlier issue of this journal Vivienne Gray sought to challenge my claim that Xenophon's account of Prodicus' narrative concerning the Choice of Heracles represents ‘a very close approximation to Prodicus’ actual wording'. Since that time, Gray's article has been cited approvingly by Louis-André Dorion and David Wolfsdorf, both of whom consider that Gray has settled the matter, at least as far as the linguistic aspect of my argument is concerned. In view of this, I (...) feel it necessary to point out that Gray's argument is fundamentally flawed. In addition, I should like to take this opportunity to show that the arguments of Dorion and Wolfsdorf, which are aimed at other aspects of the case that I made for Xenophon's faithfulness to Prodicus' text, are likewise invalid. (shrink)

I am intrigued by the use of the words ‘embedded’ and ‘capacity’ as they appear in what I take to be the strategy of Sovereignty Across Generations where these words are used to make what is evidently implicit within John Rawls’s political liberalism explicit, that is, a normative account of ‘the justice and legitimacy of political orders’. If I am correct about this strategy, my question is quite simple: is something lost in translation in this transition from Rawls’s more historical (...) to this normative orientation? I conclude with a positive comment on the potential that a theory of temporality has for the development of a notion of political self-constitution as it pertains to the transition from ethnos to demos. (shrink)

(2009). Mellow Monday and furious Friday: The approach-related link between anger and time representation. Cognition & Emotion: Vol. 23, No. 6, pp. 1166-1180.

The article takes as its starting point the assumption that (a) competing accounts of moral rules should be judged by the distribution of benefits and burdens which would arise from everyone accepting these rules, and that (b) these benefits and burdens are understood in a way which has a substantial resource or freedom-based component. This starting point is compatible with contractualism and various forms of rule consequentialism, and will yield a morality in which people have significant freedoms. The main claim (...) of the article is that as a consequence of these freedoms, and because of phenomena connected with cost internalization, this morality will also impose strong constraints on harming and weak constraints on allowing harm. Thus the starting point ends up vindicating commonsense morality. (shrink)

David Brown explores the ways in which the symbolic associations of the body and what we do with it have helped shape religious experience and continue to do so. A Church narrowly focused on Christ's body wracked in pain needs to be reminded that the body as beautiful and sexual has also played a crucial role not only in other religions but also in the history of Christianity itself. Dance was one way in which the connection was expressed. The (...) irony is not that such a connection has gone but that it now exists almost wholly outside the Church. Much the same could be said about music more generally, and Brown writes excitingly about the spiritual potential of not just classical music but also pop, jazz, musicals, and opera. Like Brown's much-praised earlier volumes, God and Enchantment of Place, Tradition and Imagination, and Discipleship and Imagination, the present book will enlarge horizons and challenge the narrowness of much theological thinking. (shrink)