Derek Parfit (1942-2017) is the most famous philosopher you've likely never heard of. In 1984, Parfit published what was, and is still, hailed by many philosophers as a work of genius - one of the most cited works of philosophy since World War II, Reasons and Persons. At its core, he argued that we should be concerned less with our own interests and more with the common good. His book brims with brilliant argumentative detail and stunningly inventive thought experiments that (...) challenged contemporary views about what it means to be a person, why one should forego concern for oneself as an identity that persists over time, what it means to act on the basis of reasons, and what we owe to future generations. Parfit also - unfashionably at the time - believed in a kind of grand unified theory of morality, what he called theory x, a non-religious ethical theory wherein all the major moral theories were converging from different sides on the same mountaintop. Parfit has had an enormous influence not only on philosophy, but also beyond, particularly amongst those in the fields of climate ethics, poverty relief, and charitable giving. In this book, the first-full scale biography of Parfit, Dave Edmonds tells the story of the thinker that many philosophers consider the most important moral philosopher of the last century. Edmonds' rendering of the man in full skilfully illuminates the person behind the acclaimed philosopher. Despite Parfit's extraordinary mind, outward appearances suggest his was also an extraordinarily uneventful life - one largely spent in cloistered institutions from Eton to Oxford and one seemingly monomaniacally devoted to ideas. Edmonds' aim is to show how this son and grandson of missionaries went from a genial and outgoing history student to a captivating, yet monkish philosopher singularly devoted to saving morality. In doing so, Edmonds makes Parfit's profound, but often impenetrable, ideas accessible to a broad audience and gives life and body to the thoughts of a seemingly pure thinker that captured the imagination of a generation of philosophers. (shrink)

From the author of Wittgenstein's Poker and Would You Kill the Fat Man?, the story of an extraordinary group of philosophers during a dark chapter in Europe's history On June 22, 1936, the philosopher Moritz Schlick was on his way to deliver a lecture at the University of Vienna when Johann Nelböck, a deranged former student of Schlick's, shot him dead on the university steps. Some Austrian newspapers defended the madman, while Nelböck himself argued in court that his onetime teacher (...) had promoted a treacherous Jewish philosophy. David Edmonds traces the rise and fall of the Vienna Circle—an influential group of brilliant thinkers led by Schlick—and of a philosophical movement that sought to do away with metaphysics and pseudoscience in a city darkened by fascism, anti-Semitism, and unreason. The Vienna Circle's members included Otto Neurath, Rudolf Carnap, and the eccentric logician Kurt Gödel. On its fringes were two other philosophical titans of the twentieth century, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Karl Popper. The Circle championed the philosophy of logical empiricism, which held that only two types of propositions have cognitive meaning, those that can be verified through experience and those that are analytically true. For a time, it was the most fashionable movement in philosophy. Yet by the outbreak of World War II, Schlick's group had disbanded and almost all its members had fled. Edmonds reveals why the Austro-fascists and the Nazis saw their philosophy as such a threat. The Murder of Professor Schlick paints an unforgettable portrait of the Vienna Circle and its members while weaving an enthralling narrative set against the backdrop of economic catastrophe and rising extremism in Hitler's Europe. (shrink)

Il y a une énigme chez Foucault : la mise en plan de l’histoire de la sexualité en faveur d’un retour au sujet s’explique plutôt mal. Qui plus est, le projet d’élaborer une subjectivité sans sujet n’était pas sans poser quelques problèmes. Dans cet article, nous mettons en contexte ces difficultés afin de montrer qu’une autre forme de subjectivité était malgré tout possible. Pour ce faire, nous solutionnons une part de l’énigme en justifiant le recours à des formations historiques de (...) longue durée dès 1978 (I). Nous décrivons ensuite la subjectivation qui, dans le cadre d’une esthétique de l’existence, répond aux critères d’une subjectivité sans sujet (II). Et pour illustrer comment Foucault dépasse le sujet moderne, nous introduisons la parrêsia qui, dans le cours de 1982, rattache le sujet et la vérité de manière à offrir une résistance au pouvoir (III). En conclusion, nous tentons de cerner l’originalité méthodologique de Foucault sur cette question en précisant le sens d’une approche poststructuraliste de la signification. (shrink)

Thus far in the development of the discipline of medical ethics, the overriding concern has been with solutions to specific problems. But discussion is hampered by lack of understanding of the scope and methodology of medical ethics, and its scientific and philosophical basis. In Underpinnings of Medical Ethics Edmond A. Murphy, James J. Butzow, and Edward L. Suarez-Murias offer much-needed clarification of the purview, ontological basis, and methodology of a medical ethics that is to be comprehensive and yet readily (...) accepted by all. The authors begin by describing the scope of the analysis and discussing possible ethical systems and paradigms. They then deal with the structures and concepts necessary in the formulation of a coherent philosophy: normality and disease, scientific and juridical law, certainty and certitude, decisions. Finally, they introduce particular human dimensions, such as quality of life, pain, and responsibility. Throughout, case examples illustrate the authors' theoretical framework. (shrink)

This review article provides a new perspective on the ethics of green nudging. We advance a new model for assessing the ethical permissibility of green nudges (GNs). On this model, which provides normative guidance for policymakers, a GN is ethically permissible when the intervention is (1) efficacious, (2) cost-effective, and (3) the advantages of the GN (i.e. reducing the environmental harm) are not outweighed by countervailing costs/harms (i.e. for nudgees). While traditional ethical objections to nudges (paternalism, etc.) remain potential normative (...) costs associated with GNs, any such costs must be weighed against the injunction to reduce environmental harm to third parties. (shrink)

Edmond Hiriartborde & Paul Fraisse, « Les Aptitudes rythmiques », Monographie française de psychologie, n° 14, 1968. - Psychologie.

This dissertation undertakes a philosophical analysis of “natural capital” and argues that this concept has prompted economists to view Nature in a radically novel manner. Formerly, economists referred to Nature and natural products as a collection of inert materials to be drawn upon in isolation and then rearranged by human agents to produce commodities. More recently, nature is depicted as a collection of active, modifiable, and economically valuable processes, often construed as ecosystems that produce marketable goods and services gratis. Nature (...) is depicted as consisting of various unproduced mechanisms or “natural machines” that are first discovered and then channeled so as to serve human ends. In short, nature as an ideal is a kind of garden that is characterized by natural objects purposefully arranged by intentional human agents. This dissertation first lays out working definitions of the key terms, such as capital and Nature, and then traces the historical roots of natural capital in the writings of eminent classical political economists, such as Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, and Karl Marx. I then examine the question of substitutes for “critical natural capital”, and argue that the preservation paradox is warranted: no one can restore or preserve a part of Nature without turning it into an artifact. Following the recent work of Debra Satz and Michael Sandel, I finish my dissertation by situating the question of natural capital in the broader context of whether some goods should not be for sale, particularly those I define as Basic Ecological Goods. (shrink)

The skewness of a distribution, a poorly-defined term, is conventionally deemed to be invariant under linear transformations. A comparison is made of three criteria of it: the sign of odd central moments; the several relationships of the mean, the median and the mode; and asymmetry proper which is the set of ratios of the probability densities of all pairs of points equidistant above and below some arbitrary point, usually the principal mode. Some useful general relationships are discussed. The skeness of (...) convolutions is briefly discussed. A class of distributions is identified for which the skewness of the minimum ofk competing processes is independent ofk. It has importance in the parametric study of survivorship. (shrink)

Philosophical and scientific defenses of Indirect Realism and counterarguments to the attacks of qualiaphobes.

Originally published in 1955, The Moral Decision remains today a fresh, lively, and literate quest for moral guides in the American system of law. Each topic is introduced with a real courtroom case followed by a summary of the uncontroverted facts, the issues before the court, the judge's opinion, and Edmond Cahn's objective and penetrating discussion of the ethical issues involved. The cases chosen operate as prisms, revealing an entire spectrum of moral forces—personal ambitions, group standards, lusts, sufferings, and (...) ideals. A new foreword by Norman Redlich, Dean of the New York University School of Law, affirms the value of The Moral Decision as an authoritative and humane introduction to law and morality. (shrink)

This article examines some of the interactions between law, science, and society taking place during a trial. By focusing on a restricted set of scientific and nonscientific actors engaged in negotiating the meaning, relevance, and reliability of scientific evidence, the article illustrates how the categories—law, science, and society—are inextricably interrelated in the legal negotiations and outcome. The introduction of scientific evidence into adversarial legal settings produces strategies, opinions, and claims that are not shaped solely by scientists, lawyers, or legal processes. (...) The situated law-science negotiations provide a site where social order and scientific knowledges are mutually constituted. The outcome of specific law-science interactions will be open to a range of readings and constraints that are not reducible to some putatively correct scientific understanding nor adequately described as the distortion of scientific evidence by the legal system. (shrink)

In this paper I explore how citizenship education might position students as always/everywhere political to diminish the pervasive belief that one either is or is not a “political person.” By focusing on how liberal and radical democracy are both necessary frameworks for engaging with issues of power, I address how we might reframe citizenship education to highlight the ubiquity of politics, offering a deepened sense of democracy. This reframing of citizenship education entails highlighting how liberalism and radical democracy are mutually (...) reinforcing when it comes to illustrating political life as entangled in power relations. My argument centers on Sigal Ben-Porath’s :381–395, 2012) concept of shared fate as a frame for citizenship education. In this model, students are habituated into thinking of democracy as an “enduring pluralism” in which their fates are connected to that of their fellow citizens. In this paper I recast shared fate education in the singular to an education of shared fates in the plural. By doing so I theorize how citizenship education might construct citizenship as relational, emotional, embedded in power, and uncomfortable. (shrink)

This book reflects upon the manner in which medical research is performed and interpreted.

Ecological economics is an interdisciplinary science that is primarily concerned with developing interventions to achieve sustainable ecological and economic systems. While ecological economists have, over the last few decades, made various empirical, theoretical, and conceptual advancements, there is one concept in particular that remains subject to confusion: critical natural capital. While critical natural capital denotes parts of the environment that are essential for the continued existence of our species, the meaning of terms commonly associated with this concept, such as ‘non-substitutable’ (...) and ‘impossible to substitute,’ require a clearer formulation then they tend to receive. With the help of equations and graphs, this article develops new definite account of critical natural capital that makes explicit what it means for objective environmental conditions to be essential for continued existence. The second main part of this article turns to the question of formally modeling the priority of conserving critical natural capital. While some ecological economists have maintained that, beyond a certain threshold, critical natural capital possesses absolute infinite value, absolute infinite utility models encounter significant problems. This article shows that a relative infinite utility model provides a better way to model the priority of conserving critical natural capital. (shrink)

A system of semigroup identities is hereditarily finitely based if it defines a variety all semigroups of which are finitely based. Two new types of hereditarily finitely based identity systems are presented. Two of these systems, together with eight existing systems, establish the hereditary finite basis property of every semigroup of order five or less with one possible exception.

Voilà un ouvrage d’une grande originalité, si grande qu’un spécialiste aussi consommé de la biologie aristotélicienne que Pierre Pellegrin – qui préface le livre – peut écrire (p. 10) : « Mes années d’études ne me donnent pas plus de compétence que n’en a n’importe quel lecteur nouveau du corpus biologique aristotélicien pour apprécier un travail aussi neuf ». Quant à moi, je ne saurais mieux faire, pour en donner une première idée, que d’emprunter quelques phrases à cette préface : (...) « […] l.. (shrink)