The second International Knowledge and Discourse Conference, held at the University of Hong Kong in June 2002, was the forum for the long-awaited debate between Bruno Latour and Steve Fuller. Bruno Latour counts beyond two. He places the blame for the emphasis in academia on the subject-object distinction on Kant. Latour wants academics to acknowledge that things act, and suggests we look at other traditions, e.g. the Chinese, for alternatives to the subject-object dichotomy. Steve Fuller concentrated on the moral project (...) of science, which is to draw a distinction between the human and the non-human and, to highlight the fact that, as the culmination of the sciences, social science has a particular responsibility to make this distinction. He accused Bruno Latour of evading the moral issue. The debate can be read as a reiteration of the postions of Bruno Latour and Steve Fuller on the question of heterogeneity at the theoretical level, but it did not address the topic at the practical or research level. (shrink)

MEDIEVAL LOGICS LAMBERT MARIE DE RIJK (ed.), Die mittelalterlichen Traktate De mod0 opponendiet respondendi, Einleitung und Ausgabe der einschlagigen Texte. (Beitrage zur Geschichte der Philosophie und Theologie des Mittelalters, Neue Folge Band 17.) Miinster: Aschendorff, 1980. 379 pp. No price stated. THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY MARTA FATTORI, Lessico del Novum Organum di Francesco Bacone. Rome: Edizioni dell'Ateneo 1980. Two volumes, il + 543, 520 pp. Lire 65.000. VIVIAN SALMON, The study of language in 17th century England. (Amsterdam Studies in the Theory (...) and History of Linguistic Science, Series 111: Studies in theHistory of Linguistics, Volume 17.) Amsterdam: John Benjamins B.V., 1979.x + 218 pp. Dfl. 65. Theoria cum Praxi. Zum Verhaltnis von Theorie und Praxis im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert. (Akten des 111. Internationalen Leibnizkongress, Hannover, 12. bis 17.November 1977, Band 111: Logik, Erkenntnistheorie, Wissenschaftstheorie, Metaphysik, Theologie.) Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1980. vii + 269 pp. DM 48. CLASSICAL AND NON-CLASSICAL LOGICS MICHAEL CLARK, The place of syllogistic in logical theory. Nottingham: University of Nottingham Press, 1980. ix + 151 pp. £3.00. A.F. PARKER-RHODES, The theory of indistinguishables. Dordrecht, Boston and London: D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1981. xvii + 216 pp. Dfl.90.00/$39.50. NICHOLAS RESCHER and ROBERT BRANDOM, The logic of inconsistency. Oxford:Basil Blackwell, 1980. x + 174 pp. f 11.50. MISCELLANEOUS J. ZELENY, The logic of Marx. Translated from the German by T. Carver. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980. xcii + 247 pp. £12.50. FELIX KAUFMANN, The infinite in mathematics. Edited by Brian McGuinness. Introduction by E. Nagel. Translation from the German by Paul Foulkes. Dordrecht: Reidel, 1978. xvii + 235 pp. Dfl 85/$39.50 (cloth); Dfl 45/$19.95 (paper). PAMELA MCCORDUCK, Machines who think. San Francisco: W.H. Freeman and Company, 1979. xiv + 275 pp. $14.95. J. MITTELSTRASS (ed.), Enzyklopadie Philosophie und Wissenschaftstheorie Bd. 1 : A-G. Mannheim, Wien, Ziirich: Bibliographisches Institut, 1980. 835 pp. DM 128. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:MetanoiaRichard G. T. Gipps, ClinPsyD, PhD (bio)A “honeysuckle on a broken fence”: Scrutton’s (2024) theologically potent image offers us a dignified vision of how a living faith and the experience of mental illness might intersect. Mental and physical illness, deprivation and bereavement sometimes provide a propitious structure on which faith’s bright strands may grow. Scrutton posits no simply causal relationship between faith and mental illness, and steers us helpfully (...) away from the narcissistic overvaluation of inner experience too often met with in (1) mysterium tremendum (meeting-God-blew-my-mind), and (3) mental openness (divine-light-pours-through-the-cracks), formulations. She helps us to avoid settling, too, for the clever-sounding but ultimately too-easy idea of (2) ‘mental illness’ and ‘religious experience’ as different descriptions under which identical experiences may sometimes be brought. For one thing, and to animadvert now in my own vein: can we really—as William James aspires to, say, when he takes it for granted that the “more personal branch [of] feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to... the divine” can be neatly hived off from the “institutional branch of religion... worship... theology... ceremony... ” and so on—even individuate the relevant experiential phenomena independently of their meaning-conferring contexts? For another, it seems to me that too often in the literature of (1) (2) and (3) do we meet with a fatal confusion that can be expressed in terms of a conflation of two meanings of “ego,” as when a) the dropping of the kinds of boundaries which it makes sense to talk of putting up (i.e., our ego’s defensive, prideful, shame-driven shirking of intimacy) is muddled together with b) the crumbling of such individuating ego boundaries as constitute us. Such a confusion gets readily promulgated by vague and tacitly polysemic talk not only of ‘ego’ but also of ‘non-duality,’ ’transpersonal,’ and ‘higher’ and ‘lower’ ‘levels’ of ‘self’ and ‘consciousness’ (e.g., see Kasprow & Scotton 1999). Sometimes driving this, one can’t help suspect, is the narcissistic gain of conflating the dismal dissolution of ego boundaries in illness (Conrad, 1958) with the epiphanic transcendence of a grasping and fearful ego. Spiritual pride and spiritual bypass (i.e. fleeing the relational tasks of adult development into a self-preoccupied ‘spiritualised’ inner journey) (Welwood, 2000) then abound, not only for the sufferer but also for the lowly therapist who now receives their shamanic guide/hierophant upgrade. By contrast with all of this, Scrutton’s (4) honeysuckle on a broken fence model stands out in its theological dignity and psychological sobriety.Even so I found myself, on reading Scrutton’s piece, wondering whether a more romantic conception of a growing faith’s possible relation [End Page 257] to psychological disturbance might yet be available and sometimes even find application. What particularly came to my mind was that notion of metanoia as offered us by the existential tradition in both theology and psychopathology.Mark’s gospel begins with John the Baptist heralding Christ’s arrival and preaching the “baptism of repentance [metanoia; μετανοίας] for the remission of sins” (Mark 1:4). Jesus’s first public words then proclaim the same message: “the kingdom of God is at hand: repent ye [μετανοεῖτε], and believe the gospel” (Mark 1:15). ‘Repentance’ is today often understood as a sorrowful acknowledgement of one’s wrongdoings, but it has long been acknowledged that, if that be the meaning we give the term, it is an inapt translation of ‘metanoia’ (Walden, 1896). For what the gospel instead calls for is rather a wholesale turning about, or conversion, from ‘ego-dominance to surrender’ (Barron, 2021), i.e. from (a) defensive and illusory attempts to handle our vulnerability and dependency through self-reliance and self-affirmation to (b) an aliveness to grace (i.e. seeing our lives and their bounties under the aspect of the freely given gift) and a trusting surrender to the dominion of that God of love in which we anyway inexorably ‘live and move and have our being’ (Acts 17:28). The ‘I’ in Paul’s “It is no longer I who... (shrink)

This article takes a speculative and design fiction approach to the critical analysis of the role of smart and autonomous vehicles (AVs) in the context of smart cities. The article explores arguments that these cars of the future will have decisive impacts on mobility, sustainability and road safety. The article examines the main parameters of smart city and smart car developments and then focuses on the visions of increasing AI-driven autonomy. The article demonstrates how these debates are linked to speculative (...) design as full autonomy does not currently exist but takes a speculative position as to what the critical issues are that face smart/autonomous city visions (enhanced surveillance and data mining) and considers the potentially hazardous ethical dilemmas that AVs may encounter once fully rolled out onto city roads. From a design fiction perspective, the article envisions the viability of AV prioritizing public rather than private transport as a means by which the ‘techno-utopic’ visions of smart city/AV integration can be realized and make positive impacts to enhance urban living in rendering future cities as more sustainable, efficiently mobile and safer urban spaces. (shrink)

Anthony Barron explores the relationship between the philosophy of Schopenhauer and the forms and themes of Beckett's critical and creative writings. He shows that Beckett's aesthetic preoccupations are consonant with some of Schopenhauer's seminal arguments regarding the arational basis of artistic composition and appreciation and the impotence of reason in human affairs. While Beckett's critical writings are, in places, formidably opaque, this work examines the ways in which such texts can be elucidated when their intertextual affinities with Schopenhauer's arguments (...) are revealed. Using Schopenhauer's thought as a presiding interpretative framework, Barron demonstrates how the widespread presence of philosophical and theological ideas in Beckett's creative texts signifies less about his personal convictions than it does about his authorial aims. He thereby highlights the ways in which discursive ideas were appropriated and manipulated by Beckett for purely literary ends -- Back cover. (shrink)

The rapid recent expansion of copyright law worldwide has sparked efforts to defend the ‘public domain’ of non-propertized information, often on the ground that an expansive public domain is a condition of a ‘free culture’. Yet questions remain about why the public domain is worth defending, what exactly a free culture is, and what role (if any) authors’ rights might play in relation to it. From the standard liberal perspective shared by many critics of copyright expansionism, the protection of individual (...) expression by means of marketable property rights in authors’ works serves as an engine of progress towards a fully competitive ‘marketplace of ideas’ – though only if balanced by an extensive public domain from which users may draw in the exercise of their own expressivity. This article shows that a significantly different, and arguably richer, conception of what a free culture is and how authors’ rights underpin it emerges from a direct engagement with the philosophy of Immanuel Kant. For Kant, progress towards a fully emancipated (i.e. a ‘mature’ or ‘enlightened’) culture can only be achieved through the critical intellectual activity that public communication demands: individual expressive freedom is only a condition, not constitutive, of this ‘freedom to make public use of one’s reason in all matters’. The main thesis defended in this article is that when Kant’s writings on publicity (critical public debate) are read in relation to his writings on the legal organization of publishing, a necessary connection emerges between authors’ rights – as distinct from copyrights – and what Jürgen Habermas and others have named the public sphere. I conclude that it is the public sphere, and not the public domain as such, that should serve as the key reference point in any evaluation of copyright law’s role in relation to the possibility of a free culture. (shrink)

Nathaniel J.P. Barron offers the first book length account in English of Ernst Bloch's contribution to a Marxist philosophy of language. It is ambitious both in situating Bloch's ideas in the broader Marxist engagement with language as it currently exists, and in using Bloch's utopian categories to challenge that engagement. In particular, Barron reads Voloshinov's insights into language through Bloch's categories, and argues that Bloch advances on Voloshinov by offering an understanding of the social materiality of language which (...) is more useful for challenging fascist forms of utterance. (shrink)

IN examining Herodotos' account of the Samian tyranny, historians have long been disturbed by two considerations. First, it seems strange that the period of settled tyranny should have begun no earlier than the rise of Polykrates and his two brothers c. 533 B.C., even though Samos was among the most advanced cities in Ionia. Yet it seems equally impossible to revise this accession date in an upward direction, at least by any significant margin. Furthermore, there had been at work in (...) Samos from c. 600 or earlier many of the factors which elsewhere in Ionia did in fact lead to a comparatively stable period of tyranny at that date, for instance at Miletos and Ephesos. Secondly, though Herodotos knows of no tyrant before Polykrates, it has been observed that the policies ascribed to him as characteristic were very largely the continuation of policies initiated a generation or more previously. (shrink)

This article seeks to identify and address the normative void that resides at the heart of postmodernist-feminist theory, and to propose a philosophical framework – beyond postmodernism, but incorporating its central insights – for thinking through the normative questions with which feminists are inevitably confronted in their engagements with positive law. Two varieties of postmodernist-feminism are identified and critically analysed: the ‘corporeal feminism’ of Elizabeth Grosz and Judith Butler, which seeks to ground feminist critical practice in the irruptive capacities of (...) the material body considered as an arte fact of social construction; and the deconstructionist feminism of Drucilla Cornell, for whom ‘the feminine’ is an indeterminate but disruptive force beyond its construction in law and in other social sites. The first component of the argument elaborated here is that each of these approaches ultimately reduces to a form of aestheticism which is incapable of generating a worthwhile and workable feminist approach to the restructuring of politics and law. The second component of the argument involves a return to aesthetics, in particular to the philosophical aesthetics of Kant’s Critique of Judgement. Kant’s aesthetic philosophy, it will be suggested, yields a framework of concepts which, duly re-manipulated, could speak to the very concerns that have inspired postmodernist-feminism: how to attend to (bodily) particularity while avoiding the dangers associated with ‘essentialism’; and how to theorise the propensity of the unrepresentable power of the feminine to exceed both embodied human capacities and the confining rein of socially privileged rationalities. Crucially, however it also responds to a set of preoccupations – those of the feminist lawyer – that cannot be accommodated by postmodernism: how to translate embodied experience into (legal) norms; generalise from the particular; seek consensus; and codify an endless potentiality in the form of law. (shrink)

A close reading of Mary Robinson’s late-eighteenth-century poem “London’s Summer Morning,” which captures all the noises and smells of a busy London street, is not enough to convince the reader that it isn’t all a dream. But whose dream? René Descartes and Wallace Stevens suggest that it may not matter.

Forms characteristic of the earth itself are inherent in the design of man. Man's being emerged out of a cosmic matrix whose morphic aspects man himself expresses. These forms and their functional interrelationships are the very conditions of consciousness. This paper proposes that the relationship between human consciousness and its complete environment should be the subject matter of an emerging discipline, the ecology of consciousness. Constructs useful in the ecology of plants and animals should be coordinated to psychological constructs. These (...) coordinating constructs should be based upon study of the most pervasive morphic regularities at the biophysical level. An analysis of the design of man suggests many possibilities, especially when one considers the known neurophysiological and biochemical conditioners of consciousness. Educational (experiential) strategies for the transformation of consciousness should also be explored. These might include the manipulation of variables such as volume, duration, and intensity of sensory stimulation, including various combinations of modalities. A systematic effort should be made to state the fundamental problems to which a scientific ecology of consciousness might address itself. New methods must be devised. A preliminary program for an ecology of consciousness is proposed. (shrink)

The first Dr. Lerner -- Super doctor -- Illness hits home -- The second Dr. Lerner -- Forging my own path -- Treating the whole patient -- Family practitioner -- Growing disillusionment -- Slowing down -- Epilogue.

This dissertation offers and defends a phenomenological account of personal identity. It does so critically in conversation with Anglo-analytical traditions and varieties of other philosophical traditions from around the world, especially Zen Buddhism. Chapter One brings together three areas of philosophy: the multiple realizability thesis from philosophy of science, the logical pluralist position from philosophical logic, and the various conceptions of personhood from metaphysics. I argue that even though the divide in the literature on the metaphysics of personal identity is (...) unresolved, there is a core notion, “person,” that is understood to be the target of explanation in each of the traditions. The multiple-realizability of personhood entails the multiple realizability of identity. Because "person" is an unsettled term, "personal identity" is also unsettled. Chapter Two examines those metaphysics traditions in more detail. After outlining the claims of body continuity theorists, psychological continuity theorists, and narrative continuity theorists, I raise objections to each of the theories. In Chapter Three, I propose that all three categories of metaphysics approaches to identity face a unified objection: they presume a level of objectivity that belies the negotiation of our identities. This chapter examines the limits of methodological naturalism and examines the work of two Indigenous scholars from North and South America who present theories of identity that embrace contradictory beliefs and goals. Chapter Four proposes that phenomenology offers a new and more promising approach to studying personal identity. In this chapter, I point out that there is a disciplinary divide over whether identity is a thing (something of substance) or a way of understanding. By shifting the approach to identity from metaphysics to epistemology, I demonstrate that phenomenology avoids the objections that the metaphysics theories face. In this chapter, I also raise objections that arise in Buddhist traditions. The chapter concludes with close readings of Keiji Nishitani's critique of Western philosophy from Religion and Nothingness and Jean-Paul Sartre's defense of phenomenology, which appears in Being and Nothingness. Chapter Five defends the phenomenological analysis of identity against Nishitani’s critique. I show that the phenomenological approach to identity entails that identities are distributed within contexts. I adopt a deflationary account of identity grounded in the term existence—all that can be said about one's identity is that it is whatever makes them stand out against a background. No amount of precision that is added to the various accounts will settle whether the metaphysics or epistemic approach to identity is better. Therefore, the deflationary understanding of identity allows us to continue talking about the core notion even if the term remains unsettled. In the end, I offer an account of personal identity that suggests that identity is a distributed phenomenon. If one’s identity is intelligible only in the context of the world, then my circumstances are part of my identity. (shrink)

This book provides an accessible introduction to jurisprudence and legal theory. It sets out a course of study that offers a highly effective series of introductions into a wide variety of theories and theoretical perspectives, from traditional approaches such as Natural Law to modern ones such as Feminist Theory, Economic Analysis of Law and Foucault and Law, The book is designed for students of jurisprudence and legal theory, but it will also assist those studying law and legal systems within courses (...) on Political Science, Philosophy and Sociology. (shrink)

This article, which was originally presented at the annual conference of the Venerable John Henry Newman Association in Mundelein, Illinois, in August 2004, portrays Newman as anticipating three aspects of postmodernism:the question of epistemological foundations, the role of theology in the academy, and a conversational model of truth.

Research over the last decades has stimulated a paradigm shift in biology from assuming fixed and dichotomous male and female sexual strategies to an appreciation of significant variation in sex and sexual behaviour both within and between species. This has resulted in the development of a broader biological understanding of sexual strategies, sexuality and variation in sexual behaviour. However, current introductory biological textbooks have not yet incorporated these new research findings. Our analysis of the content of current biology texts suggests (...) that in undergraduate biology curricula variation in sexual behaviour, sexual strategies and sexuality barely feature, even though sex is discussed in a range of contexts. In this aspect, biological teaching is lagging behind current research. Here, we draw attention to new findings in the biology of sex, and suggest how these might be incorporated in undergraduate teaching to provide a more contemporary and inclusive education for biology students. (shrink)

Social theory can sometimes seem as though it's speaking of a world that existed long ago, so why should we continue to study and discuss the theories of these dead white men? Can their work still inform us about the way we live today? Are they still relevant to our consumer-focused, celebrity-crazy, tattoo-friendly world? This book explains how the ideas of classical sociological theory can be understood, and applied to, everyday activities like listening to hip-hop, reading fashion magazines or watching (...) reality TV. Taking the reader through central sociological texts, Social Theory In Popular Culture explains why key theorists – from Marx to Saussure – are still considered to be the bedrock of sociology and sociological enquiry. Each chapter examines a different key thinker and applies their work to a recognisable aspect of popular cultural, showing how the central issues underpinning classic social thought - class, conflict, gender, power, ethnicity, and social status - can still be readily observed within the modern global world. Encouraging the reader to critique and reflect upon the ways in which classic social theory applies to their own worlds, this is the perfect antidote to dry social theory explanations. It is an eye-opening read for all students and scholars across the social sciences. (shrink)

This reflective essay is an attempt to organize trends in feedback I have observed during ten years of coursework, conversations, and correspondence with former students associated with the Medical Humanities Program at Baylor University. Over the years, recurrent themes arise when speaking with alumni about whether and how their medical humanities experience intersects with their current training. I have identified five particular domains in which baccalaureate medical humanities training affects students’ subsequent healthcare professions training and practice: context and complementarity, clinical (...) relevance, reflective practice, professional preparedness and vocational calling. I created an instrument of open-ended questions for each of these categories and posted it to social media with an invitation for alumni to respond. This informal survey was conceived as an exploratory exercise with the intent to help generate a foundation for more formal qualitative research in these five domains. In this essay, I offer my own reflections together with those of former students on the impact of baccalaureate-level medical humanities training in order to illustrate the benefits in each domain for subsequent healthcare training and practice. The need for qualitative research that explores the impact of baccalaureate medical humanities merits collaboration between multiple centers of investigation across many disciplines, and across the divide between premedical and medical educators. (shrink)

Objectives: To explore opinions and attitudes regarding the current information-giving practices in research involving adults with intellectual disabilities.Design: Qualitative focus group study with a purposive sample.Setting: An intellectual disabilities service within the NHSParticipants: A sample of 26 individuals including adults with mild intellectual disability, carers, clinicians, care managers and the charitable sector.Results: Three main themes were identified: process, format, and content. There was agreement that there is a need for improvement in the process and quality of information giving. With regard (...) to the content of information, there was little discrepancy between the study findings and existing guidance.Conclusions: Information should be presented in different formats and prepared with input from appropriate professions. Additionally the roles of peers, carers and other professionals in the process of information giving should be considered. (shrink)

Editor James Fetzer presents an analytical and historical introduction and a comprehensive bibliography together with selections of many of Carl G. Hempel's most important studies to give students and scholars an ideal opportunity to appreciate the enduring contributions of one of the most influential philosophers of science of the 20th century.

Some ways of defending inequality against the charge that it is unjust require premises that egalitarians find easy to dismiss—statements, for example, about the contrasting deserts and/or entitlements of unequally placed people. But a defense of inequality suggested by John Rawls and elaborated by Brian Barry has often proved irresistible even to people of egalitarian outlook. The persuasive power of this defense of inequality has helped to drive authentic egalitarianism, of an old-fashioned, uncompromising kind, out of contemporary political philosophy. The (...) present essay is part of an attempt to bring it back in. (shrink)

1. The present paper is a continuation of my “Self-Ownership, World Ownership, and Equality,” which began with a description of the political philosophy of Robert Nozick. I contended in that essay that the foundational claim of Nozick's philosophy is the thesis of self-ownership, which says that each person is the morally rightful owner of his own person and powers, and, consequently, that each is free to use those powers as he wishes, provided that he does not deploy them aggressively against (...) others. To be sure, he may not harm others, and he may, if necessary, be forced not to harm them, but he should never be forced to help them, as people are in fact forced to help others, according to Nozick, by redistributive taxation. (shrink)

In this stimulating work of political philosophy, acclaimed philosopher G. A. Cohen sets out to rescue the egalitarian thesis that in a society in which distributive justice prevails, peopleâes material prospects are roughly equal. Arguing against the Rawlsian version of a just society, Cohen demonstrates that distributive justice does not tolerate deep inequality. In the course of providing a deep and sophisticated critique of Rawlsâes theory of justice, Cohen demonstrates that questions of distributive justice arise not only for the state (...) but also for people in their daily lives. The right rules for the macro scale of public institutions and policies also apply, with suitable adjustments, to the micro level of individual decision-making. Cohen also charges Rawlsâes constructivism with systematically conflating the concept of justice with other concepts. Within the Rawlsian architectonic, justice is not distinguished either from other values or from optimal rules of social regulation. The elimination of those conflations brings justice closer to equality. (shrink)

Responding to calls for more substantive studies into ethical and responsible lobbying, we analyze data collected over a 5-year period in Brussels to explore how individual lobbyists understand the ethical dimensions of their work. Mobilizing insights from the sociology of the professions, we expose an emerging lobbying professionalism and unpack practitioners’ understandings of what being a professional lobbyist entails, focusing in particular on their espoused values of transparency and honesty. While expectations to lobby more transparently and honestly stem from political (...) institutions, we find individual lobbyists—acting as conduits—attempt to disseminate these expectations by setting limits that incite their clients to embrace what policymakers consider professional lobbying practice. Our study contributes to corporate political activity (CPA) scholarship by providing a professions-based understanding of ethical and responsible approaches to lobbying. We provide new insights into contextual and individual-level factors behind the emergence of such approaches, and elucidate implications of lobbying professionalism for business and European Union (EU) governance. (shrink)

Excerpt from Genetic Philosophy of Education: An Epitome of the Published Educational Writings, of President G Stanley Hall, of Clark University All must admit that there is a lack at the present time, at least among the rank and file of teachers, and in the public mind generally, of any adequate philoso phy of education, or even Of a point of view from which the themes of school and home can be dis cussed broadly and intelligently. The older philoso phies (...) of F roebel, Hegel, and Herbart are certainly in sufficient to meet present needs, and especially in the training of teachers is this painfully felt. They are not only obscure, and little inspiring, either Of breadth of thought or intelligent practice but they fail en tirely to connect with the teacher 3 daily life, unless they be taught in a very shallow and formal way. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works. (shrink)

Chalmers' (2018) meta-problem of consciousness emphasizes unexpected common ground between otherwise incompatible positions. We argue that the materialist should welcome discussion of the meta-problem. We suggest that the core of the metaproblem is the seeming arbitrariness of subjective experience. This has an unexpected resolution when one moves to an interventionist account of scientific explanation: the same interventions that resolve the hard problem should also resolve the meta-problem.

In his Tanner Lecture of 1979 called ‘Equality of What?’ Amartya Sen asked what metric egalitarians should use to establish the extent to which their ideal is realized in a given society. What aspect of a person’s condition should count in a fundamental way for egalitarians, and not merely as cause of or evidence of or proxy for what they regard as fundamental?

The dilemma confronted by Buridan’s Ass leads into a problem about nil-preference situations, to which there is a solution in the literature that is inspired by Alan Turing: we have evolved with a computational module in our brains that comes into play in such situations by picking a random action among the alternatives that detennines the subject’s choice. We relate these Buridan’s Ass situations to a larger, theoretically interesting category in which there is no alternative that is decisively superior to (...) others with respect to expected utility, and we try to show how our emotional makeup figures in a rational response, particularly as informed by symbolic utilitythat we draw down from our culture’s shared understandings. The category is theoretically interesting because it contains moral dilemmas, as well as hard cases in which an imponant choice must be made without an option that has clearly superior expected utility. We argue that our Emotional Response Model is preferable to Turing’s Randomizer for this category, as well as more illuminating about nil-preference situations or close approximations thereto. (shrink)

En su obra La Estructura de las Revoluciones Científicas, Kuhn hace una distinción entre ciencia revolucionaria -la que origina nuevos paradigmas- y ciencia normal -aquella que contribuye a aumentar el alcance y la precisión con la que puede aplicarse un paradigma. De esta manera es posible ent..

This book presents G. A. Cohen's Gifford Lectures, delivered at the University of Edinburgh in 1996. Focusing on Marxism and Rawlsian liberalism, Cohen draws a connection between these thought systems and the choices that shape a person's life. In the case of Marxism, the relevant life is his own: a communist upbringing in the 1940s in Montreal, which induced a belief in a strongly socialist egalitarian doctrine. The narrative of Cohen's reckoning with that inheritance develops through a series of sophisticated (...) engagements with the central questions of social and political philosophy. In the case of Rawlsian doctrine, Cohen looks to people's lives in general. He argues that egalitarian justice is not only, as Rawlsian liberalism teaches, a matter of rules that define the structure of society, but also a matter of personal attitude and choice. Personal attitude and choice are, moreover, the stuff of which social structure itself is made. Those truths have not informed political philosophy as much as they should, and Cohen's focus on them brings political philosophy closer to moral philosophy, and to the Judeo-Christian ethical tradition, than it has recently been. (shrink)

The JSTOR Archive is a trusted digital repository providing for long-term preservation and access to leading academic journals and scholarly literature from around the world. The Archive is supported by libraries, scholarly societies, publishers, and foundations. It is an initiative of JSTOR, a not-for-profit organization with a mission to help the scholarly community take advantage of advances in technology. For more information regarding JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

‘No matter what the grievance, and I'm sure that the Palestinians have some legitimate grievances, nothing can justify the deliberate targeting of innocent civilians. If they were attacking our soldiers it would be a different matter.’ (Dr. Zvi Shtauber, Israeli Ambassador to the United Kingdom, BBC Radio 4, May 1, 2003).

This essay is written on the following premises and argues for them. “Enlightenment” is a word or signifier, and not a single or unifiable phenomenon which it consistently signifies. There is no single or unifiable phenomenon describable as “the Enlightenment,” but it is the definite article rather than the noun which is to be avoided. In studying the intellectual history of the late seventeenth century and the eighteenth, we encounter a variety of statements made, and assumptions proposed, to which the (...) term “Enlightenment” may usefully be applied, but the meanings of the term shift as we apply it. The things are connected, but not continuous; they cannot be reduced to a single narrative; and we find ourselves using the word “Enlightenment” in a family of ways and talking about a family of phenomena, resembling and related to one another in a variety of ways that permit of various generalizations about them. We are not, however, committed to a single root meaning of the word “Enlightenment,” and we do not need to reduce the phenomena of which we treat to a single process or entity to be termed “the” Enlightenment. It is a reification that we wish to avoid, but the structure of our language is such that this is difficult, and we will find ourselves talking of “the French” or “the Scottish,” “the Newtonian” or the “the Arminian” Enlightenments, and hoping that by employing qualifying adjectives we may constantly remind ourselves that the keyword “Enlightenment” is ours to use and should not master us. (shrink)