Once upon a time, I attempted to create a web-based one-stop-shop for global poverty relief called the Maximin Project. Drawing on aspects of that experience, I show that although some existing ways of rating and recommending charities are significantly better than others, there remain certain challenges that need to be overcome. Specifically, I argue that the emerging Effective Altruism movement, with its emphasis on measurable effectiveness, runs the risk of neglecting a whole range of projects that are necessary for a (...) well-rounded approach to human development. I briefly model an alternative virtue-based approach that calls on the personal insight of individual researchers and practitioners in addition to the more directly experimental approach of organizations like GiveWell. (shrink)

Dominant agri-food systems are increasingly seen as unsustainable in terms of environmental degradation, mass production or high food waste. In an attempt to counteract these developments and foster sustainability transitions in agri-food systems, a variety of actors are engaging in socially innovative models of food production and consumption. Using a multiple case study approach, our study examines three contrasting alternative economic models in the city of Berlin: community gardens, the app Too Good To Go (TGTG), and a cooperative supermarket. Based (...) on 15 qualitative interviews, we provide insights into their transformative potential by exploring participants' underlying motivations, the changes they have experienced, and the challenges and potential for future development of these models. We find that participation in community gardens and the cooperative supermarket is similarly motivated by social aspects and dissatisfaction with existing food access options, while TGTG users are more motivated by financial reasons. Our study shows that change is experienced mainly at the individual level, e.g. by building new relationships, changing cognitive framings, and learning (new) practices, especially in community-oriented settings. The individualization of change shows that these models have a rather low potential to lead to more systemic accounts of changes. Yet, they can prefigure regime change, describe resistance, and foster cumulative incremental change that may spill over into society. We conclude that in order to sustain this role and drive transitions, it is important to up- and outscale these models; and we provide recommendations on how these models can mutually support their development, establishment, and protection. (shrink)

Dr Andorno and I have corresponded for some time on the question of a right not to know information. I enjoyed reading his paper and I am struck by the degree of agreement that we share. We both agree—for example, that unsolicited knowledge can be a burden which can significantly compromise an individual’s psychological integrity. We both share a desire to respect individual self determination. Also we each consider it reasonable for individuals to choose not to receive potentially harmful information. (...) I have already made these arguments, and more, elsewhere,1 but my starting point has not been autonomy, as advocated by Andorno, but rather privacy. In essence, my argument is that individuals enjoy, and are entitled to enjoy, a measure of psychological privacy which can be invaded by unwarranted disclosures of information.The reason that I prefer privacy to autonomy is not because I have any wish to “deny people the right to self determination”2 but rather because I perceive deficiencies in the autonomy model. Indeed, my approach and that of Andorno are not mutually exclusive; it is simply that my approach is broader and encompasses some of the harder cases which an autonomy based approach cannot help us to resolve. Thus, most of the substance of Andorno’s approach is subsumed within my model. I have—for example, no disagreement whatsoever with the view that if you have an indication that an individual would not wish to know then this wish should be respected. One might even establish novel means of discerning individuals’ wishes by establishing a register to record advance refusals, as Andorno …. (shrink)

Teaching bioethics with visual education tools, such as movies and comics, is a unique way of explaining the history and progress of human research and the art and science of medicine to high school students. For more than a decade, bioethical concepts have appeared in movies, and these films are useful for teaching medical and research ethics in high schools. Using visual tools to teach bioethics can have both interpretational and transformational effects on learners that will enhance their overall understanding (...) of complex moral and legal issues in medicine and research.High school students are uniquely suited to learn bioethics because they will soon become legal adults. As adults, they will make moral decisions that may affect their health and wellbeing as well as that of their communities and societies.However, not all visual education tools are appropriate for bioethics pedagogy in high school. Bioethics film and comic producers must consider the specifics of student age, race, gender, belief, level of education, and sexual orientation. Such tools must not be dominated by either dystopic or utopic genres, must aim for objectivity, and must consider the complexity of ethical decision making. It is critical that the teacher, who is the final arbiter regarding the use of visual tools in the classroom, determines that the visual learning tool is acceptable for students in any particular education context. In addition, during the conceptualization and creation of these tools, bioethics film and comic producers must work harder to ensure that these visual tools are devoid of any form of stereotyping. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A THEORY OF BASIC GOODS: STRUCTURE AND HIERARCHY* I. FTEN, PERHAPS ALWAYS, moral theory emerges from particular problems. Just how is obscure. The logic of discovery is elusive; and it is harder to explain how we have come to see matters rightly than to recognize that we do, in fact, see them rightly. What counts as a theory, moreover, calls for explication as much as does a theory's (...) emergence. When we have in mind a theory that shapes our social vision, there is a progression from a central set of propositions, keyed to a range of paradigm cases and seen as a logical structure, to a " way of thinking " widely enough embraced to have political significance, at least for a given oommunity. In this essay I want to explore some fundamental questions raised by Germain Grisez's theory of natural law ethics.1 These questions are chiefly conceptual. But neither they nor Grisez's theory should be seen in a vacuum. Rather, I would begin by suggesting that the importance of his work, its emergence in some Catholic circles, is linked with two specific moral and political problems. The first is abortion; the second is the superpowers' policy of nuclear deterrence. *I thank David Blake, Robert Gordh, Carroll Kearley, Gary Mar. Martin Woods, and Linda Zagzebski for their comments on an earlier version of this essay. 1 For the theory's fullest presentation, see Germain Grisez, The Way of the Lord Jesus, vol. one, Ohristian Moral Principles, with the help of Joseph M. Boyle, Jr., Basil Cole, O.P., John Finnis, John A. Geinzer, Robert G. Kennedy, Patrick Lee, William E. May, and Russell Shaw (Chicago: Franciscan Herald Press, 1983). Especially critical are chapters two through twelve. 221 JAMES G. HANINK As a point of chronology, Grisez's early study of rubortion was the context for one of the first formulations of his natural law ethics.2 But why should this have been so? And why should abortion so engage Catholic thinkers, some of whom had felt a distance from explicitly Catholic positions, that Grisez's work should become pivotal? Answers to such questions must be tentative, but they include the following considerations. In a brief period, no more than a decade, legal abortion in the West became entrenched social policy.8 It was a policy, too, supported by dominant intellectual forces. But the new policy, defended in terms of individual freedom and a right to privacy, struck many Catholicsand non-Catholics-as vicious and tragic. It was vicious in that it made expendable the weakest and most vulnerable human beings. Human rights somehow became restricted to the strong and self-sufficient. The policy was tragic in its denial of human community. We are not, however much radical individualism supposes, merely a collection of separate egos. l/Ve are, rather, a community tied to a past and pledged to a future, so pledged, in part, by the children we bear and nurture.4 For in hearing and nurturing children we carry on the love of parents who have done as much for us; and we carry ourselves into a future where we hope our own love will be thus extended. But abortion, and surely unrestricted abortion, betrays this community of trust. Still, a policy so vicious and tragic can make us look for a fresh moral vision. And, of course, to the extent that we have contributed to,a climate in which abortion could become entrenched -either by our failures to support women in need or 2 Germain Grisez, Abortion: The Myths, the Realities, and the Arguments (New York and Cleveland: Corpus Books, 1970). a A milepost, of course, was the United States Supreme Court decision, Roe v. Wade, in 1973. Recent U.S. Government figures indicate that there are now well over a million legal abortions annually in this country. 4 For a provocative discussion of this theme, see Stanley Hauerwas's " The Moral Value of the Family " in his A Commimity of Character (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981). A THEORY OF BASIC GOODS: STRUCTURE & HIERARCHY 223 by an acquiescence in our culture's individualism-the call for theoretical reconstruction is all the more urgent... (shrink)

In this essay, I explore alternatives to traditional philosophical writing assignments. I propose that inviting students to engage with philosophical ideas creatively can make our writing instruction more inclusive. Creative assignments, I argue, can achieve the same goals as traditional writing assignments but are able to sidestep some of the assumptions and habits that make it harder for students to experience writing as an authentic act of self-expression. I also discuss assessment strategies and provide several sample assignments including grading (...) criteria. (shrink)

In his stimulating article on this topic Mr. Christopher Ehrhardt sought to show that there is no good reason to believe in any intervention by Philip of Macedon in Thessaly earlier than his campaign of 353. The second half of his paper is devoted to the date of Philip's capture of Pagasae, which Diodorus appears to put in the Athenian archon year 354/3 after the fall of Methone, a date adopted by most modern interpreters accepting the emendation for the unidentifiable (...) in the text of Diodorus. Ehrhardt shows well the difficulties of believing in any capture of Pagasae, the port of Pherae, earlier than the capture of Pherae itself, and concludes that the emendation is to be rejected. In this I think he is right, and I am joining him in dating the capture of Pagasae in 352 after Pherae itself had fallen. The first half of his paper, however, rejecting all the evidence suggesting other interventions by Philip in Thessaly earlier than 353, is much harder to accept, for two reasons. (shrink)

Time series forecasting is a well-known deep learning application field in which previous data are used to predict the future behavior of the series. Recently, several deep learning approaches have been proposed in which several nonlinear functions are applied to the input to obtain the output. In this paper, we introduce a novel method to improve the performance of deep learning models in time series forecasting. This method divides the model into hierarchies or levels from simpler to more complex ones. (...) Simpler levels handle smoothed versions of the input, whereas the most complex level processes the original time series. This method follows the human learning process where general/simpler tasks are performed first, and afterward, more precise/harder ones are accomplished. Our proposed methodology has been applied to the LSTM architecture, showing remarkable performance in various time series. In addition, a comparison is reported including a standard LSTM and novel methods such as DeepAR, Temporal Fusion Transformer, NBEATS and Echo State Network. (shrink)

Content-based authorship identification is an emerging research problem in online social media networks, due to a wide collection of issues ranging from security to privacy preservation, from radicalization to defamation detection, and so forth. Indeed, this research has attracted a relevant amount of attention from the research community during the past years. The general problem becomes harder when we consider the additional constraint of identifying the same false profile over different social media networks, under obvious considerations. Inspired by this (...) emerging research challenge, in this paper we propose and experimentally assess an innovative framework for supporting content-based authorship identification and analysis in social media networks. (shrink)

Much work in moral epistemology is devoted to explaining apparent asymmetries between moral and non-moral epistemology. These asymmetries include testimony, expertise, and disagreement. Surprisingly, these asymmetries have been addressed in isolation from each other, and the explanations offered have been piecemeal, rather than holistic. In this paper, I provide the only unified account on offer of these asymmetries. According to this unified account, moral beliefs typically have a higher epistemic standard than non-moral beliefs. This means, roughly, that it is typically (...) more difficult for agents to receive the relevant positive epistemic credit (e.g. knowledge) for moral beliefs than for non-moral beliefs. After presenting this account, I consider two alternative unified accounts. According to the first alternative, moral matters are more cognitively demanding; according to the second, moral beliefs have more defeaters. I argue that neither of these alternative accounts succeed, and that my higher standards account is the best unified explanation. (shrink)

FOR women, it is supposed to trigger one of the most intense orgasms imaginable, with waves of pleasure spreading out across the whole body. If the "G spot orgasm" seems semi-mythical, however, that's because there has been scant evidence of its existence. Now for the first time gynaecological scans have revealed clear anatomical differences between women who claim to experience vaginal orgasms involving a G spot and those who don't. It might mean that there is a G spot, after all. (...) What's more, a simple test could tell you if it's time to give up the hunt, or if your partner just needs to try harder. (shrink)

Given the ever-present subject of consciousness wherever consciousness is, it is peculiar that consciousness researchers often mention mental states as if they are conscious independently of being the conscious states of someone [1, p. 132]. We refer to visual perceptions that become conscious, when in reality no one has ever studied mere conscious visual perceptions. What are studied are visual perceptions belonging to conscious human or animal subjects; it is the subjects who are conscious of visual stimuli, not the visual (...) perceptions. I do not know all the reasons why conscious subjects are rarely mentioned in consciousness science, but one could be pragmatic. Explaining the mysterious jump from the nonconscious nuts and bolts of neurons to the aurora borealis of consciousness is a hard problem. But it is an easy problem compared to explaining the emergence of a single conscious subject from the human brain’s 86 billion neurons [cf. 5]. Perhaps it is more practically realistic to solve the less hard problem before attempting to solve the harder hard problem. On the other hand, if we ignore a necessary condition for the presence of consciousness, our explanations of it could be plagued by inadequacy. And how can we explain our whole data set regarding consciousness if we neglect the most fundamental aspect of the data? (shrink)

Precision livestock farming (PLF) is the management of livestock using the principles and technology of process engineering. Key to PLF is the dense monitoring of variegated parameters, including animal growth, output of produce (e.g. milk, eggs), diseases, animal behaviour, and the physical environment (e.g. thermal micro-environment, ammonia emissions). While its proponents consider PLF a win-win strategy that combines production efficiency with sustainability goals and animal welfare, critics emphasise, inter alia, the potential interruption of human-animal relationships. This paper discusses the notion (...) that the objectification of animals by PLF influences the developmental pathways of conventional industrial farming. We conduct a conceptual analysis of objectification by comparing discussions in feminist ethics and animal ethics. We find that in animal ethics, objectification includes deontological arguments regarding instrumentalisation, de-animalisation, alienation, commodification and quantification of animals. The focus on socio-political context and relationality connects these debates to central ideas in care ethics. We adopt a care ethics perspective to assess the implications of the objectification of animals in livestock farming. The basic claim is that sensory knowledge symbolised by the farmers’ unity of hand, head and heart would make it harder to objectify animals than abstract and instrumental reasoning where the pursuit of knowledge is intertwined with the pursuit of control, as in mainstream PLF. Despite of what can be considered as a good caring relationship between farmers and animals that is mediated by PLF, people involved in conventional industrial farming still seem to become further detached from farmers and animals, because the PLF system itself is objectifying. PLF redefines the notion of care, in terms of data transparency, standardisation of methods for analysis, real-time collection and processing of data, remote control, and the use of digital platforms. This creates new expectations and requires a redistribution of responsibilities within a wider scope of relations in the value chain. (shrink)

In the natural deduction system for classical propositional logic given by G. Gentzen, there are some inference rules with assumptions discharged by the rule. D. Prawitz calls such inference rules improper, and others proper. Improper inference rules are more complicated and are often harder to understand than the proper ones. In the present paper, we distinguish between proper and improper derivations by using sequent systems. Specifically, we introduce a sequent system \(\vdash_{\bf Sc}\) for classical propositional logic with only structural (...) rules, and prove that \(\vdash_{\bf Sc}\) does not allow improper derivations in general. For instance, the sequent \(\Rightarrow p \to q\) cannot be derived from the sequent \(p \Rightarrow q\) in \(\vdash_{\bf Sc}\). In order to prove the failure of improper derivations, we modify the usual notion of truth valuation, and using the modified valuation, we prove the completeness of \(\vdash_{\bf Sc}\). We also consider whether an improper derivation can be described generally by using \(\vdash_{\bf Sc}\). (shrink)

The Animal Rights Thesis (ART) entails that nonhuman animals like pigs and cows have moral rights, including rights not to be unjustly harmed. If ART is true, it appears to imply the permissibility of killing ranchers, farmers, and zookeepers in defense of animals who will otherwise be unjustly killed. This is the Militancy Objection (MO) to ART. I consider four replies to MO and reject three of them. First, MO fails because animals lack rights, or lack rights of sufficient strength (...) to justify other-defensive killing. Second, MO fails because those who unjustly threaten animals aren't liable or, if they are liable, their liability is outweighed by other considerations (e.g., a strong presumption against vigilante killing). I then argue both of these fail. Third, MO succeeds because animal militancy is permissible. Fourth, MO fails because there aren't liability justifications for defensive killing in general (i.e., pacifism is true). I argue that there's thoroughgoing epistemic parity between the Militancy View (MV) and the Pacifist View (PV), and that two considerations favor PV over MV. First, because under conditions of uncertainty, we should believe rights-bearers retain rather than lose their rights, which PV affirms and MV denies. Second, because PV is intrinsically likelier than MV to be true since PV at worst affirms wrongful letting die and MV at worst affirms wrongful killing, the latter of which is intrinsically harder to justify than the former. (shrink)

Two self-paced reading experiments investigated several factors that influence the comprehension complexity of singly-embedded relative clauses (RCs) in English. Three factors were manipulated in Experiment 1, resulting in three main effects. First, object-extracted RCs were read more slowly than subject-extracted RCs, replicating previous work. Second, RCs that were embedded within the sentential complement of a noun were read more slowly than comparable RCs that were not embedded in this way. Third, and most interestingly, object-modifying RCs were read more slowly than (...) subject-modifying relative clauses. This result contradicts one of the central tenets of complexity research: that nested sentences are harder to understand than their right-branching equivalents (e.g., Miller and Chomsky 1963). It is hypothesized that this result followed from a combination of two information-flow factors: (1) background information is usually presented early in a sentence; and (2) restrictive RCs—the form of the RCs in Experiment 1—usually convey background information. Experiment 2 tested this hypothesis by comparing restrictive and non-restrictive RCs— which generally provide new information—in both subject- and objectmodifying positions. The results of the experiment were as predicted by the information-flow account: Only restrictive RCs were read more slowly when modifying objects. It is concluded that both resource and information-flow factors need to be considered in explaining RC complexity effects. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:After Extinction ed. by Richard Grusin, and: Anthropocene Poetics: Deep Time, Sacrifice Zones and Extinction by David FarrierChris CrewsRichard Grusin, editor. After Extinction. University of Minnesota Press, 2018. 272pp.David Farrier. Anthropocene Poetics: Deep Time, Sacrifice Zones and Extinction. University of Minnesota Press, 2019. 176pp.Thinking Critically and Poetically with the AnthropocenePublished within a year of each other, Richard Grusin’s edited collection, After Extinction, and David Farrier’s Anthropocene Poetics offer (...) two valuable perspectives on the themes of extinction and the Anthropocene. Most readers are likely familiar with some version of the Anthropocene by now, and its usage in these books (with a few exceptions) follows a common refrain in the humanities and social sciences, where it is used as an umbrella term to describe a wide range of (mostly negative) impacts to the Earth associated with industrial civilization and human activities.The topic of extinction is a much older issue, but increasingly frequent (and alarming) reports about biodiversity loss and extinction from bodies like the United Nations, combined with activism from groups like Extinction Rebellion, have raised its profile. Elizabeth Kolbert’s 2014 book The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, which performs a sort of Derridean hauntology throughout the pages of After Extinction, further reinforced this trend. As Richard Grusin notes in his Introduction to After Extinction, the book emerged from a conference hosted by the Center for Twenty-First Century Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee which focused on the question of what comes after extinction. Each chapter is thought-provoking, but at times they sat uneasily together, producing a sort of Chthulucenic cacophony drawn from multiple disciplines and themes, from entangled humanism and the power of photography to a rethinking of disability and Indigenous languages in the Anthropocene. [End Page 156]I found David Farrier’s Anthropocene Poetics harder to pin down, despite being a more cohesive text. The book offers a series of ecocritical musings that engage with a series of poets and authors whose work Farrier uses to draw out a poetic imagination of the Anthropocene. Farrier develops this Anthropocene poetics through a dizzying array of textual and artistic examples that draws inspiration from queer ecology and New Materialism (e.g., Elizabeth Grosz, Timothy Morton, Jane Bennett, Quentin Meillassoux) to problematize the liminal spaces and borders between human and non-human agencies and affect, animacies and intimacies, while suggesting that poetry is well suited (perhaps best suited?) to help us rethink our relationship to deep time and geologic agency. While reading Farrier’s book, I could not help but think of Bruno Latour’s comments about how we need a new geostory to help us make sense of the Anthropocene.Farrier engages widely with Donna Haraway and Anna Tsing to develop some key themes, yet there is no attempt to force the concept of the Anthropocene into any prefigured box, despite his study’s grounding in ecocriticism and his stated sympathy with the fledgling field of Anthropocene studies. As Farrier notes, “I pursue a more inclusive approach to defining the Anthropocene, that is, that each discipline must do so according to its own terms and, by implication, that each discipline must reappraise its boundaries and assumptions in the Anthropocene’s shadows” (3). Farrier’s familiarity with both the scientific basis and cultural debates around the Anthropocene allows him to pull this off successfully.A key aim for Farrier is to explore what an Anthropocene poetics might look like, and to show how such a poetics can allow for more fluid engagements with the Anthropocene. He does this through three framing devices: intimacy (deep time), entanglements (sacrifice zones), and swerve (kin-making), each of which allows him to think more deeply about our growing awareness of deep time (past and future) and our entanglements with a changing planet. Farrier suggests this awareness is creating a deeper appreciation for how the human project is (and always has been) deeply bound up with other than human beings and non-human agencies. As Farrier argues: “One of the most striking and unsettling aspects of the Anthropocene is the newly poignant sense that our present is in fact accompanied by deep pasts and... (shrink)

Reconstructs the original Greek version of the confatalia-argument that Cicero attributes to Chrysippus in De fato and misrepresent in crucial ways. Compares this argument with Seneca's discussion of determinism in the Naturales quaestiones. Clarifies that Seneca makes a different distinction from that attested in Cicero's De fato. Argues that problems with interpreting both accounts derive from disregarding terminological distinctions harder to spot in the Latin versions and, related to this, insufficient attention to the ontological distinction between bodies (such as (...) Fate) and predicates (e.g. "what is fated"), which unfortunately does not square well with the modern ontological category "event." Contains some corrections to the author's earlier discussion of the topic in Seneca und die Stoa: Der Platz des Menschen in der Welt, De Gruyter 2006, ch. 3.3.4. (shrink)

Realism about cognitive or semantic phenomenology, the view that certain conscious states are intrinsically such as to ground thought or understanding, is increasingly being taken seriously in analytic philosophy. The principle aim of this paper is to argue that it is extremely difficult to be a physicalist about cognitive phenomenology. The general trend in later 20th century/early 21st century philosophy of mind has been to account for the content of thought in terms of facts outside the head of the thinker (...) at the time of thought, e.g. in terms of causal relations between thinker and world, or in terms of the natural purposes for which mental representations have developed. However, on the assumption that consciousness is constitutively realised by what is going on inside the head of a thinker at the time of experience, the content of cognitive phenomenology cannot be accounted for in this way. Furthermore, any internalist account of content is particularly susceptible to Kripkensteinian rule following worries. It seems that if someone knew all the physical facts about what is going on in my head at the time I was having a given experience with cognitive phenomenology, they would not thereby know whether that state had ‘straight’ rather than ‘quus-like’ content, e.g. whether the experience was intrinsically such as the ground the thought that two plus two equals four or intrinsically such as to ground the thought that two quus two equals four. The project of naturalising consciousness is much harder for realists about cognitive phenomenology. (shrink)

Predictive processing theorists have claimed PTSD and depression are maladaptive and epistemically distorting because they entail undesirably wide gaps between top-down models and bottom-up information inflows. Without denying this is sometimes so, the “maladaptive” label carries questionable normative assumptions. For instance, trauma survivors facing significant risk of subsequent attacks may overestimate threats to circumvent further trauma, “bringing forth” concretely safer personal spaces, to use enactive terminology, ensuring the desired gap between predicted worries and outcomes. The violation of predictive processing can (...) go in the opposite direction too, as when depression coincides with energy-depletion, and hence objectively strenuous situations in which things look farther away because they are (accurately anticipated to be) harder to reach. These examples partly encapsulate what predictive processing theorists call “active inference,” yet with differences. In the first case, actions fruitfully obviate predictions rather than fulfilling them. In the second, mental models do not dysregulate bodily processes, making coping harder. Instead, problems (e.g., personal obstacles, gastric illness) deplete energy, eliciting a depressive and adaptive slow-down. Some predictive proponents apply correspondence criteria when alleging mismatches between internal models and the world, while incongruously asserting that the brain did not evolve to see things veridically, but to execute actions. An alternative is to adopt pluralistic, pragmatic epistemologies suited to the complexity of mind. The upshot is that mental outlooks can depart from the norm without epistemically being distorted and that mismatches between anticipatory worries and outcomes, when they actually exist, can be a measure of adaptive and epistemic success. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Minor Socratics* PHILIP MERLAN OF MEN MORE OR LESS DECISIVELY influenced by Socrates, three--Antisthenes (c. 455-360), Aristippus of Cyrene (c. 435-356), and Eucleides of Megara (c. 450380 )--became founders of schools (or sects) often referred to as "minor Socratic schools." These schools are the Cynic, the Cyrenaic, and the Megaric, respectively. The names of the last two are self-explanatory. That of the first sounds somewhat like "dog (kytn)-like." By (...) some it is assumed to have been derived from the meeting place of Antisthenes with his followers, the gymnasium of Kynosarges; x others believe it to be contemptuously indicative of the dog-like life of the members of the sect (shamelessness, begging, barking, biting). 2 In this sense it was proudly and defiantly accepted by the members themselves, a What we know of the ethical teachings of the Megaric school amounts to hardly more than one sentence, in which the Good seems to have been identified with the One. 4 All we can say of this formula is that it, in some way, links the * Size (very limited), scope (ethical doctrines only), manner of presentation (for the general reader and rather dogmatic), etc., of this article were determined by the character of the Encyclopedia of Morals, in which it originally appeared. The present footnotes try to make up for some of the shortcomings unavoidable in this kind of article. [The Journal is grateful to Philosophical Library, Inc. for permission to reprint this article. The footnotes were subsequently added by Professor Merlan and appear here for the first time.] As the only collection of fragments of Cynics (Antisthenes, Diogenes, Crates, Monimus, Demonax, Oenomaus, Teles, Bion) is that contained in F. W. A. Mullach, Fragmenta philosophorum graecorum (Paris: 1865), vol. II, pp. 274-429, which is hard to obtain (the collection of fragments by A. W. Winekelmann, Antisthenis fragmenta [1842] even harder), I shall quote them directly from the sources. There was no need to do so with the Cyrenaics, as we have two recent collections of their fragments: G. Giannantoni, 1 Cirenaici (Florence, n.d.: [1958])--they will be quoted as G--and E. Mannebach, Aristippi et Cyrenaicorum fragmenta (K~51n-Leiden: 1961), which will be quoted as Ma. A generous selection of fragments of Megarians, Cynics and Cyrenaics in German translation with introduction and notes is contained in W. Nestle, Die Sokratiker (Jena: 1922), pp. 79-177. Our knowledge of Antisthenes would considerably be enriched if we could follow H. Kesters, who, in a number of publications (one of them: Plaidoyer d'un Socratique... [Louvain: 1959]) ascribes Themistius, Or. XXVI to Antisthenes. However, the ascription is doubtful. i I.e., Whitehound: D.L. VI 13. Elias, In Cat. (CAG XVIII/I, Berlin: 1908), p. Ill, 2-29. Busse has a fourfold explanation of the name, all connected with the word Kt~v. Cf. K. v. Fritz, Quellenuntersuchungen zu Leben und Philosophie des Diogenes von Sinope (Leipzig: 1926), pp. 47-49. D.L. VI 60. 55; Stob. vol. III, p. 462, 16 W.-H. Quotations from Stobaeus refer to: K. Wachsmuth, O. Hense, loannis Stobaei Anthologium, 5 vol. (Berlin: 1884-1902); they are by volume, page, and line of this edition. 4 Eus. PE XIV 17, 1; D.L. II 106 (~v x6 dtTu06v). [143] 144 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY Megarians to the Eleatic school 5 but also to some aspects of Plato's Philebus and his Laws, and also to the Epinomis, and, above all, to his lecture or course of lectures "The Good," the conclusion of which was that it is the One which is the Good. 6 And though we know that many Megarians were engaged in political activities,7 we do not know in what way, if any, that highly abstract ethical doctrine was linked to practice. It is entirely different with the other two schools, in which ethical theory is immediately applied to life and theoretical aspects of philosophy are often neglected or even absent. However, there is some doubt as to whether Antisthenes can actually be considered the fountainhead of Cynicism. He seems to have undergone the influence of Socrates late in his life, when he had already been active as a... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Reviews PASSION AND PARADOX L G Religious Studies / McMaster U. Hamilton, , Canada   @. Joan Cocks. Passion and Paradox: Intellectuals Confront the National Question. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton U. P., . Pp. . .; pb .. ccording to an ancient legend, four Rabbis ventured into the garden of Aphilosophy. One, it is said, went insane, another became a heretic, a third died and only the (...) fourth emerged unscathed. A modern variation of this story might go like this. Four or perhaps  philosophers entered the jungle of nationalism and for the most part went insane. There were those who embraced nationalism and consequently abandoned the universality of philosophy for the promotion of xenophobia, racism and even Nazism. Others remained internationalist and hence became futile—philosophical Canutes—commanding the raging beasts of nationality to be still. No one struggled harder with nationalism than Bertrand Russell. In , writing as an internationalist, he announced the demise of the principle of nationality only to see nationalisms explode in every region of the world (see his “National Independence and Internationalism”, Papers ). He opposed it relentlessly and without compromise until near the end of his life when he found himself endorsing wars of national liberation. Nationalism is often depicted as a howling beast. It would be better to think of it as an anaconda that wraps itself around everyone who ventures into its domain. Joan Cocks’ Passion and Paradox is an important book on nationalism and the intelligentsia. She traces the intellectual encounter with nationalism of a number of figures—Karl Marx, Rosa Luxemburg, Isaiah Berlin and the Scottish nationalist Tom Nairn, among others. All are exiles, most are Jews, and all try to hack their way through a jungle of conundrums of nationalist thought. Her accounts of these thinkers sometimes read like complex legal briefs, but are always illuminating. Though an internationalist, she sees the power of nationalist imperatives. Her approach to the contradictory strains of nationalism and hostility to nationalism echoes that of Hegel. She presents critical but sympathetic accounts of each side of the nationalist problematic and shows how their difficulties might be resolved in a higher synthesis. Alas! her resolution suffers from the unworldliness that she finds in other versions of internationalism. Her argument begins with a personal experience. In the early ’s she joined a group of Arabs and Jews against the Gulf War. In the course of their associ- Reviews  ation she learned that the Jews were all internationalists, while the Arabs were outspoken nationalists. This experience presumably demonstrated that a happy collusion of nationalism and internationalism was possible. But, of course, there was another side: those prosecuting the war she opposed were also nationalists. Her central thesis addresses the tragedy of opposition. It states that nationalism is “dilemmatic”, that is, that “all paths of thought obscured equally telling contrary thoughts; all courses of action were strewn with causes for regret and remorse” (p. ). The horns of the dilemma are the valid claims of the internationalist who sees the underlying self-destructive deep structures of nationalism on one side, and the claims of the national particularistic who is engaged in the compelling theatre of national liberation and the protection of local customs and roots on the other. Her book is an account of how her thinkers are framed by this dilemma, locked in by the imperatives of either side. In the period between the Gulf War and the composition of this book in  Cocks was able to observe what she identifies as the destructive logic of nationalism. The ’s were a period of postmodernist celebration of the local, a sensibility that helped to legitimate nationalism. The explosion of nationalism that followed the breakup of the Communist imperium was a time of liberation of the imprisoned nations—a springtime when it was good to be alive. But as the decade wore on the concealed pit bulls came out—in Yugoslavia, in Rwanda and elsewhere. In Cocks’ view nationalism showed an inner logic, of a sort that Russell called attention to in the early ’s—a logic that led from euphoria to self-destruction (see his Prospects). Her aim is to revive the half-remembered internationalist tradition as formulated by Marx and Luxemburg—but also to show... (shrink)

PHOTO ID 121339257© Designer491| Dreamstime.com ABSTRACT When physicians use their clinical knowledge and skills to advance the well-being of their patients, there may be apparent conflict between patient autonomy and physician beneficence. We are skeptical that today’s medical ethics education adequately fosters future physicians’ commitment to beneficence, which is both rationally defensible and fundamentally consistent with patient autonomy. We use an ethical dilemma that was presented to a group of third-year medical students to examine how ethics education might be causing (...) them to give undue deference to autonomy, thereby undermining their commitment to beneficence. INTRODUCTION The right of patients to choose which treatments they prefer is rooted in today’s social mores and taught as a principle of medical ethics as respect for autonomy. Yet, when physicians use their clinical knowledge and skills to advance the well-being of their patients, there may be a conflict between patient autonomy and physician beneficence. We are skeptical that today’s medical ethics education adequately fosters a commitment to beneficence, which is both rationally defensible and fundamentally consistent with patient autonomy. I. An Ethical Dilemma The impetus for this paper arose when students who were completing their third clinical year discussed a real-life ethical dilemma. A middle-aged man developed a pulmonary hemorrhage while on blood thinners for a recently placed coronary stent. The bleeding was felt to be reversible, but the patient needed immediate intubation or he would die. The cardiologist was told that the patient previously expressed to other physicians that he never wanted to be intubated. However, the cardiologist made the decision to intubate the patient anyway, and the patient eventually recovered.[1] Students were asked if they believed that the cardiologist had acted ethically. Their overwhelming response was, “No, the patient should have been allowed to die.” We looked into how students applied ethical reasoning to conclude that this outcome was ethically preferred. To explore how the third-year clinical experience might have formed the students’ judgment, we presented the same case to students who were just beginning their third year. Their responses were essentially uniform in recommending intubation. While there is likely more than one reasonable view in this case, we agree with the physician and the younger medical students that intubation was the ethically appropriate decision and will present an argument for it. But first, we explain the reasoning behind the more advanced medical students’ decision to choose patient autonomy at the expense of beneficence. II. Medical Ethics Education and the Priority of Autonomy Beauchamp and Childress’s Principles of Biomedical Ethics, first published in 1979 and now in its 8th edition, is a significant part of the formal ethics education in medical school.[2] Students learn an ethical decision-making approach based on respect for four ethical principles: autonomy, beneficence, nonmaleficence, and justice. While Beauchamp and Childress officially afford no prima facie superiority to any principle, the importance of respect for patient autonomy has increased through the editions of their book. For example, early editions of their book opposed the legalization of physician-assisted death compared to recent editions that defended it.[3] As another example, Beauchamp and Childress make paternalism harder to justify by adding an autonomy-protecting condition to the list of conditions for acceptable paternalism.[4] Authority, they contend, need not conflict with autonomy—provided the authority is autonomously chosen.[5] “The main requirement,” they write, “is to respect a particular patient’s or subject’s autonomous choices, whatever they may be.[6] In the principlism of Beauchamp and Childress, autonomy now seems to have a kind of default priority.[7] However, the bioethics discourse has strong counternarratives, noting some movement to elevate the role of beneficence and to respect the input of stakeholders, including the family and the healthcare team. Ethics education achieves particular relevance in the third clinical year when students become embedded in the care of patients and learn from what has been called the informal curriculum. They observe how attending physicians approach day-to-day ethical problems at the patient’s bedside. In this context, students observe the importance of informed consent for serious treatments or invasive procedures, a practice that highlights the principle of patient autonomy. In both the formal and informal curriculum, medical students observe how, in the words of Paul Wolpe, “patient autonomy has become the central and most powerful principle in ethical decision-making in American medicine.”[8] In short, students appear to learn a deference for patient autonomy. This curricular shift in favor of autonomy coincides with legal developments that protect patients’ rights and decision-making with respect to their healthcare choices. The priority of autonomy in medicine benefits patients by reflecting their choices and, in some cases, their fundamental liberty. III. The Practice of Medicine and the Commitment to Beneficence There are many critiques of the dominant place that autonomy has in biomedical ethics,[9] especially considering that autonomy seems to be biased toward individualistic, Western, and somewhat American culture-driven values.[10] In addition, many bioethical dilemmas are cast as a conflict between autonomy and beneficence. Our point is that medical students bring to their study of medicine a commitment to beneficence that seems to be suppressed by practical ethics education. We think this commitment is rationally defensible and should be nurtured. It is striking that young medical students have a pre-reflective commitment to beneficence at all. For, as we mentioned, it is not just medicine but Western culture generally that prioritizes autonomy in settling ethical dilemmas. In wanting to act for the good of others (rather than simply agreeing to what others want), physicians are already swimming somewhat against the cultural tide.[11] However, doing so makes sense, given the nature of medicine and the profession of healing. When prospective medical students are asked why they wish to become physicians, the usual answer is some variation on caring for the sick and preventing disease. It is unlikely that a reason to become a physician is to respect a patient’s autonomy. It would be easy to dismiss medical students’ commitment to beneficence as a mere intuition and contrary to a more reasoned and deliberative approach. Beauchamp and Childress seem to minimize the value of physician intuition, stating that justifications for certain procedures are “…supported by good reasons. They need not rest merely in intuition or feeling.”[12] Henry Richardson writes that “situational or perceptive intuition…leaves the reasons for decision unarticulated.”[13] We think this is a crude and rather thin way of understanding intuition. Some bioethicists have defended intuition as essential to the practice of medicine and not something opposed to reason.[14] In the case we describe, we believe the ethical justifications s for the patient’s intubation are fundamentally sound: the patient did not have a “do not intubate” order written in the chart, the emergency intubation had not been foreseen, so the patient did not have the opportunity to consent to or reject intubation; the patient had consented to the treatment for his cardiac disease so his consent for intubation could have been assumed;[15] and the consequences of respecting his autonomy did not justify allowing him to die.[16] While it is possible to have more than one reasonable view on this case, we think the case for beneficence is strong and certainly should not be dismissed out of hand. We do not deny that if a patient makes a clearly documented, well-informed decision to forgo intubation that this decision ought to be respected by the physician (even if the physician disagrees with the patient’s decision). But, in this situation, as in many others in the practice of medicine, the patient’s real wishes and preferences are not well-articulated in advance. There are many cases where a physician acts based on what she believes the patient, or the surrogate, would want, sometimes in situations that do not allow much time for reflection. An example might be resuscitation of a newborn at the borderline of viability. In their ethics education, beneficence would mean acting first to save a life. If the patient or surrogate makes an informed decision to the contrary, a beneficent physician respects that autonomous decision. In the case presented, the patient expressed gratitude to the cardiologist when extubated. But what if he had expressed anger at the physician for violating his autonomy? There are those who could argue that not only was intubation ethically wrong but that the cardiologist put himself in legal jeopardy by his actions (especially if there had been a written refusal applicable to the specific situation). In the example we use, we point out that the cardiologist may not have escaped a lawsuit if the patient had died without intubation. His family, when hearing the circumstances, may have sued for failure to act and dereliction of the cardiologist’s duty to save him. Beyond a potential legal challenge for either action or inaction, there is an overriding ethical question the cardiologist had to address: what course would be most satisfying to his conscience? Would he rather allow a patient to die for fear of recrimination, or act to save his life, regardless of the personal consequences? In the absence of real knowledge about the patient’s considered wishes, it is most reasonable to err on the side of promoting patient well-being. A physician’s commitment to beneficence is not necessarily a way of undermining a patient’s autonomy. In acting for the patient's good, physicians are also acting on what it is reasonable to believe a patient (or most patients, perhaps) would want, which is obviously connected to what a patient does want. Pellegrino and Thomasma argue that beneficence includes respect for a patient’s autonomy since “the best interests of the patient are intimately linked with their preferences.”[17] Instead of conceptualizing ethical dilemmas in medicine as conflicts between autonomy and beneficence, it is possible that medical schools could teach students that truly practicing beneficence is a way of valuing patient autonomy, especially when the patient’s wishes are not specific to the situation and are not clearly expressed. CONCLUSION It is important for students and practicing physicians to understand the principle of respect for patient autonomy in a pluralistic society that demands personal self-determination. However, the role of the physician as a beneficent healer should not be diminished by this respect for autonomy. Respecting a patient’s autonomy is grounded in and manifested by physician beneficence.[18] That is, seeking what is good for the patient can only be good if it respects their personhood and dignity. We propose that a commitment to beneficence, incipient in young medical students, should be developed over time with their other clinical reasoning skills. Such a commitment need not be sacrificed on the altar of patient autonomy. Beneficence needs greater relative moral weight with students as they proceed in their ethics education. - [1] S. Jauhar, “When Doctors Need to Lie,” New York Times, February 22, 2014, https://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/23/opinion/sunday/when-doctors-need-to-lie.html. [2] T. L. Beauchamp and James F. Childress, Principles of Biomedical Ethics, 8th ed. (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2019). [3] Louise A. Mitchell, “Major Changes in Principles of Biomedical Ethics,” The National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly 14, no. 3 (2014): 459–75, https://doi.org/10.5840/ncbq20141438. [4] Tom L. Beauchamp and James F. Childress, Principles of Biomedical Ethics, 8th ed. (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2019), 238. [5] Beauchamp and Childress, 103. [6] Beauchamp and Childress, p. 108. [7] For other accounts that prioritize autonomy, see e.g. Allen E. Buchanan and Dan W. Brock, Deciding for Others: The Ethics of Surrogate Decision Making (Cambridge University Press, 1989), 38–39; R Gillon, “Ethics Needs Principles—Four Can Encompass the Rest—and Respect for Autonomy Should Be ‘First among Equals,’” Journal of Medical Ethics 29, no. 5 (October 2003): 307–12, https://doi.org/10.1136/jme.29.5.307. For examples of critiques of these accounts, see footnote 9. [8] P. R. Wolpe, “The Triumph of Autonomy in American Bioethics: A Sociological View,” in Bioethics and Society: Constructing the Ethical Enterprise, p. 43. [9] V. A. Entwistle et al., “Supporting Patient Autonomy: The Importance of Clinician-Patient Relationships,” Journal of General Internal Medicine 25, no. 7 (July 2010): 741–45; C. Foster, Choosing Life, Choosing Death: The Tyranny of Autonomy in Medical Ethics and Law, 1st ed. (Oxford ; Hart Publishing, 2009); O. O’Neill, Autonomy and Trust in Bioethics, The Gifford Lectures, University of Edinburgh 2001 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002). [10] P. Marshall and B. Koenig, “Accounting for Culture in a Globalized Bioethics,” The Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics: A Journal of the American Society of Law, Medicine & Ethics 32, no. 2 (2004): 252–66; R. Fan, “Self-Determination vs. Family-Determination: Two Incommensurable Principles of Autonomy,” Bioethics 11, no. 3–4 (1997): 309–22. [11] Arguments stressing the importance of beneficence, as ours does here, certainly approach paternalistic arguments. We set aside the complex issue of paternalism for purposes of this paper and simply note that the principle of beneficence as such does not say anything specifically about acting against the patient’s will. In the case study that focuses this paper, we do not believe the patient’s will or wishes were clearly indicated. [12] Beauchamp and Childress, Principles of Biomedical Ethics, p. 20, see note 2 above. [13] H. S. Richardson, “Specifying, Balancing, and Interpreting Bioethical Principles,” The Journal of Medicine and Philosophy: A Forum for Bioethics and Philosophy of Medicine 25, no. 3 (January 1, 2000): 285–307, p. 287. [14] H. D. Braude, Intuition in Medicine a Philosophical Defense of Clinical Reasoning (Chicago ; University of Chicago Press, 2012). [15] R. Kukla, “Conscientious Autonomy: Displacing Decisions in Health Care,” The Hastings Center Report 35, no. 2 (2005): 34–44. [16] M. Schermer, The Different Faces of Autonomy: Patient Autonomy in Ethical Theory and Hospital Practice, vol. 13, Library of Ethics and Applied Philosophy (Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands, 2002). [17] E. D. Pellegrino and D. C. Thomasma, For the Patient’s Good - the Restoration of Beneficence in Health Care (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 29. [18] Pellegrino and Thomasma, For the Patient’s Good. 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Linsky and Zalta try to explain how we can refer to mathematical objects by saying that this happens through definite descriptions which may appeal to mathematical theories. I present two issues for their account. First, there is a problem of finding appropriate pre-conditions to reference, which are currently difficult to satisfy. Second, there is a problem of ensuring the stability of the resulting reference. Slight changes in the properties ascribed to a mathematical object can result in a shift of reference (...) and this leads to various problems, e.g., it makes inferring knowledge much harder than it is. (shrink)

Health ethics can justify the use of vaccination mandates. However, policies that pressurize parents to vaccinate their children can undermine traditional clinical ethics standards (e.g. autonomy and informed consent). The aim of this paper is to argue that the ethical impact of vaccination mandates can only be determined in the context of the clinical encounter. Public debate on the topic tends to be general in nature and, as a result, issues that require clarification to help sustain the trust of service (...) users are underexamined. In addition, ethical debates are hampered by a toxic dichotomy in the public sphere between those (anti-vaccinators) who claim a move away from parental choice is necessarily a serious ethical violation; and others (often health scientists) who neglect serious consideration of ethical issues. This predicament permits flawed ethical claims to be made, and to remain unchallenged. Despite this, ethical concerns – including those relating to trust and individual freedom – are fundamental to sustaining confidence in vaccination. This has recently been highlighted by the Covid-19 pandemic which made accessing childhood vaccinations harder, leading to a further decline in uptake. The pandemic has also revealed the strength of public feeling towards infection control measures that restrict peoples’ freedoms. In this paper I argue that to minimize the ethical disruption associated with the use of vaccination mandates, it is essential to focus more attention on their impact in the clinic and to accurately identify the drivers of such tensions. (shrink)

Contrary to the assumption of arbitrariness in modern linguistics, sound symbolism, which is the non-arbitrary relationship between sounds and meanings, exists. Sound symbolism, including the “Bouba–Kiki” effect, implies the universality of such relationships; individuals from different cultural and linguistic backgrounds can similarly relate sound-symbolic words to referents, although the extent of these similarities remains to be fully understood. Here, we examined if subjects from different countries could similarly infer the surface texture properties from words that sound-symbolically represent hardness in Japanese. (...) We prepared Japanese sound-symbolic words of which novelty was manipulated by a genetic algorithm. Japanese speakers in Japan and English speakers in both Singapore and the United States rated these words based on surface texture properties, as well as familiarity. The results show that hardness-related words were rated as harder and rougher than softness-related words, regardless of novelty and countries. Multivariate analyses of the ratings classified the hardness-related words along the hardness-softness dimension at over 80% accuracy, regardless of country. Multiple regression analyses revealed that the number of speech sounds /g/ and /k/ predicted the ratings of the surface texture properties in non-Japanese countries, suggesting a systematic relationship between phonetic features of a word and perceptual quality represented by the word across culturally and linguistically diverse samples. (shrink)

Much has been written about the presumed interaction between moral and aesthetic properties in art, about whether moral flaws in a work or its artist can compromise the work’s aesthetic value. In the philosophy of sport, similarly, the beauty of an athlete’s performance may be undermined by moral flaws in the performance itself (e.g., in a case of cheating). Yet to be addressed, however, is a potential analogy between artists and athletes where personal moral flaws failing to register in the (...) work or performance may nonetheless compromise aesthetic response. Along with tracing the conceptual terrain in these debates and drawing on earlier work endorsing pluralism in such matters, I will argue that an athlete’s moral flaws may indeed compromise the aesthetic appeal of their performances, even where such flaws stand apart from those performances. In contrast to creative artists whose presence is immaterial to accessing their work, in the case of performing artists and athletes—since they themselves are the vehicles of their work—it is, and ought to be, harder to avoid having one’s moral response to the person diminish one’s aesthetic response to the work. We want athletes to be moral exemplars, I propose, less because they serve as role models and more because we want to preserve unspoiled the aesthetic rewards they provide. (shrink)

Abstract“Gamification” refers to adding game-like elements to non-game activities so as to encourage participation. Gamification is used in various contexts: apps on phones motivating people to exercise, employers trying to encourage their employees to work harder, social media companies trying to stimulate user engagement, and so on and so forth. Here, I focus on gamification with this property: the game-designer (a company or other organization) creates a “game” in order to encourage the players (the users) to bring about certain (...) outcomes as a side effect of playing the game. The side effect might be good for the user (e.g., improving her health) and/or good for the company or organization behind the game (e.g., advertising their products, increasing their profits, etc.). The “players” of the game may or may not be aware of creating these side effects; and they may or may not approve of/endorse the creation of those side effects. The organizations behind the games, in contrast, are typically directly aiming to create games that have the side effects in question. These aspects of gamification are puzzling and interesting from the point of view of philosophical analyses of agency and responsibility for outcomes. In this paper, I relate these just-mentioned aspects of gamification to some philosophical discussions of responsibility gaps, the ethics of side effects (including the Knobe effect and the doctrine of double effect), and ideas about the relations among different parties’ agency. (shrink)

This monograph will be devoted to a cluster of related issues arising between two formidable bodies of work: between the philosophical works of G.W.F. Hegel (1770-1831) and the very different flavored writings of Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1855). These two thinkers are commonly regarded as polar opposites. Certainly they thought and wrote in altogether different styles, and Kierkegaard frequently gave vent to vigorous anti-Hegelian polemics. Yet ever since I was a graduate student in the late 1950s, Hegel and Kierkegaard have together supplied (...) most of my intellectual nourishment. Superficially the issues between them are obvious. With careful study they come mus less obvious, much harder to pin down, and yet, one sense, much more important than one had supposed. (shrink)

Reconstructs the original Greek version of the confatalia-argument that Cicero attributes to Chrysippus in De fato and misrepresent in crucial ways. Compares this argument with Seneca's discussion of determinism in the Naturales quaestiones. Clarifies that Seneca makes a different distinction from that attested in Cicero's De fato. Argues that problems with interpreting both accounts derive from disregarding terminological distinctions harder to spot in the Latin versions and, related to this, insufficient attention to the ontological distinction between bodies (such as (...) Fate) and predicates (e.g. "what is fated"), which unfortunately does not square well with the modern ontological category "event." Contains some corrections to the author's earlier discussion of the topic in Seneca und die Stoa: Der Platz des Menschen in der Welt, De Gruyter 2006, ch. 3.3.4. (shrink)

*North American Society for Social Philosophy (NASSP) Book Award 2019.* -/- *International Studies Association (ISA) - International Ethics Section Book Award 2021.* -/- Although military mores have relied primarily on just war theory, the ethic of cooperation in warfare (ECW)—between enemies even as they are trying to kill each other—is as central to the practice of warfare and to conceptualization of its morality. Neither game theory nor unilateral moral duties (God-given or otherwise) can explain the explicit language of cooperation in (...) developing and enforcing principles of military ethics and the law of armed conflict. -/- The ethic of cooperation is borne of various motivations: reciprocity, self-preservation, and efficiency, to be sure, but also a sense of warrior honor and concern with human rights. This shared morality can persist despite making it more difficult for one side or the other to win and, unfortunately, its well-meaning motivations often lead to unintended tragic consequences. -/- This book explores three manifestations of this significant yet overlooked ethic of cooperation in warfare: (1) for a “fair fight,” (2) to protect classes of individuals (e.g., non-combatants or prisoners of war), and (3) to end the war quickly. Such cooperation can take unexpected forms, from ad hoc decisions on the battlefield to institutionalization in international law, and is the source of some critical tensions in one of the most significant developments in warfare in recent years: namely, how to handle terrorism or other forms of warfare that lie outside the purview of international law. -/- Each type of ECW raises questions internal to that ethic, such as inconsistencies in the concept of “parity” across different weapons bans, contradictions within the warrior ethic that heavily influence—and therefore confuse—notions of the “fair fight,” the disconnect between what protections a person receives and his responsibility for the war (e.g., political leaders), or the limited decisiveness of outcomes generated by very short wars. -/- Their simultaneous application also generates significant tensions and raises questions about the proper relationship of ECW to the immediate goal of war itself, which is to win, and thus yield either a political settlement or a justicial decision. For example, the ECWs for a “fair fight” and to protect classes of individuals can make it harder to win the war, but even more concerning is that they can also kill more people, which in the latter case contravenes its very purpose. -/- Human history is in some ways the story of trying to concurrently wage and tame war, and the architecture of warfare itself is informed by the ECW, in particular: (a) the political nature of war, (b) the abdication from jus ad bellum judgments in order to concentrate on justice within war (jus in bello), and (c) the ways in which modern nation-states collude to define “legitimacy” in war. -/- The combination of these three features leave questions of justicial right and responsibility for war disturbingly unresolved, it also generates new challenges in a geopolitical context in which cooperative and non-cooperative (e.g. contemporary terrorism) forms of warfare clash. (shrink)

Our culture is conflicted about morally judging and condemning. We can't avoid it altogether, yet many layfolk today are loathe to do it for reasons neither they nor philosophers well understand. Their resistance is often confused (by themselves and by theorists) with some species of antiobjectivism. But unlike a nonobjectivist, most people think that (a) for us to judge and condemn is generally (objectively) morally wrong , yet (b) for God to do so is (objectively) proper, and (c) so too (...) for certain persons in certain relations (e.g., self-condemnation, parental child rearing.) Certainly, religious (e.g., Christian) critics of judging and condemning without doubting the objective truth of their tradition's core moral teachings. Most puzzling is that (a) merely judging and condemning in one's heart may be improper, and (b) someone else with no more evidence or expertise might properly judge and condemn the same action. The answer is in condemning's complex structure of presuppostions. Condemning and judging are acts, and attitudes initiated by the act. Condemnation is motivated by two judgments presumed to justify it, a criticism of a target, and a judgment that the criticism justifies some negative response toward the target. Unlike nonpunitive penalties, punishments are motivated and explained by condemnation. Condemnation is an act of a hostile will, wishing some evil for its target, not (just) as a means to some good. Its root is in damning, an act akin to cursing. It declares a degraded status. The hostility makes it harder to justify condemnation than criticism, and punishment than nonpunitive penalties. Condemning claims objectivity and authority. It involves reflexive evaluation, regarding itself justified, approving its hostile feelings toward the target. Condemners presume themselves entitled to sit in judgment, pass judgment, and cast the condemned down. Those presumptions inhere in sitting in judgment, assuming jurisdiction. Unlike mathematical or scientific judgments, passing moral judgment seems to be a political act subject to extraepistemic constraints. "Who are you to judge?" may properly challenge your right to pass judgment. (shrink)

In Section 1, we questioned the evidence for iteration of tenses, even with abstraction. To permit abstraction would in any case risk neutralizing our distinction between tensed and untensed sentences. Sequence of tense phenomena, far from supporting iteration, were incompatible with it. Instead, we argued, tense always retains its full deictic character; tenses never have scope over each other. The future modal WILL is exceptional (Section 2), but abstraction is not required to deal with this.An important suggestion, first made in (...) Section 1 and developed further in Section 3, would restrict quantification induced by the interpretation of Past to a domain determined by pragmatic factors. When Past serves as a reference time, e.g. when it forms part of would, as inSam believed that he would be in BostonJames bought a stamp that would be priceless then a previous occurrence of Past serves to define the domain relevant to the quantificational element of Past. Without semantic binding or reference, the two cases of Past in such sentences will thus be satisfied by the same interval in the past.The extension of this idea in Section 3, permits an account of the supposed incompleteness of the past tense without invoking a hidden THEN in e.g. I turned the lights off. In this case, restriction of the relevant domain does not proceed via an earlier occurrence of Past but depends solely on discourse factors.In Section 4, the analysis of have given in Part I is modified to introduce an element of ‘pastness’. The relevant sub-interval must be non-final-and perhaps need not even be a sub-interval of the evaluation interval itself. Empirically necessary, this change makes the incompatibility of Pres,have and a definite adverb like at 6 o'clock in a single sentence even harder to explain semantically. However, the vague restrictions on domain imposed by the present tense and relevant to the sub-interval required by an embedded have below it seem clearly pragmatically incompatible with the explicit restriction of that same interval to a very specific interval in the past — a restriction which, we argue, is imposed by a definite time adverb.Thus, Part II represents a consistent, though entirely informal plea for the embedding of the semantics of Part I in a framework in which pragmatic considerations can interact freely with the semantics, to restrict the domains within which quantification is permitted. It is in effect a plea for the introduction of partial models along the lines suggested by Barwise and Perry (1981). The advantages of the basic distinctions between tense, aspect and adverbs introduced in Part I would, we have suggested in the second part, be yet more obvious in such a framework. Formalization in a system of partial models must await further work. (shrink)

Philosophers who have turned their thoughts to the subject of education have most often concerned themselves with the construction of very abstract models of cognition by means of which the activities of teaching and learning are to be understood. Such attention as they have given to the subject matter of instruction has tended to be dominated by a concern with the morally or practically beneficial effects to be expected from a child’s acquisition of a certain kind of knowledge. It would (...) appear, too, that the decisive index used in assessing the value of such knowledge has often been the degree to which it approximated to an antecedently established archetype of knowledge. While the primary emphasis that has been given to these matters by Plato and by most of the modern philosophers of education from Locke to Dewey is understandable and has led to the elaboration of important theses in general epistemology, there are good reasons for thinking that this commentary needs to be more broadly based than it has often been in the past. More specifically, it will need to be informed by a better understanding of the distinctive character of the several subjects of instruction. Whatever contribution general epistemology may be able to make to the understanding of teaching and learning, its theses clearly stand in need of the kind of amplification that can come only from a survey of the particular types of knowledge to which the divisions of academic subject-matter correspond. In the absence of such a survey, there will be a very strong tendency for a single type of knowledge to be treated as the perfect exemplification of the general model of knowledge produced by our epistemology and for other subjects to be regarded simply as inferior approximations to that epistemic standard which will itself very likely become harder and harder to distinguish from its paradigm instance. What I am suggesting then is that the philosophy of education needs to orient itself to a much greater degree than it has previously done on the various ‘philosophies of’, e. g. the philosophies of science, of history and the social sciences, of law, and of art, which have come to occupy such an important place in contemporary philosophy. My special concern in this paper will be to argue that much discussion of the humanities and of their place within the instructional programs of the schools could benefit from work that has recently been done in the philosophy of language and in the philosophy of history and the social sciences. My guiding assumption which I will try to make as plausible as I can is that a consideration of the distinctive logical and conceptual features of the humanities does not have a merely theoretical interest but offers important clues to the nature of the educational and broadly moral importance which we traditionally impute to these studies. (shrink)

In “Hume and Julius Caesar,” G.E.M. Anscombe argues that some historical claims, such as “Julius Caesar was assassinated,” serve as touchstones for historical knowledge. Only Cartesian doubt can call them into question. I examine her reasons for thinking that the discipline of history must be grounded in claims that it is powerless to discredit. I argue that she is right to recognize that some historical claims are harder to dislodge than others, but wrong to contend that any are invulnerable (...) to non-Cartesian doubt. (shrink)

Now in its fourth edition, Rational Diagnosis and Treatment: Evidence-Based Clinical Decision - Making is a unique book to look at evidence-based medicine and the difficulty of applying evidence from group studies to individual patients._ The book analyses the successive stages of the decision process and deals with topics such as the examination of the patient,_the reliability of clinical data, the logic of diagnosis, the fallacies of uncontrolled therapeutic experience and the need for randomised clinical trials and meta-analyses. It is (...) the main theme of the book that, whenever possible, clinical decisions must be based on the evidence from clinical research, but the authors also explain the pitfalls of such research and the problems involved in applying evidence from groups of patients to the individual patient._ For this new edition, the sections on placebo and meta-analysis and on alternative medicine have been thoroughly updated, and there is more focus on insufficient reporting of harms of interventions. The sections on different research designs describe advantages and limitations, and the increased medicalisation and the effects of cancer screening on health people are noted. A section on academic freedom when clinicians collaborate with industry and ghost authors is added._ This essential reference work integrates the science and statistical approach of evidence-based medicine with the art and humanism of medical practice; distinguishing between data, sets of data, knowledge and wisdom, and their application. Such an intellectually challenging book is ideal for both medical students and doctors who require theoretical and practical clinical skills to help ensure that they apply theory in practice. (shrink)

One of the insights of dynamic semantics in its various guises (Kamp 1981, Heim 1982, Groenendijk & Stokhof 1991, Kamp & Reyle 1993 among many others) is that interpretation is sensitive to left-to-right order. Is order sensitivity, particularly the default left-to-right order of evaluation, a property of particular meanings of certain lexical items (e.g., dynamically interpreted conjunction) or is it a more general feature of meaning composition? If it is a more general feature of meaning composition, is it a processing (...) ‘preference’ or should it be captured as a ‘harder’ constraint on the type of meanings and operations over meanings involved in natural language interpretation? This squib draws attention to the symmetrical A-too B-too construction (found in a variety of languages, e.g., Hungarian, Japanese, Romanian, Russian) in this context. It argues that any semantic analysis of its main ‘symmetrical-meaning’ characteristic should also allow for subtler interactions between this construction and items that are clearly sensitive to evaluation-order effects, e.g., anaphoric adjectives like next and other. We suggest that the notion of postsupposition embedded in a broader dynamic framework is better able to account for both the symmetric nature of this construction, its non-symmetric variant A-too, and its interaction with items that are evaluation-order sensitive. We briefly compare this proposal with a couple of possible alternative accounts. (shrink)

Historical analysis and policy making often require counterfactual thought experiments that isolate hypothesized causes from a vast array of historical possibilities. However, a core precept of Jervis's “systems thinking” is that causes are so interconnected that the historian can only with great difficulty imagine causation by subtracting all variables but one. Prediction, according to Jervis, is even more problematic: The more sensitive an event is to initial conditions (e.g., butterfly effects), the harder it is to derive accurate forecasts. Nevertheless, (...) if awareness of system effects can help forecasters better calibrate their probability estimates of whether or not certain events will come to pass, systems thinkers who are pessimistic about prediction are diluting their confidence too much. The challenge is a meta-cognitive one: thinking systematically about when to engage in systems thinking; and weighing the costs and benefits of using simple or complex heuristics in policy environments that can shift suddenly from quiescence to turbulence. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 63.4 (2002) 599-617 [Access article in PDF] Thinking Geometrically in Pierre-Daniel Huet's Demonstratio evangelica (1679) April G. Shelford Sometime after 1679, Pierre-Daniel Huet (1630-1721) indulged an author's vanity by comparing his Demonstratio evangelica with works whose authors are far better known today. He recorded his judgments on a scrap of paper. 1First, he contrasted the Demonstratio to Antoine Arnauld's Les nouveaux élémens de (...) géometrie (1664). While Arnauld had assumed that all the principles of geometry were true and all geometrical demonstrations certain, and had considered religious questions not amenable to methodical demonstration, Huet noted, "I made clear the contrary by proving religion through a methodical sequence of propositions similar to those one finds in geometry." For Arnauld religious belief fell into the class of things better proven through a series of mutually reinforcing propositions than through proofs modeled on geometry; Huet had actually accomplished the latter. Arnauld did not require geometric proofs in religious works; Huet wrote the Demonstratio "to satisfy those who do." Indeed, Arnauld forbade such proofs, "but I permitted them... and I proposed something to satisfy those who do [demand them]."Huet then considered Blaise Pascal's Pensées (1670). Pascal had also rejected demonstration in proving religious truths, Huet noted, opting instead for "moral proofs, which are directed more to the heart than to the mind. In other words he desired to work harder at moving and disposing the heart than at convincing and persuading the intellect." Apparently, "M. Pascal did not believe that one could prove the truth of the Christian religion by geometric proofs; much less that he had any hope of doing so." [End Page 599]Huet's jottings precisely situate the Demonstratio evangelica (1679)between the claims of Cartesian rationalism and Pascal's fideism and religion of the heart, inviting us to take another look at an imperfectly understood work. Scholarly treatment of the Demonstratio has generally been cursory or partial because it has been considered less for its own merits than for how it fits into larger research agendas. 2 Some scholars have offered important insights but either do not develop them or do not consider the Demonstratio in a sufficiently broad context. 3 A consensus on the Demonstratio's general thrust thus masks puzzling questions. Everyone acknowledges, for example, that Huet's apologetic responded to Baruch Spinoza's Tractatus theologico-politicus (1670). Like other Christian apologists, he had to maintain "the Mosaic authorship" that was "the supposed guarantee of the truth of the text," 4 devoting "long chapters to the authenticity of the books of the Old Testament." 5 Yet Huet began the Demonstratio with an assault on geometrical knowledge and an epistemological discussion—an odd place to begin refuting the Tractatus. 6 Why? The question deserves a good answer, as Huet was a scholar of international reputation, and his contemporaries judged the Demonstratio an important work. 7More important for us, the evolution of the Demonstratio superbly reflects a vanished intellectual world and scholarly culture and in fact records change [End Page 600] in that world over four decades. Its genesis was the rash promise of a young man inspired by the possibilities of geometry and aspiring to recognition in the Republic of Letters, but before fulfilling that promise Huet developed a lively interest in such diverse fields as biblical criticism and natural philosophy, and he would apply the insights gained there in his apologetic. 8 A central question confronting Huet and his contemporaries was how to achieve certainty in matters religious, historical, and scientific. 9 The Demonstratio reveals Huet's conclusion that certainty in all three was profoundly interrelated. Finally, he composed the Demonstratio during the 1670s, having grasped with much alarm the consequences of the spread of Cartesianism. Thus, the Demonstratio is an intellectual biography not just of the author but of an era.Of course, Huet had to contend with Spinoza's challenge to Mosaic authorship, which fatally undermined the historical certainty of the Bible, but he also wrote... (shrink)

After briefly reviewing the standard set-theoretic resolutions of the Burali-Forti paradox, we examine how the paradox arises in set theory formalized with plural quantifiers. A significant choice emerges between the desirable unrestricted availability of ordinals to represent well-orderings and the sensibility of attempting to refer to ‘absolutely all ordinals’ or ‘absolutely all well-orderings’. This choice is obscured by standard set theories, which rely on type distinctions which are obliterated in the setting with plurals. Zermelo's attempt ( 1930 ) to secure (...) ordinal representability of arbitrary well-orderings through relativization of quantification to set-theoretic models is reviewed and found wanting. The natural modal-structural recasting provides, it is claimed, a good repair. (shrink)

Anthropologists have tended to treat dreams as private fantasies arising from restless libidos struggling with reality. In this view, the dreamer is a victim of what she or he does not want, the intentions of the dreamer, and dreamed of, are often confused or illusory, and what happens in the dream is subj ect to a more primary, more objective, waking reality.The Barok people of New Ireland, Papua New Guinea, define dreams as both sleeping and waking experiences. Their dreams are (...) expressions of spiritually powerful persons who deal with a spiritual reality.In waking and real, but substantially dreamlike experiences such as one I describe in this paper, the desires and intents of all involved were perceived as wild possibilities. In the three sleeping dreams that I describe, the desires and intents of the dreamers were true, clearly expressed, and effective in creating or foretelling reality.Describing such subjective and willful experiences entails personal and professional risk. But toward understanding what happened, I undertake this in personally revealing terms, and I recommend Barok and other Native perspectives for the light they shed on dreams and reality.Social science has, for the most part, left dream analysis to the psychologists, and dreaming experiences to "the natives.” People educated in modern European traditions, and especially in academe, learn to not talk plainly or too much about their more subjective experiences or awarenesses, e.g, sex, emotions, and dreams. This applies not only to our lives as fieldworkers, but to our private lives in Western culture.Even recent publications1 still define dreams as a softer and more subjective, or even false, too private, in contrast to the harder and more objective, true reality of waking life (see Tedlock 1987). From this perspective, the accepted truth of there being an objective, socially defined, wakeful reality is not seriously called into question.Fieldwork experiences have shown me different distinctions between dreaming and not‐dreaming realities. I have learned to both expect and get more from dreams. I did not seek nor intentionally precipitate these experiences. They were a congruent part of my learning during four different periods of fieldwork.These experiences suggest a link between the ambiguity of intent in western style, non‐Native2 dreamers, and a lack of creative power. This contrasts with the clarity in the intent of Native style dreamers, and a real creative power.This link short‐circuits conventional academic distinctions between dreaming and waking experiences. For this reason, people like myself have not paid attention to these kinds of field experiences, much less written them up. We fear being disbelieved and discredited. Treating dreams on a comparable footing with objective reality is tantamount to "going native.”3 As Katherine Ewing has stated it, the problem is how to believe the Native meaning of dreams in defiance of the taboo against anthropologists' accepting the "temptation to believe" that "the subjects of one's research actually know something about the human condition and an encompassing 'reality'"(Ewing 1994:572).The field experiences I describe here have made me a believer of both the Native version of what happened, and the truth of there being an encompassing (Native) reality.4 They also convinced me of the necessity of trying to deal openly with what I know of the internal, private, libidinous, and willful stuff that is a part of these dreaming experiences. I reveal my own intent, desires, and needs, in both personal and professional terms, in order to lay some of the cards on the table, in order to look at them from both Native and non‐Native perspectives on what happened.I have learned that the difference between dreams and reality is not what it has been made out to be. On the one hand, the conventional definition of reality too strongly limits my ability to talk about my subjective experiences of it. On the other hand, the conventional definition of dreams does not make enough sense of my real experiences.By describing the real, non‐dreaming experience in which my subjective feelings are centered, the problematic issues of my own wakeful intent as a person and as an anthropologist are centered. This allows comparison of what is supposedly the nature of waking reality with what I experienced in the three sleeping dreams (hereafter "sleepdreams") which follow.The first three sleepdreams were experienced when I was living among Barok people at New Ireland, PNG, between 1979 and 1985. The fourth occured at Taumako, Solomon Islands, in 1993. (shrink)