Nobody in this debate questions the point that neuroeconomics remains full of potential, and little else as yet. If so, that really is progress of sorts. I was getting afraid that we would have to open nominations for the Captain Ahab Award for obsessive work on the promotion of neuroeconomics.

(Series copy) The new Oxford Readings in Feminism series maps the dramatic influence of feminist theory on every branch of academic knowledge. Offering feminist perspectives on disciplines from history to science, each book assembles the most important articles written on its field in the last ten to fifteen years. Old stereotypes are challenged and traditional attitudes upset in these lively-- and sometimes controversial--volumes, all of which are edited by feminists prominent in their particular field. Comprehensive, accessible, and intellectually daring, the (...) Oxford Readings in Feminism series is vital reading for anyone interested in the effects of feminist ideas within the academy. Can science be gender-neutral? In recent years, feminist critics have raised troubling questions about the practice and goals of traditional science, demonstrating the existence of a pervasive bias in the ways in which scientists conduct and discuss their work. This exciting volume gathers seventeen essays--by sociologists, scientists, historians, and philosophers--of seminal significance in the emerging field of feminist science studies. Analyzing topics from the stereotype of the "Man of Reason" to the "romantic" language of reproductive biology, these fascinating essays challenge readers to take a fresh look at the limitations--and possibilities--of scientific knowledge. (shrink)

This article applies Hilary Putnam’s theory of internal realism to the issue of religious plurality. The result of this application – ‘internalist pluralism’ – constitutes a paradigm shift within the Philosophy of Religion. Moreover, internalist pluralism succeeds in avoiding the major difficulties faced by John Hick’s famous theory of religious pluralism, which views God, or ‘the Real,’ as the noumenon lying behind diverse religious phenomena. In side-stepping the difficulties besetting Hick’s revolutionary Kantian approach, without succumbing to William Alston’s critique of (...) conceptual-scheme dependence, internalist pluralism provides a solution to significant theoretical problems, while doing so in a manner that is respectful of cultural diversity and religious sensitivities. (shrink)

Welfarism is the view that morality is centrally concerned with the welfare or well-being of individuals. The division between welfarist and non-welfarist approaches underlies many important disagreements in ethics, but welfarism is neither consistently defined nor well understood. I survey the philosophical work on welfarism, and I offer a suggestion about how the view can be characterized and how it can be embedded in various kinds of moral theory. I also identify welfarism's major rivals, and its major attractions and weaknesses.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Virtues of Animals in Seventeenth-Century ThoughtPeter HarrisonDiscussions about animals—their purpose, their minds or souls, their interior operations, our duties towards them—have always played a role in human self-understanding. At no time, however, except perhaps our own, have such concerns sparked the magnitude of debate which took place during the course of the seventeenth century. The agenda had been set in the late 1500s by Montaigne, who had made (...) the remarkable (if somewhat rhetorical) claim that animals were both moral and rational, and moreover, more moral and rational than humans. In the century which followed, Descartes, not to be outdone, put forward the even more contentious counter-proposal that animals were not only neither rational nor moral, but that they were not even conscious. The Cartesian hypothesis fueled a debate which continued until well into the eighteenth century. 1 While in recent years much attention has been given to issues of animal consciousness and cognition in seventeenth-century thought, the related question of the moral capabilities of animals has been by comparison neglected. In this paper I shall explore the converse side of the better known arguments about the rational capabilities of the beasts, focusing on seventeenth-century discussions concerning the behaviors and passions of the beasts and the extent to which animals were thought to participate in the moral universe of human beings.I. During the first sixteen hundred years of the common era, those thinkers who directed their attention to the natural world had tended to be preoccupied neither with questions of how animals came into being nor with the direct [End Page 463] causes of their various operations but rather with the question of why they existed at all. Almost without exception responses to this question were variations on a single theme: animals had been placed in the world to provide for the physical needs of human beings. 2 While this response proved to be satisfactory in general terms, there were acknowledged deficiencies. Many living things seemed to have been rather extravagantly designed for their putative purpose. Others seemed blatantly to contradict it. Why were our meat supplies, for example, not more conveniently presented, like the fabled Scythian lamb which grew on a tree? Why was it that a significant number of creatures appeared to be useless or even downright harmful to those whom they were designed to serve? And why, finally, were human beings created such that they were dependent upon lesser creatures for their survival?Responses to these difficulties generally took one of three forms, each of which was influential throughout the Middle Ages and beyond. First, it could be asserted that as a result of the Fall, human beings had forfeited their dominion over the creatures, many of which now served as instruments for their punishment and correction. Augustine observed that “there are many things, such as fire, frost, wild beasts and so forth, which do not suit but injure this thin-blooded and frail mortality of our flesh, which is at present under just punishment.” 3 In the seventeenth century this view still attracted many supporters. Thus Godfrey Goodman, in The Fall of Man (1616), wrote that “all the creatures, forsaking their first and naturall use, did serve for mans punishment, and rebelled against him.” 4Second, an appeal could be made to the Platonic principle of plenitude and the related idea of the chain of being. The principle of plenitude taught that more is better and that variety is preferable to uniformity. God, wrote the third-century Christian apologist Lactantius, “wished to display His providence and power by a wonderful variety of many things.” 5 It followed that all existing things could be ranged in a vast scale from non-existence to God himself, with each link in the chain separated from its neighbor by a small difference. Again, this view found many adherents in the early modern period. Thomas Robinson declared that “it was necessary that there shou’d be a variety of Natures, and [End Page 464] different Degrees of Life and Perfection.” Thus “every Creature even of the lowest Degree of Life, is Good and Perfect in its Kind.” 6 Important for our... (shrink)

In this paper we examine to what extent the lengths of the links in an animated articulated figure can be changed without the viewer being aware of the change. This is investigated in terms of a framework that emphasizes the role of attention in visual perception. We conducted a set of five experiments to establish bounds for the sen-sitivity to changes in length as a function of several parameters and the amount of attention available. We found that while length changes (...) of 3% can be perceived when the relevant links are given full attention, changes of over 20% can go unnoticed when attention is not focused in this way. These results provide general guidelines for algorithms that produce or process character motion data and also bring to light some of the potential gains that stand to be achieved with attention-based algorithms. (shrink)

A philosophical tradition is in part identified by its more durable controversies. The British tradition in moral philosophy running, roughly, from Hobbes to the present day, involves several fine examples of the type—the plausibility or otherwise of the compatibilist view of free will, the case for and against utilitarianism, and perhaps above all the implications of the fact/value distinction. It is always pleasing to find some new variation on such themes; you have a comforting sense of the inherent permanence of (...) this corner of the intellectual universe. Thus R. G. Swinburne's paper ‘The Objectivity of Morality’ is much to be welcomed as a contribution to a well-matured debate. Even more, perhaps, it is welcome on account of its considerable clarity. But clarity often comes at a high price, and the price in this case is too high. By setting out his version of the objectivist position with such precision and lack of ambiguity Professor Swinburne has made its difficulties and weaknesses accessible to all but the meanest intellect. (shrink)

Cases involving certain kinds of manipulation seem to challenge compatibilism about responsibility-grounding free will. To deal with such cases many compatibilists give what has become known as a ‘soft line’ reply. In this paper I present a challenge to the soft line reply. I argue that any relevant case involving manipulation—and to which a compatibilist might wish to give a soft line reply—can be transformed into one supporting a degree of moral responsibility through the addition of libertarian elements (such as (...) alternative possibilities of a kind unavailable under determinism and executive control of the sort commonly associated with agent-causation). From a compatibilist’s perspective the subtraction of libertarian elements should make no difference to any assessment of the agent’s responsibility. The compatibilist should therefore judge the agent morally responsible after the removal of the libertarian elements. Yet removal of the libertarian elements returns the case to its original form and thus what started out as a soft line has now collapsed into a hard line reply. Various ways of resisting my argument are considered, but each is shown to carry important burdens. (shrink)

Libertarians make indeterminism a requirement of free will. But many argue that indeterminism is destructive of free will because it reduces an agent’s control. This paper argues that such concerns are misguided. Indeterminism, at least as it is located by plausible Libertarian views, poses no threat to an agent’s control, nor does it pose any other kind of threat.

Cases involving clandestine manipulation pose a significant challenge to compatibilist conceptions of free will. But compatibilists often argue that they are not alone and that modest libertarian conceptions of free will are also susceptible to the problem. I take issue with this claim. I argue that agent-causal libertarian views are not susceptible to the problem. I then argue that the compatibilist cannot cite a relevant difference between agent-causal libertarian views and modest libertarian views. Therefore from a compatibilist's perspective modest libertarian (...) views are impervious to the problem of clandestine manipulation. (shrink)

CONTENTS: Introduction On the Supposed Necessity of Certain Metaphysical Problems The Subjective Synthesis Synthesis The Three Great Syntheses The Human ...

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 63.2 (2002) 239-259 [Access article in PDF] Original Sin and the Problem of Knowledge in Early Modern Europe Peter Harrison It is not the philosophy received from Adam that teaches these things; it is that received from the serpent; for since Original Sin, the mind of man is quite pagan. It is this philosophy that, together with the errors of the senses, (...) made men adore the sun, and that today is still the universal cause of the disorder of men's minds and the corruption of men's hearts. Nicolas Malebranche 1In his Éloge du Pere Malebranche, delivered to the Parisian Academy of Sciences on 22 April 1716, Bernard Fontenelle recounted the story of Nicolas Malebranche's somewhat controversial conversion to Cartesianism. When friends and colleagues had taken him to task over his new-found commitment to the doctrines of Descartes, Malebranche responded with this question: "Did Adam have the perfect science?" It was agreed that this was the common view. Malebranche responded that he, too, aspired to the perfect science, and that his quest for this knowledge could not be satisfied by following the historical or critical pursuits of his colleagues, but by adopting the procedures set out by Descartes. 2 For Malebranche, the Cartesian method offered a means of overcoming the limitations of the fallen intellectual faculties of Adam's seventeenth-century descendents, and thus of restoring the fabled encyclopedic knowledge of the first man. [End Page 239]Aspirations to recover the science of Adam provided a common motivation for a number of early-modern philosophical projects. Earlier in the seventeenth century Francis Bacon had famously observed in his Novum Organum (1620) that the human dominion over nature which Adam had lost at the Fall could be restored in some measure by the sciences: "For man by the fall fell at the same time from this state of innocency and from his dominion over creation." The moral losses of the human race were to be restored in some measure by "religion and faith"; Adam's lost knowledge, and the dominion which it made possible, by "arts and sciences." 3 Bacon's vision of a reconstructed knowledge of nature during the period which he regarded (somewhat prematurely) as "the last times" clearly played an important role in legitimizing the goals and methods of the new natural philosophy. Indeed the program of the Royal Society of London from its inception in 1660 explicitly relied upon a Baconian rhetoric of the restoration of that human knowledge and dominion over nature which Adam had once enjoyed.While historians such as Charles Webster have alluded to the ways in which the myth of an original perfect philosophy motivated projects for the advancement of learning in a rather general way, little attention has been paid to the manner in which early-modern views of the nature of the original fall from knowledge directly informed the methods of the new sciences, determined the scope of their enquiry, and provided ammunition for use against traditional learning. 4 Moreover, most commentators, following Webster's lead, have restricted their attention to Francis Bacon, and to the Baconian aspirations of subsequent reformers of knowledge in seventeenth-century England. In this paper I shall suggest that the biblical narrative of the Fall played a far more direct role in the development of early modern knowledge—both in England and on the Continent—than has often been assumed, and that competing strategies for the advancement of knowledge in the seventeenth century were closely related to different assessments of the Fall and of its impact upon the human mind. While confirmation of this claim would require a more comprehensive study than space here permits, this paper will set out a number of preliminary considerations which establish the plausibility of such a thesis, showing how the biblical narrative of the Fall directly informed the epistemological projects of the seventeenth century, and prompted various rationalist and empiricist solutions. [End Page 240] The Mind of Adam There was an almost universal consensus in the sixteenth... (shrink)

Brown (advanced graduate student, Irish-Scottish studies) and Harrison (archaeologist, Dublin Excavations Publication project) were also the organizers of the graduate student conference at Trinity College in 1999, from which these papers come. Written by young academics, and somewhat uneven in qual.

Lapsing into nonsense is an occupational hazard of philosophy. But, unless they’ve been drinking, the sort of nonsense that philosophers are liable to lapse into is (usually) not pure gibberish—rather, it’s nonsense that often has the illusion of making sense. Such nonsense is sometimes accompanied by what Gareth Evans (1982) called “illusions of thought”: cognitive events that seem to have content, but don’t. In this paper we defend the existence of deceptive nonsense and illusions of thought by (i) providing positive (...) arguments for their existence, (ii) a framework for thinking about them, and (iii) responses to some important arguments against them. (shrink)

Dialogue about the moral permissibility of sex reassignment surgery (SRS) in Catholic health care has recently received considerable attention. In an effort to further this discussion and bring clarity to the debate, the author uses Pope St. John Paul II’s robust theological and philosophical anthropology to evaluate the morality of SRS and enter dialogue with current arguments that suggest SRS is morally licit. The author argues that John Paul II’s anthropology renders SRS morally illicit. Moreover, current arguments supporting SRS rely (...) on an anthropology of body–soul dualism. This conclusion suggests that future arguments for the permissibility of SRS in Catholic health care will always be invalid if they fail to uphold the body–soul unity of the person. (shrink)

According to a long-standing narrative of Western modernity science is one of the main drivers of secularization. Science is said to have generated challenges to core religious beliefs and to have provided an alternative, rational way of looking at the world. This narrative typically relies on progressive and teleological understandings of history, and commitment to some version of an ongoing struggle between science and religion. By way of contrast, recent theories of secularization, such as that of Charles Taylor, have suggested (...) that the role of science in secularization has been greatly exaggerated. This article also offers a critique of the standard “science causes secularization” story. But in contrast to other critiques of this kind, it suggests that science nonetheless has a significant role in secularization – one that can be maintained without a commitment to a crude progressivist history or a narrative of science-religion conflict. (shrink)

As a result of thinking (pace Tarski, wrongly) that it is propositions, not sentences, that are true or false, it has been supposed (also wrongly) that propositions such as that ‘Snow is white’ is true if and only if snow is white are necessarily true. But changing the rules for the use of the words in a sentence has no effect on the truth of the proposition, only on what proposition it formulates. Many similar statements, e.g., that ‘plus’ does not (...) mean plus, are only pragmatically contradictory: if this were true, it would be impossible to say so in these words. One should distinguish between sentences that express necessary truths, and sentences that necessarily express truths. It follows that many well known accounts of necessity are wrong, that the truth of an analytic proposition does not follow from the definitions of the words in the sentence that expresses it, that it is not helpful to define meaning in terms of truth, that truth is not relative to language, and that conventionalism is false. This paper is a move in the direction of establishing the eternity of truth. (shrink)

The claim that moral responsibility requires relevant alternative possibilities is encapsulated by the following principle: PAP: A person is morally responsible for what he has done only if he could have done otherwise. In 1969 Harry Frankfurt devised what purported to be a counterexample to PAP: Suppose someone, Black, let us say, wants Jones to perform a certain action. Black is prepared to go to considerable lengths to get his way, but he prefers to avoid showing his hand unnecessarily. So (...) he waits until Jones is about to make up his mind what to do, and he does nothing unless it is clear to him that Jones is going to decide to do something other than what he, Black, wants him to do. If it does become clear that Jones is going to decide to do something else, Black takes effective steps to ensure that Jones decides to do, and that he does do, what he, Black, wants him to do. Whatever Jones's initial preferences and inclinations, then, Black will have his way. . . . Now suppose that Black never has to show his hand because Jones, for reasons of his own, decides to perform and does perform the very action Black wants him to perform. In that case, it seems clear, Jones will bear precisely the same moral responsibility for what he does as he would have borne if Black had not been ready to take steps to ensure that he do it. (shrink)

This article reviews three basic ways in which the relationship between Abrahamic religion and science has been construed: as fundamentally antagonistic; as non‐antagonistically incommensurable; and as complementary. Unfortunately, while each construal seems to offer benefits to the religious believer, none, as the article demonstrates, is without considerable cost.

This book reflects on the variety of ways in which mourning affects political and social life. Through the narrative of the contributors, the book demonstrates how mourning is intertwined with politics and how politics involves a struggle over which losses and whose lives can, or should, be mourned.

Despite acknowledging that musicality evolved to serve multiple adaptive functions in human evolution, Savage et al. promote social bonding to an overarching super-function. Yet, no unifying neurobiological framework is offered. We propose that oxytocin constitutes a socio-allostatic agent whose modulation of sensing, learning, prediction, and behavioral responses with reference to the physical and social environment facilitates music's social bonding effects.

The story of the preceding article continues….