The interventionist account of causal explanation, in the version presented by Jim Woodward, has been recently claimed capable of buttressing the widely felt—though poorly understood—hunch that high-level, relatively abstract explanations, of the sort provided by sciences like biology, psychology and economics, are in some cases explanatorily optimal. It is the aim of this paper to show that this is mistaken. Due to a lack of effective constraints on the causal variables at the heart of the interventionist causal-explanatory scheme, as presently (...) formulated it is either unable to prefer high-level explanations to low, or systematically overshoots, recommending explanations at so high of a level as to be virtually vacuous. (shrink)

Examines the issues of self (including gender), truth, and transcendence in classical Chinese and Western philosophy.

In recent years, a number of realist thinkers have charged much contemporary political theory with being idealistic and moralistic. While the basic features of the realist counter-movement are reasonably well understood, realism is still considered a critical, primarily negative creed which fails to offer a positive, alternative way of thinking normatively about politics. Aiming to counteract this general perception, in this article I draw on Bernard Williams’s claims about how to construct a politically coherent conception of liberty from the non-political (...) value of freedom. I do this because Williams’s argument provides an illuminating example of the distinctive nature of realist political thinking and its attractions. I argue that Williams’s account of realist political thinking challenges the orthodox moralist claim that normative political arguments must be guided by an ideal ethical theory. I then spell out the repercussions Williams’s claims about the significance of political opposition and non-mor... (shrink)

Many bodily sensations are connected quite closely with specific actions: itches with scratching, for example, and hunger with eating. Indeed, these connections have the feel of conceptual connections. With the exception of D. M. Armstrong, philosophers have largely neglected this aspect of bodily sensations. In this paper, I propose a theory of bodily sensations that explains these connections. The theory ascribes intentional content to bodily sensations but not, strictly speaking, representational content. Rather, the content of these sensations is an imperative: (...) in the case of itches, 'Scratch!' The view avoids non-intentional qualia and hence accords with what could be called, generalizing Lycan slightly, the 'hegemony of intentionality'. (shrink)

The article proposes a framework for the analysis of identity as produced in linguistic interaction, based on the following principles: identity is the product rather than the source of linguistic and other semiotic practices and therefore is a social and cultural rather than primarily internal psychological phenomenon; identities encompass macro-level demographic categories, temporary and interactionally specific stances and participant roles, and local, ethnographically emergent cultural positions; identities may be linguistically indexed through labels, implicatures, stances, styles, or linguistic structures and systems; (...) identities are relationally constructed through several, often overlapping, aspects of the relationship between self and other, including similarity/difference, genuineness/artifice and authority/ delegitimacy; and identity may be in part intentional, in part habitual and less than fully conscious, in part an outcome of interactional negotiation, in part a construct of others’ perceptions and representations, and in part an outcome of larger ideological processes and structures. The principles are illustrated through examination of a variety of linguistic interactions. (shrink)

One of the most basic functions of human language is to convey who did what to whom. In the world's languages, the order of these three constituents (subject [S], verb [V], and object [O]) is uneven, with SOV and SVO being most common. Recent experiments using experimentally elicited pantomime provide a possible explanation of the prevalence of SOV, but extant explanations for the prevalence of SVO could benefit from further empirical support. Here, we test whether SVO might emerge because (a) (...) SOV is not well suited for describing reversible events (a woman pushing a boy) and (b) pressures to be efficient and mention subjects before objects conspire to rule out many other alternatives. We tested this by asking participants to describe reversible and non‐reversible events in pantomime, and we instructed some participants to be consistent in the form of their gestures and to teach them to the experimenter. These manipulations led to the emergence of SVO in speakers of both English (SVO) and Turkish (SOV). (shrink)

Despite Spinoza’s prominence in Joyce’s Ulysses, almost nothing in the Joyce Industry’s hundred years has been written about him. My first section reviews three exceptions to this trend, which view the character Leopold Bloom as modeled on Spinoza’s (1) life, (2) redefinition of prophecy, and (3) the “attribute” of thought thinking thought. My second section follows a fourth Joycean to the Marxist Antonio Negri’s essay on Spinozist freedom and Joyce, from which I derive a fourth figure of Bloom as (4) (...) a liberating prosthesis for infinite democracy. And my final section applies my previous interpretation of Spinoza’s “intuition” as poetry to Ulysses, interpreted as an epic prose poem where Joyce as a Spinozist God poly-conjugationally persecutes a poly-subjugated Bloom, including with pervasive antisemitism, thus making Ulysses more satirical Inferno than happy Divine Comedy. However, strategically channeling Spinoza and his philosophy more powerfully into Bloom renders him an ethically-politically Stoic hero, defiantly prophesizing a democratization of Joycean conjugation, from persecuting poly-subjugated Others to joyful self-conjugating in search of radical democracy and just peace. (shrink)

Journal of Applied Philosophy, EarlyView.

Fertility clinicians participate in non-sexual reproductive projects by providing assisted reproductive technology (ART) to those hoping to reproduce, in support of their reproductive goals. In most countries where ART is available, the state regulates ART as a form of medical treatment. The predominant position in the reproductive rights literature frames the clinician’s role as medical technician, and the state as a third party with limited rights to interfere. These roles broadly align with established functions of clinician and state in Western (...) liberal democracies, where doctors have duties to provide safe, beneficial and legal healthcare to all who seek it. Recognised state responsibilities include safeguarding equitable access to medical services and protecting and promoting reproductive liberty.I argue against this normative moral framing of clinician and state involvement in non-sexual reproduction, suggesting that clinician and state join the non-sexual reproductive project at the point of triggering conception. Begetting a child is more than just the provision and regulation of healthcare; it generates rights and confers responsibilities on all who join this morally significant project. All who collaborate have the right to join or refuse to join the project. I suggest this is intuitively understood in the sexual realm, but not in the non-sexual realm. My key substantive claim is that non-sexual reproduction is a pluralist pursuit that morally implicates more than the genetic and gestational contributors. I find that while the moral basis of a clinician or the state’s right to refuse to join the ART project is the same as for those providing gestational or genetic input, the reasons that morally underpin their refusal differs. (shrink)

In the fourteenth plateau of A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari develop a dichotomy between two kinds of space – the smooth and the striated. What I want to focus on in this chapter is the status of these two conceptions of space. As Deleuze and Guattari note, these two forms of space are only discovered in a mixed form, yet are capable of being analysed de jure through their separation. In this sense, the plateau on the smooth and striated (...) can be seen as something like a transcendental deduction of their ontology of spaces. I will explore what Deleuze and Guattari mean when they say that they want to construct a theo-noology of smooth and striated spaces. I want to look at the ethical implications of this distinction, before looking at some alternative approaches to the issue of space. It should be noted that the question of the striation of space is one that is shared by Bergson, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and Sartre among others. The novelty of Deleuze and Guattari’s account is in their formulation of the notion of smooth space as a response. I will begin by looking at the notion of striated space itself, and in particular will explore the degree to which we should see it as a structure or as a method, and the interrelation between these two characterisations. (shrink)

The importance of preserving trust in physicians and in medical institutions has received widespread attention in recent years. Primarily, this is due to the threats to trust posed by managed care, but there is a general and growing recognition that trust deserves more attention than it traditionally has received in all aspects of medical ethics, law, and public policy. Trust has both intrinsic and instrumental value. Trust is intrinsically important because it is a core characteristic that affects the emotional and (...) interpersonal aspects of the physician/patient relationship. As an instrumental value, trust is widely believed to be essential for effective therapeutic encounters. It has been hypothesized or shown to affect a host of important behaviors and attitudes relating to care, including seeking care, disclosing private information, complying with treatment, and being satisfied with care. Moreover, trust may be a mediator of measurable clinical outcomes and a key factor in the mind–body interactions that underlie placebo/nocebo effects and the effectiveness of alternative medicine. It is no surprise, then, that preserving, justifying, and enhancing trust is the fundamental goal of much of medical ethics, and is a prominent objective in healthcare law and public policy. Discussions of trust and related concepts were commonplace in professionally based medical ethics prior to the 1970s. a 1 2. (shrink)

In this article, I critique two conceptions from the history of academic philosophy regarding academic philosophers as shamans, deriving more community-responsible criteria for any future versions. The first conception, drawing on Mircea Eliade’s Shamanism (1951), is a transcultural figure abstracted from concrete Siberian practitioners. The second, drawing on Chicana theorist Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera (1987), balances Eliade’s excessive abstraction with Indigenous American philosophy’s emphasis on embodied materiality, but also overemphasizes genetic inheritance to the detriment of environmental embeddedness. I therefore conclude (...) that any aspiring philosophical shaman must ground their bodily-material transformative linguistic practices in the practices and environments of their own concrete communities, including the nonverbal languages of bodily comportment, fashion, and dance, in pursuit of social justice for all, including sovereignty, ecological justice, and well-being for Indigenous peoples worldwide. (shrink)

In this article, I explore two neglected works by the twentieth-century Jewish German Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch, Avicenna and the Aristotelian Left and Natural Law and Human Dignity. Drawing on previous analyses of leftist Aristotelians and natural law, I blend Bloch’s two texts’ concepts of pregnant matter and maternal law into “pregnant materialist natural law.” More precisely, Aristotelian Left articulates a concept of matter as a dynamic, impersonal agential force, ever pregnant with possible forms delivered by artist-midwives, building Bloch’s messianic (...) utopia. And Natural Law resurrects the Stoics’ concept of natural law as drawing on a prehistoric matriarchal utopia, later channeled by earth goddess cults misconstrued by the nineteenth-century German anthropologist Johann Jakob Bachofen as political matriarchy. I then conclude by linking this pregnant materialist natural law to Dionysus as son of the Great Mother Goddess. Though stigmatized throughout homophobic Western history for his queerness and maternal dependence, Dionysus is also the patron god of Bloch’s hero, the slave revolutionary Spartacus, paramour of a priestess of Dionysus who prophesied his divine mission of liberation. (shrink)

Having elsewhere connected Walter Otto’s interpretation of Dionysus as a politically progressive deity to Huey P. Newton’s vision for the Black Panthers, I here expand this inquiry to a line of Otto-inspired scholarship. First, Alain Daniélou identifies Dionysus and Shiva as the dancing god of a democratic/decolonizing cult oppressed by tyrannical patriarchies. Arthur Evans sharpens this critique of sexism and heteronormativity, concluding that, as Dionysus’s chorus is to Greek tragedy, so Socrates’s circle is to Western philosophy. I thus call for (...) the creation of a hybrid Dionysian-Socratic revolutionary philosophical chorus, modeled on Dionysus Lyseus, wielding philosophical analysis to loosen injustice’s bonds, as a vanguard of social justice. I find a handbook for this chorus’s creation in Euripides’s Bacchae, whose Dionysus is an ally of immigrant women, overthrower of Theban patriarchy, and international revolutionary. Finally, I offer a contemporary example of such a chorus that is based in my hometown in Alabama, namely, the Birmingham Philosophy Guild. (shrink)

ISBN 1-58477-498-3. Cloth. $125. * The standard one-volume treatise based on classic legal-realist principles.

This article derives from a project attempting to show that Western formal logic, from Aristotle onward, has both been partially constituted by, and partially constitutive of, what has become known as racism. In the present article, I will first discuss, in light of Frege’s honorary role as founder of the philosophy of mathematics, Reuben Hersh’s What is Mathematics, Really? Second, I will explore how the infamous section of Frege’s 1924 diary (specifically the entries from March 10 to April 9) supports (...) Hersh's claim regarding the link between political conservatism and the (historically and currently) dominant school of the philosophy of mathematics (to which Frege undeniably belongs). Third, I will examine Frege’s attempt at a more reader-friendly introduction to his philosophy of mathematics, The Foundations of Arithmetic. And finally, I will briefly analyze Frege’s Begriffsschrift to see how questions of race arise even at the heights of his logical abstraction. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to explore Deleuze's use of Kant's argument from incongruent counterparts, which Kant uses to show the existence of what he calls an “internal difference” within things. I want to explore how Deleuze draws out an important distinction between the concept and the Idea, and provides an incisive account of his relationship to both the Kantian and Leibnizian projects. First, I look at Kant's use of the argument to provide a refutation of the Leibnizian account (...) of space, before showing how this criticism in fact rests on the question of the conceptual determination of object. Second, I show how Deleuze develops a taxonomy of difference on the basis of his reading of Kant's argument. Finally, I look at what Deleuze sees as the limitations in Kant's understanding of this concept and Deleuze's attempt to overcome these limitations through the introduction of the notion of the Idea, which will provide a genetic and nonconceptual account of the object. In doing so, I show why Deleuze takes the formulation of an adequate account of difference to be one of the central aims of his own metaphysics. (shrink)

How can the development of ideas in a scientific field be studied over time? We apply unsupervised topic modeling to the ACL Anthology to analyze historical trends in the field of Computational Linguistics from 1978 to 2006. We induce topic clusters using Latent Dirichlet Allocation, and examine the strength of each topic over time. Our methods find trends in the field including the rise of probabilistic methods starting in 1988, a steady increase in applications, and a sharp decline of research (...) in semantics and understanding between 1978 and 2001, possibly rising again after 2001. We also introduce a model of the diversity of ideas, topic entropy, using it to show that COLING is a more diverse conference than ACL, but that both conferences as well as EMNLP are becoming broader over time. Finally, we apply Jensen-Shannon divergence of topic distributions to show that all three conferences are converging in the topics they cover. (shrink)

This introductory chapter offers an overview of the context, content, and history of environmental political theory as a field of study within political science. It starts by differentiating EPT from both the subfield of political theory and other areas of sustainability and environmental studies, with its focus on the political nature of human/non-human relations. EPT’s development over the last twenty years is discussed, in terms of both substantive foci and maturation as a field. The chapter then turns to an overview (...) of the structure and chapters of the Handbook, including chapters on EPT as a field of inquiry, the rethinking of nature and political subjects, the goals and ideals of EPT, various obstacles faced by environmental change, and the role of activism in environmental politics and thought. (shrink)

Objective: Little empirical evidence exists to support either side of the ongoing debate over whether legalising physician aid in dying would undermine patient trust.Design: A random national sample of 1117 US adults were asked about their level of agreement with a statement that they would trust their doctor less if “euthanasia were legal [and] doctors were allowed to help patients die”.Results: There was disagreement by 58% of the participants, and agreement by only 20% that legalising euthanasia would cause them to (...) trust their personal physician less. The remainder were neutral. These attitudes were the same in men and women, but older people and black people had more agreement that euthanasia would lower trust. However, overall, only 27% of elderly people and 32% of black people thought that physician aid in dying would lower trust. These views differed with physical and mental health, and also with education and income, with those having more of these attributes tending to view physician aid in dying somewhat more favourably. Again, however, overall views in most of these subgroups were positive. Views about the effect of physician aid in dying on trust were significantly correlated with participants’ underlying trust in their physicians and their satisfaction with care. In a multivariate regression model, trust, satisfaction, age, and white/black race remained independently significant.Conclusion: Despite the widespread concern that legalising physician aid in dying would seriously threaten or undermine trust in physicians, the weight of the evidence in the USA is to the contrary, although views vary significantly. (shrink)

The ethics of physical restraint in the Emergency Department has always been an emotive and controversial issue. Recently a vanguard of advocacy groups and regulatory agencies have...

The aim of this study was to explore neonatal nurses’and mothers of preterm infants’experiences of daily challenges. Interviews took place asking for good, bad and challenging experiences. Data were analysed using qualitative content analysis and findings were clustered in two categories: good and challenging experiences, each containing three themes. The good experiences were: managing with success as a nurse, small things matter for mothers, and a good day anyhow for mothers and nurses. The challenging experiences were: mothering in public, being (...) pulled between responsibilities, and adverse things stick under the nurses’skin. The study shows that small daily clinical matters become big issues and could lead to moral distress, and that nurses integrate ethics of justice and ethics of care while mothers are concerned about health and well-being of their specific infant only. The challenge for nursing to integrate fairness and sensitive care in family-oriented neonatal care is discussed. (shrink)

Work organizations construct gender relations by two mechanisms. First, they allocate men and women to different positions. Instead of the traditional pattern of firm-specific segregation of waiters and waitresses, quantitative data show that most restaurants in this study have integrated wait staffs. Second, work organizations define job performances in gender terms. Qualitative data from five illustrative restaurants show that male and female servers in integrated staffs “do gender” by performing gendered service styles. Even when men and women are coservers, job (...) titles and dress codes suggest that providing service in a fine dining restaurant is waitering, whereas serving in a coffee shop is waitressing. Focusing on gendered styles of services expands our definition of gender and has serious implications for efforts to achieve occupational integration. (shrink)

This paper suggests that public health, due to its community orientation, may be ignoring certain ethical principles--namely the rights of individuals and communities to self-determination. The expectation of individual rights as a member of a community is reviewed and the additional right of a community for self-determination is proposed. The influences on ethical evaluations by the legal and economic environments are suggested, using US examples. The conclusion argues that as the focus of health-care delivery changes, it will become more important (...) to consider these questions of group ethics. (shrink)

Arguably, Hume's greatest single contribution to contemporary philosophy of science has been the problem of induction (1739). Before attempting its statement, we need to spend a few words identifying the subject matter of this corner of epistemology. At a first pass, induction concerns ampliative inferences drawn on the basis of evidence (presumably, evidence acquired more or less directly from experience)—that is, inferences whose conclusions are not (validly) entailed by the premises. Philosophers have historically drawn further distinctions, often appropriating the term (...) “induction” to mark them; since we will not be concerned with the philosophical issues for which these distinctions are relevant, we will use the word “inductive” in a catch-all sense synonymous with “ampliative”. But we will follow the usual practice of choosing, as our paradigm example of inductive inferences, inferences about the future based on evidence drawn from the past and present. A further refinement is more important. Opinion typically comes in degrees, and this fact makes a great deal of difference to how we understand inductive inferences. For while it is often harmless to talk about the conclusions that can be rationally believed on the basis of some.. (shrink)

We investigate the entrepreneurial opportunities and ethical dilemmas presented by technological turbulence. More specifically we investigate the line between Baumol’s [J. Polit. Econ. 98 (1990) 893] productive (e.g. innovation), unproductive (e.g. rent seeking) and destructive (e.g. criminal) entrepreneurship through three examples of Internet innovation – spam (destructive), music file sharing (unproductive), and Internet pharmacies (potentially productive). The emergence of accessible Internet technologies, under present norms, has created the potential for all three entrepreneurial activities. Because of the propensity for self-serving biases (...) and for bending the rules, the need for creativity in overcoming obstacles and overall liabilities of newness, entrepreneurs are likely to challenge established industrial morals and laws. Unlike new entrants, incumbents must abide by the currently accepted norms, and thus suffer from “liabilities of oldness”. The challenge for new entrants is to change sociopolitical legitimacy, whereas incumbents need to defend the established norms. We discuss competitive and other issues that result from technological turbulence and innovation. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to explore the uses made of the calculus by Gilles Deleuze and G. W. F. Hegel. I show how both Deleuze and Hegel see the calculus as providing a way of thinking outside of finite representation. For Hegel, this involves attempting to show that the foundations of the calculus cannot be thought by the finite understanding, and necessitate a move to the standpoint of infinite reason. I analyse Hegel’s justification for this introduction of dialectical (...) reason by looking at his responses to Berkeley’s criticisms of the calculus. For Deleuze, instead, I show that the differential must be understood as escaping from both finite and infinite representation. By highlighting the sub-representational character of the differential in his system, I show how the differential is a key moment in Deleuze’s formulation of a transcendental empiricism. I conclude by dealing with some of the common misunderstandings that occur when Deleuze is read as endorsing a modern mathematical interpretation of the calculus. (shrink)

A significant portion of the world’s text is tagged by readers on social bookmarking websites. Credit attribution is an inherent problem in these corpora because most pages have multiple tags, but the tags do not always apply with equal specificity across the whole document. Solving the credit attribution problem requires associating each word in a document with the most appropriate tags and vice versa. This paper introduces Labeled LDA, a topic model that constrains Latent Dirichlet Allocation by defining a one-to-one (...) correspondence between LDA’s latent topics and user tags. This allows Labeled LDA to directly learn word-tag correspondences. We demonstrate Labeled LDA’s improved expressiveness over traditional LDA with visualizations of a corpus of tagged web pages from del.icio.us. Labeled LDA outperforms SVMs by more than 3 to 1 when extracting tag-specific document snippets. As a multi-label text classifier, our model is competitive with a discriminative baseline on a variety of datasets. (shrink)

I will begin this comparative analysis with Quine, focusing on the front matter and first chapter of Word and Object (alongside From a Logical Point of View and two other short pieces), attempting to illuminate there a (1) basis of excessive, yet familiar, chaos, (2) method of improvised, dramatic distortion, and (3) consequent neo-Pragmatist metaphysics. Having elaborated this Quinian basis, method and metaphysics, I will then show that they can be productively translated into James Mercer’s poetic lyrics for The Shins, (...) with an emphasis on the first song, entitled “Caring is Creepy,” from their debut studio album, Oh, Inverted World! Finally, I will explain why Quine and Mercer are particularly suited to this translation (in contrast to other philosophically-rich pop lyricists such as Bob Dylan, and other pragmatist philosophers like Robert Brandom), in the course of which important implications will emerge for our globalized world today. (shrink)

In this paper, I will discuss Deleuze’s account of the reversal of Platonism in chapter one of Difference and Repetition, tying it together with Merleau-Ponty’s work on perception. In Difference and Repetition, there are only two references to Merleau-Ponty – one in the note on Heidegger that was added at the insistence of his examiners, and one brief mention in a footnote. Nonetheless, as we shall see, many of the discussions of the origin of representation, as well as the relation (...) of the determinate to the indeterminate in the structure of difference, and the nature of depth, draw heavily on Merleau-Ponty’s work. While there has been some recognition of this influence, I want to draw out some specific points where Deleuze draws on Merleau-Ponty within chapter one of Difference and Repetition. On the other side, as far as I am aware, there is no sustained discussion of Plato in Merleau-Ponty’s work. In showing how Deleuze takes up Merleau-Ponty in his explicit project of reversing Plato, I want to show that the move to a philosophy of the simulacrum is synonymous with Merleau-Ponty’s thesis of the primacy of perception. I will begin by talking about Plato and representation, which ends the chapter, before returning to the beginning of the chapter to look at the nature of difference, then turning to the question of how representation covers over difference. I want to conclude by looking at what Deleuze considers to be the limitations of Merleau-Ponty’s account. (shrink)

It is argued that genuinely subsentential phrases, such as a discourse-initial utterance of “From France” to indicate the provenance of an item, provide evidence for the reality of the pragmatic process of free enrichment. I consider recent attempts to treat such discourse-initial fragments as linguistic ellipsis of some kind while accommodating the difference between these cases and accepted types of ellipsis such as sluicing and gapping. I claim that the mechanisms they posit to save an ellipsis story have no role (...) in an account of performance. An argument against the enrichment approach from the indeterminacy of the content of subsentential utterances is discussed, and refuted, and it is shown how this indeterminacy is accommodated in a contextualist pragmatic theory. (shrink)

It was in the closing year of the nineteenth century that Paul Tannery organized at an international historical congress the first international meeting devoted to the history of science. If antiquity would make a scholarly subject respectable, scholarship in the history of science must be beyond reproach; still earlier than Tannery and his colleagues in many European countries were the German historian of chemistry Kopp, and William Whewell, Master of Trinity; the eighteenth century had produced substantial works like those on (...) mathematics and astronomy of Montucla and Delambre; Isaac Vossius and others virtually take these studies back to the Renaissance and Polydore Vergil. Just as in our day such classical scholars as Heiberg, Bailey, Housman, Drachman or Peck have chosen scientific texts as their subjects, so in the past, too, learning and science have met on this common ground. Few creative mathematicians of the seventeenth century thought that attention to the writings of Euclid or Archimedes was a waste of time. (shrink)

The disability critique of negative genetic selection is frequently accused of threatening reproductive liberty. This paper describes the disability critique and defends it against that objection. It also contends that the critique can work to deflate belief in genetic determinism. Recognizing the influence of genetic determinism helps advocate for existing persons in the disability community and protects reproductive liberty. The disability critique can point to genetic determinism but does not suggest a ban or obstacles to the choice of negative genetic (...) selection; therefore, it is not antithetical to reproductive liberty, as has been charged. (shrink)

It has recently been asserted that legislative moves to consider plants as ethical subjects are philosophically foolish because plants lack autonomy. While by no means the sole basis or driving criterion for moral behavior, it is possible to directly challenge skeptical attitudes by constructing a human-plant ethics centered on fundamental notions of autonomy. Autonomous beings are agents who rule themselves, principally for their own purposes. A considerable body of evidence in the plant sciences is increasingly recognizing the capacity of plants (...) to assess, perceive, and act on their environment. The primary purpose of their doing so is to generate the conditions for their own flourishing. With these plant purposes in mind, it is evidentially inappropriate to treat plants purely as instruments. In this age of environmental crisis, knowledge of plant intelligence and autonomy opens up a new debate on respecting and promoting the well-being of the plants that make life on Earth possible. (shrink)