Are there nonhuman animals who behave morally? In this paper I answer this question in the affirmative by applying the framework of care ethics to the animal morality debate. According to care ethics, empathic care is the wellspring of morality in humans. While there have been several suggestive analyses of nonhuman animals as empathic, much of the literature within the animal morality debate has marginalized analyses from the perspective of care ethics. In this paper I examine care ethics to extract (...) its core commitments to what is required for moral care: emotional motivation that enables the intentional meeting of another’s needs, and forward-looking responsibility in particular relationships. What is not required, I argue, are metarepresentational capacities or the ability to scrutinize one’s reasons for action, and thus being retrospectively accountable. This minimal account of moral care is illustrated by moral practices of parental care seen in many nonhuman animal species. In response to the worry that parental care in nonhuman animals lacks all evaluation and is therefore nonmoral I point to cultural differences in human parenting and to normativity in nonhuman animals. (shrink)

This book challenges the standard view that modern hermeneutics begins with Friedrich Ast and Friedrich Schleiermacher, arguing instead that it is the dialectic of reflective and teleological reason in Kant’s Critique of Judgment that provides the actual proto-hermeneutic foundation. It is revolutionary in doing so by replacing interpretive truth claims by the more appropriate claim of rendering opaque contexts intelligible. Taking Gadamer’s comprehensive analysis of hermeneutics in Truth and Method (1960) as its point of departure, the book turns to Kant’s (...) Critiques, reviewing his major concepts as a coherent system in relation to his sensus communis. At the heart of the book is the interaction between reflective, bottom-up search and teleological, top-down interpretative projection as provided in Part II of the third Critique. This text contends that Kant’s broad definition of nature invites the liberation of the reflective-teleological judgment from its biological exemplifications and so permits us to establish its generalised status as a path-breaking, methodological tool. Kant’s dialectic of reflective search and meaning bestowing, stipulated teleology is asserted to anticipate a series of motifs commonly associated with hermeneutics. Figures covered include Dilthey, Husserl, Ingarden, Heidegger, Gadamer, Apel, Habermas, Ricoeur, Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard, Deleuze, Vattimo, Nancy and Caputo. Their collective contributions to interpretation allow for a review of the evolution of hermeneutics from the perspective of the Kantian critique of the limitations of human cognition. The book is written for the informed, general reader, but will likewise appeal to advanced undergraduate and graduate students as well as researchers in the humanities and social sciences. (shrink)

Many nonhuman animals have the emotional capacities to form caring relationships that matter to them, and for their immediate welfare. Drawing from care ethics, we argue that these relationships also matter as objectively valuable states of affairs. They are part of what is good in this world. However, the value of care is precarious in human-animal interactions. Be it in farming, research, wildlife ‘management’, zoos, or pet-keeping, the prevention, disruption, manipulation, and instrumentalization of care in animals by humans is ubiquitous. (...) We criticize a narrow conception of welfare that, in practice, tends to overlook non-experiential forms of harm that occur when we interfere with caring animals. Additionally, we point out wrongs against caring animals that are not just unaccounted for but denied by even an expansive welfare perspective: The instrumentalization of care and caring animals in systems of use can occur as a harmless wrong that an approach purely focused on welfare may, in fact, condone. We should therefore adopt an ethical perspective that goes beyond welfare in our dealings with caring animals. (shrink)

African (Bantu) philosophy conceptualizes morality through ubuntu, which emphasizes the role of community in producing moral agents. This community is characterized by practices that respond to and value interdependence, such as care, cooperation, and respect for elders and ancestral knowledge. While there have been attributions of morality to nonhuman animals in the interdisciplinary animal morality debate, this debate has focused on Western concepts. We argue that the ubuntu conception of morality as a communal practice applies to some nonhuman animals. African (...) elephant communities are highly cooperative and structured around elders; they alloparent, protect their communities, mourn their dead, and pass on cultural knowledge between generations. Identifying these as important moral practices, ubuntu provides a theoretical framework to expand our ethical concern for elephants to their communities. In practice, this will deepen our understanding of the wrongness of atrocities like culling for population management or trophy hunting. (shrink)

This teaching case study poses classic questions about following orders versus serving one's conscience. It tracks the actions of Captain Lawrence Rockwood, an intelligence officer with the Tenth Mountain Division of the United States Army, who was sent to Haiti in September 1994 as part of the mission to oust the dictator Cedras and put the elected Aristide in power. Captain Rockwood felt that his conscience, his humanitarian duty and international law all required that he inspect the National Penitentiary where, (...) intelligence reports showed, political prisoners were being tortured and murdered. His chain of command was unanimous in refusing him permission to inspect the prison and in directing that he do nothing that would endanger fragile relations with the peacefully departing Cedras regime. The case is intended for use in courses on force and justice, for ethics and leadership classes at military academies, at chaplaincy schools and seminaries or in classes on law of war and international law, civil-military relations, peacekeeping and new missions for the military. (shrink)

In acting intentionally, it is no accident that one is doing what one intends to do. In this paper, I ask how to account for this non-accidentality requirement on intentional action. I argue that, for systematic reasons, the currently prevailing view of intentional action – the Causal Theory of Action – is ill-equipped to account for it. I end by proposing an alternative account, according to which an intention is a special kind of cause, one to which it is essential (...) that it represents its effect. (shrink)

Horst Ruthrof revisits Husserl's phenomenology of language and highlights his late writings as essential to understanding the full range of his ideas. Focusing on the idea of language as imaginable as well as the role of a speech community in constituting it, Ruthrof provides a powerful re-assessment of his methodological phenomenology. From the Logical Investigations to untranslated portions of his Nachlass, Ruthrof charts all the developments and amendments in his theorizations. Instead of emphasising the definition and meaning of words, (...) Husserl's later writings point to the variation produced by a community of speakers in the act of communicating. Essential to this linguistic meaning is the intersubjective character that Ruthrof argues is so emblematic of Husserl's position. Using his concepts of intimation, introjection, reciprocity, and voice further outlines a theory that is intersubjective and communal. Bringing his study up to the present day, Ruthrof discusses metal time travel, the evolution of language, and protosyntax in the context of Husserl's late writings, progressing a comprehensive new phenomenological ontology of language with wide-ranging implications for philosophy, linguistics, and cultural studies. (shrink)

English summary: The relationship between science and politics can hardly be reduced to a simple formula. On one hand they appear to be completely separate systems that follow only their own internal logic. On the other hand, mutual references can be identified. It is quite possible to consistently align political decisions to scientific evidence, whereby the autonomy and the legitimacy of democratic policy would however inevitably be affected. In four sections the relationship between science and politics are analyzed under the (...) viewpoint of a specific key question: Does true policy require powerful decision and therefor specifically the absence of science? And is science not conversely determined by it being free of value and policy? What about concepts that tend to want to replace policy with science? Finally, there is the question of what legitimate role science can play in today's politics, and whether this can be in the form of policy advice. This book, with contributions from renowned authors from different disciplines, is systematically devoted to answering these questions. German text. German description: Das Verhaltnis zwischen Wissenschaft und Politik ist kaum auf eine einfache Formel zu bringen. Einerseits erscheinen sie als vollig getrennte Systeme, die nur ihrer eigenen inneren Logik folgen. Andererseits lassen sich wechselseitige Bezugnahmen ausmachen. So ist durchaus denkbar, politische Entscheidungen konsequent an wissenschaftlichen Erkenntnissen auszurichten, wodurch aber unweigerlich die Autonomie auch und gerade demokratisch legitimierter Politik betroffen wuerde.In vier Sektionen wird das Verhaltnis von Wissenschaft und Politik unter einer bestimmten Leitfrage analysiert: Setzt wahre Politik kraftvolle Dezision und somit gerade die Abwesenheit von Wissenschaft voraus? Und ist Wissenschaft nicht umgekehrt durch ihre Wert- und damit Politikfreiheit bestimmt? Wie steht es um Konzepte, die Politik tendenziell durch Wissenschaft ersetzen wollen? Schliesslich fragt sich, welche legitime Rolle Wissenschaft heutzutage in der Politik spielen kann, etwa in Form der Politikberatung.Der Band mit Beitragen renommierter Autoren unterschiedlicher Disziplinen geht diesen Problemkonstellationen in systematischer Weise nach. (shrink)

Although the individuality of whole-body movements has been suspected for years, the scientific proof and systematic investigation that individuals possess unique movement patterns did not manifest until the introduction of the criteria of uniqueness and persistence from the field of forensic science. Applying the criteria of uniqueness and persistence to the individuality of motor learning processes requires complex strategies due to the problem of persistence in the learning processes. One approach is to examine the learning process of different movements. For (...) this purpose, it is necessary to differentiate between two components of movement patterns: the individual-specific component and the discipline-specific component. To this end, a kinematic analysis of the shot put, discus, and javelin throwing movements of seven high-performance decathletes during a qualification competition was conducted. In total, joint angle waveforms of 57 throws formed the basis for the recognition task of individual- and discipline-specific throwing patterns using a support vector machine. The results reveal that the kinematic throwing patterns of the three disciplines could be distinguished across athletes with a prediction accuracy of up to 100% (57 of 57 throws). However, athlete-specific throwing characteristics could also be identified across the three disciplines. Prediction accuracies of up to 52.6% indicated that up to 10 out of 19 throws of a discipline could be assigned to the correct athletes, based on only knowing these athletes from the kinematic throwing patterns in the other two disciplines. The results further suggest that individual throwing characteristics across disciplines are more pronounced in shot put and discus throwing than in javelin throwing. Applications for training and learning practice in sports and therapy are discussed. In summary, the chosen approach offers a broad field of application related to the search of individually optimal movement solutions in sports. (shrink)

Many virtue epistemologists conceive of epistemic competence on the model of skill —such as archery, playing baseball, or chess. In this paper, I argue that this is a mistake: epistemic competences and skills are crucially and relevantly different kinds of capacities. This, I suggest, undermines the popular attempt to understand epistemic normativity as a mere special case of the sort of normativity familiar from skilful action. In fact, as I argue further, epistemic competences resemble virtues rather than skills—a claim that (...) is based on an important, but often overlooked, difference between virtue and skill. The upshot is that virtue epistemology should indeed be based on virtue, not on skill. (shrink)

In this paper, we argue that scientists working on the animal morality debate have been operating with a narrow view of morality that prematurely limits the variety of moral practices that animals may be capable of. We show how this bias can be partially corrected by paying more attention to the touch behaviours of animals. We argue that a careful examination of the ways in which animals engage in and navigate touch interactions can shed new light on current debates on (...) animal morality, like the study of consolation behaviour, while also revealing further forms that animal morality may take and that have been neglected so far, like capacities of tolerance or trust. This defence is structured as an analysis of the three main functions of touch: the discriminative function, the affiliative function, and the vigilance function. (shrink)

This paper provides an analysis of U.S. farmland owners, operators, and workers by race, ethnicity, and gender. We first review the intersection between racialized and gendered capitalism and farmland ownership and farming in the United States. Then we analyze data from the 2014 Tenure and Ownership Agricultural Land survey, the 2012 Census of Agriculture, and the 2013–2014 National Agricultural Worker Survey to demonstrate that significant nation-wide disparities in farming by race, ethnicity and gender persist in the U.S. In 2012–2014, White (...) people owned 98% and operated 94% of all farmland. They generated 98% of all farm-related income from land ownership and 97% of income from farm owner-operatorship. Meanwhile, People of Color farmers were more likely to be tenants rather than owners, owned less land, and generated less farm-related wealth per person than their White counterparts. Hispanic farmers were also disproportionately farm laborers. In addition to racial and ethnic disparities, there were disparities by gender. About 63% of non-operating landowners, 86% of farm operators, and 87% of tenant farmers were male, and female farmers tended to generate less income per farmer than men. This data provides evidence of ongoing racial, ethnic and gender disparities in agriculture in the United States. We conclude with a call to address the structural drivers of the disparities and with recommendations for better data collection. (shrink)

Many hold that theoretical reasoning aims at truth. In this paper, I ask what it is for reasoning to be thus aim-directed. Standard answers to this question explain reasoning’s aim-directedness in terms of intentions, dispositions, or rule-following. I argue that, while these views contain important insights, they are not satisfactory. As an alternative, I introduce and defend a novel account: reasoning aims at truth in virtue of being the exercise of a distinctive kind of cognitive power, one that, unlike ordinary (...) dispositions, is capable of fully explaining its own exercises. I argue that this account is able to avoid the difficulties plaguing standard accounts of the relevant sort of mental teleology. (shrink)

Contemporary philosophers of mind tend to assume that the world of nature can be reduced to basic physics. Yet there are features of the mind consciousness, intentionality, normativity that do not seem to be reducible to physics or neuroscience. This explanatory gap between mind and brain has thus been a major cause of concern in recent philosophy of mind. Reductionists hold that, despite all appearances, the mind can be reduced to the brain. Eliminativists hold that it cannot, and that this (...) implies that there is something illegitimate about the mentalistic vocabulary. Dualists hold that the mental is irreducible, and that this implies either a substance or a property dualism. Mysterian non-reductive physicalists hold that the mind is uniquely irreducible, perhaps due to some limitation of our self-understanding. In this book, Steven Horst argues that this whole conversation is based on assumptions left over from an outdated philosophy of science. While reductionism was part of the philosophical orthodoxy fifty years ago, it has been decisively rejected by philosophers of science over the past thirty years, and for good reason. True reductions are in fact exceedingly rare in the sciences, and the conviction that they were there to be found was an artifact of armchair assumptions of 17th century Rationalists and 20th century Logical Empiricists. The explanatory gaps between mind and brain are far from unique. In fact, in the sciences it is gaps all the way down.And if reductions are rare in even the physical sciences, there is little reason to expect them in the case of psychology. Horst argues that this calls for a complete re-thinking of the contemporary problematic in philosophy of mind. Reductionism, dualism, eliminativism and non-reductive materialism are each severely compromised by post-reductionist philosophy of science, and philosophy of mind is in need of a new paradigm. Horst suggests that such a paradigm might be found in Cognitive Pluralism: the view that human cognitive architecture constrains us to understand the world through a plurality of partial, idealized, and pragmatically-constrained models, each employing a particular representational system optimized for its own problem domain. Such an architecture can explain the disunities of knowledge, and is plausible on evolutionary grounds. (shrink)

The paper answers the title question via its methodological commitment to a Husserlian description of the acts of consciousness which we cannot but perform when we engage in linguistic communication. Familiarizing the reader with the central terms of the German Vorstellung and Vorstellbarkeit (imaginability) and their prominence in phenomenological inquiry in the Introduction, the paper addresses major uses of Vorstellung from Kant to Husserl, before identifying imaginability as the hidden core of natural language, captured in a re-definition of language and (...) linguistic meaning. The observation that imaginability affects all linguistic aspects from phonology to pragmatics is followed by the claim that it is primarily a communally shared form of. The last Section offers a speculative, radically gradualist thesis of language evolution in opposition to dominant catastrophe theories, with the conclusion summarising the answer to the title question in terms imaginable, schematized resemblance relations. (shrink)

Cycle of lectures held at Heinrich-Heine-Universitèat Dèusseldorf.

A lay movement known as the Poor of Christ, incorrectly referred to as the Waldensians, started in the Roman Church in 1176 and rapidly spread through Europe despite severe persecution by the church. Through their values and methods, they impacted on the communities where they were present. This article aims to show their role and contributions indicating its impact on the 16th century Reformation and relevance for the church today. It does this by examining selected themes from the Poor of (...) Christ: their life-transforming faith, the strengthening of laity, the equal role of women in ministry, the importance of teaching and living the faith, a focused rather than fenced theology and loyalty to the one Church of Christ. The article also draws reference to the COVID-19 pandemic and explores what we can learn from the Poor of Christ in addressing this situation.Contribution: This article puts the spotlight on an overlooked lay movement that contributed significantly in preparing the climate for the 16th Century Reformation. Their example shows that the real strength of church is through members empowered to holistically live their faith. The article shows the current relevance of their values and methods. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:THE CONCEPT OF PERSON IN ST. THOMAS AQUINAS: A Contribution to Recent Discussion* ST. THOMAS AQUINAS accepted and consistently defended Boethius' definition of person: "persona est substantia individua rationalis naturae." St. Thomas' analysis of this definition necessarily involves metaphysical questions because of the implications of the terms " substance" and " nature" and moreover it manifests the inescapahle imprint of the theological problematics which surrounded the issue (e.g. the (...) Trinity and the hypostatic union). Both of these influences, metaphysical and theological, have engendered problems of interpretation and criticism. Contemporary discussions of person largely either continue the scholastic controversies or adopt a modern perspective from which to expose apparent contradictions in St. Thomas' doctrine. The purpose of this article will be limited to a consideration of the metaphysical problems concerning the relationship between individual substance, universal, nature, and existence. It is hoped that such a clarification will resolve not only the neoscholastic controversies, but also some of the contemporary problems. I. BOETHIUS' DEFINITION OF PERSON AND ST. THOMAS' EXPLANATION A. BOETHIUS' DEFINITION Boethius develops his definition of person in the Liber contra Eutychen et N estorium after a careful consideration of na- * I have to thank cordially Father Brian Shanley, 0.P. for having revised completely this English version, devoting much time and energy to fit the text and the footnotes to the style of The Thomist. He adapted the version in good style and verified the Latin quotations. 435 436 HORST SEIDL ture and substance.1 In the first chapter he sets out to define nature and discovers four possible meanings. The first and broadest definition, embracing both substances and accidents, describes nature as belonging to all things which by their being can be in some way or another be comprehended by reason: "natura est earum rermn quae, cum sint, quoquo modo intellectu capi possunt." A second definition, comprising substances alone both corporeal and incorporeal, describes nature as anything that can effect or suffer something: " natura est vel quod facere vel quod pati possit." A third sense, taken from the Aristotelian analysis of the motion of natural substances, describes nature as the immanent principle of movement : "natura est motus principium per se et non per accidens." Finally, nature can also refer to the formal cause which provides the specific difference: " natura est unam quamque rem informans specifica differentia" (cf. ST Ia. 29, I ad 4). It is this last sense which is most important. In sum, "nature" is a broad term encompassing both composite beings and their causes. Boethius continues in chapter two by first narrowing the relevant sense of nature to substances (thus excluding accidents ) and then presenting a complete division of substances. The major distinction is between corporeal substances and incorporeal substances. Corporeal subdivides further into inanimate and animate, with animate dividing. into insensitive and sensitive and the latter dividing finally into irrational and rational. Incorporeal subdivides into rational and irrational (the life-principle of animals), with rational incorporeal substances being further distinguished into those that are immutable by nature (the Creator) and those that are not so by nature (the human soul and angels) but may become so by virtue of the immutable substance. Boethius then argues that person cannot be affirmed of inanimate beings or irrational animals. A 1 All citations from Boethius are taken from the Loeb text in Boethius: Theological Tractates and the Consolation of Philosophy, ed. H. F. Stewart and E. K. Rand (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1918). THE CONCEPT OF PERSON IN ST. THOMAS AQUINAS 437 final distinction of :substance into universal and particular leads to the conclusion that person must refer to an individual. Thus the background is set for the definition of person which opens the third chapter: " naturae rationalis individua substantia." Person must be an individual substance of a certain nature, namely rational, which nature accounts for the form or specific difference of the particular substance (the fourth meaning of chapter 1). The connection of this definition with Aristotle 's definition of man as a rational animal is unmistakable. It should also be noted that this definition of person is applicable not only to man, in whom the rational nature is not identical with his substance, but also to the... (shrink)

Are empirical theories empirically testable? In this article Theoretische Begriffe und die Prüfbarkeit von Theorien V. Gadenne comes to the conclusion that theories are testable. On this basis he criticizes the non-statement view which asserts the contrary. It is shown that this criticism, however, is erroneous.

Horst Bredekamp’s subject is the astute deployment and perennial resonance of the startling image of the body politic that dominates the frontispiece to Leviathan: a treatise on the psychology of the individual and the dynamic of the multitude, published in 1651 by the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes. Affirming the centrality of such a figural device for this pioneering theorist of the state, Bredekamp goes on to address the art-historical dimension of the mesmerising etched title-page. In his central chapters he (...) explores the extraordinary range of sources – from socio-cultural tradition to scientific advances – on which the author and his artist-collaborator may have drawn. In conclusion, he reveals Hobbes to be no less passionate than shrewd in his belief that the constraints and amenities of a tolerable life in common attest to the potency of the visual. As appendices, two essays and catalogues explore the portraits made of Hobbes as well as illustrations that appeared in his other works, thus systematically completing the exploration of the images connected with this exceptional philosopher. (shrink)

Towards the end of Beyond Reduction Horst hypothesizes that ‘it is a general design principle of the cognitive architecture of humans that the mind possesses multiple models for understanding and interacting practically with different aspects of the world’. The suggestion is made following a discussion of recent research in cognitive science. According to Horst, the hypothesis is also consistent with what recent non-reductionist tendencies in the philosophy of science teach us. Taken together, Horst claims these two sets (...) of evidence motivate a new post-reductionist approach to the philosophy of mind. After outlining the route Horst takes to reach this claim, I shall raise a worry I have about the claim and the route taken to it.Beyond Reduction is in three parts. Part one frames the debate. In Chapter 1 Horst notes how naturalism is a view to which nearly all philosophers of mind, some of whom hold quite disparate views, would subscribe. He formulates a schema for naturalism that he thinks most would accept: ‘naturalism about domain D is the view that all features of D are to be accommodated within the framework of nature as it is understood by the natural sciences’. Horst acknowledges that the schema under-describes matters. The notion of ‘accommodation’ may be understood as involving either explanation or metaphysical determination; it is also unclear how we are to understand ‘the …. (shrink)

Since the seventeenth century, our understanding of the natural world has been one of phenomena that behave in accordance with natural laws. While other elements of the early modern scientific worldview may be rejected or at least held in question—the metaphor of the world as a great machine, the narrowly mechanist assumption that all physical interactions must be contact interactions, the idea that matter might actually be obeying rules laid down by its Divine Author – the notion of natural law (...) has continued to play a pivotal role in actual scientific practice, in our philosophical interpretations of science, and in their its metaphysical implications. (shrink)

In this carefully argued critique, Steven Horst pronounces the theory deficient.