This study examined the performance and future predictions for the Middle East produced by 18 global climate models participating in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Fourth Assessment Report. Under the Special Report on Emission Scenarios A2 emissions scenario the models predict an overall temperature increase of ~1.4 K by mid-century, increasing to almost 4 K by late-century for the Middle East. In terms of precipitation the southernmost portion of the domain experiences a small increase in precipitation due to the (...) Northward movement of the Inter-Tropical Convergence Zone. The largest change however is a decrease in precipitation that occurs in an area covering the Eastern Mediterranean, Turkey, Syria, Northern Iraq, Northeastern Iran and the Caucasus caused by a decrease in storm track activity over the Eastern Mediterranean. Other changes likely to impact the region include a decrease of over 170,000 km 2 in viable rainfed agriculture land by late-century, increases in the length of the dry season that reduces the length of time that the rangelands can be grazed, and changes in the timing of the maximum precipitation in Northern Iran that will impact the growing season, forcing changes in cropping strategy or even crop types. (shrink)

This paper develops the outlines of a pragmatic, adaptive management-based approach toward the control of invasive nonnative species (INS) through a case study of Kings Bay/crystal River, a large artesian springs ecosystem that is one of Florida’s most important habitats for endangered West Indian manatees (Trichechus manatus). Building upon recent critiques of invasion biology, principles of adaptive management, and our own interview and participant–observer research, we argue that this case study represents an example in which rigid application of invasion biology’s (...) a␣priori imperative to minimize INS has produced counterproductive results from both an ecological and social standpoint. As such, we recommend that INS control in Kings Bay should be relaxed in conjunction with an overall program of adaptive ecosystem management that includes meaningful participation and input from non-institutional stakeholders. However, we also note that adaptive management and INS control are by no means mutually exclusive, in Kings Bay or elsewhere. Instead, we suggest that adaptive management offers a means by which INS control efforts can emerge from—and be evaluated through—ongoing scientific research and participatory dialogue about the condition of specific places, rather than non-contextual assumptions about the harmfulness of INS as a general class. (shrink)

We formulate a sort of "generic" cosmological argument, i.e., a cosmological argument that shares premises (e.g., "contingent, concretely existing entities have a cause") with numerous versions of the argument. We then defend each of the premises by offering pragmatic arguments for them. We show that an endorsement of each premise will lead to an increase in expected utility; so in the absence of strong evidence that the premises are false, it is rational to endorse them. Therefore, it is rational to (...) endorse the cosmological argument, and so rational to endorse theism. We then consider possible objections. (shrink)

The new science of genomics endeavors to chart the genomes of individuals around the world, with the dual goals of understanding the role genetic factors play in human health and solving problems of disease and disability. From the perspective of indigenous peoples and developing countries, the promises and perils of genomic science appear against a backdrop of global health disparity and political vulnerability. These conditions pose a dilemma for many communities when attempting to decide about participating in genomic research or (...) any other biomedical research. Genomic research offers the possibility of improved technologies for managing the acute and chronic diseases that plague their members. Yet, the history of biomedical research among people in indigenous and developing nations offers salient examples of unethical practice, misuse of data and failed promises. This dilemma creates risks for communities who decide either to participate or not to participate in genomic science research. (shrink)

Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health continues a trajectory of U.S. Supreme Court jurisprudence that undermines the normative foundation of public health — the idea that the state is obligated to provide a robust set of supports for healthcare services and the underlying social determinants of health. Dobbs furthers a longstanding ideology of individual responsibility in public health, neglecting collective responsibility for better health outcomes. Such an ideology on individual responsibility not only enables a shrinking of public health infrastructure for reproductive (...) health, it facilitates the rise of reproductive coercion and a criminal legal response to pregnancy and abortion. This commentary situates Dobbs in the context of a long historical shift in public health that increasingly places burdens on individuals for their own reproductive health care, moving away from the possibility of a robust state public health infrastructure. (shrink)

Psychiatry is rapidly adopting digital phenotyping and artificial intelligence/machine learning tools to study mental illness based on tracking participants’ locations, online activity, phone and text message usage, heart rate, sleep, physical activity, and more. Existing ethical frameworks for return of individual research results (IRRs) are inadequate to guide researchers for when, if, and how to return this unprecedented number of potentially sensitive results about each participant’s real-world behavior. To address this gap, we convened an interdisciplinary expert working group, supported by (...) a National Institute of Mental Health grant. Building on established guidelines and the emerging norm of returning results in participant-centered research, we present a novel framework specific to the ethical, legal, and social implications of returning IRRs in digital phenotyping research. Our framework offers researchers, clinicians, and Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) urgently needed guidance, and the principles developed here in the context of psychiatry will be readily adaptable to other therapeutic areas. (shrink)

A long line of writers on Evans – Andy Hamilton, Lucy O'Brien, José Bermúdez, and Jason Stanley, to name just a few – assess Evans' account of first-person thought without heeding his warnings that his theory comprises an information and an action component. By omitting the action component, these critics are able to characterize Evans' theory as a perceptual model theory and reject it on that ground. This paper is an attempt to restore the forgotten element. (...) With this component put back in, the charge of Evans' theory as a perceptual model of such thoughts falls apart, and the theory turns out to have enough merit to project itself as a legitimate contender for a plausible account of ‘I’-thought. (shrink)

I present a critical discussion of dual-process theories of reasoning and decision making with particular attention to the nature and role of Type 2 processes. The original theory proposed...

In this paper, we provide a comprehensive survey of the space of possible analyses of the phenomenon of quantifier domain restriction, together with a set of considerations which militate against all but our own proposal. Among the many accounts we consider and reject are the ‘explicit’ approach to quantifier domain restric‐tion discussed, for example, by Stephen Neale, and the pragmatic approach to quantifier domain restriction proposed by Kent Bach. Our hope is that the exhaustive discussion of this special case of (...) context‐dependence will provide guidelines for how to decide, for an arbitrary case of context‐dependent discourse, whether it should be treated syntactically, semantically, or pragmatically. (shrink)

Arguments for slavery reparations have fallen out of favor even as reparations for other forms of racial injustice are taken more seriously. This retreat is unsurprising, as arguments for slavery reparations often rely on two normatively irregular claims: that reparations are owed to the dead (as opposed to, say, their living heirs), and that the present generation inherits an as yet unrequited guilt from past generations. Outside of some strands of Black thought and activism on slavery reparations, these claims are (...) widely rejected. I develop an argument for slavery reparations around those foundational claims by adopting the normative framework of Immanuel Kant. On what I call the Basic Argument for slavery reparations, the application of Kant’s retributivist theory of punishment to slavery justifies reparations as a kind of proportional punishment for slavery. I also show that Kant’s philosophy offers reparations theorists resources to overcome several contemporary objections to slavery reparations. (shrink)

First published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Ontological Pluralism is the view that there are different modes, ways, or kinds of being. In this paper, I characterize the view more fully (drawing on some recent work by Kris McDaniel) and then defend the view against a number of arguments. (All of the arguments I can think of against it, anyway.).

We argue against Christopher Meyers’s call for clinical ethicists to participate in deceiving patients, surrogate decision-makers, or family members. While we acknowledge that some forms of deception may be ethically appropriate in highly circumscribed situations, the type of case Meyers describes as involving justifiable deception differs in at least two important ways. First, Meyers fails to distinguish acts of deception based on the critical feature of who is being deceived—patient, surrogate, or family member—and the overarching duty to respect the autonomy (...) of relevant decision-makers to make rationally-informed decisions. Second, Meyers’s analysis relies on an assessment of harm, a value-laden concept which health care professionals and ethicists should not presumptively assess without considering how the patient, surrogate, or family might assess specific harms. (shrink)

Fictionalist approaches to ontology have been an accepted part of philosophical methodology for some time now. On a fictionalist view, engaging in discourse that involves apparent reference to a realm of problematic entities is best viewed as engaging in a pretense. Although in reality, the problematic entities do not exist, according to the pretense we engage in when using the discourse, they do exist. In the vocabulary of Burgess and Rosen (1997, p. 6), a nominalist construal of a given discourse (...) is revolutionary just in case it involves a “reconstruction or revision” of the original discourse. Revolutionary approaches are therefore prescriptive. In contrast, a nominalist construal of a given discourse is hermeneutic just in case it is a nominalist construal of a discourse that is put forth as a hypothesis about how the discourse is in fact used; that is, hermeneutic approaches are descriptive. I will adopt Burgess and Rosen’s terminology to describe the two different spirits in which a fictionalist hypothesis in ontology might be advanced. Revolutionary fictionalism would involve admitting that while the problematic discourse does in fact involve literal reference to nonexistent entities, we ought to use the discourse in such a way that the reference is simply within the pretense. The hermeneutic fictionalist, in contrast, reads fictionalism into our actual use of the problematic discourse. According to her, normal use of the problematic discourse involves a pretense. According to the pretense, and only according to the pretense, there exist the objects to which the discourse would commit its users, were no pretense involved. My purpose in this paper is to argue that hermeneutic fictionalism is not a viable strategy in ontology. My argument proceeds in two steps. First, I discuss in detail several problematic consequences of any interesting application of hermeneutic fictionalism. Of course, if there is good evidence that hermeneutic fictionalism is correct in some cases, then some of these drastic consequences would have to be accepted.. (shrink)

This chapter seeks clarification into how Marion understands “desire,” especially in The Erotic Phenomenon. Philosophies of “objectivity” have lost sight of love and its uniquely supporting evidences, and desire plays a number of roles in restoring to love the “dignity of a concept,” in its contribution to forming selfhood and “individualization,” and in its establishing the paradoxical bases of the erotic reduction and “eroticization.” Since he claims in La Rigueur des Choses that “The Erotic Phenomenon logically completes the phenomenology of (...) the gift and the saturated phenomenon,” it is necessary to conceive of how and to what degree. The erotic reduction demands that one bracket oneself and return to the Ursprung of intuition by asking the important question “can I be the first to love?” This chapter initiates an application of these findings on the manifold of desire back onto Marion’s understanding of “the gift” and his phenomenology of givenness. How might the erotic reduction and the reduction to givenness interrelate? Might love and desire be modes or “capacities” of alteration of one’s experience within intuition? Desire, which is conceived in relation to “lack” as a resource, provides a kind of “negative assurance” that allows the adonné to access an affirmation of love. (shrink)

The problem of academic dishonesty is as old as it is widespread – dating back millennia and perpetrated by the majority of students. Attempts to promote academic integrity, by comparison, are relatively new and rare – stretching back only a few hundred years and implemented by a small fraction of schools and universities. However, the past decade has seen an increase in efforts among universities to promote academic integrity among students, particularly through the use of online courses or tutorials. Previous (...) research has found this type of instruction to be effective in increasing students’ knowledge of academic integrity and reducing their engagement in academic dishonesty. The present study contributes to this literature with a natural experiment on the effects of the Academic Integrity Course (AIC) at The University of Auckland, which became mandatory for all students in 2015. In 2012, a convenience sample of students (n= 780) had been asked to complete a survey on their perceptions of the University’s academic integrity polices and their engagement in several forms of academic dishonesty over the past year. In 2017, the same procedures and survey were used to collect data from second sample of students (n= 608). After establishing measurement invariance across the two samples on all latent factors, analysis of variance revealed mixed support for the studies hypotheses. Unexpectedly, students who completed the AIC (i.e., the 2017 sample) reported: (1) significantly lower (not higher) levels of understanding, support, and effectiveness with respect to the University’s academic integrity policies; (2) statistically equivalent (not higher) levels of peer disapproval of academic misconduct, and; (3) significantly higher (not lower) levels of peer engagement in academic misconduct. However, results related to participants’ personal engagement in academic misconduct offered partial support for hypotheses – those who completed the AIC reported significantly lower rates of engagement on three of the eight behaviors included in the study. The implications and limitations of these findings are discussed as well as possible future directions for research. (shrink)

Epistemologists often assume that an agent’s epistemic goal is simply to acquire as much knowledge as possible for herself. Drawing on an analogy with ethics and other practices, I argue that being situated in an epistemic community introduces a range of epistemic virtues (and goals) which fall outside of those typically recognized by both individualistic and social epistemologists. Candidate virtues include such traits as honesty, integrity (including an unwillingness to misuse one’s status as an expert), patience, and creativity. We can (...) understand such traits to be epistemic virtues insofar as they tend to produce knowledge – not for the agent alone, but for her community. Recognition of such ‘otherregarding epistemic virtues’ both broadens the area of inquiry of epistemology, and introduces new standards for the evaluation of epistemic agents. (shrink)

U.S. regulations do not afford consistent protections to human research subjects. One complaint is that they focus on federally sponsored research, with private research covered only if it falls under the jurisdiction of the Food and Drug Administration. This paper examines a deeper problem: Even when the regulations do apply, they still do not afford consistent standards of protection. The U.S. Common Rule and related FDA regulations lack a workable regulatory control mechanism.

I argue that recent virtue theories (including those of Hursthouse, Slote, and Swanton) face important initial difficulties in accommodating the supererogatory. In particular, I consider several potential characterizations of the supererogatory modeled upon these familiar virtue theories (and their accounts of rightness) and argue that they fail to provide an adequate account of supererogation. In the second half of the paper I sketch an alternative virtue-based characterization of supererogation, one that is grounded in the attitudes of virtuous ideal observers, and (...) that avoids the concerns raised in the first part of the paper. (shrink)

Achieving genuine engagement and understanding between communities with radically divergent worldviews is challenging. If there is no common ground on which to stand and have a discussion, the likely outcomes of an apparent intercultural disagreement are a stalemate, or the (sometimes colonialist) imposition of a single worldview, or a kind of relativistic tolerance that falls short of genuine engagement. In this paper, we suggest a way forward that takes as its starting point the philosophical discussion of deep disagreement, using the (...) example of taniwha (powerful water beings that must be treated with respect) to outline a strategy for building intercultural understanding and enabling constructive intercultural dialogue. (shrink)

Virtue theorists in ethics often embrace the following characterizationof right action: An action is right iff a virtuous agent would performthat action in like circumstances. Zagzebski offers a parallel virtue-basedaccount of epistemically justified belief. Such proposals are severely flawedbecause virtuous agents in adverse circumstances, or through lack ofknowledge can perform poorly. I propose an alternative virtue-based accountaccording to which an action is right (a belief is justified) for an agentin a given situation iff an unimpaired, fully-informed virtuous observerwould deem the (...) action to be right (the belief to be justified). (shrink)

There have been several recent defenses of biocentric individualism, the position that all living beings have at least some moral standing, simply insofar as they are alive. I develop a virtue-based version of biocentric individualism, focusing on a virtue of reverence for life. In so doing, I attempt to show that such a virtuebased approach allows us to avoid common objections to biocentric individualism, based on its supposed impracticability (or, on the other hand, its emptiness).

There is an unspoken distinction in ethical criteria in bioethics. On the one hand, there are criteria that can be used with discretion and judgment by an individual or small group of people like a...

The literature on mathematical explanation contains numerous examples of explanatory, and not so explanatory proofs. In this paper we report results of an empirical study aimed at investigating mathematicians’ notion of explanatoriness, and its relationship to accounts of mathematical explanation. Using a Comparative Judgement approach, we asked 38 mathematicians to assess the explanatory value of several proofs of the same proposition. We found an extremely high level of agreement among mathematicians, and some inconsistencies between their assessments and claims in the (...) literature regarding the explanatoriness of certain types of proofs. (shrink)

Virtue Epistemology Virtue epistemology is a collection of recent approaches to epistemology that give epistemic or intellectual virtue concepts an important and fundamental role. Virtue epistemologists can be divided into two groups, each accepting a different conception of what an intellectual virtue is. Virtue reliabilists conceive of intellectual virtues as stable, reliable and truth-conducive cognitive … Continue reading Virtue Epistemology →.

These 14 essays bring Schelling in tune with such luminaries as Heidegger, Derrida, Bataille, Foucault, Deleuze, Levinas, and Irigaray and situate him squarely in the centre of current themes.

In Heidegger’s last seminar, which was in Zähringen in 1973, he introduces what he called a “phenomenology of the inconspicuous”. Despite scholars’ occasional references to this “approach” over the last 40 years, this approach of Heidegger’s has gone largely under investigated in secondary literature. This article introduces three different, although not necessarily conflicting ways in which these sparse references to inconspicuousness can be interpreted: The a priori of appearance can never be brought to manifestation, and the unscheinbar is interwoven with (...) the scheinbar as an active characteristic or form of “hiddenness”, therefore making inconspicuousness inherent within all phenomenology. Or, there is now a particular step or reduction within phenomenology that involves one’s being attuned to the various modes of potential hiddenness, of which “inconspicuousness” is a particular character trait. Or there are particular, unique, and specific phenomena that give themselves “inconspicuously,” and there is also thus a corresponding, particular phenomenology in which one must engage in order to gain some kind of access to these specific things’ phenomenal strata. This paper introduces Heidegger’s “phenomenology of the inconspicuous” most especially in his last seminar in Zähringen in 1973, engages related references to unscheinbar in his 1942/1943 Seminar on Parmenides, and then puts forward an interpretation of what these somewhat ambiguous references could mean when contextualized according to Heidegger’s overall interests. This essay brings these references to light, and puts forward a proposal as to what kind of phenomenology Heidegger was–somewhat inconspicuously–referring. (shrink)