This article situates the work of East India Company servant Alexander Dow (1735–1779), principally his writings on the history and future state of India, in contemporary debates about empire, religion and enlightened government. To do so it offers a sustained analysis of his 1772 essay ‘A Dissertation Concerning the Origin and Nature of Despotism in Hindostan’, as well as his proposals for the restoration of Bengal, both of which played an influential part in shaping the preoccupations with Mughal history that (...) dominated the contemporary crisis in the Company’s legitimacy. By linking these texts to his earlier work on ‘Hindoo’ religion, it will argue that Dow’s analysis of the relationship between certain religious cultures and their civic qualities was rooted in a deist perspective. It doing so it restores the enlightenment components of Dow’s thought, and their impact on the ideology of empire, in a crucial period of British expansion in India. (shrink)

Formalised knowledge systems, including universities and research institutes, are important for contemporary societies. They are, however, also arguably failing humanity when their impact is measured against the level of progress being made in stimulating the societal changes needed to address challenges like climate change. In this research we used a novel futures-oriented and participatory approach that asked what future envisioned knowledge systems might need to look like and how we might get there. Findings suggest that envisioned future systems will need (...) to be much more collaborative, open, diverse, egalitarian, and able to work with values and systemic issues. They will also need to go beyond producing knowledge about our world to generating wisdom about how to act within it. To get to envisioned systems we will need to rapidly scale methodological innovations, connect innovators, and creatively accelerate learning about working with intractable challenges. We will also need to create new funding schemes, a global knowledge commons, and challenge deeply held assumptions. To genuinely be a creative force in supporting longevity of human and non-human life on our planet, the shift in knowledge systems will probably need to be at the scale of the enlightenment and speed of the scientific and technological revolution accompanying the second World War. This will require bold and strategic action from governments, scientists, civic society and sustained transformational intent. (shrink)

Formalised knowledge systems, including universities and research institutes, are important for contemporary societies. They are, however, also arguably failing humanity when their impact is measured against the level of progress being made in stimulating the societal changes needed to address challenges like climate change. In this research we used a novel futures-oriented and participatory approach that asked what future envisioned knowledge systems might need to look like and how we might get there. Findings suggest that envisioned future systems will need (...) to be much more collaborative, open, diverse, egalitarian, and able to work with values and systemic issues. They will also need to go beyond producing knowledge about our world to generating wisdom about how to act within it. To get to envisioned systems we will need to rapidly scale methodological innovations, connect innovators, and creatively accelerate learning about working with intractable challenges. We will also need to create new funding schemes, a global knowledge commons, and challenge deeply held assumptions. To genuinely be a creative force in supporting longevity of human and non-human life on our planet, the shift in knowledge systems will probably need to be at the scale of the enlightenment and speed of the scientific and technological revolution accompanying the second World War. This will require bold and strategic action from governments, scientists, civic society and sustained transformational intent. (shrink)

In the decades following the British victory at the Battle of Plassey (1757), officials of the East India Company transmitted new knowledge of Indian religious texts and traditions to European read...

According to a number of contemporary theorists, aesthetic reasons can invite or entice us but never compel us. In this paper, I develop a Kantian account of the normative force of aesthetic reasons. While Kant would likely agree that aesthetic reasons do not give rise to obligations, his account nevertheless gives us the resources for explaining how aesthetic reasons can still have more force than merely enticing reasons. This account appeals to the distinct normativity of aesthetic judgments on Kant's theory (...) and the way in which this kind of normativity structures aesthetic exchanges with other judging subjects. I argue that, in addition to the moral reasons we have for appreciating and preserving beauty, Kant’s account can accommodate distinctly aesthetic reasons for doing so that stem from our membership in aesthetic communities. (shrink)

Emanuel Viebahn accounts for the distinction between lying and misleading in terms of what the speaker commits to, rather than in terms of what the speaker says, as on traditional accounts. Although this alternative type of account is well motivated, I argue that Viebahn does not adequately explain the commitment involved in lying. He explains the commitment in lying in terms of a responsibility to justify one's knowledge of a proposition one has communicated, which is in turn elaborated in terms (...) of being able to consistently dismiss a challenge to justify that knowledge. But whether one can consistently dismiss such a challenge, as Viebahn defines this, depends on whether one is responsible for justifying one's knowledge. Without further specification of the nature of this justificatory responsibility, it is difficult to assess whether it is one that liars have but misleaders lack. (shrink)

I argue that the best explanation of the multiplicity of available frameworks for treating any given philosophical topic is that philosophy currently (though not insuperably) lacks fixed standards; I then go on to identify three barriers to philosophical progress associated with our present epistemic situation. First is that the lack of fixed standards encourages what I call “intra‐disciplinary siloing,” and associated dialectical and argumentative failings; second is that the lack of fixed standards makes room for sociological factors (including elite influence (...) and disciplinary inertia) to be determinative of which philosophical frameworks are embraced; third is that the lack of fixed standards encourages (implicit and/or explicit) bias. I close by offering some suggestions about how to move beyond these barriers, even in the absence of fixed standards. (shrink)

Since the publication of Kit Fine's “Essence and Modality”, there has been lively debate over how best to think of essence in relation to necessity. The present aim is to draw attention to a definition of essence in terms of modality that has not been given sufficient attention. This neglect is perhaps unsurprising, since it is not a proposal made in response to Fine's 1994 paper and ensuing discussion, but harks back to Ruth Barcan Marcus's earlier work in the 1960s (...) and 1970s on essentialist claims. At the core of Barcan Marcus's account is Minimal Essentialism, of which there are several extensions, in particular, for cases of referential predicates (such as “x is identical to Socrates”), Individuating Essentialism, and Aristotelian Essentialism. I argue that Minimal Essentialism fares favourably against a host of familiar examples. I close with some historical observations, that the distinction between essence and necessity was already commonplace in the early days of quantified modal logic and its philosophy. (shrink)

This study looks to the work of Tarski's mentors Stanislaw Lesniewski and Tadeusz Kotarbinski, and reconsiders all of the major issues in Tarski scholarship in light of the conception of Intuitionistic Formalism developed: semantics, truth, paradox, logical consequence.

The Romantic- and Revolution-era French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck is an important precursor for Jablonka’s and Ginsburg’s theory of living beings as beings that learn. Lamarck defined living beings as beings that compose and create. Like Jablonka and Ginsburg’s learning theory, Lamarck’s composing and creating theory locates life in the capacity for a kind of purposeful striving. A consideration of his theory can suggest fundamental questions for Jablonka and Ginsburg regarding the relations among what they call “vivaciousness,” the state of living (...) organisms, learning, and evolutionary transformation. (shrink)

A core principle of modern science holds that a scientific explanation must not attribute will or agency to natural phenomena.The Restless Clock examines the origins and history of this, in particular as it applies to the science of living things. This is also the story of a tradition of radicals—dissenters who embraced the opposite view, that agency is an essential and ineradicable part of nature. Beginning with the church and courtly automata of early modern Europe, Jessica Riskin guides us (...) through our thinking about the extent to which animals might be understood as mere machines. We encounter fantastic robots and cyborgs as well as a cast of scientific and philosophical luminaries, including Descartes and Leibnitz, Lamarck and Darwin, whose ideas gain new relevance in Riskin's hands. The book ends with a riveting discussion of how the dialectic continues in genetics, epigenetics, and evolutionary biology, where work continues to naturalize different forms of agency.The Restless Clock reveals the deeply buried roots of current debates in artificial intelligence, cognitive science, and evolutionary biology. (shrink)

While Kant was arguably as deeply engaged with the emerging special sciences of his time as he was with Newtonian physics, there is a deep tension in his treatment of these disciplines. On the one hand, Kant endorses a reductionist approach in natural science. On the other hand, Kant is committed to a variety of anti-reductionist positions in empirical psychology, chemistry, and the emerging biological sciences. This chapter examines the precise form that Kant’s anti-reductionism takes in each of these domains (...) and the corresponding set of questions about the extent to which each of these constitutes a genuine science for Kant. (shrink)

This collection of new essays put the debates on the mind-body problem into historical context.

A right to family privacy is considered a cornerstone of American life, and yet access to it is apportioned by race. Our notion of the “racialization of privacy” refers to the phenomenon that family privacy, including the freedom to create a family uninhibited by law, pressure, and custom, is delimited by race. Building upon racial formation theory, this article examines three examples: the Native American boarding school system (1870s to 1970s), eugenic laws and practices (early/mid 1900s), and contemporary deportation. Analysis (...) reveals that state-sponsored limitations on family privacy is a racial project that shapes the racial state. Performing an ideological genealogy with our cases, this article makes three contributions: it illustrates how the state leverages policies affecting families to define national belonging; it reveals how access to family privacy is patterned by race, ethnicity, gender, class, sexuality, and national origin; and it distills how Whiteness and a national racial hierarchy are socially constructed and maintained over time. With the racialization of privacy, we identify how the state seeks to reproduce institutionalized White supremacy and the effects this has on families. We argue that families are the linchpin in state-sponsored racial projects that construct the nation and that the racialization of privacy, as a form of inequality, is a defining characteristic of the color-line. (shrink)

In this article, I introduce engaged phenomenology as an approach through which phenomenologists can more explicitly and critically consider the generative conditions and implications of their rese...

Editors' introduction to Puncta's February 2022 Special Issue, "Pandemic Politics and Phenomenology.".

Generalisation in evaluative conditioning occurs when the valence acquired by a conditional stimulus (CS), after repeated pairing with an unconditional stimulus (US), spreads to stimuli that are similar to the CS (generalisation stimuli, GS). CS evaluations can be updated via CS instructions that conflict with prior conditioning (negative conditioning + positive instruction). We examined whether CS instructions can update GS evaluations after conditioning. We used alien stimuli where one alien (CSp) from a fictional group was paired with pleasant US images (...) and another alien (CSu) from a different group was paired with unpleasant US images. The other members from the two groups were used as GSs. After conditioning, participants received negative CSp instructions and positive CSu instructions. In Experiment 1, explicit and implicit GS evaluations were measured before and after the instructions. In Experiment 2, we used a between-participants design where one group received positive/negative CS instructions while a control group received neutral instructions. In both experiments, the positive/negative CS instructions caused a reversal of explicit GS evaluations and an elimination of implicit GS evaluations. The findings suggest that generalised evaluations can change after CS instructions which may have implications for interventions aimed at reducing negative group attitudes. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This essay reflects on what it would mean to have faith in the reality of truth, particularly in light of current affairs and the apparent insignificance and impotence of truth to sway opinion or affect behavior. In doing so, it draws on American pragmatism's consequentialist epistemology, C. S. Peirce's “Fixation of Belief,” and George Santayana's concept of a realm of truth.

Death and morality connect in interesting ways in Disney movies. In some Disney films, heroes are defined partly by their willingness to take risks that might result in death, as long as these risks are to protect or obtain good things that make human life worth living. A related ethical issue that Disney films address with regard to death is appropriate grief. Disney films, on balance, show an awareness and respect for the cycle of human life. Perhaps that is why (...) Disney reserves some of its worst deaths for evil characters who refuse to accept the fact of their own mortality. In all of the examples, Disney illustrates the connection many philosophers maintain between courage, cowardice, and death. Disney and Pixar films are so rich and popular that people should use them to engage in difficult conversations about death and other subjects. (shrink)

In assessing ethical issues concerning the sex-industry, feminist liberalism ought to combine the concern for the worker that is central to its treatment of prostitution, with sensitivity to the social and cultural embeddedness of self that is central to its treatment of pornography. That would enable us to then look at live-actor pornography as a form of prostitution that raises additional questions about third party consumption — and analysis both more theoretically coherent and practically useful.

The article considers liberal progressivism as an ambivalent set of ideological commitments and uses Tony Kushner’s Angels in America to make this point. In addition, it considers John Dewey’s theory of religious ideals and his progressivism as a way of making sense of both the themes of the play and the overall thesis.

The mining and energy industries present unique challenges to engineers, who must navigate sometimes competing responsibilities and codes of conduct, such as personal senses of right and wrong, professional ethics codes, and their employers’ corporate social responsibility policies. Corporate social responsibility is the current dominant framework used by industry to conceptualize firms’ responsibilities to their stakeholders, yet has it plays a relatively minor role in engineering ethics education. In this article, we report on an interdisciplinary pedagogical intervention in a petroleum (...) engineering seminar that sought to better prepare engineering undergraduate students to critically appraise the strengths and limitations of CSR as an approach to reconciling the interests of industry and communities. We find that as a result of the curricular interventions, engineering students were able to expand their knowledge of the social, rather than simply environmental and economic dimensions of CSR. They remained hesitant, however, in identifying the links between those social aspects of CSR and their actual engineering work. The study suggests that CSR may be a fruitful arena from which to illustrate the profoundly sociotechnical dimensions of the engineering challenges relevant to students’ future careers. (shrink)

In this paper, we discuss how phenomenology might cogently express the way painful experiences are layered with complex intersubjective meaning. In particular, we propose a critical conception of pain as an intricate multi-levelled phenomenon, deeply ingrained in the constitution of one’s sense of bodily self and emerging from a web of intercorporeal, social, cultural, and political relations. In the first section, we review and critique some conceptual accounts of pain. Then, we explore how pain is involved in complex ways with (...) modalities of pleasure and displeasure, enacted personal meaning, and contexts of empathy or shame. We aim to show why a phenomenology of pain must acknowledge the richness and diversity of peculiar painful experiences. The second section then weaves these critical insights into Husserlian phenomenology of embodiment, sensation, and localisation. We introduce the distinction between Body-Object and Lived-Body to show how pain presents intersubjectively. Furthermore, we stress that, while pain seems to take a marginal position in Husserl’s whole corpus, its role is central in the transcendental constitution of the Lived-Body, interacting with the personal, interpersonal, and intersubjective levels of experiential constitution. Taking a critical-phenomenological perspective, we then concretely explore how some people may experience structural conditions which may make their experiences more or less painful. (shrink)

Social entrepreneurs need resources to develop their organizations and catalyze social impact. Existing research focuses on how social entrepreneurs access and use resources, yet it neglects how they search for resource holders. This issue is particularly salient in social entrepreneurs’ decisions about whom to approach for interpersonal feedback as a valuable resource. The current literature offers lists of individuals whom social entrepreneurs approach for feedback and implies these individuals can be easily accessed. Thus, it offers little insight into how social (...) entrepreneurs select whom to approach for feedback and why, or why they struggle to access feedback. We conducted an in-depth inductive study based on 82 interviews with 36 nascent social entrepreneurs to investigate how they search for and select individuals to approach for feedback within and outside their social networks through an iterative appraisal process. Our findings start to open the black box of searching for resource holders in the resource mobilization process and offer insights on power and stigma in social entrepreneurship. (shrink)

In recent years, there has been increasing managerial and academic attention given to a variety of mechanisms for companies to respond to stakeholder concerns about global business ethics. One area that merits further analysis is the role of industry‐level cooperation regarding issues in global business ethics such as labor practices. There are two main issues that we will address in this article: institutional pressures that predict when an industry will create a code of conduct and institutional complements for an industry‐level (...) code of conduct to be “successful” with regard to responding to stakeholder concerns about international business operations. We offer a number of propositions—bringing together work from both the corporate social responsibility and (neo)institutional theory literatures—with regard to both predictors and complements of industry self‐regulation in reference to labor practices. (shrink)

DO RESTABELECIMENTO DO PRAZO DE VALIDADE DOS CRÉDITOS DE CELULARES PRÉ-PAGOS: UMA ANÁLISE DA DECISÃO DO STJ A PARTIR DA LEGISLAÇÃO CONSUMERISTA.

The title of this book invites the question "what makes a metaphysical club real?" Overthinkers like myself may wonder whether metaphysical clubs can partake of varying degrees of reality or whether the distinction is, more likely, one between imposters and the genuine article. It only heightens the curiosity to read, in the general introduction to the book, that metaphysical clubs both preceded and followed the so-called "real" one and that the real one was itself divided into two phases. Given, then, (...) that there appear to have been more than one actual metaphysical club, what is the point of characterizing the subject of this anthology as real?The Real Metaphysical Club focuses entirely and thoroughly on the club... (shrink)

Humor is an indispensable element of George Santayana's philosophy. Santayana is, in many ways, philosophy's fool, poking fun at endeavors to obtain epistemological and moral mastery over existence. Moreover, he reminds us of the over-arching benefits of a humorous attitude, suggesting a humility by which we may put into relative perspective our otherwise totalizing aspirations and pursue a moral life without succumbing to moralism. Ultimately, a sense of humor reminds us that comedy is as honest a narrative as tragedy and (...) that the benefit in living is the fun of it. (shrink)

BackgroundPeople with upper extremity amputations report receiving insufficient information about treatment options. Furthermore, patients commonly report not knowing what questions to ask providers. A question prompt sheet, or list of questions, can support patient-centered care by empowering patients to ask questions important to them, promoting patient-provider communication, and increasing patient knowledge. This study assessed information needs among people with UE amputations about UE vascularized composite allotransplantation and developed a UE VCA-QPS.MethodsThis multi-site, cross-sectional, mixed-methods study involved in-depth and semi-structured interviews with (...) people with UE amputations to assess information needs and develop a UE VCA-QPS. Qualitative data were analyzed by thematic analysis; quantitative data were analyzed by descriptive statistics. The initial UE VCA-QPS included 130 items across 18 topics.ResultsEighty-nine people with UE amputations participated. Most were male, had a mean age of 46 years, and had a unilateral and below-elbow amputation. Participants desired information about UE VCA eligibility, evaluation process, surgery, risks, rehabilitation, and functional outcomes. After refinement, the final UE VCA-QPS included 35 items, across 9 topics. All items were written at a ≤ 6th grade reading level. Most semi-structured interview participants reported being ‘completely’ or ‘very’ likely to use a UE VCA-QPS.ConclusionPeople with UE amputations have extensive information needs about UE VCA. The UE VCA-QPS aims to address patients’ information needs and foster patient-centered care. Future research should assess whether the UE VCA-QPS facilitates patient-provider discussion and informed decision-making for UE VCA. (shrink)

Necro-advertising refers to the use of deceased celebrities in advertising. This practice offers unique advantages to brands that seek to benefit from positive associations with timeless celebrities at a more affordable cost than celebrity endorsement. Nevertheless, how consumers actually respond to the use of deceased celebrities in advertising remains under-theorized. This research is the first to empirically examine consumers’ ethical judgments about necro-advertising practices. In particular, drawing from the signaling theory, it demonstrates the impact of consumer inferences about the existence (...) of a legal agreement for using deceased celebrities’ images on brand ethicality. The results of two experimental studies show that a low-equity brand is more likely to be perceived as unethical when using necro-advertising since consumers have limited knowledge about these brands. Conversely, our findings confirm how a high level of equity prevents from the aforementioned adverse effects since these brands’ assets send a credible signal about their capability to get approval from a deceased celebrity’s estate for the use of its image. While deepening current knowledge on the perceived ethicality of necro-advertising practices, this research uncovers the moderating effect of equity on consumer inferences about brand ethicality. The results also suggest managerial caveats and guidelines for low-equity brands. In particular, while necro-advertising may have a negative impact on the perceived ethicality of low-equity brands, disclosing a statement about a contractual engagement with the deceased celebrity’s estate can mitigate this negative effect by providing an unequivocal signal that the brand is acting ethically. (shrink)

The first in-depth reference in the field that combines scientific knowledge with philosophical inquiry, _The Philosophy of Science: An Encyclopedia_ is a two-volume set that brings together an international team of leading scholars to provide over 130 entries on the essential concepts in the philosophy of science. _The areas covered include:_ biology chemistry epistemology and metaphysics physics psychology and mind the social sciences key figures in the combined studies of science and philosophy. The essays represent the most up-to-date philosophical thinking (...) on timeless scientific topics such as: determinism, explanation, laws of nature, perception, individuality, time, and economics as well as timely topics like adaptation, conservation biology, quantum logic, consciousness, evolutionary psychology, and game theory. (shrink)

Wittgenstein's distinction between understanding and interpretation is fundamental to the account of meaning in _Philosophical Investigations. In his discussion of rule-following, Wittgenstein explicitly rejects the idea that understanding or grasping a rule is a matter of interpretation. Wittgenstein explains meaning and rule-following in terms of action, rejecting both realist and Cartesian accounts of the mental. I argue that in his effort to employ Wittgenstein's views on meaning and rule-following, Professor Morawetz embraces the position Wittgenstein rejects. In the course of making (...) his case for law as a "deliberative practice", Professor Morawetz embraces interpretation as a fundamental element of human practices, thereby taking up precisely the view Wittgenstein rejects. (shrink)