Given the fact that the prevalent political debates about the status and significance of liberty and welfare are almost polarised, this book defends both of them as essential to human dignity and well being. Amartya Sen's capability approach is the result of his constructive criticism of John Rawls' political liberalism. Though Jacques Maritain is often regarded as the forerunner of Rawls, he has not yet been discussed in relation to Sen's capability approach. Despite Maritain's pioneering contributions to human rights discourse (...) in the twentieth century, his personalism only insufficiently reflects and explains the demands of welfare rights. In view of this shared deficit in liberal traditions, this book argues that Sen's human rights discourse, with its 'goal rights system,' persuasively integrates both liberty and welfare rights. In addition, it merges both human rights and human development discourses, consequently laying a solid foundation for a rights based approach to development"--Publisher's website. (shrink)

The Herald of Free Enterprise, a ferry operating in the English Channel, sank on March 6, 1987, drowning nearly two hundred people. The official inquiry found that the company running the ferry was extremely sloppy, with poor routines of checking and management. “From top to bottom the body corporate was infected with the disease of sloppiness.”1 But the courts did not penalize anyone in what might seem to be an appropriate measure, failing to identify individuals in the company or on (...) the ship itself who were seriously enough at fault. As one commentator put it, “The primary requirement of finding an individual who was liable . . . stood in the way of attaching any significance to the organizational sloppiness that had been found by the official inquiry.”2 In a case like this it can make good sense to hold that while the individuals involved may not bear a high degree of personal responsibility, together as a corporate enterprise they should carry full responsibility for what occurred. Although the members may not fully satisfy the conditions for being held personally responsible—although there are mitigating circumstances that excuse them in some mea-. (shrink)

Few musical works loom as large in Western culture as Richard Wagner's four-part Ring of the Nibelung. In Finding an Ending, two eminent philosophers, Philip Kitcher and Richard Schacht, offer an illuminating look at this greatest of Wagner's achievements, focusing on its far-reaching and subtle exploration of problems of meanings and endings in this life and world. Kitcher and Schacht plunge the reader into the heart of Wagner's Ring, drawing out the philosophical and human significance of the text and (...) the music. They show how different forms of love, freedom, heroism, authority, and judgment are explored and tested as it unfolds. As they journey across its sweeping musical-dramatic landscape, Kitcher and Schacht lead us to the central concern of the Ring--the problem of endowing life with genuine significance that can be enhanced rather than negated by its ending, if the right sort of ending can be found. The drama originates in Wotan's quest for a transformation of the primordial state of things into a world in which life can be lived more meaningfully. The authors trace the evolution of Wotan's efforts, the intricate problems he confronts, and his failures and defeats. But while the problem Wotan poses for himself proves to be insoluble as he conceives of it, they suggest that his very efforts and failures set the stage for the transformation of his problem, and for the only sort of resolution of it that may be humanly possible--to which it is not Siegfried but rather Brünnhilde who shows the way. The Ring's ending, with its passing of the gods above and destruction of the world below, might seem to be devastating; but Kitcher and Schacht see a kind of meaning in and through the ending revealed to us that is profoundly affirmative, and that has perhaps never been so powerfully and so beautifully expressed. (shrink)

Argues i) that part of what it is to understand what is being asked, when we ask whether something is good, is being able to distinguish stopping points in a series of "Why?" questions, and ii) that this ability explains how we can reason from observable facts to conclusions about value.

This paper explores the relationship between phenomenal properties and intentional properties. In recent years a number of philosophers have argued that intentional properties are sometimes necessitated by phenomenal properties, but have not explained why or how. Exceptions can be found in the work of Katalin Farkas and Farid Masrour, who develop versions of reductionism regarding phenomenally-necessitated intentionality (or "phenomenal intentionality"). I raise two objections to reductive theories of the sort they develop. Then I propose a version of primitivism regarding phenomenal (...) intentionality. I argue that primitivism avoids the pitfalls of reductionism while promising broad explanatory payoffs. (shrink)

This paper analyzes ethical aspects of the new paradigm of Ambient Intelligence, which is a combination of Ubiquitous Computing and Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI’s). After an introduction to the approach, two key ethical dimensions will be analyzed: freedom and privacy. It is argued that Ambient Intelligence, though often designed to enhance freedom and control, has the potential to limit freedom and autonomy as well. Ambient Intelligence also harbors great privacy risks, and these are explored as well.

This article has a few goals. The first goal is to discover the development of Semitic pointing systems such as Babylonian Hebrew (both simple and complex), Tiberian Hebrew, Palestinian Hebrew, Samaritan Hebrew, Syriac (both Western [Jacobite] and Eastern [Nestorian]) and Arabic. The second goal is to propose the possible development because of the interaction between those languages in the past. In this article, the comparative method will be used as the methodology. A general observation of these signs and a proposition (...) regarding the possible development amongst those languages will be presented.Contribution: This article traces the synchronic and diachronic development of Semitic languages’ vocalisation systems and proposes a possible development between them. (shrink)

Contemporary discussions of skepticism often frame the skeptic's argument around an instance of the closure principle. Roughly, the closure principle states that if a subject knows p, and knows that p entails q, then the subject knows q. The main contention of this paper is that the closure argument for skepticism is defective. We explore several possible classifications of the defect. The closure argument might plausibly be classified as begging the question, as exhibiting transmission failure, or as structurally inefficient. Interestingly, (...) perhaps, each of these has been proposed as the correct classification of Moore's proof of an external world. (shrink)

In response to the liar’s paradox, Kripke developed the fixed-point semantics for languages expressing their own truth concepts. Kripke’s work suggests a number of related fixed-point theories of truth for such languages. Gupta and Belnap develop their revision theory of truth in contrast to the fixed-point theories. The current paper considers three natural ways to compare the various resulting theories of truth, and establishes the resulting relationships among these theories. The point is to get a sense of the lay of (...) the land amid a variety of options. Our results will also provide technical fodder for the methodological remarks of the companion paper to this one. (shrink)

Characterizing how activity in the central and autonomic nervous systems corresponds to distinct emotional states is one of the central goals of affective neuroscience. Despite the ease with which individuals label their own experiences, identifying specific autonomic and neural markers of emotions remains a challenge. Here we explore how multivariate pattern classification approaches offer an advantageous framework for identifying emotion-specific biomarkers and for testing predictions of theoretical models of emotion. Based on initial studies using multivariate pattern classification, we suggest that (...) central and autonomic nervous system activity can be reliably decoded into distinct emotional states. Finally, we consider future directions in applying pattern classification to understand the nature of emotion in the nervous system. (shrink)

In this provocative and insightful work, Philip Leon examines the nature of power and its ethical implications, delving into topics such as social justice, democracy, and civil disobedience. Drawing on a wide variety of sources from philosophy, politics, and history, Leon offers a nuanced and thought-provoking exploration of one of the most fundamental issues of our time. This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know (...) it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

Philip H Walkling; The Idea of a Multicultural Curriculum [1], Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 14, Issue 1, 30 May 2006, Pages 87–95, https://doi.org.

This book is a volume in the Penn Press Anniversary Collection. To mark its 125th anniversary in 2015, the University of Pennsylvania Press rereleased more than 1,100 titles from Penn Press's distinguished backlist from 1899-1999 that had fallen out of print. Spanning an entire century, the Anniversary Collection offers peer-reviewed scholarship in a wide range of subject areas.

R. K. Meyer once gave precise form to the question of whether relevant implication can be defined in any modal system, and his answer was `no'. In the present paper, we extend S4, first with propositional quantifiers, to the system S4π+; and then with definite propositional descriptions, to the system S4π+ lp . We show that relevant implication can in some sense be defined in the modal system S4π+ lp , although it cannot be defined in S4π+.

I compare recent work in the sociology of scientific knowledge with other types of sociological research. On this basis I urge a revival of the sociology of science, offer a tentative agenda, and attempt to show how the questions I raise might be addressed.

Is phenomenology a metaphysics of its own type? This is the question that L,szl0 Tengelyi interprets affirmatively in his last oeuvre. Such a type can be characterized as a metaphysics of transgressiveness in contrast to the metaphysics of potentiality. According to Tengelyi, phenomenology must therefore be thought of in the form of a diacritique of world and infinity, which can be seen as the metaphysical architectonics of the transfinite. By relating the difference between thing and world to the difference between (...) transfinite and absolute infinite, it is to be proven that the actual infinite belongs to the reality of the world, precisely in the sense of phenomenology. We want to critically appreciate this attempt of radicalization by confronting it with another radicalization approach: Marc Richir’s phenomenology. This will show that in the starting point of the thing-world difference a subtle subjectivism or quasi-Cartesianism is inherent, which does not do justice to the infinity of the world, one which even includes the radical sense of uninhabitability. (shrink)

David Lewis [1988; 1996] canvases an anti-Humean thesis about mental states: that the rational agent desires something to the extent that he or she believes it to be good. Lewis offers and refutes a decision-theoretic formulation of it, the 'Desire-as-Belief Thesis'. Other authors have since added further negative results in the spirit of Lewis's. We explore ways of being anti-Humean that evade all these negative results. We begin by providing background on evidential decision theory and on Lewis's negative results. We (...) then introduce what we call the indexicality loophole: if the goodness of a proposition is indexical, partly a function of an agent's mental state, then the negative results have no purchase. Thus we propose a variant of Desire-as-Belief that exploits this loophole. We argue that a number of meta-ethical positions are committed to just such indexicality. Indeed, we show that with one central sort of evaluative belief--the belief that an option is right--the indexicality loophole can be exploited in various interesting ways. Moreover, on some accounts, 'good' is indexical in the same way. Thus, it seems that the anti-Humean can dodge the negative results. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Interpretation According to Law References.

We introduce and study a natural class of fields in which certain first-order definable sets are existentially definable, and characterise this class by a number of equivalent conditions. We show that global fields belong to this class, and in particular obtain a number of new existential predicates over global fields.

Following in general a history of religions analysis, the paper argues that myth lays a basis for morality in that it sets forth a picture of “how things really are” (the is), to which humans seek to conform their actions (morality, the ought). A parallel argument locates the capacity for morality and values orientation in the process of evolution itself. A hypothesis is formulated concerning the function of myth in the emergence of Homo sapiens, namely, to motivate the action required (...) if creatures so culturally formed as humans were to survive. The Christian love command (understood as altruism) is interpreted as an example of the general hypothesis. (shrink)

Patient and family demands for the initiation or continuation of life-sustaining medically non-beneficial treatments continues to be a major issue. This is especially relevant in intensive care units, but is also a challenge in other settings, most notably with cardiopulmonary resuscitation. Differences of opinion between physicians and patients/families about what are appropriate interventions in specific clinical situations are often fraught with highly strained emotions, and perhaps none more so when the family bases their desires on religious belief. In this essay, (...) I discuss non-beneficial treatments in light of these sorts of disputes, when there is a clash between the nominally secular world of fact- and evidence-based medicine and the faith-based world of hope for a miraculous cure. I ask the question whether religious belief can justify providing treatment that has either no or a vanishly small chance of restoring meaningful function. I conclude that non-beneficial therapy by its very definition cannot be helpful, and indeed is often harmful, to patients and hence cannot be justified no matter what the source or kind of reasons used to support its use. Therefore, doctors may legitimately refuse to provide such treatments, so long as they do so for acceptable clinical reasons. They must also offer alternatives, including second opinions, as well the option of transferring the care of the patient to a more accommodating physician or institution. (shrink)

In this article, Herbert Marcuse’s nature-ethical considerations, which have to date been scarcely received, are used to develop perspectives on how the nature-ethical gap in contemporary Critical Theory could be closed. The central idea is that nature is tobe recognized as a subject in its own right without needing to anthropomorphize it in the process. The advocatory ethics of nature, which is outlined here, differs from current sustainability and environmental ethics primarily in that it maintains the tension between an anthropocentric (...) and an ecocentric approach and does not resolve it in one direction. Marcuse’s so-called “liberation of nature” is understood as a means for the “liberation of humans”, but the latter can only succeed if the former is also carried out. (shrink)