Ever since the publication of Placide Tempel's epoch-making work Bantu Philosophy, African philosophers have worked to dispel the myth that there is no metaphysics in Africa.

This book examines the extremely important issue of the consistency of medical involvement in ending lives in medicine, law and war. It uses philosophical theory to show why medical doctors may be involved at different stages of the capital punishment process. The author uses the theories of Emmanuel Kant and John S. Mill, combined with Gerwith's principle of generic consistency, to concretize ethics in capital punishment practice. This book does not discuss the moral justification of capital punishment, but rather looks (...) at the possible forms of involvement and shows why consistency would demand medical involvement. The author takes a general approach, using arguments that may apply universally. The book broaches different academic fields, such as medicine, ethics, business, politics and defense. The Ethics of Medical Involvement in Capital Punishment is of interest to students, teachers, lecturers and researchers working in the areas of capital punishment, medical, legal and business ethics, and political philosophy. (shrink)

In this chapter, a reprint of an article initially appearing in the Journal of Moral Education (2010), we provide a theoretical reconstruction of sub-Saharan ethics that we argue is a strong competitor to typical Western approaches to morality. According to our African moral theory, actions are right roughly insofar as they are a matter of living harmoniously with others or honouring communal relationships. After spelling out this ethic, we apply it to several issues in both normative and empirical research into (...) morality. With regard to normative research, we compare and contrast this African moral theory with utilitarianism and Kantianism in the context of several practical issues. With regard to empirical research, we compare and contrast our sub-Saharan ethic with several of Lawrence Kohlberg’s views on the nature of morality. Our aim is to highlight respects in which the African approach provides a unitary foundation for a variety of normative and empirical conclusions that are serious alternatives to dominant Western views. (shrink)

Public Art has represented a rising artistic genre for the last few decades. Art abandoned museums and galleries to conquer the public space, a fact which gave birth to passionate controversies that cannot be approached only in terms of paradigms of art history. Taking Richard Serra’s controversial sculpture, Tilted Arc, as an example, this article aims at tracing, by means of an interdisciplinary approach, the challenges that public art has been confronted with in the contemporary city.

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 was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. 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. As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. 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)

ABSTRACT Many recent articles argue that participants who seroconvert during HIV prevention trials deserve treatment when they develop AIDS, and there is a general consensus that the participants in HIV/aids treatment trials should have continuing post‐trial access. As a result, the primary concern of many ethicists and activists has shifted from justifying an obligation to treat trial participants, to working out mechanisms through which treatment could be provided. In this paper I argue that this shift frequently conceals an important assumption: (...) that if there is an obligation to supply treatment, then any party who could provide it may be prevailed upon to discharge the obligation. This assumption is false. The reasons why trial participants should get ART affect who has the duty to provide it. We should not burden governments with the obligations of sponsors, nor researchers with the obligations of the international community. And we should not deprive a group of treatment because their need is less salient than that of research participants. Insisting otherwise may lead to people being wrongfully deprived of access to antiretrovirals. (shrink)

False belief tasks have enjoyed a monopoly in the research on children’s development of a theory of mind. They have been granted this status because they promise to deliver an unambiguous assessment of children’s understanding of the representational nature of mental states. Their poor cousins, true belief tasks, have been relegated to occasional service as control tasks. That this is their only role has been due to the universal assumption that correct answers on true belief tasks are inherently ambiguous regarding (...) the level of the child’s understanding of mental states. It has also been due to the universal assumption that nothing in the child’s developing theory of mind would lead to systematically incorrect answers on true belief tasks. We review new findings that 4- and 5-year-olds do err, systematically and profoundly, on the true belief versions of all the extant belief tasks. This reveals an intermediate level of understanding in the development of children’s theory of mind. Researchers have been unaware of this intermediate level because it produces correct answers in false belief tasks. A simple two-task battery—one true belief task and one false belief task—is sufficient to remove the ambiguity from each task. The new findings show that children do not acquire an understanding of beliefs, and hence a representational theory of mind, until after 6 years of age, or 2 years later than most developmental psychologists have concluded. This raises the question of how to interpret other new findings that infants are able to pass false belief tasks. We review these new infant studies, as well as recent studies on chimpanzees, in light of older children’s failure on true belief tasks, and end with some speculation about how all of these new findings might be reconciled. (shrink)

Taking a critical look at some of the recent controls over human life, health, and death, Fletcher draws a vivid picture of contemporary biological needs and ethical responsibility. Genetic engineering, fetal research, abortion, suicide, human experimentation, infanticide, and euthanasia are some of the issues explored.

The authors identify the challenge of holding contemporary business leaders accountable for enhancing the intangible strategic asset of integrity capacity in organizations. After defining integrity capacity and framing it as part of a strategic resource model of sustainable global competitive advantage, the stakeholder costs of integrity capacity neglect are delineated. To address this neglect issue, the authors focus on the cultivation of judgment integrity to handle behavioral, moral and hypothesized economic complexities as key dimensions of integrity capacity. Finally, the authors (...) recommend two leadership practices to build competence in business leaders to enhance integrity capacity as an organizational strategic asset. (shrink)

The authors propose the integrity capacity construct with its four dimensions (process, judgment, development and system dimensions) as a framework for analyzing and resolving behavioral, moral and legal complexity in business ethics' issues at the individual and collective levels. They claim that moral progress in business comes about through the increase in stakeholders who regularly handle moral complexity by demonstrating process, judgment, developmental and system integrity capacity domestically and globally.

Temporal externalists expand Putnam’s and Burge’s semantic externalisms to argue that later uses of words transform the semantic significance of earlier uses. Conflicting intuitions about temporal externalism often turn on different conceptions of linguistic practice, which have mostly not been thematically explicated. I defend a version of temporal externalism that replaces the familiar regularist and normative-regulist conceptions of linguistic practice or use. This alternative identifies practices neither by regularities of use, nor by determinate norms governing their constituent performances, but by (...) the ways those performances bear upon and are accountable to one another. Performances are intelligible as part of a larger pattern of practice, but different performances extend that pattern in partially conflicting ways. The essentially anaphoric concepts of “issues” and “stakes” allow us to talk about how alternative extensions of past performance conflict or otherwise mis-align , and what differences it would make to extend the practice in one way rather than another . The result is to recognize both the interdependence of linguistic performances, and the open texture of concepts, by situating them within broader patterns of discursive interaction with changing circumstances. (shrink)

In this paper I focus on John Locke as a representative figure of English Enlightenment theorizing about the legitimacy of cognitive authority and examine the way in which a greater attention to the cultural milieu in which Locke worked can lead to a profound reexamination of his writings on cognitive authority. In particular, I suggest that an inattention to the rise of a culture of reading and the growing availability of books in Early Modern England has led historians of philosophy (...) largely to misrepresent Locke's theory of testimonial justification. At the core of my paper are two interrelated claims. First, with respect to the history of ideas, I argue that the Locke's interest in testimony as a source of justification was in fact greater than that of his Scholastic forebears, and that this fact has a simple, if as yet unacknowledged, cultural cause -- viz., the rise of the book as a mass commodity in the late 17th century. Second, with respect to the history of philosophy more particularly, I argue that this failure to acknowledge the cultural movements that led to a consideration of testimony as a topic of interest to epistemologists in the Modern era has led to a misreading of Locke's work on the subject. Indeed, Locke, though usually read as having attempted to denigrate testimony as a legitimate source of justification, in fact sought to devise an epistemology that would do justice to the centrality of testimony in the intellectual lives of growing numbers of his contemporaries in 17th and 18th century England and Scotland. (shrink)

Neuron diagrams are heavily employed in academic discussions of causation. Stephen Mumford and Rani Lill Anjum, however, offer an alternative approach employing vector diagrams, which this paper attempts to develop further. I identify three ways in which dispositionalists have taken the activities of powers to be related: stimulation, mutual manifestation, and contribution combination. While Mumford and Anjum do provide resources for representing contribution combination, which might be sufficient for their particular brand of dispositionalism, I argue that those resources are not (...) flexible enough to further accommodate either stimulation or mutual manifestation. Representational tools are provided to address these limitations, improving the general value of the vector model for dispositionalist approaches to causation. (shrink)

Social Constructivism and the Philosophy of Science by Andre Kukla The Social Construction of What? by Ian Hacking.

In taking properties to have powerful or dispositional essences, dispositionalism is primed to provide an account of causation. This paper lays out a challenge confronting the dispositionalist’s ability to account for how powers causally interact with one another so as to bring about collective results. The challenge, here labeled the “interaction gap,” is raised for two competing kinds of approaches to dispositional interaction: contribution combinationist and mutual manifestationist. After carefully highlighting and testing potential resources for closing the interaction gap, it (...) is concluded that the mutual manifestationist approach holds a significant advantage. In turn, the importance of the interaction gap itself is highlighted. While powers prime an ontology to yield an account of causation, how far that account can actually go depends on the metaphysical details of one’s view of powers and their causal interaction. (shrink)

Modernism in the philosophy of science demands a unified story about what makes an inquiry scientific (or a successful science). Fine's "natural ontological attitude" (NOA) is "postmodern" in joining trust in local scientific practice with suspicion toward any global interpretation of science to legitimate or undercut that trust. I consider four readings of this combination of trust and suspicion and their consequences for the autonomy and cultural credibility of the sciences. Three readings take respectively Fine's trusting attitude, his emphasis upon (...) local practice, and his antiessentialism about science as most fundamental to NOA. A fourth, more adequate reading, prompted by recent feminist interpretations of science, offers less restrictive readings of both Fine's trust and his suspicion toward approaching science with "ready-made philosophical engines" (Fine 1986b, 177). (shrink)

Naturalism in the philosophy of science has proceeded differently than the familiar forms of meta-philosophical naturalism in other sub-fields, taking its cues from “science as we know it” (Cartwright in The Dappled World, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1999, p. 1) rather than from a philosophical conception of “the Scientific Image.” Its primary focus is scientific practice, and its philosophical analyses are complementary and accountable to empirical studies of scientific work. I argue that naturalistic philosophy of science is nevertheless criterial for (...) other versions of meta-philosophical naturalism; relying on a conflicting conception of scientific understanding would constitute a “first philosophy” imposed on the sciences. Moreover, naturalistic philosophy of science provides the basis for a “radically” naturalistic alternative to the familiar forms of orthodox or liberal naturalism. Goodman, Sellars and Hempel had previously challenged empiricist scruples against causal connections or nomological necessity by arguing that scientific concepts already had modal import. The radical naturalism I defend similarly challenges meta-philosophical naturalists’ conception of the Scientific Image as anormative, and instead shows how the normativity of scientific understanding in practice is a scientifically intelligible natural phenomenon. This account then provides a basis for naturalistic reflection on how other practices and normative concerns fit together with the best scientific understanding of human ways of life. (shrink)

In contrast to earlier accounts of the epistemic significance of narrative, it is argued that narrative is important in natural scientific knowledge. To recognize this, we must understand narrative not as a literary form in which knowledge is written, but as the temporal organization of the understanding of practical activity. Scientific research is a social practice, whereby researchers structure the narrative context in which past work is interpreted and significant possibilities for further work are projected. This narrative field displays a (...) constant tension between a need for a coherent, shared understanding of the field and the incoherence threatened by divergent projects and interpretations. The account has three parts. First, a summary of the general account of the narrative intelligibility of action which underlies the proffered view of narrative in science. This account is then applied to understanding how scientific work acquires significance, and how the scientific literature is constructed and read. Finally, it is shown how this account should transform our understanding of the unity of science, and it is suggested how it can help undercut various realist and anti?realist interpretations of scientific knowledge, while also challenging the ironic stance which many recent sociologists adopt toward the global legitimation of science attempted by many philosophers. (shrink)

ספר ויקרא, או תורת כוהנים, נראה היום פחות מעניין מאשר ספרי-קודש אחרים, כי הוא ספר מצוות - הוא כולל כארבעים אחוז מכל תרי"ג המצוות - ואף במידה רבה מצוות שאינן בתוקף מאז חורבן בית-המקדש. אך יש בו עניין, שכן הוא מוכר כספר השלם ביותר מבחינת סגנונו ותכנו, ואולי אף בכך שעריכתו כנראה עתיקה ביותר - לא לדעת דון יצחק אברבנאל, שכן הוא לא הטיל בספק כי תורה נתנה למשה מפי הגבורה - אמנם לא בסיני אך בכל-זאת למשה מפי הגבורה. החוקרים (...) המתעלמים מדעה זו.. (shrink)

As sports fans, we often experience what seem to be strong garden-variety emotions—everything from joy and euphoria to anger, dread and despair. In self-description, in physiology and even in phenomenology, these reactions to sporting events present themselves as genuine emotions. But we don’t act on these ‘sporting emotions’ in the ways one might expect. This is because these reactions are not genuine emotions. Or so I argue. Johan Huizinga suggested that play has a pretend ‘set aside’ ‘extra-ordinary’ character. And Kendall (...) Walton has argued that make-believe is involved in our emotional responses to fiction, as well as to sport. Here I articulate and extend the idea that sporting emotions centrally involve pretense and make-believe in ways that can meet some forceful objections. These extensions draw on a ‘double-consciousness’ I claim to find in the pretense of play. I end by saying why the proper characterization of our sporting emotions is important. (shrink)

This paper presents a simple mathematical model that shows how economic inequality between social groups can arise and be maintained even when the only adaptive learning process driving cultural evolution increases individuals’ economic gains. The key assumptions are that human populations are structured into groups and that cultural learning is more likely to occur within than between groups. Then, if groups are sufficiently isolated and there are potential gains from specialization and exchange, stable stratification can sometimes result. This model predicts (...) that stratification is favored, ceteris paribus, by (1) greater surplus production, (2) more equitable divisions of the surplus among specialists, (3) greater cultural isolation among subpopulations within a society, and (4) more weight given to economic success by cultural learners. (shrink)

In his recent book, The Universe As We Find It, John Heil offers an updated account of his two-category ontology. One of his major goals is to avoid including relations in his basic ontology. While there can still be true claims positing relations, such as those of the form “x is taller than y” and “x causes y,” they will be true in virtue of substances and their monadic, non-relational properties. That is, Heil’s two-category ontology is deployed to provide non-relational (...) truthmakers for relational truths. This paper challenges the success of Heil’s project with respect to causation. The arguments here are not entirely negative, however. An option is made available to Heil’s ontology so that it might, at least to some extent, regain non-relational causings. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: There is an abundance of scholarship on John Dewey. Dewey's writings are vast, so scholars try to find the crux that connects their many themes into a distinctive vision for philosophy and life. Many claim that the democratic way of life is the center of Dewey's philosophical vision. Others claim that Dewey's response to Darwin was the impetus for a philosophical experimentalism that could envision a better life (...) by responding to the needs in an age of modern industry. Some claim that the crux is a dynamic and non-mechanistic naturalism that Dewey develops to critically undo the dualisms of tradition, most especially the distinction between nature and culture. There has even been an effort to interpret each of these themes within Dewey's theory about the conditions for aesthetics in life, the life of art within an experience, and an experience of life as art. Arguably, no strategy is more preferable than another because each is plausible. Each plausibly selects a crux that connects the many themes across an array of writings, since Dewey's philosophy is multimodal by design and shuns reductionism for pluralism. Even amidst plurality, through many modes of activity and existence, each of these themes and all of Dewey's writings have a concern for meaning in life and how life is a process of meaning-making. And yet, meaning, for Dewey, is irreducible to verbal or written language and is made by more than propositions, but extends beyond the divide of nature and culture to potentially encompass all of life and life's processes. This expansive conception of meaning has more in common with semiotics, especially those of Charles Sanders Peirce, than any philosophy of language. And yet almost no scholar has sought to semiotically interpret Dewey's philosophy as a whole. Perhaps, though, Dewey's multimodal and pluralistic vision for philosophy and life also has a semiotic crux that intersects with the others in ways that are fundamentally important. There are scholars who have dealt with semiotic themes or insights with implications for semiotics in Dewey's writings. None have sought to semiotically interpret Dewey's philosophy as a whole, or, as a consequence, to chronologically survey Dewey's writings to determine if there is a conceivably Deweyan approach to semiotics that might contrast with or contribute to the more dominant approaches. There is a reason scholars may not have sought a Deweyan approach to semiotics. Dewey did not have an explicit theory of semiotics. There is no attempt to devise a doctrine of signs in Dewey's writings. Never did Dewey try to classify the fundamental types of sign, analyze the relations of signification by which they differ, or methodically explain how the logic of signification works. This contrasts sharply with Charles Sanders Peirce. Peirce has an explicit theory of semiotics that divides the fundamental types of sign into icons, indices, and symbols by their distinct relations of signification that are at work in the logic of inference by the categories. During his second year at Johns Hopkins, Dewey was actually Peirce's student in a class on logic. This already suggests the possibility of influence. Dewey's writings around 1883 even espouse the central thesis of Peirce's semiotics. All signs, however else their significations may differ, are triadic relations for both Peirce and Dewey. Whether and how far Peirce's logic was an influence on Dewey at Johns... (shrink)

Three decades ago, planned obsolescence was a widely discussed ethical issue in marketing classrooms. Planned obsolescence is topical again today because an increasing emphasis on continuous product development promotes shorter durables replacement and disposal cycles with troublesome environmental consequences. This paper offers explanations of why product obsolescence is practiced and why it works. It then examines the ethical responsibilities of product developers and corporate strategists and their differing responses to this problem. Pro-environment product design and marketing practices and innovative government (...) policies may alleviate the problem over time. However, given the current lack of understanding about consumer replacement and disposal behavior, it is questionable as to whether these practices and policies will be sufficiently informed to be effective. Thus, marketing scholars have a significant opportunity to contribute to sustainable durables product development. (shrink)

Scholars often argue that Charles Sanders Peirce was responsible for Josiah Royce's semiotic turn in _The Problem of Christianity_ of 1913. Thus scholars tend to assume that a _Roycean_ approach to semiotics was a later development and derives almost entirely from Peirce's semiotics. Far from a later development, Royce probably read Peirce much earlier. Indeed, even before Royce had read Peirce, the kernel of a Rocyean approach to semiotics is found in the dissertation of 1878. Thus the present essay will (...) prove that a Roycean approach to semiotics did not have a basis in Peirce's semiotics, whether early or later, but rather grew out of Royce's earliest writings. The first part will reconstruct the early pragmatism in the dissertation of 1878 and find that the kernal of a Roycean approach to semiotics was the idea of a _mediating third_. The second part will show how the disseration's pragmatism develops into a phenomenology of time that contains Royce's earliest semiosic insights. The third part will explain how the early pragmatism and phenomenology come together in the argument on the possibility of error from Royce's _The Religious Aspect of Philosophy_ of 1885. The possibility of error is Royce's original argument for absolute idealism, so the essay will conclude that a Roycean approach to semiotics entails a semiotics of the absolute. (shrink)

Recent stories of corporate insiders avoiding losses and, in some cases, generating enormous personal profits as their companies crumbled have led investors to question the integrity of American business and the fairness of the United States stock markets. The SEC tries to ensure the fairness of the stock markets by making and enforcing laws against unfair practices such as insider trading. In the United States, when insiders trade stock based on non-public information, they have broken the law and betrayed the (...) trust that has been placed in them.This study used student subjects to test the relationship between the likelihood of trading based on insider information and subjective probabilities of deterrents and motivations for insider trading. Expected gain, guilt, cynicism, and fairness of laws were the determinants that had a significant relationship with the intent to trade based on insider information. This study also found support for prospect theory with regard to insider trading. The results indicate that subjects are more likely to trade based on insider information to avoid a loss than to achieve an abnormal gain. The study also finds evidence of social desirability response bias. (shrink)

Much of the recent discussion of problematic aspects of quantum-mechanical measurement centers around that feature of quantum theory which is called "the projection postulate." This is roughly the claim that a change of a certain sort occurs in the state of a physical system when a measurement is made on the system. In this paper an argument for the projection postulate due to von Neumann is considered. Attention is focused on trying to provide an understanding of the notion of "the (...) state of a physical system" which is compatible with the argument von Neumann offers. An attempt is made to formulate the argument in terms of an objectivistic interpretation of probability concepts. It is seen that such an interpretation does not provide a suitable way of understanding the argument. An attempt is made to illustrate the source of this failure in terms of a non-quantum-mechanical example. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article seeks to “contaminate” an ethics of care with three different but interrelated theoretical interventions: the expansion of the care ethic beyond interpersonal relations, ecofeminism, and feminist political theory. This makes care theoretically resilient: durable enough to have grounded meaning but flexible enough for situational application. This also makes care a primary concept capable of subsuming some aspects of the traditional ethical theories of deontology, consequentialism, and virtue ethics. This holds vast implications for journalists as they seek new (...) ways to delineate and articulate their service to democracy in an ever-changing mediascape. Furthermore, this ethic of care engenders media literacy and enables an active public to critically question media content and influence. This theoretical explication is thus not an abstract exercise but intentionally focused to aid the difficult work of worldmaking. (shrink)

There has been much discussion of whether there could be objects A and B that are “individuatively vague” in the following way: object A and object B neither determinately stand in the relation of identity to one another, nor do they determinately fail to stand in this relation. If there are objects of this type, then we would have a genuine case of metaphysical vagueness, or “vagueness-in-the-world.” The possibility of vague objects in this sense strikes many as incoherent. The possibility’s (...) very description not only seems to talk of two objects but, much worse, it seems to point to a feature that distinguishes them: unlike object A, object B is not determinately identical to object A. This suspicion of incoherence is voiced in the famous arguments given against the possibility by Gareth Evans and Nathan Salmon. But the status of those arguments and others is uncertain. Here I present a new argument against vague objects — or more precisely, against the possibility of individuatively vague objects that satisfy an important and common additional condition that I will call “Democracy.” Since my argument turns on a connection between what is indeterminate and what is possible, I call it “the modal argument.”. (shrink)

A person incurs inchoate criminal liability when he incites another person or other persons to commit a crime. The most salient characteristic of incitement, in comparison with the other forms of inchoate crime, is the existence of a communication that is made with a view to persuading the addressee to commit an offence. This article explores the question of why incitement should incur criminal liability, and the nature of such liability. It also identifies its distinctive features. The principal focus here (...) is on ambiguity in the putative words of incitement and on questions of gauging whether the words have had any effect on the actions of the addressee. It covers both the standard criminal offences and conduct which, arguably, should not be regulated by the criminal law, thereby raising issues of freedom of speech. Legal issues are set in the context of the common law generally, while drawing on English law in matters of detail. (shrink)

The author identifies the major micro-, meso-, and macro-level financial risk shifting factors that contributed to the Great Global Recession and how the absence of a compelling moral vision of responsible financial risk management perpetuated the economic crisis and undermined the recovery by blind reliance upon insufficiently accountable bailouts. The author offers a new theoretical model of Sustainable Stakeholder Capitalism by exercising moral imagination which inclusively and moderately balances four multi-level factors: types of capitalism, moral theories, human nature drives, and (...) credit risk profiles. Finally, the author recommends micro-, meso-, and macro-level practical reforms to prevent a recurrence of the current economic freefall, to re-create systemic global financial institution integrity, and to promote responsible risk management for sustainable global prosperity for current and future generations. (shrink)

In light of the variety of uses of the term autonomy in recent bioethics literature, in this paper, I suggest that competence, not being as contested, is better placed to play the anti-paternalistic role currently assigned to autonomy. The demonstration of competence, I will argue, can provide individuals with robust spheres of non-interference in which they can pursue their lives in accordance with their own values. This protection from paternalism is achieved by granting individuals rights to non-interference upon demonstration of (...) competence. In this paper, I present a risk-sensitive account of competence as a means of grounding rights to non-interference. On a risk-sensitive account of competence individuals demonstrate their competence by exercising three capacities to the extent necessary to meet a threshold determined by the riskiness of the decision. These three capacities are the capacity to acquire knowledge, use instrumental rationality, and form and revise a life plan. (shrink)

This essay illustrates ethical decisions that the policy makers, healthcare providers, and non-government organizations can use as guide in their day to day activities and engagements. The paper does not attempt to provide a definitive menu on how to act on certain situation, but it discusses principles that are congruent with our treasured Filipino values. Likewise, the essay neither imposes nor provides universal solutions to dilemmas but rather it encourages deep practical reasoning to arrive at culturally sensitive decisions.

"This fine work's ample documentation should gladden the scholarly reader while its accessible prose & well-organized presentation will make it useful for ...

ABSTRACT Generative artificial intelligence is transforming the way we make, and think about, art. With prompting from human users, these generative systems now produce aesthetically compelling and seemingly creative works in a variety of artistic domains. In doing so, they challenge the ways we think about artistic credit, about creativity, and about the mechanism of legal copyright, which is meant to protect and promote creativity in a capitalist art market. All of this is currently at play in the courtroom, as (...) artists contest the ways in which their artworks can be rightfully fed into these artificial systems (“the problem of the inputs”), and other artists are challenged over whether they might be credited for the visual images these systems generate (“the problem of the outputs”). Here, we explore these problems as they arise in visual art. We argue that the contested legal landscape surrounding these artificial systems reflects the ways they challenge our received notions of artistic credit and creativity. And we suggest that clarifying or changing the application of copyright in light of their generative capacities will ultimately involve revising our conception of art. (shrink)

The following is a prominent version of the causal theory of reference, held by certain moral philosophers and philosophers of science: (CTR) A general term 'T' rigidly designates a property F iff the use of 'T' by competent users of the term is causally regulated by F. In a series of papers, Terence Horgan and Mark Timmons present a thought experiment our intuitive responses to which provide evidence against (CTR). The present essay goes beyond Horgan and Timmons by offering a (...) metaphysical argument, according to which (CTR) implies the denial of any normative ethical theory. (shrink)

Gabriele Contessa has recently introduced and defended a view he calls ‘non-eliminative nihilism’. Non-eliminative nihilism is the conjunction of mereological nihilism and non-eliminativism about ordinary objects. Mereological nihilism is the thesis that composite objects do not exist, where something is a composite object just in case it has proper parts. Eliminativism about ordinary objects denies that ordinary objects exist. Eliminativism thus implies, for example, that there are no galaxies, planets, stars, ships, tables, books, organisms, cells, molecules, or atoms. Non-eliminativism is (...) the denial of eliminativism. Thus, NEN is the intriguing thesis that although composite objects do not exist, ordinary objects do. In this essay, I, first, summarize Contessa’s core support for NEN. Second, I describe two flaws in that support when it comes to organismic terms. Third, I consider and reject two possible responses on behalf of NEN’s defenders. Fourth, I show how the flaws cast doubt upon NEN itself. Finally, I offer reasons to think that if nihilism is true, then the folk have probably been trying to fix the reference of organismic terms to apparent objects within illusions. (shrink)