During the querelle des infiniment petits Leibniz wrote several texts addressed to Parisian savants to justify the use of the differential calculus, but only three of them were made public. One of the three, the “Sentiment de Monsieur Leibnitz”, was published without authorization in 1706 at the peak of the quarrel, together with the writings of other mathematicians united in the defence of the new calculus ( Joseph Saurin, Jacob Hermann and the Bernoulli brothers). However, Jean-Paul Bignon, director (...) of the Académie Royale des Sciences, confiscated the prints. All copies of this publication were assumed to be lost, but we have recently identified one copy of it in the British Library catalogue. In this article, we analyse the “Sentiment de Monsieur Leibnitz” by contextualizing it not only from an epistemological approach but also from a political perspective. We will examine the institutional issues at stake by relying on recently published correspondence. (shrink)

Over the last few decades, multiple studies have examined the understanding of participants in clinical research. They show variable and often poor understanding of key elements of disclosure, such as expected risks and the experimental nature of treatments. Did the participants in these studies give valid consent? According to the standard view of informed consent they did not. The standard view holds that the recipient of consent has a duty to disclose certain information to the profferer of consent because valid (...) consent requires that information to be understood. The contents of the understanding and disclosure requirements are therefore conceptually linked. In this paper, we argue that the standard view is mistaken. The disclosure and understanding requirements have distinct grounds tied to two different ways in which a token of consent can be rendered invalid. Analysis of these grounds allows us to derive the contents of the two requirements. It also implies that it is sometimes permissible to enroll willing participants who have not understood everything that they ought to be told about their clinical trials. (shrink)

In this book, Joseph Millum explains how parental rights and responsibilities are acquired, what they consist in, and how parents should go about making decisions on behalf of their children. In doing so, he provides a set of frameworks to help solve pressing ethical dilemmas relating to parents and children.

In this book Joseph Heath brings Jürgen Habermas's theory of communicative action into dialogue with the most sophisticated articulation of the instrumental conception of practical rationality-modern rational choice theory. Heath begins with an overview of Habermas's action theory and his critique of decision and game theory. He then offers an alternative to Habermas's use of speech act theory to explain social order and outlines a multidimensional theory of rational action that includes norm-governed action as a specific type.In the second (...) part of the book Heath discusses the more philosophical dimension of Habermas's conception of practical rationality. He criticizes Habermas's attempt to introduce a universalization principle governing moral discourse, as well as his criteria for distinguishing between moral and ethical problems. Heath offers an alternative account of the level of convergence exhibited by moral argumentation, drawing on game-theoretic models to specify the burden of proof that the theory of communicative action and discourse must assume. (shrink)

Basic research or fundamental research is distinct from both pure and applied research, in that it is pure research with expected useful results. The existence of basic or fundamental research is problematic, at least for both inductivists and instrumentalists, but also for Popper. Assuming scientific research to be the search for explanatory conjectures and for refutations, and assuming technology to be the search of conjectures and some corroborations, we can easily place basic or fundamental research between science and technology as (...) a part of their overlap. As a bonus, the present view of basic or fundamental research as an overlap explains the specific hardship basic research workers encounter. (shrink)

Does the Second Amendment protect those who threaten others by negligently or recklessly wielding firearms? What line separates constitutionally legitimate gun displays from threatening activities that can be legally proscribed? This article finds guidance in the First Amendment doctrine of true threats, which permits punishment of “statements where the speaker means to communicate a serious expression of an intent to commit an act of unlawful violence to a particular individual or group of individual.” The Second Amendment, like the First, should (...) not be read to protect those who threaten unlawful violence. And to the degree that the constitution requires a culpable mental state in such circumstances, the appropriate standard should be recklessness. (shrink)

Rats and mice are very much more likely to be experimented on today in biomedical research than dogs, cats, or primates. Rats and mice, however, are explicitly excluded from the federal Animal Welfare Act's protections against animal pain and suffering in a research setting. This paper is a response to an invitation to reflect on how medical and scientific researchers should think about the rats and mice they use, in light of ongoing legal developments in the human-animal relationship. The invitation (...) was extended by the Michigan Society for Biomedical Research, an organization for the promotion of biomedical research and defense of the use of animals in research. It was extended to a teacher of Animal Law at the University of Michigan Law School who was serving as the non-scientist member from the University on the University's Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee. Considerations to which attention is directed include developments in experimentation on humans paralleling and connected with developments in experimentation on animals, developments in the science of animals beyond the biomedical field, general movements in the legal treatment of animals that are not the outcome of conflicts between animal activists and research institutions, and the importance of attitude as a focus in any regulation of experimentation, animal or human. (shrink)

Authorship is a complicated subject in Kierkegaard's work, which he surely recognized, given his late attempts to explain himself in On My Work as an Author. From the use of multiple pseudonyms and antonyms, to contributions across a spectrum of media and genres, issues of authorship abound. Why did Kierkegaard write in the ways he did? Before we assess Kierkegaard's famous thoughts on faith or love, or the relationship between 'the aesthetic,' 'the ethical,' and 'the religious,' we must approach how (...) he expressed them. Given the multi-authored nature of his works, can we find a view or voice that is definitively Kierkegaard's own? Can entries in his unpublished journals and notebooks tell us what Kierkegaard himself thought? How should contemporary readers understand inconsistencies or contradictions between differently named authors? We cannot make definitive claims about Kierkegaard's work as a thinker without understanding Kierkegaard's work as an author. This collection, by leading contemporary Kierkegaard scholars, is the first to systematically examine the divisive question and practice of authorship in Kierkegaard from philosophical, literary and theological perspectives. (shrink)

Does thinking have a history? If there are no necessarily changeless structures to be found in things and in our inquiry into them, then what knowledge of the world and ourselves is possible? In this boldly original and elegantly written study, Joseph Margolis argues for a radically historicized view of history that treats it as both a real process and a narrative account, each a product of continual change. Developing his argument through discussions of such influential philosophers of history (...) and the natural sciences as Vico, Danto, Collingwood, Habermas, Hempel, Popper, Putnam, and Gadamer, he provides a coherent theory of flux and invariance that resolves several deep puzzles regarding human nature and understanding. While maintaining a thorough command of Anglo-American philosophy, Margolis challenges many of its most cherished assumptions and demonstrates the sense in which history and interpretation are one and the same. Exploring one of the master themes of this century, his book offers a novel theory of the human condition whose conclusions and concerns seem certain to inform philosophy in the next century as well. (shrink)

British Journal for the History of Philosophy, Volume 19, Issue 6, Page 1216-1220, December 2011.

Shaftesbury is widely regarded as an early champion of sentimentalism in ethics, yet no one appears to have succeeded at stating, in terms congenial to modern moral philosophy, a theory of ethics which can appropriately be ascribed to him. Two themes of his doctrine of fellow feeling, I argue, contain implicitly the two basic principles of his ethical system and the proper key to his sentimentalism. Shaftesbury is a sentimentalist in virtue of his attempt to discover a foundation for morality (...) through a study of human emotion, sentiment and desire, rather than by appeal to "reason's" demand for consistency and impartiality in practical choice. Without "natural affection"--sympathy, compassion and fellow concern--not only would humans lack sufficient motivational resources for the practice of altruism in their lives, but any attempt by moralists to rationally justify other-regarding and benevolent moral principles would necessarily be futile. I further clarify the nature of sentimentalism as it speaks to questions both of explanation and of justification by means of a comparison with parts of Thomas Nagel's argument in The Possibility of Altruism . Nagel's rationalist arguments against the feasibility of ethical sentimentalism are by no means conclusive; the sentimentalist account can shed light on important philosophical problems of morality which Nagel's view is ill-equipped to discuss. I then render my own modernized versions of various traditional objections to Shaftesbury's view, and, while acknowledging the presence of several serious problems for contemporary sentimentalism, I argue that the same type of approach which distinguished Shaftesbury from his predecessors and peers is still quite defensible within current moral theory and psychology of ethics. I believe I have achieved my two most significant objectives: to do something to loosen the grip of a certain widely accepted picture of ethics and morality which I take to be misguided--the view that moral principle must be seen to have "rational force" independent of the actual desires, emotions and attachments of human beings--and to get some contemporary handle on the ethical thought of this puzzling and neglected, though very influential, early British Moralist. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Untying Foucauldian Knots of Power/Knowledge and Tying Better Relationships with the Confucian PersuasionJoseph Harroff (bio)Reconsidering the Life of Power: Ritual, Body, and Art in Critical Theory and Chinese Philosophy. By James Garrison. Albany: SUNY Press, 2021.Life is a self-renewing process through action upon the environment.—Dewey, Democracy and Education (2)There is no pure self to be redeemed here, but perhaps some kind of rehabilitation beyond the problematic trappings of subject (...) life might be possible.—Garrison, Reconsidering the Life of Power (54)The problem of critiquing power by untangling and retangling ourselves more creatively and intelligently in webs of habit and flows of somaesthetic information and value-laden ethical-political imaginative horizons of futurity is taken up by James Garrison in Reconsidering the Life of Power: Ritual, Body and Art in Critical Theory and Chinese Philosophy (2021). By asking a series of ethically sustained and interculturally hermeneutically sensitive questions surrounding the critical problematic as to the conditions for the possibility of how "it is possible to use the sign chains of power to chain power," or how it is possible to "tie power up in its own knots" (p. 18), Garrison makes creative use of "subjectality theory" that foregrounds somaesthetic practices seeking to be in many ways recasting rather than simply reconsidering the life of power. It is through a methodological sounding of the depths of somaesthetic experience and a creative-critical inquiry into the ways in which the complex of social arts understood in the broadest possible conception, including at all ethical and political intersections, that this book enters into the domain of Confucian theorizing of persons as part of never-simply-located root-body-persons (shenti 身體)—that is, as offering a theory of relational persons that is simultaneously and intersectionally caught up in a manifold of social practices of aesthetic, ethical, political, and religious signification. It is by critically interrogating the historical a priori that condition the possibility for any specific knowledge-power discursive interpellation by drawing attention to the complex interplay and entanglement of forces and signification involved in tool-making and tool-using practices as a "sedimentation" (jidian 積澱) of [End Page 809] somaesthetic arts that straddle a polarity of natural-cultural form-functioning, that Garrison makes creative advances in pushing critical theory past a problematic pessimism and/or nihilism that stems from any brute recognition of the "skintight prison" houses we inhabit as a result of Foucauldian power knots.Using the idea of "sedimentation" to better articulate the complex strata of social experience as mediated by aesthetic culture Garrison draws heavily from Li Zehou. Li is suspicious of a Maoist model of conflating theory and practice, subject and object, especially when the treatment is part of a civic and political religiosity that renders the Great Helmsman a supreme leader and unilateral decision-maker in a Marxist-Leninist vanguard of the historico-teleological revolution. For Li, aesthetic sensibility is the "manifestation of the sedimentation of society in nature, and the sedimentation of humankind as a species in the individual."1 And moreover, the "animal structure and quality of psychology" is "transformed into something that has a human nature, in which sensation and rationality are dissolved and combined."2 This complex process of dissolution and combination is more like a Hegelian dialectic of spirit than it is a linear-totalitarian realization of Maoist voluntarism. However, this is what I want to begin challenging by asking what degree Garrison draws upon this aspect of Li. I would suggest that Maoist voluntarism can be read as part of a traditional Chinese philosophical problematic that prioritizes practice in order to realize the truth of nature (gongfu jishi benti 功夫即是本體).This way of approaching the Maoist dynamic of voluntarism seems much closer to the Expansive Learning 《大學》 dynamic of "from the King to the commoners, everyone takes self-cultivation as the root," but would avoid any problematic Maoist hubris regarding the limits, methods and confines of class "struggle." The post-linguistic turn and then return to a Deweyan process metaphysical and creatively democratic inquiry into experience to garner more intelligent methods for critiquing and cultivating embodied and relationally configured habits of perception, speech, and thought via the vocabulary of... (shrink)

It does not derive its authority, as many authors have supposed, from some logically prior discipline, whether physics, economics, or philosophy, these ultimately depend on law itself, in its fundamental expression of human intellect and purpose. Law, he holds, is inseparably connected to everything in the world that goes to make up personal identity and meaning.

Boston Monday Lectures: Biology, a book of popular essays by the American orator Joseph Cook first published in 1879, was derived from a successful lecture series at Boston's Tremont Temple in 1878 that expertly synthesised the scientific scholarship of the day for public consumption and attempted to show that science was in harmony with religion and the Bible. Writing with clarity and conveying excitement to the lay audiences who flocked to hear him, Cook's lectures became extremely popular around the (...) world. Biology focuses on evolution, immortality and materialism. In 13 lectures, Cook discusses topics including T. H. Huxley and John Tyndall's ideas on evolution, Rudolf Hermann Lotze's thoughts on theism, and microscopy. Cook's lectures on immortality all begin with 'Does Death End All?' before probing further into a philosophical aspect of immortality. Cook interjects short essays, which he calls 'preludes', on subjects as diverse as political patronage and Daniel Webster's death. (shrink)

Although it is widely believed that post-Mao China has fallen into a moral crisis, there are few scholarly analyses of its nature, causes, and consequences. Jiwei Ci's Moral China in the Age of Reform–1 fills this gap by giving an unusually penetrating and insightful account of this crisis. There is much in Ci's account that one can find thought-provoking and enlightening. Any good analysis of a crisis not only gives a good diagnosis but also sheds light on a possible solution. (...) While the diagnosis of China's problem occupies a large part of the book, in a tentative yet careful manner Ci does suggest a way out. In my comment here, I focus on his suggestions as to how China can accomplish this.For Ci, China has been... (shrink)

It has become fashionable to worry about the development of superintelligent AI that results in the destruction of humanity. This worry is not without merit; but it may be overstated. This paper explores some previously undiscussed reasons to be optimistic that; even if superintelligent AI does arise; it will not destroy us. These have to do with the possibility that a superintelligent AI will become mired in skeptical worries that its superintelligence cannot help it to solve. I argue that superintelligent (...) AIs may lack the psychological idiosyncracies that allow humans to act in the face of skeptical problems; and so as a result they may become paralyzed in the face of these problems in a way that humans are not. (shrink)

Dignity may just be the most promiscuous normative abstraction. This article, informed by dignity’s historical variability, political theoretic multipurpose, and conflicting jurisprudence, focuses on a particular but influential invocation of the term: dignity as the normative ground for the ‘capabilities approach’ (CA) model of social justice. We ask whether or not the CA, in particular the influential version propounded by philosopher Martha Nussbaum, requires dignity as its foundational premise, and whether or not dignity may be more costly than beneficial for (...) the CA’s vision of a minimally just society. The first section of this article rehearses the warrants of and criticisms against the dignity-basis of Nussbaum’s CA. We canvass the relatively sparse scholarship on dignity within the CA to situate our contribution. The next two sections are case studies, demonstrating dignity’s shortcomings for assessing and regulating sex and abortion, respectively. The fourth section rebuts two possible objections to our criticisms of dignity. The fifth and final section gestures toward another normative abstraction, ‘minimum conditions of individuation’, less polysemic than dignity, which might alternatively ground the CA. (shrink)

The problem of evil is a much-debated issue and is as old as human history itself. Evil is a universal and the most common experience of humans, in the sense it functions as a common denominator and no one escapes. Evil causes a sense of isolation. This is evident in the lives of theists. Evil isolates humans from God. Evil is also one such experience that is personal and existential. Evil brings along a lot of meaninglessness. Here it expresses itself (...) as victimization. (shrink)