An understanding of underlying mechanisms involved in the activation of HIF‐1 in response to both hypoxic stress and oncogenic signals has important implications for how these processes may become deregulated in human cancer. Changes in microenvironmental stimuli such as hypoxia and growth factors in combination with genetic lesions, such as loss or inactivation of p53, PTEN or pVHL or oncogenic activation, can all lead to increased HIF‐1 activity. This provides cancer cells with a distinct advantage for survival and proliferation, resulting (...) in their ability to form vascular tumours, which are aggressive and metastatic. Accordingly, upregulation of HIF‐1α, a key component of HIF‐1, correlates with a poor treatment outcome using conventional therapies. A variety of mechanisms exist that regulate expression of HIF‐1α. In recent years, it has become clear that an extensive network of signalling cascades converge on HIF‐1α to regulate the transcriptional response. A better understanding of this regulation may provide a basis for the development of new cancer therapies. BioEssays 26:262–269, 2004. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

Previous research has suggested that individuals who identify as being more religious request more aggressive medical treatment at end of life. These requests may generate disagreement over life-sustaining treatment (LST). Outside of anecdotal observation, however, the actual role of religion in conflict over LST has been underexplored. Because ethics committees are often consulted to help mediate these conflicts, the ethics consultation experience provides a unique context in which to investigate this question. The purpose of this paper was to examine the (...) ways religion was present in cases involving conflict around LST. Using medical records from ethics consultation cases for conflict over LST in one large academic medical centre, we found that religion can be central to conflict over LST but was also present in two additional ways through (1) religious coping, including a belief in miracles and support from a higher power, and (2) chaplaincy visits. In-hospital mortality was not different between patients with religiously versus non-religiously centred conflict. In our retrospective cohort study, religion played a variety of roles and did not lead to increased treatment intensity or prolong time to death. Ethics consultants and healthcare professionals involved in these cases should be cognisant of the complex ways that religion can manifest in conflict over LST. (shrink)

Critical care society guidelines recommend that ethics committees mediate intractable conflict over potentially inappropriate treatment, including Do Not Resuscitate status. There are, however, limited data on cases and circumstances in which ethics consultants recommend not offering cardiopulmonary resuscitation despite patient or surrogate requests and whether physicians follow these recommendations. This was a retrospective cohort of all adult patients at a large academic medical center for whom an ethics consult was requested for disagreement over DNR status. Patient demographic predictors of ethics (...) consult outcomes were analyzed. In 42 of the 116 cases, the patient or surrogate agreed to the clinician recommended DNR order following ethics consultation. In 72 of 74 of the remaining cases, ethics consultants recommended not offering CPR. Physicians went on to write a DNR order without patient/surrogate consent in 57 of those cases. There were no significant differences in age, race/ethnicity, country of origin, or functional status between patients where a DNR order was and was not placed without consent. Physicians were more likely to place a DNR order for patients believed to be imminently dying. The median time from DNR order to death was 4 days with a 90-day mortality of 88.2%. In this single-center cohort study, there was no evidence that patient demographic factors affected ethics consultants’ recommendation to withhold CPR despite patient/surrogate requests. Physicians were most likely to place a DNR order without consent for imminently dying patients. (shrink)

Systematic study of the intersection of ethics consultation services and solid organ transplants and recipients can identify and illustrate ethical issues that arise in the clinical care of these patients, including challenges beyond resource allocation. This was a single-centre, retrospective cohort study of all adult ethics consultations between January 1, 2007, and December 31, 2017, at a large academic medical centre in the north-eastern United States. Of the 880 ethics consultations, sixty (6.8 per cent ) involved solid organ transplant, thirty-nine (...) (65.0 per cent) for candidates and twenty-one (35.0 per cent ) for recipients. Ethics consultations were requested for 4.3 per cent of heart, 4.9 per cent of lung, 0.3 per cent of liver, and 0.3 per cent of kidney transplant recipients over the study period. Nurses were more likely to request ethics consultations for recipients than physicians (80.0 per cent vs 20.0 per cent, p = 0.006). The most common reason for consultation among transplant candidates was discussion about intensity of treatment or goals of care after the patient was not or was no longer a transplant candidate. The most common reason for ethics consultation among transplant recipients was disagreement between transplant providers and patients/families/non-transplant healthcare professionals over the appropriate intensity of treatment for recipients. Very few consultations involved questions about appropriate resource allocation. Ethics consultants involved in these cases most often navigated communication challenges between transplant and non-transplant healthcare professionals and patients and families. (shrink)

While a significant literature has appeared discussing theoretical ethical concerns regarding COVID-19, particularly regarding resource prioritization, as well as a number of personal reflections on providing patient care during the early stages of the pandemic, systematic analysis of the actual ethical issues involving patient care during this time is limited. This single-center retrospective cohort mixed methods study of ethics consultations during the first surge of the COVID 19 pandemic in Massachusetts between March 15, 2020 through June 15, 2020 aim to (...) fill this gap. Results indicate that there was no significant difference in the median number of monthly consultation cases during the first COVID-19 surge compared to the same period the year prior and that the characteristics of the ethics consults during the COVID-19 surge and same period the year prior were also similar. Through inductive analysis, we identified four themes related to ethics consults during the first COVID-19 surge including (1) prognostic difficulty for COVID-19 positive patients, (2) challenges related to visitor restrictions, (3) end of life scenarios, and (4) family members who were also positive for COVID-19. Cases were complex and often aligned with multiple themes. These patient case-related sources of ethical issues were managed against the backdrop of intense systemic ethical issues and a near lockdown of daily life. Healthcare ethics consultants can learn from this experience to enhance training to be ready for future disasters. (shrink)

In his monumental 1687 work, _Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica_, known familiarly as the _Principia_, Isaac Newton laid out in mathematical terms the principles of time, force, and motion that have guided the development of modern physical science. Even after more than three centuries and the revolutions of Einsteinian relativity and quantum mechanics, Newtonian physics continues to account for many of the phenomena of the observed world, and Newtonian celestial dynamics is used to determine the orbits of our space vehicles. This (...) authoritative, modern translation by I. Bernard Cohen and Anne Whitman, the first in more than 285 years, is based on the 1726 edition, the final revised version approved by Newton; it includes extracts from the earlier editions, corrects errors found in earlier versions, and replaces archaic English with contemporary prose and up-to-date mathematical forms. Newton's principles describe acceleration, deceleration, and inertial movement; fluid dynamics; and the motions of the earth, moon, planets, and comets. A great work in itself, the _Principia_ also revolutionized the methods of scientific investigation. It set forth the fundamental three laws of motion and the law of universal gravity, the physical principles that account for the Copernican system of the world as emended by Kepler, thus effectively ending controversy concerning the Copernican planetary system. The illuminating Guide to Newton's _Principia_ by I. Bernard Cohen makes this preeminent work truly accessible for today's scientists, scholars, and students. (shrink)

According to Richard Swinburne, the principle of simplicity is of great importance to theory choice scenarios and theoretical changes in the sciences. In particular, he holds that the theory choice criterion of fit with background evidence can be reduced to the criteria of simplicity and of yielding the data. We will, however, rebut this reduction thesis and show that three central aspects of theoretical change (confirming power of empirical data, reliability of experimental methods, and truth of new theoretical proposals) cannot (...) be adequately reconstructed if simplicity is regarded as a key criterion of theory choice. (shrink)

Membership in voluntary organizations is associated with individual and social benefits. Due to the negative consequences of the global pandemic on older people, and the governmental challenges posed by population aging, voluntary membership is of great importance to society. To effectively promote volunteering among older people, it is necessary to understand the determinants of voluntary membership. This study analyses the influence of individual values—secular/traditional and survival/self-expression–on voluntary membership among European adults. Specifically, it examines which values orient two age groups, as (...) well as men and women toward a certain type of association. The sample of 31,985 comprises 60% of adults aged 50–64 and 40% aged 65–79; of which 56% are women and 44% men. The empirical estimation considers different levels of data aggregation: individual, national and welfare system, therefore multilevel analysis is used as an analytical strategy. Individual-level variables from the Integrated Values Survey and national-level variables from the World Bank and Eurostat are used. The results indicate that traditional and self-expression values promote membership in voluntary organizations in general more than secular and survival values. However, there are differences according to the type of organization. Furthermore, values are found to moderate the effect of age and gender on voluntary membership. (shrink)

We chart how neuroscience and philosophy have together advanced our understanding of moral judgment with implications for when it goes well or poorly. The field initially focused on brain areas associated with reason versus emotion in the moral evaluations of sacrificial dilemmas. But new threads of research have studied a wider range of moral evaluations and how they relate to models of brain development and learning. By weaving these threads together, we are developing a better understanding of the neurobiology of (...) moral judgment in adulthood and to some extent in childhood and adolescence. Combined with rigorous evidence from psychology and careful philosophical analysis, neuroscientific evidence can even help shed light on the extent of moral knowledge and on ways to promote healthy moral development. (shrink)

LANGUAGE NOTE | Document text in English; abstract also in Chinese. Embedded in the narration of “Bioethics: Cross Cultural Explorations” is a trilogy of three nuanced and tightly interwoven accounts: (1) a descriptive account, (2) a reflective account, and (3) a futuristic account. Together, they offer invaluable insights into the complexity and challenges in conducting cross-cultural bioethics dialogues. These complexities are illustrated through Father Joseph Tham’s 12-year-long engagement with the project “Bioethics, Multiculturalism and Religion” in his capacity as Chair of (...) the UNESCO project in Bioethics and Human Rights. (Abstract taken from first paragraph of document) 本文評論了Tham的豐富論述，及其深刻解説後現代世界道德多元化和多元文化為跨文化生命倫理學對話帶來的複雜性和挑戰。本文亦回應了Tham提出應如何重塑跨文化接觸的本質、使命、目標和方法的關鍵問題，以協和 道德普遍性和多元性之間的緊張關係，並深化參與及對話，以促進有成效的跨文化接觸。. (shrink)

Ideal agents are role models whose perfection in some normative domain we try to approximate. But which form should this striving take? It is well known that following ideal rules of practical reasoning can have disastrous results for non-ideal agents. Yet, this issue has not been explored with respect to rules of theoretical reasoning. I show how we can extend Bayesian models of ideally rational agents in order to pose and answer the question of whether non-ideal agents should form new (...) degrees of belief in the same way as their ideal counterparts. I demonstrate that the epistemic and the practical case are parallel: following ideal rules does not always lead to optimal outcomes for non-ideal agents. (shrink)

Some philosophers (such as Kant and Rawls) think it is only wrong to be cruel to cats because it will make one behave cruelly to humans. This explanation is unsatisfactory. Why? Because being cruel to your cat is a direct wrong to your cat regardless of the effects it has on other humans. Ascribing the wrongness of cruelty to the fact it will make one callous to other humans is to assess the character of the cruel person not the act (...) they are performing. Cruelty to your cat is wrong because it wrongs your cat directly. (shrink)

Early Polemical Writings covers the young Kierkegaard's works from 1834 through 1838. His authorship begins, as it was destined to end, with polemic. Kierkegaard's first published article touches on the theme of women's emancipation, and the other articles from his student years deal with freedom of the press. Modern readers can see the seeds of Kierkegaard's future career these early pieces. In "From the Papers of One Still Living," his review of Hans Christian Andersen's novel Only a Fiddler, Kierkegaard rejects (...) the notion that environment is decisive in determining the fate of genius. He also puts forward his belief that each person needs a life-view or life for which and by which to live, a thought he explores further in the comic play The Battle between the Old and the New Soap-Cellars. (shrink)

The solution frequently being advocated to a range of regulatory and indeed constitutional questions is to devise procedures for participation, for democratization. The aim of this article is to explore just what the shift to procedures and to participation might involve. The article will appear in this Journal in two parts. The first part distinguishes between two possible forms of proceduralization: «thin» proceduralization, based on a liberal model of democracy, and «thick» proceduralization, based on deliberative models of democracy. In exploring (...) the latter, the article takes as its starting point the work of Habermas. Given the richness and complexity of his argument the development of the notion of thick proceduralization necessarily occurs in part through a critique of his work, for it is argued that although Habermas may provide an important starting point, his work cannot also be the end point of the debate. The second part of the article will discuss the modifications that may need to be made for «thick» proceduralization to be adopted as a regulatory strategy. (shrink)

In this article, I discuss three distinct but related puzzles involving lotteries: Kyburg’s lottery paradox, the statistical evidence problem, and the Harman-Vogel paradox. Kyburg’s lottery paradox is the following well-known problem: if we identify rational outright belief with a rational credence above a threshold, we seem to be forced to admit either that one can have inconsistent rational beliefs, or that one cannot rationally believe anything one is not certain of. The statistical evidence problem arises from the observation that people (...) seem to resist forming outright beliefs whenever the available evidence for the claim under consideration is purely statistical. We need explanations of whether it is in fact irrational to form such beliefs, and of whether a clear distinction can be drawn between statistical and non-statistical evidence. The Harman-Vogel paradox is usually presented as a paradox about knowledge: we tend to assume that we can know so-called ordinary propositions, such as the claim that I will be in Barcelona next spring. Yet, we hesitate to make knowledge claims regarding so-called lottery propositions, such as the claim that I won’t die in a car crash in the next few months, even if these lottery propositions are obviously entailed by the ordinary propositions we claim to know. Depending on one’s view about the relationship between rational belief and knowledge, the Harman-Vogel paradox has ramifications for a theory of rational outright belief. Formal theories of the relationship between rational credence and rational belief, such as Leitgeb’s stability theory, tend to focus mostly on handling Kyburg’s lottery paradox, but not the other two puzzles I mention. My aim in this article is to draw out relationships and differences between the puzzles, and to examine to what extent existing formal solutions to Kyburg’s lottery paradox help with answering the statistical evidence problem and the Harman-Vogel paradox. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to present the problem of truth in ethics in the light of the ethical theories of two philosophers: Polish philosopher Tadeusz Styczeń and French philosopher Alain Badiou. The article is divided into three parts. The first part and the second part, introductions are to the ethics of truth by Tadeusz Styczeń and the ethics of truths by Alain Badiou. The third part is a presentation of the notion of truth as a basis of ethics (...) in order to reveal the concepts of truth lying at the base of these thinkers’ ethics’ and to compare them. (shrink)

Sentences containing predicates of personal taste exhibit two striking features: whether they are true seems to lie in the eye of the beholder and whether they are true can be—and often is—subject to disagreement. In the last decade, there has been a lively debate about how to account for these two features. In this paper, I shall argue for two claims: first, I shall show that even the most promising approaches so far offered by proponents of so-called indexical contextualism fail (...) to account for the disagreement feature. They might be able to account for some disagreement data, but they have trouble accounting for two kinds of disagreement data that caused the estrangement from indexical contextualism and the migration to relativism in the first place: the denial and the retraction data. Second, I shall show that we still do not have to abandon indexical contextualism, because what I shall call the superiority approach—a new pragmatically extended version of indexical contextualism—can very well account for the data. (shrink)

IntroductionThe assisted reproductive technology field deals with consistent and predictable gaps in knowledge. Expressing lack of knowledge with a sentence like “I don’t know” can be challenging for doctors. This study examined physicians’ negative epistemic disclaimer “non lo so” in Italian ART doctor-couple interactions. In particular, it aimed to reveal specific features of “non lo so”: function, topic, temporality, responsibility, and interactional aspects.MethodsThis was a video-based observational study. We used microanalysis of face-to-face dialogue to analyze 20 purposively selected triadic consultations (...) from a corpus of 85. This inductive analysis focused on the function, the content and some selected interactional aspects of the “non lo so”, quantifying and capturing the interaction between these qualitative features.ResultsWe found 82 doctors’ “non lo so” in the corpus. We discovered three main functions of this expression: propositional, relational, discursive. The most frequent topics raising doctors’ “non lo so” were costs, treatment-related aspects, and timing issues. In more than half of the cases, present issues emerged. The majority of “non lo so” was framed using the “I,” with doctors’ taking personal responsibility. Patients played a role in these expressions from doctors: Patients initiated more than one third of them, and in one fourth of the cases, patients followed up immediately.ConclusionOur findings may be related to characteristics of the specific field of ART. Doctors in this setting must frequently express a direct lack of knowledge to their patients, and when they do, they mean it literally. Patients contribute to such disclosures, and their responses suggest that they find them acceptable, showing that they may expect limitations in their potential to conceive. (shrink)

I argue that in order to account for normative uncertainty, an expressivist theory of normative language and thought must accomplish two things: Firstly, it needs to find room in its framework for a gradable conative attitude, degrees of which can be interpreted as representing normative uncertainty. Secondly, it needs to defend appropriate rationality constraints pertaining to those graded attitudes. The first task – finding an appropriate graded attitude that can represent uncertainty – is not particularly problematic. I tackle the second (...) task by exploring whether we can devise expressivist versions of the standard arguments used to support rationality constraints on degrees of uncertainty, Dutch book arguments and accuracy-dominance arguments. I show that we can do so, but that the resulting arguments don’t support the same rationality constraints as the original versions of the arguments. (shrink)

When Mill's The Subjection of Women was published in 1869 it was ahead of its time in boldly championing feminism. It failed to inaugurate a respectable intellectual debate. Feminist writers have tended to refer to it with respect but without any serious attempt to come to grips with Mill's actual arguments. Kate Millett's chapter in Sexual Politics is the only sustained discussion of Mill in the feminist literature that I am aware of, but it is not from a philosophical viewpoint, (...) and deals with Mill only in the service of an extended comparison with Ruskin. Philosophical books on Mill give the essay short measure. Alan Ryan in J. S. Mill heads one chapter ‘Liberty and The Subjection of Women’, but the former work gets twenty-six pages and the latter only four. Ryan says that ‘it is almost entirely concerned with the legal disabilities of women in Victorian England’. H. J. McCloskey, injfohn Stuart Mill: A Critical Study, gives the essay one and a half pages, commenting that it reads ‘like a series of truisms’ and seems so unimportant today because equality of the sexes has been achieved! (shrink)

The article analyzes the rationale for S.I. Hessen’s idea of transcendental empiricism, which highlights the issue of the individual and makes it “the fundamental bedrock of truth.” The author also discusses Hessen’s understanding of individual causality and its forms in the process of cognition of historical reality.

This essay is a rejoinder to comments on Uneasy Virtue made by Onora O'Neill, John Skorupski, and Michael Slote in this issue. In Uneasy Virtue I presented criticisms of traditional virtue theory. I also presented an alternative – a consequentialist account of virtue, one which is a form of ‘pure evaluational externalism’. This type of theory holds that the moral quality of character traits is determined by factors external to agency (e.g. consequences). All three commentators took exception to this account. (...) Therefore, the bulk of my response focuses on defending the externalist account of virtue presented in the final chapters of Uneasy Virtue. (shrink)

This essay examines control discourse in and out of educational settings, arguing that illusions of control are among the means by which governance is accomplished in domains far from schools. The tactical productivity of such illusions in non-school settings "necessitates" and explicates their prevalence in education. The first installment of this essay identifies some assumptions undergirding dominant control and management discourse; analyzes discussions of control in fields other education; and briefly examines the role that social location plays in fostering specific (...) understandings of control. A later installment will focus more narrowly on education, music education specifically. The author maintains that recognizing the limits of governmentality, bankrupting illusions of control, and uncoupling associations between uncertainty and terror, are powerful political disruptions. Acknowledging that classroom control may be neither achievable nor desirable may open the door to different understandings of classroom power relations and to re-articulations of the purposes of schooling. (shrink)

Accounts of virtue suffer a conflation problem when they appear unable to preserve intuitive distinctions between types of virtue. In this essay I argue that a number of influential attempts to preserve the distinction between moral and epistemic virtues fail, on the grounds that they characterize virtuous traits in terms of ‘characteristic motivation’. I claim that this does not distinguish virtuous traits at the level of value‐conferring quality, and I propose that the best alternative is to distinguish them at the (...) level of good produced. It follows from this that a consequentialist account is best placed to avoid a conflation of moral and epistemic virtue. (shrink)

We study the relative computational power of structures related to the ordered field of reals, specifically using the notion of generic Muchnik reducibility. We show that any expansion of the reals by a continuous function has no more computing power than the reals, answering a question of Igusa, Knight, and Schweber [7]. On the other hand, we show that there is a certain Borel expansion of the reals that is strictly more powerful than the reals and such that any Borel (...) quotient of the reals reduces to it. (shrink)

Some years ago I started to write a book on virtue ethics, in which I tried to meet early criticisms of what was then a new way of doing ethics. The book continued to be unsatisfactory, and I finally abandoned it, realizing that I needed to get clear about virtue before producing a defence of virtue ethics. This need should have been obvious, especially since I frequently teach Platonic dialogues where Socrates gets people to see that they are doing what (...) I was doing, namely developing ideas about something without first examining what it is. The need became even more obvious as the field rapidly expanded with the production of Humean, Nietschean, Kantian and consequentialist kinds of virtue ethics. Within the field of neo-Aristotelian ethics itself it became clear that different aspects can be stressed: the importance of practical wisdom can be developed, for example, without defending a naturalistic account of the relation of virtue to happiness.I finally wrote a book to explore and d .. (shrink)

This paper examines the surprisingly central role of sympathetic love within Margaret Cavendish’s philosophy. It shows that such love fulfils a range of metaphysical functions, and highlight an important shift in Cavendish’s account vis-a-vis earlier conceptions: sympathetic love is no longer given an emanative or mechanistic explanation, but is naturalized as an active emotion. It furthers investigate to what extent Cavendish’s account reveals a rift between the realm of nature and the realm of human sociability, and whether this rift really (...) prompts an inward turn, as some interpreters have suggested. (shrink)

In Accuracy and the Laws of Credence Richard Pettigrew assumes a particular view of belief, which states that people don't have any other doxastic states besides credences. This is in tension with the popular position that people have both credences and outright beliefs. Pettigrew claims that such a dual view of belief is incompatible with the accuracy-first approach. I argue in this paper that it is not. This is good news for Pettigrew, since it broadens the appeal of his framework.

In this paper I am concerned with the question of whether degrees of belief can figure in reasoning processes that are executed by humans. It is generally accepted that outright beliefs and intentions can be part of reasoning processes, but the role of degrees of belief remains unclear. The literature on subjective Bayesianism, which seems to be the natural place to look for discussions of the role of degrees of belief in reasoning, does not address the question of whether degrees (...) of belief play a role in real agents’ reasoning processes. On the other hand, the philosophical literature on reasoning, which relies much less heavily on idealizing assumptions about reasoners than Bayesianism, is almost exclusively concerned with outright belief. One possible explanation for why no philosopher has yet developed an account of reasoning with degrees of belief is that reasoning with degrees of belief is not possible for humans. In this paper, I will consider three arguments for this claim. I will show why these arguments are flawed, and conclude that, at least as far as these arguments are concerned, it seems like there is no good reason why the topic of reasoning with degrees of belief has received so little attention. (shrink)

ABSTRACT I propose a division of the literature on natural kinds into metaphysical worries, semantic worries, and methodological worries. I argue that the latter set of worries, which concern how classification influences scientific practices, should occupy centre stage in philosophy of science discussions about natural kinds. I apply this methodological framework to the problems of classifying chemical species and nanomaterials. I show that classification in nanoscience differs from classification in chemistry because the latter relies heavily on compositional identity, whereas the (...) former must consider additional properties, namely, size, shape, and surface chemistry. I use this difference to argue for a scale-dependent theory of scientific classification. _1_ Introduction _2_ The Methodological Problem of Kinds _3_ Chemical Kindhood: Reactivity, Microstructure, and the Structure–Property Paradigm _4_ Scale-Dependence and Nanoscale Kinds _5_ Conclusion. (shrink)

Early philosophical accounts of explanation mistook the function of boundary conditions for that of contingent facts. I diagnose where this misunderstanding arose and establish that it persists. I...

Abstract: Hegel's theory of tragedy is often considered to be primarily a theory of the objective powers involved in tragic conflicts—for Hegel, these are paradigmatically competing ethical notions—and of the rationality which underlies and drives such conflicts. Such a view follows naturally from a close reading of Hegel's discussion of classical Greek tragedy in his Lectures on Aesthetics. However, this view gives rise to the question of whether Hegel's theory of tragedy can account for the significance of tragic experience, in (...) particular the experience of tragic suffering; it has been argued repeatedly that it cannot. In contrast, I want to suggest in this paper that a theory of tragic experience can be derived from Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. This Hegelian theory of tragic experience, I argue, should be understood as complementing rather than challenging Hegel's theory of objective tragic conflict. (shrink)

forthcoming in New Essays on the Explanation of Action Abstract Philosophers influenced by Wittgenstein rejected the idea that the explanatory power of our ordinary interpretive practices is to be found in law-governed, causal relations between items to which our everyday mental terms allegedly refer. Wittgenstein and those he inspired pointed to differences between the explanations provided by the ordinary employment of mental expressions and the style of causal explanation characteristic of the hard sciences. I believe, however, that the particular non-causalism (...) espoused by the Wittgensteinians is today ill- understood. The position does not, for example, find its place on a map that charts the territory disputed by mental realists and their irrealist opponents. In this paper, I take a few steps toward reintroducing this ill-understood position by sketching my own understanding of it and explaining why it fits so uncomfortably within the contemporary metaphysical landscape. (shrink)

In this book I look at the tradition of eudaimonistic ethics which stems from Aristotle's treatment of ethics, and which takes distinct, though related forms in Epicurus, the Stoics and the Sceptics. I look at this tradition from different points of view: how is it related to human nature, how does it account for other-related virtue and action, and how much does it require in terms of revising previously held priorities. I discuss the methodology of discussing ancient texts in ways (...) that relate them to contemporary concerns, particularly the importance of respecting the texts and avoiding anachronism. (shrink)

In this paper I trace Husserl’s transformation of his notion of phantasy from its strong leanings towards empiricism into a transcendental phenomenology of imagination. Rejecting the view that this account is only more incompatible with contemporary neuroscientific research, I instead claim that the transcendental suspension of naturalistic (or scientific) pretensions precisely enables cooperation between the two distinct realms of phenomenology and science. In particular, a transcendental account of phantasy can disclose the specific accomplishments of imagination without prematurely deciding upon a (...) particular scientific paradigm for its experimental investigation; a decision that is best left to the sciences themselves. (shrink)

Współczesna etyka coraz rzadziej odwołuje się do kategorii prawdy – z tego powodu zainteresowanie budzić może każda propozycja etyczna, której twórca umieszcza kategorię prawdy w samym jej centrum. Na gruncie polskim taką etyką prawdy jest teoria Tadeusza Stycznia (1931-2010), w której prawda ma charakter normatywny. Do normatywnej mocy prawdy w etyce, choć rozumie on prawdę w zupełnie inny sposób, odwołuje się także francuski filozof Alain Badiou (ur. 1937). Zarówno w myśli Stycznia, jak i Badiou zagadnienie prawdy jest ściśle związane z (...) pojęciem powinności. Nie da się ukryć, że filozofie tych myślicieli są od siebie różne, ale można dostrzec między nimi pewne podobieństwa. Celem tego artykułu jest ukazanie zbieżnych punktów w filozofiach Tadeusza Stycznia i Alaina Badiou. Obaj myśliciele zdają się twierdzić, że człowiek, który dochowuje wierności odkrytej prawdzie czy wydarzeniu, jako podmiot moralny pozostaje wolny, unika zła oraz jest osobą lub Nieśmiertelny. (shrink)

Much ink has been spilled in the last years on whether voting is a duty that citizens ought to discharge in a democracy that aspires to be acceptably just. In this essay, I concentrate on whether a moral duty to participate in elections logically entails that people ought to vote simpliciter or well. I propose that voting well – i.e. with information and a sense of justice – is the electoral duty that we should value. Voting as such is not (...) – at least, not if we care about the substantive quality of democratic outcomes, not only about equality of participation. As a matter of fact, voting well seems to be a more adequate form of political participation than simply voting under varied normative conceptions of democracy, as I will show. At the same time, while we can't freely choose not to follow a moral duty to vote well just because we're not inclined to do so, we have to allow for the possibility that some individuals will not be in a good position to act on it. I conclude by discussing admissible reasons for this inability with respect to our citizenship responsibilities. (shrink)

Some of our moral commitments strike us as necessary, and this feature of moral phenomenology is sometimes viewed as incompatible with sentimentalism, since sentimentalism holds that our commitments depend, in some way, on sentiment. His dependence, or contingency, is what seems incompatible with necessity. In response to this sentimentalists hold that the commitments are psychologically necessary. However, little has been done to explore this kind of necessity. In this essay I discuss psychological necessity, and how the phenomenon of imaginative resistance (...) offers some evidence that we regard our moral commitments as necessary, but in a way compatible with viewing them as dependent on desires (in some way). A limited strategy for defending sentimentalism against a common criticism is also offered. (shrink)

The topic of cruelty features regularly in discussions concerning animals’ moral status. Further, condemnation of cruelty to animals is virtually unanimous. As Regan points out, ‘[i]t would be difficult to find anyone who is in favour of cruelty.’ What is to count as cruelty is therefore important. My aim here is to gain a clearer understanding of one aspect of our moral landscape: cruelty to animals. I will start by analyzing the concept of cruelty in section II. In section III (...) I will examine some implications of this analysis. I will present two arguments for why we should reassess whether modern farming practices are cruel. First, farming practices have changed and our understanding of the concept of cruelty needs to change with them. Second, our application of the concept of cruelty is inconsistent: we would consider many routine practices involving farm animals to be cruel if they involved pets. This inconsistency presents a dilemma: either extending farming practices to pets would not be cruel, or continuing our current farming practices is cruel. In section IV I consider some objections. (shrink)

The pejorative connotation often associated with the ordinary language meaning of “conspiracy theory” does not only stem from a conspiracy theory’s being about a conspiracy, but also from a conspiracy theory’s being regarded as a particular kind of theory. I propose to understand conspiracy theory-induced polarization in terms of disagreement about the correct epistemic evaluation of ‘theory’ in ‘conspiracy theory’. By framing the positions typical in conspiracy theory-induced polarization in this way, I aim to show that pejorative conceptions of ‘conspiracy (...) theory’ are problematic for research open to the possibility of finding depolarization strategies. That is, because they preclude constructive engagement with the epistemic norms governing (the rationales foundational of) belief in conspiracy theories. (shrink)

This paper proposes a novel answer to the question of what attitude agents should adopt when they receive misleading higher-order evidence that avoids the drawbacks of existing views. The answer builds on the independently motivated observation that there is a difference between attitudes that agents form as conclusions of their reasoning, called terminal attitudes, and attitudes that are formed in a transitional manner in the process of reasoning, called transitional attitudes. Terminal and transitional attitudes differ both in their descriptive and (...) in their normative properties. When an agent receives higher-order evidence that they might have reasoned incorrectly to a belief or credence towards p, then their attitude towards p is no longer justified as a terminal attitude towards p, but it can still be justified as a transitional attitude. This view, which I call the unmooring view, allows us to capture the rational impact of misleading higher-order evidence in a way that integrates smoothly with a natural picture of epistemic justification and the dynamics of deliberation. (shrink)

Until recently, it seemed like no theory about the relationship between rational credence and rational outright belief could reconcile three independently plausible assumptions: that our beliefs should be logically consistent, that our degrees of belief should be probabilistic, and that a rational agent believes something just in case she is sufficiently confident in it. Recently a new formal framework has been proposed that can accommodate these three assumptions, which is known as “the stability theory of belief” or “high probability cores.” (...) In this paper, I examine whether the stability theory of belief can meet two further constraints that have been proposed in the literature: that it is irrational to outright believe lottery propositions, and that it is irrational to hold outright beliefs based on purely statistical evidence. I argue that these two further constraints create a dilemma for a proponent of the stability theory: she must either deny that her theory is meant to give an account of the common epistemic notion of outright belief, or supplement the theory with further constraints on rational belief that render the stability theory explanatorily idle. This result sheds light on the general prospects for a purely formal theory of the relationship between rational credence and belief, i.e. a theory that does not take into account belief content. I argue that it is doubtful that any such theory could properly account for these two constraints, and hence play an important role in characterizing our common epistemic notion of outright belief. (shrink)

This paper discusses the inefficacy problem that arises in contexts of “collective harm.‘ These are contexts in which by acting in a certain sort of way, people collectively cause harm, or fail to prevent it, but no individual act of the relevant sort seems to itself make a difference. The inefficacy problem is that if acting in the relevant way won’t make a difference, it’s unclear why it would be wrong. Each individual can argue, “things will be just as bad (...) whether or not I act in this way, so there’s no point in doing otherwise.‘ The goal of this paper is to give an overview of some of the main responses available to the problem and to highlight central issues that arise for each type of response. In the final section, I explain what I take to be the most promising strategy and discuss the form that this strategy should take. (shrink)