In this paper we make a proposal for reforming biomedical research that is aimed to align re-search more closely with the so-called fair-share principle according to which the proportions of global resources as-signed to different diseases should agree with the ratios of human suffering associated with those diseases.

Is the brain the biological substrate of consciousness? Most naturalistic philosophers of mind have supposed that the answer must obviously be «yes » to this question. However, a growing number of philosophers working in 4e (embodied, embedded, extended, enactive) cognitive science have begun to challenge this assumption, arguing instead that consciousness supervenes on the whole embodied animal in dynamic interaction with the environment. We call views that share this claim dynamic sensorimotor theories of consciousness (DSM). Clark (2009) a founder and (...) leading proponent of the hypothesis of the extended mind, demurs, arguing that as matter of fact the biology of consciousness doesn’t allow for a brain, body and world boundary crossing architecture. We begin by looking at one of the arguments for DSM, the variable neural correlates argument. We then outline two criticisms that Clark has made of this argument and endorse his criticisms. However we finish up by using the case of sensory substitution to argue that something of this argument for DSM nevertheless survives. We suggest that Clark ought to concede sensory substitution as a case in which the conscious mind extends. (shrink)

The recent judgement in the case of Re:M in which the Court held that it would be unlawful to withdraw artificial nutrition and hydration from a woman in a minimally conscious state raises a number of ethical issues of wide application. Central to these is the extent to which precedent autonomous decisions should be respected in the absence of a legally binding advance decision. Well-being interests can survive the loss of many of the psychological faculties that support personhood. A decision (...) to respect precedent autonomy can contradict the well-being interests of the individual after capacity is lost. These decisions raise difficult questions about personal identity and about the threshold of evidence that is required of an earlier decision in order for it to be respected. (shrink)

According to the free energy principle all living systems aim to minimise free energy in their sensory exchanges with the environment. Processes of free energy minimisation are thus ubiquitous in the biological world. Indeed it has been argued that even plants engage in free energy minimisation. Not all living things however feel alive. How then did the feeling of being alive get started? In line with the arguments of the phenomenologists, I will claim that every feeling must be felt by (...) someone. It must have mineness built into it if it is to feel a particular way. The question I take up in this paper asks how mineness might have arisen out of processes of free energy minimisation, given that many systems that keep themselves alive lack mineness. The hypothesis I develop in this paper is that the life of an organism can be seen as an inferential process. Every living system embodies a probability distribution conditioned on a model of the sensory, physiological, and morphological states that are highly probably given the life it leads and the niche it inhabits. I argue for an ecological and enactive interpretation of free energy. I show how once the life of an organism reaches a certain level of complexity mineness emerges as an intrinsic part of the process of life itself. (shrink)

In this beautifully written account, Julian Young provides the most comprehensive biography available today of the life and philosophy of the nineteenth-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. Young deals with the many puzzles created by the conjunction of Nietzsche's personal history and his work: why the son of a Lutheran pastor developed into the self-styled 'Antichrist'; why this archetypical Prussian came to loath Bismarck's Prussia; and why this enemy of feminism preferred the company of feminist women. Setting Nietzsche's thought in (...) the context of his times - the rise of Prussian militarism, anti-Semitism, Darwinian science, the 'Youth' and emancipationist movements, as well as the 'death of God' - Young emphasises the decisive influence of Plato and of Richard Wagner on Nietzsche's attempted reform of Western culture. (shrink)

Margaret J. Osler - Jan W. Wojcik 1944-2006 - Journal of the History of Philosophy 44:4 Journal of the History of Philosophy 44.4 iv Muse Search Journals This Journal Contents Jan W. Wojcik 1944–2006 Margaret J. Osler Jan Wojcik, who served as Book Review Editor for The Journal of the History of Philosohy, died in Paris, France,..

What is the meaning of life? In the post-modern, post-religious scientific world, this question is becoming a preoccupation. But it also has a long history: many major figures in philosophy had something to say on the subject, as Julian Young so vividly illustrates in this thought-provoking book. Part One of the book presents an historical overview of philosophers from Plato to Hegel and Marx who have believed in some sort of meaning of life, either in some supposed 'other' world (...) or in the future of this world. Part Two looks at what happened when the traditional structures that provided life with meaning ceased to be believed. With nothing to take their place, these structures gave way to the threat of nihilism, to the appearance that life is meaningless. Julian Young looks at the responses to this threat in the work of Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre, Camus, Foucault and Derrida. This compelling and highly engaging exploration of fundamental values will captivate anyone who's ever asked themselves where life's meaning really lies. It also makes a perfect historical introduction to philosophy. (shrink)

This paper argues that, within the Western ‘classical’ tradition of performing works of music, there exists a performance value of authenticity that is distinct from that of complying with the instructions encoded in the work's score. This kind of authenticity—interpretive authenticity—is a matter of a performance's displaying an understanding of the performed work. In the course of explaining the nature of this norm, two further claims are defended: that the respective values of interpretive authenticity and score compliance can come into (...) conflict; and that when this happens, compromising ideal score compliance for the sake of making the performance more interpretively authentic can make for a better performance. (shrink)

The phenomenon of ‘structural irrationality’ covers a diverse range of combinations of attitudes, including (inter alia) contradictory beliefs, contradictory intentions, means–end incoherence, akratic incoherence, and cyclical preferences. This paper offers a novel, unified account of when a pattern of attitudes qualifies as structurally irrational. It begins by setting up the core of the view I will be defending: a set of attitudes is irrational if and only if it is impossible for those attitudes to be jointly successful. I show that (...) this view can account for a wide range of paradigmatically irrational combinations of attitudes. I then refine the account to make it sufficiently subjective. I argue that a set of attitudes is irrational only if the impossibility of their joint success is (i) logically transparent, (ii) subjectively inferable, and (iii) not justifiably denied. (shrink)

Defending a procedural conception of global justice that calls for the establishment of reasonably democratic arrangements within and beyond the state, this book argues for a justice-based understanding of social development and justifies why a democracy-promoting international development practice is a requirement of global justice.

This is a clear and lucid account of Nietzsche's philosophy of art, combining exegesis, interpretation and criticism in a judicious balance. Julian Young argues that Nietzsche's thought about art can only be understood in the context of his wider philosophy. In particular, he discusses the dramatic changes in Nietzschean aesthetics against the background of the celebrated themes of the death of God, eternal recurrence, and the idea of the Übermensch. Young then divides Nietzsche's career and his philosophy of art (...) into four distinct phases, but suggests that these phases describe a circle. An attempt at world-affirmation is made in the central phases, but Nietzsche is predominantly influenced at the beginning and end of his career by a Schopenhauerian pessimism. At the beginning and end art is important because it 'redeems' us from life. (shrink)

Genomic research can reveal ‘unsolicited’ or ‘incidental’ findings that are of potential health or reproductive significance to participants. It is widely thought that researchers have a moral obligation, grounded in the duty of easy rescue, to return certain kinds of unsolicited findings to research participants. It is less widely thought that researchers have a moral obligation to actively look for health-related findings. This paper examines whether there is a moral obligation, grounded in the duty of easy rescue, to actively hunt (...) for genomic secondary findings. We begin by showing how the duty to disclose individual research findings can be grounded in the duty of easy rescue. Next, we describe a parallel moral duty, also grounded in the duty of easy rescue, to actively hunt for such information. We then consider six possible objections to our argument, each of which we find unsuccessful. Some of these objections provide reason to limit the scope of the duty to look for secondary findings, but none provide reason to reject this duty outright. We argue that under a certain range of circumstances, researchers are morally required to hunt for these kinds of secondary findings. Although these circumstances may not currently obtain, genomic researchers will likely acquire an obligation to hunt for secondary findings as the field of genomics continues to evolve. (shrink)

Due to the economic and social effects of globalization democracy is currently in crisis in many states around the world. This book suggests that solving this crisis requires rethinking democratic education. It argues that educational public policy must cultivate democratic relationships not only within but also across and between states, and that such policy must empower citizens to exercise democratic control in domestic as well as in inter- and transnational politics. -/- Democratic Education in a Globalized World articulates and defends (...) democratic conceptions of global citizenship education and educational justice on the basis of a democratic understanding of global justice. It will be of interest to researchers across the fields of education, political theory, philosophy, development and postcolonial studies. (shrink)

The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Volume 78, Issue 1, Page 85-90, Winter 2020.

A theoretical assumption of this chapter on time in mind is that people ought to take phenomenological descriptions of temporal experience at face value. The chapter begins with a brief review of Rick Grush's trajectory estimation model of temporal representation – the predictive inference model. It introduces the issues of whether temporal properties as they appear should be thought of as primary or secondary qualities. A constraint runs from the best science of the mind back to phenomenology that the best (...) phenomenological descriptions of experience cohere with the best science of the human mind. Grush's model bears a close resemblance to computational theories in neuroscience that take perception to consist in predictive inference. A section explains the relationship between the Orwellian interpretation of postdiction and the Husserlian view of temporal experience. The chapter also presents a discussion on “the time as its own representation view” (TOR) and supervenience thesis (SUP). (shrink)

The issue of COVID-19 vaccine allocation is still highly controversial on the international as well as on the national level, and policy-makers worldwide struggle in striking a fair balance between different ethical principles of vaccine allocation, in particular maximum benefit, reciprocity, social justice and equal respect. Any political decision that implements these principles comes at a cost in terms of loss of lives and of loss of life years that could potentially have been prevented by a different vaccination strategy. This (...) article illustrates these trade-offs using quantitative analysis and shows how this approach can contribute to providing a rational and transparent grounding of political decisions on COVID-19 vaccine allocation. (shrink)

We look on Fernán Pérez de Guzmán as an exile not only because he lived out the last thirty years of his life in the relative seclusion of his estate in Batres; he is an exile, too, because as a poet he has long been banished from critical acclaim. For an enthusiastic view, one has to go back to the 1860s and the eulogy of the literary historian José Amador de los Ríos, according to whom Fernán Pérez's graceful didacticism deserved (...) “[el] aprecio de la verdadera crítica.” Since then, “the appreciation of true critics” has been reserved for what is now considered a canonical work of prose history, the Generaciones y semblanzas, whereas most of his poetry has been condemned for stylistic inelegance — ironically, as we shall see, one of the very qualities he seems deliberately to have cultivated. (shrink)

Explaining socio-economic phenomena is one important aim of economics. There is very little agreement, however, on what precisely constitutes an adequate economic explanation. Starting from the very influential but defective ‘deductive-nomological model’ of explanation, this article describes and criticizes the major contemporary competitors for such an account (the probabilistic–causal, the mechanistic–causal and the unificationist models) and argues that none of them can by itself capture all aspects of a good explanation. When seeking to explain a socio-economic phenomenon it should therefore (...) be borne in mind that different types of explanation serve different purposes. (shrink)

Digital topology is an extreme approach to constructive spatial representation in that a classical space is replaced or represented by a finite combinatorial space. This has led to a popular research area in which theory and applications are very closely related, but the question remains as to ultimately how mathematically viable this approach is, and what the formal relationship between a space and its finite representations is. Several researchers have attempted to answer this by showing that a space can be (...) constructed as the inverse limit of its finite representations, and this construction has been developed independently in computer science and physics. Therefore, in this formal sense, finite representations of classical spaces can be arbitrarily good. The relationship between classical and finite topology is by now fairly well understood, and in this work we extend the theory by showing that measures on the classical space are approximated by measures on finite spaces. (shrink)

A series of cases, some of them with a high media profile, suggest that freedom of religion or belief in the United Kingdom is being undermined by the operation of new equality laws. This article outlines the constitutional context for liberty and equality rights as well as the main ways in which religious liberty is secured by and within equality law. However, British equality law puts pressure on religious liberty in four ways: (1) it confines the relevance of ‘religion’ to (...) limited social contexts; (2) it creates a priority for equality-perspectives over liberty-perspectives on social conflict; (3) it generates new social assumptions about what individuals have to believe and say (or refrain from saying) if they are to be trusted to uphold the law; (4) it provides legitimation for the imposition of contested comprehensive equality doctrines, some of which are inimical to civil liberty. In response, it is important to emphasise the role of equality law as a tool to secure mutual toleration and equal rights in the face of religious and ethical disagreement. (shrink)

Examining Marcel Duchamp’s final installation Etant donnés: 1º la chute d’eau, 2º le gaz d’éclairage or Given: 1. The Waterfall 2. The Illuminating Gas (1946-66) has proven to be problematic for historians and theorists. Theories involving this assemblage typically incorporate the work into existing conceptions of Duchampian work and therefore do not consider the implication of the work in comparison to Duchamp’s artistic work as a whole, specifically in relation to his consistent engagement with issues of sexuality and fantasy. My (...) paper examines Duchamp’s staging of a series of fantasy constructions, which are compared with Freud’s stages in “A Child is Being Beaten,” specifically in relation to an understanding of fantasy developed by Zizek, as well as Laplanche and Pontalis. (shrink)

In A Philosophers' Manifesto a diverse range of leading philosophers from around the world present the philosophical case for a new policy or law they think will make an improvement in the world. The proposals range across questions of punishment, state ownership, education, freedom, democratic and economic inclusion. They draw in perspectives from Europe, the Americas, East Asia, Africa and India. This collection presents robust arguments for some radical new approaches to social and political issues, showing exactly how philosophy can (...) be of real, practical benefit, especially in these fractious times. (shrink)

Knowledge is often thought of as something that we each individually have, something inside our own minds. But our knowledge depends on other people's testimony and expertise. And what we know depends on what our society makes it possible for us to know, either formally or informally through social norms and practices that suppress some ideas and privilege others. The philosophical study of the social dimension of knowledge is called Social Epistemology. This volume gathers experts in the field from across (...) the world to give their perspectives on it. (shrink)

Referência do artigo comentado: PUCCIARELLI, Daniel. Meaning and fate of critique on the ontological turn. Trans/form/ação: revista de Filosofia da Unesp, v. 45, n. 1, p. 95-114, 2022.

John Rawls wurde 1921 in Baltimore im Bundesstaat Maryland als zweiter von fünf Söhnen geboren. Nach dem Besuch einer privaten und einer öffentlichen Schule in Baltimore wechselte Rawls an die religiöse Kent School im Bundesstaat Connecticut. Wie sein älterer Bruder Bill studierte Rawls in Princeton, wo er 1943 sein Studium mit einem Bachelor of Arts abschloss. In seiner Senior Thesis Über Sünde, Glaube und Religion beschäftigte sich der zu dieser Zeit streng religiöse Rawls mit dem Problem des Bösen, auf das (...) er durch Veranstaltungen von Norman Malcom gebracht wurde. (shrink)

Der Begriff Supranationalität entstammt politisch-rechtlichen Kontexten und bezeichnet die Eigenschaft einer jenseits des Nationalstaates angesiedelten politisch-rechtlichen Autorität, Maßnahmen ergreifen und Gesetze erlassen zu können, die für Nationalstaaten einen verbindlichen Charakter haben.

Interview with Anthony Gottlieb about his "The Dream of Reason.".

Ein Argument gegen die ärztliche Beihilfe zum Suizid lautet, Patienten könnten sich um Suizidassistenz bemühen, weil sie sich als Belastung empfinden. Dabei wird die Selbstbestimmtheit eines so motivierten Todeswunsches in Frage gestellt. Ist dieses Argument überzeugungskräftig? Empirische Daten zeigen, dass die ärztliche Beihilfe zum Suizid auf der Grundlage dieses Motivs den ethischen Prinzipien der Sorge um das Patientenwohl und des Respekts vor der Autonomie des Patienten nicht widersprechen muss. Denn das Empfinden, anderen zur Last zu fallen, kann trotz adäquater palliativmedizinischer (...) Betreuung wesentlich zu einem Leidensdruck am Lebensende beitragen. Zudem ist dieses Motiv eng verknüpft mit der Sorge um das Wohl der Angehörigen, die einer erheblichen Belastungssituation ausgesetzt sein können. Da aber das Wohlergehen der Familie zu den elementaren Werten von schwerstkranken Patienten am Lebensende gehört, kann der Wunsch nach ärztlicher Beihilfe zum Suizid auch auf der Basis dieses Motivs Ausdruck eines selbstbestimmten Patientenwillens sein. Andererseits korreliert das Empfinden, anderen zur Last zu fallen, mit einer depressiven Verstimmung. Dieser Zusammenhang ist deshalb relevant, da bei depressiven Störungen eine Einschränkung der Selbstbestimmungsfähigkeit vorliegen kann. Vor diesem Hintergrund sind Zweifel an der Selbstbestimmtheit eines so motivierten Sterbewunsches durchaus begründet. Aufgrund des bestehenden Wissensdefizits bei der Feststellung der Selbstbestimmungsfähigkeit ist die Mitwirkung des Arztes bei einem so motivierten Todeswunsch daher ethisch fragwürdig. (shrink)