The biological functions debate is a perennial topic in the philosophy of science. In the first full-length account of the nature and importance of biological functions for many years, Justin Garson presents an innovative new theory, the 'generalized selected effects theory of function', which seamlessly integrates evolutionary and developmental perspectives on biological functions. He develops the implications of the theory for contemporary debates in the philosophy of mind, the philosophy of medicine and psychiatry, the philosophy of biology, and biology (...) itself, addressing issues ranging from the nature of mental representation to our understanding of the function of the human genome. Clear, jargon-free, and engagingly written, with accessible examples and explanatory diagrams to illustrate the discussion, his book will be highly valuable for readers across philosophical and scientific disciplines. (shrink)

In contrast to scholars and signers in the nineteenth century, William Stokoe conceived of American Sign Language (ASL) as a unique linguistic tradition with roots in nineteenth-centurylangue des signes française, a conception that is apparent in his earliest scholarship on ASL. Stokoe thus contributed to the theoretical foundations upon which the field of sign language historical linguistics would later develop. This review focuses on the development of sign language historical linguistics since Stokoe, including the field's significant progress and the theoretical (...) and methodological problems that it still faces. The review examines the field's development through the lens of two related problems pertaining to how we understand sign language relationships and to our understanding of cognacy, as the term pertains to signs. It is suggested that the theoretical notions underlying these terms do not straightforwardly map onto the historical development of many sign languages. Recent approaches in sign language historical linguistics are highlighted and future directions for research are suggested to address the problems discussed in this review. (shrink)

There is a great deal of interest among business ethicists of today on the topic of spirituality of work. The connection between spirituality and business ethics has been acknowledged in scholarly literature, but this connection is expressed in different ways. Nonetheless, there is a growing consensus that spirituality and corporate profitability are not mutually exclusive. This essay presents a spirituality of work from the perspective of Hindu religion. Hinduism is one of the major religions in the world comprising 15% of (...) the world population. In its origin, Hinduism is somewhat a geographical term. It encompasses the various beliefs, spiritual practices, and rituals of people who originally inhabited the Indus Valley. Hinduism is not a single religion, in the sense that the term religion is understood in the Western context. Treating it as one tradition without considering its diverse and pluralistic character as well as the historical and textual factors that influence its development and complexities is highly problematic. This study explores a Hindu spirituality of work using Bhagavadgita as its primary source – one of the most important texts in Hinduism. (shrink)

Research on the relationship between religious commitment and business ethics has produced widely varying results and made the impact of such commitment unclear. This study presents an empirical investigation based on a questionnaire survey of business managers and professionals in the United States yielding a database of 1234 respondents. Respondents evaluated the ethical acceptability of 16 business decisions. Findings varied with the way in which the religion variable was measured. Little relationship between religious commitment and ethical judgment was found when (...) responses were compared on the basis of broad faith categories – Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, other religions, and no religion. However, respondents who indicated that religious interests were of high or moderate importance to them demonstrated a higher level of ethical judgment (less accepting of unethical decisions) than others in their evaluations. Evangelical Christians also showed a higher level of ethical judgment. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIn this paper, I develop a truthmaker semantics for essence and use the semantics to investigate the explanatory role of essence.

Facebook research has proliferated during recent years. However, since November 2017, Facebook has introduced a new limitation on the maximum amount of page posts retrievable through their Graph application programming interface, while there is limited documentation on how these posts are selected. This paper compares two datasets of the same Facebook page, a full dataset obtained before the introduction of the limitation and a partial dataset obtained after, and employs bootstrapping technique to assess the bias caused by the new limitation. (...) This paper demonstrates that posts with high user engagement, Photo posts and Video posts, are over-represented, while Link posts are under-represented. Top-term analysis reveals that there are significant differences in the most prominent terms between the full and partial dataset. This paper also reverse engineered the new application programming interface’s ranking algorithm to identify the features of a post that would affect its odds of being selected. Sentiment analysis reveals that there are significant differences in the sentiment word usage between the selected and non-selected posts. This paper has significant implications for the representativeness of research that use Facebook page data collected after the introduction of the limitation. (shrink)

Like Kant, the German Idealists, and many neo-Kantian philosophers before him, Nietzsche was persistently concerned with metaphysical questions about the nature of objects. His texts often address questions concerning the existence and non-existence of objects, the relation of objects to human minds, and how different views of objects significantly impact various commitments in many areas of philosophy—not just metaphysics, but also semantics, epistemology, science, logic and mathematics, and even ethics. This book presents a systematic and comprehensive analysis of Nietzsche’s material (...) object metaphysics. Remhof argues that Nietzsche embraces the controversial _constructivist_ view that all concrete objects are socially constructed. Reading Nietzsche as a constructivist, Remhof contends, provides fresh insight into Nietzsche's views on truth, science, naturalism, and nihilism. Remhof investigates how Nietzsche’s view of objects compares with similar views offered by influential American pragmatists, and explores the implications of Nietzsche’s constructivism for debates in contemporary material object metaphysics. _Nietzsche’s Constructivism _is a highly original and timely contribution to the steadily growing literature on Nietzsche’s thought. (shrink)

Is there evidence of constitutionalism in classical Confucian political thought? In Sungmoon Kim's book on Confucian virtue politics, he argues that that Mencius (Mengzi, fourth century BCE) and Xunzi (third century BCE) are constitutionalists in the following sense: they expressed a commitment to creating durable institutions, one of whose primary aims is to constrain the exercise of legitimate political authority and facilitate good and proper uses of political authority. But for many political thinkers, the sort of constitutionalism that really matters (...) is the sort that entails a commitment to "constitutional remedies." Roughly, a constitutional remedy is some sanctioned means of enforcing the constraints or correcting political authorities who fail to abide by them. Moreover, it is often thought that the remedies should be entrenched – that is, widely recognized and regarded as beyond the legitimate power of the political authorities to change easily. Most decent political thinkers are constitutionalists in the the weak sense that they think there should be durable institutions that constrain abuses of power and facilitate good uses of power. Fewer go so far as to say that there should be entrenched checks and balances on that power, so that people's well-founded objections have something more than just rhetorical force against abuses of power. -/- In this paper, I examine whether Mencius and Xunzi would qualify as constitutionalists in the robust sense that presupposes entrenched remedies. I find that Mencius has some political commitments that might make him friendlier to aristocratic remedies than to democratic ones, but that his reluctance to divide political authority among non-ideal agents makes it difficult to know whether he would accept constitutional remedies of any sort. And my findings with respect to Xunzi are similar, but a modicum more hopeful: at best, Xunzi could be stretched to underwrite some aristocratic constitutional remedies, and he seems somewhat more open to dividing power among non-ideal agents. Neither Mencius nor Xunzi were robust constitutionalists, but it is historically and philosophically informative to ask how near they came to robust constitutionalism, and in which respects they fell short of it. -/- In the course of developing and justifying my interpretation, I call attention to two considerations in assessing an historical thinker's commitment to robust constitutionalism: first, whether the thinker invokes the threat of rebellion as a way of countenancing it or merely as a descriptive claim about likely consequences of bad governance; second, whether non-ideal political agents are empowered to check abuses of power. Only when the thinker actually countenances rebellion and allows that non-ideal political agents can check abuses can the thinker be plausibly described as a robust constitutionalist. (shrink)

In this paper, I pose a dilemma for a very influential kind of metaethical constructivism, advocated recently by Sharon Street. It is either true or false that, if an action is morally wrong for a certain agent, then that agent has a normative reason not to do it. If it is true, then the constructivist is committed to the counterintuitive claim that some apparently morally horrendous acts are not actually wrong. If it is false, then the constructivist cannot maintain a (...) distinctively metaethical constructivism. Either way, this type of constructivism comes with a significant cost. (shrink)

Since the 1990s, Reinhart Koselleck has been one of the critics of the concept of collective memory. This includes contributions to practical debates on the one hand and reflections on a more theoretical level on the other. In contrast, with her concept of cultural memory, Aleida Assmann has taken a more positive view of the concept of collective memory. She defends this concept against Koselleck’s critical remarks, referring to him as an implicit addressee of her reflections. This essay takes this (...) disagreement as an opportunity to look more closely at the ‘dialogue’ between them by addressing three overlapping aspects, primarily on a theoretical level: the distinction between experience and recollection, the collective conditions of recollection, and the opposition between history of memory and memory of history. (shrink)

Using empirical evidence gathered from Chinese listed companies, this article explores the relationship between micro-governance mechanisms and corporate philanthropy from a corporate governance perspective. In China’s emerging market, ultimate controlling shareholders of state-owned enterprises are reluctant to donate their assets or resources to charitable organizations; in private enterprises marked by more deviation in voting and cash flow rights, such donations tend to be more likely. However, the ultimate controllers in PEs refuse to donate assets or resources they control or own, (...) which implies that corporate philanthropy by PEs comes at the cost of others, through assets or resources owned by minority shareholders. Even after devastating natural disasters such as the 2008 Wenchuan Earthquake, the controlling shareholders continue to express reluctance to donate any assets they control. Despite widespread evidence that corporate philanthropy boosts corporate growth and profitability, these ultimate controllers indicate no intention to donate their own money as a means to improve corporate performance. (shrink)

In a fascinating article in The Journal of Ethics, Eleonore Stump contends that while the flicker of freedom defense is the best available strategy for defending the principle of alternative possibilities against the threat posed to that principle by the Frankfurt cases, the defense is ultimately unsuccessful. In this article I identify a number of difficulties with Stump’s criticism of the flicker strategy. Along the way, I also clarify various nuances of the strategy that often get overlooked, and I highlight (...) the advantages of one version of it in particular. (shrink)

The past couple of decades have witnessed a remarkable burst of philosophical energy and talent devoted to virtue ethical approaches to Confucianism, including several books, articles, and even high-profile workshops and conferences that make connections between Confucianism and either virtue ethics as such or moral philosophers widely regarded as virtue ethicists. Those who do not work in the combination of Chinese philosophy and ethics may wonder what all of the fuss is about. Others may be more familiar with the issues (...) but have doubts about the fruitfulness of this line of inquiry. It is therefore worth asking whether a constructive engagement between Confucianism and virtue ethics is worth turning into a significant, multi-generational research agenda. Most answers to this question will fall somewhere between two poles. At one end is the view that the line of inquiry has run its course, if ever there were a course to run in the first place; at the opposite end is the view that we’re only just getting started. And then there is a wide range of more moderate views falling between these two positions. Far from having exhausted the potential of virtue ethical approaches to Confucianism, I think we are standing on a philosophical gold mine that we’ve only just begun to tap. In what follows I would like to explain briefly why I take this to be the case. (shrink)

Through the lenses of cognitive science of religion, successful god concepts must possess a number of features. God concepts must be counterintuitive, an intentional agent, possessing strategic information, able to act in the human world in detectable ways and capable of motivating behaviors that reinforce belief. That Santa Claus appears to be only inconsistently represented as having all five requisite features Santa has failed to develop a community of true believers and cult. Nevertheless, Santa concepts approximate a successful god concept (...) more closely than other widespread cultural characters such as Mickey Mouse and the Tooth Fairy, in part explaining Santa's relative cultural prominence. (shrink)

Helen Longino’s “contextual empiricism” is one of the most sophisticated recent attempts to defend a social theory of science. On this view, objectivity and epistemic acceptability require that research be produced within communities that approximate a Millian marketplace of ideas. I argue, however, that Longino’s embedding of her epistemology within the framework of Mill’s political liberalism implies a conception of individual epistemic agents that is incompatible with her view that scientific knowledge is necessarily social, and I begin to articulate an (...) alternative conception that is better suited to a truly social theory of science. †To contact the author, please write to: School of Public Policy, Georgia Institute of Technology, 685 Cherry Street, Atlanta, GA 30332‐0345; e‐mail: [email protected]. (shrink)

The direct argument is among the most prominent arguments for the incompatibility of determinism and moral responsibility. Some critics of the argument have accused it, or certain defenses of its central premise, of begging the question. This article responds to that accusation.

This chapter contains sections titled: The Rise of Virtue Ethics Essential Features of Virtue Ethics Virtue Ethics Approaches to Bioethics Criticisms of Virtue Ethics Conclusion References Further reading.

If “Big Gods” evolved in part because of their ability to morally regulate groups of people who cannot count on kin or reciprocal altruism to get along, then powerful gods would tend to be good gods. If the mechanism for this cooperation is some kind of fear of supernatural punishment, then we may expect that mighty gods tend to be punishing gods. The present study is a statistical analysis of superhuman being concepts from 20 countries on five continents to explore (...) whether the goodness of a god is related to its mightiness. Gods that looked more like the God of classical theism and gods that were low in anthropomorphism were more likely to be regarded as morally good and to be the target of religious practices. Mighty gods were not, however, especially likely to punish or to be a “high god.”. (shrink)

The order of discovery can have a profound effect upon the way in which we think about the function of a gene. In E. coli, recA is nearly essential for cell survival in the presence of DNA damage. However, recA was originally identified, as a gene required to obtain recombinant DNA molecules in conjugating bacteria. As a result, it has been frequently assumed that recA promotes the survival of bacteria containing DNA damage by recombination in which DNA strand exchanges occur. (...) We now know that several of the processes that interact with or are controlled by recA, such as excision repair and translesion synthesis, operate to ensure that DNA replication occurs processively without strand exchanges. Yet the view persists in the literature that recA functions primarily to promote recombination during DNA repair. With the benefit of hindsight and more than three decades of additional research, we reexamine some of the classical experiments that established the concept of DNA repair by recombination, and we consider the possibilities that recombination is not an efficient mechanism for rescuing damaged cells, and that recA may be important for maintaining processive replication in a manner that does not generally promote recombination. BioEssays 23:463–470, 2001. © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. (shrink)

Many philosophers have argued that moral disagreement raises metaphysical and/or epistemological challenges for moral realism. In this paper, I consider whether widespread moral disagreement raises a different sort of challenge by threatening the semantic commitments of moral realism. In particular, I suggest that the character of many moral disagreements gives us reason to suspect that not all competent moral speakers pick out the same properties as one another when they use moral terms. If this is so, both sides of a (...) moral dispute may speak truly, and the standard realist diagnosis of such disputes—that at most one party can be correct—is mistaken. My argumentative strategy is to first isolate some features of linguistic exchanges that provide evidence of a lack of co-reference, and then argue that many moral disputes have these features. I conclude by suggesting that there are plausible accounts of moral disputes that do not require co-reference. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIn this paper, we reply to Tom Sorell’s criticism of our engagement with the history of philosophy in our book, The Theory and Practice of Experimental Philosophy. We explain why our uses of the history of philosophy are not undermined by Sorell’s criticism and why our position is not threatened by the dilemma Sorell advances. We argue that Sorell has mischaracterized the dialectical context of our discussion of the history of philosophy and that he has mistakenly treated our use of (...) the history of philosophy as univocal, when in fact we called on the history of philosophy in several different ways in our text. (shrink)

In Logiques des Mondes, Paris, Seuil, 2006, Alain Badiou has produced a sequel to his magnum opus Being and Event. Whereas Being and Event primarily restricted itself to the relationship between ontology and the event, mathematics and poetry, the new book seriously extends and revises certain of its predecessor's. This article outlines some of the major doctrines, arguments, and motivations for the new work, as well as several points of possible difficulty.

Based upon research done by evolutionary psychologists into the reason why human beings feel depression in social situations, I argue that philosophers have significant warrant to consider depression as an important feature conditioning moral imagination. The moral imagination come up with new enterprises and new ways of organizing social life. This reorganization would meet many of the goals put forth by pragmatist philosopher John Dewey. I argue that depression will work as a leading clue and unique imaginative “space” to reconstruct (...) various social situations. (shrink)

The focus of this paper is a fascinating but hitherto unstudied 1742 manuscript treatise by Johannes Daniel Schlichting (1705–1765) titled “Sapientiæ Problema” that contains something extremely rare in the mid-eighteenth century: a full-blown speculative cosmogony. As this article reveals, Schlichting developed a distinctive vital liquid matter in an effort to account for the generation of all natural bodies and combat the stamina-based theories that were dominant in his day. He hoped that his treatise would be published in the Philosophical Transactions (...) of the Royal Society, but an accompanying abridgment by the FRS Henry Baker (1698–1774) strongly implies that Schlichting’s speculative bent and desire to divulge causal explanations were unacceptable to the Englishman and generally ill-suited to the intellectual climate of mid-century England. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to present some results which suggest that the Singular Cardinals Hypothesis follows from the Proper Forcing Axiom. What will be proved is that a form of simultaneous reflection follows from the Set Mapping Reflection Principle, a consequence of PFA. While the results fall short of showing that MRP implies SCH, it will be shown that MRP implies that if SCH fails first at κ then every stationary subset of reflects. It will also be demonstrated (...) that MRP always fails in a generic extension by Prikry forcing. (shrink)

In this article, we argue that there is an essential difference between social intelligence and creative intelligence, and that they have their foundation in human sexuality. For sex differences, we refer to the vast psychological, neurological, and cognitive science research where problem-solving, verbal skills, logical reasoning, and other topics are dealt with. Intelligence tests suggest that, on average, neither sex has more general intelligence than the other. Though people are equals in general intelligence, they are different in special forms of (...) intelligence such as social intelligence and creative intelligence, the former dominant in women, the latter dominant in men. The dominance of creative intelligence in men needs to be explained. The focus of our research is on the strictly anthropological aspects, and consequently our explanation for this fact is based on the male-female polarity in the mating systems. Sexual dimorphism does not only regard bodily differences but implies different forms of sex life. Sex researchers distinguish between two levels of sexual intercourse: procreative sex and recreational sex, and to these we would add “creative sex.” On all three levels, there is a behavioral difference between men and women, including the subjective experience. These differences are as well attributed to culture as genetically founded in nature. Sexual reproduction is only possible if females cooperate. Their biological inheritance makes females play a decisive role in mate choice. Recreational sex for the purpose of pleasure rather than reproduction results from female extended sexual activity. Creative sex, on the contrary, is a specifically male performance of sexuality. We identify creative sex with eroticism. Eroticism evolved through the transformation of the sexual drive into a mental state of expectation and fantasizing. Hence, sex differences (that nowadays are covered up by cultural egalitarianism) continue to be the evolutionary origin of the difference between social and creative intelligence. (shrink)

Three distinct reasons that Plato calls the rational part of the soul “divine” are analyzed: its metaphysical kinship with the Forms, its epistemological ability to know the Forms, and its ethical capacity to live by them. Supposing these three divine aspects of the rational part are unified in the life of each person, they naturally suggest a process of divinization or “becoming like god” according to which a person, by living more virtuously, which requires increasingly better knowledge of the Forms, (...) gradually becomes united with them. This process of divinization is in fact found throughout the middle and late dialogues, including the Phaedo, Republic, Symposium, Phaedrus, Timaeus, and the Laws. This synoptic view of the Platonic idea of divinization provides a standard according to which misplaced emphasis, flaws, and tension created by other interpretations are criticized and corrected. (shrink)

Naïve realism is often characterized, by its proponents and detractors alike, as the view that for a subject to undergo a perceptual experience is for her to stand in a simple two-place acquaintance relation toward an object. However, two of the leading defenders of naïve realism, John Campbell and Bill Brewer, have thought it necessary to complicate this picture, claiming that a third relatum is needed to account for various possible differences between distinct visual experiences of the same object. This, (...) I argue, is a mistake. Once it is acknowledged that a subject’s visual experience acquaints her with more than just a single object, all of the relevant facts can be explained from within the simpler naïve realist framework. (shrink)