Although the job security afforded by tenure is one important factor in deciding whether or how to exercise academic freedom, professors must weigh a number of other important career goals that constrain their choices. This multiplicity of goals, combined with concerns about career mobility, may help to explain the differences Ceci et al. observe between professors at different ranks. (Published Online February 8 2007).

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:SubStance 32.3 (2003) 109-132 [Access article in PDF] Passages Beyond the Resistance:René Char's Seuls demeurent and its Harmonics in Semprun and Foucault Van Kelly —Les actions du poète ne sont que la conséquence des énigmes de la poésie. —Le poète ne jouit que de la liberté des autres. René Char Spanish-born writer Jorge Semprun, in his memoir of deportation to Buchenwald, L'écriture ou la vie (1994), tells how (...) in spring 1945 he first came to read what is arguably René Char's first influential book of poetry, Seuls demeurent, and to recite on the liberated camp's assembly ground one of the keynote poems of the collection, "La liberté," as an emblem of his survival. Although Char had published several collections prior to World War II, Seuls demeurent was a major sign that something had changed in his poetry and politics, that he was about to entrer dans la carrière, to borrow the phrase that historian Olivier Wieviorka uses to describe the political and cultural ascension of French resisters in the postwar era. 1 A Gaullist officer, Marc, present at the liberation of Buchenwald in mid-April 1945, gave a copy of Seuls demeurent to Semprun, who had been deported for resistance activities in France. Semprun immediately felt that this book transcended what better-known writers had published from the late 1930s through early 1944, when he lost contact with a French literary scene he knew well (L'écriture, 79-87).Indeed, Seuls demeurent resonated so strongly in the post-Liberation years that it furnished a major reference point in Foucault's preface to his Folie et déraison (1961), where the philosopher links his own critique of social repression with Char's "Partage formel," the poetic sequence of aphorisms that concludes Seuls demeurent. Without mentioning his source (either poet or title of the poem), Foucault quotes from aphorism XXII, where Char praises the uncanny murmur he calls "étrangeté légitime," 2 and where we might hear the whispers of the Resister's legitimate revolt against repression as well as a legitimate strangeness or new self-assertive idiom within poetry. [End Page 109]It is interesting that Semprun and Foucault route their early encounters with Char's writing through the more explicitly poetical Seuls demeurent, and not through Feuillets d'Hypnos, a series of maxims, action portraits, and homages published in 1946 inGallimard's « Espoir » series, directed by Albert Camus, Char's friend. In Feuillets d'Hypnos, Char described, aphoristically more than anecdotally, his experience in the southern French Resistance. Seuls demeurent (and eventually other poems in a similar vein from his 1948 compendium Fureur et mystère, into which Seuls demeurent was merged alongside Feuillets d'Hypnos) purveyed Char's most lasting political and ideological impact on the generations represented by Semprun and Foucault.To understand how Seuls demeurent and the liberational poetics it initiated might spur two such nonconformist yet widely divergent left intellectual projects—Semprun's politique fiction, which resulted in novels like La deuxième mort de Ramón Mercader (1969), and Foucault's archeologies of social control—we must try to read Char's work back into the immediacy of its era, with the help of historians like H.R. Kedward, Henri Michel and others, despite the fact that Seuls demeurent is striated with discernible secondary work—the displacements and condensations that the Occupation and Liberation induced in its survivors and itinerants. Semprun and Foucault, in their quotations from Char's poetry, attest to the sense of personal empowerment that his voice effected. Perhaps something in his poetics, especially its mode of interaction with history, anticipated such readers.I will explore these ideas by showing, first, how in Seuls demeurent Char's poetic re-enactment of his passage through WWII foregrounds historical events and violence, but privileges poetry as a means of giving overriding sense to the war, and more specifically to the French internal Resistance, to the extent that it was morally distinct (if not always organizationally severed) from De Gaulle's external... (shrink)

Arts and Humanities in Higher Education, Volume 21, Issue 2, Page 158-175, April 2022. Despite the increased use of technology in higher education classrooms, we need a better understanding of pedagogical strategies that improve student ability to produce quality scholarly digital content in the humanities. This research was designed to examine student learning through scholarly digital storytelling, a technology-enhanced assessment. The researcher collected data during and after an interdisciplinary, graduate scholarly digital storytelling course, including student work, student reflections, and (...) individual interviews, to examine experiences at key points throughout the learning process. The results indicate that this pedagogical approach, when carefully scaffolded alongside formative feedback and ongoing student support, can increase student capacity—including digital agency, problem-solving skills, and digital knowledge production skills—to produce scholarly digital work in the humanities. Students can also learn to understand the interplay between disciplinary learning and digital skills and the ways in which both are essential for scholarly communication within and beyond the classroom. (shrink)

Hastings Center Report, Volume 52, Issue S1, Page S72-S78, March‐April 2022.

Hastings Center Report, Volume 52, Issue 2, Page 49-57, March‐April 2022.

ABSTRACTWith over 560 citations reported on Google Scholar by April 2018, a publication by Juslin and Gabrielsson presented evidence supporting performers’ abilities to communicate, with hig...

BackgroundThe Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute is obligated to peer review and to post publicly “Final Research Reports” of all funded projects. PCORI peer review emphasizes adherence to PCORI’s Methodology Standards and principles of ethical scientific communication. During the peer review process, reviewers and editors seek to ensure that results are presented objectively and interpreted appropriately, e.g., free of spin.MethodsTwo independent raters assessed PCORI peer review feedback sent to authors. We calculated the proportion of reports in which spin was identified during (...) peer review, and the types of spin identified. We included reports submitted by April 2018 with at least one associated journal article. The same raters then assessed whether authors addressed reviewers’ comments about spin. The raters also assessed whether spin identified during PCORI peer review was present in related journal articles.ResultsWe included 64 PCORI-funded projects. Peer reviewers or editors identified spin in 55/64 submitted research reports. Types of spin included reporting bias, inappropriate interpretation, inappropriate extrapolation of results, and inappropriate attribution of causality. Authors addressed comments about spin related to 47/55 of the reports.Of 110 associated journal articles, PCORI comments about spin were potentially applicable to 44/110 articles, of which 27/44 contained the same spin that was identified in the PCORI research report. The proportion of articles with spin was similar for articles accepted before and after PCORI peer review.DiscussionJust as spin is common in journal articles and press releases, we found that most reports submitted to PCORI included spin. While most spin was mitigated during the funder’s peer review process, we found no evidence that review of PCORI reports influenced spin in journal articles. Funders could explore interventions aimed at reducing spin in published articles of studies they support. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Hume Studies Volume 32, Number 1, April 2006, pp. 113-117 How Wide Is Hume's Circle? (A question raised by the exchange between Erin I. Kelly and Louis E. Loeb, Hume Studies, November 2004) ANNETTE C. BAIER Hume's version, in An Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals, section 9,2 of the viewpoint from which moral assessments are made, and from which traits are recognized as virtues or vices, (...) is that it is one which activates a "universal principle of the human frame," the "principle of humanity." It displays "the force of many sympathies," and depends upon our possession of "some propensity to the good of mankind" (EPM 5.39; SBN 226). Does this represent a revision, on Hume's part, of his Treatise claim that sympathy with a person's "narrow circle" is what enables us to judge that person's moral goodness? A humanity-wide circle is scarcely "narrow," even if it is not wide enough for those who see our treatment of animals as relevant to our moral merit or demerit. The claim about sympathy with the narrow circle is made in the Treatise section "Of goodness and benevolence."3 It has recently been assuming the status of a definition of the Humean moral point of view, in some commentators' writings.4 If it had been so intended, then there would indeed be a revision in EPM, where there is no mention of narrow circles, merely two footnotes, 22 and 25, to the section "Why utility pleases," concerning the wisdom of confining our efforts to do good to those close to us, lest our efforts be "dissipated or lost for want of a properly limited object." But in fact Hume never claimed that sympathy with a Annette Baier formerly taught in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh, and is now retired. Email: [email protected]. 114 Annette C. Baier person's narrow circle was enough to enable us to recognize her bravery, her proper pride, her prudence, her good judgement, her wit, her integrity, her "justice" or her allegiance to lawful magistrates. It is needed only to judge her "goodness and benevolence. " (I take it that the title, "Of goodness and benevolence," is pleonastic, that the varieties of benevolence exhaust "goodness.") Just as benevolence is not the whole of virtue, for Hume, nor is "goodness." The section in which he uses the phrase, "narrow circle," begins with an explicit limitation of what is there to be discussed: "Having thus explained that praise and approbation for everything we call great in human affections, we now proceed to give an account of their goodness..." (T 3.3.3.1; SBN 602). "Good" is not, for Hume, the most general term of moral approbation. Just as we can judge some to be "too intrepid" (an ingredient in "greatness of mind"), so we can judge some to be "too good" (EPM 7.22; SBN 259). Hume's most general terms of approbation are "meritorious" and "estimable." He uses "good" in a restricted sense, for a person's possession of the group of virtues that come under "benevolence." In the Treatise 3.3.3.15 (SBN 581-82), he speaks not of one moral point of view, but of "steady and generalpoinrs of view" (my emphasis), and it is possible, indeed plausible, that sympathy with circles of different widths will be needed to recognize different virtues and groups of virtues. For some, such as justice, "extensive sympathy" (T 3.3.1.23; SBN 586) is needed. For others, such as affability, and other aspects of "goodness," we sympathize with the effects of the person's character on a less extensive circle. A good person is affable, generous, and kind, does well as friend, as parent, as neighbor, as colleague, as employer. She does considerate and helpful things to those she encounters, both those close to her, friends, family, and work-mates, and also to those to whom she is not so close, such as the needy in her own community, to whom she may give employment, or charity. Hume uses other phrases in Treatise 3.3 which are sometimes taken to refer to the same... (shrink)

Response to Skiles (2009) on Trogdon (2009) on intrinsic properties and fundamentality.

The search for meaningful work has been of interest to researchers from a variety of disciplines for decades and seems to have grown even more recently. Much of the literature assumes that employees share a sense of what is meaningful in work and there isn’t much attention given to how and why meanings might differ. Researchers have not only called for more research studying demographic differences in definitions of meaning :77–90, 2014), but also more research utilizing mixed methods to study (...) psychological concepts like meaningful work Handbook of multimethod measurement in psychology, American Psychological Association, Washington, 2006). This study specifically examines differences across generational cohorts on their prioritization of sources of meaningful work through qualitative, in-depth interviews followed by a more generalizable, quantitative survey. Findings from the qualitative study show that generational cohorts define the meaning in their jobs differently, and they hold negative perceptions about the lack of desire for meaning in each of the other cohorts. Study 2 maps generational cohorts on the comprehensive model of meaningful work designed by Lips-Wiersma and Morris :491–511, 2009) to reveal that although there are some differences in prioritization of sources of meaningful work, all generational cohorts share similar desire to “develop and become themselves” when asked about their definitions of meaningful work. Implications and future research are discussed. (shrink)

Discussion of grounding-theoretic accounts of truthmaking in terms of the theoretical role of “catching cheaters”.

Hellenistic philosophy concerns the thought of the Epicureans, Stoics, and Skeptics, the most influential philosophical groups in the era between the death of Alexander the Great and the defeat of the last Greek stronghold in the ancient world. The Routledge Handbook of Hellenistic Philosophy provides accessible yet rigorous introductions to the theories of knowledge, ethics, and physics belonging to each of the three schools. It explores the fascinating ways in which interschool rivalries shaped the philosophies of the era, and offers (...) unique insight into the relevance of Hellenistic views to issues today, such as environmental ethics, consumerism, and bioethics. Eleven countries are represented among the Handbook's thirty-five authors, whose chapters were written specifically for this volume and are organized thematically into six sections: I. The people, history, and methods of Epicureanism, Stoicism, and Skepticism. II. Earlier philosophical influences on Hellenistic thought, such as Aristotle, Socrates, and Presocratics. III. The soul, perception, and knowledge. IV. God, fate, and the primary principles of nature and the universe. V. Ethics, political theory, society, and community. VI. Hellenistic philosophy's relevance to contemporary life. Spanning from the ancient past to the present, this Handbook aims to show that Hellenistic philosophy has much to offer all thinking people of the twenty-first century. (shrink)

This paper contributes to the contemporary business ethics narrative by proposing an approach to corporate ethical decision making (EDM) which serves as an alternative to the imposition of codes and standards to address the ethical consequences of grand challenges, like COVID-19, which are impacting today’s society. Our alternative approach to EDM embraces the concept of reflexive thinking and ethical consciousness among the individual agents who collectively are the corporation and who make ethical decisions, often in isolation, removed from the collocated (...) corporate setting. We draw on the teachings of the Canadian philosopher and theologian, Fr. Bernard Lonergan, to conceptualize an approach to EDM which focuses on the ethics of the corporate agent by nurturing the universal and invariant structure that is operational in all human beings. Embracing Lonergan’s dynamic cognitive structure of human knowing, and the structure of the human good, we advance a paradigm of EDM in business which emboldens authentic ethical thought, decision making, and action commensurate with virtuous living and germane to human flourishing. Lonergan’s philosophy guides us away from the imposition of over-arching corporate codes of ethics and inspires us, as individual agents, to attend to the data of our own consciousness in our ethical decision making. Such cognitional endowment leads us out of the ethics of the ‘timeless present’ (Islam and Greenwood in Journal of Business Ethics 170: 1–4, 2021) towards ethical authenticity in business, leaving us better placed to reflect upon and address the ethical issues emanating from grand challenges like COVID-19. (shrink)

The articles published in our Winter 2016 edition are connected loosely under the themes of pop culture and public memory. Our annual conference, held in late April, featured Dr. Kelly MacFarlane as our keynote lecture to speak on the interplay between history, public memory, and pop culture. We are thrilled to present to you eight excellent articles in our Winter 2016 edition: An ideological examination of the US-Russian Space Race and public memory of the event during the cold (...) war is offered in "Narrative Memory in the Space Race"; The article "The Swastika and the Maple Leaf: National-socialism and anti-semitism in Canada" returns to the 1930s to explore anti-semitist ideologies in our country preceeding the second world war;"The Monumentalization of our Disgrace" is a captivating look at the manner in which concentration and death camps standing after the Holocaust are memorialized today and the local residents' public perception of such memorials; "Hegemony without Tears: Defenitions and uses of hegemony from Gramsci onwards" explores the works of Marxist writer Antonio Gramsci and his influence upon other writers through several case studies, ultimately commenting on the subsequent reinterpretation of Gramsci's definition of hegemony; "Confrontation and Cooperation: the hidden history of national parks and Indigenous groups in Canada" takes the reader through a historical analysis of Canada's national parks and the indigenous groups originally inhabiting them, arguing the erasure of these groups by the National Parks system; "War and Faith: Memories of the Great Patriotic War in the Russian Orthodox church" examines the Church's modern conceptualization of the Soviet Union as a "holy battle for survival; "Administering State Legislation: The kirk and witchcraft in early modern Scotland" is a fascinating look at the relationship between the duties performed by the Royal Court and the Calivinist church in Scotland; and finally, we have "The Limits of Rationalism: Early modern geography and the idea of Europe", an investigation of cartogropher's contributions in the 16th and 17th century towards the concept of 'Europe' and the growth of a scientific worldview. We wholly hope you enjoy our Winter 2016 edition as much as our staff has enjoyed curating it. Editors Emily Kaliel Ellen Sutherland Assistant Editors Jean Middleton Kayla Pituka Senior Reviewers Kyler Chittick Emily Hoven Katarina Hoven Faculty Advisor Jeremy Caradonna. (shrink)

Rather than set out an overarching view or take a stand on the debunking of morality tout court, in what follows I’ll explore a divide and conquer strategy. First, I will briefly sketch a debunking argument that, instead of targeting all of morality or human moral nature, has a more narrow focus—namely, the intuitive moral authority of disgust. The argument concludes that as vivid and compelling as they can be while one is in their grip, feelings of disgust should be (...) granted no power to justify moral judgments. Importantly, the argument is grounded in empirical advances concerning the character of the emotion itself. Next, I will step back and consider the argument’s general form. I then point to arguments that others have made that seem to share this form and selective focus, and comment on what such arguments do and do not presuppose. Finally, I locate the selective strategy with respect to other approaches moral debunking. (shrink)

In his book Prejudice, Endre Begby argues that people who hold paradigmatically prejudiced beliefs – for example, the belief that women are less adept at math than men – might be fully rational in holding those beliefs. In this article, I argue that Begby fails to provide compelling examples of beliefs that are both rational and prejudiced. On Begby’s account, whether a belief is prejudiced is determined by its content: it follows that any two token beliefs with the same content (...) will either both be prejudiced, or both unprejudiced, regardless of how they differ in other respects. I sketch an alternative account, on which whether a person’s belief counts as prejudiced might be sensitive to a greater range of factors. I then turn to Bebgy’s discussion of ‘evidential preemption,’ a phenomenon by which certain speech acts seem to inoculate themselves from having their contents disconfirmed or falsified by later counterevidence. I argue for skepticism about evidential preemption. To the extent that there is a genuine normative phenomenon in the neighborhood, it is the familiar one of testimonial defeat, in which testimony from one source is neutralized by conflicting testimony from another source that one has reason to think is more reliable. (shrink)

ArgumentBetween 1838 and 1863 the Grimm brothers led a collaborative research project to create a new kind of dictionary documenting the history of the German language. They imagined the work would present a scientific account of linguistic cohesiveness and strengthen German unity. However, their dictionary volumes (most of which were arranged and written by Jacob Grimm) would be variously criticized for their idiosyncratic character and ultimately seen as a poor, and even prejudicial, piece of scholarship. This paper argues that such (...) criticisms may reflect a misunderstanding of the dictionary. I claim it can be best understood as an artifact of romanticist science and its epistemological privileging of subjective perception coupled with a deeply-held faith in inter-subjective congruence. Thus situated, it is a rare and detailed case of Romantic ideas and ideals applied to the scientific study of social artifacts. Moreover, the dictionary's organization, reception, and legacy provide insights into the changing landscape of scientific practice in Germany, showcasing the difficulties of implementing a romanticist vision of science amidst widening gaps between the public and professionals, generalists and specialists. (shrink)

By the end of the Second World War the advancing allied forces discovered a new nerve gas in Germany. It was called Tabun. Codenamed GA, it was found to be extremely toxic. British experts were immediately dispatched to examine the agent. On arrival, they discovered that German scientists had also developed even more toxic nerve agents, including Sarin, known as GB. The first organized testing of Sarin on humans began in October 1951 at Porton Down in Wiltshire, Britain's biochemical warfare (...) establishment since the First World War. In February 1953, volunteer number 562 experienced the first recorded serious adverse reaction. Testing continued. Two months later, on April 27, six subjects were given 300 milligrams of Sarin. One of the volunteers, a man named Kelly, suffered serious ill effects, fell into a coma, but then recovered. Although asked by their superiors to reduce the amount tested to the “lowest range of dosage”—which would have been somewhere in the region of 10–15 milligrams—Porton's scientists continued their tests with a “lower” dosage, reducing it from 300 to 200 milligrams. (shrink)

There is strong disagreement about whether indicative conditionals have truth values. In this paper, I present a new argument for the conclusion that indicative conditionals have truth values based on the claim that some true statements entail indicative conditionals. I then address four arguments that conclude that indicative conditionals lack truth values, showing them to be inadequate. Finally, I present further benefits to having a worldly view of conditionals, which supports the assignment of truth values to indicative conditionals. I conclude (...) that certain types of account of indicative conditionals, which have been ignored in the literature partly on the basis of assigning truth values to indicative conditionals, deserve consideration. (shrink)

Modes-of-being figure centrally in Heidegger's masterwork Being and Time. Testimony to this is Heidegger's characterisation of two of his most celebrated enquiries—the Existential analytic and the Zeug analysis—as investigations into the respective modes-of-being of the entities concerned. Yet despite the importance of this concept, commentators disagree widely about what a mode-of-being is. In this paper, I systematically outline and defend a novel and exegetically grounded interpretation of this concept. Strongly opposed to Kantian readings, such as those advocated by Taylor Carman (...) and Cristina Lafont, I interpret a mode-of-being as a universal that defines a district —that is, a natural class of entities that ought to be conceptualised in a special way. As such, every mode-of-being plays an important metaphysical and epistemic role: serving both to unify a natural class of a high degree of generality and as the interpretandum of an act yielding the basic-concepts pertaining to the entities therein. In explicating and arguing for this interpretation, I attribute a characteristically Aristotelian philosophical position to the early Heidegger, encompassing both metaphysical and epistemological realism and a conceptualist theory of universals. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A Pantheology of Pandemic: Sex, Race, Nature, and The VirusMary-Jane Rubenstein (bio)I. PunitheologyThe explanations started pouring in even before the virus attained “pandemic” status in March of 2020: we were being punished. According to a vocal subset of Evangelical pastors and ultra-Orthodox rabbis, the death-dealing virus was divine retribution for the sins of (who else?) LGBT-identified people and their allies, who aggressively violated what the pastors and rabbis called (...) “the order of nature.”1 Meanwhile, their left-leaning counterparts argued that the sin in question wasn’t so much sexual as ecological: in the words of one Roman Catholic commentator, the coronavirus was God’s punishment for “our unfettered domination attitude toward nature.”2At the same time, an equally vocal throng of secular environmentalists called the virus nature’s own punishment for our manifold violations against her—in particular, the extractivism, pollution, alleged overpopulation, deforestation, carbon emissions, and industrial slaughterhouses that allowed the zoonotic strain to break out among humans in the first place.3 Depending on whom [End Page 5] you ask, then, the disaster we’ve come to encapsulate as COVID-19 is either godly or natural retribution for our manifold sins against “nature.”Although these sacred and secular punitheologies are not equivalent, they bear striking similarities to one another thanks to the monotheistic heritage of the concept of “nature” itself. As we will see, whether it is invoked by pastors, politicians, activists, or scientists, “nature” in the Western-descended world is presented as singular, nonwhite, and feminine; morally normative; and prone to abuse. Nature is often capitalized, often maternalized, and reliably distinguished either from a disembodied male God, a universalized “humanity,” or both. Nature, in short, carries immense ideological freight. Specifically, it installs and polices the work of what Kelly Brown Douglas calls “theo-ideology”: a “sacred legitimation” for a social order that seeks to present itself as unquestionable.4 And “nature” does this unparalleled ideological work thanks to the freedom it keeps promising from ideology: “your” way of being might be constructed, distorted, historical, subjective, contingent, artificial, cultural, or indeed sinful, but “ours” is natural—which is to say universally, even transcendently, true.Whether it comes from the mouths of angry clerics or righteous ecologists, then, the call to get right with nature is a call to adhere to one or another self-concealing social arrangement—to a set of interests and values whose power derives from its seeming so “natural.” For this reason, many contemporary thinkers recommend abandoning the term altogether. Donna Haraway suggests we try the non-binary and carefully pluralized “naturecultures”; Bruno Latour proposes “critical zones,” and Timothy Morton pivots to ecological practice which, he insists, can only function if we let go of the romantic delusion of “nature.”5Regardless of nature’s conceptual integrity, it is important to attend to the term in order to account for its rhetorical force and ubiquity—for the polyphibious presence of “nature” within the left and right-wings of science, religion, and politics alike. In this article, I will decode some of the recent, theologically [End Page 6] retributive appeals to nature within early, informal, literary responses to the COVID-19 outbreak in the US. In the process, I hope to unearth some of the mythic norms of race and gender that this concept both entrenches and conceals in the American imagination. Finally, I will ask what happens when we start messing with these categories, beginning with the mirroring chasms between humans and nature, and nature and God. How might we start to think pantheologically about this unrelenting pandemic, and why would anybody want to?II. Sins against NatureAs Catherine Keller noticed as early as April 2020, American pundits across the political spectrum immediately attributed COVID-19 to the relentless justice of an angry God.6 It is perhaps America’s favorite theological maneuver: explaining natural and social disasters as the product of divine vengeance. From Jonathan Edwards’s spider to Fred Phelps’s funeral protests, American preachers and political commentators have got a long-standing knack for putting the fear of God into a suffering nation. (Even my home insurance policy washes its hands of... (shrink)

The following essays were originally presented at the Eastern Meeting of the American Society of Aesthetics, April 28, 2017, in Philadelphia. I convened the session, which was well-received. There were two other members of the panel: Felicia Nimue Ackerman and Kelly Jolley. Each of us is a published poet.The focus of the session was the way we have used poetry in our teaching of philosophy. It has been my experience that most in the mainstream of philosophy do not (...) use poetry to help engage students with the subject matter of their courses. This is a... (shrink)

In The Foundations of Arithmetic, Gottlob Frege contended that the difference between concepts and objects was absolute. He meant that no object could be a concept and no concept an object. Benno Kerry disagreed; he contended that a concept could be an object, and that therefore the difference between concepts and objects was only relative. In this book, Jolley aims to understand the debate between Frege and Kerry. But Jolley's purpose is not so much to champion either side; rather, it (...) is to utilize an understanding of the debate to shed light on the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein-and vice versa. Jolley not only sifts through the debate between Frege and Kerry, but also through subsequent versions of the debate in J. J. Valberg and Wilfred Sellars. Jolley's goal is to show that the central notion of Philosophical Investigations, that of a 'conceptual investigation', is a legacy of the Frege/Kerry debate and also a contribution to it. Jolley concludes that the difference between concepts and objects is as absolute in its way in Philosophical Investigations as it was in The Foundations of Arithmetic and that recognizing the absoluteness of the difference in Philosophical Investigations provides a beginning for a 'resolute' reading of Wittgenstein's book. (shrink)

Abstract: In this article I contest a reading of Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations —a reading of it as debunking philosophy. I concede that such a reading is not groundless, but I show why it is nonetheless mistaken. To do so, I distinguish two different ways of viewing Philosophical Investigations and its concern with philosophical problems, an External View and an Internal View. On the External View, readers of the book are taken to know ahead of time what philosophical problems are. On (...) the Internal View, readers are not taken to know this ahead of time: the task of the book is to disclose what philosophical problems are, to show them coming into being. One thing disclosed is our participatory role in philosophical problems coming to be. Learning about the nature of philosophical problems is thus learning about our own nature; metaphilosophical knowledge is in part self-knowledge. If the Internal View is correct (as I believe it is), then Philosophical Investigations does not debunk philosophy but provides a different conception of philosophy and the philosopher's task. (shrink)

In this article, I re-examine the relationship between the thoughts of contemporaneous and associated late twentieth-century French philosophers Michel Foucault and Louis Althusser, through the prism of the notion of the problem. I discuss the philology of the use of the noun “problematic” in French philosophy in relation to Foucault and Althusser’s use of it, concluding that while Althusser makes this a term of art in his thought, Foucault does not make any particular use of this concept. I nonetheless consider (...) the possibility of the existence of a similar notion under a different name, episteme, in Foucault’s thought, but conclude that this is a distinct notion from Althusser’s “problematic.” I then consider Foucault’s later, idiosyncratic notion of problematization and its possible relation to Althusser’s conceptual framework. I conclude that, despite divergent vocabularies, Althusser and Foucault do have a common problematic and approach to problematization, though Foucault also problematizes aspects of Althusser’s problematic, effectively taking problematization a step further. (shrink)

In “Ontologies Relevant to behaviour change interventions: A Method for their Development” Wright, et al. outline a step by step process for building ontologies of behaviour modification – what the authors call the Refined Ontology Developmental Method (RODM) – and demonstrate its use in the development of the Behaviour Change Intervention Ontology (BCIO). RODM is based on the principles of good ontology building used by the Open Biomedical Ontology (OBO) Foundry in addition to those outlined in (Arp, Smith, and Spear (...) 2015). BCIO uses as its top-level ontology Basic Formal Ontology (BFO). The methods outlined in Wright, et al. are a valuable contribution to the field, especially the use of formal mechanisms for literature annotation and expert stakeholder review, and the BCIO will certainly play an important role in the extension of OBO Foundry ontologies into the behavioural domain. (shrink)

Alternative food networks are emerging in opposition to industrial food systems, but are criticized as being exclusive, since customers’ ability to patronize these market spaces is premised upon their ability to pay higher prices for what are considered the healthiest, freshest foods. In response, there is growing interest in widening the demographic profile given access to these alternative foods. This research asks: what barriers do alternative food businesses face in providing access and inclusion for low income consumers? Surveys and interviews (...) with 45 alternative food businesses in British Columbia, Canada uncovered five key barriers. The findings indicate that the barriers are symptomatic of structural issues in the Canadian food and social welfare systems. Although opportunities exist for business operators to widen access for low income shoppers, these alone cannot meaningfully ameliorate food-access inequality. Rather, these barriers underscore issues of income-disparity, poverty, and food-access inequality more broadly, and require structural and societal change to rectify. (shrink)

Independently of whether an object of experience becomes a candidate for being a part of the self or a part of the external world, it is always given to us as just an object of experience. The observer-observed relation can be seen as a type of relation with many instances, both between the self and different objects of experience and between any given object of experience and different selves. The self is situated in a spatial grid, where the latter can (...) be characterised as an array of relations, of which the relata include both observers and observed. The world, understood as independent existence, including the self, is empty. However, Paolo Bozzi’s method for identifying the self and delimiting its independent existence from the external world has taught us just the opposite lesson. Bozzi’s project is to teach us how to use them, and to recognise that they allow a self to be situated in a world of objects. (shrink)

Wexler and Sullivan (2023) recommend integration as a guiding principle for translational neuroethics. We agree that collaboration between neuroethicists and other professionals can advance the fie...

This case study examines the failure of top management at Putnam to exercise ethical behavior in the face of their clear knowledge of corruption in the company. Market timing by employees was expressly forbidden by Putnam. Six employees, including two portfolio managers, repeatedly engaged in market timing activities from 1998 to 2003, garnering over a million dollars in personal profit. The CEO and key senior executives had factual knowledge of the abuses. Management failed to stop the abuses or to discipline (...) those involved until faced with charges from government regulators. By failing to do so, top management breached ethical duties to its shareholders and inflicted serious damage on the organization. The end results of top management's failure to address ethical violations were significant outflow of assets from Putnam's funds, payment of penalties, and loss of trust among investors. This case raises awareness about ethical issues surrounding mutual fund trading practices and the impact that top management can have on the ethical behavior of employees. (shrink)

Rips et al. raise important questions about the relation between infant quantification and achievement of natural number concepts. However, they may be oversimplifying the interactions that characterize actual development in real time. Though they propose a worthwhile agenda for future research, its explanatory power will be limited if it does not address developmental issues with greater sensitivity.

Gideon Yaffe argues that children should be treated as less culpable by the criminal justice system because children have little political say over the law. I analyze several elements of Yaffe’s argument and express qualified agreement with his thesis. Though I reject the role he assigns to the notions of desert and legal reasons, I agree that people who lack political power are less accountable to the criminal justice system’s legal authorities.

Heroism is apparently nonadaptive in Darwinian terms, so why does it exist at all? Risk-taking and heroic behavior are predominantly male tendencies, and literature and legend reflect this. This study explores the possibility that heroism persists in many human cultures owing to a female preference for risk-prone rather than risk-averse males as sexual partners, and it suggests that such a preference may be exploited as a male mating strategy. It also attempts to quantify the relative influences of altruism and bravery (...) in the evolution of heroism. Our study found that females do prefer risk-prone brave males to risk-averse non-brave males, and that men are aware of this preference. Bravery in a male was shown to be the stronger factor influencing female choice of short-term partners, long-term partners, and male friends, with altruism playing a lesser part in their choice. Altruism was deemed important in long-term relationships and friendships, but for short-term liaisons, non-altruists were preferred to altruists. Heroism may therefore have evolved owing to a female preference for brave, risk-prone males because risk-taking acts as an honest cue for "good genes." Altruism was judged to be a less influential factor in the evolution of heroism than bravery and a demonstrated willingness to take risks. (shrink)

Two issues should be addressed to refine and extend the distinction between temporal updating and reasoning advocated by Hoerl & McCormack. First, do the mental representations constructed during updating differ from those used for reasoning? Second, are updating and reasoning the only two processes relevant to temporal thinking? If not, is a dual-systems framework sensible? We address both issues below.

My short essay on Irigaray’s relation to Nietzsche could be divided into the beginnings of six arguments: First, Nietzsche continues to hold a special place in Irigaray’s thinking. Second, Amante Marine is an important part of Irigaray’s elemental philosophy. Third, Irigaray’s insistence on depth over surface in Amante Marine points to two different ways Nietzsche has been taken up in French Philosophy, which could be characterized as the difference between surface and depth. Fourth, Irigaray’s Amante Marine anticipates the most recent (...) direction in Nietzsche scholarship, which focuses on plants and the earth. Fifth, following Nietzsche, Irigaray suggests that we can learn lessons about sharing the earth from plants. And, finally, Irigaray’s elemental philosophy resonates with my own conception of earth ethics as responsiveness to other earthlings and our environment, which I develop in my recent book Earth and World. (shrink)

In “Empiricism, Semantics, and Ontology” Camap drew his famous distinction between ‘internal’ and ‘external’ questions of existence, pronouncing the former meaningful and the latter meaningless. In The Significance of Philosophical Scepticism, Barry Stroud understands Carnap to be applying the verification criterion of meaningfulness in order to refute Cartesian skepticism. I suggest that Stroud misrepresents both Carnap's aim and method. Camap was responding to critics who suggested that his willingness to quantify over abstract entities in his work in semantics violated his (...) commitment to empiricism. He rejected that criticism as presupposing a super‐scientific standpoint from which constraints on the admissible domain of entities of science could be delivered. Carnap wanted to insulate science from the imposition of first‐philosophical metaphysical prejudice, not to defuse scepticism by appeal to verificationism. (shrink)

This volume honors the Rev. Professor James McEvoy on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday. The theory of friendship, which has been one of McEvoy's major fields of research and publication, used to be at the heart of the philosophical project, and indissociable from it. For Socrates, philosophy was possible only as the pursuit of wisdom, virtue, and beauty in a community of friends engaged in an "erotic" quest for the good. The present volume wants to make a contribution to (...) the recovery of the friendship theme in its central importance to philosophy. It contains eighteen contributions by colleagues and pupils of Professor McEvoy from three different continents, who approach the topics of friendship, love, and charity from a variety of different angles. Several contributions are devoted to the theory of friendship in ancient and medieval thought, including its Christian appropriation. Others analyze friendship in modern and contemporary philosophy, while two contributors introduce cross-cultural perspectives. This volume will help to throw into higher relief the importance of the philosophy of friendship, as well as stimulating further discussion on this intriguing topic. (shrink)