The coupling of protein synthesis and folding is a crucial yet poorly understood aspect of cellular protein folding. Over the past few years, it has become possible to experimentally follow and define protein folding on the ribosome, revealing principles that shape co‐translational folding and distinguish it from refolding in solution. Here, we highlight some of these recent findings from biochemical and biophysical studies and their potential significance for cellular protein biogenesis. In particular, we focus on nascent chain interactions with the (...) ribosome, interactions within the nascent protein, modulation of translation elongation rates, and the role of mechanical force that accompanies nascent protein folding. The ability to obtain mechanistic insight in molecular detail has set the stage for exploring the intricate process of nascent protein folding. We believe that the aspects discussed here will be generally important for understanding how protein synthesis and folding are coupled and regulated. (shrink)

"With increasingly divergent views and commitments, and an all-or-nothing mindset in political life, it can seem hard to sustain the level of trust in other members of our society necessary to ensure our most basic institutions work. This book features interdisciplinary perspectives on social trust. The contributors address four main topics related to social trust. The first topic is empirical and formal work on norms and institutional trust, especially the relationships between trust and human behaviour. The second topic concerns trust (...) in particular institutions, notably the legal system, scientific community, and law enforcement. Third, the contributors address challenges posed by diversity and oppression in maintaining social trust. Finally, they discuss different forms of trust and social trust. Social Trust will be of interest to researchers in philosophy, political science, economics, law, psychology, and sociology"--. (shrink)

It is plausible to think that the epistemic benefit of having an explanation is understanding. My focus in this article is on the extent to which explanatory understanding, perhaps unlike knowledge, is compatible with certain forms of luck—the extent to which one can understand why something is the case when one is lucky to truly believe an explanatorily relevant proposition. I argue, contra Stephen Grimm ([2006]) and Duncan Pritchard ([2008], [2009]), that understanding quite generally is compatible with luckily believing a (...) true, explanatorily relevant proposition. My strategy is to argue that various intuitions that seem to rule against lucky understanding can be explained away, and thus do not compel us to reject the thesis that, in general, understanding tolerates luck. In arriving at this conclusion, I address some salient issues regarding the testimony of others, and also draw out the consequences of my discussions for the status of understanding as a cognitive achievement. (shrink)

This paper advances the conception of social entrepreneurs as caring entrepreneurs. We argue that the care ethics of social entrepreneurs, implying the pursuit of caring goals through caring processes, can be challenged when they engage in the process of scaling up their ventures. We propose that social entrepreneurs can sustain their care ethics as the essential dimension of their venture only if they are able to build a caring enterprise. Organizational care designates the set of organizing principles that facilitate the (...) embedding of care ethics at an organizational level, beyond the imprinting induced by social entrepreneurs’ personal ethics. (shrink)

This article argues that xing 性 in the Zhuangzi 莊子 should not be understood as “human nature” but as “human condition.” It introduces the problem of interpreting xing as “human nature” by surveying relevant English-language literature before detailing the interpretive paradigm of Chinese accounts, showing how the latter’s appropriation of the language of substance ontology hinders an accurate portrayal of Daoist xing. It argues that xing should be interpreted in connection to the concept of ming 命 understood as contingent, natural, (...) and temporal “external conditions.” It argues that xing are “internal conditions” that function in conjunction with ming as “external conditions” where “habit” ( xi 習) mediates their interaction. (shrink)

Provides an accessible and scholarly introduction to the core ideas of the existentialist tradition. Kevin Aho draws on a wide range of existentialist thinkers in chapters centering on the key themes of freedom, being-in-the-world, alienation, nihilism, anxiety and authenticity. He also addresses important but often overlooked issues in the canon of existentialism, with discussions devoted to the role of embodiment, the movement's contribution to ethics, politics, and environmental and comparative philosophies, as well as its influence on contemporary psychiatry and (...) psychotherapy. The enduring relevance of existentialism is shown by applying existentialist ideas to contemporary philosophical discussions of interest to a wide audience. The book covers secular thinkers such as Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Nietzsche, Sartre, Camus, and Beauvoir as well as religious authors, such as Buber, Dostoevsky, Marcel, and Kierkegaard"--Back cover. (shrink)

In this paper, I draw on Heidegger’s phenomenology of “moods” (_Stimmungen_) to interpret loneliness as a diffused and atmospheric feeling-state that often undergirds the lives of older adults, shaping the ways in which they are attuned to and make sense of the world. I focus specifically on residents in long-term care facilities to show how the social isolation and lockdown measures of the COVID-19 pandemic dramatically intensified the mood. The aim is to shed light on how profound and totalizing the (...) experience has been for residents. Making use of Heidegger’s account of the affective “collapse” or “breakdown” (_Zusammenbruch_) of meaning, I argue that when older adults are functionally locked in their rooms for months at a time and cut off from the orienting routines and rhythms of the relational world, the result is a crumbling of the fundamental meaning-structures that constitute subjectivity. The global sense of abandonment and disconnection strips away the possibility for self-understanding, and residents are often left confused and abandoned to an existence that has been drained of meaning and significance. (shrink)

Vogel, Sosa, and Huemer have all argued that sensitivity is incompatible with knowing that you do not believe falsely, therefore the sensitivity condition must be false. I show that this objection misses its mark because it fails to take account of the basis of belief. Moreover, if the objection is modified to account for the basis of belief then it collapses into the more familiar objection that sensitivity is incompatible with closure.

I give an account how the principle of ‘respect for autonomy’ dominates the field of bioethics, and how it came to triumph over its competitors, ‘respect for persons’ and ‘respect for free power of choice’. I argue that ‘respect for autonomy’ is unsatisfactory as a basic principle of bioethics because it is grounded in too individualistic a worldview, citing concerns of African theorists and other communitarians who claim that the principle fails to acknowledge the fundamental importance of understanding persons within (...) the nexus of their communal relationships. I defend the claim that ‘respect for persons’ is a more appropriate principle, as it is able to acknowledge both individual decision making and the essential relationality of persons. I acknowledge that my preference for ‘respect for persons’ is problematic because of the important debate around the definition of ‘personhood’ in bioethics discourse. Relying on Thaddeus Metz's conception of moral status, I propose a relational definition of personhood that distinguishes between persons with agency and persons without agency, arguing that we have different moral obligations to these distinct categories of persons. I claim that this conception of personhood is better able to accommodate our moral intuitions than conventional approaches, and that it is able to do so without being speciesist or question-begging. (shrink)

This book offers cutting edge research on the modifications and disruptions of bodily experience in the context of anxiety, depression, trauma, chronic illness, pain, and aging. It presents original contributions in applied phenomenology, biomedical ethics, and the use of medical technologies.

The dominance of agency theory can reduce our collective scope to analyse private equity in all its diversity and depth. We contribute to theorisation of private equity by developing a contrasting perspective that draws on a rich tradition of virtue ethics. In doing so, we juxtapose 'private equity' with 'public good' to develop points of rhetorical and analytical contrast. We develop a typology differentiating various forms of private equity, and focus on the 'take private' form. These takeovers are where private (...) equity funds are used to buy all a firm's publicly listed shares. Take private deals reduce reporting requirements and lessen the amount of public scrutiny a firm comes under. They allow greater control of a firm's assets and resources but also have effects in terms of the wider social fabric. The 'public good' and virtue ethics offer an alternative basis for theorisation of these deals. This provides a needed contrast to accounts of private equity based on agency theory. (shrink)

In 2022, students at North American universities with third-dose COVID-19 vaccine mandates risk disenrolment if unvaccinated. To assess the appropriateness of booster mandates in this age group, we combine empirical risk-benefit assessment and ethical analysis. To prevent one COVID-19 hospitalisation over a 6-month period, we estimate that 31 207–42 836 young adults aged 18–29 years must receive a third mRNA vaccine. Booster mandates in young adults are expected to cause a net harm: per COVID-19 hospitalisation prevented, we anticipate at least (...) 18.5 serious adverse events from mRNA vaccines, including 1.5–4.6 booster-associated myopericarditis cases in males (typically requiring hospitalisation). We also anticipate 1430–4626 cases of grade ≥3 reactogenicity interfering with daily activities (although typically not requiring hospitalisation). University booster mandates are unethical because they: (1) are not based on an updated (Omicron era) stratified risk-benefit assessment for this age group; (2) may result in a net harm to healthy young adults; (3) are not proportionate: expected harms are not outweighed by public health benefits given modest and transient effectiveness of vaccines against transmission; (4) violate the reciprocity principle because serious vaccine-related harms are not reliably compensated due to gaps in vaccine injury schemes; and (5) may result in wider social harms. We consider counterarguments including efforts to increase safety on campus but find these are fraught with limitations and little scientific support. Finally, we discuss the policy relevance of our analysis for primary series COVID-19 vaccine mandates. (shrink)

It is natural to think that social groups are concrete material particulars, but this view faces an important objection. Suppose the chess club and nature club have the same members. Intuitively, these are different clubs even though they have a common material basis. Some philosophers take these intuitions to show that the materialist view must be abandoned. I propose an alternative explanation. Social groups are concrete material particulars, but there is a psychological explanation of nonidentity intuitions. Social groups appear coincident (...) but nonidentical because they are perceived to be governed by conflicting social norms. (shrink)

Increasingly, frontiers between business and philanthropy seem to be blurred. Reward-Based Crowdfunding platforms contribute to this blurring of lines since they propose funders to support both for-profit and philanthropic projects. Our empirical paper explores the case of Ulule, the leading crowdfunding platform in Europe. Our results, based on a statistical analysis of more than 3000 projects, show that crowdfunding platforms foster specific kinds of relationships relying on reciprocal giving, beyond the usual opposition between altruistic and selfish motivations. We use the (...) work of Marcel Mauss to account for this process of reciprocal giving, and we argue that Maussian theory of gift can be used more generally to describe funding activities in the context of early stage entrepreneurship. (shrink)

Do we have a strong reason to offset even if offsetting is morally inefficient? Some philosophers – such as John Broome – argue that justice-based climate duties require us to contribute money to o...

In his article, a unified brain-based determination of death is described by James Bernat (2024) as a permanent cessation of systemic circulation causing a permanent cessation of brain circulation...

The peculiar case of Lehrer’s lawyer purports to describe a scenario in which a subject has a justified belief, indeed knowledge, despite the fact that their belief is not causally or counterfactually sustained by any good reasons for it. The case has proven controversial. While some agree with Lehrer’s assessment of the case, others disagree, leading to a schism among accounts of the basing relation. In this paper I aim to reconcile these camps and put simple causal and counterfactual accounts (...) of the basing relation back on the table, by arguing that Lehrer’s case is probably metaphysically impossible, but even if it isn’t, it is ambiguous between a psychologically implausible and a psychologically plausible reading, and this can account for the diverging intuitions that it generates. (shrink)

Traces Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben's engagement with deconstructive thought from his early work in the 1960s to the present, examining his key concepts - infancy, Voice, potentiality, sovereignty, bare life, messianism - in relation to key texts and concepts in Jacques Derrida's work.

Algorithms for approximate Bayesian inference, such as those based on sampling (i.e., Monte Carlo methods), provide a natural source of models of how people may deal with uncertainty with limited cognitive resources. Here, we consider the idea that individual differences in working memory capacity (WMC) may be usefully modeled in terms of the number of samples, or “particles,” available to perform inference. To test this idea, we focus on two recent experiments that report positive associations between WMC and two distinct (...) aspects of categorization performance: the ability to learn novel categories, and the ability to switch between different categorization strategies (“knowledge restructuring”). In favor of the idea of modeling WMC as a number of particles, we show that a single model can reproduce both experimental results by varying the number of particles—increasing the number of particles leads to both faster category learning and improved strategy‐switching. Furthermore, when we fit the model to individual participants, we found a positive association between WMC and best‐fit number of particles for strategy switching. However, no association between WMC and best‐fit number of particles was found for category learning. These results are discussed in the context of the general challenge of disentangling the contributions of different potential sources of behavioral variability. (shrink)

This article considers the recent defense of the supervenience approach to physicalism due to Jaegwon Kim. Kim argues that supervenience supports physical causal closure, and that causal closure supports physicalism – indeed, a kind of reductive physicalism – and thus that supervenience suffices for physicalism. After laying out Kim's argument, I ask whether its success would truly vindicate the role of supervenience in defining physicalist positions. I argue that it would not, and that insofar as Kim's defense of supervenience physicalism (...) succeeds, it does so by showing that supervenience physicalism is not a unique, nonredundant way to be a physicalist. (shrink)

Heidegger’s failure to discuss ‘the body’ in Being and Time has generated a cottage industry of criticism. In his recently translated Zollikon Seminars, Heidegger provides a response to the critics by offering a thematic account of the body that is strikingly similar to Merleau-Ponty’s account in Phenomenology of Perception. In this article, I draw on the parallels between these two texts in order to see how Heidegger’s neglect of the body affects his early project of fundamental ontology and to determine (...) whether or not an account of the body is necessary to complete the project. I defend Heidegger by suggesting that any analysis of the body is ‘ontic’ or regional and is made possible only on the basis of Dasein, understood as a public ‘clearing’ or ‘there’ of intelligibility that determines in advance the way things emerge-into-presence as the kinds of things that they are. Heidegger’s core concern in Being and Time is to unearth the essential, ‘ontological-existential’, structures of Dasein that make it possible for us to begin regional investigations into the problem of the body in the first place. (shrink)

Gegenstand des Bandes ist eine Profilierung der Kulturphilosophie mit dem Ziel ihrer notigen Selbstbehauptung gegenuber einem gegenwartigen Naturalismus. Ein zentrales Ratsel der Gegenwartsphilosophie ist das Verhaltnis unseres Bewusstseins, der Perspektive der ersten Person machtig und Urheber der Kultur zu sein, zu den Erkenntnissen der Kognitions- sowie der Evolutionswissenschaften seit Darwin. In diesen scheint von der Natur her auf die Kultur ein neues Licht zu fallen. Dies ist ebenso faszinierend wie interessant. Es ist aber auch eine Herausforderung: Der Begriff der "Welt" (...) wird naturwissenschaftlich praokkupiert, Extrapolationen ins Ontologische wie die "kausale Geschlossenheit der Welt" breiten sich auf Kosten fruherer, starker zuruckgenommener Erkenntnis- und Wissenschaftstheorien aus. Wie steht es demgegenuber mit den Beitragen von Kulturphilosophie und Kulturwissenschaften / Geisteswissenschaften? Deutlich wird in den Beitragen im Anschluss an Dilthey, Cassirer, Simmel und weitere Autoren: Die Notwendigkeit und der Eigencharakter kultureller Arbeit mussen offentlich wie in den Wissenschaften wieder bewusst werden. Mit Beitragen von Katharina Bauer, Jorn Bohr, Gunter Dux, Ralf Glitza, Kinga Golus, Julia Gruevska, Ralph Kohnen, Gudrun Kuhne-Bertram, Hans-Ulrich Lessing, Kevin Liggieri, Ernst Wolfgang Orth, Annika Schlitte, Gunter Scholtz und Rene Torkler. (shrink)

This book explores new phenomenological research on the structural disruptions of spatiality, temporality, and understanding in the context of anxiety and depressive disorders. It offers critiques of mainstream psychopathology, taking a transdisciplinary approach to the relationship between mental illness and self-constitution.

Trainees with disabilities in health-related professions are often subjected to structural ableism in medicine: the discriminatory manifestation of lowered expectations towards people with disabilities by medical professionals. In this case study, I reflect on my experiences as the first individual with significant disabilities to be offered a postdoctoral fellowship in clinical bioethics at the National Institutes of Health. I focus on the following question: What arrangements need to be in place in order for someone with my level of disability to (...) thrive as a clinical bioethicist? By telling my story, I show how the process of accommodating trainees with disabilities often requires creative problem-solving and a considerable amount of institutional resources. I also describe the team-based method that my mentors and I developed to enable me to complete rotations on the NIH’s bioethics consultation service. If more trainees with disabilities are to succeed in clinical bioethics trainee programs, the field will have to grapple with how to develop an infrastructure for providing disability related support across training programs. This article is the beginning of a dialogue about how to build such an infrastructure. (shrink)

"Foucault's Aestheticism" asks to what extent critique as Foucault conceives it can be read as a form of style. Starting from Foucault's description of "aestheticism" as "self-transformation," Lamb argues that accounts of Foucauldian critique have often sought to establish Foucault's position as one of affirmation or opposition without carefully setting out the terms by which his practice and relation to the self shift with respect to the institutions, disciplines, and practices that form his objects of study. By focusing on Foucault's (...) description of modernity as an ethos against the reception of his history of classical ethics, the essay concludes not only that an impersonal style often functions crucially in Foucault's critical practice but also that no account of his style can afford to ignore the changed understanding of style at which Foucault ultimately arrives, an understanding in which style constitutes less the final expression of an authorial position than a provisional practice of self-modification. (shrink)

African ethical theories tend to hold that moral agents ought to be partial, in the sense that they should favour members of their family or close community. This is considered an advantage over the impartiality of many Western moral theories, which are regarded as having counterintuitive implications, such as the idea that it is unethical to save a family member before a stranger. The partiality of African ethics is thought to be particularly valuable in the context of bioethics. Thaddeus Metz, (...) in particular, argues that his African-derived theory best accounts for a number of plausible intuitions, such as the intuition that health care practitioners ought to be biased towards the patients for whom they are directly responsible. In this article, I claim that the plausible intuitions drawn on in favour of partiality can be satisfactorily explained on the basis of impartial moral theories. Moreover, I argue that blanket acceptance of partiality has problematic consequences for distributive justice in resource allocation in biomedical contexts. By contrast, impartial theories can justify plausible instances of partiality whilst avoiding the pitfalls of fully partial moral theories. Although this provides grounds for abandoning partiality in principle, I claim that this finding should not be seen as damaging to African medical ethics. Instead, it prompts investigation of underexplored possibilities of impartial African moral theories. To demonstrate the value of this direction, I sketch some novel and attractive conceptions that combine impartiality with elements of African ethics. (shrink)

In this lively undergraduate textbook, Kevin Gibson explores the relationship between ethics and the world of business, and how we can serve the interests of both. He builds a philosophical groundwork that can be applied to a wide range of issues in ethics and business, and shows readers how to assess dilemmas critically and work to resolve them on a principled basis. Using case studies drawn from around the world, he examines topics including stakeholder responsibilities, sustainability, corporate social responsibility, (...) and women and business. Because business can no longer be isolated from its effects on communities and the environment, these concerns are brought to the forefront. The book also captures the dynamic nature of business ethics in the era of globalization where jobs can be outsourced, products are made of components from scores of countries and sweatshops often provide the cheap goods the public demands. (shrink)

Kevin Yuill goes straight to the heart of a difficult issue. Critical of both sides of the discussion, this book presents an up-to-date analysis of the direction discussion is taking, showing that atheists, libertarians, those favouring abortion rights and stem-cell research should stand beside their religious compatriots in opposing legalization of assisted suicide. The author shows that the real issue behind the debate is not euthanasia but suicide. Rather than focusing on tragic cases, he indicates the real damage that (...) will be done if we affirm the suicidal wishes of even a small segment of the population. Analyzing the movement for the right to die in historical terms, Yuill shows that, though many proponents of a change in the law believe they are rationalist heirs of such thinkers as John Stuart Mill, legalizing assisted suicide will reduce privacy and freedom. Finally, Yuill suggests a radical alternative to legalization of assisted suicide that would embrace both the cause of freedom and the anxieties of many about securing good deaths. (shrink)

Le présent article porte sur la trame relationnelle tissée autour de l’enfant né par gestation pour autrui ou conçu grâce à un don d’ovules, et plus spécifiquement sur les affiliations familiales qui émergent de ce processus inédit d’enfantement à plusieurs. La démonstration s’appuie sur les récits de 38 femmes canadiennes impliquées dans une entente de procréation assistée avec autrui en tant que mères, femmes porteuses ou donneuses. Deux cas de figure mettant en lumière la construction des liens d’apparentement entre les (...) personnes concernées sont présentés, qu’il s’agisse d’une inscription dans le réseau de parenté de l’enfant ou d’une reconnaissance symbolique mutuelle basée sur l’amitié. La proximité relationnelle entre les adultes est au cœur d’une filiation métissée qui témoigne de leur préoccupation commune envers l’intérêt de l’enfant. (shrink)

In 2016 Pope Francis went to Lund in Sweden for a joint service with the Lutherans to begin the events marking the 500th anniversary of the Reformation. Catholics have also been involved in conferences and other events that have been organized as part of this anniversary. The context and background to the Catholic Church's involvement is the Church's commitment to ecumenical dialogue made at the Second Vatican Council. The theological basis for that commitment is to be found in the Second (...) Vatican Council's Constitution on the Church, Lumen Gentium and its Decree on Ecumenism, Unitatis Redintegratio. This paper takes the opportunity of this anniversary to take stock of the progress of the ecumenical movement and notes some of the issues and challenges that have impacted upon it. As well as social and cultural factors these include the increasing importance of interreligious dialogue and its relationship to ecumenical dialogue. Ecumenists also have to take account of the widely varying interpretations of the Reformation offered by church historians. Finally the paper argues that in the Catholic Church perceptions of ecumenism often fail to take account of the many ways in which the Second Vatican Council significantly changed the global role and profile of the Catholic Church as a source and agent of peace and reconciliation on many different levels. Ecumenical engagement is an integral part of that continuing development which is increasingly acknowledged by political and religious leaders throughout the world. (shrink)

Technology companies are increasingly being asked to take responsibility for the technologies they create. Many of them are rising to the challenge. One way they do this is by implementing “guardrails”: restrictions on functionality that prevent people from misusing their technologies (per some standard of misuse). While there can be excellent reasons for implementing guardrails (and doing so is sometimes morally obligatory), I argue that the unrestricted authority to implement guardrails is incompatible with proper respect for user freedom, and is (...) not something we should welcome. I argue instead that guardrails should be implemented for only two reasons: to prevent accidental misuse of the technology, and as a proportionate means of preventing people from using the technology to violate other people’s rights. If I’m right, then we may have to get more comfortable with developers releasing technologies that can, and to some extent inevitably will, be misused; people using technologies in ways we disagree with is one of the costs of liberty, but it is a cost we have excellent reasons to bear. (shrink)

Unarguably, Jean-Luc Marion is the leading figure in French phenomenology as well as one of the proponents of the so-called “theological turn” in European philosophy. In this volume, Kevin Hart has assembled a stellar group of philosophers and theologians from the United States, Britain, France, and Australia to examine Marion's work—especially his later work—from a variety of perspectives. The resulting volume is an indispensable resource for scholars working at the intersection of philosophy and theology. “This is a ground-breaking book (...) by leading continental thinkers on one of the most pioneering and controversial voices to emerge in French thought in decades. This volume addresses the lynch-pin of Marion's thought—the point where philosophy and theology, gift and revelation, impossibility and grace, intersect in fascinating and arresting ways. Kevin Hart, as editor, assembles and conducts a magisterial intellectual orchestra.” —Richard Kearney, Boston College “The collective strength of these exceptionally high-quality essays is the authors’ diversity of reflection on the relation of phenomenology to theology. Readers new to Marion will find their way into the _corpus_ and those already familiar with Marion’s work will encounter stimulating interpretations, challenges, and defenses. Valuable, too, are Hart’s introduction to Marion as phenomenologist and Marion’s defense of the saturated phenomenon that bookend the volume.” —Merold Westphal, Fordham University “As a sophisticated engagement with the question of Marion’s relation to Christian theology specifically, and as a general response to Marion’s work as a whole, _Counter-Experiences_ is an undeniable success. The authors treat Marion’s texts carefully, bring impressive intellectual force to their task, and provide rich documentation in the strongest volume of work on Marion’s thought yet to appear in English.” —Jeffrey Bloechl, College of the Holy Cross. (shrink)

In two highly powered studies (total N = 1617), we showed that individuals estimated that they would stop earlier than others in a Milgram-like biomedical task leading to the death of an animal, confirming the relevance of the Better than Average Effect (BTAE) in a new research setting. However, this effect was not magnified among participants displaying high self-esteem. We also showed that participants who already knew obedience studies expected that others would be more obedient and would administer more damaging (...) treatment to the target. However, knowledge of Milgram’s studies was unrelated to a higher estimate of their own behavior (study 1), and was even linked to the prediction that they would stop earlier (study 2, preregistered). Despite the wide educational use of Milgram’s studies to increase people’s awareness of the risks inherent to blind obedience, it may be that this knowledge only serves to evaluate other’s behaviors, and not oneself. (shrink)

This article describes recent jurisprudential accountsof analogical legal reasoning andcompares them in detail to the computational modelof case-based legal argument inCATO. The jurisprudential models provide a theoryof relevance based on low-levellegal principles generated in a process ofcase-comparing reflective adjustment. Thejurisprudential critique focuses on the problemsof assigning weights to competingprinciples and dealing with erroneously decidedprecedents. CATO, a computerizedinstructional environment, employs ArtificialIntelligence techniques to teach lawstudents how to make basic legal argumentswith cases. The computational modelhelps students test legal hypotheses againsta database of (...) legal cases, draws analogiesto problem scenarios from the database, andcomposes arguments by analogy with a setof argument moves. The CATO model accountsfor a number of the important featuresof the jurisprudential accounts, includingimplementing a kind of reflective adjustment.It also avoids some of the problems identifiedin the critique; for instance, it deals withweights in a non-numeric, context-sensitivemanner. The article concludes by describingthe contributions AI research can make tojurisprudential investigations of complexcognitive phenomena of legal reasoning. Forinstance, unlike the jurisprudential models,CATO provides a detailed account of how togenerate multiple interpretations of a citedcase, downplaying or emphasizing the legalsignificance of distinctions in terms of thepurposes of the law as the argument contextdemands. (shrink)

In his Contributions to Philosophy, Martin Heidegger introduces "acceleration" as one of the three symptoms--along with "calculation" and the "outbreak of massiveness"--of our technological way of "being-in-the-world." In this article, I unpack the relationship between these symptoms and draw a twofold conclusion. First, interpreting acceleration in terms of time pathologies, I suggest the self is becoming increasingly fragmented and emotionally overwhelmed from chronic sensory arousal and time pressure. This experience makes it difficult for us to qualitatively distinguish what matters to (...) us in our everyday lives, resulting in a pervasive cultural mood of indifference, what Heidegger calls "profound boredom." Second, by drawing on Heidegger's hermeneutic method, I argue that the practice of mainstream psychology, by adopting the reductive methodology of the empirical sciences, largely ignores our accelerated socio-historical situation, resulting in therapeutic models that have a tendency to construct and perpetuate the very pathologies the psychologist is seeking to treat. (shrink)

This essay contends that René Girard is not a philosopher or a scientist whose ideas are open to theological appropriation. Instead, contrary to his assertions otherwise, the Girard corpus ought to be read as if it were articulating a form of theology whose primary intellectual home can ultimately be found on a theological map. As the field of Girardian theology grows, it becomes more evident that we need some theological lenses for examining the theology already lying waiting—sometimes inchoately, sometimes not—in (...) Girard's texts, and also for examining how theologians use and misuse his texts. If we can see that he is already doing theology then a theological critique becomes plausible and valid in principle, and indeed becomes an internal critique. Applying good interpretive lenses will provide some rigorous criteria for analyzing the degree to which Girardian theologians are following the internal logic of Girard's thought in their appropriations of it. The interpretive lenses I propose using on Girard are first the theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar and then the theology of John Cassian . These two theologians provide us with lenses that help us see that Girard is fundamentally a Catholic theologian involved in resisting the speculative re‐writing of Christianity by proponents of “false gnosis” and that he belongs within the category of theologians who advocate spiritual transformation and “true gnosis.”. (shrink)