Double-effect reasoning (DER) is attributed to Aquinas "tout court". Aquinas's account, however, differs from contemporary DER insofar as Thomas considers the ethical status of "risking" an assailant's life while contemporary accounts focus on actions causing harm inevitably. Since one cannot claim to risk the inevitable, and since there is a significant difference between risking harm and causing harm inevitably. Thomas's account does not extend to cases of inevitable harm. Thus, the received understanding of Aquinas's account is flawed and leads to (...) untenable attributions of the direction of intention to Aquinas and to misunderstandings of contemporary DER. (shrink)

Due to the historic separation of cognition and emotion, the affective aspects of learning are often seen as trivial in comparison to the more ‘essential’ cognitive qualities—particularly in science. We are taught that science should objectively scrutinize the world in search of answers, and science educators have been taught to look to scientists to guide their teaching of content and processes.2 As a result, science pedagogy characteristically instructs students to step back from objects and events in order to dispassionately observe (...) and analyze them. In an attempt to guide students towards thinking like scientists, the process of scientific inquiry is typically the focus in science. What is left out, of course .. (shrink)

Much of Roman Catholic discussion concerning bioethical controversies, such as the surgical removal of a life-threatening cancerous uterus when the fetus is not viable, has focused on the employment of double-effect reasoning. While double-effect reasoning has been the subject of much debate, this paper argues first, that there is a distinction between the intended and the foreseen; second, that this distinction applies to the contrasted cases in such a way as to categorize foreseen but not intended consequences; and third, that (...) this intended/foreseen distinction has essential ethical significance. (shrink)

Juergensmeyer's interviews of ex-fighters—Muslims in Iraq and Mindanao, Sikhs in Punjab—illustrate how stubbornly they refuse to conform to Western narratives about “religious violence.” Among the Sikhs, “almost none of the militants surveyed... were said to be noticeably religious”; in ISIS, “many in the movement were attracted not by the ideology or the ideals, but by the excitement of being involved in an alternative culture, one of largely male militancy.” For the Moros in Mindanao, likewise, Islamic theology is one factor among (...) many, and one of relatively minor importance for the majority. These are all, nevertheless, treated as exemplars of religious violence, as Juergensmeyer puzzles through how to end it. His final chapter is called “How Imagined Wars End,” though we have been informed in the first chapter that “every war is an imagined war.” War is an “alternative reality,” “an inversion of ordinary reality where differences are negotiated through civil discourse.” Religion—whatever that is; no definition is offered—is also an alternative reality, one based on fear of one's own death. When these two alternative realities are joined, and “religion is thought to be war, and war religion,” the result is “cosmic war,” which is the worst. The book seeks to understand how cosmic war fades into more mundane conflict (and eventually peace).The internal factors that bring cosmic war to an end—fighters lose faith in their movement when it loses battles, when there is infighting, when new alternatives offer hope—and the external factors—a strong military or police response, concessions by the government, gestures of respect from opponents—do not seem different from the factors that bring all wars to an end. Juergensmeyer never convincingly distinguishes cosmic from other kinds of war. But the book exudes a bias toward the status quo, such that the violence of armed anticolonial movements is of a fundamentally different order than the everyday violence of established governments. It is hard to resist the conclusion that cosmic wars are simply wars that we “secular” Westerners find distasteful. We puzzle over cosmic religious violence to assure ourselves that our “ordinary” violence does not really count as violence. (shrink)

Language and Materiality integrates linguistic anthropological and sociolinguistic scholarship on a range of topics: semiotic approaches to language, language commodification, sound, embodiment, mediatization, and aesthetics. Empirically rigorous, the volume engages scholars and students interested in language, its use, and meanings. It consists of three sections - 'Texts, Objects, Mediality', 'Sound, Aesthetics, Embodiment', and 'Time, Place, Circulation' - containing chapters and short commentaries, framed by a curated conversation about semiotics and materiality in anthropology. Each section theorizes intersections, connections, and relationships between (...) language and materiality across diverse topics and ethnographic contexts. The volume shows that materiality may be approached as a feature of political economy, sensual experience, aesthetics, and affective relationships in its relation to language as talk, register, genre, ideology, and acoustic object. It consists of new perspectives on materiality as a vital dimension of social life and signification in global capitalism, connecting inquiries on subjects as diverse as food, media, fonts, and music. (shrink)

Michael Ruse's forthcoming book gives an enjoyable history of teleology in biology, philosophy, and theology. It argues that concepts of cause, final cause, purpose, teleology, function, design, adaptation, contrivance, progress, ends, and value have all been telescoped by most writers in those three disciplines but that these concepts (and especially the concept of design) are nonetheless valid, provided only that we recognize their metaphorical nature. I agree with this basic argument, and Ruse's critiques and historical summaries of these concepts are (...) both useful and delightful. However, I also explore one major and three minor reservations. The minor reservations are that Ruse overdoes the allegation of telescoping, does not adequately explore ways to express teleology more accurately, and erroneously denies the existence of biology–based theologians who make the same point he is making. The major reservation is that, despite all the groundwork he lays, Ruse comes to a conclusion other than the one clearly suggested by his first fourteen chapters. If he followed the evolutionary story just a bit further, to include the evolution of the human brain, he would be in a position to articulate a theologically sophisticated understanding of teleology and avoid an ending that is uncharacteristically tame. (shrink)

There exists a limited pluralist model of regulating or `managing' religious diversity in contemporary Europe. This pluralist model, however, is in contrast to the limitations that appear at the state level, which reflect an increasingly illiberal, secular Europe. Such contrast stems historically from tensions that exist between the national and transnational aspects of the model itself, but it also reflects the emerging debates on religious pluralism and the democratic state. With the settlement of post-colonial migrants (with Muslims constituting a large (...) majority) a public debate on the role of religion in Europe has resurfaced as these communities exist outside the historical formation of Western church-state relations and are challenging the very underpinning of what comprises a `liberal' democratic state. In particular, it is the role of Islam in secular Europe that frames several questions in this debate: to what extent is it necessary to regulate religious freedoms in the `public sphere' in order to protect the democratic state? What restrictions on minority religions should be considered `necessary in a democratic society’ and what limitations should be placed on state interference in minority religions as protection against the undue influence of a dominant social group? Against this backdrop, this article explores the historical social formation of religious pluralism in the European context and examines the legal and political frameworks at the national and regional levels to `regulate' diversity. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Two Views of Authenticity Being a Real Father Notes.

_Being Human _examines the complex connections among conceptions of human nature, attitudes toward non-human nature, and ethics. Anna Peterson proposes an "ethical anthropology" that examines how ideas of nature and humanity are bound together in ways that shape the very foundations of cultures. Peterson discusses mainstream Western understandings of what it means to be human, as well as alternatives to these perspectives, and suggests that the construction of a compelling, coherent environmental ethics will revise our ideas not only about nature (...) but also about what it means to be human. (shrink)

This important new book explores the contemporary refugee crisis and the untold realities and experiences of refugees themselves. A team of top scholars offer a critical and necessary diagnosis of the challenges, complexities, and contradictions impacting our philosophical approaches to the contemporary figure of the refugee.

Rips et al. consider whether representations of individual objects or analog magnitudes are building blocks for the concept natural number. We argue for a third core capacity – the ability to bind representations of individuals into sets. However, even with this addition to the list of starting materials, we agree that a significant acquisition story is needed to capture natural number.

The laser, first operated in 1960, produced light with coherence properties that demanded explanation. While some attempted a treatment within the framework of classical coherence theory, others insisted that only quantum electrodynamics could give adequate insight and generality. The result was a sharp and rather bitter controversy, conducted over the physics and mathematics that were being deployed, but also over the criteria for doing good science. Three physicists were at the center of this dispute, Emil Wolf, Max Born’s collaborator on (...) a canonical text on optics as a branch of classical electromagnetism, Roy J. Glauber, a student of Julian Schwinger and a high-energy particle theorist, and Leonard Mandel, both experimentalist and theorist and versed in the physics of photodetection. The story told here is thus one of three distinct research trajectories and of the explosion that occurred when, pushed into the well-financed field of laser studies, these trajectories collided. (shrink)

The two-factor theory (Davies, Coltheart, Langdon & Breen 2001; Coltheart 2007; Coltheart, Menzies & Sutton 2010) is an influential account of delusion formation. According to the theory, there are two distinct factors that are causally responsible for delusion formation. The first factor is supposed to explain the content of the delusion, while the second factor is supposed to explain why the delusion is adopted and maintained. Recently, another remarkable account of delusion formation has been proposed, in which the notion of (...) “prediction error” plays the central role (Fletcher & Frith 2009; Corlett, Krystal, Taylor & Fletcher 2009; Corlett, Taylor, Wang, Fletcher & Krystal 2010). According to this account, the prediction-error theory, delusions are formed in response to aberrant prediction-error signals, those signals that indicate a mismatch between expectation and actual experience. -/- In this chapter, we examine the relationship between the two-factor theory and the prediction-error theory in some detail. Our view is that the prediction-error theory does not have to be understood as a rival to the two-factor theory. We do not deny that there are some important differences between them. However, those differences are not as significant as they have been presented in the literature. Moreover, the core ideas of the prediction-error theory may be incorporated into the two- factor framework. For instance, the aberrant prediction-error signal that is posited by prediction-error theorists can be (or underlie) the first factor contributing to the formation of some delusions, and help explain the content of those delusions. Alternatively, the aberrant prediction-error signal can be (or underlie) the second factor, and help explain why the delusion is adopted and maintained. (shrink)

The last two decades have seen a dramatic increase in scientific publications on Tourette syndrome, but the etiology of this common neurodevelopmental condition is still unknown. Many questions remain—about the unitary nature of the syndrome, and the criteria used to define it in such internationally accepted manuals as the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders and the International Classification of Disorders. Meanwhile, individuals and families affected by TS remain underserviced, as pharmacological and behavioral therapies provide relief for some but (...) not all who need support. We urgently need new... (shrink)

Americans increasingly cite moral values as a factor in how they vote, but when we define morality simply in terms of a voter's position on gay marriage and abortion, we lose sight of the ethical decisions that guide our everyday lives. In our encounters with friends, family members, nature, and nonhuman creatures, we practice a nonutilitarian morality that makes sacrifice a rational and reasonable choice. Recognizing these everyday ethics, Anna L. Peterson argues, helps us move past the seemingly irreconcilable conflicts (...) of culture and refocus on issues that affect real social change. Peterson begins by divining a "second language" for personal and political values, a vocabulary derived from the loving and mutually beneficial relationships of daily life. Even if our interactions with others are fleeting and fragmentary, they provide a viable alternative to the contractual and atomistic attitudes of mainstream culture. Everyday ethics point toward a more just, humane, and sustainable society, and to acknowledge moments of grace in our daily encounters is to realize a different way of relating to people and nonhuman nature—an alternative ethic to cynicism and rank consumerism. In redefining the parameters of morality, Peterson enables us to make fundamental problems such as the distribution of wealth, the use of public land and natural resources, labor and employment policy, and the character of political institutions the preferred focus of debate and action. (shrink)

Given recent legal developments in the United States, now is a critical time to draw attention to how ‘conscientious objection’ is sometimes used by health care providers to discriminate against the LGBTQ community. We review legal developments from 2019 and present several cases where health care providers used conscientious objection in ways that discriminate against the LGBTQ community, resulting in damaged trust by this underserved population. We then discuss two important conceptual points in this debate. The first involves the interpretation (...) of discrimination (provider versus patient-centered views), and we argue for a patient-centered view; the second involves the use of the people versus procedure distinction to reach a compromise between LGBTQ individuals and the clinicians who do not want to treat them. We argue the distinction is problematic when applied to treatment of the LGBTQ population. (shrink)

Commentary on the editorial by D Stein et al.'s "What is a Mental/Psychiatric Disorder? From DSM-IV to DSM-V".

Implementation of guidelines regarding breaches of electronic health information requires an anticipatory stance and physician and patient education regarding security and monitoring measures and methods of redress. Adopting a preventive ethics, rather than a crisis management, model may also increase physician awareness of how the information they choose to include and privilege within the health record may expose patients to added harms if not done mindfully.

This article investigates new convergences between animal ethics and environmental ethics by focusing on the effects as well as the causes of climate change. Its main objective is to show how a non-anthropocentric approach to climate ethics can increase the potential of collaboration between animal ethics theorists and environmental ethics theorists. It develops an approach that explains how animal ethics, environmental ethics and climate ethics can converge at the theoretical level on the common problem of livestock farming. Then it explains (...) how, from a practical point of view, the vegetarian and vegan diet as well as the vegan lifestyle can be a solution to this common problem. Finally, it replies to major objections in order to develop arguments in favour of a duty not to consume animal products. (shrink)

Until quite recently human reproduction was considered an entirely natural process, and the ethics of reproduction were governed more by cultural mores and religious strictures than by any serious philosophical or empirical inquiry. However, more recently reproductive ethics has exploded as a field for several reasons. At a cultural level, many things taken for granted a generation ago, including the increasing medicalization of birth and the heteronormative two-parent nuclear family, have been challenged, and new possibilities have arisen from these now (...) contested ideas. It is important to remember that the explosion of reproductive ethics is as much from new thinking as it is from new technologies, and, at least in regard to reproductive possibilities for the LGBTQ community, it may well be fair to say that it is our new thinking that then led to new technological explorations. (shrink)

The ability to judge accurately whether or not an action can be accomplished successfully is critical for selecting appropriate response options that enable adaptive behaviors. Such affordance judgments are thought to rely on the perceived fit between environmental properties and knowledge of one's current physical capabilities. Little, however, is currently known about the ability of individuals to judge their own affordances following a stroke, or about the underlying neural mechanisms involved. To address these issues, we employed a signal detection approach (...) to investigate the impact of left or right hemisphere injuries on judgments of whether a visual object was located within reach while remaining still. Regarding perceptual sensitivity and accuracy in judging reachability, there were no significant group differences between healthy controls, right brain damaged and left brain damaged stroke patients. However, while healthy controls and RBD patients demonstrated a negative response criterion and thus overestimated their reach capability, LBD patients' average response criterion converged to zero, indicating no judgment tendency. Critically, the LBD group's judgment tendency pattern is consistent with previous findings in this same sample on an affordance judgment task that required estimating whether the hand can fit through apertures. Lesion analysis suggests that this loss of judgment tendency may be associated with damage to the left insula, the left parietal and middle temporal lobe. Based on these results, we propose that damage to the left ventro-dorsal stream disrupts the retrieval and processing of a stable criterion, leading to stronger reliance on intact on-line body-perceptive processes computed within the preserved bilateral dorsal network. (shrink)

This article looks at riots that consumed Paris and much of France for three consecutive weeks in November 2005. The author argues that the uprisings were not instigated by radical Muslims, children of African polygamists, or despairing youth suffering from high unemployment. First and foremost, they were provoked by a terrible incident of police brutality, a tragedy among a litany of similar tragedies. Black and Arab youth were already frustrated: decades of violent enforcement of France's categorical boundaries—both racial and geographic—had (...) filled many with rage. When Minister of Interior Nicholas Sarkozy responded to the violent death of three teenage boys on October 25, 2005, by condemning the boys rather than the police officers who had killed them, he merely reaffirmed what many young blacks and Arabs already believed: that their lives have no value in France. (shrink)

Philosophers and physicians alike tend to discuss the physician-patient relationship in terms of physician privilege and patient autonomy, stressing the duty of the physician to respect the autonomy and the variously elaborated rights of the patient. The authors of this article argue that such emphasis on rights was initially productive, in a first generation of debate on medical ethical issues, but that it is now time for a second generation effort that will stress the importance of the unique experiential aspects (...) of the physician-patient relationship — mutual trust, suffering and healing. We attempt here to initiate this second-generation discussion, presenting the first generation's philosophical background, criticizing it from the perspective of clinical experience, and seeking a synthesis in the relational qualities of patient and physician interacting in a medical context. (shrink)

BackgroundSex and gender influence individuals’ psychology, but are often overlooked in psychological science. The sex and gender equity in research guidelines provide instruction for addressing sex and gender within five sections of a manuscript.MethodsWe examined whether the 89 journals published by the American Psychological Association provide explicit instruction for authors to address sex and gender within these five sections. Both authors reviewed the journal instructions to authors for the words “sex,” and “gender,” and noted explicit instruction pertaining to these five (...) sections.ResultsOnly 8 journals instructed authors to address sex/gender within the abstract, introduction, and/or methods sections. No journals instructed authors to address sex and gender in the results or discussion sections.ConclusionThese journals could increase sex/gender equity and improve the reproducibility of psychological science by instructing authors to follow the SAGER guidelines. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Lisa’s StoryLisa P. (wife of patient) and Jeanne KerwinMy husband suffered from sudden onset of heart failure with a very low ejection fraction and was on IV Milrinone at the age of 47. One of the most powerful things he told me was that he was not afraid to die and therefore did not want to move forward with Milrinone. He eventually “did it for the kids.” After (...) the Milrinone drip was no longer working, he was offered an LVAD (left ventricular assist device) to keep him alive. He refused, but the doctor again convinced him to “do it for your kids” and said, “we put these devices in 80-year-olds.” He did not have time to explore any other options and reluctantly accepted the LVAD. It was implanted in May of 2014 in a very long and complicated surgery with a long and difficult recovery. He was in the hospital for a long time, and then he refused to go to rehab upon discharge, making it difficult for our family to manage, as he was extremely weak and needed care of his wound dressing. He worried about the financial [End Page 7] impact of a heart transplant and the medications required, as we were already struggling with the medical bills. He refused to have more surgery with the potential complications and never agreed to get on the transplant waiting list.After the implanted LVAD, my husband was not able to do most of what he loved in life. He couldn’t work (he was a truck driver), he couldn’t go fishing or swimming in the ocean, he couldn’t go hunting and fishing, and his overall physical condition was so poor that he couldn’t cook, garden and, most aggravating to him, he could not take a regular hot shower. The LVAD had to be covered with plastic in order to avoid getting the drive-line area wet, so bathing was a complicated process. He had trouble with stairs, had neuropathic pain in his legs from diabetes, and because of the pain medications, he felt cloudy and dizzy and slept most of the day in his recliner. I took care of him, even after I had to go back to work, and at the same time, I managed our two children (ages 9 and 12 at the time of LVAD).After almost two years of living with the LVAD, multiple hospitalizations for GI bleeds then seizures, more medications, and weekly blood draws for INR1, my husband requested that the LVAD be de-activated and that he be allowed to die of his heart failure. He described his life as “miserable.” He watched as his misery impacted his children and me. He suffered daily and had none of the joys that made life worth living for him. When we approached the cardiac team that implanted and monitored his LVAD with his request, they said “no.” They would not de-activate the LVAD because it was working. It was keeping him alive and he had no other terminal illness. His palliative doctor, who was treating his pain, also heard his request and told us to call for an “ethics consult” to determine if he would be “allowed” to have the LVAD de-activated. We got the number and called on March 31, 2016.At the time of the call to Ethics, we had no idea what “Ethics” was, other than a general definition of the word ethics as in professional behaviors and such. We did not know what to expect but we called. We would never have known to call “Ethics” if the palliative doctor had not advised us to do so, and my husband might have suffered a longer, more painful life both mentally and physically prolonged by the LVAD.We explained the request to the ethics consultant. She listened to my husband describe his daily living and his dissatisfaction with the quality of his life, his physical and emotional suffering, and his wish to rid himself of the LVAD and allow nature to take its course. There was actually no decision to be made on his part. He had already made up... (shrink)

In the chapter of the Critique of Pure Reason entitled ‘The Discipline of Pure Reason in Dogmatic Use’, Kant contrasts mathematical and philosophical knowledge in order to show that pure reason does not (and, indeed, cannot) pursue philosophical truth according to the same method that it uses to pursue and attain the apodictically certain truths of mathematics. In the process of this comparison, Kant gives the most explicit statement of his critical philosophy of mathematics; accordingly, scholars have typically focused their (...) interpretations and criticisms of Kant’s conception of mathematics on this small section of the Critique. (shrink)

This essay looks to the omission of aging queer bodies from new medical technologies of sex. We extend the Foucauldian space of the clinic to the mediascape, a space not only of representations but where the imagination is conditioned and different worlds dreamed into being. We specifically examine the relationship between aging queers and the marketing of technologies of sexual function. We highlight the ways queers are excluded from the spaces of the clinic, specifically the heternormative sexual scripts that organize (...) biomedical care. Finally, using recent zombie theory, we gesture toward both the constraints and possibilities of queer inclusion within the discourses and practices that aim to reanimate sexual function. We suggest that zombies usefully frame extant articulations of aging queers with sex and the dangerous lure of medical treatments that promise revitalized, but normative, sexual function at the cost of other, perhaps queerer intimacies. (shrink)

Prolonged solitary confinement has become a widespread and standard practice in U.S. prisons—even though it consistently drives healthy prisoners insane, makes the mentally ill sicker, and, according to the testimony of prisoners, threatens to reduce life to a living death. In this profoundly important and original book, Lisa Guenther examines the death-in-life experience of solitary confinement in America from the early nineteenth century to today’s supermax prisons. Documenting how solitary confinement undermines prisoners’ sense of identity and their ability to (...) understand the world, Guenther demonstrates the real effects of forcibly isolating a person for weeks, months, or years. -/- Drawing on the testimony of prisoners and the work of philosophers and social activists from Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty to Frantz Fanon and Angela Davis, the author defines solitary confinement as a kind of social death. It argues that isolation exposes the relational structure of being by showing what happens when that structure is abused—when prisoners are deprived of the concrete relations with others on which our existence as sense-making creatures depends. Solitary confinement is beyond a form of racial or political violence; it is an assault on being. (shrink)

This article examines the operation of “skilled feelings” in metaphors for the heart-mind (xin 心) as ruler of the body. It focuses on three Chinese philosophical texts in contexts outside of the “Confucian” texts that have dominated the emerging field of comparative virtue ethics—the Zhuangzi 莊子, Sunzi Bingfa 孫子兵法 (Sunzi’s Art of War), and Huangdi Neijing 黃帝內經 (The Yellow Emperor’s Classic of Internal Medicine)—and briefly contrasts the Chinese accounts to influential Greek metaphors of the mind as ruler of the body (...) and passions. (shrink)

A new theory of how the brain constructs emotions that could revolutionize psychology, health care, law enforcement, and our understanding of the human mind Emotions feel automatic, like uncontrollable reactions to things we think and experience. Scientists have long supported this assumption by claiming that emotions are hardwired in the body or the brain. Today, however, the science of emotion is in the midst of a revolution on par with the discovery of relativity in physics and natural selection in biology--and (...) this paradigm shift has far-reaching implications for us all. Leading the charge is psychologist and neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett, whose theory of emotion is driving a deeper understanding of the mind and brain, and shedding new light on what it means to be human. Her research overturns the widely held belief that emotions are housed in different parts of the brain and are universally expressed and recognized. Instead, she has shown that emotion is constructed in the moment, by core systems that interact across the whole brain, aided by a lifetime of learning. This new theory means that you play a much greater role in your emotional life than you ever thought. Its repercussions are already shaking the foundations not only of psychology but also of medicine, the legal system, child-rearing, meditation, and even airport security. Why do emotions feel automatic? Does rational thought really control emotion? How does emotion affect disease? How can you make your children more emotionally intelligent? How Emotions Are Made answers these questions and many more, revealing the latest research and intriguing practical applications of the new science of emotion, mind, and brain. (shrink)

Over the last decade, AI models of language and word meaning have been dominated by what we might call a statistics-of-occurrence, strategy: these models are deep neural net structures that have been trained on a large amount of unlabeled text with the aim of producing a model that exploits statistical information about word and phrase co-occurrence in order to generate behavior that is similar to what a human might produce, or representations that can be probed to exhibit behavior similar to (...) what a human might produce (meaningsemblant behavior). Examples of what we can call Statistics-of-Occurrence Models (SOMs) include: Word2Vec (CBOW and Skip-Gram), BERT, GPT-3, and, most recently, ChatGPT. Increasingly, there have been suggestions that such systems have semantic understanding, or at least a proto-version of it. This paper argues against such claims. I argue that a necessary condition for a system to possess semantic understanding is that it function in ways that are causally explainable by appeal to its semantic properties. I then argue that SOMs do not plausibly satisfy this Functioning Criterion. Rather, the best explanation of their meaning-semblant behavior is what I call the Statistical Hypothesis: SOMs do not themselves function to represent or produce meaningful text; they just reflect the semantic information that exists in the aggregate given strong correlations between word placement and meaningful use. I consider and rebut three main responses to the claim that SOMs fail to meet the Functioning Criterion. The result, I hope, is increased clarity about why and how one should make claims about AI systems having semantic understanding. (shrink)

This chapter contains section titled: Cartesian Philosophy and the Conduct of Life Putting the Pieces of Descartes's Ethical Writings Together: Cartesian Virtue Ethics Key Texts The “Perfect Moral System” and the Morale Par Provision Cartesian Virtue Descartes's Virtue Ethics and His Metaphysics and Epistemology, Revisited Conclusion Notes References and Further Reading.

The world of wage labour seems to have become a soulless machine, an engine of social and environmental destruction. Employees seem to be nothing but 'cogs' in this system - but is this true? Located at the intersection of political theory, moral philosophy, and business ethics, this book questions the picture of the world of work as a 'system'. Hierarchical organizations, both in the public and in the private sphere, have specific features of their own. This does not mean, however, (...) that they cannot leave room for moral responsibility, and maybe even human flourishing. Drawing on detailed empirical case studies, Lisa Herzog analyses the nature of organizations from a normative perspective: their rule-bound character, the ways in which they deal with divided knowledge, and organizational cultures and their relation to morality. The volume examines how individual agency and organizational structures would have to mesh to avoid common moral pitfalls and develops the notion of 'transformational agency', which refers to a critical, creative way of engaging with one's organizational role while remaining committed to basic moral norms. The volume goes on to explore the political and institutional changes that would be required to re-embed organizations into a just society. Whether we submit to 'the system' or try to reclaim it, Herzog argues, is a question of eminent political importance in our globalized world. (shrink)

Lisa Tessman's Burdened Virtues is a deeply original and provocative work that engages questions central to feminist theory and practice, from the perspective of Aristotelian ethics. Focused primarily on selves who endure and resist oppression, she addresses the ways in which devastating conditions confronted by these selves both limit and burden their moral goodness, and affect their possibilities of flourishing. She describes two different forms of "moral trouble" prevalent under oppression. The first is that the oppressed self may be (...) morally damaged, prevented from developing or exercising some of the virtues; the second is that the very conditions of oppression require the oppressed to develop a set of virtues that carry a moral cost to those who practice them--traits that Tessman refers to as "burdened virtues." These virtues have the unusual feature of being disjoined from their bearer's own well being. Tessman's work focuses on issues that have been missed by many feminist moral theories, and her use of the virtue ethics framework brings feminist concerns more closely into contact with mainstream ethical theory. This book will appeal to feminist theorists in philosophy and women's studies, but also more broadly, ethicists and social theorists. (shrink)

I argue against traditional virtue epistemology on which knowledge is a success due to a competence to believe truly, by revealing an in-principle problem with the traditional virtue epistemologist’s explanation of Gettier cases. The argument eliminates one of the last plausible explanation of Gettier cases, and so of knowledge, in terms of non-factive mental states and non-mental conditions. I then I develop and defend a different kind of virtue epistemology, on which knowledge is an exercise of a competence to know. (...) I show how the account, while circular, is not viciously so. It explains both how knowledge is a mental state, as well as the relationship between knowledge and justification, including justified false beliefs and Gettier cases. Moreover, although direct virtue epistemology is compatible with many views on the nature of belief, it can explain how knowledge might be metaphysically more fundamental than belief as well. (shrink)

Between the years 1643 and 1649, Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia and René Descartes exchanged fifty-eight letters—thirty-two from Descartes and twenty-six from Elisabeth. Their correspondence contains the only known extant philosophical writings by Elisabeth, revealing her mastery of metaphysics, analytic geometry, and moral philosophy, as well as her keen interest in natural philosophy. The letters are essential reading for anyone interested in Descartes’s philosophy, in particular his account of the human being as a union of mind and body, as well as (...) his ethics. They also provide a unique insight into the character of their authors and the way ideas develop through intellectual collaboration. Philosophers have long been familiar with Descartes’s side of the correspondence. Now Elisabeth’s letters—never before available in translation in their entirety—emerge this volume, adding much-needed context and depth both to Descartes’s ideas and the legacy of the princess. Lisa Shapiro’s annotated edition—which also includes Elisabeth’s correspondence with the Quakers William Penn and Robert Barclay—will be heralded by students of philosophy, feminist theorists, and historians of the early modern period. (shrink)

What is the meaning of critique for critical phenomenology? Building on Gayle Salamon’s engagement with this question in the inaugural issue of Puncta: A Journal for Critical Phenomenology (2018), I will propose a six-fold account of critique as: 1) the art of asking questions, moved by crisis; 2) a transcendental inquiry into the conditions of possibility for meaningful experience; 3) a quasi-transcendental, historically-grounded study of particular lifeworlds; 4) a (situated and interested) analysis of power; 5) the problematization of basic concepts (...) and methods; and 6) a praxis of freedom that seeks not only to interpret the meaning of lived experience, but also to change the conditions under which horizons of possibility for meaning, action, and relationship are wrongfully limited or foreclosed. While the first two dimensions of critique are alive and well in classical phenomenology, the others help to articulate what is distinctive about critical phenomenology. (shrink)

Delusions are defined as irrational beliefs that compromise good functioning. However, in the empirical literature, delusions have been found to have some psychological benefits. One proposal is that some delusions defuse negative emotions and protect one from low self-esteem by allowing motivational influences on belief formation. In this paper I focus on delusions that have been construed as playing a defensive function (motivated delusions) and argue that some of their psychological benefits can convert into epistemic ones. Notwithstanding their epistemic costs, (...) motivated delusions also have potential epistemic benefits for agents who have faced adversities, undergone physical or psychological trauma, or are subject to negative emotions and low self-esteem. To account for the epistemic status of motivated delusions, costly and beneficial at the same time, I introduce the notion of epistemic innocence. A delusion is epistemically innocent when adopting it delivers a significant epistemic benefit, and the benefit could not be attained if the delusion were not adopted. The analysis leads to a novel account of the status of delusions by inviting a reflection on the relationship between psychological and epistemic benefits. (shrink)

Delusions are a common symptom of schizophrenia and dementia. Though most English dictionaries define a delusion as a false opinion or belief, there is currently a lively debate about whether delusions are really beliefs and indeed, whether they are even irrational. The book is an interdisciplinary exploration of the nature of delusions. It brings together the psychological literature on the aetiology and the behavioural manifestations of delusions, and the philosophical literature on belief ascription and rationality. The thesis of the book (...) is that delusions are continuous with ordinary beliefs, a thesis that could have important theoretical and practical implications for psychiatric classification and the clinical treatment of subjects with delusions. By bringing together recent work in philosophy of mind, cognitive psychology and psychiatry, the book offers a comprehensive review of the philosophical issues raised by the psychology of normal and abnormal cognition, defends the doxastic conception of delusions, and develops a theory about the role of judgements of rationality and of attributions of self-knowledge in belief ascription. Presenting a highly original analysis of the debate on the nature of delusions, this book will interest philosophers of mind, epistemologists, philosophers of science, cognitive scientists, psychiatrists, and mental health professionals. (shrink)

We talk about irrationality when behaviour defies explanation or prediction, when decisions are driven by emotions or instinct rather than by reflection, when reasoning fails to conform to basic principles of logic and probability, and when beliefs lack coherence or empirical support. Depending on the context, agents exhibiting irrational behaviour may be described as foolish, ignorant, unwise or even insane. -/- In this clear and engaging introduction to current debates on irrationality, Lisa Bortolotti presents the many facets of the (...) concept and offers an original account of the importance of judgements of irrationality as value judgements. The book examines the standards against which we measure human behaviour, and reviews the often serious implications of judgements of irrationality for ethics and policy. Bortolotti argues that we should adopt a more critical stance towards accepted standards of rationality in the light of the often surprising outcomes of philosophical inquiry and cognitive science research into decision making. -/- Irrationality is an accessible guide to the concept and will be essential reading for students and scholars interested in the limitations of human cognition and human agency. (shrink)

The Gift of the Other brings together a philosophical analysis of time, embodiment, and ethical responsibility with a feminist critique of the way women’s reproductive capacity has been theorized and represented in Western culture. Author Lisa Guenther develops the ethical and temporal implications of understanding birth as the gift of the Other, a gift which makes existence possible, and already orients this existence toward a radical responsibility for Others. Through an engagement with the work of Levinas, Beauvoir, Arendt, Irigaray, (...) and Kristeva, the author outlines an ethics of maternity based on the givenness of existence and a feminist politics of motherhood which critiques the exploitation of maternal generosity. (shrink)

Some claim that moral factors affect the epistemic status of our beliefs. Call this _the moral encroachment thesis_. It’s been argued that the moral encroachment thesis can explain at least part of the wrongness of racial profiling. The thesis predicts that the high moral stakes in cases of racial profiling make it more difficult for these racist beliefs to be justified or to constitute knowledge. This paper considers a class of racial generalizations that seem to do just the opposite of (...) this. The high moral stakes of the beliefs we infer from these generalizations make it _easier_ rather than _harder_ for these beliefs to be justified or to constitute knowledge. I argue that the existence of this class of cases—cases of “positive profiling”—give us reason to expand our account of moral encroachment in a way that brings it closer to the ideal of pragmatic encroachment that motivates it in the first place. (shrink)

In this paper I discuss the costs and benefits of confabulation, focusing on the type of confabulation people engage in when they offer explanations for their attitudes and choices. What makes confabulation costly? In the philosophical literature confabulation is thought to undermine claims to self-knowledge. I argue that when people confabulate they do not necessarily fail at mental-state self-attributions, but offer ill-grounded explanations which often lead to the adoption of other ill-grounded beliefs. What, if anything, makes confabulation beneficial? As people (...) are unaware of the information that would make their explanations accurate, they are not typically in a position to acknowledge their ignorance or provide better-grounded explanations for their attitudes and choices. In such cases, confabulating can have some advantages over offering no explanation because it makes a distinctive contribution to people’s sense of themselves as competent and largely coherent agents. This role of ill-grounded explanations could not be as easily played by better-grounded explanations should these be available. In the end, I speculate about the implications of this conclusion for attempting to eliminate or reduce confabulation. (shrink)

It is taken as obvious that there is a conflict between objective temporal passage and relativistic physics. The traditional formulation of temporal passage is the movement of a universe-wide set of simultaneous events known as the NOW; the Special Theory of Relativity implies that there is no NOW and therefore no temporal passage. The vast majority of those who accept the B-theory blockworld—the metaphysics of time most friendly to relativistic physics—deny that time passes. I argue that this denial is a (...) mistake. Contrary to overwhelmingly popular opinion, temporal passage does not need a NOW. To show this, I defend a relational understanding of temporal becoming, that I call B-coming, in which an event y B-comes with respect to x iff R xy. Temporal passage is then the difference in what has B-come at one point in a thing’s history with respect to what has B-come at an earlier point in that thing’s history. Appealing to this kind of relation is a strategy that is well-known but has been widely dismissed. This dismissal is premature; I show that the essential elements of temporal passage do not necessarily require a NOW. There can be passage without presentness. (shrink)

The thesis of Weak Unrestricted Composition says that every pair of objects has a fusion. This thesis has been argued by Contessa and Smith to be compatible with the world being junky and hence to evade an argument against the necessity of Strong Unrestricted Composition proposed by Bohn. However, neither Weak Unrestricted Composition alone nor the different variants of it that have been proposed in the literature can provide us with a satisfying answer to the special composition question, or so (...) we will argue. We will then go on to explore an alternative family of purely mereological rules in the vicinity of Weak Unrestricted Composition, Cardinal Composition: A plurality of pairwise non-overlapping objects composes an object iff the objects in the plurality are of cardinality smaller than $$\kappa$$ κ. As we will show, all the instances for infinite $$\kappa$$ κ s determine fusion and are compatible with junk, and every instance for a $$\kappa > \aleph _0$$ κ > ℵ 0 is furthermore compatible with gunk and dense chains of parthood. (shrink)

Inventing the Market explores two paradigms of the market in the thought of Adam Smith and G.W.F. Hegel, bridging the gap between economics and philosophy, it shows that both disciplines can profit from a broader, more historically situated ...