In this volume, three aspects are examined: a) normal subjects, where new findings on spatial behavior are described. b) brain-lesioned subjects, where the ...

It has often been argued that Humean accounts of natural law cannot account for the role played by laws in scientific explanations. Loewer (Philosophical Studies 2012) has offered a new reply to this argument on behalf of Humean accounts—a reply that distinguishes between grounding (which Loewer portrays as underwriting a kind of metaphysical explanation) and scientific explanation. I will argue that Loewer’s reply fails because it cannot accommodate the relation between metaphysical and scientific explanation. This relation also resolves a puzzle (...) about scientific explanation that Hempel and Oppenheim (Philosophy of Science 15:135–75, 1948) encountered. (shrink)

The fifty-seven original essays in this book provide a comprehensive overview of the interdisciplinary field of animal cognition.

If a potential person would have a good life if he were to come into existence, can we coherently regard his coming into existence as better for him than his never coming into existence? And can we regard the situation in which he never comes into existence as worse for him? In this paper, we argue that both questions should be answered affirmatively. We also explain where prominent arguments to differing conclusions go wrong. Finally, we explore the relevance of our (...) answers to issues in population ethics. (shrink)

English summary: Bonaventurian thought is indeed a monadology. This book makes use of Foucauldian archaeology in order to present the monadological discourse. Further, it provides a solution to the archaeological questions that relate to subject, object, and speech which reappear systematically in Bonaventure's texts. Further, as Bonaventure did not write a treaty of monadology, and as far as his monadology is only the result of his thought and practice, this book must be understood, instead, as a rewriting of his monadology. (...) French description: La pensee bonaventurienne est une monadologie. Son principe n'est pas l'unite indivisible de la monade, comme dans la monadologie leibnizienne, mais la ressemblance avec une tri-unite, la Trinite creatrice que tous les etres expriment a leur maniere. Le cadre de cetteexpression qui ne doit rien a une harmonie preetablie, releve d'unehierarchie qui, ordonnee a la Trinite, comprise comme modele exemplairede toutes les creatures qui en sont les images, necessite l'engagement d'un sujet libre qui peut s'y refuser. Cette etude use de l'archeologie foucaldienne et presente le discours monadologique qui articule le sujet et l'objet en tant que monades, comme solution a la problematique archeologique qui articule sujet, objet et discours. Enfin, dans la mesure ou Bonaventure n'a pas ecrit de traite monadologique et que sa monadologie est la resultante de sa pensee et de son exercice, ce livre doit etre compris comme une reecriture de sa monadologie. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to understand why empiricist philosophers of language did not try to refute the Leibniz-Beauzée argument, which questioned the genetical priority of proper names. It is shown that, within the semantic theory which underlies the empiricist doctrine, one may assume that all general terms derive from particular names, while conceding that every proper name can be etymologically traced back to the ancestor of a common noun.

The main aim of this article is to argue the case for understanding improvising as a real-time emergent process grounded in collaborative action, while noting that talking about improvisation, bluntly put, is not the same as improvising. The ways in which improvisers respond and adapt to changing circumstances in the moment and over time, it is argued, connect directly to the discipline of process philosophy and involve pattern recognition and creation skills as well as the ability to predict the actions (...) of conspecifics. The conclusion considers some benefits and challenges in approaching improvisation from a process-based and systems-theoretical perspective. (shrink)

The heart of the matter -- The evolution of the French medicine -- Coping with physicians' conflicts of interest in France -- The rise of a protected medical market : the United States before 1950 -- The commercial transformation : the United States, 1950-1980 -- The logic of medical markets : the United States, 1980 to the present -- Coping with physicians' conflicts of interest in the United States -- The evolution of Japanese medicine -- Coping with physicians' conflicts of (...) interest in Japan -- Reforms -- Professionalism reconsidered. (shrink)

This paper argues that Rawls’ principles of justice provide a normative foundation for stakeholder theory. The principles articulate (at an abstract level) citizens’ rights; these rights create interests across all aspects of society, including in the space of economic activity; and therefore, stakeholders – as citizens – have legitimate interests in the space of economic activity. This approach to stakeholder theory suggests a political interpretation of Boatright’s Moral Market approach, one that emphasizes the rights/place of citizens. And this approach to (...) stakeholder theory – in terms of citizens – raises a further question, what rights and obligations do economic agents have, beyond those attached to their roles as citizens? Rawls would reject additional rights and obligations of this sort for two reasons, one tied to freedom and one tied to pluralism. Rawls’ work therefore presses us to re-conceptualize the place of ethical claims in the economic context. (shrink)

Across the management, social science, and business ethics literatures, and in much of the philosophy literature, trust is characterized as a disposition to act given epistemic states—beliefs and/or expectations about others and about the risks involved. This characterization of trust is best thought of as epistemological because epistemic states distinguish trust from other dispositions. The epistemological characterization of trust is the amoral one referred to in the title of this paper, and we argue that this characterization is conceptually inadequate. We (...) outline and defend an alternative conception of trust as a moral phenomenon: when A trusts B to do something, A invites B to acknowledge and accept an obligation; when B accepts the invitation, B takes on an obligation; in that way trust creates an obligation. We conclude with an application, drawing out the difference between the epistemological conception of trust and our own in the context of Ghoshal et al.'s (Sloan Management Review 40:9—20, 1995, Academy of Management Learning & Education 4:75—91, 2005) critique of transaction cost theories of the firm. (shrink)

Max Skjönsberg's The Persistence of Party: Ideas of Harmonious Discord in Eighteenth-Century Britain is a rich, detailed, and nuanced study of eighteenth-century ideas about party politics and the British political contexts that both inspired and were affected by their development. The study is ambitious in scope and extensively researched. With David Hume and Edmund Burke as its principal protagonists, the book is organised chronologically and centered on analyses of writings by Paul de Rapin-Thoyras, Henry St John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke, Hume, (...) John Brown, and Burke to illustrate the centrality of party, as a concept, to political debate in the eighteenth... (shrink)

A noted psychologist and theologian considers the precepts of conventional morality in the light of the legitimate findings of contemporary pscyhology. He finds the norms of traditional morality inadequate for modern man, and proposes a morality in tune with contemporary life. After careful consideration and deep study, the author concludes that a rigid, legalistic standard of morality which would apply to all men regardless of personal circumstances and subjective situations is not only unhealthy, it is un-Christian. He advocates a personal (...) relationship with God -- a God of love, not a moral scorekeeper in the sky. He condemns the legalism, the confusing abstractions, the impersonal codes, and in their place he offers a relevant, living Christian morality based on freedom and responsibility. (shrink)

Ouija board sessions are illustrious examples of how subjective feelings of control – the Sense of Agency - can be manipulated in real life settings. We present findings from a field experiment at a paranormal conference, where Ouija enthusiasts were equipped with eye trackers while using the Ouija board. Our results show that participants have a significantly lower probability at visually predicting letters in a Ouija board session compared to a condition in which they are instructed to deliberately spell out (...) words with the Ouija board planchette. Our results also show that Ouija board believers report lower SoA compared to sceptic participants. These results support previous research which claim that low sense of agency is caused by a combination of retrospective inference and an inhibition of predictive processes. Our results show that users in Ouija board sessions become increasingly better at predicting letters as responses unfold over time, and that meaningful responses from the Ouija board can only be accounted for when considering interactions that goes on at the participant pair level. These results suggest that meaningful responses from the Ouija board may be an emergent property of interacting and predicting minds that increasingly impose structure on initially random events in Ouija sessions. (shrink)

Here I briefly discuss some comparative data on social play behaviour in hope of broadening the array of species in which researchers attempt to study animal morality. I am specifically concerned with the notion of ‘behaving fairly'. In the term ‘behaving fairly’ I use as a working guide the notion that animals often have social expectations when they engage in various sorts of social encounters the violation of which constitutes being treated unfairly because of a lapse in social etiquette. I (...) will cash this out below in my discussion of social play behaviour. (shrink)

Australia’s experience of the COVID-19 pandemic has been widely perceived to have been a successful one, based on the relatively few number of lives lost to the virus compared to the rest of the world. There remain, nonetheless, serious ethical challenges at the heart of the Australian response to COVID-19. The broadly positive outcomes of Australia’s pandemic response mask more troubling developments within its political culture, and the costs it has imposed on its society. This article examines two concerns in (...) particular: the normalisation of fear and emergency through the language and policy responses adopted by governments, and the significant diminution of individual freedoms and human rights. (shrink)

In this article, the relationship between philosophy and history of education is delved into. First, it is noted that both disciplines have diverged from each other over the last few decades to become relatively autonomous subsectors within the pedagogical sciences, each with its own discourses, its own expositional characteristics, its own channels of communication, and its own networks. From the perspective of the history of education, it seems as though more affiliation has been sought with the science of history. The (...) history of education, in any event, has in the past few years become more historicizing and less ‘educationalizing’. According to the author, there are signs that indicate that such an analogous line of reasoning, mutatis mutandis, also applies for the philosophy of education. Does this mean that there are no longer any bridges from the one area to the other or that none are possible? Probably not. In the second portion, it is shown that the modern or even postmodern ‘new cultural history of education’, with its often ironical and demythologizing traits uses or can use a considerable amount of ‘grand theory’. Indeed, the development of an adequate conceptual apparatus that also has to cope with the problem of ‘presentism’ assumes a constant dialogue with the past and for this a philosophical‐interpretative approach is still the best situated. Inversely, the Foucauldian perspective shows that philosophy in general and philosophy of education in particular equally hardly do without history. Within the reflection on pedagogical praxis, the historical and the philosophical thus probably will continue to rely on each other—if only as allies against the dominance of short‐winded empirical‐quantitative research. Still, it would be naive to think that, from this possible alliance, the fragmentation of historically developed knowledge systems with their own sociological and institutional foundation of scientific activities can be rectified in a trice. (shrink)

A model is proposed for the population dynamics of an annual plant (Sesbania vesicaria) with a seed bank (i.e. in which a proportion of seeds remain dormant for at least one year). A simple linear matrix model is deduced from the life cycle graph. The dominant eigenvalue of the projection matrix is estimated from demographic parameters derived from field studies. The estimated values for population growth rate () indicates that the study population should be experiencing a rapid exponential increase, but (...) this was not the case in our population.The addition of density dependent effects on seedling survivorship and adult fecundity, effects for which field studies provide evidence, considerably improves our model. Depending on the demographic parameters, the model leads to stable equilibrium, oscillations, or chaos. Study of the behaviour of this model in the parameter space shows that the existence of a seed bank allows higher among-year variation of adult fecundity, without leaving the region of demographic stability. Field data obtained over 3 years confirm this prediction. (shrink)

Philosophy & Social Criticism, Volume 48, Issue 3, Page 437-456, March 2022. Societal polarization has given rise to opposing groups that fight each other as enemies and that have very different ideas about what should be done and about what is the case. This article investigates what tools there are in the philosophy of Martin Buber to address this societal polarization. Buber’s notion of community, the relationship between means and ends, his opposition to the political principle, the notion of an (...) I-Thou dialogue and his conception of truth are presented as relevant for overcoming societal polarization. The article also presents the case of Daryl Davis as manifesting some of these Buberian principles. (shrink)

In the first part of this paper I argue that epiphenomenalism does not pose a threat to nonreductive physicalism, if type-epiphenomenalism does not imply the redundancy of mental (or in general higher-level) typing of events and/or states. Furthermore, if justifiable induction over folk-psychological regularities is possible independently of the ways in which these regularities are realized, type-epiphenomenalism does not imply the redundancy ofmental typing. Inthe second part of this paper I explain how justifiable 'cross-realization induction' can be possible. This explanation (...) does what none of the currently available ones can: combine the generally accepted ideas that (i) folk-psychology is a successful means of predicting, explaining, and understanding human behaviour and (ii) that mental states are multiply realized. Given these two steps, it is relatively safe to say that there is no epiphe-nomenalism-threat to nonreductive physicalism. (shrink)

Darwin offered an intriguing answer to the species problem. He doubted the existence of the species category as a real category in nature, but he did not doubt the existence of those taxa called ‘‘species’’. And despite his scepticism of the species category, Darwin continued using the word ‘‘species’’. Many have said that Darwin did not understand the nature of species. Yet his answer to the species problem is both theoretically sound and practical. On the theoretical side, DarwinÕs answer is (...) confirmed by contemporary biology, and it offers a more satisfactory answer to the species problem than recent attempts to save the species category. On the practical side, DarwinÕs answer frees us from the search for the correct theoretical definition of ‘‘species’’. But at the same time it does not require that we banish the word ‘‘species’’ from biology as some recent sceptics of the species category advocate. Ó The Willi Hennig Society 2010. (shrink)

Many of our ideological, political, moral, religious, aesthetic, scientific beliefs, as well as those concerning everyday life, are controversial; other people do not share them. As a rule, that does not bother us much: we tend to retain our contestable beliefs even if we ascribe no less skill and well-informedness to those who represent other points of view than to ourselves. But is that really reasonable? Shouldn't we often admit that we might be as wrong as others? And if we (...) do, shouldn't this consequently lead us to give up many of our beliefs in favor of agnostic attitudes? Marc Andree Weber argues that in the face of disagreement with equally competent and well-informed interlocutors we should almost always refrain from insisting on our controversial beliefs – with the few exceptions being all the more remarkable. (shrink)

An adaptation of Hofstede’s classic model of culture was applied to the fifty US states, to examine the connection between states’ cultural values and the prevalence of public sector corruption. While the culture-corruption link has been widely studied at the country level, little research exists that examines this phenomenon at the level of the states. The ambivalence of the findings may be attributable to the challenge of disaggregating minor cultural differences among the states, in contrast to the enormous heterogeneity of (...) the world’s countries. (shrink)

This article aims at presenting the concept of “phantasmagorical interpellation”. This theoretical effort is inspired by Walter Benjamin’s concept of “phantasmagoria” and Louis Althusser’s concept of “ideological interpellation”. The proposal is to ally their respective philosophical work-in-progress in their “anthropological” and “aleatory” materialisms in order to provide a socio-political analysis of today’s capitalist aesthetics as displayed in postmodern architecture or the design of everyday life. The aim is also to open new perspectives of resistance to the normativity of the consumer (...) imaginary using a critical interpretation of cultural creations which, following the inspiration of both authors, could reveal a new subject history capable of burst onto the scene of history. (shrink)

La publication des Inédits laisse émerger dans les notes et réflexions d’Emmanuel Levinas un véritable « corpus » de notations autour de la métaphore. L’article cherche à ressaisir le mouvement de pensée qui traverse cette attention portée à un thème moins explicitement présent dans l’œuvre publiée. Il montre que Levinas se dégage des perspectives rhétoriques classiques et se démarque de Husserl, Heidegger et Merleau-Ponty, en décelant dans le « mouvement d’amplification au-delà » porté par la métaphore, l’essence même du langage. (...) Il tente ensuite de retracer le lien qui lie « l’au-delà » (dont les métaphores du langage expriment la transcendance de pur jeu) et la « hauteur » (dont le visage est Dire dans la trace de l’absolument Autre). Il s’efforce enfin d’expliciter ce que Levinas – qui désigne Dieu tel l’Irrévélé de la responsabilité éthique – veut signifier par cette notation surprenante : « sans métaphore on ne peut pas entendre la voix de Dieu »! L’article se conclut par quelques remarques sur la rupture du mouvement de la métaphore vers l’insaisissable de la passivité du créé et sur l’usage de l’emphase hyperbolique dans Autrement qu’être ou au-delà de l’essence. (shrink)