Ron Giere’s recent book Scientific perspectivism sets out an account of science that attempts to forge a via media between two popular extremes: absolutist, objectivist realism on the one hand, and social constructivism or skeptical anti-realism on the other. The key for Giere is to treat both scientific observation and scientific theories as perspectives, which are limited, partial, contingent, context-, agent- and purpose-dependent, and pluralism-friendly, while nonetheless world-oriented and modestly realist. Giere’s perspectivism bears significant similarity to earlier ideas of Paul (...) Feyerabend and John Dewey. Comparing these to Giere’s work not only uncovers a consilience of ideas, but also can help to fill out Giere’s account in places where it is not fully developed, as well as helping us understand the work of these earlier authors and their continuing relevance to contemporary concerns in philosophy of science.Keywords: Ronald Giere; Paul Feyerabend; John Dewey; Perspectivism; Pragmatism; Pluralism. (shrink)

This chapter presents an overview and discussion of the primary Buddhist virtues within the context of the Buddhist path of moral and spiritual development. Buddhist ethics counsels practitioners to overcome the three poisons of greed, hatred, and ignorance and to cultivate those states and traits of mind (and the actions they motivate) that conduce to the genuine happiness and spiritual freedom of oneself and others. The chapter will discuss the four immeasurable states of loving-kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity. It (...) will then discuss the six perfections of generosity, moral discipline, forbearance, vigor, meditation, and wisdom. The chapter will conclude with a discussion of the prospects of a Buddhist virtue ethics. (shrink)

This article seeks to challenge existing understandings of good work. It does so through a critical exploration of recognitive and craft conceptions of work, which are among the richest and most philosophically nuanced of extant accounts. The recognitive view emphasises work’s recognitive value through the social esteem derived from making a valuable social contribution. But by making recognition foundational, it is unable to appreciate the irreducible ethical significance of the objective quality of one’s work activity. The ‘craft ideal’, by contrast, (...) promises to provide a powerful basis for understanding the importance of rich, rewarding, and morally educative activities, but is undermined by a laudable but misdirected egalitarian impulse which prevents it from being able to properly distinguish good from bad work. One underlying aim of our discussion is to provoke deeper reflection from business ethicists regarding what we might want from an account of good work. (shrink)

I defend a view of the structure of visual property-awareness by considering the phenomenon of perceptual constancy. I argue that visual property-awareness is a three-place relation between a subject, a property, and a manner of presentation. Manners of presentation mediate our visual awareness of properties without being objects of visual awareness themselves. I provide criteria of identity for manners ofpresentation, and I argue that our ignorance of their intrinsic nature does not compromise the viability of a theory that employs them. (...) In closing, I argue that the proposed manners of presentation are consistent with key direct-realist claims about the structure of visual awareness. (shrink)

Studies have shown that some covertly conscious brain-injured patients, who are behaviorally unresponsive, can reply to simple questions via neuronal responses. Given the possibility of such neuronal responses, Andrew Peterson et al. have argued that there is warrant for some covertly conscious patients being included in low-stakes medical decisions using neuronal responses, which could protect and enhance their autonomy. The justification for giving credence to alleged neuronal responses must be analyzed from various perspectives, including neurology, bioethics, law, and as we (...) suggest, philosophy of mind. In this article, we analyze the warrant for giving credence to neuronal responses from two different views in philosophy of mind. We consider how nonreductive physicalism’s causal exclusion problem elicits doubt about interpreting neural activity as indicating a conscious response. By contrast, such an interpretation is supported by the mind-body powers model of neural correlates of consciousness inspired by hylomorphism. (shrink)

_Kant and Applied Ethics_ makes an important contribution to Kant scholarship, illuminating the vital moral parameters of key ethical debates. Offers a critical analysis of Kant’s ethics, interrogating the theoretical bases of his theory and evaluating their strengths and weaknesses Examines the controversies surrounding the most important ethical discussions taking place today, including abortion, the death penalty, and same-sex marriage Joins innovative thinkers in contemporary Kantian scholarship, including Christine Korsgaard, Allen Wood, and Barbara Herman, in taking Kant’s philosophy in new (...) and interesting directions Clarifies Kant’s legacy for applied ethics, helping us to understand how these debates have been structured historically and providing us with the philosophical tools to address them. (shrink)

In the recent history of psychology and cognitive neuroscience, the notion of habit has been reduced to a stimulus-triggered response probability correlation. In this paper we use a computational model to present an alternative theoretical view (with some philosophical implications), where habits are seen as self-maintaining patterns of behavior that share properties in common with self-maintaining biological processes, and that inhabit a complex ecological context, including the presence and influence of other habits. Far from mechanical automatisms, this organismic and self-organizing (...) concept of habit can overcome the dominating atomistic and statistical conceptions, and the high temporal resolution effects of situatedness, embodiment and sensorimotor loops emerge as playing a more central, subtle and complex role in the organization of behavior. The model is based on a novel “iterant deformable sensorimotor medium” (IDSM), designed such that trajectories taken through sensorimotor-space increase the likelihood that in the future, similar trajectories will be taken. We couple the IDSM to sensors and motors of a simulated body and environment and show that under certain conditions, the IDSM forms self-maintaining patterns of activity that operate across the IDSM, the body, and the environment. We present various environments and the resulting habits that form in them. The model acts as an abstraction of habits at a much needed sensorimotor “meso-scale” between microscopic neuron-based models and macroscopic descriptions of behavior. Finally, we discuss how this model and extensions of it can help us understand aspects of behavioral self-organization, historicity and autonomy that remain out of the scope of contemporary representationalist frameworks. (shrink)

I wish to examine a rather different way of thinking about permissibility, one according to which, roughly speaking, an agent acts impermissibly if and only if he acts for reasons insufficient to justify him in doing what he does. For reasons that will emerge in Section II, I call this the inferential account of permissibility. I shall not here try to prove that this account is superior to its rivals. My aims are more modest. I shall develop the inferential account, (...) exhibiting some of its attractions along the way, and then show that it is invulnerable to a number of influential objections to the very idea that an agent's reasons for acting could be directly relevant to whether he acts permissibly. If these objections have seemed decisive, it is because we have not considered the full range of possible accounts. The inferential account of permissibility is both plausible and attractive---it deserves to be taken seriously. (shrink)

Aims: The experience of a compromised sense of ‘self’, termed ego-dissolution, is a key feature of the psychedelic experience and acute psychosis. This study aimed to validate the Ego-Dissolution Inventory (EDI), a new 8-item self-report scale designed to measure ego-dissolution. Additionally, we aimed to investigate the specificity of the relationship between psychedelics and ego-dissolution. Method: Sixteen items relating to altered ego-consciousness were included in an internet questionnaire; 8 relating to the experience of ego-dissolution (comprising the EDI), and 8 relating to (...) the antithetical experience of increased self-assuredness. Items were rated using a visual analogue scale. Participants answered the questionnaire for experiences with classical psychedelic drugs, cocaine or alcohol. They also answered the 7 questions from the Mystical Experiences Questionnaire (MEQ) relating to the experience of unity with one’s surroundings. Results: 691 participants completed the questionnaire, providing data for 1828 drug experiences (1043 psychedelics. 377 cocaine. 408 alcohol). Exploratory factor analysis demonstrated that the 8 EDI items loaded exclusively onto a single common factor, which was orthogonal to a second factor comprised of the items relating to increased self-assuredness (rho= -.110), demonstrating discriminant validity. The EDI correlated strongly with our measure of unitive experience (rho =.735), demonstrating convergent validity. EDI internal consistency was excellent (Cronbach’s alpha 0.93). Three analyses confirmed the specificity of ego-dissolution for experiences occasioned by psychedelic drugs. Firstly, EDI score correlated with drug-dose for psychedelic drugs (rho=.371), but not for cocaine (rho=.115) or alcohol (rho=-0.055). Secondly, the linear regression line relating the subjective intensity of the experience to EDI was significantly steeper for psychedelics (unstandardized B coefficient= 0.701) compared with cocaine (0.135) or alcohol (0.144). Finally, a binary support vector machine classifier identified experiences occasioned by psychedelic drugs vs. cocaine or alcohol with over 85% accuracy using ratings of ego-dissolution and ego-inflation alone. Conclusions: Our results demonstrate the psychometric structure, internal consistency and construct validity of the EDI. Moreover, we demonstrate the close relationship between ego-dissolution and the psychedelic experience. The EDI will facilitate the study of the neuronal correlates of ego-dissolution, which is relevant for psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy and our understanding of psychosis. (shrink)

This article provides a critical analysis of Justin Remhof’s attempt to defend the view that Nietzsche is best understood as a metaphysician.

Physarum polycephalum, also known more colloquially as 'the blob', 'acellular slime mould', or just 'slime mould', is a unicellular multinucleate protist that has continued to attract the interest of biologists over the past century because of its complex life cycle, unique physiology, morphology, and behaviour. More recently, attention has shifted to Physarum as a model organism for investigating putative cognitive capacities such as decision making, learning, and memory in organisms without nervous systems. The aim of this Element is to illustrate (...) how Physarum can be used as a valuable tool for approaching various topics in the philosophy of biology. Physarum and its behaviour not only pose a challenge to some of the received views of biological processes but also, I shall argue, provide an opportunity to clarify and appropriately sharpen the concepts underlying such received views. (shrink)

Current theoretical account of judgment has a difficult time saying anything positive about the experience of judging and, when they do offer positive accounts, they seem to overlook much that we know about the capacity already in our daily lives. Following the work of Martin Heidegger and Hubert Dreyfus, this article provides a phenomenological consideration of the structure of judging that considers judgment not as an intellectual act, but as a comportment. The article proceeds in two parts. The first offers (...) a brief consideration of the assumptions of intellectualist accounts and shows why, ultimately, they may be unable to bring judging into focus. The second section offers a phenomenological account of judging. The argument of section two is that deliberate judgment is a continuation of the structure of judgment understood as comportment and, in turn, that intellectualist accounts come onto the scene too late. (shrink)

This article discusses recent work in metaphysics on temporal parts. After a short introduction introducing the notion of a temporal part, we examine several well‐known arguments for the view that ordinary material objects such as tables, trees, and persons have temporal parts: (1) positing temporal parts makes it possible to solve puzzles of coincidence (e.g., the statue/lump puzzle); (2) positing temporal parts makes it possible to solve the problem of intrinsic change over time; and (3) the existence of temporal parts (...) can be demonstrated based on considerations about vagueness in composition. We conclude by examining briefly a recent argument that the dispute over whether there are temporal parts is merely verbal. (shrink)

This paper builds upon, but substantially revises, John Harsanyi's concept of ‘extended preferences’. An individual ‘history’ is a possible life that some person (a subject) might lead. Harsanyi supposes that a given spectator, formulating her ethical preferences, can rank histories by empathetic projection: putting herself ‘in the shoes’ of various subjects. Harsanyi then suggests that interpersonal comparisons be derived from the utility function representing spectators’ (supposedly common) ranking of history lotteries. Unfortunately, Harsanyi's proposal has various flaws, including some that have (...) hitherto escaped scholarly attention. In particular, it ignores the limits of personal identity. If the subject has welfare-relevant attributes that the spectator cannot acquire without changing who she is, full empathetic identification of the latter with the former becomes impossible. This paper proposes instead to usesympathyas the attitude on a spectator's part that allows us to make sense of her extended preferences. Sympathy – an attitude of care and concern – is a psychological state quite different from empathy. We should also allow for hetereogeneity in spectators’ extended preferences. Interpersonal comparisons emerge from a plurality of sympathetic spectators, not (as per Harsanyi) from a common empathetic ranking. (shrink)

: This article argues that conceptions of community after Dewey despair of an institutional means of recovering individuality, which is the central problem of democracy. They so despair, I contend, because of their politicized view of the individual. I first briefly consider the contrast between Dewey and contemporary proceduralists and civic republicans, before turning to my central discussion: C. Wright Mills, whose critique indicates a historical watershed for Dewey's view of community. Ultimately, despair of a Deweyan sense of community issues (...) in a contemporary stalemate between what I identify as the political "activist" and "apathist.". (shrink)

I argue that the Bradley of the 1883 The Principles of Logic marks and separates contents under tension in judgments. The separation comes in attending to content as a device for recuperation of scale. For Bradley that involves scaling material of immediate presentations under limits. As unrealised commitments of so- called real and ideal are an exclusionary condition of singular comprehension, singularity of judgments is mark of singular reflex with privative force; not some singularity in objects taken in episodic correspondence (...) forming distinctively in singular judgment. The distinguishing input, as it were, to judgment forms is via content in some consequential and fact-like limitive facing of the real. I want to approach Bradley in this slightly negative sense as imposing via inversion some sensible restrictions under some conditions of scaling rather than in direct contact with materials to which one stands in some act of obversion, finally. (shrink)

Several philosophers (e.g., Ehring (Nous (Detroit, Mich.) 30:461–480, 1996 ); Funkhouser (Nous (Detroit, Mich.) 40:548–569, 2006 ); Walter (Canadian Journal of Philosophy 37:217–244, 2007 ) have argued that there are metaphysical differences between the determinable-determinate relation and the realization relation between mental and physical properties. Others have challenged this claim (e.g., Wilson (Philosophical Studies, 2009 ). In this paper, I argue that there are indeed such differences and propose a “mechanistic” account of realization that elucidates why these differences hold. This (...) account of realization incorporates two distinct roles that mechanisms play in the realization of mental (and other special science) properties which are implicit, but undeveloped, in the literature—what I call “constitutive” and “integrative” mechanisms. I then use these two notions of mechanism to clarify some debates about the relations between realization, multiple realizability, and irreducibility. (shrink)

In his monograph, Robust Ethics: The Metaphysics and Epistemology of Godless Normative Realism, Erik Wielenberg offers arguably one of the most sophisticated defenses of the autonomy thesis to date. Wielenberg argues that the divine command theory is problematic because it cannot account for the moral obligations of reasonable unbelievers; Godless normative robust realism can be formulated in a way that avoids the standard objections to the autonomy thesis; and GRNR provides a better account of intrinsic value. In this paper, I (...) will argue Wielenberg’s defenses of the autonomy thesis fails. I will argue that his objection to divine command theories fails, that he fails to address two standard challenges to the autonomy thesis adequately, and, finally, that Wielenberg fails to show that GRNR better accounts for the intuition that certain things are intrinsically good than various forms of theistic alternatives. (shrink)

It is quite likely that parents will soon be able to use genetic engineering to select the sex of their child by directly manipulating the sex of an embryo. Some might think that this method would be a more ethical method of sex selection than present technologies such as preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) because, unlike PGD, it does not need to create and destroy “wrong gendered” embryos. This paper argues that those who object to present technologies on the grounds that (...) the embryo is a person are unlikely to be persuaded by this proposal, though for different reasons. (shrink)

I have argued elsewhere that children have a moral right to be loved. Mhairi Cowden challenges my arguments. Among other things, Cowden believes that children do not need to be loved. In this paper, I explain why Cowden’s arguments fail and offer additional evidence for why children need to be loved.

This article addresses the issue of professionalization in the life sciences during the second half of the nineteenth century through a survey of British entomological periodicals. It is generally accepted that this period saw the rise of professional practitioners and the emergence of biology (as opposed to the older mode of natural history). However, recent scholarship has increasingly shown that this narrative elides the more complex processes at work in shaping scientific communities from the 1850s to the turn of the (...) century. This article adds to such scholarship by examining the ways in which the editors of four entomological periodicals from across this time frame attempted to shape the communities of their readership, and in particular focuses upon the apparent divide between ‘mere collectors’ and ‘entomologists’ as expressed within these journals. Crucially, the article argues that non-professional practitioners were active in defining their own distinct identities and thereby claiming scientific authority. Alongside the periodicals, the article makes use of the correspondence archive of the entomologist and periodical editor Henry Tibbats Stainton (1822–1892), which has hitherto not been subject to sustained analysis by historians. (shrink)

In Laudato si’, Pope Francis calls for an “ecological conversion,” inviting his readers to abandon the interspecies violence characterizing our “throwaway culture,” which reductively and lamentably instrumentalizes the earth. Yet, while Francis recognizes the problems of systemic anthropogenic animal violence and economic agricultural imperialisms inherent in corporatized food production systems individually, he does not address the intersectional nature of these issues. Neither does he address the most obvious ethical conflicts arising in industrialized food production: the conflicts focused on meat eating. (...) In this article, we explore what Laudato si’ means for the ethics of eating well with reference to industrialized animal agriculture and its relation to animal dignity and environmental concerns. After analyzing Laudato si’ on the economics and ethics of food, animal well-being, and ecological ethics, we discuss the possibilities and limitations of Catholic vegetarianism in the context of traditional ascetic fasting practices and a discussion of ecological lamentation. (shrink)

During his more than fifty-year writing and teaching career, Horace M. Kallen (1882-1974), the American Jewish philosopher who coined the term "cultural pluralism," incorporated into his pragmatism-infused philosophy of life a number of different sciences, from racial science to psychology and physics. Part biography, part cultural history, "Horace Kallen Confronts America" offers fresh insight into the larger question of how social discourses shape modern American Jewish identity.

Given the ever-present subject of consciousness wherever consciousness is, it is peculiar that consciousness researchers often mention mental states as if they are conscious independently of being the conscious states of someone [1, p. 132]. We refer to visual perceptions that become conscious, when in reality no one has ever studied mere conscious visual perceptions. What are studied are visual perceptions belonging to conscious human or animal subjects; it is the subjects who are conscious of visual stimuli, not the visual (...) perceptions. I do not know all the reasons why conscious subjects are rarely mentioned in consciousness science, but one could be pragmatic. Explaining the mysterious jump from the nonconscious nuts and bolts of neurons to the aurora borealis of consciousness is a hard problem. But it is an easy problem compared to explaining the emergence of a single conscious subject from the human brain’s 86 billion neurons [cf. 5]. Perhaps it is more practically realistic to solve the less hard problem before attempting to solve the harder hard problem. On the other hand, if we ignore a necessary condition for the presence of consciousness, our explanations of it could be plagued by inadequacy. And how can we explain our whole data set regarding consciousness if we neglect the most fundamental aspect of the data? (shrink)

While many political theorists have focused on the question of whether states have a duty to grant citizenship to noncitizens, this article examines the issues associated with the state’s withdrawal of citizenship. Denationalization powers have recently emerged as a controversial political issue in a number of liberal states, making their ethical scrutiny important. I begin by considering the historical practice of banishment and how denationalization power emerged and became consolidated in the United Kingdom and the United States in the first (...) half of the twentieth century. I then discuss the nature of liberal objections to the power. My focus next shifts to the United Kingdom’s Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act of 2002, which attempted to create a “liberal” denationalization power. In the final section of the article, I discuss whether the Act successfully addresses liberal concerns and in so doing shed light on the possibility of reconciling liberal principles with conditional citizenship. (shrink)

While Spinoza claims that our good is both what increases our essential power and what helps us to satisfy our desires, he admits that people desire things that do not increase their power. This paper addresses this problem by arguing that Spinoza conceives of desires as expressions of our conatus , so that satisfying our desires necessarily increases our power and vice versa. This reading holds, in opposition to recent work, that Spinoza upholds a desire-satisfaction theory of the good, though (...) an unusual one, since our good is only determined by desires arising from our conatus , in other words, active desires. (shrink)

According to the principles derived from his theory of discourse ethics, Habermas's model of deliberative democracy is justified only if the public is capable of making political decisions that advance the common good. Recent public‐opinion research demonstrates that the public's overwhelming ignorance of politics precludes it from having such capabilities, even if radical measures were taken to thoroughly educate the public about politics or to increase the salience of politics in their lives.