In 1460 Karl von Seckendorf sent the following note along with a manuscript that included a biblical commentary, the Postilla super epistulas dominicales by Matthias de Liegnitz, to an acquaintance.

Dominique Lestel is a French philosopher whose work is significant for the rethinking of animality and human-animal relations. Throughout such important books as _L’Animalité _, _Les Origines animales de la culture _ and _L’Animal singulier_, he offers a fierce critique of reductive, mechanistic models of animal behaviour, as well as a positive contribution to etho-ethnographic and phenomenological methods for understanding animal life. Centred around hybrid human–animal communities of shared interests, affects and meaning, his critical and speculative approach to the animal (...) sciences offers a vision of animals as acting subjects and bearers of culture, who form their own worlds and transform them in concert with human and other partners. In tracing the ways in which we share our lives with animals in the texture of animality, Lestel’s cutting-edge philosophical ethology also contributes to an overarching philosophical anthropology of the human as the most animal of animals. This book was originally published as a special issue of _Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities. _. (shrink)

Daniel Dennett is one of the most influential thinkers at the interface between philosophy and science. This book is the first comprehensive examination of Dennett ’s ideas on the nature of thought, consciousness, free will, and the significance of Darwinism. A highly original introduction to contemporary thinking about the relationship between mind and science. This is the first comprehensive examination of Dennett ’s ideas on the nature of thought, consciousness, free will, and the significance of Darwinism. Examines Dennett ’s unique (...) response to the question of when and how science should affect the conception that we have of ourselves. Casts new light on specific controversies: Could robots ever think, feel, and enjoy freedom? Does Dennett really explain consciousness? Are mental states real or merely ‘useful fictions’? Do we have free will? Is the self a ‘centre of narrative gravity’? (shrink)

Recent discussions in critical social epistemology have raised the idea that the concept 'knower' is not only an epistemological concept, but an ethical concept as well. Though this idea plays a central role in these discussions, the theoretical underpinnings of the claim have not received extended scrutiny. This paper explores the idea that 'knower' is an irreducibly ethical concept in an effort to defend its use as a critical concept. In Section 1, I begin with the claim that 'knower' is (...) an irreducibly normative and social concept, drawing from some ideas in Wilfrid Sellars. In Section 2, I argue that one's being a knower involves demands for various sorts of ethically-laden recognition. I develop this thought by arguing that Axel Honneth's threefold typology of recognition—love, respect, and esteem—finds clear expression within the context of socio-epistemic practice. I conclude in Section 3 by arguing that Miranda Fricker's proposed " analogy " between epistemic and moral perception should be modified to indicate a closer relationship than mere analogy. (shrink)

The correspondence theory of truth is often thought to be supported by the intuition that if a proposition (sentence, belief) is true, then something makes it true. I argue that this appearance is illusory and is sustained only by a conflation of two distinct notions of truthmaking, existential and non-existential. Once the conflation is exposed, I maintain, deflationism is seen to be adequate for accommodating truthmaking intuitions.

Brings together and interprets previously hard-to-find texts, new translations and passages detailing the interplay between philosophy and psychopathology.

This paper develops a phenomenological account of what it is to lose a primitive and pervasive sense of certainty. I begin by considering Wolfgang Blankenburg’s descriptions of losing common sense or natural self-evidence. Although Blankenburg focuses primarily on schizophrenia, I note that a wider range of phenomenological disturbances can be understood in similar terms—one loses something that previously operated as a pre-reflective, unquestioned basis for experience, thought, and practice. I refer to this as the loss of certainty. Drawing upon and (...) integrating themes in the work of Wittgenstein and Husserl, I propose that losses of certainty centrally involve the inability to tolerate a certain kind of uncertainty. The contrast between having and lacking certainty is to be construed in terms of differing patterns or styles of nonlocalized, practical, bodily anticipation. I conclude by showing how this conception enables us to better understand various different disturbances to which human experience is susceptible. (shrink)

The Bayesian Approach and the Classical Approach are two very different families of approaches to statistical inference. There are many different versions of each view, often with very substantial differences among them. But I will here endeavor to explain the philosophical core of each family of approaches, as well as to identify four main philosophical differences between them.

Television medical dramas frequently depict the practice of medicine and bioethical issues in a strikingly realistic but sometimes inaccurate fashion. Because these shows depict medicine so vividly and are so relevant to the career interests of medical and nursing students, they may affect these students' beliefs, attitudes, and perceptions regarding the practice of medicine and bioethical issues. We conducted a web-based survey of medical and nursing students to determine the medical drama viewing habits and impressions of bioethical issues depicted in (...) them. More than 80% of medical and nursing students watch television medical dramas. Students with more clinical experience tended to have impressions that were more negative than those of students without clinical experience. Furthermore, viewing of television medical dramas is a social event and many students discuss the bioethical issues they observe with friends and family. Television medical dramas may stimulate students to think about and discuss bioethical issues. (shrink)

In this article, we highlight the importance of psychoanalysis and the Heideggerian concept of 'place' for each respective domain of inquiry. In particular, the writings of Jung and Lacan can unconceal and reveal new dimensions of Jeff Malpas's work on place. Alternatively, Malpas can extend the work of these psychoanalysts by showing new dimensions of their ideas through an analysis of 'place'. Ultimately, this article sets up a number of possibilities for future research through this novel interaction and engagement between (...) the philosophy of place and psychoanalysis. One of these possibilities is in genomics and genetic determinism, which we briefly acknowledge throughout. (shrink)

In this article, we report a study in which 109 research-active mathematicians were asked to judge the validity of a purported proof in undergraduate calculus. Significant results from our study were as follows: (a) there was substantial disagreement among mathematicians regarding whether the argument was a valid proof, (b) applied mathematicians were more likely than pure mathematicians to judge the argument valid, (c) participants who judged the argument invalid were more confident in their judgments than those who judged it valid, (...) and (d) participants who judged the argument valid usually did not change their judgment when presented with a reason raised by other mathematicians for why the proof should be judged invalid. These findings suggest that, contrary to some claims in the literature, there is not a single standard of validity among contemporary mathematicians. (shrink)

This article looks at the strong links between Deleuze's molecular ontology and the fields of complexity and emergence, and argues that Deleuze's work implies a ‘philosophy of technology’ that is both open and dynamic. Following Simondon and von Uexküll, Deleuze suggests that technical objects are ontologically unstable, and are produced by processes of individuation and self-organization in complex relations with their environment. For Deleuze design is not imposed from without, but emerges from within matter. The fundamental departure for Deleuze, on (...) the basis of such an ontology, is to conceive of modes of relating to the evolution of technology. In this way Deleuze, along with Guattari, provides the basis for an ethics and a politics of becoming and emergent control that constitutes an alternative to the hubris of contemporary reductionist accounts of new areas such as nanotechnology. (shrink)

In this paper I give a definition of assertion that develops William P. Alston’s account. Alston’s account of assertion combines a responsibility condition R, which captures the appropriate socio-normative status that one undertakes in asserting something, with an explicit presentation condition, such that the speech act in some way presents the content of what is being asserted. I develop Alston’s account of explicit presentation and add a Brandomian responsibility condition. I then argue that this produces an attractive position on the (...) nature of assertion. (shrink)

The paper explores how harm must be understood if intuitively attractive deontological principles concerning the infliction and prevention of harm are to be vindicated. It focuses especially upon how harm must be understood if it is to be plausible that preventing people from undergoing harm takes priority over improving the conditions of badly-off people who have not suffered harm.

This paper addresses how and why social restrictions imposed during the COVID-19 pandemic have affected people’s experiences of grief. To do so, I adopt a broadly phenomenological approach, one that emphasizes how our experiences, thoughts, and activities are shaped by relations with other people. Drawing on first-person accounts of grief during the pandemic, I identify two principal (and overlapping) themes: (a) deprivation and disruption of interpersonal processes that play important roles in comprehending and adapting to bereavement; (b) disturbance of an (...) experiential world in the context of which loss is more usually recognized and negotiated. The combination, I suggest, can amount to a sort of “grief within grief”, involving a sense of stasis consistent with clinical descriptions of prolonged grief disorder. (shrink)

Are there nonexistent objects? Can we make sense of objects having properties without thinking that there are nonexistent objects? Is existence a predicate? Can we make sense of necessarily existing objects depending on God? Tackling these central questions, Matthew Davidson explores the metaphysics of existence and nonexistence. -/- He presents an extended argument for independence actualism, a previously undefended view that objects can have properties in worlds and at times at which they do not exist. Among other unique points (...) of discussion, Davidson considers the nature of actualism, arguments for and against serious actualism, the semantics of “exists” as a predicate, the merits of different sorts of Meinongian theories, and different views on which God might ground the existence of necessarily existing abstracta. The book offers a Lewisian-style argument for adopting independence actualism in that the view may be used to solve many problems in metaphysics, philosophy of language and philosophy of religion. (shrink)

Hidden among the myriad nucleotide variants that constitute each species' gene pool are a few variants that contribute to phenotypic variation. Many of these differences that make a difference are non‐coding cis‐regulatory variants, which, unlike coding variants, can only be identified through laborious experimental analysis. Recently, Cowles et al.1 described a screening method that does an end‐run around this problem by searching for genes whose cis regulation varies without having to find the polymorphic nucleotides that influence transcription. While we will (...) continue to require a diverse arsenal of experimental methods, this versatile method will speed the identification of functional genetic variation. BioEssays 25:421–424, 2003. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

The ‘Major Transitions in Evolution’ framework has emerged as the dominant paradigm for understanding the origins of life's hierarchical organization, but it has been criticized on the grounds that it lacks theoretical unity, that is, that the events included in the framework do not constitute a coherent category. I agree with this criticism, and I argue that the best response is to modify the framework so that the events it includes do comprise a coherent category, one whose members share fundamental (...) similarities. Specifically, I recommend defining major transitions as all those, and only those, events and processes that result in the emergence of a new population of evolutionary individuals. Two sorts of change will be required to achieve this. First, events and processes that do not meet this criterion, such as the origins of the genetic code and of human language, should be excluded. Second, events and processes that do meet the criterion, but which have generally been neglected, should be included. These changes would have the dual benefits of making MTEs a philosophically coherent category and of increasing the sample size on which we may infer trends and general principles that may apply to all MTEs. (shrink)

This paper addresses the question of human and divine agency in Augustine’s later writings through the Trinitarian lens that shapes his understanding of salvation and the human person. It focuses on the way Augustine draws on Christological and pneumatological claims to structure the relation between human and divine agency within his totus christus model. Here I examine how the relation between human and divine agency can be grounded on and understood through the predestination of Christ. This leads into a consideration (...) of how we participate in Christ’s body through the power of the Spirit. In this I think we can discern a nascent eschatological social ontology: the body of Christ is not only an ecclesiological but also an anthropological metaphor signaling a new form of corporate embodiment, not complete until the resurrection, from which to understand the reforming of human agency through divine grace. (shrink)

Criminalistics laboratories routinely provide cold hits in police investigations by comparing DNA profiles from crime scenes to offenders residing in the Combined DNA Index System. Forensic DNA analysis is often glamorized in popular culture, where the perpetrators are identified and crimes solved within a single television episode. In reality forensic DNA hits can identify perpetrators of violent offenses, link multiple crimes committed by the same individual, or exclude suspects and exonerate the falsely accused. Unlike the media portrayals, downstream activities after (...) a DNA identification or cold hit are often more complex. While the Federal Bureau of Investigation cites a national Data Bank of more than 7.2 million DNA profiles and 94,000 identifications nationwide, an in-depth analysis of public safety improvements made with CODIS is currently unavailable to forensic practitioners and public policy analysts. A review of case resolutions for 198 DNA database hits in San Francisco created performance metrics to provide a concrete measure of the effectiveness of DNA databasing efforts at the city and county level. (shrink)

The view that innocent beneficiaries of injustice bear special duties to victims of injustice has recently come under attack. Luck egalitarian theorists have argued that thought experiments focusing on the way innocent beneficiaries should distribute the benefits they’ve received provide evidence against this view. The apparent special duties of innocent beneficiaries, they hold, are wholly reducible to general duties to compensate people for bad brute luck. In this paper we provide empirical evidence in defense of the view that innocent beneficiaries (...) have genuine special duties to victims of injustice. Through a series of four experiments, we show that judgments about the kinds of cases that luck egalitarian critics have provided do not undermine but rather support this view. We also explore a number of other questions that theorists working in this area have yet to discuss and provide suggestions for further research on the moral significance of benefiting from injustice. (shrink)