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This article juxtaposes Anna Pawełczyńska’s writings with the works of Meir Dworzecki and Dov Levin. It will adopt a threefold analytical lens: first, using Pawełczyńska’s writings to reassess the conception of the early resistance that Dworzecki elaborated, second utilising Dworzecki’s viewpoint as a means to articulate Pawełczyńska’s perspective of Amidah, and then looking at Levin’s perspective on Pawełczyńska’s use of partisan testimony as a historical source. The main aims are to contribute to today’s debates on the Jewish (...) resistance and the relevance of partisanship in Holocaust historiography. The article also highlights some debates on the relationship between history and memory, as well as the necessity of rethinking Catholic-Jewish relations in Poland before and after the war. It presses for a new discussion of Dan Michman’s discourse of Jewish resistance, or Yehuda Bauer’s conceptualisation of it, and underscores the originality of Levin’s thought on memory as an essential tool for history. By way of a conclusion, the reader is invited to rethink the Polish World War II historiography and to read Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik’s contribution about the blessings of the Amidah. (shrink)

Sulla scia di un percorso già segnato da appuntamenti importanti e coinvolgenti istituzioni e studiosi italiani e stranieri, centri di studi specializzati, il Volume che qui si presenta raccoglie i contributi del Convegno Internazionale di Studi dedicato a: Lévinas e la cultura del XX secolo, tenutosi a Napoli tra il 10 ed il 12 aprile 2000: G. Lissa, S. Trigano, I. Kajon, E. Méir, S. Petrosino, E. D’Antuono, M. Signore, M. Zarader, D. Cohen-Lévinas, J. Colette, E. Baccarini, D. Banon, P. (...) Amodio, E. Arseneva, è. Levine, F. Ciaramelli, M. Caporale, G. Giannini. (shrink)

In many spheres, the law takes the legal concept of causation to correspond to the folk concept (the correspondence assumption). Courts, including the US Supreme Court, tend to insist on the "common understanding" and that which is "natural to say" (Burrage v. United States) when it comes to expressions relating to causation, and frequently refuse to clarify the expression to juries. As recent work in psychology and experimental philosophy has uncovered, lay attributions of causation are susceptible to a great number (...) of unexpected factors, some of which seem rather peripheral to causation. One of those is the norm effect (Knobe & Fraser, 2008): Agents who, in acting as they do, break a salient norm, are more likely to be considered as having caused a certain consequence than when they do not violate a norm. According to some (e.g., Alicke, 1992) this constitutes a bias. According to others (e.g., Sytsma, 2020), the folk concept of causation is sensitive to normative factors, and there’s nothing wrong with that. In this paper, we explore the question whether the norm effect should be considered a bias from the legal perspective on the one hand, and from the psychological perspective on the other. To do this, we test whether norms which are nonpertinent to the consequences or outright silly also impact causation judgements. The data from two preregistered experiments (total N=593) clearly show they do. This, we argue, makes the bias interpretation plausible from the psychological perspective, and both plausible and problematic from the legal perspective. It also shows that the law should abstain from unreflectively assuming conceptual correspondence between legal and ordinary language concepts. (shrink)

In a study that goes beyond the ego affirmed by Freudian psychology, David Levin offers an account of personal growth and self-fulfillment based on the development of our capacity for listening. Drawing on the work of Dewey, Piaget, Erikson, and Kohlberg, he uses the vocabulary of phenomenological psychology to distinguish four stages in this developmental process and brings us the significance of these stages for music, psychotherapy, ethics, politics, and ecology. This analysis substantiates his claim that the development of (...) our listening capacity is a process that fits Foucault's conception of a practice of the self, forming our character as social beings and moral agents. David Levin contends that our self- development as auditory beings is necessary for the achievement of a just and democratic society. (shrink)

A new explanation of the relation between schooling and work in the democratic, advanced industrial state emerges from this study that rejects both traditional views and the more recent Marxian perspective. Traditional views consider schools as autonomous institutions that are able to pursue the goals of equality and social mobility irrespective of the inequalities of capitalist society; the Marxian perspective views schools as serving the role of producing wage-labor for capitalistic exploitation. The authors suggest that the shortcomings of both views (...) are rooted in the fact that they do not recognize the true functions of the democratic, capitalist state. The state is seen as an arena for struggle between forces pushing for egalitarian, democratic reforms and those seeking to use the resources of the state for private capital accumulation. Depending on which side has primacy at the moment, schools will reflect one set of goals over the other. However, victory is never complete, and the tide of battle has shifted back and forth historically. The authors develop this theory through interpreting the dynamic relation between U.S. schools and the workplace. Based on this approach, they predict changes in both schooling and work as well as the forms that future conflicts between the contending forces are likely to take. (shrink)

To reassure those concerned about wholesale discontinuity between human existence and posthumanity, transhumanists assert shared ground with antiquity on vital challenges and aspirations. Because their claims reflect key misconceptions, there is no shared vision for transhumanists to invoke. Having exposed their misuses of Prometheus, Plato, and Aristotle, I show that not only do transhumanists and antiquity crucially diverge on our relation to ideals, contrast-dependent aspiration, and worthy endeavors but that illumining this divide exposes central weaknesses in transhumanist argumentation. What is (...) more, antiquity’s handling of these topics suggests a way through the impasse in current enhancement debates about human “nature” and helps to resolve a tension within transhumanists’ accounts of what our best moments signify about the ontological requirements for real flourishing. (shrink)

Defenders of pragmatic theories of knowledge (such as contextualism and sensitive invariantism) argue that these theories, unlike those that invoke a single standard for knowledge, comport with the intuitively compelling thesis that knowledge is the norm of assertion and practical reason. In this paper, I dispute this thesis, and argue that, therefore, the prospects for both “high standard” approach, and contend that if one abandons the thesis that knowledge is the norm of assertion and practical reason, the most serious arguments (...) against it lose force. (shrink)

In Marx’s posthumously published manuscripts from 1857–1863, we find a systematic exposition of his concept of subsumption. Though much has been written about it, significant interpretative gaps persist. In this article, I begin filling these gaps by examining the emergence of Marx’s concept of subsumption. I will argue that in the Grundrisse Marx brings together distinct but complementary elements from Hegel’s theories of judgment and teleology to coin two new and well delineated concepts of subsumption that prefigure his later concepts (...) of formal and real subsumption. These two concepts may be defined as: (a) the process of acquiring the social relational property of being a means to an end; (b) the process by which changes in non-relational properties occur in something due to this acquisition – and occur to better suit said end. (shrink)

The basic concepts of motor control formulated in our target article were derived from specific experiments, a fact which is disregarded in Dalenoort's comments. A purely academic approach to motor control may not result in a clearer understanding of control concepts.

Engels explained his admiration for Balzac by pointing to an apparent discrepancy between Balzac’s literature and his politics. Despite his sympathies for the French nobility, Balzac’s realism “compelled” him to portray this class in unflattering terms. In this article, I challenge Engels’s reading, arguing that Marx’s scattered remarks on Balzac take us in a different direction. Specifically, I argue that in his remark on Balzac’s The Peasants Marx pinpointed the author’s preoccupation with the spread of bourgeois ideology into the nobility. (...) Building on this remark, I analyze several of Balzac’s works showing that insofar as Balzac lambasted the nobles, his critique was primarily directed towards nobles who had adopted bourgeois ways. In this light, and against Engels’s observation, Balzac’s critique of the nobles appears to stem from his sympathy to aristocratic values rather than conflicting with them. In showing that affinities between Balzac, Marx and Engels did not depend on Balzac expressing anti-noble sentiment, I argue that the admiration the fathers of communism had for the monarchist’s prose exemplifies a partial, yet typical convergence between socialists and conservatives in their critique of modern bourgeois society. (shrink)

Understanding cooperation and punishment in small-scale societies is crucial for explaining the origins of human cooperation. We studied warfare among the Turkana, a politically uncentralized, egalitarian, nomadic pastoral society in East Africa. Based on a representative sample of 88 recent raids, we show that the Turkana sustain costly cooperation in combat at a remarkably large scale, at least in part, through punishment of free-riders. Raiding parties comprised several hundred warriors and participants are not kin or day-to-day interactants. Warriors incur substantial (...) risk of death and produce collective benefits. Cowardice and desertions occur. (shrink)

Transhumanists would have humanity's creation of posthumanity be our governing aim. Susan B. Levin challenges their overarching commitments regarding the mind, brain, ethics, liberal democracy, knowledge, and reality. Her critique unmasks their notion of humanity's self-transcendence via science and technology as pure, albeit seductive, fantasy.

The distinctly contemporary proliferation of pornography and hate speech poses a challenge to liberalism's traditional ideal of a 'marketplace of ideas' facilitated by state neutrality about the content of speech. This new study argues that the liberal state ought to depart from neutrality to meet this challenge.

The question, what measures to address the shortage of transplantable organs are ethically permissible? requires careful attention because, apart from its impact on medical practice, the stance we espouse here reflects our interpretations of human freedom and mortality. To raise the number of available organs, on utilitarian grounds, bioethicists and medical professionals increasingly support mandatory procurement. This view is at odds with the Catechism of the Catholic Church, according to which ‘[o]rgan donation after death is a noble and meritorious act’ (...) but ethically impermissible absent consent. Those who concur with this position, but would oppose conscription on independent philosophical grounds, have not yet found a voice in the Western tradition comparable in strength to the utilitarian basis of the policy’s support, for Kantian and Aristotelian ethics, too, lend themselves to a requirement that we make our organs available to others when they can no longer serve ourselves. One finds an ethical wedge against conscription in an unexpected philosophical locale: the ‘fundamental ontology’ of Heidegger’s Being and Time, where pertinent individual choices arc protectively over what happens post mortem. Heidegger’s perspective on this issue thus meshes, not with other philosophical voices, but with Catholic doctrine—a surprising convergence of atheistic and theistic approaches to our flourishing whose ground I address in the article’s conclusion. (shrink)

When do two sentences say the same thing, that is, express the same content? We defend two-component (2C) semantics: the view that propositional contents comprise (at least) two irreducibly distinct constituents: (1) truth-conditions and (2) subject-matter. We contrast 2C with one-component (1C) semantics, focusing on the view that subject-matter is reducible to truth-conditions. We identify exponents of this view and argue in favor of 2C. An appendix proposes a general formal template for propositional 2C semantics.

The international protest surrounding the Copenhagen Zoo’s recent decision to kill a healthy giraffe in the name of population management reveals a deep moral tension between contemporary zoological display practices—which induce zoo-goers to view certain animals as individuals, quasi-persons, or friends—and the traditional objectives of zoos, which ask us only to view animals as specimens. I argue that these zoological display practices give rise to moral obligations on the part of zoos to their visitors, and thus ground indirect duties on (...) behalf of zoos to their animals. I conclude that zoos might take on interspecies friendship as a new zoological objective. (shrink)

I argue against the currently popular view that a radical change in theory affects the meaning of theoretical terms, and hence render pre- and post-shift theories incomparable. I first show how to pose the meaning-change issue without appeal to meanings reified. I contend that arguments against theory-neutral observation languages are faulty, but that even if they were sound, there are semantic devices that allow a theory to refer to the factual basis of a competitor. This suggests a picture of science (...) as the accumulation of truths, with each successive stage being more stable. (shrink)

Alex Broadbent’s Philosophy of Epidemiology is the latest volume in Palgrave Macmillan’s New Directions in the Philosophy of Science series. Other monographs in the series focus on mathematics, biology, astronomy, et al.—the usual topics of discourse when philosophers engage science. The present volume is a welcome addition not just to the series but also for the field of epidemiology. As Broadbent notes, “Although a few philosophers have studied epidemiology, there have been no philosophical studies of epidemiology” . There is one (...) now.As noted in the book’s foreword, the core theme of Philosophy of Epidemiology “has to do with the nature and role of explanation and prediction in epidemiological analyses” . These are practical matters which are familiar to epidemiologists, but being largely mechanical in nature, “this explains why philosophers of science have neglected epidemiology” .Broadbent is a young philosopher, trained at Cam .. (shrink)

Writing twenty years ago, the late Harvard Law professor William Stuntz diagnosed a set of “pathological politics” at the heart of US criminal law. Stuntz sought to explain why carceral policies in...

This paper defends the view that homosexuality is abnormal and hence undesirable—not because it is immoral or sinful, or because it weakens society or hampers evolutionary development, but for a purely mechanical reason. It is a misuse of bodily parts. Clear empirical sense attaches to the idea of the use of such bodily parts as genitals, the idea that they are for something, and consequently to the idea of their misuse. I argue on grounds involving natural selection that misuse of (...) bodily parts can with high probability be connected to unhappiness. I regard these matters as prolegomena to such policy issues as the rights of homosexuals, the rights of those desiring not to associate with homosexuals, and legislation concerning homosexuality, issues which I shall not discuss systematically here. However, I do in the last section draw a seemingly evident corollary from my view that homosexuality is abnormal and likely to lead to unhappiness. (shrink)

Proponents of corporate environmental responsibility argue that corporations shortchange shareholders by investing too little in environmental responsibility. They claim that corporations can improve their financial performance by increasing their investment in environmental responsibility. Opponents of corporate social responsibility argue that corporations shortchange shareholders by investing too much in environmental responsibility. They claim that corporations can improve their financial performance by reducing their investment in environmental responsibility. Yet, others claim that corporations serve their shareholders well by investing just enough in social (...) responsibility, not too little and not too much. If so, corporations increase their investment in environmental responsibility when an increase improves financial performance and reduce their investment in environmental responsibility when a decrease improves financial performance. Our evidence is consistent with this last claim. We find that the behavior of corporations is consistent with the claim that they act in the interest of shareholders, increasing or decreasing their investment in environmental responsibility as necessary to improve their financial performance. (shrink)

It is argued against critics that the concept of race is well-formed. The issue is formulated in terms of the classic sense/reference distinction and shown that "race" has a sense specified in terms of geographic ancestry, and thereby a reference. Excessive constraints on "race," for instance that races must by definition have signature genes, are rejected. Empirical validation is considered, although the emphasis here is to place empirical validation in a philosophical context, not answer the empirical questions themselves. At several (...) junctures the familiar divisions of the races are compared to the stellar luminosity types of astronomy, which are still serviceable although representing an earlier state of astrophysical knowledge. (shrink)

This paper examines the adequacy of an evolutionary-oriented notion of rationality—ecological rationality—that has recently been proposed in economics. Ecological rationality is concerned with what it is rational to do, and in this sense is a version of what philosophers call ‘practical rationality’. Indeed, the question of the adequacy of ecological rationality as it is understood in the paper, is the question of whether ecological rationality is a genuine notion of practical rationality. The paper first explicates and motivates the notion of (...) ecological rationality by (a) explicating the notion of practical rationality, (b) grounding ecological rationality in an evolutionary approach to the emotions which is mainly illustrated by the example of fear, and (c) outlining the reasons adduced in economics for generalizing ecological rationality beyond the emotions. The paper then argues that (d) the raison d’être of practical rationality is first and foremost a specific role it plays in the explanation of behavior, or in telling why it has occurred. Finally, based on (a)–(d), the paper argues that (e) ecological rationality lacks a constitutive feature of practical rationality—namely, normativity—which is related to the latter’s basic explanatory role, and thus cannot be considered a genuine notion of practical rationality. While the paper focuses on the economic version of ecological rationality, its conclusions apply just as well to other, related, versions of the ecological notion that have been proposed in biology and evolutionary psychology. (shrink)

Levin argues that the results of the most methodologically sound and philosophically relevant studies discussed in this volume [ Experimental Philosophy] could have been obtained from the armchair, and thus that experimental philosophy may not present a serious challenge to the traditional methods of analytic philosophy.

Hegel contends that judgements are contradictory, finite and untrue. Prominent schol- ars argue that Hegel’s issue with judgements is resolved in the later stages of his Logic. Specifically, Ng suggests that this solution is found in Hegel’s discussion of life. In this article, I argue that not only does life fail to resolve Hegel’s problem with judgement— death highlights its insolubility. To support this claim, I examine Hegel’s discussion of judgements in the Logic, showing that judgements are inherently contradictory because (...) they both unite and separate individuals and universals. Instead of being resolved ret- rospectively, I demonstrate that contradiction, finitude and untruth are intrinsic to judgements. Moreover, since judgements play a constitutive and determinative role in Hegel’s metaphysics, they pass their contradictions, finitude and untruth onto the objects they constitute. Specifically, I argue that for living beings, judgement is literally a matter of life and death, because the contradiction of judgements implies the finitude of the objects they constitute—namely, the perishability of things and the mortality of organisms. (shrink)

This collection of original essays by preeminent interpreters of continental philosophy explores the question of whether Western thought and culture have been dominated by a vision-centered paradigm of knowledge, ethics, and power. It focuses on the character of vision in modern philosophy and on arguments for and against the view that contemporary life and thought are distinctively "ocularcentric." The authors examine these ideas in the context of the history of philosophy and consider the character of visual discourse in the writings (...) of Plato, Descartes, Hegel, Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger, Benjamin, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Levinas, Derrida, Foucault, Gadamer, Wittgenstein, and Habermas. With essays on television, the visual arts, and feminism, the book will interest readers in cultural studies, gender studies, and art history as well as philosophers. (shrink)