On the classical account of evolution by natural selection found in Lewontin and many subsequent authors, ENS is conceived as involving three key ingredients: phenotypic variation, fitness differences, and heredity. Through the analysis of three problem cases involving heredity, I argue that the classical conception is substantially flawed, showing that heredity is not required for selection. I consider further problems with the classical account of ENS arising from conflations between three distinct senses of the central concept of ‘fitness’ and offer (...) an alternative to the classical conception of ENS involving the interaction of distinct evolutionary mechanisms. (shrink)

This incisive book fills the longstanding need for a sound, reliable, and balanced guide to the whole of Plato's philosophical work. Melling describes the different stages in Plato's philosophical development, introduces his different methods and styles of philosophy, and explains why the debates were important then and what sense we can make of them now. Against the background of the ancient Greek world, Melling illuminates Plato the man, his writings, and, above all, why his ideas should be considered important two (...) thousand years after his death. (shrink)

Indigenous peoples often embrace different versions of the concept of food sovereignty. Yet some of these concepts are seemingly based on impossible ideals of food self-sufficiency. I will suggest in this essay that for at least some North American Indigenous peoples, food sovereignty movements are not based on such ideals, even though they invoke concepts of cultural revitalization and political sovereignty. Instead, food sovereignty is a strategy of Indigenous resurgence that negotiates structures of settler colonialism that erase the ecological value (...) of certain foods for Indigenous peoples. (shrink)

Cet article est la traduction de la première partied’un chapitre d’ouvrage écrit par Ullrich Melle, ayant pour titre original « Husserls deskriptive Erforschung der Gefühlserlebnisse » et paru en 2012. La traduction de cet article nous a paru particulièrement pertinente en raison du contexte actuel effervescent autour du problème de l’affectivité chez Husserl, matérialisé bien sûr par la parution tant attendue des Studien zur Struktur des Bewußtseins, notamment de leur second volume intitulé...

Background Self-binding directives (SBDs) are psychiatric advance directives that include the possibility for service users to consent in advance to compulsory care in future mental health crises. Legal provisions for SBDs exist in the Netherlands since 2008 and were updated in 2020. While ethicists and legal scholars have identified several benefits and risks of SBDs, few data on stakeholder perspectives on SBDs are available. Aims The aim of the study was to identify opportunities and challenges of SBDs perceived by stakeholders (...) who have personal or professional experience with legally enforceable SBDs. Methods Data collection was carried out in the Netherlands from February 2020 to October 2021 by means of semi-structured interviews. Participants were selected through purposive sampling and snowball methods. Interviews were conducted with mental health service users (n = 7), professionals (n = 13), and an expert on SBD policy (n = 1), resulting in a total number of 21 interviews. The data were analyzed thematically. Results Perceived benefits of SBDs included increased autonomy, improvement of the therapeutic relationship, possibility of early intervention and prevention of harm, prevention of compulsory care, reduction of the duration of compulsory care and recovery, mitigation of negative experiences around compulsory care, and guidance for professionals in providing compulsory care. Perceived risks included infeasibility of SBD instructions, difficulty in decision-making around SBD activation, limited accessibility of SBDs, disappointment of service users due to non-compliance with SBDs, and limited evaluation and updating of SBD content. Barriers to SBD completion included lack of knowledge of SBDs among professionals, lack of motivation or insight among service users, and lack of professional support for SBD completion. Facilitators of SBD completion and activation included support for SBD completion, involvement of relatives and peer experts, specification of SBD content, and evaluation of compulsory care and SBD content. The new legal framework was regarded as having both positive and negative effects on SBD implementation. Conclusions Stakeholders who have personal or professional experience with legally enforceable SBDs perceive SBDs as having important benefits and tend not to articulate the fundamental ethical concerns about SBDs which can be found in the ethics and legal literature. Instead, they perceive ethical and practical challenges that can be addressed through the implementation of suitable safeguards. (shrink)

Avant-propos du traducteur Cet article est la deuxième (et dernière) partie de la traduction du chapitre d’ouvrage de Ullrich Melle ayant pour titre « Husserls deskriptive Erforschung der Gefühlserlebnisse », publié en 2012. Le premier volet de ce travail a paru dans le précédent numéro d’Alter, accompagné d’une introduction précisant l’intérêt majeur de ce texte pour l’étude de la phénoménologie husserlienne de l’affectivité et justifiant les traductions de quelques termes centraux. Nous y...

The point of departure of any ethical theory is the anthropological fact that normally developed humans must lead their own lives themselves. This means that their conduct is neither programmed nor determined by instincts. Human beings must on every occasion engage the circumstances of a practical situation by their own choice and decision. Even when they find themselves delivered over to the stimuli and powers of particular circumstances in a completely passive manner, this does not occur in the way that (...) it does for a robot, but rather, on the basis of a background of an essential possibility that they can conduct themselves otherwise than they are now behaving. Where there is the possibility of a choice, then the question inevitably arises regarding the principle of the choice. On what do we base our decision to choose one possibility rather than another? We can let fate decide, we can consult astrological charts, we can appeal to an authority, or we can try to find out what we truly want, what are our deepest desires and what choice agrees best with these desires. Finally, we can also inquire into what decision is the objectively correct and rational one, i.e. which decision is good independent of our subjective preferences. This latter case, of course, presupposes a standard of the objectively good and rational, in regard to which we can be responsible for and evaluate our decisions as well as our ensuing actions. (shrink)

This book traces the profound impact of technical media on the sound of music, asking: how do media technologies shape sound? How does this affect music? And how did it change what we listen for in music? Based on the information theoretical proposition that all transmission channels introduce noise and distortion, the argument accounts for the fact that technologically reproduced music is inherently shaped by the technologies that enable its reproduction. The media archaeological assessment of this noise of sound media (...) developed in the book draws from a wide range of sources, both theoretical and historical, conceptual and technical. Together, they show that noise should not be understood as unwanted by-effect but instead plays a foundational role in shaping the sonic contours of technologically reproduced music. Over the course of five chapters, the book sketches a broad history of the problem of noise in sound recording, looks at specific analog and digital noise-related technologies, traces the ideal of sonic purity back to key developments in nineteenth century acoustics, and develops an analysis of the close interrelation between noise and the temporality of sound. This relation, it argues, is central to the way in which recorded sound and music resonate with listeners. Ultimately, this media specific analysis of the noise of sound media thereby greatly enriches our understanding of the way in which they changed and continue to change the sonorous qualities of music, thus offering a new perspective on the interaction between music, media and listeners. (shrink)

Capitalism is a system of selfish individualism. That is why it is so successful. Individualism is the idea that individuals should decide for themselves what they will do, including what they will produce and consume. Because an individual’s preferences both cause their actions and measure the value of their outcomes, individualism naturally promotes personal welfare. Understood as a tendency to give more weight to our own welfare than to others’, selfishness is an unavoidable—and welcome—feature of human life. Individualism protects each (...) of us against the selfishness of our fellow citizens, including the authorities. (shrink)

Environmental tourism is a growing practice in indigenous communities worldwide. As members of indigenous communities, what environmental justice framework should we use to evaluate these practices? I argue that, while some of the most relevant and commonly discussed norms are fair compensation and participative justice, we should also follow Robert Figueroa’s claim that “recognition justice” is relevant for environmental justice. I claim that from Figueroa’s analysis there is a “norm of direct participation,” which requires all environmental tourism practices to feature (...) a forum for meaningful representation andconsideration. This claim motivates a distinction between practices that should be termed “mutually advantageous exploitation” and those that should be termed “environmental coalition development.” We need to ask ourselves whether we should continue to tolerate mutually advantageous exploitation and how we can increase the number of practices that develop coalitions. (shrink)

Whyte chooses nine thinkers to illustrate this historical and evolutionary movement, including Heraclitus, Marx, and Freud, and the resulting vignettes are a synthesis of knowledge that suggest, as well, a reorientation of thought, feeling, and action for the future."--BOOK JACKET.

Environmental justice seeks fairness in how environmental burdens and risks are visited on poor people, women, communities of color, Indigenous peoples, minorities, and citizens of developing countries. It also concerns whether members of these same groups have fair access to environmental goods such as urban green spaces, forested areas, and clean water. Environmental goods extend, also, to opportunities to benefit from enterprises such as tourism and green infrastructure (Shrader-Frechette 2002; Bullard 2000; Taylor 2000; Whyte 2010). The moral wrongs characteristic (...) of environmental injustices often do not resonate with members of dominant societies. In some cases, those injustices are unknowable. To say that .. (shrink)

Cette bande dessine prsente par le Haut Commissariat des Nations Unies aux droits de l'homme (HCDH) le Programme commun des Nations Unies sur le VIH/SIDA (ONUSIDA) et l'Organisation mondiale de la Sant (OMS) a t conue pour donner aux jeunes les moyens de dfendre les droits de l'homme en relation avec le VIH/SIDA pour sensibiliser aux liens cruciaux existant entre le VIH/SIDA et les droits de l'homme pour faire mieux connatre la maladie et pour lutter contre les ides fausses et (...) les tabous qui s'y associent. (shrink)

Friedrich Hayek repeatedly stressed the centrality of submission to his own account of spontaneous order. In what he depicted as the rationalist refusal to submit to anything beyond human comprehension, he saw a threat to the “spontaneous order” of a market society. Kyong-Min Son’s criticism of my account of the neoliberal subject provides me with an opportunity to further specify my understanding of the submissive disposition of the Hayekian subject. In this brief reply, I defend the claim that Hayek saw (...) the complexity and opacity of the market order as constraining the possibility of collective political intervention that aims to alter the outcomes of market competition. While Hayek theorized a subject who was actively invested in the competitive “game,” the premise of this investment was submission to the rules of the market and acceptance of its outcomes as a form of fate. (shrink)

Capitalism is a system of selfish individualism. That is why it is so successful. Individualism is the idea that individuals should decide for themselves what they will do, including what they will produce and consume. Because an individual’s preferences both cause their actions and measure the value of their outcomes, individualism naturally promotes personal welfare. Understood as a tendency to give more weight to our own welfare than to others’, selfishness is an unavoidable—and welcome—feature of human life. Individualism protects each (...) of us against the selfishness of our fellow citizens, including the authorities. (shrink)

Intentional mental states have causes and effects. Davidson has shown that this fact alone does not entail the existence of psycho‐physical laws, but his anomalism makes the connection between the content and causation of intentional states utterly mysterious. By defining intentional states in terms of their causes and effects, functionalism promises to explain this connection. If intentional states have their causes and effects in virtue of their contents, then there must be intrinsic states (of the people who have them) which (...) are ‘local causal surrogates’ for the propositions believed, desired, or whatever. We can define these intrinsic states in terms of the laws that govern them, but these laws alone are not sufficient to account for intentional content. To do that we need to invoke laws which link these intrinsic states with their contents. Such a ‘wide’ functional account is sketched; it combines a suggestion of Ramsey's about truth conditions with a ‘feedback’ account of the content of desires. (shrink)

stufe oder Unterstufe im emporsteigenden Gang zur absoluten Er kenntnis gewinnen. Man kann sagen, daB das philosophisehe Interesse in vollbe wuBter Weise als leitendes Ziel das vor Augen hat, was sieh in jedem 5 rein theoretisehen Interesse als gleiehsam verborgene Tendenz be kundet: Die Tendenz auf vollkommene Erkenntnis liegt in allem rein theoretisehen Bestreben. a) Immerfort ftihlt es sieh fortgetrieben im Sinne mOgliehster Verdeutliehung, Klarung, mogliehst vollkom mener Begriindung. b) Immerfort ftihlt es sieh mit der vereinzelten 10 Tatsaehe, mit dem (...) vereinzelten Gesetz unbefriedigt; es kann daran nieht haften bleiben. Es ftihlt sich gedrangt, von dem Besonderen emporzusteigen zum Allgemeineren, von der Tatsaehe zum Gesetz, von der niederen Allgemeinheit zu der hoheren. Damit nieht zufrie den, muB es aIle mogliehen theoretisehen Lehren durehlaufen, um- 15 spannende Theorien bauen, die Theorien zu umfassenden Theorien verbinden, und so immer weiter. Dabei erweitert sieh der enge Kreis der yom theoretisehen Interesse zunaehst ins Auge gefaBten Gegen standliehkeiten; Einheit der theoretisehen Erkenntnis greift immer weiter von Gebiet zu Gebiet, ohne Grenze. 20 Bringen wir uns diese Tendenzen zur Klarheit, so sehen wir, daB sie im Verborgenen dem Ziel der hoehsten Vereinheitliehung die nen, daB sie verstreuten, zusammenhangslosen Erkenntnissen feind sind, daB sie gleiehsam niehts Untheoretisehes, Unvereinheitlichtes dulden wollen ebensowenig als ein Ende, soweit irgend noeh ein plus 25 ultra denkbar ist. Und zu alledem gehort offenbar aueh die Tendenz zu voll ausweisender Klarheit. (shrink)

Ideas for How to Take Wicked Problems Seriously Content Type Journal Article Pages 1-5 DOI 10.1007/s10806-011-9348-9 Authors Kyle Powys Whyte, Department of Philosophy, Michigan State University, 503 S. Kedzie Hall, East Lansing, MI 48824, USA Paul B. Thompson, Department of Philosophy, Michigan State University, 503 S. Kedzie Hall, East Lansing, MI 48824, USA Journal Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics Online ISSN 1573-322X Print ISSN 1187-7863.

ABSTRACTPolitical reconciliation between Indigenous peoples and settler nations is among the major ethical issues of the twenty-first century for millions of Indigenous peoples globally. Political reconciliation refers to the aspiration to transform violent and harmful relationships into respectful relationships. This essay discusses how efforts to achieve reconciliation are not feasible when settler nations and some of their citizens believe Indigenous peoples to be clamoring for undeserved privileges. Settler colonialism often includes the illusion that historic and contemporary settler populations have moral (...) grounds for their mistreatment of Indigenous peoples. This illusion masks historical and ongoing practices of settler colonialism that thwart effective practices of reconciliation. (shrink)