The volume under review brings together new translations of the young Nietzsche's four published Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen and, from his contemporary literary leftovers, a portion commonly called "Wir Philologen," here translated, rightly enough, "We Classicists." The latter is an important gift to the English-speaking student of Nietzsche since it starts, as the only previous translation could not, with the leftovers as chronologically ordered by Georgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari; it is fully annotated, in some places beyond Colli/montinari; and it is introduced (...) by Arrowsmith so as to highlight Nietzsche's struggle with the classicists. (shrink)

According to the most popular versions of the flicker defense, Frankfurt-style cases fail to undermine the Principle of Alternative Possibilities (PAP) because agents in these cases are (directly) morally responsible not for making the decisions they make but for making these decisions on their own, which is something they could have avoided doing. Frankfurt defenders have primarily focused on trying to show that the alternative possibility of refraining from making the relevant decisions on their own is not a robust alternative, (...) while generally granting that this alternative cannot easily be eliminated from successful cases of this sort. In a recent issue of this journal, Stockdale (2022) attempts to sidestep the debate concerning robustness and develops a novel kind of Frankfurt-style case in which agents are unable to avoid making the relevant decisions on their own. The fundamental problem with Stockdale’s argument is that it hinges on an implausible conception of acting on one’s own. I help clarify the pertinent sense of what it means to do a thing on one’s own in this context and show that these new cases are unable to overcome the targeted versions of the flicker defense of PAP. (shrink)

Integrating large language models (LLMs) like GPT-4 into medical ethics is a novel concept, and understanding the effectiveness of these models in aiding ethicists with decision-making can have significant implications for the healthcare sector. Thus, the objective of this study was to evaluate the performance of GPT-4 in responding to complex medical ethical vignettes and to gauge its utility and limitations for aiding medical ethicists. Using a mixed-methods, cross-sectional survey approach, a panel of six ethicists assessed LLM-generated responses to eight (...) ethical vignettes.The main outcomes measured were relevance, reasoning, depth, technical and non-technical clarity, as well as acceptability of GPT-4’s responses. The readability of the responses was also assessed. Of the six metrics evaluating the effectiveness of GPT-4’s responses, the overall mean score was 4.1/5. GPT-4 was rated highest in providing technical (4.7/5) and non-technical clarity (4.4/5), whereas the lowest rated metrics were depth (3.8/5) and acceptability (3.8/5). There was poor-to-moderate inter-rater reliability characterised by an intraclass coefficient of 0.54 (95% CI: 0.30 to 0.71). Based on panellist feedback, GPT-4 was able to identify and articulate key ethical issues but struggled to appreciate the nuanced aspects of ethical dilemmas and misapplied certain moral principles.This study reveals limitations in the ability of GPT-4 to appreciate the depth and nuanced acceptability of real-world ethical dilemmas, particularly those that require a thorough understanding of relational complexities and context-specific values. Ongoing evaluation of LLM capabilities within medical ethics remains paramount, and further refinement is needed before it can be used effectively in clinical settings. (shrink)

It’s not implausible to think that whenever I have a justified noninferential belief that p, it is caused by a seeming that p. It’s also tempting to think that something contributes to the justification of my belief only if I hold my belief because of that thing. Thus, given that many of our noninferential beliefs are justified and that we hold them because of seemings, one might be inclined to hold a view like Phenomenal Conservatism, according to which seemings play (...) a crucial role—perhaps the only crucial role—in the justification of our noninferential beliefs. But Phenomenal Conservatism seems to conflict, in a number of ways, with externalist accounts of justification. As a result, the attractiveness of the intuitions appealed to in support of views like Phenomenal Conservatism present something of a challenge to externalism. The purpose of this paper is to deal with that challenge by developing and defending an externalist-friendly account of the role of seemings in the formation and justification of our noninferential beliefs—an account that incorporates what is attractive in views like Phenomenal Conservatism. Because this externalist-friendly account is compatible with both externalist accounts of justification and the plausible elements of views like Phenomenal Conservatism, the challenge to externalism inspired by such views is thereby undermined. (shrink)

Nietzsche and Foucault famously employ a philosophical method of “genealogy” and apply it to the realm of morality in particular. In this article I would like to do two main things: I will begin by offering a contribution toward a sort of “genealogy of genealogy,” that is, toward an account of how the method emerged historically. I will then give an explanation of how the method is supposed to work. In a subsequent, companion article in this journal, “Genealogy and Morality,” (...) I will discuss the method’s application to morality in some concrete ways. (shrink)

An assumption central to some forms of retributivism is that it is noninstrumentally good that a culpable wrongdoer suffers in receiving a deserved punishment. A justification for this can be built from a conversational theory of moral responsibility, and in particular deserved blame. On such a theory, deserved blame is fitting as a response to a wrongdoer insofar as it is conversationally meaningful as a reply to a wrong done. Punishment, it might be argued, has this feature too. The conversational (...) aim in both deserved blame and punishment is for the guilty to grasp the meaning conveyed by those who blame or punish and then respond meaningfully by, for example, apologizing or expressing remorse. Ideally, a culpable agent would experience a form and degree of guilt suitable for a wrong done. So, a conversational theory of punishment can then be justified in terms of providing conditions conducive for a culpable wrongdoer to respond to punishment by manifesting an appropriately pained response of guilt. (shrink)

The release of genetically engineered organisms into the shared environment raises scientific, ethical, and societal issues. Using some form of democratic deliberation to provide the public with a voice on the policies that govern these technologies is important, but there has not been enough attention to how we should connect public deliberation to the existing regulatory process. Drawing on lessons from previous public deliberative efforts by U.S. federal agencies, we identify several practical issues that will need to be addressed if (...) relevant federal agencies are to undertake public deliberative activities to inform decision‐making about gene editing in the wild. We argue that, while agencies may have institutional capacity to undertake public deliberative activities, there may not be sufficient political support for them to do so. Advocates of public deliberation need to make a stronger case to Congress about why federal agencies should be encouraged and supported to conduct public deliberations. (shrink)

Belief fragments and mental files are based on the same idea: that information in people’s minds is compartmentalized rather than lumped all together. Philosophers mostly use the two notions differently, though the exact relationship between fragments and files has yet to be examined in detail. This chapter has three main goals. The first is to argue that fragments and files, properly understood, play distinct yet complementary explanatory roles; the second is to defend a model of belief that includes them both; (...) and the third is to raise and address a shared dilemma that confronts them: that they threaten to be either explanatorily lightweight or empirically refuted. This chapter contends that it is better to embrace the horn of this dilemma that opens up files and fragments to empirical refutation or confirmation, by adopting a psychofunctionalist approach. (shrink)

Metaethical constitutivists attempt to explain reasons or normativity in terms of what is constitutive of agency. Michael Smith has recently defended a novel form of constitutivism that he argues provides a rational foundation for morality. This article develops three main objections centered on (1) the normative significance of Smith’s conception of ideal agency, (2) whether that conception begs the question in favor of the rationality of moral requirements, and (3) whether Smith’s constitutivism provides a plausible account of the content (...) of moral requirements. The conclusion is that Smith’s constitutivism, at least in its present form, is not persuasive. (shrink)

Both Higher-Order Uni cation approaches to In linguistic theories on discourse coherence Kehler, discourse semantics Dalrymple et al., 1991; Shieber et.

∗Thanks to J. C. Beall, Alex Byrne, Jason Decker, Tyler Doggett, Paul Elbourne, Adam Elga, Warren Goldfarb, Delia Graff, Richard Heck, Charles Parsons, Mark Richard, Susanna Siegel, Jason Stanley, Judith Thomson, Carol Voeller, Brian Weatherson, Ralph Wedgwood, Steve Yablo, Cheryl Zoll, and an anonymous referee for valuable comments and discussions. Versions of this material were presented in my seminar at MIT in the Fall of 2000, and at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Parts of this paper also derive from (...) my comments on a paper of Scott Soames at the ‘Liars and Heaps’ conference at the University of Connecticut in the Fall of 2002. I am grateful for the help of these audiences, and especially to Prof. Soames. (shrink)

The human ability to form large, coordinated groups is among our most impressive social adaptations. Larger groups facilitate synergistic economies of scale for cooperative breeding, such economic tasks as group hunting, and success in conflict with other groups. In many organisms, genetic relationships provide the structure for sociality to evolve via the process of kin selection, and this is the case, to a certain extent, for humans. But assortment by genetic affiliation is not the only mechanism that can bring people (...) together. Affinity based on symbolically mediated and socially constructed identity, or cultural kinship, structures much of human ultrasociality. This paper examines how genetic kinship and two kinds of cultural kinship—affinal kinship and descent—structure the network of cooperating whale hunters in the village of Lamalera, Indonesia. Social network analyses show that each mechanism of assortment produces characteristic networks of different sizes, each more or less conducive to the task of hunting whales. Assortment via close genetic kin relationships (r = 0.5) produces a smaller, denser network. Assortment via less-close kin relations (r = 0.125) produces a larger but less dense network. Affinal networks are small and diffuse; lineage networks are larger, discrete, and very dense. The roles that genetic and cultural kinship play for structuring human sociality is discussed in the context of these results. (shrink)

Creating focal lesions in primary visual cortex (V1) provides an opportunity to study the role of extra-geniculo-striate pathways for activating extrastriate visual cortex. Previous studies have shown that more than 95% of neurons in macaque area V2 and V3 stop firing after reversibly cooling V1 [1,2,3]. However, no studies on long term recovery in areas V2, V3 following permanent V1 lesions have been reported in the macaque. Here we use macaque fMRI to study area V2, V3 activity patterns from 1 (...) to 22 months after lesioning area V1. We find that visually driven BOLD responses persist inside the V1-lesion projection zones (LPZ) of areas V2 and V3, but are reduced in strength by ,70%, on average, compared to prelesion levels. Monitoring the LPZ activity over time starting one month following the V1 lesion did not reveal systematic changes in BOLD signal amplitude. Surprisingly, the retinotopic organization inside the LPZ of areas V2, V3 remained similar to that of the non-lesioned hemisphere, suggesting that LPZ activation in V2, V3 is not the result of input arising from nearby (non-lesioned) V1 cortex. Electrophysiology recordings of multi-unit activity corroborated the BOLD observations: visually driven multi-unit responses could be elicited inside the V2 LPZ, even when the visual stimulus was entirely contained within the scotoma induced by the V1 lesion. Restricting the stimulus to the intact visual hemi-field produced no significant BOLD modulation inside the V2, V3 LPZs. We conclude that the observed activity patterns are largely mediated by parallel, V1-bypassing, subcortical pathways that can activate areas V2 and V3 in the absence of V1 input. Such pathways may contribute to the behavioral phenomenon of blindsight. (shrink)

Anthropology of Consciousness, Volume 32, Issue 2, Page 154-181, Autumn 2021.

We present a content markup language for physics realized by extending the OMDoc format by an infrastructure for the principal concepts of physics: observables, physical systems, and experiments.

Recently, some scholars have sought to cast Marx and other socialists as participants in the republican tradition, expanding ideas such as non-domination and self-rule beyond what they had been typically conceived of as by many of the instigators of the revival of republican thought in recent decades. The ramifications of such an expansion, however, have not yet been fully grappled with in the area of rights. This article aims to remedy this by building a theory of social republican rights by (...) drawing on both prongs of this framework. I argue that (1) rights ought to function primarily as instruments to overcome domination and that Marxist and socialist analysis identifies novel forms of domination missed by other republicans, (2) certain liberal rights are themselves vectors of domination, (3) rights are realised through active will formation in politics and the public sphere rather than being pre-political claims against these things, (4) rights should be based on a social ontology that is relational rather than individualist and (5) rights are powers that are struggled for and operate as zones of contestation rather than trans-historical principles. (shrink)

This essay examines one of the most important but understudied aspects of William James’s philosophy, his doctrine of pluralism. It aims to shed new light on the complex and sometimes ambiguous relationship between James’s pluralism and his doctrines of pragmatism and radical empiricism, and shows that his pluralism is a much more pervasive feature of his philosophy than has usually been thought. In particular, the essay shows that James was a pluralist not only in his metaphysical views, but also in (...) his epistemological, ethical, and religious views, and that these latter views are not always clearly dependent upon his pluralistic metaphysics. (shrink)

This article explains a new ‘foreignizing’ approach to translation that was invented in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, especially by Herder and Schleiermacher, and that has since become the predominant approach in translation theory. The article argues that despite the great virtues of this approach, it was based on an unduly narrow restriction to Indo-European languages, which leaves considerable room for further improvement. Greater attention to Hebrew has since made up this deficit to a certain extent. But Chinese (...) holds the potential for even more important refinements of the original theory. The article explains the original theorists’ failure to exploit this case in terms of a certain prejudice against Chinese language and culture that had arisen at the time, and for which these theorists were themselves partly responsible. It then tries to show in some detail how deeply enriching for the theory a consideration of Chinese can be. (shrink)

The endomorphism monoid of a model-theoretic structure carries two interesting topologies: on the one hand, the topology of pointwise convergence induced externally by the action of the endomorphisms on the domain via evaluation; on the other hand, the Zariski topology induced within the monoid by (non-)solutions to equations. For all concrete endomorphism monoids of $\omega $ -categorical structures on which the Zariski topology has been analysed thus far, the two topologies were shown to coincide, in turn yielding that the pointwise (...) topology is the coarsest Hausdorff semigroup topology on those endomorphism monoids. We establish two systematic reasons for the two topologies to agree, formulated in terms of the model-complete core of the structure. Further, we give an example of an $\omega $ -categorical structure on whose endomorphism monoid the topology of pointwise convergence and the Zariski topology differ, answering a question of Elliott, Jonušas, Mitchell, Péresse, and Pinsker. (shrink)

The doctrine of double effect has a firm, respected position within Roman Catholic medical ethics. Neil M. Gorsuch, a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit, believes that this doctrine also enjoys a central place within U.S. law. This essay examines and assesses Gorsuch’s thesis. National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly 11.1 (Spring 2011): 31–40.

Der Laureatus dieser Schrift hatte 1986 Hans Jonas eröffnet, daß er an einer Politischen Philosophie arbeite, aus der, wie die Autoren dieses Bandes wissen, nichts geworden ist und von der man auch sonst nicht viel vernommen hat. Jonas wandte damals ein: "Wie wollen Sie der Politischen Vernunft auf die Beine helfen? Das Wissen über die politischen Bewußtseinsvoraussetzungen in uns und ihre Struktur in Gesellschaften ist in esoterische Teilbestände und exoterische politische Religionen, Ideologien und Denkschulen zerfallen. Diese Angelegenheit müßte einer umfassenden (...) Kritik unterzogen werden. Außerdem müßten alle gescheiterten Restitutionsversuche von Platon bis heute auf ihre Prägnanz hin durchgegangen werden. Er nannte Thomas von Aquin, Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, Arendt, Strauss, Voegelin und sich selbst. Sie müßten die Erfahrungen und die Maßstäbe, aus denen das politische Bewußtsein sich ernährt und aufrichtet und die, die es vergiften, frei legen." Im nachfolgenden Gespräch über verschiedene Denker und ihre Texte zur politischen Philosophie tauchten metaphorisch die "leuchtenden Fünkchen" oder "Goldklümpchen" auf, in denen Jonas und der Laureatus lebendige Reste der Politischen Vernunft und die menschheitliche Erinnerung an sie erkannten. "Wir sind womöglich aus einer Jeremiade herausgekommen …" lautete der verheißungsvolle Schlußpunkt des kurzen Gesprächs. Der Laureatus, Jurist und Politikwissenschaftler, konnte während seiner Lehr- und Forschungstätigkeit einige Anregungen für "philosophische Fragestellungen" zu den grotesken und verflachten Formationen des politischen Denkens unserer Zeit geben. Die Autoren sind Claus-Ekkehard Bärsch, Giandomenico Bonanni, Ulrich Diehl, Michael Ensslen, Jürgen Gebhardt, Volker Gerhardt, Manfred Henningsen, Vittorio Hösle, Klaus Kodalle, Peter König, Daniel Krochmalnik, Jan-Ivar Lindén, Reiner Manstetten, Krzysztof Maurin, Peter J. Opitz, Thomas Petersen, Walter Rothholz, Florian Sattler, Stephan Sattler, Julius H. Schoeps, Peter von Sivers, Chiara Staude-Colli, Jakob Staude, Kurt Stenzel, Peter Weber-Schäfer, Reiner Wiehl und James Wood. (shrink)

In Christ Meets Me Everywhere, Michael Cameron argues that Augustine wanted to train readers of Scripture to transpose themselves into the texts in the same way he did, by the same process of figuration that he found at its core. Tracking Augustine's developing practice of self-transposition into the figures of the biblical texts over the course of his entire career, Cameron shows that this practice is the key to Augustine's hermeneutics.

Spreadsheets are heavily employed in administration, financial forecasting, education, and science because of their intuitive, flexible, and direct approach to computation. In previous work we have studied how an explicit representation of the background knowledge associated with the spreadsheet can be exploited to alleviate usability problems with spreadsheet-based applications. The SACHS system implements this approach to provide a semantic help system for DCS, an Excelbased financial controlling system.

The race against COVID-19 has been intense and painful and many of us are now looking for a way to move on. We may try to seize a degree of comfort and security by convincing ourselves that we are among the “fittest”—that is, among those who have managed to survive—who can now hope for a “new-normal” time, relatively unscathed. But this isn’t what we should be hoping for. Our world, and ourselves, will never be free of COVID-19 or its insidious (...) effects. COVID-19, like climate change, is a threat multiplier and the challenges it has raised are now indelibly engraved in our vulnerable, interconnected lives. Rather than vainly hoping for a return to an imaginary, erstwhile “normal” what we need is something more fundamental: a new version of hope that embraces a courage to learn what we need to do, to enable us to live a future to which we aspire. Perhaps counter-intuitively, we need to accept that the COVID-19 experience has already changed us deeply and hope that we can learn from this and from the future changes that the pandemic will give rise to. We need to radicalize our responses to the challenges, enabling ourselves to learn new lessons about old but increasingly pertinent topics, such as the realities of human fragility, and inter-connection. (shrink)

An accessible introduction to the ethical theory of the Mohists.