One of the most provocative projects in recent analytic philosophy has been the development of the doctrine of externalism, or, as it is often called, anti-individualism. While there is no agreement as to whether externalism is true or not, a number of recent investigations have begun to explore the question of what follows if it is true. One of the most interesting of these investigations thus far has been the question of whether externalism has consequences for the doctrine that we (...) have authoritative, a priori self-knowledge of our mental states. The selected works presented in this volume, some previously published, some new, are representative of this debate and open up new questions and issues for philosophical investigation, including the connection between externalism, self-knowledge, epistemic warrant, and memory. (shrink)

Do free will beliefs influence moral judgments? Answers to this question from theoretical and empirical perspectives are controversial. This study attempted to replicate past research and offer theoretical insights by analyzing World Values Survey data from residents of 46 countries (n = 65,111 persons). Corroborating experimental findings, free will beliefs predicted intolerance of unethical behaviors and support for severe criminal punishment. Further, the link between free will beliefs and intolerance of unethical behavior was moderated by variations in countries’ institutional integrity, (...) defined as the degree to which countries had accountable, corruption-free public sectors. Free will beliefs predicted intolerance of unethical behaviors for residents of countries with high and moderate institutional integrity, but this correlation was not seen for countries with low institutional integrity. Free will beliefs predicted support for criminal punishment regardless of countries’ institutional integrity. Results were robust across different operationalizations of institutional integrity and with or without statistical control variables. (shrink)

Feminist bioethics is a relatively new field, the major works in which only started to appear in the late 1980s. At first feminist bioethicists focused mainly on issues of particular concern to women such as reproduction. Recently, papers have begun to appear that show that a feminist analysis can be brought to bear on any subject traditional bioethics discusses. So far, however, feminist bioethics has not been brought to bear on psychiatry. There have been feminist critiques of psychiatry and feminist (...) discussions of certain diagnostic categories that disproportionately affect women, but these are concerned with womens issues within psychiatry and how psychiatry has been used to oppress women. Certainly these are important, but what has been missing is a discussion of psychiatry in the sense that feminist bioethics suggests a general critique of psychiatry and the rethinking of the practice of psychiatry, regardless of whether the specific instances involved are womens issues. In this paper I look at what such a feminist bioethical intervention into psychiatry would look like. (shrink)

Liberal neutrality is assumed to pertain to rival conceptions of the good. The nature of the rivalry between conceptions of the good is pivotal to the coherence, scope and realisation of liberal neutrality. Yet, liberal theorists have said very little about rivalry. This paper attempts to fill this gap by reviewing three conceptions of rivalry: incompatibility rivalry, intra-domain rivalry and state power rivalry. I argue that state power rivalry is the morally relevant conception of rivalry, and that it has significant (...) implications for the scope and realisation of liberal neutrality. I conclude that in the light of state power rivalry, the only feasible liberal neutral state is a very minimal one. (shrink)

This is the first comparative study of Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy and Schiller's Aesthetic Letters, two crucial texts in aesthetic and cultural theory. Martin's scrupulous examination and comparison reveals the common ground shared by the two writers, who are usually regarded as being poles apart. In addition, Martin shows how this common ground mutually illuminates both texts.

I reconstruct and analyze al-Ghazali’s arguments defending a plurality of real divine attributes in The Incoherence of the Philosophers. I show that one of these arguments can be made to engage with and defend Jeffrey E. Brower and Michael C. Rea’s “Numerical Sameness Without Identity” model of the Trinity. To that end, I provide some background on the metaphysical commitments at play in al-Ghazali’s arguments.

A growing body of research suggests that students achieve learning outcomes at higher rates when instructors use active-learning methods rather than standard modes of instruction. To investigate how one such method might be used to teach philosophy, we observed two classes that employed Reacting to the Past, an educational role-immersion game. We chose to investigate Reacting because role-immersion games are considered a particularly effective active-learning strategy. Professors who have used Reacting to teach history, interdisciplinary humanities, and political theory agree that (...) it engages students and teaches general skills like collaboration and communication. We investigated whether it can be effective for teaching philosophical content and skills like analyzing, evaluating, crafting, and communicating arguments in addition to bringing the more general benefits of active learning to philosophy classrooms. Overall, we find Reacting to be a useful tool for achieving these ends. While we do not argue that Reacting is uniquely useful for teaching philosophy, we conclude that it is worthy of consideration by philosophers interested in creative active-learning strategies, especially given that it offers a prepackaged set of flexible, user-friendly tools for motivating and engaging students. (shrink)

Friedrich Nietzsche’s intellectual autobiography Ecce Homo has always been a controversial book. Nietzsche prepared it for publication just before he became incurably insane in early 1889, but it was held back until after his death, and finally appeared only in 1908. For much of the first century of its reception, Ecce Homo met with a sceptical response and was viewed as merely a testament to its author’s incipient madness. This was hardly surprising, since he is deliberately outrageous with the ‘megalomaniacal’ (...) self-advertisement of his chapter titles, and brazenly claims ‘I am not a man, I am dynamite’ as he attempts to explode one preconception after another in the Western philosophical tradition. In recent decades there has been increased interest in the work, especially in the English-speaking world, but the present volume is the first collection of essays in any language devoted to the work. Most of the essays are selected from the proceedings of an international conference held in London to mark the centenary of the first publication of Ecce Homo in 2008. They are supplemented by a number of specially commissioned essays. Contributors include established and emerging Nietzsche scholars from the UK and USA, Germany and France, Portugal, Sweden and the Netherlands. (shrink)

We created Justice: The Game, an educational, role-immersion game designed to be used in philosophy courses. We seek to describe Justice in sufficent detail so that it is understandable to readers not already familiar with role-immersion pedagogy. We hope some instructors will be sufficiently interested in using the game. In addition to describing the game we also evaluate it, thereby highlighting the pedagogical potential of role-immersion games designed to teach political philosophy. We analyze the game by drawing on our observations (...) as designers and playtesters of Justice, along with feedback from students obtained in focus-groups conducted shortly after playtesting ended. We present evidence that Justice, compared to conventional instructional methods alone, plausibly enhances student learning of philosophical skills and content by requiring them to practice those skills and put their content-area knowledge to use in a highly-motivating and engaging context. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Because Pastafarianism – or the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster – is a parodic religion, common sense suggests its ‘adherents’ should not receive exemptions. However, the prima facie case for excluding Pastafarians is complicated by the fact that many assert their religion is as legitimate as any other religion and that their beliefs are genuine. Indeed, Pastafarians have already obtained exemptions in various countries. Taking the dominant liberal egalitarian, integrity‐based approach to exemptions, this article investigates whether there is (...) a principled, objective basis for excluding Pastafarians that accounts for their assertions. To that end, I examine four tests: a religion, seriousness, obligation, and sincerity test. I assess whether each test can actually exclude Pastafarians, and if it could, can it do so in a way that is consistent with liberal egalitarian commitments. I argue that only a sincerity test – based on consistent behaviour and a willingness to bear the costs of one's beliefs – satisfies both of these conditions, but, on a weak and contingent basis. (shrink)

This collection of papers by prominent feminist thinkers advances the positive feminist project of remapping the moral by developing theory that acknowledges the diversity of women.

This volume brings together some of the most distinguished thinkers in the field of theology to consider the question of the meaning of life in the various global religions.

El presente trabajo se propone recuperar las nociones de biopolítica y debiopoder en cuanto origen y fundamento de los actuales constructos de lapsicopolítica y del psicopoder. El tiempo pandémico, que obligó a recuperarlos postulados de la sociedad disciplinaria, contribuyó a expandir el universodigital y tecnológico, configurando unos poderosos instrumentos que yano solo se sirven del control sobre el cuerpo sino también –y principalmente–de la mente. Los efectos de este psicopoder smart se dejan notar en losindividuos, configurando una situación de servidumbre (...) voluntaria y prereflexivaen la mayor parte de los casos. La búsqueda de soluciones para superartal estadio de servidumbre es uno de los grandes retos que, en la sociedadtecnológica, tiene el jurista en general, y el filósofo del Derecho enparticular, intentando aunar racionalidad y ética. (shrink)

This essay shows that some recent work by George Weaver can be reformulated in an especially perspicuous way within the theory of closure systems. Closure theoretic generalizations of some theorems of Robert Goldblatt are presented. And, more generally, the relation between closure systems and the deducibility relations of Goldblatt is explored.

“Active intervention” with suicidal callers to telephone crisis lines involves breaking confidentiality by dispatching emergency services, typically the police, to a suicidal person without that person’s consent and sometimes without his or her knowledge. In this paper I am concerned with the issue of whether active intervention is ethically justified from a feminist bioethical perspective, and if so, under what conditions.

La influencia perniciosa que el populismo tiene sobre numerosas construcciones, tiene a extenderse también al cosmopolitismo. En el terreno fértil de posmodernidad relativista y de narrativas contrahegemónicas, hay que deshacer dicotomías artificialmente construidas y fácilmente manipulables. En este trabajo se justificará por qué el populismo es una amenaza para la construcción cosmopolita y se reflejarán los aspectos que separan al populismo del proyecto cosmopolita. A partir de uno de los subtipos del populismo, el punitivo, se examinará la problemática que suscita (...) su aplicación a dos de las vertientes del identitarismo como son las cuestiones relativas al género (sexo) y a la idiosincrasia nacional (frente a “los otros”). Se justificará cómo el cosmopolitismo, lejos de negar tales cuestiones identitarias, lo que hace es trabajar con ellas de forma distinta. (shrink)

Cada vez son más estrechas las relaciones entre la informática y el Derecho. La evolución ha sido notable: de la informática jurídica documental, que nos ha facilitado en numerosas ocasiones obtener información jurídica muy completa en un corto espacio de tiempo, hemos pasado a una Informática jurídica de gestión, que cada día avanza más en su empeño de liberar al jurista de las tareas más rutinarias. Se ha llegado así a la Informática jurídica decisional, con un futuro más prometedor. Pero (...) también, como contrapartida, es la esfera que más susceptibilidades y reticencias provoca. Concretamente, vamos a prestar especial atención a la proyección de las nuevas tecnologías en las decisiones judiciales, tanto en la vertiente de la Inteligencia Artificial como en la de los Sistemas Expertos Jurídicos: es un área controvertida, ya que en la actualidad no es posible, ni deseable, una suplantación plena del razonamiento jurídico del juez o del abogado por el cálculo informático del ordenador. Basta que se configure como una herramienta de apoyo o de ayuda a la decisión. Todo ello proyecta una nueva línea de reflexión para la Filosofía del Derecho, como es la hermenéutica telemática. (shrink)

El uso cada vez más frecuente de la Inteligencia Artificial en el ámbito delDerecho, obliga a plantearse si las decisiones automatizadas pueden, y deben, ser justas. El algoritmo, en el Machine Learning, tiene la virtualidad de ir aprendiendo, lo que lo dota de un cierto grado de autonomía. Sesgos, discriminaciones y desigualdades que derivan de decisiones automatizadas, ponen al descubierto el mito del algoritmo justo. El criterio de justicia que se exige en la concepción analógica del Derecho también debe exigirse (...) en la dimensión digital. En este trabajo, desde la dificultad inicial de una falta de consenso sobre qué sea la fairness, examino cómo incorporar la fairness al algoritmo. Ello exigirá un previo análisis de los fundamentos iusfilosóficos y de algunas de las teorías de la justicia (utilitaristas, contractualistas, comunitaristas, igualitaristas) a partir de las cuales se puedan establecer parámetros, correctores y garantías para la consecución de la imprescindible correlación entre la fairness artificial y la fairness legal. (shrink)

There is widespread agreement in neuroscience and psychology that the visual system identifies objects and faces based on a pattern of activation over many neurons, each neuron being involved in representing many different categories. The hypothesis that the visual system includes finely tuned neurons for specific objects or faces for the sake of identification, so‐called “grandmother cells”, is widely rejected. Here it is argued that the rejection of grandmother cells is premature. Grandmother cells constitute a hypothesis of how familiar visual (...) categories are identified, but the primary evidence against this hypothesis comes from studies that have failed to observe neurons that selectively respond to unfamiliar stimuli. These findings are reviewed and it is shown that they are irrelevant. Neuroscientists need to better understand existing models of face and object identification that include grandmother cells and then compare the selectivity of these units with single neurons responding to stimuli that can be identified. (shrink)

En décadas pasadas América Latina ha atravesado un ciclo autoritario en su trayectoria pendular entre democracia y dictadura. Actualmente se trata de que la sociedad política busque solución a los problemas en fórmulas diversas del recurso al brazo armado del Estado. En este trabajo hemos querido poner de manifiesto las dificultades de las democracias latinoamericanas "formales" o "impuestas" poniendo de relieve las dificultades y dilemas a los que han de enfrentarse, no tanto para instaurar cuanto para consolidar sus democracias.