According to Father Patrick Verspieren, a Roman Catholic priest and member of the Society of Jesus, the chief duty of the palliative care-giver is to suspend all preconceptions of the incurably ill patient's journey to life's end: "To accompany a dying patient is not to walk ahead of him, or to show him the right path, or to impose an itinerary on him, or even to presume to know what direction he will take. Rather, it consists in walking (...) at the patient's side, leaving him free to choose his own way and the rhythm of his own step". Is it possible, in practice, to suspend one's judgment regarding what is best for a dying patient and to respect the uncharted horizon that presents itself to each dying... (shrink)

At least since Aristotle’s famous 'sea-battle' passages in On Interpretation 9, some substantial minority of philosophers has been attracted to the doctrine of the open future--the doctrine that future contingent statements are not true. But, prima facie, such views seem inconsistent with the following intuition: if something has happened, then (looking back) it was the case that it would happen. How can it be that, looking forwards, it isn’t true that there will be a sea battle, while also being true (...) that, looking backwards, it was the case that there would be a sea battle? This tension forms, in large part, what might be called the problem of future contingents. A dominant trend in temporal logic and semantic theorizing about future contingents seeks to validate both intuitions. Theorists in this tradition--including some interpretations of Aristotle, but paradigmatically, Thomason (1970), as well as more recent developments in Belnap, et. al (2001) and MacFarlane (2003, 2014)--have argued that the apparent tension between the intuitions is in fact merely apparent. In short, such theorists seek to maintain both of the following two theses: (i) the open future: Future contingents are not true, and (ii) retro-closure: From the fact that something is true, it follows that it was the case that it would be true. It is well-known that reflection on the problem of future contingents has in many ways been inspired by importantly parallel issues regarding divine foreknowledge and indeterminism. In this paper, we take up this perspective, and ask what accepting both the open future and retro-closure predicts about omniscience. When we theorize about a perfect knower, we are theorizing about what an ideal agent ought to believe. Our contention is that there isn’t an acceptable view of ideally rational belief given the assumptions of the open future and retro-closure, and thus this casts doubt on the conjunction of those assumptions. (shrink)

This is an exploration of a cluster of related logical results. Taken together these seem to have something philosophically important to teach us: something about knowledge and truth and something about the logical impossibility of totalities of knowledge and truth. The book includes explorations of new forms of the ancient and venerable paradox of the :Liar, applications and extensions of Kaplan and Montague's paradox of the Knower, generalizations of Godel's work on incompleteness, and new uses of Cantorian diagonalization. Throughout, the (...) concern is with metaphysical and epistemological implications of these results: what such results may have to teach us about knowledge, truth, and possibility. (shrink)

I provide a manipulation-style argument against classical compatibilism—the claim that freedom to do otherwise is consistent with determinism. My question is simple: if Diana really gave Ernie free will, why isn't she worried that he won't use it precisely as she would like? Diana's non-nervousness, I argue, indicates Ernie's non-freedom. Arguably, the intuition that Ernie lacks freedom to do otherwise is stronger than the direct intuition that he is simply not responsible; this result highlights the importance of the denial of (...) the principle of alternative possibilities for compatibilist theories of responsibility. Along the way, I clarify the dialectical role and structure of “manipulation arguments”, and compare the manipulation argument I develop with the more familiar Consequence Argument. I contend that the two arguments are importantly mutually supporting and reinforcing. The result: classical compatibilists should be nervous—and if PAP is true, all compatibilists should be nervous. (shrink)

Various philosophers have long since been attracted to the doctrine that future contingent propositions systematically fail to be true—what is sometimes called the doctrine of the open future. However, open futurists have always struggled to articulate how their view interacts with standard principles of classical logic—most notably, with the Law of Excluded Middle. For consider the following two claims: Trump will be impeached tomorrow; Trump will not be impeached tomorrow. According to the kind of open futurist at issue, both of (...) these claims may well fail to be true. According to many, however, the disjunction of these claims can be represented as p ∨ ~p—that is, as an instance of LEM. In this essay, however, I wish to defend the view that the disjunction these claims cannot be represented as an instance of p ∨ ~p. And this is for the following reason: the latter claim is not, in fact, the strict negation of the former. More particularly, there is an important semantic distinction between the strict negation of the first claim [~] and the latter claim. However, the viability of this approach has been denied by Thomason, and more recently by MacFarlane and Cariani and Santorio, the latter of whom call the denial of the given semantic distinction “scopelessness”. According to these authors, that is, will is “scopeless” with respect to negation; whereas there is perhaps a syntactic distinction between ‘~Will p’ and ‘Will ~p’, there is no corresponding semantic distinction. And if this is so, the approach in question fails. In this paper, then, I criticize the claim that will is “scopeless” with respect to negation. I argue that will is a so-called “neg-raising” predicate—and that, in this light, we can see that the requisite scope distinctions aren’t missing, but are simply being masked. The result: a under-appreciated solution to the problem of future contingents that sees and as contraries, not contradictories. (shrink)

Management and Morality provides a comprehensive and accessible overview of the moral and ethical dimension to organizational and individual behavior, while adding an original, developmental perceptive. Management and Morality combines organizational theory and behavior with approaches to organizational and individual development. The first two sections of the book, Ethical Thinking and Management Practice, and Moral Issues in Organizations, provide a clear and thorough coverage of these areas relevant to ethical behavior in and of organizations. On this basis, the third section, (...) A Developmental Perspective, develops a new approach to ethical development of organizations and individuals concerned with the improvement of organizational structures, processes, and practices so as to allow for individual morality and individual moral behavior. Rich in its coverage of the field and variety of ideas, Management and Morality will be essential reading to students and academics in management, business and organizational ethics, organizational behavior and development, and organizational sociology. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The aim of this paper is to elucidate Schopenhauer’s moral philosophy in terms of an ethics of virtue. This paper consists of four sections. In the first section I outline three major objections Schopenhauer raises for Kant’s moral philosophy. In section two I extract from these criticisms a framework for Schopenhauer’s own position, identifying how his moral psychology underpins a unified and hierarchical conception of virtue and vice. I then ascertain some strengths of this view. In section three I (...) focus in upon the issue of fixed character and moral education as at least one major point of divergence between Schopenhauer’s virtue ethics and typical trends within the tradition. In the fourth and final section, I consider and respond to this ethical framework’s possible susceptibility to the charge of egoism, and adjudicate among competing solutions in the secondary literature. I conclude that refined forms of Schopenhauer’s ethical views offer rich and plausible insights into both virtue and vice which have received less attention than they deserve. Hence, Schopenhauer warrants more serious concern in contemporary discussions of virtue ethics alongside the likes of Aristotle, Hume and Nietzsche. (shrink)

In this paper, I introduce a problem to the philosophy of religion – the problem of divine moral standing – and explain how this problem is distinct from (albeit related to) the more familiar problem of evil (with which it is often conflated). In short, the problem is this: in virtue of how God would be (or, on some given conception, is) “involved in” our actions, how is it that God has the moral standing to blame us for performing those (...) very actions? In light of the recent literature on “moral standing”, I consider God’s moral standing to blame on two models of “divine providence”: open theism, and theological determinism. I contend that God may have standing on open theism, and – perhaps surprisingly – may also have standing, even on theological determinism, given the truth of compatibilism. Thus, if you think that God could not justly both determine and blame, then you will have to abandon compatibilism. The topic of this paper thus sheds considerable light on the traditional philosophical debate about the conditions of moral responsibility. (shrink)

A prominent recent strategy for advancing the thesis that moral responsibility is incompatible with causal determinism has been to argue that agents who meet compatibilist conditions for responsibility could nevertheless be subject to certain sorts of deterministic manipulation, so that an agent could meet the compatibilist’s conditions for responsibility, but also be living a life the precise details of which someone else determined that she should live. According to the incompatibilist, however, once we became aware that agents had been manipulated (...) or ‘set up’ in the relevant way, we should no longer judge that they are responsible for their behavior, nor should we hold them responsible for it by blaming them, in case what they did was wrong. In this paper, I aim to shift the debate to different terrain. The focus so far has been simply on what we may or may not permissibly say or do concerning manipulated agents. But I believe a powerful new incompatibilist argument can be mounted from considering whether the manipulators themselves can justifiably blame the agents they manipulate in compatibilist-friendly ways. It seems strikingly counterintuitive to suppose that they may do so. The argument of this paper, however, is that, given the right story, incompatibilism provides the best explanation for why this is so. In short, the compatibilist must say that, while such manipulated agents are still responsible, the manipulators lack the moral standing to blame them. But I argue that, on compatibilist assumptions, this explanation ultimately fails. (shrink)

In this paper I argue for an association between impurity and explanatory power in contemporary mathematics. This proposal is defended against the ancient and influential idea that purity and explanation go hand-in-hand (Aristotle, Bolzano) and recent suggestions that purity/impurity ascriptions and explanatory power are more or less distinct (Section 1). This is done by analyzing a central and deep result of additive number theory, Szemerédi’s theorem, and various of its proofs (Section 2). In particular, I focus upon the radically impure (...) (ergodic) proof due to Furstenberg (Section 3). Furstenberg’s ergodic proof is striking because it utilizes intuitively foreign and infinitary resources to prove a finitary combinatorial result and does so in a perspicuous fashion. I claim that Furstenberg’s proof is explanatory in light of its clear expression of a crucial structural result, which provides the “reason why” Szemerédi’s theorem is true. This is, however, rather surprising: how can such intuitively different conceptual resources “get a grip on” the theorem to be proved? I account for this phenomenon by articulating a new construal of the content of a mathematical statement, which I call structural content (Section 4). I argue that the availability of structural content saves intuitive epistemic distinctions made in mathematical practice and simultaneously explicates the intervention of surprising and explanatorily rich conceptual resources. Structural content also disarms general arguments for thinking that impurity and explanatory power might come apart. Finally, I sketch a proposal that, once structural content is in hand, impure resources lead to explanatory proofs via suitably understood varieties of simplification and unification (Section 5). (shrink)

Everyone agrees that we can’t change the past. But what about the future? Though the thought that we can change the future is familiar from popular discourse, it enjoys virtually no support from philosophers, contemporary or otherwise. In this paper, I argue that the thesis that the future is mutable has far more going for it than anyone has yet realized. The view, I hope to show, gains support from the nature of prevention, can provide a new way of responding (...) to arguments for fatalism, can account for the utility of total knowledge of the future, and can help in providing an account of the semantics of the English progressive. On the view developed, the future is mutable in the following sense: perhaps, once, it was true that you would never come to read a paper defending the mutability of the future. And then the future changed. And now you will. (shrink)

In this paper, I articulate an argument for incompatibilism about moral responsibility and determinism. My argument comes in the form of an extended story, modeled loosely on Peter van Inwagen’s “rollback argument” scenario. I thus call it “the replication argument.” As I aim to bring out, though the argument is inspired by so-called “manipulation” and “original design” arguments, the argument is not a version of either such argument—and plausibly has advantages over both. The result, I believe, is a more convincing (...) incompatibilist argument than those we have considered previously. (shrink)

The subject matter of this essay is a certain understanding of the value of equality which I will call ‘relational egalitarianism’ – a view which locates the value of equality not in distributions but in social and political relationships. This is a suitable topic for a contribution to a volume based on themes from the work of G.A. Cohen for two, somewhat contradictory, reasons.

Husserl argues in the Crisis that the prevalent tradition of positive science in his time had a philosophical core, called by him "Galilean science", that mistook the quest for objective theory with the quest for truth. Husserl is here referring to Gottingen science of the Golden Years. For Husserl, theory "grows" out of the "soil" of the prescientific, that is, pretheoretical, life-world. Scientific truth finally is to be sought not in theory but rather in the pragmatic-perceptual praxes of measurement. Husserl (...) is faulted for taking measuring processes to be "infinitely perfectible". The dependence of new scientific phenomena on the existence of prior "prescientific" inductive praxis is analyzed, also Husserl's residual objectivism and failure to appreciate the hermeneutic character of measurement. Though not a scientific (theory-)realist, neither was he an instrumentalist, but he was a scientific (phenomena-)realist. (shrink)

One set of neglected problems consists of paradoxes of omniscience clearly recognizable as forms of the Liar, and these I have never seen raised at all. Other neglected problems are difficulties for omniscience posed by recent work on belief de se and essential indexicals. These have not yet been given the attention they deserve.

Let R(X, B) denote the class of probability functions that are defined on algebra X and that represent rationally permissible degrees of certainty for a person whose total relevant background evidence is B. This paper is concerned with characterizing R(X, B) for the case in whichX is an algebra of propositions involving two properties and B is empty. It proposes necessary conditions for a probability function to be in R(X, B), some of which involve the notion of statistical dependence. The (...) class of probability functions that satisfy these conditions, here denoted PI, includes a class that Carnap once proposed for the same situation. Probability functions in PI violate Carnap's axiom of analogy but, it is argued, that axiom should be rejected. A derivation of Carnap's model by Hesse has limitations that are not present in the derivation of PI given here. Various alternative probability models are considered and rejected. (shrink)

Two hundred years ago, Friedrich Schleiermacher took critical issue with Immanuel Kant's intellectual notion of intuition as applied to human nature (Wellmon 2006). He found it necessary to modify—"hermeneutically," as he said—Kant's notion of anthropology by enabling it to include as human the new and strange human tribes Captain Cook found in the Pacific South Seas. A similar hermeneutic move is necessary if physics is to include the local contextual empirical syntheses of relativity and quantum physics. In this hermeneutical revision (...) the synthesis is formed around the notion of a Hilbert Vector Space as the universal grammar of physics, adding to it the dynamic of the Schrödinger equation, and representing empirical "observables" by projection operators that map the subspaces of definite measurable values. Among the set of observable projection operators, some pairs share the same subspace, commute with one another, and share a common laboratory setting. Other pairs do not share this property and are described as being mutually complementary. Complementary symmetries introduce into the discursive language of physics the commonsense notion of contextuality. The new synthesis, proposed by Eugene Wigner, John von Neumann, and (in his own way) Paul Dirac, brought physics into the community of common language and established it as a work of general human achievement. 1. (shrink)

In the following paper, I review and critically assess the four standard routes commonly taken to establish that gravitational waves possess energy-momentum: the increase in kinetic energy a GW confers on a ring of test particles, Bondi/Feynman’s Sticky Bead Argument of a GW heating up a detector, nonlinearities within perturbation theory, taken to reflect the fact that gravity contributes to its own source, and the Noether Theorems, linking symmetries and conserved quantities. Each argument is found to either to presuppose controversial (...) assumptions or to be outright spurious. I finally examine the standard interpretation of binary systems, according to which orbital decay is explained in terms of the system’s energy being via GW energy- momentum transport. I contend that a better interpretation, drawing only on the general-relativistic Equations of Motions and the Einstein Equations, is available - and in fact preferable; thereby also an inference to the best explanation for the vindication of GW energy-momentum is blocked. (shrink)

The present paper revisits the debate between realists about gravitational energy in GR and anti-realists/eliminativists. I re-assess the arguments underpinning Hoefer’s seminal eliminativist stance, and those of their realist detractors’ responses. A more circumspect reading of the former is proffered that discloses where the so far not fully appreciated, real challenges lie for realism about gravitational energy. I subsequently turn to Lam and Read’s recent proposals for such a realism. Their arguments are critically examined. Special attention is devoted to the (...) adequacy of Read’s appeals to functionalism, imported from the philosophy of mind. (shrink)

Corporate social responsibility is frequently defined primarily in terms of the social and environmental impact of systemic organisational activity. This misses the point. To be applicable, corporate responsibility should be understood as a process, through which individuals’ moral values and concerns are articulated. Moreover, there are important grounds for asserting that such a process should be participative, involving employees . It seems inconsistent not to respect such groups’ right to an opinion, while at the same time purporting to be ethical (...) and responsible; also, a better alignment of organisational policy and employees’ values holds possibilities for enhanced motivation and work performance. Through such a participative process, matters of social responsibility may be identified in the expectations and moral claims of an organisation’s stakeholders. Such claims constitute prima facie obligations to which those responsible for corporate policy should attend, and where such demands conflict then dialogue is required in order to establish an appropriate course of action. (shrink)

Joe Horton argues that partial aggregation yields unacceptable verdicts in cases with risk and multiple decisions. I begin by showing that Horton’s challenge does not depend on risk, since exactly similar arguments apply to riskless cases. The underlying conflict Horton exposes is between partial aggregation and certain principles of diachronic choice. I then provide two arguments against these diachronic principles: they conflict with intuitions about parity, prerogatives, and cyclical preferences, and they rely on an odd assumption about diachronic choice. Finally, (...) I offer an explanation, on behalf of partial aggregation, for why these diachronic principles fail. (shrink)

Understanding the dynamics of information is crucial to many areas of research, both inside and outside of philosophy. Using computer simulations of three kinds of information, germs, genes, and memes, we show that the mechanism of information transfer often swamps network structure in terms of its effects on both the dynamics and the fitness of the information. This insight has both obvious and subtle implications for a number of questions in philosophy, including questions about the nature of information, whether there (...) is genetic information, and how to arrange scientific communities. (shrink)

Theological fatalists contend that if God knows everything, then no human action is free, and that since God does know everything, no human action is free. One reply to such arguments that has become popular recently— a way favored by William Hasker and Peter van Inwagen—agrees that if God knows everything, no human action is free. The distinctive response of these philosophers is simply to say that therefore God does not know everything. On this view, what the fatalist arguments in (...) fact bring out is that it was logically impossible for God to have known the truths about what we would freely do in the future. And this is no defect in God’s knowledge, for infallible foreknowledge of such truths is a logical impossibility. It has commonly been assumed that this position constitutes an explanation of where the fatalist argument goes wrong. My first goal is to argue that any such assumption has in fact been a mistake; Hasker and van Inwagen have in effect said only that something does go wrong with the argument, but they have not explained what goes wrong with it. Once we see this result, we’ll see, I think, that they need such an account—and that no such account has in fact been provided. The second goal of this paper is therefore to develop— and to criticize— what seems to be the most promising such account they might offer. As I see it, this account will in fact highlight in an intuitively compelling new way what many regard to be the view’s chief liability, namely, that the truths about the future which God is said not to know will now appear even more clearly (and problematically)‘ungrounded’. (shrink)

Tschacher and Haken have recently applied a systems-based approach to modeling psychotherapy process in terms of potentially beneficial tendencies toward deterministic as well as chaotic forms of change in the client’s behavioral, cognitive and affective experience during the course of therapy. A chaotic change process refers to a greater exploration of the states that a client can be in, and it may have a potential positive role to play in their development. A distinction is made between on the one hand, (...) specific instances of instability which are due to techniques employed by the therapist, and on the other, a more general instability which is due to the therapeutic relationship, and a key, necessary result of a successful therapeutic alliance. Drawing on Friston’s systems-based model of free energy minimization and predictive coding, it is proposed here that the increase in the instability of a client’s functioning due to therapy can be conceptualized as a reduction in the precisions with which the client’s prior beliefs about themselves and their world, are held. It is shown how a good therapeutic alliance results in the emergence of a new hierarchical level in the client’s generative model of themselves and their relationship with the world. The emergence of this new level of functioning permits the reduction of the precisions of the client’s priors, which allows the client to ‘open up’: to experience thoughts, emotions and experiences they did not have before. It is proposed that this process is a necessary precursor to change due to psychotherapy. A good consilience can be found between this approach to understanding the role of the therapeutic alliance, and the role of epistemic trust in psychotherapy as described by Fonagy and Allison. It is suggested that beneficial forms of instability in clients are an underappreciated influence on psychotherapy process, and thoughts about the implications, as well as situations in which instability may not be beneficial for therapy, are considered. (shrink)

This study argues that the notion of transparency requires reconsideration as an essence of ethical agency. It provides a brief explication of the concept of transparency, rooted in the principle of human dignity of Immanuel Kant, and suggests that it has been inadequately appreciated by media ethics scholars and instructors more focused on relatively simplistic applications of his categorical imperative. This study suggests that the concept's Kantian roots raise a radical challenge to conventional understandings of human interaction and, by extension, (...) what it means to exercise freedom. (shrink)

One of the most influential arguments for realism about mathematical objects is the indispensability argument. Simply put, this is the argument that insofar as we are committed to the existence of the physical objects existentially quantified over in our best scientific theories, we are also committed to the mathematical objects existentially quantified over in these theories. Following the Quine–Putnam formulation of the indispensability argument, some proponents of the indispensability argument have made the mistake of taking confirmational holism to be an (...) essential premise of the argument. In this paper, I consider the reasons philosophers have taken confirmational holism to be essential to the argument and argue that, contrary to the traditional view, confirmational holism is dispensable. (shrink)

Some claim Kant’s commitment to the explanatory priority of judgments over concepts is one of his most important contributions to the philosophy of mind. There is, however, extensive disagreement over the nature and extent of this commitment. Existing interpretations ignore a substantial body of textual evidence and offer no account of the origins of Kant’s view. This paper corrects for these deficiencies. I explain, first, the relevant accounts of concept possession Kant encountered in the writings of his predecessors; and, second, (...) how within this context he first expressed a commitment to the view that conceptual content is explanatorily dependent on acts of judgment. I then argue that Kant endorsed a second form of discursive primacy, namely, the view that every use of a concept in conscious thought about an object has the form of a judgment. (shrink)

Human languages typically employ a variety of spatial metaphors for time (e.g., “I'm looking forward to the weekend”). The metaphorical grounding of time in space is also evident in gesture. The gestures that are performed when talking about time bolster the view that people sometimes think about regions of time as if they were locations in space. However, almost nothing is known about the development of metaphorical gestures for time, despite keen interest in the origins of space–time metaphors. In this (...) study, we examined the gestures that English‐speaking 6‐to‐7‐year‐olds, 9‐to‐11‐year‐olds, 13‐to‐15‐year‐olds, and adults produced when talking about time. Participants were asked to explain the difference between pairs of temporal adverbs (e.g., “tomorrow” versus “yesterday”) and to use their hands while doing so. There was a gradual increase across age groups in the propensity to produce spatial metaphorical gestures when talking about time. However, even a substantial majority of 6‐to‐7‐year‐old children produced a spatial gesture on at least one occasion. Overall, participants produced fewer gestures in the sagittal (front‐back) axis than in the lateral (left‐right) axis, and this was particularly true for the youngest children and adolescents. Gestures that were incongruent with the prevailing norms of space–time mappings among English speakers (leftward and backward for past; rightward and forward for future) gradually decreased with increasing age. This was true for both the lateral and sagittal axis. This study highlights the importance of metaphoricity in children's understanding of time. It also suggests that, by 6 to 7 years of age, culturally determined representations of time have a strong influence on children's spatial metaphorical gestures. (shrink)

Innovative therapy is the name we give to novel medical interventions, radically different from the standard of care, provided in order to benefit a patient, rather than to acquire new knowledge. They are paradigmshifting, not incremental, responses to serious patient problems that standard medical care inadequately addresses. Innovative therapies are often devised by clinicians, not basic science researchers; they do not follow the linear model of basic research, to translation, to clinical research, to application. Instead, they come from thinking backwards (...) from the patient’s circumstances, and forward from deep knowledge of how the body functions, to challenge the limits of current mechanisms for effecting cures. (shrink)

We are increasingly exposed to polarized media sources, with clear evidence that individuals choose those sources closest to their existing views. We also have a tradition of open face-to-face group discussion in town meetings, for example. There are a range of current proposals to revive the role of group meetings in democratic decision-making. Here, we build a simulation that instantiates aspects of reinforcement theory in a model of competing social influences. What can we expect in the interaction of polarized media (...) with group interaction along the lines of town meetings? Some surprises are evident from a computational model that includes both. Deliberative group discussion can be expected to produce opinion convergence. That convergence may not, however, be a cure for extreme views polarized at opposite ends of the opinion spectrum. In a large class of cases, we show that adding the influence of group meetings in an environment of self-selected media produces not a moderate central consensus but opinion convergence at one of the extremes defined by polarized media. (shrink)

What part should description play in coming to judgment? Questions about genre have become more important in religious ethics as many seek to reform “thin” models of ethical arbitration by recourse to artistic, literary, and historical descriptions in their texts. In this book discussion, I explore what the consequences would be of pursuing this reform by turning to social anthropology—a discipline that relies on extensive empirical descriptions. I do this by considering the anthropology of ethics: a movement that seeks, for (...) the first time, to devote systematic and sustained attention the moral lives of ethnographic informants. I focus on the ways that authors within this field attempt to arrive at more realistic portraits of the different ways societies play out the familiar ethical themes of freedom, responsibility, suffering and agency. Their work challenges religious ethicists to consider what ethical conversation across these differences would look like, and thus to reconsider the relationship between description and judgment in their work. (shrink)

This paper explores themethodological consequences of AmericanPragmatism for the social sciences. It alsocriticises some rival perspectives onmethodology of social research, in particularfalsificationist, realist and someanti-naturalist views. It is argued thatAmerican Pragmatism shows striking affinitieswith the genealogical method of history and thereflexive turn in cultural anthropology. It isalso argued that Pragmatism forces us to thinkdifferently about the relationship betweentheory and empirical research.

A critique of Collingwood's re-enactment concept.

To make abstractions hold good in actuality means to destroy actuality.

SELF-INJURY IS A COMPLEX phenomenon that is encountered on a regular basis by health care professionals in mental health care. In this article, I use the concept of epistemic injustice to examine this complex phenomenon and argue that this helps us to understand developments in the way we think about and support people who self-injure. Individuals with lived experience have important knowledge about the nature of self-injury and particularly how it relates to them. If the credibility of this knowledge is (...) denied, for example through accusations of emotional instability, manipulation and attention seeking, then we may cause epistemic and non-epistemic harms. The former by denying the capacity for knowledge, by not... (shrink)

"'There is only one thing that is certain, namely that we can have nothing certain; and therefore it is not certain that we can have nothing certain,' Samuel Butler once said, expressing in that mindbloggler all the elements required to form a classical paradox. Throughout the ages wise men and jesters alike have been intrigued by such mental twists and riddles which defy common sense and yet appear to be true." -- Dust jacket.