Is childhood valuable? And is childhood as, less, or more, valuable than adulthood? In this article I first delineate several different questions that we might be asking when we think about the ‘value of childhood’, and I explore some difficulties of doing so. I then focus on the question of whether childhood is good for the person who experiences it. I argue for two key claims. First, if childhood wellbeing is measured by the same standards as adulthood, then children are (...) worse off than adults. Second, if childhood and adulthood wellbeing are measured by different standards, then we cannot compare them, and children are neither better off nor worse off than adults. This has some counter-intuitive implications, such as that we do not harm persons by depriving them of a childhood, nor by keeping them as children for elongated periods. (shrink)

Stokes’ earlier chapter in this volume argued that, given the role ethical considerations play in our judgments of what to believe, ethical factors will put limits on the extent to which we can embrace particularism about conspiracy theories. However, that will only be the case if there are ethical problems with conspiracy theory as a practice (rather than simply as a formal class of explanation). Utilising the Lakatosian framework for analysing conspiracy theories developed by Steve Clarke, this paper identifies a (...) morally costly feature of conspiracy theorizing: its tendency to generate and expand new accusations purely to defend the core theory from countervailing evidence. Such 'auxiliary accusations' violate important norms around justified accusation, which supplies a defeasible, but important, reason to be reluctant to take part in the practice of conspiracy theorizing. (shrink)

The concept of media accountability is widely used but remains inadequately defined in the literature and often is restricted to a 1-dimensional interpretation. This study explores perceptions of accountability as manifestations of claims to responsibility, based on philosophical conceptions of the 2 terms, and suggests media accountability be more broadly understood as a dynamic of interaction between a given medium and the value sets of individuals or groups receiving media messages. The shape-shifting nature of the concept contributes to the volatility (...) of debate surrounding conflicting notions of press freedom and responsibility. (shrink)

Questions about dirty hands have often focused on legitimate, secure leaders deciding whether to violate important deontological principles or the rules of interpersonal morality. The purpose of this paper is to show that revolutionaries have dirty hands; revolutionaries do wrong by engaging in unilateral usurpation of the existing system with the hope that latter benefits will justify their actions. Yet, once the revolution securely generates improvements for the common good, the initial usurpation becomes increasingly irrelevant to judgments of the new (...) government’s legitimacy. The paper argues that only retroactive justification—where later success forces opponents and advocates to reinterpret the wrongness of the initial action—can fully capture the complex moral dynamics of revolutions. (shrink)

Modal logics have in the past been used as a unifying framework for the minimality semantics used in defeasible inference, conditional logic, and belief revision. The main aim of the present paper is to add adaptive logics, a general framework for a wide range of defeasible reasoning forms developed by Diderik Batens and his co-workers, to the growing list of formalisms that can be studied with the tools and methods of contemporary modal logic. By characterising the class of abnormality models, (...) this aim is achieved at the level of the model-theory. By proposing formulae that express the consequence relation of adaptive logic in the object-language, the same aim is also partially achieved at the syntactical level. (shrink)

In their article, Nielsen Busch and Mjaaland defend the moral permissibility of cDCD, suggesting that much of the controversy around this donation practice has been the result of a misinterpretatio...

Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte, EarlyView.

Volume 34, Issue 1, January-March 2019, Page 1-1.

This paper offers a phenomenological analysis of the relationship between regret and episodic memory, the temporal structure of ‘regretful memory’, the affective and evaluative dimension of regretful memory and the counterfactual dimension of regretful memory. Based on Husserl’s phenomenology, I offer an analysis of regret’s complex structures of intentionality and time-consciousness. Husserl held that episodic memory requires two temporal orientations on one’s own experience: the past now that one relives and the present now in which one does the reliving. If (...) memory generally entails two temporal perspectives, regretful memory brings in a third point of temporal reference: that now that could have been. Drawing on Hoerl and McCormack, I give an account of regret as a mnemic and counterfactual form of intentional consciousness that confronts an alternative past and attempts to negotiate between two essential yet conflicting features of its actual past: its contingency and its irreversibility. On this basis, I then draw on Bagnoli to offer a phenomenological theory of regretful memory as an emotional mode of valuing possibilities that belong to the past. (shrink)

Institutionalism gives priority to structure over agency. Yet institutions have never developed and operated without the intervention of interested groups. This paper develops a conceptual framework for the role of agency in historical institutionalism. Based on recent contributions following the coalitional turn and drawing on insights from sociological institutionalism, it argues that agency plays a key role in the creation and maintenance of social coalitions that stabilize but also challenge institutions. Without such agency, no coalition can be created, maintained, or (...) changed. Similarly, without a supporting coalition, no contested institution can survive. Yet, due to collective action problems, such coalitional work is challenging. This coalitional perspective offers a robust role for agency in historical institutionalism, but it also explains why institutions remain stable despite agency. In addition, this paper forwards several portable propositions that allow for the identification of who is likely to develop agency and what these actors do. (shrink)

Many people have the intuition that the failure to impose punishment on perpetrators of such serious human rights violations as murder, torture and rape that occurred in the course of violent conflict preceding a society’s transition from authoritarianism to democracy amounts to an injustice. This intuition is to an appreciable extent accounted for by the retributivist outlook of a high proportion of those who share it. Colleen Murphy, however, though she accepts that retributivism may justify punishment of offenders in stable (...) democracies, claims in her recent book on transitional justice that retributivism is inapplicable in the circumstances of transitional justice. I argue that the four arguments she provides in support of this claim are unsuccessful and that retributivism, assuming it to be a tenable rationale for punishment, justifies the subjection of perpetrators of at least some serious human rights abuses to sanctions in at least some transitional societies. (shrink)

One feature of the individuals Nietzsche considers paradigms of greatness is that they are, in some capacity, rare —an exception to the majority.1 It would be difficult to overstate the frequency of this association in the texts. From as early as UM, Nietzsche repeatedly contrasts the “rarest and most valuable exemplars” with the pejorative “herd [Heerde]”, the “common [gemein]”, the “mediocre [mittelmässig]”, and the “rabble [Pöbel]”.2 This contrast becomes more explicit in Nietzsche’s mature period, where, for example, he writes plainly (...) that “what can be common has ever but little... (shrink)

A significant criticism of the anthropic principle as a scientific claim is that testable predictions cannot be derived from it. Brandon Carter has argued, however, that the principle can be used to predict on the one hand that the period of time biological evolution is intrinsically likely to require is very large, and on the other that the number of ‘critical steps’ that have occurred in the evolution of life on earth is related to the length of time life can (...) continue to evolve. I attempt to show that neither of Carter's arguments provides a convincing defence of the testability of the anthropic principle. (shrink)

The latest volume of Leibniz’ Politische Schriften, in the great Akademie-Ausgabe of the Sämtliche Schriften und Briefe, reveals the astonishing range of Leibniz’ political-moral-legal-religious-scientific-cultural concerns: if the first, largest and most important section of this new fifth volume deals with justice and law, that is only to be expected, since Leibniz’ doctoral degree was in law and jurisprudence, and since he served as jurisconsult and “intimate counsellor of justice” to an ever-expanding circle of European rulers: first the Elector of Mainz, (...) then the house of Hannover, then the King of Prussia in Berlin, the Emperor in Vienna, and Czar Peter the Great.. But Politische Schriften vol. 5 also treats “church policy” and charitable religious reconciliation—including a Latin memorial poem on the death of benevolently ecumenical Huguenot-turned-Catholic Pellisson ; the raising of Hannover to the status of an Electorate within the Holy Roman Empire; and the relations of the Reich with Europe, especially with the France of bellicose Louis XIV. Moreover vol. 5 takes up “health policy,” the improvement of the coinage, and numerous schemes for the rational re-ordering of the ducal libraries of Hannover and Wolfenbüttel, with emphasis on books in the so-called “higher-faculties”. And all of these apparently diverse, seemingly scattered matters are coherently linked by Leibniz’ charitable concern for le bien général du genre humain: “Provided that something of importance is achieved, I am indifferent whether it is done in Germany or France, for I seek the good of mankind. I am neither a phil-Hellene nor a philo-Roman, but a philanthropos.”. (shrink)

The first part of the book is an excellent historico-systematic analysis of the romantic reaction against science underlying and pervading the once popular philosophical currents within the last seventy-five years, such as, e.g., Austro-German empirio-criticism, English neo-Hegelianism, French intuitionism, and Anglo-American pragmatism. The second part studies the new theories of mathematics and physics--including non-Euclidean geometry, non-Aristotelian logic, and non-Newtonian physics--in relation to "the phenomenon of irrationalism" in contemporary thought. The book is definitely worth reading, and anyone acquainted with Morris R. (...) Cohen's Reason and Nature will readily come to realize how Aliotta anticipates remarkably the courageous position that great American classic in contemporary philosophy takes towards "the insurgence against reason" in recent times. (shrink)

The status of risk factors and disease remains a disputed question in the theory and practice of medicine and healthcare, and so does the related question of delineating disease boundaries. I present a framework based on Bernard Lonergan’s account of emergent probability for differentiating (1) generically distinct levels of systematic function within organisms and between organisms and their environments and (2) the methods of functional, genetic, and statistical investigation. I then argue on this basis that it is possible to understand (...) disease in terms of biological or higher intra-level dysfunction, risk factors—including genetic risk factors—in terms of statistical inter-level conditioning of a given stage or developmental sequence of systematic functioning, and the empirical boundaries of disease in terms of the limits of both functional categorization (from an epistemic standpoint) and upper-level integration of lower-level processes and events (from an ontological standpoint). (shrink)

Der Kosmologie von Alfred N. Whitehead wird gegenwärtig viel Aufmerksamkeit zuteil. Eine entscheidende Frage entbehrt jedoch einer zufriedenstellenden Antwort: Wie kommen die prozesshaften Ereignisse zu ihrer räumlichen Ausdehnung? Dieser Artikel möchte aufzeigen, worin das Problem besteht und dass Whiteheads Metaphysik keine Lösung des Problems zu bieten vermag.The cosmology of Alfred N. Whitehead is attracting much attention these days. But a vital point remains unanswered: In which way do the actual occasions acquire their spatial extension? This paper is supposed to show (...) where the problem lies and that Whitehead's metaphysics offers no solution to it. (shrink)

Schopenhauer is one of the few philosophers in the history of Western ethics to dedicate sustained critical attention to the nature, extent, and phenomenology of malice. Yet while other aspects of Schopenhauer's moral psychology have received significant attention, his nuanced account of malice is under-explored. This paper attempts to remedy this oversight. It argues that Schopenhauer defends a unified and hierarchical account of moral vice in which malice is a sui generis motive, the pinnacle of immorality, and far more pervasive (...) in the human psyche than typically recognized. Moreover, it is argued that part of the significance of Schopenhauer’s account lies in how his idiosyncratic conceptual framework allows him to philosophically capture many widespread beliefs about malicious persons — particularly the view that malice is best explained in terms of the agents own inner-suffering. Nevertheless, Schopenhauer’s views about malice raise a number of interpretive puzzles, which the paper subsequently aims to elucidate and solve. (shrink)

I argue for the possibility of hypergunk: that is, it is possible that there exists an x such that every part of x has a proper part and, for any set S of parts of x, there is a set S′ of parts of...

This is an excerpt from the contentThe Khmer Rouge Tribunal is charged with prosecuting senior leaders and those most responsible for mass crimes committed in Cambodia during the 1970s. It has a unique structure as a court formally embedded in the Cambodian domestic system but with international participation by the UN. Under the agreement between Cambodia and the UN, the Tribunal has been composed of both local and international judges. On July 19, 2007, the prosecutors submitted a list of five (...) persons to the Tribunal’s co-investigating judges and requested that they be indicted and brought to trial.The current volume III of a series of volumes in this collection provides for the final trial evidence submitted by the co-lawyers for civil parties and the final closing statements by the co-prosecutors as of 2009 in the trial of Kaing Guek Eav , chairman of Tuol Sleng prison, Security Center 21 where at least 12,272 ‘enemies of the revolution’ were sent to be “smashed” . T. (shrink)

Foreword -- Theory postmortem : Derrida -- Political sense and sensibility : Gramsci to Bourdieu -- Genealogies of common sense : Marx and Nietzsche -- Folklores of the future : Wilde and Llawrence -- The transcendental ordinary : Wittgenstein to Badiou -- Epilogue: Not a manifesto.

Patrick Gardiner; XII—Error, Faith and Self-Deception, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 70, Issue 1, 1 June 1970, Pages 221–244, https://doi.org/.

Written by leading scholars in the field, this collection analyses the notion of travel writing as a genre, while tracing significant examples of Mediterranean travel writing that return us to Ancient Greece, to Medieval pilgrimages, to Venetians diplomatic missions, to an Egyptian's account of Paris in the nineteenth century, to French artistic journeys in North Africa and to contemporary narratives of privileged resettlement, death and dislocation.

Choral music teachers simultaneously work toward two potentially competing goals: the quality of the musical performance and the quality of the education they provide for students. Is either goal preeminent, or can both exist in an ever-shifting balance? This paper highlights how this conundrum has existed since the emergence of North American choral music education nearly a century ago. The problem is explored as a paradox, with examples drawn from the author's personal experience. A proposed resolution supports the validity of (...) both goals, with the suggestion that teachers need to increase awareness of how their goals affect decisions concerning policy, pedagogy, and musical practice. (shrink)

In recent years, philosophers and psychologists have criticized character- or virtue-based normative theories on the basis that human behavior and cognition depend more on situation than on traits of character. This set of criticisms, which initially aimed at broadly Aristotelian virtue theories in ethics, has expanded to target a wide range of approaches in both ethics and, recently, epistemology. In this essay, I draw on the works of Maria Montessori to defend her conception of character and particularly of intellectual virtue (...) in the light of situationist objections. I start with an overview of the situationist challenge before turning to some reasons to think that Montessori’s virtue epistemology might be susceptible to it. I then offer a brief discussion of Montessori’s approach to character. After laying out two ways that Montessori, like recent conservative defenses of virtue epistemology, deflates the significance of situationist findings, I show some ways that Montessori’s virtue epistemology resembles so-called “accommodationist” responses to situationism. (shrink)

La notion de chair s’élabore chez Merleau-Ponty, à l’encontre du primat husserlien du toucher, dans l’articulation du toucher et du voir. C’est par cette articulation, ce recouvrement l’un par l’autre des champs sensoriels que Merleau-Ponty peut penser la chair comme chair du monde, élément de l’Être. L’auto-appréhension charnelle doit se comprendre d’abord selon une visibilité errante, dans la transitivité des regards qui se voient et s’échangent le paysage commun de leurs vues. Mais, remontant au cœur même de ce « transitivisme (...) », c’est dans la rencontre des corps, dans leur enlacement, que Le visible et l’invisible décrit au plus près l’opération de cette réversibilité. Naissance du monde dans la figure d’une scène primitive où les corps se donnant l’un à l’autre ouvrent un espacement originaire. Cette réflexivité essentiellement est inaccomplie, les corps ne se touchent que dans l’écart qui les unit. La chair, Merleau-Ponty y insiste, ne se rejoint que dans l’immi­nence d’une auto-affection toujours différée, par là elle est différenciée, polymorphe, et elle demeure ouverte. De cette ouverture de la chair naît l’expression. La voix s’élève dans une autre réflexivité, celle d’un sonore qui s’entend et, plus proprement, celle des voix qui s’écoutent. Incarnation sonore, la voix est la chair vive du sens. Entre la caresse et la voix, c’est à un même mouvement de réflexivité et d’expressivité charnelle que Merleau-Ponty nous fait donc assister, un même élan de la chair qui s’exhausse de son anonymat élémentaire pour naître à soi dans l’expression. (shrink)

No. South African Journal of Philosophy Vol. 25(1) 2006: 48-61.