An original study of the philosophical problems associated with inductive reasoning. Like most of the main questions in epistemology, the classical problem of induction arises from doubts about a mode of inference used to justify some of our most familiar and pervasive beliefs. The experience of each individual is limited and fragmentary, yet the scope of our beliefs is much wider; and it is the relation between belief and experience, in particular the belief that the future will in some respects (...) resemble the past and the unobserved the observed, which forms the subject of this book. Dr Blackburn's first aim is to state the problem of induction properly, to show that there does exist a genuine problem immune to the solutions in vogue at present, yet no tin principle insoluble. He gives an extended and original account of the concept of a reason and goes on to discuss prediction. In the end Dr Blackburn produces a rationale for belief in certain short-term predictions based on his reinterpretation of the classical principle of indifference. He claims that a justification for induction can be found along the lines he has suggested and must indeed be found there if anywhere. (shrink)

By examining an exemplar sample of mental health nursing educational policies and related legislation, in this article, we trace the discursive production of madness as an “othered” identity category. We engage in a critical discourse analysis of mental health nursing education in Canada, drawing on provincial and federal policies and legislation as the main sources of data. Theoretically framed by critical posthumanism and mad studies, this article outlines how the mad subjectivity becomes decontextualized out of its identity‐based understanding and recontextualized (...) as an inferior category of “the human,” circulating within discourses of pedagogy, economics, law, and psychiatry. The article maps the intertextual nexus of the discourse of mental health nursing education, making visible the complex, the arbitrary, and the sometimes‐contradictory nature of the discipline's grappling with identity‐based mental health concepts. We close with several implications for nursing policy, education, and practice. (shrink)

Loss aversion can occur in riskless and risky choices. We present novel evidence on both in a non-student sample (660 randomly selected customers of a car manufacturer). We measure loss aversion in riskless choice in endowment effect experiments within and between subjects and find similar levels of average loss aversion in both. The subjects of the within study also participate in a simple lottery choice task which arguably measures loss aversion in risky choices. We find substantial heterogeneity in both measures (...) of loss aversion. Loss aversion in riskless choice and loss aversion in risky choice are strongly positively correlated, but on average riskless loss aversion is higher than risky loss aversion. We find that in both choice tasks, loss aversion increases in age, income, and wealth, and decreases in education. Our results provide novel supportive input to the debate about the reality of loss aversion. (shrink)

Herbert McCabe was unique amongst the grammatical thomists in making significant use of the thought of Karl Marx. He engaged, moreover, with two topics in Marx which have generally been avoided by Christian theologians: class struggle and atheism. This paper examines McCabe’s treatment of both themes, and concludes that he effected a compelling incorporation of them into Christian thought. With respect to class struggle, McCabe understands there to be an intrinsic antagonism in capitalist society. He holds that an antagonistic society (...) is antithetical to Christian norms, and concludes (with Marx) that this kind of society ought to be done away with by engaging in the side in the class-struggle – namely the working class – which has the capacity to do away with class society. He situates this view ironically, however, relativising the claims made about socialist society in the light of God’s Kingdom. With respect to atheism, McCabe brings his thomistic doctrine of God into conversation with Marx’s atheism, arguing that what Marx rejects when he rejects ‘God’ is a thing in the world, whereas God is – by thomistic hypothesis – not one more thing in the world. A radical view, therefore, is sustained by a traditional theology. (shrink)

In this paper we argue that the consensus around normative standards for the ethics of research in clinical trials, strongly influenced by the Declaration of Helsinki, is perceived from various quarters as too conservative and potentially restrictive of research that is seen as urgent and necessary. We examine this problem from the perspective of various challengers who argue for alternative approaches to what ought or ought not to be permitted. Key themes within this analysis will examine these claims and argue (...) they have implications for the interests of the research subject, research governance and regulation. Using our work with TREAT-NMD, the neuromuscular clinical trials network, we posit that there is a place for advancing the discourse of moral rights and moral duties in the context of research, especially from the perspective of patients and their families, and for including the politics of patient activism and empowerment. At the same time we remain vigilant to the danger that the therapeutic misconception and other serious vulnerabilities for the patient population in clinical trials, are at risk of being overlooked. (shrink)

I bring together social ontology and social epistemology by consideringsocial entities (``epistemic unities'') that are constituted by the holdingof epistemic relations between their members. In particular, I focus onthe relation of taking someone as an expert. Among the types of structuresexamined are ones with a single expert and one or more non-experts whomay or may not know of each other's situation; and ones with more thanone expert, including cases in which the relation between the experts ishierarchical and cases in which (...) it is symmetrical. These structures modela variety of social situations which can thus be given a unified treatment.Among the cases I discuss are persons, which I argue are multiple-expertunities of persons at times. Taking a person as a social unity like this offersa clear sense in which some groups can also be person-like. (shrink)

We present some natural examples of countable Borel equivalence relations E, F with E ≤ B F such that there does not exist a continuous reduction from E to F.

The thesis of the paper is that persons are similar to a kind of group: multiple-expert epistemic unities (MEUs). MEUs are groups in which there are multiple experts on whom other members of the group model their opinion. An example would be a group of children playing Telephone. Any child nearer the source is an 'expert' for any child further away. I argue that, with certain important qualifications, it is both rational and necessary for persons to treat their future selves (...) as experts (i.e. to satisfy Bas Van Fraassen's Principle of Reflection). This makes a person a kind of MEU. (The paper "Epistemic Unities" gives more details about different kinds of epistemic unities.). (shrink)

In this paper I problematize the use of appeals to the common intuitions people have about the morality of our society’s current treatment of animals in order to defend that treatment. I do so by looking at recent findings in the field of cognitive science. First I will examine the role that appeals to common intuition play in philosophical arguments about the moral worth of animals, focusing on the work of Carl Cohen and Richard Posner. After describing the theory of (...) Moral Disengagement—which has been used to explain how people live with themselves when they commit acts that they themselves believe are wrong—I will review the recent empirical research that details the nature of the moral disengagement that accompanies animal treatment. This includes studies that reveal that those who eat animals engage in the following behaviors: They minimize the nature of the harm of killing animals by casting the practice in a positive light; They obscure personal responsibility by blaming others for harms; They minimize the effect of the conduct on the animals by avoiding reference to the animal origins of meat; They derogate vegetarians as a way of avoiding feelings of guilt for their own practices. Perhaps most importantly, a number of empirical studies have shown that people’s intuitions about the moral worth of animals are shaped by their practice of eating animals—and not the other way around. In addition to the studies on moral disengagement, there is another body of research that has attempted to discover what accounts for the individual differences in attitudes people have toward the moral worth of animals. These studies have linked masculinity and traits like Authoritarianism, Social Dominance Orientation and Right Wing Authoritarianism to the tendency to disregard the moral worth of animals. I will briefly summarize this body of research and will then conclude by arguing that this data should cause us to be highly skeptical of the value that the common intuition that people who eat animals have about the moral status of animals may have in helping us understand the actual moral worth of animals. (shrink)

Philosophe politique et intellectuel engage dans la vie des idées aux Etats-Unis comme dans le monde, Michael Walzer est l'un des penseurs de la société parmi les plus stimulants a l'époque contemporaine. Son oeuvre défriche des pistes nouvelles de réflexion dans les domaines du politique, de la justice sociale, de la morale ou de l'identité culturelle. En même temps, Walzer, dont la pensée s'est forgée lors des luttes pour l'égalité des droits civiques aux USA et contre la guerre du Vietnam (...) dans les années 1960, poursuit une activité féconde d'animation du débat public à travers sa revue Dissent. Dans cet essai, Simon Wuhl a souhaité éclairer une autre dimension de la pensée de Michael Walzer : la relation étroite avec la pensée juive, dont les potentialités d'universalisation sont une référence majeure dans la plupart de ses écrits. Qu'elle s'exprime ouvertement comme dans son article emblématique sur " Les deux universalismes ", ou en arrière-fond comme dans son livre plus théorique sur les Sphères de justice, l'empreinte du judaïsme est toujours présente dans son oeuvre pour éclairer les grandes questions de société. Faisant par ailleurs retour, dans certains de ses travaux, sur les textes de base du judaïsme, Walzer mobilise les ressources méthodologiques des sciences humaines pour les soumettre à une relecture critique. (shrink)

There are generally two controversial issues over Kant's solution to the free will problem. One is over whether he is a compatibilist or an incompatibilist and the other is over whether his solution is a success. In this paper, I will argue, regarding the first controversy, that “compatibilist” and “incompatibilist” are not the right terms to describe Kant for his unique views on freedom and determinism; but that of the two, incompatibilist is the more accurate description. Regarding the second controversy, (...) I will argue that Kant's solution to the free will problem is not a success because his effort in making the effects of freedom part of the field of appearance has made his solution incoherent and ambiguous. Despite this, I argue that Kant's attempt to solve the free will problem is groundbreaking because he at least has separated freedom from the dominance of determinism. (shrink)

Self-exempting conciliationism is the view that it is rational to give weight to the opinions of peers in disagreement, except in disagreements about how to respond to disagreement. The special treatment of disagreements about disagreement, which is important to avoid self-undermining, seems arbitrary. Two arguments against this objection were put forward. Elga [3] aims to show that there is an independent motivation for conciliationism to be self-exempting. Pittard [5] argues that the special treatment is not arbitrary because the concern for (...) epistemic deference motivates conciliatory responses only in ordinary disagreements, but not in disagreements aboutdisagreement. I will argue that both replies fail—none of them can provide a consistent justification for why one ought to be conciliatory in disagreements except in cases of disagreement about disagreement. (shrink)

One line of argument in defense of an unconditional basic income is that it reduces the dependence of less advantaged citizens on others. However, its claim to help ensure individual self-government is undermined by the fact that it is consistent with social and economic inequality. For those who are more wealthy and talented are better placed to influence the democratic decision-making process according to their interests and contrary to the interests of those who are less advantaged. In sum, a basic (...) income does not provide the sufficient conditions for equal citizenship. One solution to that problem, defended by Rousseau, is that in addition to a social minimum, material inequality should be moderated. In this paper I argue that such a measure is unnecessary provided that we can insulate the political decision-making process from the background inequalities. It is argued, following a recent innovative proposal by Bruce Ackerman and Ian Ayres, that to ensure the effective right to self-government the basic income should be complemented by a voucher of equal value to be used by each and every citizen as a campaign contribution to a candidate of their choice. (shrink)

Many scholars claim that democracy improves population health. The prevailing explanation for this is that democratic regimes distribute health-promoting resources more widely than autocratic regimes. The central contention of this article is that democracies also have a significant pro-health effect independently of public redistributive policies. After establishing the theoretical plausibility of the non-distributive effect a panel of 153 countries for the years 1972 to 2000 is used to examine the relationship between extent of democratic experience and life expectancy. We find (...) that democratic governance continues to have a salutary effect on population health even when controls are introduced for the distribution of health-enhancing resources. Data for 50 autocratic countries for the years 1994 to 2007 is then used to examine whether that press freedom has a positive impact on life expectancy independently of government responsiveness. (shrink)

If critical momentum in European philosophy and theory has seemed to shift away from deconstruction over the past decade or so, nevertheless the indebtedness of contemporary key thinkers to Derrida's writing and the entire project of deconstruction is unquestionable, regardless of whether it is always fully acknowledged, and whether or not Derrida's influence manifests itself as a source of inspiration or the grounds of critical antagonism or opposition. Many of those who now reject deconstruction continue to write texts that engage (...) with Derrida's work, whether dismissively or not. In this context, how best to recall deconstruction as a continuing 'voice' across the various fields of the critical humanities, theory and philosophy? The starting point for this collection of essays is the idea that, rather than reduce deconstruction to an object of historical importance or memory, one might more fruitfully analyze its significance in terms of complex matrices of desire in which it continues to figure; ceaselessly provoked in this way, deconstruction may neither be dismissed as simply 'dead', nor unproblematically defended as still alive and well. Instead, it asks to be repositioned on the threshold of life-death (about which deconstruction has always had much to say), an intricate threshold which profoundly complicates its relationship to the 'present' field of critical thought. This is a field which-according to a highly complex set of desires-still struggles to memorialize, to inter, or indeed to cremate, reduce to ashes, the deconstructive corpus. This collection therefore brings together leading voices at the forefront of their critical fields, in order to address the question of the desires of deconstruction, in precisely these multiple senses. With contributions from Etienne Balibar, Catherine Malibou and Martin Hagglund, the volume includes key thinkers across various generations of scholarship: those whose careers took off in the 1960s, at the same time Derrida's importance was gaining acknowledgement; those who played their part in the Anglo-American reception and translation of Derrida in the subsequent two or three decades; those taught by him; and those who, without undue discipleship or hagiography, now seek to critically re-evaluate his work. (shrink)

ABSTRACTLike Kant a little over a hundred years earlier, Nietzsche saw the history of Europe as moving towards the formation of an integrated political union. Unlike Kant, however, Nietzsche does not see this development as an unambiguous good. Kant had supposed that European integration would belong to a history of constitutional improvements that would make war between what we would now call “democratic” states in Europe increasingly less likely. Nietzsche also sees it as part of a process of democratization, but (...) he understands that as a movement of “levelling and mediocritizing” of the European peoples, making Europeans into serviceable herd animals, “weak willed highly employable workers”. The general trend of European democratization is simply a movement towards the production of a type that is “prepared for slavery in the subtlest sense”. Nietzsche does not think this is a wholly unhappy development, however, because he thinks the same conditions will also bring about something that he welcomes: “th... (shrink)

This paper explores Pierre Bourdieu’s conception of social science. In particular, it aims to show that the common assumption that Bourdieu remains trapped in a positivist paradigm does not do justice to his multifaceted account of social science. In order to illustrate the complexity of Bourdieu’s conception of social science, this study scrutinises ten epistemological tensions which can be found in his writings on the nature of systematic forms of knowledge production. In view of these epistemological tensions, a more fine-grained (...) picture emerges which demonstrates that Bourdieu compels us to reflect upon the complexity of the various tasks intrinsic to the pursuit of a critical social science. The paper concludes by discussing the limitations and shortcomings of the epistemological presuppositions that underpin Bourdieu’s reflexive sociology. (shrink)

Sound symbolism refers to non‐arbitrary mappings between the sounds of words and their meanings and is often studied by pairing auditory pseudowords such as “maluma” and “takete” with rounded and pointed visual shapes, respectively. However, it is unclear what auditory properties of pseudowords contribute to their perception as rounded or pointed. Here, we compared perceptual ratings of the roundedness/pointedness of large sets of pseudowords and shapes to their acoustic and visual properties using a novel application of representational similarity analysis (RSA). (...) Representational dissimilarity matrices (RDMs) of the auditory and visual ratings of roundedness/pointedness were significantly correlated crossmodally. The auditory perceptual RDM correlated significantly with RDMs of spectral tilt, the temporal fast Fourier transform (FFT), and the speech envelope. Conventional correlational analyses showed that ratings of pseudowords transitioned from rounded to pointed as vocal roughness (as measured by the harmonics‐to‐noise ratio, pulse number, fraction of unvoiced frames, mean autocorrelation, shimmer, and jitter) increased. The visual perceptual RDM correlated significantly with RDMs of global indices of visual shape (the simple matching coefficient, image silhouette, image outlines, and Jaccard distance). Crossmodally, the RDMs of the auditory spectral parameters correlated weakly but significantly with those of the global indices of visual shape. Our work establishes the utility of RSA for analysis of large stimulus sets and offers novel insights into the stimulus parameters underlying sound symbolism, showing that sound‐to‐shape mapping is driven by acoustic properties of pseudowords and suggesting audiovisual cross‐modal correspondence as a basis for language users' sensitivity to this type of sound symbolism. (shrink)

Much of traditional rabbinic hermeneutics, what I call "midrashic interpretation," appears to be of such a bizarre nature as to require some sort of explanation, or even justification. This essay attempts to provide a philosophical foundation for midrashic interpretation by placing it in the context of the idea (vaguely neo-platonic) that God is only fully realized as the result of a certain process, a process of which midrashic interpretation is an essential part. In the final section I attempt to spell (...) out some connections between the specifically Jewish question of rabbinic hermeneutics and some more general ideas in philosophy and psychoanalysis. (shrink)

Graham Harman’s Object-Oriented Ontology has employed a variant of occasionalist causation since 2002, with sensual objects acting as the mediators of causation between real objects. While the mechanism for living beings creating sensual objects is clear, how nonliving objects generate sensual objects is not. This essay sets out an interpretation of occasionalism where the mediating agency of nonliving contact is the virtual particles of nominally empty space. Since living, conscious, real objects need to hold sensual objects as sub-components, but nonliving (...) objects do not, this leads to an explanation of why consciousness, in Object-Oriented Ontology, might be described as doubly withdrawn: a sensual sub-component of a withdrawn real object. (shrink)

This article examines the ethical thought of the prominent French philosopher, Alain Badiou. His work is placed in the context of discussions of the sources of normativity in relation to Kant and Levinas and then the central category of the event in Badiou's work is critically discussed. The article claims that Badiou's talk of truth in relation to event is misplaced and argues that there is a residual heroism behind Badiou's political thinking.

This paper examines how digital technologies might be used to improve ethical attitudes towards nonhuman animals, by exploring the case study of nonhuman apes kept in modern zoos. The paper describes and employs a socio-ethical framework for undermining anti-ape prejudice advanced by philosopher Edouard Machery which draws on classic anti-racism strategies from the social sciences. We also discuss how digital technologies might be designed and deployed to enable and enhance rather than impede the three anti-prejudice strategies of contact and interaction, (...) enlightenment, and individualization. In doing so, the paper illuminates the broad potential and limitations of digital technology to both harm and benefit animals via its effects on human ethical attitudes. This examination provides guidance for future projects and empirical work on using digital technologies to promote moral respect for a range of nonhuman animals in different settings. (shrink)

In response to prevailing perceptions, I contend that Søren Kierkegaard (1813–55) conceives of the wholly otherness of God via his dialectical category of the ‘infinite qualitative difference’ between the human and the divine, initially through the self's consciousness of sin and ultimately through the self's acceptance of the gift of forgiveness. Therefore, I claim that while the common designation of Kierkegaard's God as ‘Wholly Other’ may initially evoke the alterity of sin; it is not ultimately sufficient to describe the divine (...) alterity which Kierkegaard regards as more faithfully manifest in the ‘impossible possibility’ of forgiveness. Through this reading, I finally suggest that the ‘Wholly Other’ is not ultimately representative of God in Kierkegaard's writings and might be more faithfully supplemented by the appellation of the Holy Other. (shrink)