Giordano Bruno’s Cabala del cavallo pegaseo _ _grew out of the great Italian philosopher’s experiences lecturing and debating at Oxford in early 1584. Having received a cold reception there because of his viewpoints, Bruno went on in the Cabala to attack the narrow-mindedness of the university--and by extension, all universities that resisted his advocacy of intellectual freethinking. _The Cabala of Pegasus _consists_ _of vernacular dialogues that turn on the identification of the noble Pegasus and the humble ass. In the interplay (...) of these ideas, Bruno explores the nature of poetry, divine authority, secular learning, and Pythagorean metempsychosis, which had great influence on James Joyce and many other writers and artists from the Renaissance to the modern period. This book, the first English translation of _The Cabala of Pegasus, _contains both the English and Italian versions as well as helpful annotations. It will have particular appeal to all Renaissance scholars and those interested in the Renaissance cabalistic underpinnings of modern literature. (shrink)

This essay replies to critics since 1995 of my “biostatistical theory” of health. According to the BST, a pathological condition is a state of statistically species-subnormal biological part-functional ability, relative to sex and age. Theoretical health, the total absence of pathological conditions, is then a value-free scientific notion. Recent critics offer a mixture of old and new objections to this analysis. Some new ones relate to choice of reference class, situation-specificity of function, common diseases and healthy populations, improvements in population (...) health, the practice of pathologists, “Cambridge changes” in health status, and comparative vs. absolute health concepts. I make no changes in doctrine, except to consider treating “normal aging” as pathological by taking young adults as the standard for all adults. (shrink)

This short piece of communication has the sole purpose of identifying some evidence, supporting our view regarding a possible missing environment-nurturing cultural value. Here, we attempt to examine the presence of cultural studies within the boundary of biodiversity research.

This chapter sheds light on a response to experimental philosophy that has not yet received enough attention: the reflection defense. According to proponents of this defense, judgments about philosophical cases are relevant only when they are the product of careful, nuanced, and conceptually rigorous reflection. The chapter argues that the reflection defense is misguided: Five studies (N>1800) are presented, showing that people make the same judgments when they are primed to engage in careful reflection as they do in the conditions (...) standardly used by experimental philosophers. (shrink)

A straightforward way to handle moral uncertainty is simply to follow the moral theory in which you have most credence. This approach is known as My Favourite Theory. In this paper, I argue that, in some cases, My Favourite Theory prescribes choices that are, sequentially, worse in expected moral value than the opposite choices according to each moral theory you have any credence in. In addition this, problem generalizes to other approaches that avoid intertheoretic comparisons of value, such as My (...) Favourite Option, the Borda Rule, Variance Normalization, and the Principle of Maximizing Expected Normalized Moral Value. (shrink)

The concept of second nature plays a central role in McDowell's project of reconciling thought's external constraint with its spontaneity or autonomy: our conceptual capacities are natural in the sense that they are fully integrated into the natural world, but they are a second nature to us since they are not reducible to elements that are intelligible apart from those conceptual capacities. Rather than offering a theory of second nature and an account of how we acquire one, (...) McDowell suggests that Aristotle's account of ethical character formation as the acquisition of a second nature serves as a model that can reassure us that thought's autonomy does not threaten its naturalness. However, far from providing such reassurance, the Aristotelian model of second nature actually generates an anxiety about how the acquisition of such autonomous conceptual abilities could be possible. (shrink)

Examines the philosophical and clinical history of scientific medicine, and critiques the movements in psychoneuroimmunology and holistic and environmental medicine.

Many think that equality is an intrinsic value. However, this view, especially when based on a consequential foundation, faces familiar objections related to the claim that equality is sometimes good for none and bad for some: most notably the levelling down objection. This article explores a unique (consequential) conception of equality, as part of a more general conception of fairness concerning the resolution of interpersonal conflicts, which is not exposed to these objections.

The target article proposes that people perceive social robots as depictions rather than as genuine social agents. We suggest that people might instead view social robots as social agents, albeit agents with more restricted capacities and moral rights than humans. We discuss why social robots, unlike other kinds of depictions, present a special challenge for testing the depiction hypothesis.

This article is a reconsideration of Tesch's (1977) ethical, educational, and methodological functions for debriefing through a literature review and an Internet survey of authors of articles published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology and Journal of Traumatic Stress . We advocate for a larger ethical role for debriefing in nondeception research. The educational function of debriefing is examined in light of the continued popularity of undergraduate participant pools. A case is made for the methodological function of debriefing (...) to clarify aspects of research participation. Recommendations are made to improve the conducting and reporting of debriefings. (shrink)

질 들뢰즈(Gilles Deleuze)의 대표적 저작 『차이와 반복』(1968)은 ‘차이’와 ‘반복’이라는 두 개념에 있어서의 잘못된 이해의 역사를 규탄하고, 두 개념의 올바른 정의를 바로 세운다는 목표 하에 쓰인 책이다. 즉 반복 개념에 주목해본다면, 책을 관통하는 것은 ‘재현의 반복’에 대한 비판과 이를 대신하는 ‘차이의 반복’의 개념화다. 본고는 책의 2장에 등장하는 세 가지 종합의 기술 안에서 이 두 형태의 반복 개념이 등장하는 양상을 다루고자 하며, 이러한 본고의 관심사가 주목하게 되는 것은 세 번째 종합 중 두 번째 종합이고, 그것의 이중적 구조다. 본고는 두 번째 종합을 특징짓는 (...) 이원성의 구조, 혹은 ‘애매성(ambiguïté)’을 근본적인 설명의 대상으로 삼으면서 그것의 상세한 해설을 제시하고, 그 가운데 두 번째 종합이 바로 이 두 가지 상반되는 반복 개념의 방향을 동시에 가리키고 있다는 점을 논설할 것이다. 또한 우리가 보기에 『차이와 반복』곳곳에서 두 번째 종합에 관해, 혹은 그것과 세 번째 종합의 관계에 관해 비일관적이고 양립 불가능한 진술들이 발견된다면, 이는 바로 이 애매성을 중심으로 두 번째 종합이 이원화되고 있다는 사실에 의해 합당하게 설명될 수 있다. (shrink)

In 'An undermining diagnosis of relativism about truth', Horwich claims that the notion of relative truth is either explanatorily sterile or explanatorily superfluous. In the present paper, I argue that Horwich's explanatory demands set the bar unwarrantedly high: given the philosophical import of the theorems of a truth-theoretic semantic theory, Horwich's proposed explananda, what he calls acceptance facts, are too indirect for us to expect a complete explanation of them in terms of the deliverances of a theory of meaning based (...) on the notion of relative truth. And, to the extent that there might be such an explanation in certain cases, there is no reason to expect relative truth to play an essential, ineliminable role, nor to endorse the claim that it should play such a role in order to be a theoretically useful notion. (shrink)

Objections to the use of assistive technologies in elite sports are generally raised when the technology in question is perceived to afford the user a potentially “unfair advantage,” when it is perceived as a threat to the purity of the sport, and/or when it is perceived as a precursor to a slippery slope toward undesirable changes in the sport. These objections rely on being able to quantify standards of “normal” within a sport so that changes attributed to the use of (...) assistive technology can be judged as causing a significant deviation from some baseline standard. This holds athletes using assistive technologies accountable to standards that restrict their opportunities to achieve greatness, while athletes who do not use assistive technologies are able to push beyond the boundaries of these standards without moral scrutiny. This paper explores how constructions of fairness and “normality” impact athletes who use assistive technology to compete in a sporting venue traditionally populated with “able-bodied” competitors. It argues that the dynamic and obfuscated construction of “normal” standards in elite sports should move away from using body performance as the measuring stick of “normal,” toward alternate forms of constructing norms such as defining, quantifying, and regulating the mechanical actions that constitute the critical components of a sport. Though framed within the context of elite sports, this paper can be interpreted more broadly to consider problems with defining “normal” bodies in a society in which technologies are constantly changing our abilities and expectations of what normal means. (shrink)