_Identity and Discrimination_, originally published in 1990 and the first book by respected philosopher Timothy Williamson, is now reissued and updated with the inclusion of significant new material. Williamson here proposes an original and rigorous theory linking identity, a relation central to metaphysics, and indiscriminability, a relation central to epistemology.__ Updated and reissued edition of Williamson’s first publication, with the inclusion of significant new material Argues for an original cognitive account of the relation between identity and discrimination that has (...) been influential in the philosophy of perception Pioneers the use of epistemic logic to solve puzzles about indiscriminability Develops the application of techniques from mathematical logic to understand issues about identity over time and across possible worlds. (shrink)

This paper explores how popular understandings of physical/mental supervenience can be employed to help support Robert Sokolowski’s enactivist theory of perception. The paper also investigates how the relationship between the world and our perceptions of it ties into the development and evolution of language and the terms we use to “say things about things.”.

Is philosophy a unique discipline, or are its methods more like those of other sciences than many philosophers think? Timothy Williamson explains clearly and concisely how contemporary philosophers think and work, and reflects on their powers and limitations.

The influential public health ethics framework proposed by Childress et al. includes five “justificatory conditions,” two of which are “necessity” and “least infringement.” While the framework points to important moral values, we argue it is redundant for it to list both necessity and least infringement because they are logically equivalent. However, it is ambiguous whether Childress et al. would endorse this view, or hold the two conditions distinct. This ambiguity has resulted in confusion in public health ethics discussions citing the (...) Childress et al. framework, as demonstrated by debate between Resnik and Wilson and Dawson. We analyse this debate to resolve these ambiguities. Finally, we argue that the necessity/least infringement principle of the Childress et al. framework applies only in cases in which only one intervention is to be implemented to achieve one specific goal. In other cases, it is not essential to require that only the least infringing intervention be implemented. (shrink)

This study focuses on one of the newer forms of software piracy, known as digital piracy, and uses the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB) as a framework to attempt to determine factors that influence digital piracy (the illegal copying/downloading of copyrighted software and media files). This study examines factors, which could determine an individual’s intention to pirate digital material (software, media, etc.). Past piracy behavior and moral obligation, in addition to the prevailing theories of behavior (Theory of Planned Behavior), were (...) studied to determine the influence on digital piracy intention. Based on the results of this study, planned behavioral factors in addition to past piracy behavior and moral obligation were found to influence an individual’s intention to pirate digital material. Attitude, past piracy behavior, perceived behavior control, and moral obligation explained 71 percent of the intention to pirate variance. Using these results, a better understanding of why individuals pirate is presented and can be used to help combat digital piracy. (shrink)

Timothy Williamson; VII*—Equivocation and Existence, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 88, Issue 1, 1 June 1988, Pages 109–128, https://doi.org/10.

The most important clarification we bring in our reply to commentators concerns the problem of the “explanatory gap”: that is, the gulf that separates physical processes in the brain from the experienced quality of sensations. By adding two concepts (bodiliness and grabbiness) that were not stressed in the target article, we strengthen our claim and clarify why we think we have solved the explanatory gap problem, – not by dismissing qualia, but, on the contrary, by explaining why sensations have a (...) “feel” and why “feels” feel the way they do. We additionally clarify our views on: internal representations (we claim internal representations cannot explain why sensation has a feel), on behaviorism (we are not behaviorists), on perception and action (we believe there can be perception without action), and on the brain (we believe the brain does do something important in perception). (shrink)

Background: The aim of this study was to investigate associations between demographic and clinical variables and duration of untreated psychosis (DUP) in a sample of cases of psychosis across an adult early intervention in psychosis service and a child and adolescent community team. Method: Cross-sectional baseline data for cases of psychosis across the two teams on the caseload at a given time point were collected, including age of onset, gender, ethnicity, referral route, and DUP. Results: The median DUP across the (...) entire sample was 91 days, while those patients with initial treatment for psychosis from the child and adolescent team had a median DUP of 69 days. Using multiple linear regression, there were two variables that showed a significant association with DUP: referral route (p < .001), and age of onset, with earlier age of onset associated with shorter DUP (p = .015). Conclusion: These findings are discussed in relation to possible explanatory factors, with particular focus on service-level variables and pathways to care. It is suggested that the involvement of child and adolescent teams is vital to the work of early intervention in psychosis services. (shrink)

Any theory of experience which postulates that brain mechanisms generate "raw feel" encounters the impassable "explanatory gap" separating physics from phenomenology.

Robinson argues that by certain threshold criteria, pregnant women qualify for a higher moral status by reason of their pregnancies. While her intention is to make this a status upgrade for women, we worry that it may result in a status downgrade for women as a class, by presupposing and reinforcing women’s value in relation to their reproductive labour. Historically, central to feminist analysis is resistance to reductive accounts of women in relation to their reproductivity. For example, de Beauvoir addressed (...) men’s transcendence and contrasted it with women’s immanence, a status distinction possible because women are mired in expectations that they will marry, produce children and remain in the domestic realm; and for her part, Firestone argued that biological reproduction underlies women’s inferiority to men and that ‘The reproduction of the species by one sex for the benefit of both (should) be replaced by…artificial reproduction’1 2 Her concern was to liberate women from expectations of biological reproduction so their productive value in society is not reduced to their reproductive contributions. A formidable body of analysis in this same vein cautions against collapsing the value of women into their pregnancies, so much so that some commentators even distinguish ‘mothering’ from gestation.3 Robinson’s argument that pregnant women qualify at a higher threshold of personhood emphasises …. (shrink)

This article argues that the quiet politics of informal business-state interaction explains the political determinants of growth regimes. Building on the business power literature within the study of comparative capitalism, it shows that the noisy politics of elections often leads to changes of government but rarely to fundamental changes in the growth regime. Rather, growth models can be traced to the interactions and interests of dominant corporations within a country and its policymaking elites. The argument is developed through a comparative (...) case study research design, using the case of foreign direct investment–led growth in Ireland and Hungary. FDI-led growth regimes are a universe of cases that rely on state-led industrial and enterprise policies targeting the capital investment of foreign-owned multinational firms. Despite periods of noisy electoral politics challenging basic tenets of the FDI-led growth model in both Hungary and Ireland, the continuity of FDI-oriented growth is traced to the corporate politics of business-state elite deals. (shrink)

An overview of the key debates in biomedical researchethics, presented through a wide-ranging selection of casestudies.

In Lesotho, the risk of mother-to-child-transmission (MTCT) of HIV is substantial; women of childbearing age have a high HIV prevalence rate (26·4%), low knowledge of HIV status and a total fertility rate of 3·5 births per woman. An effective means of preventing MTCT is to reduce unwanted fertility. This paper examines the unmet need for contraception to limit and space births among HIV-positive women in Lesotho aged 15–49 years, using the 2004 Lesotho Demographic and Health Survey. HIV-positive women have their (...) need for contraception unmet in almost one-third of cases, and multivariate analysis reveals this unmet need is most likely amongst the poor and amongst those not approving of family planning. Urgent action is needed to lower the level of unmet need and reduce MTCT. A constructive strategy is to improve access to family planning for all women in Lesotho, irrespective of HIV status, and, more specifically, integrate family planning with MTCT prevention and voluntary counselling and testing services. Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2008. (shrink)

Students in the humanities have found Antigone intriguing ever since she was cast as the focal character in Sophocles's much contemplated tragedy. Antigone is enigmatic, to be sure; until comparatively recently, most interpretations of her focused on her role in the context of the tragic series of events unfolding in the play. These accounts relied heavily on her portrayal by Hegel, as representing the prepolitical ties of kinship coming into conflict with the ascending authority of the state.Richer life was breathed (...) into the 2,400-year-old play, however, by Jacques Lacan in his 1960 lecture "The Essence of Tragedy."1 As a result, over the past several decades an intense interest has developed in the persona of... (shrink)

Medical practice is ideally based on robust, relevant research. However, the lack of disease-modifying treatments for Alzheimer’s disease has motivated “innovative practice” to improve patients’ well-being despite insufficient evidence for the regular use of such interventions in health systems treating millions of patients. Innovative or new non-validated practice poses at least three distinct ethical questions: first, about the responsible application of new non-validated practice to individual patients ; second, about the way in which data from new non-validated practice are communicated (...) via the scientific and lay press ; and third, about the prospect of making new non-validated interventions widely available before more definitive testing. We argue that the authors of metabolic enhancement protocols for Alzheimer’s disease have overstated the evidence in favor of these interventions within the scientific and lay press, failing to communicate weaknesses in their data and uncertainty about their conclusions. Such unmeasured language may create false hope, cause financial harm, undermine informed consent, and frustrate the production of generalizable knowledge necessary to face the societal problems posed by this devastating disease. We therefore offer more stringent guidelines for responsible innovation in the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease. (shrink)

Some commentators object to the use of embryonic and fetal diagnostic technologies by parents who wish to avoid disabilities in their children. In particular, they say this use is hurtful in the meaning it expresses, namely that the lives of people with disabilities are not valuable or are less valuable than the lives of others. Other commentators have tried to show that this meaning does not necessarily belong to parents' choices and is not therefore credible as a general moral objection. (...) However, this analysis overlooks the way in which the use of these technologies can be legitimately interpreted as hurtful. Once we admit to these hurtful effects felt by people with disabilities and those who hold them dear, it becomes important to ask whether that hurt can justify limits on parents' choices. Because the use of these technologies does not hurt people with disabilities directly and because there is no requirement that people having children work to ensure the continued existence of people with disabilities, no justification for limiting parents' choices is to be found in the hurt some people experience in steps taken to avoid disabilities in children. (shrink)

The notion of accountability was introduced by Harold Garfinkel in the opening pages of Studies in Ethnomethodology as part of his ‘central recommendation’ for sociological inquiry. Though the term itself first appears in the Studies, it will be argued that elements of the idea were already discernible in earlier writings. The current article traces the development of the notion from its early emergence in the proto-ethnomethodological period, through its elaboration in the Studies, and, finally, to its refinement in certain later (...) works produced toward the end of the author’s career. In so doing, it reveals the centrality of the notion to ethnomethodologically-informed study and shows its enduring contribution to social theory. (shrink)

Professional standards in medicine and psychology treat concurrent sexual relationships with patients as violations of fiduciary trust, and they sometimes rule out sexual relationships even after a clinical relationship is over. These standards also rule out sex with research subjects who are also patients, but what about nonclinical relationships where there are not always parallels to the standards of clinical medicine? One way to treat sex in nonclinical research relationships is to treat it as sex is treated elsewhere among adults, (...) as a matter of individual choice and responsibility. Alternately, one could ask oversight bodies to draw lines between research that can safely accommodate sexual relationships and research that cannot. One could even ask researchers to avoid all concurrent sexual relationships with their research participants, as happens in clinical medicine. Each of these options has drawbacks that undermine its value as a definitive solution. The deficiencies of these options highlight the need for a professional code of conduct for nonclinical researchers. (shrink)

This paper understands Hodgson’s Hegel and Christian Theology not only to represent the definitive expression of a distinguished Hegel scholar’s theological interpretation, but also to mark a threshold between where Hegel studies have been on the topic of the relation between religion and philosophy in Hegel’s thought and where they are going. On the threshold, Hodgson’s text faces three essential challenges with respect to its bona fides. The first challenge is whether, even if the privileged status of the Lectures on (...) the Philosophy of Religion is granted, anything like consensus has been achieved concerning the importance of narrative and Trinity, on the one hand, and its claim to truth, on the other. The second challenge concerns method, and more specifically whether the teleological model deployed by Hodgson to underwrite the importance of the Lectures is sufficiently reflective to resist the rising authority of archeological accounts which privilege Hegel’s Phenomenology and pre-Phenomenology writings. The third challenge concerns the stability of Hodgson’s interpretation which tends to mediate between the religious and the political, on the one hand, and the non-logical and the logical, on the other. This is by far the most serious concern since it pertains to Hodgson’s act of synthesis. Here it is open to question whether Hodgson has succeeded here anymore than Fackenheim a generation earlier. (shrink)

H. S. Harris’s Hegel’s Ladder opens up the epic universe of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit by constructing a text that is epic in its dimensions and self-conscious design. It aims at truth. In the first instance, this means adequacy with respect to the Phenomenology ’s epic account of humanity’s movement toward self-certain truth. In the second instance, it means correspondence to the epic design of the Phenomenology. For Harris, it is self-evident that the Phenomenology belongs to the genre of epic, (...) since it repeats in a philosophical idiom the form and content of classical Western epics. That Harris accepts, even celebrates the secondariness of his text, vis-à-vis Hegel’s best-known text, does nothing to diminish its intellectual and narrative power. Indeed, with respect to the latter, I want to claim that Hegel’s Ladder rises to the level of a powerful, original epic precisely in its ascesis. Like all powerful texts, Hegel’s Ladder intimidates. Before interpretation so exhaustive, before discernment so perspicacious, any Hegel commentator will fear that whatever he or she has to say will be parochial, redundant, opaque, and intellectually impoverished. (shrink)

Jan Narveson has rendered a valuable service with his examination of two recent publications on the general topic of the treatment of animals. Not only has he given us the means for securing a better understanding of many of the most important arguments common to these two volumes; what is more, he has advanced a position which fails to receive any attention in either, and a position which, should it happen to be correct, would fatally undermine perhaps the most basic (...) thesis advanced by those who argue for the rights of animals-the thesis, namely, that we have as much reason for believing that many animals have rights as we have for believing that humans do. Narveson's position is that this thesis can be seen to be false, if, as he thinks may be the case, egoism can give us a “coherent and quite theoretically smooth account of our moral intuitions”. (shrink)

This article addresses two explanatory gaps in Althusser’s late work. One has to do with the relation between nominalism and materialism; the other engages the relation between Althusser’s later materialism and a broadly materialist approach to history. In the first part of the article, I develop a response to the problem of nominalism that makes use of Hobbes’s nominalism and Deleuze’s concept of the plane of immanence. In the second part, I address the problem of history by explaining the concept (...) of an aleatory causal chain, and showing how such chains could be at work in human history. I also make use of Hobbes’s materialist account of causation, applying it to social relations, social collectivities, and historical events. (shrink)

On a subject that hath been so often treated, ’tis impossible to avoid saying many things which have been said before. It may, however, with reason be affirmed, that there still remains, on this subject, great scope for new observations. Besides, it ought to be remember’d, that the evidence of any complex argument depends very much on the order into which the material circumstances are digested, and the manner in which they are display’d.

Garfinkel's dissertation, "The Perception of the Other," was completed and defended 15 years prior to the publication of Studies in Ethnomethodology. This essay seeks hints of the familiar ethnomethodological themes (indexicality, reflexivity, accountability) within his thesis. It begins by examining the contributions of earlier social theorists, particularly Talcott Parsons and Alfred Schütz, to Garfinkel's thought. It then examines the dissertation itself seeking evidence to support the claim that Garfinkel was already moving in the direction of an 'incommensurable, asymmetric, and alternate' (...) program of sociological inquiry well before the term 'ethnomethodology' had even been coined. (shrink)

In Max Scheler’s powerful critique of modernity, he claimed that moderns suffer more in the midst of technological advancement, their values are set by an “ethos of industrialization,” and they have no unified vision of who they are. The consequences have been devastating, including a lack of balanced living and ecological estrangement. In pointing beyond modernism, Scheler called for establishing personal, collective, and environmental harmony. His philosophical anthropology—rooted in a phenomenology of persons and values—is a helpful foundation for an environmental (...) philosophy that simultaneously forwards personal self-cultivation and a deeper connection to the non-human world. (shrink)

Australasian Journal of Philosophy, Ahead of Print.

Call the claim, common to many in the Christian intellectual tradition, that Christ, in virtue of his created human intellect, had certain, infallible, exhaustive foreknowledge the Foreknowledge Thesis. Now consider what I will call the Conditional: if the Foreknowledge Thesis is true, then Christ's created human will was not free. In so far as many, perhaps all, of the people who affirm the Foreknowledge Thesis also wish to affirm the freedom of Christ's human will, the truth of the Conditional would (...) be most unwelcome to them. I consider an argument in support of the Conditional; I argue that it is not successful. (shrink)