Nathan Salmon, in his paper Trans-World Identification and Stipulation (1996) purports to give a proof for the claim that facts concerning trans-world identity cannot be conceptually reduced to general facts. He calls this claim ‘Extreme Haecceitism.’ I argue that his proof is fallacious. However, I also contend that the analysis and ultimate rejection of his proof clarifies the fundamental issues that are at stake in the debate between the reductionist and haecceitist solutions to the problem of trans-world identity. These issues (...) hinge on the ability of modal logic and possible worlds semantics to draw a hard and fast distinction between the logic and the metaphysics of modal logic. I shall claim that the considerations in this paper call into question the viability of such a distinction. (shrink)

This study explores models of how people perceive moral aspects of socio‐scientific issues. Thirty college students participated in interviews during which they discussed their reactions to and resolutions of two genetic engineering issues. The interview data were analyzed qualitatively to produce an emergent taxonomy of moral concerns recognized by the participant. The participants expressed sensitivity to moral aspects including concern and empathy for the well‐being of others, an aversion to altering the natural order and slippery slope implications. In arriving at (...) their final resolutions, many participants integrated their moral concerns with non‐moral factors. The patterns revealed suggest that moral and non‐moral concerns act in concert as they influence socio‐scientific decision‐making. (shrink)

"Something in between : on the nature of love" -- Love's blindness (1) : love's closed heart -- Love's blindness (2) : love's friendly eye -- Beyond comparison -- Commitments, values, and frameworks -- Valuing persons -- Love and morality -- Afterword. Between the universal and the particular.

People often say that romantic love should be unconditional, and they often want romantic love to last forever. These claims and desires are presumably linked: part of the reason it would be good for love to be unconditional is that it is assumed that such love, being detached from changing conditions, would last forever. This article argues that there are, indeed, kinds of unconditional and permanent love that are worth wanting, but also kinds that are not, and attempts to clarify (...) just what it is that is valuable about these kinds of romantic love. (shrink)

It is relatively common for philosophers to doubt whether we have any reason to act as morality requires. But it is very difficult to find philosophers who are willing to doubt, in a similar way, the idea that we have reason to act as instrumental rationality requires; reason, that is, to take effective steps toward attaining the ends we have accepted as our own. The inference from the fact that a certain action is an effective means of satisfying an agent’s (...) ends to the conclusion that that agent has reason to perform that action is held by almost everyone to be, as it is sometimes said, automatic: once it is determined that the action in question bears the specified relation to one’s goals, nothing more needs to be shown. But fewer philosophers are willing to grant that morality possesses this sort of automatic reason-giving force. Rather, it is quite commonly held that some additional consideration needs to be cited in order to show that an agent has reason to act as she is morally required. The fact that an action is morally required, claim those who adhere to this type of position, is not enough in itself. (shrink)

In the spring of 2005, the Portuguese government passed legislation paving the way for all residents to contribute their DNA to a national database to be used for medical and forensic purposes. There was no significant opposition. In sharp contrast, the United States will experience a contentious debate with strong opposition from many groups if and when such a law is proposed. Some of the reasons have to do with a history of sharply different experiences with, and trust of, the (...) criminal justice system. (shrink)

As psychoanalysis becomes more and more important to literary studies and the accompanying literature bulks larger and larger, students often feel overwhelmed, not knowing where to turn for readings that will open up the subject. Holland's Guide to Psychoanalytic Psychology and Literature-and-Psychology offers an ingenious solution to this problem. It provides concise outlines of all types of psychoanalytic theory and shows how they apply to literary criticism. The outlines point in turn to further, more specific readings--articles, essays, and books--which (...) can then be located by two extensive bibliographies that follow the discussion. These offer materials that range from the earliest Freud to the latest cognitive science and include dozens of bibliographic aids. Holland integrates these suggested readings with lively, detailed comments on various psychologies as they relate to literature. He is thus able to guide students easily to the precise subject they wish to study, be it Jungian criticism, ego psychology, feminist psychoanalysis, psychoanalytic film theory, or interpretation of some specific text. Holland also offers a bracing discussion of reader-response criticism and a lucid guide to the work of Jacques Lacan. A trenchant epilogue defends the psychological approach, suggesting which points in psychoanalytic theory will work for literary critics, and which will not. The only such guidebook for students of psychoanalytic literary theory and literary criticism, Holland's Guide will also prove an invaluable aid for those studying psychoanalysis and psychology. (shrink)

This essay explores some of the affinities between current theories of North American Indigenous trickster narratives and continental philosophy where they are both concerned with the question of responsibility in subject formations. Taking up the work of Judith Butler, Franz Kafka and Gerald Vizenor, the author works to show how both continental and Indigenous intellectual traditions work against any assumed stability for the ‘I’ in the narration of the self, yet toward responsible relationality. Such affinities, however, emerge from differing socio‐cultural (...) and linguistic horizons that are not reducible one to the other. This is particularly so with regard to the natural world and the ways in which Indigenous narratives are developed to foster responsible subjects to a larger biotic environment. Through discussion of such affinities and differences, the author seeks to broaden and multiculturalize contemporary debates in philosophy. (shrink)

Low birth weight, intrauterine growth retardation, and prematurity are overwhelming risk factors associated with infant mortality and morbidity. The lack of efficacious prenatal screening tests for these three outcomes illuminates the problems inherent in bivariate estimates of association. A biocultural strategy for research is presented, integrating societal and familial levels of analysis with the metabolic, immune, vascular, and neuroendocrine systems of the body. Policy decisions, it is argued, need to be based on this type of biocultural information in order to (...) impact the difficult-to-change problems of low birth weight, intrauterine growth retardation, and prematurity. (shrink)

As part of the development of the Symbolic and Sub-symbolic Robotics Intelligence Control System, we have implemented a memory store to allow a robot to retain knowledge from previous exp...

How far should we go in protecting and promoting public health? Can we force people to give up unhealthy habits and make healthier choices, or does everyone have the right to decide their own lifestyle? Should we stop treating smokers who refuse to give up smoking? Should we put a tax on fatty foods and ban vending machines in schools to address the obesity epidemic? Should parents be required to have their children vaccinated? Are some of our screening programmes unethical (...) Downs syndrome screening, for example or should we be screening people for more conditions, such as Huntington disease? Such questions are at the heart of public health ethics. Holland shows that to understand and debate these issues requires philosophy: moral philosophies, such as utilitarianism and deontology, as well as political philosophies such as liberalism and communitarianism. And philosophy informs other aspects of public health, such as epidemiology and health promotion. The aim of this book is to provide a lively, accessible and philosophically informed introduction to such issues. It is an ideal textbook for students taking courses in public health ethics. And since this book develops systematic discussions of issues in public health ethics, there is also much here to engage and challenge the more advanced reader. (shrink)

Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) are for many the defining features of the early twenty-first century. With such a provocation, this essay considers how one might understand the relational philosophies articulated by Indigenous learning scientists, Indigenous technologists and feminine philosophers of education as co-constitutive of an ensemble mediating or regulating an educative philosophy interfacing with ML/AI. In these mediations, differing vocabularies – kin, the one caring, cooperative – are recognized for their ethical commitments, yet challenging epistemic claims in (...) the contexts of ML. Similarly, ML poses some questions to claims made about relational and Indigenous epistemologies, where the latter is perceived as separated from and unaffected by computation specifically or algorithmic societies generally. This essay seeks to gain several vantage points to explore and complicate how diverse relational philosophies can address ML and perhaps reconsider their own critical practices. (shrink)

First Published in 2001. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

In this paper I shall attempt to argue for the simple view of personal identity. I shall first argue that we often do have warrant for our beliefs that we exist as continuing subjects of experience, and that these beliefs are justified independently of any reductionist analysis of what it means to be a person. This has two important implications that are relevant to the ongoing debate concerning the number of persons that are in existence throughout any duration in time: (...) (1) the lack of logically or metaphysically necessary and sufficient conditions for distinguishing one person from another should imply neither that there is only one person nor that personhood is not individuative; and (2) the lack of such universally applicable identity criteria should not imply that the term ‘person’ is a folk term with no real application. In other words, lack of reductionist analysis does not entail lack of existence. (shrink)

In support of a recent conjecture by Nielsen (1999), we prove that the phenomena of ‘incomparable entanglement’— whereby, neither member of a pair of pure entangled states can be transformed into the other via local operations and classical communication (LOCC)—is a generic feature when the states at issue live in an infinite-dimensional Hilbert space.  2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.

Attempts to capture the distinction between categorical and dispositional states in terms of more primitive modal notions – subjunctive conditionals, causal roles, or combinatorial principles – are bound to fail. Such failure is ensured by a deep symmetry in the ways dispositional and categorical states alike carry modal import. But the categorical/dispositional distinction should not be abandoned; it underpins important metaphysical disputes. Rather, it should be taken as a primitive, after which the doomed attempts at reductive explanation can be transformed (...) into circular but interesting accounts. (shrink)

Benardete paradoxes involve infinite collections of Grim Reapers, assassins, demons, deafening peals, or even sentences. These paradoxes have recently been used in arguments for finitist metaphysical theses such as temporal finitism, causal finitism, and discrete views of time. Here we develop a new finite Benardete-like paradox. We then use this paradox to defend a companions in guilt argument that challenges recent applications of patchwork principles on behalf of the aforementioned finitist arguments. Finally, we develop another problem for those applications by (...) examining the notion of exact duplication. (shrink)

If we humans are truly facing a posthuman future, the shape of that future will in no small part be a consequence of the writings of Ayn Rand. This is the fundamental claim of Ben Murnane in Ayn Rand and the Posthuman— a claim that he supports while discussing the benefits and problems of such a likely Randian future. From seasteading to technologically enhanced humans, the future, it seems, belongs to Ayn Rand and the pioneers of technology she has most (...) influenced. (shrink)

Die Untersuchung der wallonischen consolatio-Übersetzung führte zur Entdeckung und Neudatierung eines lateinischen consolatio-Kommentars, der auch von Jean de Meun benutzt wurde. Somit kann durch Gegenüberstellung von Vorlage und Übersetzung an einem konkreten Beispiel Einblick in die Übersetzungspraxis im Mittelalter gewonnen werden.

In this essay Troy Richardson works to develop a conceptual framework and set of terms by which a diplomatic reception of different forms of law can be developed in multicultural education. Taking up the trope of the door in multiculturalist discourse as a site in which a welcoming of the difference of others is organized, Richardson interrogates the complex nature of receptivity to Indigenous customary law, in particular. He argues that, within this trope, a metonymic structure operates in relation (...) to the deployment of “policy” that maintains a perspective of customary law as premodern and primitive. This structure leads to an impoverished set of terms and a lack of diplomacy toward difference. Richardson proceeds by considering the notion of extraterritoriality and the metonyms that organize Emmanuel Levinas's discourse of “doors” in conceptualizing a welcoming receptivity. The term “extraterritoriality” anticipates the law of the other as it approaches the door and implies a diplomatic moment of reception of such difference. Richardson concludes by highlighting Jacques Derrida's evaluation of Levinas's discourse of receptivity and by considering the possibilities for a diplomatic engagement with the laws of others toward a mutation in the current geopolitical moment. (shrink)

"Dying in the City of Blues: Sickle Cell Anemia and the Politics of Race and Health" by Keith Wailoo is reviewed.

A Thousand Plateaus is the engaging and influential second part of Capitalism and Schizophrenia, the remarkable collaborative project written by the philosopher Gilles Deleuze and the psychoanalyst Félix Guattari. This hugely important text is a work of staggering complexity that made a major contribution to contemporary Continental philosophy, yet remains distinctly challenging for readers in a number of disciplines. Deleuze and Guattari's 'A Thousand Plateaus': A Reader's Guide offers a concise and accessible introduction to this extremely important and yet challenging (...) work. Written specifically to meet the needs of students coming to Deleuze and Guattari for the first time, the book offers guidance on: - Philosophical and historical context - Key themes - Reading the text - Reception and influence - Further reading. (shrink)

Using the term world to mean a creative response to objective reality, this book considers the ways in which Eastern and Western peoples construct their natural, social, aesthetic, and religious worlds. It points the way to a view of Eastern and Western as complementary, rather than contradictory, descriptions.

In this collection of essays we hear from an international array of computer and brain scientists who are actively working from both the machine and human ends...

Abstract:Business ethicists are eager to connect the ethical treatment of stakeholders with financial rewards. However, little attention has been paid to the cultural and industry context that influences how stakeholders are regarded by the firm, and how innovative strategies for engaging stakeholders can help a firm outperform its competitors. By reconnecting stakeholder theory to its roots in the field of strategy, we provide a framework for understanding the dynamic interplay between stakeholder relationships, innovation, and competitive advantage. The result is a (...) set of testable propositions aimed at better characterizing when and how “ethics pays” (Paine 2003). (shrink)

This paper argues for a permissivism of personal rationality, a rationality concerning the epistemic evaluation of persons. I work from the perspective of virtue epistemology where the standards of evaluation are the intellectual character virtues. On this picture, an agent is personally rational in having a doxastic attitude when having it is the result of some exemplification of an intellectual virtue. Permissive cases arise when the emotional components of intellectual virtues conflict, making some potential conclusions both enabled and disabled for (...) the agent. The agent is left in a confusion needing resolution, but if each of these conflicting emotions are components of intellectual virtues, then she has multiple personally rational options. This grounds a potential case of a permissivism of personal rationality, but this should be interesting to epistemologists in general since opting for one of the sides of this conflict leads an agent to have different doxastic attitudes. (shrink)

This dissertation addresses the problem of trans-world identity in possible worlds semantics, and argues that essentialism does not provide a satisfactory solution to it. If one takes possible worlds semantics seriously as a viable elucidation of the logic of the metaphysical modalities, one must also take a realistic stance toward possible worlds. But then, contrary to Kripke, Plantinga, Van Inwagen, and others, there is a problem with trans-world identity; the real problem being, not the problem of identifying individuals across possible (...) worlds, but rather the problem of the theoretical basis for these identifications. Possible worlds semantics presupposes a substantive theory of what constitutes the cross-world continuation or persistence of individuals. Standard formulations of these semantics nevertheless fail to articulate such a theory. Therefore cross-world identifications become inherently problematic. All available solutions to this problem either presuppose non-trivial essentialism or are incoherent. Non-trivial essentialism is the view that there are certain non-identity properties which a given individual has in every world in which it exists but which other possible individuals fail to have in some of the worlds in which they exist. ;But the question of the coherence of essentialism itself is intimately connected with one's views concerning the nature and existence of properties. Three Cantorian paradoxes are adduced, one against individuative essentialism, one against non-trivial essentialism, and one against properties in general. The paradoxes against properties in general and non-trivial essentialism can be avoided only if one eschews a Quine/Goodman view of property existence---the view that any extensionally well-defined class answers to a property---and makes some kind of distinction between natural and artificial properties. Nevertheless such an eschewal does not avoid the paradox of individuative essentialism. Thus essentialism cannot provide a completely adequate theory of trans-world individuation. For although it provides the necessary conditions for the identity of individuals across possible worlds, it does not allow us to identify these individuals on this basis alone. This conclusion precludes actualist solutions to the problem of the individuation of possibilia which quantify over individual essences. (shrink)

In his paper, “Identity Statements and Essentialism,” Loux seeks to demonstrate sortal essentialism based on Frege’s thesis that all statements of number concerning a collection require that the members fall under the same sortal concept. I shall attempt to argue that a detailed analysis of Loux’s argument reveals it as failing to imply the type of sortal dependency thesis necessary for the justification of sortal essentialism. However, if one construes the transworld identity relation as no different from our run of (...) the mill identity relation, then his argument can serve as the basis for a proof of a type of nontrivial essentialism, thereby showing that the possible worlds picture of modality is indeed committed to a robust essentialism. (shrink)

The Ancient Egyptian Netherworld Books. By John Coleman Darnell and Colleen Manassa Darnell. Writings from the Ancient World, vol. 39. Atlanta: SBL Press, 2018. Pp. xxxvii + 685, illus. $99.95.

This article revisits Krzysztof Kieślowski's films in light of Gilles Deleuze's writings on cinema. Its central argument is that, while Kieślowski's films register what Deleuze calls exhausted life, or la vie épuisée, they also offer an affirmative response to exhaustion. Deleuze's articulation of exhaustion in the context of film emerges first in Cinema 2: The Time-Image, where the term is posited as the denial of life's capacity to transform itself. In the context of Kieślowski's films and the communist milieux from (...) which they emerge, exhaustion as a film-philosophical concept acquires a socio-political specificity otherwise lacking in Deleuze. Kieślowski's films thus provide the basis for reading exhaustion as an affective correlate of what Deleuze famously calls the “crisis of the action-image”. Stressing Kieślowski's resistance to the hegemony of exhaustion – and what the director calls a “world without representation” – this article emphasizes films such as From the City of Łódź, The Scar, Camera Buff, Three Colors: Red. Reading Kieślowski and communist Poland's repressive socio-political context in light of the Deleuzian sense of exhaustion vivifies the affective dimension of the director's oeuvre. Surveying the director's earlier documentary work, his decision to transition to fiction, and his reflections on ethics and politics, this article concludes by arguing for the generative, life-affirming character of Kieślowski's cinema of exhaustion. (shrink)

Using a purposive sample with an even distribution of 299 non-Hispanic Whites, 294 African Americans, 292 Asian Americans and 295 Hispanics, we test a moderated mediation model that examines the relationship between self-reported news media consumption (e.g., non-conservative and conservative) and environmental behavioural intentions. Our study found evidence supporting the mainstreaming hypothesis (converging attitudes) across key variables within the theory of planned behaviour (TPB). Our results also reveal non-conservative outlets to be associated with more favourable environmental attitudes, subjective norms and (...) perceived behavioural control, while conservative outlets are associated with less favourable levels for two of these three variables. Results also indicate conditional indirect relationships between non-conservative news use on behavioural intentions through our TPB variables, which vary by race/ethnicity. (shrink)