The Ockhamist claims that our ability to do otherwise is not endangered by God’s foreknowledge because facts about God’s past beliefs regarding future contingents are soft facts about the past—i.e., temporally relational facts that depend in some sense on what happens in the future. But if our freedom, given God’s foreknowledge, requires altering some fact about the past that is clearly a hard fact, then Ockhamism fails even if facts about God’s past beliefs are soft. Recent opponents of Ockhamism, including (...) David Widerker and Peter van Inwagen, have argued along precisely these lines. Their arguments, if successful, would undermine Ockhamism while avoiding the controversy over the alleged softness of facts about God’s past beliefs. But these arguments do not succeed. The past facts they rely on must be clear and uncontroversial examples of hard facts about the past, and these facts must be such that an ability to refrain from the relevant future action implies an ability to alter the relevant hard fact. We demonstrate the flaw in these arguments by showing how they rely on past facts that do not satisfy these criteria. The Ockhamist may have troubles, but this type of argument is not one of them. (shrink)

As a first step in involving user emotion in human‐computer interaction, a memory‐based expert system (JANUS; Kearney, 1991) was designed to interpret facial expression in terms of the signaled emotion. Anticipating that a VDU‐mounted camera will eventually supply face parameters automatically, JANUS now accepts manually made measurements on a digitized full‐face photograph and returns emotion labels used by college students. An intermediate representation in terms of face actions (e.g., mouth open) is also used. Production rules convert the geometry into these. (...) A dynamic memory (Kolodner, 1984; Schank, 1982) interprets the face actions in terms of emotion labels. The memory is dynamic in the sense that new emotion labels can be learned with experience. A prototype system has been implemented on a Sun 2/120 system using POPLOG. Validation studies on the prototype suggest that the interpretations achieved are generally consistent with those of college students without formal instruction in emotion signals. (shrink)

The pandemic creates unprecedented challenges to society and to health care systems around the world. Like all crises, these provide a unique opportunity to rethink the fundamental limiting assumptions and institutional inertia of our established systems. These inertial assumptions have obscured deeply rooted problems in health care and deflected attempts to address them. As hospitals begin to welcome all patients back, they should resist the temptation to go back to business as usual. Instead, they should retain the more deliberative, explicit, (...) and transparent ways of thinking that have informed the development of crisis standards of care. The key lesson to be learned from those exercises in rational deliberation is that justice must be the ethical foundation of all standards of care. Justice demands that hospitals take a safety‐net approach to providing services that prioritizes the most vulnerable segments of society, continue to expand telemedicine in ways that improve access without exacerbating disparities, invest in community‐based care, and fully staff hospitals and clinics on nights and weekends. (shrink)

In this issue of the Report, Daniel Groll suggests new ways to understand old tensions between autonomy and paternalism. He categorizes disagreements between doctors and patients in four ways. Some are about the ends or goals of medical treatment. For these, he claims, patient choices are based upon patient values, and physicians should neither challenge nor assess them. More common are disagreements about the appropriate means to achieve an agreed-upon goal. These subdivide into two distinct categories—those in which the relative (...) efficacy of possible means is “medically assessable” and those in which it is not. When disagreements are medically assessable, Groll argues, doctors can legitimately challenge patient .. (shrink)

In response to stakeholder pressure, companies increasingly make ambitious forward-looking sustainability commitments. They then draw on corporate policies with varying degrees of alignment to disseminate and enforce corresponding behavioral rules among their suppliers and business partners. This goal-based turn in private sustainability governance has important implications for its likely environmental and social outcomes. Drawing on paradox theory, this article uses a case study of zero-deforestation commitments in the Indonesian palm oil sector to argue that goal-based private sustainability governance’s characteristics set (...) the stage for two types of paradoxes to emerge: performing paradoxes between environmental, social, and economic sustainability goals, and organizing paradoxes between cooperation and competition approaches. Companies’ responses to these paradoxes, in turn, can explain the lack of full goal attainment and differential rates of progress between actors. These results draw our attention to the complexities hidden behind governance through goal setting in the corporate space, and raise important questions about the viability of similar strategies such as science-based targets and net-zero goals. (shrink)

Bioethical decision‐making in pediatrics diverges from similar decisions in other medical domains because the young child is not an autonomous decision‐maker, while the teen is developing—and should be encouraged to develop—autonomy and decisional capacity. Thus the balance between autonomy and beneficence is fundamentally different in pediatrics than in adult medicine. While ethical dilemmas that reflect these fundamental issues are common, many pediatric physician and nursing training programs do not delve into the issues or offer specific training about how to deal (...) with borderline cases.To meet this need, the Children's Mercy Bioethics Center in Kansas City, Missouri, created a program specifically dedicated to serving practicing, experienced pediatric health professionals. Our students come from various professional disciplines: they are doctors, nurses, social workers, chaplains, lawyers, psychologists, counselors, and hospital administrators practicing in pediatrics. (shrink)

This collection of essays on themes in the work of John Locke , George Berkeley , and David Hume , provides a deepened understanding of major issues raised in the Empiricist tradition. In exploring their shared belief in the experiential nature of mental constructs, The Empiricists illuminates the different methodologies of these great Enlightenment philosophers and introduces students to important metaphysical and epistemological issues including the theory of ideas, personal identity, and skepticism. It will be especially useful in courses devoted (...) to the history of modern philosophy. (shrink)

We present four new change detection methods that create an automated change map from a probability map. In this case, the probability map was derived from a 3D model. The primary application of interest is aerial photographic applications, where the appearance, disappearance or change in position of small objects of a selectable class (e.g., cars) must be detected at a high success rate in spite of variations in magnification, lighting and background across the image. The methods rely on an earlier (...) derivation of a probability map. We describe the theory of the four methods, namely Bernoulli variables, Markov Random Fields, connected change, and relaxation-based segmentation, evaluate and compare their performance experimentally on a set probability maps derived from aerial photographs. (shrink)

Three things often recognized as central to morality are concern for others’ welfare, respect for their self-expression, and cooperation in worthwhile collective activity. When philosophers have proposed theories of the substance of morality, they have typically looked to one of these three sources to provide a single, fundamental principle of morality – or they have tried to formulate a master-principle for morality that combines these three ideas in some way. This book views them instead as three independently important foundations of (...) morality. It sets out a plural-foundation moral theory with affinities to that of W.D. Ross. There are major differences: the account of the foundations of morality differs from Ross’s, and there is a more elaborate explanation of how the rest of morality derives from them. However, the overall aim is similar. This is to illuminate the structure of morality by showing how its complex content is generated from a relatively simple set of underlying elements – with the complexity resulting from the various ways in which one part of morality can derive from another, and the various ways in which they can interact. Plural-foundation moral theories are sometimes criticized for having nothing helpful to say about cases in which their fundamental norms conflict. Responding to this, the book concludes with three detailed applications of the theory: to the questions surrounding paternalism, the use of others as means, and our moral responsibilities as consumers. (shrink)

The hard problem of consciousness has been a perennially vexing issue for the study of consciousness, particularly in giving a scientific and naturalized account of phenomenal experience. At the heart of the hard problem is an often-overlooked argument, which is at the core of the hard problem, and that is the structure and dynamics (S&D) argument. In this essay, I will argue that we have good reason to suspect that the S&D argument given by David Chalmers rests on a limited (...) conception of S&D properties, what in this essay I’m calling extrinsic structure and dynamics. I argue that if we take recent insights from the complexity sciences and from recent developments in Integrated Information Theory (IIT) of Consciousness, that we get a more nuanced picture of S&D, specifically, a class of properties I’m calling intrinsic structure and dynamics. This I think opens the door to a broader class of properties with which we might naturally and scientifically explain phenomenal experience, as well as the relationship between syntactic, semantic, and intrinsic notions of information. I argue that Chalmers’ characterization of structure and dynamics in his S&D argument paints them with too broad a brush and fails to account for important nuances, especially when considering accounting for a system’s intrinsic properties. Ultimately, my hope is to vindicate a certain species of explanation from the S&D argument, and by extension dissolve the hard problem of consciousness at its core, by showing that not all structure and dynamics are equal. (shrink)

Suppose lightning strikes a dead tree in a swamp; I am standing nearby. My body is reduced to its elements, while entirely by coincidence (and out of different molecules) the tree is turned into my physical replica. My replica, The Swampman.....moves into my house and seems to write articles on radical interpretation. No one can tell the difference.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Reviewed by: Hume’s Imagination by Tito MAGRI Don Garrett MAGRI, Tito. Hume’s Imagination. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022. xiii + 494 pp. Cloth, $115.00In A Treatise of Human Nature, Hume defines “the imagination” in an inclusive sense as “the faculty, by which we form our fainter ideas”—that is, those that are not memories. In the narrower sense, it is “the same faculty, excluding only our demonstrative and (...) probable reasonings.” Book 1 of the Treatise is largely a work about the imagination in the inclusive sense. Indeed, by Magri’s count, book 1 contains more occurrences of the term imagination/imagine and its variants than of any other philosophical term with the exceptions of impression and idea. Yet until the late 1990s, it was surprisingly rare to find commentators treating the Humean imagination as a focus of attention in its own right, and the complete range of its many roles and operations has largely remained uncatalogued until now. With twelve highly detailed chapters distinguishing no fewer than twenty different “works of the imagination” governed by eighteen different “principles,” Hume’s Imagination is by far the most comprehensive treatment of the faculty to date. Indeed, its only limitations are its two announced ones. First, it does not discuss the imagination in Hume’s subsequent An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding (where its operations receive much less attention) or other writings. Second, it does not discuss the extensive roles played by the imagination in Treatise, book 2 (“Of the Passions”) and book 3 (“Of Morals”)—although readers may hope that a sequel will take up those roles. The wide array of roles and operations that Hume attributes to the inclusive imagination, even in Treatise, book 1 alone, naturally raises the question of how much real unity it has as a psychological natural kind. Magri’s original and provocative answer to this question is that the various operations of Hume’s imagination are unified by their filling in various “cognitive gaps” between the representational contents of the mind’s sensations and memories, on the one hand, and the full range of its cognitive contents and capacities, on the other. Rather than appealing to the kind of purely intellectual ideas posited by Descartes and other so-called rationalists who drew a strong distinction between the intellect and the imagination, however, Hume traces our further abilities to the inferences and mental transitions that the imagination produces utilizing only broadly imagistic ideas. In support of this answer, the book is divided into five parts. Part I, chapter 1 explains the central notion of a “cognitive gap” in terms of a “dualism of representation and inference.” For Magri, “representation” applies only to sensation and memory (although he grants that [End Page 156] “presentation” might be the better term in the case of sensation), as governed by Hume’s self-described first principle: “our simple ideas in their first appearance are deriv’d from simple impressions which are correspondent to them, and which they exactly represent.” This principle is the topic of chapter 2. “Inference” (or, more broadly, “transitions”) applies only to the imagination, which generates new “nonrepresentational” cognitive content in accordance with what Hume calls his second principle: “the liberty of the imagination to transpose and change its ideas.” This principle is the topic of chapter 3. To say, as Magri does, that the only “representational” ideas for Hume are those of memory sounds highly paradoxical, but the intended (nonparadoxical) meaning becomes clear enough on careful reading. Part 2 of the book takes up the role of the imagination in generating specifically conceptual modes of thought. In chapter 4, Magri explains the mind’s capacity for generality in thought through the operation of “abstract ideas” and its capacity to distinguish different aspects of an object through the operation of “distinctions of reason.” In chapter 5, he examines the generation of distinctively modal content through the capacity of the imagination to conceive the same object as having different qualities or being placed in different circumstances. Part 3 turns to the crucial topic of the imagination’s generation of cognition of a world of “realities” beyond sensation and memory through the production of “causal ideas.” Chapter 6... (shrink)

Common sense realism, by E. G. Bewkes.--Theology and religious experience, by Vergilius Ferm.--A reasoned faith, by G. F. Thomas.--Can religion become empirical? By J. S. Bixler.--Value theory and theology, by H. R. Niebuhr.--The truth in myths, by Reinhold Niebuhr.--Is subjectivism in value theory compatible with realism and meliorism? By Cornelius Krusé.--The semi-detached knower: a note on radical empiricism, by R. L. Calhoun.--The new scientific and metaphysical basis for epistemological theory, by F. S. C. Northrop.--A psychological approach to reality, by Hugh (...) Hartshorne.--A definition of religious liberalism, by D. S. Robinson. (shrink)

This article is a critical discussion of David Owen's book, _Hume's Reason. Owen rightly emphasizes (i) that an understanding of Hume's theory of reasoning is essential to understanding his philosophy and (ii) that an understanding of early modern antiformalism in logic is crucial to understanding Hume's theory of reasoning. Against most commentators, Owen and I agree that Hume's famous conclusion about inductive inferences, i.e., that they are "not determin'd by reason"--is a causal rather a normative claim; however, I dispute Owen's (...) particular interpretation of this conclusion, arguing instead for an interpretation that allows Hume to use the term 'reason' univocally to mean "the inferential faculty." While agreeing with Owen that Hume regards the "wise" use of reason as a moral virtue, I argue that Hume's _endorsement of the use of reason is not entirely dependent on this fact. (shrink)

Davidson argues that mental properties are causally relevant properties. I argue that Davidson cannot appeal to ceteris paribus causal laws to ensure that these properties are causally relevant, if he wishes to retain his argument for anomalous monism. Second, I argue that the appeal to supervenience cannot, by itself, give us an account of the causal relevancy of mental properties. I argue that, while mental properties may indeed 'make a difference' to the causally efficacious properties of events, this is not (...) sufficient to show that mental properties are causally relevant. (shrink)

P. J. E. Kail's Projection and Realism in Hume's Philosophy is an excellent book, consisting—like Hume's Treatise itself—of three excellent parts. I will comment on one central aspect of its second part: its explanation of the source of the second thoughts that Hume famously expressed, with a frustrating lack of specificity, about his own initial discussion of personal identity in the Treatise.As is well known, Hume holds in the section "Of personal identity" (T 1.4.6) that a self, mind, or person (...) is "nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions" (T 1.4.6.4; SBN 252) and, more specifically, a "system of different perceptions or different existences link'd together by the relation of cause and .. (shrink)

Sur la base de ce qu’il a appelé « le principe d’héritabilité causale », Jaegwon Kim a soutenu que les propriétés réalisables de façons multiples ne constituent pas des sortes causales scientifiques. Mon principal objectif est de répondre aux arguments de Kim contre le physicalisme non réductionniste. Je défends l’idée qu’il existe plus de pouvoirs causaux que les seuls pouvoirs causaux physiques. Cela n’a rien de surprenant puisqu’il existe plus de particuliers que le nombre total de particules physiques fondamentales. Et (...) la réflexion sur la nature des individus, et plus spécifiquement sur leur capacité à préserver leur identité à travers le changement ou le remplacement de leurs parties, indique que les individus ont des pouvoirs causaux distincts de ceux des particuliers physiques qui les constituent. Je soutiens que si cela est plausible, alors l’abandon du principe d’héritabilité causale l’est tout autant.Jaegwon Kim has recently argued, using what he calls “The Causal Inheritance Principle”, that multiply realizable properties are not causal, scientific kinds. My primary concern is to reply to Kim's arguments against nonreductive physicalism. I shall defend the idea that there are, indeed, more causal powers than the physical. But this should come as no surprise, since there are more individuals than the total number of fundamental physical particles. Reflections on the nature of individuals, specifically, on their ability to survive through change or replacement of their parts, indicates that individuals have causal powers nonidentical with the causal powers of the physical individuals that constitute them. I claim that, if this is plausible, the rejection of The Causal Inheritance Principle is also plausible. (shrink)

David Owen begins his contribution by setting out very clearly how my interpretation of Hume’s distinction between simple and complex perceptions helps to resolve some puzzles about apparent counterexamples to the two most fundamental principles of Hume’s cognitive psychology: the Copy Principle and the Separability Principle. His primary object of criticism is my interpretation of Hume’s famous conclusion that inductive inferences are “not determin’d by reason”. I am as grateful for Owen’s criticisms concerning my treatment of induction as I am (...) for his approval of my treatment of the simple/complex distinction, because his criticisms provide me with an opportunity to modify my earlier interpretation of Hume’s famous conclusion in a way that I hope will resolve the issue to everyone’s—including Owen’s—satisfaction. I will first explain Owen’s own interpretation and the most serious objection to which it is subject. I will then present my modified interpretation and explain how it avoids the objection while accommodating Owen’s central insight. I will conclude by responding to Owen’s two specific criticisms of the earlier version of my interpretation. (shrink)

This paper argues that a behavioral or functional analysis of human action is compatible with human freedom. This thesis is quite contrary to what behaviorists such as B. F. Skinner as well as their critics such as D. C. Dennett have assumed to be the case. The essential argument involves three steps. First, the paper proceeds by presenting a novel analysis of intentional or mental states in terms of the principles of reinforcement. It is argued that with the acquisition of (...) language humans are able to think about, plan for, and make rational choices about the future. Second, the paper, while not trying to define freedom, nonetheless argues that freedom is essentially a function of three conditions. These include our power over the environment, our will power, and the ability to rationally determine our value priorities. Third, and finally, it is shown that there is nothing in a behavioral or functional analysis to prevent our satisfying these three basic conditions of which our freedom is a function. (shrink)

In this discussion paper, I evaluate some arguments of Mark Johnston's which appear in his articles «Fission and the Facts» and «Reasons and Reductionism» . My primary concern is with his description of fission cases, and his assessment of the implications of such cases for value theory. In particular, Johnston advances the following three claims:Rejecting the intrinsicness of identity is an arbitrary response to the paradox of fission;Fission cases involve indeterminate identity;Contra Parfit, fission cases have no implications for value theory (...) in the actual world.I argue that and are false, and that , if true, is not true for any reason that Johnston gives. (shrink)

I highlight and amplify three central points that McKay & Dennett (M&D) make about the origin of failures to perform biologically proper functions. I question whether even positive illusions meet criteria for evolved misbelief.

Common sense realism, by E. G. Bewkes.--Theology and religious experience, by V. Ferm.--A reasoned faith, by G. F. Thomas.--Can religion become empirical? By J. S. Bixler.--Value theory and theology, by H. R. Niebuhr.--The truth in myths, by R. Niebuhr.--Is subjectivism in value theory compatible with realism and meliorism? By C. Krusé.--The semi-detached knower: a note on radical empiricism, by R. L. Calhoun.--The new scientific and metaphysical basis for epistemological theory, by F. S. C. Northrop.--A psychological approach to reality, by H. (...) Hartshorne.--A definition of religious liberalism, by D. S. Robinson. (shrink)

David Owen begins his contribution by setting out very clearly how my interpretation of Hume’s distinction between simple and complex perceptions helps to resolve some puzzles about apparent counterexamples to the two most fundamental principles of Hume’s cognitive psychology: the Copy Principle and the Separability Principle. His primary object of criticism is my interpretation of Hume’s famous conclusion that inductive inferences are “not determin’d by reason”. I am as grateful for Owen’s criticisms concerning my treatment of induction as I am (...) for his approval of my treatment of the simple/complex distinction, because his criticisms provide me with an opportunity to modify my earlier interpretation of Hume’s famous conclusion in a way that I hope will resolve the issue to everyone’s—including Owen’s—satisfaction. I will first explain Owen’s own interpretation and the most serious objection to which it is subject. I will then present my modified interpretation and explain how it avoids the objection while accommodating Owen’s central insight. I will conclude by responding to Owen’s two specific criticisms of the earlier version of my interpretation. (shrink)

Berkowitz and Garrett (2020) raise important arguments in favor of consent for apnea testing used in determining death by neurological criteria (DNC); and yet, a fundamental consideration is left u...

Causal theories of mental content (CTs) ground certain aspects of a concept's meaning in the causal relations a concept bears to what it represents. Section 1 explains the problems CTs are meant to solve and introduces terminology commonly used to discuss these problems. Section 2 specifies criteria that any acceptable CT must satisfy. Sections 3, 4, and 5 critically survey various CTs, including those proposed by Fred Dretske, Jerry Fodor, Ruth Garrett Millikan, David Papineau, Dennis Stampe, Dan Ryder, and (...) the author himself. The final section considers general objections to the causal approach. (shrink)

In her landmark book, Language, Thought, and Other Biological Categories (Millikan1984),1 Ruth Garrett Millikan utilizes the idea of a biological function to solve philosophical problems associated with the phenomena of language, thought, and meaning. Language and thought are activities of biological organisms, according to Millikan, and we should treat them as such when trying to answer related philosophical questions. Of special interest is Millikan’s treatment of intentionality. Here Millikan employs the notion of a biological function to explain what it (...) is for one thing in nature, a bee dance (43), for example, to be about another, in this case, the location of a nectar source. My concern in this paper is to understand whether Millikan’s account of intentionality adequately explains how humans achieve reference, in language or thought, to individuals and groups in their environment. In bringing her theory of intentional content to bear on human activities, Millikan focuses largely on natural language. Thus, in what follows, I begin by laying out the biology-based principles that underlie Millikan’s theory of content, then proceed with an explanation of how the theory is to apply to natural language. As it appears, Millikan’s account of how content is determined for natural language terms and sentences rests on the determinacy of intentional content at the psychological level. This leads me to take a careful look at what Millikan says about the content of mental representations, in hopes of finding a sufficient basis there for the application of Millikan’s theory of content to natural language. Ultimately, I conclude that Millikan’s theory faces a problem of vacuity. If we approach the theory as a theory of intentional content, intended to explain the nature of reference, the theory is lacking in an extremely important respect: Millikan explains how it could be one of the biological functions of a mental or natural language term to refer, without telling us precisely what in the natural order constitutes the reference relation.. (shrink)

A brief preface to the Cambridge Companion to Nietzsche announces the aims of the ambitious series of which this volume is a part: to provide students and nonspecialists with a handy reference volume and to help them overcome the “intimidation” they often feel when encountering a difficult thinker for the first time. Unlike the other volumes that I have seen in the Companion series, this one truly is pitched to the undergraduate and/or popular market. Of the 11 articles, only 4 (...) are grouped under the rubric “Nietzsche as Philosopher,” although Tracy B. Strong’s essay, “Nietzsche’s Political Misappropriation,” and Jörg Salaquarda’s “Nietzsche and the Judeo-Christian Tradition”—both listed under part II, “The Use and Abuse of Nietzsche’s Life and Works”—in their analysis of Nietzsche’s politics and his critique of religion certainly strike philosophical, or at least theoretical, poses. So, we have 6 articles out of eleven, roughly 191 out of 403 pages, that are devoted to the analysis, or at least discussion, of Nietzsche’s philosophy as such. The remaining articles treat broadly biographical topics and Nietzsche’s reception: in the 20th Century in general, in France, and in East Asia. This proportion, sadly, echoes the larger structure of the Nietzsche legend, which often expresses a desire to explain Nietzsche’s philosophy by means of certain biographical details, and which is in fact the central topic of R.J. Hollingdale’s contribution to this volume, “The Hero as Outsider.” That the devotion of such a disproportionate amount of space to what are arguably tangential issues is not inevitable is proven by the splendid Cambridge Companion to Spinoza, edited by Don Garrett, in which one article each is devoted to Spinoza’s life and his reception, with the remaining eight articles organized according to major topics in Spinoza’s philosophy: metaphysics, philosophy of mind, politics, critique of religion, et cetera, thus giving us a proper 8/2 proportion in favor of philosophy—and this vis-à-vis a philosopher with his own “extra-philosophical” legend. Of course, the Nietzsche question is complicated by National Socialism, among other things. (shrink)

Garrett Hardin, Ph.D.—biologist, environmental ethicist, and lightning rod for controversy for over four decades—died in a double suicide with his wife in September 2003 at his longtime home in Santa Barbara, where he was a Professor Emeritus of Human Biology at the University of California. Both Hardins had been ill for some time and in fact were leaders in the local chapter of the Hemlock Society, the “right-to-die” advocacy organization.

What is involved in weighing normative reasons against each other? One attractive answer offers us the following Simple Picture: a fact is a reason for action when it bears to an action the normative relation of counting in its favour; this relation comes in different strengths or weights; the weights of the reasons for and against an action can be summed; the reasons for performing the action are sufficient when no other action is more strongly supported, overall; the reasons are (...) decisive when it is most strongly supported; one ought to perform the action there is most reason to perform; rational deliberation is weighing reasons correctly; and acting rationally is doing what one has sufficient reasons to do. This chapter investigates various ways in which, on examination, this Simple Picture appears to require modification and refinement. It examines some of the ways in which talk of the weight of a reason may need improvement, looks more closely at the relationship between reasons and rationality, and asks whether there are ways in which a reason can be defeated which are not kinds of outweighing. The conclusion is that while in some respects the Simple Picture does need to be corrected, in others the jury is out. (shrink)

In many ways, Benedict (Baruch) de Spinoza appears to be a contradictory figure in the history of philosophy. From the beginning, he has been notorious as an "atheist" who seeks to substitute Nature for a personal deity; yet he was also, in Novalis's famous description, "the God-intoxicated man." He was an uncompromising necessitarian and causal determinist; yet his ethical ideal was to become a "free man." He maintained that the human mind and the human body are identical; yet he also (...) insisted that the human mind can achieve a kind of eternality that transcends the death of the body. He has been adopted by Marxists as a precursor of historical materialism, and by Hegelians as a precursor of absolute idealism. He was a psychological egoist, proclaiming that all individuals necessarily seek their own advantage and implying that other individuals were of value to him only insofar as they were useful to him; yet his writings aimed to promote human community based on love and friendship, he had many devoted friends, and even his critics were obliged to acknowledge that his personal conduct was above reproach. He held that the state has the right to do whatever it has the power to do, while at the same time he defended democracy and freedom of speech. He denied supernatural revelation and criticized popular religion as a grave danger to the peace and stability of the state; yet he devoted himself to the careful interpretation of scripture and argued for toleration and freedom of religion. Rarely employing figures of speech or rhetorical flourishes of any kind, his works are nevertheless among the most magisterial and uplifting of all philosophical writings, and they have inspired more poets and novelists than those of any other philosopher of the early modern period. (shrink)

In a new interpretation, Garrett Wallace Brown considers Kant's cosmopolitan thought as a form of international constitutional jurisprudence that requires minimal legal demands. He explores and defends topics such as cosmopolitan law, cosmopolitan right, the laws of hospitality, a Kantian federation of states, a cosmopolitan epistemology of culture and a possible normative basis for a Kantian form of global distributive justice.

Game theory involves deliberating about what to do in light of what other people are likely to do. One of the central frameworks of game theory is the prisoner’s dilemma, in which participants who make rational choices end up in suboptimal outcomes. Using the prisoner’s dilemma to model competition between firms sets the stage for a new and promising approach to business ethics: the market failures approach.