We are often uncertain how to behave morally in complex situations. In this controversial study, Ted Lockhart contends that moral philosophy has failed to address how we make such moral decisions. Adapting decision theory to the task of decision-making under moral uncertainly, he proposes that we should not always act how we feel we ought to act, and that sometimes we should act against what we feel to be morally right. Lockhart also discusses abortion extensively and proposes new (...) ways to deal with the ethical and moral issues which surround it. (shrink)

Ted T. Aoki, the most prominent curriculum scholar of his generation in Canada, has influenced numerous scholars around the world. Curriculum in a New Key brings together his work, over a 30-year span, gathered here under the themes of reconceptualizing curriculum; language, culture, and curriculum; and narrative. Aoki's oeuvre is utterly unique--a complex interdisciplinary configuration of phenomenology, post-structuralism, and multiculturalism that is both theoretically and pedagogically sophisticated and speaks directly to teachers, practicing and prospective. Curriculum in a New Key: The (...) Collected Works of Ted T. Aoki is an invaluable resource for graduate students, professors, and researchers in curriculum studies, and for students, faculty, and scholars of education generally. (shrink)

This paper investigates links between social capital and symbolic capital and responsible entrepreneurship in the context of small and medium enterprises (SMEs). The source of the primary data was 144 ‘Business Profiles’, written by the owner-managers of small businesses in application for a Small Business Awards competition in 2005. Included in each of these narratives were claims relating to the firms’ contributions to wider society, relationships with customers, employees and stakeholders. These narratives were coded and classified in a framework drawn (...) from Nahapiet and Ghoshal’s (1998, Academy of Management Review 23(2), 242–266) categorisation of social capital. The analysis revealed a range of strategic orientations towards the development of social and symbolic capital, along a conceptual continuum ranging from being responsible for oneself to being responsible for others. Overall, the evidence demonstrates the significance of the power inherent in the social relations of SMEs as a force for ethical behaviour, and suggests that normative theories of the development of social capital may provide ‘competitive advantage’ through responsible behaviour for small business in the global economy. (shrink)

In this paper, we compare and contrast two methods for the revision of qualitative beliefs. The first method is generated by a simplistic diachronic Lockean thesis requiring coherence with the agent’s posterior credences after conditionalization. The second method is the orthodox AGM approach to belief revision. Our primary aim is to determine when the two methods may disagree in their recommendations and when they must agree. We establish a number of novel results about their relative behavior. Our most notable finding (...) is that the inverse of the golden ratio emerges as a non-arbitrary bound on the Bayesian method’s free-parameter—the Lockean threshold. This “golden threshold” surfaces in two of our results and turns out to be crucial for understanding the relation between the two methods. (shrink)

An argument has been made for identifying Mill as an individualistic thinker. Certainly, A System of Logic develops views, such as methodological individualism and a conception of the ‘art of life’, which portray persons as having unique essences that, when supported by autonomous choices with respect to life experiments, reveal their individuality. These views are at least loosely applied in later works. Principles of Political Economy treats economic aspects of social life frequently in terms consistent with those of classical economists (...) for whom the self-interested actions of individuals achieve economic growth. On Liberty, the flagship volume in this view, and, less centrally, The Subjection of Women provide impressive testimony for an individualistic way of life in terms of its contributions to social progress. Considerations on Representative Government examines means for institutionalizing an individualistic way of life. And Utilitarianism provides a basis for justifying an individualistic view of this social programme: more satisfaction of individual desires. But such an account, Mill's own assessment notwithstanding, would be unsatisfactory. (shrink)

Introduction There are (at least) two questions which readily arise in the minds of sociology students when they begin courses in the philosophy of social ...

Artistic Creation and Ethical Criticism investigates an idea that underpins the ethical criticism of art but is rarely acknowledged and poorly understood - namely, that the ethical criticism of art involves judgments not only of the attitudes a work endorses or solicits, but of what artists do to create the work. The book pioneers an innovative production-oriented approach to the study of the ethical criticism of art, one that will provide a refined philosophical account of this important topic as well (...) as conceptual tools that can guide future philosophizing and criticism. (shrink)

Hallucination: the perception of an impossible image. That which can never appear suddenly does so anyways - a private world that appears only to the eye of the one imagining it... until now. Ted Serios, psychic photographer, claimed he could project images directly from his mind onto photographic film. Under the sign of the psychic photograph, “Hallucinating Ted Serios” is a theorization of the dominant forms of uncertainty that persist in postmodern evaluations of representation, interpretation and identity. The central thesis (...) of this paper is that the imaginary and the real have collapsed into the spectral hallucination of one another, rendering impossible the rhetorical separation of hallucination from image. With the collapse of the boundary between the fictive and the real, the world of representation becomes intelligible only as an imaginary phenomenon; with the collapse between the object and the observer, interpretation is rendered deceptively magical; and, with the collapse between the self and its anonymous double, identity itself is relegated to a state of impossibility. Consequently, under the persisting signs of the imaginary, the magical and the impossible, “Hallucinating Ted Serios” asserts that in our contemporary world there no longer exists the possibility of failed performativity – psychic, imaginary or otherwise. (shrink)

Do you know who you are? If the question seems unclear, it might owe to the notion of ‘knowing-wh’ (knowing-who, knowing-what, knowing-when, etc.). Such knowledge contrasts with ‘knowing-that’, the more familiar topic of epistemologists. But these days, knowing-wh is receiving more attention than ever, and here we will survey three current debates on the nature of knowing-wh. These debates concern, respectively, (1) whether all knowing-wh is reducible to knowing-that (‘generalized intellectualism’), (2) whether all knowing-wh is relativized to a contrast proposition (...) (‘contrastivism about knowing-wh’), and (3) whether the context-sensitivity of knowing-wh is a semantic or purely pragmatic phenomenon (‘contextualism vs. invariantism about knowing-wh’). (shrink)

I argue that externalism about mental content is consistent with the thesis that individuals need not investigate their environment to come to know the contents of their thoughts. In particular, externalism is consistent with the thesis that we come to know the contents of our thoughts on the basis of introspection.

The authors aim to reinstate a spirit of philosophical enquiry in physics. They abandon the intuitive continuum concepts and build up constructively a combinatorial mathematics of process. This radical change alone makes it possible to calculate the coupling constants of the fundamental fields which? via high energy scattering? are the bridge from the combinatorial world into dynamics. The untenable distinction between what is?observed?, or measured, and what is not, upon which current quantum theory is based, is not needed. If we (...) are to speak of mind, this has to be present? albeit in primitive form? at the most basic level, and not to be dragged in at one arbitrary point to avoid the difficulties about quantum observation. There is a growing literature on information-theoretic models for physics, but hitherto the two disciplines have gone in parallel. In this book they interact vitally. (shrink)

John Greco’s Putting Skeptics in Their Place is an important book. Greco persuasively argues that the best skeptical arguments cannot be easily dismissed and should not be ignored. These arguments cannot be easily dismissed because they defend important conclusions and make no obvious mistake. The arguments should not be ignored because their proper analysis reveals much about central philosophical notions such as knowledge and evidence. While defending these conclusions Greco offers sophisticated metaepistemological and metaphilosophical reflections. Philosophers properly attending to the (...) strongest skeptical arguments will, according to Greco, find themselves heading in the direction of a virtue-based version of reliabilism. Greco defends this general type of theory and outlines the major components of his preferred version of the theory. Greco stops short of defending a fully precise account of knowledge, but he offers a spirited defense of his claim that such a theory should fall somewhere in the family of virtue-based reliabilist theories, a type of theory that Greco calls “agent reliabilism.” Greco concludes with a brief discussion of moral and religious epistemology in which he applies some of the insights gained in his exploration and defense of agent reliabilism. (shrink)

Reason and Explanation develops a new explanationist account of epistemic justification. Poston argues that the explanatory virtues provide a plausible account of necessary and sufficient conditions for justification. The justification of a subject's belief consists in the explanatory virtue of her entire beliefs compared with other sets of beliefs she could have. Poston's argument for coherentism involves a defense of the epistemic value of background beliefs, the development of a novel framework view of reasons, and the articulation of a mentalism (...) evidentialist account of coherentism. Poston argues against foundationalist views that ground justification in sense experience apart from supporting background beliefs. He extends the argument against foundationalism by examining a coherentist view of a priori knowledge. Finally, he articulates a compatiblist position regarding Bayesianism and inference to the best explanation. (shrink)

Contemporary television has been marked by such exceptional programming that it is now common to hear claims that TV has finally become an art. In Appreciating the Art of Television, Nannicelli contends that televisual art is not a recent development, but has in fact existed for a long time. Yet despite the flourishing of two relevant academic subfields—the philosophy of film and television aesthetics—there is little scholarship on television, in general, as an art form. This book aims to provide scholars (...) active in television aesthetics with a critical overview of the relevant philosophical literature, while also giving philosophers of film a particular account of the art of television that will hopefully spur further interest and debate. It offers the first sustained theoretical examination of what is involved in appreciating television as an art and how this bears on the practical business of television scholars, critics, students, and fans—namely the comprehension, interpretation, and evaluation of specific televisual artworks. (shrink)

Most presentations of the problem of moral luck invoke the notion of control, but little has been said about what control amounts to. We propose a necessary condition on an agent's having been in control of performing an action: that the agent's effort to perform the action ensured that the agent performed the action. The difficulty of satisfying this condition leads many on both sides of the moral luck debate to conclude that much of what we do is not within (...) our control, and, at the limit, underpins agential skepticism, the view that no one has ever been in control of having performed an action in the external world. We propose a response to the agential skeptic modeled on the epistemological disjunctivist's response to the skeptic about perceptual experience. According to agential disjunctivism, the necessary condition on control can be met, thus undermining agential skepticism and one motivation for the problem of moral luck. Our view can be understood as resisting moral luck not by shrinking the domain of robust moral evaluation but by refusing to contract the realm of robust control. (shrink)

Scientists’ identities and social locations influence their work, but the content of scientific work can also influence scientists. Theory from feminist science studies, autoethnographic accounts, interviews, and experiments indicate that the substance of scientific research can have profound effects on how scientists are treated by colleagues and their sense of belonging in science. I bring together these disparate literatures under the framework of professional cultures. Drawing on the Survey of Earned Doctorates and the Web of Science, I use computational social (...) science tools to argue that the way scientists write about sex in their research influences the future gender ratio of PhDs awarded across 53 subfields of the life sciences over a span of 47 years. Specifically, I show that a critical paradigm of “feminist biology” that seeks to de-essentialize sex and gender corresponds to increases in women’s graduation rates, whereas “sex difference” research—sometimes called “neurosexism” because of its emphasis on essential, categorical differences—corresponds to decreases in women’s graduation rates in most fields. (shrink)

This book brings together eleven case studies of inductive risk-the chance that scientific inference is incorrect-that range over a wide variety of scientific contexts and fields. The chapters are designed to illustrate the pervasiveness of inductive risk, assist scientists and policymakers in responding to it, and productively move theoretical discussions of the topic forward.

The current dominant perspective on addiction as a brain disease has been challenged recently by Marc Lewis, who argued that the brain-changes related to addiction are similar to everyday changes of the brain. From this alternative perspective, addictions are bad habits that can be broken, provided that people are motivated to change. In that case, autonomous choice or “free will” can overcome bad influences from genes and or environments and brain-changes related to addiction. Even though we concur with Lewis that (...) there are issues with the brain disease perspective, we also argue that pointing to black swans can be important, that is: there can be severe cases where addiction indeed tips over into the category of brain disease, but obviously that does not prove that every case of addiction falls into the disease category, that all swans are black. We argue that, for example, people suffering from Korsakoff’s syndrome, can be described as having a brain disease, often caused by alcohol addiction. Moreover, the brain changes occurring with addiction are related to choice-behaviour, habit formation and insight, hence essential mental abilities to break the addiction. We argue for a more graded perspective, where both black swans and white swans are rare, and most cases of addiction come as geese in different shades of gray. (shrink)

Constitutivism holds that an account of what a thing is yields those normative standards to which that thing is by nature subject. We articulate a minimal form of constitutivism that we call _formal, non-epistemological constitutivism_ which diverges from orthodox versions of constitutivism in two main respects. First: whereas orthodox versions of constitutivism hold that those ethical norms to which people are by nature subject are sui generis because of their special capacity to motivate action and legitimate criticism, we argue that (...) these features are compatible with treating these norms as of a piece with those ‘formal’ natural-historical norms which can be used to assess living things. Second: unlike orthodox versions of constitutivism, our version does not seek to use a non-normative account of that kind of being which we are as a means of identifying those normative claims to which we are are by nature subject. We then indicate how our position can afford us the resources to address some of the familiar difficulties that face cognitivism in ethics. (shrink)

Jason Stanley and Timothy Williamson's influential article "Knowing How" argues that knowledge-how is a species of knowledge-that. One objection to their view is that knowledge-how is significantly different than knowledge-that because Gettier cases afflict the latter but not the former. Stanley and Williamson argue that this objection fails. Their response, however, is not adequate. Moreover, I sketch a plausible argument that knowledge-how is not susceptible to Gettier cases. This suggests a significant distinction between knowledge-that and knowledge-how.

The first comprehensive intellectual biography of William Petty, the inventor of 'political arithmetic' and a key figure in the English colonization of Ireland, the institutionalization of experimental science, and early social science.

Abe and his friend Sol are out for a walk together in a part of town they haven't been in before. Passing a Christian church, they notice a curious sign in front that says "$1,000 to anyone who will convert." "I wonder what that's about," says Abe. "I think I'll go in and have a look. I'll be back in a minute; just wait for me." Sol sits on the sidewalk bench and waits patiently for nearly half an hour. Finally, (...) Abe reappears. "Well," asks Sol, "what are they up to? Who are they trying to convert? Why do they care? Did you get the $1,000?" Indignantly Abe replies, "Money. That's all you people care about." Ted Cohen thinks that's not a bad joke. But he also doesn't think it's an easy joke. For a listener or reader to laugh at Abe's conversion, a complicated set of conditions must be met. First, a listener has to recognize that Abe and Sol are Jewish names. Second, that listener has to be familiar with the widespread idea that Jews are more interested in money than anything else. And finally, the listener needs to know this information in advance of the joke, and without anyone telling him or her. Jokes, in short, are complicated transactions in which communities are forged, intimacy is offered, and otherwise offensive stereotypes and cliches lose their sting—at least sometimes. _Jokes_ is a book of jokes and a book about them. Cohen loves a good laugh, but as a philosopher, he is also interested in how jokes work, why they work, and when they don't. The delight at the end of a joke is the result of a complex set of conditions and processes, and Cohen takes us through these conditions in a philosophical exploration of humor. He considers questions of audience, selection of joke topics, the ethnic character of jokes, and their morality, all with plenty of examples that will make you either chuckle or wince. _Jokes:_ more humorous than other philosophy books, more philosophical than other humor books. "Befitting its subject, this study of jokes is... light, funny, and thought-provoking.... [T]he method fits the material, allowing the author to pepper the book with a diversity of jokes without flattening their humor as a steamroller theory might. Such a book is only as good as its jokes, and most of his are good.... [E]ntertainment and ideas in one gossamer package."—_Kirkus Reviews_ "One of the many triumphs of Ted Cohen's Jokes-apart from the not incidental fact that the jokes are so good that he doesn't bother to compete with them-is that it never tries to sound more profound than the jokes it tells.... [H]e makes you feel he is doing an unusual kind of philosophy. As though he has managed to turn J. L. Austin into one of the Marx Brothers.... Reading Jokes makes you feel that being genial is the most profound thing we ever do-which is something jokes also make us feel-and that doing philosophy is as natural as being amused."—Adam Phillips, _London Review of Books_ "[A] lucid and jargon-free study of the remarkable fact that we divert each other with stories meant to make us laugh.... An illuminating study, replete with killer jokes."—Kevin McCardle, _The Herald_ "Cohen is an ardent joke-maker, keen to offer us a glimpse of how jokes are crafted and to have us dwell rather longer on their effects."—Barry C. Smith, _Times Literary Supplement_ "Because Ted Cohen loves jokes, we come to appreciate them more, and perhaps think further about the quality of good humor and the appropriateness of laughter in our lives."—Steve Carlson, _Christian Science Monitor_. (shrink)

Abe and his friend Sol are out for a walk together in a part of town they haven't been in before. Passing a Christian church, they notice a curious sign in front that says "$1,000 to anyone who will convert." "I wonder what that's about," says Abe. "I think I'll go in and have a look. I'll be back in a minute; just wait for me." Sol sits on the sidewalk bench and waits patiently for nearly half an hour. Finally, (...) Abe reappears. "Well," asks Sol, "what are they up to? Who are they trying to convert? Why do they care? Did you get the $1,000?" Indignantly Abe replies, "Money. That's all you people care about." Ted Cohen thinks that's not a bad joke. But he also doesn't think it's an easy joke. For a listener or reader to laugh at Abe's conversion, a complicated set of conditions must be met. First, a listener has to recognize that Abe and Sol are Jewish names. Second, that listener has to be familiar with the widespread idea that Jews are more interested in money than anything else. And finally, the listener needs to know this information in advance of the joke, and without anyone telling him or her. Jokes, in short, are complicated transactions in which communities are forged, intimacy is offered, and otherwise offensive stereotypes and cliches lose their sting—at least sometimes. _Jokes_ is a book of jokes and a book about them. Cohen loves a good laugh, but as a philosopher, he is also interested in how jokes work, why they work, and when they don't. The delight at the end of a joke is the result of a complex set of conditions and processes, and Cohen takes us through these conditions in a philosophical exploration of humor. He considers questions of audience, selection of joke topics, the ethnic character of jokes, and their morality, all with plenty of examples that will make you either chuckle or wince. _Jokes:_ more humorous than other philosophy books, more philosophical than other humor books. "Befitting its subject, this study of jokes is... light, funny, and thought-provoking.... [T]he method fits the material, allowing the author to pepper the book with a diversity of jokes without flattening their humor as a steamroller theory might. Such a book is only as good as its jokes, and most of his are good.... [E]ntertainment and ideas in one gossamer package."—_Kirkus Reviews_ "One of the many triumphs of Ted Cohen's Jokes-apart from the not incidental fact that the jokes are so good that he doesn't bother to compete with them-is that it never tries to sound more profound than the jokes it tells.... [H]e makes you feel he is doing an unusual kind of philosophy. As though he has managed to turn J. L. Austin into one of the Marx Brothers.... Reading Jokes makes you feel that being genial is the most profound thing we ever do-which is something jokes also make us feel-and that doing philosophy is as natural as being amused."—Adam Phillips, _London Review of Books_ "[A] lucid and jargon-free study of the remarkable fact that we divert each other with stories meant to make us laugh.... An illuminating study, replete with killer jokes."—Kevin McCardle, _The Herald_ "Cohen is an ardent joke-maker, keen to offer us a glimpse of how jokes are crafted and to have us dwell rather longer on their effects."—Barry C. Smith, _Times Literary Supplement_ "Because Ted Cohen loves jokes, we come to appreciate them more, and perhaps think further about the quality of good humor and the appropriateness of laughter in our lives."—Steve Carlson, _Christian Science Monitor_. (shrink)

In this challenging book, Ted Benton takes recent debates about the moral status of animals as a basis for reviewing the discourse of “human rights.” Liberal-individualist views of human rights and advocates of animal rights tend to think of individuals, whether human or animals, in isolation from their social position. This makes them vulnerable to criticisms from the left which emphasize the importance of social relationships to individual well-being. Benton’s argument supports the important assumption, underpinning the cause for human rights, (...) that humans and other species of animal have much in common, both in the conditions for their well-being and their vulnerability to harm. Both liberal rights theory and its socialist critique fail adequately to theorize these aspects of human vulnerability. Nevertheless, it is argued that, enriched by feminist and ecological insights, a socialist view of rights has much to offer. Lucid and wide-ranging in its argument, Natural Relations enables the outline of an ecological socialist view of rights and justice to begin to take shape. (shrink)

Three experiments investigating children's understanding of inference as a source of knowledge and beliefs were used to determine whether children use a theory in understanding the mind. A child watched while a sweet was placed in a box whereas a doll was merely given a message about which sweet had been transferred. Children were asked to judge whether the doll knew the colour of the sweet in the box and what colour the do6 would think the sweet was. The main (...) finding was that children tended to say the doll would hold a false belief about the colour of the sweet whenever the doll had not looked in the box. This result is easily reconciled with the theory view as a drive for coherence within the different aspects (knowledge and belier predictions) of the child's theory of mind. The result is contrary to the simulation view because children were generally good at‘inputting’or taking account of the relevant information (i.e. the doll's knowledge of the sweets’colours and the message to the doll), because children assessed their own beliefs quite differently from the doll's beliefs, and because contrary to the default assumptions set out by Harris (1991) children found it easier to assign a false belief to the doll than to assign a true belief. (shrink)

Yet, hitherto, there has been no attempt to reconstruct the relation betwen these two thinkers, a major interpretative task for which "Heidegger and Aristotle" ...

This paper argues that Kantians face a little discussed problem in accounting for how actions that fulfill imperfect duties can be morally motivated. It is widely agreed that actions that are performed from the motive of duty are performed through a recognition of the objective necessity of the action. It is also generally held that the objective necessity of an action consists in its rational non-optionality. Many actions that fulfill imperfect duties, however, are rationally optional. Given these constraints, it is (...) impossible that such rationally optional actions could be performed from the motive of duty. After presenting the problem as one that Kantians should find genuinely pressing, this paper offers a solution by advancing an alternative to the conception of rational necessity widely shared by Kantians. On the alternative view presented here, an action is rationally necessary if and only if the justifying reasons that speak in favor of performing the action do not depend on any empirical and therefore contingent motivational source on the part of an agent. Such actions may well be rationally optional. Moral motivation is therefore possible even in the case of rationally optional actions. Abbreviations: The following abbreviations are used for Kant’s works. All translations are from Practical Philosophy, ed. Mary J. Gregor. Citations are given by the abbreviation, the volume, and the page number from Kant’s Gesammelte Schriften, edited by the Royal Prussian Academy of Sciences. G.Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten.KpVKritik der praktischen Vernunft.MSDie Metaphysik der Sitten. (shrink)

In this book, Ted Peters explores the fallacies of the "gene myth" and presents a resounding array of arguments against this kind of all-encompassing genetic determinism. On the scientific side, he correctly points out that genetic influences on behavior are in most instances relatively modest. Does anyone deny that identical twins are still able to practice individual free will? After dispatching some of the sweepingly deterministic conclusions of the "science" of evolutionary psychology with a particularly effective set of rebuttals, Peters (...) arrives at the conclusion that the nature of humanness is an interaction of three things- not one, not two, but three: genetics, environment, and free will. Neglecting any one of these three leads down a path of fuzzy thinking and dangerous consequences. (shrink)

This is the first book in the new series, is a comprehensive introduction to philosophical problems in the social sciences, encompassing traditional and contemporary perspectives. It is readily accessible, with a firm emphasis on communicating difficult philosophical ideas clearly and effectively to those from outside this discipline. Ted Benton and Ian Craib move systematically through major topic areas, from positivism to post-structuralism, using a wide variety of examples and cases to illustrate key themes.