The first objective of this article is to demonstrate that ethics committee members can learn a great deal from a forensic analysis of two classic psychology studies: Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Study and Milgram’s Obedience Study. Rather than using hindsight to retrospectively eradicate the harm in these studies, the article uses a prospective minimization of harm technique. Milgram attempted to be ethical by trying to protect his subjects through debriefing and a follow-up survey. He could have done more, however, by carrying (...) out what ethics committees routinely insist on today for those researching sensitive topics. The establishment of counselling supports to identify harm to participants would have minimized additional harm. Were these in place, or in Zimbardo’s case had the Stanford Ethics Committee properly identified Zimbardo’s conflict of interest – he was both a principal investigator and the prison warden – how much harm could have been minimized? The second aim is to examine how some qualitative authors routinely demonize these classic studies. It might appear that there are too few cases of unethical qualitative research to justify such an examination; however, this article identifies a number of recent examples of ethically dubious qualitative research. This would suggest that qualitative research should examine its own ethics before poaching from psychology. (shrink)

The National Women's Hospital research scandal saw women being involved in medical research without their knowledge and without the opportunity to make a choice about their participation. The 1988 Cartwright Inquiry into this decades-long study established a template for ethics review in New Zealand. Ethics committees were subsequently established to independently assess the potential benefits as well as risks of research. This book describes the gradual undermining of the independence of New Zealand ethics review and the politicisation of ethics committees (...) between 1988 and 2014. The authors, involved continuously in ethics review matters over the period, have seen substantial change brought about by government in response to another medical research crisis - in Gisborne in the late 1990s - and then between 2008 and 2010 an economic crisis involving foreign pharmaceutical companies. Some New Zealand medical researchers claimed that the ethics review process for clinical trials was too slow and was losing the country its economic advantage. This book traces the changes and the implications for a robust ethics review process in all research environments in New Zealand, especially those affecting Maori. The book includes a set of suggestions and recommendations aimed at enhancing independent ethics review, best practice, and the provision of adequate protection for all citizens. (shrink)

A previous research ethics article by the authors provided evidence to support the claim that the New Zealand Ethics Committee was a powerless ethics committee. Ethics review applicants were not formally obliged to seek ethics review, and any committee recommendations were given on a ‘take it or leave it’ basis. One year later, the capacity of applications has doubled, and NZEC finds its core assumptions challenged as funders and government agencies now compel contracted researchers to make use of this free (...) service. Moreover, NZEC has expanded into research areas inhabited by market researchers, long shy of ethics review. Review requirements and remit expansion challenges some, but not all, aspects of NZEC’s assumption of powerlessness as NZEC remains committed to research ethics, not research governance, and it adheres to the principles of the New Brunswick Declaration to respect applicants the same way it expects applicants to respect participants. This annual survey of applicants makes NZEC accountable to its applicants, providing evidence once more that NZEC’s expeditious and cordial review of applications is considered different from traditional ethics review. (shrink)

Finding Your Ethical Research Self introduces novice researchers to the need for ethical reflection in practice and gives them the confidence to use their knowledge and skill when, later as researchers, they are confronted by big ethical moments in the field. -/- The 12 chapters build on each other, but not in a linear way. Core ethical concepts like consent and confidentiality once established in the early chapters are later challenged. The new focus becomes how to address qualitative research ethics (...) when confidentiality and consent take on a limited form. This approach helps students understand that the application of concepts always requires thoughtful adaptation in different contexts and the book provides guidance on how to do this. Classroom/workbook exercises develop alternative solutions to create process consent, internal confidentiality, and engage reference groups, as examples. The first eight chapters allow students to develop their ethical research self before thinking through how they might address formal ethics review. Formal ethics review is deliberately not introduced until Chapter 9. Chapter 10 offers practical help to elements of review, before Chapter 11 emphasises the key message by providing examples of researchers' dilemmas in the field using vignettes and discussion. By providing these examples, students become aware that these can arise, explore how they might arise, and recognise how they might deal with them in the moment when they are unavoidable. -/- With numerous examples of ethical dilemmas and issues and questions and exercises to encourage self-reflection, this reflexive, learn-by-doing model of research ethics will be highly useful to the novice researcher, undergraduate, and postgraduate research student. (shrink)

Low-level community based ethics committees staffed by teachers, parents and community representatives can readily review children’s science fair projects subject to the revision of two core assumptions currently governing children’s Science Fairs. The first part of the paper recasts the New Zealand Royal Society guidelines from its primary emphasis on risk to a new assumption, without benefit there can be no risk. Equally, this revision gives more prominence to the participant information sheet, allowing it to act as a quasi application (...) form which provides ethical transparency between student researchers, participants and a community based ethics committee. A second core assumption, more accurately labeled a cult of originality, produces a random, open-ended array of student topics taking ethics review beyond the confidence level of most community based ethics review committees. This paper reins in Science Fair coordinators recommending they make community level ethics review more manageable by providing a list of preapproved topics for those students wanting to conduct research involving human participants. These revised assumptions create a workable division of labour. Teachers’ preapproved topics involving human participants are more likely to be low risk, permitting community level ethics review to focus primarily on two aspects of the minimization of harm: first, for all participants, especially those with diminished autonomy, and second, for the child researchers themselves, as some participants may be unknown to the student. These revised assumptions make science and ethics more accessible to public education thus demonstrating how Science Fairs can lead students and the community into better understanding the role and function that ethics has in all scientific research human participants. (shrink)

Laura Stark’s ethnography of IRB decision-making unearthed two concerns: first, even though the committees were governed by ethical principles, the committees generated their own precedents for future decision-making; second, Stark witnessed unequal power relations within committee decision-making as a member’s expertise was accepted as a ‘warrant’. This article examines how these warrants are practiced within the decision-making process of New Zealand’s four Health and Disability Ethics Committees. More specifically, this article concerns these warrants during a committee’s decision to consult with (...) indigenous communities, a decision for which there exist no guidelines. The article ends by discussing ethical issues when observing in public places. (shrink)

This paper demonstrates the limited efficacy procedural ethics has for qualitative research. Ethics committee's instructions have a short shelf life given the research question qualitative researchers create is volatile; that is, likely to change due to the inductive, emergent, informant-led nature of qualitative research. Design-This article draws on extensive literature to examine the void between the original research design and the messy reality experienced in the field. We focus on how researchers can practice ethically by recognizing the need for agile (...) and responsive ethics praxis in their work. Findings-This practice describes the researcher, recognizing the initial support from an ethics committee and its limitations, but as the research gets underway assuming full responsibility for ethical considerations that emerge in the field. Practical implications-Researchers' responsibilities entail recognising the dual …. (shrink)

Neither ethics committees nor qualitative researchers can predict the types of ethical dilemmas that will happen in the field, only that they will routinely occur. In Qualitative Ethics in Practice, a team of fifteen top researchers from various disciplines and nationalities offer ethical strategies unique to qualitative researchers for those "big ethical moments" beyond what can be predicted by ethics committees. Ideally structured for qualitative classes that tackle ethics issues, the book -calls for an ethical code unique to the practice (...) of qualitative research; -uses a variety of cases from education, community development, tourism, family, and other settings to examine how researchers addressed ethical dilemmas in practice, including the infamous Belfast Project; -highlights some relevant models and programs being developed that may lead to solutions. (shrink)

Despite recommendations from the Cartwright Report ethical review by health ethics committees has continued in New Zealand without health practitioners ever having to acknowledge their dual roles as health practitioners researching their own patients. On the other hand, universities explicitly identify doctor/research-patient relations as potentially raising conflict of role issues. This stems from the acknowledgement within the university sector itself that lecturer/research-student relations are fraught with such conflicts. Although similar unequal relationships are seen to exist between health researchers and their (...) patients, the patient/subjects are not afforded the levels of protection that are afforded student/subjects. In this paper we argue that the difference between universities and health research is a result of the failure of the Operational Standard Code for Ethics Committees to explicitly acknowledge the vulnerability of the patient and conflict of interests in the dual roles of health practitioner/researcher. We end the paper recommending the Ministry of Health consider the rewriting of the Operational Standard Code for Ethics Committees, in particular in the rewriting of section 26 of the Operational Standard Code for Ethics Committees. We also identify the value of comparative ethical review and suggest the New Zealand's Health Research Council's trilateral relationship with Australia's NHMRC (National Health and Medical Research Council) and Canada's CIHR (Canadian Institute of Health Research) as a useful starting point for such a process. (shrink)

Since the 1988 Cartwright Inquiry, lay members of ethics committees have been tasked with ensuring that ordinary New Zealanders are not forgotten in ethical deliberations. Unlike Institutional Review Boards in North America, where lay members constitute a fraction of ethics committee membership, 50% of most New Zealand ethics committees are comprised of lay members. Lay roles are usually defined in very broad terms, which can vary considerably from committee to committee. This research queries who lay representatives are, what they do, (...) and what if anything they represent. Our findings are based on data collection with 12 participants: eight semi-structured interviews with lay members from diverse types of ethics committees who described their roles, and commentary from four ethics committee chairs, three of these lay members who commented on this article’s final draft. Findings indicate that the role of New Zealand lay persons – although distinctively valued – is otherwise similar to the documented role of lay persons within North American ethics committees. Lay members see their role as primarily protecting the research participant and at times offering a corrective to non-lay members’ views and the interests of their institutions. However, in spite of their numbers, most lay members do not see themselves as representing any particular constituent groups or institutionally unaffiliated areas of concern. On tertiary education committees especially, there is a good deal of ambiguity in the lay role. (shrink)

This study examines a significant gap in the role of providing ethical guidance and support for community-based research. University and health-based ethical review committees in New Zealand predominantly serve as ‘gatekeepers’ that consider the ethical implications of a research design in order to protect participants and the institution from harm. However, in New Zealand, community-based researchers routinely do not have access to this level of support or review. A relatively new group, the New Zealand Ethics Committee, formed in 2012, responds (...) to the uneven landscape of access for community-based research. By offering ethical approval inclusive of the review of a project’s study design outside institutional settings, NZEC has endeavoured to move beyond a gatekeeping research governance function to that of bridge-building. This change of focus presents rich possibilities but also a number of limitations for providing ethical review outside conventional institutional contexts. This paper reports on the NZEC’s experience of working with community researchers to ascertain the possibilities and tensions of shifting ethics review processes from research governance to a focus on research ethics in community-based participatory research. (shrink)

Informed consent and confidentiality supposedly minimize harm for research participants in all qualitative research methodologies, inclusive of one-on-one unstructured interviews and focus groups. This is not the case for the latter. Confidentiality and informed consent uniquely manifest themselves as endemic ethical dilemmas for focus group researchers. The principle of caveat emptor (let the buyer beware) may be a more useful tool for those involved in focus group research: that is, let the researcher, the participants and the ethics committee beware that (...) the only ethical assurance that can be given to focus group participants is that there are few ethical assurances. These ethical dilemmas are not sufficiently realized in the literature, and if they are discussed, they are often dealt with within the focus group moderator’s preamble to the group discussion. This paper encourages the mandatory use of a participant information sheet sufficiently detailed to engender the participant’s active consent. Sufficient here means the participant must be made adequately aware of these endemic ethical dilemmas in advance, to allow them to consent to share responsibility for any ensuing harm. The focus group moderator is not their sole protector. (shrink)

Despite recommendations from the Cartwright Report ethical review by health ethics committees has continued in New Zealand without health practitioners ever having to acknowledge their dual roles as health practitioners researching their own patients. On the other hand, universities explicitly identify doctor/research-patient relations as potentially raising conflict of role issues. This stems from the acknowledgement within the university sector itself that lecturer/research-student relations are fraught with such conflicts. Although similar unequal relationships are seen to exist between health researchers and their (...) patients, the patient/subjects are not afforded the levels of protection that are afforded student/subjects. In this paper we argue that the difference between universities and health research is a result of the failure of the Operational Standard Code for Ethics Committees to explicitly acknowledge the vulnerability of the patient and conflict of interests in the dual roles of health practitioner/researcher. We end the paper recommending the Ministry of Health consider the rewriting of the Operational Standard Code for Ethics Committees, in particular in the rewriting of section 26 of the Operational Standard Code for Ethics Committees. We also identify the value of comparative ethical review and suggest the New Zealand's Health Research Council's trilateral relationship with Australia's NHMRC (National Health and Medical Research Council) and Canada's CIHR (Canadian Institute of Health Research) as a useful starting point for such a process. (shrink)

Online supplement, "Mulsow: Additions to Notes drawn from the 2002 edition of Moderne aus dem Untergrund" full versions of nearly 300 notes that were truncated in the print edition. Hosted on H. C. Erik Midelfort's website. Martin Mulsow's seismic reinterpretation of the origins of the Enlightenment in Germany won awards and renown in its original German edition, and now H. C. Erik Midelfort's translation makes this sensational book available to English-speaking readers. In Enlightenment Underground, Mulsow shows that even in (...) the late seventeenth century some thinkers in Germany ventured to express extremely dangerous ideas, but did so as part of a secret underground. Scouring manuscript collections across northern Europe, Mulsow studied the writings of countless hitherto unknown radical jurists, theologians, historians, and dissident students who pushed for the secularization of legal, political, social, and religious knowledge. Often their works circulated in manuscript, anonymously, or as clandestinely published books. Working as a philosophical microhistorian, Mulsow has discovered the identities of several covert radicals and linked them to circles of young German scholars, many of whom were connected with the vibrant radical cultures of the Netherlands, England, and Denmark. The author reveals how radical ideas and contributions to intellectual doubt came from Socinians and Jews, church historians and biblical scholars, political theorists, and unemployed university students. He shows that misreadings of humorous or ironic works sometimes gave rise to unintended skeptical thoughts or corrosively political interpretations of Christianity. This landmark book overturns stereotypical views of the early Enlightenment in Germany as cautious, conservative, and moderate, and replaces them with a new portrait that reveals a movement far more radical, unintended, and puzzling than previously suspected. (shrink)

L’addition, dans la cinquième édition en 1683 de La Logique ou L’Art de penser, d’un chapitre consacré à la définition générale du signe et de plusieurs chapitres relevant spécifiquement d’une analyse des signes linguistiques, a été parfois interprétée comme une apparition tardive du “problème du langage” dans le traité d’Arnauld et Nicole. Parce que la plupart de ces chapitres supplémentaires sont la transposition de passages auparavant destinés dans la Perpétuité de la foi (1669-1674) à réfuter le sens calviniste de Ceci (...) est mon corps, on a été enclin à attribuer l’importance de la question du signe et du “problème du langage” dans l’édition de 1683 à une origine théologique. J’essaie au contraire de montrer que, dès la première édition de L’Art de penser en 1662, la problématisation des écarts des expressions linguistiques avec une correspondance terme à terme entre les mots et les idées a été indissociable pour Port-Royal de l’analyse des opérations de l’esprit. Selon moi, dans la Perpétuité de la foi, la critique du sens calviniste de la formule eucharistique constitue elle-même une application de cette analyse logique du langage : les passages incorporés ensuite dans L’Art de penser sont dans le prolongement des réflexions de 1662 sur les difficultés d’adéquation entre le dire et le vouloir-dire. Je montre pour finir que la définition générale du signe à Port-Royal suppose une restructuration de la définition augustinienne du De doctrina christiana, et fonde en 1683 une identification de la relation de signification linguistique à un rapport de représentation des mots aux idées, qui vient redoubler le rapport de représentation des idées aux choses établi en 1662. (shrink)

Many philosophers and psychologists argue that out everyday ability to predict and explain the actions and mental states of others is grounded in out possession of a primitive 'folk' psychological theory. Recently however, this theory has come under challenge from the simulation alternative. This alternative view says that human beings are able to predict and explain each other's actions by using the resources of their own minds to simulate the psychological aetiology of the actions of the others. This book and (...) the companion volume Folk Psychology: The Theory of Mind Debate together offer a richly woven fabric of philosophical and psychological theory, which promises to yield real insights into the nature of our mental lives. (shrink)

Of course, although this view on meaning was the prevailing one for almost a century, many of the people who initiated the enterprise of logical semantics, including people like Frege and Wittgenstein, had an open eye for all that it did not catch. However, the logical means which Frege, Wittgenstein, Russell, and the generation that succeeded them, had at their disposal were those of classical mathematical logic and set-theory, and these indeed are not very suited for an analysis of other (...) aspects of meaning than those which the slogan covers. A real change in view then had to await the emergence of other concepts, which in due course became available mainly under the influence of developments in computer science and cognate disciplines such as artificial intelligence. And this is one of the reasons why it took almost a century before any serious and successful challenge of the view that meaning equals truthconditions from within logical semantics could emerge. (shrink)

In this paper I propose a new solution to the problem of change: situationalism. According to this view, parts of reality fundamentally disagree about what is the case and reality as a whole is unsettled (i.e. metaphysically indeterminate). When something changes, parts of the world irreconcilably disagree about what properties it has. From this irreconcilable disagreement, indeterminacy arises. I develop this picture using situations, which are parts of possible worlds; this gives it the name situationalism. It allows a B-theory endurance (...) view on which there is genuine incompatibility when things change. There are costs to the view, which are explored, but it is a novel approach which offers a distinct explanation of what happens when things exist through change. (shrink)

. Science at the interface with society is regarded with mistrust among parts of the public. Scientific judgments on matters of practical concern are not infrequently suspected of being incompetent and biased. I discuss two proposals for remedying this deficiency. The first aims at strengthening the independence of science and suggests increasing the distance to political and economic powers. The drawback is that this runs the risk of locking science in an academic ivory tower. The second proposal favors “counter-politicization” in (...) that research is strongly focused on projects “in the public interest,” that is, on projects whose expected results will benefit all those concerned by these results. The disadvantage is that the future use of research findings cannot be delineated reliably in advance. I argue that the underlying problem is the perceived lack of relevance and reliability and that pluralism is an important step toward its solution. Pluralism serves to stimulate a more inclusive research agenda and strengthens the well-testedness of scientific approaches. However, pluralism also prevents the emergence of clear-cut practical suggestions. Accordingly, pluralism is part of the solution to the credibility crisis of science, but also part of the problem. In order for science to be suitable as a guide for practice, the leeway of scientific options needs to be narrowed – in spite of uncertainty in epistemic respect. This reduction can be achieved by appeal to criteria that do not focus on the epistemic credentials of the suggestions but on their appropriateness in practical respect. (shrink)

Divided into four parts, this treatise begins with well-known criticisms of nonreligious ethics and then develops an atheistic metaethics. In Part 2, Martin criticizes the Christian foundation of ethics, specifically the ’divine command theory’ and the idea of imitating the life of Jesus as the basis of Christian morality. Part 3 demonstrates that life can be meaningful in the absence of religious belief. Part 4 criticizes the theistic point of view in general terms as well as the specific Christian (...) doctrines of the atonement, salvation, and the resurrection. (publisher, edited). (shrink)

This collection of texts (originally published in German under the title Holzwege) is Heidegger's first post-war book and contains some of the major expositions of his later philosophy. Of particular note are 'The Origin of the Work of Art', perhaps the most discussed of all of Heidegger's essays, and 'Nietzsche's Word 'God is Dead',' which sums up a decade of Nietzsche research. Although translations of the essays have appeared individually in a variety of places, this is the first English translation (...) to bring them all together as Heidegger intended. The text is taken from the last edition of the work, which contains the author's final corrections together with important marginal annotations that provide considerable insight into the development of his thought. This fresh and accurate new translation will be an invaluable resource for all students of Heidegger, whether they work in philosophy, literary theory, religious studies, or intellectual history. (shrink)

This paper addresses a problem about epistemic warrant. The problem is posed by philosophical arguments for externalism about the contents of thoughts, and similarly by philosophical arguments for architecturalism about thinking, when these arguments are put together with a thesis of first person authority. In each case, first personal knowledge about our thoughts plus the kind of knowledge that is provided by a philosophical argument seem, together, to open an unacceptably ‘non-empirical’ route to knowledge of empirical facts. Furthermore, this unwelcome (...) prospect of transferring a ‘non-empirical’ warrant from premises about our own mental states and about philosophical theory to a conclusion about external environment or internal architecture seems to depend upon little more than the possibility of knowledge by inference. (The use of the scare-quoted term ‘non-empirical’ is explained a couple of paragraphs further on.). (shrink)

And, as The Promise of Salvation makes clear through abundant empirical evidence, religion will not disappear as long as these promises continue to help people ...

This book traces the development of theories of the self and personal identity from the ancient Greeks to the present day. From Plato and Aristotle to Freud and Foucault, Raymond Martin and John Barresi explore the works of a wide range of thinkers and reveal the larger intellectual trends, controversies, and ideas that have revolutionized the way we think about ourselves. The authors open with ancient Greece, where the ideas of Plato, Aristotle, and the materialistic atomists laid the groundwork (...) for future theories. They then discuss the ideas of the church fathers and medieval and Renaissance philosophers, including St. Paul, Philo, Augustine, Aquinas, and Montaigne. In their coverage of the emergence of a new mechanistic conception of nature in the seventeenth century, Martin and Barresi note a shift away from religious and purely philosophical notions of self and personal identity to more scientific and social conceptions, a trend that has continued to the present day. They explore modern philosophy and psychology, including the origins of different traditions within each discipline, and explain both the theoretical relevance of feminism and gender and ethnic studies and also the ways that Derrida and other recent thinkers have challenged the very idea that a unified self or personal identity even exists. Martin and Barresi cover a number of issues broached by philosophers and psychologists, such as the existence of a fixed and unchanging self and whether the concept of the soul has a use outside of religious contexts. They address the question of whether notions of the soul and the self are still viable in today's world. Together, they reveal the fascinating ways in which great thinkers have grappled with these and other questions and the astounding impact their ideas have had on the development of self-understanding in the west. (shrink)

According to a view widely held by epistemic contextualists, the truth conditions of a knowledge claim depend on features of the context such as the presuppositions, interests and purposes of the conversational participants. Against this view, I defend an intentionalist account, according to which the truth conditions of a knowledge attribution are determined by the speaker’s intention. I show that an intentionalist version of contextualism has several advantages over its more widely accepted rival account.

Taking issue with those who see recent social transformations as an extension of modernity, the author contends that social theory must confront an epochal change from the modern era to a new era of globality, in which human beings can conceive of forces at work on a global scale, and in which they espouse values that take the globe as their reference point. The book begins by assessing the problems of writing about modernity, showing how narratives of an endlessly self-perpetuating (...) modern age were intrinsic to the "modern project," the attempt by Enlightenment philosophers to transform the everyday world in accord with science and logic under the auspices of the nation-state. Now we are beginning to realize that the nation-state and the modern project cannot renew themselves endlessly through expansion. Instead, the author contends, the age has culminated in its own dissolution, and globality has supplanted modernity as the basis for action and social organization. In theorizing the global age, he considers the worldwide environmental consequences of aggregate human activities, the reconception of human security in the age of nuclear weapons, technological advances in communication systems, the rise of a global economy, and the growing reflexivity of global consciousness, as people and groups begin to refer to the globe as the frame for their beliefs. The book concludes by examining the consequences of the Global Age thesis for politics, identifying a new popular construction of the state that the author terms "performative citizenship." In the modern age, the nation-state was the central power and citizens were beneficiaries of that power, with rights and duties. In the global age, citizens respond to the lack of central power by creating, or performing, the state themselves. The global managerial class uses the skills learned in the bureaucracy of the nation-state to bring pressure on national governments in the interests of global economic, environmental, or human-rights issues. (shrink)

Explores the moral dimensions of the current global role of the U.S. military.

In 2014 the Essex Autonomy Project undertook a six month project, funded by the AHRC, to provide technical advice to the UK Ministry of Justice on the question of whether the Mental Capacity Act is compliant with the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. Over the course of the project, the EAP research team organised a series of public policy roundtables, hosted by the Ministry of Justice, and which brought together leading experts to discuss and debate (...) the issues. A one-day public conference was held at the Institute for Government in July. In September 2014, the EAP research team submitted its findings to the Ministry of Justice. (shrink)

Christian Georg Martin offers an argumentative reconstruction of the whole work, reading it as a critical ontology, namely as the attempt to abstract from all presuppositions and to immanently unfold conceptual determinations characterizing ...

In this paper, I shall defend externalism for the contents of perceptual experience. A perceptual experience has representational properties; it presents the world as being a certain way. A visual experience, for example, might present the world to a subject as containing a surface with a certain shape, lying at a certain distance, in a certain direction; perhaps a square with sides about 30 cm, lying about one metre in front of the subject, in a direction about 20 degrees to (...) the left of straight ahead. (shrink)

If the tiles of a mosaic are arranged symmetrically, then the image those tiles constitute must be symmetric as well. This paper formulates and defends the general principle at work in this case: roughly, that a symmetry cannot ground an asymmetry. It is argued that the principle supports strong objections to four metaphysical views: qualitativism, relationalism, the tenseless or ‘B’ theory of time, and comparativism. A response to these objections is developed which appeals to fragmentalism, the view that reality contains (...) facts which are incompatible with one another. But fragmentalism might be thought too bizarre to tolerate, and if it is, then the objections developed in this paper may well be fatal. (shrink)

Philosophers of logic are particularly interested in understanding the aims, epistemology, and methodology of logic. This raises the question of how the philosophy of logic should go about these enquires. According to the practice-based approach, the most reliable method we have to investigate the methodology and epistemology of a research field is by considering in detail the activities of its practitioners. This holds just as true for logic as it does for the recognised empirical and abstract sciences. If we wish (...) to systematically understand the aims and epistemology of logic, we are best placed achieving this by looking at what logicians do, rather than reflecting upon the nature of logic itself. In this entry, we outline the motivations for a practice-based approach towards the philosophy of logic and highlight its advantages over more “top-down” approaches, which attempt to infer conclusions about the nature of logic and its methodology on the basis of traditional assumptions about knowledge, metaphysics, or logic itself. We end by addressing several prominent concerns raised against the practice-based approach. (shrink)

Entitlement is defined as a sort of epistemic justification that one can possess by default – a sort of epistemic justification that does not need to be earned or acquired. Epistemologists who accept the existence of entitlement generally have a certain anti-sceptical role in mind for it – entitlement is intended to help us resist what would otherwise be compelling radical sceptical arguments. But this role leaves various details unspecified and, thus, leaves scope for a number of different potential conceptions (...) of entitlement. At one extreme there are conceptions that portray entitlement as a weak, attenuated epistemic status and, at the other, we have conceptions that portray entitlement as something potent and strong. Certain intermediate conceptions are also possible. In this paper, I shall argue that the weak and intermediate conceptions of entitlement do not survive careful scrutiny, and the stronger conceptions – while they do, in a way, strain credulity – are the only conceptions that are ultimately viable. (shrink)

I defend a contextualist account of bare epistemic modal claims against recent objections. I argue that in uttering a sentence of the form ‘It might be that p,’ a speaker is performing two speech acts. First, she is (directly) asserting that in view of the knowledge possessed by some relevant group, it might be that p. The content of this first speech act is accounted for by the contextualist view. But the speaker's utterance also generates an indirect speech act that (...) consists in a weak suggestive that p. Since this second speech act is typically the main point of a bare epistemic modal utterance, our (negative or positive) responses to the utterance actually target this second speech act. I show how this two-speech-act account can explain the data recently adduced against contextualism. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to provide a proof-theoretic characterization of relevant logics including fusion and fission connectives, as well as Ackermann’s truth constant. We achieve this by employing the well-established methodology of labelled sequent calculi. After having introduced several systems, we will conduct a detailed proof-theoretic analysis, show a cut-admissibility theorem, and establish soundness and completeness. The paper ends with a discussion that contextualizes our current work within the broader landscape of the proof theory of relevant logics.

Die Konstitution des menschlich-personalen Geistes ist fur Augustinus und Anselm von<I> Canterbury von<I> zentraler Bedeutung. Dabei sind Einheit und Identitat des Geistes und die Erkenntnis Gottes als des immer schon gewussten absoluten Grundes untrennbar miteinander verbunden. Dies wird bei Augustinus unter anderem in der Zeituberhobenheit des Geistes und bei Anselm im ontologischen Argument deutlich. Mit Hilfe der gewonnenen Erkenntnisse konnen auch unterschiedliche Perspektiven in okumenischer Hinsicht deutlich gemacht werden, wie anhand zweier Exkurse aufgezeigt wird.".

Bd. 1. A-B -- Bd. 2. C-F -- Bd. 3. G-Inn -- Bd. 4. Ins-Loc.