P McKenzie; George Orwell, ‘Seeing’ and ‘Saying’: a reply to Francis Dunlop, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 16, Issue 2, 30 May 2006, Pages 255–264.

We claim that the meaning of the adverbial almost contains both a scalar proximity measure and a modal that allows it to work sometimes when proximity fails, what we call the at-a-distance reading. Essentially, almost can hold if the proposition follows from the normal uninterrupted outcomes of adding a small enough number of premises to a selection of relevant facts. Almost at-a-distance is blocked when the temporal properties of the topic time and Davidsonian event prevent normal outcomes from coming true (...) when they need to. This approach to almost differs from the two general approaches that have emerged in the literature, by replacing the negative polar condition with a positive antecedent condition that entails not p while avoiding the numerous well-documented complications of employing a polar condition. Since this approach to almost involves a circumstantial base with a non-interrupting ordering source, almost behaves in certain ways like the progressive, and shows contextual variability of the same kinds that we see with premise sets. (shrink)

Always connect—that is the imperative of today’s media. But what about those moments when media cease to function properly, when messages go beyond the sender and receiver to become excluded from the world of communication itself—those messages that state: “There will be no more messages”? In this book, Alexander R. Galloway, Eugene Thacker, and McKenzie Wark turn our usual understanding of media and mediation on its head by arguing that these moments reveal the ways the impossibility of communication is (...) integral to communication itself—instances they call excommunication. In three linked essays, _Excommunication_ pursues this elusive topic by looking at mediation in the face of banishment, exclusion, and heresy, and by contemplating the possibilities of communication with the great beyond. First, Galloway proposes an original theory of mediation based on classical literature and philosophy, using Hermes, Iris, and the Furies to map out three of the most prevalent modes of mediation today—mediation as exchange, as illumination, and as network. Then, Thacker goes boldly beyond Galloway’s classification scheme by examining the concept of excommunication through the secret link between the modern horror genre and medieval mysticism. Charting a trajectory of examples from H. P. Lovecraft to Meister Eckhart, Thacker explores those instances when one communicates or connects with the inaccessible, dubbing such modes of mediation “haunted” or “weird” to underscore their inaccessibility. Finally, Wark evokes the poetics of the infuriated swarm as a queer politics of heresy that deviates from both media theory and the traditional left. He posits a critical theory that celebrates heresy and that is distinct from those that now venerate Saint Paul. Reexamining commonplace definitions of media, mediation, and communication, _Excommunication_ offers a glimpse into the realm of the nonhuman to find a theory of mediation adequate to our present condition. (shrink)

This paper aims to take the measure of the strand of early modern anti-clericalism that was conveyed by the term “priestcraft”. Priestcraft amounted to the claim that priests had usurped civil power and accumulated material wealth by systematically deceiving the laity and its secular rulers. Religion as it was practised and avowed by believers in early modern Europe was left tainted by this charge since manifold aspects of religious practice and belief fell under the pall of the suspicion that they (...) were merely part of the ruse perpetrated through the centuries by greedy and power-hungry priests. While the English language was particularly effective in condensing this claim into the term in question, mistrust of the clergy informed numerous discourses unfolding in diverse confessional and intellectual contexts. The present article seeks to draw attention to the thematic richness of priestcraft as an object of historical inquiry by identifying the multiple ways in which this trope made its presence felt in the early modern world. (shrink)

When should we make use of the criminal law? Suppose that a responsible legislature seeks to enact a morally justifiable range of criminal prohibitions. What criteria should it apply when deciding whether to proscribe conduct? Crimes, Harms, and Wrongs is a philosophical analysis of the nature, significance, and ethical limits of criminalisation. The authors explore the scope and moral boundaries of harm-based prohibitions, proscriptions of offensive behaviour, and 'paternalistic' prohibitions aimed at preventing self-harm. Their aim is to develop guiding principles (...) for these various grounds of state prohibition, including an analysis of the constraints and mediating factors that weigh for and against criminalisation. Both authors have written extensively in the field. In Crimes, Harms, and Wrongs they have reworked a number of well-known essays and added several important new essays to produce an integrated, accessible, philosophically-sophisticated account that will be of great interest to legal academics, philosophers, and advanced students alike"--Provided by publisher. (shrink)

The criminal law presently distinguishes between actions and omissions, and only rarely proscribes failures to avert consequences that it would be an offense to bring about. Why? In recent years it has been persuasively argued by both Glover and Bennett that, celeris paribus, omissions to prevent a harm are just as culpable as are actions which bring that harm about. On the other hand, and acknowledging that hitherto “lawyers have not been very successful in finding a rationale for it,” Tony (...) Honoré has sought to defend the law's differential treatment. He proposes a “distinct-duties theory” that in addition to the general duties we owe to everyone, we also owe distinct duties to a more limited collection of people and associations, specified by features of our relationship with them. Where a distinct duty holds, breach by omission may well be no better than breach by positive action. But absent a distinct duty, omissions, per Honoré, are less culpable. They are mere failures to intervene and improve or rectify things, whereas actions are positive interventions which make things worse. And, thus, the law has good reason to differentiate between them. (shrink)

This essay lays the groundwork for a novel conception of autonomy that may be called “effective autonomy”—a conception designed to be genuinely action guiding in bioethics. As empirical psychology research on the heuristics and biases approach shows, decision making commonly fails to correspond to people’s desires because of the biases arising from bounded cognition. People who are classified as autonomous on contemporary philosophical accounts may fail to be effectively autonomous because their decisions are uncoupled from their autonomous desires. Accordingly, continuing (...) attempts to value patient autonomy must go beyond existing philosophical conceptions of autonomy to consider the background conditions of human decision making. (shrink)

Aristotle's definition of the soul should be interpreted as: 'the soul is the entelechy of a natural body that serves as its instrument'.

The book opens with a description of the smooth transition from Newtonian to Einsteinian behaviour from electrons as their energy is progressively increased, ...

Epistemic trust is an unacknowledged feature of medical knowledge. Claims of medical knowledge made by physicians, patients, and others require epistemic trust. And yet, it would be foolish to define all epistemic trust as epistemically responsible. Accordingly, I use a routine example in medical practice to illustrate how epistemically responsible trust in medicine is trust in epistemically responsible individuals. I go on to illustrate how certain areas of current medical practice of medicine fall short of adequately distinguishing reliable and unreliable (...) processes because of a failure to systematically evaluate health outcomes. I conclude by articulating the devastating obstacles to the consilience assumption, which takes intellectual character as the standard for epistemic responsibility. (shrink)

It is often alleged that an agent is morally responsible in a liability sense for a transgression just in case s/he deserves a negative interpersonal response for that transgression, blaming responses such as resentment and indignation being paradigms. Aside from a few exceptions, guilt is cited in recent discussions of moral responsibility, if at all, as merely an effect of being blamed, or as a reliable indicator of moral responsibility, but not itself an explanation of moral responsibility. In this paper, (...) I argue that an agent is morally responsible in a liability sense for a transgression just in case s/he deserves to feel moral guilt for that transgression. I argue that this alternative view offers all that the predominant blame-focused view offers, while also solving some puzzling features of moral responsibility. Specifically, it offers a compelling way to reconcile conflicting intuitions about the suberogatory, and allows those who do not understand what Darwall calls ‘second-personal’ reasons to be morally responsible for their immoral acts. (shrink)

Ideal interpretation is understanding a text in the best possible way. It is usually used when the text has a canonical status, such as the Bible or the U.S. Constitution. We argue that Zhu Xi’s view about interpreting the Four Books and Ronald Dworkin’s view about constitutional interpretation are examples of ideal interpretation and that their basic principles are similar. Each holds, roughly, that their target text contains moral truth; that the author’s mind requires the mediation of learning; that the (...) purpose of interpretation is not only to lead the reader to the moral truth but to become a better person; that all propositions are about the same moral truth or about political justice; that the interpretation ultimately must come from oneself, purged of prejudices; and that the only correct interpretation is one that captures the original meaning. (shrink)

I argue that four-dimensionalism and the desire satisfaction account of well-being are incompatible. For every person whose desires are satisfied, there will be many shorter-lived individuals (‘person-stages’ or ‘subpersons’) who share the person’s desires but who do not exist long enough to see those desires satisfied; not only this, but in many cases their desires are frustrated so that the desires of the beings in whom they are embedded as proper temporal parts may be fulfilled. I call this the frustrating (...) problem for four-dimensionalism. In the first half of the paper I lay the groundwork for understanding the frustrating problem, and then in the second half, I will examine six possible responses to the frustrating problem on behalf of the four-dimensionalist, (i) the Parfit (1984) inspired claim that identity is not what matters, (ii) the personal pronoun revisionism of Noonan (2010), (iii) the indirect concern account of Hudson (2001), (iv) the sensible stages account of Lewis (1986), (v) a multiple-concepts account of desire satisfaction, and (vi) a No Desire View according to which subpersons have no mental states and thus no desires to frustrate. I argue that none of these solutions will help the four-dimensionalist; she does better to reject the desire satisfaction theory, while the defender of the desire satisfaction theory does better to reject four-dimensionalism. (shrink)

Many of the most serious crimes that fall within the justificatory scope of the harm principle do so constitutively. They do so in the sense that the harm that the crime is designed to prevent is a...

It has often been charged that the doctrine of papal infallibility is either false or incoherent. These charges stem, I believe, from a misunderstanding of the logical character of infallible papal utterances, a misunderstanding shared alike by friends and foes of the doctrine. In this paper, I shall argue that the doctrine is both coherent and correct. I devote section I to uncovering some of the sources of this misunderstanding and thereby defending what might be called my negative thesis, namely, (...) that infallible papal utterances are not statements. In section II, I continue defending my negative thesis, not now as an end in itself, but rather as a means of advancing my positive thesis that infallible papal utterances are declarations and have the same logic as other declarations. The latter thesis requires a discussion of the difference between statements and declarations. Section III contains a formal speech act analysis of successful and non-defective statements and declarations with some additional explanatory notes. In section IV, I speak rather generally about the task of philosophical theology in the light of the results and procedures of sections I–III. (shrink)

In 1956, a few writings of Wittgenstein that he didn't publish in his lifetime were revealed to the public. These writings were gathered in the book Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics (1956). There, we can see that Wittgenstein had some discontentment with the way philosophers, logicians, and mathematicians were thinking about paradoxes, and he even registered a few polemic reasons to not accept Gödel’s incompleteness theorems.

The partitions of a given set stand in a well known one-to-onecorrespondence with the equivalence relations on that set. We askwhether anything analogous to partitions can be found which correspondin a like manner to the similarity relations (reflexive, symmetricrelations) on a set, and show that (what we call) decompositions – of acertain kind – play this role. A key ingredient in the discussion is akind of closure relation (analogous to the consequence relationsconsidered in formal logic) having nothing especially to do (...) with thesimilarity issue, and we devote a final section to highlighting some ofits properties. (shrink)

This paper explores the Offence Principle. It discusses whether two constraints, additional to the criteria stated in conventional analysis, ought to be met before the Offense Principle can be satisfied: (i) that offensive conduct must be a wrong, and (ii) that the conduct must also lead to harm. The nature of the Harm Principle, and its relationship to the Offense Principle, are also considered. The paper suggests that, even if all cases in which offense should be criminalized also involve harm, (...) nonetheless there may be good reasons to retain a separate Offense Principle. (shrink)

Thomas Hobbes is recognized as one of the fathers of modern philosophy and political theory. In his own time he was as famous for his work in physics, geometry, and religion. He associated with some of the greatest writers, scientists, and politicians of his age. Martinich has written a complete and accessible biography of Hobbes. The book takes full account of the historical and cultural context in which Hobbes lived, drawing on both published and unpublished sources. It will be a (...) great resource for philosophers, political theorists and historians of ideas. The clear, crisp prose style will also ensure that the book appeals to general readers with an interest in the history of philosophy, the rise of modern science and the English Civil War. (shrink)

Patrick McGrath has argued that my defence of papal infallibility does not succeed. His basic strategy is to establish that, contrary to my arguments, infallible papal utterances are statements and not merely declarations. He wants this result in order to go on to show that the Pope, in possession of no priviliged epistemic access to the world, is not infallible. I agree that the Pope has no priviliged epistemic access; so that is not in dispute. What is in dispute is (...) the fundamental question of whether infallible papal utterances are statements or declarations. I want to show that McGrath's arguments against my position do not work. If I am successful, then the Pope's infallibility is secure. (shrink)