ABSTRACT This article aims to broaden the scope of Critical Theory beyond the Anglo-American and European sphere by addressing the work of Stefan Gandler. Gandler, who has long advocated for the importance of Mexican philosophers, has also utilized their work to criticize the current iteration of Critical Theory in its second and third generations. Finding them far removed from the first, he considers the work of thinkers like Bolívar Echeverría to be the tradition’s true heirs. By attending to his critique, (...) this article examines rethinking the history of Critical Theory as such and expand its scope. (shrink)

Cognitive biases can lead to misinterpretations of human and non-human biology and behavior. The concept of the Umwelt describes phylogenetic contrasts in the sensory realms of different species and has important implications for evolutionary studies of cognition (including biases) and social behavior. It has recently been suggested that the microbiome (the diverse network of microorganisms in a given environment, including those within a host organism such as humans) has an influential role in host behavior and health. In this paper, we (...) discuss the host’s microbiome in relation to cognitive biases and the concept of the Umwelt. Failing to consider the role of host–microbiome (collectively termed a “holobiont”) interactions in a given behavior, may underpin a potentially important cognitive bias – which we refer to as the Holobiont Blindspot. We also suggest that microbially mediated behavioral responses could augment our understanding of the Umwelt. For example, the potential role of the microbiome in perception and action could be an important component of the system that gives rise to the Umwelt. We also discuss whether microbial symbionts could be considered in System 1 thinking – that is, decisions driven by perception, intuition and associative memory. Recognizing Holobiont Blindspots and considering the microbiome as a key factor in the Umwelt and System 1 thinking has the potential to advance studies of cognition. Furthermore, investigating Holobiont Blindspots could have important implications for our understanding of social behaviors and mental health. Indeed, the way we think about how we think may need to be revisited. (shrink)

We argue that all comparative expressions in natural language obey a principle that we call Comparability: if x and y are at least as F as themselves, then either x is at least as F as y or y is at least as F as x. This principle has been widely rejected among philosophers, especially by ethicists, and its falsity has been claimed to have important normative implications. We argue that Comparability is needed to explain the goodness of several patterns (...) of inference that seem manifestly valid, that the purported failures of Comparability would have absurd consequences, and that the influential arguments against Comparability are less compelling than they may have initially seemed. (shrink)

Chapter One INTRODUCTORY DESCRIPTION OF THE GENERAL PROBLEM The title of this work is rather vague and general, and does not go very far towards making ...

We defend three controversial claims about preference, credence, and choice. First, all agents (not just rational ones) have complete preferences. Second, all agents (again, not just rational ones) have real-valued credences in every proposition in which they are confident to any degree. Third, there is almost always some unique thing we ought to do, want, or believe.

Scientific knowledge and technological expertise continue to evolve rapidly. Such innovation gives rise to new benefits as well as risks, at an ever-increasing pace. Within this context, regulatory regimes must function in order to address policymakers’ objectives. Innovation, though, can challenge the functioning and effectiveness of regulatory regimes. Questions over fit, effectiveness, and capacity of these regimes to ensure the safe entry of such technologies, and their products, onto the market will be asked in parallel to their development. With this (...) in mind, this article examines the strengths and weaknesses of current regulatory frameworks, including those designed for biotechnology, cosmetics, novel organisms, and foods, in order to inform and help shape Australia’s regulatory landscape around innovation. By focusing on Australia, the article illustrates the need to assess future changes to regulatory frameworks using a careful balancing of key factors. These include, for example, horizon scanning and monitoring, availability of appropriate data, existing health, safety, environmental, ethical, and social risks and impacts, and regulatory capacity. The article argues that rather than using one of these factors in isolation, a careful assessment of where each factor stands can lead regulators to an approach that properly manages the potential risks of emerging technologies. (shrink)

“What is the structure of thought?” is as central a question as any in cognitive science. A classic answer to this question has appealed to a Language of Thought (LoT). We point to emerging research from disparate branches of the field that supports the LoT hypothesis, but also uncovers diversity in LoTs across cognitive systems, stages of development, and species. Our letter formulates open research questions for cognitive science concerning the varieties of rules and representations that underwrite various LoT-based systems (...) and how these variations can help researchers taxonomize cognitive systems. (shrink)

Background: Clinical genomic implementation studies pose challenges for informed consent. Consent forms often include complex language and concepts, which can be a barrier to diverse enrollment, and these studies often blur traditional research-clinical boundaries. There is a move toward self-directed, web-based research enrollment, but more evidence is needed about how these enrollment approaches work in practice. In this study, we developed and evaluated a literacy-focused, web-based consent approach to support enrollment of diverse participants in an ongoing clinical genomic implementation study. (...) Methods: As part of the Cancer Health Assessments Reaching Many (CHARM) study, we developed a web-based consent approach that featured plain language, multimedia, and separate descriptions of clinical care and research activities. CHARM offered clinical exome sequencing to individuals at high risk of hereditary cancer. We interviewed CHARM participants about their reactions to the consent approach. We audio recorded, transcribed, and coded interviews using a deductively and inductively derived codebook. We reviewed coded excerpts as a team to identify overarching themes. Results: We conducted 32 interviews, including 12 (38%) in Spanish. Most (69%) enrolled without assistance from study staff, usually on a mobile phone. Those who completed enrollment in one day spent an average of 12 minutes on the consent portion. Interviewees found the information simple to read but comprehensive, were neutral to positive about the multimedia support, and identified increased access to testing in the study as the key difference from clinical care. Conclusions: This study showed that interviewees found our literacy-focused, web-based consent approach acceptable; did not distinguish the consent materials from other online study processes; and valued getting access to testing in the study. Overall, conducting empirical bioethics research in an ongoing clinical trial was useful to demonstrate the acceptability of our novel consent approach but posed practical challenges. (shrink)

The commentary of the Italian physician and philosopher Pietro d'Abano on Bartholomew of Messina's Latin translation of Pseudo-Aristotle's 'Problemata Physica', published in 1310, constitutes an important historical source. In a section of the corpus Aristotelicum that was not part of the standard curriculum at the medieval university, the commentary of Pietro d'Abano investigates the complex relationship between text, translation, and commentary. The eight articles in this volume provide valuable insights into the manner in which Pietro d'Abano deals with the (...) problems of a translated text. They emphasize the idiosyncrasy of his approach in comparison to his contemporaries and successors, the particularities of his commentary in light of the habitual exegetical practices applied in the teaching of curricular texts, as well as the influence of philosophical traditions outside the strict framework of the medieval arts faculty. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Editors' IntroductionAlan D. Schrift and Shannon SullivanThe articles in this special issue of the Journal of Speculative Philosophy were selected from revised versions of papers that were originally presented at the sixtieth annual meeting of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy (SPEP) at Texas A&M University in College Station, Texas October 13–15, 2022.Michael Hardt of Duke University and Patricia Pisters of the University of Amsterdam gave the SPEP (...) 2022 Plenary Addresses, and we are grateful to be able to include their plenary papers in this special issue. Hardt's paper, "The Politics of Articulation and Strategic Multiplicities," treated SPEP members to an early peek at his newest book, The Subversive 70s (Oxford University Press, 2023). In this work, Hardt digs into the powerful resources for social movements that activists and theorists from the 1970s developed. As he argues, in many ways those activists and thinkers were ahead of their times—and also ahead of ours—in understanding how to analyze interwoven multiplicities of power and how to articulate and organize liberation struggles based on those multiplicities. Hardt brilliantly demonstrates how analyzing the progressive and revolutionary social [End Page 237] movements of the '70s can help us not only understand the roots of contemporary social and political struggles but also reclaim critical resources for those struggles.Patricia Pisters's paper, "Thinking with Fire: Elemental Philosophy and Media Technology," draws upon Gaston Bachelard's "fire complexes" to address a variety of pyrotechnical images appearing in contemporary cinema. Noting that elemental philosophy is on the rise in media studies and elsewhere, not least because of current environmental crises, fire is particularly engaging for its metaphorical, "matterphorical," and technological associations. While acknowledging fire as a material medium—cooking, heating, burning, etc.—Pisters's primary focus in her paper is on fire as an immaterial medium, and it is here that she turns to Bachelard's constellation of fire complexes—the Empedocles, Prometheus, and Novalis Complexes—to which she adds her own fourth complex, the Sita Complex. With these complexes, she provides readings of four cinematic productions that elucidate the annihilating, transgressive, sexual, and purifying qualities of fire, and she suggests that these entangled fire complexes present different kinds of combustive knowledge in which the element of fire manifests itself as material phenomenon of nature, the engine for modern life, and immaterial affective reverie of destruction, transgression, and sexuality.The other articles in this special issue have been organized according to five broad groupings. The first grouping, "On Latin American Philosophy," brings together three papers that engage Latin American philosophy, particularly as found in Mexican, Columbian, and Venezuelan history and political movements. In "Radicalizing Localization: Notes on Santiago Castro-Gómez's Genealogies of Coloniality," Julian Rios Acuña argues that Columbian philosopher Santiago Castro-Gómez develops a radical method of localization. This method allows Castro-Gómez to transform Foucauldian genealogy into genealogies of coloniality that grapple with the complexities of extreme violence produced by colonialism. In "Stefan Gandler's Renewal of Critical Theory from Latin America," Jake M. Bartholomew argues for a version of Critical Theory that is not bound by Europe but also remains true to its first-generation Marxist roots. Relocating to Mexico and advocating for Mexican philosophers, German-born philosopher Stefan Gandler shows how Latin American philosophy can enrich Critical Theory, providing more than can the second and third generations of Critical Theory because of its ability to analyze capitalism from outside the economic perspectives of the Global North. In "Two Versions of the Mestizo [End Page 238] Model: Toward a Theory of Anti-Blackness in Latin American Thought," Miguel Gualdron Ramirez criticizes the anti-Blackness that he sees at the heart of mestizo models of latinidad, or lo latinoamericano. Focusing on the concepts of liberation offered by Venezuelan theorist and politician Simón Bolívar and Mexican philosopher José de Vasconcelos, Ramirez reveals the exclusion and erasure of Black bodies, lives, and histories that ground their versions of Latinx identity and Latin American history. Together these three articles showcase how Latin American philosophy can enrich and expand the scope of Continental philosophy.The second grouping, "Liberatory Limits and Misalignments," features three articles... (shrink)

This book argues that a radical political gesture can be found in Søren Kierkegaard’s writings. The chapters navigate an interdisciplinary landscape by placing Kierkegaard’s passionate thought in conversation with the writings of Georg Lukács, Carl Schmitt, Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno. At the heart of the book’s argument is the concept of “indirect politics,” which names a negative space between methods, concepts, and intellectual acts in the work of Kierkegaard, as well as marking the dynamic relations between Kierkegaard and the (...) aforementioned thinkers. Kierkegaard’s indirect politics is a set of masks that displaces identities from one field to the next: theology masks politics; law masks theology; political theory masks philosophy; and psychology masks literary approaches to truth. As reflected in Lukács, Schmitt, Benjamin, and Adorno, this book examines how Kierkegaard’s indirect politics sets into relief three significant motifs: intellectual non-conformism, indirect communication in and through ambiguous identities, and negative dialectics. Bartholomew Ryan is currently a postdoctoral fellow (2011- ) at the Instituto de Filosofia da Nova, New University of Lisbon, Portugal. He holds degrees from Aarhus University, Denmark (PhD), University College, Dublin (MA), and Trinity College, Dublin (1999). He was visiting lecturer at the European College of Liberal Arts in Berlin (2007-2011) and Lady Margaret Hall, University of Oxford (2010), and was a guest scholar at the Søren Kierkegaard Research Centre in Copenhagen (2007 and 2005) and Hong Kierkegaard Library at St. Olaf College, Minnesota (2005). He has written extensively on Kierkegaard, and also published articles on Nietzsche, Pessoa, Joyce, Shakespeare and Schmitt. (shrink)

‘Fake news’ has become an increasingly common refrain in public discourse, though the term itself has several uses, at least one of which constitutes Frankfurtian bullshit. After examining what sorts of fake news appeals do and do not count as bullshit, I discuss strategies for overcoming our openness to such bullshit. I do so by drawing a parallel between openness to bullshit and naïve skepticism—one’s willingness to reject the concept of truth on unsupported or ill-considered grounds—and suggest that this parallel (...) indicates three principles for how we ought to combat our openness to fake news and other bullshit. First, the root causes of bullshit openness are not monolithic; we should adopt anti-bullshit strategies in recognition of this fact. Second, our efforts to overcome bullshit openness should be collaborative efforts to create an environment that allows for sustained interrogation of our bullshit openness, rather than a confrontational provision of contrary evidence, despite the fact that such strategies are more time-intensive. Third, social media is unlikely to be a fertile ground on which we will make meaningful progress in the fight against bullshit because of the inherent nature of social media platforms as spaces for short, declarative, confrontational claims. (shrink)

It is well known that classical, aka ‘sharp’, Bayesian decision theory, which models belief states as single probability functions, faces a number of serious difficulties with respect to its handling of agnosticism. These difficulties have led to the increasing popularity of so-called ‘imprecise’ models of decision-making, which represent belief states as sets of probability functions. In a recent paper, however, Adam Elga has argued in favour of a putative normative principle of sequential choice that he claims to be borne out (...) by the sharp model but not by any promising incarnation of its imprecise counterpart. After first pointing out that Elga has fallen short of establishing that his principle is indeed uniquely borne out by the sharp model, I cast aspersions on its plausibility. I show that a slight weakening of the principle is satisfied by at least one, but interestingly not all, varieties of the imprecise model and point out that Elga has failed to motivate his stronger commitment. (shrink)

This study described the relationships between academic class and student moral sensitivity and reasoning and between curriculum design components for ethics education and student moral sensitivity and reasoning. The data were collected from freshman (n = 506) and senior students (n = 440) in eight baccalaureate nursing programs in South Korea by survey; the survey consisted of the Korean Moral Sensitivity Questionnaire and the Korean Defining Issues Test. The results showed that moral sensitivity scores in patient-oriented care and conflict were (...) higher in senior students than in freshman students. Furthermore, more hours of ethics content were associated with higher principled thinking scores of senior students. Nursing education in South Korea may have an impact on developing student moral sensitivity. Planned ethics content in nursing curricula is necessary to improve moral sensitivity and moral reasoning of students. (shrink)

Buddhism originated and developed in an Indian cultural context that featured many first-person practices for producing and exploring states of consciousness through the systematic training of attention. In contrast, the dominant methods of investigating the mind in Western cognitive science have emphasized third-person observation of the brain and behavior. In this chapter, we explore how these two different projects might prove mutually beneficial. We lay the groundwork for a cross-cultural cognitive science by using one traditional Buddhist model of the mind (...) – that of the five aggregates – as a lens for examining contemporary cognitive science conceptions of consciousness. (shrink)

This third book in a series of successful introductory textbooks by Craig Bartholomew and Michael Goheen builds on their previous projects, The Drama of Scripture and Living at the Crossroads, to offer a comprehensive narrative of philosophical thought from a distinctly Christian perspective. After exploring the interaction among Scripture, worldview, theology, and philosophy, the authors tell the story of philosophy from ancient Greece through postmodern times, positioning the philosophers in their historical contexts and providing Christian critique along the way. (...) The authors emphasize the Reformed philosophical tradition without neglecting other historical trajectories and show how philosophical thought relates to contemporary life. (shrink)

Recent work has considered the problem of extending to the case of iterated belief change the so-called `Harper Identity' (HI), which defines single-shot contraction in terms of single-shot revision. The present paper considers the prospects of providing a similar extension of the Levi Identity (LI), in which the direction of definition runs the other way. We restrict our attention here to the three classic iterated revision operators--natural, restrained and lexicographic, for which we provide here the first collective characterisation in the (...) literature, under the appellation of `elementary' operators. We consider two prima facie plausible ways of extending (LI). The first proposal involves the use of the rational closure operator to offer a `reductive' account of iterated revision in terms of iterated contraction. The second, which doesn't commit to reductionism, was put forward some years ago by Nayak et al. We establish that, for elementary revision operators and under mild assumptions regarding contraction, Nayak's proposal is equivalent to a new set of postulates formalising the claim that contraction by ¬A should be considered to be a kind of `mild' revision by A. We then show that these, in turn, under slightly weaker assumptions, jointly amount to the conjunction of a pair of constraints on the extension of (HI) that were recently proposed in the literature. Finally, we consider the consequences of endorsing both suggestions and show that this would yield an identification of rational revision with natural revision. We close the paper by discussing the general prospects for defining iterated revision in terms of iterated contraction. (shrink)

What makes democracy valuable? One traditional answer holds that participating in democratic self-government amounts to a kind of autonomy: it enables citizens to be the authors of their political affairs. Many contemporary philosophers, however, are skeptical. We are autonomous, they argue, when important features of our lives are up to us, but in a democracy we merely have a say in a process of collective choice. In this paper, we defend the possibility of democratic autonomy, by advancing a conception of (...) it which is impervious to this objection. At the core of our account is the idea of joint authorship. You are a joint author of something when that thing expresses your joint intentions. Democracy may not make any one of us sole author of our political affairs, but it can make us their joint authors. It is in such joint authorship, we claim, that the intrinsic value of democratic self-government consists. (shrink)

One of the most popular arguments in favor of dualism is the zombie-conceivability argument. It is often argued that the possibility of zombies would entail that mental properties are epiphenomenal. This paper attempts to defuse the argument, offering a model of dualist mental causation which can serve as a basis for a modified, interactionist-friendly zombie argument.

Extended Reality (XR) and Large Language Model (LLM) technologies have the potential to significantly influence higher education practices and pedagogy in the coming years. As these emerging technologies reshape the educational landscape, it is crucial for educators and higher education professionals to understand their implications and make informed policy decisions for both individual courses and universities as a whole. -/- This paper has two parts. In the first half, we give an overview of XR technologies and their potential future role (...) in higher education. Then, we discuss the benefits and challenges of adopting and integrating XR technologies into higher education settings. Finally, we offer recommendations for educators, administrators, and policymakers on how to approach the adoption of this set of technologies and set institutional policy to take advantage of its benefits while minimizing its potential negative consequences. -/- In the paper’s second half, we discuss LLMs - specifically Generative Pre-trained Transformers (GPTs). Again, we provide an overview of this rapidly developing technology and examine its unprecedented and potentially disruptive impact on higher education pedagogy. We delve into the benefits and limitations of GPTs, highlighting the pedagogical and ethical challenges they may pose. Finally, we present actionable recommendations for instructors and administrators at both the course level and the university-wide level to guide policy decisions concerning these transformative technologies. (shrink)

Peter Lamarque, in chapter 4 of his 2010 book Work and Object, argues that certain artworks, like musical scores and literary texts, are such that there can be no forgeries of them that purport to be of an actually existing work—what Lamarque calls “referential forgeries”. Lamarque motivates this claim via appeal to another distinction, first made by Goodman, between “allographic” and “autographic” artworks. This article will evaluate Lamarque’s argument that allographic literary works are unable to be referentially forged and will (...) find them wanting. In so doing, the distinction between allographic and autographic artworks (and therefore artforms) will be called into question. In section I, I characterize referential forgery and Lamarque’s definition of allographic and autographic artforms. Section II critically examines Lamarque’s argument against the possibility of referential forgery in allographic artforms. Section III offers a case where it appears that a putatively allographic text’s type membership is sensitive to facts about its causal-intentional provenance. This case serves as pretext for Section IV’s identification of this causal-intentional relation with the sanctioning relation as formulated by Sherri Irvin. On the basis of considerations treated in sections I through IV, section V questions the tenability of the allographic/autographic distinction. -/- . (shrink)

This manuscript discusses the author’s experience implementing a secularized version of Lectio Divina, a medieval monastic contemplative reading practice, in an introductory philosophy classroom. Following brief discussion of Lectio Divina’s history and a description of how the practice was modified for the classroom, I discuss three benefits (increased attention to cognitive and noncognitive reactions to the text, willingness to engage with the material in novel ways, and the opportunity to engage in independent disciplinary practice) and three potential challenges (the time (...) required, student engagement, and the practice’s perceived religiosity) arising from the exercise. Following this, I discuss potential modifications to the exercise that instructors may wish to consider, namely strategies for addressing students’ status as novice meditators, focusing textual selections on course materials, and having students engage in some aspects of the practice as homework. (shrink)

Organizations are making massive investments in artificial intelligence, and recent demonstrations and achievements highlight the immense potential for AI to improve organizational and human welfare. Yet realizing the potential of AI necessitates a better understanding of the various ethical issues involved with deciding to use AI, training and maintaining it, and allowing it to make decisions that have moral consequences. People want organizations using AI and the AI systems themselves to behave ethically, but ethical behavior means different things to different (...) people, and many ethical dilemmas require trade-offs such that no course of action is universally considered ethical. How should organizations using AI—and the AI itself—process ethical dilemmas where humans disagree on the morally right course of action? Though a variety of ethical AI frameworks have been suggested, these approaches do not adequately address how people make ethical evaluations of AI systems or how to incorporate the fundamental disagreements people have regarding what is and is not ethical behavior. Drawing on moral foundations theory, we theorize that a person will perceive an organization’s use of AI, its data procedures, and the resulting AI decisions as ethical to the extent that those decisions resonate with the person’s moral foundations. Since people hold diverse moral foundations, this highlights the crucial need to consider individual moral differences at multiple levels of AI. We discuss several unresolved issues and suggest potential approaches for thinking about conflicts in moral judgments concerning AI. (shrink)

A survey of the recent literature suggests that physicians should engage religious patients on religious grounds when the patient cites religious considerations for a medical decision. We offer two arguments that physicians ought to avoid engaging patients in this manner. The first is the Public Reason Argument. We explain why physicians are relevantly akin to public officials. This suggests that it is not the physician’s proper role to engage in religious deliberation. This is because the public character of a physician’s (...) role binds him/her to public reason, which precludes the use of religious considerations. The second argument is the Fiduciary Argument. We show that the patient-physician relationship is a fiduciary relationship, which suggests that the patient has the clinical expectation that physicians limit themselves to medical considerations. Since engaging in religious deliberations lies outside this set of considerations, such engagement undermines trust and therefore damages the patient-physician relationship. (shrink)

Several contemporary philosophers have argued that democracy earns its moral keep in part by rendering political authority compatible with social or relational equality. In a recent article in this journal, Alexander Motchoulski examines these relational egalitarian defenses of democracy, finds the standard approach wanting, and advances an alternative. The standard approach depends on the claim that inequality of political power constitutes status inequality (the ‘constitutive claim’). Motchoulski rejects this claim on the basis of a theory of social status: once you (...) see what social status is, Motchoulski thinks, the constitutive claim is a non-starter. In its place, Motchoulski suggests that relational egalitarians can and should content themselves with a defense of democratic institutions on the basis of a causal-instrumental link between equality of political power and equality of social relations. In this reply, I advance three main claims. First, relational egalitarians have good reason to hope for a defense of the constitutive claim, since that claim is required if relational equality is to vindicate the intrinsic value of democracy. Second, Motchoulski’s argument against the constitutive claim fails, because it depends on conflating one species of social status for the genus as a whole. Finally, I argue that the constitutive claim is trivially true for one kind of status, namely de facto authority, but, since equality of that kind of status is not intrinsically valuable, this does not amount to a defense of the intrinsic value of democracy. (shrink)

This article provides a discussion of the principle of transmission of evidential support across entailment from the perspective of belief revision theory in the AGM tradition. After outlining and briefly defending a small number of basic principles of belief change, which include a number of belief contraction analogues of the Darwiche-Pearl postulates for iterated revision, a proposal is then made concerning the connection between evidential beliefs and belief change policies in rational agents. This proposal is found to be suffcient to (...) establish the truth of a much-discussed intuition regarding transmission failure. (shrink)

Previous research has shown that the UK has low levels of financial literacy by international standards, particularly among those in lower socio-economic groups. This may have an impact upon young people, with social inequalities in financial attitudes, behaviours and skills perpetuating across generations. Using parent-child linked survey data from 3,745 UK families, we find sizeable socio-economic inequalities in young people’s financial capabilities, aspects of their mindset, and their financial behaviours. Sizeable differences are also observed in the financial education that socio-economically (...) advantaged and disadvantaged children receive at school, and how they interact with their parents about money. Parental interactions can account for part of the socio-economic gap in money confidence, money management, financial connections, and financial behaviours, but less so in boosting financial abilities. However, we find no evidence of differences in financial education in schools driving differences in young people’s financial capabilities. (shrink)

Aulisio and Arora argue that the moral significance of value imposition explains the moral distinction between traditional conscientious objection and non-traditional conscientious objection. The former objects to directly performing actions, whereas the latter objects to indirectly assisting actions on the grounds that indirectly assisting makes the actor morally complicit. Examples of non-traditional conscientious objection include objections to the duty to refer. Typically, we expect physicians who object to a practice to refer, but the non-traditional conscientious objector physician refuses to refer. (...) Aulisio and Arora argue that physicians have a duty to refer because refusing to do so violates the patient’s values. While we agree with Aulisio and Arora’s conclusions, we argue value imposition cannot adequately explain the moral difference between traditional conscientious objection and non-traditional conscientious objection. Treating autonomy as the freedom to live in accordance with one’s values, as Aulisio and Arora do, is a departure from traditional liberal conceptions of autonomy and consequently fails to explain the moral difference between the two kinds of objection. We outline how a traditional liberal understanding of autonomy would help in this regard, and we make two additional arguments—one that maintains that non-traditional conscientious objection undermines society’s autonomy, and another that maintains that it undermines the physician-patient relationship—to establish why physicians have a duty to refer. (shrink)

A progressive and uncompromising work that merges fiction and theory to create an intense yet gloriously deviant look at the world through the eyes of controversial Brit-artist, Jake Chapman (of the Chapman Brothers). With protagonists who -- like his mutated Nike-wearing child mannequins -- exhibit similar aberrations, Chapman engages with Freudian theory, genetic engineering and consumerism, to create a highly original and intellectually stimulating work that is as challenging and confrontational as any of his acclaimed works of art.

I argue that sports clubs should be punished for bad behaviour by their fans in a way that affects the club’s sporting success: for example, we are justified in imposing points deductions and competition disqualifications on the basis of racist chanting. This is despite a worry that punishing clubs in such a way is unfair because it targets the sports team rather than the fans who misbehaved. I argue that this belies a misunderstanding of the nature of sports clubs and (...) of the nature of sporting success. Further, I argue that fans should want to be held responsible in such a way because it vindicates the significant role that they play in the life of their club. (shrink)

After a number of decades of research into the dynamics of rational belief, the belief revision theory community remains split on the appropriate handling of sequences of changes in view, the issue of so-called iterated revision. It has long been suggested that the matter is at least partly settled by facts pertaining to the results of various single revisions of one’s initial state of belief. Recent work has pushed this thesis further, offering various strong principles that ultimately result in a (...) wholesale reduction of iterated to one-shot revision. The present paper offers grounds to hold that these principles should be significantly weakened and that the reductionist thesis should ultimately be rejected. Furthermore, the considerations provided suggest a close connection between the logic of iterated belief change and the logic of evidential relevance. (shrink)

Crispin Wright’s discussion of the notion of ‘transmission-failure’ promises to have important philosophical ramifications, both in epistemology and beyond. This paper offers a precise, formal characterisation of the concept within a Bayesian framework. The interpretation given avoids the serious shortcomings of a recent alternative proposal due to Samir Okasha.

The crux of feminist ideological alignments is the struggle for the woman’s liberation from patriarchal subjectivities. This study investigates the utilization of poetry by Patricia Jabbeh Wesley to challenge patriarchal dominance and expose the gimmicks of female devaluation by hegemonic imperialism. Wesley’s poems: “Inequality in Hell” and “My Auntie’s Woman-Lappa Husband” which sufficiently explore feminist consciousness from Wesley’s poetry collection, Where the Road Turns, were purposively selected and subjected to close reading and qualitative analysis. The poems were critically analyzed through (...) the lens of postcolonial feminist literary criticism which examines issues of phallocentric structures, especially in formerly colonized states. The selected poems show the itchy pains of masculinity and devaluation of womanhood in canonical text. Wesley’s poetry invites her readers to a philosophical introspection of patriarchal order with respect to the unbalanced treatment of women in postcolonial Liberia. The poet, through her art, exposes the unfair imaging of women globally. (shrink)

Diverse and dynamic societies face a problem of social control. Institutions of social control, of which the police are a part, are a necessary part of just and legitimate governance. But in our non-ideal world they are also responsible for injustices of their own. This project raises questions of political philosophy as they apply to the professional police agency. It begins by constructing an inchoate, but mainstream view about just policing, legalism, according to which police power is justified by the (...) criminal code, and just policing is just the faithful enforcement of law. This view is undermined by the practical realities of policing, which involves widespread and unavoidable police discretion. It then develops an account of just and legitimate police discretion, including principles of proportionality, liberal neutrality, and democratic responsiveness. This sheds lights on controversial police tactics, order maintenance initiatives, and community policing strategies. This account also informs the just institutional arrangement of police powers, informing ongoing debates about police reform and abolition. (shrink)

In a recent article, Douven and Williamson offer both (i) a rebuttal of various recent suggested sufficient conditions for rational acceptability and (ii) an alleged ‘generalization’ of this rebuttal, which, they claim, tells against a much broader class of potential suggestions. However, not only is the result mentioned in (ii) not a generalization of the findings referred to in (i), but in contrast to the latter, it fails to have the probative force advertised. Their paper does however, if unwittingly, bring (...) us a step closer to a precise characterization of an important class of rationally unacceptable propositions—the class of lottery propositions for equiprobable lotteries. This helps pave the way to the construction of a genuinely lottery-paradox-proof alternative to the suggestions criticized in (i). (shrink)