This collection of essays, offered in honor of the distinguished career of prominent political philosophy professor Clifford Orwin, brings together internationally renowned scholars to provide a wide context and discuss various aspects of the virtue of “humanity” through the history of political philosophy.

This collection of essays, offered in honor of the distinguished career of prominent political philosophy professor Clifford Orwin, brings together internationally renowned scholars to provide a wide context and discuss various aspects of the virtue of “humanity” through the history of political philosophy.

This essay thinks through Nanguo Ziqi’s famous “I lost myself” (wu sang wo 吾喪我) remark in the Qiwulun 齊物論 in light of Weil’s notion of decreation. The desire to undo the self is paradoxical, and most philosophical interpretations of the Zhuangzi passage try to avoid the paradox of “I lost myself” by positing various levels of self. Weil’s decreation embraces the paradox, and thereby helps clarify how Nanguo’s “I lost myself” connects with his subsequent metaphor of pipes of Heaven. More (...) broadly, this essay is a first step in drawing together these two uniquely unsystematic and paradoxical thinkers. (shrink)

In response to cancer, patients may be thrown into precarious processes of remaking their purpose, identity, and connections to the world around them. Thoughtful and thorough responses to these issues can be supported by person-centered phenomenological approaches to caring for patients. The importance of perspectives on illness offered by theoretical phenomenology will become apparent through the example of the experience of nausea, or perhaps more accurately put—chemo sickness. The focus here is on how chemo sickness alters one's way of relating (...) to the world. I will examine the phenomenon of nausea through the lens of the phenomenological concept of mood—an existential feeling that engenders a diffused tone permeating through one's world and shapes the envisioned possibilities on one's horizon. (shrink)

This paper discusses poetry as a site of what Pierre Hadot calls “spiritual exercises,” with particular reference to China's greatest poet, Du Fu (712–70 C.E.). While Hadot's work has bridged gaps between (i) philosophy and religion and (ii) theory and practice, this paper suggests that spiritual exercises can also blur the modern separation between form and content. It argues for the possibility of poetry as philosophy; that is, philosophy in a less-recognized form. If poetry can be spiritual exercise and if (...) spiritual exercise with its goal of self-transformation is the core of philosophy, then we may be able to treat poetry as one form of philosophy. The paper also demonstrates the relevance of Hadot's work for ancient Chinese and comparative philosophy more broadly. (shrink)

We believe that clinical ethics consultants (CECs) should offer advice, options, and recommendations to attending physicians and their teams. In their article in this issue of The Journal of Clinical Ethics, however, Kornfeld and Prager give CECs a somewhat different role. The CEC they describe may at times be more aptly understood as a medical interventionist who appropriates the roles of the attending physician and the medical team than as a traditional CEC. In these remarks, we distinguish the role of (...) the CEC from that of the physician, in contrast to some of these authors’ recommendations, which confuse the two roles. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 39.4 (2001) 602-603 [Access article in PDF] Paul B. Thompson and Thomas C. Hilde, editors. The Agrarian Roots of Pragmatism. The Vanderbilt Library of American Philosophy. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2000. Pp. ix + 342. Cloth, $39.95. If "racial memory" is a viable concept, then the enduring paradigm of human productivity is agriculture, whose seventy-century dominion Western industry and urbanization have eclipsed only (...) within the last two hundred years. The fifteen essays collected here explore America's distinctive form of agrarianism: where individualism, democracy, and a seemingly endless frontier transcended European quarrels over "commons" versus "containment." These values also helped forge our indigenous philosophy—pragmatism—and it is the confluence of these two distinctive American forms that intrigues each of these authors.The essays fall roughly into three groups: 1) historical queries whose connection to pragmatism is marginal, 2) expositions of the agrarian roots of pragmatism, and 3) estimates of the influence of classical pragmatism on the recent rise of neoagrarianism. The first category offers sparkling essays by Charles Taliaferro, James Campbell, Paul B. Thompson, Robert S. Corrington, and Douglas R. Anderson. Together these scholars sketch a history from colonial times to the mid-twentieth century—from Jefferson's "noble agrarian" to the agony of reconstruction, which hastened the split between Northern transcendentalists and Southern romantics. There are some surprises: Franklin outshines even Jefferson with his balanced vision of self-improvement and community weal, and Jefferson's correspondent Crèvecoueur emerges as a visionary who foresaw farming as a wholesome and integrated way of life a century before Emerson and Thoreau. Thomas C. Hilde finds an engagingly pragmatic notion of community in Josiah Royce, and Richard E. Hart discovers Dewey's sense of concrete experience in the novels of John Steinbeck. The contributions of neglected figures such as Francois Quesnay, Liberty Hyde Bailey, John Brewster, and A Whitney Griswold are also recovered.Turning to the second group, though obviously an irresistible title the notion that classical pragmatism is robustly "rooted" in agrarianism is slightly disingenuous. Peirce and James have no direct ties to agrarianism. And though Dewey's themes of innovation, social intelligence, community, and a conception of experience broadly inclusive of organisms and environments reflect obvious affinities, they do not show that pragmatism grew directly from or is a variant of agrarianism. Happily, the pieces on Dewey contributed by Larry A. Hickman and Armen Marsoobian harbor no such illusions, [End Page 602] and Dewey is specifically disassociated from the claim that agriculture is a privileged form of experience.The third, and perhaps most significant, aim of the volume is to bring pragmatic insights into the recent groundswell toward neoagrarianism. Where traditional agrarianism was polarized between the domination of nature and its romantic beatification, the movement pioneered by Wendell Berry in the 1970s portrays the farmer as a nurturer whose goal is to seek an optimal harmony in the health of the land, the family, the community, and the country. In this James A. Montmarquet finds a Deweyan respect for an encompassing "situation," a unity of fact and value in stark opposition to the "corporate" mentality of specialization and success measured in economic gain alone. For Jeffrey Burkhardt, land grant universities must renew their original commitment to the family farm by distancing themselves from the forces of positivism and scientism—the technocrats and bio-chemical engineers who have imperiled both the land and the communities who depend upon it. Neither Montmarquette nor Burkhardt are looking for handouts, or for a return to the "idyllic" life of the one-horse plow. They emphasize moral training and a combination of practices designed to support the sustainability of the smaller farm in a competitive marketplace.One author compares the mention of agrarianism in philosophical discourse to committing a rude act in public. Clearly, however, mere "respectability" is not enough. If the contributors to this volume are correct, agrarianism is a lantern that may illuminate our ongoing search for wholeness and integrity. Frank X. Ryan Kent State University... (shrink)

AbstractMany management theories have descriptive and normative elements, and no management theory used to generate prescriptions can be totally devoid of normative assumptions. Yet, there remain few useful models for assessing the relative strength or utility of the normative frameworks that inform most management theorizing. In this essay, we offer a model from a field of art rather than science. We introduce the poetry of early twentieth century American writer Hart Crane as providing such a model. Crane uses a (...) panorama of consequences to examine modern social phenomena and subject them to normative evaluation. We argue that management theorists can use a similar panorama of consequences method to “test” normative theories by assessing the directional consistency of the normative evaluations the theories generate about an empirical phenomenon or relationship, as well as how extensively the theories’ normative evaluations cover the full scope of a phenomenon’s or relationship’s impact. We explicate an exemplar poem of Crane’s, and then demonstrate how his method might be used to study shareholder activism, a normatively ambiguous management practice, in a way that illuminates the strengths and weaknesses of the relevant normative frameworks. (shrink)

This volume concerns the status and ambitions of metaphysics as a discipline.

Scientific research is almost always conducted by communities of scientists of varying size and complexity. Such communities are effective, in part, because they divide their cognitive labor: not every scientist works on the same project. Philip Kitcher and Michael Strevens have pioneered efforts to understand this division of cognitive labor by proposing models of how scientists make decisions about which project to work on. For such models to be useful, they must be simple enough for us to understand their dynamics, (...) but faithful enough to reality that we can use them to analyze real scientific communities. To satisfy the first requirement, we must employ idealizations to simplify the model. The second requirement demands that these idealizations not be so extreme that we lose the ability to describe real-world phenomena. This paper investigates the status of the assumptions that Kitcher and Strevens make in their models, by first inquiring whether they are reasonable representations of reality, and then by checking the models' robustness against weakenings of these assumptions. To do this, we first argue against the reality of the assumptions, and then develop a series of agent-based simulations to systematically test their effects on model outcomes. We find that the models are not robust against weakenings of these idealizations. In fact we find that under certain conditions, this can lead to the model predicting outcomes that are qualitatively opposite of the original model outcomes. (shrink)

Most accounts of cognitive scaffolding focus on ways that external structure can support or augment an agent’s cognitive capacities. We call cases where the interests of the user are served benign scaffolding and argue for the possibility and reality of hostile scaffolding. This is scaffolding which depends on the same capacities of an agent to make cognitive use of external structure as in benign cases, but that undermines or exploits the user while serving the interests of another agent. We develop (...) criteria for scaffolding being hostile and show by reference to examples including the design features of electronic gambling machines and casino management systems that hostile scaffolding exists and can be highly effective. In cases where the scaffolding is deep and permits the offloading of significant cognitive work, hostile scaffolding exploitatively manipulates cognitive processing itself. Given the extent of human reliance on scaffolding this is an important and neglected vulnerability. [This is an updated version of the paper, added in February 2023.]. (shrink)

This mixed methods study examines how college students’ perceptions and experiences affect their understanding of academic integrity. Using qualitative and quantitative responses from the Personal and Social Responsibility Institutional Inventory, both quantitative and qualitative results demonstrate that while campuses may see a reduction in overall levels of cheating when punitive academic integrity policies are present, students may develop higher levels of personal and academic integrity through the use of more holistic and community-focused practices.

This book explores the constraints which justice imposes on immigration policy. Like liberal nationalists, Ryan Pevnick argues that citizens have special claims to the institutions of their states. However, the source of these special claims is located in the citizenry's ownership of state institutions rather than in a shared national identity. Citizens contribute to the construction and maintenance of institutions, and as a result they have special claims to these institutions and a limited right to exclude outsiders. Pevnick shows (...) that the resulting view justifies a set of policies - including support for certain types of guest worker programs - which is distinct from those supported by either liberal nationalists or advocates of open borders. His book provides a framework for considering a number of connected topics including issues related to self-determination, the scope of distributive justice and the significance of shared national identity. (shrink)

In this article, robust evidence is provided showing that an individual’s moral character can contribute to the aesthetic quality of their appearance, as well as being beautiful or ugly itself. It is argued that this evidence supports two main conclusions. First, moral beauty and ugliness reside on the inside, and beauty and ugliness are not perception-dependent as a result; and, second, aesthetic perception is affected by moral information, and thus moral beauty and ugliness are on the outside as well.

When are morally good actions beautiful, when indeed they are? In this paper, it is argued that morally good actions are beautiful when they appear to express the deep or true self, and in turn tend to give rise to an emotion which is characterised by feelings of being moved, unity, inspiration, and meaningfulness, inter alia. In advancing the case for this claim, it is revealed that there are additional sources of well-formedness in play in the context of moral beauty (...) in addition to those that have tended to be focused on to date: one which is connected to imagining a deep location for the goodness concerned, and another which is connected to imagining that the goodness stems from capacities which are essential to the person. (shrink)

Ryan Wasserman explores a range of fascinating puzzles raised by the possibility of time travel, with entertaining examples from physics, science fiction, and popular culture, and he draws out their implications for our understanding of time, tense, freedom, fatalism, causation, counterfactuals, laws of nature, persistence, change, and mereology.

Very diverse societies pose real problems for Rawlsian models of public reason. This is for two reasons: first, public reason is unable accommodate diverse perspectives in determining a regulative ideal. Second, regulative ideals are unable to respond to social change. While models based on public reason focus on the justification of principles, this book suggests that we need to orient our normative theories more toward discovery and experimentation. The book develops a unique approach to social contract theory that focuses on (...) diverse perspectives. It offers a new moral stance that author Ryan Muldoon calls, "The View From Everywhere," which allows for substantive, fundamental moral disagreement. This stance is used to develop a bargaining model in which agents can cooperate despite seeing different perspectives. Rather than arguing for an ideal contract or particular principles of justice, Muldoon outlines a procedure for iterated revisions to the rules of a social contract. It expands Mill's conception of experiments in living to help form a foundational principle for social contract theory. By embracing this kind of experimentation, we move away from a conception of justice as an end state, and toward a conception of justice as a trajectory. (shrink)

According to the most important objection to the existence of moral beauty, true judgements of moral beauty are not possible as moral judgements require being motivated to act in line with the moral judgement made, and judgements of beauty require not being motivated to act in any way. Here, I clarify the argument underlying the objection, and show that it does not show that moral beauty does not exist. I present two responses: namely, that the beauty of moral beauty does (...) not lie in the moral goodness per se (the “adjacent properties” response); and that only a dispositional motivation to act is required for the moral judgements that are typically made as part of judgements of moral beauty, whereas aesthetic judgements only rule out state motivations to act (the “equivocation of motivation required” response). In addressing the objection, I show how moral beauty is consistent with disinterestedness, and so should be accepted more widely; and also clarify where the beauty in moral beauty resides, and how the moral-aesthetic distinction should be drawn. (shrink)

What is the nature of the concept BEAUTY? Does it differ fundamentally from nearby concepts such as PRETTINESS? It is argued that BEAUTY, but not PRETTINESS, is a dual-character concept. Across a number of contexts, it is proposed that BEAUTY has a descriptive sense that is characterised by, inter alia, having intrinsically pleasing appearances; and a normative sense associated with deeply-held values. This account is supported across two, pre-registered, studies (N=500), and by drawing on analysis of corpus data. It is (...) suggested that this can help to explain why beauty, unlike prettiness, is thought to be deep in both the sense of being important, and in the sense of being less closely tied to sensory surfaces. (shrink)

Which traits are beautiful? And is their beauty perceptual? It is argued that moral virtues are partly beautiful to the extent that they tend to give rise to a certain emotion— ecstasy—and that compassion tends to be more beautiful than fair-mindedness because it tends to give rise to this emotion to a greater extent. It is then argued, on the basis that emotions are best thought of as a special, evaluative, kind of perception, that this argument suggests that moral virtues (...) are partly beautiful to the extent that they tend to give rise to a certain kind of evaluative perceptual experience. (shrink)

Why are moral actions beautiful, when indeed they are? This paper assesses the view, found most notably in Schiller, that moral actions are beautiful just when they present the appearance of freedom by appearing to be the result of internal harmony (the Schillerian Internal Harmony Thesis). I argue that while this thesis can accommodate some of the beauty involved in contrasts of the ‘continent’ and the ‘fully’ virtuous, it cannot account for all of the beauty in such contrasts, and so (...) needs to be weakened considerably (to the Internal Harmony Thesis). To account for the remaining beauty that cannot be fully accommodated even by this revised thesis, as well as the beauty contained in contrasts that involve agents who experience internal conflict as a result of being sensitive to different sources of moral value to an appropriate extent, a number of further theses need to be posited: namely, that the beauty of some moral actions is to be accommodated in terms of internal disharmony (the Internal Disharmony Thesis), and in terms of a felt harmony between the appreciator of the action and the executor of the action (the Affective Harmony Thesis). As such, in contrast to Schiller, I suggest that we need to take a pluralist and context-sensitive approach to accommodating the beauty of moral actions. (shrink)

AI and people do not compete on a level-playing field. Self-driving vehicles may be safer than human drivers, but laws often penalize such technology. People may provide superior customer service, but businesses are automating to reduce their taxes. AI may innovate more effectively, but an antiquated legal framework constrains inventive AI. In The Reasonable Robot, Ryan Abbott argues that the law should not discriminate between AI and human behavior and proposes a new legal principle that will ultimately improve human (...) well-being. This work should be read by anyone interested in the rapidly evolving relationship between AI and the law. (shrink)

In The Conditions for Ethical Chemical Restraint, Crutchfield and Redinger (2024) propose ethical standards for the use of chemical restraints, which they consider normatively distinct from physica...

A common view holds that consciousness is needed for knowledge acquired in one domain to be applied in a novel domain. We present evidence for the opposite; where the transfer of knowledge is achieved only in the absence of conscious awareness. Knowledge of artificial grammars was examined where training and testing occurred in different vocabularies or modalities. In all conditions grammaticality judgments attributed to random selection showed above-chance accuracy , while those attributed to conscious decisions did not. Participants also rated (...) each string’s familiarity and performed a perceptual task assessing fluency. Familiarity was predicted by repetition structure and was thus related to grammaticality. Fluency, though increasing familiarity, was unrelated to grammaticality. While familiarity predicted all judgments only those attributed to random selection showed a significant additional contribution of grammaticality, deriving primarily from chunk novelty. In knowledge transfer, as in visual perception , the unconscious may outperform the conscious. (shrink)

I offer the first sustained defence of the claim that ugliness is constituted by the disposition to disgust. I advance three main lines of argument in support of this thesis. First, ugliness and disgustingness tend to lie in the same kinds of things and properties (the argument from ostensions). Second, the thesis is better placed than all existing accounts to accommodate the following facts: ugliness is narrowly and systematically distributed in a heterogenous set of things, ugliness is sometimes enjoyed, and (...) ugliness sits opposed to beauty across a neutral midpoint (the argument from proposed intensions). And third, ugliness and disgustingness function in the same way in both giving rise to representations of contamination (the argument from the law of contagion). In making these arguments, I show why prominent objections to the thesis do not succeed, cast light on some of the artistic functions of ugliness, and, in addition, demonstrate why a dispositional account of disgustingness is correct, and present a novel problem for warrant-based accounts of disgustingness (the ‘too many reasons’ problem). (shrink)

Strike action in healthcare has been a common global phenomenon. As such action is designed to be disruptive, it creates substantial ethical tension, the most cited of which relates to patient harm, that is, a strike may not only disrupt an employer, but it could also have serious implications for the delivery of care. This article systematically reviewed the literature on strike action in healthcare with the aim of providing an overview of the major justifications for strike action, identifying relative (...) strengths and shortcomings of this literature and providing direction for future discussions, and theoretical and empirical research. Three major themes emerged related to (1) the relationship between healthcare workers, patients and society; (2) the consequences of strike action; and (3) the conduct of strike action. Those who argue against strike action generally cite the harms of such action, particularly as it relates to patients. Many also argue that healthcare workers, because of their skills and position in society, have a special obligation to their patients and society more generally. Those who see this action as not only permissible but also, in some cases, necessary have advanced several points in response, arguing that healthcare workers do not necessarily have any special obligation to their patients or society, and even if so, this obligation is not absolute. Overwhelmingly, when talking about the potential risks of strike action, authors have focused on patient welfare and the impact that a strike could have. Several directions for future work are identified, including greater explorations into how structural and systemic issues impact strike action, the need for greater consideration about the contextual factors that influence the risks and characteristics of strike action and finally the need to tie this literature to existing empirical evidence. (shrink)

Which traits are beautiful? And is their beauty perceptual? It is argued that moral virtues are partly beautiful to the extent that they tend to give rise to a certain emotion—ecstasy—and that compassion tends to be more beautiful than fair-mindedness because it tends to give rise to this emotion to a greater extent. It is then argued, on the basis that emotions are best thought of as a special, evaluative, kind of perception, that this argument suggests that moral virtues are (...) partly beautiful to the extent that they tend to give rise to a certain kind of evaluative perceptual experience. (shrink)

Active inference offers a unified theory of perception, learning, and decision-making at computational and neural levels of description. In this article, we address the worry that active inference may be in tension with the belief–desire–intention model within folk psychology because it does not include terms for desires at the mathematical level of description. To resolve this concern, we first provide a brief review of the historical progression from predictive coding to active inference, enabling us to distinguish between active inference formulations (...) of motor control and active inference formulations of decision processes. We then show that, despite a superficial tension when viewed at the mathematical level of description, the active inference formalism contains terms that are readily identifiable as encoding both the objects of desire and the strength of desire at the psychological level of description. We demonstrate this with simple simulations of an active inference agent motivated to leave a dark room for different reasons. Despite their consistency, we further show how active inference may increase the granularity of folk-psychological descriptions by highlighting distinctions between drives to seek information versus reward—and how it may also offer more precise, quantitative folk-psychological predictions. Finally, we consider how the implicitly conative components of active inference may have partial analogues in other systems describable by the broader free energy principle to which it conforms. (shrink)

I argue that the main existing accounts of the relationship between the beauty of environmental entities and their moral standing are mistaken in important ways. Beauty does not, as has been suggested by optimists, confer intrinsic moral standing. Nor is it the case, as has been suggested by pessimists, that beauty at best provides an anthropocentric source of moral standing that is commensurate with other sources of pleasure. I present arguments and evidence that show that the appreciation of beauty tends (...) to cause a transformational state of mind that is more valuable than mere pleasure, but that leads us to falsely represent beautiful entities as being sentient and, in turn, as having intrinsic moral standing. To this extent, beauty is not, then, a source of intrinsic moral standing; it’s a source of a more important anthropocentric value than has hitherto been acknowledged. (shrink)

In this article I will introduce and outline the concept of resistance as it relates to health and healthcare. Starting with a number of examples of action, I will then turn to the broader literature to discuss some conventional definitions and related concepts, outlining debates, controversies and limitations related to conceptualizing resistance. I conceptualize resistance broadly, as any act, performed by any individual (or collective) acting as or explicitly identifying as a healthcare professional, that is a response to power, most (...) often in opposition to contentious, harmful or unjust rules, practices, policies or structures. Practically this could account for any public action, marches, sit‐ins and civil disobedience, but also forms of ‘everyday resistance’, such as working slowly, feigning sickness, or even providing care for marginalized groups that would otherwise not have access. Such action could go unrecognized by those in power and perhaps more contentiously, those resisting needn’t even recognize their actions as resistance. I will then apply this conceptualization to explain action that has been undertaken by healthcare professionals, identifying its key features. I will briefly discuss future directions for inquiry that appear particularly pressing. These including ongoing conceptual development, identifying the functions of resistance in health and healthcare along with what makes it distinct from healthcare as usual and other forms of resistance and finally, the range of normative questions resistance raises. (shrink)

In epistemology and the philosophy of science, there has been an increasing interest in the social aspects of belief acquisition. In particular, there has been a focus on the division of cognitive labor in science. This essay explores several different models of the division of cognitive labor, with particular focus on Kitcher, Strevens, Weisberg and Muldoon, and Zollman. The essay then shows how many of the benefits of the division of cognitive labor flow from leveraging agent diversity. The essay concludes (...) by examining the benefits and burdens of diversity, particularly in the evaluative diversity that can be found in interdisicplinary science. (shrink)

Deep brain stimulation is an experimental procedure for treatment-resistant depression. Some results show promise, but blinded trials had limited success. Ethical questions center on vulnerability: especially on whether depressed patients can weigh the risks and benefits effectively, whether depression causes “desperation,” and whether media portrayals create unrealistic hopes. We interviewed 24 psychiatric inpatients with treatment-resistant depression, qualitatively analyzing their comments. Most had minimal interest in deep brain stimulators. Some might consider them if their depression worsened, if alternatives were exhausted, or (...) if the evidence were stronger. Fears focused on the surgery, adverse effects, and the novelty of the device. Patients felt the depression interfered with their ability to weigh the risks and benefits. Patients seemed highly attuned to the risks, and were skeptical that the treatment would be effective. We conclude that ethical concerns about vulnerability remain, yet patients with treatment-resistant depression were thoughtful and cautious about trying a novel therapy. (shrink)

The puzzle of petitionary prayer: if we ask for the best thing, God was already going to do it, and if we ask for something that's not the best, God's not going to grant our request. In this paper, we give a new solution to the puzzle.

Young and colleagues . Betwixt life and death: case studies of the Cotard delusion. In P. W. Halligan & J. C. Marshall , Method in madness: Case studies in cognitive neuropsychiatry. Mahway, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.) have suggested that cases of the Cotard delusion result when a particular perceptual anomaly occurs in the context of an internalising attributional style. This hypothesis has not previously been tested directly. We report here an investigation of attributional style in a 24-year-old woman with Cotard (...) delusion . LU’s attributional style was assessed using the Internal, Personal and Situational Attributions Questionnaire . A new measure of causal locus: the internal, personal and situational attributions questionnaire. Personality and Individual Differences, 20, 261–264.). LU showed a significantly greater proportion of internalising attributions than the control group, both overall and for negative events specifically. The results obtained thus support an association of Cotard delusion with an internalising attributional style, and are therefore consistent with the account of Young and colleagues. The potential brain basis of Cotard delusion is discussed. (shrink)

On the surface, the world of fashion may seem like a utopia: the glamour, the ability to purchase confidence and performance, giving people the freedom of self-expression. However, many of us are masked from the dystopia that drives this industry. The business models of fast fashion often thrive on exploiting land and people, through supply chains that are as opaque as offshore banking scandals, with many middlemen and much finger- pointing. The way clothing is consumed is much like a subscription (...) model, with consumers paying low costs more frequently, rather than investing a large amount into a long-lasting garment. This all results in poor-quality and -performance clothing, excessive waste of... (shrink)

Argumentation schemes bring artificial intelligence into day to day conversation. Interpreting the force of an utterance, be it an assertion, command, or question, remains a task for achieving this goal. But it is not an easy task. An interpretation of force depends on a speaker’s use of words for a hearer at the moment of utterance. Ascribing force relies on grammatical mood, though not in a straightforward or regular way. We face a dilemma: on one hand, deciding force requires an (...) understanding of the speaker’s words; on the other hand, word meaning may shift given the force in which the words are spoken. A precise theory of how mood and force relate helps us handle this dilemma, which, if met, expands the use of argumentation schemes in language processing. Yet, as our analysis shows, force is an inconstant variable, one that contributes to a scheme’s defeasibility. We propose using critical questions to help us decide the force of utterances. (shrink)

This essay examines Friedman's recent approach to the analysis of physical theories. Friedman argues against Quine that the identification of certain principles as ‘constitutive’ is essential to a satisfactory methodological analysis of physics. I explicate Friedman's characterization of a constitutive principle, and I evaluate his account of the constitutive principles that Newtonian and Einsteinian gravitation presuppose for their formulation. I argue that something close to Friedman's thesis is defensible.

The debate over persistence is often cast as a disagreement between two rival theories—the perdurantist theory that objects persist through time by having different temporal parts at different times, and the endurantist theory that objects persist through time by being wholly present at different times. This way of framing the debate over persistence involves both an important insight and an important error. Unfortunately, the error is often embraced and the insight is often ignored. This paper aims to correct both of (...) these mistakes, and thus clarify the debate over persistence. (shrink)

What role should the physician's conscience play in the practice of medicine? Much controversy has surrounded the question, yet little attention has been paid to the possibility that disputants are operating with contrasting definitions of the conscience. To illustrate this divergence, we contrast definitions stemming from Abrahamic religions and those stemming from secular moral tradition. Clear differences emerge regarding what the term conscience conveys, how the conscience should be informed, and what the consequences are for violating one's conscience. Importantly, these (...) basic disagreements underlie current controversies regarding the role of the clinician's conscience in the practice of medicine. Consequently participants in ongoing debates would do well to specify their definitions of the conscience and the reasons for and implications of those definitions. This specification would allow participants to advance a more philosophically and theologically robust conversation about the means and ends of medicine. (shrink)

In this paper we discuss several generalization of theorems from stability theory to simple theories. Cherlin and Hrushovski, in [2] develop a substitute for canonical bases in finite rank, ω-categorical supersimple theories. Motivated by methods there, we prove the existence of canonical bases (in a suitable sense) for types in any simple theory. This is done in Section 2. In general these canonical bases will (as far as we know) exist only as “hyperimaginaries”, namely objects of the forma/Ewhereais a possibly (...) infinite tuple andEa type-definable equivalence relation. (In the supersimple, ω-categorical case, these reduce to ordinary imaginaries.) So in Section 1 we develop the general theory of hyperimaginaries and show how first order model theory (including the theory of forking) generalises to hyperimaginaries. We go on, in Section 3 to show the existence and ubiquity of regular types in supersimple theories, ω-categorical simple structures and modularity is discussed in Section 4. It is also shown here how the general machinery of simplicity simplifies some of the general theory of smoothly approximable (or Lie-coordinatizable) structures from [2].Throughout this paper we will work in a large, saturated modelMof a complete theoryT. All types, sets and sequences will have size smaller than the size ofM. We will assume that the reader is familiar with the basics of forking in simple theories as laid out in [4] and [6]. For basic stability-theoretic results concerning regular types, orthogonality etc., see [1] or [9]. (shrink)

In this paper we argue that there is a kind of moral disagreement that survives the Rawlsian veil of ignorance. While a veil of ignorance eliminates sources of disagreement stemming from self-interest, it does not do anything to eliminate deeper sources of disagreement. These disagreements not only persist, but transform their structure once behind the veil of ignorance. We consider formal frameworks for exploring these differences in structure between interested and disinterested disagreement, and argue that consensus models offer us a (...) solution concept for disagreements behind the veil of ignorance. (shrink)

In recent years the doctrine of divine simplicity has become a topic of interest in the philosophical theological community. In particular, the modal collapse argument against divine simplicity has garnered various responses from proponents of divine simplicity. Some even claiming that the modal collapse argument is invalid. It is our contention that these responses have either misunderstood or misstated the argument, and have thus missed the force of the objection. Our main aim is to clarify what the modal collapse argument (...) in fact says, and explain why the recent responses do not succeed. In order to argue our case, we will proceed in several steps. First, we aim to systematically articulate the doctrine of divine simplicity. Second, articulate the Christian conviction that God is free to create any feasible world or no world at all. Third, argue that divine simplicity suffers a modal collapse and thus undermines God's freedom. Fourth, respond to potential objections to modal collapse. Fifth, we offer some concluding remarks. (shrink)