What is the relationship between music and time? How does musical rhythm express our social experience of time? In Groove: An Aesthetic of Measured Time, Mark Abel explains the rise to prominence in Western music of a new way of organising rhythm - groove. He provides a historical account of its emergence around the turn of the twentieth century, and analyses the musical components which make it work. Drawing on materialist interpretations of art and culture, Mark (...) class='Hi'>Abel engages with aesthetic arguments, challenging in particular Adorno's critique of popular music. He concludes that groove does not simply reflect the temporality of contemporary society, but, by incorporating abstract time into its very structure, is capable of effecting a critique of it"--Provided by publisher. (shrink)

Novel cellular therapy techniques promise to cure many haematology patients refractory to other treatment modalities. These therapies are intensive and require referral to and care from specialised providers. In the USA, this pool of providers is not expanding at a rate necessary to meet expected demand; therefore, access scarcity appears forthcoming and is likely to be widespread. To maintain fair access to these scarce and curative therapies, we must prospectively create a just and practical system to distribute care. In this (...) article, we first review previously implemented medical product and personnel allocation systems, examining their applicability to cellular therapy provider shortages to demonstrate that this problem requires a novel approach. We then present an innovative system for allocating cellular therapy access, which accounts for the constraints of distribution during real-world oncology practice by using a combination of the following principles: maximising life-years per personnel time, youngest and robust first, sickest first, first come/first served and instrumental value. We conclude with justifications for the incorporation of these principles and the omission of others, discuss how access can be distributed using this combination, consider cost and review fundamental factors necessary for the practical implementation and maintenance of this system. (shrink)

Marxists regard works of art as meaningful, and look for political meanings even when they are not addressing political subjects. But where does music’s meaning lie? The conventional view is that music is non-referential, capable only of supporting other artforms or of expressing emotions. Adorno rejects the idea of music as a language of emotions, and does not believe that music has universal grammatical and syntactical rules. Yet he claims that music has language characteristics which make it as political as (...) other artforms. What does he mean, and is he right? To answer those questions, we need to know how he understands language. This article examines how Adorno's view compares with the Marxist theory of language and consciousness developed by Valentin Voloshinov, and explores the extent to which approaching music from this direction might clarify a Marxist understanding of music and contribute to solving the thorny question of musical meaning. (shrink)

Sociological accounts usually emphasise the primacy of phenotype (cor, colour) over ancestry for orienting concepts of ‘race’ in Brazil. In this paper, I present an alternative account of the cultural and political significance of ancestry in contemporary Brazil, drawing on qualitative interviews conducted with 50 Brazilians who had recently taken personalised DNA ancestry tests. The interviewees’ attitudes towards their ancestry are interpreted in relation to Brazil’s longstanding national myth of mestiçagem and the history of eugenic Whitening ideologies (ideologias do branqueamento) (...) that have sought to erase traces of Brazil’s African origins. However, they are also interpreted also against the backdrop of contemporary Black Movement activism that aims to actively recovering Afro-Brazilian histories and memories from these processes of erasure. (shrink)

My concern in this paper is what, in Art and Illusion, Gombrich calls "the riddle of style". This is the problem of why people at different times and in different cultures have depicted objects in very different ways. An adequate solution to this problem will comprise an explanation of why depiction has a history. The problem seems intractable because of three common assumptions about the history of depiction that, while independently plausible, are inconsistent. First, we assume that this history is (...) a history of realism. Artists from a wide range of cultures and ages seem to have shared the common goal of capturing the visual appearances of the objects they depicted. Secondly, we assume that depictive styles differ from context to context in part because of features internal to the contexts in which they emerged. Finally, we are loathe to accept the claim that differences of style necessarily result from differences in technical capacity. However, these assumptions are in conflict. If artists throughout history sought to capture the appearances of the things they depicted and did not differ markedly in their technical capacities, then surely the pictures each produced should not depend on features internal to the contexts in which they emerged and should instead look more alike. -/- I argue that the history of style is not, in its entirety, a history of realism. Throughout history, pictures have been used to inform viewers about a wide variety of things other than their objects' appearances. Investigating the purposes for which pictures were used in particular historical and cultural contexts will help us to understand why certain styles were appropriate to those contexts. Nevertheless, it will not help us to understand why certain styles were appropriate to just one among a number of contexts in which pictures were used for a single purpose. To understand this, we need to know what cognitive environment was shared by the members of the relevant community. This will enable us to understand why, given the purpose for which pictures were used in that community, a certain style was more informative than another. In addition to cataloguing stylistic changes, therefore, the historian of art has two further tasks: to investigate both the various purposes for which pictures have been used and the cognitive environments of those who used them. (shrink)

Peter Abell's review of Marxism and Workers’ Self‐Management misses the mark. Contrary to Abell's assertions, my book neither champions a postmodern case for self‐management, nor does it try to salvage a socialist case for self‐management by focusing on Marx's humanism. Self‐managed firms require markets. It may be interesting to ask if that saves Marx, or if that also requires postmodernity, but these were not the concerns or arguments of the book.

In his essay "Imagination," George Santayana writes, "There are books in which the footnotes, or the comments scrawled by some reader's hand in the margins, may be more interesting than the text." Santayana himself was an inveterate maker of notes in the margins of his books, writing comments that illuminate, contest, or interestingly expand the author's thought. These volumes offer a selection of Santayana's marginalia, transcribed from books in his personal library. These notes give the reader an unusual perspective on (...) Santayana's life and work. He is by turns critical, approving, literary, slangy, frivolous, and even spiteful. The notes show his humor, his occasional outcry at a writer's folly, his concern for the niceties of English prose and the placing of Greek accent marks. These two volumes list alphabetically by author all the books extant that belonged to Santayana, reproducing a selection of his annotations intended to be of use to the reader or student of Santayana's thought, his art, and his life. Each entry includes a headnote with the author's name, the title of the work, brief publication information, and the library location of the book. Not all marginalia from a given text is included; the notes have been selected for content and style. [cut last sentence; cut entire paragraph if nec.] Santayana, often living in solitude, spent a great deal of his time talking to, and talking back to, a wonderful miscellany of writers, from Spinoza to Kant to J. S. Mill to Bertrand Russell. These notes document those conversations. (shrink)

In his essay "Imagination," George Santayana writes, "There are books in which the footnotes, or the comments scrawled by some reader's hand in the margins, may be more interesting than the text." Santayana himself was an inveterate maker of notes in the margins of his books, writing comments that illuminate, contest, or interestingly expand the author's thought. These volumes offer a selection of Santayana's marginalia, transcribed from books in his personal library. These notes give the reader an unusual perspective on (...) Santayana's life and work. He is by turns critical, approving, literary, slangy, frivolous, and even spiteful. The notes show his humor, his occasional outcry at a writer's folly, his concern for the niceties of English prose and the placing of Greek accent marks. These two volumes list alphabetically by author all the books extant that belonged to Santayana, reproducing a selection of his annotations intended to be of use to the reader or student of Santayana's thought, his art, and his life. Each entry includes a headnote with the author's name, the title of the work, brief publication information, and the library location of the book. Not all marginalia from a given text is included; the notes have been selected for content and style. [cut last sentence; cut entire paragraph if nec.] Santayana, often living in solitude, spent a great deal of his time talking to, and talking back to, a wonderful miscellany of writers, from Spinoza to Kant to J. S. Mill to Bertrand Russell. These notes document those conversations. (shrink)

On the basis of careful textual exegesis and philosophical analysis, and contrary to the received view, Mark R. Wheeler demonstrates that Aristotle presents and systematically explicates his definition of the essence of the truth in the Metaphysics. Aristotle states the nominal definitions of the terms "truth" and "falsehood" as part of his arguments in defense of the logical axioms. These nominal definitions express conceptions of truth and falsehood his philosophical opponents would have recognized and accepted in the context of (...) dialectical argument. On the basis of these nominal definitions, Aristotle develops his definitions of the essences of truth and falsehood--his "real" definitions of truth and falsehood. Aristotle's methodical exposition of his essential definitions of truth and falsehood in the Metaphysics serves as a well-developed example of how his philosophical inquiry starts with nominal definitions and ends with real definitions. Wheeler also argues for the novel claim that Aristotle defines the most fundamental kind of truth in terms of accurate measurement. Aristotle's metrical conception of truth serves as the theoretical basis for specifying the truth conditions of various assertions, for identifying the sorts of beings implicated in these truth conditions, and for explaining the nature of approximate truth and falsehood. Far from offering us a minimal account of truth, Wheeler shows how Aristotle offers us a sophisticated and metrical theory of truth. (shrink)

In ancient China, a revered Taoist sage named Zhuangzi told many parables. In Existential Psychology and the Way of the Tao, a selection of these parables will be featured. Following each parable, an eminent existential psychologist will share a personal and scholarly reflection on the meaning and relevance of the parable for psychotherapy and contemporary life. The major tenets of Zhuangzi's philosophy are featured. Taoist concepts of emptiness, stillness, Wu Wei (i.e. intentional non-intentionality), epistemology, dreams and the nature of reality, (...) character building in the midst of pain, meaning and the centrality of relationships, authenticity, self-care, the freedom that can come from one's willingness to confront death, spiritual freedom, and gradations of therapeutic care are topics highlighted in this book. (shrink)

What can we learn about the nature of technology by studying practices of maintenance and repair? This volume addresses this question by bringing together scholarship from philosophers of technology working at the forefront of this emerging and exciting topic. -/- The chapters in this volume explore how attending to maintenance and repair can challenge and complement existing ways of thinking about technology focused on use and design and introduce new philosophical perspectives on the relationship between technology, time and human practice. (...) They examine the significance of maintenance and repair practices at different scales in relation to a diverse range of philosophical traditions and a wide variety of technologies, from urban infrastructure such as bridges and buildings to data technologies such as servers and software systems. Together, the contributions highlight common themes in the philosophical study of maintenance, including the role of skill, the significance of social values and the potential of these practices to transform the technologies to which they are applied. By reflecting on the different ways in which we keep technologies going, from the devices we use in our homes to the large technical systems which surround us, this volume reveals the philosophical significance of practices of maintenance, not only as a source of new insights but also as a resource for enriching our understanding of a variety of existing topics in philosophy. -/- Maintenance and Philosophy of Technology will appeal to scholars and advanced students working in philosophy of technology, philosophy of engineering and science & technology studies. (shrink)

Everyone wants to be virtuous, but recent psychological investigations suggest that this may not be possible. Mark Alfano challenges this theory and asks, not whether character is empirically adequate, but what characters human beings could have and develop. Although psychology suggests that most people do not have robust character traits such as courage, honesty and open-mindedness, Alfano argues that we have reason to attribute these virtues to people because such attributions function as self-fulfilling prophecies - children become more studious (...) if they are told that they are hard-working and adults become more generous if they are told that they are generous. He argues that we should think of virtue and character as social constructs: there is no such thing as virtue without social reinforcement. His original and provocative book will interest a wide range of readers in contemporary ethics, epistemology, moral psychology and empirically informed philosophy. (shrink)

In his groundbreaking book, Thin Objects, Linnebo (2018) argues for an account of neo-Fregean abstraction principles and thin existence that does not rely on analyticity or conceptual rules. It instead relies on a metaphysical notion he calls “sufficiency”. In this short discussion, I defend the analytic or conceptual rule account of thin existence.

Together again for the first time, Marx and Durkheim join forces in the pages of Disintegration: Bad Love, Collective Suicide, and the Idols of Imperial Twilight for a dialectical exploration of the moral economy of neoliberalism, animated, as it is not only by the capitalist chase for surplus value, but also by an immortal vortex of sacred powers. Classical sociology and psychoanalysis are reconstituted within Hegelian social ontology and dialectical method that differentiates between the ephemeral and free and the eternal (...) and fixed aspects of modern life. (shrink)

In recent years the ways in which humans treat animals has come to hold a central place in contemporary ethics, encapsulating, as it does, our increasingly strained relationship with our environment as well as overlapping with other global issues such as overpopulation and hunger. Animal Rights: All That Matters is a compelling account of some of the often bitterly contentious debates surrounding animal ethics. Starting from the key argument that - ethically speaking - there is far less difference between humans (...) and animals than has conventionally been allowed, Mark Rowlands goes on to explore and illuminate a host of contemporary issues - from farming and animal experimentation to hunting and the preservation of endangered species. This accessible and readable book will appeal to both students and general readers, giving a fascinating introduction to animal rights - and what matters most about them -- P. 4 of cover. (shrink)

In a vivid re-creation of late sixteenth-century Flemish intellectual life, Mark Morford explores the intertwined careers of one of the period's most influential thinkers and one of its most original artists: Justus Lipsius and Peter Paul Rubens. He investigates the scholarship of Lipsius (1547-1606), whose revival of Roman Stoicism guided his contemporaries during the revolt of the Netherlands from the rule of Spain and whose teaching prepared future leaders in church and state. Maintaining that Lipsius' thought reached Peter Paul (...) Rubens through his brother, Philip Rubens, Morford analyzes the artist's use of Stoic philosophical and political allegory, beginning with his painting The Four Philosophers. This book discusses the revival of Stoicism in northern Europe, focusing on Lipsius' editions of Tacitus and Seneca, his widely read handbooks on constancy and politics, and his interaction with leading scholars and public figures. As his letters reveal, Lipsius was inconsistent in his life and unsuccessful in reconciling Stoicism with Catholic doctrine; Rubens, although at first sympathetic to the doctrines of Lipsius, is shown to have later transcended their limitations. (shrink)

The concept of an operator is used in a variety of practical and theoretical areas. Operators, as both conceptual and physical entities, are found throughout the world as subsystems in nature, the human mind, and the manmade world. Operators, and what they operate, i.e., their substrates, targets, or operands, have a wide variety of forms, functions, and properties. Operators have explicit philosophical significance. On the one hand, they represent important ontological issues of reality. On the other hand, epistemological operators form (...) the basic mechanism of cognition. At the same time, there is no unified theory of the nature and functions of operators. In this work, we elaborate a detailed analysis of operators, which range from the most abstract formal structures and symbols in mathematics and logic to real entities, human and machine, and are responsible for effecting changes at both the individual and collective human levels. Our goal is to find what is common in physical objects called operators and abstract mathematical structures, with the name operator providing foundations for building a unified but flexible theory of operators. The paper concludes with some reflections on functionalism and other philosophical aspects of the ‘operation’ of operators. (shrink)

The classes stable, simple, and NSOP $_1$ in the stability hierarchy for first-order theories can be characterised by the existence of a certain independence relation. For each of them there is a canonicity theorem: there can be at most one nice independence relation. Independence in stable and simple first-order theories must come from forking and dividing (which then coincide), and for NSOP $_1$ theories it must come from Kim-dividing. We generalise this work to the framework of Abstract Elementary Categories (AECats) (...) with the amalgamation property. These are a certain kind of accessible category generalising the category of (subsets of) models of some theory. We prove canonicity theorems for stable, simple, and NSOP $_1$ -like independence relations. The stable and simple cases have been done before in slightly different setups, but we provide them here as well so that we can recover part of the original stability hierarchy. We also provide abstract definitions for each of these independence relations as what we call isi-dividing, isi-forking, and long Kim-dividing. (shrink)

Experiments in cognitive neuroscience build a setup whose set of controlled stimuli and rules elicits a cognitive process in a participant. This setup requires researchers to decide the value of quite a few parameters along several dimensions. We call ‘’contextual factors’’ the parameters often assumed not to change the cognitive process elicited and are free to vary across the experiment’s repetitions. Against this assumption, empirical evidence shows that many of these contextual factors can significantly influence cognitive performance. Nevertheless, it is (...) not entirely clear what it means for a cognitive phenomenon to be context-sensitive and how to identify context-sensitivity experimentally. We claim that a phenomenon can be context-sensitive either because it is only triggered within a specific context or because different contexts change its manifestation conditions. Assessing which of these forms of context-sensitivity is present in a given phenomenon requires a criterion for individuating it across contextual variations. We argue that some inter-level experiments that, within the mechanistic approach to explanation, are required to identify relations of constitutive relevance between a phenomenon and a mechanism, are also necessary for individuating the phenomenon across its contextual variations. We articulate a criterion according to which behavioral variations across contexts indicate different phenomena if and only if the mechanistic activities, components and/or organizational properties recruited in each context are different. We support this approach by showing how it is applied in paradigmatic studies addressing cognitive performance differences resulting from contextual variations of task features, such as stimulus type and response modality. Finally, we address the challenge that a form of context-sensitivity possessed by the so-called ‘multifunctional mechanisms’ is incompatible with our proposal because it entails that the same mechanism can be recruited in different contexts to produce different phenomena. We examine key cases of multifunctionality and argue that they are consistent with our proposal because a single mechanism can have different components, activities and/or organizational properties in different contexts. Thus, these modifications may not affect the identity of a mechanism, and they could explain how it produced different phenomena in those contexts. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to conceptualize and explore what I shall call the Common Subject Problem for ethics. The problem is that there seems to be no good answer to what property everyone who makes moral claims could be talking and thinking about. The Common Subject Problem is not a new problem; on the contrary, I will argue that it is one of the central animating concerns in the history of both metaethics and normative theory. But despite its (...) importance, the Common Subject Problem is essentially invisible on many contemporary ways of carving up the problems of metaethics and normative ethical theory. My aim, therefore, is to make progress – in part by naming the problem, but also by beginning to sketch out the contours of what gives the problem its force, by distinguishing between different paths of response to the problem and assessing some of their chief merits, and finally, by distinguishing the Common Subject Problem from another problem with which it has come to be conflated. This nearby problem is the Moral Twin Earth Problem. Whereas the Common Subject Problem is a problem about what property ‘wrong’ could refer to, the Moral Twin Earth Problem is a problem about how ‘wrong’ could refer to it. The upshot of the paper, therefore, is to rescue one of the historically significant problems in normative ethics and metaethics – a problem that is essentially about normative semantics – from the illusion that has persisted over the last twenty years that it is really, somehow, a problem about metasemantics. Once we have reclaimed this problem, we can see that it could still be a problem even if there are no distinctively metasemantic problems in metaethics at all, that it is a problem faced by a wider variety of views, and that the space of possible solutions is much wider and more interesting for normative theory, moral psychology, and moral epistemology. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Russell's leviathan by Mark S. Lippincott 1. INTRODUCTION BERTRAND RUSSELL'S POLITICAL thought underwent several metamorphoses in his nearly seventy years of political activism and writing. Indeed, many commentators on Russell take this as the overarching attribute ofhis politics. Alan Ryan writes that "Russell's career defies summary analysis; his life was much too long and his activities too various. His philosophical allegiances were no more stable than his emotional (...) allegiances, and his political allegiances no more stable than either."1 Likewise, Benjamin Barber suggests that "Russell had to contend with staying alive; and by the time he was ninety, consistency must have seemed to him less like the hobgoblin of little minds than the hallmark Of a short life."2 Ryan, Barber and others come to different conclusions about Russell's engagements with pacifism, anarcho-syndicalism, socialism and liberalism, but their efforts, taken collectively, signal a growing appreciation for the fluidity of Russell's politics. This essay treats the diversity of Russell's "political allegiances" as a first step 1 Alan Ryan, Bertrand Russell: a Political Life (London: Allen Lane The Penguin Press, 1988), p. l. 2 Benjamin R. Barber, "Solipsistic Politics: Bertrand Russell and Empiricist Liberalism", in his The Conquest ofPolitics: Liberal Philosophy in Democratic Times (Princeton: Princeton U. P., 1988), p. 25. Russell's leviathan 7 toward a new understanding of his political thought. Yet, unlike so much commentary on Russell, the search for the overarching concept or unifying theme is eschewed. The core premise of the argument is that to understand the political Russell, it is necessary to suspend the urge to unify. What is crucial is an openness to the extraordinary variety and range of his political interests and reflections. Once this step is taken, it becomes possible to uncover the degree to which Russell's eclectic activism is reflected in his approach to political theory. It becomes possible to see that his statements on a particular political issue are embedded with concepts selected from various sources within the western tradition ofpolitical discourse. In addition, this approach highlights the conceptual background of some of Russell's more contentious political statements which seem so characteristically out of character. The issue selected for this essay arises from one of the most controversial and least understood acts in Russell's life. It concerns his public statements following World War II that the United States might do well to use its monopoly of atomic bombs to force the Soviet Union into abandoning the development of its own atomic weapons. Past attempts to explain this episode range from cursory denials and dismissals of its importance, to assertions that it was the step-child of Russell's Russophobia.3 If one examines these state3 The argument for threatening the Soviet Union into renouncing nuclear weapons is advanced by Russell in several public statements: "The Bomb and Civilization", Forward, 29 Sept. 1945; "Humanity's Last Chance", Cavalcade, 20 Oct. 1945; speech in the House of Lords, Hansard,_'2,~Nov. 1945; "The Atomic Bomb and the Prevention of War", Polemic, July-Aug. 1946; speech in the House of Lords, Hansard, 30 April 1947; "Still Time for Good Sense", '47 Magazine ofthe Year, Nov. 1947; "International Government", The New Commonwealth, Jan. 1948. Ronald Clark provides an important guide to Russell's statements during this period in Vie Life of Bertrand Russell (London : CapelWeidenfeld & Nicolson, 1975), but he does not examine the philosophical background. Alan Ryan comes closest to seeing Russell's theoretical link with Hobbes, but he leaves it as a passing remark about Russell's attitude towards world government during the First World War: "It is as if Russell had read Hobbes's Leviathan and been carried away by Hobbes's argument that the state of nature and the war of all against all was so dreadful that any rational man would fly to absolute monarchy for protection. Russell generalizes Hobbes's argument to the international sphere, but it fails to ask how men who get themselves into a 'war of all against all' can be expected to get themselves out again, and fails to show how they have done 8 Russell summer 1990 ments with an eye to Russell's... (shrink)

In _Buddhism As Philosophy_, Mark Siderits makes the Buddhist philosophical tradition accessible to a Western audience. Offering generous selections from the canonical Buddhist texts and providing an engaging, analytical introduction to the fundamental tenets of Buddhist thought, this revised, expanded, and updated edition builds on the success of the first edition in clarifying the basic concepts and arguments of the Buddhist philosophers.

Experimental moral philosophy began to emerge as a methodology inthe last decade of the twentieth century, a branch of the largerexperimental philosophy approach. From the beginning,it has been embroiled in controversy on a number of fronts. Somedoubt that it is philosophy at all. Others acknowledge that it isphilosophy but think that it has produced modest results at best andconfusion at worst. Still others think it represents an important advance., Before the research program can be evaluated, we should have someconception of (...) its scope. But controversy surrounds questionsabout its boundaries as well. Uncontroversially, the distinctionbetween experimental and non-experimental philosophy is not identicalto the distinction between a posteriori and a prioriphilosophy. Experimental evidence is a proper subset of empiricalevidence, which is itself a subset of a posteriorievidence. Can any more be said?, L1: A child raised in a particular linguistic community almostinevitably ends up speaking an idiolect of the local language despitelack of sufficient explicit instruction, lack of extensive negativefeedback for mistakes, and grammatical mistakes by caretakers., character, moral | cognitivism vs. non-cognitivism, moral | emotion | ethics: virtue | intuition | moral anti-realism | moral psychology: empirical approaches | moral realism | moral relativism | well-being, Copyright © 2014 byMark Alfano Don Loeb, View this site from another server:. (shrink)

Techniques from behavioral economics—nudges—may help physicians increase pediatric vaccine compliance, but critics have objected that nudges can undermine autonomy. Since autonomy is a centrally important value in healthcare decision-making contexts, it counts against pediatric vaccination nudges if they undermine parental autonomy. Advocates for healthcare nudges have resisted the charge that nudges undermine autonomy, and the recent bioethics literature illustrates the current intractability of this debate. This article rejects a principle to which parties on both sides of this debate sometimes seem (...) committed: that nudges are morally permissible only if they are consistent with autonomy. Instead, I argue that, at least in the case of pediatric vaccination, some autonomy-undermining nudges may be morally justified. This is because parental autonomy in pediatric decision-making is not as morally valuable as the autonomy of adult patients, and because the interests of both the vaccinated child and other members of the community can sometimes be weighty enough to justify autonomy-infringing pediatric vaccination nudges. This article concludes with a set of worries about the effect of pediatric vaccination nudges on parent-physician relationships, and it calls on the American Academy of Pediatrics to draw on scientific and bioethics research to develop guidelines for the use of nudges in pediatric practice and, in particular, for the use of pediatric vaccination nudges. (shrink)

Most philosophers find it puzzling how beliefs could wrong, and this leads them to conclude that they do not. So there is much philosophical work to be done in sorting out whether I am right to say that they do, as well as how this could be so. But in this paper I will take for granted that beliefs can wrong, and ask instead when beliefs wrong. My answer will be that beliefs wrong when they falsely diminish. This answer has (...) three parts: that beliefs wrong only when they are false, that beliefs wrong only when they diminish, and that false diminishment is sufficient for wronging. I will seek to elaborate on and defend all three of these claims, but it is the first to which I will give the most attention. (shrink)

In his contribution, Mark Alfano lays out a new (to virtue theory) naturalistic way of determining what the virtues are, what it would take for them to be realized, and what it would take for them to be at least possible. This method is derived in large part from David Lewis’s development of Frank Ramsey’s method of implicit definition. The basic idea is to define a set of terms not individually but in tandem. This is accomplished by assembling all (...) and only the common sense platitudes that involve them (e.g., typically, people want to be virtuous), conjoining those platitudes, and replacing the terms in question by existentially quantified variables. If the resulting sentence is satisfied, then whatever satisfies are the virtues. If it isn’t satisfied, there are a couple of options. First, one could just admit defeat by saying that people can’t be virtuous. More plausibly, one could weaken the conjunction by dropping a small number of the platitudes from it (and potentially adding some others). Alfano suggests that the most attractive way to do this is by dropping the platitudes that deal with cross-situational consistency and replacing them with platitudes that involve social construction: basically, people are virtuous (when they are) at least in part because other people signal their expectations of virtuous conduct, which induces virtuous conduct, which in turn induces further signals of expected virtuous conduct, and so on. (shrink)

In this essay, I give an analysis of the account of non-being in the Weltalter, focusing on the ways in which this account reflects Schelling’s new ontology of revelation. I begin by discussing the connection between non-being and the fundamental distinction between the principles in God. I then turn to the relationship of non-being to being in the Weltalter and show how a new meaning of being allows Schelling to distinguish non-being from nothing. The new meaning of being also makes (...) possible a distinction between essential non-being and de facto non-being; this distinction allows for the temporal sequence of revelation and the possibility of evil. I conclude by showing the implications of Schelling’s theory of non-being for his understanding of creation. (shrink)

Ontology has been proposed as a solution to the 'Tower of Babel' problem that threatens the semantic interoperability of information systems constructed independently for the same domain. In information systems research and applications, ontologies are often implemented by formalizing the meanings of words from natural languages. However, words in different natural languages sometimes subdivide the same domain of reality in terms of different conceptual categories. If the words and their associated concepts in two natural languages, or even in two terminological (...) traditions within the same language, do not have common referents in the real world, an ontology based on word meanings will inherit the 'Tower of Babel' problem from the languages involved, rather than solve it. In this paper we present evidence from a preliminary comparison of landscape terms in English with those in the Yindjibarndi language of northwestern Australia demonstrating that this problem is not just hypothetical. Some possible solutions are suggested. (shrink)

In this largely antimetaphysical treatment of free will and determinism, Mark Balaguer argues that the philosophical problem of free will boils down to an open scientific question about the causal histories of certain kinds of neural events. In the course of his argument, Balaguer provides a naturalistic defense of the libertarian view of free will. The metaphysical component of the problem of free will, Balaguer argues, essentially boils down to the question of whether humans possess libertarian free will. Furthermore, (...) he argues that, contrary to the traditional wisdom, the libertarian question reduces to a question about indeterminacy--in particular, to a straightforward empirical question about whether certain neural events in our heads are causally undetermined in a certain specific way; in other words, Balaguer argues that the right kind of indeterminacy would bring with it all of the other requirements for libertarian free will. Finally, he argues that because there is no good evidence as to whether or not the relevant neural events are undetermined in the way that's required, the question of whether human beings possess libertarian free will is a wide-open empirical question. (shrink)

At first glance, Schopenhauer’s account of human freedom looks strikingly similar to Schelling’s account of formal freedom in the Freiheitsschrift. Despite the clear similarities, I argue that there is a decisive difference between the two accounts—a difference that has to do with the ultimate grounding of freedom. For Schelling, the intelligible deed is a radical self-grounding of the eternal essence of the human being. For Schopenhauer, the eternal essence of the human being is groundless. Moreover, I argue that this difference (...) has decisive consequences for two sets of issues. On the one hand, Schelling’s concept of self-grounding allows him to preserve the universal application of the principle of ground. On the other hand, self-grounding is the only way that human beings can be responsible for who they are. Schelling thus anticipates a key insight of Galen Strawson: ultimate moral responsibility is only possible for a causa sui. (shrink)

Pragmatics is the study of the role of context in communication. This chapter discusses experimental research in pragmatics. It provides clarity on pragmatics by contrasting the role of context in communication with the role of sentence meaning. There is some disagreement about which communicative effects are due to which thing, so there is some disagreement as to where to draw the boundary between semantics and pragmatics. The chapter considers a rich experimental research project in pragmatics, which has developed primarily within (...) linguistics and psychology over the course of the last several decades in response to the boundary disputes. Finally, it talks about a more nascent experimental research project, which, building upon insights from psychology, aims towards understanding survey pragmatics. These two projects are discussed and attention is paid to the methods unique to each project and the philosophical and linguistic underpinnings they share in common. (shrink)

Socrates provides an argument at the end of the Apology that he believes gives hope that death is a blessing. This argument, grounded on the claim that death is one of two things, has been the subject of much derision and some recent defense. In this essay, I build on the work of other sympathetic commentators to show that Socrates' argument, when taken in context, not only makes good sense, but unifies Socrates' speech into a cohesive exhortation toward virtue.

Hobbes emphasized that the state of nature is a state of war because it is characterized by fundamental and generalized distrust. Exiting the state of nature and the conflicts it inevitably fosters is therefore a matter of establishing trust. Extant discussions of trust in the philosophical literature, however, focus either on isolated dyads of trusting individuals or trust in large, faceless institutions. In this paper, I begin to fill the gap between these extremes by analyzing what I call the topology (...) of communities of trust. Such communities are best understood in terms of interlocking dyadic relationships that approximate the ideal of being symmetric, Euclidean, reflexive, and transitive. Few communities of trust live up to this demanding ideal, and those that do tend to be small (between three and fifteen individuals). Nevertheless, such communities of trust serve as the conditions for the possibility of various important prudential epistemic, cultural, and mental health goods. However, communities of trust also make possible various problematic phenomena. They can become insular and walled-off from the surrounding community, leading to distrust of out-groups. And they can lead their members to abandon public goods for tribal or parochial goods. These drawbacks of communities of trust arise from some of the same mecha-nisms that give them positive prudential, epistemic, cultural, and mental health value – and so can at most be mitigated, not eliminated. (shrink)

This chapter lays out a case that with the proper perspective on the place of epistemology within normative inquiry more generally, it is possible to appreciate what was on the right track about some of the early approaches to the analysis of knowledge, and to improve on the obvious failures which led them to be rejected. Drawing on more general principles about reasons, their weight, and their relationship to justification, it offers answers to problems about defeat and the conditional fallacy (...) that plagued early defeasibility analyses of knowledge and offers a sketch of a contemporary alternative that is motivated by the idea that knowledge requires the right kind of “match” between objective and subjective factors. (shrink)

We argue that the interaction of biased media coverage and widespread employment of the recognition heuristic can produce epistemic injustices. First, we explain the recognition heuristic as studied by Gerd Gigerenzer and colleagues, highlighting how some of its components are largely external to, and outside the control of, the cognitive agent. We then connect the recognition heuristic with recent work on the hypotheses of embedded, extended, and scaffolded cognition, arguing that the recognition heuristic is best understood as an instance of (...) scaffolded cognition. In section three, we consider the double-edged sword of cognitive scaffolding. On the one hand, scaffolds can reduce the internal processing demands on cognitive agents while increasing their access to information. On the other hand, the use of scaffolding leaves cognitive agents increasingly vulnerable to forming false beliefs or failing to form beliefs at all about particular topics. With respect to the recognition heuristic, agents rely on third parties (such as the media) to report not just what’s true but also what’s important or valuable. This makes cognitive agents relying on these third parties vulnerable to two erroneous influences: 1) because they don’t recognize something, it isn’t important or valuable, and 2) because they do recognize something, it is important or valuable. Call the latter the Kardashian Inference and the former the Darfur Inference. In section four, we use Fricker’s (2007) concept of epistemic injustice to characterize the nature and harm of these false inferences, with special emphasis on the Darfur Inference. In section five, we use data-mining and an empirical study to show how Gigerenzer’s population estimation task is liable to produce Darfur Inferences. We conclude with some speculative remarks on more important Darfur Inferences, and how to avoid them by scaffolding better. One primary way to accomplish this it to shift the burden of embodying the virtue of epistemic justice from the hearer or consumer of media to the media themselves. (shrink)

Medicalization was the theme of the 29th European Conference on Philosophy of Medicine and Health Care that included a panel session on the DSM and mental health. Philosophical critiques of the medical model in psychiatry suffer from endemic assumptions that fail to acknowledge the real world challenges of psychiatric nosology. The descriptive model of classification of the DSM 3-5 serves a valid purpose in the absence of known etiologies for the majority of psychiatric conditions. However, a consequence of the “atheoretical” (...) approach of the DSM is rampant epistemological confusion, a shortcoming that can be ameliorated by importing perspectives from the work of Jaspers and McHugh. Finally, contemporary psychiatry’s over-reliance on neuroscience and pharmacotherapy has led to a reductionist agenda that is antagonistic to the inherently pluralistic nature of psychiatry. As a result, the field has suffered a loss of knowledge that may be difficult to recover. (shrink)

In this article I survey Foucault’s remarks on norms and normalisation from across his oeuvre, with a view to reconstructing his genealogy of norms, leaning at points – following Foucault himself – on Georges Canguilhem’s seminal work on the topic. I also survey in tandem the existing secondary scholarship on this question, maintaining – pace other schol-ars – that Foucault’s position has not been adequately explicated despite sophisticated attempts. I argue that Foucault’s idiosyncratic conception of the norm, overlooked or mis-understood (...) by other readers, is consistently of an ideal model guiding human action in any particular sphere. This concept is a relatively modern one that may be contrasted to the older form of restricting human behaviour according to binary discriminations that may be called ‘laws’ or ‘rules’. Foucault traces the form of the norm specifically to medieval pro-cesses for dealing with the plague, which later become highly generalised and diffused to produce a normalising society. I conclude with a more speculative discussion of how this society of the norm continues to utilise binarising rules, arguing that norms are typically used in order to ground binarising condemnations of abnormal cases, but that the nebu-lousness of norms ultimately allows any particular case to be condemned by such stand-ards. (shrink)

This article considers two important problems for the idea that what we ought to do is determined by the balance of competing reasons. The problems are distinct, but the object of the article is to explore how they admit of a single solution. It is a consequence of this solution that objective reasons—facts that count in favor—are in an important sense less objective than they have consistently been assumed to be. This raises but does not answer the question as to (...) what evidence we ever had that reasons are as objective as has been assumed. (shrink)

Unfortunately, many people today see the regulation of lies, disinformation, hate speech, and fake news as an infringement of free speech, at least when such speech is ‘political,’ despite the damage that such speech can do. But this very protective attitude toward speech rests on a mistaken understanding of the role of free speech in a liberal society. The right to free speech is based on the liberal value of freedom, and as such can be no broader than freedom itself. (...) And freedom has always been subject to reasonable limits in a liberal society. Indeed, while the principles of toleration and neutrality are often cited as supporting a broad interpretation of the right to free speech, they also tell us that certain limits apply to that right. We need not tolerate speech that encourages intolerance, and while government should be neutral between reasonable conceptions of the good, it need not be neutral between reasonable and unreasonable conceptions. These ideas form the framework of liberal society, and as I shall show, also provide a guide for understanding what kind of speech is protected in a liberal society and what it is not. (shrink)

This chapter explores a case study in contemporary fanaticism. We adopt Katsafanas’s conceptualization of fanaticism to make possible an in-depth discussion of and evaluation of a diffuse but important social movement — the anglophone manosphere. According to Katsafanas, fanatics are fruitfully understood as members of a group that adopts sacred values which they hold unconditionally to preserve their own psychic unity, and who feel that those values are threatened by those who do not accept them. The manosphere includes several social (...) movements, including incels, men’s rights activists, and men-going-their-own-way. We show that many members of these groups are well-characterized by Katsafanas’s theory of fanaticism, and that they have forged their fanatical group identity using tools that philosophers have tended to associate with more benign social movements and the task of “conceptual engineering.” Indeed, we think that manosphere groups have in many cases been more successful than more palatable liberationist movements, and that this case study in the dark side of conceptual engineering may be both sobering and informative. (shrink)