This paper advances a continuing line of research investigating the potential of web-based educative curriculum materials (ECMs) to facilitate teachers’ development of professional teaching knowledge (PTK). Our ECMs consisted of online lesson plans scaffolded with embedded digital resources to promote teacher understanding of a particular wise-practice pedagogy: problem-based historical inquiry (PBHI). Our research question was: Can a 2nd generation of web-based ECMs encourage social studies teachers’ development of PTK for PBHI? Participants reacted positively to several educative scaffolds, especially videocases of (...) experts modeling historical thinking. Evidence suggested that multiple experiences with planning and implementing instruction with our ECMs helped teachers recognize value in some of the materials’ underpinning concepts (e.g., scaffolding and inquiry-based instruction). However, planning instruction individually, the novelty of planning resources enhanced with digital resources, and certain contextual features of schooling such as inadequate focused time for planning seemed to frustrate the ECMs potential to promote teacher-learning. Here we suggest that ECMs function less effectively as stand-alone supports; however, employed in more formal contexts that feature collaboration, they may be able to provide valuable support for teachers’ professional development. (shrink)

This paper describes three social studies teachers’ participation in an approximately 50-h, 13-month, Lesson Study-type professional development program called Beyond Words. The program centered around promoting teachers’ understanding of historical domain knowledge through experiences with innovative visual curriculum materials and sustained collaboration. This qualitative investigation answers: To what degree can Beyond Words help in-service geography teachers design and implement powerful instruction centered around historical photographs? Throughout Beyond Words the teachers demonstrated a spirit of open-mindedness and a willingness to experiment with (...) unfamiliar ideas; they planned and implemented a lesson that featured engaging historical photographs, thinking critically about the past, and making claims about a public issue. At the end of the program, however, they demonstrated conventional approaches toward social studies instruction, especially regarding curriculum and assessment. The work shared here suggests that helping teachers craft high-quality questions to anchor student-inquiry and scaffolding teachers’ sensemaking of student-outcome data should be high priorities for professional development providers. (shrink)

According to the moral encroachment thesis, moral features of a situation can affect not just what we’re practically justified in doing but also what we’re epistemically justified in believing. This paper offers a new rationale for that thesis, drawing on observations about the role of reflection in agency.

Most of the recent work on propaganda in philosophy has come from a narrowly epistemological standpoint that sees it as flawed messaging that negatively impacts public reasonableness and deliberation. This article posits two problems with this approach: first, it obscures the full range of propaganda's activities; and second, it prevents effective ameliorative measures by offering an overly truncated assessment of the problems to be addressed. Following Ellul and Hyska, I argue that propaganda aims at shaping actions and not just beliefs, (...) and that the propaganda activities that shape action include modifying beliefs but also much more. Examining this larger set of activities results in a shift in how we conceptualize the way that propaganda works. In particular, I add a novel argument that propaganda works by creating and reshaping publics, transforming who they are and their characteristic action. This article concludes that a more complete philosophical account of propaganda cannot just draw on epistemology but must also call on the tools of social ontology and political philosophy to create a more robust critical account. (shrink)

Scientific models are often said to be more or less general depending on how many cases they cover. In this paper we argue that the cardinality of cases is insufficient as a metric of generality, and we present a novel account based on measure theory. This account overcomes several problems with the cardinality approach, and additionally provides some insight into the nature of assessments of generality. Specifically, measure theory affords a natural and quantitative way of describing local spaces of possibility. (...) The generality of models can be understood as the measure of possibilities to which the models apply. In order to illustrate our view, we consider the example of structural genomics, the ongoing project of building three-dimensional models of biological macromolecules like proteins. Using measure theory, we interpret the practice of homology modeling, where such models are understood to apply widely but imperfectly to the space of possible proteins. (shrink)

How Propaganda Became Public Relations pulls back the curtain on propaganda: how it was born, how it works, and how it has masked the bulk of its operations by rebranding itself as public relations. Cory Wimberly uses archival materials and wide variety of sources — Foucault’s work on governmentality, political economy, liberalism, mass psychology, and history — to mount a genealogical challenge to two commonplaces about propaganda. First, modern propaganda did not originate in the state and was never primarily (...) located in the state; instead, it began and flourished as a for-profit service for businesses. Further, propaganda is not focused on public beliefs and does not operate mainly through lies and deceit; propaganda is an apparatus of government that aims to create the publics that will freely undertake the conduct its clients’ desire. Businesses have used propaganda since the early twentieth century to construct the laboring, consuming, and voting publics that they needed to secure and grow their operations. Over that time, corporations have become the most numerous and well-funded apparatuses of government in the West, operating privately and without democratic accountability. Wimberly explains why liberal strategies of resistance have failed and a new focus on creating mass subjectivity through democratic means is essential to countering propaganda. This book offers a sophisticated analysis that will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working in social and political philosophy, Continental philosophy, political communication, the history of capitalism, and the history of public relations. (shrink)

Wesley Salmon’s version of the ontic conception of explanation is a main historical root of contemporary work on mechanistic explanation. This paper examines and critiques the philosophical merits of Salmon’s version, and argues that his conception’s most fundamental construct is either fundamentally obscure, or else reduces to a non-ontic conception of explanation. Either way, the ontic conception is a misconception.

What features will something have if it counts as an explanation? And will something count as an explanation if it has those features? In the second half of the 20th century, philosophers of science set for themselves the task of answering such questions, just as a priori conceptual analysis was generally falling out of favor. And as it did, most philosophers of science just moved on to more manageable questions about the varieties of explanation and discipline-specific scientific explanation. Often, such (...) shifts are sound strategies for problem-solving. But leaving fallow certain basic conceptual issues can also result in foundational debates. (shrink)

Analyticity, or the 'analytic/synthetic' distinction is one of the most important and controversial problems in contemporary philosophy. It is also essential to understanding many developments in logic, philosophy of language, epistemology and metaphysics. In this outstanding introduction to analyticity Cory Juhl and Eric Loomis cover the following key topics: The origins of analyticity in the philosophy of Hume and Kant Carnap's arguments concerning analyticity in the early twentieth century Quine's famous objections to analyticity in his classic 'Two Dogmas of (...) Empiricism' essay The relationship between analyticity and central issues in metaphysics, such as ontology The relationship between analyticity and epistemology Analyticity in the context of the current debates in philosophy, including mathematics and ontology Throughout the book the authors show how many philosophical controversies hinge on the problem of analyticity. Additional features include chapter summaries, annotated further reading and a glossary of technical terms making the book ideal to those coming to the problem for the first time. (shrink)

At the age of sixty, Cory Taylor was dying of melanoma-related brain cancer. With her illness no longer treatable, she began at the start of 2016 to write about her experiences and, in an extraordinary creative surge, wrote what would become Dying: A Memoir. This is a brief and clear-eyed account of what dying taught Cory: amid the tangle of her feelings, she reflects on the patterns of her life, and remembers the lives and deaths of her parents. (...) She tells us why she would like to be able to choose the circumstances of her own death.Dying is about the vulnerability and strength, courage and humility, anger and acceptance that it takes to live a good life and say goodbye to it in peace. (shrink)

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Volume 104, Issue 3, Page 623-638, May 2022.

The author argues Ayn Rand made a genuinely novel, but often overlooked and underappreciated, contribution in her synthesis of Aristotelianism and liberalism. Aristotelianism, a philosophy of flourishing, and liberalism, a politics of freedom, have been viewed throughout history as largely incompatible doctrines, often understandably so. The author discusses the history of these concepts, especially their tensions, as a backdrop to further explore and contextualize the work of Rand, who argued that Aristotelian ideas about flourishing and liberal ideas about freedom are (...) natural allies, and in fact strengthen each other. Rand’s “Aristotelian liberalism” is a fruitful synthesis. (shrink)

We propose a friendly amendment to integrative experiment design (IED), adversarial-collaboration IED, that incentivizes research teams from competing theoretical perspectives to identify zones of the design space where they possess an explanatory edge. This amendment is especially critical in debates that have high policy stakes and carry a strong normative-political charge that might otherwise prevent free exchange of ideas.

In Aquinas, the senses are widely construed as “gatekeepers” restricting the possible content of our embodied intellectual thought. But if this is true, how can Aquinas justify his extensive theorizing about incorporeal substances, and how can he account for human experiential self-awareness? This paper argues that, for Aquinas, the scope of our embodied experience is not limited to objects of sense, but extends to our intellects and everything ontologically “below” them; we can and do conceptualize something incorporeal—the intellectual soul—as it (...) is in itself and not merely by comparison to bodies; this concept of ‘incorporeality’ is precisely a concept of ‘intellectuality.’ The restrictions embodied human intellects encounter in attempting to know entities “above” us arise less from their incorporeality than from a fundamental mismatch between our attempts to conceptualize them in terms of what they have in common with us, and their simplicity. (shrink)

In virtue of what do some considerations count in favor or against actions? Some philosophers have recently been interested in hybrid answers to this question. For instance, it might be that some facts about reasons are brute, and some are explained in terms of agents’ acts of will. Such views face a challenge: they need a story about how reasons grounded in one way combine with reasons grounded in other ways to yield overall verdicts about what to do. This paper (...) assesses the two most prominent accounts of how that happens, and offers an alternative that captures what's most plausible about each. (shrink)

A collection of previously published articles and essays.

Building on the advances made by feminist reconsiderations of methods, methodology and epistemology, this paper calls for an alliance between feminist social science and the emerging field of queer theory. By challenging traditional scientific approaches to research on sexual minority groups, a distinctly ‘queer’ approach is advocated that adopts a reflexive position on subjectivity and sexuality. While essentialist approaches privilege gay/lesbian, man/woman, and object/subject, this approach advances a framework of critical sexualities that moves social science into an arena of inclusivity (...) and multiple identities, rather than reductionistic categorical thought. The implications are clear: a rethinking of identity categories that transcend stagnant dualisms. (shrink)

In the early 20th century, the most numerous and well-funded institutions in the United States—corporations—used public relations to make a widespread and fundamental change in the way they constitute and regulate their relations of knowledge with the public. Today, we can see this change reflected in a variety of areas such as journalism, political outreach, social media, and in the ‘fake news’ and ‘post-truth’ administration of Donald J. Trump. This article traces practices of corporate truth-telling and knowledge production across three (...) periods I will call the personal, the legal, and public relations, which are roughly coincident with the antebellum period, the Gilded Age, and the 20th century, respectively. In sum, what can be found in public relations and now broadly across society, is that relations of knowledge have come to be refigured as relations of power, subordinating traditional epistemological concerns like justification and belief in favor of government and control. (shrink)

Minimalists about truth contend that traditional inflationary theories systematically fail to explain certain facts about truth, and that this failure licenses a ‘reversal of explanatory direction’. Once reversed, they purport that their own minimal theory adequately explains all of the facts involving truth. But minimalists’ main objection to inflationism seems to misfire, and the subsequent reversal of explanatory direction, if it can be made sense of, leaves minimalism in no better explanatory position; and even if the objection were serviceable and (...) the reversal legitimate, minimalists’ adequacy thesis is still implausible. (shrink)

The paper introduces a special issue of the journal Philosophical Problems in Science (ZFN) on the topic of the nature and norms of scientific explanation.

The decline in the interest in ethical theory is first outlined, as a background to the author’s discussion of principlism. The author’s own stance, that of a communitarian philosopher, is then described, before the subject of principlism itself is addressed. Two problems stand in the way of the author’s embracing principlism: its individualistic bias and its capacity to block substantive ethical inquiry. The more serious problem the author finds to be its blocking function. Discussing the four scenarios the author finds (...) that the utility of principlism is shown in the two scenarios about Jehovah’s Witnesses but that when it comes to selling kidneys for transplantation and germline enhancement, principlism is of little help. (shrink)

For years, experimental philosophers have attempted to discern whether laypeople find free will compatible with a scientifically deterministic understanding of the universe, yet no consensus has emerged. The present work provides one potential explanation for these discrepant findings: People are strongly motivated to preserve free will and moral responsibility, and thus do not have stable, logically rigorous notions of free will. Seven studies support this hypothesis by demonstrating that a variety of logically irrelevant (but motivationally relevant) features influence compatibilist judgments. (...) In Study 1, participants who were asked to consider the possibility that our universe is deterministic were more compatibilist than those not asked to consider this possibility, suggesting that determinism poses a threat to moral responsibility, which increases compatibilist responding (thus reducing the threat). In Study 2, participants who considered concrete instances of moral behavior found compatibilist free will more sufficient for moral responsibility than participants who were asked about moral responsibility more generally. In Study 3a, the order in which participants read free will and determinism descriptions influenced their compatibilist judgments—and only when the descriptions had moral significance: Participants were more likely to report that determinism was compatible with free will than that free will was compatible with determinism. In Study 3b, participants who read the free will description first (the more compatibilist group) were particularly likely to confess that their beliefs in free will and moral responsibility and their disbelief in determinism influenced their conclusion. In Study 4, participants reduced their compatibilist beliefs after reading a passage that argued that moral responsibility could be preserved even in the absence of free will. Participants also reported that immaterial souls were compatible with scientific determinism, most strongly among immaterial soul believers (Study 5), and evaluated information about the capacities of primates in a biased manner favoring the existence of human free will (Study 6). These results suggest that people do not have one intuition about whether free will is compatible with determinism. Instead, people report that free will is compatible with determinism when desiring to uphold moral responsibility. Recommendations for future work are discussed. (shrink)

Moral cognition, by its very nature, stems from intuitions about what is good and bad, and these intuitions influence moral assessments outside of conscious awareness. However, because humans evolved a shared set of moral intuitions, and are compelled to justify their moral assessments as good and rational (even erroneously) to others, moral virtue and moral progress are still possible.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Metaphysical Themes in Thomas Aquinas III by John F. WippelTherese Scarpelli CoryWIPPEL, John F. Metaphysical Themes in Thomas Aquinas III. Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2021. ix + 321 pp. Cloth, $65.00; eBook, $65.00This volume is the third in what can now be considered informally a series of volumes collecting some of John F. Wippel's most important writings. (Two previous volumes, Metaphysical Themes in Thomas (...) Aquinas and Metaphysical Themes in Thomas Aquinas II, were published in 1984 and 2007, respectively, by the same press.) In this volume, Wippel has collected nine of his articles or book chapters, originally published from 2002–2019, on a wide range of topics: (1) "Aquinas on Separatio and Our Discovery of Being as Being," (2) "Thomas Aquinas on Philosophy and the Preambles of Faith," (3) "Cornelio Fabro on the Distinction and Composition of Essence and Esse in the Metaphysics of Thomas Aquinas," (4) "Cornelio Fabro on Participation and Aquinas's Quarta Via," (5) "Aquinas on Creation and Preambles of Faith," (6) "Thomas Aquinas and the Unity of Substantial Form," (7) "Thomas Aquinas on the Separated Soul's Natural Knowledge," (8) "Metaphysical Themes in De Malo I," and (9) "Metaphysical Composition of Angels in Bonaventure, Aquinas, and Godfrey of Fontaines."Such collections provide a valuable opportunity for the author's retrospective on the work thus collected. In this respect, it is especially worth noting the usefulness of the introduction to this volume, in which Wippel has provided a detailed précis for each included chapter. The introduction thus serves as a helpful roadmap to orient new and returning readers of Wippel's work to some of his most important writings.In a book review of this length, it is impossible to summarize adequately the content of each essay. Indeed, it would be redundant to try, given the much more authoritative content of Wippel's own introduction to the volume. Consequently, I will limit myself to highlighting one of the notable inclusions in this collection, namely, chapter 6, "Thomas Aquinas and the Unity of Substantial Form." Despite the modest title, the piece is an extensive and wide-ranging study of the development and fate of Aquinas's controversial doctrine, the anxieties it raised among his contemporaries, and the debate that raged at Paris in the late thirteenth century, and during which the doctrine appears to have narrowly escaped inclusion on the list of condemnations of 1270. Wippel correlates some interesting historical anecdotes and documentary evidence with Aquinas's series of changing formulations in discussions of the unity of substantial form. He is thereby able to document a particularly nuanced case in which Aquinas attempts to make his own thought clearer in the face of a developing controversy, but without giving up on the essentials of his own position.Nonetheless, Wippel points out that Aquinas never fully resolved the theological criticisms lodged against his position. Within the debate over the number of substantial forms in a substance, the identity of Christ's dead body in the tomb between the crucifixion and resurrection ended up becoming a test case: What makes Christ's living body and his dead body in the tomb both be identically the same body? The problem is as follows: [End Page 371] Since substantial form is what secures the identity of a substance across time, if there is just one substantial form in a human substance, and that form (the human soul) departs Christ's body in his death on the cross, then after his death whatever is left can no longer be identified as Christ's body. It must be some new substance with its own substantial form.For opponents, this difficulty was fatal. How did Aquinas respond? Disappointingly, he only asserts that Christ's dead body is numerically identical with his living body, just not "in every way"—but without explaining why he thinks this identity is preserved. It is left to Giles of Rome to fill out a tentative solution: Although the matter of Christ's body does take on a new substantial form, it remains Christ's, because it remains united to the person of the Word.The problem is... (shrink)

The ontic conception of scientific explanation has been constructed and motivated on the basis of a putative lexical ambiguity in the term explanation. I raise a puzzle for this ambiguity claim, and then give a deflationary solution under which all ontically-rendered talk of explanation is merely elliptical; what it is elliptical for is a view of scientific explanation that altogether avoids the ontic conception. This result has revisionary consequences for New Mechanists and other philosophers of science, many of whom have (...) assimilated their conception of explanation to the ontic conception. (shrink)

One of the foremost objections to theological voluntarism is the contingency objection. If God’s will fixes moral facts, then what if God willed that agents engage in cruelty? I argue that even unrestricted theological voluntarists should accept some logical constraints on possible moral systems—hence, some limits on ways that God could have willed morality to be—and these logical constraints are sufficient to blunt the force of the contingency objec­tion. One constraint I defend is a very weak accessibility requirement, related to (...) (but less problematic than) existence internalism in metaethics. The theo­logical voluntarist can maintain: Godcouldn’t have loved cruelty, and even though he could have willed behaviors we find abhorrent, he could only have done so in a world of deeply alien moral agents. We cannot confidently declare such a world unacceptable. (shrink)

Research has examined various cognitive processes underlying ethical decision-making, and has recently begun to focus on the differential effects of specific emotions. The present study examines three self-focused moral emotions and their influence on ethical decision-making: guilt, shame, and embarrassment. Given the potential of these discrete emotions to exert positive or negative effects in decision-making contexts, we also examined their effects on ethical decisions after a cognitive reappraisal emotion regulation intervention. Participants in the study were presented with an ethical scenario (...) and were induced, or not induced, to feel guilt, shame, or embarrassment, and were asked to reappraise, or not reappraise, the situation giving rise to those emotions. Responses to questions about the ethical case were evaluated for the quality of ethical sensemaking, perceptions of moral intensity, and decision ethicality. Findings indicate that guilt, shame, and embarrassment are associated with different sensemaking processes and metacognitive reasoning strategies, and resulted in different perceptions of moral intensity. Additionally, cognitive reappraisal had a negative impact on each of these factors. Implications of these findings for ethical decision-making research are discussed. (shrink)

Regress arguments show that to do something for a reason, one does not have to have reflectively endorsed that reason. This might seem to establish that reflection does not play a fundamental role in agency. This paper argues that this conclusion rests on too narrow a conception of agency. If agents are not just creatures who act for reasons but also creatures who can take ownership of the reasons for which they act, then there is a central role for reflection (...) to play in agency even if it's not the role that philosophers of action have typically envisioned for it. (shrink)

This paper reports an experimental investigation of presuppositions and scalar implicatures in language acquisition. Recent proposals posit the same mechanisms for generating both types of inferences, in contrast to the traditional view. We used a Covered Box picture selection task to compare the interpretations assigned by two groups of children and by adults, in response to sentences with presuppositions and ones with either ‘direct’ or ‘indirect’ scalar implicatures. The main finding was that the behavior of children and adults differed across (...) inference types. This asymmetry is consistent with the traditional perspective, but poses a challenge for the more recent uniform accounts. We discuss how the latter could be amended to account for these findings, and also relate the findings to previous results on presupposition processing. Finally, we discuss an unexpected difference found between direct and indirect scalar implicatures. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to explore corporate perspectives on the development and use of sustainability reports. Interviews with experts from 35 Canadian corporations were conducted. The research showed that the content of the reports was determined by following standards, conducting an internal evaluation, and other methods. Five corporations were found to develop fully integrated reports, while another 15 included some sustainability aspects in their annual reports. The extent of external stakeholder involvement in the development of the report varied (...) widely, but the majority of the corporations considered stakeholder input. Data collection was handled by a number of different individuals and groups, with sustainability departments often taking a lead role. Twenty-five corporations relied exclusively on internal personnel to write the report, with the remaining corporations using a combination of internal and external writers. A number of key challenges in developing sustainability reports were identified, including timelines, data collection, selecting content, and striking an appropriate balance in reporting. The reports were used internally in a number of different ways, including enhancing employee awareness and engagement and as an internal reference tool. A number of potential future uses of sustainability reports were also mentioned, such as improving the ability to track real-time performance. (shrink)

As much as assumptions about mechanisms and mechanistic explanation have deeply affected psychology, they have received disproportionately little analysis in philosophy. After a historical survey of the influences of mechanistic approaches to explanation of psychological phenomena, we specify the nature of mechanisms and mechanistic explanation. Contrary to some treatments of mechanistic explanation, we maintain that explanation is an epistemic activity that involves representing and reasoning about mechanisms. We discuss the manner in which mechanistic approaches serve to bridge levels rather than (...) reduce them, as well as the different ways in which mechanisms are discovered. Finally, we offer a more detailed example of an important psychological phenomenon for which mechanistic explanation has provided the main source of scientific understanding. (shrink)

The objective of this editorial is to help authors better understand how to contribute to discourse on corporate sustainability and business ethics. We do this in two ways. First, we clarify our expectations for publication in the “Corporate Sustainability and Business Ethics” section at the Journal of Business Ethics (JBE). As section editors at the journal, we want to make explicit the criteria we apply in our decisions to accept or reject a submission. We argue that authors should explicitly reflect (...) upon what corporate sustainability means in the context of their research. We also stress that publishing in JBE requires an explicit central focus on ethics. We do not take a position on how authors must do either of these two, only that it should be done. In short, there are good business ethics papers that do not add to corporate sustainability theory building or practice, and there are good corporate sustainability papers that are not framed in a business ethics discourse. For the “Corporate Sustainability and Business Ethics” section, we expect authors to strive for both. Second, we provide several illustrations of how corporate sustainability research can be framed from a business ethics perspective around three central sustainability constructs: objective function, carrying capacity, and generational sustainability. These examples are not intended to be comprehensive or to bound the range of acceptable research for JBE’s “Corporate Sustainability and Business Ethics” section. Rather, we aim to provide representative examples of potentially publishable research on business ethics and corporate sustainability to spur innovative thinking and constructive discussion. We hope this editorial will help authors better understand what we expect from submissions to the “Corporate Sustainability and Business Ethics” at JBE. (shrink)

Pluralists maintain that there is more than one truth property in virtue of which bearers are true. Unfortunately, it is not yet clear how they diagnose the liar paradox or what resources they have available to treat it. This chapter considers one recent attempt by Cotnoir (2013b) to treat the Liar. It argues that pluralists should reject the version of pluralism that Cotnoir assumes, discourse pluralism, in favor of a more naturalized approach to truth predication in real languages, which should (...) be a desideratum on any successful pluralist conception. Appealing to determination pluralism instead, which focuses on truth properties, it then proposes an alternative treatment to the Liar that shows liar sentences to be undecidable. (shrink)

von Fintel and Gillies : 329–360, 2007) have proposed a dynamic strict conditional account of counterfactuals as an alternative to the standard variably strict account due to Stalnaker and Lewis. Von Fintel’s view is motivated largely by so-called reverse Sobel sequences, about which the standard view seems to make the wrong predictions. More recently Moss :561–586, 2012) has offered a pragmatic/epistemic explanation that purports to explain the data without requiring abandonment of the standard view. So far the small amount of (...) subsequent literature has focused primarily on the original class of cases motivating the strict conditional view. What is needed in the debate is an examination of the predictions of the dynamic strict conditional account for a broader range of data. I undertake this task here, presenting a slew of cases that are problematic for the strict conditional view but not for Moss’s view, and considering some possible responses. Ultimately I take my contribution to constitute a significant blow to the dynamic strict conditional view, though not a decisive verdict against it. (shrink)

The alt-right is an online subculture marked by its devotion to the execution of a racist, misogynistic, and xenophobic politics through trolling, pranking, meme-making, and mass murder. It is this devotion to far-right politics through the discordant conjunction of humor and suicidal violence this article seeks to explain by situating the movement for the first time within its constitutive online relationships. This article adds to the existing literature by viewing the online relationships of the alt-right through the genealogy of propaganda. (...) Through situating the alt-right alongside the genealogy of propaganda, the article offers new insights into the social isolation, increasingly extreme social and political positions, nihilism, and violence that have emerged within the alt-right. The article concludes by applying the lessons of the alt-right for online organizing across the political spectrum and argues that a class-based politics of the left is an important part of countering the rise of the alt-right. (shrink)

A number of authors have claimed that the fact that our universe seems ’fine-tuned’ is evidence that there are many universes. Ian Hacking (1987) raised doubts about inferences to many sequential universes. More recently, Roger White has argued that it is a fallacy to infer that there are many universes, whether existing all at once or sequentially, from the fact that ours is fine-tuned. The upshot of our discussion will be that Hacking is right about the existence of certain fallacious (...) inferences, but that he (and White) are incorrect in their assimilation of arguments for many universes to these fallacious cases. (shrink)

American bioethics began in the late 1960s, stimulated by a plethora of new medical technologies and biological knowledge and by a scandal-induced interest in human subject research. Although it was understood that there would be ethical debate , no one thought the disputes would be ideological in character, as if part of one's voting pattern as liberal or conservative, Democrat or Republican. There were arguments, often sharp, but no culture wars.