There has always been a tension between a critique of ‘real existing conditions’ and meta-theoretical paradigms through which the tasks of critique can both be anchored and images of humankind explored.

Musiker, Freigeist, Drogensüchtiger, Stimme der Schwachen und Entrechteten, Christ, Familienmensch, Sänger von Liebe, Gott und Mord. Viel gibt es über Johnny Cash zu sagen, man kann es aber auch auf eine einfache Formel bringen: Er war der "Man in Black". Er sang vor Schwerverbrechern in Saint-Quentin, für Richard Nixon und alle amerikanischen Präsidenten nach ihm. Er verzweifelte an der Liebe zu June Carter und fand später mit ihr seine Erfüllung. Er förderte Musiker wie Bob Dylan und Kris Kristofferson, spiele (...) absichtlich schlechte Schaltplatten ein und wurde in den 1990gern von einer neuen Generation entdeckt. Was steht hinter dieser Karriere, was bewegte diesen Mann, wie sind seine Lieder und sein Weltbild zu verstehen? 21 Philosophen betrachten das Leben und Wirken dieser amerikanischen Ikone und zeigen Ihnen so eine Welt zwischen Kunst, Kommerz und Kant. (shrink)

Michael Hand's interesting analysis of the concept of intelligence crucially depends upon three assumptions: firstly, that there is an ordinary use of the term which, when applied to an individual is perfectly general and not context dependent. Secondly, that this use is best cashed in terms of aptitude. Thirdly, that the aptitude in question is to be explained in terms of theorizing. I shall argue in what follows that the first assumption may be true, but, if it is true, this (...) presents a problem for Hand's analysis and not a path to a solution. That the second assumption is false but, even if it were true, it would sit badly with assumption one. And, finally, that the third assumption runs into too many difficulties to be acceptable. (shrink)

The Theosophical Society, founded in New York in 1875, was, at the turn of the Twentieth Century, a global phenomenon with 100,000 members. New Age philosopher Dr Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925) was appointed as the first Secretary General of the German Section of the Theosophical Society on 19 October 1902. The Theosophical Society offered Rudolf Steiner a platform, a ready-made audience, infrastructure, and the insider experience of the world’s leading New Age spiritual society. The success of the Theosophical Society demonstrated that (...) there was a public appetite to hear about reincarnation, karma, maya, kamaloca, and other Eastern and alternative spiritual ideas. The Theosophical Society provided Rudolf Steiner a capable, multilingual, and determined personal assistant, Marie von Sivers (1867-1948). For Rudolf Steiner the Theosophical Society offered the perfect training ground for what would be, a decade later, his life’s work, the Anthroposophical Society. Rudolf Steiner grew the membership of the German Section of the Theosophical Society from 377 in 1905 to 3,702 in 1913. He earned cash from ticketing of his lectures and his Mystery plays, and from book sales of his personal publishing house, ‘Philosophisch-Theosophischer Verlag’. Another enterprise, the ‘Johannes-Bau-Verein’ (Johannes Building Association) was founded in 1911, independent of the Theosophical Society, to build a theatre in Munich to present Rudolf Steiner's plays. The building application was rejected by the Munich municipal authorities in 1912. The resistance to a build in Munich, provided impetus for the move to build in Dornach, Switzerland. The Anthroposophical Society was founded 28 December 1912 in Cologne, Germany. Most of the members of the German Section of the Theosophical Society members followed Rudolf Steiner into the Anthroposophical Society. The Theosophical Society expelled Rudolf Steiner from the Theosophical Society on 7 March 1913. The foundation stone for the Goetheanum (then still called the ‘Johannesbau’) was laid 20 September 1913. The Theosophical Society had served as the ideal prototype and springboard for founding and growing the Anthroposophical Society. (shrink)

In my reply to Wertheimer and Miller's paper on coercive offers and payment for research participation1 I claim that ‘… it's not unreasonable to suppose that there is another normative aspect to these cases, over and above the voluntariness of consent. While the parents of children at Willowbrook and the millionaire's mistress might have given consent that was voluntary and informed, they are still wronged by taking up this offer…’2 Furthermore, nowhere in my paper on surgical castration do I claim (...) that coercive offers invalidate consent,3 and I suggest that Bomann-Larsen has come closest to cashing this out correctly with her idea that ‘the wrongness of these coercive offers has more to do with the wilful creation of choices that take advantage of others vulnerabilities…’.4 So, it is puzzling that they object to my analysis of coercion and castration because coercive offers are not readily unpacked as a problem with consent. …. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:138 In 2010 the city of Colorado Springs was strapped for cash. Government officials announced that they would either have to raise revenue through increased taxation or cut public services—­ in some cases rather severely—­ including, perhaps, police and fire protection, and even more basic bits of municipal infrastructure. The city shut down one-­ third of residential streetlights and closed public restrooms. Citi­ zens were outraged, but a (...) majority of voters had recently defeated a proposed tax increase. It’s tempting to suppose that the city was trying to teach its citizens a lesson: if you want public services, you have to be willing to pay for them. Colorado Springs is, and has been for some time now, a died-­in-­the-­wool small-­government, anti-­tax-­increase, fiscally conservative town. As Colorado Springs resident Bo Sharifi put it, “As soon as I hear government [say] ‘Oh, we need more money’... I guess I kind of automatically assume there’s probably some other things you could probably cut before firemen, policemen, city lights and that sort of thing.”1 On the surface, that seems reasonable. So... what comes to mind? How about food stamps? What about WIC? Of course these are federal services, not funded by Coloradans alone. There’s government, and then there’s government. Well, how about... well... what? Doesn’t the government spend money on all sorts of things we could very easily do without? Perhaps. Isn’t it part of our job to know or to decide which things these are? If we don’t trust government, even more obviously we don’t trust it with our money, though we pretty clearly have no idea how public funds are actually allocated or spent. When asked whether he remembered the proposed tax increase that the city had voted against, Sharifi replied, “maybe.” Bo and his wife were charged $125 to have Connected: How Trains, Genes, Pineapples, Piano Keys, and a Few Disasters Transformed Americans at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century By Steven Cassedy Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014 JOHN MARIANA Book Reviews 139 their streetlight turned back on. Bo’s wife Sara viewed this as extortion. “By shoveling out a hundred dollars to turn on a streetlight that we kind of felt was supposed to be on anyway, that it was giving them what they wanted,” she said. They who? One resident wrote the city of Colorado Springs a check for $300 to turn the lights on for his entire neighborhood. City Councilwoman Jan Martin pointed out to him that the total cost to the individual Colorado Springs taxpayer to keep the streetlights on—­and to fund the maintenance of public parks and medians, as well as community centers and pre-­recession-­level police and fire services—­by approving the tax increase would have been: $200. He replied that he would never vote for a tax increase. In other words, as the reporter who covered the story (Robert Smith) observed, he would rather pay more to keep the streetlights on in his own neighborhood than to pay for all city services combined. Smith remarked that “Colorado Springs was stepping away from one of the things that we take for granted in most American cities: that we’re all in it together—­ at least when it comes to basic services.”2 As near as I can tell, this is the moral of Steven Cassedy’s exceptionally timely Connected: that we’re all in it together. For much of the book Cassedy merely traces the history of the emergence in the consciousness of ordinary Americans of the concept of the social network, but he is not so much talking about the notion of a network society as such, as I understand him. Or, at any rate, the network society as such is not really his main concern. He is talking about the idea of social, political, national, and ultimately global and universal human interconnectedness that was a distinct product of the complex networked structures (both concrete and abstract) that came to constitute modern American life in the twentieth century (and of course life pretty much everywhere ), and about our understanding of ourselves as so networked.3 On this... (shrink)

In this chapter, we recount some of the most pressing objections to character scepticism, pointing out their limitations and, when appropriate, incorporating their suggestions. From here, we consider what empirically informed moral improvement might look like by turning to the skill analogy. While the skill analogy provides a realistic rubric for becoming a better person, many of the questions concerning the details of how moral improvement might take place remain unanswered. When developing expertise in domains like chess and morality, a (...) wide range of factors will likely be important and it is unlikely than any one individual factor will be especially important. Given this, for any account of moral improvement, our optimism should be bounded: the effect of any particular intervention is likely to be limited, in both magnitude and domain. Lastly, we consider how character scepticism has reshaped the way we think about moral responsibility, whether this is cashed out in reasons-responsiveness or self-expression accounts. While both views face challenges, by distinguishing the possession of the responsibility-making feature from failures to manifest that property in behaviour, we gain a certain degree of wiggle room that allows us to accommodate empirical findings while holding on to notions of responsibility. This chapter highlights that the ‘person-situationism debate’ has expanded far beyond its beginnings, giving way to new accounts of moral improvement and moral responsibility. (shrink)

Although the notion of physician value neutrality in medicine may be traced back to the writings of Sir William Osler, it is relatively new to medicine and medical ethics. We argue in this paper that how physician value neutrality has been cashed out is often obscure and its defense not persuasive. In addition, we argue that the social/political implementation of neutrality, Political Liberalism, fails, and thus, PVN's case is weakened, for PVN's justification relies largely on the reasoning undergirding PL. For (...) these reasons, we conclude that PVN has no philosophical or ethical warrant and thus should be abandoned. We suggest that the physician present to her patients some type of statement or creed that would give them an idea of where she stands on important axiological issues and how these stands are cashed out clinically. (shrink)

Within international development [1], public health [2], and clinical medicine [3]–[5], there is increasing interest in determining whether cash payments or other economic incentives can be used to influence the choices and behavior of individuals and groups in order to promote desired health goals. However, a number of complex issues affect the review and approval by research ethics committees of research studying the effectiveness of using financial incentives to promote desired health goals. Current ethical and regulatory frameworks regard the (...) provision of gifts or cash payments to participants in human research as potentially problematic. Specifically, these frameworks imply that such incentives may undermine the autonomy of participant choice, hinder the disclosure of medical information, exacerbate social inequalities, or result in the exploitation or degradation of vulnerable populations [6]–[9]. Typically, these frameworks provide guidance about payment to research participants to reimburse expenses, to compensate for time and effort, to provide insurance coverage, or as an incentive to participate in the research itself. However, the issue of payment as a component of the research intervention is relatively new. RECs thus lack explicit guidance about ethical issues surrounding research that evaluates the use of financial incentives as an intervention to promote health. (shrink)

Can firms overcome credit constraints with a corporate culture of high integrity? We empirically address this question by studying their investment–cash flow sensitivities. We identify firms with a culture of integrity through textual analysis of public documents in a sample of Chinese listed firms and also through corporate culture statements. Our results show that firms with an integrity-focused culture have lower investment–cash flow sensitivity, even after we address endogeneity concerns. However, we also find that for the culture to (...) reduce the investment–cash flow sensitivity, external stakeholders must be able to verify this culture through a low information asymmetry environment. Overall, our findings show that a corporate culture of high integrity can mitigate a firm’s external transaction costs. (shrink)

This article focuses on the welfare state, which includes social protection, health, education and training, housing, and social services, but can also be conceived more broadly to include policies that affect earnings capacity and the structure of the labour market. It discusses the difficulties of capturing the impact of the welfare state on income inequality, given that one does not observe what the distribution would be in the absence of the welfare state or specific aspects of it. Theories of welfare (...) state redistribution are reviewed, and the conventional categorization into welfare ‘regimes’ discussed. The empirical evidence about the extent and nature of redistribution by the welfare state is described, including noncash services as well as cash transfers, and the impact on poverty in particular is discussed. Economic inequality is also strongly affected by the political process, and vice versa. (shrink)

Are theories ‘underdetermined by the evidence’ in any way that should worry the scientific realist? I argue that no convincing reason has been given for thinking so. A crucial distinction is drawn between data equivalence and empirical equivalence. Duhem showed that it is always possible to produce a data equivalent rival to any accepted scientific theory. But there is no reason to regard such a rival as equally well empirically supported and hence no threat to realism. Two theories are empirically (...) equivalent if they share all consequences expressed in purely observational vocabulary. This is a much stronger requirement than has hitherto been recognised— two such ‘rival’ theories must in fact agree on many claims that are clearly theoretical in nature. Given this, it is unclear how much of an impact on realism a demonstration that there is always an empirically equivalent ‘rival’ to any accepted theory would have—even if such a demonstration could be produced. Certainly in the case of the version of realism that I defend—structural realism—such a demonstration would have precisely no impact: two empirically equivalent theories are, according to structural realism, cognitively indistinguishable. (shrink)

In his preface Mr Wilson writes 'I feel that a great many adults … would do better to spend less time in simply accepting the concepts of others uncritically, and more time in learning how to analyse concepts in general'. Mr Wilson starts by describing the techniques of conceptual analysis. He then gives examples of them in action by composing answers to specific questions and by criticism of quoted passages of argument. Chapter 3 sums up the importance of this kind (...) of mental activity. Chapter 4 presents selections for the reader to analyse, followed by questions of university entrance/scholarship type. This is a book to be worked through, in a sense a text-book. (shrink)

How do we acquire thoughts and beliefs about particulars by looking at pictures? One kind of reply essentially compares depiction to perception, holding that picture-perception is a form of remote object-perception. Lopes’s theory that pictures refer by demonstrative identification, and Walton’s transparency theory for photographs, constitute such remote acquaintance theories of depiction. The main purpose of this paper is to defend an alternative conception of pictures, on which they are not suitable for acquainting us with particulars but for acquainting us (...) with certain kinds of properties. This conception is outlined in §4, where it is argued that pictures are useful devices for what Heal has called indexical predication. In §2 and §3, I explain why I believe that remote acquaintance theories are false, and why picture-perception cannot function as a form of extended or remote object-perception. The main reason is that the contents of picture-perceptions do not themselves provide the kind of numerical and contextual information required for singular thought. Picture-reference is instead secured by independent beliefs or linguistic communication about the causal history of pictures as objects. In other words, it is beliefs about the numerical identity of pictures as objects that anchors the reference of the representational contents of pictures. (shrink)

Setting the scene -- Sentience and the sentient mind -- Special senses and their interpretation Survival strategies -- Social strategies -- Animals of the waters -- Animals of the air -- Animals of the savannah and plains -- Animals of the forests -- Close neighbours -- Our duty of care.

In this philosophically sophisticated and historically significant work, John H. Zammito reconstructs Kant's composition of The Critique of Judgment and reveals that it underwent three major transformations before publication. He shows that Kant not only made his "cognitive" turn, expanding the project from a "Critique of Taste" to a Critique of Judgment but he also made an "ethical" turn. This "ethical" turn was provoked by controversies in German philosophical and religious culture, in particular the writings of Johann Herder and (...) the Sturm und Drang movement in art and science, as well as the related pantheism controversy. Such topicality made the Third Critique pivotal in creating a "Kantian" movement in the 1790s, leading directly to German Idealism and Romanticism. The austerity and grandeur of Kant's philosophical writings sometimes make it hard to recognize them as the products of a historical individual situated in the particular constellation of his time and society. Here Kant emerges as a concrete historical figure struggling to preserve the achievements of cosmopolitan Aufkl-rung against challenges in natural science, religion, and politics in the late 1780s. More specifically Zammito suggests that Kant's Third Critique was animated throughout by a fierce personal rivalry with Herder and by a strong commitment to traditional Christian ideas of God and human moral freedom. "A work of extraordinary erudition. Zammito's study is both comprehensive and novel, connecting Kant's work with the aesthetic and religious controversies of the late eighteenth century. He seems to have read everything. I know of no comparable historical study of Kant's Third Critique."-Arnulf Zweig, translator and editor of Kant's ;IPhilosophical Correspondence, 1759-1799;X "An intricate, subtle, and exciting explanation of how Kant's thinking developed and adjusted to new challenges over the decade from the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason to the appearance of the Critique of Judgment. "--John W. Burbidge, Review of Metaphysics "There has been for a long time a serious gap in English commentary on Kant's Critique of Judgment Zammito's book finally fills it. All students and scholars of Kant will want to consult it."--Frederick Beiser, Times Literary Supplement. (shrink)

The rift between science and religion needs to be assessed not merely on pragmatic grounds, on the basis of the effect of scientific versus religious beliefs on people's behavior, as John Caiazza's essay does, but also and above all in regard to the cogency of the respective beliefs in reference to what we can reasonably assume is the true face of reality. About such truth value, the conflict is not irremediable; there are elements of belief regarding the nature of (...) reality that are strikingly similar regardless of whether one arrived at them on the basis of faith in revealed knowledge or on the basis of knowledge acquired by reasoning from or in reference to experience. Two such items are selected here by way of example: belief that in certain states of mind and consciousness individuals can experience union with something larger or deeper than themselves, and belief that the universe we inhabit is the result of an original creative act. (shrink)

Obviously medicine should be evidence-based. The issues lie in the details: what exactly counts as evidence? Do certain kinds of evidence carry more weight than others? (And if so why?) And how exactly should medicine be based on evidence? When it comes to these details, the evidence-based medicine (EBM) movement has got itself into a mess – or so it will be argued. In order to start to resolve this mess, we need to go 'back to basics'; and that means (...) turning to the philosophy of science. The theory of evidence, or rather the logic of the interrelations between theory and evidence, has always been central to the philosophy of science – sometimes under the alias of the 'theory of confirmation'. When taken together with a little philosophical commonsense, this logic can help us move towards a position on evidence in medicine that is more sophisticated and defensible than anything that EBM has been able so far to supply. (shrink)

This book investigates the central role of reason in Islamic intellectual life. Despite widespread characterization of Islam as a system of belief based only on revelation, John Walbridge argues that rational methods, not fundamentalism, have characterized Islamic law, philosophy and education since the medieval period. His research demonstrates that this medieval Islamic rational tradition was opposed by both modernists and fundamentalists, resulting in a general collapse of traditional Islamic intellectual life and its replacement by more modern but far shallower (...) forms of thought. However, the resources of this Islamic scholarly tradition remain an integral part of the Islamic intellectual tradition and will prove vital to its revival. The future of Islam, Walbridge argues, will be marked by a return to rationalism"--Provided by publisher. (shrink)

Man controls and dominates the habitat of most animals, both domestic and wild and there is a need for a pragmatic, workable approach to the problem of reconciling animal welfare with economic forces and the needs of man. It is the author's contention that much of the current philosophical discussion of animal welfare is misdirected now that it is possible to measure to some extent what animals think and feel and how much they can appreciate their quality of life. The (...) book deals with farm animals, pets, wild animals and laboratory animals and dicusses their environmental requirements, fear and stress, their response to pain, injury, disease and death, behaviour and aggression, and the implications of biotechnology and genetic engineering. Finally, the book tries to reconcile reverence for life with the inescapability of killing and reviews the prospects of preserving and enhancing quality of life for animals through legislations, education, economic and moral incentives. (shrink)

John Turri gives an example that he thinks refutes what he takes to be “G. E. Moore's view” that omissive assertions such as “It is raining but I do not believe that it is raining” are “inherently ‘absurd'”. This is that of Ellie, an eliminativist who makes such assertions. Turri thinks that these are perfectly reasonable and not even absurd. Nor does she seem irrational if the sincerity of her assertion requires her to believe its content. A commissive counterpart (...) of Ellie is Di, a dialetheist who asserts or believes that The Russell set includes itself but I believe that it is not the case that the Russell set includes itself. Since any adequate explanation of Moore's paradox must handle commissive assertions and beliefs as well as omissive ones, it must deal with Di as well as engage Ellie. I give such an explanation. I argue that neither Ellie's assertion nor her belief is irrational yet both are absurd. Likewise neither Di's assertion nor her belief is irrational yet in contrast neither is absurd. I conclude that not all Moore-paradoxical assertions or beliefs are irrational and that the syntax of Moore's examples is not sufficient for the absurdity found in them. (shrink)

A brief account of educational aims, focussing on preparation for a life of autonomous well-being.