This paper outlines a truth-conditional view of logical form, that is, a view according to which logical form is essentially a matter of truth-conditions. The main motivation for the view is a fact that seems crucial to logic. As _§_1 suggests, fundamental logical relations such as entailment or contradiction can formally be explained only if truth-conditions are formally represented.§2 spells out the view. _§_3 dwells on its anity with a conception of logical form that has been defended in the past. (...) _§§_4-6 draw attention to its impact on three major issues that concern, respectively, the extension of the domain of formal explanation, the semantics of tensed discourse, and the analysis of quantication. (shrink)

Several scholars have recognized the limitations of theories of moral reasoning in explaining moral behavior. They have argued that moral behavior may also be influenced by moral identity, or how central morality is to one’s sense of self. This idea has been supported by findings that people who exemplify moral behavior tend to place more importance on moral traits when defining their self-concepts (Colby & Damon, 1995). This paper takes the next step of examining individual variation in a construct highly (...) associated with immoral behavior — psychopathy. In Study 1, we test the hypothesis that individuals with a greater degree of psychopathic traits have a weaker moral identity. Within a large online sample, we found that individuals who scored higher on a measure of psychopathic traits were less likely to base their self-concepts on moral traits. In Study 2, we test whether this reduced sense of moral identity can be attributed to differences in moral judgment, which is another factor that could influence immoral behavior. Our results indicated that the reduced sense of moral identity among more psychopathic individuals was independent of variation in moral judgment. These results suggest that individuals with psychopathic traits may display immoral behavior partially because they do not construe their personal identities in moral terms. (shrink)

Though widely derided by popular psychologists and self-help writers as an emotionally toxic and destructive response, blame has many defenders among contemporary moral philosophers. Blaming wrongdoers has been thought to express deep commitment to moral values and norms, to be intimately bound up with practices of holding others responsible, and to be an important exercise of moral agency. In this paper I push against the grain of such defenses of blame just enough to articulate what seems right in the more (...) popular lines of critique. I distinguish between blame as a reactive attitude and blaming as a speech act, and argue that some disagreement over the value of blame can be explained by the fact that blaming, as a speech act, takes several distinct forms. Critiques of blame, I suggest, properly target what we might call judgmental or strongly verdictive blaming, the sort of blaming that passes judgment on the wrongdoer him- or herself, and treats him or her as deserving of the blamer’s hostile or “punishing” reactions. This kind of blaming, I argue, tends to foreclose engagement in further moral dialogue with wrongdoers, an effect that is particularly destructive in therapeutic contexts. In such contexts, it is often more appropriate—and more constructive—to hold others answerable without blaming them in the strongly verdictive sense. I argue, moreover, that strongly verdictive blame may be similarly destructive outside of straightforwardly therapeutic contexts, and I challenge the idea that there is in any case a sharp or clear dividing line between therapeutic and non-therapeutic responses to wrongdoers. Holding answerable in a non-judgmental mode is a response that may have a therapeutic dimension, but it nonetheless engages a wrongdoer as a moral peer and partner in moral dialogue. This account of non-judgmental answerability, I suggest, captures much of what moral philosophers have taken to be valuable about blame, while accommodating the insights of those who criticize its more toxic forms. (shrink)

Autonomy, at least in one sense of the term, requires sovereign authority over one’s choices and actions. In this paper, I argue that such authority is relational in at least two respects. First, I argue that sovereign authority may be shared – and, indeed, must be shareable – with others through the exercise of normative powers. Second, I argue that normative powers are themselves relational powers, powers that depend in part on the recognition of agents as having an equal basic (...) authority to exercise such powers in the first place. Drawing on feminist speech-act analyses of silencing and subordination, I examine how failures of uptake for exercises of normative powers compromise personal autonomy. (shrink)

This paper argues that God's immanent causation and Spinoza's account of activity as adequate causation (of finite modes) do not always go together in Spinoza's thought. We show that there is good reason to doubt that this is the case in Spinoza's early Short Treatise on God, Man and His Well‐being. In the Short Treatise, Spinoza defends an account of God's immanent causation without fully endorsing the account of activity as adequate causation that he will later introduce in the Ethics (...) (E3def2). We turn to an examination of how God's immanent causation relates to the activity of finite things in the Ethics. We consider two ways to think about the link between God, seen as immanent cause, and the activity of finite things: namely, in terms of entailment and in terms of production. We argue that the productive model is most promising for understanding the way in which the activity of finite things and God's immanent causality are connected in Spinoza's (mature) philosophy. (shrink)

Both Aristotle and Kant note that the highest form of friendship enables individuals of good virtue to reveal themselves to one another. I argue that Aristotle and Kant emphasize complementary aspects of self-disclosure in friendship: whereas Kant acknowledges the inherent value of self-disclosure in friendship, Aristotle suggests that joint perception in friendship is instrumentally valuable in the acquisition of self-knowledge. I also argue that although Aristotle has a more developed account of friendship, Kant advances a superior account of self-disclosure in (...) friendship in his later remarks on friendship in the Metaphysical Principles of Virtue. (shrink)

Analizamos aquí un conjunto de narrativas de docentes de escuela secundaria durante la pandemia de COVID-19 en la Argentina. Los resultados muestran la transformación de su práctica ante la virtualidad forzada y la pérdida de la materialidad de la escuela. La institución aparece así como el lugar de “lo común” y de fortalecimiento de los vínculos en un contexto de incertidumbre.

Alethic pluralism holds that there are many ways of being true. Such a view has been challenged to make sense of the standard account of logical validity as necessary truth preservation. In this paper, the recent solution elaborated by Aaron Cotnoir, based on an algebraic approach, is shown to be untenable. Some reflections about the relation of many-valued logics with truth pluralism are also discussed.

Recent feminist accounts of autonomy have focused both on autonomous agents’ relationships to others and on their self-regarding attitudes or self-relations. This chapter focuses on the attitude of practical self-care, arguing that autonomous agents must care about themselves in a sense that amounts to caring about their practical reasons. While self-care is primarily a self-relation, it also implies a form of interpersonal relationality. Caring about one’s reasons requires caring about intersubjective assessments thereof, and the relation of self-care thus implies openness (...) to the reasons of others and a disposition to hold oneself answerable for one’s identity-constituting concerns. (shrink)

Eric Weil explicite son concept de reprise en mentionnant une analogie fonctionnelle entre la reprise et le concept kantien de schème. Or, la nature, les conditions et les limites de cette analogie doivent être approfondies. En partant d’une analyse du schème transcendan­tal kantien, l’analogie entre schème et reprise est mise en cause à la lumière de la différence entre les ordres des fonctions que les deux concepts sont destinés à accomplir : d’un côté, le schème opère au niveau transcendantal ; (...) de l’autre côté, la reprise opère soit historique­ment soit philosophiquement (les deux moments étant un, étant donné le rapport entre philosophie et histoire selon Weil). La distance procédurale et conceptuelle entre schème et reprise conduit donc à un degré plus formel de proximité : les deux concepts représentent les conditions méthodologiques des deux logiques (transcendantale et de la philosophie), les principes qui les constituent en tant que logiques, les éléments nécessaires de leur pos­sibilité philosophique, de leur sens en tant que deux types de “logique”. (shrink)

In order to rebut G. E. Moore’s open question argument, ethical naturalists adopt a theory of direct reference for our moral terms. T. Horgan and M. Timmons have argued that this theory cannot be applied to moral terms, on the ground that it clashes with competent speakers’ linguistic intuitions. While Putnam’s Twin Earth thought experiment shows that our linguistic intuitions confirm the theory of direct reference, as applied to ‘water’, Horgan and Timmons devise a parallel thought experiment about moral terms, (...) in order to show that this theory runs against our linguistic intuitions about such terms. My claim is that the Horgan–Timmons argument does not work. I concede that their thought experiment is a good way to test the applicability of the theory of direct reference to moral terms, and argue that the upshot of their experiment is not what they claim it is: our linguistic intuitions about Moral Twin Earth are parallel to, not different from, our intuitions about Twin Earth. (shrink)

In der Tugendlehre Kants findet die allgemeine ethische Orientierung, wie sie der Kategorische Imperativ ausdrückt, Anwendung auf die Bedingungen der menschlichen Existenz. Die vorliegende Untersuchung rekonstruiert den Kantischen Ansatz vor dem Hintergrund der gegenwärtigen, vor allem aristotelischen Tugendethik und löst dabei den Kantischen Tugendbegriff kritisch von seinen zeitbedingten Prägungen. Auf so erneuerter Grundlage wird eine transzendentalphilosophische Ethikkonzeption entfaltet, die den methodischen und inhaltlichen Einsichten der jüngeren Theorieentwicklung Rechnung trägt. Zu den Ergebnissen zählt die Bestimmung einzelner Tugenden, deren ethische Orientierung an (...) konkreten Strukturen unserer alltäglichen Praxis demonstriert wird. (shrink)

Much recent research on child language has been inspired by linguistic principles uncovered by linguists working in the generative framework. Developmental psycholinguists have demonstrated young children’s mastery of a variety of linguistic principles; mostly syntactic principles, but also some semantic principles. The present paper contributes to research on the acquisition of semantics by presenting the findings of a new experiment designed to investigate young children’s knowledge of downward entailment, which is a basic semantic property of Universal Grammar. Section 2 describes (...) how downward entailing operators work in natural languages. Section 3 addresses the issue of how a child could master the complex behavior displayed by downward entailing operators across natural languages. That section also reviews the findings of previous research on children’s knowledge of downward entailment. Section 4 presents the new experiment which was designed to investigate whether children’s knowledge of downward entailment extends to one of its logical properties, as illustrated by one of De Morgan’s laws. Section 5 offers some brief remarks on future research. (shrink)

Montesquieu's respect for moderation is almost universally acknowledged, but not very well understood. In recent scholarship, his moderation has been interpreted as inclusive and pluralistic with a view to the range of regimes that are hospitable to liberty. This paper challenges this currently dominant interpretation of Montesquieu by revisiting his understanding of moderation. On reflection, he does not simply discourage radical change, he even provides advice as to when and how such change is to be enacted. French absolute monarchy requires (...) fundamental change, not least because monarchy as such is not sufficiently accommodating to liberty. While the English commercial republic is better suited to liberty than French monarchy, there is no doubt that monarchy is more attractive than commercial republicanism. Montesquieu offers a profound and perhaps unsettling account of the possible incompatibility of honour, generosity and greatness of spirit, on the one hand, and safety and liberty, on the other. (shrink)

Citizen science models of public participation in scientific research represent a growing area of opportunity for health and biomedical research, as well as new impetus for more collaborative forms of engagement in large-scale research. However, this also surfaces a variety of ethical issues that both fall outside of and build upon the standard human subjects concerns in bioethics. This article provides background on citizen science, examples of current projects in the field, and discussion of established and emerging ethical issues for (...) citizen science in health and biomedical research. (shrink)

These notes contain an annotated edition of the only four extant letters of Burchard de Volder to Philipp van Limborch. In the first letter De Volder provides Van Limborch with some information about the subscription to the Dordrecht Confession of Faith by professors. In the second letter De Volder comments upon Van Limborch’s De veritate religionis Christianae. This letter is interesting as it provides insights into De Volder’s views on religion and theology. The third letter served as a cover letter (...) for De Volder’s sending to Van Limborch a copy of the honestum testimonium on Jacobus Arminius that was requested by Arminius’s widow in 1611. In the fourth letter Volder comments upon the visit that Pieter Burman had paid him. The visit was an episode in the quarrel between Pieter Burman, his brother Frans Burman jr., and Van Limborch, caused by Van Limborch’s remark, in his Theologia Christiana, that Frans Burman sr. had used Spinoza’s words while treating the issue of divine omnipotence in his Synopsis theologiae. (shrink)

Un commentario al § 381 delle "Ricerche filosofiche" di Wittgenstein.

For addressing the problem of negotiating social orders in a way that protects one’s humanity, I have considered Deleuze and Guattari’s intriguing claim in Anti-Oedipus that “a schizophrenic out for a walk is a better model than a neurotic lying on the analyst’s couch‘. I outlined the associated principles of schizoid living developed in Anti-Oedipus via a critique that reverses the value of two Freudian concepts, namely, ”neurosis’ and ”psychosis’. I then cited some of the book’s eulogising ”praise poetry’, which (...) describes the ”schizo’ and connected it to a contemporaneous text, J.M. Coetzee’s Life and Times of Michael K, that addresses the same ethical problem of negotiating social orders. Through the activities and reflections of the novel’s protagonist, Michael K, who might be thought of as “a schizophrenic out for a walk‘, I showed that Coetzee explores various forms of resistance. He investigates the impotence of resistance as the active construction of an alternative story from the alienated position of the ”other’. I pointed out that this strategy fails because it remains within the neurotic desire to construct a coherent narrative. Similarly, I indicated that resistance fails as a gesture of pure refusal akin to schizophrenic antiproduction, because the neurotic response re-appropriates this extremity through self-serving gestures of externalisation. Finally, I pointed out how Coetzee alludes to a kind of resistance that might be called schizoid and that changes the rules of the game. In the novel, K experiments with the first and second options, but cannot make life possible, either as a servant to a social order, on his own terms, or on the absolute outside. Echoing the question posed by Deleuze and Guattari of whether the schizoid ”men of desire’ they praise exist yet, K only dreams of the third option in the novel’s final lines, which detail the thoughts of a man dying of starvation. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to show how the critically acclaimed and award winning film Margin Call may be used in business ethics teaching. Set in a fictional investment bank at the dawn of the financial crisis, the film zooms in on the motivations and decision-making of people who had much to lose from the crash of the hitherto very profitable mortgage-backed securities market. The film offers rich material for analysis of behaviours that contributed to the crisis. The article (...) will set out topics for classroom discussion, including the impact of incentives and power structures, contextual factors that distance people from the consequences of their actions, and considerations of how the banking industry may be transformed. (shrink)

This volume collects new writing on Kant. It offers a broad overview of Kant's importance to and influence on the continental philosophical tradition - the tradition which derives its impetus from Kant's project as developed and rethought by such figures as Heidegger, Derrida and Irigaray.

In this article Mare liberum is placed within the context of seventeenth-century European politics. It focuses on the development of conventional relations between European States regarding their interests outside of Europe and their importance concerning the status of Asian and African 'actors'. It turns out that in spite of Mare liberum's high-sounding proclamation of equality of non-European sovereigns with European States, Grotius's position as well as Dutch policy was inspired by self-interest and was essentially opportunistic. The Dutch Republic – as (...) well as other European States – used the 'liberal' principles of Freedom of trade and the Universality of the Law of Nations to attack the Portuguese/Spanish claims of monopoly. However, as the Dutch Republic, Great Britain and France developed their own 'Spheres of Interest' in Asia, Africa and the Americas, they effectively excluded would-be competitors. Indeed, in the eighteenth century the 'pacte colonial' constituted a distinctive characteristic of the conventional and customary 'European Law of Nations'. As non-European political actors in the eighteenth century relatively lost military and political power, the European States finally relegated them to an inferior position, beyond the charmed circle of full 'subjects of Public International Law'. The article also is a contribution to the ongoing discussion about the relation between European imperialism and the development of the doctrine of European International Law. (shrink)

This essay identifies a connection between the capacities required for individual autonomy and the capacities required for a particular form of shared agency. Like other feminist philosophers, I hold that individual autonomy must be understood in relational terms. In the first section of the essay, I argue that that autonomy is constitutively relational in the sense that it depends upon a dialogical disposition to hold oneself answerable to external, critical perspectives. In the second section, I argue that this disposition is (...) intimately tied to a capacity for symmetrically shared or “joint” deliberation. Joint deliberation is, in my view, a centrally important form of shared agency, particularly in the context of informal, personal relationships such as friendship and love. I argue that, in virtue of its dialogical structure, joint deliberation constitutes us as autonomous in relation to one another. This is because joint deliberation depends on the presence of mutually referring attitudes that are also integral to the individual autonomy of the participants. In the final section of the paper I consider the significance of this argument from a feminist point of view, arguing that, under moderately favorable conditions, we should expect joint deliberation to destabilize acceptance of social norms that are in tension with an agent’s own self-presentation as autonomous. (shrink)

The notion of truth is a central subject both in Philosophy and Mathematical Logic. The logical approach on the one side and the philosophical one on the other, however, mostly deal with problems which, apparently, require different tools to be tackled. In this paper I argue that such a separation can and should be overcome, and, in order to build a bridge, I focus on the philosophical issue of the insubstantiality of truth, which is a crucial topic to distinguish inflationist (...) from deflationist proposals. Elaborating on the interpretation of insubstantiality in terms of the sparse/abundant classification of properties, I put forward a refined version in which certain flaws afflicting other formulations are solved. Then, I show how, using this improved variant, the philosophical notion of abundance can be fruitfully related to the formal notion of expandability of models, if a logical framework is adopted. Among other virtues, the obtained link can shed new light on the debate of deflationism and conservativity. (shrink)

The Center for 21st Century Studies, a UW System Center of Excellence at the University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee campus, is a postdoctoral research institute founded in 1968 to foster crossdisciplinary research in the humanities. This series of occasional, on-line Working Papers provides a forum for rapid distribution of ideas in texts that are not yet ready or suitable for publication in more formal academic publications, but still offer valuable content. Usually the authors of Center Working Papers will be Center (...) fellows, invited speakers, or others with significant ties to the Center, although we reserve the right to make exceptions. We regret that we are unable to consider unsolicited submissions. (shrink)

How do religions and languages interact? This inquiry prompts us to explore not only various religious traditions and their respective languages but also the plurality of linguistic codes. When examined in relation to religious experiences, concepts, and identities, this linguistic plurality becomes interconnected, giving rise to a pluralism that taps into religious paths, practices, texts, stories, and encounters. Reflecting upon the interplay of languages within religious contexts takes us on a journey beyond Babel – a journey beyond a fragmented plurality (...) and toward a polyphonic and embodied unity. The chapters of the book Beyond Babel: Religion and Linguistic Pluralism illuminate different stages of this journey, spanning from the boundaries of language in religious contexts to novel forms of interreligious dialogue. The exploration encompasses translation between sacred and secular languages, as well as the intricate interconnections between religious and scientific codes, and it culminates in an exploration of religion within formal languages. (shrink)

On a dreary spring morning in late October 2006, two policemen drove their cruiser up Nkonjane Road in the K Section of KwaMashu, a former “Africans only” township about fifteen kilometers northwest of Durban. As the cruiser passed over K Section’s softly sloping hills, two men sat handcuffed together in the back. The officers parked the car in front of a house where a woman had reported being raped a few days prior. Leaving the two suspects in the car, the (...) officers alighted and walked up to the home. After greeting the victim, they asked her to step outside to identify the men. The victim, upon seeing the two men seated in the squad car, loudly screamed that they were the rapists... The crowd... (shrink)

This study is concerned with the properties of the disjunction operator, or, and the acquisition of these properties by English-speaking children. Previous research has concluded that adult truth conditions for logical connectives are acquired relatively late in the course of language development. With particular reference to disjunction, the results of several studies have led to two claims. First, it has been argued that the full range of truth-conditions associated with inclusive-or is not initially available to children; instead, children are supposed (...) to interpret disjunction using the truth conditions that are associated with exclusive-or (e.g., Beilin and Lust 1975; Braine and Rumain 1981, 1983; Paris 1973). A second, related claim is that even when children respond as if they have access to the complete range of truth conditions, their responses result from the failure to distinguish or from and (Paris, 1973). Different conclusions were reached in recent work by Chierchia, Crain, Guasti and Thornton (1998). The experiments conducted by Chierchia et al. (1998) draw upon a distinction between linguistic contexts. In one type of context, the inclusive-or reading of disjunction is available. By contrast, in another type of context, the exclusive-or reading of disjunction is highly preferred; the truth conditions that are uniquely associated with the inclusive-or reading are eliminated in such contexts due to conversational implicatures. One context that cancels conversational implicatures is called the Prediction Mode by Chierchia et al. (1998). Notice that a prediction like (1) is consistent with different scenarios. (shrink)