Situated in a period that witnessed the genesis of institutions that have lasted to this day, this path-breaking study looks at how ancient Christian women, particularly in Asia Minor and Egypt, initiated ascetic ways of living, and how these practices were then institutionalized. Susanna Elm demonstrates that--in direct contrast to later conceptions--asceticism began primarly as an urban movement, in which women were significant protagonists. In the process, they completely transformed and expanded their roles as wife, mother, or widow: as (...) Christian ascetics, they became `virgin wives', `virgin mothers', and `virgin widows' - with all the legal and economic implications of such a dramatic shift. As importantly, though, Christian men and women ascetics lived together. As `virgins of God' they created new families `in Christ'. No longer determined by their human bonds or human sexuality, they were `neither male nor female'. Finally, the book demonstrates how ascetic bishops - today known as saints - eventually `reformed' these early models of communal, ascetic life by dividing the `virgins of God' into monks and nuns and thus laid the foundation for the monasticism we know today. (shrink)

Today the medical community faces a number of pressing issues. Molecular and high-tech medicine, despite their tremendous successes, also burden us with new ethical dilemmas: when and how to die, whose life to preserve, whether to modify genes and to create life, and how to pay for it all. Furthermore, alternative methods appear to work at least for certain disorders. They are popular and definitely cost less, while the spiraling costs of conventional medicine have led to the development of managed (...) care and health economy assessments with controversial consequences. An international symposium in Berlin, in September 1999, sought to address some of these issues by sparking an interdisciplinary discussion gathering leading experts in the field of genetics, robotic surgery, medical ethics, preventive health and health economics, history, and law. This book contains all the contributions and seeks to involve scholars and medical practitioners who are interested in shaping the future of medicine. (shrink)

This article explores how economic inequality in the United States has led to growing levels of poverty, food insecurity, and obesity for the bottom segments of the economy. It takes the position that access to nutritious food is a requirement for living and for participating fully in the workplace and society. Because of increasing economic inequality in the United States, growing segments of the U.S. economy have become more food insecure and obese, eating unhealthy food for survival and suffering an (...) erosion of “equality of capabilities” that undermines their ability to play a “full and active part in the functioning of community.” Unequal access to nutritious foods in the United States is attributable in part to an industrial food system that is designed to produce short-term profits for industrial food producers, processors, and distributors that extract surplus labor value through market concentration and opportunistic behavior at the expense of the long-term benefits for consumers, food workers, and ecosystems. Economic inequality, food insecurity, and the erosion of equality of capabilities in the United States have given rise to protest movements, social movements, social innovations, and some modest strengthening of regulations to make access to and consumption of healthy food a right for every person. Implications for business and society research are explored. (shrink)

What do we see? We are visually conscious of colors and shapes, but are we also visually conscious of complex properties such as being John Malkovich? In this book, Susanna Siegel develops a framework for understanding the contents of visual experience, and argues that these contents involve all sorts of complex properties. Siegel starts by analyzing the notion of the contents of experience, and by arguing that theorists of all stripes should accept that experiences have contents. She then introduces (...) a method for discovering the contents of experience: the method of phenomenal contrast. This method relies only minimally on introspection, and allows rigorous support for claims about experience. She then applies the method to make the case that we are conscious of many kinds of properties, of all sorts of causal properties, and of many other complex properties. She goes on to use the method to help analyze difficult questions about our consciousness of objects and their role in the contents of experience, and to reconceptualize the distinction between perception and sensation. Siegel's results are important for many areas of philosophy, including the philosophy of mind, epistemology, and the philosophy of science. They are also important for the psychology and cognitive neuroscience of vision. (shrink)

There is an important division in the human mind between perception and reasoning. We reason from information that we have already, but perception is a means of taking in new information. Susanna Siegel argues that these two aspects of the mind become deeply intertwined when beliefs, fears, desires, or prejudice influence what we perceive.

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Volume 104, Issue 2, Page 434-453, March 2022.

There is an important division in the human mind between perception and reasoning. We reason from information that we have already, but perception is a means of taking in new information. Susanna Siegel argues that these two aspects of the mind become deeply intertwined when beliefs, fears, desires, or prejudice influence what we perceive.

This article examines the problems of forming the technological competence of various scientists. In the process of training future specialists in various industries, the authors propose methods and means for the formation of technological competence: the introduction of a special course into the educational process, which is aimed at developing the professionally important qualities of a specialist; application of gaming technology and project method in the classroom in special disciplines; passing by students of industrial practice; creating a portfolio.

Perception grounds demonstrative reference, yields singular thoughts, and fixes the reference of singular terms. Moreover, perception provides us with knowledge of particulars in our environment and justifies singular thoughts about particulars. How does perception play these cognitive and epistemic roles in our lives? I address this question by exploring the fundamental nature of perceptual experience. I argue that perceptual states are constituted by particulars and discuss epistemic, ontological, psychologistic, and semantic approaches to account for perceptual particularity.

Sometimes different partitions of the same space each seem to divide that space into propositions that call for equal epistemic treatment. Famously, equal treatment in the form of equal point-valued credence leads to incoherence. Some have argued that equal treatment in the form of equal interval-valued credence solves the puzzle. This paper shows that, once we rule out intervals with extreme endpoints, this proposal also leads to incoherence.

This paper defends a principle I call Equal Treatment, according to which the rationality of a belief is determined in precisely the same way as the rationality of any other state. For example, if wearing a raincoat is rational just in case doing so maximizes expected value, then believing some proposition P is rational just in case doing so maximizes expected value. This contrasts with the popular view that the rationality of belief is determined by evidential support. It also contrasts (...) with the common idea that in the case of belief, there are two different incommensurable senses of rationality, one of which is distinctively epistemic. I present considerations that favor Equal Treatment over these two alternatives, reply to objections, and criticize some arguments for Evidentialism. I also show how Equal Treatment opens the door to a distinctive kind of response to skepticism. (shrink)

My replies to Errol Lord, Adam Pautz, and Peter Railton's commentaries on The Rationality of Perception (2017).

I argue that any account of perceptual experience should satisfy the following two desiderata. First, it should account for the particularity of perceptual experience, that is, it should account for the mind-independent object of an experience making a difference to individuating the experience. Second, it should explain the possibility that perceptual relations to distinct environments could yield subjectively indistinguishable experiences. Relational views of perceptual experience can easily satisfy the first but not the second desideratum. Representational views can easily satisfy the (...) second but not the first desideratum. I argue that to satisfy both desiderata perceptual experience is best conceived of as fundamentally both relational and representational. I develop a view of perceptual experience that synthesizes the virtues of relationalism and representationalism, by arguing that perceptual content is constituted by potentially gappy de re modes of presentation. (shrink)

Perception is our key to the world. It plays at least three different roles in our lives. It justifies beliefs and provides us with knowledge of our environment. It brings about conscious mental states. It converts informational input, such as light and sound waves, into representations of invariant features in our environment. Corresponding to these three roles, there are at least three fundamental questions that have motivated the study of perception. How does perception justify beliefs and yield knowledge of our (...) environment? How does perception bring about conscious mental states? How does a perceptual system accomplish the feat of converting varying informational input into mental representations of invariant features in our environment? -/- This book presents a unified account of the phenomenological and epistemological role of perception that is informed by empirical research. So it develops an account of perception that provides an answer to the first two questions, while being sensitive to scientific accounts that address the third question. The key idea is that perception is constituted by employing perceptual capacities - for example the capacity to discriminate instances of red from instances of blue. Perceptual content, consciousness, and evidence are each analyzed in terms of this basic property of perception. Employing perceptual capacities constitutes phenomenal character as well as perceptual content. The primacy of employing perceptual capacities in perception over their derivative employment in hallucination and illusion grounds the epistemic force of perceptual experience. In this way, the book provides a unified account of perceptual content, consciousness, and evidence. (shrink)

Those who model doxastic states with a set of probability functions, rather than a single function, face a pressing challenge: can they provide a plausible decision theory compatible with their view? Adam Elga and others claim that they cannot, and that the set of functions model should be rejected for this reason. This paper aims to answer this challenge. The key insight is that the set of functions model can be seen as an instance of the supervaluationist approach to vagueness (...) more generally. We can then generate our decision theory by applying the general supervaluationist semantics to decision-theoretic claims. The result: if an action is permissible according to all functions in the set, it’s determinately permissible; if impermissible according to all, determinately impermissible; and – crucially – if permissible according to some, but not all, it’s indeterminate whether it’s permissible. This proposal handles with ease some difficult cases ) on which alternative decision theories falter. One reason this view has been overlooked in the literature thus far is that all parties to the debate presuppose that an acceptable decision theory must classify each action as either permissible or impermissible. But I will argue that this thought is misguided. Seeing the set of functions model as an instance of supervaluationism provides a compelling motivation for the claim that there can be indeterminacy in the rationality of some actions. (shrink)

Perceptions guide our actions and provide us with evidence of the world around us. Illusions and hallucinations can mislead us: they may prompt as to act in ways that do not mesh with the world around us and they may lead us to form false beliefs about that world. The capacity view provides an account of evidence that does justice to these two facts. It shows in virtue of what illusions and hallucinations mislead us and prompt us to act. Moreover, (...) it shows in virtue of what we are in a better epistemic position when we perceive than when we hallucination. In this paper, I develop the capacity view, that is, the view that perceptual experience has epistemic force in virtue of the epistemic and metaphysical primacy of the perceptual capacities employed in perception. By grounding the epistemic force of experience in facts about the metaphysical structure of experience, the capacity view is not only an externalist view, but moreover a naturalistic view of the epistemology of perceptual experience. So it is an externalist and naturalistic alternative to reliabilism. I discuss the repercussions of this view for the justification of beliefs and the epistemic transparency of mental states, as well as, familiar problem cases. (shrink)

Siegel and Byrne debate whether perceptual experiences present rich properties or exclusively thin properties.

The private provision of security services has attracted a great deal of recent attention, both professional and popular. Much of that attention suggests the questioned moral legitimacy of the private vs. public provision of security. Linking the literature on moral legitimacy and responsibility from new institutional and stakeholder theories, we examine the relationship between moral legitimacy and responsible behavior by both private security companies (PSCs) and their stakeholders. We ask what the moral-legitimacy-enhancing responsibilities of both might be, and contribute to (...) both literatures and their managerial implications by detailing the content of those responsibilities, emphasizing the reciprocal nature of moral obligations. We suggest that the moral legitimacy of the industry depends upon responsible behavior by both PSCsandtheir stakeholders. (shrink)

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Volume 104, Issue 1, Page 3-18, January 2022.

Evidentialists and Pragmatists about reasons for belief have long been in dialectical stalemate. However, recent times have seen a new wave of Evidentialists who claim to provide arguments for their view which should be persuasive even to someone initially inclined toward Pragmatism. This paper reveals a central flaw in this New Evidentialist project: their arguments rely on overly demanding necessary conditions for a consideration to count as a genuine reason. In particular, their conditions rule out the possibility of pragmatic reasons (...) for action. Since the existence of genuine pragmatic reasons for action is common ground between the Evidentialist and the Pragmatist, this problem for the New Evidentialist arguments is fatal. The upshot is that the deadlock between these two positions is restored: neither side can claim to be in possession of an argument that could convince the other. As it happens, I myself favor Pragmatism about reasons for belief, and although I don't claim to be able to convince a committed Evidentialist, I do make a prima facie case for Pragmatism by describing particular scenarios in which it seems to be true. I then go on to develop my own preferred version of the view: Robust Pragmatism, according to which a consideration never constitutes a reason for believing a proposition purely in virtue of being evidence for it. (shrink)

In recent years, digital tools, such as WhatsApp, have been increasingly deployed to support group interaction and collaboration in higher education contexts. To understand contemporary, digitally-mediated collaborative dynamics – including the role played by tutors and the situated nature of group development – robust and innovative methodologies are needed. In this paper, we illustrate how integrating qualitative methods with quantitative tools used in qualitative ways makes it possible to trace how tutors adapt their style to support group development, which in (...) turn triggers student development in a circular and responsive process. To make visible this contemporary phenomenon, we combine thematic content analysis – a qualitative tool – with a quantitative method: Social Network Analysis. Drawing on data generated by two WhatsApp learning groups in research exploring the collaborative construction of boundary objects in a master’s level “E-learning Psychology” course, we suggest that our methodological approach has the potential to support interrogation of complex and dynamic digitally-mediated group interactions. Our results show the situational nature of an effective tutorship style through its complex adaptation to learners’ maturity, digital tools, and learning goals. (shrink)

El trabajo desarrolla una crítica y una propuesta sobre el uso de la calificación de vulnerable desde una perspectiva de género. A partir de un análisis crítico del concepto de autonomía clásica, se propone como científicamente más productiva la noción de autonomía relacional, que se considera más apta para explicar las acciones humanas reales, de personas no idealizadas, y se revela capaz de dar sentido al caso de las acciones relativamente constreñidas. Desde esta perspectiva se aborda el análisis de algunos (...) casos reales de aplicación del derecho donde la calificación de vulnerabilidad aplicada al contexto se muestra útil para identificar un espacio de derecho positivo perjudicial para las mujeres o las minorías. (shrink)

Will stakeholder theory continue to transform how we think about business and society? On the occasion of this journal’s 60th anniversary, this review article examines the journal’s role in shaping stakeholder theory to date and suggests that it still has transformative potential. We conducted a bibliometric analysis of co-citations in the literature from 1984 to 2020. Reporting these results, we examine the field’s evolving structure. Contextualized theoretically as an accomplishment of institutional work—the creation of a meaningful and innovative field ideology—this (...) structure is remarkable for how it integrates ethical and behavioral arguments, invites engagement from adjacent domains, and arrives at important insights for business and society. We advance a research agenda consistent with this larger institutional project. (shrink)

Noting the pervasiveness of the adoption of "responsibility" as a core ideal of neoliberal governance, the contributors to Competing Responsibilities challenge contemporary understandings and critiques of that concept in political, social, and ethical life. They reveal that neoliberalism's reification of the responsible subject masks the myriad forms of individual and collective responsibility that people engage with in their everyday lives, from accountability, self-sufficiency, and prudence to care, obligation, and culpability. The essays—which combine social theory with ethnographic research from Europe, North (...) America, Africa, and New Zealand—address a wide range of topics, including critiques of corporate social responsibility practices; the relationships between public and private responsibilities in the context of state violence; the tension between calls on individuals and imperatives to groups to prevent the transmission of HIV; audit culture; and how health is cast as a citizenship issue. Competing Responsibilities allows for the examination of modes of responsibility that extend, challenge, or coexist with the neoliberal focus on the individual cultivation of the self. Contributors Barry D. Adam, Elizabeth Anne Davis, Filippa Lentzos, Jessica Robbins-Ruszkowski, Nikolas Rose, Rosalind Shaw, Cris Shore, Jessica M. Smith, Susanna Trnka, Catherine Trundle, Jarrett Zigon. (shrink)

This paper proposes that the question “What should I believe?” is to be answered in the same way as the question “What should I do?,” a view I call Equal Treatment. After clarifying the relevant sense of “should,” I point out advantages that Equal Treatment has over both simple and subtle evidentialist alternatives, including versions that distinguish what one should believe from what one should get oneself to believe. I then discuss views on which there is a distinctively epistemic sense (...) of should. Next I reply to an objection which alleges that non-evidential considerations cannot serve as reasons for which one believes. I then situate Equal Treatment in a broader theoretical framework, discussing connections to rationality, justification, knowledge, and theoretical vs. practical reasoning. Finally, I show how Equal Treatment has important implications for a wide variety of issues, including the status of religious belief, philosophical skepticism, racial profiling and gender stereotyping, and certain issues in psychology, such as depressive realism and positive illusions. (shrink)

A number of Bayesians claim that, if one has no evidence relevant to a proposition P, then one's credence in P should be spread over the interval [0, 1]. Against this, I argue: first, that it is inconsistent with plausible claims about comparative levels of confidence; second, that it precludes inductive learning in certain cases. Two motivations for the view are considered and rejected. A discussion of alternatives leads to the conjecture that there is an in-principle limitation on formal representations (...) of belief: they cannot be both fully accurate and maximally specific. (shrink)

The introduction of social distancing, as part of efforts to try and curb the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, has brought about drastic disruption to the world of the performing arts. In the UK the majority of professional orchestral musicians are freelance and therefore self-employed. These players, previously engaged in enjoyable, busy, successful, portfolio careers, are currently unable to earn a living carrying out their everyday work of performing music, and their future working lives are surrounded by great uncertainty. The (...) aim of the present study was to examine how established professional musicians are experiencing this period, and to look for similarities and differences between the experiences of musicians in the middle of their performing careers, with those of older players. Single semi-structured interviews were carried out over Zoom with 24 freelance, self-employed orchestral musicians; 12 mid-career musicians aged 35–45, and 12 seasoned musicians aged 53 and over. Thematic analysis identified themes common to both groups: the loss of a much-loved performing career, missing music making and colleagues, and anxiety about the future of the music profession. It also identified differences between the two groups: challenges to their identity as a musician, the extent of their anxiety about finances, the extent of their emotional distress, attitudes toward practicing and engaging in collaborative music making, and confusion over future career plans. Findings are discussed with reference to lifespan models of musicians' career development, the PERMA model of wellbeing, and the concept of resilience. (shrink)

I am deeply indebted to Alex Byrne, Jonathan Cohen and Matthew McGrath for their careful, constructive, and penetrating comments on The Unity of Perception and I am grateful for the opportunity to clarify my view further.

Some prominent evidentialists argue that practical considerations cannot be normative reasons for belief because they can’t be motivating reasons for belief. Existing pragmatist responses turn out to depend on the assumption that it’s possible to believe in the absence of evidence. The evidentialist may deny this, at which point the debate ends in an impasse. I propose a new strategy for the pragmatist. This involves conceding that belief in the absence of evidence is impossible. We then argue that evidence can (...) play a role in bringing about belief without being a motivating reason for belief, thereby leaving room for practical considerations to serve as motivating reasons. I present two ways in which this can happen. First, agents can use evidence as a mere means by which to believe, with practical considerations serving as motivating reasons for belief, just as we use tools (e.g. a brake pedal) as mere means by which to do something (e.g. slow down) which we are motivated to do for practical reasons. Second, evidence can make it possible for one to choose whether or not to believe – a choice one can then make for practical reasons. These arguments push the debate between the evidentialist and the pragmatist into new territory. It is no longer enough for an evidentialist to insist that belief is impossible without evidence. Even if this is right, the outcome of the debate remains unsettled. It will hang on the ability of the evidentialist to respond to the new pragmatist strategy presented here. (shrink)

In part one I present a positive argument for the claim that philosophical argument can rationally overturn common sense. It is widely agreed that science can overturn common sense. But every scientific argument, I argue, relies on philosophical assumptions. If the scientific argument succeeds, then its philosophical assumptions must be more worthy of belief than the common sense proposition under attack. But this means there could be a philosophical argument against common sense, each of whose premises is just as worthy (...) of belief as the scientist’s philosophical assumptions. If so, then the purely philosophical argument will also succeed. In part two I consider three motivations, each of which comprises a distinct philosophical methodology, for the opposing view: (1) the Moorean idea that common sense enjoys greater plausibility than philosophy; (2) case judgments should trump general principles; (3) reflective equilibrium and conservatism. I argue that all three motivations fail. (shrink)