The phrase ‘teaching and learning’ has essentially replaced the word ‘teaching’ in educational discourse. The linguistic shift occurred as part of a wider movement in the 1980s and 1990s to give greater attention to learning in the educational process, and the phrase served a sloganistic function. With the learning paradigm now largely uncontroversial, the phrase—like other ex-slogans—may now be carrying implications more tied to its literal meaning. This paper suggests that the constant reference to learning in the context of teaching (...) carries the implication that teaching is always accompanied by learning. After applying Gilbert Ryle’s distinction between task and achievement verbs, the paper argues that under certain interpretations, the idea that teaching implies learning is deeply problematic. The paper proposes that we instead use ‘teaching and studying’: to communicate the deep connections between the activities carried out by teachers and students, without supporting the unhelpful idea that the activity of teaching must always lead to the achievement of learning. (shrink)

The Java® programming language is a general-purpose, concurrent, object-oriented language. Its syntax is similar to C and C++, but it omits many of the features that make C and C++ complex, confusing, and unsafe. The Java platform was initially developed to address the problems of building software for networked consumer devices. It was designed to support multiple host architectures and to allow secure delivery of software components. To meet these requirements, compiled code had to survive transport across networks, operate on (...) any client, and assure the client that it was safe to run. (shrink)

Robotic warfare has now become a real prospect. One issue that has generated heated debate concerns the development of ‘Killer Robots’. These are weapons that, once programmed, are capable of finding and engaging a target without supervision by a human operator. From a conceptual perspective, the debate on Killer Robots has been rather confused, not least because it is unclear how central elements of these weapons can be defined. Offering a precise take on the relevant conceptual issues, the article contends (...) that Killer Robots are best seen as executors of targeting decisions made by their human programmers. However, from a normative perspective, the execution of targeting decisions by Killer Robots should worry us. The article argues that what is morally bad about Killer Robots is that they replace human agency in warfare with artificial agency, a development which should be resisted. Finally, the article contends that the issue of agency points to a wider problem in just war theory, namely the role of moral rights in our normative reasoning on armed conflict. (shrink)

While those who take a "structuralist" approach to racial justice issues are right to call attention to the importance of social practices, laws, etc., they sometimes go too far by suggesting that antiracist efforts ought to focus on changing unjust social systems rather than changing individuals’ minds. We argue that while the “either/or” thinking implied by this framing is intuitive and pervasive, it is misleading and self-undermining. We instead advocate for a “both/and” approach to antiracist moral education that explicitly teaches (...) how social structures influence ideas about race and how ideas about race shape, sustain, and transform social structures. Ideally, antiracist moral education will help people see how social change and moral progress depend on the symbiotic relations between individuals and structures. We articulate a conception of “structure-facing virtue” that exemplifies this hybrid approach to illuminate the pivotal role moral education plays in the fight for racial justice. (shrink)

The “fair benefits” approach to international research is designed to produce results that all can agree are fair without taking a stand on divisive questions of justice. But its appealing veneer of collaboration masks ambiguities at both a conceptual and an operational level. An attempt to put it into practice would look a lot like an auction, leaving little reason to think the outcomes will satisfy even minimal conditions of fairness.

I distinguish two different kinds of practical stakes associated with propositions. The W-stakes track what is at stake with respect to whether the proposition is true or false. The A-stakes track what is at stake with respect to whether an agent believes the proposition. This poses a dilemma for those who claim that whether a proposition is known can depend on the stakes associated with it. Only the W-stakes reading of this view preserves intuitions about knowledge-attributions, but only the A-stakes (...) reading preserves the putative link between knowledge and practical reasoning that has motivated it. (shrink)

This article argues that lingering uncertainty about the normative foundations of research ethics is perpetuated by two unfounded dogmas of research ethics. The first dogma is that clinical research, as a social activity, is an inherently utilitarian endeavor. The second dogma is that an acceptable framework for research ethics must impose constraints on this endeavor whose moral force is grounded in role-related obligations of either physicians or researchers. This article argues that these dogmas are common to traditional articulations of the (...) equipoise requirement and to recently articulated alternatives, such as the non-exploitation approach. Moreover, important shortcomings of these approaches can be traced to their acceptance of these dogmas. After highlighting these shortcomings, this article illustrates the benefits of rejecting these dogmas by sketching the broad outlines of an alternative called the "integrative approach" to clinical research. (shrink)

Before participants can be enrolled in a clinical trial, an institutional review board must determine that the risks that the research poses to participants are ‘reasonable.’ This paper examines the two dominant frameworks for assessing research risks and argues that each approach suffers from significant shortcomings. It then considers what issues must be addressed in order to construct a framework for risk assessment that is grounded in a compelling normative foundation and might provide more operationally precise guidance to the deliberations (...) of various stakeholders. The paper concludes by sketching the outlines of what is referred to as the ‘Integrative Approach’ to risk assessment and by highlighting some of the ways in which this approach may be more promising than current alternatives. (shrink)

It's often said that it is impossible to respond to non-evidential considerations in belief-formation, at least not directly and consciously. Many philosophers think that this provides grounds for accepting a normative thesis: typically, some kind of evidentialism about reasons for belief, or what one ought to believe. Some also think it supports thinking that evidentialist norms are constitutive of belief. There are a variety of ways in which one might try to support such theses by appeal to the impossibility-claim. In (...) this paper, I put pressure on these various attempts by raising a simple yet overlooked problem for them. In brief, the problem is that it isn't true that one cannot (directly and consciously) respond, in belief-formation to considerations that don't actually constitute (good) evidence for the proposition under consideration; what is true, at most, is that one cannot (directly and consciously) respond, in belief-formation to considerations that one oneself takes to be evidentially irrelevant to that proposition. While this point is obvious once stated, its significance hasn't been appreciated, or so I'll argue. Once we take full account of it, the standard arguments from the impossibility-claim to evidentialism don't go through. (shrink)

We extract some properties of Mahlo’s operation and show that some other very natural operations share these properties. The weakly compact sets form a similar hierarchy as the stationary sets. The height of this hierarchy is a large cardinal property connected to saturation properties of the weakly compact ideal.

In the preface, Kim writes hopefully that his introduction to the philosophy of mind is “intended to be accessible to those without a formal background in philosophy”. The blurb at the end is more realistic: Philosophy of Mind is “a textbook for upper-level undergraduates and graduate students”. It is an admirable addition to Westview’s excellent Dimensions of Philosophy series. Brisk, workmanlike chapters profile the usual suspects: behaviorism, the identity theory, mind as computer and as causal structure, mental causation, consciousness, mental (...) content, and reductive and nonreductive physicalism. Each chapter ends with a useful note on further readings. (shrink)

The “happy fish” passage in the Zhuangzi 莊子 is often interpreted as endorsing some form of perspectivism which precludes objective claims of knowledge and displaces the significance of human perspectives. Relativism has gained particular currency in contemporary readings. However, this essay aims to show the limited explanatory power of such relativist positions, with focus on Chad Hansen’s “perspectival relativism” and Lea Cantor’s “species relativism.” I will also offer a new, “transitional contextualist” reading, which intends to demonstrate that Zhuangzi’s utterance is (...) grounded in his epistemic context and that Huizi’s 惠子 disputation arises from his changing of the epistemic context, from one with quotidian “low standards” to one with “high-standards” skeptical demands. I further argue that when “wandering” (you 遊) is understood as a freedom from one’s partial perspective, it becomes clear how Zhuangzi analogizes a parallel with the fish’s “wandering” through a continuity between his “world” and that of the fish. (shrink)

The threat of biological and chemical terrorism highlights a growing tension in research ethics between respecting the interests of individuals and safeguarding and protecting the common good. But what it actually means to protect the common good is rarely scrutinized. There are two conceptions of the common good that provide very different accounts of the limits of permissible medical research. Decisions about the limits of acceptable medical research in defense of the common good should be carried out only within the (...) latter framework. (shrink)

Abstract:The commentaries of Wang Bi (226–249 c.e.), who coined a substantial part of the xuanxue 玄學 tradition, represent one of the most systematic attempts in early China to explore language as limited in its capabilities of expression and how language can be used to deal with issues beyond the reach of language itself. However, few studies on Wang Bi explore his philosophy of language. Therefore, the relationship between what can and cannot be expressed through language, and what lies beyond these (...) limits, is explored via a comparison with the early works of Ludwig Wittgenstein, who himself described this issue as "the cardinal problem of philosophy." I argue that Wang Bi and Wittgenstein share a similar hermeneutical approach, centered on the deficiency of language in mapping determinate sense beyond the manifest world. The factuality of the universe is therefore ineffable and "mystical," and silence becomes an indispensable means of expression. (shrink)

I argue here that the impairment principle requires clarification. It needs to explain what makes one impairment greater than another, otherwise we will be unable to make the comparisons it requires, the ones that enable us to determine whether b really is a greater impairment than a, and as a result, whether causing b is immoral because causing a is. I then develop two of what I think are the most natural accounts of what might make one impairment greater than (...) another. The quantitative understanding of greater impairment is problematic because it leaves the impairment principle vulnerable to counterexamples; just because impairment b impairs a larger number of abilities or the same number of abilities but for a longer period or to a higher degree does not mean that b is a greater impairment than a. The qualitative understanding of greater impairment is problematic because it does not explain examples of greater impairment used in the literature, means that an abortion is always a qualitatively more severe impairment than causing fetal alcohol syndrome regardless of how the organism is affected, and/or entails that lethal impairment is always greater than nonlethal impairment. (shrink)

Geach's account of the Aristotelian logic of categorical sentences supplemented the views shared by Frege, Russell, Quine and others. I argue that this particular predicate logic approach and Geach's points apply to only one variety of natural language categorical sentences. For example, it takes the universal categorical as a universal conditional “If anything is a man, then it is mortal”. A different natural language form can and should be invoked: “Every man is a mortal.” Employing special restricted quantifiers in a (...) version of predicate logic, we justify a full square of opposition and the rules of quality and quantity that Geach rejected. (shrink)

Cohen begins by defining ‘Color Physicalism’ so that the position is incompatible with Color Relationalism (unlike Byrne and Hilbert 2003, 7, and note 18). Physicalism, in any event, is something of a distraction, since Cohen’s argument from perceptual variation is directed against any view on which minor color misperception is common (Byrne and Hilbert 2004). A typical color primitivist, for example, is equally vulnerable to the argument. Suppose that normal human observers S1 and S2 are viewing a chip C, as (...) in Cohen’s example. C looks unique green to S1, and bluish green to S2. The problem, as Cohen has it, is to explain “what could (metaphysically) make it the case” that S1, say, and not S2, is perceiving C correctly. He purports to find the explanation “extremely hard to imagine”, and so concludes that both S1 and S2 are perceiving C correctly. (That is not the only option, of course: Hardin concludes that neither is perceiving the chip correctly.). (shrink)

Commonly we distinguish the strike of a match, as a cause of the match lighting, from the presence of oxygen, as a mere condition. In this paper I propose an account of this phenomenon, which I call causal selection. I suggest some reasons for taking causal selection seriously, and indicate some shortcomings of the popular contrastive approach. Chief among these is the lack of an account of contrast choice. I propose that contrast choice is often just the counterfactual scenario in (...) which the effect does not occur: I suggest that if c causes e , then if e hadn't occurred, c wouldn't have occurred. I argue that this is a necessary condition on causation which causes meet but mere conditions fail. (shrink)

A semantic framework for interpreting dialogue should provide an account of the content that is mutually accepted by its participants. The acceptance by one agent of another’s contribution crucially involves the theory of what that contribution means; A’s acceptance of B’s contribution means that the content of B’s contribution must be integrated into A’s extant commitments.1 For assertions, traditionally assumed to express a proposition formalised as a set of possible worlds, it was clear how the integration should go: acceptance meant (...) intersecting the newly accepted proposition with the set of worlds representing the content of the agent’s prior commitments. Dynamic semantics (e.g., Asher (1989)) refined this picture by replacing intersection with the operation of dynamic update. The way to treat the negative counterpart of acceptance—namely, rejection—is also clear in principle: A s rejection of B’s assertion means that the negation of the content of B’s contribution should be integrated with the content of A’s prior commitments. However, acceptance and rejection don’t just happen with assertions. These speech acts can happen with questions as well. That is, an agent can choose to address the issues raised by the questioner; he can also choose to reject them. The explicit acceptance of a question can be conveyed by providing a direct answer or by an explicit admittance that one doesn’t know an answer; explicit rejection by uttering I won’t answer. (shrink)

The definitions of disease proffered by philosophers and medical actors typically require that a state of ill health be linked to some known bodily dysfunction before it is classified as a disease. I argue that such definitions of disease are not fully implementable in current medical discourse and practice. Adhering to the definitions would require that medical actors keep close track of the current state of knowledge on the causes and mechanisms of particular illnesses. Yet, unaddressed problems in medical terminology (...) can make this difficult to do. I show that unrecognized misuse of “heterogeneous,” “biomarker,” and other important health terms—which I call index terms—can misrepresent the current empirical evidence on illness pathophysiology, such that unvalidated illness constructs become mistaken for diseases. Thus, implementing common definitions of disease would require closing this “loophole” in medical discourse. I offer a simple rule that, if followed, could help do just that. (shrink)

Alex Blum ABSTRACT: We argue that the part of the future which is up to us is in principle unknowable. Download PDF.

This article argues that considerations about the role and predictability of intellectual innovation make the protection of intellectual property morally obligatory even when it greatly reduces short-term welfare. Since the provision of good new ideas is the only productive input not subject to decreasing marginal productivity, welfarist considerations require that no impediment to its maximal provision be erected and the potentially substantial welfare losses imposed by a patent system be mitigated by taxation of other sources of wealth and income. Key (...) Words: patent system • welfarism • decreasing marginal productivity. (shrink)

Humans face many game problems that are too large for the whole game tree to be used in their deliberations about action, and very little is understood about how they cope in such scenarios. However, when a human player’s chosen strategy is conditioned on her limited perspective of how the game might progress, then it should be possible to manipulate her into changing her planned move by mentioning a possible outcome of an alternative move. This paper demonstrates that human players (...) can be manipulated this way: in the game The Settlers of Catan, where negotiation is only a small part of what one must do to win the game thereby generating uncertainty about which outcomes to the negotiation are good and which are bad, the likelihood that a player accepts a trade offer that deviates from their declared preferred strategy is higher if it is accompanied by a description of what that trade offer can lead to. (shrink)

. The ‘common good’ spirituality of Louis-Joseph Lebret and his influence in the Constitution and development thinking in Brazil. Journal of Global Ethics: Vol. 17, Lebret and the Projects of Économie Humaine, Integral Human Development, and Development Ethics, Guest Editors Des Gasper and Lori Keleher, pp. 185-203.

Political scientists generally consider that the incentive for legislators to switch parties lies in their desire to be re-elected. While some scholars attribute defection to the legislators’ popularity and strong connections with their constituents which enable them to be re-elected without relying on party labels, others assert that legislators switch if they perceive that staying put might threaten their chances of re-election. In this paper, we find that the two assumptions, to some extent, contradict each other. More surprisingly, the two (...) contradictory hypotheses cohabit under the single non-transferable vote system. From an analysis of the switching in the Taiwanese Legislative Yuan, the empirical evidence shows that because of fierce intraparty competition in the multimember districts, not only barely elected but also top-ranked legislators switched party affiliation in order to avoid the loss in votes or even seats to their copartisans and to maximize their chances of re-election. (shrink)

Emergentists such as Samuel Alexander and C. Lloyd Morgan held that the mental is causally efficacious, supervenes on the physical, but does so mysteriously. We must accept the emergent mind, in Alexander's phrase, with "natural piety". Emergentism emerged late last century and all but disappeared in the twentieth. This dissertation attempts to revive the position. ;To explain psycho-physical supervenience is to provide a proof of the mental facts from the physical facts, such that mental vocabulary only occurs in the proof (...) in the form of a priori bridge principles connecting mental goings on with the physical facts. Offering a proof of the mental facts from the physical facts would be one way to justify supervenience, thus simultaneously vindicating and explaining it. ;Those philosophers who try to "naturalize intentionality" can be seen as seeking such proofs for intentional states. Various theories of this kind are considered: those of Fodor, Millikan, Lewis, and others. It is argued in chapters 2 and 3 that these theories are either false or unknowable. ;The case for eliminativism is examined in chapter 4, where it is argued that eliminativism is, of necessity, not a rational thesis to adopt. ;A view found in the writings of Davidson and Dennett is the topic of chapter 5. This is a kind of third-person Cartesianism: a person's mind is completely revealed by the deliverances of a suitably equipped interpreter. This position would elegantly vindicate supervenience without explaining it, at the price of a kind of anti-realism about the mind. It is argued that the price is not worth paying. ;In the sixth chapter it is argued that if the phenomenal aspects of the mind supervene, they do so mysteriously. An argument is then presented for psycho-physical supervenience. It was argued earlier that if supervenience holds for intentional states, it cannot be adequately explained. Therefore physicalism is true, but the mind-body problem has no solution. (shrink)

This essay contends that the ethics around the use of spy technology to gather intelligence (TECHINT) during espionage and counterintelligence operations is ambiguous. To build this argument, the essay critically scrutinizes Cécile Fabre's recent and excellent book Spying through a Glass Darkly, which argues that there are no ethical differences between the use of human intelligence (HUMINT) obtained from or by human assets and TECHINT in these operations. As the essay explains, Fabre arrives at this position by treating TECHINT as (...) a like-for-like replacement for HUMINT. The essay argues instead that TECHINT is unlikely to act as a like-for-like replacement for HUMINT. As such, TECHINT might transform existing practices of espionage and counterintelligence, giving rise to new ethical challenges not captured in Fabre's analysis. To illustrate the point, the essay builds an analogy between TECHINT and recent armed conflicts in which precision weapons have been deployed. Although precision weapons seem ethically desirable, their availability has created new practices of waging war that are ethically problematic. By analogy, TECHINT, though not intrinsically undesirable, has the capacity to generate new practices of intelligence gathering that are ethically problematic—potentially more than HUMINT. Ultimately, recent negative experiences with the use of precision weaponry should caution against an overly positive assessment of TECHINT's ethical desirability. (shrink)

We show, that given two fundamental theses of Kripke, no statement of the form ‘‘a=b’ is necessarily true’, is true, if ‘a’ and ‘b’ are distinct rigid designators.

This paper discusses a number of themes and arguments in The Quest for Reality: Stroud's distinction between “philosophical” and “ordinary” questions about reality; the similarity he finds between the view that coloris “unreal” and the view that it is “subjective”; his argument against thesecondary quality theory; his argument against the error theory; and the “disappointing” conclusion of the book.

Many philosophers call themselves ‘naturalists’ because they believe theism is incompatible with science. However, many also hold that science is compatible with many other theistic beliefs about morality, free will, the mind, and the meaning of life. Those naturalists who reject these other beliefs need a different label for their view. This article recommends the term ‘scientism’.

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)

The lyric is a form or genre of poetry often intimately related to subjectivity. But is a lyricism divested of the subject possible? By examining the philosophical refl ections of Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe upon lyricism, poetry, and their relation to subjectivity, this article explicates how an impersonal lyricism is not only possible, but perhaps necessary. If we wish to do justice to the phrasing or saying of poetic language, then we must endeavour to think the displacement of the subject in and (...) by the very language that the poem expresses. Following Lacoue-Labarthe, this article explores the paradoxical turn of lyricism—that it is bound to the subject, but not to its personal expression; rather, to its disappearance, its displacement, in the expression of language itself. By tracing a sketch of Lacoue-Labarthe’s poetics, relating this thought to the lyrical theories of Hamburger and Culler, and providing a brief explication of one of Lacoue-Labarthe’s “poetic” writings, lyricism is shown to be the testament to the disappearance of the subject, the remainder of a disappearance already passed insofar as the poem remains. What remains is that the lyrical subject would be no “subject” at all—only language itself, intimating its own diction. (shrink)

The social sciences need to take seriously their status as divisions of biology. As such they need to recognize the central role of Darwinian processes in all the phenomena they seek to explain. An argument for this claim is formulated in terms of a small number of relatively precise premises that focus on the nature of the kinds and taxonomies of all the social sciences. The analytical taxonomies of all the social sciences are shown to require a Darwinian approach to (...) human affairs, though not a nativist or genetically driven theory by any means. Non-genetic Darwinian processes have the fundamental role on all human affairs. I expound a general account of how Darwinian processes operate in human affairs by selecting for strategies and sets of strategies individuals and groups employ. I conclude by showing how a great deal of social science can be organized in accordance with Tinbergen’s approach to biological inquiry, an approach required by the fact that the social sciences are all divisions of biology, and in particular the studies of one particular biological species. (shrink)

There are good reasons for being dissatisfied with standard criticisms of the various arguments, all of which are referred to as being “The Ontological Argument”. While refutation by logical analogy is compelling, it merely teaches us that something is amiss. It does not specify the exact nature of the flaw. The first part of this paper examines and rejects several well-known attempts at refuting and clarifying the argument(s). The second part attempts to provide a principled uniform account of what is (...) wrong by treating the arguments as resting on definitions. Then, by bringing to bear Ajdukiewicz’s exhaustive classification of definitions, we arrive at a unified account of the flaw common to such arguments. In effect we have an explication of the dictum that one cannot define into existence. (shrink)