Developing World Bioethics, Volume 22, Issue 3, Page 162-169, September 2022.

This article chronicles the material conditions of producing a film in the Philippine independent film scene which has experienced a marked resurgence at the turn of the century, and has been credited for having revived the ailing Filipino film industry. By way of case study, I use my own film Ang Panggagahasa kay Fe (international title: The Rapture of Fe), awarded the best feature-length digital film at the 33rd Cairo Film Festival in 2009. I co-produced, wrote and directed this film. (...) I recount the different factors that helped shape the film, from scripting to film financing, and provide further evidence of the significance of the private sector, in infusing new money and in reviving the national Filipino film industry as a whole. (shrink)

The Black community has a long, well-documented history of being disproportionately harassed by law enforcement. While psychological research has studied this phenomenon, more in-depth research on Black men’s lived-experience of police harassment is needed. This qualitative study used descriptive phenomenology to investigate Black men’s experience of being harassed by law enforcement officers. An analysis of non-structured interviews with a sample of four participants revealed several essential aspects of this experience, including: anxiety in response to the initial awareness of law enforcement’s (...) presence, fear and confusion in response to abrupt escalation of aggression and hostility by officers, a sense of humiliation in response to degrading police tactics, anger over inability to pursue redress through the justice system, ongoing negative emotion, and a sense of having been psychologically harmed by the harassment. The implications of the findings are discussed. (shrink)

Schools worldwide have started opening doors to welcome back students who, for almost two years, have been stuck studying at home. This study looks at the standpoint of Filipino students on going back to regular face-to-face schooling. There were 2,274 students of different tiers of education (high school, collegiate, graduate) from different major island groups of the Philippines (Luzon, Visayas, Mindanao) who participated in the study. The study used a mixed-method of descriptive statistics to present the quantitative data gathered and (...) thematic analysis of qualitative responses from the subjects. The majority of all the respondents favored going back to the physical classroom, and little only favored staying using the distance mode. In the qualitative analysis, the recurring reasons of the students varied from personal, economic, and fear of getting the virus. It was concluded that Filipino students want to go back to schooling. Moreover, a sizeable amount preferred hybrid while a small number preferred to stay in online or distance mode. Educational institutions should always observe the covid 19 protocol when students go back. (shrink)

This Festschrift seeks to honor three highly distinguished scholars in the Department of Philosophy, University of Michigan: William K. Frankena, Charles L. Stevenson, and Richard B. Brandt. Each has made significant con­tributions to the philosophic literature, particularly in the field of ethics. Michigan has been fortunate in having three such original and productive moral philosophers serving on its faculty simultaneously. Yet they stand in a long tradition of excellence, both within the Department and in the University. Let us trace that (...) tradition briefly. The University of Michigan opened in 184l. lts Department of Literature, Science, and the Arts at first resembled a typical American college of that period, with religious and ethical indoctrination playing a central role in course offerings. But when Henry Tappan, a Presbyterian clergyman and Professor of philosophy, became President in 1852, he succeeded in shifting the emphasis from indoctrination to inquiry and scholarship. Though he was dismissed for his policies in 1863, Tappan's efforts to establish a broad and liberal curriculum prevailed. Michigan was to take its place among the leading educational institutions in this country, and to achieve an international reputation as a research center. Several past philosophers are worthy of mention here. George Sylvester Morris, an absolute idealist, joined the Department in 1881, having served from 1870 as Chairman of the Department of Modern Languages and Literature. He assumed the Chairmanship of Philosophy in 1884. (shrink)

Theories of embodied cognition abound in the literature, but it is often unclear how to understand them. We offer several interpretations of embodiment, the most interesting being the thesis that mental representations in bodily formats (B-formats) have an important role in cognition. Potential B-formats include motoric, somatosensory, affective and interoceptive formats. The literature on mirroring and related phenomena provides support for a limited-scope version of embodied social cognition under the B-format interpretation. It is questionable, however, whether such a thesis can (...) be extended. We show the limits of embodiment in social cognition. (shrink)

One possible aim of epistemology is to advise cognizers on the proper choice of beliefs or other doxastic attitudes. This aim has often been part of scientific methodology: to tell scientists when they should accept a given hypothesis, or give it a certain degree of credence. This regulative function is naturally linked to the notion of epistemic justification. It may well be suggested that a cognizer is justified in believing something just in case the rules of proper epistemic procedure prescribe (...) that belief. Principles that make such doxastic prescriptions might thereby "double" as principles of justification. In the first part of this paper I contrast the regulative conception of justification with another, equally tenable, conception. Then, after noting a fundamental worry about the applicability of the regulative conception, I proceed to lay it out in more detail. The regulative justificational status of a doxastic attitude for person S at time t depends upon (a) the right set of doxastic instructions and (b) the states S is in at (or just before) t. (shrink)

Philip Quinn’s “On Finding the Foundations of Theism” is both challenging and important. Quinn proposes at least the following four theses: (a) my argument against the criteria of proper basicality proposed by classical foundationalism is unsuccessful, (b) the quasi-inductive method I suggest for arriving at criteria of proper basicality is defective, (c) even if belief in God is properly basic, it could without loss of justification be accepted on the basis of other propositions, and (d) belief in God is probably (...) not nowadays properly basic for intellectually sophisticated adults, There is much to be said about each of these four theses; I shall say just a bit about them. I take the fourth claim to be the most important and devote the most space to it. (shrink)

Philip Quinn’s “On Finding the Foundations of Theism” is both challenging and important. Quinn proposes at least the following four theses: (a) my argument against the criteria of proper basicality proposed by classical foundationalism is unsuccessful, (b) the quasi-inductive method I suggest for arriving at criteria of proper basicality is defective, (c) even if belief in God is properly basic, it could without loss of justification be accepted on the basis of other propositions, and (d) belief in God is probably (...) not nowadays properly basic for intellectually sophisticated adults, There is much to be said about each of these four theses; I shall say just a bit about them. I take the fourth claim to be the most important and devote the most space to it. (shrink)

The question is: how should a theist think of justification or positive epistemic status? The answer I suggest is: a belief B has positive epistemic status for S only if S’s faculties are functioning properly (i.e., functioning in the way God intended them to) in producing B, and only if S’s cognitive environment is sufficiently similar to the one for which her faculties are designed; and under those conditions the more firmly S is inclined to accept B, the more positive (...) epistemic status it has for her. I conclude by making some qualifications and applications and exmaining some objections. (shrink)

are properly basic for at least some believers in God; there are widely realized sets of conditions, I suggested, in which such propositions are indeed properly basic. And when I said that these beliefs are properly basic, I had in mind what Quinn calls the narrow conception of the basing relation.[1] I was taking it that a person S accepts a belief A on the basis of a belief B only if (roughly) S believes both A and B and could (...) correctly claim (on reflection) that B is part of his evidence for A. S's belief that there is an error in some argument against p will not typically be a belief on the basis of which he accepts p and will not be a part of his evidence for p. (shrink)

The author criticizes an article by c b martin called "the perfect good." the author shows that martin's argument, That the theologians' argument is a contradiction, Does not hold. (staff).

In this discussion note, I defend Gaunilo's famous parody of Anselm's Ontological Argument for God's existence against a well-known objection due to Alvin Plantinga.

My thesis is on the intersection of epistemology and the philosophy of religion. Contemporary religious epistemology asks the question of how, if at all, can religious belief be rationally justified. I focus on a relatively new tradition that responds to this question known as Reformed Epistemology, as advanced by Alvin Plantinga. Reformed Epistemologists argue that belief in God can be rational, reasonable, and justified without appeal to evidence as was traditionally thought. Plantinga argues that religious belief stems from an (...) innate faculty which produces properly basic beliefs that need not rest on any other beliefs for their justification. My aim is to critically examine these claims. My thesis begins in section I with a discussion of Plantinga’s early attacks on classical foundationalism and Evidentialism, that is, the view that being rational means according one's belief with the evidence. His early goal is to discredit the Evidentialist objection by rebutting the flawed epistemological system he argues it presupposes. In so doing, Plantinga attempts to loosen the canons of basicality to include the belief in God as properly basic. -/- In section II I then discuss Plantinga’s notion of warrant, which is his term for justification – the hallmark difference between true belief and knowledge. After examining the tenability of Plantinga’s concept of what makes belief warranted, I examine how successfully he specifically applies this notion of justification to religious belief. Plantinga’s contention is that religious belief can enjoy enough warrant so that if the belief is true, it will constitute knowledge. In examining this claim I evaluate in section III Plantinga’s evolutionary argument against naturalism, his Aquinas/Calvin model in section IV, potential rationality defeaters in section V and in section VI the larger question of the internalism / externalism debate and its influence on these central issues. (shrink)

It has become standard practice for scientists to avoid the possibility of references to God by adopting methodological naturalism, a method that assumes that the reality of the universe, as it can be accessed by empirical enquiry, is to be explained solely with recourse to natural phenomena. In this essay, I critique the Christian practice of this method, arguing that a Christian's practices should always reflect her belief that the universe is created and sustained by the triune God. This leads (...) me to contend that the Christian should adopt a theologically humble approach to the sciences, with which she humbly acknowledges that special divine action is not discernible by empirical science. To further my critique, I consider three ways in which the practice of MN can be particularly problematic for Christianity. (shrink)

In reference to the philosophical theology of medieval Islamic theologian Ibn Taymiyya, this paper outlines a parallel between Taymiyyan thought and Alvin Plantinga’s thesis of ‘Reformed Epistemology’. In critiquing a previous attempt to build an account of ‘Islamic externalism’, the Taymiyyan model offers an account that can be seen as wholly ‘Plantingan’.

Contemporary philosophy of religion has been fascinated with questions of the rationality of religious belief. Alvin Plantinga—a prominent Christian philosopher—has contributed greatly to the exploration of these questions. Plantinga’s epistemology is rooted in the intuitions of Thomas Reid’s “common-sense” philosophy and has developed into a distinctive outlook that we may coin, Plantingian (Calvinist) Reidianism. This chapter aims to propose that, in fact, the central ideas of that outlook can be seen prior to Reid (and John Calvin), beyond the confines (...) of exclusively Christian and European circles, in the theological epistemology of the Damascene Islamic theologian, Taqī al-Dīn Ibn Taymiyya (d. 1328 CE). In exploring the contours of a Taymiyyan worldview, primed upon the notion of fiṭra, Ibn Taymiyya can be seen to have developed a faculty-based account of knowledge, moderate foundationalism, and a distinct “Reformed” epistemology. Within the midst of these developments, Ibn Taymiyya offers a potential framework for a “common-sense” philosophical methodology. Taken together these ideas form the basis for the intuitions of Plantingian Reidianism. Therefore, Plantinga might have looked to an earlier figure working in another tradition for historical support and inspiration for his religious epistemology. (shrink)

Epistemic minimalism affirms that mere true belief is sufficient for propositional knowledge. I construct a taxonomy of some specific forms of minimalism and locate within that taxonomy the distinct positions of various advocates of minimalism, including Alvin Goldman, Jaakko Hintikka, Crispin Sartwell, Wolfgang Lenzen, Franz von Kutschera, and others. I weigh generic minimalism against William Lycan’s objection that minimalism is incompatible with plausible principles about relations between knowledge, belief, and confidence. I argue that Lycan’s objection fails for equivocation but (...) that some specific forms of minimalism are better able than others to articulate that defense. (shrink)

The abandonment of sole reliance on the logical positivist canon of wholly general, topic-neutral, a priori inference principles has created a pressing need for a principled way to set limits on the demand for justification. I diagnose the problems with several contemporary proposals via two case studies, the first concerned with the possibility of groundlessly rational theism, and the second with the use of groundlessly rational commitments in defense of scientific rationality. ;I argue that William Alston's appeal to the "practical" (...) rationality of engaging in a socially established belief-forming practice and Alvin Plantinga's defense of properly basic belief in God are overly permissive. Alston's position gives too much scope to pragmatic and social considerations, while Plantinga's rejection of polemically useful epidemic principles leaves him with an implausible externalism about rationality as the only way to block irrationality. In the case of scientific rationality, I argue that Bas van Fraassen's "liberal probabilism" gives too much scope to tradition and pragmatic factors, while Richard Boyd's methodological argument for scientific realism gives too much weight to the successful use of theories that happen to belong to one's own scientific tradition. ;In the light of these defects, I argue that the only propositions that don't require justification are "hinge-propositions"--topic-specific, defeasible principles that express conceptual competence conditions--because groundless doubt of them is either irrational or betrays lack of conceptual grasp. ;This account provides adequate fundamental principles for science, but sets strict limits to groundless rationality. For example, theistic belief-forming practices can't be groundlessly rational because they involve an unjustified departure from the application of the concept of a person in response to experience. ;I defend the closure claim that hinge-propositions are the only kind of groundlessly rational propositions by arguing that this account provides the best explanation for our shared uncontroversial judgments of rationality and irrationality. My account makes the strongest demands for justification that are compatible with our shared and secure judgments of prima facie rationality and the weakest demands for justification that are compatible with our shared and secure judgments about epistemically responsible beliefs. (shrink)

Overview of the basic ideas and motivations of naturalism in epistemology, with discussion of the styles of naturalism associated with W. V. Quine, Thomas Kuhn, and Alvin Goldman.

Are the characteristics and relationships among spatio-temporal entities "real" or are they simply conventional terms that note similarities among things in the world but lack any reality of their own? Or if they are real, what sort of reality do they have? Do we live in a world of causes and effects, or is this relation a useful contrivance for our convenience? What is the nature of this "I" that we invoke when referring to ourselves? Is it body? Mind? Both? (...) Neither? And once its nature is understood, what can be said of the choices it makes? Are they really ours, freely made by an independent will? Or is each choice determined more by the internal makeup of the "I" we happen to be and the social/environmental circumstances in which this "I" finds itself, rather than by any act of will? But if each of us "could not have chosen otherwise" than we have, are we no better than the machines we construct? Then again, maybe some of our more advanced machines should be considered conscious entities? Introduction to Metaphysics: The Fundamental Questions presents these and other intriguing questions, many of which have challenged philosophers from antiquity to the present in their efforts to speculate on the nature of what is real. Often filled with twists and turns, dark corners and hidden recesses, this journey of discovery is an exciting excursion into the depths of human understanding. As guides for this intellectual journey editor Andrew Schoedinger has chosen an impressive array of creative and thought-provoking philosophers: Peter Abelard, Aristotle, Renford Bambrough, George Berkeley, Joseph Butler, Rudolf Carnap, Roderick Chisholm, R.G. Collingwood, Arthur Danto, Donald Davidson, Rene Descartes, C.J. Ducasse, Alvin I. Goldman, Keith Gunderson, David Hume, John Locke, Alasdair MacIntyre, A.I. Melden, John Stuart Mill, D.F. Pears, Hilary Putnam, Anthony Quinton, Bertrand Russell, Michael Scriven, Sydney Shoemaker, P. F. Strawson, Richard Taylor, and others. This volume is a unique invitation to join a distinguished group of theorists as they tackle tough questions concerning the existence of universals, the nature of causation, understanding personal identity, the tangled web of free will, and the challenges posed by the advent of artificial intelligence. (shrink)

Contemporary philosophy of religion has been fascinated with questions of the rationality of religious belief. Alvin Plantinga—a prominent Christian philosopher—has contributed greatly to the exploration of these questions. Plantinga’s epistemology is rooted in the intuitions of Thomas Reid’s “common-sense” philosophy and has developed into a distinctive outlook that we may coin, Plantingian (Calvinist) Reidianism. This chapter aims to propose that, in fact, the central ideas of that outlook can be seen prior to Reid (and John Calvin), beyond the confines (...) of exclusively Christian and European circles, in the theological epistemology of the Damascene Islamic theologian, Taqī al-Dīn Ibn Taymiyya (d. 1328 CE). In exploring the contours of a Taymiyyan worldview, primed upon the notion of fiṭra, Ibn Taymiyya can be seen to have developed a faculty-based account of knowledge, moderate foundationalism, and a distinct “Reformed” epistemology. Within the midst of these developments, Ibn Taymiyya offers a potential framework for a “common-sense” philosophical methodology. Taken together these ideas form the basis for the intuitions of Plantingian Reidianism. Therefore, Plantinga might have looked to an earlier figure working in another tradition for historical support and inspiration for his religious epistemology. (shrink)

Premise acceptability is conceptually connected to presumption. To say that a premise is acceptable just when there is a presumption in its favor is to give a first approximation to this connection. A number of popular principles of presumption suggest that whether there is a presumption for a premise, belief, or claim depends on the sources which vouch for it. Sources consist of internal belief-generating mechanisms and external testimony. Alvin Plantinga's notion of warrant lays down four conditions upon a (...) source for the belief which it generates to be warranted. We argue that there is a presumption for a premise, belief, or claim if and only if there is a presumption of warrant for that premise,belief or claim. This amounts to the thesis that there is a presumption for a belief from a challenger's point of view if and only if there is a presumption from that person's point of view that her cognitive faculties which have generated the belief have been functioning properly, in an appropriate cognitive environment, in accord with a segment of her design plan aimed at the truth, and that these faculties are reliable. In light of our argument for this thesis, we may legitimately claim that one way to determine that there is a presumption for a belief is to determine that there is a presumption of warrant for that belief, and thus that in determining whether there is a presumption for a belief or premise, we may consider the source. (shrink)

Die folgenden miteinander zusammenhängenden Themen werden erörtert : der Essentialismus, die Trans-Welt-Identität, der ontologische Gottesbeweis und der Glaube, Gott könne jede beliebige Welt erschaffen. Plantingas Einschätzung der De-re-Modalität stellt sich als fehlerhaft heraus, wenn seine Überzeugung, Menschen dürften nicht mit ihren Körpern gleichgesetzt werden, auch überzeugender ist. Leibniz würde jedoch mit guten Gründen der Behauptung Plantingas nicht vorbehaltlos zustimmen, daß Menschen ihrem Wesen nach immateriell sind. Plantinga hat Recht, wenn er — z. B. im Gegensatz zu Leibniz — die Auffassung (...) vertritt, daß dasselbe Individuum in mehr als einer möglichen Welt existieren kann und daß — trotz Tooley — die Rede von möglichen Welten kohärent ist. Van Invagen hat gezeigt, daß Plantingas Version des ontologischen Gottesbeweises nicht sicherer ist als die von Leibniz und daß sie verwundbar bleibt durch eine Kritik Jerome Shaffers. Aber Plantinga hat Recht, wenn er Leibniz' Ansicht, Gott könne jede beliebige Welt schaffen, zurückweist und als „Leibniz' Fehler" abstempelt. (shrink)

Can deconstruction be accomplished not through the close reading of just one discourse, but through its combination with another? This paper aims at exploring this second way of performing deconstruction through a particular case study: Marxism and psychoanalysis. In the body of the essay, the history of Freudo-Marxism is divided into two parts, depending on which psychoanalyst stands as point of reference: Freud or Lacan. We proceed by studying the four main strategies by virtue of which a genuine combination between (...) Marxism and psychoanalysis has been historically attempted: separation (Reich), domination (Marcuse), contradiction (Althusser) and, finally, deconstruction (Laclau). (shrink)

In 2012 the Spanish government implemented the Royal Decree Law 16/2012 by which undocumented migrants are denied free access to the Spanish healthcare system. In the midst of unemployment, poverty and cuts in social protection, undocumented migrant women are facing multidimensional exclusions whereby austerity measures are having different consequences for women, especially for those who bear the greater brunt of caring roles in the form of mothering. Drawing upon qualitative research in the form of semi-structured interviews in Madrid, this article (...) examines the structural vulnerabilities of undocumented migrant mothers and analyses the gendered processes that provoke them. At a time in which the borders of Europe are reinforced and internal political and economic tensions question this fortress, migrants become shock absorbers for national anxieties. The article argues that the Royal Decree Law, following neoliberal discourses of citizenship and social rights and saturated by patriarchal normative understandings of women’s place in society and care, turns undocumented migrant mothers into disposable and invisible reproductive bodies deprived of rights. (shrink)

This volume will be of great interest to scholars and students in epistemology.