The world is becoming deeply interconnected, whereby actions in one part of the world can have profound repercussions elsewhere. In a world of overlapping communities of fate, there has been a renewed enthusiasm for thinking about what it is that human beings have in common, and to explore the ethical basis of this. This has led to a renewed interest in examining the normative principles that might underpin efforts to resolve global collective action problems and to ameliorate serious global risks. (...) This project can be referred to as the project of cosmopolitanism. In response to this renewed cosmopolitan enthusiasm, this volume has brought together 25 seminal essays in the development of cosmopolitan thought by some of the world's most distinguished cosmopolitan thinkers and critics. It is divided into six sections: classical cosmopolitanism, global justice, culture and cosmopolitanism, political cosmopolitanism, cosmopolitan global governance and critical examinations. This volume thus provides a thorough and extensive introduction to contemporary cosmopolitan thought and acts as a definitive source for those interested in cosmopolitan thinking and its critics. See also David Held's _Cosmopolitanism: Ideals and Realities_. (shrink)

At the end of a thoughtful article on the future of nuclear war, Wiesner and York concluded that: "Both sides in the arms race are... confronted by the dilemma of steadily increasing military power and steadily decreasing national security. It is our considered professional judgment that this dilemma has no technical solution. If the great powers continue to look for solutions in the area of science and technology only, the result will be to worsen the situation.".

There is an extensive literature in social choice theory studying the consequences of weakening the assumptions of Arrow's Impossibility Theorem. Much of this literature suggests that there is no escape from Arrow-style impossibility theorems unless one drastically violates the Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives (IIA). In this paper, we present a more positive outlook. We propose a model of comparing candidates in elections, which we call the Advantage-Standard (AS) model. The requirement that a collective choice rule (CCR) be rationalizable by the (...) AS model is in the spirit of but weaker than IIA; yet it is stronger than what is known in the literature as weak IIA (two profiles alike on x, y cannot have opposite strict social preferences on x and y). In addition to motivating violations of IIA, the AS model makes intelligible violations of another Arrovian assumption: the negative transitivity of the strict social preference relation P. While previous literature shows that only weakening IIA to weak IIA or only weakening negative transitivity of P to acyclicity still leads to impossibility theorems, we show that jointly weakening IIA to AS rationalizability and weakening negative transitivity of P leads to no such impossibility theorems. Indeed, we show that several appealing CCRs are AS rationalizable, including even transitive CCRs. (shrink)

We present a self-organizing approach to sentence processing that sheds new light on notional plurality effects in agreement attraction, using pseudopartitive subject noun phrases. We first show that notional plurality ratings predict verb agreement choices in pseudopartitives, in line with the “Marking” component of the Marking and Morphing theory of agreement processing. However, no account to date has derived notional plurality values from independently needed principles of language processing. We argue on the basis of new experimental evidence and a dynamical (...) systems model that the theoretical black box of notional plurality can be unpacked into objectively measurable semantic features. With these semantic features driving structure formation, our model reproduces the human verb production patterns as a byproduct of normal processing. Finally, we discuss how the self-organizing approach might be extended to other agreement attraction phenomena. (shrink)

Game theory involves deliberating about what to do in light of what other people are likely to do. One of the central frameworks of game theory is the prisoner’s dilemma, in which participants who make rational choices end up in suboptimal outcomes. Using the prisoner’s dilemma to model competition between firms sets the stage for a new and promising approach to business ethics: the market failures approach.

Given that there is a forceful case for thinking that the affluent are morally required to devote a substantial proportion of what they have to helping the poor, Garrett Cullity examines, refines and defends an argument of this form. He then identifies its limits.

One of the most famous, and most derided, arguments against the morality of abortion is the argument from potential, which maintains that the fetus' potential to become a person and enjoy the valuable life common to persons, entails that its destruction is prima facie morally impermissible. In this paper, I will revisit and offer a defense of the argument from potential.

Among theories of human language comprehension, cue‐based memory retrieval has proven to be a useful framework for understanding when and how processing difficulty arises in the resolution of long‐distance dependencies. Most previous work in this area has assumed that very general retrieval cues like [+subject] or [+singular] do the work of identifying (and sometimes misidentifying) a retrieval target in order to establish a dependency between words. However, recent work suggests that general, handpicked retrieval cues like these may not be enough (...) to explain illusions of plausibility (Cunnings & Sturt, 2018), which can arise in sentences like The letter next to the porcelain plate shattered. Capturing such retrieval interference effects requires lexically specific features and retrieval cues, but handpicking the features is hard to do in a principled way and greatly increases modeler degrees of freedom. To remedy this, we use well‐established word embedding methods for creating distributed lexical feature representations that encode information relevant for retrieval using distributed retrieval cue vectors. We show that the similarity between the feature and cue vectors (a measure of plausibility) predicts total reading times in Cunnings and Sturt’s eye‐tracking data. The features can easily be plugged into existing parsing models (including cue‐based retrieval and self‐organized parsing), putting very different models on more equal footing and facilitating future quantitative comparisons. (shrink)

If the quasi-realist wants to earn the right to talk like a moral realist, he needs to be able to make sense of moral error. A special form of error—fundamental moral error—is often thought to be u...

The significance of Friedrich Nietzsche for twentieth century culture is now no longer a matter of dispute. He was quite simply one of the most influential of modern thinkers. The opening essay of this 1996 Companion provides a chronologically organised introduction to and summary of Nietzsche's published works, while also providing an overview of their basic themes and concerns. It is followed by three essays on the appropriation and misappropriation of his writings, and a group of essays exploring the nature (...) of Nietzsche's philosophy and its relation to the modern and post-modern world. The final contributions consider Nietzsche's influence on the twentieth century in Europe, the USA, and Asia. New readers and non-specialists will find this the most convenient, accessible guide to Nietzsche currently available. Advanced students and specialists will find a conspectus of recent developments in the interpretation of Nietzsche. (shrink)

Traditional views about God and about deliberation seem to imply that we need a deliberation restriction on the concept of divine omniscience. I will argue, however, that this deliberation restriction is both irrelevant and unnecessary. It is irrelevant because there is no time at which God needs to deliberate; and it is unnecessary because even if God does deliberate, it’s possible for him to do so while knowing what the results of that deliberation will be. And because this possibility of (...) deliberating despite knowing the results holds for deliberation in general, my argument provides useful (and perhaps surprising) results not only for discussions of the divine attributes, but also for broader discussions of deliberation itself. (shrink)

In a new interpretation, Garrett Wallace Brown considers Kant's cosmopolitan thought as a form of international constitutional jurisprudence that requires minimal legal demands. He explores and defends topics such as cosmopolitan law, cosmopolitan right, the laws of hospitality, a Kantian federation of states, a cosmopolitan epistemology of culture and a possible normative basis for a Kantian form of global distributive justice.

The standard topological representation of a Boolean algebra via the clopen sets of a Stone space requires a nonconstructive choice principle, equivalent to the Boolean Prime Ideal Theorem. In this article, we describe a choice-free topological representation of Boolean algebras. This representation uses a subclass of the spectral spaces that Stone used in his representation of distributive lattices via compact open sets. It also takes advantage of Tarski’s observation that the regular open sets of any topological space form a Boolean (...) algebra. We prove without choice principles that any Boolean algebra arises from a special spectral space X via the compact regular open sets of X; these sets may also be described as those that are both compact open in X and regular open in the upset topology of the specialization order of X, allowing one to apply to an arbitrary Boolean algebra simple reasoning about regular opens of a separative poset. Our representation is therefore a mix of Stone and Tarski, with the two connected by Vietoris: the relevant spectral spaces also arise as the hyperspace of nonempty closed sets of a Stone space endowed with the upper Vietoris topology. This connection makes clear the relation between our point-set topological approach to choice-free Stone duality, which may be called the hyperspace approach, and a point-free approach to choice-free Stone duality using Stone locales. Unlike Stone’s representation of Boolean algebras via Stone spaces, our choice-free topological representation of Boolean algebras does not show that every Boolean algebra can be represented as a field of sets; but like Stone’s representation, it provides the benefit of a topological perspective on Boolean algebras, only now without choice. In addition to representation, we establish a choice-free dual equivalence between the category of Boolean algebras with Boolean homomorphisms and a subcategory of the category of spectral spaces with spectral maps. We show how this duality can be used to prove some basic facts about Boolean algebras. (shrink)

One argument used by detractors of human embryonic stem cell research (hESCR) invokes Kant's formula of humanity, which proscribes treating persons solely as a means to an end, rather than as ends in themselves. According to Fuat S. Oduncu, for example, adhering to this imperative entails that human embryos should not be disaggregated to obtain pluripotent stem cells for hESCR. Given that human embryos are Kantian persons from the time of their conception, killing them to obtain their cells for research (...) fails to treat them as ends in themselves. (shrink)

In August 2017, Google executives found themselves in a difficult position. An internal memo written by a disgruntled software engineer, James Damore, had just gone viral. In this memo, Damore claimed that the relatively small number of women in the tech industry was partly due to biological factors, and that many of Google’s diversity efforts were therefore counterproductive. The contents of this memo were offensive to many (and thus were having a negative impact on the overall workplace environment), but the (...) executives were aware that the wrong reaction to it would at least partially vindicate Damore’s claims about the lack of open discussion at Google. In the end, after two days of controversy, Google leadership decided to fire Damore on the grounds that he had violated the company’s code of conduct. This case gives students an opportunity to explore the numerous issues raised by Damore’s memo and the controversy surrounding it. Did Google handle this case properly? Was firing Damore the right thing to do? How could the situation have been handled more effectively? (shrink)

Book reviewed in this article: The Imperative of Responsibility. In Search of an Ethics for the Technological Age. By Hans Jonas.

The past six decades have seen rising interest in the philosophy of time, driven in large measure by the metaphysical implications of the physical theories of relativity and quantum mechanics. Philosophical theology has only recently begun serious interaction with contemporary metaphysics of time. In particular, the issue of God's temporal mode of being has come under investigation In Part 1, I begin with the metaphysics of time, explicating and defending a causal account of dynamic time. I then consider objections that (...) can be brought against this account from the standpoint of the Special and General Theories of Relativity and Quantum Mechanics, and conclude that one of the objections are compelling. In Part II, I consider the evidence from Scripture relative to God's temporal mode of being, and find that it is neutral between a temporal and an atemporal conception. The arguments upholding the medieval consensus in philosophical theology of divine timelessness are evaluated, along with contemporary arguments for atemporality. Openness to divine temporality is discernible in some medieval philosophers; their arguments, along with contemporary arguments for temporality, are investigated. I then offer an analysis of the concept of omnitemporality which I take to be the form of temporality most appropriate to expressing God's temporal mode of being. Finally I argue that objections to omnitemporality are not forceful, and that the concept has in its favor greater explanatory power for a range of issues in philosophical theology. (shrink)

Are the wishes of the dead more important than the needs of the living? This question is prompted by consideration of the Hershey Trust Company, a perpetual charitable trust that not only owns and operates the Milton Hershey School in Pennsylvania, but also owns a controlling interest in various Hershey-related for-profit entities. This unusual arrangement, and the conditions under which it was formed, have produced a situation in which a small, private boarding school for low-income students has an endowment of (...) $12 billion (in addition to its other corporate and real estate interests). The trust has been operating according to its founder’s wishes for decades, but some have wondered whether its resources could be put to better use for more urgent needs. This case will invite students to consider the question of how we should weigh the needs of the living against the wishes of the dead. (shrink)

Three things often recognized as central to morality are concern for others’ welfare, respect for their self-expression, and cooperation in worthwhile collective activity. When philosophers have proposed theories of the substance of morality, they have typically looked to one of these three sources to provide a single, fundamental principle of morality – or they have tried to formulate a master-principle for morality that combines these three ideas in some way. This book views them instead as three independently important foundations of (...) morality. It sets out a plural-foundation moral theory with affinities to that of W.D. Ross. There are major differences: the account of the foundations of morality differs from Ross’s, and there is a more elaborate explanation of how the rest of morality derives from them. However, the overall aim is similar. This is to illuminate the structure of morality by showing how its complex content is generated from a relatively simple set of underlying elements – with the complexity resulting from the various ways in which one part of morality can derive from another, and the various ways in which they can interact. Plural-foundation moral theories are sometimes criticized for having nothing helpful to say about cases in which their fundamental norms conflict. Responding to this, the book concludes with three detailed applications of the theory: to the questions surrounding paternalism, the use of others as means, and our moral responsibilities as consumers. (shrink)

The Library of Scottish Philosophy: Volumes 1 – 6, Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2004 James Otteson , ed. Adam Smith: Selected Philosophical Writings, 247pp. Paperback £12.95. ISBN 184540-001-1 James Harris , ed. James Beattie: Selected Philosophical Writings, 204pp. Paperback £12.95. ISBN 0907845-711 David Boucher , ed. The Scottish Idealists: Selected Philosophical Writings, 201pp. Paperback £12.95. ISBN 0907845-72X Jonathan Friday , ed. Art and Enlightenment: Scottish Aesthetics in the 18th century, 212pp. Paperback £12.95. ISBN 0907845-762 Gordon Graham , ed. Scottish Philosophy: Selected (...) Writings 1690–1960, 253pp. Paperback £12.95. ISBN 0907845-746 Esther McIntosh , ed. John Macmurray: Selected Philosophical Writings, 198pp. Paperback £12.95. ISBN 0907845-738. (shrink)

What is involved in weighing normative reasons against each other? One attractive answer offers us the following Simple Picture: a fact is a reason for action when it bears to an action the normative relation of counting in its favour; this relation comes in different strengths or weights; the weights of the reasons for and against an action can be summed; the reasons for performing the action are sufficient when no other action is more strongly supported, overall; the reasons are (...) decisive when it is most strongly supported; one ought to perform the action there is most reason to perform; rational deliberation is weighing reasons correctly; and acting rationally is doing what one has sufficient reasons to do. This chapter investigates various ways in which, on examination, this Simple Picture appears to require modification and refinement. It examines some of the ways in which talk of the weight of a reason may need improvement, looks more closely at the relationship between reasons and rationality, and asks whether there are ways in which a reason can be defeated which are not kinds of outweighing. The conclusion is that while in some respects the Simple Picture does need to be corrected, in others the jury is out. (shrink)

In recent years, there has been a marked increase in the use of imaginative play in child psychotherapy, yet the theoretical conceptualization of the meaning of play is lacking behind its application in practice. In search of a deeper understanding of the phenomenon of imaginative play, the author turns to Merleau-Ponty's ontology and to his phenomenology of structure, of the lived body, of perception, and of expression. In light of his work, play is an embodied mode of being in the (...) world and a body-world phenomenon. Imaginative play in particular exemplifies the human order in that it enables the child to create and re-create his own meanings within his play world. In a therapeutic context, the evocation of play imagery and the expressive shaping and reshaping of play meanings lead to surprising insights and new discoveries relevant to the child's life-world. A central therapeutic value of imaginative play lies in its promise for facilitating change and healing. A clinical case illustration of a young boy is provided, and the meaning of his imaginative play is exemplified in light of Merleau-Ponty's thought. Some implications are drawn for the theory of play in child psychotherapy. (shrink)

Since its 1929 publication, philosophers have been more or less unsure what to make of Heidegger's Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics. Although it wielded more than its fair share of influence over the course of the twentieth century, its chief interpretive claims are mostly untenable today. Of course, it has always been recognized that the book was never intended as a straightforward piece of Kant interpretation. But neither does it appear to be a reliable presentation of Heidegger's own thought. (...) The result has been that, for all its influence, Heidegger's book has fallen into a kind of academic limbo, a concern for neither scholars of Heidegger nor scholars of Kant. My goal is to help return to Heidegger's reading of Kant its provocative power. I do so by means of a conceptual genesis of Heidegger's reading of Kant that takes both thinkers, as far as possible, on their own terms, but includes an investigation into why Heidegger was so convinced--for a few decisive years, at least--that he had to be able to find in Kant a precedent for his own path of thinking. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Semiotica Jahrgang: 2014 Heft: 202 Seiten: 321-343.

Nicholas of Cusa and his daringly speculative theology seem odd matches for Blaise Pascal, the constant critic of the philosophies en vogue during his life. A commonality they share is their mutual concern for the apparent disproportion between the infinite God and the finite human. In this paper, I compare and analyse the shape this question takes in Cusanus's De ludo globi and Pascal's Pensées. Both men observe a sort of ‘ludic’ character inherent to the pursuit of bridging finite and (...) infinite. Cusanus's ‘ball game’ realises the universe and the human being's pursuit of salvation as a circular field in which the player seeks to reach the vanishing point of its centre. Pascal likewise portrays human life as a cosmic game that everyone must ‘play’ with their ethical decisions. Ultimately, they both come to register Christ as the agent and object of their games, the divine player who fashions finitude into infinity. I conclude by sketching a way to reconcile Pascal with natural theology based on his universal game. (shrink)

Brouwer's views on the foundations of mathematics have inspired the study of intuitionistic logic, including the study of the intuitionistic propositional calculus and its extensions. The theory of these systems has become an independent branch of logic with connections to lattice theory, topology, modal logic and other areas. This paper aims to present a modern account of semantics for intuitionistic propositional systems. The guiding idea is that of a hierarchy of semantics, organized by increasing generality: from the least general Kripke (...) semantics on through Beth semantics, topological semantics, Dragalin semantics, and finally to the most general algebraic semantics. While the Kripke, topological, and algebraic semantics have been extensively studied, the Beth and Dragalin semantics have received less attention. We bring Beth and Dragalin semantics to the fore, relating them to the concept of a nucleus from pointfree topology, which provides a unifying perspective on the semantic hierarchy. (shrink)

Using data from a survey of certified organic or in-transition to organic vegetable and dairy producers in Canada, we seek to understand a farmer’s decision to convert to organic production by exploring the motives, problems and challenges, and benefits of transition to organic. Results suggest that health and safety concerns and environmental issues are the predominant motives for conversion, while economic motives are of lesser importance. In contrast to the extant literature, results suggest that the motives underlying transition have not (...) changed overtime in Canada. Problems experienced during transition relate to lack of governmental and institutional support, negative pressure from other farmers and farm groups, and lack of physical and financial capital. Reduced exposure to chemicals and improved food quality were highly ranked benefits, while economic related benefits were scored among the lowest of the listed benefits. To prosper, the Canadian organic sector must overcome fundamental marketing problems and challenges. Promulgation of the Canada Organic standard may help address some marketing issues by providing more information to consumers. (shrink)

Thomas Reid offers a powerful challenge to Hume and his skeptical system. In “Thomas Reid on Epistemic Principles,” William Alston gives an explanation of that challenge and concludes in favor of a Reidian-inspired thesis. I argue, however, that Alston’s thesis is a diluted version of Reid’s radical position, one that Reid’s principles cannot accommodate. Thus, I conclude that, because Alston’s position is not available, we are left with Reid’s radical thesis, with which we are rightly uncomfortable.

In his original metabletic research on the nature of neurosis. Van den Berg revealed how, towards the 19th century, the increasingly complex and dividing nature of Western society led to the emergence of neurosis as a form of divided existence. By the mid 20th century, the manifestations of neurosis itself changed from a crystalized disorder to vague neurotic disturbances which Van den Berg related to the societal disorder, incoherence and instability which followed the second world war. He identified a series (...) of neuroticizing factors at the time including the ambivalence of society, the increased mobility, a changed sense of time, the disappearance of small groups, the weakening of family ties and the fear of death. In our postmodern world today, the nature of neurosis has changed once again and awaits a new metabletic investigation to reveal its nature and its particular manifestations. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to respond to Jacques Derrida’s reading of Immanuel Kant’s laws of hospitality and to offer a deeper exploration into Kant’s separation of a cosmopolitan right to visit ( Besuchsrecht) and the idea of a universal right to reside ( Gastrecht). Through this discussion, the various laws of hospitality will be examined, extrapolated and outlined, particularly in response to the tensions articulated by Derrida. By doing so, this article will offer a reinterpretation of the laws (...) of hospitality, arguing that hospitality is not meant to capture all the conditions necessary for cosmopolitan citizenship or for a thoroughgoing condition of cosmopolitan justice as Derrida assumes. This is because hospitality could be understood as the basic normative requirement necessary to establish an ethical condition for intersubjective communication at the global level, where discursive communication regarding the substance of a future condition of cosmopolitan justice is to be subjected to global public reason. (shrink)

In 2008, many states sought to pass Human Life Amendments, which would extend the definition of personhood to encompass newly fertilized eggs. If such an amendment were to pass, Roe v. Wade, as currently defended by the Supreme Court, may be repealed. Consequently, it is necessary to defend the right to an abortion in a manner that succeeds even if a Human Life Amendment successfully passes. J.J. Thomson's argument in “A Defense of Abortion” successfully achieves this. Her argument is especially (...) strong when one considers that her central thesis—that one person's right to life does not entail the right to use another's person's body for continued sustenance—is pervasive in legal policies in the U.S.A. (shrink)