This article discusses various arguments for and against treating equality as a fundamental norm in law and political philosophy, combining prior arguments to the effect that equality is essentially an empty idea with arguments that treat it as a non‐empty but mistaken value that should be rejected. After concluding that most of the arguments for treating equality as a fundamental value fall victim to one or both of these arguments, it considers more closely arguments made by philosophers such as Ronald (...) Dworkin and Thomas Nagel that base a duty of promoting equality on the fact that governments impose a legal order on persons without their consent. It concludes that these arguments are mistaken: if the legal order imposed by government is justified then imposing it is not wrongful and generates no duty of equal treatment, while if that order is not justified no requirement of equality of treatment would cure the lack of justification. It concludes that equality should not be a value in law or political theory, but in some cases other considerations may justify particular rules that are sometimes mistakenly thought to be based on equality. (shrink)

The book aims at equipping you with 21st Century Skills key life skills that will drive your future employability, promotion and career success. These are required for effective reasoning, writing and decision-making in changing, evolving environments. You give reasons for what you do and think every day. You argue. You often argue about things that matter to you. For example you might argue that you are the best candidate for promotion, about whether your company should invest in China, about the (...) best way to help a friend or about what the right thing to do is in an ethical dilemma. The list is up to you. If you work your way carefully through this book you will become better at reasoning both in terms of understanding and clarifying other peoples’ arguments and also at producing increasingly sophisticated and compelling arguments of your own. You will learn how to recognize common but often seductive mistakes in reasoning and so be empowered to avoid making these mistakes yourself. Your writing and oral presentations will improve and you will hone your ability to define crucial terms in argument, debate and discussion. As this book is specifically written with everyday language considerations in mind, it is a valuable tool for anyone to understand, evaluate and construct arguments in ordinary language. (shrink)

This article explores the implications of the Harm Principle, modified to accommodate recent criticisms by Arthur Ripstein, for theories of distributive justice. It concludes that the resulting Sovereignty Principle leads to a left-libertarian theory of justice that is based not on egalitarianism but rather on considerations internal to the Principle itself. This theory avoids criticisms of incoherence that have been rightly applied to other recent versions of left-libertarianism, and supports a requirement of substantial redistribution without necessarily precluding further redistribution for (...) reasons other than those of justice. (shrink)

"This book presents a distinctive version of a contractarian approach to law and justice. The work argues that law and justice are social norms that arise from a process of social evolution, and are binding only if and to the extent that they are mutually beneficial. It explicitly rejects accounts of law and justice that are based on morality, on the basis that morality itself is only legitimately founded on mutual advantage, But it also rejects most existing versions of contractarianism, (...) which are based on ideas of hypothetical agreements by rational contractors, in favour of an approach that is based on actually existing social norms, but advocates critically examining these norms and discarding those that are not truly mutually beneficial. The first half of the book develops the approach, while the second half explores some of its implications for law. It argues for a left-libertarian approach to property, an approach largely based on the common law of tort, contract and criminal law, and a rejection of most statutory law, which is based not on mutual advantage but rather on benefiting some at the expense of others. However, it ultimately recognises that there are those who want a more extensive state than this approach allows, and advocates a strong form of federalism to allow this, provided robust exit rights are provided"--. (shrink)

Aristotle distinguishes friendships of pleasure or utility from more valuable ‘character friendships’ in which the friend cares for the other qua person for the other’s own sake. Aristotle and some neo-Aristotelians require such friends to be fairly strictly symmetrical in their separateness of identity from each other, in the degree to which they identify with each other, and in the degree to which they are virtuous. We argue that there is a neglected form of valuable friendship–neither of friendship nor utility–that (...) allows significant asymmetries. We know of no sustained discussion of such ‘asymmetrical’ friendships in the literature. (shrink)

Famously, Aristotle in his discussion of friendship in Books 8 and 9 of the Nicomachaean Ethics (EN) introduces a tripartite distinction in friendship. Friendships are either friendships of pleasure or of utility or of character. This typology has struck a responsive chord among many other writers on friendship. Nevertheless it is our contention that there is a fourth important category of friendship that has been overlooked in the philosophical literature. We call this fourth category, asymmetrical friendship. Asymmetrical friendships do not (...) fit the Aristotelian tripartite classification in that they are not friendships of pleasure or of utility nor are they recognizably what Aristotle means by character friendship even though they may hold much in common in various ways with character friendship. We will have little to say about friendships of pleasure or utility. Instead we will elucidate our fourth category of asymmetrical friendships in contradistinction to Aristotle’s notion of character friendships. Aristotle thinks that character friendships are neither friendships of pleasure nor utility but instead are ones in which the friends care for each other for their own sakes. We show that the tradition of Aristotelian thinking requires character friendship to be symmetrical in various ways that we will explain soon. In contrast we argue that asymmetrical friendships are also not friendships of pleasure or utility but like character friendships are ones in which the friends care for each other for their own sakes. Such friendships appear especially valuable to us in the phenomenology of our lives. Thus they are unlike friendships of pleasure or utility that may also be asymmetrical in various ways. And they are therefore also unlike Aristotle’s symmetrical and certainly valuable character friendships that seldom appear at all in our imperfect lives lived as they are in an imperfect world. (shrink)

In his seminal work Moral Notions , Julius Kovesi presents a novel account of concept formation. At the heart of this account is a distinction between what he terms the material element and the formal element of concepts. This paper elucidates his distinction in detail and contrasts it with other distinctions such as form-matter, universal-particular, genus-difference, necessary-sufficient, and open texture-closed texture. We situate Kovesi’s distinction within his general philosophical method, outlining his views on concept formation in general and explain how (...) his theory of concept formation is applied in moral philosophy. (shrink)

Listen to the interview with Brian Kemple... and learn to appreciate the diachronic trajectory of semiotics. *** Live interview with Brian Kemple, Executive Director of the Lyceum Institute, to discuss the legacy and influence of John Deely (1942-2017), the thinker most responsible for developing semiotics into the 21st century. This interview, conducted by William Passarini (Mansarda Acesa) and Tim Troutman (Lyceum Institute), is part of the preliminary activities of the 2022 International Open Seminar on Semiotics: a Tribute (...) to John Deely on the Fifth Anniversary of His Passing, cooperatively organized by the Institute for Philosophical Studies of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities of the University of Coimbra, the Lyceum Institute, the Deely Project, Saint Vincent College, the Iranian Society for Phenomenology at the Iranian Political Science Association, the International Association for Semiotics of Space and Time, the Institute for Scientific Information on Social Sciences of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the Semiotic Society of America, the American Maritain Association, the International Association for Semiotic Studies, the International Society for Biosemiotic Studies, the International Center for Semiotics and Intercultural Dialogue, Moscow State Academic University for the Humanities and the Mansarda Acesa with the support of the FCT - Foundation for Science and Technology, I.P., of the Ministry of Science, Technology and Higher Education of the Government of Portugal under the UID/FIL/00010/2020 project. Brian Kemple holds a PhD in Philosophy from the University of St. Thomas, in Houston TX, where he wrote his dissertation under the inimitable John Deely. He is the Founder and Executive Director of the Lyceum Institute (https://lyceum.institute). Philosophical interests and areas of study include: Thomas Aquinas, John Poinsot, Charles Peirce, Martin Heidegger, the history and importance of semiotics, scholasticism, phenomenology; as well as ancillary interests in the liberal arts, technology, and education as a moral habit. He has published two scholarly books— 'Ens Primum Cognitum in Thomas Aquinas and the Tradition' (Brill: 2017) and 'The Intersections of Semiotics and Phenomenology: Peirce and Heidegger in Dialogue' (De Gruyter: 2019), as well as a number of scholarly articles, popular articles, and his own 'Introduction to Philosophical Principles: Logic, Physics, and the Human Person' (2019) and the forthcoming 'Linguistic Signification: A Classical Course in Grammar and Composition' (2021). In addition to being the Executive Director of the Lyceum Institute, he is the Executive Editor of 'Reality: a Journal for Philosophical Discourse' (https://realityjournal.org/). *** Technical support was assured by Robert Junqueira and the cover image for the video was designed by Zahra Soltani. (shrink)

At every level, the study of organic life underlies the relational nature of its subject. Whether one looks at an organism as a whole and its relationship to its environment or other members of its species, or at the component parts of the organism at an organ system, cellular or even molecular level, there is an externally referential and thus relational nature to lived beings. There is perhaps no place as fruitful to illustrate this relationality than the field of immunology. (...) This paper argues that close attention to the phenomenon of relationality that is evidenced by natural scientific research provides an important occasion to demonstrate the wide-ranging validity of the sort of relational ontology defended by the tradition of phenomenological personalism. Such intersections as one discerns in interdisciplinary engagement between personalist phenomenology and immunology, moreover, can provide a basis for further clarification of the relation of person to the world of nature and vice versa in ways that call into question the dominance of reductive philosophies of nature. (shrink)

Two principal questions are addressed: In De Finibus 3.54 what position does Cicero imagine the talus to fall and lie? How does this talus simile shed light on the problematic relationship between the Stoics’ doctrine of ‘preferred indifferents’ and their definition of the Good as virtue?

ABSTRACTHow should judges reason in a well-ordered constitutional democracy? According to John Rawls’s famous remarks in Political Liberalism, they ought to do so in accordance with the idea of pub...

1 Evidence-based policy requires researchers to provide the answers to ecological questions that are of interest to policy makers. To find out what those questions are in the UK, representatives from 28 organizations involved in policy, together with scientists from 10 academic institutions, were asked to generate a list of questions from their organizations. 2 During a 2-day workshop the initial list of 1003 questions generated from consulting at least 654 policy makers and academics was used as a basis for (...) generating a short list of 100 questions of significant policy relevance. Short-listing was decided on the basis of the preferences of the representatives from the policy-led organizations. 3 The areas covered included most major issues of environmental concern in the UK, including agriculture, marine fisheries, climate change, ecosystem function and land management. 4 The most striking outcome was the preference for general questions rather than narrow ones. The reason is that policy is driven by broad issues rather than specific ones. In contrast, scientists are frequently best equipped to answer specific questions. This means that it may be necessary to extract the underpinning specific question before researchers can proceed. 5 Synthesis and applications. Greater communication between policy makers and scientists is required in order to ensure that applied ecologists are dealing with issues in a way that can feed into policy. It is particularly important that applied ecologists emphasize the generic value of their work wherever possible. (shrink)

What might we learn if the study of ethics focused less on hard cases and more on the practices of everyday life? In Everyday Ethics, Michael Lamb and Brian Williams gathered some of the world's leading scholars and practitioners of moral theology (including some Georgetown University Press authors) to explore that question in dialogue with anthropology and the social sciences. In a field largely begun by Michael Banner, contributors engage with and extend his ideas of ethics as it is (...) practiced in daily life. Crossing disciplinary boundaries, these scholars analyze the ethics of ordinary practices--from eating, learning, and loving the neighbor to borrowing and spending, using technology, and working in a flexible economy. Along the way, they consider the moral and methodological questions that emerge from this interdisciplinary dialogue and assess the implications for the future of moral theology. (shrink)

Efforts aimed at broadening participation in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) require a holistic presentation of the state of racial and gender participation. Statistics currently used to describe participation often include raw counts of degrees and the percentages of demographic groups receiving STEM degrees. While these data provide insights into demographic trends, they do not present the complete picture because these “traditional” statistics do not capture how well a field of study reflects—or is proportionally similar to—a larger body, such (...) as the college population. If the goal of broadening participation in STEM education is to ensure that all racial and gender groups are proportionally represented, analysts require direct measures of representation. In this article, we present a novel metric that assesses the degree to which groups are overrepresented or underrepresented in a given field. This metric calculates field-specific representation by comparing the proportion of degrees awarded to members of a demographic group in a specific field of study with the proportion of all degrees awarded to that group. Using data from the National Science Foundation and the Department of Education, we demonstrate the efficacy of this representation metric and show that it provides new insights into STEM participation levels for women and other groups considered to be underrepresented. While traditional measurements show the increasing number of degrees awarded to and the increasing share of underrepresented minority students in STEM, our metric revealed that underrepresented minorities remain underrepresented in STEM fields, especially in engineering and the natural sciences. (shrink)

This is a book symposium on Steffen Borge’s The Philosophy of Football. It has contributions from William Morgan, Murray Smith and Brian Weatherson with replies from Borge.

Moral norms are the rules of morality, those that people actually follow, and those that we feel people ought to follow, even when they don’t. Historically, the social sciences have been primarily concerned with describing the many forms that moral norms take in various cultures, with the emerging implication that moral norms are mere arbitrary products of culture. Philosophers, on the other hand, have been more concerned with trying to understand the nature and source of rules that all cultures ought (...) to follow, with relatively little regard for what people actually do. The tension between the two approaches has to do with whether there are any standards higher than the whims of culture in determining right and wrong. Typically, the social sciences say “no”, pointing at the diversity of moral beliefs. Most philosophers (along with people of moral conviction) feel that there must be some deeper source of morality than the trends and fads of culture. Unfortunately, the nature and source of such standards has remained something of a mystery. Recent work on the evolution of norms has changed this picture dramatically. (shrink)

Despite their ubiquity and widespread acceptance in contemporary education, formal grading systems are relatively recent innovations in the history and philosophy of education. Far from innocuous tools which aid the student’s academic development, grades and grading systems developed as ad hoc tools for ranking students against one another in academic competitions. This article examines the history of assessment, grades, and grading in light of the longer tradition of education and suggests alternative practices could better orient students toward the true, good, (...) beautiful, holy, healthy, and beneficial. By understanding how and why contemporary approaches to grades developed, classical educators will be equipped to mitigate the unintended and often unseen adverse consequences grades have on their students. Ultimately, this article seeks to liberate teachers and students to pursue the intrinsic goods of learning over against the fleeting and extrinsic rewards of making the grade. (shrink)

This month the American Journal of Bioethics examines the intersectionality of medicine, ethics, and race. In “Race, Power, and COVID-19: A Call for Advocacy Within Bioethics,” Mithani and colleagu...

Civil society organizations attempt to induce corporations to behave in more socially responsible ways, with a view to raising labour standards. A broader way of conceptualizing their efforts to influence the policies and practices of employers is desirable, one centred upon the concept of civil governance. This recognizes that CSOs not only attempt to shape the behaviour of employers through the forging of direct, collaborative relationships, but also try to do so indirectly, with interactions of various kinds with the state (...) being integral. Drawing on evidence derived from UK-based CSOs involved in work and employment relations, four types of civil governance are identified and characterized. By elaborating the concept of civil governance, and demonstrating how different types of civil governance operate, the research extends our knowledge and understanding of how CSOs, as increasingly prominent actors in the field of work and employment relations, operate within, and contribute to, systems of labour governance. (shrink)

The papers collected here are, with three exceptions, those presented at a conference on probability and causation held at the University of California at Irvine on July 15-19, 1985. The exceptions are that David Freedman and Abner Shimony were not able to contribute the papers that they presented to this volume, and that Clark Glymour who was not able to attend the conference did contribute a paper. We would like to thank the National Science Foundation and the School of Humanities (...) of the University of California at Irvine for generous support. WILLIAM HARPER University of Western Ontario BRIAN SKYRMS University of California at Irvine VII INTRODUCTION TO CAUSATION, CHANCE, AND CREDENCE The search for causes is so central to science that it has sometimes been taken as the defining attribute of the scientific enterprise. Yet even after twenty-five centuries of philosophical analysis the meaning of "cause" is still a matter of controversy, among scientists as well as philosophers. Part of the problem is that the servicable concepts of causation built out of Necessity, Sufficiency, Locality, and Temporal Precedence were constructed for a deterministic world-view which has been obsolete since the advent of quantum theory. A physically credible theory of causation must be, at basis, statistical. And statistical analyses of caus­ ation may be of interest even when an underlying deterministic theory is assumed, as in classical statistical mechanics. (shrink)

Despite there being deep lines of convergence between the philosophies of Alfred North Whitehead, C. S. Peirce, William James, John Dewey, and other classical American philosophers, it remains an open question whether Whitehead is a pragmatist, and conversation between pragmatists and Whitehead scholars have been limited. Indeed, it is difficult to find an anthology of classical American philosophy that includes Whitehead’s writings. These camps began separately, and so they remain. This volume questions the wisdom of that separation, exploring their (...) connections, both historical and in application. The essays in this volume embody original and creative work by leading scholars that not only furthers the understanding of American philosophy, but seeks to advance it by working at the intersection of experience and reality to incite novel and creative thought. This exploration is long overdue. Specific questions that are addressed are: Is Whitehead a pragmatist? What contrasts and affinities exist between American pragmatism and Whitehead’s thought? What new questions, strategies, and critiques emerge by juxtaposing their distinct perspectives? -/- . (shrink)

Omnipresent calls for more women in university administration assume these women will prioritize using resources and power to increase female representation, especially in STEM fields where women are most underrepresented. However, empirical evidence is lacking for systematic differences in female versus male administrators’ attitudes. Do female administrators agree on which strategies are best, and do men see things differently? To answer this question, we explored United States college and university administrators’ opinions regarding policies, strategies, and structural changes in their organizations (...) designed to increase women professors’ representation and retention in STEM fields. A comprehensive review of past research yielded a database of potentially-effective, recommended policies (e.g., increasing emphasis on teaching, service, and administration during promotion reviews; stopping the tenure clock for childbearing; providing on-campus childcare; couples-hiring; sharing tenure lines; having more women chair search committees; setting gender quotas for promotion). A survey based on these recommended policies was sent to provosts, deans, associate deans, and department chairs of STEM fields at 96 public and private research universities (formerly called R1s) across the U.S. These administrators were asked to rate the quality and feasibility of each recommended policy; 474 provided data, of which 334 contained complete numerical data used in the analyses, so our results are based on a large, geographically diverse group of administrators at research universities. Our data revealed that female administrators perceived the 44 strategies to be higher in quality overall than did male administrators--but not higher in feasibility--with 9 policies perceived differently when rated by women versus men administrators, after imposing conservative statistical controls. There was broad general agreement on the relative rankings of the 44 policies in terms of their perceived quality. Overall, our national survey of U.S. administrators supported the assertion that placing women in administrative roles creates greater emphasis on the importance of enacting policies to attract and retain women in STEM. Topics of disagreement between women and men regarding strategy quality are important focuses of future policy and planning, because female administrators may have insights into how to retain women professors that male administrators do not share. (shrink)

To acquire one’s native phonological system, language-specific phonological categories and relationships must be extracted from the input. The acquisition of the categories and relationships has each in its own right been the focus of intense research. However, it is remarkable that research on the acquisition of categories and the relations between them has proceeded, for the most part, independently of one another. We argue that this has led to the implicit view that phonological acquisition is a “two-stage” process: Phonetic categories (...) are first acquired and then subsequently mapped onto abstract phoneme categories. We present simulations that suggest two problems with this view: First, the learner might mistake the phoneme-level categories for phonetic-level categories and thus be unable to learn the relationships between phonetic-level categories; on the other hand, the learner might construct inaccurate phonetic-level representations that prevent it from finding regular relations among them. We suggest an alternative conception of the phonological acquisition problem that sidesteps this apparent inevitability and acquires phonemic categories in a single stage. Using acoustic data from Inuktitut, we show that this model reliably converges on a set of phoneme-level categories and phonetic-level relations among subcategories, without making use of a lexicon. (shrink)

The perfect companion to Lewis Carroll's classic book and director Tim Burton's March 2010 remake of Alice in Wonderland Alice?s Adventures in Wonderland has fascinated children and adults alike for generations. Why does Lewis Carroll introduce us to such oddities as blue caterpillars who smoke hookahs, cats whose grins remain after their heads have faded away, and a White Queen who lives backwards and remembers forwards? Is it all just nonsense? Was Carroll under the influence? This book probes the deeper (...) underlying meaning in the Alice books, and reveals a world rich with philosophical life lessons. Tapping into some of the greatest philosophical minds that ever lived?Aristotle, Hume, Hobbes, and Nietzsche?Alice in Wonderland and Philosophy explores life?s ultimate questions through the eyes of perhaps the most endearing heroine in all of literature. Looks at compelling issues such as perception and reality as well as how logic fares in a world of lunacy, the Mad Hatter, clocks, and temporal passage Offers new insights into favorite Alice in Wonderland characters and scenes, including the Mad Hatter and his tea party, the violent Queen of Hearts, and the grinning Cheshire Cat Accessible and entertaining, Alice in Wonderland and Philosophy will enrich your experience of Alice's timeless adventures with new meaning and fun. (shrink)

This paper draws on a study of numeracy coordinators in primary schools in the UK in the second year of the implementation of the National Numeracy Strategy. It identifies them as working between three main tasks: embedding the Strategy, sustaining teacher collegiality and auditing accountability. We identify tensions in 'being a coordinator' in relation to these tasks, especially for discourse and identity. We assess the usefulness of the metaphor of 'brokering' in 'communities of practice' to theorise such tensions. We conclude (...) with some reservations about the metaphor, especially in the way the tensions are discursively performed in relation to the rate of change, complexity of notions of professional identity, and the problematic 'community' status of audit in the educational context. (shrink)

A central feature of Confucianism is the doctrine that an adult child has, for want of a better word, the ‘duty’ to care for his elderly parents1. Whether this doctrine should be framed in terms of an ethic of duties as opposed to an ethic of virtues is a vexed question. It might be argued that the doctrine is best framed in terms of the behaviour and dispositions appropriate to an agent who is, within the Confucian moral vision, good. Nonetheless, (...) in both popular discourse and in much the secondary literature, the doctrine is characterized in terms of a moral ‘ought’. We will adopt this perspective, and talk of the ‘filial duty of care’. We investigate the empirical question of whether Chinese communities still have a strong sense of this duty. We conclude that although there is a widespread perception among Chinese communities that their sense of filial duty of care has been eroded, in fact the adherence to it remains robust. (shrink)

Storage and Commodity Markets is primarily a work of economic theory, concerned with how the capability to store a surplus affects the prices and production of commodities. Its focus on the behaviour, over time, of aggregate stockpiles provides insights into such questions as how much a country should store out of its current supply of food considering the uncertainty in future harvests. Related topics covered include whether storage or international trade is a more effective buffer and whether stockpiles are more (...) useful in raw or processed form. Several chapters are devoted to analysing such government programmes as price bands, buffer stocks, and strategic reserves. This material is in the domain of applied welfare analysis with public finance. Because the theory presented is sufficiently general, it should be of interest to macroeconomists studying aggregate inventories or savings and to those in operations research studying inventory and pricing policies of large firms. (shrink)

There are two ways to do the unexpected. The banal way—let's call it the expectedly unexpected—is simply to chart the waters of what is and is not done, and then set out to do something different. For a philosopher, this can be done by embracing a method of non sequitor or by perhaps inverting some strongly held assumption of the field. The more interesting way— the unexpectedly unexpected—is to transform the expectations themselves; to do something new and contextualize it in (...) such a way that it not only makes perfect sense, but has the audience scratching their heads and saying, “Of course!” To do the unexpectedly unexpected on a regular basis is the true mark of genius. It recalls Kant's characterization of the genius as the one who not merely follows or breaks the rules of art but that, “Genius is the natural endowment that gives the rule to art.” We would not like to make the bold claim that Paul M. Churchland (PMC) is a philosophical genius of Kantian standards, but he sometimes achieves the unexpectedly unexpected and his position on the issue of scientific realism is a fine example of this. Given other views he holds and the philosophical forebears he holds dear, one might expect him to embrace an antirealism with respect to the posits of scientific theories. But, quite to the contrary, Churchland is one of the strongest contemporary philosophical voices on behalf of scientific realism. And, as we will discuss in this chapter, a closer look at this reasoning reveals that his realism is not perverse, it is exactly the sort of position he should be expected to hold, if only we understand the philosophical issues correctly. (shrink)

The Life and World of... biographies tell the life-story of key people from history - the part they played in shaping events, and how their lives touched other people.