The historical debate on representation in cognitive science and neuroscience construes representations as theoretical posits and discusses the degree to which we have reason to posit them. We reject the premise of that debate. We argue that experimental neuroscientists routinely observe and manipulate neural representations in their laboratory. Therefore, neural representations are as real as neurons, action potentials, or any other well-established entities in our ontology.

A rigorous treatment of a thought experiment that has become notorious within and outside of philosophy - The Trolley Problem - by one of the most influential moral philosophers alive todaySuppose you can stop a trolley from killing five people, but only by turning it onto a side track where it will kill one. May you turn the trolley? What if the only way to rescue the five is to topple a bystander in front of the trolley so that his (...) body stops it but he dies? May you use a device to stop the trolley that will kill a bystander as a side effect? The "Trolley Problem" challenges us to explain and justify our different intuitive judgments about these and related cases and has spawned a huge literature. F.M. Kamm's 2013 Tanner Lectures present some of her views on this notorious moral conundrum. After providing a brief history of changing views of what the problem is about and attempts to solve it, she focuses on two prominent issues: Does who turns the trolley and how the harm is shifted affect the moral permissibility of acting? The answers to these questions lead to general proposals about when we may and may not harm some to help others. Three distinguished philosophers - Judith Jarvis Thomson, Thomas Hurka, and Shelly Kagan - then comment on Kamm's proposals. She responds to each comment at length, providing an exceptionally rich elaboration and defense of her views. The Trolley Problem Mysteries is an invaluable resource not only to philosophers concerned about the Trolley Problem, but to anyone worried about how we ought to act when we can lessen harm to some by harming others and how we can reach a decision about the question. (shrink)

At some point in the future – perhaps within the next few decades – it will be possible for foetuses to develop completely outside the womb. Ectogenesis, as this technology is called, raises substantial issues for the abortion debate. One such issue is that it will become possible for a woman to have an abortion, in the sense of having the foetus removed from her body, but for the foetus to be kept alive. We argue that while there is a (...) right to an abortion, there are reasons to doubt that there is a right to the death of the foetus. Our strategy in this essay is to consider and reject three arguments in favour of this latter right. The first claims that women have a right not to be biological mothers, the second that women have a right to genetic privacy, and the third that a foetus is one's property. Furthermore, we argue that it follows from rejecting the third claim that genetic parents also lack a right to the destruction of cryopreserved embryos used for in vitro fertilization. The conclusion that a woman possesses no right to the death of the foetus builds upon the claims that other pro-choice advocates, such as Judith Jarvis Thomson, have made. (shrink)

This essay contrasts two approaches to permissible self-defensive killing. The first is the forfeiture approach; the second is the elbow room for self-defense approach. The forfeiture approach comes in many versions — not all of which make prominent use of the word “forfeiture.” However, all versions presume that the permissibility of X killing Y (when X must kill Y in order to prevent herself from being unjustly killed) depends entirely on there being some feature of Y in virtue of which (...) Y has become liable to be killed, that is, in virtue of which Y has forfeited or lost or been stripped of his right not to be killed. Different versions of the forfeiture approach advance different claims about what feature of Y will render Y liable to being killed by X. I criticize versions of this approach offered by Thomson, Otsuka, and McMahan and argue that the shared deep error is the presumption that the permissibility of X’s action turns entirely on some feature of Y. In focusing entirely on Y, the forfeiture approach fails to take seriously X’s right of self-defense. In contrast, the elbow room for self-defense approach starts with an explication of a plausible right of self-defense and maintains that a proper explication of Y’s right not to be killed must make moral elbow room from X’s exercise of this right. Within the elbow room approach, Y’s liability to being killed is based upon X’s right of self-defense rather than the permissibility of X’s killing Y being based upon Y’s forfeiture. (shrink)

Gilbert Imlay’s 1793 epistolary novel The Emigrants, which dramatizes several characters’ journey across the Alleghenies to occupy and develop a tract in the Ohio country, features the use of allusions and commonplaces that illuminate this fiction’s provocative campaign to conciliate physiocracy, proto-feminism, and the new philosophy with the expulsion of indigenous people in the region. Imlay uses Pope, Sterne and Thomson to justify and eroticize U.S. expansiveness. The heroine Caroline T—n embodies, especially, the wondering, wonderful vindication of a world-historical (...) land-grab. Comparisons with contemporary stories by Chateaubriand, Blake, Radcliffe, and the Seneca leader known as the Cornplanter highlight ways in which Imlay—partaking of a rhetorical repertoire demonstrably familiar to his peers—mutes history, religion, appropriation, and aggression in favour of erotic appeal, a series of emblematic, excusatory metonymies, and the picturesque language of an early phase of the North American real estate pitch. (shrink)

Gilbert Imlay’s 1793 epistolary novel The Emigrants, which dramatizes several characters’ journey across the Alleghenies to occupy and develop a tract in the Ohio country, features the use of allusions and commonplaces that illuminate this fiction’s provocative campaign to conciliate physiocracy, proto-feminism, and the new philosophy with the expulsion of indigenous people in the region. Imlay uses Pope, Sterne and Thomson to justify and eroticize U.S. expansiveness. The heroine Caroline T—n embodies, especially, the wondering, wonderful vindication of a world-historical (...) land-grab. Comparisons with contemporary stories by Chateaubriand, Blake, Radcliffe, and the Seneca leader known as the Cornplanter highlight ways in which Imlay—partaking of a rhetorical repertoire demonstrably familiar to his peers—mutes history, religion, appropriation, and aggression in favour of erotic appeal, a series of emblematic, excusatory metonymies, and the picturesque language of an early phase of the North American real estate pitch. (shrink)

Theorists, historians, and artists address the precarious futurity of the notion of the future. Not long ago, a melancholic left and a manic neoliberalism seemed to arrive at an awkward consensus: the foreclosure of futurity. Whereas the former mourned the failure of its utopian project, the latter celebrated the triumph of a global marketplace. The radical hope of realizing a singularly different, more equitable future displaced by a belief that the future had already come to pass, limiting post-historical society to (...) an uneventful life of endless accumulation. Today, amidst an abundance of neofuturisms, posthumanisms, futurologies, speculative philosophies and accelerationist scenarios, there is as well an expanding awareness of a looming planetary catastrophe driven by the extractionist logic of capitalism. Despite this return to the future, the temporal horizon of our present moment is perhaps more aptly characterized by the “shrinking future” of just-in-time production, risk management, high-frequency trading, and the futures market. In Futurity Report, theorists, historians, and artists address the precarious futurity of the notion of the future itself. Contributors McKenzie Wark, China Miéville, Kerstin Stakemeier, Diedrich Diederichsen, Natascha Sadr Haghighian, Marina Vishmidt, Johannes Paul Raether, Felicity D. Scott, Silvia Maglioni, Graeme Thomson, Doreen Mende, Pedro Neves Marques, Achille Mbembe, Kodwo Eshun, Haytham El-Wardany, T. J. Demos, Ana Teixeira Pinto. (shrink)

Ectogenesis, or the use of an artificial womb to allow a foetus to develop, will likely become a reality within a few decades, and could significantly affect the abortion debate. We first examine the implications for Judith Jarvis Thomson’s violinist analogy, which argues for a woman’s right to withdraw life support from the foetus and so terminate her pregnancy, even if the foetus is granted full moral status. We show that on Thomson’s reasoning, there is no right to (...) the death of the foetus, and abortion is not permissible if ectogenesis is available, provided it is safe and inexpensive. This raises the question of whether there are persuasive reasons for the right to the death of the foetus that could be exercised in the context of ectogenesis. Eric Mathison and Jeremy Davis have examined several arguments for this right, doubting that it exists, while Joona Räsänen has recently criticized their reasoning. We respond to Räsänen’s analysis, concluding that his arguments are unsuccessful, and that there is no right to the death of the foetus in these circumstances. (shrink)

Eric Voegelin (1901-1985) was one of the most original philosophers of our time, working throughout his life to account for the endemic political violence of the twentieth century, in an effort variously referred to as a philosophy of politics, history, or consciousness. Drawing from the University of Missouri Press's thirty-four-volume edition of his collected works, Charles Embry and Glenn Hughes have assembled a selection of Voegelin's representative writings, satisfying the need for a single volume that can serve as a (...) general introduction to his philosophy. The selection demonstrates the range and creativity of Voegelin's thought, including writings that show his thinking as it developed historically in his long search for order in human society. (shrink)

Was sind wir? Wie immer man sich zu dieser Frage stellt, eines scheint offenkundig: Wir sind Tiere, genauer gesagt: menschliche Tiere, Mitglieder der Art Homo sapiens. Dabei mag es überraschen, daß viele Philosophen diese vermeintlich banale Tatsache abstreiten. Plato, Augustinus, Descartes, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Kant und Hegel, um nur einige herausragende zu nennen, waren alle der Meinung, wir seien keine Tiere. Es mag zwar sein, daß unsere Körper Tiere sind. Doch sind wir nicht mit unseren Körpern gleichzusetzen. Wir sind etwas (...) anderes als Tiere. Kaum anderer Meinung sind Denker nicht-westlicher Traditionen. Und rund neun von zehn Philosophen, die heutzutage über Probleme der personalen Identität nachdenken, vertreten Ansichten, die ausschließen, daß wir Tiere sind. (shrink)

Ce premier numéro des Cahiers Eric Weil contient deux textes d'Eric Weil: une réédition de "Violence et langage" de 1967 et un inédit de 1974: "L'avenir de la philosophie". Il contient également des études sur la philosophie de Weil.Ont...

a short text on the concept of justice by Walter Benjamin. The text was preserved by Gershom Scholem on 8 October 1916, the same method by which most of Benjamin's early writings have reached us. However, this piece somehow remained undetected by the editors of the Gesammelte Schriften. It first appeared in German and English in Metaphysics of the Profane, New York: Columbia University Press, 2003, pp. 166-169, with permission of the German publishers Suhrkamp Verlag. It is presented here with (...) a typographical error corrected. (shrink)

an anarchist critique of Bolshevism, drawing on Walter Benjamin. The translation and commentary published as "Theories of Justice, Profane and Prophetic: Gershom Scholem on the Bolshevik Revolution" in Gershom Scholem: In memoriam, Vol. 2, Jerusalem Studies in Jewish Thought, 21, 2007.

In this essay I propose to explicate and defend a new and improved version of a Lockean proviso—the self-ownership proviso . I shall presume here that individuals possess robust rights of self-ownership. I shall take it that each individual has strong moral claims over the elements which constitute her person, e.g., her body parts, her talents, and her energies. However, in the course of the essay, I shall be challenging what I take to be the standard conception of self-ownership and (...) proposing an enrichment of that conception. The SOP is presented and in part justified as an implication of the right of self-ownership as it is more richly conceived—hence its designation as the self-ownership proviso. As an implication of the right of self-ownership which is also compatible, in theory and practice, with extensive and robust private property rights, the SOP is offered as an integral element of classical-liberal political theory. (shrink)

On October 1, 1988, thirty-five years after co-discovering the structure of the DNA molecule, Dr. James Watson launched an unprecedented experiment in American science policy. In response to a reporter's question at a press conference, he unilaterally set aside 3 to 5 percent of the budget of the newly launched Human Genome Project to support studies of the ethical, legal, and social implications of new advances in human genetics. The Human Genome Project, by providing geneticists with the molecular maps of (...) the human chromosomes that they use to identify specific human genes, will speed the proliferation of a class of DNA-based diagnostic and risk-assessment tests that already create professional ethical and health-policy challenges for clinicians. “The problems are with us now, independent of the genome program, but they will be associated with it,” Watson said. “We should devote real money to discussing these issues.” By 1994, the “ELSI program” had spent almost $20 million in pursuit of its mission, and gained both praise and criticism for its accomplishments. (shrink)

My goal in this essay is to say something helpful about the philosophical foundations of deontic restraints, i.e., moral restraints on actions that are, roughly speaking, grounded in the wrongful character of the actions themselves and not merely in the disvalue of their results. An account of deontic restraints will be formulated and offered against the backdrop of three related, but broader, contrasts or puzzles within moral theory. The plausibility of this account of deontic restraints rests in part on how (...) well this account resolves the puzzles or illuminates the contrasts which make up this theoretical backdrop. (shrink)

David Silver has argued that there is an illegitimate circularity in Plantinga's account of how a Christian theist can defend herself against the potential defeater presented by Paul Draper's formulation of the problem of evil. The way out of the circle for the theist, thinks Silver, would be by adopting a kind of evidentialism: she needs to make an appeal to evidence that is independent of the reasons she has for holding theistic belief in the first place. I shall argue (...) that Silver's argument is unsuccessful, mainly because he does not get Plantinga's thought right. Silver's confusion is in taking causes of belief as reasons for belief, and in failing to account for the impact of belief holism and our web of beliefs on the very hope for independent reasons. (shrink)

1. Introduction This essay deals with the hard topic of the permissible killing of the innocent. The relevance of this topic to the morality of war is obvious. For even the most defensive and just wars, i.e., the most defensive and just responses to existing or imminent large-scale aggression, will inflict harm upon – in particular, cause the deaths of – innocent bystanders. 1 The most obvious and relevant example is that of innocent Soviet noncombatants who would be killed by (...) even the most precise defensive strike against Soviet strategic weapons or troop formations that is now possible. Should there be no vindication or, at least, no excuse for some killings of such innocent bystanders, morality would dictate that even defensive counterforce measures against largescale attacks should be renounced. (shrink)

To the student of the recent history of theological ideas in the West, it sometimes seems as though, of all the ‘new’ subjects that have been intro duced into theological discussion during the last hundred or so years, only two have proved to be of permanent significance. One is, of course, biblical criticism, and the other, the subject which in my University is still called ‘comparative religion’—the dispassionate study of the religions of the world as phenomena in their own right.

In this paper I offer three main challenges to James (2011). All three turn on the nature of philosophy and secure knowledge in Spinoza. First, I criticize James's account of the epistemic role that experience plays in securing adequate ideas for Spinoza. In doing so I criticize her treatment of what is known as the ‘conatus doctrine’ in Spinoza in order to challenge her picture of the relationship between true religion and philosophy. Second, this leads me into a criticism of (...) her account of the nature of philosophy in Spinoza. I argue it is less piecemeal and less akin to what we would recognize as ‘science’ than she suggests. Third, I argue against James's core commitment that Spinoza's three kinds of knowledge differ in degree; I claim they differ in kind. My argument will offer a new interpretation of Spinoza's conception of ‘common notions’. Moreover, I argue that Spinozistic adequate knowledge involves something akin to angelic disembodiment. (shrink)

Do moral questions have objective answers? In this great debate, Gilbert Harman explains and argues for relativism, emotivism, and moral scepticism. In his view, moral disagreements are like disagreements about what to pay for a house; there are no correct answers ahead of time, except in relation to one or another moral framework. Independently, Judith Jarvis Thomson examines what she takes to be the case against moral objectivity, and rejects it; she argues that it is possible to find out (...) the correct answers to some moral questions. In her view, some moral disagreements are like disagreements about whether the house has a ghost. Harman and Thomson then reply to each other. This important, lively accessible exchange will be invaluable to all students of moral theory and meta-ethics. (shrink)

In this paper I take a critical look at Judith Jarvis Thomson famous violinist analogy for abortion. I argue that while the violinist example does show that a right to life does not entail a right to be given the means of life, the violinist cast is relevantly different from the pregnancy case. I also argue that Thomson's positive argument in favor of the permissibility of abortion fails because it is based on a false conception of bodily self-ownsership. (...) Finally, I offer an argument against abortion built not on the child's rights, but the mother's obligation to the vulnerable. (shrink)

In the first book of its kind, Garland-Thomson defines staring, explores the factors that motivate it, and considers the targets and the effects of the stare.

Judith Jarvis Thomson (1929-2020), philosophe américaine parmi les figures les plus marquantes dans l’étude de la normativité et de l’éthique, s’est éteinte ce 20 novembre à l’âge de 91 ans. Professeure émérite au MIT, sa carrière s’est étendue sur cinq décennies consacrées à la recherche, à l’enseignement et à la publication de plusieurs articles et ouvrages sur la nature des valeurs, des normes et des droits. Parmi ses ouvrages les plus importants, nous rappelons The Realm of Rights (1990), Goodness (...) and Advice (2001) et Normativity (2008). (shrink)

This article defends the existence of _borderline consciousness._ In borderline consciousness, conscious experience is neither determinately present nor determinately absent, but rather somewhere between. The argument in brief is this. In considering what types of systems are conscious, we face a quadrilemma. Either nothing is conscious, or everything is conscious, or there’s a sharp boundary across the apparent continuum between conscious systems and nonconscious ones, or consciousness is a vague property admitting indeterminate cases. Assuming mainstream naturalism about consciousness, we ought (...) to reject the first three options, which forces us to the fourth, indeterminacy. Standard objections to the existence of borderline consciousness turn on the inconceivability of borderline cases. However, borderline cases are only inconceivable by an inappropriately demanding standard of conceivability. I conclude with some plausible cases and applications. (shrink)

There continues to be a vigorous public debate in our society about the status of climate science. Much of the skepticism voiced in this debate suffers from a lack of understanding of how the science works - in particular the complex interdisciplinary scientific modeling activities such as those which are at the heart of climate science. In this book Eric Winsberg shows clearly and accessibly how philosophy of science can contribute to our understanding of climate science, and how it (...) can also shape climate policy debates and provide a starting point for research. Covering a wide range of topics including the nature of scientific data, modeling, and simulation, his book provides a detailed guide for those willing to look beyond ideological proclamations, and enriches our understanding of how climate science relates to important concepts such as chaos, unpredictability, and the extent of what we know. (shrink)

This book examines public policy in physical education and sport and provides insights into practices of school curriculum and after-school sport programs from a global context. The authors reflect on the continuously shifting understanding of the field of physical education and suggest a new direction for the profession.

This book examines public policy in physical education and sport and provides insights into practices of school curriculum and after-school sport programs from a global context. The authors reflect on the continuously shifting understanding of the field of physical education and suggest a new direction for the profession.

This volume attempts to give a short account of Herbert Spencer's life, an appreciation of his characteristics, and a statement of some of the services he rendered to science. Prominence has been given to his Autobiography, to his Principles of Biology, and to his position as a cosmic evolutionist; but little has been said of his psychology and sociology, which require another volume, or of his ethics and politics, or of his agnosticism-the whetstone of so many critics. Our appreciation of (...) Spencer's services is therefore partial, but it may not for that reason fail in its chief aim, that of illustrating the working of one of the most scientific minds that ever lived, -whose excess of science was almost unscientific.-. (shrink)

The famous ‘trolley problem’ began as a simple variation on an example given in passing by Philippa Foot , involving a runaway trolley that cannot be stopped but can be steered to a path of lesser harm. By switching from the perspective of the driver to that of a bystander, Judith Jarvis Thomson showed how the case raises difficulties for the normative theory Foot meant to be defending, and Thomson compounded the challenge with further variations that created still (...) more puzzles of broader interest. In recent years, her thought experiments have even been co-opted by psychologists engaged in the empirical study of moral judgment . Yet more than thirty years after launching the trolley problem, Thomson has now strikingly reversed course, retracting the very claim she had originally used to raise puzzles for Foot. I shall argue that this reversal is a mistake, leading to a needlessly counterintuitive, contrarian position about damage-control cases. Instead of overturning her earlier position, her new variations merely uncover a surprising insight about the conditions under which one may permissibly sacrifice another for a good end.1. The central case at issue is what Thomson now calls Bystander's Two Options: you are a bystander who sees a runaway trolley headed toward five innocent people who cannot move off the track; you cannot stop the trolley, but you have access to a switch that will divert it onto a side track where one innocent person is trapped. Is it permissible to throw the switch and divert the trolley toward lesser harm? The common answer, and Thomson's earlier one, is that it is: in cases like this, where there is a public threat and we can act on it so …. (shrink)

This is the first complete, one-volume English translation of the ancient Chinese text Xunzi, one of the most extensive, sophisticated, and elegant works in the tradition of Confucian thought. Through essays, poetry, dialogues, and anecdotes, the Xunzi articulates a Confucian perspective on ethics, politics, warfare, language, psychology, human nature, ritual, and music, among other topics. Aimed at general readers and students of Chinese thought, Eric Hutton's translation makes the full text of this important work more accessible in English than (...) ever before. Named for its purported author, the Xunzi has long been neglected compared to works such as the Analects of Confucius and the Mencius. Yet interest in the Xunzi has grown in recent decades, and the text presents a much more systematic vision of the Confucian ideal than the fragmented sayings of Confucius and Mencius. In one famous, explicit contrast to them, the Xunzi argues that human nature is bad. However, it also allows that people can become good through rituals and institutions established by earlier sages. Indeed, the main purpose of the Xunzi is to urge people to become as good as possible, both for their own sakes and for the sake of peace and order in the world. In this edition, key terms are consistently translated to aid understanding and line numbers are provided for easy reference. Other features include a concise introduction, a timeline of early Chinese history, a list of important names and terms, cross-references, brief explanatory notes, a bibliography, and an index. (shrink)

Removing the Commons defends a Lockean Left-Libertarian account of the moral conditions in which people may remove, either via use or appropriation, natural resources from the commons. I conclude that self-owning agents may remove natural resources from the commons just so long as they leave others the competitive value of their removal in a way that best affords others an equal opportunity for welfare.

It is commonly believed that disability disqualifies people from full participation in or recognition by society. This view is rooted in eugenic logic, which tells us that our world would be a better place if disability could be eliminated. In opposition to this position, I argue that that disability is inherent in the human condition and consider the bioethical question of why we might want to conserve rather than eliminate disability from our shared world. To do so, I draw together (...) an eclectic, rather than systematic, configuration of counter-eugenic arguments for conserving disability. The idea of preserving intact, keeping alive, and even encouraging to flourish denoted by conserve suggests that disabilities would be better understood as benefits rather than deficits. I present, then, a reading of disability as a potentially generative resource rather than unequivocally restrictive liability. In other words, what I consider here is the cultural and material contributions disability offers to the world. (shrink)