GJ: We've talked a lot about critics who are hostile toward you. Do you ever feel the need to make a stand against those who are favourably inclined toward your plays but whose comments seem to you to be stupid? EI: Well, for better or worse, that's what I've always done: I wrote Notes and Counter-Notes, had discussions with Claude Bonnefoy, I've written articles; and in each case what I've said, in short, is that critics who gave me their approval, (...) did so because they misunderstood me and were mistaken about my intentions. GJ: Finally, are you at all bitter about the critics? EI: No. Many have become good friends of mine. But it is a bit disheartening; when I began, a critic who, shall we say, is on the Right, a conservative critic who is very well-known and has since become a friend of mine, called me an impostor, a fraud, and a dummy; and now, twenty-five years later, the Leftists still call me an impostor, a fraud, and a dummy. GJ: But less often? EI: Well, I suppose so. Eugene Ionesco, renowned by playwright , recently was awarded the International Writer's Prize by the Welsh Arts Council. While in Wales, he was interviewed by Gabriel Jacobs, lecturer in French at University College of Swansea; the interview represents Ionesco's most concerted attempt yet to deal with his critics. He is completing a book on the subject which Gabriel Jacobs will translate into English. (shrink)

Performance appraisals are widely used as an HR instrument. This study among 332 police officers examines the effects of performance appraisals from a behavioral ethics perspective. A mediation model relating justice perceptions of police officers’ last performance appraisal to their work affect, perceived supervisor and organizational support and, in turn, their ethical (pro-organizational proactive) and unethical (counterproductive) work behavior was tested empirically. The relationship between justice perceptions and both, ethical and unethical behavior was mediated by perceived support and work affect. (...) Hence, a singular yearly performance appraisal was linked to both ethical and unethical behaviors at work. The finding that ethical and unethical aspects of employee behavior share several of the same organizational antecedents, namely organizational justice perceptions, has strong practical implications which are discussed as well. (shrink)

In response to the continued expansion of “red flag” laws allowing broader classes of people to petition a court for the removal of firearms from individuals who exhibit dangerous conduct, this paper argues that state laws should adopt a double-filter provision that balances individual rights and government public safety interests. The main component of such a provision is a special statutory category — “reporting party” — that enables a broader social network, such as co-workers or school administrators, to request that (...) a law enforcement officer file a petition for an Extreme Risk Protection Order. A double-filter provision would not give reporting parties a right to file a court petition directly. Instead, parties would file a request for petition with law enforcement officers, who must seek an ERPO from the court if they find the reporting party's information credible. That information is then transmitted to the court as a sworn affidavit of the reporting party. The goal is to facilitate a balanced policy model that widens the reporting circle in order to feed more potentially life-saving information into the system, mitigates the risk of erroneous deprivation of constitutionally protected due process and Second Amendment rights. (shrink)

An implicit assumption in most works on change recipient reactions is that employees are self-centred and driven by a utilitarian perspective. According to large parts of the organizational change literature, employees’ reactions to organizational change are mainly driven by observations around the question ‘what will happen to me?’ We analysed change recipients’ reactions to 26 large-scale planned change projects in a policing context on the basis of 23 in-depth interviews. Our data show that change recipients drew on observations with three (...) foci to assess change, making sense of change as multidimensional and mostly ambivalent in nature. In their assessment of organizational change, recipients care not only about their own personal outcomes, but go beyond self-interested concerns to show a genuine interest in the impact of change on their colleagues and organization. Meaningful engagement of employees in organizational change processes requires recognizing that reactions are not simply ‘all about me’. We add to the organizational change literature by introducing a behavioural ethics perspective on change recipients’ reactions highlighting an ethical orientation where moral motives that trigger change reactions get more attention than is common in the change management literature. Beyond the specifics of our study, we argue that the genuine concern of change recipients for the wellbeing of others, and the impact of the organizations’ activities on internal and external stakeholders, needs to be considered more systematically in research on organizational change. (shrink)

A variety of studies show that parental absence early in life leads to deleterious effects on the developing CNS. This is thought to be largely because evolutionary-dependent stimuli are necessary for the appropriate postnatal development of the young brain, an effect sometimes termed the “experience-expectant brain,” with parents providing the necessary input for normative synaptic connections to develop and appropriate neuronal survival to occur. Principal among CNS systems affected by parental input are the monoamine systems. In the present study,N= 434 (...) rhesus monkeys (233 males, 201 females) were reared in one of two conditions: as mother-reared controls (MR;n= 269) or without adults with 24-h access to same-aged peers (PR;n= 165). When subjects were six-months-old, they underwent a separation paradigm involving 4, sequential, four-day social separations from their mothers or peers, with each separation followed by three-day reunions with their mothers or their peers. Prior to the separation paradigm, baseline cisternal CSF samples were obtained, as well as at the end of each the four social separations, and after final separation, during a recovery period. CSF was assayed for concentrations of monoamine metabolites and a blood sample was genotyped for the serotonin transporter (5-HTT) genotype. Replicating earlier landmark findings, PR subjects with thesallele exhibited lower baseline concentrations of the serotonin metabolite 5-hydroxyindoleacetic acid (5-HIAA), when compared to PR subjects homozygous for theLallele. MR subjects were undifferentiated by genotype. PR subjects exhibited lower CSF 5-HIAA concentrations during baseline, but higher CSF 5-HIAA during social separations, when compared to MR subjects. There were rearing effects for the dopamine metabolite homovanillic acid (HVA) and for the norepinephrine metabolite 3-methoxy-4-hydroxyphenylglycol (MHPG), with PR subjects showing higher HVA and lower MHPG when compared to MR subjects. These findings indicate that there are long-term deficits in the response of monoamines following early maternal absence. The results of this study confirm and extend earlier findings that early parental absence has deleterious consequences for the development of the monoamine systems, and that these consequences are modulated by the 5-HTT genotype. (shrink)

We describe the parallel changes that have taken place in recent years in two countries, Israel and The Philippines, the former once an “exporter” of transplant tourists and the latter once an “importer” of transplant tourists. These changes were in response to progressive legislation in both countries under the influence of the Declaration of Istanbul. The annual number of Israeli patients who underwent kidney transplantation abroad decreased from a peak of 155 in 2006 to an all-time low of 35 in (...) 2011 while in the Philippines the annual number of foreign transplant recipients fell from 531 in 2007 to two in 2011. The experience of these two countries provides a “natural experiment” on the potential impact of legal measures to prevent transplant tourism. (shrink)

La cuestión ética se cae hoy por su propio peso. Muchos han creído poder anularla, con el temor de regresar a postulados ancestrales. Importa, en verdad, no tomar a la ligera una crisis de los fundamentos que ataca el conjunto del Pensar humano. Sin embargo, la inevitabilidad de la acción no la condena por tanto a la arbitrariedad. Una severa vigilancia con respecto a las abstracciones debería autorizar un nuevo comienzo. El fundamentar antropológicamente la conducta humana se propone como una (...) vía media entre reducciones empiristas –tentaciones nihilistas- y el llamado desesperado a los valores seculares: como si la Moral fuera el recurso mínimo, sino el último, para una época que no puede más con sus problemas. (shrink)

As it has historically been the case with many pandemics, the Covid-19 experience will induce many philosophers to reconsider the value of medical practice. This should be a good opportunity to critically scrutinize the way medical research and medical interventions are carried out. For much of its history, medicine has been very inefficient. But, even in its contemporary forms, a review of common protocols in medical research and medical interventions reveal many shortcomings, especially related to methodological flaws, and more importantly, (...) conflicts of interests due to profit incentives. In the face of these problems, we propose a program of “gentle medicine”. This term, originally formulated by philosopher Jacob Stegenga, describes a form of medicine in which physicians intervene less than they currently do. As part of this general program, we advance a series of reform recommendations that could be enacted both by medical staff in their everyday practice, but also by public health officials and policymakers. (shrink)

The distinction between dimensions and units in physics is commonplace. But are dimensions a feature of reality? The most widely-held view is that they are no more than a tool for keeping track of the values of quantities under a change of units. This anti-realist position is supported by an argument from underdetermination: one can assign dimensions to quantities in many different ways, all of which are empirically equivalent. In contrast, I defend a form of dimensional realism, on which some (...) assignments of dimensions to quantities better describe reality than others. The argument I provide is a form of inference to the best explanation. In particular, the technique of dimensional analysis is explanatory, but it is only successful for certain systems of dimensions. Since these dimensional systems support scientific explanations, we have reason to believe that they are real. (shrink)

It is often claimed that one can avoid the kind of underdetermination that is a typical consequence of symmetries in physics by stipulating that symmetry-related models represent the same state of affairs (Leibniz Equivalence). But recent commentators (Dasgupta 2011; Pooley 2021; Pooley and Read 2021; Teitel 2021a) have responded that claims about the representational capacities of models are irrelevant to the issue of underdetermination, which concerns possible worlds themselves. In this paper I distinguish two versions of this objection: (1) that (...) a theory’s formalism does not (fully) determine the space of physical possibilities, and (2) that the relevant notion of possibility is not physical possibility. I offer a refutation of each. (shrink)

This edited volume examines the realizations between theological considerations and natural law theorizing, from Plato to Spinoza.Theological considerations have long had a pronounced role in Catholic natural law theories, but have not been as thoroughly examined from a wider perspective. The contributors to this volume take a more inclusive view of the relation between conceptions of natural law and theistic claims and principles. They do not jointly defend one particular thematic claim, but articulate diverse ways in which natural law has (...) both been understood and related to theistic claims.In addition to exploring Plato and the Stoics, the volume also looks at medieval Jewish thought, the thought of Aquinas, Scotus, and Ockham, and the ways in which Spinoza's thought includes resonances of earlier views and intimations of later developments. Taken as a whole, these essays enlarge the scope of the discussion of natural law through study of how the naturalness of natural law has often been related to theses about the divine. The latter are often crucial elements of natural law theorizing, having an integral role in accounting for the metaethical status and ethical bindingness of natural law. At the same time, the question of the relation between natural law and God-and the relation between natural law and divine command-has been addressed in a multiplicity of ways by key figures throughout the history of natural law theorizing, and these essays accord them the explanatory significance they deserve. (shrink)

I explore two accounts of properties within a dispositional essentialist (or causal powers) framework, the pure powers view and the powerful qualities view. I first attempt to clarify precisely what the pure powers view is, and then raise objections to it. I then present the powerful qualities view and, in order to avoid a common misconception, offer a restatement of it that I shall call the truthmaker view. I end by briefly defending the truthmaker view against objections.

Possible worlds, concrete or abstract as you like, are irrelevant to the truthmakers for modality—or so I shall argue in this paper. First, I present the neo-Humean picture of modality, and explain why those who accept it deny a common sense view of modality. Second, I present what I take to be the most pressing objection to the neo-Humean account, one that, I argue, applies equally well to any theory that grounds modality in possible worlds. Third, I present an alternative, (...) properties-based theory of modality and explore several specific ways to flesh the general proposal out, including my favored version, the powers theory. And, fourth, I offer a powers semantics for counterfactuals that each version of the properties-based theory of modality can accept, mutatis mutandis. Together with a definition of possibility and necessity in terms of counterfactuals, the powers semantics of counterfactuals generates a semantics for modality that appeals to causal powers and not possible worlds. (shrink)

It is nearly impossible to open a textbook on Newtonian mechanics without encountering the concept of inertial frames: the frames that are privileged by the theory’s dynamics. In this paper, I argue that extant definitions of inertial frames are unsatisfactory. I criticise two common definitions of inertial frames: law-based definitions, according to which inertial frames are simply those in which the laws are true, and structure-based definitions, according to which inertial frames are those that are ‘adapted’ to spatiotemporal structure. I (...) then offer a new, symmetry-based definition of inertial frames. This definition offers a non-conventional way of specifying the dynamically privileged frames. The result clarifies the foundations of Newtonian mechanics and accounts for the empirical success of coordinate-dependent formulations of it. (shrink)

A long tradition of research including classical rhetoric, esthetics and poetics theory, formalism and structuralism, as well as current perspectives in (neuro)cognitive poetics has investigated structural and functional aspects of literature reception. Despite a wealth of literature published in specialized journals like Poetics, however, still little is known about how the brain processes and creates literary and poetic texts. Still, such stimulus material might be suited better than other genres for demonstrating the complexities with which our brain constructs the world (...) in and around us, because it unifies thought and language, music and imagery in a clear, manageable way, most often with play, pleasure, and emotion (Schrott and Jacobs, 2011 ). In this paper, I discuss methods and models for investigating the neuronal and cognitive-affective bases of literary reading together with pertinent results from studies on poetics, text processing, emotion, or neuroaesthetics, and outline current challenges and future perspectives. (shrink)

Among political philosophers - and indeed public officials - it is generally believed that some sort of general principle of distributional equality can provide solid moral foundations for universal access to health care. In fact, this belief is so widely received that even among those who are very critical of egalitarianism, few have expressed doubts about the prospects for an egalitarian defense of universal access to health care. The purpose of this paper is to put pressure on this received view.

It is now standard to interpret symmetry-related models of physical theories as representing the same state of affairs. Recently, a debate has sprung up around the question when this interpretational move is warranted. In particular, Møller-Nielsen :1253–1264, 2017) has argued that one is only allowed to interpret symmetry-related models as physically equivalent when one has a characterisation of their common content. I disambiguate two versions of this claim. On the first, a perspicuous interpretation is required: an account of the models’ (...) common ontology. On the second, stricter, version of this claim, a perspicuous formalism is required in addition: one whose mathematical structures ‘intrinsically’ represent the physical world, in the sense of Field. Using Dewar’s :485–521, 2019) distinction between internal and external sophistication as a case study, I argue that the second requirement is decisive. This clarifies the conditions under which it is warranted to interpret symmetry-related models as physically equivalent. (shrink)

The presence of symmetries in physical theories implies a pernicious form of underdetermination. In order to avoid this theoretical vice, philosophers often espouse a principle called Leibniz Equivalence, which states that symmetry-related models represent the same state of affairs. Moreover, philosophers have claimed that the existence of non-trivial symmetries motivates us to accept the Invariance Principle, which states that quantities that vary under a theory’s symmetries aren’t physically real. Leibniz Equivalence and the Invariance Principle are often seen as part of (...) the same package. I argue that this is a mistake: Leibniz Equivalence and the Invariance Principle are orthogonal to each other. This means that it is possible to hold that symmetry-related models represent the same state of affairs whilst having a realist attitude towards variant quantities. Various arguments have been presented in favour of the Invariance Principle: a rejection of the Invariance Principle is inter alia supposed to cause indeterminism, undetectability or failure of reference. I respond that these arguments at best support Leibniz Equivalence. (shrink)

In “On what matters: Personal identity as a phenomenological problem” (2020), Steven Crowell engages a number of contemporary interpretations of Husserl’s account of the person and personal identity by noting that they lack a phenomenological elucidation of the self as commitment. In this article, in response to Crowell, I aim to show that such an account of the self as commitment can be drawn from Husserl’s work by looking more closely at his descriptions from the time of Ideas and after (...) of the self as ego or I and egoic experience as attentive experience. I specifically aim to sketch the beginning of a response to three questions I take Crowell to be posing to a Husserlian account of the person and personal identity: (1) What more than pre-reflective self-awareness can be attributed to the self on phenomenological grounds so that we can understand, phenomenologically speaking, how selves become persons? (2) How can what characterizes the self in addition to pre-reflective self-awareness be discerned in both our commitment to truth and our feeling bound by love and other emotive commitments that cannot be fully rationally justified, which Husserl acknowledges are both sources of personal self-constitution? And (3), do all selves become persons? In the paper I elaborate how my answers to the first two questions turn on the self not just being self-aware but active in a particular sense. And to begin to address the third question, I suggest that while any form of wakeful conscious experience is both self-aware and active, this activity of the self makes a difference for those who are socio-historically embedded in the way we are. Specifically, on the proposed Husserlian account, selves that are socio-historically embedded become persons in and through their active relating to what they attentively experience. In concluding, I indicate how this Husserlian account might compare to Crowell’s claim that “self-identity (ipseity) is not mere logical identity (A=A) but a normative achievement […] which makes a ‘personal’ kind of identity possible” (2020). (shrink)

ABSTRACT In this journal, Middleton and Murgueitio Ramírez argue that absolute velocity is measurable, contrary to the received wisdom. Specifically, they claim that ‘there exists at least one reasonable analysis of measurement according to which the speedometer in [a world called “the Basic World”] measures the absolute velocity of the car.’ In this note, I critically respond to that claim: the analysis of measurement that Middleton and Murgueitio Ramírez propose is not reasonable; nor does it entail that absolute velocities are (...) measurable. (shrink)

Ruetsche ([2011]) argues that the occurrence of unitarily inequivalent representations in quantum theories with infinitely many degrees of freedom poses a novel interpretational problem. According to Ruetsche, such theories compel us to reject the so-called ideal of pristine interpretation; she puts forward the ‘coalescence approach’ as an alternative. In this paper I offer a novel defence of the coalescence approach. The defence rests on the claim that the ideal of pristine interpretation already fails before one considers the peculiarities of QM∞: (...) there are pre-QM∞ parallels to coalescence. Despite this departure from pristinism, the ‘modest’ view that emerges poses no threat to scientific realism. (shrink)

Normative pragmatics can bridge the differences between dialectical and rhetorical theories in a way that saves the central insights of both. Normative pragmatics calls attention to how the manifest strategic design of a message produces interpretive effects and interactional consequences. Argumentative analysis of messages should begin with the manifest persuasive rationale they communicate. But not all persuasive inducements should be treated as arguments. Arguments express with a special pragmatic force propositions where those propositions stand in particular inferential relations to one (...) another. Normative pragmatics provides a framework within which varieties of propositional inference and pragmatic force may be kept straight. Normative pragmatics conceptualizes argumentative effectiveness in a way that integrates notions of rhetorical strategy and rhetorical situation with dialectical norms and procedures for reasonable deliberation. Strategic effectiveness should be seen in terms of maximizing the chances that claims and arguments will be reasonably evaluated, whether or not they are accepted. Procedural rationality should be seen in terms of adjustment to the demands of concrete circumstances. Two types of adjustment are illustrated: rhetorical strategies for framing the conditions for dialectical deliberation and rhetorical strategies for making do with limitations to dialectical deliberation. (shrink)

The vast majority of studies on affective processes in reading focus on single words. The most robust finding is a processing advantage for positively valenced words, which has been replicated in the rare studies investigating effects of affective features of words during sentence or story comprehension. Here we were interested in how the different valences of words in a sentence influence its processing and supralexical affective evaluation. Using a sentence verification task we investigated how comprehension of simple declarative sentences containing (...) a noun and an adjective depends on the valences of both words. The results are in line with the assumed general processing advantage for positive words. We also observed a clear interaction effect, as can be expected from the affective priming literature: sentences with emotionally congruent words (e.g., The grandpa is clever) were verified faster than sentences containing emotionally incongruent words (e.g., The grandpa is lonely). The priming effect was most prominent for sentences with positive words suggesting that both, early processing as well as later meaning integration and situation model construction, is modulated by affective processing. In a second rating task we investigated how the emotion potential of supralexical units depends on word valence. The simplest hypothesis predicts that the supralexical affective structure is a linear combination of the valences of the nouns and adjectives (Bestgen, 1994 ). Overall, our results do not support this: The observed clear interaction effect on ratings indicate that especially negative adjectives dominated supralexical evaluation, i.e., a sort of negativity bias in sentence evaluation. Future models of sentence processing thus should take interactive affective effects into account. (shrink)

Shifts are a well-known feature of the literature on spacetime symmetries. Recently, discussions have focused on so-called dynamic shifts, which by analogy with static and kinematic shifts enact arbitrary linear accelerations of all matter (as well as a change in the gravitational potential). But in mathematical formulations of these shifts, the analogy breaks down: while static and kinematic shift act on the matter field, the dynamic shift acts on spacetime structure instead. I formulate a different, `active' version of the dynamic (...) shift which does act on matter. (shrink)

The role that trust plays in blockchain-based systems is understood and portrayed in various manners. The blockchain technology is said to enable and establish trust as well as to redirect it, to substitute for it, and to make it obsolete. Furthermore, there is disagreement on whom or what users have to trust when using the blockchain technology: code, math, algorithms, and machines, or still human actors. This paper hypothesizes that the divergences of the depictions largely rest on implicitly adhering to (...) different accounts of trust. Thus, the goal of this paper is to outline how the current lack of a shared understanding of the term “trust” leads to diverging interpretations of the blockchain technology’s core features. Furthermore, it shows how this lack of common understanding obstructs scholars from referring to one another meaningfully in the discourse on blockchain technology. To do so, this paper outlines the most prominent depictions of the setup of relevant trust relationships within blockchain-based systems and traces their roots to different underlying assumptions on the nature of trust. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIn this article we investigate structural differences between “literary” metaphors created by renowned poets and “nonliterary” ones imagined by non-professional authors from Katz et al.’s 1988 corpus. We provide data from quantitative narrative analyses of the altogether 464 metaphors on over 70 variables, including surface features like metaphor length, phonological features like sonority score, or syntactic-semantic features like sentence similarity. In a first computational study using machine learning tools we show that Katz et al.’s literary metaphors can be successfully discriminated (...) from their nonliterary ones on the basis of response measures, in particular the ratings for familiarity, ease of interpretation, semantic relatedness, and comprehensibility. A second computational study then shows that the classifier can reliably detect and predict between-group differences on the basis of five QNA features generalizing from a... (shrink)

How do Dutch people let each other know that they disagree? What do they say when they want to resolve their difference of opinion by way of an argumentative discussion? In what way do they convey that they are convinced by each other’s argumentation? How do they criticize each other’s argumentative moves? Which words and expressions do they use in these endeavors? By answering these questions this short essay provides a brief inventory of the language of argumentation in Dutch.

"Edmund Husserl is widely regarded as the principal founder of phenomenology, one of the most important movements in twentieth-century philosophy. His work inspired subsequent figures such as Martin Heidegger, his most renowned pupil, as well as Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, all of whom engaged with and developed his insights in significant ways. He also made important contributions to logic and philosophy of mathematics and his work on fundamental problems such as intentionality, consciousness and subjectivity continues to animate philosophical research (...) and argument. The Husserlian Mind is an outstanding reference source to the full range of Husserl's philosophy. Forty chapters by a team of international contributors are divided into seven clear parts covering the following areas: Husserl's major works, Husserl's phenomenological method, Phenomenology of consciousness, Epistemology, Ethics and social and political philosophy, Science, Metaphysics. Contained in these sections are chapters on many of the key aspects of Husserl's thought, including intentionality, transcendental philosophy, reduction, perception, time, self and subjectivity, personhood, logic and mathematics, psychology, ontology and idealism. Offering an unparalleled guide to the enormous range of his thought, The Husserlian Mind is essential reading for students and scholars of Husserl, phenomenology, and the history of twentieth-century philosophy. It will also be of interest to those in related fields, such as religion and sociology"--. (shrink)

Two main goals of the emerging field of neurocognitive poetics are the use of more natural and ecologically valid stimuli, tasks and contexts and providing methods and models allowing to quantify distinctive features of verbal materials used in such tasks and contexts and their effects on readers responses. A natural key element of poetic language, metaphor, still is understudied insofar as relatively little empirical research looked at literary or poetic metaphors. An exception is Katz et al.’s corpus of 204 literary (...) metaphors by authors such as Shakespeare or Dylan Thomas, for which various rating data are available. We reanalyzed their corpus using a combination of quantitative narrative analysis, latent semantic analysis, and machine learning in order to identify relevant features of the metaphors that influenced the ratings. The combined application of computational tools sheds light on surface and affective-semantic features that co-determine the reception of poetic metaphors and successfully predicted the period of origin, authorship and goodness ratings of the metaphors. The present results can be used for generating quantitative hypotheses or selecting and matching verbal stimuli in empirical studies of literature and neurocognitive poetics. (shrink)

- Emilie du Châtelet offers an interesting and unusual account of the origin of our representation of extension. - She is an idealist about the essence extension, bodies and space, regarding them as mental constructs. - Du Châtelet's account requires a brute fact about the mind, in apparent tension with the Principle of Sufficient Reason.

Two semantic theories of proper names are explained and assessed. The theories are Burge’s treatment of proper names as complex demonstratives and Larson and Segal’s quasi-descriptivist account of names. The two theories are evaluated for empirical plausibility. Data from deficits, processing models, developmental studies and syntax are all discussed. It is concluded that neither theory is fully confirmed or refuted by the data, but that Larson and Segal’s theory has more empirical plausibility.

Having watched totalitarianism emerge in its left-wing (Russian Soviet) and right-wing (Nazi) forms, Michael Polanyi devoted considerable attention to analysing totalitarianism in its development, makeup and mode of operation. At the same time as he developed his account of totalitarianism incrementally he pieced together his picture of liberalism. His fundamental insight is that while liberal civilization is dedicated to protecting, and is animated by, a set of ideals that includes freedom, truth, toleration, equality and justice, totalitarian regimes aim at erasing (...) ideals such as these from their social face. (shrink)

Physics presents us with a symphony of natural constants: G, h, c, etc. Up to this point, constants have received comparatively little philosophical attention. In this paper I provide an account of dimensionful constants, in particular the gravitational constant. I propose that they represent inter-quantity structure in the form of relations between quantities with different dimensions. I use this account of G to settle a debate over whether mass scalings are symmetries of Newtonian Gravitation. I argue that they are not, (...) but only if we interpret mass anti-quidditistically. This is analogous to anti-haecceitism in the presence of spacetime symmetries. (shrink)