The article interprets Franz Caucig’s Socrates with a Disciple and Diotima?, one of several paintings commissioned for Palais Auersperg in Vienna, now housed at the Slovenian National Gallery. Socrates and a young man are in a pastoral setting beneath a plane tree near a river. They are addressed by a woman, and a chariot with maidens can be seen in the background. The scene is from Plato’s Phaedrus, since Socrates never leaves Athens, except for military service and in this scene (...) from the Phaedrus. The woman addressing Socrates and Phaedrus in the painting cannot be Diotima because her chariot has two white horses, indicating a goddess. The most likely goddess would be the goddess in the poem of Parmenides of Elea, the source of the soul-chariot analogy in the Phaedrus. The setting of Caucig’s Socrates painting bears a remarkable similarity to his Amnytus painting, which features political references to Napoleon’s subjection of Gorizia, Caucig’s homeland. Caucig’s Phaedrus remarks upon Napoleon’s conquests, Hegel’s lectures on Parmenides, and David’s idealized painting of Napoleon crossing the Alps. (shrink)

Moral theorists like Singer and Greene argue that we should discount intuitions about ‘up-close-and-personal’ moral dilemmas because they are more likely than intuitions about ‘impersonal’ dilemmas to be artifacts of evolution. But by that reasoning, it seems we should ignore the evolved, ‘up-close-and-personal’ intuition to save a drowning child in light of the too-new-to-be-evolved, ‘impersonal’ intuition that we need not donate to international famine relief. This conclusion seems mistaken and horrifying, yet it cannot be the case both that ‘up-close-and-personal’ intuitions (...) are more reliable than ‘impersonal’ intuitions, and vice versa. Thus, Singer’s evolutionary debunking argument proves too much, and should not be taken seriously. However, Singer’s debunking argument is typical of an entire class of arguments that seeks to debunk normative principles by reference to evolution. This entire class of argument, I argue, therefore also proves too much to be taken seriously. (shrink)

Why has gender equality progressed so much more slowly in philosophy than in other academic disciplines? Here, I address both factual and theoretical matters relating to the causes, effects, and potential redress of the lack of women in philosophy. First, I debunk extant claims that women are more likely than men to disagree with their philosophy professors and male peers; that women are more sensitive to disagreements in the philosophy classroom than men are; and that the gender imbalance in philosophy (...) is no worse than in many cognate disciplines. Second, I discuss ways in which the nature of philosophical inquiry and debate may provide uniquely strong opportunities for person-perception to hinder progress toward egalitarian treatment of interlocutors. And third, I argue that a diversity of perspectives in philosophy is essential not only for reasons of social justice, but also for philosophical progress. Efforts to improve philosophy should therefore countenance the role of person-perception in the practice of philosophical debate. For philosophy to become more diverse, the steps the profession takes to achieve that goal will have to go beyond—and not merely match—the steps taken to increase the numbers of women and otherwise underrepresented individuals in other fields. (shrink)

Summary As part of the events marking Nero’s assumption of the toga virilis in 51 CE, he along with Britannicus led the circus procession (pompa circensis) in advance of games in the Circus Maximus. The aim of this paper is to reconstruct this pompa circensis, both in its processional elements and route through the city. The presence of potential successors along with images of the deified and honored dead of the imperial family shows how this ceremony evolved and expanded in (...) the Principate to become a dynastic ceremony. The route of the newly modified pompa circensis, marked by monuments built by or dedicated to members of the imperial family, also had become increasingly dynastic. An essential element of the pompa circensis was the participation of the senate and equestrian order as well as the urban plebs, an act of performed consensus fully realized when the procession ended in the Circus Maximus. This circus procession, as reconstructed here, has further implications for the larger question of the imperial succession under Claudius. (shrink)

Critical reflection on the available neuropsychological evidence suggests that the roles of emotion and reason in moral judgment may not be distinct. This casts significant doubt on our current understanding of moral judgment, and therefore also on all philosophical theories based on that understanding. Most notably, it raises doubts about both sentimentalism and rationalism, which historically have often been treated as exclusive and exhaustive theories regarding the nature of moral concepts. As an alternative, I endorse pluralism with regard to the (...) emotional and rational nature of moral concepts. (shrink)

Neuroethics is typically conceived of as consisting of two traditions: the ethics of neuroscience and the neuroscience of moral judgment. However, recent work has sought to draw philosophical and ethical implications from the neuroscience of moral judgment. Such work, which concernsnormative moral neuroscience(NMN), is sufficiently distinct and complex to deserve recognition as a third tradition of neuroethics. Recognizing it as such can reduce confusion among researchers, eliminating conflations among both critics and proponents of NMN.This article identifies and unpacks some of (...) the most prominent goals, characteristic assumptions, and unique arguments in NMN and addresses some of the strongest objections NMN faces. The paper synthesizes these considerations into a set of heuristics, or loose discovery principles, that can help overcome obstacles in and attenuate resistance to NMN. These heuristics may simultaneously help identify those projects in NMN that are most likely to be fruitful and help fortify them. (shrink)

This book brings together a number of essays that are optimistic about the ways certain neuroscientific insights might advance philosophical ethics, and other essays that are more circumspect about the relevance of neuroscience to philosophical ethics. As a whole, the essays form a self-reflective body of work that simultaneously seeks to derive normative ethical implications from neuroscience, and to question whether and how that may be possible at all. In doing so, the collection brings together psychology, neuroscience, philosophy of mind, (...) ethics, and philosophy of science. Neuroscience seeks to understand the biological systems that guide human behavior and cognition. Normative ethics, on the other hand, seeks to understand the system of abstract moral principles dictating how people ought to behave. By studying how the human brain makes moral judgments, can philosophers learn anything about the nature of morality itself? A growing number of researchers believe that neuroscience can, indeed, provide insights into the questions of philosophical ethics. However, even these advocates acknowledge that the path from neuroscientific is to normative ethical ought can be quite fraught. (shrink)

I argue that free will is a nominal construct developed and deployed post hoc in an effort to provide cohesive narratives in support of a priori moral-judgmental dispositions. In a reversal of traditional course, I defend the view that there are no circumstances under which attributions of moral responsibility for an act can, should, or do depend on prior ascriptions of free will. Conversely, I claim that free will belief depends entirely on the apperceived possibility of moral responsibility. Orthodoxy dictates (...) an agency-first thesis, according to which free will is necessarily antecedent to moral responsibility. However, I present a number of arguments against this view, and in favor of an agency-last stance, according to which the concept of free will is dependent upon that of moral responsibility. I provide further support for my case in the form of new empirical evidence regarding the stable mode of inference used to attribute free will across moral contexts. These experimental results can be interpreted to imply the deflation of one of the longest-standing veridical paradoxes in experimental philosophy. Furthermore, the sole conceptual scheme found to be capable of modeling the experimental results is also capable of illuminating several classic works in the analytic philosophy of moral agency. (shrink)

The Black Lives Matter movement marks a critical moment in the ebb and flow of racial progress. But as Camisha Russell points out, this moment might not last long. Prior high-water marks in...

This paper explores the relationship between religious denomination and individual attitudes to Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) within the context of a large sample of over 17,000 individuals drawn from 20 countries. We address two general questions: do members of religious denominations have different attitudes concerning CSR than people of no denomination? And: do members of different religions have different attitudes to CSR that conform to general priors about the teachings of different religions? Our evidence suggests that, broadly, religious individuals do (...) not prioritise the responsibilities of the firm differently, but do tend to hold broader conceptions of the social responsibilities of businesses than non-religious individuals. However, we show that this neither true for all religious groups, nor for all areas of CSR. (shrink)

The article focuses on stories and storytelling practices as explanatory resources in standardization processes. It draws upon an ethnographic study of the development of a technical standard for data sharing in an ecological research community, where participants struggle to articulate the difficulties encountered in implementing the standard. Building from C. Wright Mills’ classic distinction between private troubles and public issues, the authors follow the development of a story as it comes to assist in transforming individual troubles in standard implementation into (...) an institutional issue for the ecological scientific community. The authors present the “hands-on” social science collaboration in this study as an example of a mechanism for supporting institutionalization of issues. Finally, the authors argue that narratives can serve as effective organizing principles within institutional settings, thereby providing an approach to understand the practical, substantive difficulties that occur in work with data in the sciences. (shrink)

Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) investing is increasingly popular (Giese, Lee, Melas, Nagy, & Nishikawa 2019), and is now percolating into sustainability textbooks and pedagogy. This is problematic because many faculty teaching sustainability do not have a background in finance, and thus find teaching ESG challenging. This paper develops pedagogical resources to teach the fundamentals of ESG investing, be that in a Foundations of Sustainable Management course or a Business Ethics course. We do this by developing four learning objectives: (1) (...) Understand the ESG basics, including why ESG investing is important to investors and, for faculty, outlining where it might be appropriately placed in an ethics or introduction to sustainability class, (2) Define ESG Investing and discuss how ESG investing strategies differ from regular investment strategies, (3) Identify the primary methods to choose ESG investments, the related ESG rating systems, and the primary proprietary investment options based on these screening rules, and (4) Identify ESG options available to investors that meet their risk preferences. (shrink)

There is a very simple way in which the safe/normal variable discipline of Bellantoni–Cook recursion [S. Bellantoni, S. Cook, A new recursion theoretic characterization of the polytime functions, Computational Complexity 2 97–110] can be imposed on arithmetical theories like PA: quantify over safes and induct on normals. This weakens the theory severely, so that the provably recursive functions become more realistically computable . Earlier results of D. Leivant [Intrinsic theories and computational complexity, in: D. Leivant , Logic and Computational Complexity, (...) Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 960, Springer-Verlag, 1995, pp. 177–194] are re-worked and extended in this new context, giving proof-theoretic characterizations of complexity classes between Grzegorczyk’s E2 and E3. (shrink)

This extraordinary book offers a clear and compelling biography of Jacques Derrida along with one of Derrida's strangest and most unexpected texts. Geoffrey Bennington's account of Derrida leads the reader through the philosopher's familiar yet widely misunderstood work on language and writing to the less familiar themes of signature, sexual difference, law, and affirmation. In an unusual and unprecedented "dialogue," Derrida responds to Bennington's text by interweaving Bennington's text with surprising and disruptive "periphrases." Truly original, this dual and dueling (...) text opens new dimensions in Derrida's thought and work. "Bennington is a shrewd and well-informed commentator whose book should do something to convince the skeptics... that Jacques Derrida's work merits serious attention."—Christopher Norris, _New Statesman & Society_ "Geoffrey Bennington and Jacques Derrida have presented a fascinating example of what might be called post-structuralist autobiography."—Laurie Volpe, _French Review_ "Bennington's account of what Derrida is up to is better in almost all respects—more intelligent, more plausible, more readable, and less pretentious—than any other I have read."—Richard Rorty, _Contemporary Literature_. (shrink)

DCPS is a connectionist production system interpreter that uses distributed representations. As a connectionist model it consists of many simple, richly interconnected neuron‐like computing units that cooperate to solve problems in parallel. One motivation for constructing DCPS was to demonstrate that connectionist models are capable of representing and using explicit rules. A second motivation was to show how “coarse coding” or “distributed representations” can be used to construct a working memory that requires far fewer units than the number of different (...) facts that can potentially be stored. The simulation we present is intended as a detailed demonstration of the feasibility of certain ideas and should not be viewed as a full implementation of production systems. Our current model only has a few of the many interesting emergent properties that we eventually hope to demonstrate: It is damage‐resistant, it performs matching and variable binding by massively parallel constraint satisfaction, and the capacity of its working memory is dependent on the similarity of the items being stored. (shrink)

In this, the first Reader of Geoffrey Hartman's work, significant essays reflect his abiding interest in English and American poetry, focusing not only on Romanticism but also on the transition from early modern to modern and including reflections on the radical elements in artistic representation.

Machery has usefully organized the vast heterogeneity in conceptual representation. However, we believe his argument is too narrow in tacitly assuming that concepts are comprised of only prototypes, exemplars, and theories, and also that its eliminative aspect is too strong. We examine two exceptions to Machery's representational taxonomy before considering whether doing without concepts is a good idea.

In this paper several problems are raised concerning Ian Barbour's four ways of interrelating science and religion—Conflict, Independence, Dialogue, and Integration—as put forward in such publications as his highly influential Religion in an Age of Science (1990) and widely adopted by other writers in this field. The authors argue that this taxonomy is not very useful or analytically helpful, especially to historians seeking to understand past engagements between science and religion.

Starting from a behavioural-economics critique of standard rational choice theory Sugden seeks to restate the case for classical liberalism. That case has three strands: a refutation of libertarian...

Geoffrey Hunter; VIII*—Dummett's Arguments about the Natural Numbers, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 80, Issue 1, 1 June 1980, Pages 115–126, h.

The Allegory of the Cave (Pl. Resp. 514a1–520e2) is often analyzed in terms of metaphysical, epistemological, political, and psychic hierarchies that are clarified and reinforced by philosophical education. But the Allegory also contains an important historical allusion to the silver mining that took place in classical Attica. Examining the Cave in light of the enslaved miners around Lavrio leads us to reconsider the philosophical ‘liberation’ (λύσιν … τῶν δεσμῶν, 515c4) at the Allegory’s heart in the context of Athenian slavery and (...) Plato’s thoughts on the practice. Elsewhere in his work Plato generally uses servile metaphors in two ways: to depict ‘bad’ internal psychic subjection and ‘good’ submission to logos as manifested in various entities. This historical dimension of the Allegory works to undermine the ostensible naturalness of the slave/citizen distinction and suggest that philosophical education has the potential to ‘free’ the former and ‘subjugate’ the latter. The implication that these juridical categories are, to an extent, arbitrary and mutable reveals important differences between Plato’s views and those of his classical peers, and it adds to the dialogue’s protreptic dimension for its readers then and now. (shrink)

This paper explores the relationship between attitudes to corporate social responsibility (CSR) and the cultural dimensions of business activity identified by Hofstede & Hofstede using a sample of nearly 90,000 stakeholders drawn from 28 countries. We develop five general propositions relating attitudes to CSR to aspects of culture. We show that the propensity of consumers to punish firms for bad behaviour varies in ways that appear to relate closely to the cultural characteristics identified by Hofstede. Furthermore, this variation appears to (...) be understandable in terms of the standard interpretation of the Hofstede dimensions, suggesting that cultural variation in the attitudes of consumers may play an important role in helping us to understand variations in CSR across countries. This in turn has implications for how managers of multinational companies should implement CSR strategies in different cultural contexts. (shrink)

Geoffrey Lloyd engages in a wide-ranging exploration of what we can learn from the study of ancient civilizations that is relevant to fundamental problems, both intellectual and moral, that we still face today. These include, in philosophy of science, the question of the incommensurability of paradigms, the debate between realism and relativism or constructivism, and between correspondence and coherence conceptions of truth. How far is it possible to arrive at an understanding of alien systems of belief? Is it possible (...) to talk meaningfully of 'science' and of its various constituent disciplines, 'astronomy' 'geography' 'anatomy' and so on, in the ancient world? Are logic and its laws universal? Is there one ontology - a single world - to which all attempts at understanding must be considered to be directed? When we encounter apparently very different views of reality, how far can that be put down to a difference in conceptions of what needs explaining, or of what counts as an explanation, or to different preferred modes of reasoning or styles of inquiry? Do the notions of truth and belief represent reliable cross-cultural universals? In another area, what can ancient history teach us about today's social and political problems? Are the discourses of human nature and of human rights universally applicable? What political institutions do we need to help secure equity and justice within nation states and between them? Lloyd sets out to answer all these questions, and to argue that the study of the science and culture of ancient Greece and China provided a precious resource in order to advance a wealth of modern debates. (shrink)

This paper explores the relationship between attitudes to corporate social responsibility (CSR) and the cultural dimensions of business activity identified by Hofstede & Hofstede using a sample of nearly 90,000 stakeholders drawn from 28 countries. We develop five general propositions relating attitudes to CSR to aspects of culture. We show that the propensity of consumers to punish firms for bad behaviour varies in ways that appear to relate closely to the cultural characteristics identified by Hofstede. Furthermore, this variation appears to (...) be understandable in terms of the standard interpretation of the Hofstede dimensions, suggesting that cultural variation in the attitudes of consumers may play an important role in helping us to understand variations in CSR across countries. This in turn has implications for how managers of multinational companies should implement CSR strategies in different cultural contexts. (shrink)

The incident at Antioch described in Galatians 2:11–14 features in a number of Augustine’s works: Expositio epistulae ad Galatas, his correspondence with Jerome, De mendacio, Sermo 162C, and in De baptismo contra Donatistas. While a few scholars have seen Augustine’s anti-Donatism as a driving force behind all his comments about this encounter between Peter and Paul, this article argues that, while the idea of Peter’s humility is to be found in his commentary, the sermon, one of the letters, and the (...) treatises, Augustine interpreted the scriptural passage in a variety of different ways, depending upon his situation. In the commentary, Augustine wanted to defend the reality of the argument between Peter and Paul because of his belief that scriptural authors would not lie. The same idea occurs in his letters, e.g., Epistula 82, where he adds that his interpretation was supported by Cyprian. Contrary to the aforementioned scholars, it is only in De baptismo that Augustine applies the Galatians passage, which he takes as referring to Peter’s humility, to Cyprian himself as an imitator of Peter. Thus, it is only in this treatise that Augustine seeks to redeem Cyprian from the clutches of the Donatists. A close reading of this variety of interpretation by Augustine contributes to an appreciation of the complexity of his reception of Cyprian, a topic of ever-increasing importance in Augustinian studies. (shrink)

From one of the most influential scientists of our time, a dazzling exploration of the hidden laws that govern the life cycle of everything from plants and animals to the cities we live in. The former head of the Sante Fe Institute, visionary physicist Geoffrey West is a pioneer in the field of complexity science, the science of emergent systems and networks. The term "complexity" can be misleading, however, because what makes West's discoveries so beautiful is that he has (...) found an underlying simplicity that unites the seemingly complex and diverse phenomena of living systems, including our bodies, our cities and our businesses. Fascinated by issues of aging and mortality, West applied the rigor of a physicist to the biological question of why we live as long as we do and no longer. The result was astonishing, and changed science, creating a new understanding of energy use and metabolism: West found that despite the riotous diversity in the sizes of mammals, they are all, to a large degree, scaled versions of each other. If you know the size of a mammal, you can use scaling laws to learn everything from how much food it eats per day, what its heart-rate is, how long it will take to mature, its lifespan, and so on. Furthermore, the efficiency of the mammal's circulatory systems scales up precisely based on weight: if you compare a mouse, a human and an elephant on a logarithmic graph, you find with every doubling of average weight, a species gets 25% more efficient--and lives 25% longer. This speaks to everything from how long we can expect to live to how many hours of sleep we need. Fundamentally, he has proven, the issue has to do with the fractal geometry of the networks that supply energy and remove waste from the organism's body. (shrink)

One of the most significant contemporary thinkers in continental philosophy, Jacques Derrida’s work continues to attract heated commentary among philosophers, literary critics, social and cultural theorists, architects and artists. This major new work by world renowned Derrida scholar and translator, Geoffrey Bennington, presents incisive new readings of both Derrida and interpretations of his work. Part one sets out Derrida’s work as a whole and examines its relevance to, and ‘interruption’ of, the traditional domains of ethics, politics and literature. The (...) second part of the book presents compelling insights into some important motifs in Derrida’s work, such as death, friendship, psychoanalysis, time and endings. The final section introduces trenchant appraisals of other influential accounts of Derrida’s work. This influential and original contribution to the literature on Derrida is marked by a commitment to clarity and accuracy, but also by a refusal to simplify Derrida’s often difficult thought. (shrink)

This essay draws on the work of Jacques Derrida and Angela Y. Davis towards a philosophical resistance to the death penalty in the U.S. I find promise in Derrida’s claim that resistance to the death penalty ought to contest a political structure that founds itself on having the power to decide life and death, but I move beyond Derrida’s desire to consider the abolition of the death penalty without engaging with the particular histories and geographies of European colonialism. I offer (...) a critique of Derrida’s recently published work on the death penalty by engaging with the work of Davis and argue that discussions of state violence in nations that inherit European forms of sovereignty must take seriously the racist violence on which those sovereign powers rely. (shrink)

Each time patients and their families are asked to make a decision about resuscitation, they are also asked to engage the political, social, and cultural concerns that have shaped its history. That history is exemplified in the career of Claude S. Beck, arguably the most influential researcher and teacher of resuscitation in the twentieth century. Careful review of Beck’s work discloses that the development and popularization of the techniques of resuscitation proceeded through a multiplication of definitions of death. CPR consequently (...) remains unique among medical treatments, because it is indicated precisely when a person dies, depending always on how each event of death becomes defined practically by patients, families, and medical professionals present at the time. It is therefore as an occasion to manage a surplus of definitions of death, and not as an occasion to determine the physiological efficacy of resuscitation, that one should approach analysis of contemporary challenges in decision-making about resuscitation. (shrink)

God and time play crucial, intricately related roles in Descartes' project of grounding mathematical physics on metaphysical first principles. This naturally raises the perennial theological question of God's precise relation to time. I argue, against the strong current of recent commentary, that Descartes' God is fully temporal. This means that God's duration is successive, with parts ordered 'before and after', rather than permanent or 'all at once'. My argument will underscore the seamless connection between Descartes' theology and his physics, and (...) the degree to which he was prepared to depart from orthodoxy in the former in order to secure an a priori foundation for the latter. As Newton would later do, Descartes freed time from its traditional dependence on bodily motion and so removed an important barrier to making God temporal. Acting in time, God makes the physical world intelligible in a way He could not were He timeless. (shrink)

In a Special Issue of Discourse Studies titled ‘The Epistemics of Epistemics’, contributing authors criticize Heritage’s research on participants’ orientations to, and management of, the distribution of knowledge in conversation. These authors claim that the analytic framework Heritage developed for analyzing epistemic phenomena privileges the analysts’ over the participants’ point of view, and rejects standard methods of conversation analysis ; that and are adopted in developing and defending the use of abstract analytic schemata that offer little purchase on either the (...) specific actions speakers accomplish or the understanding others display of them; and that, by virtue of these deficiencies, claims about the systematic relevance of epistemic phenomena for talk-in-interaction breach long-standing norms regarding the relationship between data analysis and generalizing claims. Using a collection of excerpts bearing on the import of epistemics for action formation and action sequencing, I demonstrate that these claims are patently false and suggest that they reflect the authors’ effort to recast CA as a kind of fundamentalist enterprise. I then consider excerpts from a second collection to illustrate how the form of social organization described by Heritage can be used to explicate other phenomena that depend on systematic alterations to its basic features. In conclusion, I suggest that CA’s success in enhancing our grasp of the organization of talk-in-interaction derives from its unique commitment to both generalization and context specificity, collections and single cases, findings plus a continual openness to the ‘something more’ that each particular case can provide. (shrink)