This paper examines the doctrine of existence as a perfection. Examining some of the comments from Leroy Howe, there is an immense amount of confusion with the idea of existence as a perfection. Leaning on some level of the cosmological argument, I believe it is Descartes that brings forth a proper understanding of why existence is a great making property. However, there is a level of irrelevance between the Kantian problem existence as a predicate and the nature (...) of Anselm's argument. (shrink)

In this paper, I take it to be uncontroversial that increasingly into his philosophical career, Nietzsche believed human greatness to be an appropriately valuable goal, at least for certain types of people. But while Nietzsche's repeated paradigms of greatness include figures as seemingly diverse as Beethoven, Goethe, Shakespeare, Cesare Borgia, Julius Caesar, it is unclear precisely what great-making property (or properties) Nietzsche considers these figures to share. I consider two possible approaches which have shaped the terrain of (...) the secondary literature on this controversial matter: greatness as a matter of internal properties (character traits); or external properties (achievements). I discuss the arguments for each view here, resulting with my own view being that both achievements and traits of character are at least necessary for what Nietzsche understands greatness to consist in. I then consider a distinction between actual and potential greatness in order to explore further necessary and perhaps sufficient conditions of Nietzsche's positive ideal. While my aim in this paper is primarily exegetical, I hope to draw upon contemporary issues in value theory surrounding the nature of achievement which are of interest to ethicists more broadly. (shrink)

Based on a question posed by global philosophy of religion project regarding the absence of literal attribution of omnibenevolence to God in the Qur’ān, this paper aims to examine how to understand perfect goodness in Islam. I will first discuss the concept of perfect goodness and suggest that perfect goodness is not an independent attribute on its own and it is predicated on other moral attributes of God without which the concept of perfect goodness could hardly be understood. I will (...) examine perfect goodness by a specific emphasis on the attribute of justice as one of the conditions to be satisfied by a perfectly morally good being. In so doing, I will appeal to the distinctions made among great-making properties by Daniel Hill, and Al-Ghazālī’s definition of justice by applying them to God’s moral attributes. I will argue that justice has a crucial role in maximality-optimality balance between great-making properties and it seems quite difficult, if not impossible, to conceive of goodness without justice. Having said that, I will claim that the conceptual frame I suggest sheds light on why omnibenevolence is not literally attributed to God in the Qur’ān. Then, I will briefly show how the divine attributes mentioned in the Qur’ān and the discussions about divine names and attributes in the Islamic tradition supports the understanding of perfect goodness I defend. Consequently, I will try to show that far from indicating that the Islamic concept of God doesn’t involve perfect goodness, the Qur’ān establishes the proper meaning of perfect goodness by focusing on its constitutive attributes, and thus provides us with a sound conception of it. (shrink)

The notion of maximal greatness is arguably part of the very concept of God: something greater than God is not even possible. But how should we understand this notion? The aim of this paper is to provide a Śaivist answer to this question by analyzing the form of theism advocated in the Pratyabhijñā tradition. First, I extract a model of divine greatness, the Hierarchical Model, from Nagasawa’s work "Maximal God". According to the Hierarchical Model, God is that than which nothing (...) could be greater by virtue of being better suited than all other beings in relation to certain great-making properties (§1). I then offer an analysis of the form of theism advocated in the Pratyabhijñā tradition by discussing passages from the works of Somānanda, the founder of the Pratyabhijñā school, and of Utpaladeva, the most prominent of Somānanda’s disciples. I argue that the Pratyabhijñā theist cannot account for divine greatness in terms of the Hierarchical Model. My argument is that the Hierarchical Model requires a comparison between God and other beings that cannot be made with the Pratyabhijñā God (§2). Finally, I develop an original alternative model, the Unlimited Nature Model, that accounts for God’s maximal greatness in a way that suits Pratyabhijñā’s theism. According to the Unlimited Nature Model, the nature of all ordinary beings is metaphysically limited as a result of realizing only a small portion of the potential of what could be, and God is maximally great because only he has a completely unlimited nature (§3). (shrink)

What makes a property intrinsic? What exactly does the intrinsic/extrinsic distinction rest upon, and how can we reasonably justify this distinction? These questions bear great importance on central debates in such diverse philosophical fields as ethics, philosophy of mind, epistemology and philosophy of science - to only name a few. Given the central relevance of the intrinsic/extrinsic distinction to philosophical research, a collection of pertinent essays on the topic is an essential addition to the literature. It helps to (...) identify more clearly the problems and arguments that are at stake. The anthology provides a comprehensive overview of central facets of the debates, including both crucial earlier and important new contributions by leading philosophers. As such it constitutes an indispensable component of any serious study of the topic. (shrink)

Our days are a vast, intricate, evolving dance of mutual understandings. We stop at a traffic light, offer a plastic card as payment for a meal, leave our weapons at home, or enter a voting booth. We live and work in close proximity, at high speed, with few collisions: on our roads and in our neighborhoods, places of worship, and places of business. Somehow, having all those people around is more liberating than stifling. The secret is that we know roughly (...) what to expect from each other. Knowing what to expect enables us to adapt to each other. Not being obliged to conform to expectations—being free to test the previously untested— is likewise a great benefit. The two benefits seem mutually exclusive, yet property rights, combined with freedom of contract, enable us to reap both at once. We can rely on being able to go to market and find someone selling cauliflower at an affordable price. We can also rely on being able to go to market and find someone rendering obsolete what a few years ago had been cutting-edge technology. We make progress by testing what has not previously been tested. We experiment. One problem with experiments is: many of them don’t work.1 Or, the ideas being tested turn out to be bad ideas. Thus a successful society encourages people not only to experiment, but also to shut down experiments whose inspiration proves unsound. What kind of framework encourages experimentation without at the same time perpetuating bad ideas? Here is one hypothesis: in societies that sustain progress over long periods, people are free to experiment at their own expense and free from having to pay for other people’s bad ideas. This is the true test of a system of property. It is natural to assume instead that the true test of a system of property is a question of whether the system is just. That is, philosophers should theorize about justice first, and only then begin to theorize about what can legitimately become a person’s property. I have become skeptical about this. (shrink)

Brettschneider argues that the granting of property rights to all entails a right of exclusion by acquirer/owners against all others, that this exclusionary right entails a loss on their part, and that to make up for this, property owners owe any nonowners welfare rights. Against this, I argue that exclusion is not in fact a cost. Everyone is to have liberty rights, which are negative: what people are excluded from is the liberty to attack and despoil others. Everyone, (...) whether an owner of external property or not, benefits from this and thus rationally exchanges that liberty in exchange for a like abandonment of it by others. The proper social contract trade is thus liberty for liberty—not liberty for owners and positive welfare rights for nonowners (though the latter in fact benefit greatly from the property rights of owners). (shrink)

This chapter argues that the Great Ideas are integral to Mortimer J. Adler’s Great Books Movement in much the same way that the Four Noble Truths and the Noble Eightfold Path are integral to Buddhism. Both use ‘Great’ and ‘Noble’ to point toward human excellence. For Adler, the Great Ideas are the metaphysical and moral concepts out of which Western civilization developed. They are the main topics in an ongoing great conversation that shapes Western culture. (...) Precisely because these Great Ideas are great, insofar as they point toward human excellence (virtue), they ought not be considered the exclusive property of the West. Instead, as Adler recognized, they should be utilized in the analysis of other cultural traditions. This chapter uses two of Adler’s Great Ideas, freedom and religion, to analyze Buddhism as it is encountered in the early Indian Buddhist texts. It asserts all human philosophy and culture, including that of Buddhism, is ultimately based in religion, thereby making religion the greatest of Adler’s and the Buddha’s Great philosophical and cultural ideas. (shrink)

The current situation of climate change at a global level clearly requires policy changes at local levels. Global efforts to reach a consensus regarding the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions have so far been focused on developing Climate-Friendly Technologies (CFTs). The problem is that in order for these efforts to have an actual impact at a global level we need to be concerned with more than just promotion and info-dissemination on the already existing CFTs, but also with costs, implementation and (...) the international intellectual property and trade system necessary for this strategy to work. Currently, almost 80% of all patent applications belong to OECD countries like Japan, US, Germany, South Korea, Great Britain and France. The obligations climate change imposes on developing countries represent a technological shift that depends on Technology Transfer (TT) and implementation of IP laws. The current IP framework, especially patent law, copyright and trade secrets produces another kind of obligations. The main question is if the conjunction of these two sets of obligations (rules) is fair from a global justice point of view. Also, it is questionable whether this conjunction helps developing countries to produce their own CFTs. When discussing the demands of global justice one cannot skip the very important distinction Pogge makes between negative and positive obligations. In the context of global warming and the measures that the world’s states ought to take to prevent it, there seems to lie another conjunction between the positive obligation of preserving the natural environment that we all share and a negative obligation of allowing the less developed countries to help us all do so. Because one cannot impose regulations that cannot be put into practice, it is more and more obvious that a new framework of action and development needs to be drawn in the field of TT of CFTs. (shrink)

By taking ‘existence in reality’ to be a great-making property and ‘God’ to be the greatest possible being, Plantinga skillfully presents Anselm’s ontological argument. However, since he proves God’s existence by virtue of a premise, “God (a maximally great being) is a possible being”, that is true only if God actually exists; his argument begs the question of the existence of God.

It is very well known that from the late-1960s onwards Feyerabend began to radically challenge some deeply-held ideas about the history and methodology of the sciences. It is equally well known that, from around the same period, he also began to radically challenge wider claims about the value and place of the sciences within modern societies, for instance by calling for the separation of science and the state and by questioning the idea that the sciences served to liberate and ameliorate (...) human societies. But what is less known is how, if at all, these two sets of challenges were connected, and why Feyerabend felt it important to raise them at all. In this chapter, my aim is to explore these issues by considering why Feyerabend used radical strategies to challenge the authority of science, and what purpose, if any, they were supposed to serve. Why, for instance, did Feyerabend defend alternative medicine, psychical abilities, astrology, magic and witchcraft and why did he argue that ‘Western science’ is complicit in environmental destruction, intellectual imperialism, social oppression, and spiritual destitution. Located in their historical and political context, such defences and arguments seem peculiar, not least because science was recognised not only as a central site of the intellectual and ideological competition between the West and the Soviet Union, but also because Western victory in that site was considered inevitable. What, then, did Feyerabend think he was trying to achieve by raising radical challenges to a central component of the cultural and intellectual prestige of the Western world grounded in appeals to practices and traditions which most would regard as eccentric at best and absurd at worst? My suggestion is that Feyerabend was making a subtler point than one might suppose. For the purpose of these radical challenges was to determine if the members of Western societies would in fact honour the epistemic standards – of tolerance, critical enquiry – which were identified as being characteristic of science and definitive of the social and political values of Western liberal democracy. I suggest that Feyerabend was trying to demonstrate that scientists were, too often, guilty of the same intolerant and dogmatic attitudes which were, according to prevailing propaganda, the property of illiberal totalitarian societies. Science does not reflect the superior epistemic and political values of Western societies but are, in fact, reflective of the same vices ascribed to the Soviet Union. If that is the case, then the sciences are not symbols of our epistemic and political values, but quite the reverse, hence Feyerabend’s talk of the ‘dogmatic’, ‘totalitarian’, ‘ratiofascist’ nature of modern science. But there is a positive upshot to Feyerabend’s challenge. For even if the sciences do not yet reflect the epistemic and political values of liberal democratic Western societies, they might yet be reformed so that they are. And there is a parallel between Feyerabend’s strategy and that of many of the other radicals of the time – student activists, environmentalists, and pacifists – namely to test the commitment to tolerance and deliberative debate of the establishment by asking it to seriously engage with ideas and convictions opposed to its own. For both science and society can become ‘tyrannical’ through the same means: by exempting themselves from critical scrutiny, by promoting self-serving ‘myths’ about themselves, and by derogating and excluding alternatives, including the ‘outsider’ perspectives they offer. The chapter concludes by suggesting that Feyerabend is distinctive in virtue of his willingness to offer radical criticisms of the authority of science such that it can fulfil its legitimate ideological role – namely, of symbolising and instantiating our core epistemic and political values – such that we can offer a sincere and meaningful answer to Feyerabend’s question ‘what’s so great about science?’. (shrink)

This paper examines the coherence of naturalistic personal pantheism in an attempt to reconcile pantheism, naturalism, and a personal concept of God. NPP proposes that i) God is identical with the universe, ii) the universe is entirely natural, and iii) God is personal. Several critics of accounts of a God such as this have voiced concerns about a natural — as opposed to a supernatural — God, since a natural God cannot be worship-worthy. In response, I propose a controversial premise (...) — physical primacy — to justify the worship-worthiness of a natural God. Physical primacy maintains that physical existence is a great-making property, therefore a God that exists naturally is greater than a God that exists supernaturally. I maintain that NPP is an attractive alternative to other theisms because it bypasses the pairing problem, presents a worship-worthy concept of God, and boasts ontological simplicity. (shrink)

In debates about the moral foundations of intellectual property, one very popular strand concerns the role of labor as a moral basis for intellectual property rights. This idea has a great deal of intuitive plausibility; but is there a way to make it philosophically precise? That is, does labor provide strong reasons to grant intellectual property rights to intellectual laborers? In this paper, I argue that the answer to that question is “yes”. I offer a new (...) view, different from existing labor theories of intellectual property, which I call the productive capacities view. This view gives us a way to make sense of the idea of labor as the basis for intellectual property rights, as well as a tool for critically evaluating existing intellectual property institutions. (shrink)

Mirvac chief executive Susan Lloyd-Hurwitz, not one usually associated with sympathy for tenants on the rental market, said earlier this year that ‘renting in Australia is generally a very miserable customer experience…the whole industry is set up to serve the owner not the tenant’ Her observation is basically correct and the solution she offers is to change the current situation where small investors, supported by generous government tax concessions, provide effectively all of the country’s private rental housing. Lloyd-Hurwitz wants Mirvac, (...) a property group currently managing over $15 billion of assets, to become an apartment landlord that would own not one or several properties like small investors currently do but rather thousands of properties to rent out. The proposal is for Mirvac to build apartment blocks and then, instead of selling individual apartments, rent them out on long-term or indefinite leases. This build-to-rent housing scheme would of course make the real estate–investment company a great deal of money. At the same time it would do very little to alleviate the current housing crisis. Such schemes are a nonstarter for people who want the security, stability and independence of home ownership, which is a very Australian aspiration that is increasingly becoming unobtainable not only for those experiencing homelessness, but also for the poor and middle-class. Those of us who care about finding a real solution to the housing crisis would do well to consider how we got into this situation in the first place, and then consider how this might inform what we do next. The following then, traces some of the historical and philosophical roots of our understanding of property and their institutionalisation via various levels of government, especially in the Australian context. (shrink)

This paper explores a variety of perfect being theism that combines Yujin Nagasawa’s maximal God thesis with the view that God is not atemporal. We argue that the original maximal God thesis still implicitly relies on a “static” view of divine perfections. Instead, following the recent re-evaluation of divine immutability by analytic philosophers, we propose that thinking of divine great-making properties as fluctuating but nevertheless remaining maximal either for every time t or across all times strengthens the original (...) maximal God thesis. Furthermore, we show that “temporalising” Nagasawa’s maximal God and adopting what we call the fluctuating maximal God thesis provides more effective ways of responding to objections to perfect being theism, in particular, the argument from evil and some conceptual problems pertaining to the Incarnation. Finally, we demonstrate that our proposal is compatible with Christian Scriptures and coheres with numerous biblical passages better than Nagasawa’s original proposal does. (shrink)

There is yet one more proposed solution to the argument from evil which merits attention. Though it does have elements in common with other proposed solutions in that it postulates a justifying end to account for the existence of all evil, it is different in that evil is viewed as nothing more than a polluting by-product of the proper functioning of the laws of nature in their industrious manufacture of the summum bonum. The unimpeded functioning of the laws of nature (...) is seen as necessary for the production and creation of a justifying (indiscernible) end and evil or suffering is merely a foreseen but unfortunate by-product of this natural machinery. The place and function of evil in this solution is what is novel: it is not a greatness-making property, nor is it a punishment or warning from on high, nor is its usefulness an aesthetic or contrasting one, nor is it the result of free will. Evil is admitted as just plain evil; it itself plays no role to serve the valuable end, which is precipitated by the unimpeded operation of natural laws upon the universe. Evil here is seen to play the same role that pollution might: it is a foreseen and unfortunate consequence of the means used to produce the coveted final product. -/- Professor Clement Dore, in his book entitled Theism,[1] introduces this solution in which evil itself plays no role to serve an enormously valuable end, yet is necessitated by this end. However, in order for the theist to be in a position to defend Dore's claim, a viable interpretation of the justifying, indiscernible end, must be proposed. To assess the validity of Dore's schema, four apparently exhaustive interpretations of the justifying end will be presented. It will be argued here that each of these possible interpretations is, in one respect or another, inadequate. The result is that the concept of the justifying, indiscernible end and its relation to Dore's overall schema lacks lucidity. In addition, other problems with this solution will be discussed in order to show that severe flaws exist in the solution as a whole. (shrink)

It is widely thought that God must love each and every human to the same depth and degree. This proposition plays a prominent role in influential versionsof the problem of evil, and in theistic attempts to answer the problem of evil. A common reason cited in support of the idea of God’s loving equally every human is that a perfect being would possess every great-making property and loving equally every human would be a great-making (...) class='Hi'>property. It is the argument of this essay, however, that a perfect being cannot in principle equally love every human. This argument is erected upon an unnoticed principle of perfect being theology: for all properties F, if F is a deficiency when had by a human, then F cannot be great-making when had by God. (shrink)

Predictive judicial analytics holds the promise of increasing efficiency and fairness of law. Judicial analytics can assess extra-legal factors that influence decisions. Behavioral anomalies in judicial decision-making offer an intuitive understanding of feature relevance, which can then be used for debiasing the law. A conceptual distinction between inter-judge disparities in predictions and inter-judge disparities in prediction accuracy suggests another normatively relevant criterion with regards to fairness. Predictive analytics can also be used in the first step of causal inference, where (...) the features employed in the first step are exogenous to the case. Machine learning thus offers an approach to assess bias in the law and evaluate theories about the potential consequences of legal change. (shrink)

Context: To speak of constructivism -- and in particular of radical constructivism -- in education is to place oneself on a field which, like any other academic field, is the scene of tensions, debates, and indeed battles. While such controversies are, predictably enough, fought out between the partisans of constructivism and those defending other theses, they are also fought out between the constructivists themselves, as a number of group works have brought out (e.g., Steffe & Gale 1995; SRED 2001). In (...) other words, constructivists do not express their views in unison whenever there is a question on the development of knowledge (an individual or collective matter?), the underpinnings of knowledge (be they of a psychological, sociological or other type) or, as humorously noted by Quale (2007), that "sin" which is said to consist in the relativist mode of questioning or critique authorized by constructivism. Purpose: In this paper, we would like to contribute to this discussion and to this plurality of ways of embedding oneself in constructivism, in particular by bringing out (as was so acutely shown by Ernst von Glasersfeld 1987a, 1995, 2007) that while constructivism offers a basis on which to revisit the question of knowledge, its contributions nevertheless extend well beyond this single preoccupation. By reincorporating "the properties of the observer" into his or her discourse as well as the conditions, stakes and issues surrounding the utterance in question, in short, by reincorporating the question of power into the utterance-making, constructivism also provides a basis for revisiting the "Great Divides" -- that is, the (unequal) relationships between the various forms of knowledge as well as the (unequal) modes of evidence and authority that accompany these relations. Method: Through an examination of three topics, that is the "racism" of intelligence, the Semmelweis affair, and the question of endogenous knowledge, we will attempt to explicate various insights afforded by constructivism. Conclusion: So doing, we will show that radical constructivism, in its recognition of the plurality of possible modes of description and explanation, contributes to a form of epistemological democracy. (shrink)

Our understanding of how evolution acts on biological networks remains patchy, as is our knowledge of how that action is best identified, modelled and understood. Starting with network structure and the evolution of protein–protein interaction networks, we briefly survey the ways in which network evolution is being addressed in the fields of systems biology, development and ecology. The approaches highlighted demonstrate a movement away from a focus on network topology towards a more integrated view, placing biological properties centre‐stage. We argue (...) that there remains great potential in a closer synergy between evolutionary biology and biological network analysis, although that may require the development of novel approaches and even different analogies for biological networks themselves. (shrink)

: It is often assumed that the best way to learn about an object involves observing it. That is why teachers bring live ferrets to the nature table. However, what is often assumed may not always be true. Why visit a place when you can watch a film about it? A film is cheaper and might do a better job of delivering the salient information.This article discusses the impact of this issue on the role of live performances in disseminating music. (...) Suppose you want to get to know some unimprovised musical work intended for concert performance. Must you see it live? Or would a decent recording do?The author argues that, most of the time, recording technology offers a mode of access to the work's musical properties that is at least as good as the access that a live performance can offer. This does not mean that concert performances are a waste of breath. But it means that we should be careful about the claims we make for them, especially in music education. It also means that musicologists and music educators should channel more energy than they do into understanding and promoting the distinctive analytical tools that the playback experience provides. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 38.2 (2004) 7-19 [Access article in PDF] Evaluating a Performance - Ideal vs. Great Performance Gilead Bar-Elli Two Notions of Performance Music, as everybody knows, is a performing art. Not only are musical works performed, but they are also designed, by their very nature, to be performed. The notion of a performance of a musical composition is therefore part and parcel of our (...) conception of music. And yet the relationships between a composition and its performances give rise to many difficult problems, some of which will be touched on later. For the present I want to stress two more specific issues in which the significance of the notion of performance for music lies. The first is that a musical composition is constituted by concepts and properties intrinsically connected to performance. In fact, I believe that the very meaning of these concepts and properties is rooted in the ways they are manifested in performance. Hence, even if a certain composition has never and will never be performed, it is still constituted by concepts and properties whose meaning lies in the ways they should be manifested in performance.The second point is that since music is in fact a performing art, since weperform music, and listen to various performances of the same compositions, and conceive of them and evaluate them as music, notions of performance are an integral part of the conceptual repertoire in which we conceive of music. Hence questions pertaining to the nature of performance, and to the relationship between a composition and its performances are inescapable in any philosophical investigation of music. And around these general questions a host of others suggest themselves: What makes a particular performance (even if faulty) a performance of a particular work? Can there be different equally good performances of the same work? In what terms should performances be evaluated (and graded) and how? Can a composition be individuated apart from its performances and how?On many of these problems and the issues surrounding them, a distinction between two conceptions of performance seems helpful, and sometimes [End Page 7] necessary. On the one hand we may conceive of a performance as a musical entity in itself, independently of the composition whose performance it in fact is. A performance thus conceived can be aesthetically evaluated "on its own" so to speak, or in and of itself, with no regard to our having an independent access to the composition whose performance it is. Sometimes, to push it to an extreme, we may not even know that it is a performance of a particular composition, and may not care if it is. Let us call this the"autonomousconception of a performance."On the other hand we often think of a performance as being essentially a performance of a particular composition, and we thus conceive of it and evaluate it. Here knowing which composition the performance is a performance of is essential. It is arguable that on this conception we must also have (in principle at least) an independent access to the composition, by being able to read its score, for example.1 Being a performance of a particular composition is, on this view, part of the very nature and identity of the performance. There can yet be various different performances of the same composition, and they may be compared and evaluated as such. In light of this essential relationship between the performance and "its" composition (the work whose performance it is) let us call this the "intentionalisticconception of a performance."There is a great difference between these two conceptions, and they imply important differences for the nature of music and of musical composition. I am not committing myself here to any particular view of the ontic nature of a composition — whether it is a class of performances, or a kind (in Nicholas Wolterstorff's sense) or a design (in Roger Scruton's).2 I shall exemplify the pertinence of the above distinction for one case. Many people think that music resides only in performances (some would add, actual and possible... (shrink)

This article argues that considerations about the role and predictability of intellectual innovation make the protection of intellectual property morally obligatory even when it greatly reduces short-term welfare. Since the provision of good new ideas is the only productive input not subject to decreasing marginal productivity, welfarist considerations require that no impediment to its maximal provision be erected and the potentially substantial welfare losses imposed by a patent system be mitigated by taxation of other sources of wealth and income. (...) Key Words: patent system • welfarism • decreasing marginal productivity. (shrink)

This article serves to explore the historical development of the ontological argument from Anselm to Present. Initially, the main goal is to introduce the lay reader to one of the most perplexing arguments for the theistic conception of God. Logically, this is an a priori argument, similar to one of a mathematical proof. Oddly, the argument has sort of fallen out of place in contemporary philosophy, apart from a reboot from Alvin Plantinga. The goal is to illustrate that the initial (...) argument as stated by Anselm seems to be an unsolved problem in philosophical inquiry. (shrink)

The traditional doctrine of human dignity has fallen on hard times. It is said that that doctrine is “speciesist to the core” and “the moral effluvium of a discredited metaphysics.” Those of us who would defend the view that humans enjoy greater moral standing than nonhuman living things must answer the question, “What’s so special about humans?” In this paper, I argue that moral agency is a great-making property that confers special worth on its bearer.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 43.4 (2005) 490-491 [Access article in PDF] Husain Sarkar. Descartes' Cogito: Saved from the Great Shipwreck. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Pp. xviii + 305. Cloth, $65.00. Descartes's first critics attacked his cogito, ergo sum as deficient; his present critics attack it as excessive. Either way, it is an Archimedean point in Descartes's world and merits a book-length study. In this (...) book, Husain Sarkar makes a powerful case that the cogito is not an argument, but rather an "experiment," generating an intuition enabling Descartes to retrieve a timber from what Bourdin called the "great shipwreck" of the hyperbolic doubt.Sarkar places the experiment within his own fresh readings of Descartes's philosophy. They will be illuminating to new Descartes scholars. Some readings will seem perverse or cryptic. Constructive passages illuminate more, polemic passages less, as when Sarkar finds seven flaws in Hintikka's cogito interpretation. Despite the polemic excesses, Sarkar writes with modesty, epitomized by his slogan, "Reason with them in the most courteous manner."With verve and imagination Sarkar presents the cogito as an experiment which can be carried out in any world at all and yields an intuition that qualifies as a Cartesian first principle. He suggests various implications of his interpretation—for example, for the epistemic role of will: "The will initially learns the limits that it must recognize only at the foot of the cogito... It is in the state of the cogito that the will learns what it means to be ineluctably inclined toward affirming a proposition, and what it is to be free" (256).What is the content of the intuited 'I exist'? Sarkar calls upon Robert Adams's notion of a "primitive thisness," entirely distinct from a substance's properties or "suchnesses," and upon David Lewis's thesis that besides knowing propositions a person can know a self-ascription of a property. Still, he makes no headway at all. True, the question is extraordinarily [End Page 490] difficult. It has not yielded appreciably to brilliant phenomenologists or brilliant students of direct reference and indexicality or, for that matter, me. The content of 'I' statements is a topic for another book, and no one I know of is writing it.In the book's centerpiece, Sarkar marshals a series of attacks on the cogito as argument. Sometimes they miss—more polemic overkill. Usually they hit home. Their cumulative effect is persuasive.Descartes says that "I think, therefore I exist" is the first principle of his philosophy (VI, 32; VIIIA, 7; V, 147: references are to the Adam and Tannery edition). But if the cogito were an argument, one of its premises would become his first principle.An argument requires movement of thought and that requires reliance on memory (X, 370 and 408), and in the cogito Descartes strips memory of its credentials (VII, 24, superseding the assurances of X, 368).An argument relies on logical principles, but Descartes suspects these and reasoning generally. In the First Meditation he calls into doubt the simplest mathematics; elsewhere he generalizes from mathematics to "self-evident principles" and to "all the arguments I had previously taken as demonstrative proofs" (VI, 32; IXB, 6; similar aspersions are cast in V, 137 and 139). (But see also Mark Olson, "Descartes' First Meditation: Mathematics and the Laws of Logic" JHP 26 [1988]: 407–438.)I'll add a wrinkle. Descartes's mouthpiece Eudoxus says you can use your own doubt to deduce facts that are even more certain than those commonly built upon the great principle that it is impossible that a thing should both exist and at the same time not exist (X, 522). The conclusion of any argument rests on such logical principles. If the cogito were an argument, its certainty could not exceed theirs. Descartes suggests here that it does.Sarkar also cites Descartes's denigrations of "logic," but these often pertain not to reasoning generally but to syllogistic logic. Thus Margaret Wilson took the cogito to be a nonsyllogistic argument. Still, Sarkar effectively deploys... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 27.2 (2003) 436-443 [Access article in PDF] How Does Love Make the Ugly Beautiful? Amihud Gilead IT IS OBVIOUS TO SEE how greatly Gideon loves his wife, who is physically quite an ugly old lady. Nothing about her physical appearance or gait seems beautiful, at least to the extent of what meets your eye. Physically, she seems not to be considered beautiful at all. Still, Gideon (...) is quite sure that his beloved wife is the most beautiful woman in the entire world. He cannot fathom why other people do not realize that obvious truth: Mira is a real, fascinating, unique beauty. "But, dear Gideon," says one of his friends, "you cannot deny a very simple fact, Mira is a most beautiful person, and it is a great fortune to know her, all the more to know her intimately. Still, physically judging, she is not beautiful at all. It is an undeniable, objective fact." Gideon's answer does not fail in its directness: "Well, those who are blind to her physical, actual beauty, should discover it. Like the Michelangeloean sculptors, who must reveal and disclose the sculpture hidden in the marble, those people should expose and realize her physical, actual beauty." For Gideon, beauty, physical or mental, is an objective matter, which should be discovered, not invented. For him, beauty is not just in the eye of the beholder, but it lies there waiting to be uncovered and revealed to the world. For Gideon, those whose eyes meet Mira's ugliness are not ready or fit to remove the superfluity that covers her beauty, whether mental or physical. Removing all that is superfluous in the marble is necessary to give birth to the sculpture. Like a midwife, the artistic gaze gives birth, and this gaze is not just the property of customary artists, but also of lovers. To love means to reveal, to create or discover beauty. [End Page 436]I believe that William Butler Yeats put this in the most adequate words: "All changed, changed utterly: / A terrible beauty is born." The lover's gaze exposes such a beauty, even as regards the husband of the woman that the poet loved for so many years but in vain: "This other man I had dreamed / A drunken, vainglorious lout. / He had done most bitter wrong / To some who are near my heart, / Yet I number him in the song; / He, too, has been changed in his turn, / Transformed utterly: / A terrible beauty is born" ("Easter, 1916"). The artistic, poetic gaze redeems the "direct object" of his love, but also redeems what is so ugly, like the "drunken, vainglorious lout," about her. After all, her decision to maintain her miserable marriage instead of accepting the poet's love, is quite ugly or contemptuous, to say the least, in the eyes of the poet-lover. But this is the strength of his poetic, artistic revelation: to give birth even to the hidden beauty of that vainglorious lout who, unfortunately, happened to be her husband. All the more so, to reveal the real beauty of the loved woman, "the loveliest woman born" ("A Prayer for my Daughter"). Another gaze, by those who do not love her or were indifferent to her, could not realize her beauty at all, physically as well as mentally.Yet others believe that we can love somebody who is physically ugly, even the "ugliest woman born"—as a person she may be considered "the loveliest woman born." I would like to challenge this commonplace. In the eyes of the artist-lover she is physically beautiful, no matter how ugly or lacking in beauty she may be in the eyes of others looking at her indifferently, as though nothing has happened, there is nothing to stay with, and nothing has left its impression. Indeed, Gideon's love reveals that Mira is physically beautiful no less than mentally. Her gaze, gait, even clumsiness, all her physical "flaws," and other attributes are considered beautiful in his eyes as a lover-artist. To be more precise, all of her traits are so considered. The... (shrink)

Although artificial intelligence techniques have been successfully applied to reproduce many rational features of human behaviour, a great barrier has been encountered in simulating human activities where intuition and emotion are involved. Art making and viewing are processes where typically rational and mechanical aspects interact with aesthetic and cognitive criteria. Can you make a computer understand and autonomously produce art?The main purpose of this paper is to present the most relevant approaches in the study of art perception and (...) creation via computer, focusing on the results achieved in artistic computer graphics. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 38.2 (2004) 7-19 [Access article in PDF] Evaluating a Performance - Ideal vs. Great Performance Gilead Bar-Elli Two Notions of Performance Music, as everybody knows, is a performing art. Not only are musical works performed, but they are also designed, by their very nature, to be performed. The notion of a performance of a musical composition is therefore part and parcel of our (...) conception of music. And yet the relationships between a composition and its performances give rise to many difficult problems, some of which will be touched on later. For the present I want to stress two more specific issues in which the significance of the notion of performance for music lies. The first is that a musical composition is constituted by concepts and properties intrinsically connected to performance. In fact, I believe that the very meaning of these concepts and properties is rooted in the ways they are manifested in performance. Hence, even if a certain composition has never and will never be performed, it is still constituted by concepts and properties whose meaning lies in the ways they should be manifested in performance.The second point is that since music is in fact a performing art, since weperform music, and listen to various performances of the same compositions, and conceive of them and evaluate them as music, notions of performance are an integral part of the conceptual repertoire in which we conceive of music. Hence questions pertaining to the nature of performance, and to the relationship between a composition and its performances are inescapable in any philosophical investigation of music. And around these general questions a host of others suggest themselves: What makes a particular performance (even if faulty) a performance of a particular work? Can there be different equally good performances of the same work? In what terms should performances be evaluated (and graded) and how? Can a composition be individuated apart from its performances and how?On many of these problems and the issues surrounding them, a distinction between two conceptions of performance seems helpful, and sometimes [End Page 7] necessary. On the one hand we may conceive of a performance as a musical entity in itself, independently of the composition whose performance it in fact is. A performance thus conceived can be aesthetically evaluated "on its own" so to speak, or in and of itself, with no regard to our having an independent access to the composition whose performance it is. Sometimes, to push it to an extreme, we may not even know that it is a performance of a particular composition, and may not care if it is. Let us call this the"autonomousconception of a performance."On the other hand we often think of a performance as being essentially a performance of a particular composition, and we thus conceive of it and evaluate it. Here knowing which composition the performance is a performance of is essential. It is arguable that on this conception we must also have (in principle at least) an independent access to the composition, by being able to read its score, for example.1 Being a performance of a particular composition is, on this view, part of the very nature and identity of the performance. There can yet be various different performances of the same composition, and they may be compared and evaluated as such. In light of this essential relationship between the performance and "its" composition (the work whose performance it is) let us call this the "intentionalisticconception of a performance."There is a great difference between these two conceptions, and they imply important differences for the nature of music and of musical composition. I am not committing myself here to any particular view of the ontic nature of a composition — whether it is a class of performances, or a kind (in Nicholas Wolterstorff's sense) or a design (in Roger Scruton's).2 I shall exemplify the pertinence of the above distinction for one case. Many people think that music resides only in performances (some would add, actual and possible... (shrink)

Various attempts have been made to save Gaunilo's ‘ideal’ island by proposing different criteria for its maximal greatness or perfection. This paper addresses a recent proposal that ‘an ideal island is conceivable if it's defined as any island exhibiting an ideal ratio of great‐making island properties’ (Milo Crimi, ‘Ideally sized islands: Reply to Danielyan, Garrett and Plantinga’, Analysis 77 (2), 273‐278) and shows that it fails because the idea of an island – indeed, of anything that is finite, (...) delineated and circumscribed as a necessary condition of its conception ‐ cannot accommodate maximal greatness or perfection; neither can a determined quantitative relation between finite relata constitute a criterion of maximal greatness or perfection. Danielyan, Edgar (2018), On the Inherent Incoherence of Gaunilo's Island. The Heythrop Journal. doi:10.1111/heyj.13056. (shrink)

Here I reply to a recent exchange between Edgar Danielyan and Brian Garrett regarding Alvin Plantinga’s assessment of Gaunilo’s ‘ideal island’ objection to Anselm’s ontological argument. I argue that an ideal island is conceivable if it’s defined as any island exhibiting an ideal ratio of great-making island properties.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:IntroductionGerhold K. BeckerThe concept of personhood has been a prime focus in contemporary bioethics. Three areas of ethical decision making in particular have been addressed through explorations into the conditions and criteria of personhood: the beginning and the end of human life and the morally relevant boundaries that separate human beings from nonhuman animals. Blending theology with science fiction, the scope of the latter area has been expanded (...) further to include entities ranging from gods, angels, and extraterrestrials all the way down to machines. Although the recognition of personhood traditionally has been based on metaphysical and ontological considerations about sets of (psychological and cognitive) person-making properties, the emphasis is now squarely placed on moral concerns. Simply put, from a moral perspective a person is someone morally considerable who is the subject of moral rights and merits moral protection. The implications of the conferral of person status for moral decision making in medicine, health care, and research are, however, less clear. Problems arise from the fact that the traditional concept of personhood is constituted by three rather different ideas. As David Wiggins has pointed out, the concept of personhood combines in a single focus the ideas of the person as object of science (biological, neurophysiological, and so forth), as subject of consciousness and experience, and as locus of value and moral attributes. It is therefore extremely difficult to neatly separate metaphysical personhood from moral personhood, and vice versa, and to draw morally relevant conclusions without continuously moving back and forth between the different constitutive factors. Thus, moral rights seem to presuppose moral agency, and moral agency is contingent on personal identity, which in turn presupposes some form of physical (including psychological) existence. It is obvious, that differences in the analysis of any one of these constituents of personhood will result in different conceptions of personhood with different implications for ethical decision making. Bioethical disputes about the moral status of human fetuses or of irreversibly comatose patients, as well as of the great apes [End Page 289] and other animals, are notoriously complex because they involve fundamental disagreements about personhood and the most promising strategies for their resolution. Although this has led some to question the usefulness of the concept of personhood for bioethics altogether, others seek remedy through the analysis of moral agency within the context of particular bioethical issues.The essays in this volume clearly reflect the current state of the bioethical debate on personhood and are representative of its major strands. They evolved from discussions at an international symposium on Bioethics and the Concept of Personhood at the Centre for Applied Ethics, Hong Kong Baptist University, May 1998, that explored the bioethical implications of the concept of personhood in a historical and cross-cultural perspective.In the opening essay, John Harris gives Locke’s concept of person a new twist by reading his list of criteria of personhood as preconditions of a being’s capability to value his or her own existence. The status of person is contingent upon the possession of the capacity to value one’s own existence; whoever is capable of such valuation is a person (as long such capacity actually exists) and makes moral claims on other persons. On this account, personhood is not co-extensive with human life or the human species, and even transcends other forms of organic life. Harris allows for the possibility that some machines in effect might qualify for person status. Although human life develops gradually and with it the capacity to value existence, Harris rejects both the potentiality argument and gradualism on the grounds that personhood is a “threshold” concept. Accordingly, proximity to the threshold is morally insignificant, and everything depends on actually crossing the threshold.Tom Beauchamp takes issue with what he sees as the dominant trend in contemporary bioethics to derive moral conclusions from metaphysical accounts of personhood. On his reading, metaphysical theories of personhood are abused in normative analysis by employing certain sets of psychological or cognitive properties to identify persons as bearers of moral rights. He argues that by themselves, without the incorporation of independent moral principles, such properties have no moral implications and cannot confer moral standing. Thus, a being may... (shrink)

This article makes the case for a specific variety of what we call Collective Capital Institutions (CCIs), by returning to the idea of Wage-Earner Funds (WEFs) – a 1970s Swedish policy proposal designed gradually to shift ownership and control over parts of the economy to democratically controlled institutions. We identify two attractive rationales in favour of such a scheme and argue that both can fruitfully be transposed to the current worldwide economic situation. The egalitarian rationale is that WEFs could help (...) in the pursuit of equality by giving a wider set of people a stake in collectively owned companies and a right to their profits. The democratic rationale is that WEFs redistribute not only these profits, but also the power over economic decisions made within companies. We then contrast such schemes for collective capital ownership with the similar but much more privatised proposals set out in, for instance, John Rawls's idea of a ‘property-owning democracy’. We argue that CCIs ultimately are more likely to contribute to the development of the ‘sense of justice’ within society that is needed for a stable just society. We conclude that CCIs deserve a great deal more exploration in academic and political discussions of egalitarian economic systems. (shrink)

Nominalists are confronted with a grave difficulty: if abstract objects do not exist, what explains the success of theories that invoke them? In this paper, I make headway on this problem. I develop a formal language in which certain platonistic claims about properties and certain nominalistic claims can be expressed, develop a formal language in which only certain nominalistic claims can be expressed, describe a function mapping sentences of the first language to sentences of the second language, and prove some (...) facts about that function and facts about some sound logics for those languages. In doing so, I prove that, given some plausible metaphysical assumptions, a large class of sentences about properties of concrete objects are “safe” on nominalistic grounds. Whenever some true sentences about concrete objects and some sentences belonging to this class that are true according to platonists collectively entail a conclusion about concrete objects, some nominalistically acceptable sentences are true and entail the same conclusion. Because the proof can itself be formulated without abstract objects, it provides a nominalistic explanation of the success of theories that invoke properties of concrete objects. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: The Validity of Anselm's Ontological Argument The Truth of the Anselmian Premises On Whether Anselm's Ontological Argument Begs the Question On Parodies The Validity of the Ontological Argument of Descartes and Leibniz On the Truth of the Descartes–Leibniz Premises Critiques of the Descartes–Leibniz Ontological Argument Ontological Arguments of the Twentieth Century Gödel's Ontological Argument On Whether Gödel's Argument is Sound The Modal Perfection Argument The Temporal‐Contingency Argument Conclusion References Appendix 1. Logic Matters Appendix 2. Formal (...) Proofs of Some Modal Arguments. (shrink)

One way to make philosophy of science more socially relevant is to attend to specific scientific practises that affect society to a great extent. One such practise is biomedical research. This paper looks at contemporary U.S. biomedical research in particular and argues that it suffers from important epistemic, moral and socioeconomic failings. It then discusses and criticises existing approaches to improve on the status quo, most prominently by Thomas Pogge (a political philosopher), Joseph Stiglitz (a Nobel-prize winning economist) and (...) James Robert Brown (a philosopher of science). Finally, it sketches an alternative proposal and argues for its superiority. The proposal has four components: changing the intellectual property regime; instituting independent clinical research; aligning innovators' and patients' interests; and enacting additional regulation. (shrink)

Must mental properties figure in psychological causal laws if they are causally efficacious? And do those psychological causal laws give the essence of mental properties? Contrary to the prevailing consensus, I argue that, on the usual conception of laws that is in play in these debates, there are in fact lawless causally efficacious properties both in and out of the philosophy of mind. I argue that this makes a great difference to the philosophical relevance of empirical psychology. 1 begin (...) by making the case that revolutions and hurricanes are lawless phenomena, before arguing for a similar thesis about creativity, love, courage, dreams, daydreams, and musings. Furthermore, the empirical research on these phenomena suggests that the philosophical issues may be independent of what empirical psychology can tell us. (shrink)

All of the ingredients for what has become known as Anselmian perfect being theology were present already in the thought of St. Augustine. This paper develops that thesis by calling attention to various claims Augustine makes. It then asks whether there are principled reasons for determining which properties the greatest possible being has and whether an account of what contributes to greatness can settle the question whether the greatest possible being is the same as the God of Abraham, Isaac, and (...) Jacob. The paper develops Augustine’s answer to the first question by extracting several principles he endorses that generate a hierarchy of greatness. It addresses the second question by discussing the requirements of worship and of creation. (shrink)

This article presents important properties of standard discrete distributions and its conjugate densities. The Bernoulli and Poisson processes are described as generators of such discrete models. A characterization of distributions by mixtures is also introduced. This article adopts a novel singular notation and representation. Singular representations are unusual in statistical texts. Nevertheless, the singular notation makes it simpler to extend and generalize theoretical results and greatly facilitates numerical and computational implementation.

Physicalism, the thesis that everything is physical, is one of the most controversial problems in philosophy. Its adherents argue that there is no more important doctrine in philosophy, whilst its opponents claim that its role is greatly exaggerated. In this superb introduction to the problem Daniel Stoljar focuses on three fundamental questions: the interpretation, truth and philosophical significance of physicalism. In answering these questions he covers the following key topics: -/- (i)A brief history of physicalism and its definitions, (ii)what a (...) physical property is and how physicalism meets challenges from empirical sciences, (iii)'Hempel’s dilemma’ and the relationship between physicalism and physics, (iv)physicalism and key debates in metaphysics and philosophy of mind, such as supervenience, identity and conceivability, and (v)physicalism and causality. -/- Additional features include chapter summaries, annotated further reading and a glossary of technical terms, making Physicalism ideal for those coming to the problem for the first time. (shrink)

During the last twenty – thirty years there has been unprecedented demand for new legal regulation in the field of environmental protection, which influenced the immense growth in both the body of environmental legislation and in re-thinking the idea and principles of the environmental protection itself. The provisions of environmental law are passed, accepted and obeyed with a great resistance in the society. On the one hand, environmental law may be defined as a value system that seeks to induce (...) humans to act as stewards of nature rather than only its exploiters, and therefore the environmental provisions are construed in a manner that the main instruments are limitations of different activities in order to prevent the disruption of natural systems. On the other hand, by doing so the environmental law places nature and future generations (those categories commonly do not have any legal personality) and not the human (the sole addressee and the beneficiary of the traditional legal system) in the centre of environmental regulation. This concept radically transforms the relationship between nature and mankind by subordinating the initiative to benefit from legal regulation. By doing so, the environmental provisions make the opposite and evolve tension in respect of such rights as the right to property, the right to personal life, or individual welfare. In the present research the aim is to disclose the origins and the most important principles of international and regional legal regulation of environmental protection, and to analyse the essence of environmental law in the context of public interest. The environmental law is analysed in the context of such human rights as the right to property and the right to personal life. (shrink)

To answer tantalizing questions such as whether animals are moral or how morality evolved, I propose starting with a somewhat less fraught question: do animals have normative cognition? Recent psychological research suggests that normative thinking, or ought-thought, begins early in human development. Recent philosophical research suggests that folk psychology is grounded in normative thought. Recent primatology research finds evidence of sophisticated cultural and social learning capacities in great apes. Drawing on these three literatures, I argue that the human variety (...) of social cognition and moral cognition encompass the same cognitive capacities and that the nonhuman great apes may also be normative beings. To make this argument, I develop an account of animal social norms that shares key properties with Cristina Bicchieri's account of social norms but which lowers the cognitive requirements for having a social norm. I propose a set of four early developing prerequisites implicated in social cognition that make up what I call naïve normativity: the ability to identify agents, sensitivity to in-group/out-group differences, the capacity for social learning of group traditions, and responsiveness to appropriateness. I review the ape cognition literature and present preliminary empirical evidence supporting the existence of social norms and naïve normativity in great apes. While there is more empirical work to be done, I hope to have offered a framework for studying normativity in other species, and I conclude that we should be open to the possibility that normative cognition is yet another ancient cognitive endowment that is not human-unique. (shrink)

"Karl Marx wrote a great deal about the countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America, but commentators upon his work have subsequently disagreed--sometimes violently--about the implications of his observations. In this book, the author strives to disentangle the threads of Marx's narrative and analysis and to demonstrate how, property understood, they form a coherent pattern and one still capable of application to the world about us. An outstanding merit of the book is that although it makes a signal (...) and distinguished contribution to Marxism, it is at the same time one of the best and clearest introductions to Marxism that one could hope to find"--Provided by publisher. (shrink)

Organoids are three-dimensional biological structures grown in vitro from different kinds of stem cells that self-organise mimicking real organs with organ-specific cell types. Recently, researchers have managed to produce human organoids which have structural and functional properties very similar to those of different organs, such as the retina, the intestines, the kidneys, the pancreas, the liver and the inner ear. Organoids are considered a great resource for biomedical research, as they allow for a detailed study of the development and (...) pathologies of human cells; they also make it possible to test new molecules on human tissue. Furthermore, organoids have helped research take a step forward in the field of personalised medicine and transplants. However, some ethical issues have arisen concerning the origin of the cells that are used to produce organoids and their properties. In particular, there are new, relevant and so-far overlooked ethical questions concerning cerebral organoids. Scientists have created so-called mini-brains as developed as a few-months-old fetus, albeit smaller and with many structural and functional differences. However, cerebral organoids exhibit neural connections and electrical activity, raising the question whether they are or will one day be somewhat sentient. In principle, this can be measured with some techniques that are already available, which are used for brain-injured non-communicating patients. If brain organoids were to show a glimpse of sensibility, an ethical discussion on their use in clinical research and practice would be necessary. (shrink)

Chapter 1: An Introduction: The ‘Semantic Sting’ Argument Describes Dworkin’s theory as concerning the conditions of legal validity. “A legal system is a system of norms. Validity is a logical property of norms in a way akin to that in which truth is a logical property of propositions. A statement about the law is true if and only if the norm it purports to describe is a valid legal norm…It follows that there must be certain conditions which render (...) certain norms, but not others, legally valid. Hence it also follows that there can be two types of disagreement over the truth or falsehood of propositions about the law. People can disagree over the question ‘What are the conditions of legal validity?’, in which case their disagreement is a theoretical one. Or they can agree on the conditions of validity, and disagree as to whether or not those conditions actually obtain in a given case or not.” Argues that the best way to interpret Dworkin’s ‘semantic-sting argument’ is as a general argument against conventionalism in legal positivism. Summarizes the outcome of Dworkin’s argument as follows: “[I]f Dworkin is right about the legal reasoning of lawyers and judges, conventionalism would be self-defeating: if lawyers and judges recognize as legally binding not only those norms which are uncontroversially identifiable under the Rule of Recognition, that is, if what they recognize as binding is not only source-based law, then conventionalism turns out to be false on its own terms. In other words, either law is not what lawyers and judges think that it is, in which case law is not a matter of conventions, or – if it is what lawyers and judges think – conventionalism is false, as they do not see the law as purely a matter of conventions.” Dworkin’s theory, then, is a new conception of jurisprudence aiming to present itself as a rival to conventionalism. The book will be concerned with re-examining positivism in light of the interpretative challenge. Chapter 2: Meaning and Interpretation “[R]oughly, interpretation can be defined as an understanding or explanation of the meaning of an object.” Interpretation in this narrow sense is distinct from a less formal and broader use of interpretation that makes it equivalent to explanation. “Hence also, only those objects which are capable of bearing some meaning qualify as objects of interpretation.” [Why shouldn’t we think of interpretation as object-identification? This seems to be closer to what Dworkin has in mind.] Thus, a consideration of the philosophical work on meaning is appropriate. First, a consideration of Davidson on interpretation. The thesis is that Davidson’s “radical interpretation” can only account for sentence meaning and not for linguistic interpretation in general. Davidson cannot account for the non-rule-governed aspects of communication. “Semantics, as opposed to interpretation, concerns those aspects of communication which are rule or convention governed…but such rules are normally unavailable as reasons or justifications for an interpretation. On the contrary, interpretation is usually required because the issue is not determined by rules or conventions.” Interpretation, rather, is parasitic with understanding the meaning of an expression and not equivalent with it. As Dummett notes, any reflection on the meanings of words assumes prior knowledge of ordinary meanings. “This leads to the conclusion that understanding or explaining the meaning of an expression and interpreting it, are two conceptually separate things. It also indicates that seman ics can only be employed, if at all, to elucidate the concept of interpretation by way of contrast: interpretation concerns those aspects of communication which are under-determined by semantic rules or conventions.” Pragmatics, the study of problems posed by discrepancies between utterer’s meaning and sentence meaning, would seem to be closer to inquiry into interpretation. Both are concerned with understanding how meaning is possible where conventional rules leave off. Contemporary pragmatics, moreover, recognizes the logically indeterminate character of communicative inferences beyond conventional meaning and that the contextual conditions that account for the possibility cannot be realized in the semantic structure of the sentence. However, different criteria of success may be at work in pragmatics than interpretation. Pragmatics is concerned with how communication is achieved and thus the criteria of success would be grasping a speaker’s intentions. Many think, however, that communication is unimportant in certain spheres of communication, e.g. artistic interpretation, and that in these cases the aim of interpretation is not to uncover the actual artist’s intentions. What kind of meaning is interpretation aimed at then? It cannot be the meaning the object has for the interpreter. “Interpretation purports to be a statement about the object interpreted, not about the subject who offers the interpretation…it is crucial to remember that not everything we say about a work of art, or any other text, amounts to an interpretation of it. Only those aspects of a text which can shed light on its meaning form part of the text’s interpretation. What the text means for someone rarely entails anything about what the text means.” [This is puzzling to some extent for it remains somewhat ambiguous what it means to talk of subject-independent meaning.] Interpretive meaning attribution is, rather, counterfactual. “In general, I will suggest that the answer to this question consists in the fact that meaning is assigned by a counterfactual statement. Given that x is the meaning attributed to, for instance a text T, and x is not the literal meaning of T, nor is it the meaning of T intended by its author, then the attribution of meaning x to T can only be understood as the contention that on the basis of certain assumptions a certain fictitious or stipulated speaker would have meant x by expressing T.” Thus, on this account, interpretation, when it does not concern an actual speaker, turns out to be a kind of counterfactual intention attribution. Twofold point: “First, that interpretation is essentially a matter of attributing intentions, that is, in the pragmatics sense of ‘meaning’, namely, meaning that such-and-such by an act or expression. At the same time, interpretations need not be based on the intentions of actual authors; the meaning of an act or expression is understandable in terms of counterfactual intentions.” [Are we really restricted to understanding the coherence and integrity of meaning in such a way? Presumably the author is a kind of device for organizing meaning, much like Dworkin’s integrity, but need it take that format?] The logic of interpretation is typically reducible to intention attribution. [What role does the counterfactual author play in structuring meaning?] The criteria of interpretive success will depend upon the object, whether it is the real author or the counterfactual author. If the former, success will depend upon the retrieval of the author’s actual intentions. “Likewise, if the author is characterized in terms of some ideal representative of a certain genre, for instance, the presumptions which are taken to determine this c aracterization would provide the criteria of success for the particular interpretation offered.” [The criteria of success would seem, then, to be the principles, ideals, etc. that we attribute to the counterfactual author. These attributed qualities would be doing all the work – is the attribution of intention to the hypothetical author, then, really necessary at all?] [Does this account presuppose a weird dichotomy between what an object is and what it means? This dichotomy is different, if present at all, in Dworkin.] Chapter 3: Dworkin’s Theory of Interpretation and the Nature of Jurisprudence Three main insights of Dworkin’s theory of interpretation: “First, that interpretation strives to present its object in its best possible light. Second, that interpretation is essentially genre-dependent. And third, that there are certain constraints that determine the limits of possible interpretations of a given object.” Why the best light? Dworkin doesn’t really address this question in depth but claims that otherwise we are left with no way of justifying and choosing an interpretation or we are left with the author’s intention model, which we should reject. [Marmor doesn’t seem clear on what precisely it means to present something in its best light – seems to conflate it with most appealing light which, I take it, is different than what Dworkin has in mind.] “Dworkin is quite right to maintain that without having some views about the values inherent in the genre to which the text is taken to belong, no interpretation can take off the ground. The values we associate with the genre partly, but crucially, determine what would make sense to say about the text, what are the kinds of meaning we could ascribe to it.” There is no necessity for an interpretation to present an object in its best light with regards to the genre it is taken to be part of. Interpretations “could simply strive to present it in a certain light, perhaps better than some, worse than others, but in a way which highlights an aspect of the meaning of the text which may be worth paying attention to for some reason or another.” [What kind of reasons would count in choosing to present it in one light rather than another?] There is simply zero grounds for Dworkin’s assertion that we have no reason to pay attention to an interpretation that does not present it in its best light. Take a psychoanalytic interpretation of Hamlet, for example – not the best light, but a legitimate one. [This seems related to the next criticism – clearly Dworkin would have to loosen his insistence on the best, though not to detriment.] Moreover, especially with regards to art, it doesn’t appear possible to make an all things considered judgment about the best interpretation given the incommensurability of different values that are taken to inhere in a given genre. [Dworkin can respond here that we may have different available interpretations that could be justified with respect to the relevant value. Moreover, a lack of common denominator does not prevent any comparison whatsoever.] Constructive interpretation concerns social practices constituted by norms – it imposes a purpose or value rendering intelligible the normative character of the practice. There is a separate aspect of constructive interpretation that maintains that elements of the practice are sensitive to the point of the practice. It is important to note that different social practices will institutionalize themselves in different ways – thus, different practices will establish varying conditions on how the practice can be altered. The position of the positivists is that evaluative judgments concerning what the law should be are insufficient for determining what the law is given the nature of law’s institutionalization.&nb p; [This would seem to reside on a certain conception of law, i.e. an interpretation about where the value of law lies.] “[T]his being one of the main points of dispute between Dworkin and his positivist opponents, Dworkin cannot at this initial state presume law to be sensitive to its value in the manner that other, non-institutional practices might be, without incurring the charge of having assumed the very point at issue.” The upshot for Dworkin is that any explanation of a social practice such as law requires the same kind of reasoning as participation in that practice. This will be called the hermeneutic thesis. We can try to reconstruct a justification for this view based on the necessity of shared background assumptions – but this will not do since Dworkin’s claim is stronger: it contends that participants’ and theorists’ must “adopt one and the same normative point of view.” [The sense of normative here is unclear. It is true, though, that shared background assumptions do not imply viewing the law as valuable in any particular way, or at least it does not imply this in any strong sense.] Dworkin makes two distinct points with the hermeneutic thesis: “First, that the explanation of a social practice, like law or the arts, is essentially interpretative, and as such, necessarily value laden. Second, that the interpretation of such social practices, which Dworkin calls ‘argumentative’, is unique in the sense that the practice itself is an evaluative enterprise, and that therefore the interpreter of such a practice must form an evaluative judgment of her own about those values which are inherent in the practice that she purports to interpret.” [As stated, the first thesis is terribly ambiguous – for Dworkin, it clear implies a commitment to constructive interpretation. For Marmor, who accepts it, it is totally unclear what commitment he intends to make. He seems to mean simply that we have criteria for success concerning what counts as a successful explanation.] Mamor denies the second thesis. “What Dworkin seems to ignore here is that there is a crucial difference between forming a view about the values which are manifest in a social practice, like law, and actually having evaluative judgments about them.” [The problem, however, it that it is a contentious matter what values are part of the law – a theorist’s account of what values are constitutive of a particular legal system must rely on the kind of arguments which participants rely on. Of course, a theorist might simply note a debate about values and attempt to remain agnostic, but this will fail to be a full theoretical account of what law is!] Dworkin’s thesis seems to depend exclusively on his account of constructive interpretation. [This seems exactly right.] Chapter 4: Coherence, Holism, and Interpretation: The Epistemic Foundation of Dworkin’s Legal Theory Begins with discussion of Rawls’ reflective equilibrium. Sums up dual criticism as follows: “[T]he assumption that intuitions are independently true and the converse one, that their truth depends on fitting a coherent scheme, both seem to yield paradoxical results.” Dworkin, in his article “The Original Position”, claims that Rawls cannot commit himself to ethical realism. “[T]he natural model presupposes some form of ethical realism, while the constructive model does not. One important difficulty arising from an attempt to apply the natural model to Rawls is, that under the natural model, any theory which dopes not account for an intuition, at least for one which is held firmly, cannot be wholly satisfactory, just as scientific theory which does not account for certain observational data it is supposed to cover, would not be satisfactory in a familiar way.” Rawls, rather, is committed to a constructivist view of morality. Moreover, the reason we value coherence epistemically in moral theory is that it itself is a value of political morality – fairness requires consistency and publicity in the application of moral standards. Marmor notes the following problem with such a view: “[I]f coherence is justified, as it is here, with reference to certain moral values, that is, a specific conception of fairness, then we face the following problem: the presupposed values of fairness must themselves be based upon intuitive convictions, in which case the question of their truth cannot be ignored. If they are taken to be true…we are driven back to the perplexities of the natural model.” Discusses, helpfully, the Fish/Dworkin debate. The upshot is that Dworkin’s interpretive model is best off if it commits itself to a Quineian holism. However, this undermines his distinction between internal and external skepticism since holism must deny that moral judgments constitute a closed system. [This analysis seems exactly right.] Endorses Simmonds view that Dworkin’s theory does not meet the requirements of complexity he identifies as necessary to avoid vicious circularity in interpretive judgments of fit and identity. Coherence is doing the work through and through and therefore the interpretive theory of law is circular. [Will require further investigation, though it is unclear how coherence is doing any work in the pre-interpretive stage. At this stage, the judgments, if interpretive, seem to be derived from different sources. In any case, using coherence as a value seems to be highly suspect.] Why doesn’t Dworkin just reject Fish’s assumptions: because of his jurisprudence. “If legal texts can have a meaning that is not entirely dependent on a process of interpretation, then it is at least sometimes the case that the law can simply be understood, and applied, without the mediation of interpretation. And if that is the case, then the argument from interpretation against legal positivism collapses. It is no longer the case that every conclusion about what the law is, depends on evaluative considerations about what it ought to be.” Chapter 5: Semantics, Realism, and Natural Law Assessment of Michael Moore’s legal realism and its implications. [The final criticisms of Moore are not decisive.] Chapter 6: Constructive Identification and Razian Authority A consideration of Dworkin’s denial that the communication model of interpretation is appropriate for legal interpretation. Marmor argues that intentions do play a crucial role in the identification of legal norms in a way that is incompatible with Dworkin’s “coherence thesis”. Marmor takes Dworkin to be committed to the constructive identification thesis: that the identification of something as part of the legal, artistic, etc. genre can be done sufficiently by evaluative considerations. “Here, one must maintain that evaluative considerations are sufficient to determine whether something is a legal norm or a work of art”. [Fit, however, constrains possible evaluative considerations – thus evaluative considerations are not sufficient in themselves.] “Now the crucial point here is this: if you maintain the possibility of constructive identification in art, you must assume that works of art can be identified as such on the basis of certain features they happen to possess, features which contain no reference to any particular intention to create a work of art…unless we take intentions into account, how can we discriminate between the concept of an aesthetic artifact and the con ept of a work of art?” [It is unclear, and I think false, that constructive interpretation of anything requires identifying something irrespective of an artificers intentions. Those intentions may be relevant, dependent upon the genre under which we are trying to classify the object. Nothing, seemingly, about constructive interpretation in general excludes this possibility.] Marmor’s point is that it turns out to be impossible to identify art as art without reference to an artist’s intentions – especially given the state of contemporary art. [It is notable that Marmor’s response to counterexample implicitly depends upon a fully developed theory of aesthetics. His cursory comments on the matter of identifying art seem insufficient to say the least.] The rest of the chapter considers the incompatibility of Raz’s account of authority with constructive interpretation. The incompatibilities mentioned do not move beyond what Raz identifies in his article “Authority, Law and Morality”, but a defense of this notion of authority is defended in several [inconclusive] respects. [Raz and Marmor want to separate identification from content. This is not clearly a defensible separation.] Chapter 7: No Easy Cases? Chapter defends notion that there is a distinction between easy and hard cases in the positivist sense. Takes a Hartian approach and ultimately defends the distinction by associating it Wittgenstein’s conception of rule following. The point is that one need to look the purpose of rule in order to understand what the rule requires. Chapter 8: Legislative Intent and the Authority of Law Examines the following doctrine concerning the role of legislative intent in adjudication: “[F]irst, it would hold that laws, at least in certain cases, are enacted with relatively specific intentions, and that this is a matter of fact which is discernible through an ordinary fact-finding procedure. Second, that in certain cases the presence of such a fact, namely, that the law was enacted with a certain intention, provides judges with a reason to decide the legal dispute in accordance with the relevant legislative intent.” [It is important that for Marmor, interpretive strategies are only appropriate in hard cases. However, we should wonder what grounds positivism can offer for deciding a hard case in any manner which is not the morally best manner according to the judgment of the judge. There are no legal grounds, by definition, in hard cases and so what justificatory strategy would endorse any judicial decision except for the morally best one?] We can ascribe intentions to a legislative body, when this is possible at all, by taking the shared intentions of the majority, rather than some group intention, to be the significant intentions. Moreover, we should expect a good deal of consensus about intentions for otherwise it is hard to explain how legislative bodies are able to produce so much legislation. Discussion of kinds of intentions concludes as follows: “I have distinguished between three main types of intention that are potentially relevant from the legal point of view. Apart from the intentions that are manifest in the language of the law itself, legislators typically have further intentions in enacting a given law, and sometimes they would have certain intentions bearing on its proper application. I have also suggested that some of these further intentions may be essentially non-avowable, in which case they are rendered initially irrelevant. Finally, I have pointed out that considerations of consistency require that the legislator’s application intentions be taken into account only if, and to the extent that, they are in accord with his further intentions.” The manner in which intentionalism is to be justif ed relies on the distinction, Marmor maintains, between expert and mere collective action authority. “The point I wanted to make is strictly conditional: if, and only if, a certain law is justified on the basis of the expertise branch of the normal justification thesis, would it make sense to defer to the legislature’s intentions in the interpretation of the law, that is, to the extent that there is, in fact,; such an intention and it can clarify something that needs clarification.” Insofar as a legislature can be considered an expert on the matter requiring adjudication and interpretation should the body’s intention be taken into account. Chapter 9: Constitutional Interpretation Begins by laying out general necessary features of a constitution. Then Marmor moves on to consider general questions of constitutional legitimacy. First, he considers what grounds might be offered for the legitimacy of a constitution at all. He notes that the central question is what permits a single generation to bind future generations. He then examines four arguments to avoid this problem. The first is based on the moral legitimacy of the constitution; Marmor rejects this solution for the [truly dubious] reason that the constitution would make no practical difference because it would not supply reasons in addition to those provided by morality [but, presumably, the point is that these legally valid rules would be institutionally enshrined]. The second is based on the moral authority of the framers and Marmor rightly rejects this on the basis of the idealization of the framers it requires and less rightly on the basis that there cannot be moral authorities. Third is the “argument from interpretation” which claims that “as long as the particular content of the constitution is determined by its interpretation, and the authoritative interpretation at any time correctly instantiates the values which ought to be upheld in the community, the constitution would be morally legitimate”. The fourth is Raz’s which argues that a constitution is valid so long as its constraints are morally permissible because conventions of this type might aid the continuity of the legal system, i.e. it is important to have a convention of this type and the constitution is a kind of this type. Marmor appears to endorse these two approaches and concludes: “The conditions for the legitimacy of a constitution must comprise the following conditions. First, the values and principles enshrined in it must be morally permissible…Second, when certain choices are made in particular cases, they would be legitimate if they are either morally underdetermined, or else, morally correct…It follows from this that both arguments must assume that at least in those areas in which the constitution would make a moral difference, it can be interpreted to make the difference that it should, that is, according to the true moral principles that should apply to the particular case...the moral legitimacy of constitutions very much dependent on the practices of their interpretation. In other words, a great deal of the burden of moral legitimacy is shifted by these arguments to the application of the constitution, thus assuming that the constitution is legitimate only if the courts are likely to apply the constitution in a morally desirable way.” [This implies that the only significant value constitutions have is in providing a conventional practice where some such practice is required.] Moves on to argue that courts typically rely, and rightly so, on moral considerations when deciding constitutional issues because typically, in cases of the kind that reach the supreme or constitutional court, there is no law on the case. Much of this relies on his earlier discussion about the nature of interpretation in the law – that legal interpretation is always a matter of cha ging the law. (shrink)

Since the heyday of ordinary language philosophy, Anglophone epistemologists have devoted a great deal of attention to the English word ‘know’ and to English sentences used to attribute knowledge. Even today, many epistemologists, including contextualists and subject-sensitive invariantists are concerned with the truth conditions of “S knows that p,” or the proposition it expresses. In all of this literature, the method of cases is used, where a situation is described in English, and then philosophers judge whether it is true (...) that S knows that p, or whether saying “S knows that p” is false, deviant, etc. in that situation. However, English is just one of over 6000 languages spoken around the world, and is the native language of less than 6% of the world’s population. When Western epistemology first emerged, in ancient Greece, English did not even exist. So why should we think that facts about the English word “know,” the concept it expresses, or subtle semantic properties of “S knows that p” have important implications for epistemology? Are the properties of the English word “know” and the English sentence ‘S knows that p’ shared by their translations in most or all languages? If that turned out to be true, it would be a remarkable fact that cries out for an explanation. But if it turned out to be false, what are the implications for epistemology? Should epistemologists study knowledge attributions in languages other than English with the same diligence they have shown for the study of English knowledge attributions? If not, why not? In what ways do the concepts expressed by ‘know’ and its counterparts in different languages differ? And what should epistemologists make of all this? (shrink)

This study aims to look at the role of the practice of excellence strategies in education in achieving sustainable competitive advantage for the Higher educational institutions of the faculty of Engineering and Information Technology at Al-Azhar University in Gaza, a model, and the study considered the competitive advantage of educational institutions stems from the impact on the level of each student, employee, and the institution. The study was based on the premise that the development of strategies for excellence in education, (...) and its implementation is a vital important prerequisite to achieve sustainable competitive advantage in higher educational institutions. The study followed a systematic exploratory descriptive methodology through review of the theoretical literature, and the adoption of the experience of the Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology at Al-Azhar University in Gaza as a model for its unique experience in the field of excellence in education. The study results showed that the most important are: There is a strong correlation between the level of exercising excellence strategies in education and the achievement of higher educational institutions to the sustainable competitive advantage. The results include a general required number of important sub results on the subject of the model - Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology at Al-Azhar University in Gaza as follows: - The student considered the academic focus of the operation in the development process of the workers’ skills, particularly academics at the university helps to distinguish students and increase the employment rate after graduation. - The existence of consistency in development efforts and quality improvement for all three levels (student, employee, and the university), and this contributes to the Faculty excellence. - The Faculty has been able to achieve competitive advantages by offering excellent services without harming the efficiency, and this alone is a great success because improving service properties requires great investments, which negatively affect the continued institutional development. The study also reached a set of recommendations as follows: - The need to exercise excellence strategies in education, excellence reward at the national level, and those higher educational institutions follow the criteria for measuring the competitive advantages of its institutions always. - There is a need to increase efforts to implement programs of excellence, the allocation of adequate time, reward outstanding efforts as well. There is a necessity for each faculty to achieve competitive advantage and sustainability, using the general philosophies of competitive advantage, but with a different strategically content from what is in the private commercial sector, it reflects the Faculties mission and objectives, depending on making improvements and excellence in processes that ensure the safety of its outputs. As well as the need to find a balance between the work of teaching and research work of the faculty members, this has important implications regarding the criteria used in the process of excellence evaluation. The study recommended the adoption of strategies for excellence in education on a national public policy level mainly in the processes of change in higher education institutions. The need to support the existence of a common understanding of the efforts of excellence to create a general culture that appreciates excellence in faculties and universities. This underlines the need for transparent, fair rewards systems, to encourage innovation in education. The need to conduct a comprehensive surveys on the graduates of faculties and universities including the areas of employment and skills, because that will give accurate indications of the graduates and will help to establish a link to a more precise about the relationship of excellence strategies with the competitive advantages. (shrink)

From the point of view of non-classical logics, Heyting's implication is the smallest implication for which the deduction theorem holds. This book studies properties of logical systems having some of the classical connectives and implication in the neighbourhood of Heyt ing's implication. I have not included anything on entailment, al though it belongs to this neighbourhood, mainly because of the appearance of the Anderson-Belnap book on entailment. In the later chapters of this book, I have included material that might be (...) of interest to the intuitionist mathematician. Originally, I intended to include more material in that spirit but I decided against it. There is no coherent body of material to include that builds naturally on the present book. There are some serious results on topological models, second order Beth and Kripke models, theories of types, etc., but it would require further research to be able to present a general theory, possibly using sheaves. That would have postponed pUblication for too long. I would like to dedicate this book to my colleagues, Professors G. Kreisel, M.O. Rabin and D. Scott. I have benefited greatly from Professor Kreisel's criticism and suggestions. Professor Rabin's fun damental results on decidability and undecidability provided the powerful tools used in obtaining the majority of the results reported in this book. Professor Scott's approach to non-classical logics and especially his analysis of the Scott consequence relation makes it possible to present Heyting's logic as a beautiful, integral part of non-classical logics. (shrink)

Sentences such as 'Chocolate tastes good' have been widely discussed as sentences that give rise to faultless disagreement. As such, they actually belong to the more general class of impersonal perception reports, which include 'The violin sounds / looks strange' as well sentences that are about an agent-centered situation such as 'It feels / seems like it is going to rain'. I maintain the view that faultless disagreement is due to first person-based genericity, which, roughly, consists in attributing a (...) class='Hi'>property to anyone the speaker (or described agent) identifies with (which generally requires a first-person experience) (Moltmann 2010). Unlike my previous analysis (and similar analyses), this paper no longer makes use of experiencers or judges as implicit arguments of taste predicates, but argues that impersonal perception verbs (taste, look, feel, seem), have a logophoric character. More precisely, such verbs describe perceptual occurrences whose experiencer is identical to the agent of the utterance situation, described attitudinal situation, or the situations a generic operator may range over. Perceptual occurrences are sharply distinguished ontologically from perceptual experiences as well as perceptual objects, entities we refer to as ‘the taste of chocolate’, ‘the sound of the violin’, ‘the look of the violin’. Sentences about perceptual objects ('the taste of chocolate is good', 'the sound of the violin is great', 'the look of the violin is beautiful') also give rise to faultless disagreement, but the source of that is a first-person-based attribution of an evaluative predicate to an (objective) perceptual object. (shrink)