Can we be held morally responsible for our actions? Yes, says Daniel Dennett. No, says Gregg Caruso. Reader, you decide.

In this Article we propose an analytical framework for allocating responsibility for the protection of worker’s rights in the global labor market. Since production and services have expanded globally, and the state’s ability to protect worker’s rights on the national level has been undermined, the main challenge today is to find the appropriate institutional arrangements that allocate responsibility in a manner that realizes basic labor standards. The Article argues that in the context of a global labor market, responsibility should be (...) perceived in terms of "shared responsibility," whereby responsibility is shared by a complex network of agents and institutions that take part in global production and services. Within these global social networks and connections, labor relations generate a unique type of social connection which implies a special type of commitment and obligation towards workers. We propose four principles to guide the allocation of responsibility for remedying the unjust conditions of workers in the world, based on measures of connectedness, capacity, benefit, and contribution. (shrink)

What place does consciousness have in the natural world? If we reject materialism, could there be a credible alternative? In one classic example, philosophers ask whether we can ever know what is it is like for bats to sense the world using sonar. It seems obvious to many that any amount of information about a bat's physical structure and information processing leaves us guessing about the central questions concerning the character of its experience. A Place for Consciousness begins with reflections (...) on the existence of this gap. Is it just a psychological shortcoming in our merely human understanding of the physical world? Is it a trivial consequence of the simple fact that we just cannot be bats? Or does it mean there really are facts about consciousness over and above the physical facts? If so, what does consciousness do? Why does it exist? Rosenberg sorts out these problems, especially those centering on the causal role of consciousness. He introduces a new paradigm called Liberal Naturalism for thinking about what causation is, about the natural world, and about how to create a detailed model to go along with the new paradigm. Arguing that experience is part of the categorical foundations of causality, he shows that within this new paradigm there is a place for something essentially like consciousness in all its traditional mysterious respects. A striking feature of Liberal Naturalism is that its central tenets are motivated independently of the mind-body problem, by analyzing causation itself. Because of this approach, when consciousness shows up in the picture it is not introduced in an ad hoc way, and its most puzzling features can be explained from first principles. Ultimately, Rosenberg's final solution gives consciousness a causally important role without supposing either that it is physical or that it interacts with the physical. (shrink)

This article begins the task of assessing polygamy as a moral ideal. The structure of traditional polygamy, in which only one central spouse may marry multiple partners, necessarily yields two inequalities. The central spouse has greater rights and expectations within each marriage and greater control over the wider family. However, two alternative structures for polygamy can remove these inequalities. In polyfidelity, each spouse marries every other spouse in the family. In “molecular” polygamy, any spouses may marry a new spouse outside (...) the family. These new models of polygamy face additional difficulties, but they can be egalitarian in principle. (shrink)

"Are those who know equal to those who do not know?". In the Hadith similar sentiments are expressed; "The seeking of knowledge is obligatory upon every Muslim". These demands to attain knowledge have been deeply inscribed on the hearts of pious Muslims everywhere. Nevertheless, there have been discussions historically over whether every statement claiming to be valid knowledge should be accepted under such injunctions. Knowledge of nature is one such area of concern. Should the results of natural philosophy or science (...) be accepted uncritically as valid knowledge? This question is especially acute in cases where the sciences appear to contradict the overt content of the divine Qur'anic revelation, whose veracity cannot be questioned. Some have argued that all knowledge is valid, while others have claimed that some knowledge is not acceptable and should either be reformulated in an appropriate way or be excluded from the repertoire of the sincere Muslim. (shrink)

Gregg Lambert demonstrates that since the publication of _Proust and Signs_ in 1964 Gilles Deleuze’s search for a new means of philosophical expression became a central theme of all of his oeuvre, including those written with psychoanalyst Félix Guattari. Lambert, like Deleuze, calls this “the image of thought.” Lambert’s exploration begins with Deleuze’s earliest exposition of the Proustian image of thought and then follows the “tangled history” of the image that runs through subsequent works, such as _Kafka: Toward a (...) Minor Literature_, _The Rhizome_, and several later writings from the 1980s collected in _Essays Critical and Clinical._ Lambert shows how this topic underlies Deleuze’s studies of modern cinema, where the image of thought is predominant in the analysis of the cinematic image—particularly in _The Time-Image_. Lambert finds it to be the fundamental concern of the brain proposed by Deleuze in the conclusion of _What Is Philosophy? _By connecting the various appearances of the image of thought that permeate Deleuze’s entire corpus, Lambert reveals how thinking first assumes an image, how the images of thought become identified with the problem of expression early in the works, and how this issue turns into a primary motive for the more experimental works of philosophy written with Guattari. The study traces a distinctly modern relationship between philosophy and non-philosophy that has developed into a hallmark of the term “Deleuzian.” However, Lambert argues, this aspect of the philosopher’s vision has not been fully appreciated in terms of its significance for philosophy: “not only ‘for today’ but, to quote Nietzsche, meaning also ‘for tomorrow, and for the day after tomorrow.’”. (shrink)

The Meaning Circuit Hypothesis (MCH) is a synthesis of ideas providing John Wheeler’s outline of ultimate physics, which he fine-tuned over several decades from the 1970s onward. It is a ‘working hypothesis’ in which ‘existence is a ‘meaning circuit”’ that portrays the world as a “system self-synthesized by quantum networking.” It was strongly advocated by him for roughly two decades and since then has had an increasingly strong impact on the approach of many investigators of quantum theory; in particular, elements (...) such as the quantum participator and ‘it from bit’ are now considered by others as candidate components of a foundation for quantum theory in which information is involved essentially. Therefore, it is worthy of review and critique. (shrink)

Within the criminal justice system, one of the most prominent justifications for legal punishment is retributivism. The retributive justification of legal punishment maintains that wrongdoers are morally responsible for their actions and deserve to be punished in proportion to their wrongdoing. This book argues against retributivism and develops a viable alternative that is both ethically defensible and practical. Introducing six distinct reasons for rejecting retributivism, Gregg D. Caruso contends that it is unclear that agents possess the kind of free (...) will and moral responsibility needed to justify this view of punishment. While a number of alternatives to retributivism exist - including consequentialist deterrence, educational, and communicative theories - they have ethical problems of their own. Moving beyond existing theories, Caruso presents a new non-retributive approach called the public health-quarantine model. In stark contrast to retributivism, the public health-quarantine model provides a more human, holistic, and effective approach to dealing with criminal behavior. (shrink)

Freedom of association operates as an organizational "meta-norm," appreciated both as an independent value and as a touchstone for the institutional design of the International Labour Organization . Despite the renewed interest of the ILO in various aspects of the norm, its understanding of freedom of association lacks a comprehensive normative framework. This article presents such a conceptual framework and a critical in-depth analysis of current ILO freedom of association jurisprudence. Freedom of association should be understood in terms of equitable (...) dialogue , a term offered and developed herein, as an understanding that is already partly embedded in ILO jurisprudence. (shrink)

Human genetic enhancement, examined from the standpoint of the new field of political bioethics, displaces the age-old question of truth: What is human nature? This book displaces that question with another: What kind of human nature should humans want to create for themselves? To answer that question, this book answers two others: What constraints should limit the applications of rapidly developing biotechnologies? What could possibly form the basis for corresponding public policy in a democratic society? Benjamin Gregg focuses on (...) the distinctly political dimensions of human nature, where politics refers to competition among competing values on which to base public policy, legislation, and political culture. This book offers citizens of democratic communities a broad perspective on how they together might best approach urgent questions of how to deal with the socially and morally challenging potential for human genetic engineering. (shrink)

The current essay introduces the guidance theory of representation, according to which the content and intentionality of representations can be accounted for in terms of the way they provide guidance for action. The guidance theory offers a way of fixing representational content that gives the causal and evolutionary history of the subject only an indirect role, and an account of representational error, based on failure of action, that does not rely on any such notions as proper functions, ideal conditions, or (...) normal circumstances. Moreover, because the notion of error is defined in terms of failure of action, the guidance theory meets the “meta-epistemological requirement” that representational error should be potentially detectable by the representing system itself. In this essay, we offer a brief account of the biological origins of representation, a formal characterization of the guidance theory, some examples of its use, and show how the guidance theory handles some traditional problem cases for representation: the representation of fictional and abstract entities. Being both representational and actiongrounded, the guidance theory may provide some common ground between embodied and cognitivist approaches to the study of the mind. (shrink)

Alternative dispute resolution occurs outside the litigation process. The alternative dispute resolution (ADR) movement in North America has emphasized viable alternatives to the litigation framework, such as arbitration, mediation, med-arb, multi-party facilitation, non-legal negotiation, mini-trials, administrative hearings, private judging (“renta-judge”), fact finding, and moderated settlement conferences. This essay addresses argument in the dominant alternatives: arbitration, mediation, and multi-party facilitation. Prior to comparing argument in these ADR systems, each will be briefly described.

Paul Busch argued that the positive operator measure, a generalization of the standard quantum observable, enables a consistent notion of unsharp reality based on a quantifiable degree of reality whereby systems can possess generalized properties jointly, whereas related sharp properties cannot be so possessed. Here, the work leading up to the formalization of this notion to which he made great contributions is reviewed and explicated in relation to Heisenberg’s notions of potentiality and actuality. The notion of unsharp reality is then (...) extended further by the introduction of a distinction between actual and actualizable elements of reality based on these mathematical innovations. (shrink)

Skepticism about moral responsibility, or what is more commonly referred to as moral responsibility skepticism, refers to a family of views that all take seriously the possibility that human beings are never morally responsible for their actions in a particular but pervasive sense. This sense is typically set apart by the notion of basic desert and is defined in terms of the control in action needed for an agent to be truly deserving of blame and praise. Some moral responsibility skeptics (...) wholly reject this notion of moral responsibility because they believe it to be incoherent or impossible. Others maintain that, though possible, our best philosophical and scientific theories about the world provide strong and compelling reasons for adopting skepticism about moral responsibility. What all varieties of moral responsibility skepticism share, however, is the belief that the justification needed to ground basic desert moral responsibility and the practices associated with it—such as backward-looking praise and blame, punishment and reward (including retributive punishment), and the reactive attitudes of resentment and indignation—is not met. Versions of moral responsibility skepticism have historically been defended by Spinoza, Voltaire, Diderot, d’Holbach, Priestley, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Clarence Darrow, B.F. Skinner, and Paul Edwards, and more recently by Galen Strawson, Derk Pereboom, Bruce Waller, Neil Levy, Tamler Sommers, and Gregg D. Caruso. -/- Critics of these views tend to focus both on the arguments for skepticism about moral responsibility and on the implications of such views. They worry that adopting such a view would have dire consequences for our interpersonal relationships, society, morality, meaning, and the law. They fear, for instance, that relinquishing belief in moral responsibility would undermine morality, leave us unable to adequately deal with criminal behavior, increase anti-social conduct, and destroy meaning in life. Optimistic skeptics, however, respond by arguing that life without free will and basic desert moral responsibility would not be as destructive as many people believe. These optimistic skeptics argue that prospects of finding meaning in life or of sustaining good interpersonal relationships, for instance, would not be threatened. They further maintain that morality and moral judgments would remain intact. And although retributivism and severe punishment, such as the death penalty, would be ruled out, they argue that the imposition of sanctions could serve purposes other than the punishment of the guilty—e.g., it can also be justified by its role in incapacitating, rehabilitating, and deterring offenders. (shrink)

As philosophical and scientific arguments for free will skepticism continue to gain traction, we are likely to see a fundamental shift in the way people think about free will and moral responsibility. Such shifts raise important practical and existential concerns: What if we came to disbelieve in free will? What would this mean for our interpersonal relationships, society, morality, meaning, and the law? What would it do to our standing as human beings? Would it cause nihilism and despair as some (...) maintain or would it rather have a humanizing effect on our practices and policies, freeing us from the negative effects of belief in free will? In this chapter we consider the practical implications of free will skepticism and argue that life without free will and basic desert moral responsibility would not be as destructive as many people believe. We argue that prospects of finding meaning in life or of sustaining good interpersonal relationships, for example, would not be threatened. On treatment of criminals, we argue that although retributivism and severe punishment, such as the death penalty, would be ruled out, preventive detention and rehabilitation programs would still be justified. While we will touch on all these issues below, our focus will be primarily on this last issue. -/- We begin in section I by considering two different routes to free will skepticism. The first denies the causal efficacy of the types of willing required for free will and receives its contemporary impetus from pioneering work in neuroscience by Benjamin Libet, Daniel Wegner, and John-Dylan Haynes. The second, which is more common in the philosophical literature, does not deny the causal efficacy of the will but instead claims that whether this causal efficacy is deterministic or indeterministic, it does not achieve the level of control to count as free will by the standards of the historical debate. We argue that while there are compelling objections to the first route—e.g., Al Mele (2009), Eddy Nahmias (2002, 2011), and Neil Levy (2005)—the second route to free will skepticism remains intact. In section II we argue that free will skepticism allows for a workable morality, and, rather than negatively impacting our personal relationships and meaning in life, may well improve our well-being and our relationships to others since it would tend to eradicate an often destructive form of moral anger. In section III we argue that free will skepticism allows for adequate ways of responding to criminal behavior—in particular, incapacitation, rehabilitation, and alternation of relevant social conditions—and that these methods are both morally justified and sufficient for good social policy. We present and defend our own preferred model for dealing with dangerous criminals, an incapacitation account built on the right to self-protection analogous to the justification for quarantine (see Pereboom 2001, 2013, 2014a; Caruso 2016a), and we respond to recent objections to it by Michael Corrado and John Lemos. (shrink)

A teoria cartesiana da verdade é essencialmenteepistemológica. Por essa razão, seuempreendimento racionalista é filosoficamente revolucionário.Neste trabalho procuro analisar algumasdas mais importantes características desteempreendimento. Proponho uma abordagem que,de certo modo, separa as questões epistêmicocognitivasdesta teoria, dos compromissos ontológicosa partir dos quais Descartes julgava imprescindíveldesenvolvê-la. Com Descartes, o problemada verdade aparece pela primeira vez comosendo um problema sobre as condições de obtençãode juízos indubitáveis acerca do que somos edo que são as coisas externas que podemos conhecer.

A ontologia de Heidegger se caracteriza não apenas pela inovação conceituai e pelas perspectivas metodológicas originais. Ele também recoloca o problema do fundamento, operando uma importante transformação no eixo da Metafisica. Desta transformação emerge a redefinição das possibilidades intrínsecas do ser heideggeriano, o Dasein existencial, além da inauguração de uma função regressiva e não dialética para o paradoxo filosófico.

A Teoria da Ação Comunicativa resulta de uma investigação acerca dos fundamentos da racionalidade prática, desenvolvida por Habermas nos últimos 30 anos. Neste artigo, serão analisados os aspectos básicos desta teoria, com ênfase nos pontos que a referenciam como modelo explanatório das nossas práticas comunicativas. Pretendo discutir prioritariamente a tese segundo a qual nossas condutas linguísticas são conduzidas por compromissos pragmático-universais. A aceitação desta tese depende da possibilidade de explicitação dos compromissos determinantes das ações comunicativas válidas. Com base neste exame, (...) vou propor a discussão de alguns pontos que me parecem mais frágeis na teoria de Habermas. Finalmente, pretendo contrastar este programa de reconstrução racional da comunicação com modelos teóricos pragmáticos não alinhados a priori com premissas racionalistas. Concluirei, a partir daí, que o argumento central de Habermas se fragiliza quando aplicado ás condições multilaterais e difusas nas quais os usos da linguagem efetivamente ocorrem. (shrink)

Some thinkers argue that our best scientific theories about the world prove that free will is an illusion. Others disagree. The concept of free will is profoundly important to our self-understanding, our interpersonal relationships, and our moral and legal practices. If it turns out that no one is ever free and morally responsible, what would that mean for society, morality, meaning, and the law? Just Deserts brings together two philosophers – Daniel C. Dennett and Gregg D. Caruso – to (...) debate their respective views on free will, moral responsibility, and legal punishment. In three extended conversations, Dennett and Caruso present their arguments for and against the existence of free will and debate their implications. Dennett argues that the kind of free will required for moral responsibility is compatible with determinism – for him, self-control is key; we are not responsible for becoming responsible, but are responsible for staying responsible, for keeping would-be puppeteers at bay. Caruso takes the opposite view, arguing that who we are and what we do is ultimately the result of factors beyond our control, and because of this we are never morally responsible for our actions in the sense that would make us truly deserving of blame and praise, punishment and reward. These two leading thinkers introduce the concepts central to the debate about free will and moral responsibility by way of an entertaining, rigorous and sometimes heated philosophical dialogue. What emerges is a clear account of the latest thinking on free will, and what is at stake for our moral and legal practices. (shrink)

Printbegrænsninger: Der kan printes 10 sider ad gangen og max. 40 sider pr. session.

The second analogy of experience is one of the most famous and crucial parts of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. Despite 220 years of intense scrutiny and debate, however, no consensus has emerged as to the precise nature of its argument. A main source of disagreement in recent years has been the following question: With what is Kant concerned in this section? Is he concerned with necessary conditions of our believing in the first place that there has been a case (...) of objective as opposed to merely subjective succession? Is he concerned, in other words, with necessary conditions of our at least seeming to be aware or having any representation at all of an event? Or is he concerned merely with conditions under which alone beliefs of some sort can be verified or confirmed? The second of these possibilities has found its most eloquent champion in Paul Guyer; the first has been defended with great ingenuity by Beatrice Longuenesse. (shrink)

This monograph identifies the essential characteristics of the objects described by current quantum theory and considers their relationship to space-time. In the process, it explicates the senses in which quantum objects may be consistently considered to have parts of which they may be composed or into which they may be decomposed. The book also demonstrates the degree to which reduction is possible in quantum mechanics, showing it to be related to the objective indefiniteness of quantum properties and the strong non-local (...) correlations that can occur between the physical quantities of quantum subsystems. Careful attention is paid to the relationships among such property correlations, physical causation, probability, and symmetry in quantum theory. In this way, the text identifies and clarifies the conceptual grounds underlying the unique nature of many quantum phenomena. (shrink)

Debate on free will with Christian List, Gregg Caruso, and Cory Clark. The exchange is focused on Christian List's book Why Free Will Is Real.

In The Divine Conspiracy, Dallas Willard offers a much-needed corrective to a prevailing understanding of the Beatitudes according to which they are virtues or conditions for blessing in God's kingdom. Unfortunately, Willard weds this corrective to an implausible read of the more positive sounding beatitudes according to which they are vices or unattractive conditions in spite of which one can be blessed. In what follows, I hope to rescue the main thrust of Willard's gloss on the beatitudes from his interpretation (...) of these particular traits. (shrink)

There are parallels between Gigerenzer et al.'s emphasis on the rationality of adults' reasoning in terms of simple heuristics and developmental researchers' emphasis on the rationality of children's reasoning in terms of intuitive theories. Indeed, just as children become better at using their theories, so might some people, experts, become better at using simple heuristics.

In the standard mathematical formulation of quantum mechanics, measurement is an additional, exceptional fundamental process rather than an often complex, but ordinary process which happens also to serve a particular epistemic function: during a measurement of one of its properties which is not already determined by a preceding measurement, a measured system, even if closed, is taken to change its state discontinuously rather than continuously as is usual. Many, including Bell, have been concerned about the fundamental role thus given to (...) measurement in the foundation of the theory. Others, including the early Bohr and Schwinger, have suggested that quantum mechanics naturally incorporates the unavoidable uncontrollable disturbance of physical state that accompanies any local measurement without the need for an exceptional fundamental process or a special measurement theory. Disturbance is unanalyzable for Bohr, but for Schwinger it is due to physical interactions’ being borne by fundamental particles having discrete properties and behavior which is beyond physical control. Here, Schwinger’s approach is distinguished from more well known treatments of measurement, with the conclusion that, unlike most, it does not suffer under Bell’s critique of quantum measurement. Finally, Schwinger’s critique of measurement theory is explicated as a call for a deeper investigation of measurement processes that requires the use of a theory of quantum fields. (shrink)

The ontology of Local Quantum Physics, Rudolf Haag’s framework for relativistic quantum theory, is reviewed and discussed. It is one of spatiotemporally localized events and unlocalized causal intermediaries, including the elementary particles, which come progressively into existence in accordance with a fundamental arrow of time. Haag’s conception of quantum theory is distinguished from others in which events are also central, especially those of Niels Bohr and John Wheeler, with which it has been compared.

This book examines the origins of communal and institutional almsgiving in rabbinic Judaism. It undertakes a close reading of foundational rabbinic texts and places their discourses on organized giving in their second to third century CE contexts. Gregg E. Gardner finds that Tannaim promoted giving through the soup kitchen and charity fund, which enabled anonymous and collective support for the poor. This protected the dignity of the poor and provided an alternative to begging, which benefited the community as a (...) whole - poor and non-poor alike. By contrast, later Jewish and Christian writings would see organized charity as a means to promote their own religious authority. This book contributes to the study of Jews and Judaism, history of religions, biblical studies, and ethics. (shrink)

O artigo defende a validade dos argumentos transcendentais. Hilary Putnam fez uso deste tipo de argumento para fixar uma condição metafísica para a semântica. Seu raciocínio segue o estilo de inferência desenvolvido por Kant, na refutação do ceticismo fenomenista e idealista. Segue-se da argumentação de Putnam a necessidade metafísica do princípio externalista em semântica. Com isso, desarmam-se as tentativas de fixar condicionamentos exclusivamente intersimbólicos para a constituição do significado.

Entanglement was initially thought by some to be an oddity restricted to the realm of thought experiments. However, Bell’s inequality delimiting local - behavior and the experimental demonstration of its violation more than 25 years ago made it entirely clear that non-local properties of pure quantum states are more than an intellectual curiosity. Entanglement and non-locality are now understood to figure prominently in the microphysical world, a realm into which technology is rapidly hurtling. Information theory is also increasingly recognized by (...) physicists and philosophers as intimately related to the foundations of mechanics. The clearest indicator of this relationship is that between quantum information and entanglement. To some degree, a deep relationship between information and mechanics in the quantum context was already there to be seen upon the introduction by Max Born and Wolfgang Pauli of the idea that the essence of pure quantum states lies in their provision of probabilities regarding the behavior of quantum systems, via what has come to be known as the Born rule. The significance of the relationship between mechanics and information became even clearer with Leo Szilard’s analysis of James Clerk Maxwell’s infamous demon thought experiment. Here, in addition to examining both entanglement and quantum information and their relationship, I endeavor to critically assess the influence of the study of these subjects on the interpretation of quantum theory. (shrink)

The first classification of general types of transition between phases of matter, introduced by Paul Ehrenfest in 1933, lies at a crossroads in the thermodynamical study of critical phenomena. It arose following the discovery in 1932 of a suprising new phase transition in liquid helium, the “lambda transition,” when W. H. Keesom and coworkers in Leiden, Holland observed a λhaped “jump” discontinuity in the curve giving the temperature dependence of the specific heat of helium at a critical value. This apparent (...) jump led Ehrenfest to introduce a classification of phase transitions on the basis of jumps in derivatives of the free energy function. This classification was immediately applied by A.J. Rutgers to the study of the transition from the normal to superconducting state in metals. Eduard Justi and Max von Laue soon questioned the possibility of its class of “second-order phase transitions” -- of which the “lambda transition was believed to be the arche type -- but C.J. Gorter and H.B.G. Casimir used an “order parameter to demonstrate their existence in superconductors. As a crossroads of study, the Ehrenfest classification was forced to undergo a slow, adaptive evolution during subsequent decades. During the 1940s the classification was increasingly used in discussions of liquid-gas, order-disorder, paramagnetic-ferromagnetic and normal-super-conducting phase transitions. Already in 1944 however, Lars Onsagers solution of the Ising model for two-dimensional magnets was seen to possess a derivative with a logarithmic divergence rather than a jump as the critical point was approached. In the 1950s, experiments further revealed the lambda transition in helium to exhibit similar behavior. Rather than being a prime example of an Ehrenfest phase transition, the lambda transition was seen to lie outside the Ehrenfest classification. The Ehrenfest scheme was then extended to include such singularities, most notably by A. Brain Pippard in 1957, with widespread acceptance. During the 1960s these logarithmic infinities were the focus of the investigation of “scaling” by Leo Kadanoff, B. Widom and others. By the 1970s, a radically simplified binary classification of phase transitions into “first-order” and “continuous” transitions was increasingly adopted. (shrink)

This article presents a description of the procedures used by behavioral psychologists to intervene with behavioral excesses and deficits in educational and clinical settings. Its focus is to provide a fundamental overview of these services for the educator and direct care staff. The discussion covers the topics of functional analysis, behavioral assessment, the Stimulus-Organismic-Response-Consequence model (SORC), positive and negative reinforcement, and treatment acceptability. The importance of the educator and direct care staff member’s participation in the development of implementation of behavioral (...) interventions is emphasized. (shrink)

The first volume in the series Cambridge Studies in Philosophy and the Arts offers a range of responses by distinguished philosophers and art historians to some crucial issues generated by the relationship between the art object and language in art history. Each of the chapters in this volume is a searching response to theoretical and practical questions in terms accessible to readers of all human science disciplines. The editors, one a philosopher and one an art historian, provide an introductory chapter (...) which outlines the themes of the volume and explicates the terms in which they are discussed. The contributors open new avenues of enquiry involving concepts of 'presence', 'projective properties', visual conventions and syntax, and the appropriateness of figurative language in accounting for visual art. The issues they discuss will challenge the boundaries to thought that some contemporary theorising sustains. (shrink)

This book gives an overview for practitioners and students of quantum physics and information science. It provides ready access to essential information on quantum information processing and communication, such as definitions, protocols and algorithms. Quantum information science is rarely found in clear and concise form. This book brings together this information from its various sources. It allows researchers and students in a range of areas including physics, photonics, solid-state electronics, nuclear magnetic resonance and information technology, in their applied and theoretical (...) branches, to have this vital material directly at hand. (shrink)

This book argues two main things: The first is that there is no such thing as free will—at least not in the sense most ordinary folk take to be central or fundamental; the second is that the strong and pervasive belief in free will can be accounted for through a careful analysis of our phenomenology and a proper theoretical understanding of consciousness.

There are a number of important links and similarities between public health and safety. In this extended essay, Gregg D. Caruso defends and expands his public health-quarantine model, which is a non-retributive alternative for addressing criminal behavior that draws on the public health framework and prioritizes prevention and social justice. In developing his account, he explores the relationship between public health and safety, focusing on how social inequalities and systemic injustices affect health outcomes and crime rates, how poverty affects (...) brain development, how offenders often have pre-existing medical conditions (especially mental health issues), how involvement in the criminal justice system itself can lead to or worsen health and cognitive problems, how treatment and rehabilitation methods can best be employed to reduce recidivism and reintegrate offenders back into society, and how a public health approach could be successfully applied within the criminal justice system. Caruso's approach draws on research from the health sciences, social sciences, public policy, law, psychiatry, medical ethics, neuroscience, and philosophy, and he delivers a set of ethically defensible and practically workable proposals for implementing the public health-quarantine model. The essay begins by discussing recent empirical findings in psychology, neuroscience, and the social sciences that provide us with an increased understanding of the social and neurological determinants of health and criminal behavior. It then turns to Caruso's public health-quarantine model and argues that the model provides the most justified, humane, and effective approach for addressing criminal behavior. Caruso concludes by proposing a capability approach to social justice grounded in six key features of human well-being. He argues that we cannot successfully address concerns over public health and safety without simultaneously addressing issues of social justice—including the social determinants of health (SDH) and the social determinants of criminal behavior (SDCB)—and he recommends eight general policy proposals consistent with his model. (shrink)

Please find below the Bibliography in PDF format for Who's Afraid of Deleuze and Guattari? Whors"s Afraid of Del.

One of the most frequently voiced criticisms of free will skepticism is that it is unable to adequately deal with criminal behavior and that the responses it would permit as justified are insufficient for acceptable social policy. This concern is fueled by two factors. The first is that one of the most prominent justifications for punishing criminals, retributivism, is incompatible with free will skepticism. The second concern is that alternative justifications that are not ruled out by the skeptical view per (...) se face significant independent moral objections. Yet despite these concerns, I maintain that free will skepticism leaves intact other ways to respond to criminal behavior—in particular preventive detention, rehabilitation, and alteration of relevant social conditions—and that these methods are both morally justifiable and sufficient for good social policy. The position I defend is similar to Derk Pereboom’s, taking as its starting point his quarantine analogy, but it sets out to develop the quarantine model within a broader justificatory framework drawn from public health ethics. The resulting model—which I call the public health -quarantine model—provides a framework for justifying quarantine and criminal sanctions that is more humane than retributivism and preferable to other non-retributive alternatives. It also provides a broader approach to criminal behavior than Pereboom’s quarantine analogy does on its own. (shrink)

Gregg Lambert examines two facets of the return to religion in the 21st century: the resurgence of overtly religious themes in contemporary philosophy and the global 'post-secular' turn that has been taking place since 9/11. He asks how these two 'returns to religion' can be taking place simultaneously, and explores the relationship between them. Lambert reflects on statements of these returns from contemporary philosophers including Alain Badiou, John D. Caputo, Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Nancy. He discovers a unique - (...) and forboding - sense of the term 'religion' that belongs exclusively to our contemporary perspective. (shrink)

This paper aims to contribute to a defense of the now quite familiar argument from the perceptual model of religious experience (hereafter PMR) to the rationality of beliefs formed on the basis of religious experience. The contribution will not, however, come in the form of a positive argument for PMR. Neither will this contribution take the form of a response to key objections to the plausibility of that model. Instead, I wish to argue that there is a widespread assumption about (...) the role of concepts in perceptual experience generally which, when assimilated by PMR, complicates the attempt to respond to the most serious objection to the argument from PMR to the rationality of religious belief—viz. the objection from conflicting religious claims. Again, this paper will not respond to the objection from conflicting religious claims. Rather, it will explain how a common assumption makes that problem worse (or even intractable) and it will offer a positive suggestion about how to avoid that common assumption. Of course, to have shown how not to make a problem worse is not yet to have solved the problem. But, if the argument of this paper succeeds, it is a crucial first step.In what follows, I will (i) very briefly summarize the role of PMR in an argument for the rationality of religious belief, (ii) state the problem of conflicting religious claims, (iii) explain how a widespread assumption about the role of concepts in perceptual experience exacerbates the problem and (iv) offer the beginningsof an alternative account of the role of concepts in perceptual experience and comment on the evidential force of religious experience construed along the lines of this alternative account. Of course, an adequate treatment of the points in (iv) would require far more attention than can be devoted to them here. The primary burden of this paper is to establish the critical point in (iii), i.e., to generate some dissatisfaction with the “widespread assumption,” and to use this dissatisfaction as a motivation for exploring an alternative account of conceptual contribution. (shrink)