How do people judge the degree of causal responsibility that an agent has for the outcomes of her actions? We show that a relatively unexplored factor -- the robustness of the causal chain linking the agent’s action and the outcome -- influences judgments of causal responsibility of the agent. In three experiments, we vary robustness by manipulating the number of background circumstances under which the action causes the effect, and find that causal responsibility judgments increase with robustness. In the first (...) experiment, the robustness manipulation also raises the probability of the effect given the action. Experiments 2 and 3 control for probability-raising, and show that robustness still affects judgments of causal responsibility. In particular, Experiment 3 introduces an Ellsberg type of scenario to manipulate robustness, while keeping the conditional probability and the skill deployed in the action fixed. Experiment 4, replicates the results of Experiment 3, while contrasting between judgments of causal strength and of causal responsibility. The results show that in all cases, the perceived degree of responsibility increases with the robustness of the action-outcome causal chain. (shrink)

BackgroundMoral case deliberation as a form of clinical ethics support is usually implemented in health care institutions and educational programs. While there is no previous research on the use of clinical ethics support on the level of health care regulation, employees of regulatory bodies are regularly confronted with moral challenges. This pilot study describes and evaluates the use of MCD at the Dutch Health Care Inspectorate.The objective of this pilot study is to investigate: 1) the current way of dealing with (...) moral issues at the IGZ; 2) experience with and evaluation of MCD as clinical ethics support, and 3) future preferences and needs regarding clinical ethics support for dealing with moral questions at the IGZ.MethodsWe performed an explorative pilot study. The research questions were assessed by means of: 1) interviews with MCD participants during four focus groups; and 2) interviews with six key stakeholders at the IGZ. De qualitative data is illustrated by data from questionnaires on MCD outcomes, perspective taking and MCD evaluation.ResultsProfessionals do not always recognize moral issues. Employees report a need for regular and structured moral support in health care regulation. The MCD meetings are evaluated positively. The most important outcomes of MCD are feeling secure and learning from others. Additional support is needed to successfully implement MCD at the Inspectorate.ConclusionWe conclude that the respondents perceive moral case deliberation as a useful form of clinical ethics support for dealing with moral questions and issues in health care regulation. (shrink)

Betr. Diltheys Professur an der Universität Basel 1867-1868.

The method of positron emission tomography illustrates the circular logic popular in subtractive neuroimaging and linear reductive cognitive psychology. Both require that strictly feed-forward, modular, cognitive components exist, before the fact, to justify the inference of particular components from images after the fact. Also, both require a "true" componential theory of cognition and laboratory tasks, before the fact, to guarantee reliable choices for subtractive contrasts. None of these possibilities are likely. Consequently, linear reductive analysis has failed to yield general, reliable, (...) componential accounts. (shrink)

Each story is presented as a narrative, so readers can ponder: What would I do if this happened to me? When they've finished the book, they'll feel prepared with an array of theoretical and practical approaches for thinking on their feet.

Consciousness and Physicalism: A Defense of a Research Program explores the nature of consciousness and its place in the world, offering a revisionist account of what it means to say that consciousness is nothing over and above the physical. By synthesizing work in the philosophy of mind, metaphysics, and philosophy of science from the last twenty years and forging a dialogue with contemporary research in the empirical sciences of the mind, Andreas Elpidorou and Guy Dove advance and defend a novel (...) formulation of physicalism. Although physicalism has been traditionally understood to be a metaphysical thesis, Elpidorou and Dove argue that there is an alternative and indeed preferable understanding of physicalism that both renders physicalism a scientifically informed explanatory project and allows us to make important progress in addressing the ontological problem of consciousness. Physicalism, Elpidorou and Dove hold, is best viewed not as a thesis (metaphysical or otherwise) but as an interdisciplinary research program that aims to compositionally explain all natural phenomena that are central to our understanding of our place in nature. Consciousness and Physicalism is replete with philosophical arguments and informed, through and through, by findings in many areas of scientific research. It advances the debate regarding the ontological status of consciousness. It will interest students and scholars in philosophy of mind, metaphysics, philosophy of cognitive science, and philosophy of science. And it will challenge both foes and friends of physicalism. -/- . (shrink)

This paper is an attempt to undermine a basic assumption of theories of well-being, one that I call well-being invariabilism. I argue that much of what makes existing theories of well-being inadequate stems from the invariabilist assumption. After distinguishing and explaining well-being invariabilism and well-being variabilism, I show that the most widely-held theories of well-being—hedonism, desire-satisfaction, and pluralist objective-list theories—presuppose invariabilism and that a large class of the objections to them arise because of it. My aim is to show that (...) abandoning invariabilism and adopting variabilism is a sensible first step for those aiming to formulate more plausible theories of well-being. After considering objections to my argument, I explain what a variabilist theory of well-being would be like and show that well-being variabilism need not be any threat to the project of formulating theories of well-being that deliver general principles concerning well-being enhancement. (shrink)

This book discusses Process Pragmatism, the view that whatever is, derives from interactions. The contributors examine and defend its merits by focusing on major topics, including truth, the existence of unobservables, the origin of knowledge, scientific activity, mathematical functions, laws of nature, and moral agency.

This chapter focuses on the responses that proponents of virtue epistemology (VE) make to radical skepticism and particularly to two related forms of it, Pyrrhonian skepticism and the “underdetermination-based” argument, both of which have been receiving widening attention in recent debate. Section 1 of the chapter briefly articulates these two skeptical arguments and their interrelationship, while section 2 explains the close connection between a virtue-theoretic and a neo-Moorean response to them. In sections 3 and 4 I advance arguments for improving (...) the prospects of virtue-theoretic responses, sketching a particular version of VE that by recasting somewhat how we understand the “externalist turn in epistemology” also suggests ways of improving the adequacy of philosophical diagnoses and responses to skepticism. (shrink)

Abstract: In this article, the logic and functions of character-trait ascriptions in ethics and epistemology is compared, and two major problems, the "generality problem" for virtue epistemologies and the "global trait problem" for virtue ethics, are shown to be far more similar in structure than is commonly acknowledged. I suggest a way to put the generality problem to work by making full and explicit use of a sliding scale--a "narrow-broad spectrum of trait ascription"-- and by accounting for the various uses (...) of it in an inquiry-pragmatist account. In virtue theories informed by inquiry pragmatism, the agential habits and abilities deemed salient in explanations/evaluations of agents in particular cases, and the determination of what relevant domains and conditions an agent's habit or ability is reliably efficacious in, is determined by pragmatic concerns related to our evaluative epistemic practices. (shrink)

Evidentialism as its leading proponents describe it has two distinct senses, these being evidentialism as a conceptual analysis of epistemic justification, and as a prescriptive ethics of belief—an account of what one ‘ought to believe’ under different epistemic circumstances. These two senses of evidentialism are related, but in the work of leading evidentialist philosophers, in ways that I think are deeply problematic. Although focusing on Richard Feldman’s ethics of belief, this chapter is critical of evidentialism in both senses. However, I (...) share with authors like Feldman and Earl Conee, that epistemology has important prescriptive functions, and that a sound, civic ethics of belief is of more than merely philosophic importance. One reason why an ethics of belief might be important to problems of practice is the need we have for tools to more effectively mediate the renewed round of ‘culture wars’ we are experiencing in Anglo-American cultures. I mean especially that grand cultural clash between science and religion, reason and faith, secularist atheism and religious fundamentalism, etc. Let us start with the genealogical question of why there is such a grand cultural debate in the first place, and why the debate especially as played out in public and popular forums and even in the courtrooms seems so volatile and so often to confusedly drag everything—beliefs, values, passions, etc., with it. These are questions that I think Sigmund Freud’s classic Civilization and its Discontents can help us understand. Freud was a major voice in criticism of the stern and often hypocritical Victorian morality, a voice pointing out the price of its sometimes high-handed, guiltinducing curtailments of the satisfactions sought by the individual. But for Freud while there are real differences in the moral demands that different societies or traditions place upon people, there is something inevitable about the conflict itself, for “replacement of the power of the individual by the power of a community constitutes the decisive step of civilization... (shrink)

Dans cet ouvrage, où il s'agit d'appréhender l'univers pascalien sur le plan apologétique, on suit le cheminement de la foi de Pascal à partir de fragments retrouvés après sa mort, textes à l'origine des différentes éditions des Pensées. La structure antithétique et paradoxale de son génie l'a conduit à une quête religieuse sans concession à l'égard de la société de son temps. La fonction dualiste de son écriture aboutit à mettre en valeur la béance séparant le fini de la nature (...) humaine de l'infini de la grâce de Dieu. Seule la médiation christique dans l'histoire a pu combler ce vide de l'homme dans l'humilité de la foi. L'aspect novateur de la quête pascalienne expliquerait alors en grande partie le côté inachevé des papiers. Cinq appendices visent à mettre le texte pascalien face aux modes de pensée du XVIIe siècle. La richesse du texte pascalien demeure malgré tout inépuisable. (shrink)

Comment l'idéologie nazie a-t-elle imprégné et corrompu jusqu'au plus intime de la pensée et du langage? Jargon de l'authenticité est l'une des charges les plus féroces écrites contre Heidegger et son jargon. Qu'est-ce que le jargon? C'est un maniement de la langue qui vise à exercer un charme magique sur les lecteurs grâce à une sacralisation du langage et à un pathos de l'authenticité. Nationalisme, repli sur soi, mépris de la réalité sociale sont dès lors autant de voies pour perdre (...) l'objet, le monde, les choses. Un livre qui mérite d'être confronté à la célèbre étude de Klemperer, LTI, qui porte sur le langage totalitaire sous le IIIe Reich. (shrink)

Examines a link in the history of the principles and struggles of Church and State by dealing with the political theory of the Huguenots of the Dispersion as a whole.

Dans son effort pour ébranler la dichotomie entre la raison calculatrice et le domaine de l'irrationnel, Ch. Perelman s'inspire de la rhétorique ancienne et, entre autres, de Platon. Il utilise celui-ci pour illustrer le mépris des philosophes à l'égard de la rhétorique, pour indiquer la voie d'une rhétorique différente, et pour caractériser la forme du dialogue. On montre que cette condamnation de la rhétorique est beaucoup plus systématique, chez Platon, que ne le laisse entendre Perelman; que la "rhétorique digne des (...) dieux" de Platon n'a rien à voir avec la nouvelle rhétorique; et que le dialogue platonicien n'est pas un dialogue au sens de cette dernière. Bref, Platon est un anti-modèle, et c'est en prenant conscience de leur hétérogénéité radicale que l'on pourra le mieux apprécier l'originalité de ces deux conceptions de la philosophie. (shrink)

A intenção deste artigo é primàriamente exegética. Não pretende chegar a conclusães filosóficas substanciais nem fazer uma apreciação crítica. Pretende simplesmente esclarecer a versão de Russell quanto ao atomismo lógico, apresentando a sua teoria do juízo empírico num contexto histórico. A maior parte dos comentários contemporâneos falham neste ponto; contudo, afigura-se impossível compreender perfeitamente a teoria de Russell aeerca do conhecimento, bem como a Teoria das Descrições, como parte integrante daquela teoria, se não for encarada como uma tentativa para evitar (...) as consequencias de certas teorias alternativas do juízo. Pensa o autor que muitas críticas contemporâneas da Teoria das Descrições estão deslocadas, simplesmente por não conseguirem apreender o papel que aquela teoria devia desempenhar na análise russelliana do juízo empírico. A título de exemplo tenta o autor mostrar como as críticas de P. F. Strawson a respeito da Teoria das Descrições, como foram formuladas no seu artigo On Referring, não vêm a propósito (cf. Secção VT). A principal comparação histórica aqui apresentada refere-se à teoria idealista do juízo de F. H. Bradley. Contudo, parece também importante salientar o acordo que existe entre Russell e Bradley quanto a rejeitar como inadequado o tipo de análise do juízo apresentado por Leibniz e, numa primeira etapa da sua carreira, por G. E. Moore. Leibniz e Moore apresentaram, em moldes diversos, aquilo a que podíamos chamar teorias 'essencialmente genéricas' do juízo. Para Leibniz uma proposição é uma conexão analitica de conceitos, para Moore uma proposição é uma conexão sintética de conceitos. Tanto Russell como Bradley afirmam que é impossível formular uma teoria do juízo satisfatória, se concebermos a relação entre uma mente e uma proposição, implicada no juízo, como uma simples conexao de conceitos. O juízo deve ser apresentado como algo que implica experiência imediata pré-conceitual, experiência essa que, embora em si mesma não seja capaz de verdade ou falsidade, está pressuposta na própria possibilidade de qualquer juízo, verdadeiro ou falso, acerca da realidade. Dum modo geral, podíamos dizer que um juízo, cujo conteúdo é conceitual, é em virtude da experiência imediata que 'atinge a realidade' ('reaches right up to reality'). Contudo, embora Russell e Bradley concordem neste ponto, a análise da experiência imediata apresentada pelo primeiro é muito diferente da do segundo. Na medida em que se pode falar duma tese exegética positiva neste artigo, dir-se-ia que a análise russelliana da experiência imediata, contida na sua doutrina do 'conhecimento por experiência directa' dos particulares na sensação, é formulada especificamente (a) para ser compatível com a existência dum universo pluralista de particulares externamente relacionados e (b) para permitir uma versão da teoria de correspondência da verdade. Por outras palavras, a análise russelliana do juízo empírico, implicando necessàriamente um 'conhecimento por experiência directa' dos particulares na sensação, foi formulada especìficamente para evitar as consequências que, tanto Bradley como Russell, viram seeguir-se da análise idealista do juízo. Isto ilustra uma diferença fundamental entre o método filosófico de Russell e o de Bradley. Bradley aceita o monismo, a irrealidade das relações externas, e a teoria de coerência da verdade como consequência da sua teoria inicial do juízo. Russell, por outro lado, pensa que estas consequências se tornaram inaceitáveis perante a prática e as descobertas da ciência empírica; e tenta, por isso, construir uma teoria do juízo compatível com o tipo de metafísica e com a teoria da verdade, que lhe parece serem exigidos pela ciência empírica. (Resumo do Autor. Trad. A. M.). (shrink)

Peter Abelard’s (1079-1142) conception of moral sin contains a fundamental element from Stoicism, which is the notion of “consent” (consensus). After the presentation of the essentials of that Abelardian theory, we return to the source of that same idea in ancient and imperial Stoicism. According to their main representatives, “consent” or “assent” (sugkata/qesij) has a determining function not only in ethics, but also in the process of knowledge as well. We emphasize in passing the resemblance between some important components of (...) Stoic epistemology and the theory expounded by Aristotle in the Posterior Analytics on the origin of knowledge. Augustine represents without any doubt one of the main intermediaries through whom this notion of consent is transmitted up to the time of Abelard in the 12th century. Even if he was influenced by the Bishop of Hippo on moral questions in general, Abelard seems to distance himself from Augustine by considering that consent is more a rational matter than a volitional one. (shrink)

The central question raised in the present article concerns the ontological nature of the intentional act, previous to the proper moral action, in Aristotle’s and Abelard’s thinking. More precisely, we examine two subjects indirectly interconnected. First, we treat the secular problem of the exact nature of will (boulêsis) in Aristotle, which certainly refers to a rational act (logikos), the source of which is, however, the appetite (orexis). The second point is related to the notion of consent (consensus) in Abelard, which (...) also raises the question of its voluntary or rational ontological character. Both topics are connected in so far as the Abelardian consent is similar to the Aristotelian idea of choice (proairesis), and particularly to that of the Stoic assent (sunkatathesis), and not, as some commentators believe, to the Augustinian notion of will as a free and spontaneous act. This identification of the Abelardian consent with the Augustine’s will comes from a confusion, which is more terminological and perspectival than interpretative. (shrink)

Depuis que le structuralisme a franchi le seuil de Ia mode et que l'on parle maintenant volontiers d’ une ère post-structuraliste, le moment se prête davantage à une réflexion philosophique et critique sur ce type d'épistémè qui a pratiquement envahi tout le champ des sciences humaines. Quoique le structuralisme ait été une mode, et une mode qui a réussi, selon l'expression de Raymond Boudon,1 il reste toutefois encore difficile d'apprécier ses succès dans des travaux comme ceux de Foucault, d'Aithusser, de (...) Barthes ou de Lacan. Là où cependant le succès est le plus évident c'est du côté des sciences sociales, en particulier du côté de Ia linguistique et de l'anthropologie. (shrink)

The field of modern European Jewish history, as I hope to show, can be of great interest to those who deal with conceptual history in other contexts, just as much as the conceptual historical project may enrich the study of Jewish history. This article illuminates the transformation of the Jewish languages in Eastern Europe-Hebrew and Yiddish-from their complex place in traditional Jewish society to the modern and secular Jewish experience. It presents a few concrete examples for this process during the (...) nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The article then deals with the adaptation of Central and Western European languages within the internal Jewish discourse in these parts of Europe and presents examples from Germany, France, and Hungary. (shrink)

Cet ouvrage propose d'unifier les sciences de l'homme entre elles et avec la philosophie en les articulant grâce à trois concepts fondamentaux: forme, sens et historicité.

Dans cet article, après avoir rappelé ce qu’est un revenu de base comme un droit humain universel et fait une analyse des failles du système actuel de distribution de la richesse créée par le travail et de la redistribution par l’État d’aides sociales, l’auteur en déduit les mesures systémiques à prendre pour garantir ce droit humain universel à une vie digne avec une allocation universelle d’existence, protectrice et émancipatrice qui permette de se libérer à la fois de la charité publique (...) qui assujettit et d’un emploi de survie aliénant. (shrink)