I argue that metaethicists should be concerned with two kinds of alienation that can result from theories of normativity: alienation between an agent and her reasons, and alienation between an agent and the concrete others with whom morality is principally concerned. A theory that cannot avoid alienation risks failing to make sense of central features of our experience of being agents, in whose lives normativity plays an important role. The twin threats of alienation establish two desiderata for theories of normativity; (...) however, I argue that they are difficult to jointly satisfy. (shrink)

I argue that the social dimension of alienation, as discussed by Williams and Railton, has been underappreciated. The lesson typically drawn from their exchange is that moral theory poses a threat to the internal integrity of the agent, but there is a parallel risk that moral theory will implicitly construe agents as constitutively alienated from one another. I argue that a satisfying account of agency will need to make room for what I call ‘genuine ethical contact’ with others, both as (...) concrete objects in the world external to ourselves and as subjects who can recognize us reciprocally. (shrink)

The conventional wisdom regarding the aims and shortcomings of Kantian constructivism is mistaken. The aim of metaethical constructivism is not to provide a naturalistic account of the objectivity of normative facts by deriving substantive morality from a conception of agency so thin as to be uncontroversial (a task at which it is generally regarded to have failed). Its aim is to explain the “grip” that normative facts have on us—to avoid what I call the problem of normative alienation. So understood, (...) Kantian constructivism faces two problems: that determinate normative facts cannot be derived from agency and that its individualistic conception of agency cannot account for the sociality of morality. I propose and elaborate a social conception of agency that is better able to address the latter problem while still avoiding normative alienation, and evaluate two different strategies for responding to the former problem. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Phenomenological Interviews and Tourette'sThe authors report no conflicts of interest.We appreciate the responses from the two clinicians, Efron and Mathieson. We agree with their reminder about the holistic nature of clinician's engagement (mood, sociality, and work life) and with their emphasis on patient-reported outcome measures, although this is not quite what we did in our interviews. As has recently been recognized in section 24 of the Victorian Mental Health (...) and Well-being Act (to provide a local Australian example), patients and caregivers' "lived experience makes them valuable leaders and active partners in the mental health and wellbeing service system."1In this paper, however, our aim was both more modest and immodest: modest, in that we aimed to work with those "leaders and active partners" to generate a more adequate account of lived experience in concert with behavioral symptomatology; immodest, in that we wondered how the lived experience of Tourette syndrome (TS) aligned (or not) with some of the commonly ascribed features of the condition. Although phenomenology as a discipline does not own lived experience, of course, it is more systematically treated in this tradition, starting with elaborations of Erlebnis.Efron and Mathieson note that older patients are more likely to describe urges or premonitory urges (PUs). This raises the priming question: Has greater exposure to and involvement in medical concepts and treatments transformed the nature of their self-report, or has it provided them with more phenomenological skills, enabling them to pick out discrete parts of experience? Or perhaps they have just been exposed more frequently to the experience over time? We address some related issues below, in our reply to Fernandez, where we outline our interview techniques more fully.They end by noting that the aim of comprehensive behavioral intervention for tics is to become attentive to PUs to better block tics. This is complex and understudied. In principle, becoming aware of something cognitively and experientially can foreground or even perhaps induce that experience. Conversely, from the TS scholarship, we know that attending to urges in certain ways (e.g., via acceptance training) can also reduce perceived urge frequency and intensity (see Gev et al., 2016). We would welcome further work on this link between attention and experience in TS. [End Page 49]Response to FernandezBecause our paper was partly framed around Fernandez' own work on phenomenological psychopathology, we welcome his invitation to provide further "inspiration and guidance" for other phenomenological researchers conducting empirical studies, who may also be dealing with the challenge posed by "narrative habits." When an interviewee uses well-worn medicalized terms to describe their experience, it is not clear whether these descriptions genuinely reveal or rather occlude the experience in question. There are sometimes, perhaps often, second-person phenomenological 'tells' regarding interviewees genuinely re-evoking an experience, but for interviewers it still raises the question of how to prompt alternative and potentially more accurate descriptions of experience.Because of this challenge, we purposely did not use the term "urge" or "premonitory urge" (PU) in our interview questions. Instead, we asked about (and used the broader term of) "experiences" that may occur prior, during, or after ticcing, without assuming that there are such experiences in the first place. We guided interviewees to evoke the memory of a specific, singular tic event (a tic token; see Curtis-Wendlandt 2020, 2023). Once a memory of such an event had been identified, we asked interviewees the following three lead questions:1. What, if anything, did you experience during this tic?2. What, if anything, did you experience before this tic?3. What, if anything did you experience after this tic?The temporal framing of these questions counters common trends and assumptions in the scholarship, which has focused heavily on pre-tic experiences, with little attention given to post-tic experiences (reduced to notions of "relief" and barely investigated), and even less to experiential explorations of the tic itself. Our catalogue of supporting questions sought to elicit fine-grained descriptions of evoked/recalled experiences along sensory and cognitive-affective dimensions:•. Did you see anything before, during, or after this tic? If so, what did you see?•. Did you hear anything... (shrink)

Cases of past absence involve agents noticing in retrospect that an object or property was absent, such as when one notices later that a colleague was not at a talk. In Sanskrit philosophy, such cases are introduced by Kumārila as counterexamples to the claim that knowledge of absence is perceptual, but further take on a life of their own as a topic of inquiry among Kumārila’s commentators and their Nyāya interlocutors. In this essay, I examine the Nyāya philosopher Gaṅgeśa’s epistemology (...) of past absence, according to which agents learn that a recollectable object or property was absent by inferring its past absence from failing to recall that object or property. Gaṅgeśa’s account is best appreciated against the backdrop of earlier theories and their shortcomings, and I begin by presenting historical views leading up to his. I identify two groups of views about the epistemology of past absence: recollection views, according to which cases of past absence involve agents recalling negative information; and recollection failure views, according to which cases of past absence involve agents failing to recall positive information. I reconstruct two early recollection views: a Bhāṭṭa view belonging to Uṃveka, and a competing Nyāya view belonging to Jayanta and Bhāsarvajña. I then examine Śālikanātha and Sucarita’s critiques of recollection views, following which I reconstruct a Bhāṭṭa recollection failure view belonging to Pārthasārathi. I then examine Gaṅgeśa’s critiques of Pārthasārathi’s account and the recollection failure view he constructs out of its shortcomings. (shrink)

Iris Murdoch’s The Sovereignty of Good—especially the first essay, “The Idea of Perfection”—is often associated with a critique of a certain picture of agency and its proper place in ethical thought. There is implicit in this critique, however, an alternative, much richer one. I propose a reading of Murdochian agency in terms of the continuous activity of cultivating and refining a distinctive practical standpoint, and I apply this reading to her account of moral progress. For Murdoch moral progress depends on (...) transcending egoism and achieving clear perception of a normatively-saturated reality, but it would be a mistake to think of egoism in terms of selfishness, or clarity in terms of altruism. Rather, I argue, Murdochian moral progress requires overcoming socially-conditioned and often ideological forms of alienation, and making the social conditions that inform our practical standpoints self-conscious. (shrink)

This paper argues that evidential decision theory is incompatible with options having objective values. If options have objective values, then it should always be rationally permissible for an agent to choose an option if they are certain that the option uniquely maximizes objective value. But, as we show, if options have objective values and evidential decision theory is true, then it is not always rationally permissible for an agent to choose an option if they are certain that the option uniquely (...) maximizes objective value. (shrink)

It is a great pleasure to introduce this collection of papers on the use of introspective evidence in cognitive science. Our task as guest editors has been tremendously stimulating. We have received an outstanding number of contributions, in terms of quantity and quality, from academics across a wide disciplinary span, both from younger researchers and from the most experienced scholars in the field. We therefore had to redraw the plans for this project a number of times. It quickly became clear (...) to us that the collection would expand beyond the scheduled double issue of the Journal of Consciousness Studies. A triple issue was then drafted, but the number of excellent contributions continued to grow. We therefore had to reconsider the publication plans again, and the decision was made to publish an extended collection of papers in discrete instalments. At present substantial progress has been made towards determining the content of a second double issue of the Journal of Consciousness Studies, due summer 2004. A third instalment now appears to be a real possibility. We welcome enquiries from authors interested in submitting to later instalments, especially those offering a novel perspective that is not otherwise represented. However, we do not intend continue this collection indefinitely. In putting together the first major interdisciplinary collection on this topic, we view our task as that of providing a starting point. Sufficient outlets exist to support ongoing debate. (shrink)

AbsractIn this paper, we contribute to a growing literature in the philosophy of social science cautioning social scientists against context-independent claims to objectivity, by analyzing the recent proposal of a new Basic Index of Gender Inequality by Gijsbert Stoet and David Geary. Despite the many internal problems with BIGI, Stoet and Geary have had some success in positioning the index as an important corrective to the way in which gender inequality is measured in mainstream metrics like the Global Gender Gap (...) Index. We argue that this success is facilitated at least in part by the failure of GGGI’s proponents to adequately justify the methodological choices underpinning the index in relation to the context in which the index’s findings are intended to be used. In so doing, the authors of GGGI oversell the objectivity of the metric’s assessment of the state of global gender inequality—and it is this overselling that allows Stoet and Geary to present BIGI as a metric that corrects what they claim are systematic biases within GGGI. The case of BIGI and GGGI, we argue, suggests that the kind of epistemic modesty exhibited by recent operational approaches to objectivity is particularly important for social research on highly politically contested topics. (shrink)

Introspective evidence is still treated with great suspicion in cognitive science. This work is designed to encourage cognitive scientists to take more account of the subject's unique perspective.

Later Nyāya philosophers maintain that absences are real particulars, irreducible to any positives, that we perceive. The fourteenth-century Nyāya philosopher Gaṅgeśa argues for a condition on absence perception according to which we always perceive an absence as an absence of its counterpositive, or its corresponding absent object or property. Call this condition the ‘counterpositive condition’. Gaṅgeśa shows that the counterpositive condition is both supported by a plausible thesis about the epistemology of relational properties and motivates the defence of absence as (...) irreducible. But against Gaṅgeśa, the sixteenth-century Nyāya philosopher Raghunātha and his seventeenth-century commentators Bhavānanda, Jagadīśa, and Gadādhara identify cases in which the counterpositive condition fails. In this article, I examine the Nyāya-internal debate over this condition. I conclude that Raghunātha makes a compelling case that the counterpositive condition fails. (shrink)

The process of dehumanization, or thinking of others as less than human, is a phenomenon with significant societal implications. According to Haslam's model, two concepts of humanness derive from comparing humans with either animals or machines: individuals may be dehumanized by likening them to either animals or machines, or humanized by emphasizing differences from animals or machines. Recent work in cognitive neuroscience emphasizes understanding cognitive processes in terms of interactions between distributed cortical networks. It has been found that reasoning about (...) internal mental states is associated with activation of the default mode network and deactivation of the task positive network ; whereas reasoning about mechanical processes produces the opposite pattern. We conducted two neuroimaging studies. The first examined the neural bases of dehumanization and its relation to these two brain networks, using images and voice-over social narratives which either implicitly contrasted or implicitly likened humans to either animals or machines. The second study addressed a discrepancy between findings from the first study and prior work on the neural correlates of dehumanization: using a design similar to prior work we examined neural responses to pictures of humans, animals and machines, presented without any social context. In both studies, human and humanizing conditions were associated with relatively high activity in the DMN and relatively low activity in the TPN. However, the non-human and dehumanizing conditions deviated in different ways: they demonstrated more marked changes either in the DMN or in the TPN. Notably, differences between the animal dehumanizing and humanizing conditions were most evident in regions associated with mechanistic reasoning, not in the mentalizing network. Conjunction analysis of contrasts from both paradigms revealed that only one region was consistently more active when participants saw human, a medial parietal region regarded as the central hub of the DMN. These findings provide a neural basis for Haslam's distinction between two types of dehumanization, and suggest that the DMN and TPN play opposing roles in creating a sense of moral concern. (shrink)

ExtractIn this paper I will put forward a brief argument against abortion rights. The argument concerns itself with the two main ways in which defenders of abortion rights develop their position. The first strategy through which they tend to do this is by arguing against the personhood of the fetus. The second strategy, made famous by Judith Jarvis Thomson, is to argue that, even if the fetus were a person, its right to life would not entail the right to draw (...) upon the resources of the woman in pregnancy, and so the pregnancy can be terminated. My argument will provide reasons to suspect that attacks on fetal personhood are based on a questionable notion of personhood, and that the most common attempts to show that the fetus does not have the right to draw on the resources of the woman in pregnancy also have considerable problems. This will buttress the case for the view that the fetus is a person and that it has the right to draw on the resources of the woman in pregnancy.Send article to KindleTo send this article to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about sending to your Kindle. Find out more about sending to your Kindle. Note you can select to send to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be sent to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply. Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.A SHORT ARGUMENT AGAINST ABORTION RIGHTSVolume 12, Issue 34Jack MulderDOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1477175613000080Your Kindle email address Please provide your Kindle [email protected]@kindle.com Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Send article to Dropbox To send this article to your Dropbox account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about sending content to Dropbox. A SHORT ARGUMENT AGAINST ABORTION RIGHTSVolume 12, Issue 34Jack MulderDOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1477175613000080Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Send article to Google Drive To send this article to your Google Drive account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about sending content to Google Drive. A SHORT ARGUMENT AGAINST ABORTION RIGHTSVolume 12, Issue 34Jack MulderDOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1477175613000080Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Export citation. (shrink)

This is a brief philosophical introduction to, and an annotated translation of, the section on absence from Śālikanātha’s Pramāṇapārāyaṇa (Study of the Instruments of Knowledge), a foundational work of Prābhākara epistemology. In this section, which focuses on the epistemology of absence, Śālikanātha argues against the Bhāṭṭa view that there is a sui generis instrument of knowledge (pramāṇa) by which we learn of absence (abhāva). He does so by arguing for a subjective reductionist thesis about absence, according to which the absence (...) of a perceivable (dṛśya) object at a locus is identical with a positive state of awareness (buddhi) whose content includes the locus but not the perceivable object. If correct, Śālikanātha argues, we should therefore learn of absence in the same ways we acquire self-knowledge more generally. While developing his reductionism about absence, Śālikanātha responds to a range of concerns, including the objection that his view cannot explain causation by absence. (shrink)

In this study, we present data on graduate students' actual experiences in dealing with impaired peers and faculty predictions of how students would deal with such situations. A total of 29 faculty and 73 graduate students responded to a survey of 40 randomly selected clinical psychology training programs. Student respondents were almost universally (95%) aware of peers whom they regarded as impaired in their professional functioning, and half (49%) the sample reported being aware of a peer's ethical impropriety. Faculty overestimated (...) the number of students who said they "did nothing" when confronted with the resulting ethical dilemma and underestimated the degree of conflict and turmoil (i.e., anger, frustration, dismay) that students reported experiencing. Faculty also estimated that students would be more concerned with peer loyalty issues, whereas students indicated that they were strongly motivated by ethical considerations. Ethics curricula ought more thoroughly to address affective concerns through experiential learning vehicles such as faculty modeling, simulation exercises, and small-group discussion. (shrink)

This essay is a critical notice of David Dyzenhaus's book, The Long Arc of Legality. I argue that Dyzenhaus’s criterion for distinguishing legal pathologies that undermine law's contractarian claim to legitimacy and political pathologies that do not is unsustainable. It relies on a categorical distinction between the threat to law's legitimacy posed by treating some subjects as de jure second-class citizens, whose formal legal status is compromised, and other threats to political legitimacy grounded in the treatment of some subjects as (...) de facto second-class citizens, who retain full formal legal equality but suffer from thoroughgoing substantive subordination. But some forms of de facto second-class citizenship are a greater threat to contractarian legitimacy than some forms of full formal equality. So formal equality for subjects and legal legitimacy come apart. I consider and respond to several responses on Dyzenhaus's behalf, and conclude by proposing a version of his jurisprudential theory that relaxes this distinction. (shrink)

Drawing on respective ideas from within both liberal political philosophy and Frankfurt School critical theory, this paper seeks to examine claims about autonomy and empowerment made on behalf of educational policies such as teacher-led codeswitching; a policy that seeks to empower students from racially marginalised groups by facilitating their proficiency in the language and cultural expressions of societally dominant groups. I set out to evaluate such claims by first sketching two competing formulations of autonomy; namely, liberal autonomy concomitant to political (...) power, and autonomy that arises out of the practice of critical self-reflection. I proceed by testing codeswitching within each formulation to reveal how – in this case – these two conceptualisations of autonomy are educationally incompatible with each other. I conclude by suggesting that educational interventions such as codeswitching may ultimately be complicit in the longer term processes of racialisation and marginalisation that they seek to diminish, not only because they carry the potential to damage minority students’ self-integrity, but also because they limit possibilities for both majority and minority students to engage in dialectical encounters that may open avenues to new principles of social and political organisation. (shrink)

The history of the Frankfurt School cannot be fully told without examining the relationships of Critical Theorists to their Jewish family backgrounds. Jewish matters had significant effects on key figures in the Frankfurt School, including Max Horkheimer, Theodor W. Adorno, Erich Fromm, Leo Lowenthal and Herbert Marcuse. At some points, their Jewish family backgrounds clarify their life paths; at others, these backgrounds help to explain why the leaders of the School stressed the significance of antisemitism. In the post-Second World War (...) era, the differing relationships of Critical Theorists to their Jewish origins illuminate their distinctive stances toward Israel. This book investigates how the Jewish backgrounds of major Critical Theorists, and the ways in which they related to their origins, impacted upon their work, the history of the Frankfurt School, and differences that emerged among them over time. (shrink)

Ethics has been identified as a significant issue among those in leadership positions. The purpose of this research was to assess the ethics and integrity of leaders in today's manufacturing environment as perceived by their employees. This study included a total of 10 manufacturing companies in the United States. A total of 59 surveys were used to calculate data for this study. A demographic survey and the Perceived Leader Integrity Scale (PLIS) were used to collect data from respondents. The research (...) addressed the following question: To what degree are leaders in the manufacturing industry considered "low ethical," "moderate ethical," and "high ethical" on the PLIS? It was determined through descriptive data analysis that the majority of supervisors in this study, as rated by their employees were highly ethical. Male and female employees equally rated their supervisors as highly ethical. Employees in the age category (18-25) rated their supervisors higher ethically than other age groups in the study. However, considering ethnicity categories, African-Americans scored their supervisors lower ethically than the European-American category. The education level of the employees did not provide any significant findings in rating their supervisors. (shrink)

Educational Theory, Volume 71, Issue 4, Page 455-473, August 2021.

“Metaphysical questions relating to what ex­ists do not seem to fade away” notes Jack Kaminsky in this book, which takes as its starting point the Quinian view that we de­termine what exists by means of the formal systems we construct to explain the world. This starting point, Kaminsky points out, is not novel; philosophers have often tried to construct formal systems, and from these systems they have been able to deduce what can be said to exist. Contemporary formal systems (...) are different from earlier ones, how­ever, because they make more extensive use of the results of linguistics, logic, and mathe­matics studies. But these contemporary formal systems also must state eventually what their commitments to existence are, and they must be able to show their commit­ments to be free of paradox, ambiguity, and contradiction. Given these conditions, Kaminsky exam­ines the difficulties inherent in the existence claims of contemporary formal language systems. To do this he uses only a minimum of the technical elements of propositional and first-order quantificational logic. He concludes: many existential commitments are relative to the formal systems of time; some commitments seem to be absolute; and some problems—those relating to vacuous terms—arise only because no distinction is made between humanly constructed objects and naturally constructed objects. (shrink)

Digital medicine—a drug delivered with an ingestion sensor and related data collection system—has potential clinical value, especially for people whose lives are made more disorganized by poverty-related stress. It would be unjust if poor people were effectively barred from this treatment modality. Yet, unless a concerted effort is made to enable access through provision of smartphones to those who cannot afford them, this injustice will aggravate the digital divide in clinical care.

This fully revised and updated 2nd edition provides a comprehensive reference guide to existentialism, featuring key chapters on key existentialist thinkers, as well as chapters applying existentialism to subject areas ranging across politics, literature, feminism, religion, the emotions, cognitive science, and poststructuralism. Contemporary developments in the field of existentialism that speak to issues of identity and exclusion are explored in 4 new chapters on race, gender, disability, and technology, whilst the 5th new chapter new chapter outlines analytic philosophy's complicated relationship (...) to existentialism. Presenting the field of existentialism beyond the European tradition, this edition also includes a new key thinker chapter on Frantz Fanon, alongside Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre and de Beauvoir, as well as new engagement with the work of scholars on race and existentialism, including Lewis R. Gordon, George Yancy, and Richard Wright. The resources section at the end of the book includes an updated A to Z glossary, and timeline of key events, texts and thinkers in existentialism, as well as a list of relevant organisations, and an annotated guide to further reading, making this 2nd edition an invaluable text for scholars and students alike. (shrink)

International codes of corporate behavior have been proposed, discussed, negotiated, and promulgated by governments, transnational corporations, and inter-corporate associations over the past few decades. It is not clear that they have been resoundingly as successful in changing corporate behavior – particularly as to corruption and environmental protection – as have national government requirements imposed on foreign enterprises and their own officials. This article arrays the many attempts to structure cooperative action to re-order corporate behavior on several dimensions – restrictive business (...) practices, labor conditions, human rights, environmental production, and corruption. It then assesses the extent to which behavior has been changed and what techniques are more effective in making corporate behavior more ethical. (shrink)

The acceptance of the concept of necessary linguistic cate­gories has given renewed prominence to the subject of ontology in contemporary discussions of language and logic. Jack Kaminsky, Professor of Philosophy at the State University of New York at Binghamton, here contributes an important expo­sition of this school of thought. He examines the views of many philosophers who either admit or deny that ontological com­mitments are necessary, and he raises broad questions and shows why there is a compelling interest in (...) the relation of a formal language to the issue of ontological inquiry. (shrink)

This article deals with the discussion of abortion in a number of US presidential and vice-presidential debates, from a scaling perspective. The interest in scales, as constructed and negotiated by participants in the course of interaction, is a component of occasioned semantics. I found that, in the political debates that I examined, there are a number of different scales anchored by the contrast between ‘pro-life’ and ‘pro-choice’ positions. These are as follows: Stage of pregnancy, Prescribed action, Special circumstances, Locus of (...) enforcement and Frequency. These scales are manipulated in various ways by the candidates to make their own stances seem reasonable and moral and their opponents’ unreasonable and immoral. A position may be made to appear more moderate by adding a more extreme alternative to the scale, which is then rejected. Also, common goals may be emphasized. The debaters also use ‘negative downgrading’ – rejection of a more moderate position – to suggest an opponent’s unreasonableness. It is noted that the availability of several scales affords various ways of formulating the reasonableness or unreasonableness of a particular position. The article continues with a close examination of an extended debate sequence, illustrating the crucial role of implicature in the manipulation of scales, the attribution of attitude, and the practice of argumentation, and the possibility of dealing with implicature within a conversation analytic framework. The discussion is, at all points, grounded in and illustrated by the actual talk of the political candidates. It is suggested that viewing specific occasions of interaction in terms of the creation and negotiation of scales can yield a unique and revealing perspective on what is taking place. (shrink)

I first met Hans Albert in 1974, when together with two friends, Rob de Vries and Berry van Berkel, I participated in the European Forum Alpbach for the first time. We attended the seminar that was led by John Watkins and Walter Kaufmann and, of course, went to as many of the plenary meetings as possible. At the time, the seminar week and the bulk of the plenary events were still organized during the same period and were included in the (...) fee, neither of which is unfortunately the case any longer. (shrink)

F. A. Hayek’s The Sensory Order (1952) is often considered to be a theory of cognitive psychology. While it contains a theory on the psychology of perception, it has the function of illustrating Hayek’s solution to the mind–body problem. The solution, which has been strongly influenced by Moritz Schlick’s epistemology, takes the form of a physicalist identity theory. An attempt is made to trace Schlick’s influence on Hayek to the latter’s stay in Zürich, which resulted in a manuscript (1920) that (...) contains the main features of the 1952 book. One of the consequences of Hayek’s theory is that we cannot describe the functioning of our mind completely without using expressions that refer to subjective experiences. For Hayek this is not a fundamental problem but a practical one that does not jeopardize his physicalist identity theory. Unlike the manuscript, The Sensory Order contains a rudimentary sketch of an evolutionary research program. When Hayek elaborated that program later, though, he focused on cultural evolution rather than on the evolution of the mind. (shrink)

Are the sources of a combatant's knowledge in war morally relevant? This article argues that privacy is relevant to just war theory in that it draws attention to privacy harms associated with the conduct of war. Since we cannot assume that information is made available to combatants in a morally neutral manner, we must therefore interrogate the relationship between privacy harms and the acts that they enable in war. Here, I argue that there is ample evidence that we cannot discount (...) the analysis of privacy harms in war, and that analysis of such harms requires us to examine social goods. I develop this point to demonstrate the problems that this poses for aspects of revisionist just war theory; namely, reductivism and individualism. In order to evaluate the moral consequences of privacy harms in war, we must understand the unilateral and adversarial character of balancing privacy harms against social goods in the context of war, which, in turn, requires that we consider social goods and social institutions as objects of moral evaluation. Further, concepts drawn from privacy scholarship, such as Helen Nissenbaum's concept of contextual integrity, enable us to identify a range of moral problems associated with contemporary war that deserve further attention from just war theorists. (shrink)

David Bohm, in his "causal theory", made the correct Hegelian synthesis of Einstein's thesis that there is a "there" there, and Bohr's antithesis of "thinglessness" (Nick Herbert’s term). Einstein was a materialist and Bohr was an idealist. Bohm showed that quantum reality has both. This is “physical dualism” (my term). Physical dualism may be a low energy approximation to a deeper monism of cosmic consciousness called "the super-implicate order" (Bohm and Hiley’s term), “pregeometry” (Wheeler’s term), “substratum” (Dirac’s term), “funda-MENTAL space” (...) (Hameroff’s term), “Chi” (Chinese medicine & Falun Gong) etc., but for our immediate pragmatic purpose of constructing naturally conscious nano-computers and of virtually reverse engineering alleged reports of propellantless UFO propulsion (French Intelligence Report, 1999 [email protected] Vol. 5, No. 11, Part 1 -- August 1, 1999 & NIDS report "Best UFO Cases - Europe", I. Von Ludwiger) to the stars and beyond, physical dualism will work. (shrink)

In this paper, I consider how a Kierkegaardian could respond critically to the question of strong theological universalism, i.e., the belief that all individuals must eventually be reconciled to God and experience everlasting happiness. A Kierkegaardian would likely reject what Thomas Talbott has called “conservative theism,” but has the resources to mount a sustained attack on the view that all individuals must experience everlasting happiness. Some have seen that Kierkegaard has some potential in this regard, but a full Kierkegaardian response (...) to strong theological universalism has yet to be given. In this paper, I give such an account. (shrink)