The United States is an outlier among nations in its failure to adopt robust climate policy. The underlying cause is not unique to the climate issue. Climate, like growing national debt, embodies a trade‐off between individual consumption now versus investment yielding long‐term societal gain. Over human history, social norms favoring one over the other wax and wane with the pervasiveness of transcendental values as embodied in personal virtue, social connectedness, spirituality, and religious faith. Over the past few decades, many indicators (...) show that American social norms and extended cooperation have weakened. Given entrenched political corruption and continuing institutional failure to address multiple long‐term societal challenges, individuals are called upon personally to practice and to enforce pro‐social norms and to advance high‐leverage systemic changes, some identified in this article, which will allow extended cooperation to once again flourish. (shrink)

Nosso objetivo central neste artigo é mostrar como as seções _of the reason of animals _sustentam a tese de uma naturalização da epistemologia de Hume. Para tal, ele será dividido em três grandes partes. Na primeira, mostraremos como Hume utilizou a analogia como fundamento para presupor uma continuidade entre as faculdades intelectivas dos animais humanos e não humanos. Na segunda, indicaremos as semelhanças que corroboram a analogia e, na última, apontaremos que as diferenças entre os humanos e demais animais são (...) apenas de grau e nunca de qualidade. (shrink)

O Concílio Vaticano II evidenciou a importância de discernir os “sinais dos tempos” para definir a missão cristã no seio do mundo e para exercer o próprio labor teológico. Ao celebrarmos, em 2015, o cinquentenário do concílio Vaticano II e da declaração Gravissimum educationis, bem como o vigésimo quinto aniversário da Constituição Apostólica Ex corde Ecclesiae, uma tarefa importante recai sobre a teologia fundamental, a saber: como discernir e redefinir a missão das universidades católicas no seio das novas situações humanas? (...) Na presente reflexão, a título de exercício, proponho três passos para um discernimento teológico, que só pode ser feito por cada comunidade acadêmica: primeiro, identificar alguns grandes apelos na realidade paradoxal que caracteriza o tempo atual; segundo, redefinir a missão própria de uma universidade católica à luz de uma releitura da constituição apostólica Ex corde Ecclesiae ; terceiro, a partir da perspectiva lançada pelo concílio, reafirmar a centralidade do Evangelho, fonte da fé e da teologia, como critério último de todo discernimento. E, à guisa de conclusão aberta, destacaremos alguns pontos fundamentais para a missão de uma universidade católica na contemporaneidade. (shrink)

This collection of essays is eclectic, covering certain political, ethical, cultural and philosophical topics. But running through all the material is the evolutionary-naturalistic perspective stated in the opening essay, which gives the book its title. Another emphatic feature is a focus on the Western cultural outlook, as the context in which the large number of topics is viewed. This focus is important as a way of re-affirming the distinctive character of Western intellectual and cultural history, at a time when that (...) character is, arguably, not sufficiently recognised and appreciated. Authors referred to include Aristotle, Shakespeare, Voltaire and Sartre. (shrink)

Standard philosophical discussions of theory-ladeness assume that observational evidence consists of perceptual outputs (or reports of such outputs) that are sentential or propositional in structure. Theory-ladeness is conceptualized as having to do with logical or semantical relationships between such outputs or reports and background theories held by observers. Using the recent debate between Fodor and Churchland as a point of departure, we propose an alternative picture in which much of what serves as evidence in science is not perceptual outputs or (...) reports of such outputs and is not sentential in structure. (shrink)

This paper presents a counterfactual account of what a mechanism is. Mechanisms consist of parts, the behavior of which conforms to generalizations that are invariant under interventions, and which are modular in the sense that it is possible in principle to change the behavior of one part independently of the others. Each of these features can be captured by the truth of certain counterfactuals.

Feminist analysis has eonvineed me that certain tendencies within that form of radical environmentalism known as deep ecology-with its supposed rejection of the Western ethical tradition and its adoption of what looks to be a feminist attitude toward the environment and our relationship to nature-constitute one more chapter in the story of Western alienation from nature. In this paper I deepen my critique of these tendencies toward alienation within deep ecology by historicizing my critique in the light of a development (...) in the ancient world that is disquietingly similar to the rise of deep ceology in recent times-namely, the rise of Stoicism in the wake of the breakup of the ancient polis. (shrink)

I offer an epistemologically grounded revisioning of Tom Birch’s ethical principle of universal consideration, suggesting that epistemologies have ethical dimensions and hence that universal moral consideration is intrinsic to the epistemological enterprise. I contrast epistemologies of domination with epistemologies in part constituted by the generosity of spirit that is the hallmark of Birch’s notion of universal consideration.

I offer an epistemologically grounded revisioning of Tom Birch’s ethical principle of universal consideration, suggesting that epistemologies have ethical dimensions and hence that universal moral consideration is intrinsic to the epistemological enterprise. I contrast epistemologies of domination with epistemologies in part constituted by the generosity of spirit that is the hallmark of Birch’s notion of universal consideration.

The paper describes four dialogue systems, developed in the tradition of Charles Hamblin. The first system provides an answer for Achilles in Lewis Carroll's parable, the second an analysis of the fallacy of begging the question, the third a non-psychologistic account of conversational implicature, and the fourth an analysis of equivocation and of objections to it. Each avoids combinatorial explosions, and is intended for real-time operation.

O professor Paulo Freire faz da sua experiência a mais importante fonte de aquisição de conhecimento, partindo da análise de suas práticas para compreender as maneiras de enfrentar os problemas complexos da vida escolar, como utilizar o conhecimento e como criar novos procedimentos e estratégias. Para o educador, esse tipo de reflexão é mergulhar no mundo de experiência e sentimentos, carregado de valores intercambio simbólico, correspondências afetivas, interesses sociais e ao mesmo tempo perceber, do ponto de vista teórico, o que (...) se passa no mundo da objetividade. (shrink)

This essay uses Györgi Buzsáki's use of EEG data to draw conclusions about brain function as an example to show that investigators sometimes draw conclusions from noisy data by analyzing the noise rather than by extracting a signal from it. The example makes vivid some important differences between McAllister's, Woodward's, and my ideas about how data are interpreted.

In a world with limited resources, allocation of resources to certain individuals and conditions inevitably means fewer resources allocated to other individuals and conditions. Should a patient's personal responsibility be relevant to decisions regarding allocation? In this project we combine the normative and the descriptive, conducting an empirical bioethical examination of how both Norwegian and British doctors think about principles of responsibility in allocating scarce healthcare resources. A large proportion of doctors in both countries supported including responsibility for illness in (...) prioritization decisions. This finding was more prominent in zero‐sum scenarios where allocation to one patient means that another patient is denied treatment. There was most support for incorporating prospective responsibility (through patient contracts), and low support for integrating responsibility into co‐payments (i.e. through requiring responsible patients to pay part of the costs of treatment). Finally, some behaviours were considered more appropriate grounds for deprioritization (smoking, alcohol, drug use)—potentially because of the certainty of impact and direct link to ill health. In zero‐sum situations, prognosis also influenced prioritization (but did not outweigh responsibility). Ethical implications are discussed. We argue that the role that responsibility constructs appear to play in doctors' decisions indicates a needs for more nuanced—and clear—policy. Such policy should account for the distinctions we draw between responsibility‐sensitive and prognostic justifications for deprioritization. (shrink)

Commentators regularly attribute to Frege realist, idealist, and quietist responses to metaphysical questions concerning the abstract objects he calls ‘thoughts’. But despite decades of effort, the evidence offered on behalf of these attributions remains unconvincing. I argue that Frege deliberately avoids commitment to any of these positions, as part of a metaphysical separatist policy motivated by the fact that logic is epistemologically autonomous from metaphysics. Frege’s views and arguments prove relevant to current attempts to argue for epistemological autonomy, particularly that (...) of ethics. (shrink)

Familiar versions of empiricism overemphasize and misconstrue the importance of perceptual experience. I discuss their main shortcomings and sketch an alternative framework for thinking about how human sensory systems contribute to scientific knowledge.

Crispin Wright offers superassertibility as an anti-realist explication of truth. A statement is superassertible, roughly, if there is a state of information available which warrants it and it is warranted by all achievable enlargements of that state of information. However, it is argued, Wright fails to take account of the fact that many of our test procedures are not sure fire, even when applied under ideal conditions. An alternative conception of superassertibility is constructed to take this feature into account. However, (...) it is then argued that when this revised concept of superassertibility is taken as the truth predicate of probability statements, statements whose test procedures are paradigmatically not sure fire, then any anti-realist theory of the sense of such probability statements cannot be compositional, in Dummett's sense of compositional. (shrink)

Scientists obtain a great deal of the evidence they use by observingnatural and experimentally generated objects and effects. Much of thestandard philosophical literature on this subject comes from20th century logical positivists and empiricists, theirfollowers, and critics who embraced their issues and accepted some oftheir assumptions even as they objected to specific views. Theirdiscussions of observational evidence tend to focus on epistemologicalquestions about its role in theory testing. This entry follows theirlead even though observational evidence also plays important andphilosophically interesting roles (...) in other areas including scientificdiscovery and the application of scientific theories to practicalproblems. (shrink)

This paper demonstrates the importance of the use of indigenous languages in formal contexts for the future of Africa’s peoples. Inter-cultural communication using one language wrongly assumes that the unfamiliar can be expressed using familiar terms. This author argues that long-term immersion by a Westerner amongst a non-Western people is a singular means of acquiring insights about them. Long-term participant observation forms the basis of the research for this article. When communicated globally, anti- racism strategies are found to be problematic (...) in their apparent denial of realities of non-Western cultures. The failure of many African communities to recognize and deal with the peculiarities of their own cultural contexts has potentially tragic consequences. Use of European languages is contributing to enormous dependence on the West and/or magic, and to gross under-development. Vulnerable intercultural exposure using non-Western languages and resources with concentrated efforts at understanding people’s theologies is advocated as the way forward. (shrink)

Contextualists offer "high-low standards" practical cases to show that a variety of knowledge standards are in play in different ordinary contexts. These cases show nothing of the sort, I maintain. However Keith DeRose gives an ingenious argument that standards for knowledge do go up in high-stakes cases. According to the knowledge account of assertion (Kn), only knowledge warrants assertion. Kn combined with the context sensitivity of assertability yields contextualism about knowledge. But is Kn correct? I offer a rival account of (...) warranted assertion and argue that it beats Kn as a response to the "knowledge" version of Moore's Paradox. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Latina/o Social Ethics: Moving beyond Eurocentric Moral Thinking, and: Racism and God-Talk: A Latino/a PerspectiveKevin N. York-SimmonsLatina/o Social Ethics: Moving beyond Eurocentric Moral Thinking Miguel A. de La Torre, Waco Tex.: Baylor University Press, 2010. 160 pp. $24.95.Racism and God-Talk: A Latino/a Perspective Rubén Rosario Rodríguez New York: New York University Press, 2008. 320 pp. $24.00Although Latina/o theologians have contributed much to Christian moral discourse in recent decades, (...) the impact of these contributions has too often remained limited to other Latina/os and those with particular interests in liberation theologies. Miguel de La Torre and Rubén Rosario Rodríguez build on the contributions of theologians before them while challenging the broader theological community to take notice of these rich and provocative works.In four concise chapters, Miguel de La Torre’s Latina/o Social Ethics delivers a forceful criticism of prominent thinkers in the field of Christian ethics and offers a creative reconstruction of ethics from a Latina/o perspective. De La Torre offers a critique of “Euroamerican” Christian ethicists whose works have greatly influenced contemporary Christian moral discourse. He addresses the writings of Walter Rauschenbusch, Reinhold Niebuhr, Stanley Hauerwas, Anthony Campolo, Ron Sider, and Jim Wallis. De La Torre faults these theologians for the ways in which their moral thinking participates in the oppression and marginalization of Latina/os, either through their silence or through their endorsement of specific polices. De La Torre concludes that the legacy of cultural and economic privilege and the oppression of Latinas/os are so [End Page 199] deeply embedded in the Eurocentric thinking that has dominated the field of Christian ethics that it cannot be the foundation for Latino social ethics.De La Torre’s aim is to “move beyond” Eurocentric modes of thinking rather than dwell on critique. This eagerness to move forward to the creative and constructive aspects of Latina/o ethics, however, limits the forcefulness of his critique of Euroamerican ethicists. De La Torre’s reading of Euroamerican ethics—and even the application of that term—is highly selective, both in terms of the thinkers chosen and the writings examined. While De La Torre’s criticisms of these thinkers are generally insightful and serve to illustrate his basic criticism of Eurocentric ethics, these criticisms are limited in their depth of analysis. De La Torre is less concerned with the broader historical and theological considerations at work in these Euroamerican ethicists than with their failures to adequately address issues of concern to Latinas/os.The second half of Latina/o Social Ethics moves to his constructive, or “reconstructive,” project. De La Torre reviews central concepts in the methodology of Latina/o social ethics, including lo cotidiano, nepantla, la lucha, en conjunto, and acompañamiento. De La Torre’s explanation of these terms is brief and accessible. Moving beyond these concepts, the fourth chapter of Latina/o Social Ethics offers a creative approach to a liberative ethics that draws on Christian tradition as well as broader Hispanic cultural resources, including folk characters and themes of the trickster found in Afro-Caribbean religious traditions. De La Torre addresses the concern for how to imagine a Christian ethics with a role for the trickster, including identifying trickster characters and themes in the Bible. His “disruptive ethics” challenges the preference for order over justice that has characterized Eurocentric ethics, for which he provides helpful examples. De La Torre is clearly concerned with imperialism, immigration, and free trade, yet it is unclear what justice means in those contexts. Perhaps due to the powerlessness of marginalized Latina/os, criticisms of injustice weigh far more heavily than visions of justice.The concise length of this book broadens its appeal. Academics unfamiliar with some of the concepts and methodologies of Latina/o theologians will find this short introduction a useful starting point. This provocative book would also be a welcome addition to the classroom, either in part or in its entirety.In contrast to De La Torre’s short work, Rubén Rosario Rodríguez sets a broader and more ambitious task in his Racism and God-Talk. His project... (shrink)

I find a lost wallet containing the owner's address and a lot of cash. Shall I keep it or return it? Suppose I have the ‘liberty of indifference’: whatever I do, I could have done otherwise. Indeed, part of what is meant in saying I act freely is that either way what I do is up to me. And let's allow this liberty requires that my choice is not a logical consequence of the past and natural laws. If I return (...) the wallet, I could have kept it without violating a law of nature or changing the past. Let's call this ‘situation S’ . Suppose I return the wallet.Others are also in S: free people find lost wallets every day. Each of us can freely return the wallet we find. It doesn’t follow immediately that we can all return it, however. That each ticket holder can win the lottery doesn’t entail they can all win it. We need the additional premiss that no number of people freely returning the wallet prevents the remainder from freely returning it. In short: each of us in S can freely return the wallet. Further, no number of us doing so prevents the remainder from doing so. Therefore it's possible that we all freely do what I do.According to Modal Realism , other possible worlds are concrete realities and the people in them as real as you and me. Some of these people are in S. Each of them can freely return the wallet; none of them is prevented from exercising that ability by others doing so, including others in worlds causally isolated from theirs. For instance, our doings in the actual world no more limit their abilities than …. (shrink)

Art and its Objects by Richard Wollheim had a major impact on aesthetics and the philosophy of art when it was first published in 1968. Of the arguments offered in response to Wollheim’s essay, Jerrold Levinson’s intentional-historical theory of art has been one of the most enduring. Levinson was influenced by three key sections of Wollheim’s enquiry: Section 40, which considers the claim that works of art fall under a concept of art, or that we are disposed to regard certain (...) things as works of art; and Sections 60 and 61, which deal with art as a historical phenomenon, and problems arising from its identification and interpretation. To date, these claims have been raised as points of contention in the philosophy of art. This paper takes a different perspective. Wollheim’s understanding of art’s historicity draws explicitly on the literature of theoretical art history. Via Wollheim, old art-historical problems will reappear as new philosophical questions. (shrink)

Recent developments in ethics and postmodemist epistemology have set the stage for a reconceptualization of environmental ethics. In this paper, I sketch a path for postmodemism which makes use of certain notions current in contemporary environmentalism. At the center of my thought is the idea of place: (1) place as the context of our lives and the setting in which ethical deliberation takes place; and (2)the epistemological function of place in the construction of our understandings of self, community, and world. (...) Central to these themes, in tum, are the related notions of myth, narrative, storied residence, and ethical vernacular. (shrink)

Gödel’s Ontological argument is distinctive because it is the most sophisticated and formal of ontological arguments and relies heavily on the notion of _positive property_. Gödel uses a third-order modal logic with a property abstraction operator and property quantification into modal contexts. Gödel describes _positive property_ as "independent of the accidental structure of the world"; "pure attribution," as opposed to privation; "positive in the 'moral aesthetic sense.'" _Pure attribution_ seems likely to be related to the Leibnizian concept of perfection. By (...) a careful examination of the formal semantics of third-order modal logic with property abstraction together with a Completeness result for third-order modal logic with property abstraction for faithful models that I previously developed in 2000 in my work, _Gödel’s Ontological Argument_, I argue that it is not possible to develop a sufficient applied third-order modal semantics for Gödel’s ontological argument. As I explore possible approaches for an applied semantics including anti-Realist accounts of the semantics of modal logic compatible with Actualism, I argue that Gödel makes implicit philosophical assumptions which commit him to both possibilism and modal realism. (shrink)

Nurses working in outreach capacities frequently encounter disaffiliated or ‘hard to reach’ populations, such as those experiencing homelessness, those who use substances, and those with mental health concerns. Despite best efforts, nurses regularly fail to find meaningful engagement with these populations. Mobilizing the work of Deleuze and Guattari, this paper will critically examine conventional outreach nursing practices as rooted in the royal science of psychiatry, which many ‘survivors’ of psychiatric interventions reject. The field of Mad Studies offers an understanding of (...) patient resistance to outreach nursing interventions. Delueze and Guattari's concepts of packs and sorcerers provide a framework to envision alternative nursing practices as a form of resistance and creativity, where new alliances may be formed outside the coercive confines of traditional practices. In response to patient resistance, outreach nurses themselves must assemble packs and engage in acts of sorcery. (shrink)

l examine the degree to which the so-called “deep ecology” movement embodies a feminist sensibility. In part one I take a brief look at the ambivalent attitude of “eco-feminism” toward deep ecology. In part two I show that this ambivalence sterns largely from the fact that deep ecology assimilates feminist insights to a basically masculine ethical orientation. In part three I discuss some of the ways in which deepecology theory might change if it adopted a fundamentally feminist ethical orientation.

In his campaign against moral pluralism, J. Baird Callicott has attempted to bring “theoretical unity and closure” to environmental ethics by providing a “metaphysics of morals” encompassing environmental, interpersonal, and social concems, as weIl as concems for domesticated animals. The central notion in this metaphysics is the community concept. I discuss two quite different, and separable, aspects of Callicott’s project. First, I argue that his metaphysics of morals does not provide ethical unity and closure. Second, and less specifically focused on (...) Callicott, I discuss the thesis that we can derive ethical obligations from descriptions of the structures of the various communities to which we belong. (shrink)

This paper offers an introduction to the philosophy and science of embodied learning, conceived as both the stabilizing and expansionary process that sustains order and novelty within learners’ worlds enacted through observing and describing. Embodied learning acknowledges stability and change as the purposeful conjoined characteristics that sustain learners. It is, in many respects, a composite theory that represents work from various disciplines. This ‘naturalized epistemology’ ( ) conceives a world of fact inevitably imbued with the values that our own structural (...) histories guarantee us observers, whether acknowledged or not within our reflective awareness. These values, however, are not simple sets of preferences, for they are constituted in our individual learning histories that, for good or bad, influence the course of future learning. This conservational element of our condition is only half the story, however. The more radical aspect resides in the expansionary capacity of embodied observers to change, to enact worlds that are not pre‐given ( ) but, rather, brought forth by learners as observers and describers. Furthermore, embodied learning seeks a grounding for understanding in the often‐unexplored epistemological terrain between positivist absolutism or its mirrored polar opposite, postmodern nihilism. Its epistemological stance derives from its ontology, which is grounded in the profound obviousness that ‘everything said is said by someone’ (, p. 27). (shrink)

In his classic 1936 paper Tarski sought to motivate his definition of logical consequence by appeal to the inference form: P(0), P(1), . . ., P(n), . . . therefore ∀nP(n). This is prima facie puzzling because these inferences are seemingly first-order and Tarski knew that Gödel had shown first-order proof methods to be complete, and because ∀nP(n) is not a logical consequence of P(0), P(1), . . ., P(n), . . . by Taski's proposed definition. An attempt to resolve (...) the puzzle due to Etchemendy is considered and rejected. A second attempt due to Gómez-Torrente is accepted as far as it goes, but it is argued that it raises a further puzzle of its own: it takes the plausibility of Tarski's claim that his definition captures our common concept of logical consequence to depend upon our common concept being a reductive conception. A further interpretation of what Tarski had in mind when he offered the example is proposed, using materials well known to Tarski at the time. It is argued that this interpretation makes the motivating example independent of reductive definitions which take natural numbers to be higher-order set theoretic entities, and it also explains why he did not regard the distinction between defined and primitive terms as pressing, as was the distinction between logical and nonlogical terms. (shrink)

Some early nineteenth-century American naturalists condemned their contemporary, Constantine Samuel Rafinesque , as ‘eccentric’, or worse. Both during his life and long after his death, his botanical work in particular was criticised, even ridiculed. However, in recent years, attempts have been made to restore his reputation and the term ‘genius’ has even been used to describe him. This paper examines this continuing fascination with this strange, disturbing figure and argues that in the competing interpretations of his life and work, Rafinesque (...) has generally been used to typify bad classification; he is perhaps better understood in a broader, literary context as embodying a particular kind of American national identity. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Recent discussions of practice in this Journal have appealed to what they describe as the classical concept of practice. In this paper, it is argued that if there is a single classical concept of practice, it has not been described with sufficient clarity for it to be of use in illuminating or correcting anything, even our ‘radically ambiguous’ common-sense understanding of educational practice; and that there are writers today whose understanding of practical wisdom is far superior to that of (...) the modern philosophers whose treatment of the topic has been relied upon. (shrink)