1 Evidence-based policy requires researchers to provide the answers to ecological questions that are of interest to policy makers. To find out what those questions are in the UK, representatives from 28 organizations involved in policy, together with scientists from 10 academic institutions, were asked to generate a list of questions from their organizations. 2 During a 2-day workshop the initial list of 1003 questions generated from consulting at least 654 policy makers and academics was used as a basis for (...) generating a short list of 100 questions of significant policy relevance. Short-listing was decided on the basis of the preferences of the representatives from the policy-led organizations. 3 The areas covered included most major issues of environmental concern in the UK, including agriculture, marine fisheries, climate change, ecosystem function and land management. 4 The most striking outcome was the preference for general questions rather than narrow ones. The reason is that policy is driven by broad issues rather than specific ones. In contrast, scientists are frequently best equipped to answer specific questions. This means that it may be necessary to extract the underpinning specific question before researchers can proceed. 5 Synthesis and applications. Greater communication between policy makers and scientists is required in order to ensure that applied ecologists are dealing with issues in a way that can feed into policy. It is particularly important that applied ecologists emphasize the generic value of their work wherever possible. (shrink)

On 26 March 20091, I introduced in the U.S. Senate a piece of legislation designed to establish a National Criminal Justice Commission. The Presidential level blue-ribbon commission would be charge...

Husserl’s first work formulated what proved to be an algorithmically complete arithmetic, lending mathematical clarity to Kronecker’s reduction of analysis to finite calculations with integers. Husserl’s critique of his nominalism led him to seek a philosophical justification of successful applications of symbolic arithmetic to nature, providing insight into the “wonderful affinity” between our mathematical thoughts and things without invoking a pre-established harmony. For this, Husserl develops a purely descriptive phenomenology for which he found inspiration in Mach’s proposal of a “universal (...) physical phenomenology.” To account for applications to any domain, Husserl envisages a theory of all possible deductive systems, which he develops extensively in his Göttingen lectures wherein he engages with Hilbert’s work on deductive systems for geometry, real arithmetic, and physics. This leads Husserl to formulate claims of decidability and proofs of completeness for various arithmetics that result from his analysis of Kronecker’s general arithmetic. Careful attention to these proofs seem to show that Husserl was not oblivious to problems that underlie our incompleteness theorems, namely that of showing that some inversions of his algorithmic arithmetic are undefined. His growing preoccupation with the issue of a pre-established harmony between mathematical thought and reality motivate his pursuit of a “supramathematics” of all possible complete theory forms to demystify such harmony, by having such a form on hand for describing any empirical domain. He soon decides that a transcendental idealism of nature will reveal the wonderful affinity of thoughts and things comprising such harmony, to be a wonderful “parallelism of objective unities and constituted manifolds of consciousness.” But the paradoxes of logic and set theory cloud the clarity of mathematics, which Weyl would restore with Brouwer’s intuitionism and Hilbert with his metamathematics. Husserl informed Weyl that his student Becker had formulated a phenomenological foundation not only for Weyl’s generalization of relativity theory but also for the Brouwer-Weyl continuum. But Weyl eventually rejected much of Becker’s work, especially when it became clear that his phenomenological intuitionism could not account for the success of Hilbert’s transfinite mathematics in quantum physics. Becker responded to this “crisis of phenomenological method” with his mantic phenomenology celebrating the magic of mathematical mysticism, which Husserl finally rejects in favor of a pluralistic phenomenology of mathematics and nature. (shrink)

Do fetuses have a right to life in virtue of the fact that they are potential adult human beings? I take the claim that the fetus is a potential adult human being to come to this: if the fetus grows normally there will be an adult human animal that was once the fetus. Does this fact ground a claim to our care and protection? A great deal hangs on the answer to this question. The actual mental and physical capacities of (...) a human fetus are inferior to those of adult creatures generally thought to lack a serious right to life, and the mere fact that a fetus belongs to our species in particular seems morally irrelevant. Consequently, a strong fetal claim to protection rises or falls with the appeal to the fetus's potentiality, for nothing else can justify it. (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)

Recent research has begun treating the perennial philosophical question, “what makes a person the same over time?” as an empirical question. A long tradition in philosophy holds that psychological continuity and connectedness of memories are at the heart of personal identity. More recent experimental work, following Strohminger & Nichols (2014), has suggested that persistence of moral character, more than memories, is perceived as essential for personal identity. While there is a growing body of evidence supporting these findings, a critique by (...) Starmans & Bloom (2018) suggests that this research program conflates personal identity with mere similarity. To address this criticism, we explore how loss of someone’s morality or memories influence perceptions of identity change, and perceptions of moral duties towards the target of the change. We present participants with a classic ‘body switch’ thought experiment and after assessing perceptions of identity persistence, we present a moral dilemma, asking participants to imagine that one of the patients must die (Study 1) or be left alone in a care home for the rest of their life (Study 2). Our results highlight the importance of the continuity of moral character, suggesting lay intuitions are tracking (something like) personal identity, not just mere similarity. (shrink)

Day-to-day life is inundated with attempts to control emotions and a wealth of research has examined what strategies people use and how effective these strategies are. However, until more recently, research has often neglected more basic questions such as whether and how people choose to regulate their emotions (i.e. emotion regulation choice). In an effort to identify what we know and what we need to know, we systematically reviewed studies that examined potential determinants of whether and how people choose to (...) regulate their emotions. Eighteen determinants were identified across 219 studies and were categorised as being affective, cognitive, motivational, individual or social-cultural in nature. Where there were sufficient primary studies, meta-analysis was used to quantify the size of the associations between potential determinants and measures of whether and how people choose to regulate their emotions. Based on the findings, we propose that people’s decisions about whether and how to regulate their emotions are determined by factors relating to the individual doing the regulating, the emotion that is being regulated, and both the immediate situation and the broader social context in which the regulation is taking place. (shrink)

This paper argues that there are no people. If identity isn't what matters in survival, psychological connectedness isn't what matters either. Further, fissioning cases do not support the claim that connectedness is what matters. I consider Peter Unger's view that what matters is a continuous physical realization of a core psychology. I conclude that if identity isn't what matters in survival, nothing matters. This conclusion is deployed to argue that there are no people. Objections to Eliminativism are considered, especially that (...) morality cannot survive the loss of persons. (shrink)

Skepticism about the external world may very well be correct, so the question is in order: what theory of knowledge flows from skepticism itself? The skeptic can give a relatively simple and intuitive account of knowledge by identifying it with indubitable certainty. Our everyday ‘I know that p’ claims, which typically are part of practical projects, deploy the ideal of knowledge to make assertions closely related to, but weaker than, knowledge claims. The truth of such claims is consistent with skepticism; (...) various other vexing problems don’t arise. In addition, even if no claim about the world outside my mind can be more probable than its negation, the project of pure scientific research remains well motivated. (shrink)

I argue that God could give us the robust power to do other than we do in a deterministic universe.

Here is a new version of the Evidential Problem of Evil.

This paper will argue that there are no people. Let me summarize the argument. In part II of what follows, I argue that if identity isn't what matters in survival, psychological connectedness isn't what matters either. Psychological connectedness, according to Derek Parfit, is the 'holding of particular direct psychological connections,' for example, when a belief, a desire, or some other psychological feature continues to be had ; psychological connectedness consists in two other relations—resemblance plus a cause that produces it. For (...) our purposes, to say of a relation that it is 'what matters in survival' is to say that it carries the burden of responsibility, remorse, and regret for past misdeeds; and that it is what makes rational the anticipation of, and the special hopes and fears we have about, our own future experiences. A consequence of II is that if identity isn't what matters in survival, either something other than psychological connectedness is what matters or nothing matters. (shrink)

This paper argues that there are no people. If identity isn't what matters in survival, psychological connectedness isn't what matters either. Further, fissioning cases do not support the claim that connectedness is what matters. I consider Peter Unger's view that what matters is a continuous physical realization of a core psychology. I conclude that if identity isn't what matters in survival, nothing matters. This conclusion is deployed to argue that there are no people. Objections to Eliminativism are considered, especially that (...) morality cannot survive the loss of persons. (shrink)

Here is a simple counterexample to David Lewis’s causal influence account of causation, one that is especially illuminating due to its connection to what Lewis himself writes: it is a variant of his trumping example.

This article assess two important recent books on Marx's political economy and argues that, despite many virtues, there are some crucial limitations in their approach to Marx's political economy. Ben Fine's and Alfredo Saad-Filho's Marx's 'Capital' and The Value of Marx by Saad-Filho place too much explanatory weight on the composition of capital, giving too little attention to Marx's analysis of money, and to the processes of circulation and realisation.

Taking Heidegger's prominent critique of Nietzsche's treatment of Kant's notion of 'aesthetic disinterestedness' as a foil this paper argues that, contrary to the dominant interpretation, Nietzsche's text contain a positive and radical notion of 'aesthetic disinterestedness'. It is argued that Nietzsche's naturalistic notion of aesthetic disinterestedness is a key feature of his conception of art as natural life process that contests the boundaries, values and libidinal constitution of the 'human'. The ramifications of this for Heidegger's reading of Nietzche's aesthetics are (...) considered. The paper reviews Nietzsche's critical treatment of the notion of 'aesthetic disinterestedness' in both "The Birth of Tragedy" and the "Genealogy of Morality" and relates these to his overall vision of the relationship between art and life. (shrink)

I argue that a version of Pascal's Wager applies to the persistent vegetative state with sufficient force that it ought to part of advance directives.

A (revised) account of what all and only religions have in common in virtue of which they are religions.

I argue that people who believe fetuses have the same moral right to life as the rest of us have sufficient reasons to refuse to classify abortion as legal murder and to refuse to punish abortion as severely as legal murder.

Advance directives typically have two defects. First, most advance directives fail to enable people to effectively avoid unwanted medical intervention. Second, most of them have the potential of ending your life in ways you never intended, years before you had to die.

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)

I argue that being wide awake is an epistemic virtue which enables me to recognize immediately that I'm wide awake. Also I argue that dreams are imaginings and that the wide awake mind can immediately discern the difference between imaginings and vivid sense experience. Descartes need only pinch himself.

Trypanosoma brucei is the causal agent of African Trypanosomiasis in humans and other animals. It maintains a long‐term infection through an antigenic variation based population survival strategy. To proliferate in a mammal, T. brucei acquires iron and haem through the receptor mediated uptake of host transferrin and haptoglobin‐hemoglobin respectively. The receptors are exposed to host antibodies but this does not lead to clearance of the infection. Here we discuss how the trypanosome avoids this fate in the context of recent findings (...) on the structure and cell biology of the receptors. (shrink)

While the vocabulary of sacrifice has been the subject of detailed studies, the terms of votive offerings in ancient Greece still lack a semantic survey of their own. I am here interested in a particular type of offering, the so-called ‘first-fruit’ offerings, in Archaic and Classical Greece. It was a common practice in different parts of the Greek world for individuals and cities to bring an offering termed ἀπαρχή to the gods using a portion of the proceeds from a variety (...) of human activities; and this act is described by the verb ἀπάρχεσθαι. And yet the word ἀπάρχεσθαι is not limited to making dedications; it is also used in sacrificial procedures and cult payments. This study aims to give a semantic analysis of these terms, examining their religious applications in different contexts. It appears that the values attached to the notion of ἀπάρχεσθαι are rather different in the cases of sacrifices, of bringing first-offerings and of cult finance. The ways in which the usages of these terms overlap with and diverge from each other constitute one of the most interesting results. (shrink)

Liberal philosopher James Mill has been understood as being unambiguously antifeminist. However, Terence Ball, supposedly informed by a feminist perspective, has argued for a new interpretation. Ball has reconceptualized Mill as a feminist and the sole source of the feminism of his son, suggesting a revision of the received wisdom about their relationship to the development of nineteenth century feminist thought. This paper takes issue with Ball's “new interpretation” and its presumed feminist basis.

An account of what all and only religions share in virtue of which they are religions.

An account of the feature all games share in virtue of which they are games.

In relation to the overall theme of the collection in which this paper appears, namely, Nietzsche and the 'future of the human' I offer a reading of Nietzsche's "The Birth of Tragedy" to argue for the key role of art in relation to Nietzsche's project of 'overcoming the human'. It is argued that Nietzsche credits the pre-Socratic Greeks, and in particular their tragic dramas, with achieving a 'transvaluation' of the optimism/pessimism distinction and thereby promoting an overcoming of the man/nature distinction. (...) The extent to which this outlook is attained by Nietzsche in his first published work - and which aspects of it demonstrate this - is underlined in its contrast with a number of current interpretations of the work. (shrink)

This paper offers a critique of what it terms the ‘Heideggerian-deconstructive’ reading of Kant’s “Analytic of the Sublime” and develops an alternative ‘genealogical’ interpretation of it. It is argued that the ‘Heideggerian-deconstructive’ reading of Kant’s text emphasises the ‘question of presentation’. By contrast, the concerns of the ‘genealogical’ interpretation of Kant’s sublime are affective and ‘libidinal’ in character. The underlying issue concerns the prioritisation of the orders of presentation and affectivity respectively and the balance between them in Kant’s text. The (...) paper begins with an appreciative overview of the ‘Heideggerian-deconstructive’ reading of Kant’s sublime as found in texts by Derrida, Escoubas, Lacoue-Labarthe, Lyotard, Nancy and Sallis. In the ensuing sections the ‘genealogical’ alternative is developed. It is suggested that such a ‘Nietzschean’ reading has two phases, oppositional and immanent respectively. The first phase exposes the evaluative economy of Kant’s text and identifies themes within it which endorse the constitutive values of the ‘Platonic-Christian’ tradition. Kant’s sublime appears to be a ‘moral’ response to the a-symmetry between ‘raw nature’ and the transcendent aspirations of rational-moral humanity. However, due to its oppositional character, this form of ‘genealogical’ critique does not execute a sufficiently radical critique of Kant’s text. A second, immanent form, of ‘genealogical’ reading is required. This focuses on the theme of ‘negative pleasure’ in Kant’s text and argues that it has priority over that of ‘negative presentation’. Kant’s sublime no longer appears to be ‘moral’ in orientation but advocates passionately the pleasures of a specific, non-universalisable, ‘affective-libidinal’ economy. The task arising concerns the evaluative comparison of different aesthetic sensibilities, the ‘negative pleasure’ of Kant’s sublime and the Nietzschean alternative of a ‘tragic joy’ that affirms precisely the ‘contrapurposiveness’ of ‘raw nature’ from which Kant turns away. This is a contrast between a teleological and dysteleological sublime, ‘human’ and ‘post-human’ aesthetic sensibilities. (shrink)

A critical exposition of Bataille's notion of the 'sacred' across all of his key texts. Bataille's thought is related to, and interpreted in terms of, the project of 'critique' and interrogated from the perspective of the experience of contemporary capital. The resources Bataille provides for configuring the relation between religion and capitalism are also considered. As a whole the paper provides an introduction and overview of Bataille's thought and underlines its on-going contemporary significance.

This paper discusses the accounts given of the nature of religious affectivity by Nietzsche, Otto and Bataille and pursues their shared claim as to the primacy of the affective dimension of religion over its conceptual, doctrinal and moral elements and to the development of a religious critique of Christianity. The first section clarifies the nature of Nietzsche’s religiosity and reconstructs his critique of Christianity from this perspective. In subsequent sections Nietzsche’s critique of Christianity is compared to both Otto’s critical defence (...) and Bataille’s ‘Nietzschean’ critique of it. Three themes are proposed as evaluative criteria for the comparative evaluation of the three thinkers undertaken. Firstly, the task of rethinking the nature of religious affectivity in ‘impersonalist’ or ‘a-subjective’ terms. Secondly, the role of the notion of ‘immanence’ in both the rethinking of transcendence given the demise of the transcendent and in a reconceiving of the critique of religion in general, and Christianity in particular, in non-oppositional terms. Thirdly, the question of the ‘autonomy of religion’ not only in relation to the ‘theoretical’, ‘moral’ and ‘aesthetic’ domains but also, ultimately, to the ‘human’ itself. In short, the thinkers considered are evaluated in terms of what they seek to formulate, namely, a radically non-anthropomorphic conception of religion. It is argued that only Bataille attains to both senses of ‘immanence’ identified in the paper in his development of a non-transcendent notion of transcendence and a critique of Christianity that finds suppressed ‘traces’ of the impersonal and a-moral force of the ‘sacred’ operative within it. (shrink)

This paper argues that, beginning with its seminal role in Kant's thought, that an increasingly radical - and ontological - notion of the imagination can be discerned in the thought of Nietzsche and Heidegger who thereby undertake a radicalisation of this key aspect of Kant's aesthetics. A wide range of texts and themes is explored from across the work of Kant, Nietzsche and Heideggger and a relation of mutual radicalisation between them is proposed.

This paper offers a critical assessment of Meillassoux's attempt to articulate a “philosophical divine” based on, and consistent with, his radical ontology of contingency. The critical claim developed is that Meillassoux's conception of the divine is inconsistent with his wider commitment to immanence and that this is due to his uncritical endorsement of key evaluative and affective features of religions of the transcendent. This affinity is evident in his view that the phenomenon of “unjust death” generates a problem concerning the (...) justification of a world thus characterised and in the solution proposed. The critical question regarding the compatibility of immanence and such a theodicy is explored. Further examples of Meillassoux's unacknowledged allegiance to the sensibility of transcendent religion are identified including his concern for “justice” and “humanity” and persistent avowal of “God”. An alternative conception of a religion of immanence is sketched which emphasises impersonality and a-moralism. This alternative, it is claimed, integrates more consistently than Meillassoux's the evaluative-affective and theoretical domains. On this basis the claim is advanced that Meillassoux misappropriates the considerable resources his ontology contains for the formulation of a religion of immanence. (shrink)

This paper sketches a critical response to Meillassoux's articulation of a 'philosophical divine' in "Spectral Dilemma" and 'The Divine Inexistence'. Reference is also made to his critical discussion of the 'return of religion' in 'After Finitude'. Meillassoux's overlooking of the religious possibilities of an ontology of contingency is highlighted and his avowals of messianism, hope and justice interrogated. The issue of the place of 'religion' within 'speculative materialism' is raised in relation to the question of how to conceive a religion (...) of immanence. (shrink)