he most worrisome skeptical doubt Descartes raises in the first of his Meditations is the hypothesis of an evil deceiver. While it might seem plainly certain and indubitable that he is “sitting by the fire, wearing a winter cloak, holding this paper” in his hands, and so on, it is possible that all these—fire, cloak, paper, even hands—are illusions. “I will suppose, then, not that there is a supremely good God, the source of truth; but that there is an evil (...) spirit, who is supremely powerful and intelligent, and does his utmost to deceive me. I will suppose that sky, air, earth, colors, shapes, sounds and all external objects are mere delusive dreams, by means of which he lays snares for my credulity.”. (shrink)

Derrick Bell’s work challenges the dichotomy that separates legitimate legal reasoning from “mere” fiction through hybrids that play across science fiction, Platonic dialogue, and autobiography. Despite its merits, I argue that Bell’s position reifies and strengthens, rather than deconstructs, structures of tyranny; it maintains the problematic rhetorical construction of United States race relations in terms of the black–white divide, either alienating, or leaving little or no room for other racial groups constructively to revise power and identity. In contrast, bell hooks’, (...) Mari Matsuda’s and Robert Chang’s work, though tentatively sketched, construes current race and gender relations in terms of a chiaroscuro of power, rather than a simple dichotomy. (shrink)

Derrick Bell’s work challenges the dichotomy that separates legitimate legal reasoning from “mere” fiction through hybrids that play across science fiction, Platonic dialogue, and autobiography. Despite its merits, I argue that Bell’s position reifies and strengthens, rather than deconstructs, structures of tyranny; it maintains the problematic rhetorical construction of United States race relations in terms of the black–white divide, either alienating, or leaving little or no room for other racial groups constructively to revise power and identity. In contrast, bell hooks’, (...) Mari Matsuda’s and Robert Chang’s work, though tentatively sketched, construes current race and gender relations in terms of a chiaroscuro of power, rather than a simple dichotomy. (shrink)

In Grundgesetze der Arithmetik, Frege tried to show that arithmetic is logical by giving gap-free proofs from what he took to be purely logical basic laws. But how do we come to judge these laws as true, and to recognize them as logical? The answer must involve giving an account of the apparent arguments Frege provides for his axioms. Following Sanford Shieh, I take these apparent arguments to instead be exhibitions: the exercise of a logical capacity in order to bring (...) us into a state of judgement. I provide an account of what sort of inferential capacities are at play in such exhibitions, and explain how they lead us to judge that Frege’s primitive laws are general and undeniable. I will also situate my account with respect to other rival interpretations, particularly the elucidatory interpretations of Joan Weiner and Thomas Ricketts. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Formless SelfNewman Robert GlassThe Formless Self. By Joan Stambaugh. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999. 174 pp.For the past seven years I have been deeply involved in a worldwide experiment in global education. Students in the Comparative Religion and Culture (CRC) Program study the world's great religions for ten-week terms in each of East Asia, South Asia, and the Middle East, totaling one academic (...) year in all. Recent programming has taken place in Taiwan, Thailand, India, Nepal, and Turkey, with stops in Rome and Athens. Students have met with Buddhist and Christian teachers in Kyoto, Sojiji, Eiheiji, Taiwan, Bangkok, Chiang Mai, Bylakuppe, Dharmsala, Jerusalem, Rome, Athens, Ankara, and Istanbul. As part of their academic work, students write responses to each encounter and engage in term-end and year-end reflections on their own work. The program brings to light, in a very powerful way, some of the fundamental questions in cross-cultural study and interreligious dialogue. How do we come to understand a religion or culture other than our own? In analyzing their own work, students find themselves using terms from a Jain teacher's talk in Sravanabelagola to frame their response to the Dalai Lama's talk in New Delhi, and terms from the Dalai Lama's talk to understand and respond to the audience with the Pope in Rome. As the students become more sophisticated in understanding issues in interpretation, new questions are posed: How many people (other than ourselves) do we unknowingly bring to understanding an encounter with an other? When we use the Dalai Lama's talk in interpreting the Pope, does this enlarge our understanding of Catholicism, diminish or distort the Pope's message, or create something new altogether? What do we gain and what do we lose?Joan Stambaugh's The Formless Self is "an attempt to present Eastern ideas, or at least oneWestern interpretation of Eastern ideas, toWestern readers in a meaningful way" (p. x). The most referenced names in the index are Heidegger, Nietzsche, Plato, Keirkegaard, Descartes, and Meister Eckhart. These, then, are the key figures Stambaugh brings with her as she enters into conversation with the three Buddhist thinkers Dogen, Hisamatsu, and Nishitani. The latter two figures are themselves well known for their conversations withWestern thinkers. Stambaugh's book is best located within the larger body of work within and about the Kyoto School, that school of Japanese philosophy identified primarily with Nishida Kitaro, Tanabe Hajime, and Nishitani Keiji, and more recently with Abe Masao. In the United States, this school of philosophy reached its zenith of popularity in the late 1980s, culminating in an American Academy of Religion (AAR) award to Abe Masao's Zen and Western Thought and a series of annual AAR dialogues between Abe and John Cobb. Abe's presence hovers over Stambaugh's book as well, from an acknowledgment in the preface (p. x) to a reference in the index that seems to encompass the whole book. The Formless Self is a good short introduction to key beginning texts [End Page 300] in this larger field: Dogen's Genjokoan, the Hisamatsu-Tillich dialogues, and Nishitani's Religion and Nothingness.Stambaugh has in print translations of a substantial number of Heidegger's texts, including a recent translation of Being and Time. As might be expected, she seems to have a special affinity for Dogen's Uji (Being-Time; see especially pp. 31-40), and makes a creative contribution to the different understandings of these difficult concepts. Stambaugh also makes a brave attempt to work with Dogen's discussions of fire turning to ashes, fish in water, and mountains walking/ranging (pp. 39-48) in a productive way. Stambaugh's middle section on Hisamatsu may be the best place to begin, centering as it does on the dialogues with the Protestant theologian Paul Tillich. In 1957, the Zen Buddhist teacher and scholar Shin'inchi Hisamatsu was a visiting professor at Harvard lecturing on his recently published book Zen and the Fine Arts. Though Tillich's aesthetic approach to "ultimacy" made for a fine series of dialogues with Hisamatsu, the numerous difficulties in the dialogue serve as a warning... (shrink)

There is often said to be something peculiar about the history of modal theory up until the turn of the fourteenth century, when John Duns Scotus decisively reframed the issues. I wish to argue that this impression of dramatic discontinuity is almost entirely a misimpression. Premodern philosophers prescind from the wide-open modal space of all possible worlds because they seek to adapt their modal discourse to the explanatory and linguistic demands of their context.

This is the first part of a two-part article in which we defend the thesis of Humean Supervenience about Laws of Nature (HS). According to this thesis, two possible worlds cannot differ on what is a law of nature unless they also differ on the Humean base. The Humean base is easy to characterize intuitively, but there is no consensus on how, precisely, it should be defined. Here in Part I, we present and motivate a characterization of the Humean base (...) that, we argue, enables HS to capture what is really stake in the debate, without taking on extraneous commitments. (shrink)

Loneliness is a near-universal experience. It is particularly common for individuals with (so-called) psychopathological conditions or disorders. In this paper, we explore the experiential character of loneliness, with a specific emphasis on how social goods are experienced as absent in ways that involve a diminished sense of agency and recognition. We explore the role and experience of loneliness in three case studies: depression, anorexia nervosa, and autism. We demonstrate that even though experiences of loneliness might be common to many psychopathologies, (...) these experiences nevertheless have distinctive profiles. Specifically, we suggest that: (i) loneliness is often a core characteristic of depressive experience; (ii) loneliness can drive, and even cement, disordered eating practices and anorectic identity in anorexia nervosa; iii) loneliness is neither a core characteristic of autism nor a driver but is rather commonly experienced as stemming from social worlds, environments, and norms that fail to accommodate autistic bodies and their distinctive forms of life. We aim to do justice to the pervasiveness of loneliness in many — if not all — psychopathologies, while also highlighting the need to attend to psychopathology-specific experiences of loneliness, agency, and (non-)recognition. (shrink)

This paper describes some of the experiences of working with teenage girls' friendship groups at 'Hilltop', a large urban comprehensive school in the north of England. Working between and within multiple friendship groups in a variety of spaces and places raises ethical and moral responsibilities for the feminist researcher. This paper explores the ethical dilemmas raised when confronted with oppressive behaviour when 'hanging out' with groups of teenage girls, as well as the implications this has for the researcher's feminist 'politics (...) of intervention'. Finally, I call for a (re)politicisation of the geographies of children and youth. (shrink)

In a recent article in this journal, Carl Knight and Andreas Albertsen argue that Rawlsian theories of distributive justice as applied to health and healthcare fail to accommodate both palliative care and the desirability of less painful treatments. The asserted Rawlsian focus on opportunities or capacities, as exemplified in Normal Daniels’ developments of John Rawls’ theory, results in a normative account of healthcare which is at best only indirectly sensitive to pain and so unable to account for the value of (...) efforts of which the sole purpose is pain reduction. I argue that, far from undermining the Rawlsian project and its application to problems of health, what the authors’ argument at most amounts to is a compelling case for the inclusion of freedom from physical pain within its index of primary goods. (shrink)

In Ernst Friedrich's Krieg dem Kriege there is a large section of photographs of survivors of World War I with the most hideous disfigurements of the face: jaws are missing, gaping slashes stare out where mouths should be. Friedrich leaves this gallery of ‘untouchables’ to the end of the book as if to achieve the maximum debasement of military glory and heroism. The head and face are obviously the most vulnerable part of the body in warfare – brutal wounds to (...) the face and decapitations are common. In World War I, a number of hospitals were set up to deal solely with head-wounds, developing the basis of what we now know as plastic surgery. Yet, in the representation of combat on screen, even in the most candid and unsentimental of war films, such as Hamburger Hill and Platoon, injuries to the face are rare or nonexistent. This absence has something to do with the difficulty of producing convincing prosthetic wound-cavities on the head; blown-off limbs can obviously be created with ease through covering up the actor's extant limb with padded clothing; bloody disembowellings can be simulated with the judicious use of imitation innards and the illusionistic application of broken flesh, and so on. But the problems of modelling head-wounds clearly only half-explain the consistency of the absence. (shrink)

Change and variation, while inherent to language, might be seen as running counter to human communicative needs. However, variation also gives language the power to convey reliable indexical information about the speaker. This has been argued to play a significant role in allowing the establishment of large communities based on cooperative exchange , although there has been little experimental investigation of the hypothesis. Here I present a preliminary study intended to help fill this gap. Participants played an online team game (...) in which they negotiated anonymously for resources using an artificial language. Players succeeded in using linguistic cues to distinguish between their teammates and their opponents, and displayed between-team variation in the use of the language. (shrink)

This the first part of a two‐part article in which we defend the thesis of Humean Supervenience about Laws of Nature (HS). According to this thesis, two possible worlds cannot differ on what is a law of nature unless they also differ on the Humean base. the Humean base is easy to characterize intuitively, but there is no consensus on how, precisely, it should be defined. Here in Part I, we present and motivate a characterization of the Humean base that, (...) we argue, enables HS to capture what is really stake in the debate, without taking on extraneous commitments. “I tend to picture the [facts of the form “it is a law that s” and “is is not a lw that s”] as having been sprinkled been sprinkled like powdered sugar over the doughy surface of the non‐nomic facts.”—Marc Lange2 “Avoid empty carbohydrates.”—Runner's World3. (shrink)

Emmanuel Levinas argues that justice is meaningful only to the extent that other persons are encountered in their individuality, as my neighbors, and not merely abstract citizens of a political community. That is, the political demand for justice arises from my ethical relationship with the other whose face I cannot look past. But despite his revolutionary ideas about the origins of justice, Levinas ultimately appeals to a very traditional view of justice in which persons are considered equal and comparable. and (...) responsibilities and rights are distributed evenly among them. In response to Levinas, I argue that insofar as justice is constructed by and for the ethicalrelationship, it must also be deconstructed by that relationship. If one takes seriously Levinas’s claim that asymmetrical ethical responsibility is the origin of justice, then one must also reject Levinas’s suggestion that justice involves viewing persons and responsibilities as comparable and symmetrical. (shrink)

A common belief about the nature of agent regret is that regretting some event E is closely linked to being sorry for the occurrence of E. Or more specifically, that if one is sorry for E then she must regret E. I will call this ‘the sorry-regret hypothesis’. My contention is that one may be sorry for some action but not regret it. I take the rejection of this ‘truism’ to be a positive development. I offer two lines of argument (...) for rejecting the sorry-regret hypothesis. One line of argument is based on counterexamples. The second attacks the validity of a reconstructed argument for the sorry-regret hypothesis. It is desirable to reject the sorry-regret hypothesis since there is a component of regret that many will not wish to be saddled with as a condition of apologizing. To regret an act, one must wish that she had not performed that act. Since a person is the person she is (speaking loosely) because of the actions she has performed, for many actions, if one regrets an action, then she wishes that she were a different person. This is a worrisome consequence. (shrink)

Grelling's Paradox is the paradox which results from considering whether heterologicality, the word-property which a designator has when and only when the designator does not bear the word-property it designates, is had by 'heterologicality'. Although there has been some philosophical debate over its solution, Grelling's Paradox is nearly uniformly treated as a variant of either the Liar Paradox or Russell's Paradox, a paradox which does not present any philosophical challenges not already presented by the two better known paradoxes. The aims (...) of this paper are, first, to offer a precise formulation of Grelling's Paradox which is clearly distinguished from both the Liar Paradox and Russell's Paradox; second, to offer a solution to Grelling's Paradox which both resolves the paradoxical reasoning and accounts for unproblematic predications of heterologicality; and, third, to argue that there are two lessons to be drawn from Grelling's Paradox which have not yet been drawn from the Liar or Russell's Paradox. The first lesson is that it is possible for the semantic content of a predicate to be sensitive to the semantic context; i.e., it is possible for a predicate to be an indexical expression. The second lesson is that the semantic content of an indexical predicate, though unproblematic for many cases, can nevertheless be problematic in some cases. In Section 1, Grelling's Paradox is presented informally. After making some refinements, Grelling's Paradox is then presented formally. In Section 2, the formal version of Grelling's Paradox is evaluated, and several previously proposed solutions are discussed and argued to be inadequate. In Section 3, it is argued that the heterologicality predicate is an indexical expression. A semantics for the heterologicality predicate is given, and it is shown how this semantics accounts for the unproblematic predications of heterologicality, as well as the problematic cases, and therefore constitutes a satisfactory and complete solution to Grelling's Paradox. Objections to this solution are addressed in Section 4. The conclusions of this paper are summarized in Section 5. (shrink)

Tax compliance is a concern to governments around the world. Prior research (Alm, J. and I. Sanchez: 1995, KYKLOS 48, 3–19) has attributed unexplained inter-country differences in compliance rates to differences in social norms. Economics researchers studying tax compliance in the United States (U.S.) (see for example J. Andreoni et al.: 1998, Journal of Economic Literature 36, 818–860) have called for more attention to social (as opposed to economic) influences on tax compliance. In this study, we extend this prior research (...) by explicitly examining the role of social norms [Cialdini, R. and M. Trost: 1998, The Handbook of Social Psychology (Oxford University Press, New York)] on tax compliance in three different countries. We test our research hypotheses using a hypothetical compliance scenario, which was administered in Australia, Singapore, and the U.S. There were differences in compliance rates and social norms among the three countries. Factor analysis of the social norm questions identified three distinct social norm constructs. Two of these factors were significant in explaining tax compliance behavior. The first and most influential factor was taxpayers’ own personal moral beliefs, along with the beliefs of those close to them (e.g., friends and important others). The second significant factor represented societal views of proper behavior. We conclude that social norms help to explain tax compliance intentions and why tax compliance rates are higher than would be predicted by strictly economic models. (shrink)

Following an extensive review of the moral intensity literature, this article reports the findings of two studies (one between-subjects, the other within-subject) that examined the effect of manipulated and perceived moral intensity on ethical judgment. In the between-subjects study participants judged actions taken in manipulated high moral intensity scenarios to be more unethical than the same actions taken in manipulated low moral intensity scenarios. Findings were mixed for the effect of perceived moral intensity. Both probable magnitude of consequences (a factor (...) consisting of magnitude of consequences, probability of effect, and temporal immediacy) and social consensus had a significant effect; proximity did not. In the within-subject study manipulated moral intensity had a significant effect on ethical judgment, but perceived moral intensity did not. Regression of ethical judgment on age, gender, major, and the three perceived moral intensity factors was significant between-subjects, but not within-subject. Ethical judgment was found to be a more robust predictor of intention than perceived moral intensity using a within-subject design. (shrink)

This paper develops an account of pluralities based on the following simple claim: some things are nothing over and above the individual things they comprise. For some, this may seem like a mysterious statement, perhaps even meaningless; for others, like a truism, trivial and inferentially inert. I show that neither reaction is correct: the claim is both tractable and has important consequences for a number of debates in philosophy.

In 1991, Jones developed an issue-contingent model of ethical decision making in which moral intensity is posited to affect the four stages of Rest's 1986 model. Jones claimed that moral intensity, which is "the extent of issue-related moral imperative in a situation", consists of six characteristics: magnitude of consequences, social consensus, probability of effect, temporal immediacy, proximity, and concentration of effect. This article reports the findings of two studies that analyzed the factor structure of moral intensity, operationalized by a 12-item (...) Perceived Moral Intensity Scale adapted from the work of Sing-hapakdi et al. [1996, Journal of Business Research, 36, 245-255] and Frey [2000, Journal of Business Ethics, 26, 181-195]. The two items that were purported to measure CE were dropped due to their inability to effectively tap into the characteristic proposed by Jones. Factor analyses of the remaining 10 items supported a 3-factor structure, with the MC, PE, and TI items loading on the first factor, the PX items loading on the second factor, and the SC items loading on the third factor. These factors were labeled: Probable Magnitude of Consequences, Proximity, and Social Consensus. The authors conclude that moral intensity consists of three characteristics, rather than the six posited by Jones. (shrink)

In Part I, we presented and motivated a new formulation of Humean Supervenience about Laws of Nature (HS). Here in Part II, we present an epistemological argument in defense of HS, thus formulated. Our contention is that one can combine a modest realism about laws of nature with a proper recognition of the importance of empirical testability in the epistemology of science only if one accepts HS.

In Part I, we presented and motivated a new formulation of Humean Supervenience about Laws of Nature (HS). Here in Part II, we present an epistemological argument in defense of HS, thus formulated. Our contention is that one can combine a modest realism about laws of nature with a proper recognition of the importance of empirical testability in the epistemology of science only if one accepts HS.

[Robert Stalnaker] Saul Kripke made a convincing case that there are necessary truths that are knowable only a posteriori as well as contingent truths that are knowable a priori. A number of philosophers have used a two-dimensional model semantic apparatus to represent and clarify the phenomena that Kripke pointed to. According to this analysis, statements have truth-conditions in two different ways depending on whether one considers a possible world 'as actual' or 'as counterfactual' in determining the truth-value of the statement (...) relative to that possible world. There are no necessary a posteriori or contingent a priori propositions: rather, contingent a priori and necessary a posteriori statements are statements that are necessary when evaluated one way, and contingent when evaluated the other way. This paper distinguishes two ways that the two-dimensional framework can be interpreted, and argues that one of them gives the better account of what it means to 'consider a world as actual', but that it provides no support for any notion of purely conceptual a priori truth. /// [Thomas Baldwin] Two-dimensional possible world semantic theory suggests that Kripke's examples of the necessary a posteriori and contingent a priori should be handled by interpreting names as implicitly indexical. Like Stalnaker, I reject this account of names and accept that Kripke's examples have to be accommodated within a metasemantic theory. But whereas Stalnaker maintains that a metasemantic approach undermines the conception of a priori truth, I argue that it offers the opportunity to develop a conception of the a priori aspect of stipulations, conceived as linguistic performances. The resulting position accommodates Kripke's examples in a way which is both intrinsically plausible and fits with Kripke's actual discussion of them. (shrink)

In this article, I offer a reading of City of God 19.6 that is consonant with Augustine’s message to real judges. Often read as a suggestion that torture and execution are judicially necessary, I argue that 19.6 actually calls such necessities into question, though this is not its primary purpose; first and foremost, 19.6 is an indictment of Stoic apatheia. Situating 19.6 within Augustine’s larger polemic against the Stoics, I find that it presents the Stoic judge as a man who (...) lacks fellow feeling, and therefore, has only a parodic happiness, costly to himself and those judges. A new look at Augustine’s letters to judges confirms this reading, and shows that, for Augustine, the man of humanitas is the true model for the good judge, not the man of apatheia. (shrink)

The factor structure of the Multidimensional Ethics Scale (MES; Reidenbach and Robin: 1988, Journal of Business Ethics 7, 871–879; 1990, Journal of Business Ethics 9, 639–653) was examined for the 8-item short form (N = 328) and the original 30-item pool (N = 260). The objectives of the study were: to verify the dimensionality of the MES; to increase the amount of true cross-scenario variance through the use of 18 scenarios varying in moral intensity (Jones: 1991, Academy of Management Review (...) 16, 366–395); and, to examine the items for measurement precision using item-response theory (IRT) methods. Results of confirmatory and exploratory factor analysis failed to conclusively support the hypothesized 3- (short form) or 5-factor (long form) structure; both instruments were instead dominated by a general factor. Item response theory analyses using Samejima’s (1969, Psychometrika Monograph Supplement 34, (4, Pt. 2)) graded response model revealed that many items in the 30-item pool performed very well, and suggested that a different collection of items be used to form a short-form version of the MES. Our proposed 10-item instrument includes more discriminating items than the 8-item version, and has the added advantage of including two items from each of the five ethical philosophies represented in the original 30-item pool. (shrink)

The Asymmetry consists of two claims. (A) That a possible person's life would be abjectly miserable –less than worth living – counts against bringing that person into existence. But (B) that a distinct possible person's life would be worth living or even well worth living does not count in favour of bringing that person into existence. In recent years, the view that the two halves of the Asymmetry are jointly untenable has become increasingly entrenched. If we say all persons matter (...) morally whether they exist or not and on that basis try to explain the first half of the Asymmetry, we lose the second half of the Asymmetry. If we say that some persons do not matter morally and some do and on that basis try to explain the second half of the Asymmetry, we lose the first half of the Asymmetry – or else find ourselves with a principle that is either inconsistent or otherwise deeply troubled in some way that has nothing to do with the content of the Asymmetry itself. In this article, I propose an alternative approach to the Asymmetry which I will call Variabilism. By understanding each and every person, whether existing or not, to matter morally but variably– such that the moral significance of any loss incurred by any person is considered to depend, not on who incurs that loss and whether that person matters morally, but rather on where that loss is incurred in relation to the person who incurs it – we can both nicely ground the two halves of the Asymmetry and avoid the conceptual difficulties that have plagued competing approaches. (shrink)

According to the Asymmetry, it is wrong to bring a miserable child into existence but permissible not to bring a happy child into existence. When it comes to procreation, we don’t have complete procreative liberty. But we do have some discretion. The Asymmetry seems highly intuitive. But a plausible account of the Asymmetry has been surprisingly difficult to provide, and it may well be that most moral philosophers – or at least most consequentialists – think that all reasonable efforts to (...) provide such an account have by now been exhausted. In this paper, I argue that, despite the difficulties, the Asymmetry is too important to be set aside. I also note a handful of accounts of the Asymmetry that have been proposed and why they fail. It seems, for example, that it will not do to say that some people matter morally and others don’t, or that a person matters morally in some worlds but not others. My own conclusion is that, while we are bound to say all people matter morally – you, me and the merely possible – we are not bound to say that all their losses– or all ours– matter morally. We can instead distinguish between morally significant and insignificant losses, with the distinction between the two being a matter of where the loss is incurred in relation to the person who incurs it. This way of looking at things – which I call Variabilism– provides the basis for a plausible account of the Asymmetry. The availability of such an account suggests, I think, that our prospects for rescuing the Asymmetry are bright. (shrink)

Throughout his career, French philosopher Pierre Bourdieu sought to interrogate what he described as the 'social unconscious', the means by which power is held and transmitted across generations. Bourdieu's work has been hugely influential in disciplines across the social sciences and humanities for decades, yet Schirato and Roberts argue that few scholars are using his work to its full potential. Bourdieu's work is so wide-ranging that commentary tends to focus on specific theoretical concepts he developed or his books on (...) particular fields of inquiry. However he continued to develop these concepts in his work across his whole career, and much of the richness of his thinking is lost if this isn't taken into account. Drawing on recently released lectures, Schirato and Roberts offer a systematic account of Bourdieu's full body of work, from his early research in Algiers to his last lectures in Paris. They show how Bourdieu continued to develop his concepts of habitus, field, capital, power and socio-cultural reproduction well into his later years. They also offer a nuanced reading of Bourdieu's thinking about education, class, language, knowledge and culture beyond the individual books Bourdieu published on these topics. This critical introduction to Bourdieu is essential reading for all Bourdieu scholars, and for researchers and thinkers using Bourdieu's work in their own social and cultural analysis. 'A terrific book, which sets out a comprehensive overview of Bourdieu's oeuvre in a way that no other text I know has done' - Professor John Frow, University of Sydney. (shrink)

Most evolutionary analyses of animal communication suggest that low-cost signals can evolve only when both the signaller and the recipient rank outcomes in the same order. When there is a conflict of interest between sender and receiver, honest signals must be costly. However, recent work suggests that low-cost signals can be evolutionarily stable, even when the sender and the receiver rank outcomes in different orders, as long as the interest in achieving coordination is sufficiently great. In this paper, we extend (...) this body of work by analysing a game theory model that shows that low-cost signals can evolve when there are conflicts of interest and no interest in coordination, as long as individuals interact repeatedly. We also present an empirical example indicating that female rhesus macaques, Macaca mulatta, use honest, low-cost, vocal signals to facilitate interactions when conflicts of interest exist. (shrink)

Traditionally, the sense of touch—alongside the senses of taste and smell—has been excluded from the aesthetic domain. These proximal modalities are thought to deliver only sensory pleasures, not the complex, world-directed perceptual states that characterize aesthetic experience. In this paper, I argue that this tradition fails to recognize the perceptual possibilities of haptic touch, which allows us to experience properties of the objects with which we make bodily contact, including their weight, shape, solidity, elasticity, and smoothness. These features, moreover, may (...) be indicative of how well-suited an object is for its function, and in feeling them we can thus feel the positive aesthetic quality of functional beauty. (shrink)

Artificial intelligence (AI) assurance is an umbrella term describing many approaches—such as impact assessment, audit, and certification procedures—used to provide evidence that an AI system is legal, ethical, and technically robust. AI assurance approaches largely focus on two overlapping categories of harms: deployment harms that emerge at, or after, the point of use, and individual harms that directly impact a person as an individual. Current approaches generally overlook upstream collective and societal harms associated with the development of systems, such as (...) resource extraction and processing, exploitative labour practices and energy intensive model training. Thus, the scope of current AI assurance practice is insufficient for ensuring that AI is ethical in a holistic sense, i.e. in ways that are legally permissible, socially acceptable, economically viable and environmentally sustainable. This article addresses this shortcoming by arguing for a broader approach to AI assurance that is sensitive to the full scope of AI development and deployment harms. To do so, the article maps harms related to AI and highlights three examples of harmful practices that occur upstream in the AI supply chain and impact the environment, labour, and data exploitation. It then reviews assurance mechanisms used in adjacent industries to mitigate similar harms, evaluating their strengths, weaknesses, and how effectively they are being applied to AI. Finally, it provides recommendations as to how a broader approach to AI assurance can be implemented to mitigate harms more effectively across the whole AI supply chain. (shrink)

It is often presumed that anti-haecceitists are not committed to the identity of indiscernibles. However, I argue that anti-haecceitism implies a particularly strong thesis about when individuals are indiscernible which motivates the identity of indiscernibles. The argument is first sketched intuitively and then formalized in a system of higher-order modal logic.

I describe a problem about the relations among symmetries, laws and measurable quantities. I explain why several ways of trying to solve it will not work, and I sketch a solution that might work. I discuss this problem in the context of Newtonian theories, but it also arises for many other physical theories. The problem is that there are two ways of defining the space-time symmetries of a physical theory: as its dynamical symmetries or as its empirical symmetries. The two (...) definitions are not equivalent, yet they pick out the same extension. This coincidence cries out for explanation, and it is not clear what the explanation could be. The Puzzle: Symmetries, Measurability and Invariance 1.1 The symmetries and the measurable quantities of Newtonian mechanics 1.2 The puzzle Two Easy Answers Another Unsuccessful Solution: Appeal to Geometrical Symmetries Locating the Puzzle The Relation between Laws and Measurability A Possible Solution CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)

Background: Empirical ethics inquiry works from the notion that stakeholder perspectives are necessary for gauging the ethical acceptability of human studies and assuring that research aligns with societal expectations. Although common, studies involving different populations often entail comparisons of trends that problematize the interpretation of results. Using graphical model selection—a technique aimed at transcending limitations of conventional methods—this report presents data on the ethics of clinical research with two objectives: (1) to display the patterns of views held by ill and (...) healthy individuals in clinical research as a test of the study's original hypothesis and (2) to introduce graphical model selection as a key analytic tool for ethics research. Methods: In this institutional review board (IRB)-approved, National Institutes of Health-funded project, data were collected from 60 mentally ill and 43 physically ill clinical research protocol volunteers, 47 healthy protocol-consented participants, and 29 healthy individuals without research protocol experience. Respondents were queried on the ethical acceptability of research involving people with mental and physical illness (i.e., cancer, HIV, depression, schizophrenia, and posttraumatic stress disorder) and non-illness-related sources of vulnerability (e.g., age, class, gender, ethnicity). Using a statistical algorithm, we selected graphical models to display interrelationships among responses to questions. Results: Both mentally and physically ill protocol volunteers revealed a high degree of connectivity among ethically salient perspectives. Healthy participants, irrespective of research protocol experience, revealed patterns of views that were not highly connected. Conclusions: Between ill and healthy protocol participants, the pattern of views was vastly different. Experience with illness was tied to dense connectivity, whereas healthy individuals expressed views with sparse connections. In offering a nuanced perspective on the interrelation of ethically relevant responses, graphical model selection has the potential to bring new insights to the field of ethics. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Broome and others have argued that it makes no sense, or at least that it cannot be true, to say that it is better for a given person that he or she exist than not. That argument can be understood to suggest that, likewise, it makes no sense, or at least that it cannot be true, to say that it is worse for a given person that he or she exist than that he or she never have existed at (...) all. This argument is of critical importance to the question of whether consequentialist theory should take a traditional, aggregative form or a less conventional, person‐affecting, or person‐based, form. I believe that, potentially, the argument represents a far more serious threat to the person‐based approach than does, for example, Parfit's two medical programmes example. Parfit's example nicely illustrates the distinction between aggregative and person‐based approaches and raises important questions. But the example — though not, I think, by Parfit — is sometimes pressed into service as a full‐fledged counterexample against the person‐based approach. As such, I argue, the example is not persuasive. In contrast, the Broomeian argument, if correct, is definitive. For that argument relies on certain metaphysical assumptions and various uncontroversial normative claims — and hence nicely avoids putting into play the controversial normative claims that lie at the very heart of the debate. The purpose of the present paper, then, is to evaluate the Broomeian argument. I argue that this potentially definitive challenge to a person‐based approach does not in fact succeed. (shrink)

This article deals with the question of what time reversal means. It begins with a presentation of the standard account of time reversal, with plenty of examples, followed by a popular non-standard account. I argue that, in spite of recent commentary to the contrary, the standard approach to the meaning of time reversal is the only one that is philosophically and physically viable. The article concludes with a few open research problems about time reversal.

This article aims to clarify the view that thick concepts are irreducibly thick. I do this by putting the disentangling argument in its place and then setting out what nonreductivists about the thick are committed to. To distinguish the view from possible reductive accounts, defenders of irreducible thickness are, I argue, committed to the claim that evaluative concepts and properties are nonevaluatively shapeless. This in turn requires a commitment to (radical) holism and particularism. Nonreductivists are also committed to the claim (...) that a thick concept is in itself evaluative, and not evaluative because of any link to thin evaluation. (shrink)

As a graduate student in Linguistics at UMass/Amherst in the 1980s, I was fortunate to be exposed to a number of new developments bearing on the relationship between formal semantics and pragmatics. In the 1970s under the influence of Cresswell, Lewis, Montague, and Partee, enormous progress in semantics was made possible by narrowing the focus of the field mainly to the consideration of the conventional, truth conditional content of an indicative utterance, calculated compositionally as a function of the semantic contributions (...) of its parts and its syntactic structure. Context was typically relegated to the background, in the form of indices of evaluation, though occasionally popping out for more serious consideration, as in the work of Kaplan, Karttunen, and Stalnaker. But eventually the nature of the rigorous formal enterprise itself, confronted with phenomena like Geach’s donkey sentences, presupposition projection, and the context-dependence of tense and aspect, forced the field into a more careful, thorough reconsideration of the relationship between context and content. Hence were born the dynamic theories of interpretation, beginning with Hans Kamp (1981) and Irene Heim (1982), who were both at UMass during my stay there, Heim completing her dissertation and Kamp on the faculty in Philosophy. Such frameworks posit a dynamic interchange between content and context, each dependent on the other, even in the course of interpreting a single utterance. Mats Rooth was also a graduate student at UMass at that time, and wrote his influential dissertation (1985) proposing an alternative semantics for the interpretation of prosodic focus, inter alia shedding light on how focus contributes to the contextual domain restriction of various operators. (shrink)

There is something amiss about post-Rawlsian efforts to bring political theory down to earth by insisting upon the political primacy of the question of legitimacy, peace, or order. The intuition driving much realism seems to be that we must first agree to get along, and only then can we get down to the business of pursuing justice. I argue that the ideological narratives of the powerful pose a political problem for this primacy of legitimacy thesis. To prioritize the achievement of (...) democratic legitimacy seems to make sense only to the extent that we already live in a world in which systematic domination—and its ideological baggage—has been stamped out. I draw on the social study of domination for the sake of combatting in political theory the temptation to focus on the static design of the constitutional state at the expense of ignoring or even condemning the social processes that motivate legal and constitutional changes. (shrink)

In _Pharmaceutical Freedom_ Professor Flanigan argues we ought to grant people self-medication rights for the same reasons we respect people’s right to give (or refuse to give) informed consent to treatment. Despite being the most comprehensive argument in favour of self-medication written to date, Flanigan’s _Pharmaceutical Freedom_ leaves a number of questions unanswered, making it unclear how the safe-guards Flanigan incorporates to protect people from harming themselves would work in practice. In this paper, I extend Professor Flanigan’s account by discussing (...) a hypothetical case to illustrate how these safe-guards could work together to protect people from harms caused by their own ignorance or incompetence. (shrink)

While many scholars have explored the Ciceronian roots of Augustine’s thought, the influence of De Finibus on De ciuitate dei has, as yet, remained unexamined. Dismissed by Testard as abstract and scholastic, De Finibus has long remained in the shadow of Cicero’s other work of moral philosophy, Tusculanae Dispuationes. This article reconsiders the nature of De Finibus and demonstrates its importance for De ciuitate dei. It begins by arguing that the dialogue is actually a meta-commentary on philosophic dogmatism, showing how (...) each of the schools that Cicero’s interlocutors represent—i.e., the Epicureans, Stoics, and Peripatetics—claim certainty about the Wise Man’s happiness. At the heart of the dialogue’s drama is Cicero’s skepticism about this claim. This article then shows how Augustine picks up on Cicero’s explanation as to why the adherents of these schools cling so tightly to their belief in the Wise Man’s happiness. Echoing Cicero, Augustine suggests that the reason for this belief is therapeutic. Going beyond Cicero, however, he diagnoses it as a symptom of pride, arguing that what the philosophers really need is not a model of self-sufficient virtue, but a Mediator. The article ends by briefly considering how Cicero might respond to Augustine’s position. (shrink)

This article introduces a new reflection principle. It is based on the idea that whatever is true in all entities of some kind is also true in a set-sized collection of them. Unlike standard reflection principles, it does not re-interpret parameters or predicates. This allows it to be both consistent in all higher-order languages and remarkably strong. For example, I show that in the language of second-order set theory with predicates for a satisfaction relation, it is consistent relative to the (...) existence of a 2-extendible cardinal (Theorem 7.12) and implies the existence of a proper class of 1-extendible cardinals (Theorem 7.9). (shrink)