We have come to regard nonhuman animals as beings of concern, and we even grant them some legal protections. But until we understand animals as moral agents in and of themselves, they will be nothing more than distant recipients of our largesse. Featuring original essays by philosophers, ethicists, religionists, and ethologists, including Marc Bekoff, Frans de Waal, and Elisabetta Palagi, this collection demonstrates the ability of animals to operate morally, process ideas of good and bad, and think seriously about sociality (...) and virtue. Envisioning nonhuman animals as distinct moral agents marks a paradigm shift in animal studies, as well as philosophy itself. Drawing not only on ethics and religion but also on law, sociology, and cognitive science, the essays in this collection test long-held certainties about moral boundaries and behaviors and prove that nonhuman animals possess complex reasoning capacities, sophisticated empathic sociality, and dynamic and enduring self-conceptions. Rather than claim animal morality is the same as human morality, this book builds an appreciation of the variety and character of animal sensitivities and perceptions across multiple disciplines, moving animal welfarism in promising new directions. (shrink)

The Oxford Handbook of Jewish Ethics and Morality offers a collection of original essays--historical and contemporary, as well as philosophical and practical--by leading scholars from around the world. The first section of the volume describes the history of the Jewish tradition's moral thought, from the Bible to contemporary Jewish approaches. The second part includes chapters on specific fields in ethics, including the ethics of medicine, business, sex, speech, politics, war, and the environment.

A collection of essays examining the contentious, dynamic, and ethically complicated relationship between race and religion in Judaism. Includes perspectives from the fields of history, philosophy, sociology, ethics, religious studies, law, psychology, literary studies, and theology.

ONE LINK WITHIN JUDAISM BETWEEN ETHICS AND LAW MAY BE FOUND IN the deployment of rationales in halakhah, Jewish law. Although rationales exist in biblical as well as rabbinic legal sources, in this essay I explore two rabbinic examples that are frequently cited, considered closely related, and applied to interactions between Jews and gentiles: mipnei darkhei shalom and mipnei eivah. I survey the broad range of issues to which these rationales are attached, evaluate current theories interpreting these rationales and their (...) relationship to each other, and conclude with reflections on the dynamic tension between and historical development of halakhah and ethical concerns. (shrink)

Torture continues to be a pressing political issue in North America, yet religious scholarly reflection on the ethics of torture remains all but sidelined in public discourse for a variety of complex reasons. These reasons are explored—and critiqued—in this collection of reflections by Christian, Jewish, Muslim, and feminist religious ethicists. These scholars find that historical amnesia, forced if not twisted readings of classical texts and contemporary human rights instruments, and sociological factors are but a few of the factors challenging contemporary (...) religious ethical discourse on torture. (shrink)

Prayer has long been a staple in the proverbial Jewish medical toolbox. While the vast majority of relevant prayers seek renewed health and prolonged life, what might prayers for someone to die look like? What ethical dimensions are involved in such liturgical expressions? By examining both prayers for oneself to die and prayers for someone else to die, this essay discerns reasons why it may be good and even necessary to pray for a patient's demise.

A surprising lack of consensus exists among contemporary Jewish scholars about Judaism's position vis-à-vis torture. Some claim that Judaism condones torture while others insist that Judaism condemns it. These diverging opinions on such a troubling practice suggest an ambivalence deep within the Judaic textual tradition about torturing bodies. This brief essay critiques both perspectives for twisting the textual tradition and offers some preliminary suggestions for a more robust Judaic approach to torture.

That Jews are concerned about human rights is distinct from why Jews should be concerned about rights in the first place. This project analyzes the reasons Jews in the twentieth century put forward to convince co-religionists to take rights seriously. Focusing on the content of these arguments facilitates dividing the proffered rationales into three broad categories--the temporal, the innate, and the philosophical. Analysis of each category reveals subdivisions, reflecting the many ways Jews try to persuade each other to care about (...) human rights. This taxonomy, unlike others, highlights the different ways in which Jews conceptualize the burning ethical questions of our day: of how and why to be Jewish and modern. These rationales therefore are understood to function as moral reasons and, as such, can be assessed by their relative claims. (shrink)

That Jews are concerned about human rights is distinct from why Jews should be concerned about rights in the first place. This project analyzes the reasons Jews in the twentieth century put forward to convince co‐religionists to take rights seriously. Focusing on the content of these arguments facilitates dividing the proffered rationales into three broad categories—the temporal, the innate, and the philosophical. Analysis of each category reveals subdivisions, reflecting the many ways Jews try to persuade each other to care about (...) human rights. This taxonomy, unlike others, highlights the different ways in which Jews conceptualize the burning ethical questions of our day: of how and why to be Jewish and modern. These rationales therefore are understood to function as moral reasons and, as such, can be assessed by their relative claims. (shrink)

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought the live music industry to an abrupt halt; subsequently, musicians are looking for ways to replicate the live concert experience virtually. The present study sought to investigate differences in aesthetic judgments of a live concert vs. a recorded concert, and whether these responses vary based on congruence between musical artist and piece. Participants made continuous ratings of their felt pleasure either during a live concert or while viewing an audiovisual recorded version of the same joint (...) concert given by a university band and a United States Army band. Each band played two pieces: a United States patriotic piece and a non-patriotic piece. Results indicate that, on average, participants reported more pleasure while listening to pieces that were congruent, which did not vary based on live vs. lab listening context: listeners preferred patriotic music when played by the army band and non-patriotic music when played by the university band. Overall, these results indicate that felt pleasure in response to music may vary based on listener expectations of the musical artist, such that listeners prefer musical pieces that “fit” with the particular artist. When considering implications for concerts during the COVID-19 pandemic, our results indicate that listeners may experience similar degrees of pleasure even while viewing a recorded concert, suggesting that virtual concerts are a reasonable way to elicit pleasure from audiences when live performances are not possible. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 27.2 (2003) 255-268 [Access article in PDF] The Tree of Knowledge and Darwinian Literary Study Jonathan Gottscha I THE BRANCHES OF KNOWLEDGE are not strewn randomly on the ground; they are part of a coherent, interconnected tree. Physics is the most fundamental of all the sciences, so it is the trunk of the tree. The branch of chemistry emerges from physics, because the laws of (...) chemistry depend on the laws of physics: chemical reactions occur the way they do because of the physical properties of atoms. Biology's branch splits off from chemistry's: the molecules that comprise living things are bound by the rules of chemistry. Scientists, while grasping this fundamental interconnection of the broad boughs of the natural sciences, 1 have rarely craned their necks sufficiently to glimpse the upper reaches of the tree of knowledge: the green canopy of human culture that is the traditional jurisdiction of the social sciences and humanities. In fact, scholars from all disciplines have mostly proceeded as though the greenery above was the outgrowth of a neighboring tree from a fundamentally different species.Since the 1960s, however, a maverick band of Darwinian neck-craners have been demonstrating that the stuff of human culture, studied in the humanities and social sciences, is a contiguous part of the tree of knowledge: human culture and behavior grow out of human biology. 2 These scholars and scientists continue to define themselves by different names depending on subtleties in their particular approaches: Darwinian psychology, sociobiology, Darwinian anthropology, biosociology, human behavioral ecology, human ethology, and evolutionary psychology. 3 However, sacrificing some precision on the alter of clarity, I will refer to all of the above approaches with the umbrella term of human [End Page 255] behavioral biology, understood in its most expansive sense as the study of how millions of years of evolution shaped the human mind, and thus human behavior, and thus human culture. No matter how human behavioral biologists define their work, they all share the conviction that human behavior, psychology, and culture cannot be fully understood separate from human bio-evolutionary history.Darwinian excavation of the foundations of human nature has inspired a revolutionary movement in the social sciences that proceeds to this day. Like most revolutions, this one has seen its share of rolling heads and intellectual bloodshed. Starting with the "sociobiology debates" of the late 1970s through mid-80s and continuing through the "science wars" of the early-mid 1990s allegations and recriminations of the most serious sort have been almost casually poured into the air: racism, sexism, Social Darwinism, biological determinism, disciplinary colonialism, disciplinary xenophobia, and "biophobia." 4 However, despite entrenched, sometimes zealous opposition, evolutionary thinking has firmly established itself in the social sciences. Thumbing through leading social science journals, it is no longer a shock to encounter articles exploring traditional topics with shiny new Darwinian tools. This stands in stark contrast to the situation in the decades immediately following World War II, where applying biology to human behavior and culture was virtually taboo. In fact, the UNESCO statement of 1952 explicitly tabooed human behavioral biology as scientifically and politically incorrect. Moreover, this phenomenon is in marked contrast to the mainstream social science of the late 1970s and early 1980s, which was in the midst of a wicked backlash against the resurgence of biological inquiry into behavior represented in sociobiology.Currently, while human behavioral biology retains many social scientist critics, and while certain social science fields remain largely hostile or indifferent, invoking biology to explain social behavior is moving toward the mainstream. Almost thirty years after E. O. Wilson made, in Sociobiology (1975), his first call for a merger of disciplines under a new biological synthesis, biology-savvy social scientists and social-science-savvy biologists have provided startling new insights into a host of topics traditionally examined in isolation from biology: gender differences, criteria for mate choice, resource acquisition and allocation, aggression, cooperation, xenophobia, ethnocentrism, sexual politics, religious sensibilities, social hierarchy, moral codes, etc. 5Though one must be careful not to overstate the progress, we are [End Page 256] witnessing... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Oxford Handbook of Jewish Ethics and Morality Edited by Elliot N. Dorff and Jonathan K. CraneLouis E. NewmanThe Oxford Handbook of Jewish Ethics and Morality EDITED BY ELLIOT N. DORFF AND JONATHAN K. CRANE New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. 499 pp. $150The Oxford Handbook of Jewish Ethics and Morality addresses what has long been a major lacuna in the field of Jewish studies. (...) No one who studies the history of Judaism would deny that ethics has always occupied a central place in Jewish thought and practice. Yet the scope and range of Jewish ethical reflection, the variety of ethical theories that have animated this tradition, and the diversity of ethical viewpoints represented by major thinkers across the centuries remain far less widely understood than they should be. With the publication of this outstanding and highly readable collection of essays, however, Elliot Dorff and Jonathan Crane have given us the most definitive and encyclopedic presentation of Jewish ethics ever assembled.This latest addition to the Oxford Handbook series encompasses twenty-nine essays that span the history of Jewish ethics from biblical times to the present, but that also introduce readers to its applied and theoretical dimensions as well as the practitioners and scholars who collectively define the field of Jewish ethics. Part 1, “Jewish Ethical Theories,” which is more accurately a comprehensive history of Jewish ethics, includes insightful pieces on biblical, rabbinic, and medieval ethics, but also pieces on key figures in the modern period from Baruch Spinoza to Martin Buber, Abraham Isaac Kook, and Joseph B. Soloveitchik, among others. This section also includes important explications of the ethics of the various modern movements of Judaism (Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, and Reconstructionist) as well as essays on specific events and theoretical perspectives that have shaped Jewish ethical discourse in the postwar period—the Holocaust, feminism, and postmodernism. What emerges from these short but remarkably focused and accessible essays is a rich tapestry in which the wide array of genres and methods that characterize the ethics of Judaism are on full display.The second half of the volume is devoted to applied ethics, and here again the diversity of Jewish ethics is showcased. The topics covered include bioethics, the ethics of speech, sexuality, business, the treatment of animals and the environment, politics (both in America and in Israel), criminal justice, and war. The topic of bioethics is wisely subdivided so that we find separate treatments of beginning and end of life, of access to health care, and of genetic technologies. [End Page 219] While some of these essays rehearse positions that will be familiar to those within the tradition, each is an original contribution designed to present the spectrum of positions on that issue that have been articulated by contemporary Jewish ethicists. Accordingly, this volume will now become the first place to look for broad, representative presentations on the most commonly discussed ethical issues of our time.The value of the whole collection is further enhanced by the editors’ introductions, which place the individual essays in context and explain their editorial decisions in selecting and arranging the contributions as they have. Each essay is accompanied by a substantial list of suggestions for further reading that will be valuable to readers in their own right. The entire volume is rounded out with a subject index and a list of references to classical Jewish literature. One could simply not ask for a more carefully constructed or broadly useful handbook on this subject.In any edited collection of this nature, the quality of the individual contributions will vary to some extent. In this instance, the overall quality is extremely high, which is a tribute both to the individual contributors and to the editorial guidance provided by Dorff and Crane. Still, one cannot help but notice that some essays in the second section of the book are more descriptive (e.g., Daniel Sinclair’s essay on end-of-life issues) while others are more ideologically driven (e.g., Arthur Waskow’s essay on environmental ethics). Similarly, while the essays average approximately fifteen to twenty pages each, a few are shorter and more cursory (e.g., Aaron Mackler’s essay on... (shrink)

Jonathan Y. Tsou examines and defends positions on central issues in philosophy of psychiatry. The positions defended assume a naturalistic and realist perspective and are framed against skeptical perspectives on biological psychiatry. Issues addressed include the reality of mental disorders; mechanistic and disease explanations of abnormal behavior; definitions of mental disorder; natural and artificial kinds in psychiatry; biological essentialism and the projectability of psychiatric categories; looping effects and the stability of mental disorders; psychiatric classification; and the validity of the (...) DSM's diagnostic categories. The main argument defended by Tsou is that genuine mental disorders are biological kinds with harmful effects. This argument opposes the dogma that mental disorders are necessarily diseases that result from biological dysfunction. Tsou contends that the broader ideal of biological kinds offers a more promising and empirically ascertainable naturalistic standard for assessing the reality of mental disorders and the validity of psychiatric categories. (shrink)

Consider a circle and a pair of its semicircles. Which is prior, the whole or its parts? Are the semicircles dependent abstractions from their whole, or is the circle a derivative construction from its parts? Now in place of the circle consider the entire cosmos (the ultimate concrete whole), and in place of the pair of semicircles consider the myriad particles (the ultimate concrete parts). Which if either is ultimately prior, the one ultimate whole or its many ultimate parts?

This article gives an overview of some recent debates about the relationship between reasons and rational requirements of coherence - e.g. the requirements to be consistent in our beliefs and intentions, and to intend what we take to be the necessary means to our ends.

The Problem of Perception is a pervasive and traditional problem about our ordinary conception of perceptual experience. The problem is created by the phenomena of perceptual illusion and hallucination: if these kinds of error are possible, how can perceptual experience be what we ordinarily understand it to be: something that enables direct perception of the world? These possibilities of error challenge the intelligibility of our ordinary conception of perceptual experience; the major theories of experience are responses to this challenge.

The revised edition of this highly successful text provides a clear and accessible introduction to some of the most important questions of political philosophy. Organized around major issues, Wolff provides the structure that beginners need, while also introducing some distinctive ideas of his own.

Dispositions are essential to our understanding of the world. Dispositions: A Debate is an extended dialogue between three distinguished philosophers - D.M. Armstrong, C.B. Martin and U.T. Place - on the many problems associated with dispositions, which reveals their own distinctive accounts of the nature of dispositions. These are then linked to other issues such as the nature of mind, matter, universals, existence, laws of nature and causation.

The paper examines the contribution of the French philosopher Michel Foucault to the subject of ethics in organizations. The paper combines an analysis of Foucault’s work on discipline and control, with an examination of his later work on the ethical subject and technologies of the self. Our paper argues that the work of the later Foucault provides an important contribution to business ethics theory, practice and pedagogy. We discuss how it offers an alternative avenue to traditional normative ethical theory that (...) both converges and diverges with other extant alternatives. By situating ethics as practices of the self, and by demonstrating the conditions under which freedom in organizations can be exercised, Foucault’s ethics attempt to connect an understanding and critique of power with a personal project of self. He therefore provides a theory of subjectivity that potentially informs a reshaping of contemporary virtue ethics theory, value-based management, and business ethics teaching. (shrink)

The fall of the Berlin Wall had enormous symbolic resonance, marking the collapse of Marxist politics and economics. Indeed, Marxist regimes have failed miserably, and with them, it seems, all reason to take the writings of Karl Marx seriously. Jonathan Wolff argues that if we detach Marx the critic of current society from Marx the prophet of some never-to-be-realized worker's paradise, he remains the most impressive critic we have of liberal, capitalist, bourgeois society. The author shows how Marx's main (...) ideas still shed light on wider concerns about culture and society and he guides the reader through Marx's notoriously difficult writings. Wolff also argues that the value of a great thinker does not depend on his or her views being true, but on other features such as originality, insight, and systematic vision. From this perspective, Marx still richly deserves to be read. Why Read Marx Today? reinstates Marx as an important critic of current society, and not just a figure of historical interest. (shrink)

Much discussion about experimental philosophy and philosophical methodology has been framed in terms of the reliability of intuitions, and even when it has not been about reliability per se, it has been focused on whether intuitions meet whatever conditions they need to meet to be trustworthy as evidence. But really that question cannot be answered independently from the questions, evidence for what theories arrived at by what sorts of inferences? I will contend here that not just philosophy's sources of evidence, (...) but also its inferential resources, are in great need of closer examination. (shrink)

Brentano’s account of what he called intentionale Inexistenz — what we now call intentionality — is without question one of the most important parts of his philosophy, and one of the most influential ideas in late 19th-century philosophy. Here I will explain how this idea figures in Brentano’s central text, Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint (Brentano 1995a). I will then briefly explain how Brentano’s ideas about intentionality evolved after the first publication of this work in 1874, and how they were (...) then misinterpreted by some influential analytic philosophers. (shrink)

Newcomers to the philosophy of mind are sometimes resistant to the idea that pain is a mental state. If asked to defend their view, they might say something like this: pain is a physical state, it is a state of the body. A pain in one’s leg feels to be in the leg, not ‘in the mind’. After all, sometimes people distinguish pain which is ‘all in the mind’ from a genuine pain, sometimes because the second is ‘physical’ while the (...) first is not. And we also occasionally distinguish mental pain (which is normally understood as some kind of emotional distress) from the ‘physical pain’ one feels in one’s body. So what can be meant by saying that pain is a mental state? Of course, it only takes a little reflection shows that this naive view is mistaken. Pain is a state of consciousness, or an event in consciousness, and whether or not all states of mind are conscious, it is indisputable that only minds, or states of mind, are conscious.2 But does the naive view tell us anything about the concept of pain, or the concept of mind? I think it does. In this paper, I shall give reasons for thinking that consciousness is a form of intentionality, the mind’s ‘direction upon its objects’. I shall claim that the consciousness involved in bodily sensations like pain is constituted by the mind’s direction upon the part or region of the body where the sensation feels to be. Given this, it is less surprising that the naive view of pain says what it does: the apparent ‘physicality’ of pain is a consequence of confusing the object of the intentional state—the part of the body in which the pain is felt—with the state of being in pain. (shrink)

When can a Bayesian investigator select an hypothesis H and design an experiment (or a sequence of experiments) to make certain that, given the experimental outcome(s), the posterior probability of H will be lower than its prior probability? We report an elementary result which establishes sufficient conditions under which this reasoning to a foregone conclusion cannot occur. Through an example, we discuss how this result extends to the perspective of an onlooker who agrees with the investigator about the statistical model (...) for the data but who holds a different prior probability for the statistical parameters of that model. We consider, specifically, one-sided and two-sided statistical hypotheses involving i.i.d. Normal data with conjugate priors. In a concluding section, using an "improper" prior, we illustrate how the preceding results depend upon the assumption that probability is countably additive. (shrink)

When can a Bayesian investigator select an hypothesis H and design an experiment to make certain that, given the experimental outcome, the posterior probability of H will be lower than its prior probability? We report an elementary result which establishes sufficient conditions under which this reasoning to a foregone conclusion cannot occur. Through an example, we discuss how this result extends to the perspective of an onlooker who agrees with the investigator about the statistical model for the data but who (...) holds a different prior probability for the statistical parameters of that model. We consider, specifically, one-sided and two-sided statistical hypotheses involving i.i.d. Normal data with conjugate priors. In a concluding section, using an "improper" prior, we illustrate how the preceding results depend upon the assumption that probability is countably additive. (shrink)

Abstract:This paper investigates whether, in theoretical terms, corporations can be citizens. The argument is based on the observation that the debate on “corporate citizenship” (CC) has only paid limited attention to the actual notion of citizenship. Where it has been discussed, authors have either largely left the concept of CC unquestioned, or applied rather unidimensional and decontextualized notions of citizenship to the corporate sphere. The paper opens with a critical discussion of a major contribution to the CC literature, the work (...) of Logsdon and Wood (Wood and Logsdon 2001; Logsdon and Wood 2002). It continues with a consideration of the nature and role of metaphors for business and of the contestable nature of the political concept of citizenship. It evaluates corporations as citizens through a four-dimensional framework of democratic citizenship offered by Stokes (2002). The analysis suggests that corporations do not easily fit the “liberal minimalist” model of citizenship. It finds, however some possibilities for fit with the three more participatory models. The paper concludes by cautioning against basing corporate citizenship on legal and administrative status or identity, and mapping out specific criteria by which we might determine whether corporations could be considered as citizens by virtue of their participation in processes of governance. (shrink)

Presentists, who believe that only present objects exist, face a problem concerning truths about the past. Presentists should (but cannot) locate truth-makers for truths about the past. What can presentists say in response? We identify two rival factions ‘upstanding’ and ‘nefarious’ presentists. Upstanding presentists aim to meet the challenge, positing presently existing truth-makers for truths about the past; nefarious presentists aim to shirk their responsibilities, using the language of truth-maker theory but without paying any ontological price. We argue that presentists (...) should be nefarious presentists. (shrink)

Sense-perception—the awareness or apprehension of things by sight, hearing, touch, smell and taste—has long been a preoccupation of philosophers. One pervasive and traditional problem, sometimes called “the problem of perception”, is created by the phenomena of perceptual illusion and hallucination: if these kinds of error are possible, how can perception be what it intuitively seems to be, a direct and immediate access to reality? The present entry is about how these possibilities of error challenge the intelligibility of the phenomenon of (...) perception, and how the major theories of perception in the last century are best understood as responses to this challenge. (shrink)

This paper is about a puzzle which lies at the heart of contemporary physicalist theories of mind. On the one hand, the original motivation for physicalism was the need to explain the place of mental causation in the physical world. On the other hand, physicalists have recently come to see the explanation of mental causation as one of their major problems. But how can this be? How can it be that physicalist theories still have a problem explaining something which their (...) physicalism was intended to explain in the first place? If physicalism is meant to be an explanation of mental causation, then why should it still face the problem of mental causation? (shrink)

This important collection of essays is a synthesis of foundational studies in Bayesian decision theory and statistics. An overarching topic of the collection is understanding how the norms for Bayesian decision making should apply in settings with more than one rational decision maker and then tracing out some of the consequences of this turn for Bayesian statistics. There are four principal themes to the collection: cooperative, non-sequential decisions; the representation and measurement of 'partially ordered' preferences; non-cooperative, sequential decisions; and pooling (...) rules and Bayesian dynamics for sets of probabilities. The volume will be particularly valuable to philosophers concerned with decision theory, probability, and statistics, statisticians, mathematicians, and economists. (shrink)

Serena Olsaretti brings together new essays by leading moral and political philosophers on the nature of desert and justice, their relations with each other and with other values.

This book is about the nature of dispositional properties, or dispositions. It is hard to give an uncontroversial definition of the notion of a disposition, since its very definition is one of the matters under dispute. But we can make a start with the following preliminary definition: a disposition is a property (such as solubility, fragility, elasticity) whose instantiation entails that the thing which has the property would change, or bring about some change, under certain conditions. For instance, to say (...) that some object is soluble is to say that it would dissolve if put in water; to say that something is fragile is to say that it would break if (for instance) dropped in suitable circumstances; to say that something is elastic is to say that it would stretch when pulled. The fragility (solubility, elasticity) is a disposition; the breaking (dissolving, stretching) is the manifestation of the disposition. (shrink)

Eighteenth-century theologian_Jonathan Edwards remains a significant influence on modern religion, and this book constitutes his most important contribution to Christian thought. Edwards_raises timeless questions about desire, choice, good, and evil, contrasting the opposing Calvinist and Arminian views of free will and addressing issues related to God's foreknowledge, determinism, and moral agency.

Many P4/WC practitioners and theorists privilege the school as a space for thinking and practicing philosophy for/with children. Despite its coercive nature, thinkers such as Jana Mohr Lone, David Kennedy, and Nancy Vansieleghem argue that P4C is a Trojan horse intended to reform the education system from within. I argue, however, that the Trojan horse argument requires us to internalize an incomplete and historically decontextualized understanding of public schools that in turn can reify histories of white supremacy within our CPIs (...) – a consequence that can be particularly harmful when practicing P4C with minority youth. To accurately adjudicate the value of public school classrooms for P4C – especially for those CPIs whose members are primarily Black, Latinx, Indigenous, or other youth of color — I contextualize the Trojan horse argument in the history of race and education in the United States. Through this historical analysis, I conclude that the reformist position becomes increasingly more untenable and that the material history of race and education in fact supports a pessimistic understanding of P4C in education. I end by reflecting on P4C’s need to rethink its privileging of schools as a primary site for philosophical inquiry and caution practitioners against using “social progress” as a justification for how and where they practice their craft. Instead, I encourage them to rethink how and where they practice P4C, based on the local historical and material conditions of the participants. (shrink)

In this book Jonathan Adler offers a strengthened version of evidentialism, arguing that the ethics of belief should be rooted in the concept of belief--that...

Gordon Belot argues that Bayesian theory is epistemologically immodest. In response, we show that the topological conditions that underpin his criticisms of asymptotic Bayesian conditioning are self-defeating. They require extreme a priori credences regarding, for example, the limiting behavior of observed relative frequencies. We offer a different explication of Bayesian modesty using a goal of consensus: rival scientific opinions should be responsive to new facts as a way to resolve their disputes. Also we address Adam Elga’s rebuttal to Belot’s analysis, (...) which focuses attention on the role that the assumption of countable additivity plays in Belot’s criticisms. (shrink)

Consent theory in sexual ethics, Jonathan Ichikawa argues, has a Euthyphro problem. -/- It is widely held that sexual violations are explicable in terms of nonconsensual sexual contact. But a notion of consent adequate to explain many moral judgments typical of sexual ethics — a notion that vindicates the idea that consent cannot be coerced, that it must be sober, that children cannot consent to sex with adults, etc. — cannot, Ichikawa argues, be articulated, motivated, or explained in a (...) way independently of moral judgments about sexual wrongs. Consequently, if there is as tight a connection between consent and sexual violation as many people think there is, there is good reason to suppose that that connection must ultimately explain consent in terms of sexual wronging, rather than vice versa. The paper highlights some costs and drawbacks to this horn of the Euthyphro dilemma in sexual ethics. One central upshot of the argument will be that mainstream accounts of sexual ethics fail in their explanatory ambitions. Consent cannot play its canonical explanatory role. (shrink)