.As editor of the National Anti-Slavery Standard in the early 1840s, Lydia Maria Child was responsible for keeping the abolitionist movement in the United States informed of relevant news. She also used her editorial position to philosophize. Her column entitled “Letters from New York” is particularly philosophical, including considerations of infinity, free will, time, nature, art, and history. She especially turned to German philosophers and intellectuals such as Kant, Schiller, Bettina von Arnim, Karoline von Günderrode, Jean Paul, Herder, and (...) Hegel in an attempt to guide her readers to a rejection of slavery for the right philosophical reasons. I consider the influence of German philosophy on three particular themes in her writings: a Romantic-Spinozistic view of humans and nature; a Kantian conception of conscience; and a Hegelian description of the philosophy of history. (shrink)

As editor of the National Anti-Slavery Standard in the early 1840s, Lydia Maria Child was responsible for keeping the abolitionist movement in the United States informed of relevant news. She also...

Two fragments of the Lydiaca attributed to Xanthus of Lydia preserve a curious claim that a king of Lydia was the first person to make eunuchs of women. In an attempt to make sense of these passages, it has been suggested that εὐνουχίζειν here refers not to castration, but rather to female genital cutting. If correct, this would provide our first evidence of this practice in Lydian culture or indeed anywhere in Anatolia. However, the assumption that what Xanthus (...) describes somehow related to real practices is highly questionable. Instead, we should re-contextualize this story in terms of other fifth-century representations of luxury and eunuchs and in terms of Xanthus’ own exemplary portraits of other Lydian kings. (shrink)

This is a community based research project using a case study of 20 people living in middle America who are food insecure, but do not use food pantries. The participants’ rate of actual hunger is twice that of food insecure community members who use food pantries. Since most of the participants are not poor, the Asset Vulnerability Framework is used to classify causes of food insecurity. The purpose of the study is to identify why participants are food insecure and why (...) they do not use food pantries. Findings reveal that the participants restrict the quality and quantity of food eaten as a strategy to manage their budget. Following AVF, this strategy allows them to offset lower returns to labor assets, cover rising costs of human capital investment, protect their two most important productive assets of housing and transportation, and compensate for household relationships that increase their vulnerability. In addition, food insecurity itself inhibited social capital formation, further increasing vulnerability. The main reasons the participants do not use food pantries is to protect their social capital assets: almost all of the participants hid their hunger from colleagues, friends, relatives, and even the people they lived with. The participants described fear of societal shaming and blaming as motivations for hiding their hunger. However, using food pantries could reduce their food insecurity. Therefore, there was a feedback loop between food insecurity and social capital: food insecurity reduced social capital and efforts to protect social capital prevented participants from improving food security by using food pantries. (shrink)

This article brings to light how AI research has benefited from post-Wittgensteinian philosophy. My research shows that Wittgenstein’s work began to engage the attention of AI researchers not only in the 1970s down to the present but right from the early beginnings of computational research in the 1950s. More specifically, his later philosophy inspired a group of researchers called the Cambridge Language Research Unit (CLRU) to start one of the first programs in machine translation, information retrieval, mechanical abstracting, and knowledge (...) representation technologies in the early 1950s, all of which have later been claimed for AI and cognitive science. I focus on the philosophical work of CLRU founder Margaret Masterman and her extraordinary but forgotten contributions to ordinary language philosophy. (shrink)

Los intentos de mejorar al ser humano parten de la suposición de que es posible lograr algo más perfecto que lo que somos actualmente. Sin embargo, no en todos los casos se plantea cuál es el objetivo último al que tienden las acciones de mejora. Si lo que se produce no es el logro de un rango óptimo, sino un proceso ilimitado de mejora continua, se abre un interrogante sobre cómo se altera la identidad de los individuos, qué consecuencias tendría (...) ese proceso de reconstrucción y qué significa hablar del ser humano cuando las características que lo definen se pueden alterar a voluntad. Igualmente, cabe preguntarse cuál es el espacio de libertad de elección que queda a los individuos, cómo se ve comprometida la autonomía de los progenitores en las decisiones sobre sus hijos y en qué medida la mejora se convierte en una exigencia que obliga a realizar modificaciones para lograr una humanidad mejor. (shrink)

What is the difference between a performance of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony and the symphony itself? What does it mean for musicians to be faithful to the works they perform? To answer this question, Goehr combines philosophical and historical methods of enquiry. She describes how the concept of a musical work emerged as late as 1800, and how it subsequently defined the norms, expectations, and behavior characteristic of classical musical practice. Out of the historical thesis, Goehr draws philosophical conclusions about the (...) normative functions of concepts and ideals. She also addresses current debates amongst conductors, early-music performers, and avant-gardists. (shrink)

The article is an analytical and critical review of the main ideas of philosophical practice. The review was prepared on the basis of the author’s personal participation in the work of international conferences on philosophical practice over the past three years. The comparison of the three last conferences reveals how tensions around definitions and goals of the practice have been reduced in ways that reflect an openness and appreciation of multiplicity. The anguish surrounding the boundaries of the field have decreased (...) as well, and is seems that philosophical practice is ready to reflect on itself through the research, publication, networking and mapping. (shrink)

The article is an analytical and critical review of the main ideas of philosophical practice. The review was prepared on the basis of the author’s personal participation in the work of international conferences on philosophical practice over the past three years. The comparison of the three last conferences reveals how tensions around definitions and goals of the practice have been reduced in ways that reflect an openness and appreciation of multiplicity. The anguish surrounding the boundaries of the field have decreased (...) as well, and is seems that philosophical practice is ready to reflect on itself through the research, publication, networking and mapping. (shrink)

Epstein, Flynn, and Martohardjono's presentation of the principal approaches to UG access in L2 acquisition is misleading; they have neglected the possibility that the L1 grammar forms the learner's initial representation of the L2, with subsequent modifications constrained by UG. Furthermore, their experimental data are open to several interpretations and are consistent with a number of different positions in the field.

The scenario is all too common: the elderly woman with end-stage dementia readmitted to the hospital for the fourth time in three months for anorexia, now static cancer progressing despite all proven chemotherapy now pursuing a toxic experimental treatment, or the patient with a rampant infection leading to multiple organ failure who requires machines, medications, and devices to filter the blood, pump the heart, exchange oxygen, facilitate clotting, and provide nutrition. Modern medical science is adept at sustaining life. The field (...) of bioethics has, since its earliest days, debated end-of-life issues; yet American society more broadly remains ill equipped for the experience of dying. This can be .. (shrink)

European Journal of Philosophy, EarlyView.

Ernst Mach’s defense of relativist theories of motion in Die Mechanik involves a well-known criticism of Newton’s theory appealing to absolute space, and of Newton’s “bucket” experiment. Sympathetic readers (Norton 1995) and critics (Stein 1967, 1977) agree that there’s a tension in Mach’s view: he allows for some constructed scientific concepts, but not others, and some kinds of reasoning about unobserved phenomena, but not others. Following Banks (2003), I argue that this tension can be interpreted as a constructive one, springing (...) from Mach’s approach to scientific reasoning. Mach’s “economy of science” allows for a principled distinction to be made, between natural and artificial hypothetical reasoning, and Mach defends a division of labor between the sciences in a 1903 paper for The Monist, “Space and Geometry from the Point of View of Physical Inquiry”. That division supports counterfactual reasoning in Mach’s system, something that’s long been denied is possible for him. (shrink)

In Hegel on Political Identity, Lydia Moland provocatively draws on Hegel's political philosophy to engage sometimes contentious contemporary issues such as patriotism, national identity, and cosmopolitanism. Moland argues that patriotism for Hegel indicates an attitude toward the state, whereas national identity is a response to culture. The two combine, Hegel claims, to enable citizens to develop concrete freedom. Moland argues that Hegel's account of political identity extends to his notorious theory of world history; she also proposes that his resistance (...) to cosmopolitanism be reassessed in response to our globalized world. By focusing on Hegel's depiction of political identity as a central part of modern life, Moland shows the potential of Hegel's philosophy to address issues that lie at the heart of ethical and political philosophy. (shrink)

Hermann von Helmholtz allows for not only physiological facts and psychological inferences, but also perspectival reasoning, to influence perceptual experience and knowledge gained from perception. But Helmholtz also defends a version of the view according to which there can be a kind of “perspectival truth” revealed in scientific research and investigation. Helmholtz argues that the relationships between subjective and objective, real and actual, actual and illusory, must be analyzed scientifically, within experience. There is no standpoint outside experience from which we (...) can reason, no extra-sensory knowledge of the constitution of the “ideal subject” or of the properties of “real objects.” In the tradition of psychophysics inherited by Helmholtz, we can arrive at a kind of perspectival analysis of perceptual experience, which embeds an account of that experience within the context of the history and situation of the perceiving subject. That analysis is relative to the perceiving subject, but the perspectival explanations Helmholtz constructs are not thereby relativist: in fact, for Helmholtz, the more squarely the perceiving subject is placed in a scientific, perspectival context, the more facts we are able to learn about her experience and the objects with which she interacts. (shrink)

This essay interrogates the motives of eighteenth-century European naturalists to alternately show and hide their laboring-class fossil suppliers. Focusing on rare moments of heightened visibility, I ask why gentlemen naturalists occasionally, deliberately, and even performatively made visible the marginalized science workers on whom they crucially depended but more typically ignored or effaced. Comparing archival fragments from elite works of natural history across a considerable stretch of time and space, including Italy, France, Switzerland, Britain, Ireland, Germany, Spain, and French, Spanish, and (...) British America, this essay sketches the contours of a disparate group of people I term ‘earth workers’: laborers of very low social rank, such as quarrymen, shepherds, ditch-diggers, and fieldworkers, whose daily labor in and on the earth enabled the discovery of subterranean specimens. At the same time, archival traces of laboring lives ultimately reveal more about the naturalists who created them than they do about the marginalized laborers whose lives they faintly record. Cultural norms of elite masculinity and scholarly self-presentation in the Republic of Letters help us to understand why some eighteenth-century naturalists felt they had to publicly disavow a form of labor that would come to be recognized as a crucial and skilled part of scientific fieldwork in the modern era. Compared to other kinds of invisible labor that historians of science have brought into view, the social meaning of earth work rendered it uniquely visible in some ways and uniquely invisible in others. (shrink)

The growth in organic and local foods consumption has been examined using two different approaches to identify characteristics and motivations of food shoppers: market segmentation and economic models using multivariate analysis. The former approach, based on Means-end Chain theory, examines how intrinsic characteristics of foods affect food choices. The latter microeconomic approach examines economic constraints and extrinsic factors. This study demonstrates value in combining the two approaches to generate better empirical predictions of who buys organic and local food. It also (...) supports a broader theoretical framework to explain behavior in terms of intrinsic and extrinsic motivations. Using US data, an adaptation of the Food Related Lifestyle model yields four consumer lifestyles segmented by intrinsic motivations related to food. Each consumer segment exhibits distinct organic and local foods consumption behaviors. A multinomial logit model is estimated to examine the probability of being in one of these four groups as a function of extrinsic variables and economic constraints. In support of Alphabet theory and Regulatory Focus theory, we find that inclusion of extrinsic factors improves prediction of behavior and the ability to explain why they buy organic and local foods. The extrinsic variables that significantly increase the probability of being in a particular consumer food lifestyle segment include: environmental concerns, health practices, race, the presence of a farmers’ market, and to a lesser degree, family composition and income. We also find regulatory focus is most pronounced among the most active organic and local food shoppers. (shrink)

Physicians, philosophers, and theologians consider how to address death and dying for a diverse population in a secularized century.Most of us are generally ill-equipped for dying. Today, we neither see death nor prepare for it. But this has not always been the case. In the early fifteenth century, the Roman Catholic Church published the Ars moriendi texts, which established prayers and practices for an art of dying. In the twenty-first century, physicians rely on procedures and protocols for the efficient management (...) of hospitalized patients. How can we recapture an art of dying that can facilitate our dying well? In this book, physicians, philosophers, and theologians attempt to articulate a bioethical framework for dying well in a secularized, diverse society.Contributors discuss such topics as the acceptance of human finitude; the role of hospice and palliative medicine; spiritual preparation for death; and the relationship between community, and individual autonomy. They also consider special cases, including children, elderly patients with dementia, and death in the early years of the AIDS epidemic, when doctors could do little more than accompany their patients in humble solidarity.These chapters make the case for a robust bioethics—one that could foster both the contemplation of finitude and the cultivation of community that would be necessary for a contemporary art of dying well.ContributorsJeffrey P. Bishop, Lisa Sowle Cahill, Daniel Callahan, Farr A. Curlin, Lydia S. Dugdale, Michelle Harrington, John Lantos, Stephen R. Latham, M. Therese Lysaught, Autumn Alcott Ridenour, Peter A. Selwyn, Daniel Sulmasy. (shrink)

What happens to philosophy when philosophical activities migrate to the AI lab? My article explores the philosophical work that has gone into the machine simulations of language and understanding after Alan Turing. The early experiments by AI practitioners such as Karen Spärck Jones, Richard Richens, Yorick Wilks, and others at the Cambridge Language Research Unit (CLRU) led to the creation of the machine interlingua, semantic networks, and other technological innovations central to the development of AI in the 1950s–1970s. I attempt (...) to show how, in the midst of their computational work, the CLRU pioneers engaged with Ludwig Wittgenstein, Ferdinand de Saussure, Rudolf Carnap, and other philosophers and developed startling new ways of formulating fundamental questions about language and human understanding. More significantly, their philosophical activities on the machine present an inclusive and culturally diverse picture of the world that profoundly negates the ethnocentric metaphysics of human-machine conundrums that John Searle and his critics represent in the Chinese Room debate. The familiar legacy of that debate has long distorted the narrative of AI origins through its simultaneous reiteration and repudiation of the Turing test. My study seeks to clarify those origins, but my primary goal is to demonstrate what it is like to practice philosophy on the machine and how the critique of metaphysics is made possible in the AI lab. (shrink)

The most extensive descriptions of Gog and Magog in the Hebrew Bible appear in Ezekiel 38–39. At various stages of their political career, both Reagan and Bush have linked Gog and Magog to the bêtes noires of the USA, identifying them either as the ‘communistic and atheistic’ Russia or the ‘evil’ Iraq. Biblical scholars, however, seek to contextualise Gog of Magog in the historical literary setting of the ancient Israelites. Galambush identifies Gog in Ezekiel as a cipher for Nebuchadnezzar, the (...) Babylonian king, who acted as Judah’s oppressor in the 6th century BCE. More recently, Klein concludes that Gog, along with his companions, is ‘eine Personifikation aller Feinde, die Israel im Buch Ezechiel gegenüberstehen’. Despite their differences in detail, these scholars, such as Reagan and Bush, work with a dualism that considers only the features of Judah’s enemies incorporated into Gog’s characteristics. Via an analysis of the semantic allusions, literary position and early receptions of Ezekiel 38–39, this article argues that Gog and his entourage primarily display literary attributes previously assigned to Judah’s political allies. (shrink)

This pioneering new book suggests how different traditions of sociological thought can contribute to an understanding of the theory and practice of rights. Rights: Sociological Perspectives provides a sociological treatment of a wide range of substantive issues but without losing sight of key theoretical questions. It considers some varied cases of public intervention, including welfare, caring, mental health provisions, pensions, justice and free speech, alongside the rights issues they raise. Similarly, it examines the question of rights from the point of (...) view of distinctive population groups, such as prisoners and victims, women, ethnic minorities, indigenous peoples, and lesbians and gays. It also contains two specifically theoretical chapters, which provide a critical overview of the existing approaches to the construction and implementation of rights. Rights: Sociological Perspectives offers a diverse and detailed exploration of the contribution sociological thought can make to this increasingly important aspect of social life and will be an invaluable aid to students. (shrink)

This paper investigates the claim that artificial Intelligence Systems cannot be held morally responsible because they do not have an ability for agential self-awareness e.g. they cannot be aware that they are the agents of an action. The main suggestion is that if agential self-awareness and related first person representations presuppose an awareness of a self, the possibility of responsible artificial intelligence systems cannot be evaluated independently of research conducted on the nature of the self. Focusing on a specific account (...) of the self from the phenomenological tradition, this paper suggests that a minimal necessary condition that artificial intelligence systems must satisfy so that they have a capability for self-awareness, is having a minimal self defined as ‘a sense of ownership’. As this sense of ownership is usually associated with having a living body, one suggestion is that artificial intelligence systems must have similar living bodies so they can have a sense of self. Discussing cases of robotic animals as examples of the possibility of artificial intelligence systems having a sense of self, the paper concludes that the possibility of artificial intelligence systems having a ‘sense of ownership’ or a sense of self may be a necessary condition for having responsibility. (shrink)

Arguments for the effectiveness, and even the indispensability, of mathematics in scientific explanation rely on the claim that mathematics is an effective or even a necessary component in successful scientific predictions and explanations. Well-known accounts of successful mathematical explanation in physical science appeals to scientists’ ability to solve equations directly in key domains. But there are spectacular physical theories, including general relativity and fluid dynamics, in which the equations of the theory cannot be solved directly in target domains, and yet (...) scientists and mathematicians do effective work there (McLarty 2023, Elder 2023). Building on extant accounts of structural scientific explanation (Bokulich 2011, Leng 2021), I argue that philosophical accounts of the role of equations in scientific explanation need not rely on scientists’ ability to solve equations independently of their understanding of the empirical or experimental context. For instance, the process of formulating solutions to equations can involve significant appeal to information about experimental contexts (Curiel 2010) or of physically similar systems (Sterrett 2023). Working from a close analysis of work in fluid mechanics by Martin Bazant and Keith Moffatt (2005), I propose an account of heuristic structural explanation in mathematics (Einstein 1921, Pincock 2021), which explains how physical explanations can be constructed even in domains where basic equations cannot be solved directly. (shrink)

Doctor, just one more thing.” I marvel every time I hear this, nearly always as I reach for the door. It is as though all patients receive copies of the same instructions, perhaps posted somewhere in the waiting room: Wait until your appointment has run over time. Watch until your doctor stands to leave. Ask a question of grave importance that cannot possibly be answered quickly. I released the doorknob. “Yes, sir?” “I was wondering if you had any advice for (...) me on preparing to die. You see, I got a copy of the pathology report and even though my oncologist didn’t tell me the prognosis was bad, I did a little of my own research. I learned that ‘high grade’ and ‘poorly .. (shrink)

The scenario could not have been more grim. Mrs. Carr had been fitted with a breathing tube for surgery, but the doctors were unable to wean her from the ventilator due to recurrent episodes of life‐threatening infection. She could not eat because of the ventilator, so she received nutrition through a tube in her stomach. At some point, her kidneys shut down and she started dialysis treatments. Between recurrent infection and dialysis, her blood pressure bottomed out, and the medical team (...) frequently jump‐started her heart with intravenous adrenaline‐type medications. Without aggressive support of her lungs, kidneys, nutrition, and cardiovascular system, Mrs. Carr would be dead. “What is going on here?” Anna wondered aloud. “Is this life?” Philosopher and physician Jeffrey Bishop might argue that this is not life. Rather, medicine has created a body in perpetual motion. Contemporary medicine, he contends, has redefined human life as human function; doctors simply replace the broken or dead parts of the human machine with other machines—a ventilator for the lungs, dialysis for the kidneys, and so forth—and the body stays in motion indefinitely. Bishop argues that the discipline of medicine needs to reexamine its metaphysical assumptions—its current approach is detrimental to human flourishing. Should a metaphysics of efficient causation be replaced with a more expansive metaphysics of final causes? (shrink)

The COVID-19 pandemic swept through New York City swiftly and with devastating effect. The crisis put enormous pressure on all hospital services, including the clinical ethics consultation team. This report describes the recent experience of the ethics consultants and Columbia University Irving Medical Center during the COVID-19 surge and compares the case load and characteristics to the corresponding period in 2019. By reporting this experience, we hope to supplement the growing body of COVID-19 scientific literature and provide details of the (...) human toll the virus took on our hospitals and communities. We also aim to highlight the role of the clinical ethics consultant as well as areas of policy and law that may need to be addressed in order to be better prepared for a future public health crisis. (shrink)

The belief that laws of nature are contingent played an important role in the emergence of the empirical method of modern physics. During the scientific revolution, this belief was based on the idea of voluntary creation. Taking up Peter Mittelstaedt’s work on laws of nature, this article explores several alternative answers which do not overtly make use of metaphysics: some laws are laws of mathematics; macroscopic laws can emerge from the interplay of numerous subsystems without any specific microscopic nomic structures (...) (John Wheeler’s “law without law”); laws are the preconditions of scientific experience (Kant); laws are theoretical abstractions which only apply in very limited circumstances (Nancy Cartwright). Whereas Cartwright’s approach is in tension with modern scientific methodology, the first three strategies count as illuminating, though partial answers. It is important for the empirical method of modern physics that these three strategies, even when taken together, do not provide a complete explanation of the order of nature. Thus the question of why laws are valid is still relevant. In the concluding section, I argue that the traditional answer, based on voluntary creation, provides the right balance of contingency and coherence which is in harmony with modern scientific method. (shrink)

The most influential physicist of the 20th century considered his scientific activity to be a contribution to ,,cosmic religion". Starting from his own writings, the article presents Einstein's religious views and questions the extent to which his pantheistic convictions can provide the necessary foundations for human knowledge and action. German Der bedeutendste Physiker des 20. Jahrhunderts fasste seine wissenschaftliche Tätigkeit als Beitrag zur ,,kosmischen Religion auf. Der Artikel zeichnet die Religionsauffassung Einsteins an Hand von Originaltexten nach und fragt, inwieweit seine (...) weitgehend pantheistisch geprägten Überzeugungen menschliches Wissen und Handeln begründen können. (shrink)

L'interrogation sur le rôle que jouent aujourd'hui les convictions religieuses en philosophie des sciences peut paraître une démarche surprenante, car trop souvent la religion est rejetée hors du champ de l'enquête philosophique. Cet ouvrage ose au contraire demander dans quelle mesure les options religieuses d'un penseur influencent sa conception de l'ordre cosmique. L'examen du concept de loi de la nature s'inscrit dans une quête plus large : il permet de tester la façon dont les choix épistémologiques d'un individu dépendent de (...) sa vision du monde et ainsi de porter une attention particulière aux interactions entre science, épistémologie et religion. L'étude porte sur quatre figures des plus marquantes du débat contemporain sur les lois de la nature : David Armstrong, Nancy Cartwright, David Lewis et Bas van Fraassen. L'analyse de leurs écrits, approfondie d'entretiens personnels, fait ressortir pour chacun les liens qui existent entre sa posture religieuse et son compte rendu de la légalité naturelle. (shrink)

Puzzles concerning attitude reports are at the origin of traditional theories of content. According to most of these theories, content has to involve some sort of conceptual entities, like senses, which determine reference. Conceptual views, however, have been challenged by direct reference theories and informational perspectives on content. In this paper we lay down the central elements of the more relevant strategies for solving cognitive puzzles. We then argue that the best solution available to those who maintain a view of (...) content as truth conditions is to abandon the idea that content is the only element of mental attitudes that can make a difference as to the truth value of attitude reports. We finally resort to means of recognition of objects as one obvious element that helps explain differences in attitudes. (shrink)