Conspiracy theories and conspiracy theorists have been accused of a great many sins, but are the conspiracy theories conspiracy theorists believe epistemically problematic? Well, according to some recent work, yes, they are. Yet a number of other philosophers like Brian L. Keeley, Charles Pigden, Kurtis Hagen, Lee Basham, and the like have argued ‘No!’ I will argue that there are features of certain conspiracy theories which license suspicion of such theories. I will also argue that these features only license a (...) limited suspicion of these conspiracy theories, and thus we need to be careful about generalising from such suspicions to a view of the warrant of conspiracy theories more generally. To understand why, we need to get to the bottom of what exactly makes us suspicious of certain conspiracy theories, and how being suspicious of a conspiracy theory does not always tell us anything about how likely the theory in question is to be false. (shrink)

Inspired by Williamson’s knowledge-first epistemology, I propose a position on practical knowledge that can be called the ‘know-how-first view’; yet whereas Williamson is one of the pioneers of the new intellectualism about know-how, I employ the know-how-first view to argue against intellectualism and instead develop a know-how-first version of anti-intellectualism. Williamson argues that propositional knowledge is a sui generis unanalyzable mental state that comes first in the epistemic realm; in parallel, I propose that know-how is a sui generis unanalyzable power (...) that comes first in the practical realm. To motivate this suggestion, I put forward two arguments: drawing on dispositionalist ideas, I argue that the practical component of know-how is unanalyzable; based on an investigation of the natures of intentionality and intelligence, I argue that know-how is prior to intentional and intelligent abilities in the order of explanation of agential action. Deploying this know-how-first anti-intellectualism, I then set out know-how-first solutions to two challenging problems for anti-intellectualism: the sufficiency problem and the necessary condition problem. (shrink)

Temporal Logic: From Ancient Ideas to Artificial Intelligence deals with the history of temporal logic as well as the crucial systematic questions within the field. The book studies the rich contributions from ancient and medieval philosophy up to the downfall of temporal logic in the Renaissance. The modern rediscovery of the subject, which is especially due to the work of A. N. Prior, is described, leading into a thorough discussion of the use of temporal logic in computer science and the (...) understanding of natural language. Temporal Logic: From Ancient Ideas to Artificial Intelligence thus interweaves linguistic, philosophical and computational aspects into an informative and inspiring whole. (shrink)

This text explores how human beings construe experience: experience as a resource, as a potential for understanding, representing and acting on reality.

Being woke, that is, being aware of the appalling injustices borne by many in American society because of certain identities or features and wanting to act to redress these injustices, seems to put one in a quandary: either one can accept a role in the struggle against injustice that seems obviously inefficacious or, if one insists on doing more, one must, it seems, engage in epistemic imperialism, thereby wronging some of those one is endeavoring to help.

This review article offers a discussion of some aspects of the historical and conceptual context when the term “ontology” (Lat. ontologia) was first introduced in the scholarly circles of the early 17th century. In particular, Barry Smith's (2022) analysis of the birth of ontology provides a springboard for some further remarks on the author of the work with the first known occurrence of the word “ontologia”, Jacob Lorhard, including an analysis of his relationship with earlier philosophers Petrus Ramus and Clemens (...) Timpler. (shrink)

This book is available either individually, or as part of the specially-priced Arguments of the Philosphers Collection.

Background. The COVID-19 pandemic necessitated drastic changes to undergraduate medical training at the University of Botswana (UB). To save the academic year when campus was locked down, the Department of Medical Education conducted a needs assessment to determine the readiness for emergency remote teaching (ERT) of the Faculty of Medicine, UB. Objectives. To report on the findings of needs assessment surveys to assess learner and teaching staff preparedness for fair and just ERT, as defined by philosopher John Rawls. Methods. Needs (...) assessment surveys were conducted using Office 365 Forms distributed via WhatsApp, targeting medical students and teaching staff during the 5 undergraduate years. Data were analysed quantitatively and qualitatively. Results. Ninety-two percent (266/289) of students and 73.5% (62/84) of teaching staff responded. Surveys revealed a high penetration of smartphones among students, but poor internet accessibility and affordability in homes. Some teaching staff also reported internet and device insufficiencies. Only WhatsApp was accessible to students and teaching staff. Conclusions. For equitable access to ERT in the future, the surveys revealed infrastructural improvement needs, including wider, stronger, affordable WiFi coverage within Botswana and enhanced digital infrastructures in educational institutions, with increased support for students. (shrink)

This book provides a clear and nuanced appraisal of Hegel's treatment of Africa, India, and Islam, and of the implications of this treatment for postcolonial and global studies. Analyzing Hegel's master-slave dialectic and his views on Africa, India, and Islam, it situates these views not only within Hegel's historical scheme but also within a broader European philosophical context and the debates they have provoked within Hegel scholarship. Each chapter explores various in depth readings of Hegel by postcolonial critics, investigating both (...) the Eurocentric and potentially global nature of his dialectic. Ultimately, the book shows both where of this profoundly influential thinker archetypally embodies certain Eurocentric traits that have characterized modernity and how, ironically, he himself gives us the tools for working towards a more global vision. Offering a concise introduction not only to an important dimension of Hegel's thought - his orientation towards "empire" - but also to the various issues raised by postcolonial theory and global studies, this book will be of use to philosophers as well as advanced students of literary and cultural theory alike. (shrink)

Alasdair MacIntyre once famously asked “is patriotism is a virtue?” but never quite answered the question. In this paper, I seek to provide a more concrete response by analyzing whether patriotism fits the model of an Aristotelian natural virtue. Since Aristotle himself does not offer an extensive discussion of patriotism as a virtue, I take my inspiration from St. Thomas who does clearly regard something like patriotism as a part of the natural virtue of piety. After exploring the significance of (...) Thomas’s key claim that patriotism is owed to the “sources of our being,” I sketch the structure of moral virtue in Aristotle with an emphasis on his claim that all the virtues are. Finally, I show how patriotism fits the model of an Aristotelian natural moral virtue and conclude by addressing a few natural objections. (shrink)

This paper investigates four questions related to ethical issues associated with the involvement of engineers and scientists in 'military work', including the influence of ethical values and beliefs, the role of gendered perspectives and moves beyond the purely technical. It fits strongly into a human (and planet)-centred systems perspective and extends my previous AI and Society papers on othering and narrative ethics, and ethics and social responsibility. It has two main contributions. The first involves an analysis of the literature through (...) the application of different ethical theories and the application of gendered analysis to discussion of masculinities in engineering and the military. The second is a survey of scientists and engineers to investigate their opinions and experiences. The conclusions draw together the results of these two contributions to provide preliminary responses to the four questions and include a series of recommendations covering education and training, ethical approval of work not involving human participants or animals, the need for organisational support, approaches covering wider perspectives and the encouragement of individual ethical commitment. (shrink)

No known cure exists for COVID-19, and medical practitioners are exhausted and at their wits’ end trying to find treatments that prevent patients from ending up in hospital or intensive care, or even dying. A variety of treatments tried by medical practitioners include standard registered medicine, investigational or so-called experimental, unapproved or preapproved medicines, emergency or compassionate-use authorised medicine and pre-market approved medicine. However, the medicines that can be accessed via each of these categories are at different stages of efficacy (...) testing and knowledge about adverse effects, dosages and risks. To obtain ethical and legal informed consent, medical practitioners must deal with a lot of medical uncertainty, and care must be taken to ensure that the patient understands the difference in risks they may be willing to take depending on the medicine’s stage of development. Often additional information is required to obtain ethical consent as opposed to legal consent. A purely legal approach to informed consent, especially when dealing with the medical uncertainties of health emergencies and pandemics, may lead to patients’ consent lacking in enough substance to be truly considered legal and ethical. Informed consent as respect for autonomy in this sense requires more than the patient’s explicit agreement or compliance with a certain treatment proposal. This article explains the difference in consent content attached to each different stage of a medicine’s development, especially considering the additional difficulties posed by obtaining truly informed consent during a pandemic with uncertain characteristics, treatment and solutions. (shrink)

In recent years, the non-relativistic quantum dynamics derived from three assumptions; probability current conservation, average energy conservation, and an epistemic momentum uncertainty. Here we show that, these assumptions can be derived from a natural extension of classical statistical mechanics.

Bronze Age Bureaucracy: Writing and the Practice of Government in Assyria. By Nicholas Postgate. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Pp. xi + 484, illus. $99.

“Para que isso servirá em minha vida?” Ao longo de minha trajetória como professor do ensino secundário, ouvi esta pergunta algumas vezes. É provável que nós professores de filosofia não sejamos um alvo privilegiado dessa pergunta provocadora. Trata-se mesmo de uma questão legítima, ainda mais para nós: latinoamericanos, brasileiros, nordestinos, piauienses. Trata-se de uma pergunta que evoca um certo desespero, uma certa pressa, um tipo de agonia que é bem nossa; como quando dizemos “estou agoniado”. Queremos tudo “pra já”. Parece (...) que jamais nos daremos o direito de viver e aprender algo pelo simples fato de que o saber é bom e merece ser fruído. (shrink)

In 2015 and 2016, European newspapers covered the Syrian migration into Europe in great detail, describing the path followed by millions of refugees as European authorities put up both physical and...

In Bangladesh, due to economic growth and greater access to education, more girls and women are veiling, even as they are also more likely to be in school or employed. Some scholars identify this trend of women appearing both “more modern” and “more religious” as paradoxical. On the basis of 114 in-depth interviews with Bangladeshi migrant workers in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Singapore, and South Korea and their wives in rural Bangladesh, I claim that Muslim women in middle-class Bengali families who (...) veil are cultivating symbolic boundaries guided by an accountability structure of middle-class religiosity and gender conservatism. The increasing tendency of middle-class Muslim women to appear both “more modern” and “more religious” can be explained by examining the role that veiling plays in signaling class status through conspicuous consumption, moral superiority, and respectable femininity, differentiating them from lower class women. I conclude that “doing gender” through veiling must be understood as also “doing middle-class difference” in Bengali Muslim families in rural Bangladesh. (shrink)

The doctor-patient relationship is the foundation of any medical intervention. Over time, the relationship has changed, from the era of paternalism to the era of self-determination or patient autonomy, following changes resulting from consumerism and lately, in South Africa, socialised medicine as a result of the proposed National Health Insurance. The premise of this article is that patient autonomy is invariably limited by a determination of who will carry the cost of a medical intervention. In recent years, legislative developments have (...) affected the understanding of a patient and doctor through the introduction of new references, such as ‘user’, ‘data subject’ and ‘consumer’ for a patient, and ‘service provider’ and ‘responsible party’ for a doctor, each giving different meanings to the doctor-patient relationship. Recent statutory additions also include new remedies available to aggrieved patients as parties in the doctor-patient relationship. The article concludes with brief observations on how the NHI will alter the essence and nature of the doctor-patient relationship in future. (shrink)

In 2005 St Andrews Studies published a volume of essays by Anscombe entitled Human Life, Action and Ethics, followed in 2008 by a second with the title Faith in a Hard Ground. Both books were highly praised. This third volume brings essays on the thought of historical philosophers in which Anscombe engages directly with their ideas and arguments. Many are published here for the first time and the collection provides further testimony to Anscombe's insight and intellectual imagination.

"M. F. Simone Roberts's A Poetics of Being-Two is animated by a lively and engaging voice, drawing readers in with a sense of serious purpose working (delightfully) in tandem with a sense of humor. Roberts's aesthetics and her close readings of Yves Bonnefoy, St-John Perse, and Jorie Graham clearly demonstrate the literary effectiveness of Irigarayan sexual difference as an analytic trope, even as they emphasize the philosophical and political possibilities sexual difference opens up for feminism, environmentalism, and all levels of (...) contemporary cultural critique and activism."—Gail M. Schwab, Hofstra University -/- In An Ethics of Sexual Difference, Irigaray calls for a new poetics in the sense of both art and life. Rather than a critique from within philosophy, A Poetics of Being-Two tests Irigaray's ethics by extending it to other sites of cultural production. Where Irigaray's method finds stirrings and repressions of sexual difference in philosophy, this project explores that tension in poetics. Building from Irigaray's ethics, the book describes a poetics of being-two as concerns gendered subjectivity in literary poetics and then traces the on-going emergence of a poetics of being-two in the post-symbolist poetic tradition. Irigaray scholars will be interested in the sustained interpolation of Irigaray's ethical concepts as principles for a critical aesthetics and in their hermeneutic application in reading a literary tradition. Readers in comparative literature will find the first sustained feminist engagements with the major French poets Bonnefoy and Perse and an elucidation of their influence on the Pulitzer Prize winning poet Jorie Graham. (shrink)

When ethics committees evaluate the research proposals submitted to them by biomedical scientists, they can seek guidance from laws and regulations, their own beliefs, values and experiences, and from the theories of philosophers. The starting point of this paper is that philosophers can only be helpful to the members of ethics committees if they take into account in their models both the basic moral intuitions that most of us share and the consequences of people's choices. A moral view which can (...) be labelled as a consequentialist interpretation of mid-level principlism is developed, defended and applied to some real-life and hypothetical research proposals. (shrink)

Scholars offer several options for Matthew’s value of the leper’s story in his narrative that range from revealing Jesus’ attributes of compassion and sympathy, manifesting God’s empire, to portraying Jesus’ function as a temple. Although these suggestions aptly portray Matthew’s rhetorical use of the leper’s healing in his narrative to address societal concerns of his time, for lack of referring to the social setting of the narrative, they do not capture the holistic healthcare system embodied by Jesus in Matthew’s narrative (...) that portrays Jesus as a superior healer to the rest of the other healers in the Roman Empire. The findings of the research for this article establish the argument that employing ethnomedical anthropology as a lens to read the leper’s healing narrative in Matthew 8:1–4 in the context of Matthew’s social setting reveals Matthew’s ideology for a transcendent and immanent Christology. The aim of the article is to demonstrate the effectiveness of medical anthropological theory in explaining the dynamics of health and healing reflected in biblical texts.Contributions: This article contributes to the interdisciplinary approach to the study of religion by employing a ethnomedical anthropological perspective to read the leper’s healing in Matthew 8.1–4 in reference to the first century CE health systems in the Roman Empire. This approach procured that Matthew’s immanent and transcendent perspectives of Christology is crucial in demonstrating the text’s function in constructing and sustaining the identity of Matthew’s community in antiquity. (shrink)

Malthus did not leave us with a systematic treatment of colonization, but from remarks scattered throughout his publications and correspondence it is possible to assemble a fairly coherent account of his views on the advantages and disadvantages of colonies, and on the reasons why some have failed and others succeeded. Included in these scattered remarks are some comparisons between his own views on colonies and those of Adam Smith. The question of the relationship between Malthus and Adam Smith is a (...) rather complex and subtle one, and cannot be given the full consideration it deserves in one short paper. But, as a general summary, it can be said that Malthus had a high regard for Smith and considered himself a follower and disciple of Smith, by contrast with Ricardo, James Mill, and McCulloch etc., whom he considered as exponents of a ‘New System of Political Economy”. His own Principles of Political Economy was conceived as a collection of ‘tracts or essays”, not as a new systematic treatise replacing the Wealth of Nations, Joseph Gamier in his article ‘Malthus” in the Dictionnaire de l'Economie Politique, 1852, saw that the title of the Principles was in fact a misnomer: ‘Malgré son titre, le livre sur les Principes n'est point un traité complet, mais seulement une collection de dissertations.” In what was probably intended as a criticism of Ricardo's Principles of Political Economy and Taxation, 1817, Malthus stated that the ‘present period … seems to be unpropitious to the publication of a new systematic treatise on political economy”, and, referring to Smith's work, stated that ‘the treatise which we already possess is still of the very highest value”. Nevertheless, despite professing his affiliation, Malthus did not hesitate to criticize Smith when he disagreed with him. He recognized that the Wealth of Nations contained ‘controverted points” and that it would require some ‘additions … which the more advanced stage of the science has rendered necessary”. (shrink)

Problem: The inclusion of the observer into scientific observation entails a vicious circle of having to observe the observer as dependent on observation. Second-order science has to clarify how its underlying circularity can be scientifically conceived. Method: Essayistic and conceptual analysis, sporadically illustrated with agent-based experiments. Results: Second-order science - implying science in general - is fundamentally and ineluctably circular. Implications - The circularity of second-order science asks for analytical methods able to cope with phenomena of complex causation and “synchronous (...) asynchrony,” such as tools for analyzing non-linearly interacting dynamics, decentralized, clustered networks and in general, systems of complex interacting components. Key Words: Observer dependency, second-order science, complexity, information, intentionality. (shrink)

The purpose of this article should become plain during the reading of it, but perhaps some prior explanation is needed. Almost from the beginning of my study of the paṭiccasamuppāda I have had the notion that it could not have come into existence in the form the usual twelvefold formulation takes. For reasons which I try to make clear this twelvefold formulation is not a satisfactory statement of what it is supposed to explain, namely the reasons for each individual's continued (...) rebirths. I feel - and sadly I have to emphasize, before someone else does it for me, that in the final analysis I am relying more or less on intuition for my attitude towards the twelvefold formulation - that if one person alone had been responsible for the usually referred to formulation, and especially if that one person had been the Buddha, then those anomalies that now prevail would never have existed. (shrink)