Stoddart writes that the God of Christian faith ‘knew [surveillance’s] gaze [and] suffered its harsh consequences’. That was especially so during the last week of Jesus’ life, when the religious/political leaders engaged him in tension-filled exchanges. Employing Stoddart’s concept of ‘visibility’, I propose a new way of reading the controversy about Roman tax which, taking up insights in Myers’s ‘political’ commentary, shows connections between this text and those immediately preceding it. Jesus makes central in the engagement about tax the same (...) issue as is already at stake: identity and recognition. His ‘amazing’ response makes clear what the leaders are not seeing. (shrink)

Kavramlar doğru anlamlandırılmadığı takdirde meselelerin anlaşılması noktasında yanlış sonuçlara varmanın kaçınılmaz olduğu bir hakikattir. Fıtrat kavramı bu manada insanın neliği bağlamında başat kavram olarak her daim farklı değerlendirmelere konu olmuştur. İnsanın, gerek kendisini var eden Allah ile olan ilişkisi gerekse hemcinsleriyle ve içerisinde yaşadığı âlemle ilişkisi çerçevesinde bu kavramın anlam alanının tespiti yine ait olduğu dünya üzerinden yapıldığı zaman konu hakkında doğru sonuçların elde edilmesine imkân tanıyacaktır. Kur’ân ve hadislerde yerini bulan fıtrat kavramının anlam alanına yönelik çalışmaların bu alanlarda derinlemesine (...) tahlili noktasında söz konusu metinleri, kendi iç bütünlükleri ve birbirleriyle olan ilişkileri bağlamında meseleyi ele alması, en sağlıklı yol olacaktır. Bu çalışmada kavramın önce sözlük anlamı, türevleri üzerinden ele alınmış daha sonra Kur’ân ve hadislerde geçtiği durumları, belirtilen usûl üzerinden değerlendirmeye tâbi tutulmuştur. Sonuç olarak luğavî anlamı da dikkate alınarak fıtrat kavramı ile Kur’ân’da insanın Allah’la ilişkisine, hadislerde ise insanın doğasındaki sâfiyete ve insanlarla olan ilişkisinde dikkat gerektiren yönüne vurgu yapıldığı ortaya konulmaya çalışılmıştır. (shrink)

Over the past few decades, Indigenous communities have successfully campaigned for greater inclusion in decision-making processes that directly affect their lands and livelihoods. As a result, two important participatory rights for Indigenous peoples have now been widely recognized: the right to consultation and the right to free, prior and informed consent (FPIC). Although these participatory rights are meant to empower the speech of these communities—to give them a proper say in the decisions that most affect them—we argue that the way (...) these rights have been implemented and interpreted sometimes has the opposite effect, of denying them a say or ‘silencing’ them. In support of this conclusion we draw on feminist speech act theory to identify practices of locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary group silencing that arise in the context of consultation with Indigenous communities. (shrink)

According Philip Pettit, suitably organised groups not only possess ‘minds of their own’ but can also ‘make up their minds’ and 'speak for themselves'--where these two capacities enable them to perform as conversable subjects or 'persons'. In this paper I critically examine Pettit's case for group personhood. My first step is to reconstruct his account, explaining first how he understands the two capacities he considers central to personhood – the capacity to ‘make up one’s mind’, and the capacity to ‘speak (...) for oneself’ – before showing how he thinks these can be manifested in groups. With Pettit’s account duly reconstructed, I then turn to criticism, arguing that Pettit’s construal of making up one’s mind does not do proper justice to our first-personal self-understanding, nor to our characteristic interpersonal forms of engagement. This leads me, finally, to consider an alternative construal of ‘making up one’s mind’ and ‘speaking for oneself’ that is associated with the work of Richard Moran and whichargue, could usefully be exteextended to groups. (shrink)

In this book, Mary Townsend proposes that, contrary to the current scholarship on Plato's Republic, Socrates does not in fact set out to prove the weakness of women. Rather, she argues that close attention to the drama of the Republic reveals that Plato dramatizes the reluctance of men to allow women into the public sphere and offers a deeply aporetic vision of women’s nature and political position—a vision full of concern not only for the human community, but for the (...) desires of women themselves. (shrink)

Language’s intentional nature has been highlighted as a crucial feature distinguishing it from other communication systems. Specifically, language is often thought to depend on highly structured intentional action and mutual mindreading by a communicator and recipient. Whilst similar abilities in animals can shed light on the evolution of intentionality, they remain challenging to detect unambiguously. We revisit animal intentional communication and suggest that progress in identifying analogous capacities has been complicated by (i) the assumption that intentional (that is, voluntary) production (...) of communicative acts requires mental-state attribution, and (ii) variation in approaches investigating communication across sensory modalities. To move forward, we argue that a framework fusing research across modalities and species is required. We structure intentional communication into a series of requirements, each of which can be operationalised, investigated empirically, and must be met for purposive, intentionally communicative acts to be demonstrated. Our unified approach helps elucidate the distribution of animal intentional communication and subsequently serves to clarify what is meant by attributions of intentional communication in animals and humans. (shrink)

People in liberal societies tend to feel a little uncomfortable talking about male genital cutting, but generally do not think it is morally abhorrent. But female genital cutting is widely consider...

In responding to Peter Forrest’s defence of ‘tough-minded theodicy’, I point to some problematic features of theodicies of this sort, in particular their commitment to an anthropomorphic conception of God which tends to assimilate the Creator to the creaturely and so diminishes the otherness and mystery of God. This remains the case, I argue, even granted Forrest’s view that God may have a very different kind of morality from the one we mortals are subject to.

Although there is extensive information about why people participate in clinical trials, studies are largely based on quantitative evidence and typically focus on single conditions. Over the last decade investigations into why people volunteer for health research have become increasingly prominent across diverse research settings, offering variable based explanations of participation patterns driven primarily by recruitment concerns. Therapeutic misconception and altruism have emerged as predominant themes in this literature on motivations to participate in health research. This paper contributes to more (...) recent qualitative approaches to understanding how and why people come to participate in various types of health research. We focus on the experience of participating and the meanings research participation has for people within the context of their lives and their health and illness biographies. (shrink)

Article Title: ‘Being and Becoming in the Theory of Group Agency’This paper explores a bootstrapping puzzle which appears to afflict Philip Pettit’s theory of group agency. Pettit claims that the corporate persons recognised by his theory come about when a set of individuals ‘gets its act together’ by undertaking to reason at the collective level. But this is puzzling, because it is hard to see how the step such a collective must take to become a group agent – the collectivisation (...) of reason – can be taken without them already being an agent. I explore this puzzle by recounting Pettit’s account of the emergence of group agents. According to Pettit this process has two stages: a first stage in which a collective incurs the distinctive pressure exemplified by the Doctrinal Paradox, and a second in which the collective responds to that pressure by instituting decision-making mechanisms designed to secure collective rationality. After arguing that this second, response stage in Pettit’s account is not coherent, I conclude with the tentative suggestion that the personhood of groups should be seen as depending not only on the efforts of group members but also on the recognitive attitudes of other persons in a wider discursive community. (shrink)

Categorization and decision making are combined in a task with photorealistic faces. Two different types of face stimuli were assigned probabilistically into one of two fictitious groups; based on the category, faces were further probabilistically assigned to be hostile or friendly. In Part I, participants are asked to categorize a face into one of two categories, and to make a decision concerning interaction. A Markov model of categorization followed by decision making provides reasonable fits to Part I data. A Markov (...) model predicting decision making followed by categorization is rejected. In Part II, a no-parameter model predicts decisions using categorization and decision responses collected in separate trials, suggesting that Part 1 results are not an artifact of the presentation of categorization and decision questions within a single trial. Decisions concerning interaction appear to be based on information from the category decision, and not from the face stimuli alone. (shrink)

Hume's Aesthetic Theory examines the neglected area of the development of aesthetics in empiricist thinking, exploring the link between the empiricist background of aesthetics in the eighteenth century and the work of David Hume.

Unlike bioethics mediators who are employed by healthcare organizations as outside consultants, mediators who are embedded in an institution must be authorized to chronicle a clinical ethics consultation or a mediation in a patient’s medical chart. This is an important privilege, as the chart is a legal document. In this article I discuss this important part of a bioethics mediator’s tool kit in my presentation of a case illustrating how bioethics mediation may proceed, and what this approach using both bioethics (...) and mediation may add. (shrink)

Popper and Miller (1983) have presented an argument purporting to establish the impossibility of inductive probability. Here I discuss critically their characterization of a deductive part of nondeductive support, a point that has not figured centrally in previous responses.