Nathan Coombs demonstrates that the Marxist science of history has been reimagined by a strand of contemporary French theory after Louis Althusser. Taking a comparative approach, Coombs explores the technical details of both traditions' historical sciences.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a claim of metaphysical modality, in possession of good alethic standing, must be in want of an essentialist foundation. Or at least so say the advocates of the reductive-essence-first view, according to which all modality is to be reductively defined in terms of essence. Here, I contest this bit of current wisdom. In particular, I offer two puzzles—one concerning the essences of non-compossible, complementary entities, and a second involving entities whose essences are modally (...) ‘loaded’—that together strongly call into question the possibility of reducing modality to essence. (shrink)

This paper is concerned with the conditions under which a person can be said to have told someone or predicted (the answer to a question like) ‘who came’.

We offer an original argument for the existence of universal fictions—that is, fictions within which every possible proposition is true. Specifically, we detail a trio of such fictions, along with an easy-to-follow recipe for generating more. After exploring several consequences and dismissing some objections, we conclude that fiction, unlike reality, is unlimited when it comes to truth.

Rather infamously, Kit Fine provided a series of counter-examples which purport to show that the modalist program of analysing essence in terms of metaphysical necessity is fundamentally misguided. Several would-be modalists have since responded, attempting to save the position from this Finean Challenge. This paper evaluates and rejects a trio of such responses, from Della Rocca, Zalta, and Gorman. But I’m not here arguing for Fine’s conclusion – ultimately, this is a fight amongst friends, with Della Rocca, Zalta, Gorman, and (...) I all wanting to be modalists, but disagreeing on the details. As such, while my primary aim is to show what’s wrong with this trio, the secondary aim is demonstrating how what’s right about them in fact pushes one towards my own sparse modalist account. So while the primary conclusion of this paper is negative, the secondary, positive, conclusion is that modalists shouldn’t give up hope – plausible responses to Fine are still out there. (shrink)

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a claim of metaphysical modality, in possession of good alethic standing, must be in want of an essentialist foundation. Or at least so say the advocates of thereductive-essence-firstview, according to which all modality is to be reductively defined in terms of essence. Here, I contest this bit of current wisdom. In particular, I offer two puzzles—one concerning the essences of non-compossible, complementary entities, and a second involving entities whose essences are modally ‘loaded’—that together (...) strongly call into question the possibility of reducing modality to essence. (shrink)

The past decade and a half has seen an absolute explosion of literature discussing the structure of reality. One particular focus here has been on the fundamental. However, while there has been extensive discussion, numerous fundamental questions about fundamentality have not been touched upon. In this chapter, I focus on one such lacuna about the modal strength of fundamentality. More specifically, I am interested in exploring the contingent fundamentality thesis - that is, the idea that the fundamentalia are only contingently (...) fundamental (or, in property-terms, that the property of being fundamental is not a (weakly) necessary property). And while I think this thesis is plausible – indeed, I show here that it lurks in the unexamined shadows/assumptions of some fairly prominent positions – as far as I can tell, nothing has been said either for or against it. Here, I hope to fix this by giving the thesis a proper airing. In this way, this chapter represents a first-pass at exploring not only the modal status of fundamentality, but also offers a starting point for examining broader issues about the relationship between fundamentality and modality. (shrink)

General consensus has it that contingencies lack the requisite modal umph to serve as explanations for the modal status of necessities. The central aim of this paper is to show that this received opinion is incorrect: contingent necessity-makers are in fact possible. To do so, I identify certain conditions the satisfaction of which entail the possibility of contingent necessity-makers. I then argue for two broad instances where these conditions are satisfied. Consequently, the associated necessities in fact have contingent necessity-makers.

The nursing community in the United States polarized in September 2020 between Dawn Wooten's whistleblowing about forced hysterectomies at an immigration center in Georgia and the American Nurses Association's refusal to endorse a presidential candidate despite the Trump administration's mounting failures to address the public health crisis posed by the COVID-19 pandemic. This reveals a need for more attention to political aspects of health outcome inequities. As advocates for health equity, nurses can join in recent scholarship and activism concerning the (...) political determinants of health. In this paper, we examine recent work on the political determinants of health with an aim to add two things. First, we seek to build further on the notion of “political” determinants of health by distinguishing policy and governance structures from dynamics of politicization through appeal to critical disabilities studies. Second, we seek to apply this further nuanced approach to challenge rhetorical uses of “vulnerable populations,” where this phrase serves to misrecognize systemic institutionalized forces that actively exploit and marginalize people and groups. By refocusing attention to political systems organized around and perpetuating inequitable health outcomes, nurses and other health care professionals—as well as those whom they serve—can concentrate their effort and power to act on political determinants of health in bringing about more equitable health outcomes. (shrink)

Non-governmental organizations often regard expanding revenue and reducing costs as standard procedures to achieve corporate sustainability, while at the same time considering human resources as important assets. Government agencies have greater flexibility in staffing, and their human resource strategies for employee education and training often use organizational learning to develop operational performance. Training is regarded as a panacea for corporate sustainability and channels have been established to support employees' learning. Curriculum development of synchronous online learning is an approach that requires (...) further investigation. We distributed 360 questionnaires to supervisors and employees of the Taipei City Government, Taiwan. A total of 268 valid copies were retrieved, giving a response rate of 74%. The study results are expected to help public sector employers enhance employee cohesiveness and generate more operational team spirit. (shrink)

Although actual human omniscience is unimaginable, it is not obvious what it means to be limited with regard to thought. One of Kant's significant contributions to epistemology was his redefinition of the limits of thought. He is explicit about this when he contrasts human, receptive intuition, and the creative intuition that an infinite being would have. Importantly, judging and reasoning are only necessary for a mind that is first affected by an object through sensibility, which is not the case for (...) a being with creative intuition, since this kind of intuition creates its own object. This means that the intellect of Kant's God is distinct from the human intellect in kind, since judging and reasoning are essentially finite activities; they are already evidence of a finite, human cognition. In contrast, Aristotle argues that human cognition - beyond its capacity for discursivity - is able to contemplate; as we will see, Aristotle argues that contemplation is divine, and so a limited intellect can become more or less like an omniscient intellect depending on the quality of one's contemplative life. In this work, I want to 1) establish that Kant and Aristotle have incompatible conceptions of non-omniscience, 2) trace the epistemological commitments that motivate their rival positions on non-omniscience, 3) show that their particular views on the legitimacy of metaphysical judgments presuppose their particular interpretations of non-omniscience, and 4) argue that Kant provides a superior analysis of non-omniscience. (shrink)

It is by way of the call that one is enabled to wake up to responsibility. What is the illocutionary mood of the ‘call’ of conscience, though? Is this transcendental enabler of responsibility an imposing demand or an invitational question? Both Levinas and Heidegger emphasize the impositional character of the call in conscience. The call seems to be the very essence of imperatives. I develop an apology for questioning by way of appeal to crumbs scattered throughout Jewish traditions as well (...) as throughout the works of Levinas and Heidegger. Perhaps we are invited to be rather than told to be. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to highlight the need for greater ethical, professional, and leadership-based education for undergraduate business students, and to offer helpful pathways for this professional preparation. This paper recommends the use of panel discussions centered around ethical and professional behavior, leadership, and related skill sets in business as one main route towards exposing students to these managerial values. A panel discussion with business leaders who value these traits can help students be exposed to impactful wisdom, advice, (...) and personal experiences that can help shape their own careers, hearts, and minds. This paper addresses the importance of these values as they relate to business ethics education, the value of panel discussions in general, one specific panel discussion, the event’s creation, the post-event Meet and Greet, takeaways for students, related assessments, and other small related ways that panelists and guest speakers have informed ethics and professionalism in undergraduate training. (shrink)

Our ability to think, argue and reason is determined by our ability to question. Questions are a vital component of critical thinking, yet we underestimate the role they play. Using Questions to Think puts questioning back in the spotlight. -/- Naming the parts of questions at the same time as we name parts of thought, this one-of-a-kind introduction allows us to see how questions relate to the definitions of propositions, premises, conclusions, and the validity of arguments. Why is this important? (...) Making the role of questions visible in thinking, reasoning, and dialogue, allows us to: -/- - Ask better questions - Improve our capability to understand an argument - Exercise vigilance in the act of questioning - Make explicit what you already know implicitly - Engage with ideas that contradict our own - See ideas in broader context -/- Breathing new life into our current approach to critical thinking, this practical, much-needed textbook moves us away from the traditional focus on formal argument and fallacy identification, combines the Kantian critique of reason with Hans-Georg Gadamer's hermeneutics and reminds us why thinking can only be understood as an answer to a question. (shrink)

Stephen Mulhall _On Film_ London and New York: Routledge, 2002 ISBN 0-415-24796-9 142 pp.

Reductionists in biology claim that all biological events can be explained in terms of genes and macromolecules alone, while antireductionists argue that some biological events must be explained at a higher level. The literature, however, does not distinguish between different kinds of molecular explanation. The goal of this article is to identify and analyze three such kinds. The analysis of molecular explanations herein carries an important philosophical implication; in shunning crude reductionism and extreme versions of holism, we can combine the (...) insights of thoughtful reductionists with sophisticated antireductionism. When this is done, the question of explanatory reductionism becomes less substantial than often supposed. (shrink)

A critique of ‘beyond left and right’ ideologies, from red Toryism to techno-libertarianism.

The market can produce skewed information about investigational products awaiting FDA approval. But the FDA rarely steps in to correct such misleading information, despite statutory authority to do so. This article evaluates a recommendation by the FDA Transparency Working Group that FDA more clearly signal when and how it will correct misleading information about investigational products, and why such a recommendation is particularly important after the 21st Century Cures Act.

Lane et al.'s proposal that psychotherapeutic change comes about through memory reconsolidation is compelling; however, the model would be strengthened by the inclusion of predictions regarding additional factors that might influence treatment response, predictions for improving outcomes for non-responsive patients, and a discussion of how the proposed model might explain individual differences in vulnerability for mental health problems.

Short-term international medical outreach experiences are becoming more popular among medical students. As the popularity of these trips grows, participants, scholars, and institutions have become more aware of the potential pitfalls of such experiences. Loyola University Chicago Stritch School of Medicine has an approximately 20-year international service immersion program that has sent more than 1,400 participants to more than 30 countries. Recently, ISI programming has been adjusted to provide students more formal sessions exploring the ethics of the ISI trips. Students (...) are required to attend both pre- and post-trip educational sessions covering a wide range of relevant global health topics as well as participating in in-country reflections and post-trip debriefings. This recent adjustment has evolved further to become the foundation for the SSOM’s four-year Global Health Honors program that not only encourages an ethical foundation for the student’s ISI experience but also hopes to provide a foundation for students as they look toward a future career in global health. (shrink)

Extending ethical considerability to animals consistently takes the form of imperialism: progressing outward from the core of human morality, it incorporates only those animals deemed relevantly similar to humans while rejecting or reforming those lifeforms which are not. I develop an ethic of animal treatment premised on the species difference of undomesticated animals, which has the potential to reunite not only animal and environmental ethics, but environmental and interhuman ethics: each species has evolutionarily specified patterns of behavior for the proper (...) treatment of members of its own species and members of other species. (shrink)

Bernard Charbonneau’s The Green Light is a classic text of French environmentalism, first published in 1980 but unavailable in English until now. Philosophically, I found the book to be underwhelming, but Charbonneau makes no apologies for this:The author’s viewpoint is...not that of a specialist,...of a bona fide philosopher or poet, but that of a man who needs air to breathe, water to drink and dive in, time and space to play, silence to sleep or reflect...who has felt in his bones (...) and his eye each of the blows the land has endured.Charbonneau’s motivations for writing are personal, but not private; the introduction which chronicles his own background, struggles, and heartbreak might be the most compelling part... (shrink)

The aim of this chapter is broadly exploratory: we want to better understand online affective manipulation and what, if anything, is morally problematic about it. To do so, we begin by pulling apart various forms of online affective manipulation. We then proceed to discuss why online affective manipulation is properly categorized as manipulative, as well as what is wrong with (online) manipulation more generally. Building on this, we next argue that, at its most extreme, online affective manipulation constitutes a novel (...) form of affective injustice that we call affective powerlessness. To demonstrate this, we introduce the notions of affective injustice and affective powerlessness and show how several forms of online affective manipulation leave users in this state. The upshot is that this chapter gives us a better grip on the nature of online affective manipulation, as well some tools to help us understand when and why it is morally problematic. (shrink)

While recent history has seen significant debate concerning the nature and extension of essence, comparatively little attention has been paid to the epistemology of essence. This is strange, as, plausibly, what answers we give to the metaphysical questions about essence will (or should) be partially constrained by our essence epistemology. Here, I aim to go some way towards filling this lacuna. In particular, I here argue that there is no plausible epistemic story available for non-modal accounts of essence. In particular, (...) existing accounts of essence epistemology cannot explain how we are able to know that something is genuinely essential, rather than merely necessary. One consequence is that modal accounts of essence – which only needs to supply an epistemology for a non-hyperintensional notion – look that much more plausible. (shrink)

In this paper, I present an interpretation of the use of constructions in both the problems and theorems of Elements I–VI, in light of the concept of given as developed in the Data, that makes a distinction between the way that constructions are used in problems, problem-constructions, and the way that they are used in theorems and in the proofs of problems, proof-constructions. I begin by showing that the general structure of a problem is slightly different from that stated by (...) Proclus in his commentary on the Elements. I then give a reading of all five postulates, Elem. I.post.1–5, in terms of the concept of given. This is followed by a detailed exhibition of the syntax of problem-constructions, which shows that these are not practical instructions for using a straightedge and compass, but rather demonstrations of the existence of an effective procedure for introducing geometric objects, which procedure is reducible to operations of the postulates but not directly stated in terms of the postulates. Finally, I argue that theorems and the proofs of problems employ a wider range of constructive and semi- and non-constructive assumptions that those made possible by problems. (shrink)

We prove the triviality of the Grothendieck ring of a Z-valued field K under slight conditions on the logical language and on K. We construct a definable bijection from the plane K 2 to itself minus a point. When we specialized to local fields with finite residue field, we construct a definable bijection from the valuation ring to itself minus a point.

As Vetter says, we are at the “beginning of the debate, not the end” (2015: 300) when it comes to evaluating her potentiality-based account of metaphysical modality. This paper contributes to this developing debate by highlighting three problems for Vetter’s account. Specifically, I begin (§1) by articulating some relevant details of Vetter’s potentiality-based view. This leads to the first issue (§2), concerning unclarity in the idea of degrees of potentiality. Similarly, the second issue (§3) raises trouble for Vetter’s proposed individuation (...) conditions for potentialities. Finally, the third issue (§4) is about apparently unmanifestable intrinsic potentialities, and suggests that there might be some deeper problems with anchoring metaphysical possibilities in concrete objects. More generally, though the issues detailed here are problematic, I do not take them to be fatal. However, they do show that, at minimum, further clarification of Vetter’s potentiality view is required. As Vetter says, we are at the “beginning of the debate, not the end” (2015: 300) when it comes to evaluating her potentiality-based account of metaphysical modality. This paper contributes to this developing debate by highlighting three problems for Vetter’s account. Specifically, I begin (§1) by articulating some relevant details of Vetter’s potentiality-based view. This leads to the first issue (§2), concerning unclarity in the idea of degrees of potentiality. Similarly, the second issue (§3) raises trouble for Vetter’s proposed individuation conditions for potentialities. Finally, the third issue (§4) is about apparently unmanifestable intrinsic potentialities, and suggests that there might be some deeper problems with anchoring metaphysical possibilities in concrete objects. More generally, though the issues detailed here are problematic, I do not take them to be fatal. However, they do show that, at minimum, further clarification of Vetter’s potentiality view is required. (shrink)

Many despair at trying to understand something’s meaning and express dissatisfaction with language wholesale. What if some things simply are not understandable? Thich Nhat Hanh coined interbeing to name the fundamental principle of interdependence defining Buddhist ontologies, and uses interbeing to dislodge despair resulting from rigid expectations of how things must be. Thich also criticized a standard view of language as generating those rigid expectations. Drawing upon classical humanist traditions, Hans-Georg Gadamer promoted a hermeneutics whereby interpreters overcome existential alienation. In (...) his theory of understanding meaning, Gadamer rehabilitated language as having its being in revealing aspects of truth. By situating Gadamer’s hermeneutics within Thich’s interbeing, I develop limits of understanding that facilitate freedom from despair about meaning and language. Thich and Gadamer both taught that the quest for stability within change is misguided. This requires rigorous attention to the limits of understanding. Attention to these limits serves to liberate people from clinging to the illusion that all things are understandable and despair accompanying the incapacity to understand some things. (shrink)

Lange has argued that contingencies lack the modal strength to be necessity-makers. Here, I argue that Lange’s case turns upon a faulty premise, and that there is no obvious fixes he might pursue. The general upshot is that his argument gives us no reason to think that contingencies could not be necessity-makers after all.

Hegel’s conception of Spirit does not subordinate difference to sameness, in a way that would make it unusable for a genuinely intersubjective idealism directed to a comprehensive account of the contemporary world. A close analysis of the logic of recognition and the dialectic of conscience in the Phenomenology of Spirit demonstrates that the unity of Spirit emerges in and through conflict, and is forged in the process whereby particular encounters between differently situated individuals reveal and establish the emerging character and (...) significance of the stances they uniquely occupy. (shrink)

Cinema, like art more generally, is both an artistic genre and a politico-economic institution. On the one hand there is film, a medium which disseminates moving images via the projection of light through celluloid onto a screen. Individual films or "movies," in turn, are discrete aesthetic objects that are distinguished and analyzed vis-à-vis their form and content. On the other hand there is the film industry-the elaborate network of artistic, technical, and economic apparatuses which plan, produce, market, and display films (...) to audiences. Since its inception, both the aesthetic and political aspects of cinema have been subject to various forms of theoretical analysis which have been subject to critique in turn. In this paper I offer a brief survey of these analyses and critiques followed by a sketch of an alternative approach to film theory. Drawing upon the ideas of Foucault and Deleuze, this "anarchist" film theory seeks to present a viable critical methodology while at the same time elucidating the liberatory potential of film. (shrink)

Posthumanist critics such as Braidotti—informed by the antihumanisms of Foucault, Irigaray, and Deleuze—seek to respond to advanced capitalism by promoting what they take to be a radical transformation of what it means to be “human,” a way of conceiving being human that is thoroughly and consistently post-anthropocentric. Braidotti calls out advanced capitalism’s global economy as being inconsistently post-anthropocentric. In response, I first lay out ways through which posthumanists can find corroboration in Asian religious thought, such as in Zhuangzi and classical (...) Chan (Zen) Buddhism. I simply put forth, basically side by side, posthumanist positions on subjectivity and flourishing and parallels in Zhuangzi and Chan. This may strike some as sophomoric, which is in part what I hope to illustrate: just how easy it is to find corroboration in these Asian religious resources. This leads to my second issue. Given such conveniently available resources, what might this tell us about limitations in posthumanist Humanities and posthumanist critical theory as developed so far? I seek to bring out both a possible covert form of Orientalism in posthumanism and a myopic methodology in excluding Religious Studies in general as paradigmatic of posthumanist Humanities. (shrink)