In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Justice Not GreedRichard A. HoehnJustice Not Greed Edited by Pamela Brubaker and Rogate Mshana Geneva: WCC Publications, 2010. 224 pp. $14.00The World Council of Churches (WCC) Advisory Group on Economic Matters (AGEM) advises the WCC and congregations on global economic issues. AGEM members from diverse backgrounds produced the papers in this volume. The introduction is by Rogate Mshana, WCC director for Peace, Justice, and Creation. Samuel Kobia, general (...) secretary of the WCC from 2004–9, introduces the rationale and role of AGEM in the global financial crisis. The book ends with a statement on just finance and the economy of life, adopted by the WCC Central Committee in September 2009. Justice Not Greed will be most useful in settings where there is interest in the intersection of ethics, the economic crisis, and Christianity in relation to the global economy, as well as among those who wish to follow the WCC. As expected [End Page 208] of conference papers, there is not a systematic development of an argument but overlapping ethical and economic analyses. All, however, are opposed to the status quo because of its manifest injustice, especially the impact on poor people.If one were to impose a thematic development, it might go something like this, allowing for individual differences among the authors. Decolonization has resulted in a lopsided, Western, capitalist economic system predicated on greed (Jan Pronk), described by other authors as a beast or a cancer (vivid but unhelpful metaphors since the crisis was caused by humans, not nature). The world lacks appropriate international structures. We need new global institutions, a new global financial architecture that is predicated on, or at least takes into account, justice. Congregations, the ecumenical movement, and the WCC could play a significant role in helping the United Nations move toward such a system.Several authors hope that the global crisis will provide a moment when such a change might become possible (e.g., Alexander Cobham’s “Blood-Stained Silver Lining”). Pamela K. Brubaker, Kim Yong-Bock, Roel Aalbersberg, Rienzie Perera, and Geevarghese Mor Coorilos examine questions related to the Bible, ethics, theology, a culture of “enough for all” (Musa Panti Filibus), the church as moral community, the ecumenical movement, and principles for an alternative economic system. Mariana Issa Zureikat argues for “econo-morals,” applying moral values to economic analyses. Thomas H. Kang advocates the capabilities approach of Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum. Marcos Arruda suggests an economy of world solidarity with the “gross happiness index” as a standard for measuring progress. While most chapters include economic analysis, John Dillon wades into some nitty-gritty causes of the current financial crisis, with a positive nod toward the (never adopted) Keynes plan for the Bretton Woods system of monetary management. Marie-Aimee Tourres lays out impacts on the developing world, as does Xiao Lian from a Chinese perspective. Most of these authors argue for such global solutions as a global reserve system and a global tax system.Justice Not Greed presents thoughtful, sometimes passionate papers that could form a basis for lively discussion. Yet real-world solutions often come down to the practice of democracy and political will. Unfortunately, it is not clear that the ecumenical movement possesses the will or the means to effect change because local organizing for political change is not a high priority at any level. [End Page 209]Richard A. HoehnChrist the Servant Lutheran ChurchCopyright © 2012 The Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)

In Mind and World, John McDowell argues against the view that perceptual representation is non-conceptual. The central worry is that this view cannot offer any reasonable account of how perception bears rationally upon belief. I argue that this worry, though sensible, can be met, if we are clear that perceptual representation is, though non-conceptual, still in some sense 'assertoric': Perception, like belief, represents things as being thus and so.

Gottlob Frege's Grundgesetze der Arithmetik, or Basic Laws of Arithmetic, was intended to be his magnum opus, the book in which he would finally establish his logicist philosophy of arithmetic. But because of the disaster of Russell's Paradox, which undermined Frege's proofs, the more mathematical parts of the book have rarely been read. Richard G.

Jim Joyce has presented an argument for Probabilism based on considerations of epistemic utility [Joyce, 1998]. In a recent paper, I adapted this argument to give an argument for Probablism and the Principal Principle based on similar considerations [Pettigrew, 2012]. Joyce’s argument assumes that a credence in a true proposition is better the closer it is to maximal credence, whilst a credence in a false proposition is better the closer it is to minimal credence. By contrast, my argument in that (...) paper assumed (roughly) that a credence in a proposition is better the closer it is to the objective chance of that proposition. In this paper, I present an epistemic utility argument for Probabilism and the Principal Principle that retains Joyce’s assumption rather than the alternative I endorsed in the earlier paper. I argue that this results in a superior argument for these norms. (shrink)

A brief, non-technical introduction to technical and philosophical aspects of Frege's philosophy of arithmetic. The exposition focuses on Frege's Theorem, which states that the axioms of arithmetic are provable, in second-order logic, from a single non-logical axiom, "Hume's Principle", which itself is: The number of Fs is the same as the number of Gs if, and only if, the Fs and Gs are in one-one correspondence.

Depression and the subjective experience of suffering are distinct forms of distress, but they are sometimes commingled with one another. Using a cross-sectional sample of flight attendants, we tested for further empirical evidence distinguishing depression and suffering. Correlations with 15 indices covering several dimensions of well-being indicated that associations with worse well-being were mostly stronger for depression than suffering. There was a large positive correlation between depression and suffering, but we also found evidence of notable non-concurrent depression and suffering in (...) the sample. After dividing participants into four groups that varied based on severity of depression and suffering, regression analyses showed higher levels of well-being among those with both none-mild depression and none-mild suffering compared to those with moderate-severe depression, moderate-severe suffering, or both. All indices of well-being were lowest among the group of participants with moderate-severe depression and moderate-severe suffering. In addition to providing further evidence supporting a distinction between depression and suffering, our findings suggest that concurrent depression and suffering may be more disruptive to well-being than when either is present alone. (shrink)

The paper formulates and proves a strengthening of ‘Frege’s Theorem’, which states that axioms for second-order arithmetic are derivable in second-order logic from Hume’s Principle, which itself says that the number of Fs is the same as the number ofGs just in case the Fs and Gs are equinumerous. The improvement consists in restricting this claim to finite concepts, so that nothing is claimed about the circumstances under which infinite concepts have the same number. ‘Finite Hume’s Principle’ also suffices for (...) the derivation of axioms for arithmetic and, indeed, is equivalent to a version of them, in the presence of Frege’s definitions of the primitive expressions of the language of arithmetic. The philosophical significance of this result is also discussed. (shrink)

In The Varieties of Reference, Gareth Evans argues that the content of perceptual experience is nonconceptual, in a sense I shall explain momentarily. More recently, in his book Mind and World, John McDowell has argued that the reasons Evans gives for this claim are not compelling and, moreover, that Evans’s view is a version of “the Myth of the Given”: More precisely, Evans’s view is alleged to suffer from the same sorts of problems that plague sense-datum theories of perception. In (...) particular, McDowell argues that perceptual experience must be within “the space of reasons,” that perception must be able to give us reasons for, that is, to justify, our beliefs about the world: And, according to him, no state that does not have conceptual content can be a reason for a belief. Now, there are many ways in which Evans’s basic idea, that perceptual content is nonconceptual, might be developed; some of these, I shall argue, would be vulnerable to the objections McDowell brings against him. But I shall also argue that there is a way of developing it that is not vulnerable to these objections. (shrink)

Some years ago, Machery, Mallon, Nichols, and Stich reported the results of experiments that reveal, they claim, cross-cultural differences in speaker’s ‘intuitions’ about Kripke’s famous Gödel–Schmidt case. Several authors have suggested, however, that the question they asked their subjects is ambiguous between speaker’s reference and semantic reference. Machery and colleagues have since made a number of replies. It is argued here that these are ineffective. The larger lesson, however, concerns the role that first-order philosophy should, and more importantly should not, (...) play in the design of such experiments and in the evaluation of their results. (shrink)

Why do people in more unequal societies have worse health and shorter lives than those in less unequal ones? Why do more unequal societies tend to have more violence and weaker community life? This paper discusses the research evidence on the psychosocial pathways which suggest how and why we are affected by inequality.How big income differences are in any society seems to serve as an indicator of the scale of social differentiation and social distances within it. The evidence shows that (...) more hierarchical societies incur a wide range of social costs reflecting the corrosive effects of inequality. But why are we so sensitive to inequality? Epidemiological research on health inequalities and the social determinants of health has demonstrated that the quality of the social environment has powerful effects on health. Particularly important are social status, friendship and early childhood experience. The indications are that poor health may share causal pathways with many other social problems associated with relative deprivation - including violence.Summarizing my recent book, The Impact of Inequality , this paper provides an account of how inequality gets under the skin to affect both health and wellbeing. Rather than making comparisons with some impractical state of complete equality, all the evidence presented shows the importance of the differences in inequality between different states of the USA or between different developed market democracies: it shows that even small increases in equality matter. (shrink)

Frege, famously, held that there is a close connection between our concept of cardinal number and the notion of one-one correspondence, a connection enshrined in Hume's Principle. Husserl, and later Parsons, objected that there is no such close connection, that our most primitive conception of cardinality arises from our grasp of the practice of counting. Some empirical work on children's development of a concept of number has sometimes been thought to point in the same direction. I argue, however, that Frege (...) was close to right, that our concept of cardinal number is closely connected with a notion like that of one-one correspondence, a more primitive notion we might call just as many. (shrink)

In his paper “Flaws of Formal Relationism”, Mahrad Almotahari argues against the sort of response to Frege's Puzzle I have defended elsewhere, which he dubs ‘Formal Relationism’. Almotahari argues that, because of its specifically formal character, this view is vulnerable to objections that cannot be raised against the otherwise similar Semantic Relationism due to Kit Fine. I argue in response that Formal Relationism has neither of the flaws Almotahari claims to identify.

Maybe the most important argument in David Chalmers’s monumental book Constructing the World is the one he calls the ‘Frontloading Argument’, which is used in Chapter 4 to argue for the book’s central thesis, A Priori Scrutability. And, at first blush, the Frontloading Argument looks very strong. I argue here, however, that it is incapable of securing the conclusion it is meant to establish.

The main focus of my comments is the role played in Dickie's view by the idea that "the mind has a need to represent things outside itself". But there are also some remarks about her (very interesting) suggestion that descriptive names can sometimes fail to refer to the object that satisfies the associated description.

Frege's intention in section 31 of Grundgesetze is to show that every well-formed expression in his formal system denotes. But it has been obscure why he wants to do this and how he intends to do it. It is argued here that, in large part, Frege's purpose is to show that the smooth breathing, from which names of value-ranges are formed, denotes; that his proof that his other primitive expressions denote is sound and anticipates Tarski's theory of truth; and that (...) the proof that the smooth breathing denotes, while flawed, rests upon an idea now familiar from the completeness proof for first-order logic. The main work of the paper consists in defending a new understanding of the semantics Frege offers for the quantifiers: one which is objectual, but which does not make use of the notion of an assignment to a free variable. (shrink)

This book by Richard G. Stevens is a comprehensive introduction to the nature of political philosophy. It offers definitions of philosophy and politics, showing the tension between the two and the origin of political philosophy as a means of resolution of that tension. Plato and Aristotle are examined in order to see the search for the best political order. Inquiry is then made into political philosophy's new tension brought about by the growth of revealed religion in the Middle Ages. (...) It then examines the changes introduced by modernity and gives an overview of postmodern political thought. The book covers the most influential philosophers and directs readers to the classics of political philosophy, guiding them in studying them. It is an approachable introduction to a complex subject, not just a history of it. It is a point of entry into the subject for students and for others as well. (shrink)

Written as a comment on Crispin Wright's "Vagueness: A Fifth Column Approach", this paper defends a form of supervaluationism against Wright's criticisms. Along the way, however, it takes up the question what is really wrong with Epistemicism, how the appeal of the Sorities ought properly to be understood, and why Contextualist accounts of vagueness won't do.

Using the case of an industrial accident involving a killer robot, the author successfully combines technical and ethical concepts to present to students and professionals real-life issues that they may one day have to confront.

Why should one think Frege's definition of the ancestral correct? It can be proven to be extensionally correct, but the argument uses arithmetical induction, and that seems to undermine Frege's claim to have justified induction in purely logical terms. I discuss such circularity objections and then offer a new definition of the ancestral intended to be intensionally correct; its extensional correctness then follows without proof. This new definition can be proven equivalent to Frege's without any use of arithmetical induction. This (...) proves, without any use of arithmetical induction, that Frege's definition is extensionally correct and so answers the circularity objections. (shrink)

This book offers a thorough reanalysis of Charles Darwin's Origin of Species, which for many people represents the work that alone gave rise to evolutionism. Of course, scholars today know better than that. Yet, few resist the temptation of turning to the Origin in order to support it or reject it in light of their own work. Apparently, Darwin fills the mythical role of a founding figure that must either be invoked or repudiated. The book is an invitation to move (...) beyond what is currently expected of Darwin's magnum opus. Once the rhetorical varnish of Darwin's discourses is removed, one discovers a work of remarkably indecisive conclusions. The book comprises two main theses: The Origin of Species never remotely achieved the theoretical unity to which it is often credited. Rather, Darwin was overwhelmed by a host of phenomena that could not fit into his narrow conceptual framework. In the Origin of Species, Darwin failed at completing the full conversion to evolutionism. Carrying many ill-designed intellectual tools of the 17th and 18th centuries, Darwin merely promoted a special brand of evolutionism, one that prevented him from taking the decisive steps toward an open and modern evolutionism. It makes an interesting read for biologists, historians and philosophers alike. (shrink)

Scaffolds are fundamental to many cellular signaling pathways. In this essay, a novel class of scaffolds are proposed, whose action bears striking resemblance to kinetic proofreading. Commonly, scaffold proteins are thought to work as tethers, bringing different components of a pathway together to improve the likelihood of their interaction. However, recent studies show that the cytoskeletal scaffold, anillin, supports contractile signaling by a novel, non‐tethering mechanism that controls the membrane dissociation kinetics of RhoA. More generally, such proof‐reading‐like scaffolds are distinguished (...) from tethers by a rare type of cooperativity, manifest as a super‐linear relationship between scaffold concentration and signaling efficiency. The evidence for this hypothesis is reviewed, its conceptual ramifications are considered, and research questions for the future are discussed. (shrink)

The book begins with an overview that introduces the Theorem and the issues surrounding it, and explores how the essays that follow contribute to our understanding of those issues.

The Evolutionary Synthesis is often seen as a unification process in evolutionary biology, one which provided this research area with a solid common theoretical foundation. As such, neo-Darwinism is believed to constitute from this time onward a single, coherent, and unified movement offering research guidelines for investigations. While this may be true if evolutionary biology is solely understood as centred around evolutionary mechanisms, an entirely different picture emerges once other aspects of the founding neo-Darwinists’ views are taken into consideration, aspects (...) potentially relevant to the elaboration of an evolutionary worldview: the tree of life, the ontological distinctions of the main cosmic entities , the inherent properties of self-organizing matter, evolutionary ethics, and so on. Profound tensions and inconsistencies are immediately revealed in the neo-Darwinian movement once this broader perspective is adopted. This pluralism is such that it is possible to identify at least three distinct and quasi-incommensurable epistemological/metaphysical frameworks as providing a proper foundation for neo-Darwinism. The analysis of the views of Theodosius Dobzhansky, Bernhard Rensch, and Ernst Mayr will illustrate this untenable pluralism, one which requires us to conceive of the neo-Darwinian research agenda as being conducted in more than one research programme or research tradition at the same time. (shrink)

Book reviewed in this article: Eros as the Educational Principle of Democracy Kerry T.Burch. Feeling Power—emotions and education Megan Boler. The Students are Watching: schools and the moral contract Theodore R.Sizer & Nancy Faust Sizer.

A revelatory alternative to the standard economic models of human behavior that proposes an exciting new way to understand decision-making "Willful is a breakthrough in economics. Richard Robb's tremendously insightful book shows how much of our behavior is not explained by existing theories of human action and explains in sparkling prose why understanding decisions made seemingly without reason presents a fuller picture of our world."--Edmund S. Phelps, Nobel Laureate in Economics Why do we do the things we do? The (...) classical view of economics is that we are rational individuals, making decisions with the intention of maximizing our preferences. Behaviorists, on the other hand, see us as relying on mental shortcuts and conforming to preexisting biases. Richard Robb argues that neither explanation accounts for those things that we do for their own sake, and without understanding these sorts of actions, our picture of decision-making is at best incomplete. Robb explains how these choices made seemingly without reason belong to a realm of behavior he identifies as "for-itself." A provocative combination of philosophy and economics that offers a key to many of our quixotic choices, this groundbreaking volume provides a new way to understand everything from investing to how hard we work to how we manage daily interactions. (shrink)

Discusses Frege's formal definitions and characterizations of infinite and finite sets. Speculates that Frege might have discovered the "oddity" in Dedekind's famous proof that all infinite sets are Dedekind infinite and, in doing so, stumbled across an axiom of countable choice.

A chance-credence norm states how an agent's credences in propositions concerning objective chances ought to relate to her credences in other propositions. The most famous such norm is the Principal Principle (PP), due to David Lewis. However, Lewis noticed that PP is too strong when combined with many accounts of chance that attempt to reduce chance facts to non-modal facts. Those who defend such accounts of chance have offered two alternative chance-credence norms: the first is Hall's and Thau's New Principle (...) (NP); the second is Ismael's General Recipe (IP). Thus, the question arises: Should we adopt NP or IP or both? In this paper, I argue that IP has unacceptable consequences when coupled with reductionism, so we must accept NP alone. (shrink)

Ethical decisions have to be made by everyone. Yet Christians often find it difficult to know exactly how they should make them. Is there a better way than an emotional response or looking for a quick answer from the Bible? In the first of the book a sixth-former, Matthew, takes moral issues as the topic of his RS project. He has interviews with various people, such as a businessman, a scientist, a police officer, and a doctor as well as with (...) members of his own family and his minister. These open his eyes to problems that he had not thought about before. In the second part the issues that have been raised are examined more systematically. (shrink)

This paper dates from about 1994: I rediscovered it on my hard drive in the spring of 2002. It represents an early attempt to explore the connections between the Julius Caesar problem and Frege's attitude towards Basic Law V. Most of the issues discussed here are ones treated rather differently in my more recent papers "The Julius Caesar Objection" and "Grundgesetze der Arithmetik I 10". But the treatment here is more accessible, in many ways, providing more context and a better (...) sense of how this issue relates to broader issues in Frege's philosophy. (shrink)

John Etchemendy has argued that it is but "a fortuitous accident" that Tarski's work on truth has any signifance at all for semantics. I argue, in response, that Etchemendy and others, such as Scott Soames and Hilary Putnam, have been misled by Tarski's emphasis on definitions of truth rather than theories of truth and that, once we appreciate how Tarski understood the relation between these, we can answer Etchemendy's implicit and explicit criticisms of neo-Davidsonian semantics.

John MacFarlane has made relativism popular again. Focusing just on his original discussion, I argue that the data he uses to motivate the position do not, in fact, motivatie it at all. Many of the points made here have since been made, independently, by Hermann Cappelen and John Hawthorne, in their book Relativism and Monadic Truth.

As is well-known, the formal system in which Frege works in his Grundgesetze der Arithmetik is formally inconsistent, Russell’s Paradox being derivable in it.This system is, except for minor differ...

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Madness, Reason, and PrideRichard G.T. Gipps, PhD (bio)MadnessQuestions such as “what’s madness?” or “what’s reason?” carry no singular sense about with them wherever they go—which isn’t to say that, asked out of a particular interest in a particular context, they can’t be perfectly intelligible. Garson (2023) is wise to this when he follows “what is madness?” with “as opposed to what?”, even if this latter question itself hardly enjoys (...) a clear sense in the initial context of his asking. What counts as a satisfactory answer to “what’s x?” varies, so that sometimes we’ll be satisfied with a name, at other times by information about something’s genus, origin, function, or composition. Things get notoriously tricky when in the philosophical context the question is asked with a presumption of intelligibility despite ‘x’ being, say, an abstract noun formed from an adjective (‘consciousness’ out of ‘conscious’; ‘happiness’ out of ‘happy’; ‘madness’ out of ‘mad,’ etc.). For “what is?” questions are typically most perspicuously mooted when what’s being pursued are enquiries into (what we might call) the ‘essential nature’ of (what philosophers used to call) ‘substances’ or (of what are more ordinarily called) types of ‘thing’ or ‘entity.’ Invoke, by taking one’s lead from the fact that an ‘x’ is grammatically speaking a substantive, the specter of substance, and you can endlessly baffle yourself by now pondering the mysteries of the putative thing. (Vide discussions of “the nature of consciousness.”) Hence the boon of instead pursuing questions of an ‘opposed to what?’ sort; hence Wittgenstein considering using the Earl of Kent’s “I’ll teach you differences” (King Lear) as a motto for his Investigations. Rather more reflective wisdom regarding ‘x’ may thus be gained when we learn to contrast it with ‘y’ and ‘z’ than when peering into x’s non-existent constitution or groping for its never-instituted genus.Later, I make the case that Garson’s conception of reason itself might suffer from a form of substantialization and that, if I’m right in this, troubling implications follow for his approach to madness. But let’s begin by considering his enquiry into the relation of madness, idiocy and reason. So perhaps we’re reflecting on matters legal, and considering—since we’d hitherto been inclined to take ‘reason’ as univocal—what justifies our different treatments of the insane, the intellectually subnormal, and the normal. Or perhaps—proceeding from the same inclination—we’re puzzled by how someone may boast an exceptional IQ or demonstrate marvelous formal rationality (i.e., make deductions of a sort which would please the logician if no-one else) and yet still be quite mad. And then we realize that at which Garson’s Late Moderns seem to have been gesturing: The lack of reason qua intelligence in idiocy is a different [End Page 307] species from the lack of reason qua sanity in madness. An amethyst is lifeless in a different manner than an expired possum (it was never living, never moribund); the arational lack reason in a different sense than do the irrational (and a baobab cannot jump to conclusions.) There is, say his Late Modern theorists, something ‘perverse’ rather than simply deficient about the irrationality of madness.Now an important part of Garson’s thesis has it that “idiocy is a better candidate for the opposite of reason than madness.” One of the reasons for his making this claim is that he follows his Late Moderns in claiming that madness has reason somehow alive within it, albeit in an unconventional or surprising form. I return to his own explication of this below. Consider first, though, the different thought-referencing descriptions under which the speech acts of the thought-disordered, the speech-disordered, the delusional, and the learning disabled subject may be brought. The sufferer of speech disorder has difficulty with fluency or sound production, but once we get used to this we can find our way to the bona fide rational thought immanent within their discourse. The speech acts of the intellectually impaired subject aren’t chaotic, but instead want for invention and richness; they fail to express... (shrink)

Thirty-four states criminalize HIV in some way, whether by mandating disclosure of one’s HIV status to all sexual partners or by deeming the saliva of HIV-positive persons a “deadly weapon.” In this paper, we argue that HIV-specific criminal laws are rooted in historical prejudice against HIV-positive persons as a class. While purporting to promote public health goals, these laws instead legally sanction discrimination against a class of persons.