The theory of action underlying Immanuel Kant's ethical theory is the subject of this book.

Since Socrates, and through Descartes to the present day, the problems of self-knowledge have been central to philosophy's understanding of itself. Today the idea of ''first-person authority''--the claim of a distinctive relation each person has toward his or her own mental life--has been challenged from a number of directions, to the point where many doubt the person bears any distinctive relation to his or her own mental life, let alone a privileged one. In Authority and Estrangement, Richard Moran argues (...) for a reconception of the first-person and its claims. Indeed, he writes, a more thorough repudiation of the idea of privileged inner observation leads to a deeper appreciation of the systematic differences between self-knowledge and the knowledge of others, differences that are both irreducible and constitutive of the very concept and life of the person.Masterfully blending philosophy of mind and moral psychology, Moran develops a view of self-knowledge that concentrates on the self as agent rather than spectator. He argues that while each person does speak for his own thought and feeling with a distinctive authority, that very authority is tied just as much to the disprivileging of the first-person, to its specific possibilities of alienation. Drawing on certain themes from Wittgenstein, Sartre, and others, the book explores the extent to which what we say about ourselves is a matter of discovery or of creation, the difficulties and limitations in being ''objective'' toward ourselves, and the conflicting demands of realism about oneself and responsibility for oneself. What emerges is a strikingly original and psychologically nuanced exploration of the contrasting ideals of relations to oneself and relations to others. (shrink)

In Cognitive Integration: Attacking The Bounds of Cognition Richard Menary argues that the real pay-off from extended-mind-style arguments is not a new form of externalism in the philosophy of mind, but a view in which the 'internal' and 'external' aspects of cognition are integrated into a whole. Menary argues that the manipulation of external vehicles constitutes cognitive processes and that cognition is hybrid: internal and external processes and vehicles complement one another in the completion of cognitive tasks. However, we (...) cannot make good on these claims without understanding the cognitive norms by which we manipulate bodily external vehicles of cognition. -/- Shaun Gallagher: “Menary sets out some extremely welcome clarifications that help to integrate the models of embodied and extended cognition. He not only provides convincing responses to all of the main objections that have been made against these approaches, he also puts flesh on the integrated model by incorporating concepts such as epistemic action, by expanding the discussion to include a Peircean view of representation, by demonstrating its evolutionary roots, and by exploring its implications for language and cognition. This is one of those books that takes us forward a number of giant steps. Menary makes it comprehensive and comprehensible.” . (shrink)

This article sheds new light on the interesting but little-studied figure of Thomas Scott of Canterbury (1566–1635). In presenting Scott's ideas I will modify the interpretation laid out by Peter Clark whose groundbreaking study, ‘Thomas Scott and the Growth of Urban Opposition to the Early Stuart Regime’, is still the only secondary source that pays detailed attention to Scott and his thought, especially his religious opinions. The necessity to revisit Clark's interpretation of Scott's place within the political and doctrinal debates (...) of early Stuart England stems from the conviction that his political work and his ideological stances deserve more subtle attention. Most importantly, they were part of the emerging reaction against the policies of the first two Stuart Kings which can be labelled ‘country patriotism’. Finally, the elucidation of Scott's writings will provide a novel insight into an early configuration of English national identity. ☆ Earlier versions of this article were presented at the seminar ‘British History in the 17th Century’ held at the Institute of Historical Research (London) and at the ‘Modern History Seminar’ held at the History Department of the University of Birmingham. I wish to thank the audiences on both occasions for their questions and comments, especially Justin Champion, Richard Cust, John Miller. I would also like to thank Jonathan Scott, Johann P. Sommerville and Richard Whatmore for reading the text. This article is based on archival research pursued at the Kentish Archive Office, Maidstone (KAO), Canterbury Cathedral Library (CCL), Bodleain Library, Oxford (BLO) and British Library, London (BL). The manuscripts referred to in the text are listed as KAO U951/z/9, U951/z/10, U951/z16, U951/z17 (Knatchbull Papers); CCL Urry Mss 66 (‘Thomas Scott's Papers on the Elections to the Parliament of 1626’, 1a–141a); BLO Ballard Ms 61; BL Harley 7018, Additional MSS 62135, n. 31. The majority of the material consists of Scott's diary and of a series of mostly unfoliated papers in Scott's own hand. Some portions of the diary are in secretarial hand, whilst others are reproduced in Proceedings in Parliament 1628, ed. R.C. Johnson et al., 6 vols. (New Haven and London, 1977–1983), VI, Appendixes and Indexes, 126–37, 218–43 (hereafter PP 1628; where there are passages in both manuscript and printed form I refer to the latter). Amongst the miscellanous Scott manuscripts two are in Bodleian Library, Rawlinson Ms A 346, 224a–34b and 285a–97b. These are transcribed and published in Dorothea Scott, otherwise Gotherson and Hogben, of Egerton House, Kent, 1611–1680, A New and Enlarged Edition by G.D. Scull (Oxford, 1883) (hereafter Dorothea Scott). (shrink)

We often ask for the opinion of a group of individuals. How strongly does the scientific community believe that the rate at which sea levels are rising has increased over the last 200 years? How likely does the UK Treasury think it is that there will be a recession if the country leaves the European Union? What are these group credences that such questions request? And how do they relate to the individual credences assigned by the members of the particular (...) group in question? According to the credal judgement aggregation principle, linear pooling, the credence function of a group should be a weighted average or linear pool of the credence functions of the individuals in the group. In this chapter, I give an argument for linear pooling based on considerations of accuracy. And I respond to two standard objections to the aggregation principle. (shrink)

Is the point of belief and assertion invariably to think or say something true? Is the truth of a belief or assertion absolute, or is it only relative to human interests? Most philosophers think it incoherent to profess to believe something but not think it true, or to say that some of the things we believe are only relatively true. Common sense disagrees. It sees many opinions, such as those about matters of taste, as neither true nor false; it takes (...) it as obvious that some of the truth is relative. Mark Richard's accessible book argues that when it comes to truth, common sense is right, philosophical orthodoxy wrong. The first half of the book examines connections between the performative aspects of talk, our emotions and evaluations, and the conditions under which talk and thought qualifies as true or false. It argues that the performative and expressive sometimes trump the semantic, making truth and falsity the wrong dimension of evaluation for belief or assertion. Among the topics taken up are: racial slurs and other epithets; relations between logic and truth; the status of moral and ethical talk; vagueness and the liar paradox. The book's second half defends the idea that much of everyday thought and talk is only relatively true or false. Truth is inevitably relative, given that we cannot work out in advance how our concepts will apply to the world. Richard explains what it is for truth to be relative, rebuts standard objections to relativism, and argues that relativism is consistent with the idea that one view can be objectively better than another. The book concludes with an account of matters of taste and of how it is possible for divergent views of such matters to be equally valid, even if not true or false. When Truth Gives Out will be of interest not only to philosophers who work on language, ethics, knowledge, or logic, but to any thoughtful person who has wondered what it is, or isn't, for something to be true. (shrink)

: A standard interpretation of Kantian "maxims" sees them as expressing reasons for action, implying that we cannot act without a maxim. But recent challenges to this interpretation claim that Kant viewed acting on maxims as optional. Kant's understanding of maxims derives from Christian Wolff, who regarded maxims as major premises of the practical syllogism. This supports the standard interpretation. Yet Kant also viewed commitments to maxims as essential for virtue and character development, which supports challenges to the standard interpretation, (...) and raises questions about the coherence of Kant's overall conception of the role of maxims in practical philosophy. (shrink)

Abstract Responding to recent calls from within critical MOS and organizational ethics studies to explore questions of difference and inclusion ‘beyond unity and fixity’, this paper seeks to enrich the debate on difference and its negotiation in organizations, thereby foregrounding difference as the contested and ever-changing outcome of power-invested configurations of practice. The paper presents an ethnographic study conducted in a psychosocial day-care centre that positions itself as a ‘space of multiplicity’ wherein ‘it is normal to be different’. Highlighting the (...) context-specific challenges and struggles encompassing mental ill-health as a category of difference deviating from the norm, our paper contributes to a critical-affirmative understanding of difference. We foster an approach that values normative orientations such as ‘egalitarian difference’ and ‘difference as multiplicity’ yet avoids idealising portrayals of an ethics of difference that challenges normalcy and unconditionally favours otherness and calls for ‘radically other kinds of difference’. (shrink)

The field of cognitive modeling has progressed beyond modeling cognition in the context of simple laboratory tasks and begun to attack the problem of modeling it in more complex, realistic environments, such as those studied by researchers in the field of human factors. The problems that the cognitive modeling community is tackling focus on modeling certain problems of communication and control that arise when integrating with the external environment factors such as implicit and explicit knowledge, emotion, cognition, and the cognitive (...) system. These problems must be solved in order to produce integrated cognitive models of moderately complex tasks. Architectures of cognition in these tasks focus on the control of a central system, which includes control of the central processor itself, initiation of functional processes, such as visual search and memory retrieval, and harvesting the results of these functional processes. Because the control of the central system is conceptually different from the internal control required by individual functional processes, a complete architecture of cognition must incorporate two types of theories of control: Type 1 theories of the structure, functionality, and operation of the controller, and type 2 theories of the internal control of functional processes, including how and what they communicate to the controller. This book presents the current state of the art for both types of theories, as well as contrasts among current approaches to human-performance models. It will be an important resource for professional and student researchers in cognitive science, cognitive-engineering, and human-factors.Contributors: Kevin A. Gluck, Jerry T. Ball, Michael A. Krusmark, Richard W. Pew, Chris R. Sims, Vladislav D. Veksler, John R. Anderson, Ron Sun, Nicholas L. Cassimatis, Randy J. Brou, Andrew D. Egerton, Stephanie M. Doane, Christopher W. Myers, Hansjorg Neth, Jeremy M Wolfe, Marc Pomplun, Ronald A. Rensink, Hansjorg Neth, Chris R. Sims, Peter M. Todd, Lael J. Schooler, Wai-Tat Fu, Michael C. Mozer, Sachiko Kinoshita, Michael Shettel, Alex Kirlik, Vladislav D. Veksler, Michael J. Schoelles, Jerome R. Busemeyer, Eric Dimperio, Ryan K. Jessup, Jonathan Gratch, Stacy Marsella, Glenn Gunzelmann, Kevin A. Gluck, Scott Price, Hans P. A. Van Dongen, David F. Dinges, Frank E. Ritter, Andrew L. Reifers, Laura Cousino Klein, Michael J. Schoelles, Eva Hudlicka, Hansjorg Neth, Christopher W. Myers, Dana Ballard, Nathan Sprague, Laurence T. Maloney, Julia Trommershauser, Michael S. Landy, A. Hornof, Michael J. Schoelles, David Kieras, Dario D. Salvucci, Niels Taatgen, Erik M. Altmann, Richard A. Carlson, Andrew Howes, Richard L. Lewis, Alonso Vera, Richard P. Cooper, and Michael D. Byrne. (shrink)

What is it for there to be a God, and what reason is there for supposing him to conform to the claims of Christian doctrine? In this pivotal volume of his tetralogy, Richard Swinburne builds a rigorous metaphysical system for describing the world, and applies this to assessing the worth of the Christian tenets of the Trinity and the Incarnation. Part I is dedicated to analyzing the categories needed to address accounts of the divine nature--substance, cause, time, and necessity. (...) Part II begins by setting out, in terms of these categories, the fundamental doctrine of Western religions--that there is a God. After pointing out some of the different ways in which this doctrine can be developed, Swinburne spells out the simplest possible account of divine nature. He then goes on to clarify the implications of this account for the specifically Christian doctrines of the Trinity (that God is "three persons in one substance") and of the Incarnation (that God became incarnate in Jesus Christ). Swinburne finds that there are good reasons to believe the Christian additions to the core Western idea of God. The Christian God builds upon Swinburne's acclaimed previous work to form a self-contained text which will no doubt become a classic in the philosophy of religion. (shrink)

The Argument of the "Tractatus" presents a single unified interpretation of the Tractatus based on Wittgenstein's own view that the philosophy of logic is the real foundation of his philosophical system.

In Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason Kant wrote that ‘freedom of the power of choice has the characteristic, entirely peculiar to it, that it cannot be determined to action through any incentive except insofar as the human being has incorporated it into his maxim.’ This is an obscure statement, in both meaning and provenance. Yet almost all recent interpreters of Kant's practical philosophy find it crucial for understanding his theories of freedom and motivation, since it seems to indicate (...) what we are required to do in order to act by our own free choice. Here I refer to Kant's statement expressing the requirement that incentives be incorporated into maxims as his ‘incorporation requirement.’ How that requirement is best understood will be the leading question in what follows: a question I shall answer by showing why the incorporation requirement, and Kant's theories of freedom and motivation, should be understood differently from the way they are now usually understood. (shrink)

Qu’est-ce qu’une norme? Y a-t-il des relations logiques entre les normes? Sur quoi repose la validité d’un système normatif? Qu’est-ce que la validité déontique? Les verbes performatifs peuvent-ils agir sur le monde? Quelles sont les différentes façons d’agir en fonction d’une règle? Que sont les règles constitutives? Et qu’est-ce que la vérité? Ce sont là quelques-unes des questions que posent les essais d’Amedeo Giovanni Conte rassemblés dans cette anthologie. Ces essais offrent quelques-unes des contributions les plus originales et les plus (...) significatives de la philosophie du langage normatif. Amedeo Giovanni Conte (Pavie, 1934-Cava Manara, 2019), professeur émérite de l’Université de Pavie, membre de l’Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, fut l’un des philosophes les plus originaux du droit italien. Parmi ses œuvres : Saggio sulla completezza degli ordinamenti giuridici (1962), les trois volumes de Filosofia del linguaggio normativo (1989-2001), Filosofia dell’ordinamento normativo (1997), Sociologia filosofica del diritto (2011) et Adelaster : Il nome del vero (2016). (shrink)

Theologians are often criticized for having little distinctive or important to say on bioethical issues. Such a critique overlooks, however, the protective dispositive, and directive ways in which faith can inform reason.

This comprehensive study of probability considers the approaches of Pascal, Laplace, Poisson, and others. It also discusses Laws of Large Numbers, the theory of errors, and other relevant topics.

The teaching of evolution has always been a controversial issue in the United States. Despite the fact that evolution is accepted by biologists all over the world and the evidence is beyond dispute, the percentage of Americans who do not accept evolution hovers around 40%. (P.14) However, it's important to note that there are positive trends on the horizon. For example, the percentage of Americans under the age of 30 who accept evolution increases to about 68%. While several factors contribute (...) to this increase in acceptance and understanding, it's fair to say that improvements in science education have contributed to the increase. In order to continue this trend, it's essential that today's science teachers present their evolution lessons with confidence and a good depth of understanding. And since teachers are each other's best resources, this book offers to give science teachers a glimpse into the classrooms of effective evolution educators. In the book's foreword, one of the world's most imminent educators of science education, Dr. Richard Dawkins, offers his insights about evolution education in America. The chapters of twelve veteran science teachers follow. Each teacher shares their educational journeys, their insights, and their best practices in the hopes they can positively contribute to the scientific literacy of our nation. All of these teachers are members of the Teacher Institute for Evolutionary Science, TIES (www.tieseducation.org). Under the direction of its director, Bertha Vazquez, TIES has presented over 200 TIES workshops and webinars in all 50 US States in the last 6 years. The authors in this book are all TIES presenters. They represent the varied voices of America's evolution educators. The astounding success of TIES is a testament to the importance of teacher training in evolution education. It is our hope that this book contributes to this ongoing professional development. (shrink)

Few challenges facing Kantian ethics are more famous and formidable than the so-called "case of the inquiring murderer." It appears in some form today in most introductory ethics texts, but it is not a new objection. Even Kant himself was compelled to respond to it, though by most accounts his response was embarrassingly unpersuasive. A more satisfactory reply can be offered to this old objection, however. It will be shown here that Kantian ethics permits lying to inquirers asking wrong questions, (...) and that, therefore, it can be right to lie to a murderer inquiring whether his intended victim is hiding in your house. We begin by reviewing a now popular and plausible-sounding defense of the right to lie. Finding it unsuccessful, we turn next to scrutinize the type of question asked. The case of the inquiring murderer cannot be presented without supposing that the murderer's inquiry is unevadable. As we shall then see, in Kantian ethics it is usually wrong to ask such questions. (shrink)

Over the centuries, the idea of the self has both fascinated and confounded philosophers. From the ancient Greeks, who problematized issues of identity and self-awareness, to Locke and Hume, who popularized minimalist views of the self, to the efforts of postmodernists in our time to decenter the human subject altogether, the idea that there is something called a self has always been in steady decline. But for Richard Sorabji, one of our most celebrated living intellectuals, this negation of the (...) self is dispiriting. In Self , he sets out to recover the rich variety of positive accounts of the self from Antiquity right up to the present, while offering his own inspiring view of what precisely the self might be. Drawing on Eastern religion, classical antiquity, and Western philosophy, Sorabji proceeds to tackle a number of thematic debates that have preoccupied philosophers over the ages, including the concept of the self, its sameness and mutability, the idea of the resurrection of the body and spirit, and the fear of death. According to Sorabji, the self is not an undetectable soul or ego, but an embodied individual whose existence is plain to see. It is also neither a linguistic creation nor a psychological fiction, but something that owns both a consciousness and a body. Ultimately, Sorabji argues, the demise of a positive idea of the self stems from much older and more pervasive problems of identity than we realize. Through an astute reading of this tradition, he helps us come to terms with our uneasiness about the subject in an account that will be at the forefront of philosophical debates for years to come. (shrink)

At least since Darwin's Origin of Species was published in 1859, it has increasingly become accepted that the existence of God is, intellectually, a lost cause, and that religious faith is an entirely non-rational matter--the province of those who willingly refuse to accept the dramatic advances of modern cosmology. Are belief in God and belief in science really mutually exclusive? Or, as noted philosopher of science and religion Richard Swinburne puts forth, can the very same criteria which scientists use (...) to reach theories about everything from DNA to the Big Bang be used to argue for the existence of God? In Is There a God? Swinburne presents a powerful and approachable case for the existence of God. Using the methods of scientific reasoning, Swinburne rigorously argues that science, far from replacing God, provides good grounds for belief in God. With each new discovery and advance, from black holes to quarks, superstrings to continuing evolution, science brings us closer to a complete understanding of how things work--but science can only go so far. Though it can explain much of how the universe works, science doesn't tell us why there is a universe at all. We can understand much of how life evolved, but why is there any life on earth? We can name and explicate scientific laws, but how is it that they operate in the universe? The Darwinian theory holds that the complex animal and human bodies that are here today exist because, ages ago, there were certain chemicals on earth, and given the laws of evolution, it was probable that complex organisms would emerge. But why those laws rather than any other? Why those chemicals? In Swinburne's view, the ultimate grand unifying theory is possible only by a belief in what he calls theism, acknowledging the existence of God: it was God who brought about the natural laws so that humans and animals would evolve. The watch may have been made, Swinburne asserts in reference to Richard Dawkins, with the aid of some blind screwdrivers (or even a blind watchmaking machine), but they were guided by a watchmaker with some very clear sight. At the heart of his argument is Swinburne's belief that the very success of science in showing us how deeply ordered the natural world is provides strong grounds for believing there is an even deeper cause of that order. By embracing a belief in God that acknowledges the truth in science, Swinburne's elegant argument supplies an essential spiritual element to our understanding of order and beauty, the structure beneath the chaos of the natural world. This informed and provocative volume will be essential reading for all readers of popular science, philosophy, and religion. (shrink)

This chapter argues for a rapprochement between Heidegger and Freud to gain a more unified, comprehensive, and holistic account of the human condition. While doing so, it explores the impact of Heidegger's philosophy on existential analysis and therapy by considering his global critique of Freudian psychoanalysis, and more specifically Freud's concepts of the Unconscious and the body. After a brief synopsis of his philosophy and its relevance for existential analysis, the chapter delineates Heidegger's critique of Freud's unconscious and considers how (...) Binswanger, Boss, and Richardson try to preserve Freud's insights within the context of Heidegger's philosophy. The exploratory process then leads us to see bodily being as pivotal for the development of a truly holistic account of human existence. The chapter argues that Heidegger's humanism and neglect of the ontological primordiality of bodily being ultimately led him to a dualism he ubiquitously fought to avoid. (shrink)

Most scholars understand para. 608 of Zettel to suggest that language and thought might arise from chaos at the neural centre. However, this contradicts Wittgenstein’s signature view that the philosopher must not advance theories. The paper proposes an alternative model of Z608 based on the Austrian Gestalt-movement that influenced Wittgenstein. Z608 does not suggest that language and thought might arise from chaos in the brain but that they may arise in a different non-causal sense from the “chaos” of activities in (...) forms of human life on analogy with the way a Gestalt-image “arises” from a “chaos” of perceptions. The concepts of chaos and the centre in Z608 are not neurophysiological concepts but refer to aspects of forms of human life. The Gestalt-interpretation also clarifies why Wittgenstein’s later philosophy is quite different from “ordinary language philosophy.” Finally, the Gestalt-interpretation clarifies why Wittgenstein is not, as is often believed, making an attack on legitimate empirical psychological investigations. (shrink)

Heidegger claims that it is the ultimate job of philosophy to preserve the force of the “elemental words” in which human beings express themselves. Many of these elemental words are found in the various cosmogonies that have informed cultural ideologies around the world. Two of these “elemental words,” which shape the ideologies are the animal-model of the cosmos in Plato’s Timaeus and the mechanical models developed in the 17th-18th centuries in Europe. The paper argues that Daoism employs a third, and (...) neglected, plant-model of cosmogony and of human life that provides an illuminating contrast to the other more well-known models. First, Plato’s animal-model of the cosmos and, second, the alternative Daoist plant-model of the cosmos are discussed. Third, the paper replies to the objection that the organic model in general and the plant-model in particular cannot accommodate human freedom. Fourth, it is shown how the Daoist plant-model supports a novel account of the central Daoist notion of wu-wei. Fifth, the paper rebuts the objection that the Daoist plant-model of the cosmos and human life is fatally nihilistic. Sixth, the paper argues that the Daoist account of the origin of human religion, art and historical feeling cannot be properly understood apart from its plant-model of the cosmos and human life. (shrink)

The discussion of good and evil must not be confined to the sterile lecture halls of academics but related instead to ordinary human feelings, needs, and desires, says noted philosopher Richard Taylor. Efforts to understand morality by exploring human reason will always fail because we are creatures of desire as well. All morality arises from our intense and inescapable longing. The distinction between good and evil is always clouded by rationalists who convert the real problems of ethics into complex (...) philosophical puzzles. In the first part of Good and Evil, Taylor looks for a more meaningful conception by reexamining and rejecting the whole rationalistic tradition that dominates philosophical ethics. The second part provides an empirical explanation of good and evil, noting that one does not have to look too far to find prime examples of the failure of fixed moral rules. Including important commentary on Joseph Fletcher's groundbreaking situation ethics, and Aristotle's virtues (e.g., magnanimity and pride), Taylor rounds out the book by developing a philosophy of aspiration--personal worth as an ethical ideal--to replace the morality of duty. He offers a modified form of situation ethics to fit the contemporary problems we face. (shrink)

Conformity is a large topic and its causes are undoubtedly heterogenous. Of the various mechanisms that contribute to conformity, I will comment on two: coordination and esteem. Game theorists have given coordination significant attention. Lewis first posited that social conventions are, roughly, particular equilibrium outcomes to recurrent coordination problems. Once the equilibrium occurs, it is, by definition, in everyone’s interest to conform. Evolutionary game theorists have explored the conditions that make a certain equilibrium likely to emerge and persist when more (...) than one equilibrium is possible. In the first section below, I set forth one point about the nature of conformity in such settings—that there can be a strong stability to conventions in which the required behavior varies by the observable physical differences among human beings, such as sex and those that come to be associated with race. In a certain class of important games, observable personal differences work to “break symmetry,” which significantly changes the possible outcomes to the game. My aim is not to provide a particular model of conformity involving sex and race, but to illustrate the usefulness of a particular approach to model-building. (shrink)

The comparative seriousness of business law and business ethics gives some business people the impression that there is nothing important in business ethics. The costly penalties of illegal conduct compared to the uncertain consequences of unethical conduct support a common illusion that business ethics is much less important than law for business people. To dispel the illusion I distinguish two perspectives from which we can view the relation of business and normative systems: the internal and external perspectives. I show that (...) in one perspective, ethics is hardly less important than law, and in the other perspective it is more important, more fundamental than law. I conclude with a discussion of why business persons must place ethical and legal rules ahead of profits. (shrink)

In this article, we argue that science textbooks do not present an accurate account of how scientific inquiry has been conducted and is conducted now. The chemistry textbooks that are used in middle school and high school use a “Great Man” theory in which all scientific discovery is attributed to a single man. However, scientific inquiry is a cooperative, collaborative effort, and it has been that sort of activity for at least the last 150 years. If girls, in general, tend (...) toward greater cooperation, as many social scientists suggest, a more accurate account of how science is done would bring more girls into the study of science. These authors suggest that science textbooks used during the times at which girls are formulating their opinions of science (the middle and high school years) should be modified to correctly reflect the fact that science and scientists are cooperative. (shrink)

Parasite is best seen in existential rather than moral terms. It does not issue in moral, social or economic judgements. The film describes, or perhaps portrays, the dreamlike mode of fantasy “existence” the “underground” people in a society so rigidly stratified that communication with people on the other side of the societal “lines” is literally impossible, inevitably resulting in the destruction, real or metaphorical, of everyone on both sides of those lines.

Many including Judith Jarvis Thomson, Philippa Foot, Peter Geach, Richard Kraut, and Paul Ziff have argued for good simpliciter skepticism. According to good simpliciter skepticism, we should hold that there is no concept of being good simpliciter or that there is no property of being good simpliciter. I first show that prima facie we should not accept either form of good simpliciter skepticism. I then show that all of the arguments that good simpliciter skeptics have proposed for their view (...) fail to show that we have good reason to accept good simpliciter skepticism. So, I show that we do not have good reason to accept good simpliciter skepticism. (shrink)