This article derives from a paper presented at the Philosophy of Religion and Mysticism Conference hosted by the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow, May 22-24, 2014. That paper introduced theories and methods drawn from the ”cognitive science of religion’ and suggested future avenues of research connecting CSR and scholarship on mysticism. Towards these same ends, the present article proceeds in three parts. Part I outlines the origins, aims, and basic tenets of CSR research. Part II discusses one specific causal (...) perspective that informs a wide range of CSR research, Sperber’s ”epidemiological’ approach to cultural expression, and connects this perspective to the example of creator deities. Part III discusses some possible future directions for CSR research concerning mysticism and mystical experience. Finally, a coda addresses two common misunderstandings concerning the ”reductionist’ nature of CSR research. (shrink)

In this strikingly original book, one of the leading scholars in the field focuses on the influential idea of deliberative democracy. Goodin examines the great challenge of how to implement the deliberative ideal among millions of people at once and comes up with a novel solution: 'democratic deliberation within'.

This paper firstly distinguishes between principles of “global justice” that apply the same anywhere and everywhere – Tännsjö’s utilitarianism, egalitarianism, prioritarianism and such like – and principles of “local justice” that apply within the specific sphere of health-care. Sometimes the latter might just be a special case of the former – but not always. Secondly, it discusses reasons, many psychological in nature, why physicians might devote excessive resources to prolonging life pointlessly, showing once again that those reasons might themselves be (...) morally significant. (shrink)

A healthy work-life balance has become increasingly important to people trying to cope with the pressures of contemporary society. This trend highlights the fallacy of assessing well-being in terms of finance alone; how much time we have matters just as much as how much money. The authors of this book have developed a novel way to measure 'discretionary time': time which is free to spend as one pleases. Exploring data from the US, Australia, Germany, France, Sweden and Finland, they show (...) that temporal autonomy varies substantially across different countries and under different living conditions. By calibrating how much control people have over their time, and how much they could have under alternative welfare, gender or household arrangements, this book offers a new perspective for comparative cross-national enquiries into the temporal aspects of human welfare. (shrink)

This is the second of two chapters on preference democracy. It points out that theories of liberal democracy necessarily require systematic responsiveness to popular wishes, in ways that make them fundamentally ‘preference‐respecting’, but that there are many different kinds of preferences and correspondingly many different ways of respecting them. Different models of democracy are better at providing certain sorts of respect for certain sorts of preferences than others, and which model of democracy liberal democrats want to adopt therefore depends on (...) which sorts of preferences they want to accord which sort of respect. The central claim of this chapter is that the author's preferred model of ‘democratic deliberation within’ is preference‐respecting in the right way, and that it therefore deserves a key role in any larger system of democratic accountability. The different sections of the chapter are: Respecting Preferences, Not Just Recording Them; Permissible Paternalism; Assessing Alternative Models of Preference‐Respecting Democracy; The Virtues of Sporadic Assessments: Preference‐Respecting Arguments for Indirect Democracy; and Combining ‘Democratic Deliberation Within’ and Trustee‐style Representative Democracy. (shrink)

Utilitarianism, the great reforming philosophy of the nineteenth century, has today acquired the reputation for being a crassly calculating, impersonal philosophy unfit to serve as a guide to moral conduct. Yet what may disqualify utilitarianism as a personal philosophy makes it an eminently suitable guide for public officials in the pursuit of their professional responsibilities. Robert E. Goodin, a philosopher with many books on political theory, public policy and applied ethics to his credit, defends utilitarianism against its critics and (...) shows how it can be applied most effectively over a wide range of public policies. In discussions of such issues as paternalism, social welfare policy, international ethics, nuclear armaments, and international responses to the environment crisis, he demonstrates what a flexible tool his brand of utilitarianism can be in confronting the dilemmas of public policy in the real world. (shrink)

A new version of the ontological argument for the existence of God is outlined and examined. After giving a brief account of some traditional ontological arguments for the existence of God, where their defects are identified, it is explained how this new argument is built upon their foundations and surmounts their defects. In particular, this version uses the resources of impossible worlds to plug the common escape route from standard modal versions of the ontological argument. After outlining the nature of (...) impossible worlds, and motivating the need for positing them, the new argument is delineated and its premises justified. It is taken for granted that the argument cannot be sound, since it would prove too much. However, its premises are all plausible, and their denial promises to have significant ramifications. Several intuitive lines of objections are then explored in order to illuminate their shortcomings. The puzzle that the argument poses is therefore not whether the argument is sound, for it clearly cannot be. Rather, it is to place pressure on its plausible premises, so some plausible account of how the argument fails can be identified, and that the devising of such an account promises to be insightful. In the process, we should gain an improved understanding of how such ontological arguments work. (shrink)

An interesting fact about customary international law is that the only way you can propose an amendment to it is by breaking it. How can that be differentiated from plain law-breaking? What moral standards might apply to that sort of international conduct? I propose we use ones analogous to the ordinary standards for distinguishing civil disobedients from ordinary law-breakers: would-be law-makers, like civil disobedients, must break the law openly; they must accept the legal consequences of doing so; and they must (...) be prepared to have the same rules applied to them as everyone else. (shrink)

Este artigo começa com uma afirmação de Dewey que retirada do contexto consiste no maior desastre que o pensamento filosófico pode incorrer. Ela explora o valor heurístico da noção de Dewey de um contexto não apenas para a filosofia, mas para o pensamento e a vida como um todo. Contextos possuem poder existencial profundo tanto que os temos encarnados em nós mesmos. Contextos funcionam como panos de fundo, conforme determinam embasamentos, influenciando de maneira ampla como ante-estruturas de nossas formas de (...) sentimentos, nossos padrões de ação, e os idiomas nos quais nos descrevemos, bem como nossos mundos. Dewey também pensa em contextos como espécies de atmosferas ou brumas, conectando-os com as qualidades determinantes das situações problemáticas nas quais nós nos encontramos. Sustento o argumento de Dewey com ferramentas analíticas fornecidas pela análise da encarnação e da natureza tácita de premissas de Michael Polanyi, e pela exploração da noção de atmosferas e espaços harmonizados de Gernot Böhme. O reconhecimento dos diversos tipos de contextos, nos quais as pessoas vivem e a partir das quais elas falam, é essencial para chegarmos aos tipos de confiança que reduzem o apelo à força e possibilitam acordos em significados comuns enquanto reconhecem as raízes existenciais da diferença. (shrink)

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 is the law of the land. But it faces an uncertain future.During congressional deliberations on the 2,700-page legislation leading up to its enactment, from February to March 2010, not one major survey recorded majority support for the legislation. Since its enactment, popular opposition to the Affordable Care Act has hardened, and was a significant factor in the 2010 congressional election, in which Democrats lost 63 seats and Republicans regained the majority in (...) the House of Representatives. Ballot initiatives in Missouri and Ohio, showcasing popular opposition to the individual mandate, passed in 2010 with overwhelming majorities. While the United States Supreme Court in National Federation of Independent Business et al. v. Sebelius, 132 S. Ct. 2566, declared the mandate on the states to expand Medicaid unconstitutionally coercive, the majority of the Justices also upheld the individual mandate as a permissible tax. The new law thus emerged as a central topic in the 2012 election. (shrink)

Este artigo compara e contrapõe a abordagem naturalista pragmatista para a peculiaridade da linguagem, exemplificada, principalmente, mas, não exclusivamente, por John Dewey, com a extensa abordagem de Charles Taylor em seu O animal linguístico. Taylor, inspirado pelas obras de Hamann, Herder, e Humboldt, conta com recursos filosóficos e conceituais diferentes para o delineamento do que ele denomina de ‘a forma’ da capacidade linguística humana. Porém, Dewey e Taylor chegam a posições que se sobrepõem sem se identificar: a linguagem é a (...) característica definidora constitutiva dos seres humanos. Seres humanos são definidos pelo surgimento da ‘como’ consciência, uma ‘ruptura’ em nossa imersão imediata no mundo, e, como Peirce e Dewey mostraram de maneira tão lúcida, um reflexivo estar consciente do uso de signos e sistemas de signos de todos os tipos. Esses sistemas potencializam e transformam nosso acesso ao mundo e a nós mesmos. Eles não apenas rotulam um mudo já existente. Eles criam âmbitos de significados e valores que não surgiram sem eles. A distinção crucial de Taylor entre os modelos designativo e constitutivo da linguagem é apoiada plenamente pela consideração pragmatista da linguagem, a qual Taylor não declara. Essa distinção mostrará ser de importância especial para Dewey e Taylor na criação de paisagens existencialmente vitais de significado incorporados nas autodescrições e nas práticas delicadas das artes de auto-reflexão. Tanto Dewey quanto Taylor mostram que assim como as texturas abertas da experiência crescem por suas extremidades, assim a própria linguagem possui sua própria “extremidade” e nos aponta para os domínios “liminares” que sustentam o limiar do sentido para além do totalmente dizível. Esses domínios, que eles mostram de maneiras diferentes mas complementares, são acessados como realidades por formas não discursivas que abrangem as obras de arte, o que Taylor denomina de ‘representações,’ e rituais performativos e restaurativos, tanto pessoais, cívicos e religiosos que incorporam os significados. Dewey e Taylor, divergem, entretanto, sobre se e de que maneira estes domínios precisam transcender a natureza. (shrink)

Many of the recent advances in the history of science have come from local microstudies, but with the unintended by‐product of a typically “postmodern” fragmentation of knowledge. The question for us post‐postmodernists is how to write a broader “general” history of science—a history for all of us specialists—without losing the advantages of case study. One way, this essay suggests, is to structure case studies around the activities or issues that are common to knowledge production generally: for example, issues of common (...) practices, role and identity, credibility and trust, fairness in participation and reward, and translocal circulation. Such studies would be particular and local yet transcend the singularities of period, place, and discipline. They would facilitate productive contest over the general meaning of science in its diversely varied forms. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: References and Further Reading.

This book examines the Condorcet Jury Theorem and how its assumptions can be applicable to the real world. It will use the theorem to assess various familiar political practices and alternative institutional arrangements, revealing how best to take advantage of the truth-tracking potential of majoritarian democracy.

The concept of person is a primary interest of the contemporary intellectual world. Modern literature, films, theater, theology and philosophy focus their attention increasingly on the meaning of person. The current interests of philosophers can activate and direct their reading of the history of philosophy. The rereading of the history of philosophy with a new interest can lead to new insights and discoveries. Through these insights and discoveries, philosophies of the past come to life in the present and influence the (...) future. One of the tasks of contemporary philosophers is to read and examine philosophies of the past under the light of the current interest in person so that errors of previous philosophers might be avoided and insights of previous philosophers might be assimilated. The rereading, examination and exposition of past philosophers is and must be a community project. Both the vastness of philosophical literature and importance of dialogue, if progress is to be made, necessitate that the project be undertaken by many. This exposition of William Torrey Harris’ philosophy is offered as part of the project. Though Harris’ philosophy has been identified as a personalism, it has not received adequate study as a personalism nor has Harris’ concept of person been sufficiently examined. Of Harris, Nicholas Murray Butler wrote. (shrink)

ABSTRACT John Dewey argued in his Art as Experience that the significance of art as experience was of incomparable importance for the adventure of philosophical thought. He claimed that while both move in the medium of imaginative mind, art provides a “unique control” for the “imaginative ventures of philosophy.” In this article I examine, relying on a range of sources, some pivotal implications of this claim and especially how various forms of art and aesthetic experience can exemplify and further ways (...) of formulating, presenting, and critically engaging focal issues, both methodological and substantive, of the tasks of philosophy. The originary context of philosophy is agonistic, wresting meaning from the noise of meaninglessness or discerning order in a seeming world of chaos, not merely that of winning an argument. Both philosophy and art have attempted to fill a “hole in sense” by various practices, discursive in the case of philosophy and nondiscursive or “presentational” in the case of art. But art forms offer us models for a plurality of philosophical approaches to the task of enabling us to maintain and restore our existential and experiential balance within what Dewey called the “moving unbalanced balance of things.”. (shrink)

I offer some supplementary reflections on the range and scope of some central concepts in Kalevi Kull’s ‘The Biosemiotic Fundamentals of Aesthetics: Beauty is Perfect Semiotic Fitting.’ Focus is directed, motivated by John Dewey, to some further aspects of Peirce’s linking of aesthetics to the nature of quality and of feeling. The complex dimensionality of semiotic fitting is taken up with an eye on Peirce’s theory of interpretants. Some suggestions are made about the use of beauty instead of form or (...) order as analytical concepts. (shrink)

Some believe that the mere beneficiaries of wrongdoing of others ought to disgorge their tainted benefits. Others deny that claim. Both sides of this debate concentrate on unavoidable beneficiaries of the wrongdoing of others, who are presumed themselves to be innocent by virtue of the fact they have neither contributed to the wrong nor could they have avoided receiving the benefit. But as we show, this presumption is mistaken for unavoidable beneficiaries who intend in certain ways to benefit from wrongdoing, (...) and who have therefore done something wrong in forming and acting on such an intention. (shrink)

It seems to me that we should aim at something very much like this today: protected spaces of many different sorts matched to the needs of the different tribes. Michael Walzer (1994)They [animals] are not brethren, they are not underlings, they are other Nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth. Henry Beston (1928).

Critics’ praise of Woody Allen as an artist is increasing. No other comedian includes within his humour so many references to God. Philosophers interested in contemporary culture should take Allen’s comedy seriously. Accepting Albert Camus’s vision of reality, Allen has been artistically handling the absurdity of reality by use of humour. Through comedies, Allen’s films deal with important questions. His finest film may contain an argument for God.

Sunstein's Infotopia offers four reasons for thinking that information-pooling via mechanical aggregation of votes is superior to discursive sharing of opinions. This article focuses on two of them—the Common Knowledge Effect and Group Polarisation—showing that both phenomena might have perfectly good Bayesian explanations. Far from constituting 'errors', both can actually contribute to truth-tracking in ways that cannot be accomplished via mechanical aggregation of votes alone.

Starting with Goffman and ending with Foucault -- The spacetimeplace "thing" -- Time goes vertical; space yields in -- What Marx brought in from the cold : reproduction -- Bringing in the body -- Bring in geography.

Individuals are often causally inconsequential parts of highly consequential wholes. If each individual is causally inconsequential, and what she does makes no causal difference, we may be inclined to absolve each of causal responsibility for the consequences of what occurs as a result of the larger whole of which each is a part. But there is another form of responsibility – constitutive responsibility. Whatever the causal consequences may be, each individual constitutes part of that whole and each therefore bears responsibility (...) of at least that sort for the whole. (shrink)