Episodic memory is usually regarded in a Conceptualist light, in the sense of its being dependent upon the grasp of concepts directly relevant to the act of episodic recollection itself, such as a concept of past times and of the self as an experiencer. Given this view, its development is typically timed as being in the early school‐age years (Perner, 2001;Tulving, 2005). We present a minimalist, Non‐Conceptualist approach in opposition to this view, but one that also exists in clear contrast (...) to the kind of minimalism (‘episodic‐like’) espoused byClayton and Dickinson (1998)with regard to memory in food‐caching birds. While emphasising the nonconceptual elements of episodic memory (in common with the ‘episodic‐like’ approach) we also insist on the essentially phenomenological nature of the memory (as does the Conceptualist approach). We propose the third year of life as a plausible onset period. Our view is rooted in Kantian assumptions about the spatiotemporal content of experience (and thus of re‐experience) and about the synthetic unity of experience—and thus of re‐experience. We answer two objections to this position. (shrink)

Episodic memory is usually regarded in a Conceptualist light, in the sense of its being dependent upon the grasp of concepts directly relevant to the act of episodic recollection itself, such as a concept of past times and of the self as an experiencer. Given this view, its development is typically timed as being in the early school-age years. We present a minimalist, Non-Conceptualist approach in opposition to this view, but one that also exists in clear contrast to the kind (...) of minimalism espoused by Clayton and Dickinson with regard to memory in food-caching birds. While emphasising the nonconceptual elements of episodic memory we also insist on the essentially phenomenological nature of the memory. We propose the third year of life as a plausible onset period. Our view is rooted in Kantian assumptions about the spatiotemporal content of experience and about the synthetic unity of experience—and thus of re-experience. We answer two objections to this position. (shrink)

Robert Hanna's twelfth book, The Fate of Analysis, is a comprehensive revisionist study of Analytic philosophy from the early 1880s to the present, with special attention paid to Wittgenstein's work and the parallels and overlaps between the Analytic and Phenomenological traditions. By means of a synoptic overview of European and Anglo-American philosophy since the 1880s-including accessible, clear, and critical descriptions of the works and influence of, among others, Gottlob Frege, G.E. Moore, Bertrand Russell, Alexius Meinong, Franz Brentano, (...) Edmund Husserl, The Vienna Circle, W.V.O. Quine, Saul Kripke, Wilfrid Sellars, John McDowell, and Robert Brandom, and, particularly, Ludwig Wittgenstein-The Fate of Analysis critically examines and evaluates modern philosophy over the last 140 years. In addition to its critical analyses of the Analytic tradition and of professional academic philosophy more generally, The Fate of Analysis also presents a thought-provoking, forward-looking, and positive picture of the philosophy of the future from a radical Kantian point of view. (shrink)

Recent work on the early development of episodic memory in my laboratory has been fuelled by the following assumption: if episodic memory is re-experiential memory then Kant’s analysis of the spatiotemporal nature of experience should constrain and positively influence theories of episodic memory development. The idea is that re-experiential memory will “inherit” these spatiotemporal features. On the basis of this assumption, Russell and Hanna (Mind and Language 27(1):29–54, 2012) proposed that (a) the spatial element of re-experience is egocentric (...) and (b) that the temporal element of re-experiencing involves order/simultaneity. The first of these assumptions is immediately problematic for two reasons. In the first place, if we assume that early episodic recall mediated by processing in the hippocampus, then (a) is clearly in tension with the fact that spatial coding in the hippocampus is allocentric/environment-centred. Second, two of our own recent experiments (described here) show that when only egocentric cues are available in a What/When/Where episodic memory task it is not possible to distinguish young children’s performance from semantic memory. I argue that this tension should be resolved by recognising that the egocentric coding of the original experience as being of an objective scene relies upon allocentric representations and these are preserved in re-experiential memory, allowing a recollection of the objective nature of the scene on which one takes a subjective view. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:diacritics 35.1 (2005) 3-6MuseSearchJournalsThis JournalContents[Access article in PDF]Whispers of the Flesh Essays in Memory of Pierre KlossowskiIan JamesRussell Ford Pierre Klossowski—novelist, essayist, painter, and translator—was one of the most startling, original, and influential figures in twentieth-century French intellectual culture. The older brother of the well-known painter Balthus and a close associate of Georges Bataille, Klossowski's diverse oeuvre includes novels, philosophical essays, and translations, as well as paintings and films. (...) Confined thus far to an undeserved but somehow fitting shadow existence in the margins and notes of theorists who have become mainstays of Anglo-American criticism, Klossowski's own work has increasingly become a focus of critical interest for its decisive contribution to the development of thought and aesthetics in France from the 1950s onward. Born in 1905, the eldest son of Polish émigrés, Klossowski spent his first ten years in Paris in an artistic milieu, heavily influenced by the neoimpressionism of figures such as Bonnard and Derain. His father, Erich Klossowski de Rola, was a painter and art historian, the author of an important monograph on Daumier. His mother, Baladine, was also a painter and trained under Bonnard. While still a teenager Klossowski was introduced to the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke, with whom he became close and who in turn introduced him to the novelist André Gide. At eighteen he became Gide's secretary and assisted him with the drafts of his famous novel Les faux-monnayeurs.Not until 1930, however, did Klossowski's own career properly begin, when he translated with Jean-Pierre Jouve a collection of poems by Friedrich Hölderlin. Throughout his life Klossowski was a prolific and influential translator from both German and Latin into French, translating amongst others Nietzsche, Kafka, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein from the German, and Suetonius, Virgil, Augustine, and Tertullian from the Latin. While working for the prominent Parisian psychoanalyst René Laforgue, Klossowski published his first philosophical essay on the Marquis de Sade in 1933 in the Revue française de la psychanalyse. Scandalized by Klossowski's Nietzschean-inflected psychoanalytic interpretation of Sade's writing, Laforgue dismissed Klossowski immediately. Throughout the 1930s Klossowski made a number of key friendships and acquaintances, most importantly with Georges Bataille, but also many others, including Walter Benjamin, André Masson, Jean Wahl, and Maurice Heine. During this period he published several articles and collaborated with Bataille on the review Acéphale and in the avant-garde experiment of the Collège de Sociologie (where, it is said, he would attend meetings dressed in a soutane). During the war years Klossowski trained in a number of Catholic seminaries, a vocation which ultimately failed and led to the writing of his first novel, La vocation suspendue. In the postwar period he married [End Page 3] a war widow, Denise Morin Sinclair, who had been interned in Ravensbrück for her activities in the Resistance and who became the model for Roberte, a key figure in much of Klossowski's fiction and painting. After the war Klossowski began to publish the influential works for which he will chiefly be remembered: literary-philosophical essays on Sade and Nietzsche (among others), as well as six important novels written between 1950 and 1965, La vocation suspendue (1950), the three works, originally published separately, which went on to form the Lois de l'hospitalité trilogy—Roberte ce soir (1954), La révocation de l'Édit de Nantes (1959) and Le souffleur ou le théâtre de société (1960)‚—and, finally, Le Baphomet (1965).Klossowski's seminal 1947 work, Sade mon prochain, was one of the first full-length literary and philosophical studies of Sade's work to be published in France and marked a decisive break from earlier accounts. Whereas earlier treatments of Sade had focused either on biographical detail or on the medical and psychosexual import of his life and writing, Klossowski's reading was concerned with the intertwined figures of law and transgression in Sade's work. After Sade mon prochain French intellectuals and writers... (shrink)

Alan Richardson’s Carnap’s Construction of the World is a well-researched, richly-detailed, and highly instructive study of a crucial moment in the history of the analytic tradition: the transitional stage between the classical or early period dominated by Frege, Moore, and Russell, and the neo-classical or middle period dominated by Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle. This stage marks a shift from ontic analysis to linguistic analysis; from platonism to conventionalism; from realistic metaphysics to anti-metaphysics; from rationalism to empiricism; and from (...) logicism to logical positivism. Only the firm commitments to antipsychologism, to “logic as the essence of philosophy,” and to semantics remain the same. But above all it is the moment at which the positive influence of Kant upon analytic philosophy—in the form of a vestigial neo-Kantianism—is finally extinguished. All this and more is packed into Rudolf Carnap’s 1928 treatise Der logische Aufbau der Welt ; hence Richardson aptly concentrates his account by unpacking the philosophical content, context, and consequences of the Aufbau. (shrink)

Two rather distinct and competing trends can be discerned in twentieth-century philosophy of language: the logical trend, found in the work of Frege, Russell and Tarski, with its focus on language-world connections and truth; the language-use trend, found in the work of Wittgenstein, Austin, and Searle, with its focus on language as employed by speakers in ordinary conversational contexts. Vanderveken's aim here is to bring together both the logistic and language-use traditions by folding the analysis of language-world relations and (...) the formal semantics of truth into the theory of speech acts. This gives rise to a "general semantics" of language-use and language-understanding. Vanderveken claims that such a general semantics of speech acts will provide a transcendental analysis of the a priori forms of possible thought and experience of human speakers. It would therefore be a great mistake to treat this book as just another contribution to the now slightly dated "speech act industry." It is, in effect, an attempt to raise speech act theory to the level of philosophical grammar, or what seventeenth- and eighteenth-century philosophers would have called grammaire générale et raisonné. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:In Kant’s Wake: Philosophy in the Twentieth CenturyRobert HannaTom Rockmore. In Kant’s Wake: Philosophy in the Twentieth Century. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2006. Pp. 213. Paper, $24.95.In In Kant's Wake, Tom Rockmore sets himself the almost impossibly ambitious task of telling a coherent story about the sprawling set of thinkers, doctrines, arguments, journal articles, books, social institutions, teachings, and other intellectual practices that make up philosophy in the twentieth century. (...) His highly plausible unifying hypothesis is that twentieth-century philosophy is a series of creative and reactive footnotes to Kant's Critical Philosophy as encapsulated in the Critique of Pure Reason, and in particular, to Kant's transcendental idealism. Of course the same unifying hypothesis is equally plausible of the nineteenth century. In this sense, the history of philosophy since Kant is just the history of post-Kantian philosophy.Rather than telling a single long story, Rockmore tells five shorter stories. He begins his narrative with a chapter on Kant's metaphysics and immediate responses to the Critique of Pure Reason (ch. 2). Then he focuses, in turn, on the diachronic developments of Marxism (ch. 3), pragmatism, (ch. 4), phenomenology (ch. 5), and analytic philosophy (ch. 6). The five stories are framed by a methodological chapter on the problem of interpreting twentieth-century philosophy (ch. 1), and a concluding chapter on the relation between Kant and the overall shape of philosophy in the twentieth century (ch. 7).Three more or less explicitly-stated interpretive principles run through each of Rockmore's historical narratives. The first, as I have already mentioned, is the grand unifying hypothesis of the essentially protean character of Kant's first Critique and the metaphysics of transcendental idealism. The second is that each distinct philosophical movement is [End Page 676] fundamentally organized around the teachings and writings of a few "master" or "strong" thinkers (14). And the third is that the history of philosophy is nothing but a multi-voiced Socratic conversation (13). Everyone knows how even the most intensely animated intellectual conversation can end with an inconclusive whimper instead of a conclusive bang. According to Rockmore, that is basically what happened to the great philosophical conversation of the twentieth century.In the chapter on Kant, Rockmore usefully distinguishes between two strands of transcendental idealism that Kant regarded as fully complementary, but which tended to run and pull in sharply opposite directions in post-Kantian philosophy: (1) the representationalist strand, and (2) the constructivist strand (36). Now Kant's transcendental idealism says four things. First, cognition is the mental representation of objects. Second, the objects we cognize are nothing but appearances or phenomena and never things-in-themselves or noumena. Third, the generic structure of the objects and the world we cognize is identical to the non-empirical or a priori generic structure of the innate cognitive capacities or faculties of our minds. And fourth, the human mind is spontaneously active in producing the specific structures of the very objects we cognize when our faculties are triggered by particular sensory inputs. The first and second theses of transcendental idealism constitute its representationalist strand, and the third and fourth theses constitute its constructivist strand.The decomposition of the orginal Kantian vector into its representationalist and constructivist components helps Rockmore in his interpretation of the four main sub-movements of twentieth-century philosophy. Marxism or dialectical materialism, organized of course around the teachings and writings of Karl Marx, is an economic, social, and political version of post-Kantian constructivism focused on the concrete struggles of alienated individuals and groups to achieve liberation and self-realization in collective action. So too pragmatism, organized around the teachings and writings of C. S. Peirce, William James, and John Dewey, is another version of post-Kantian constructivism, this time focused on the idea that the meaning and truth of concepts and propositions is strictly determined by the practical pay-offs of applying those concepts and propositions.By contrast, phenomenology and analytic philosophy are both versions of representationalism. Phenomenology is organized around the teaching and writings of Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and focuses on the structures of consciousness and object-directedness... (shrink)

Peter Abelard (1079–1142 ce) was the most wide‐ranging philosopher of the twelfth century. He quickly established himself as a leading teacher of logic in and near Paris shortly after 1100. After his affair with Heloise, and his subsequent castration, Abelard became a monk, but he returned to teaching in the Paris schools until 1140, when his work was condemned by a Church Council at Sens. His logical writings were based around discussion of the “Old Logic”: Porphyry's Isagoge, aristotle'S Categories and (...) On Interpretation and boethius'S textbook on topical inference. They comprise a freestanding Dialectica (“Logic”; probably c.1116), a set of commentaries (known as the Logica [Ingredientibus], c. 1119) and a later (c. 1125) commentary on the Isagoge (Logica Nostrorum Petititoni Sociorum or Glossulae). In a work Abelard called his Theologia, issued in three main versions (between 1120 and c.1134), he attempted a logical analysis of trinitarian relations and explored the philosophical problems surrounding God's claims to omnipotence and omniscience. The Collationes (“Debates,” also known as “Dialogue between a Christian, a Philosopher and a Jew”; probably c.1130) present a rational investigation into the nature of the highest good, in which the Christian and the Philosopher (who seems to be modeled on a philosopher of pagan antiquity) are remarkably in agreement. The unfinished Scito teipsum (“Know thyself,” also known as the “Ethics”; c.1138) analyses moral action. (shrink)

Often Bertrand Russell defends his view that names differ from descriptions in that names have meaning but descriptions do not by using a “proof.” Recently in this journal it has been debated whether Russell's “proof” fails or not. The familiar objection to Russell's argument is that it is circular or it involves a sense/reference equivocation. Avrum Stroll suggests a novel criticism by making use of a “mirror argument“ which attempts to show that Russell's argument can be (...) used to conclude that "Scott" has no meaning, and that thus the argument proves too much or nothing. Robert Fahrnkopf defends Russell's argument, but, I believe, he does not go far enough in his defense. So it will be useful to carry this debate a few steps further. (shrink)

Often Bertrand Russell defends his view that names differ from descriptions in that names have meaning but descriptions do not by using a “proof.” Recently in this journal it has been debated whether Russell's “proof” fails or not. The familiar objection to Russell's argument is that it is circular or it involves a sense/reference equivocation. Avrum Stroll suggests a novel criticism by making use of a “mirror argument“ which attempts to show that Russell's argument can be (...) used to conclude that "Scott" has no meaning, and that thus the argument proves too much or nothing. Robert Fahrnkopf defends Russell's argument, but, I believe, he does not go far enough in his defense. So it will be useful to carry this debate a few steps further. (shrink)

Often Bertrand Russell defends his view that names differ from descriptions in that names have meaning but descriptions do not by using a “proof.” Recently in this journal it has been debated whether Russell's “proof” fails or not. The familiar objection to Russell's argument is that it is circular or it involves a sense/reference equivocation. Avrum Stroll suggests a novel criticism by making use of a “mirror argument“ which attempts to show that Russell's argument can be (...) used to conclude that "Scott" has no meaning, and that thus the argument proves too much or nothing. Robert Fahrnkopf defends Russell's argument, but, I believe, he does not go far enough in his defense. So it will be useful to carry this debate a few steps further. (shrink)

This chapter offers a description of what all classical and contemporary pragmatists have in common and in virtue of which we call them pragmatists. It also describes the ways in which classical and contemporary pragmatists differ on important epistemological issues, such as knowledge and truth. After then examining and rejecting longstanding criticisms of pragmatism, this chapter compares pragmatists on the questions of atheism, theism, and the status of religious sentiment without belief in the personal God of the omni‐predicates. Peirce offered (...) an argument (he called it a Neglected Argument) for belief in God. William James felt strongly that religious belief was well worth taking seriously as a positive moral force in the world, but in the end he was quite reluctant to accept the personal God of the omni‐predicates. Unlike Bertrand Russell, however, he did not believe that all religion was harmful and basically irrational. Dewey was a hard‐core materialist and hence an unabashed atheist. In the end, it seems fair to say that with regard to the existence of the traditional personal God of the omni‐predicates, there is no uniquely clear and generally accepted position among pragmatists in general. (shrink)

Plato and the trial of Socrates -- What is philosophy? -- Euthyphro : defining philosophical terms -- The apology, Phaedo, and Crito : the trial, immortality, and death of Socrates -- Philosophy of religion -- Can we prove that God exists? -- St. Anselm : the ontological argument -- St. Thomas Aquinas : the cosmological argument -- William Paley : the teleological argument -- Blaisepascal : it is better to believe in God's existence than to deny it -- William (...) class='Hi'>James : free choice is the basis of belief -- Does the idea of a good God exclude evil? -- Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz : God can allow some evil -- David Hume : a good God would exclude evil -- Ethics -- Are ethics relative? -- Ruth Benedict : ethics are relative -- W.T. Stace : ethics are not relative -- Are humans always selfish? -- Humans are always selfish : Glaucon's challenge to Socrates -- James Rachels : humans are not always selfish -- Which is basic in ethics : happiness or obligation? -- Aristotle : happiness is living virtuously -- Jeremy Bentham : happiness is seeking the greatest pleasure for the greatest number of people -- Immanuel Kant : duty is prior to happiness -- Friedrich Nietzsche : happiness is having power -- Jean-Paul Sartre : existentialist ethics -- Rosemarie Tong : feminist ethics are different -- Contemporary moral problems : abortion, homosexuality, animal rights -- Jane English : are most abortions moral? -- Peter Singer : do animals have rights? -- Knowledge -- What is knowledge? -- Plato : knowledge is warranted, true belief -- What method is best for acquiring knowledge? -- Charles Sanders Peirce : four approaches to philosophy -- How do we acquire knowledge? -- René Descartes : knowledge is not ultimately sense knowledge -- John Locke : knowledge is ultimately sensed -- Immanuel Kant : knowledge is both rational and empirical -- How is truth established? -- Bertrand Russell : truth is established by correspondence -- Francis H. Bradley : truth is established by coherence -- William James : truth is established on pragmatic grounds -- Can we know the nature of causal relations? -- David Hume : cause means regular association -- David Hume : there are no possible grounds for induction -- Metaphysics -- Why is there something rather than nothing? -- Parmenides : being is uncaused -- Lao-Tzu : non-being is the source of being -- Is reality general or particular? -- Plato : universals are real -- David Hume : particulars are real -- Of what does reality consist? -- René Descartes : reality consists of mind and matter -- Paul Churchland : reality consists of matter -- George Berkeley : reality consists of ideas -- John Dewey : reality consists of mental and physical qualities -- Are humans free? -- Holbach : humans are determined -- Robert Kane : humans are free -- Social and political philosophy -- What is liberty? -- Fyodor Dostoevski : liberty and authority -- John Stuart Mill : liberty is independence from the majority's tyranny -- Martin Luther King, Jr. : liberty and racial prejudice -- Which government is best? -- Thomas Hobbes : monarchy is best -- John Locke : democracy is best -- Karl Marx : communism and nonalienated labor is best -- Alexis de Tocqueville : democracy can have serious problems -- Karl Popper : utopias lead to violence -- Aesthetics -- What constitutes the experience of beauty? -- Plotinus : beauty, sensuous, and ideal -- What is the function of art? -- Aristotle : the nature of tragedy -- Henri Bergson : the nature of comedy -- Philosophy and the good life -- Classic views of the good life -- Epicurus : Epicurus and the pleasant life -- Epictetus : Epictetus and the life of self-control -- What gives life meaning? -- Leo Tolstoy : faith provides life's meaning -- Albert Camus : each person determines his or her life's meaning -- What is the value of philosophy? -- Bertrand Russell : the value of philosophy. (shrink)

Providing the most thorough coverage available in one volume, this comprehensive, broadly based collection offers a wide variety of selections in four major genres, and also includes a section on film. Each of the five sections contains a detailed critical introduction to each form, brief biographies of the authors, and a clear, concise editorial apparatus. Updated and revised throughout, the new Fourth Edition adds essays by Margaret Mead, Russell Baker, Joan Didion, Annie Dillard, and Alice Walker; fiction by Nathaniel (...) Hawthorne, Ursula K. LeGuin, Anton Chekov, James Joyce, Katherine Mansfield, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Alice Walker, Louise Erdrich, Donald Barthelme, and James McPherson; poems by John Donne, Robert Browning, Walt Whitman, Edwin Arlington Robinson, e.e. cummings, Langston Hughes, W.H. Auden, Philip Levine, and Louise Gluck; and plays by August Wilson, Marsha Norman, Wendy Wasserstein, and Vaclav Havel. The chapter devoted to film examines the relation of film to literature and gives the complete screenplay for Citizen Kane plus close analysis of a scene from the film. With its innovative structure, comprehensive coverage, and insightful and stimulating presentation of all kinds of literature, this is an anthology readers will turn to again and again. (shrink)

Recent decades have seen a resurgence of contractarian thinking about the nature and origins of the state. Scholars in this tradition ask what constraints rational, self-interested actors might deliberately impose upon themselves. In response, Hobbes, Rousseau, Locke, and other early contractarians answered that laws of property were an attractive alternative to “the war of all against all.” More recently, James Buchanan, Russell Hardin, Mancur Olson, Gordon Tullock, and others have used contractarian principles to justify laws that solve a (...) variety of Prisoner's Dilemmas and other collective-action problems. And in the distributional realm, John Rawls and others have applied contractarian analysis to investigate how material wealth ought to be allocated among people. (shrink)

Ancient Greek and Roman philosophy is often characterised in terms of competitive individuals debating orally with one another in public arenas. But it also developed over its long history a sense in which philosophers might acknowledge some other particular philosopher or group of philosophers as an authority and offer to that authority explicit intellectual allegiance. This is most obvious in the development after the classical period of the philosophical 'schools' with agreed founders and, most importantly, canonical founding texts. There also (...) developed a tradition of commentary, interpretation, and discussion of texts which itself became a mode of philosophical debate. As time went on, the weight of a growing tradition of reading and appealing to a certain corpus of foundational texts began to shape how later antiquity viewed its philosophical past and also how philosophical debate and inquiry was conducted. In this book leading scholars explore aspects of these important developments. (shrink)

In ‘What's Wrong with Speciesism?’, Shelly Kagan sketches an account on which both actually being a person and possibly being a person are relevant to one's moral status, labelling this view ‘modal personism’ and supporting its conclusions with appeals to intuitions about a range of marginal cases. I tender a pessimistic response to Kagan's concern about motivating modal personism: that is, of being able to ‘go beyond the mere appeal to brute intuition, eventually offering an account of why modal personhood (...) should matter in the ways we may intuitively think that it does.’. (shrink)

First published in 1984, Cultural Analysis is a systematic examination of the theories of culture contained in the writings of four contemporary social theorists: Peter L. Berger, Mary Douglas, Michel Foucault, and Jürgen Habermas. This study of their work clarifies their contributions to the analysis of culture and shows the converging assumptions that the authors believe are laying the foundation for a new approach to the study of culture. The focus is specifically on culture, a concept that remains subject to (...) ambiguities of treatment, and concentrates on questions concerning the definition and content of culture, its construction, its relations with social conditions, and the manner in which it may be changing. The books demonstrates how these writers have made strides towards defining culture as an objective element of social interaction which can be subjected to critical investigation. (shrink)

The familiar theories of physics have the feature that the application of the theory to make predictions in specific circumstances can be done by means of an algorithm. We propose a more precise formulation of this feature—one based on the issue of whether or not the physically measurable numbers predicted by the theory are computable in the mathematical sense. Applying this formulation to one approach to a quantum theory of gravity, there are found indications that there may exist no such (...) algorithms in this case. Finally, we discuss the issue of whether the existence of an algorithm to implement a theory should be adopted as a criterion for acceptable physical theories.“Can it then be that there is... something of use for unraveling the universe to be learned from the philosophy of computer design?” —J. A. Wheeler(1). (shrink)

In a recent article in this journal, Carl Knight and Andreas Albertsen argue that Rawlsian theories of distributive justice as applied to health and healthcare fail to accommodate both palliative care and the desirability of less painful treatments. The asserted Rawlsian focus on opportunities or capacities, as exemplified in Normal Daniels’ developments of John Rawls’ theory, results in a normative account of healthcare which is at best only indirectly sensitive to pain and so unable to account for the value of (...) efforts of which the sole purpose is pain reduction. I argue that, far from undermining the Rawlsian project and its application to problems of health, what the authors’ argument at most amounts to is a compelling case for the inclusion of freedom from physical pain within its index of primary goods. (shrink)

In ‘Professional Hubris and its Consequences’, Eric Vogelstein claims that ‘that there are no good arguments in favor of professional organizations taking genuinely controversial positions on issues of professional ethics’. In this response, I defend two arguments in favour of organisations taking such positions: that their stance‐taking may lead to better public policy, and that it may lead to better practice by medical professionals. If either of those defences succeeds, then Vogelstein's easy path to his conclusion – that professional organisations (...) should not take such stances – is blocked. He or others must instead look to establish that the reasons against stance‐taking on genuine ethical controversies are more compelling than those for it: plausibly a more challenging task. (shrink)

We consider the motion of small bodies in general relativity. The key result captures a sense in which such bodies follow timelike geodesics. This result clarifies the relationship between approaches that model such bodies as distributions supported on a curve, and those that employ smooth fields supported in small neighborhoods of a curve. This result also applies to "bodies" constructed from wave packets of Maxwell or Klein-Gordon fields. There follows a simple and precise formulation of the optical limit for Maxwell (...) fields. (shrink)

Robert Hanna presents a fresh view of the Kantian and analytic traditions that have dominated continental European and Anglo-American philosophy over the last two centuries, and of the connections between them. But this is not just a study in the history of philosophy, for out of this emerges Hanna's original approach to two much-contested theories that remain at the heart of contemporary philosophy. Hanna puts forward a new 'cognitive-semantic' interpretation of transcendental idealism, and a vigorous defense (...) of Kant's theory of analytic and synthetic necessary truth, making this compelling reading for all who are interested in these fundamental philosophical issues. (shrink)

We propose to understand the global financial crisis of 2008 as an historical event marked by public decisions, economic evaluations and ratings, and business practices driven by a sense of subjugation to powerful others, uncritical conformity to serendipitous rules, and a levelling down of all meaningful differences. The crisis has also revealed two important things: that the free-market economy has inherent problems highlighting the limits of (financial) business, and, consequently, that the business organisation is not as strong as is usually (...) assumed. We reconstruct some of the most dramatic events of that time by using the narratives of two former Lehman Brothers insiders. We then provide an interpretation of that world by using Heidegger’s notions of being and care. Our investigation uncovers persistent inauthentic relationships nourished by the public structure of the financial market, which, drawing on Heidegger, we call the they. In the financial market the what of the world becomes more important than authentic being and self. But a hitch-free switch to authenticity becomes possible through anxiety and the call of conscience. (shrink)

The current debate over systematicity concerns the formal conditions a scheme of mental representation must satisfy in order to explain the systematicity of thought.1 The systematicity of thought is assumed to be a pervasive property of minds, and can be characterized (roughly) as follows: anyone who can think T can think systematic variants of T, where the systematic variants of T are found by permuting T’s constituents. So, for example, it is an alleged fact that anyone who can think the (...) thought that John loves Mary can think the thought that Mary loves John, where the latter thought is a systematic variant of the former. (shrink)

Forgiveness theorists focus a good deal on explicating the content of what they take to be a shared folk concept of forgiveness. Our empirical research, however, suggests that there is a range of concepts of forgiveness present in the population, and therefore that we should be folk conceptual pluralists about forgiveness. We suggest two possible responses on the part of forgiveness theorists: (1) to deny folk conceptual pluralism by arguing that forgiveness is a functional concept and (2) to accept folk (...) conceptual pluralism and focus on a revisionary conceptual ethics project. (shrink)