This crucial volume contains a newly-edited cache of over thirty essays on a diverse range of topics from the renowned philosopher, Adam Ferguson, a leading figure of the Scottish Enlightenment. Following on from The Correspondence of Adam Ferguson, this collection aims to set the essays more fully in the history of western philosophy, to which they made an important contribution. They give an exhaustive picture of the thinking of the author and expound ideas which build on and extend the originality (...) of his earlier work. The need for systematic writing in his earlier, published work inevitably marginalized the topics of interest that Ferguson would resume in the leisure of his retirement, when he was free to rethink and clarify earlier problems. Long-unpulished, his later essays represent a re-appraisal of the philosophical, historical and anthropoligical themes that he had examined before. In this authoritative edition, Ferguson's views on disparate philosophical, anthropological and historical topics can at last be viewed in one impressive volume. His texts are transcribed as faithfully as possible and are accompanied by extensive introductions from the general editor and both contributing editors. (shrink)

This paper is about two topics: metaepistemological absolutism and the epistemic principles governing perceptual warrant. Our aim is to highlight—by taking the debate between dogmatists and conservativists about perceptual warrant as a case study—a surprising and hitherto unnoticed problem with metaepistemological absolutism, at least as it has been influentially defended by Paul Boghossian as the principal metaepistemological contrast point to relativism. What we find is that the metaepistemological commitments at play on both sides of this dogmatism/conservativism debate do not line (...) up with epistemic relativism nor do they line up with absolutism, at least as Boghossian articulates this position. What this case study reveals is the need in metaepistemological option space for the recognition of a weaker and less tendentious form of absolutism, what we call “environment relativism”. On this view, epistemic principles are knowable, objective, and they can serve as the basis of particular epistemic evaluations, but their validity is relative to the wider global environment in which they are applied. (shrink)

Pronouns often convey information about a person’s social identity (e.g., gender). Consequently, pronouns have become a focal point in academic and public debates about whether pronouns should be changed to be more inclusive, such as for people whose identities do not fit current pronoun conventions (e.g., gender non-binary individuals). Here, we make an empirical contribution to these debates by investigating which social identities lay speakers think that pronouns should encode and why. Across four studies, participants were asked to evaluate different (...) types of real and hypothetical pronouns, including binary gender pronouns, race pronouns, and identity-neutral pronouns. We sampled participants from two languages with different pronoun systems: English (N = 1,120) and Turkish (N = 260). English pronouns commonly denote binary gender (e.g., he for men), whereas Turkish pronouns are identity-neutral (e.g., o for anyone). Participants’ reasoning about pronouns reflected both a familiarity preference (i.e., participants preferred the pronoun type used in their language) and—critically—participants’ social ideologies. In both language contexts, participants’ ideological beliefs that social groups are inherently distinct (essentialism) and should be hierarchal (social dominance orientation) predicted relatively greater endorsement of binary gender pronouns and race pronouns. A preregistered experimental study with an English-speaking sample showed that the relationship between ideology and pronoun endorsement is causal: Ideologies shape attitudes toward pronouns. Together, the present research contributes to linguistic and psychological theories concerning how people reason about language and informs policy-relevant questions about whether and how to implement language changes for social purposes. (shrink)

Most discussions of racial fetish center on the question of whether it is caused by negative racial stereotypes. In this paper I adopt a different strategy, one that begins with the experiences of those targeted by racial fetish rather than those who possess it; that is, I shift focus away from the origins of racial fetishes to their effects as a social phenomenon in a racially stratified world. I examine the case of preferences for Asian women, also known as ‘yellow (...) fever’, to argue against the claim that racial fetishes are unobjectionable if they are merely based on personal or aesthetic preference rather than racial stereotypes. I contend that even if this were so, yellow fever would still be morally objectionable because of the disproportionate psychological burdens it places on Asian and Asian-American women, along with the role it plays in a pernicious system of racial social meanings. (shrink)

We live in a world of breaking news, where at almost any moment our everyday routine can be interrupted by a faraway event. Events are central to the way that individuals and societies experience life. Even life’s inevitable moments—birth, death, love, and war—are almost always a surprise. Inspired by the cataclysmic events of September 11, Robin Wagner-Pacifici presents here a tour de force, an analysis of how events erupt and take off from the ground of ongoing, everyday life, and (...) how they then move across time and landscape. What Is an Event? ranges across several disciplines, systematically analyzing the ways that events emerge, take shape, gain momentum, flow, and even get bogged down. As an exploration of how events are constructed out of ruptures, it provides a mechanism for understanding eventful forms and flows, from the micro-level of individual life events to the macro-level of historical revolutions, contemporary terrorist attacks, and financial crises. Wagner-Pacifici takes a close look at a number of cases, both real and imagined, through the reports, personal narratives, paintings, iconic images, political posters, sculptures, and novels they generate and through which they live on. What is ultimately at stake for individuals and societies in events, Wagner-Pacifici argues, are identities, loyalties, social relationships, and our very experiences of time and space. What Is an Event? provides a way for us all—as social and political beings living through events, and as analysts reflecting upon them—to better understand what is at stake in the formations and flows of the events that mark and shape our lives. (shrink)

Despite its uniform appearance, the cerebellar cortex is highly heterogeneous in terms of structure, genetics and physiology. Purkinje cells (PCs), the principal and sole output neurons of the cerebellar cortex, can be categorized into multiple populations that differentially express molecular markers and display distinctive physiological features. Such features include action potential rate, but also their propensity for synaptic and intrinsic plasticity. However, the precise molecular and genetic factors that correlate with the differential physiological properties of PCs remain elusive. In this (...) article, we provide a detailed overview of the cellular mechanisms that regulate PC activity and plasticity. We further perform a pathway analysis to highlight how molecular characteristics of specific PC populations may influence their physiology and plasticity mechanisms. (shrink)

This chapter distinguishes between two concepts of moral responsibility. We are responsible for our actions in the first sense only when those actions reflect our identities as moral agents, i.e. when they are attributable to us. We are responsible in the second sense when it is appropriate for others to enforce certain expectations and demands on those actions, i.e. to hold us accountable for them. This distinction allows for an account of moral responsibility for implicit bias, defended here, on which (...) people may lack attributability for actions caused by implicit bias but are still accountable for them. What this amounts to is leaving aside appraisal-based forms of moral criticism such as blame and punishment in favor of non-appraising forms of accountability. This account not only does more justice to our moral experience and agency, but will also lead to more effective practices for combating the harms of implicit bias. (shrink)

Computational models of infant word‐finding typically operate over transcriptions of infant‐directed speech corpora. It is now possible to test models of word segmentation on speech materials, rather than transcriptions of speech. We propose that such modeling efforts be conducted over the speech of the experimental stimuli used in studies measuring infants' capacity for learning from spoken sentences. Correspondence with infant outcomes in such experiments is an appropriate benchmark for models of infants. We demonstrate such an analysis by applying the DP‐Parser (...) model of Algayres and colleagues to auditory stimuli used in infant psycholinguistic experiments by Pelucchi and colleagues. The DP‐Parser model takes speech as input, and creates multiple overlapping embeddings from each utterance. Prospective words are identified as clusters of similar embedded segments. This allows segmentation of each utterance into possible words, using a dynamic programming method that maximizes the frequency of constituent segments. We show that DP‐Parse mimics American English learners' performance in extracting words from Italian sentences, favoring the segmentation of words with high syllabic transitional probability. This kind of computational analysis over actual stimuli from infant experiments may be helpful in tuning future models to match human performance. (shrink)

Robin illustrates the central role that fear has played and continues to play in the wielding of power, particularly in politics and the workplace.

This Element is an introduction to contemporary religious fictionalism, its motivation and challenges. Among the issues raised are: can religion be viewed as a game of make-believe? In what ways does religious fictionalism parallel positions often labelled 'fictionalist' in ethics and metaphysics? Does religious fictionalism represent an advance over its rivals? Can fictionalism provide an adequate understanding of the characteristic features of the religious life, such as worship, prayer, moral commitment? Does fictionalism face its own version of the problem of (...) evil? Is realism about theistic language less religiously serious than fictionalism? (shrink)

Using a variation of the rainbow construction and various pebble and colouring games, we prove that RRA, the class of all representable relation algebras, cannot be axiomatised by any first-order relation algebra theory of bounded quantifier depth. We also prove that the class At(RRA) of atom structures of representable, atomic relation algebras cannot be defined by any set of sentences in the language of RA atom structures that uses only a finite number of variables.

Research has increasingly focussed on the benefits of meditation in everyday life and performance. Mindfulness in particular improves attention, working memory capacity, and reading comprehension. Given its emphasis on moment-to-moment awareness, we hypothesised that mindfulness meditation would alter time perception. Using a within-subjects design, participants carried out a temporal bisection task, where several probe durations are compared to “short” and “long” standards. Following this, participants either listened to an audiobook or a meditation that focussed on the movement of breath in (...) the body. Finally, participants completed the temporal bisection task for a second time. The control group showed no change after the listening task. However, meditation led to a relative overestimation of durations. Within an internal clock framework, a change in attentional resources can produce longer perceived durations. This meditative effect has wider implications for the use of mindfulness as an everyday practice and a basis for clinical treatment. (shrink)

Given the highly coercive and heavily surveilled dynamics of the present moment, when the tremendous pressures exerted by capital on contemporary life produce an aggressively normative 'official reality', the question of the construction of other possible worlds is crucial and perhaps more urgent than ever. This collection brings together different perspectives from the fields of philosophy, aesthetics, and art to discuss the mechanisms through which possible worlds are thought, constructed, and instantiated, forcefully seeking to overcome the contemporary moment's deficit of (...) conceptualizing alternate realities, its apparent fear of imagining possible new and compelling futures, and beginning the arduous task of producing the political dynamics necessary for actual construction. Implicit in this dynamic between the conceptual and the possible is the question of how thinking intertwines with both rationality and the inherited contingencies and structures of the world that loom before us. With no ascertainable ground on which to build, with no confidence in any 'given' that could guarantee our labours, how do we even envisage the construction site(s) of possible worlds, and with what kind of diagrams, tools, and languages can we bring them into being? (shrink)

Hastings Center Report, Volume 52, Issue 1, Page 28-31, January/February 2022.

Our study explores the folk concept of personal identity in the developmental context. Two hundred and seventeen Czech children participated in an interview study based on a hypothetical scenario about a sudden change in their friend, someone they know, or some other unspecified person. The children were asked to judge to what extent particular changes (from six categories of traits) would change the identity core of their friend or some other person on a seven-point scale. We introduced both positive and (...) negative versions of the changes. Our data suggest that children considered moral traits connected to interpersonal relationships crucial for preserving personal identity. Memory connected to personal experiences also scored highly. On the other hand, a change in physical appearance seemed to have the least important impact on personal identity. Negative changes turned out to have a significantly greater impact than positive changes in all categories, except the physical. Possible effects of scenario and the participants’ age and sex were further explored. We discuss the possible causes of the effect of negative moral change and the role of social dimension in the development of the concept of personal identity. (shrink)

This book contains the first English translations of The Origin of the Moral Sensations and Psychological Observations the two most important works by the German philosopher Paul Re. These essays present Re's moral philosophy, which ...

This paper is an argument against Truthmaker Necessitarianism—the doctrine that the existence of a truthmaker necessitates the truth of the proposition it makes true. Armstrong’s sufficiency argument for necessitarianism is examined and shown to be question begging. It is then argued in detail that truthmaking is a matter of grounding truth and that grounding is a dependency relation that neither entails nor reduces to necessitation.

Thomas Hobbes has recently been cast as one of the forefathers of political realism. This article evaluates his place in the realist tradition by focusing on three key themes: the priority of legit...

One way of understanding the reduplicative formula "Christ is, ’qua’ God, omniscient, but ’qua’ man, limited in knowledge" is to take the occurrences of the ‘qua‘ locution as picking out different parts of Christ: a divine part and a human part. But this view of Christ as a composite being runs into paradox when combined with the orthodox understanding of the Incarnation, according to which Christ is identical to the second person of the Trinity. In response, we have to choose (...) between modifying the orthodox understanding, adopting a philosophically and theologically contentious perdurantist account of persistence through time, or rejecting altogether the idea of the composite Christ. (shrink)

Nietzsche and Re is about the intellectual partnership of Friedrich Nietzsche and Paul Re . Robin Small combines biography with philosophy to give the first full-length account of a friendship that made major contributions to modern thought before it ended in intellectual differences and a painful breakdown of personal relations. Drawing on a wealth of original scholarship, Small presents an absorbing and often dramatic story, shedding valuable new light on of one of the most important of modern thinkers.

There is no doubt that a person's gender could make a difference to their role in Greek sacrifices. But did it normally make a difference in Greece? And why did it make a difference? Two inscriptions from the island of Thasos neatly illustrate the problem. First, one dated to around 440 and found in the sanctuary of Herakles: [ρα]κλε Θασωι [αγ]α ο θμισ, ο– [δ] χορον οδ γ– [υ]ναικ; θμισ ο– [δ]' νατεεται ο– δ γρα τμνετα– ι οσ' θλται1.

The Routledge Handbook of Emergence is an outstanding reference source and exploration of the concept of emergence, and is the first collection of its kind.

Perhaps the real paradox of Zeno's Arrow is that, although entirely stationary, it has, against all odds, successfully traversed over two millennia of human thought to trouble successive generations of philosophers. The prospects were not good: few original Zenonian fragments survive, and our access to the paradoxes has been for the most part through unsympathetic commentaries. Moreover, like its sister paradoxes of motion, the Arrow has repeatedly been dismissed as specious and easily dissolved. Even those commentators who have taken it (...) seriously have propounded solutions with which they profess themselves to be perfectly satisfied. So my question is: will Zeno's Arrow survive into the millennium just begun? (shrink)

Contextualism is the view that knowledge ascriptions – utterances of sentences containing the word “knows” - express different propositions in different contexts of utterance. But what features of context determine the propositions expressed by knowledge ascriptions? According to a version of contextualism I call conversational contextualism, the conversational dynamics or kinematics determine the propositions expressed by knowledge ascriptions. In this paper I argue that the most sophisticated version of conversational contextualism, which is the view defended by Michael Blome-Tillmann (2009; 2014), (...) faces serious problems. My (very) tentative conclusion will be that conversational contextualism should be abandoned because of these problems. (shrink)

This introduction to Plato's philosophical and educational thought examines Plato's views and relates them to issues and questions that occupy philosophers of education. Robin Barrow stresses the relevance of Plato today, while introducing the student both to Plato's philosophy and to contemporary educational debate. In the first part of the book the author examines Plato's historical background and summarizes the Republic. Successive chapters are concerned with the critical discussion of specific educational issues. He deals with questions relating to the (...) impartial distribution of education, taking as a starting point Plato's celebrated dictum that unequals should be treated unequally. He examines certain methodological concepts such as 'discovery-learning' and 'play' and also raises the wider question of children's freedom. He looks critically at the content of the curriculum and discusses Plato's theory of knowledge and attitude to art. Finally Robin Barrow discusses Plato's view of moral education and the related problem of what constitutes moral indoctrination. (shrink)

Are there difficulties raised by the idea of backwards time travel—travel to earlier times—that are peculiar to objects? By ‘object’ in this context I mean something that takes up space, that typically prevents other items in the same category from occupying the same space, and for which it is generally thought appropriate to talk in terms of persistence conditions. One such problem is raised in H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine, but highlighted in the philosophical literature only very recently, by (...) William Grey. Consider Tim, who boards his time machine and, at 12 noon precisely, presses the button to send him back into the past. At any moments after noon, both Tim and the machine have ceased to exist. (shrink)

In a context where the amount of red tape in healthcare organizations continues to rise, head nurses’ job satisfaction is constantly under pressure. By building on the Job Demands-Resources model, we developed a theoretical model investigating the relationship between red tape and job satisfaction. By investigating the mediating role of discretionary room and the moderating role of autonomous motivation in this relationship, this study does not only aim to provide additional knowledge regarding the underlying mechanisms in this relationship, but also (...) to increase our understanding of how this suffering at work can be mitigated. Our conditional process analyses indicate that red tape undermines head nurses’ job satisfaction and that discretionary room acts as an underlying mechanism in this process. By revealing the mediating role of discretionary room, this study advances our understanding of the risks originating from red tape for leaders. Furthermore, our findings also indicate that autonomous motivation mitigates the negative relation between red tape and discretionary room and between red tape and job satisfaction. As autonomous motivation turns out to be an important protection mechanism against the negative consequences of red tape, organizations should put extra effort into stimulating the autonomous motivation of their leaders. When organizations make sure that their leaders’ job designs and work environments meet the need for autonomy, competence, and relatedness, leaders will become more autonomously motivated, which will buffer the negative impact of red tape. (shrink)

Emergence is often described as the idea that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts: interactions among the components of a system lead to distinctive novel properties. It has been invoked to describe the flocking of birds, the phases of matter and human consciousness, along with many other phenomena. Since the nineteenth century, the notion of emergence has been widely applied in philosophy, particularly in contemporary philosophy of mind, philosophy of science and metaphysics. It has more recently (...) become central to scientists' understanding of phenomena across physics, chemistry, complexity and systems theory, biology and the social sciences. The Routledge Handbook of Emergence is an outstanding reference source and exploration of the concept of emergence, and is the first collection of its kind. Thirty-two chapters by an international team of contributors are organised into four parts: Foundations of emergence Emergence and mind Emergence and physics Emergence and the special sciences Within these sections important topics and problems in emergence are explained, including the British Emergentists; weak vs. strong emergence; emergence and downward causation; dependence, complexity and mechanisms; mental causation, consciousness and dualism; quantum mechanics, soft matter and chemistry; and evolution, cognitive science and social sciences. Essential reading for students and researchers in philosophy of mind, philosophy of science and metaphysics, The Routledge Handbook of Emergence will also be of interest to those studying foundational issues in biology, chemistry, physics and psychology. (shrink)

This paper develops a “Cliffordian” argument for a common epistemic norm governing belief, action, and assertion. The idea is that beliefs are the sorts of things that lead to actions and assertions. What each of us believes influences what we act on and assert, and in turn influences what those around us believe, act on, and assert. Belief, action, and assertion should be held to a common epistemic norm because, otherwise, this system will become contaminated. The paper finishes by drawing (...) out the relativistic implications of the Cliffordian argument. (shrink)

This paper is concerned with the discussion of the phenomenon sometimes described as “the utility and disutility of chance” both from the descriptive and the prescriptive point of view Emphasis is not on axioms and formal properties but on the psychological content of decision theoretic constructs.

In seeking to move beyond causal-reductivism, this book explores a variety of perspectives on the question of finding inherent meaning in madness and extreme states.

The first Young Researchers in Human–Robot Interaction Workshop, held on March 1, 2006 in Salt Lake City, Utah, provides insight into how to facilitate the establishment of the HRI community. Organized in conjunction with the first annual ACM/IEEE Human Robot Interaction Conference, the NSF-sponsored workshop assembled 15 graduate students from 5 different countries in computer science, psychology, engineering, and the arts to build the HRI community. This report highlights recommendations from discussion sessions, a synopsis of the plenary address, and representative (...) examples of the participants’ presentations. Participants emphasized that HRI is a unique field, requiring knowledge in computing, psychology, and communications despite the differences in the courses, methods, and philosophies across disciplines. The following are needed for future growth in HRI: stable, canonical robotics platforms for research purposes, a multidisciplinary community infrastructure to connect researchers, and a “Berlitz phrasebook” and collected reference materials for helping understand the “other” disciplines. (shrink)

The first Young Researchers in Human–Robot Interaction Workshop, held on March 1, 2006 in Salt Lake City, Utah, provides insight into how to facilitate the establishment of the HRI community. Organized in conjunction with the first annual ACM/IEEE Human Robot Interaction Conference, the NSF-sponsored workshop assembled 15 graduate students from 5 different countries in computer science, psychology, engineering, and the arts to build the HRI community. This report highlights recommendations from discussion sessions, a synopsis of the plenary address, and representative (...) examples of the participants’ presentations. Participants emphasized that HRI is a unique field, requiring knowledge in computing, psychology, and communications despite the differences in the courses, methods, and philosophies across disciplines. The following are needed for future growth in HRI: stable, canonical robotics platforms for research purposes, a multidisciplinary community infrastructure to connect researchers, and a “Berlitz phrasebook” and collected reference materials for helping understand the “other” disciplines. (shrink)