It is widely believed that Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca’s theory of argumentation is vulnerable to the charge of relativism. This paper provides a more charitable interpretation of Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca’s normative views, one that properly considers the historical trajectory of their work and a wider range of texts than existing interpretations. It is argued that their views are better characterized as a form of “contrastivism about arguments” than any kind relativism. This more accurate depiction contributes to ongoing efforts to revive interest (...) in Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca’s work as well as build bridges with trends in contemporary argumentation theory. (shrink)

Should the assessment of decision‐making capacity (DMC) be risk sensitive, that is, should the threshold for DMC vary with risk? The debate over this question is now nearly five decades old. To many, the idea that DMC assessments should be risk sensitive is intuitive and commonsense. To others, the idea is paternalistic or incoherent, or both; they argue that the riskiness of a given decision should increase the epistemic scrutiny in the evaluation of DMC, not increase the threshold for DMC. (...) We respond to the critics’ main concerns by providing a comprehensive account of how risk‐sensitive DMC is coherent, avoids paternalism, and best fulfills the epistemic goal of DMC evaluations. (shrink)

An examination of the history and arguments behind W.K. Clifford and William James's landmark essays and subsequent impact on the importance of knowledge-based evidence.

while many have explored the international reception of Dewey’s thought—for instance, by Hu Shih in the Chinese context—little has been said about the fate of pragmatism in India. Yet there is a line of discernable influence to Indian politics and civil rights movements in the person of Bhimrao Ambedkar. Ambedkar was a famous Indian statesman and anti-caste activist, but he was also a formidable intellectual and philosopher whose collected works span over twenty volumes. He also was highly educated in the (...) West, earning degrees from universities in America and England. Importantly for the fate of pragmatism in India, one of the academic mentors that made a significant impact on Ambedkar during his... (shrink)

This article presents the results of a study that investigated the roles that one's money ethic, religiosity and attitude toward business play in determining consumer attitudes/beliefs in various situations regarding questionable consumer practices. Two dimensions of religiosity - intrinsic and extrinsic religiousness - were studied. A global scale of money ethic was examined, as was a global measure of attitude toward business. Results indicate that both types of religiosity as well as one's money ethic and attitude toward business were significant (...) determinants of at least some types of consumer ethical beliefs. (shrink)

Canada has followed the pattern of Benelux nations by legislating sufferingSuffering as the pivotal eligibilityEligibilitycriterionCriterion for euthanasiaEuthanasia/assisted death without requiring terminal prognosis as is needed in most permissive jurisdictions. This chapter will explore the relationship between sufferingSuffering and Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID) and the ways in which sufferingSuffering is understood in the Supreme Court of Canada, the federal Criminal Code legislation and by health care assessors. Based on this analysis, we will argue that the resulting sufferingSufferingeligibilityEligibilitycriterionCriterion leaves the law (...) open to unintended forms of interpretation, thus instituting perhaps the most unbounded and risk-prone form of assisted death in the world. A review of the literature on sufferingSuffering, the wish to dieWish to die, and reasons for MAIDReasons for MAID requests found sufferingSuffering of severe illness to be frequently associated with unstable mental health, social, and existentialExistential variables that are often amenable to therapy or remediation. While sufferingSuffering remains a powerful motivating force to seek opportunities to relieve distress, its use as an eligibilityEligibilitycriterionCriterion for MAID has significant ambiguity in its’ characterization of ‘enduring’ and ‘irremediable’ and thus fails to protect against abuse for the vulnerable. (shrink)

In Algorithms & Autonomy, Rubel, Castro, and Pham (hereafter RCP), argue that the concept of autonomy is especially central to understanding important moral problems about algorithms. In particular, autonomy plays a role in analyzing the version of social contract theory that they endorse. I argue that although RCP are largely correct in their diagnosis of what is wrong with the algorithms they consider, those diagnoses can be appropriated by moral theories RCP see as in competition with their autonomy based theory. (...) Most notably, proponents of consequentialism and virtue ethics can appropriate RCPs insights. This is good news because RCP’s social contract theory is vulnerable to a well known class of counterexamples. The most significant contribution of RCP, if I am right, is in their identification, presentation, and evaluation of concrete cases involving algorithms and not in the more controversial claims about theoretical ethics that RCP themselves see as central to what they are doing. (shrink)

Given increasing ethical problems in business, many organizations have tried to control these problems by institutionalizing ethics such as by creating new ethics positions and formulating and enforcing codes of ethics. In this study, the impact of implicit and explicit forms of institutionalization of ethics on job satisfaction, esprit de corps, and organizational commitment for marketing professionals is investigated. Additionally, the influence of organizational socialization, ethical relativism, and age relative to each of the above organizational climate constructs is examined. Results (...) indicate that at least one of the forms of institutionalization of ethics is a significant determinant of all three organizational climate constructs. However, while organizational socialization is a significant determinant of all three organizational climate variables, relativism is only significant in determining organizational commitment (in a negative direction) and age is only significant in determining job satisfaction. (shrink)

Most jurisdictions require that a mental capacity assessment be conducted using a functional model whose definition includes several abilities. In England and Wales and in increasing number of countries, the law requires a person be able to understand, to retain, to use or weigh relevant information and to communicate one’s decision. But interpreting and applying broad and vague criteria, such as the ability ‘to use or weigh’ to a diverse range of presentations is challenging. By examining actual court judgements of (...) capacity, we previously developed a descriptive typology of justifications used in the application of the Mental Capacity Act criteria. We here critically optimise this typology by showing how clear definitions—and thus boundaries—between the criteria can be achieved if the ‘understanding’ criterion is used narrowly and the multiple rationales that fall under the ability to ‘use or weigh’ are specifically enumerated in practice. Such a typology-aided practice, in theory, could make functional capacity assessments more transparent, accountable, reliable and valid. It may also help to create targeted supports for decision making by the vulnerable. We also discuss how the typology could evolve legally and scientifically, and how it lays the groundwork for clinical research on the abilities enumerated by the MCA. No data are available. This paper does not report any original data. (shrink)

In his landmark paper, , Michael Stocker introduces an affliction that is, according to his diagnosis, endemic to all modern ethical theories. Stocker's paper is well known and often cited, yet moral schizophrenia remains a surprisingly obscure diagnosis. I argue that moral schizophrenia, properly understood, is not necessarily as disruptive as its name suggests. However, I also argue that Stocker's inability to demonstrate that moral schizophrenia constitutes a reductio of modern ethical theories does not rule out the possibility that he (...) has identified a noteworthy psychological phenomenon. Stocker is, in my opinion, correct to note that balancing our broad ethical obligations with authentic personal motives is a non-trivial psychological challenge, even if this challenge is not equivalent to a mental disorder. Hence, I conclude that proponents of modern ethical theorists should not be complacent about the burdens associated with implementing a moral psychology. (shrink)

People use commonsense science knowledge to flexibly explain, predict, and manipulate the world around them, yet we lack computational models of how this commonsense science knowledge is represented, acquired, utilized, and revised. This is an important challenge for cognitive science: Building higher order computational models in this area will help characterize one of the hallmarks of human reasoning, and it will allow us to build more robust reasoning systems. This paper presents a novel assembled coherence theory of human conceptual change, (...) whereby people revise beliefs and mental models by constructing and evaluating explanations using fragmentary, globally inconsistent knowledge. We implement AC theory with Timber, a computational model of conceptual change that revises its beliefs and generates human-like explanations in commonsense science. Timber represents domain knowledge using predicate calculus and qualitative model fragments, and uses an abductive model formulation algorithm to construct competing explanations for phenomena. Timber then scores competing explanations with respect to previously accepted beliefs, using a cost function based on simplicity and credibility, identifies a low-cost, preferred explanation and accepts its constituent beliefs, and then greedily alters previous explanation preferences to reduce global cost and thereby revise beliefs. Consistency is a soft constraint in Timber; it is biased to select explanations that share consistent beliefs, assumptions, and causal structure with its other, preferred explanations. In this paper, we use Timber to simulate the belief changes of students during clinical interviews about how the seasons change. We show that Timber produces and revises a sequence of explanations similar to those of the students, which supports the psychological plausibility of AC theory. (shrink)

The highly publicized deaths of research participants Ellen Roche and Jesse Gelsinger are stark reminders that risk is inherent in medical research and while untoward outcomes are infrequent when compared to individual and societal benefits, injury and even death will happen. Who is responsible for the welfare of research subjects and what are they owed? Why were they put at risk to begin with? Are obligations, if any, to research subjects dependent on the type of study in which they participate, (...) in recognition that there may be personal benefit from participation in some studies?The issue of injury resulting from participation in research and answers to questions such as those just posed were last considered in depth nearly 20 years ago by the President's Commission for the Study of Ethical Problems in Medicine and Biomedical and Behavioral Research. (shrink)

Rights of Women attracted much UK media attention in late 2014 by bringing a judicial review that challenged the reduced provisions for family law legal aid available for victims of domestic violence: R v The Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice [2015] EWHC 35. In June 2015, within Rights of Women’s 40th anniversary year, Hannah Camplin interviewed the organisation’s Director Emma Scott about the decision to bring the judicial review, the advantages and challenges of the judicial review (...) process, and the experience of strategic litigation within the context of Rights of Women’s long history of campaigning for women’s rights. What emerged is a portrait of a feminist organisation in 2015, and, in a fast changing political and financial landscape, the dual importance of collaborative working and the need for flexibility in service provision and campaigning tools. (shrink)

I reply to criticisms from Duetz and Dentith, Basham, and Hewitt. I argue that the central disputes on this topic concern how ordinary people understand conspiracy theories and how to evaluate concrete conspiracy theories and conspiracy theorists.

ABSTRACT This article examines Nietzsche's notion of monumental history in “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life” and considers its importance for Nietzsche's later work. In the first section, I examine the connections between monumental history and the work of Polybius, Thucydides, and Livy. Here I argue that Nietzsche takes his notion of monumental history directly from the practice of history in the ancient world. In the second section, I demonstrate that Nietzsche regards the production of illusions as (...) the principal benefit of monumental history, while he criticizes its mendacious and conservative tendencies. Finally, I argue in the third section that the collection of characters we encounter in Nietzsche's later works—including the free spirits and the figure of Zarathustra—ought to be understood through Nietzsche's account of the uses and disadvantages of monumental history. These exemplary figures neither falsify nor glorify the past, but they remain illusions in the service of life. (shrink)

This book is a wide-ranging exploration of regions in the new world order. The author - one of the leading international figures in the field - explores the economic logic and political meaning of regions. Exploring developments from Silicon Valley to Hong Kong, he makes the case for the growing importance of regions as against the sovereign state in the `borderless world' of the 21st century.

This book shows us how Edison's mother, Nancy, guided the boy who was deemed a dunce by officials_even assumed mentally retarded by his father_to become one of the greatest inventors of all time. Edison's progressive and imaginative teaching methods hold lessons for all children who learn differently from conventional methods and for the parents and teachers who care about them.

We replicated and extended the findings of Yao et al. [(2018). Differential emotional processing in concrete and abstract words. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 44(7), 1064–1074] regarding the interaction of emotionality, concreteness, and imageability in word processing by measuring eye fixation times on target words during normal reading. A 3 (Emotion: negative, neutral, positive) × 2 (Concreteness: abstract, concrete) design was used with 22 items per condition, with each set of six target words matched across conditions in (...) terms of word length and frequency. Abstract (e.g. shocking, reserved, fabulous) and concrete (e.g. massacre, calendar, treasure) target words appeared (separately) within contextually neutral, plausible sentences. Sixty-three participants each read all 132 experimental sentences while their eye movements were recorded. Analyses using Gamma generalised linear mixed models revealed significant effects of both Emotion and Concreteness on all fixation measures, indicating faster processing for emotional and concrete words. Additionally, there was a significant Emotion × Concreteness interaction which, critically, was modulated by Imageability in early fixation time measures. Emotion effects were significantly larger in higher-imageability abstract words than in lower-imageability ones, but remained unaffected by imageability in concrete words. These findings support the multimodal induction hypothesis and highlight the intricate interplay of these factors in the immediate stages of word processing during fluent reading. (shrink)

Interview with former Jemaah Islamiyah regional leader Nasir Abas and review of his book "Unveiling Jemaah Islamiyah".

Educational leadership has a rich history of epistemological debate. From the ‘Theory Movement’_ _of the 1950-1960s, through to Greenfield’s critique of logical empiricism in the 1970s, the emergence of Bates’ and Foster’s Critical Theory of educational administration in the 1980s, and Evers’ and Lakomski’s naturalistic coherentism from1990 to the present time, debates about ways of knowing, doing, and being in the social world have been central to advancing scholarship. However, since the publication of Evers’ and Lakomski’s work, questions of the (...) epistemological preliminaries of research have become somewhat marginalised. This is not to suggest that such discussions are not taking place, but rather that they have been sporadic and piecemeal. In _New Directions in Educational Leadership Theory_, the contributors sketch possible alternatives for advancing scholarship in educational leadership. The coherence of this volume comes not from the adoption of a single theoretical lens, but rather from its engagement with epistemology, ontology, and methodology. The choice of the plural ‘alternatives’ is deliberate, and its use is to evoke the message that there is more than one way to advance knowledge. The approaches adopted across this collection offer fruitful directions for the field and hopefully will stimulate substantive dialogue and debate in the interest of advancing knowledge. This book was originally published as a special issue of _Educational Philosophy and Theory. _. (shrink)

This paper begins by describing recent controversies over cross-contamination of crops in the United States and European Union. The EU and US are both applying the principle of freedom of cropping to resolve these conflicts, which is based on an individualistic philosophy. However, despite the EU and the US starting with the principle of freedom of cropping they have very dissimilar regulatory regimes for coexistence. These contradictory policies based upon the same principle are creating different sets of winners and losers. (...) In the US the organic industry claims the system of coexistence is unfair and in the EU the biotech industry claims the system is unfair. It seems that states, despites claims to neutrality and freedom of choice, are prejudicing one system of agriculture over another in resolutions to the conflict over cross contamination. In this paper I will argue that if states cannot remain neutral in coexistence policies, there are conditional reasons for favoring the organic industry over the biotech industry in coexistence policies based in communitarian moral philosophy. (shrink)

Journey Back to God explores Origen of Alexandria's creative, complex, and controversial treatment of the problem of evil. It argues that his layered cosmology functions as a theodicy that deciphers deeper meaning beneath cosmic disparity. Origen asks: why does God create a world where some suffer more than others? On the surface, the unfair arrangement of the world defies theological coherence. In order to defend divine justice against the charge of cosmic mismanagement, Origen develops a theological cosmology that explains the (...) ontological status and origin of evil as well as its cosmic implications. Origen's theodicy hinges on the journey of the soul back to God. Its themes correlate with the soul's creation, fall and descent into materiality, gradual purification, and eventual divinization. The world, for Origen, functions as a school and hospital for the soul where it undergoes the necessary education and purgation. Origen carefully calibrates his cosmology and theology. He portrays God as a compassionate and judicious teacher, physician, and father who employs suffering for our amelioration. Journey Back to God frames the systematic study of Origen's theodicy within a broader theory of theodicy as navigation, which signifies the dynamic process whereby we impute meaning to suffering. It unites the logical and spiritual facets of his theodicy, and situates it in its third-century historical, theological, and philosophical context, correcting the distortions that continue to plague Origen scholarship. Furthermore, the study clarifies his ambiguous position on universalism within the context of his eschatology. Finally, it assesses the cogency and contemporary relevance of Origen's theodicy, highlighting the problems and prospects of his bold, constructive, and optimistic vision. (shrink)

Born in 1515, Teresa of Avila survived the Spanish Inquisition and was a key reformer of the Carmelite Order. Her experience of ecstasy, which she intimately described in her writings, released her from her body and led to a complete realization of her consciousness, a state Julia Kristeva explores as it was expressed in Teresa's writing. Incorporating notes from her own psychoanalytic practice, as well as literary and philosophical references, Kristeva builds a fascinating dual diagnosis of contemporary society and the (...) individual psyche while sharing unprecedented insights into her own character. Through her dazzlingly varied formats Kristeva tests the borderlines of atheism and the need for faith, feminism and the need for a benign patriarchy. (shrink)

This volume offers both theoretical and research-based accounts from mothers in academia who must balance their own intricate knowledge of school systems, curriculum and pedagogy with their children’s education and school lives. It explores the contextual advantages and disadvantages of "knowing too much" and how this impacts children’s actions, scholastics and developing consciousness along various lines. Additionally, it allows teachers, administrators and researchers to critically examine their own discourses and those of their students to better navigate their professional and domestic (...) roles. Gathering narratives from academic women in traditional and nontraditional maternal roles, this volume presents both contemporary and retrospective experiences of what it’s like to raise children amidst educational and sociocultural change. (shrink)

Human rights have occupied a variety of roles in the course of history of the European Union. They played a negligible role at the outset, overlooked by the original Treaty of Rome and, even today, the Union's formidable associations with free trade, the single market, and regulation might suggest that it cannot be primarily defined as a human rights organization. The Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union has at last acquired binding force, provision is made for the European (...) Union to accede to the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), and the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) is to have greater powers of judicial review in the field of police and judicial cooperation in criminal law, an area of obvious relevance to human rights. This chapter highlights some significant developments in the Court's fundamental rights jurisprudence. (shrink)

Beyond Rigidity is divided into two parts. Part 1 is devoted to the semantics and pragmatics of names, and the sentences, including attitude ascriptions, that contain them. In part 2, the model developed in part 1 is extended to natural kind terms, and simple predicates in which they occur. The model is then used to explain the necessity of certain aposteriori statements containing such predicates.

Hermeneutics and Phenomenology in Paul Ricoeur: Between Text and Phenomenon calls attention to the dynamic interaction that takes place between hermeneutics and phenomenology in Ricoeur's thought. It could be said that Ricoeur's thought is placed under a twofold demand: between the rigor of the text and the requirements of the phenomenon. The rigor of the text calls for fidelity to what the text actually says, while the requirement of the phenomenon is established by the Husserlian call to return "to the (...) things themselves." These two demands are interwoven insofar as there is a hermeneutic component of the phenomenological attempt to go beyond the surface of things to their deeper meaning, just as there is a phenomenological component of the hermeneutic attempt to establish a critical distance toward the world to which we belong. For this reason, Ricoeur's thought involves a back and forth movement between the text and the phenomenon. Although this double movement was a theme of many of Ricoeur's essays in the middle of his career, the essays in this book suggest that hermeneutic phenomenology remains implicit throughout his work. The chapters aim to highlight, in much greater detail, how this back and forth movement between phenomenology and hermeneutics takes place with respect to many important philosophical themes, including the experience of the body, history, language, memory, personal identity, and intersubjectivity. (shrink)

Jessica Dubow’s In Exile – working through Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin and Franz Rosenzweig – reads Judaic thought from the Exodus as exile. With Rosenzweig, she understands this as pitting the (Judaic) singular of faith against the (Greek) universal of reason. This ‘bad universal’ was Hegel’s state, which Dubow also sees as Carl Schmitt’s state. Dubow sees this as it were universal of dominance in today’s Israeli state, against which she pits the singular of exilic thought.

This article identifies and explores the realm of ‘social nothingness’: objects, people, events and places that do not empirically exist, yet are experienced as subjectively meaningful. Taking a phenomenological approach, I investigate how people perceive, imagine and reflect upon the meanings of unlived experience: whatever is significantly not present, never appeared or cannot happen to them. These ‘negative symbolic social objects’ include no-things, no-bodies, non-events and no-where places: for example, rejected roles, unpursued careers or absent people. Reversing some key concepts (...) from phenomenology, I examine the process of ‘negative noesis’ in three aspects. ‘Negative intentionality’ describes people’s motivational stance towards absent things, such as feelings of missing, wishing, haunting, avoidance or surrender. ‘Negative embodiment’ is the corporeal grounding of negational acts, through experiences of impairment, incapacity, severance, disturbance and decline. ‘Negative temporality’ describes the recognition of past or future impossible selves and their place within biographical identity stories. (shrink)

Nothing really matters. All the things that we do not do, have or become in our lives can be important in shaping self-identity. From jobs turned down to great loves lost, secrets kept and truths untold, people missed and souls unborn, we understand ourselves through other, unlived lives that are imaginatively possible. This book explores the realm of negative social phenomena - no-things, no-bodies, non-events and no-where places - that lies behind the mirror of experience. Taking a symbolic interactionist perspective, (...) the author argues that these objects are socially produced, emerging from and negotiated through our relationships with others. Nothing is interactively accomplished in two ways, through social acts of commission and omission. Existentialism and phenomenology encourage us to understand more deeply the subjective experience of nothing; this can be pursued through conscious meaning-making and reflexive self-awareness. The Social Life of Nothing is a thought-provoking book that will appeal to scholars across the social sciences, arts and humanities, but its message also resonates with the interested general reader. (shrink)