We consider the problem of pricing in a network industry focussing in particular on the issue of cross-network pricing (e.g. cross-network cell phone charges). Economic theory tells us in relation to cross-network pricing that collusion or network monopoly may yield welfare as well as profit benefits although any welfare benefits from cross-network collusion may be more than offset by a reduction in competition elsewhere. To address this, we introduce a new regulatory concept: the independent profit-maximising agent. The agent sets prices (...) on cross-network goods taking either (i) a complete, or (ii) an arbitrarily small, share of the associated profit. We examine welfare and profits with and without agent type (i) and (ii) with collusion (network monopoly) between the non-agent firms and without collusion (independent network duopoly). We show that splitting up the network monopoly (creating independent network duopoly) may be inferior for both society and firm(s) compared with a network monopoly ‘regulated’ by an agent and that society always prefers any of the four agent regimes over network monopoly and network duopoly. Indeed, employing the agent may reduce welfare losses by a large proportion while having relatively little effect on profit. (shrink)

Aboutness has been studied from any number of angles. Brentano made it the defining feature of the mental. Phenomenologists try to pin down the aboutness-features of particular mental states. Materialists sometimes claim to have grounded aboutness in natural regularities. Attempts have even been made, in library science and information theory, to operationalize the notion. But it has played no real role in philosophical semantics. This is surprising; sentences have aboutness-properties if anything does. Aboutness is the first book to examine through (...) a philosophical lens the role of subject matter in meaning. A long-standing tradition sees meaning as truth-conditions, to be specified by listing the scenarios in which a sentence is true. Nothing is said about the principle of selection--about what in a scenario gets it onto the list. Subject matter is the missing link here. A sentence is true because of how matters stand where its subject matter is concerned. Stephen Yablo maintains that this is not just a feature of subject matter, but its essence. One indicates what a sentence is about by mapping out logical space according to its changing ways of being true or false. The notion of content that results--directed content--is brought to bear on a range of philosophical topics, including ontology, verisimilitude, knowledge, loose talk, assertive content, and philosophical methodology. Written by one of today's leading philosophers, Aboutness represents a major advance in semantics and the philosophy of language. (shrink)

In the seventeenth century, a vision arose which was to captivate the Western imagination for the next three hundred years: the vision of Cosmopolis, a society as rationally ordered as the Newtonian view of nature. While fueling extraordinary advances in all fields of human endeavor, this vision perpetuated a hidden yet persistent agenda: the delusion that human nature and society could be fitted into precise and manageable rational categories. Stephen Toulmin confronts that agenda—its illusions and its consequences for our (...) present and future world. "By showing how different the last three centuries would have been if Montaigne, rather than Descartes, had been taken as a starting point, Toulmin helps destroy the illusion that the Cartesian quest for certainty is intrinsic to the nature of science or philosophy."—Richard M. Rorty, University of Virginia "[Toulmin] has now tackled perhaps his most ambitious theme of all.... His aim is nothing less than to lay before us an account of both the origins and the prospects of our distinctively modern world. By charting the evolution of modernity, he hopes to show us what intellectual posture we ought to adopt as we confront the coming millennium."—Quentin Skinner, New York Review of Books. (shrink)

Einstein said that the most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible. But was he right? Can the quantum theory of fields and Einstein's general theory of relativity, the two most accurate and successful theories in all of physics, be united in a single quantum theory of gravity? Two of the world's most famous physicists - Stephen Hawking and Roger Penrose - disagree. Here they explain their positions in a work based on six lectures with a (...) final debate, all originally presented at the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences at the University of Cambridge. (shrink)

Kripke, argued like this: it seems possible that E; the appearance can't be explained away as really pertaining to a "presentation" of E; so, pending a different explanation, it is possible that E. Textbook Kripkeans see in the contrast between E and its presentation intimations of a quite general distinction between two sorts of meaning. E's secondary or a posteriori meaning is the set of all worlds w which E, as employed here, truly describes. Its primary or a priori meaning (...) is the set of all w such that if w is actual, then E is true. "Conceivability error" occurs when a primary possibility is mistaken for a secondary one. Textbook Kripkeanism is rejected on the grounds that it makes meaning too modal and modality too much a matter of meaning. (shrink)

The book's significance is two-fold: it argues for a new stage in the development of contemporary Confucian philosophy, and it demonstrates the value to Western ...

Essence and causation are fundamental in metaphysics, but little is said about their relations. Some essential properties are of course causal, as it is essential to footprints to have been caused by feet. But I am interested less in causation's role in essence than the reverse: the bearing a thing's essence has on its causal powers. That essencemight make a causal contribution is hinted already by the counterfactual element in causation; and the hint is confirmed by the explanation essence offers (...) of something otherwise mysterious, namely, how events exactly alike in every ordinary respect, like the bolt'ssuddenly snapping and its snapping per se, manage to disagree in what they cause. Some prior difference must exist between these events to make their causal powers unlike. Paradoxically, though, it can only be in point of a property, suddenness, which both events possess in common. Only by postulating a difference in themanner — essential or accidental — of the property's possession is the paradox resolved. Next we need an account of causation in which essence plays an explicit determinative role. That account, based on the idea that causes should becommensurate with their effects, is thatx causesy only if nothing essentially poorer would have done, and nothing essentially richer was needed. (shrink)

The concept of "practices"—whether of representation, of political or scientific traditions, or of organizational culture—is central to social theory. In this book, Stephen Turner presents the first analysis and critique of the idea of practice as it has developed in the various theoretical traditions of the social sciences and the humanities. Understood broadly as a tacit understanding "shared" by a group, the concept of a practice has a fatal difficulty, Turner argues: there is no plausible mechanism by which a (...) "practice" is transmitted or reproduced. The historical uses of the concept, from Durkheim to Kripke's version of Wittgenstein, provide examples of the contortions that thinkers have been forced into by this problem, and show the ultimate implausibility of the idea. Turner's conclusion sketches a picture of what happens when we do without the notion of a shared practice, and how this bears on social theory and philosophy. It explains why social theory cannot get beyond the stage of constructing fuzzy analogies, and why the standard constructions of the contemporary philosophical problem of relativism depend upon this defective notion. This first book-length critique of practice theory is sure to stir discussion and controversy in a wide range of fields, from philosophy and science studies to sociology, anthropology, literary studies, and political and legal theory. (shrink)

Objectivity is a key concept both in how we talk about science in everyday life and in the philosophy of science. This Element explores various ways in which recent philosophers of science have thought about the nature, value and achievability of objectivity. The first section explains the general trend in recent philosophy of science away from a notion of objectivity as a 'view from nowhere' to a focus on the relationship between objectivity and trust. Section 2 discusses the relationship between (...) objectivity and recent arguments attacking the viability or desirability of 'value free' science. Section 3 outlines Longino's influential 'social' account of objectivity, suggesting some worries about drawing too strong a link between epistemic and ethical virtues. Section 4 turns to the value of objectivity, exploring concerns that notions of objectivity are politically problematic, and cautiously advocating in response a view of objectivity in terms of invariance. (shrink)

Edmund Gettier's 1963 verdict about what knowledge is not has become an item of philosophical orthodoxy, accepted by philosophers as a genuine epistemological result. It assures us that - contrary to what Plato and later philosophers have thought - knowledge is not merely a true belief well supported by epistemic justification. But that orthodoxy has generated the Gettier problem - epistemology's continuing struggle to understand how to accommodate Gettier's apparent result within an improved conception of knowledge. In this book, (...) class='Hi'>Stephen Hetherington argues that none of epistemology's standard attempts to solve that problem have succeeded: he shows how subtle yet fundamental mistakes - regarding explication, methodology, properties, modality, and fallibility - have permeated those responses to Gettier's challenge. His fresh and original book outlines a new way of solving the problem, and an improved grasp of Gettier's challenge and its significance is the result. In a sense, Plato can now embrace Gettier. (shrink)

Holmes exists is false. How can this be, when there is no one for the sentence to misdescribe? Part of the answer is that a sentence’s topic depends on context. The king of France is bald, normally unevaluable, is false qua description of the bald people. Likewise Holmes exists is false qua description of the things that exist; it misdescribes those things as having Holmes among them. This does not explain, though, how Holmes does not exist differs in cognitive content (...) from, say, Vulcan does not exist. Our answer builds on an observation of Kripke’s: even if Holmes exists, he is not in this room, for we were all born too late. (shrink)

We characterize, more precisely than before, what Rawls calls the “analytical” method of drawing up a list of basic liberties. This method employs one or more general conditions that, under any just social order whatever, putative entitlements must meet for them to be among the basic liberties encompassed, within some just social order, by Rawls’s first principle of justice (i.e., the liberty principle). We argue that the general conditions that feature in Rawls’s own account of the analytical method, which employ (...) the notion of necessity, are too stringent. They ultimately fail to deliver as basic certain particular liberties that should be encompassed within any fully adequate scheme of liberties. To address this under-generation problem, we provide an amended general condition. This replaces Rawls’s necessity condition with a probabilistic condition and it appeals to the standard liberal prohibition on arbitrary coercion by the state. We defend our new approach both as apt to feature in applications of the analytical method and as adequately grounded in justice as fairness as Rawls articulates the theory’s fundamental ideas. (shrink)

Leslie Stephen (1832–1904) was a writer, philosopher and literary critic whose work was published widely in the nineteenth century. As a young man Stephen was ordained deacon, but he later became agnostic and much of his work reflects his interest in challenging popular religion. This two-volume work, first published in 1876, is no exception: it focuses on the eighteenth-century deist controversy and its effects, as well as the reactions to what Stephen saw as a revolution in thought. (...) Comprehensive and full of detailed analysis, this is an important work in the history of ideas. Volume 2 focuses on eighteenth-century moral philosophy, political philosophy and literature, and on the literary and religious reactions to the revolution in thought. Utilitarianism is discussed at length, as well as the work of thinkers such as Shaftesbury, Mandeville, Burke and Adam Smith. (shrink)

In light of many recent critiques of Western modernity and its conceptual foundations, the problem of adequately justifying our most basic moral and political values looms large. Without recourse to traditional ontological or metaphysical foundations, how can one affirm — or sustain — a commitment to fundamentals? The answer, according to Stephen White, lies in a turn to “weak” ontology, an approach that allows for ultimate commitments but at the same time acknowledges their historical, contestable character. This turn, White (...) suggests, is already underway. His book traces its emergence in a variety of quarters in political thought today and offers a clear and compelling account of what this might mean for our late modern self-understanding. (shrink)

It is argued that there are good reasons for believing that commercial surrogacy is often exploitative. However, even if we accept this, the exploitation argument for prohibiting (or otherwise legislatively discouraging) commercial surrogacy remains quite weak. One reason for this is that prohibition may well 'backfire' and lead to potential surrogates having to do other things that are more exploitative and/or more harmful than paid surrogacy. It is concluded, therefore, that those who oppose exploitation should concentrate on: (a) improving the (...) conditions under which paid surrogates 'work'; and (b) changing the background conditions (in particular, the unequal distribution of power and wealth) which generate exploitative relationships. (edited). (shrink)

This article gauges the progress that sociologists of gender and sexuality have made in employing the insights of queer theory by examining four recent monographs that have utilized aspects of queer theory in their empirical work: Rupp and Taylor, Seidman, Bettie, and Schippers. The article uses the insights of queer theory to push the monographs in an even “queerer” theoretical direction. This direction involves taking more seriously the nonnormative alignments of sex, gender, sexuality, resisting the tendency to essentialize identity or (...) conflate it with the broad range of gender and sexual expression and treating the construction of intersectional subjectivities as both performed and performative in nature. The analysis of these texts also insists that a queer sociological theory situate its emphasis on discursive power more firmly in economic, political, and other institutional processes. Ethnographic methods are proposed as the most useful way of combining queer theory with sociological analysis. (shrink)

For over thirty years, Stephen Braude has studied the paranormal in everyday life, from extrasensory perception and psychokinesis to mediumship and materialization. _The Gold Leaf Lady and Other Parapsychological Investigations_ is a highly readable and often amusing account of his most memorable encounters with such phenomena. Here Braude recounts in fascinating detail five particular cases—some that challenge our most fundamental scientific beliefs and others that expose our own credulousness. Braude begins with a south Florida woman who can make thin (...) gold-colored foil appear spontaneously on her skin. He then travels to New York and California to test psychokinetic superstars—and frauds—like Joe Nuzum, who claim to move objects using only their minds. Along the way, Braude also investigates the startling allegations of K.R., a policeman in Annapolis who believes he can transfer images from photographs onto other objects—including his own body—and Ted Serios, a deceased Chicago elevator operator who could make a variety of different images appear on Polaroid film. Ultimately, Braude considers his wife’s surprisingly fruitful experiments with astrology, which she has used to guide professional soccer teams to the top of their leagues, as well as his own personal experiences with synchronicity—a phenomenon, he argues, that may need to be explained in terms of a refined, extensive, and dramatic form of psychokinesis. Heady, provocative, and brimming with eye-opening details and suggestions, _The Gold Leaf Lady and Other Parapsychological Investigations_ will intrigue both adherents and detractors of its controversial subject matter alike. (shrink)

Many authors have proposed constraining the behaviour of intelligent systems with ‘machine ethics’ to ensure positive social outcomes from the development of such systems. This paper critically analyses the prospects for machine ethics, identifying several inherent limitations. While machine ethics may increase the probability of ethical behaviour in some situations, it cannot guarantee it due to the nature of ethics, the computational limitations of computational agents and the complexity of the world. In addition, machine ethics, even if it were to (...) be ‘solved’ at a technical level, would be insufficient to ensure positive social outcomes from intelligent systems. (shrink)

"There is no scientist today whose books I look forward to reading with greater anticipation of enjoyment and enlightenment than Stephen Jay Gould."—Martin Gardner Among scientists who write, no one illuminates as well as Stephen Jay Gould doesthe wonderful workings of the natural world. Now in a new volume of collected essays—his sixth since Ever Since Darwin—Gould speaks of the importance of unbroken connections within our own lives and to our ancestralgenerations. Along with way, he opens to us (...) the mysteries of fish tails, frog calls, and other matters, and shows once and for all why we must take notice when a seemingly insignificant creature is threatened, like the land snail Partula from Moorea, whose extinction he movingly relates. (shrink)

This book outlines a new account of the tacit, meaning tacit knowledge, presuppositions, practices, traditions, and so forth. It includes essays on topics such as underdetermination and mutual understanding, and critical discussions of the major alternative approaches to the tacit, including Bourdieu’s habitus and various practice theories, Oakeshott’s account of tradition, Quentin Skinner’s theory of historical meaning, Harry Collins’s idea of collective tacit knowledge, as well as discussions of relevant cognitive science concepts, such as non-conceptual content, connectionism, and mirror neurons. (...) The new account of tacit knowledge focuses on the fact that in making the tacit explicit, a person is not, as many past accounts have supposed, reading off the content of some sort of shared and fixed tacit scheme of presuppositions, but rather responding to the needs of the Other for understanding. (shrink)

Why might someone consider the answer to the titular question to be trivial? Perhaps because she has read some mereology and understands that mereologists distinguish between parthood on the one hand and proper parthood on the other. She understands that, at least when talking in the language of mereology, a thing is necessarily not a proper part of itself, but is necessarily a part of itself. Whether the English word “part” expresses parthood or proper parthood does not seem too important, (...) seeing as either can be taken as primitive and one defined in terms of the other. Thus, whether something is part of itself or not is indeed a trivial matter of definition. If by “part” one means parthood, everything is part of itself. If by “part” one means proper parthood, nothing is part of itself. (shrink)

Can we talk meaningfully about God? The theological movement known as Grammatical Thomism affirms that religious language is nonsensical, because the reality of God is beyond our capacity for expression. Stephen Mulhall critically evaluates the claims of this movement to be a legitimate inheritor of Wittgenstein's philosophical methods as well as Aquinas's theological project. The major obstacle to this claim is that Grammatical Thomism makes the nonsensicality of religious language when applied to God a touchstone of Thomist insight, whereas (...) 'nonsense' is standardly taken to be solely a term of criticism in Wittgenstein's work. Mulhall argues that a place can be found in both his early work and his later writings for a more positive role to be assigned to nonsensical utterances--one which depends on exploiting an analogy between religious language and riddles. This allows us to see various ways in which his later work has a perfectionist dimension, and results in a radical reconception of the role of analogous usage in language, and in the relation between philosophy and theology. (shrink)

Since 2000, 11 human uterine transplantation procedures (UTx) have been performed across Europe and Asia. Five of these have, to date, resulted in pregnancy and four live births have now been recorded. The most significant obstacles to the availability of UTx are presently scientific and technical, relating to the safety and efficacy of the procedure itself. However, if and when such obstacles are overcome, the most likely barriers to its availability will be social and financial in nature, relating in particular (...) to the ability and willingness of patients, insurers or the state to pay. Thus, publicly funded healthcare systems such as the UK9s National Health Service (NHS) will eventually have to decide whether UTx should be funded. With this in mind, we seek to provide an answer to the question of whether there exist any compelling reasons for the state not to fund UTx. The paper proceeds as follows. It assumes, at least for the sake of argument, that UTx will become sufficiently safe and cost-effective to be a candidate for funding and then asks, given that, what objections to funding there might be. Three main arguments are considered and ultimately rejected as providing insufficient reason to withhold funding for UTx. The first two are broad in their scope and offer an opportunity to reflect on wider issues about funding for infertility treatment in general. The third is narrower in scope and could, in certain forms, apply to UTx but not other assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs). The first argument suggests that UTx should not be publicly funded because doing so would be inconsistent with governments’ obligations to prevent climate change and environmental pollution. The second claims that UTx does not treat a disorder and is not medically necessary. Finally, the third asserts that funding for UTx should be denied because of the availability of alternatives such as adoption and surrogacy. (shrink)

If effective anti-aging interventions were achieved, they would likely bring about profound alterations in the experiences of individual and collective life. What if modern scientists could find the modern equivalent to the Fountain of Youth that Ponce de Leon sought? This book addresses this question by exploring the ramifications of possible anti-aging interventions on both individual and collective life. Through a series of essays, it examines the biomedical goal of prolongevity from cultural, scientific, religious, and ethical perspectives, offering a sweeping (...) view into the future of aging. (shrink)

_Philosophy Beside Itself _ was first published in 1986. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions. The writings of French philosopher Jacques Derrida have been the single most powerful influence on critical theory and practice in the United States over the past decade. But with few exceptions American philosophers have taken little or no interest in Derrida's work, and the task of reception, (...) translation, and commentary has been left to literary critics. As a result, Derrida has appeared as a figure already defined by essentially literary critical activities and interests. Stephen Melville's aim in _Philosophy Beside Itself _ is to insist upon and clarify the distinctions between philosophy and criticism. He argues that until we grasp Derrida's philosophical project as such, we remain fundamentally unable to see his significance for criticism. In terms derived from Stanley Cavell's writings on modernism, Melville develops a case for Derrida as a modernist philosopher, working at once within and against that tradition and discipline. Melville first places Derrida in a Hegelian context, the structure of which he explores by examining the work of Heidegger, Lacan, and Bataille. With this foundation, he is able to reappraise the project of deconstructive criticism as developed in Paul de Man's _Blindness and Insight _and further articulated by other Yale critics. Central to this critique is the ambivalent relationship between deconstructive criticism and Lacanian psychoanalysis. Criticism—radical self-criticism—is a central means through which the difficult facts of human community come to recognition, and Melville argues for criticism as an activity intimately bound to the ways in which we do and do not belong in time and in community. Derrida's achievement has been to find a new and necessary way to assert that the task of philosophy is criticism; the task of literary criticism is to assume the burden of that achievement. Stephen Melville is an assistant professor of English at Syracuse University, and Donald Marshall is a professor of English at the University of Iowa. (shrink)

Rates of crime for Blacks in the United States in the post-slavery era have always been high relative to Whites. But explaining, or minimizing, this fact faces a major problem: individual excuses for bad acts point to deficiencies, in the agent, which are perhaps forgivable, such as mental deficiency or a deprived childhood, but at the price of treating the agent as less than a full member of the moral community. Collectivizing excuses risks implying group inferiority. The history of attempts (...) to provide an explanation of crime that mitigates blame without undermining full participation to the moral community is long and convoluted, leading to the presently widespread claim that crime is itself a product of victimization through pervasive racism. Three basic strategies – rejection of comparison, attribution to racially invariant causes and explanation by reference to uniquely Black conditions, such as subculture or extreme stigmatization – are identified and their ethical implications distinguished. (shrink)

Critics of survival research often claim that the survival hypothesis is conceptually problematic at best, and literally incoherent at worst. The guiding intuition behind their skepticism is that there’s an essential link between the concept of a person (or personality or experience) and physical embodiment. Thus (they argue), since by hypothesis postmortem individuals such as ostensible mediumistic communicators have no physical body, there’s something wrong with the very idea of a postmortem person, personality or experience. However, critics can’t simply beg (...) the question and assert that physical embodiment is essential to personhood, personality, or experience, because the evidence suggesting survival is a prima facie challenge to the contrary. On the other hand, defenders of ostensible mediumistic communication need to explain how postmortem awareness and knowledge of the current physical world can occur without a physical body that experiences the world and represents it accurately enough to ground veridical postmortem reports. This paper will fi rst consider why survivalists face potentially serious problems in trying to make sense of apparent postmortem perception. Then it will consider a plausible—and arguably the only—way to deal with the issues. However, that solution turns out to be a double-edged sword. Ironically, the best way to deal with the problem of perspectival postmortem awareness may render the survival hypothesis gratuitous. (shrink)

This essay introduces the volume Scientific Pluralism (Volume 19 of Minnesota Studies in Philosophy of Science). Varieties of recent pluralisms are surveyed, the difference between monism and pluralism vis a vis the sciences is clarified, and the authors’ notion of scientific pluralism is advanced.

What might it mean to think of philosophy as being in the condition of modernism -- in which its relation to its own past, and hence its sense of its own future, has become an undismissable problem? If philosophy's hitherto-defining conventions can neither be taken for granted nor rejected, they must be put in question -- which menans re-evealuating the relation between the form and content of philosophical writing, rethinking the demands that such writing must place on its readers, and (...) reconceiving the nature of philosophy itself. Inheritance and Originality argues that the writings of Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and Kierkegaard are best understood as responsive to such questions, and as driven in consequence to strikingly similar reconceptions of language, reason, and understanding, doubt and scepticism, morality, and the structure of selfhood. Through detailed re-readings of these authors' most influential texts, as attentive to their specificity as to their family resemblances, Stephen Mulhall reorients our sense of the philosophical work each text aims to accomplish, to engender a critical dialogue betweeen them from which the elements of a new conception of philosophy might emerge, and to uncover that conception's indebtedness to certain fundamental theological preoccupations. (shrink)

Does objectivity exist in the news media? In The Invention of Journalism Ethics, Stephen Ward argues that given the current emphasis on interpretation, analysis, and perspective, journalists and the public need a new theory of objectivity. He explores the varied ethical assertions of journalists over the past few centuries, focusing on the changing relationship between journalist and audience. This historical analysis leads to an innovative theory of pragmatic objectivity that enables journalists and the public to recognize and avoid biased (...) and unbalanced reporting. Ward convincingly demonstrates that journalistic objectivity is not a set of absolute standards but the same fallible but reasonable objectivity used for making decisions in other professions and public institutions. Considered a classic in the field since its first publication in 2004, this second edition includes new chapters that bring the book up to speed with journalism ethics in the twenty-first century by focusing on the growing dominance of online journalism and calling for a radical approach to journalism ethics reform. Ward also addresses important developments that have occurred in the last decade, including the emergence of digital journalism ethics and global journalism ethics. (shrink)