The case is discussed for the doctrine of hell as posing a unique problem of evil for adherents to the Abrahamic religions who endorse traditional theism. The problem is particularly acute for those who accept retributivist formulations of the doctrine of hell according to which hell is everlasting punishment for failing to satisfy some requirement. Alternatives to retributivism are discussed, including the unique difficulties that each one faces.

Epistemic akrasia arises when one holds a belief even though one judges it to be irrational or unjustified. While there is some debate about whether epistemic akrasia is possible, this paper will assume for the sake of argument that it is in order to consider whether it can be rational. The paper will show that it can. More precisely, cases can arise in which both the belief one judges to be irrational and one’s judgment of it are epistemically rational in (...) the sense that both are supported by sufficient evidence. (shrink)

Introduction: Over the past twenty-five years the sporting body has been studied in a myriad of ways including via a range of feminist frameworks (Hall 1996; Lowe 1998; Markula 2003; George 2005; Hargreaves 2007) and gender-sensitive lenses (e.g. McKay 1994; Aoki 1996; Woodward 2008). Despite this developing corpus, studies of sport only rarely engage in depth with the ‘flesh’ of the lived sporting and exercizing body (Wainwright and Turner 2003; Allen-Collinson 2009) at least from a phenomenological angle, and in (...) relation to female embodiment. It seems that a more corporeally-grounded, phenomenological perspective on women’s sporting embodiment would be a welcome addition to extant studies. In this chapter I suggest that employing a feminist phenomenological framework can provide a powerful lens through which to explore the subjective, richly-textured, lived-body experiences of sport and exercise. Phenomenology of course offers only one of a multiplicity of avenues to investigate the body in sport, and this chapter provides just a small glimpse of its possibilities. To-date studies of sporting experience employing a phenomenological theoretical framework remain surprisingly under-developed (Kerry and Armour 2000), as do those using its ethnomethodological offspring (Coates 1999; Burke et al. 2008). Further, as Fisher (2000) notes, the significance of the interaction between phenomenology and feminism has only relatively recently begun to be explored. It seems timely, therefore, to address this intriguing, potentially productive, but sometimes uneasy nexus, focusing upon female running embodiment in this case. (shrink)

Appeals to the idea of human nature are frequent in the voluminous literature on the ethics of enhancing human beings through biotechnology. Two chief concerns about the impact of enhancements on human nature have been voiced. The first is that enhancement may alter or destroy human nature. The second is that if enhancement alters or destroys human nature, this will undercut our ability to ascertain the good because, for us, the good is determined by our nature. The first concern assumes (...) that altering or destroying human nature is in itself a bad thing. The second concern assumes that human nature provides a standard without which we cannot make coherent, defensible judgments about what is good. I will argue (1) that there is nothing wrong, per se, with altering or destroying human nature, because, on a plausible understanding of what human nature is, it contains bad as well as good characteristics and there is no reason to believe that eliminating some of the bad would so imperil the good as to make the elimination of the bad impermissible, and (2) that altering or destroying human nature need not result in the loss of our ability to make judgments about the good, because we possess a conception of the good by which we can and do evaluate human nature. I will argue that appeals to human nature tend to obscure rather than illuminate the debate over the ethics of enhancement and can be eliminated in favor of more cogent considerations. (shrink)

Carruthers argues that knowledge of our own propositional attitudes is achieved by the same mechanism used to attain knowledge of other people's minds. This seems incompatible with "privileged access"---the idea that we have more reliable beliefs about our own mental states, regardless of the mechanism. At one point Carruthers seems to suggest he may be able to maintain privileged access, because we have additional sensory information in our own case. We raise a number of worries for this suggestion, concluding that (...) Carruthers's new theory cannot clearly preserve the superior reliability of our beliefs about our own attitudes. (shrink)

Extended Cognition (EC) hypothesizes that there are parts of the world outside the head serving as cognitive vehicles. One criticism of this controversial view is the problem of “cognitive bloat” which says that EC is too permissive and fails to provide an adequate necessary criterion for cognition. It cannot, for instance, distinguish genuine cognitive vehicles from mere supports (e.g. the Yellow Pages). In response, Andy Clark and Mark Rowlands have independently suggested that genuine cognitive vehicles are distinguished from supports in (...) that the former have been “recruited,” i.e. they are either artifacts, or, products of evolution. I argue against this proposal. There are counter examples to the claim that “Teleological” EC is either necessary or sufficient for cognition. Teleological EC conflates different types of scientific projects, and inherits content externalism’s alienation from historically impartial cognitive science. (shrink)

Kant begins the First Section of the Groundwork with a statement that is one of the most memorable in all his writings: “There is nothing it is possible to think of anywhere in the world, or indeed anything at all outside it, that can be held to be good without limitation, excepting only a good will” (Ak 4:393).[i] Due to the textual prominence of this claim, readers of the Groundwork have usually proceeded to read that work, and Kant’s other ethical (...) works as well, on the assumption that the truth of that assertion, and therefore the conception of the good will, both occupy a fundamental place in Kantian ethics. The assumption, however, becomes increasingly hard to sustain as we gain more familiarity with Kant’s ethical writings and better understanding of his ethical theory.[ii] As for the concept of the good will, Kant does avow the intention of “developing” it (Ak 4:397), and he goes on to thematize concepts that he thinks of as related to the good will (the moral worth of an action, acting from duty). But he never provides an explicit account of what he takes a ‘good will’ to be.[iii]. (shrink)

The contents of our conscious mind can seem unpredictable, whimsical, and free from external control. When instructed to attend to a stimulus in a work setting, for example, one might find oneself thinking about household chores. Conscious content thus appears different in nature from reflex action. Under the appropriate conditions, reflexes occur predictably, reliably, and via external control. Despite these intuitions, theorists have proposed that, under certain conditions, conscious content resembles reflexes and arises reliably via external control. We introduce the (...) Reflexive Imagery Task, a paradigm in which, as a function of external control, conscious content is triggered reliably and unintentionally: When instructed to not subvocalize the name of a stimulus object, participants reliably failed to suppress the set-related imagery. This stimulus-elicited content is considered ‘high-level’ content and, in terms of stages of processing, occurs late in the processing stream. We discuss the implications of this paradigm for consciousness research. (shrink)

In her recent paper ‘The Epistemology of Propaganda’ Rachel McKinnon discusses what she refers to as ‘TERF propaganda’. We take issue with three points in her paper. The first is her rejection of the claim that ‘TERF’ is a misogynistic slur. The second is the examples she presents as commitments of so-called ‘TERFs’, in order to establish that radical (and gender critical) feminists rely on a flawed ideology. The third is her claim that standpoint epistemology can be used to establish (...) that such feminists are wrong to worry about a threat of male violence in relation to trans women. In Section 1 we argue that ‘TERF’ is not a merely descriptive term; that to the extent that McKinnon offers considerations in support of the claim that ‘TERF’ is not a slur, these considerations fail; and that ‘TERF’ is a slur according to several prominent accounts in the contemporary literature. In Section 2, we argue that McKinnon misrepresents the position of gender critical feminists, and in doing so fails to establish the claim that the ideology behind these positions is flawed. In Section 3 we argue that McKinnon’s criticism of Stanley fails, and one implication of this is that those she characterizes as ‘positively privileged’ cannot rely on the standpoint-relative knowledge of those she characterizes as ‘negatively privileged’. We also emphasize in this section McKinnon’s failure to understand and account for multiple axes of oppression, of which the cis/trans axis is only one. (shrink)

: Agents are enkratic when they intend to do what they believe they should. That rationality requires you to be enkratic is uncontroversial, yet you may be enkratic in a way that does not exhibit any rationality on your part. Thus, what I call the enkratic requirement demands that you be enkratic in the right way. In particular, I will argue that it demands that you base your belief about what you should do and your intention to do it on (...) the same considerations. The idea is that, if you base your belief and your intention on different considerations, then you are inconsistent in your treatment of those considerations as reasons. The enkratic requirement demands that you be enkratic by treating considerations consistently as reasons. (shrink)

The 2015 Nepal earthquake and avalanche on Mount Everest generated one of the deadliest mountaineering disasters in modern times, bringing to media attention the physical-cultural world of high-altitude climbing. Contributing to the current sociological concern with embodiment, here we investigate the lived experience and social ‘production’ of endurance in this sociologically under-researched physical-cultural world. Via a phenomenological-sociological framework, we analyse endurance as cognitively, corporeally and interactionally lived and communicated, in the form of ‘endurance work’. Data emanate from in-depth interviews with (...) 18 high-altitude mountaineers, ten of whom experienced the 2015 avalanche. The article responds to Shilling’s (2016) call to address an important lacuna identified in sociological work: the need to investigate the embodied importance of cognition in the incorporation of culture. The concept of endurance work provides a powerful exemplar of this cognitive-corporeal nexus at work as a physical-culturally shaped, embodied practice and mode-of-thinking in the social world of high-altitude climbing. (shrink)

That philosophy is an outlier in the humanities when it comes to the underrepresentation of women has been the occasion for much discussion about possible effects of subtle forms of prejudice, including implicit bias and stereotype threat. While these ideas have become familiar to the philosophical community, there has only recently been a surge of interest in acquiring field-specific data. This paper adds to quantitative findings bearing on hypotheses about the effects of unconscious prejudice on two important stages along career (...) pathways: tenure-track hiring and early career publishing. (shrink)

Weather experiences are currently surprisingly under-explored and under-theorised in sociology and sport sociology, despite the importance of weather in both routine, everyday life and in recreational sporting and physical–cultural contexts. To address this lacuna, we examine here the lived experience of weather, including ‘weather work’ and ‘weather learning’, in our specific physical–cultural worlds of distance-running, triathlon and jogging in the United Kingdom. Drawing on a theoretical framework of phenomenological sociology, and the findings from five separate auto/ethnographic projects, we explore the (...) ‘weather-worlds’ and weather work involved in our physical–cultural engagement. In so doing, we address ongoing sport sociological concerns about embodiment and somatic, sensory learning and ways of knowing. We highlight how weather work provides a key example of the phenomenological conceptualisation of the mind–body–world nexus in action, with key findings delineating weather learning across the meteorological seasons that contour our British weather-related training. (shrink)

This paper explores the idea that many “simple minded” invertebrates are “natural zombies” in that they utilize their senses in intelligent ways, but without phenomenal awareness. The discussion considers how “first-order” representationalist theories of consciousness meet the explanatory challenge posed by blindsight. It would be an advantage of first-order representationalism, over higher-order versions, if it does not rule out consciousness in most non-human animals. However, it is argued that a first-order representationalism which adequately accounts for blindsight also implies that most (...) non-mammals are not conscious. The example of the honey bee is used to illuminate these claims. Although there is some reason to think that bees have simple beliefs and desires, nevertheless, their visually-mediated cognizing is comparable to that of an animal with blindsight. There is also reason to think that the study of blindsight can also help determine how consciousness is distributed in the animal world. (shrink)

Discussions of the functions of biological traits generally take the notion of a trait for granted. Defining this notion is a non-trivial problem. Different approaches to function place different constraints on adequate accounts of the notion of a trait. Accounts of function based on engineering-style analyses allow trait boundaries to be a matter of human interest. Accounts of function based on natural selection have typically been taken to require trait boundaries that are objectively real. After canvassing problems raised by each (...) approach, I conclude with some facts that satisfactory notions of trait must respect. (shrink)

Whilst in recent years sports studies have addressed the calls ‘to bring the body back in’ to theorisations of sport and physical activity, the ‘promise of phenomenology’ remains largely under-realised with regard to sporting embodiment. Relatively few accounts are grounded in the ‘flesh’ of the lived sporting body, and phenomenology offers a powerful framework for such analysis. A wide-ranging, multi-stranded, and interpretatively contested perspective, phenomenology in general has been taken up and utilised in very different ways within different disciplinary fields. (...) The purpose of this article is to consider some selected phenomenological threads, key qualities of the phenomenological method, and the potential for existentialist phenomenology in particular to contribute fresh perspectives to the sociological study of embodiment in sport and exercise. It offers one way to convey the ‘essences’, corporeal immediacy and textured sensuosity of the lived sporting body. The use of Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) is also critically addressed. Key words: phenomenology; existentialist phenomenology; interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA); sporting embodiment; the lived-body; Merleau-Ponty. (shrink)

In this paper, I examine Emest Sosa’s defense of Conceptual Relativism: the view that what exists is a function of human thought. My examination reveals that his defense entails an ontology that is indistinguishable from that of the altemative he labels less “sensible,” viz., Absolutism: the view that reality exists independently of our thinking. I conclude by defending Absolutism against Sosa’s objections.

This article considers a novel approach to researching sporting embodiment via what has been termed ‘autophenomenography’. Whilst having some similarities with autoethnography, autophenomenography provides a distinctive research form, located within phenomenology as theoretical and methodological tradition. Its focus is upon the researcher’s own lived experience of a phenomenon or phenomena. This article examines some of the key elements of a sociological phenomenological approach to studying sporting embodiment in general before portraying how autophenomenography was utilised specifically within two recent research projects (...) on distance running. The thorny issues of epoche and bracketing within phenomenological and autophenomenographical research are addressed and some practical suggestions tentatively posited. (shrink)

A key contention of Klein & Barron (2016) is that consciousness does not depend on cortical structures. A critical appraisal suggests they have overestimated the strength of their evidence.

Primatologists generally agree that monkeys lack higher-order intentional capacities related to theory of mind. Yet the discovery of the so-called "mirror neurons" in monkeys suggests to many neuroscientists that they have the rudiments of intentional understanding. Given a standard philosophical view about intentional understanding, which requires higher-order intentionahty, a paradox arises. Different ways of resolving the paradox are assessed, using evidence from neural, cognitive, and behavioral studies of humans and monkeys. A decisive resolution to the paradox requires substantial additional empirical (...) work and perhaps a rejection of the standard philosophical view. (shrink)

Archimedes of Syracuse has long provided a touchstone for considering how we make and acquire knowledge. Since the early Roman chroniclers of Archimedes’ life, and especially intensively since Descartes, scholars have described, sought, or derided the Archimedean point, defining and redefining its epistemic role. “Knowledge,” at least within modernity, is rhetorically tied to the figure of the Archimedean point, a place somewhere outside a regular and constrained world of experience. If this figure still leads to useful ways of thinking about (...) knowing, we are left with the question of how different modes of making knowledge approach their “Archimedean” points. The question is especially important today as a renewed .. (shrink)

The articles examines how failure, especially in so-called 'stochastic' arts or sciences like medicine and navigation stimulated reflections about the nature of the knowledge required of a genuine art (techne) or science.

This paper has three purposes: first, to explicate the ex istential basis of Arendt's theory of action. This will be done by first tracing the intellectual derivation of Arendt's existentialism and the modifications she made to fit it in to her public realm. Second, I will demonstrate the con nection between Arendt's existentialism and her formula tion of political freedom. Third, I will illustrate throughout that Arendt's political ideas, if they are to be properly understood, must be subsumed under her (...) existentialism .\nPart I treats Arendt's effort to find a home for the in dividual Human Being by attacking the modern tendency to make freedom an inner domain of the mind and refuge from the outside world. We will see how she uses the ideas of Heidegger and Jaspers to counter the Being of Kant and the philosophy of Mill and Augustine. Part II demonstrates her effort to make freedom a world reality and counter to the forces of totalitarianism: the modern enchantment with totality and an inexorable history. She attacks the Will, consciousness, Being, and the historical process itself.\nFinding no suitable conceptualization of freedom which makes it political by giving it a public space, Arendt turns finally to Jaspers' communicative existentialism and Duns Scotus' emphasis on contingency. (shrink)

In The Ethical Project, Kitcher has three main aim: to provide a naturalistic explanation of the rise of morality and of its subsequent development, to supply an account of moral progress that explains progressive developments that have occurred so far and shows how further progress is possible, and to propose a further progressive development—the emergence of a cosmopolitan morality—and make the case that it is a natural extension of the ethical project. I argue that Kitcher does not succeed in achieving (...) any of these aims and that he cannot do so given the meager resources of his explanatory model. The chief difficulty is that Kitcher equivocates in his characterization of the original function of ethics. Although he begins by characterizing it as remedying altruism failures in order to avoid their social costs, he sometimes characterizes it instead as remedying altruism failures simpliciter. Kitcher does not explain how a practice whose original function was developed into one whose function is. Further, it appears that he cannot do so without significantly enriching his explanatory model to include a more robust account of how humans came to have the capacity to reflect on and revise norms. (shrink)

Hannah Arendt is often--but somehow not unfailingly--credited, together with Alasdair MacIntyre, Paul Ricoeur and Charles Taylor, as being one of the central voices in the philosophical turn to the concept of narrative of a generation or more ago. Some have even cited her 1958 The Human Condition as providing a particular impetus for later accounts of narrative. This essay examines what contemporary philosophical accounts of narrative might still owe Arendt, exploring her approach to narrative in theory as well as practice. (...) The first part looks at Arendt's use of philosophical sources from the tradition--Aristotle, Augustine and Hegel--with an eye to how her appropriation of these figures differs from that of contemporary philosophers of narrative. Three of Arendt's typically bold and rich claims about narrative action emerge as important: the notion of action as revealing an agent's own daimon: the condition that such action be revealable within a world or shared public space which has resilience yet vulnerability; and the potential for agents revealed within such a world to discover some form of narrative rebirth in their efforts at storytelling. The second section examines the extent to which Arendt herself allowed those claims to be tested and thought through in her own attempts (in Men in Dark Times, Rahel Varnhagen and elsewhere) at constructing biographical narratives. (shrink)

In recent years, calls have been made to address the relative dearth of qualitative sociological investigation into the sensory dimensions of embodiment, including within physical cultures. This article contributes to a small, innovative and developing literature utilizing sociological phenomenology to examine sensuous embodiment. Drawing upon data from three research projects, here we explore some of the ‘sensuousities’ of ‘intense embodiment’ experiences as a distance-running-woman and a boxing-woman, respectively. Our analysis addresses the relatively unexplored haptic senses, particularly the ‘touch’ of heat. (...) Heat has been argued to constitute a specific sensory mode, a trans-boundary sense. Our findings suggest that ‘lived’ heat, in our own physical-cultural experiences, has highly proprioceptive elements and is experienced as both a form of touch and as a distinct perceptual mode, dependent upon context. Our analysis coheres around two key themes that emerged as salient: warming up, and thermoregulation, which in lived experience were encountered as strongly interwoven. (shrink)

While philosophers and scientists sometimes suggest (or take for granted) that consciousness is an essential condition for free will and moral responsibility, there is surprisingly little discussion of why consciousness (and what sorts of conscious experience) is important. We discuss some of the proposals that have been offered. We then discuss our studies using descriptions of humanoid robots to explore people’s attributions of free will and responsibility, of various kinds of conscious sensations and emotions, and of reasoning capacities, and examine (...) the relationships between these attributions. Our initial results suggest that people’s attributions of free will are strongly influenced by their attributions of conscious emotions, such as happiness and disappointment, including Strawsonian emotions, such as pride and regret. These results provide some support for an intriguing proposal: Free will requires the capacity to make decisions that really matter to the agent, and for anything to really matter to the agent, she must be able to consciously experience the good and bad effects of the decisions she makes—to suffer and regret, or to enjoy and feel proud of, their outcomes. (shrink)

It is widely held by philosophers not only that there is a causal condition on perception but also that the causal condition is a conceptual truth about perception. One influential line of argument for this claim is based on intuitive responses to a style of thought experiment popularized by Grice. Given the significance of these thought experiments to the literature, it is important to see whether the folk in fact respond to these cases in the way that philosophers assume they (...) should. We test folk intuitions regarding the causal theory of perception by asking our participants to what extent they agree that they would ‘see’ an object in various Gricean scenarios. We find that the intuitions of the folk do not strongly support the causal condition; they at most strongly support a ‘no blocker’ condition. We argue that this is problematic for the claim that the causal condition is a conceptual truth. (shrink)

Search in an environment with an uncertain distribution of resources involves a trade-off between exploitation of past discoveries and further exploration. This extends to information foraging, where a knowledge-seeker shifts between reading in depth and studying new domains. To study this decision-making process, we examine the reading choices made by one of the most celebrated scientists of the modern era: Charles Darwin. From the full-text of books listed in his chronologically-organized reading journals, we generate topic models to quantify his local (...) (text-to-text) and global (text-to-past) reading decisions using Kullback-Liebler Divergence, a cognitively-validated, information-theoretic measure of relative surprise. Rather than a pattern of surprise-minimization, corresponding to a pure exploitation strategy, Darwin’s behavior shifts from early exploitation to later exploration, seeking unusually high levels of cognitive surprise relative to previous eras. These shifts, detected by an unsupervised Bayesian model, correlate with major intellectual epochs of his career as identified both by qualitative scholarship and Darwin’s own self-commentary. Our methods allow us to compare his consumption of texts with their publication order. We find Darwin’s consumption more exploratory than the culture’s production, suggesting that underneath gradual societal changes are the explorations of individual synthesis and discovery. Our quantitative methods advance the study of cognitive search through a framework for testing interactions between individual and collective behavior and between short- and long-term consumption choices. This novel application of topic modeling to characterize individual reading complements widespread studies of collective scientific behavior. (shrink)

In this article, we propose the Fair Priority Model for COVID-19 vaccine distribution, and emphasize three fundamental values we believe should be considered when distributing a COVID-19 vaccine among countries: Benefiting people and limiting harm, prioritizing the disadvantaged, and equal moral concern for all individuals. The Priority Model addresses these values by focusing on mitigating three types of harms caused by COVID-19: death and permanent organ damage, indirect health consequences, such as health care system strain and stress, as well as (...) economic destruction. It proposes proceeding in three phases: the first addresses premature death, the second long-term health issues and economic harms, and the third aims to contain viral transmission fully and restore pre-pandemic activity. -/- To those who may deem an ethical framework irrelevant because of the belief that many countries will pursue "vaccine nationalism," we argue such a framework still has broad relevance. Reasonable national partiality would permit countries to focus on vaccine distribution within their borders up until the rate of transmission is below 1, at which point there would not be sufficient vaccine-preventable harm to justify retaining a vaccine. When a government reaches the limit of national partiality, it should release vaccines for other countries. -/- We also argue against two other recent proposals. Distributing a vaccine proportional to a country's population mistakenly assumes that equality requires treating differently situated countries identically. Prioritizing countries according to the number of front-line health care workers, the proportion of the population over 65, and the number of people with comorbidities within each country may exacerbate disadvantage and end up giving the vaccine in large part to wealthy nations. (shrink)

Cet essai propose une esthétique contextualiste de l'œuvre d'art dont le paradigme est rapporté à l'artefact de design. Présenté en deux livres, il maintient la spécificité de chacun des deux domaines tout en rendant compte de leurs échanges incessants depuis le début des avant-gardes historiques. Le premier livre débute par l'examen de neuf monochromes rouges imaginés par Arthur Danto et fait appel à l'esthétique institutionnelle de Howard Becker pour les placer dans le contexte des pratiques curatoriales et du "monde de (...) l'art". Une approche contextualiste et empirique qui croise des références à la théorie de l'art, à la théorie institutionnelle, au constructivisme et à la systémique. Le second livre déplace le propos dans le domaine du design. L'histoire de l'art moderne et contemporain et l'histoire du design sont inséparables. Il s'agit pourtant pour chaque discipline de retirer de l'autre ce qui lui revient en propre. L'artefact de design existe dans le contexte de la société et non de l'art et il est lui-même le répartiteur d'un contexte au travers du projet. (shrink)

Book, 2005. B&W and colour digital print on paper. A4 format. Unbound. This project was developed during a stay in Broken Hill and the region, it was supported through the artist-in-residence program at the Faculty of Creative Arts at the University of Wollongong in August 2005 and it was edited during the following months. A full copy of the book is held in the collections of the Art Gallery of New South Wales Research Library and Archive; the Médiathèque, Musée du (...) Quai Branly, Collection des Récits de Voyageurs; the Bibliothèque Nationale, Département des Estampes et de la Photographie, Paris. (shrink)

"Catalogue" of the exhibition This talk is the exhibition held at Articulate Upstairs in Sydney, 12-20 March 2016. Print on paper 14 x 14 cm. Published by Spec&Editions Collection of the Artist. The exhibition reproduces the catalogue in a suite of larger prints pasted on the walls, with a few additions to it.

From the book's point of view post-object art did twice better than generally acknowledged. It not only sabotaged the physical object's static substance ontology but also reformulated what an object is. A new object to start again with. By reestablishing the object beyond its physical instability through processual invariance, it can then be observed in the context of its external relations and hence as having no ontological primacy over them. By bracketing the object and suspending its internality, both the object (...) and the curatorial frame can be observed as working synchronically, correlated at a placeless boundary or interface. (shrink)

Monoclonal antibodies are essential biomedical research and clinical reagents that are produced by companies and research laboratories. The NIAID ImmPort (Immunology Database and Analysis Portal) resource provides a long-term, sustainable data warehouse for immunological data generated by NIAID, DAIT and DMID funded investigators for data archiving and re-use. A variety of immunological data is generated using techniques that rely upon monoclonal antibody reagents, including flow cytometry, immunofluorescence, and ELISA. In order to facilitate querying, integration, and reuse of data, standardized terminology (...) for describing monoclonal antibody reagents and their targets needs to be used for annotating data submitted to ImmPort. (shrink)

Less discussed than Hume’s skepticism about what grounds there could be for projecting empirical hypotheses is his concern with a skeptical regress that he thought threatened to extinguish any belief when we reflect that our reasoning is not perfect. The root of the problem is the fact that a reflection about our reasoning is itself a piece of reasoning. If each reflection is negative and undermining, does that not give us a diminution of our original belief to nothing? It requires (...) much attention to detail, we argue, to determine whether or not there is a skeptical problem in this neighborhood. Consider that if we subsequently doubt a doubt we had about our reasoning, that would suggest a restoration of some of the force of our original belief. We would then have instead of runaway skepticism an alternating sequence of pieces of skeptical reasoning that cancel each others’ effects on our justification in the original proposition, at least to some degree. We will argue that the outcome of the sequence of reflections Hume is imagining depends on information about a given case that is not known a priori. We conclude this from the fact that under three precise, explanatory, and viable contemporary reconstructions of what this kind of reasoning about reasoning could be like and how it has the potential to affect our original beliefs, a belief-extinguishing regress is not automatic or necessary. (shrink)

The following technique has proven effective in helping beginning logic students locate the sections of a three-circled Venn Diagram in which they are to represent a categorical sentence. Very often theses students are unable to identify the parts of the diagram they are to shade or bar.

Whilst in recent years sports studies have addressed the calls ‘to bring the body back in’ to theorisations of sport and physical activity, the ‘promise of phenomenology’ remains largely under-realised with regard to sporting embodiment. Relatively few accounts are grounded in the ‘flesh’ of the lived sporting body, and phenomenology offers a powerful framework for such analysis. A wide-ranging, multi-stranded, and interpretatively contested perspective, phenomenology in general has been taken up and utilised in very different ways within different disciplinary fields. (...) The purpose of this article is to consider some selected phenomenological threads, key qualities of the phenomenological method, and the potential for existentialist phenomenology in particular to contribute fresh perspectives to the sociological study of embodiment in sport and exercise. It offers one way to convey the ‘essences’, corporeal immediacy and textured sensuosity of the lived sporting body. The use of Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) is also critically addressed. (shrink)

Stoerig and Cowey’s work is widely regarded as showing that monkeys with lesions in the primary visual cortex have blindsight. However, Mole and Kelly persuasively argue that the experimental results are compatible with an alternative hypothesis positing only a deficit in attention and perceptual working memory. I describe a revised procedure which can distinguish these hypotheses, and offer reasons for thinking that the blindsight hypothesis provides a superior explanation. The study of blindsight might contribute towards a general investigation into animal (...) consciousness, though there is a problem when it comes to showing how a non-verbal animal can indicate whether or not it is perceiving consciously. Perhaps whether there is something that it is like to be a given animal depends on whether it exhibits the cognitive profile of conscious vision as opposed to non-conscious “natural blindsight.”. (shrink)

Causal Determinism (CD) entails that all of a person’s choices and actions are nomically related to events in the distant past, the approximate, but lawful, consequences of those occurrences. Assuming that history cannot be undone nor those (natural) relations altered, that whatever results from what is inescapable is itself inescapable, and the contrariety of inevitability and freedom, it follows that we are completely devoid of liberty: our choices are not freely made; our actions are not freely performed. Instead of disputing (...) the soundness of this reasoning, some philosophers prefer to maintain that we could yet have a small measure of freedom were CD true of our world: although being unable to choose or act differently, one could at least under normal circumstances truly claim to be acting ‘on one’s own’, beyond the control of ‘outside forces’, in a word, autonomous. They further argue that being free in this sense suffices for moral responsibility. Call their philosophy ‘Autonomy Compatibilism’ (AC). -/- In adopting here reactive attitudes towards an agent, one is choosing to highlight the fact that the individual in question is of sound mind, reasoning and acting free from the interference of others. These facts alone, the adherent of AC claims, justify his stance, despite the necessity of the agent’s choices. Why would we not regard a sane individual who is not being coerced, intimidated, deceived or unduly put upon as in charge of his life so as to be responsible for his activities? -/- The Manipulation Argument (MA) is supposed to cut off this line of retreat. Its authors hold that, were CD true of our world, we would be no more autonomous than a victim of “covert, non-constraining control” (CNC): manipulation whereby one person causes another, through the use of methods such as brainwashing or circumspect operant conditioning, to ‘do his bidding’ without the latter being aware of his subjugation or feeling in any way coerced. Since a CNC victim obviously lacks autonomy, then so must “persons” living in a deterministic universe. Defenders of AC have, then, the following argument with which to contend: -/- 1. Victims of CNC (obviously) lack autonomy. 2. Thus, AC would be true only if some definition of autonomy succeeds in specifying a freedom relevant difference between victims of CNC and agents whose choices/actions are necessary consequences of prior events. 3. There could be no such definition. 4. Therefore, AC must be false. -/- The challenge issued here is clear: find a way to refute the claim that being subject to natural laws would be tantamount to being a victim of CNC, to show that Nature is no manipulator. Moreover, this challenge cannot be met by responding with a Frankfurt case: a situation in which things have been surreptitiously arranged so that an agent is unable to avoid doing something that he manages to do ‘on his own’, thus, being autonomous despite his inability to act otherwise. For, even if CD is not inconsistent with autonomy because it eliminates the ability to do otherwise per se, it may yet entail that no human agent ever does act of his own accord, an implication of which would be a lack of alternatives on anyone’s part. In other words, the fact that causally determined beings could never act differently than they do does is perhaps only symptomatic of the reason why such beings would lack autonomy: forces beyond their control would have dominion over their psychological development. Thus, AC advocates must show that the way that an agent’s character would be shaped, were she (merely) subject to natural laws, would leave unimpaired an ability that CNC would destroy. What follows is a definition of this ability, which I then use to solve Problem of Freedom and Foreknowledge. (shrink)

Illusionism treats the almost universally held belief in our ability to make free choices as an erroneous, though beneficent, idea. According to this view, it is sadly true, though virtually impossible to believe, that none of a person’s choices are avoidable and ‘up to him’: any claim to the effect that they are being naïveté or, in the case of those who know better, pretense. Indeed, the implications of this skepticism are so disturbing, pace Spinoza, that it must not be (...) allowed to see the light of intellectual day, confined to the nether regions of consciousness. Even those who have ‘done the philosophy’ and disabused themselves here should nevertheless (somehow) continue believing in free will, lest they come to regard our lives as meaningless, spreading despair and social upheaval. Thus, the “Illusionists” who propound this view are themselves circumspect. -/- But is escaping the (putative) truth really possible here? Could a disabused philosopher ever return to something like his former intellectual innocence? Self-deception may not be possible; but would an attempt at it reveal anything significant about choice formation? If one were to try to regain one’s illusion, what would one realize? I shall argue here that one would reflectively discover precisely the opposite of what the Illusionists contend- that there are indeed free choices. Let us begin by considering the inconsistency that supposedly entails the illusion of free will. (shrink)

The indirect argument (IA) for incompatibilism is based on the principle that an action to which there is no alternative is unfree, which we shall call ‘PA’. According to PA, to freely perform an action A, it must not be the case that one has ‘no choice’ but to perform A. The libertarian and hard determinist advocates of PA must deny that free will would exist in a deterministic world, since no agent in such a world would perform an action (...) to which there were alternatives: an action there being the necessary consequence of preceding events and the laws of nature, it would not be possible for a person to perform actions besides those he actually performs. Determinism is seen here as “indirectly” ruling out free will by making the satisfaction of a necessary condition of free agency impossible, the former requiring, according to the leading proponent of libertarianism, Robert Kane, the performance of free actions. To have a free will, on his view, is to have committed “self-forming” actions, that is, to have done things to which there were alternatives the doing of which led to the development of the desires, preferences, and beliefs that make up one’s character. -/- The range of phenomena obeying probabilistic laws has yet to be ascertained. Under certain assumptions, both STR and GTR entail an indeterministic mechanics. But, contrary what is often claimed, quanta do not behave indeterministicly: the wave function/probabilistic laws being necessary only insofar as we wish to macroscopicly describe their behavior. It is far less clear, however, that the macro-events involved in human decision making and behavior, such as the releasing of neurotransmitters and the contracting of muscles, occur indeterministically. The ontological status of these events-whether or not they are the necessary effects of prior occurrences-is, of course, what matters in the free will debate. For present purposes, however, this question will be put aside. Instead, I will concentrate on buttressing the existing case against PA, aiming to show that even if deterministic laws hold at the level of macro-phenomena, free will remains a possibility. That is to say, I shall defend the thesis that so-called “Frankfurt cases” demonstrate that alternatives are not required to perform an action that is free in the sense of being something for which its agent is responsible. -/- My defense will be carried out in three stages. First, I must respond to those who maintain that a Frankfurt case is not a counterexample to PA because it is not an example of someone acting without alternatives. Here, I confront the question of how “robust” an alternative must bein order to provide an agent with a way of avoiding praise or blame for the action that she actually commits. Secondly, I must show that an agent may be praiseworthy or blameworthy despite lacking alternatives at the time at which she acts, i.e., an appropriate object of one of a Strawsonian “reactive attitude” sans what I shall call “local” alternatives. At this point, I must attend to David Widerker’s recent critique of the use of Frankfurt cases as counterexamples to PA. Finally, I set for myself what I take to be the most difficult task of a compatibilist: demonstrating that not even an “historical” alternative-the possibility of having chosen a different path in life than the one that one has actually taken-is needed to have a free will. In this connection, it will be incumbent upon me to explain why it would be fair to hold someone accountable for behavior issuing from a self she did not create, dispositions originating from natural conditions she did not establish. That is to say, in denying that a free will entails the ability to transcend oneself, I shall be faced with what Kane calls the “ultimacy” problem: how to explain away the incompatibilist’s intuition that it is senseless to adopt a reactive attitude towards someone incapable of self-transcendence, even if such a reaction is itself unavoidable. By showing that the desire for self-transcendence is itself irrational, I intend to solve this problem. I will, thus, be left defending a version of compatibilism according to which a free will is to be understood as a healthy faculty-the will-being exercised in an environment conducive to self-realization, which is its purpose. (shrink)

Susan Wolf’s compatibilism is unique for being ‘asymmetrical. ’While holding that blameworthiness entails being able to avoid acting wrongly, she maintains that our freedom consists in single-mindedly pursuing Truth and Goodness. Comparing and contrasting her position to Saint Anselm’s seminal, libertarian approach to the same subject elicits serious questions, highlighting its drawbacks. How could freedom entail the inability to do certain things? In what sense are reasons causes? What sense can be made of a double standard for assignments of responsibility? (...) Is not self-control inconsistent with being caused to act by things independent of oneself? Does not virtue require struggling against falsehoods and evils by which one could be overcome? Wolf’s compatibilism must be rejected, I shall argue, in light of Anselm’s intuitively satisfying response to these concerns: we should prefer a philosophy that entails more of what we want from freedom without begging unanswerable questions of its own. (shrink)

I demonstrate here that St. Anselm”s understanding of free will fits neatly into an Aristotelian conceptual framework. Aristotle”s four causes are first aligned with Anselm”s four senses of “will”. The volitional hierarchy Anselm”s definition of free will entails is then detailed, culminating in its reconciliation with Eudaimonism. The summum bonum turns out to be the apex of that series of actualizations or perfections. I conclude by explicating Anselm’s teleological understanding of sin by reference to his analog of Aristotle’s essence-accident distinction.

This paper seeks to answer to following questions from a Philosophical Methodology: What is the conflict between Gender Reality and Gender Ideology? How did Sex and Gender Ideologies Begin? What are the Characteristics of Sex and Gender Ideologies? How did Gender Ideology ‘Go Viral?’ Who Mapped the Virus of Gender Ideology? How can Gender Reality be Ransomed?

Philosophers have recently argued that since there are people who are blind, but don't know it, and people who echolocate, but don't know it, conscious introspection is highly unreliable. I contend that a second look at Anton's syndrome, human echolocation, and ‘facial vision’ suggests otherwise. These examples do not support skepticism about the reliability of introspection.

This paper offers an unorthodox appraisal of empirical research bearing on the question of the low representation of women in philosophy. It contends that fashionable views in the profession concerning implicit bias and stereotype threat are weakly supported, that philosophers often fail to report the empirical work responsibly, and that the standards for evidence are set very low—so long as you take a certain viewpoint.

John Perry has recently developed a form of Compatibilism that respects the Principle of Alternatives (PA), according to which free agency requires having the ability to do more than one thing. Eschewing so-called Frankfurt counterexamples to this intuitively plausible principle, long the bête noire of those who would like to believe in free agency and Determinism, Perry argues that there is an important sense in which we can act differently than we do. It signifies the “natural” property of having a (...) latent ability, a notion free of the mysteriousness surrounding accounts based on religious or even philosophical considerations, yet sufficient to ground our assignments of praise and blame. Perry goes on to advise abandoning such accounts in favor of his common sense approach. -/- I argue that Perry’s Compatibilism (PC) leads to the same objection as other Humean accounts (as explicated below) and fails to account for certain intuitions regarding self-control and initiative. I conclude with an assessment of the prospects for his proposed revision. (shrink)

Is cultural evolution needed to explain altruistic selfsacrifice? Some contend that cultural traits (e.g. beliefs, behaviors, and for some “memes”) replicate according to selection processes that have “floated free” from biology. One test case is the example of suicide kamikaze attacks in wartime Japan. Standard biological mechanisms—such as reciprocal altruism and kin selection—might not seem to apply here: The suicide pilots did not act on the expectation that others would reciprocate, and they were supposedly sacrificing themselves for country and emperor, (...) not close relatives. Yet an examination of both the historical record and the demands of evolutionary theory suggest the kamikaze phenomenon does not cry out for explanation in terms of a special non-biological selection process. This weakens the case for cultural evolution, and has interesting implications for our understanding of altruistic self-sacrifice. (shrink)