Artykuł dotyczy dwóch bardzo mało znanych utworów słynnych twórców literatury niemieckiej. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, twórca Fausta, ma w swym dorobku moralizatorski wiersz pt. Dziennik. Jednak z obawy o posądzenie go o niemoralne treści, nigdy za życia poety utwór ten nie został opublikowany. Również Siedem wierszy Rainera Marii Rilkego jest bardzo rzadko drukowanych. Mimo, iż Rilke długo wzbraniał się przed lekturą utworów niemieckiego wieszcza, to jednak Dziennik stanowił wyjątek. Wiersz Goethego poświęcony jest kryzysowi seksualnemu i twórczemu bohatera, za którym kryje (...) się sam poeta. Wiersze Rilkego stanowią cykl poświęcony aktowi miłosnemu dwojga kochanków. Artykuł stara się przeanalizować wzajemne związki obu tych tak różnych dzieł i odpowiedzieć na pytanie, czy R. M. Rilke wzorował się na twórczości J. W. Goethego. (shrink)

One implication of Vetter's theory of modality is that necessity and possibility are regarded as unitary natural kinds. In this paper, I argue that from the perspective of the philosophy of causation, there are good reasons to distinguish between different kinds of necessity: causal necessity, which is nomologically necessary, and non-causal necessity, which is metaphysically necessary. One challenge for Vetter's approach is to explain this distinction.

This paper responds to the contributions by Alexander Bird, Nathan Wildman, David Yates, Jennifer McKitrick, Giacomo Giannini & Matthew Tugby, and Jennifer Wang. I react to their comments on my 2015 book Potentiality: From Dispositions to Modality, and in doing so expands on some of the arguments and ideas of the book.

Dispositionalism about modality is the view that metaphysical modality is a matter of the dispositions possessed by actual objects. In a recent paper, David Yates has raised an important worry about the formal adequacy of dispositionalism. This paper responds to Yates’s worry by developing a reply that Yates discusses briefly but dismisses as ad hoc: an appeal to a ’plenitude of powers’ including such powers as the necessarily always manifested power for 2+2\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} (...) \begin{document}$$2+2$$\end{document} to be 4. I argue that the reply is not ad hoc at all, by defending the metaphysics of dispositions that should underly it. I then argue, first, that a proper understanding of dispositions’ degrees provides us with an argument for such necessarily always manifested dispositions; second, that all the natural attempts to block that argument can be resisted without being ad hoc; and third, that pragmatic considerations explain our intuitive resistance to the ascription of necessarily always manifested dispositions. Dispositionalism can be formally adequate after all. (shrink)

This paper explores the prospects for dispositional accounts of abilities. According to so-called new dispositionalists, an agent has the ability to Φ iff they have a disposition to Φ when trying to Φ. We show that the new dispositionalism is beset by some problems that also beset its predecessor, the conditional analysis of abilities, and bring up some further problems. We then turn to a different approach, which links abilities not to motivational states but to the notion of success, and (...) consider ways of implementing that approach. Our results suggest that there are principled disanalogies between abilities and disposition which prevent any dispositional account of abilities from succeeding. (shrink)

Contemporary issues involving knowledge and science examined from a constructivist-pragmatist perspective often labeled "relativism." Individual chapters include a review of the difference between constructivist-pragmatist epistemology and "social constructivism;" an examination of recent writings by Bruno Latour; a critique of computational methods in literary studies; a skeptical look at current efforts to "integrate" the humanities and the natural sciences; and reflections on the social dynamics of belief in relation to denials of climate change and to hopes expressed by environmentalists.

A critical examination of the charge of self-refutation, particularly as leveled by orthodoxy-defending philosophers against those maintaining epistemologically unorthodox, especially relativistic or skeptical, views. Beginning with an analysis of its classic illustration in Plato’s *Theaetetus* as leveled against Protagoras’s “Man is the measure ...,” I consider various aspects of the charge, including logical, rhetorical, pedagogic, affective, and cognitive.

Advocates of literary Darwinism, cognitive cultural studies, neuroaesthetics, digital humanities, and other such hybrid fields now seek explicitly to make the aims and methods of one or another humanities discipline approximate more closely the aims and methods of science, and at their most visionary, they urge as well the overall integration of the humanities and natural sciences. This essay indicates some major considerations—historical, conceptual, and pragmatic—that may be useful for assessing these efforts and predicting their future. Arguments promoting integration often (...) involve dubious teleological models of intellectual history and betray limited understandings of the distinctive epistemic orientations and cultural functions of the humanities vis-à-vis the sciences. Recurrent institutional difficulties encountered by scholars and/or scientists in hybrid fields reflect steep prestige differentials between the humanities and sciences, along with significant differences of training, experience, style, and temperament. Meanwhile, both the sciences and humanities are being shaken up by technological and related intellectual developments. Though worrisome, the new disciplinary configurations are thus likely to play out in surprising and, not inconceivably, positive ways. (shrink)

Achievements have recently begun to attract increased attention from value theorists. One recurring idea in this budding literature is that one important factor determining the magnitude or value of an achievement is the amount of effort the achiever invested. The aim of this paper is to present the most plausible version of this idea. This advances the current state of debate where authors are invoking substantially different notions of effort and are thus talking past each other. While the concept of (...) effort has been invoked in the philosophical analysis of a number of important concepts such as desert, attention, competence, and distributive justice, it has hardly ever been analyzed itself. This paper makes headway in this regard by discussing three ambiguities in the everyday notion of effort. It continues to develop two accounts of effort and shows how both of them are achievement-enhancing. (shrink)

The objective of this research programme is to contribute to the establishment of the emerging science of Formal Ontology in Information Systems via a collaborative project involving researchers from a range of disciplines including philosophy, logic, computer science, linguistics, and the medical sciences. The re­searchers will work together on the construction of a unified formal ontology, which means: a general framework for the construction of ontological theories in specific domains. The framework will be constructed using the axiomatic-deductive method of modern (...) formal ontology. It will be tested via a series of applications relating to on-going work in Leipzig on medical taxonomies and data dictionaries in the context of clinical trials. This will lead to the production of a domain-specific ontology which is designed to serve as a basis for applications in the medical field. (shrink)

Medical diagnosis has been traditionally recognized as a privileged field of application for so called probabilistic induction. Consequently, the Bayesian theorem, which mathematically formalizes this form of inference, has been seen as the most adequate tool for quantifying the uncertainty surrounding the diagnosis by providing probabilities of different diagnostic hypotheses, given symptomatic or laboratory data. On the other side, it has also been remarked that differential diagnosis rather works by exclusion, e.g. by modus tollens, i.e. deductively. By drawing on a (...) case history, this paper aims at clarifying some points on the issue. Namely: 1) Medical diagnosis does not represent, strictly speaking, a form of induction, but a type, of what in Peircean terms should be called ‘abduction’ (identifying a case as the token of a specific type); 2) in performing the single diagnostic steps, however, different inferential methods are used for both inductive and deductive nature: modus tollens, hypothetical-deductive method, abduction; 3) Bayes’ theorem is a probabilized form of abduction which uses mathematics in order to justify the degree of confidence which can be entertained on a hypothesis given the available evidence; 4) although theoretically irreconcilable, in practice, both the hypothetical- deductive method and the Bayesian one, are used in the same diagnosis with no serious compromise for its correctness; 5) Medical diagnosis, especially differential diagnosis, also uses a kind of “probabilistic modus tollens”, in that, signs (symptoms or laboratory data) are taken as strong evidence for a given hypothesis not to be true: the focus is not on hypothesis confirmation, but instead on its refutation [Pr (¬ H/E1, E2, …, En)]. Especially at the beginning of a complicated case, odds are between the hypothesis that is potentially being excluded and a vague “other”. This procedure has the advantage of providing a clue of what evidence to look for and to eventually reduce the set of candidate hypotheses if conclusive negative evidence is found. 6) Bayes’ theorem in the hypothesis-confirmation form can more faithfully, although idealistically, represent the medical diagnosis when the diagnostic itinerary has come to a reduced set of plausible hypotheses after a process of progressive elimination of candidate hypotheses; 7) Bayes’ theorem is however indispensable in the case of litigation in order to assess doctor’s responsibility for medical error by taking into account the weight of the evidence at his disposal. (shrink)

In this response to comments on my article, “The Chimera of Relativism,” in the same issue of *Common Knowledge* , by cognitive neuroscientist Andreas Roepstorff, classicist G. E. R. Lloyd, and anthropologist Martin Holbraad, I illustrate and reinforce Lloyd's cautions regarding the hazards of intercultural—here, Chinese-Western—comparisons in studies of culture and cognition. Examination of a foundational study in East-West cultural/cognitive differences cited by Roepstorff indicates extensive conceptual and methodological problems in that tradition of research. Although Holbraad champions a more radical (...) relativism than that offered in my work, the moves he urges have either been present in my work from the beginning or are both dubiously radical and otherwise undesirable. (shrink)

Dispositions are modal properties. The standard conception of dispositions holds that each disposition is individuated by its stimulus condition(s) and its manifestation(s), and that their modality is best captured by some conditional construction that relates stimulus to manifestation as antecedent to consequent. I propose an alternative conception of dispositions: each disposition is individuated by its manifestation alone, and its modality is closest to that of possibility — a fragile vase, for instance, is one that can break easily. The view is (...) expounded in some detail and defended against the major objections. (shrink)

A critique of dubious contrasts between "science" and "religion" drawn on the basis of cognitive-evolutionary accounts of human psychology, e.g.,. the claim that religious concepts are “likely” and “natural” for the human mind whereas scientific thinking is “rare” and “unnatural.” Initially made by biologist Lewis Wolpert in *The Unnatural Nature of Science* (1993) and anthropologist Pascal Boyer in *Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought* (2001), they are developed at length by philosopher R. N. McCauley in a*Why Religion is (...) Natural and Science is Not* (2011). These contrasts involve tendentiously narrow or broad definitions of the terms “science” and “religion” and the obliteration of the complex historical and intellectual relations between the ideas and practices currently identified by those terms. (shrink)

Abilities are in many ways central to what being an agent means, and they are appealed to in philosophical accounts of a great many different phenomena. It is often assumed that abilities are some kind of dispositional property, but it is rarely made explicit exactly which dispositional properties are our abilities. Two recent debates provide two different answers to that question: the new dispositionalism in the debate about free will, and virtue reliabilism in epistemology. This paper argues that both answers (...) fail as general accounts of abilities, and discusses the ramifications of this result. (shrink)

This chapter explores the different dimensions of domination, including whether it has a structural approach, its relation to race and imperialism, and how non-domination can be institutionalized and achieved at a global level.

It is a familiar point that many ordinary dispositions are multi-track, that is, not fully and adequately characterisable by a single conditional. In this paper, I argue that both the extent and the implications of this point have been severely underestimated. First, I provide new arguments to show that every disposition whose stimulus condition is a determinable quantity must be infinitely multi-track. Secondly, I argue that this result should incline us to move away from the standard assumption that dispositions are (...) in some way importantly linked to conditionals, as presupposed by the debate about various versions of the ‘conditional analysis’ of dispositions. I introduce an alternative conception of dispositionality, which is motivated by linguistic observations about dispositional adjectives and links dispositions to possibility instead of conditionals. I argue that, because of the multi-track nature of dispositions, the possibility-based conception of dispositions is to be preferred. (shrink)

Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) reflects an innovation paradigm that acknowledges that market innovations do not automatically deliver on socially desirable objectives, and requires a broad governance of knowledge coalitions of governmental bodies as well as industrial and societal actors to address market deficits. Responsible Innovation should be understood as a new paradigm for innovation which requires institutional changes in the research and innovation system and the public governance of the economy. It also requires the institutionalisation of an ethics of (...) co-responsibility as well as the introduction of new standards and certification processes for products. Dr. Dr. phil. von Schomberg will introduce Responsible Innovation against the background of 6 deficits of the (global) research and innovation system. (shrink)

This paper critically assesses existing accounts of the nature of difficulty, finds them wanting, and proposes a new account. The concept of difficulty is routinely invoked in debates regarding degrees of moral responsibility, and the value of achievement. Until recently, however, there has not been any sustained attempt to provide an account of the nature of difficulty itself. This has changed with Gwen Bradford’s Achievement, which argues that difficulty is a matter of how much intense effort is expended. But while (...) this account captures something important about the relationship between difficulty and achievement, it fails to account for the fact that part of what makes achievements great is that they are difficult in a moderately agent-neutral kind of way. Nor is this thought captured by any other extant account. I argue that to fill this gap we should think of difficulty in terms of low probability of success. (shrink)

Williamsonian modal epistemology is characterized by two commitments: realism about modality, and anti-exceptionalism about our modal knowledge. Williamson’s own counterfactual-based modal epistemology is the best known implementation of WME, but not the only option that is available. I sketch and defend an alternative implementation which takes our knowledge of metaphysical modality to arise, not from knowledge of counterfactuals, but from our knowledge of ordinary possibility statements of the form ‘x can F’. I defend this view against a criticism indicated in (...) Williamson’s own work, and argue that it is better connected to the semantics of modal language. (shrink)

According to essentialism, metaphysical modality is founded in the essences of things, where the essence of a thing is roughly akin to its real definition. According to potentialism (also known as dispositionalism), metaphysical modality is founded in the potentialities of things, where a potentiality is roughly the generalized notion of a disposition. Essentialism and potentialism have much in common, but little has been written about their relation to each other. The aim of this paper is to understand better the relations (...) between essence and potentiality, on the one hand, and between essentialism and potentialism, on the other. It is argued, first, that essence and potentiality are not duals but interestingly linked by a weaker relation dubbed ‘semi-duality’; second, that given this weaker relation, essentialism and potentialism are not natural allies but rather natural competitors; and third, that the semi-duality of essence and potentiality allows the potentialist to respond to an important explanatory challenge by using essentialist resources without thereby committing to essentialism. (shrink)

According to ecological psychology, animals perceive not just the qualities of things in their environment, but their affordances: in James Gibson’s words, ’what things furnish, for good or ill’. I propose a metaphysics for affordances that fits into a contemporary anti-Humean metaphysics of powers or potentialities. The goal is to connect two debates, one in the philosophy of perception and one in metaphysics, that stand to gain much from each other.

Dispositionalists try to provide an account of modality—possibility, necessity, and the counterfactual conditional—in terms of dispositions. But there may be a tension between dispositionalist accounts of possibility on the one hand, and of counterfactuals on the other. Dispositionalists about possibility must hold that there are no impossible dispositions, i.e., dispositions with metaphysically impossible stimulus and/or manifestation conditions; dispositionalist accounts of counterfactuals, if they allow for non-vacuous counterpossibles, require that there are such impossible dispositions. I argue, first, that there are in (...) fact no impossible dispositions; and second, that the dispositionalist can nevertheless acknowledge the non-vacuity of some counterpossibles. The strategy in the second part is one of ‘divide and conquer’ that is not confined to the dispositionalist: it consists in arguing that counterpossibles, when non-vacuous, are read epistemically and are therefore outside the purview of a dispositional account. (shrink)

This paper surveys recent "new actualist" approaches to modality that do without possible worlds and locate modality squarely in the actual world. New actualist theories include essentialism and dispositionalism about modality, each of which can come in different varieties. The commonalities and differences between these views, as well as their shared motivations, are layed out.

Modal dispositionalism is the view that possibilities are a matter of the dispositions of individual objects: it is possible that p if and only if something has a disposition for p to be the case. We raise a problem for modal dispositionalism: nothing within the theory rules out that there could be necessary, perfect masks, which make the manifestation of a disposition impossible. Unless such necessary perfect masks are ruled out, modal dispositionalism runs the risk of failing to provide a (...) sufficient condition for possibility, and indeed of engendering contradictions. But to rule them out, modal dispositionalism would have to revise a crucial tenet of the view, its localism. (shrink)

My aim in this paper is to sketch, with a broad brush and in bare outlines, an approach to modal epistemology that is characterized by three distinctive features. First, the approach is agency-based: it locates the roots of our modal thought and knowledge in our experience of our own agency. Second, the approach is ambitious in that it takes the experience of certain modal properties in agency to be the sole distinctive feature of specifically modal thought and knowledge; everything that (...) we know about modality beyond the experience of agency is a matter of applying standard methods of inquiry such as deduction, induction and abductive methods for choosing between theories. Third, the account holds that modal thought and knowledge is, first and foremost, about modal properties that are sufficiently like those encountered in agency. (shrink)

According to the Market Failures Approach to business ethics, beyond-compliance duties can be derived by employing the same rationale and arguments that justify state regulation of economic conduct. Very roughly the idea is that managers have a duty to behave as if they were complying with an ideal regulatory regime ensuring Pareto-optimal market outcomes. Proponents of the approach argue that managers have a professional duty not to undermine the institutional setting that defines their role, namely the competitive market. This answer (...) is inadequate, however, for it is the hierarchical firm, rather than the competitive market, that defines the role of corporate managers and shapes their professional obligations. Thus, if the obligations that the market failures approach generates are to apply to managers, they must do so in an indirect way. I suggest that the obligations the market failures approach generates directly apply to shareholders. Managers, in turn, inherit these obligations as part of their duties as loyal agents. (shrink)

It is widely held that our beliefs can be epistemically faultless despite being morally flawed. Theories of moral encroachment challenge this, holding that moral considerations bear on the epistemic status of our attitudes. According to attitude-based theories of moral encroachment, morality encroaches upon the epistemic standing of our attitudes on the grounds that we can morally injure others with our epistemic practices. In this paper, I aim to show that current attitude-based theories have asymmetric mechanisms: moral features only make it (...) harder for attitudes to secure epistemic merits. I argue that, if attitudes can incur moral injury, failure to form attitudes can too. To make sense of this, I contend, attitude-based accounts require symmetric mechanisms, allowing that moral considerations make it both harder and easier for attitudes to attain epistemic merits. I maintain that, once we recognize this, attitude-based encroachment views must soon concede that they sometimes demand we believe against the evidence. (shrink)

ABSTRACTAchievements are among the things that make a life good. Assessing the plausibility of this intuitive claim requires an account of the nature of achievements. One necessary condition for achievement appears to be that the achieving agent acted competently, i.e. was not just lucky. I begin by critically assessing existing accounts of anti-luck conditions for achievements in both the ethics and epistemology literature. My own proposal is that a goal is reached competently, only if the actions of the would-be-achiever make (...) success likely, and that this is the reason why she acts that way. (shrink)

Domination consists in subjection to the will of others and manifests itself both as a personal relation and a structural phenomenon serving as the context for relations of power. Domination has again become a central political concern through the revival of the republican tradition of political thought . However, normative debates about domination have mostly remained limited to the context of domestic politics. Also, the republican debate has not taken into account alternative ways of conceptualizing domination. Critical theorists, liberals, feminists, (...) critical race theorists, and postcolonial writers have discussed domination in different ways, focusing on such problems as imperialism, racism, and the subjection of indigenous peoples. This volume extends debates about domination to the global level and considers how other streams in political theory and nearby disciplines enrich, expand upon, and critique the republican tradition’s contributions to the debate. This volume brings together, for the first time, mostly original pieces on domination and global political justice by some of this generation’s most prominent scholars, including Philip Pettit, James Bohman, Rainer Forst, Amy Allen, John McCormick, Thomas McCarthy, Charles Mills, Duncan Ivison, John Maynor, Terry Macdonald, Stefan Gosepath, and Hauke Brunkhorst. -/- Front matter and First chapter available for download. (shrink)

This paper provides a philosophical analysis and a new edition of an anonymous Epitome of John Dumbleton’s solution to the semantic paradoxes. The first part of this paper briefly presents Dumbleton’s cassationist solution to the semantic paradoxes, which the English philosopher proposes in his Summa Logicae, written in the 1330s–40s. The second part investigates the solution to various types of insolubles proposed by the anonymous author of the Epitome. The third part provides a new critical edition of the Latin text (...) – a first edition was edited by Bottin in 1978 – and an English translation. (shrink)

Manley and Wasserman (2008) have provided a convincing case against analyses of dispositions in terms of one conditional, and a very interesting positive proposal that links any disposition to a ‘suitable proportion’ of a particular set of precise conditionals. I focus on their positive proposal and ask just how precise those conditionals are to be. I argue that, contrary to what Manley and Wasserman imply in their paper, they must be maximally specific, describing in their antecedents complete centred worlds. This (...) suggests a natural semantics for dispositional expressions, which I briefly explore to argue that it lacks uniformity. I end by suggesting a variation on Manley and Wasserman's view which would preserve uniformity, though at the cost of some new puzzling questions. (shrink)

This paper responds to the Radical Behavioral Challenge to normative business ethics. According to RBC, recent research on bounded ethicality shows that it is psychologically impossible for people to follow the prescriptions of normative business ethics. Thus, said prescriptions run afoul of the principle that nobody has an obligation to do something that they cannot do. I show that the only explicit response to this challenge in the business ethics literature is flawed because it limits normative business ethics to condemning (...) practitioners’ behavior without providing usable suggestions for how to do better. I argue that a more satisfying response is to, first, recognize that most obligations in business are wide-scope which, second, implies that there are multiple ways of fulfilling them. This provides a solid theoretical grounding for the increasingly popular view that we have obligations to erect institutional safeguards when bounded ethicality is likely to interfere with our ability to do what is right. I conclude with examples of such safeguards and some advice on how to use the research findings on bounded ethicality in designing ethical business organizations. (shrink)

Alexander Bird puts forward a modest version of anti-Humeanism about the non-fundamental, by providing an argument for the existence of a certain select class of non-fundamental but sparse dispositions: those that have an evolutionary function. I argue that his argument over-generates, so much so that the sparse–abundant distinction, and with it the tenet of his anti-Humean view, becomes obsolete. I suggest an alternative way of understanding anti-Humeanism in the non-fundamental realm, one which is not concerned with the existence of sparse (...) properties but with explanatory relations. (shrink)

Richard Rorty's rejection of prevailing interior-mirror understandings of the presumed relationship between “minds” and “nature,” along with his promotion of nonrepresentational accounts of knowledge, truth, and science, participates in a rich tradition of jointly pragmatist and constructivist views that spans the twentieth century. This contribution to the symposium “Whatever Happened to Richard Rorty?” considers Rorty's complex and ambivalent relation to that tradition, particularly to the work of his American pragmatist predecessors, William James and John Dewey, and to subsequent pragmatist-constructivist antirepresentationalism (...) in contemporary science and technology studies (STS) and “4E” (embodied, embedded, extended, enactive) cognitive theory. A final section on Nicholas Gaskill's contribution to the symposium questions his sense of Rorty's rhetorical recklessness and suggests that his worries over relativism, in Rorty's texts and more generally, are misplaced. (shrink)

In this thesis, I develop a nonreductive and general conception of potentiality, and explore the prospects of a realist account of possibility based on this account of potentiality. Potentialities are properties of individual objects; they include dispositions such as fragility and abilities such as the ability to play the piano. Potentialities are individuated by their manifestation alone. In order to provide a unified account of potentialities, I argue in chapter 2 that dispositions, contrary to philosophical orthodoxy, are best understood in (...) terms only of their manifestations (as disposi- tions to ...), rather than in terms of a stimulus and a manifestation condition (as dispositions to ... if ...). Chapter 3 provides some preliminary motivation for a nonreductive and gen- eral account of potentiality, and chapter 4 develops such an account. The guiding question is how far the notion of potentiality can be extended from the initial ex- amples of familiar dispositions and abilities, and it is argued that it can be extended very far. Various features of potentialities are explored, among them extrinsicality, iterations of potentiality, and the behaviour of potentiality with regard to logical equivalence. In chapter 5, the account is set to work in providing the outlines and a defense of a potentiality-based account of possibility. The basic idea of such an account is that it is possible that p just in case some thing has a potentiality for p. The account is defended against the objection that there may not be enough potential- ities to ground all the possibilities that there are. Finally, in chapter 6, a logic of potentiality is formulated and the logic of possibility derived from it, showing that the potentiality-based account of possibility is formally adequate: it provides pos- sibility with the formal features that modal logicians have studied. I conclude that the proposed account of possibility is a promising research programme. (shrink)

this article makes the case that the rationale of open science and responsible innovation will help to build public planetary goods: the necessity of this rationale is illustrated on the COViD-19 case.

In May 2021, Royal Dutch Shell was ordered by the Hague District Court to significantly reduce its CO2 emissions. This ruling is unprecedented in that it attributes the responsibility for mitigating climate change directly to a specific corporate emitter. Shell neither directly causes climate change alone nor can alleviate it by itself; therefore, what grounds this responsibility attribution? I maintain that this question can be answered via Young’s social connection model of responsibility for justice. I defend two claims: First, I (...) argue that the model explains Shell’s connection to climate change and that this relationship grounds Shell’s responsibility. Second, by identifying a way in which the social connection model could be applied to corporations in legal practice, I further develop Young’s model. I question Young’s distinction between political and legal responsibility for justice and propose that courts could mediate citizens’ actions regarding political responsibilities. (shrink)

Business ethics denial refers to one of two claims about moral motivation in a business context: that there is no need for it, or that it is impossible. Neither of these radical claims is endorsed by serious theorists in the academic fields that study business ethics. Nevertheless, public commentators, as well as university students, often make claims that seem to imply that they subscribe to some form of business ethics denial. This paper fills a gap by making explicit both the (...) various forms that business ethics denial can take, and the reasons why such views are ultimately implausible. The paper argues that this type of serious engagement with business ethics denial should be an important part of the job description for teachers of business ethics. (shrink)

Aristóteles ha sido considerado como el más grande biólogo de la antigüedad clásica, el primer zoólogo y el fundador de la anatomía comparada. En el presente ensayo examinaremos en qué medida el modelo normativo estipulado en los tratados lógicos se conforma a la recogida de datos empíricos presente en los tratados biológicos. En la segunda parte de la investigación examinaremos cómo los tratados lógicos habrían condicionado la explicación del funcionamiento del cerebro, llevando a Aristóteles a cometer un “error escandaloso”.

Risk communication has been generally categorized as a warning act, which is performed in order to prevent or minimize risk. On the other side, risk analysis has also underscored the role played by information in reducing uncertainty about risk. In both approaches the safety aspects related to the protection of the right to health are on focus. However, it seems that there are cases where a risk cannot possibly be avoided or uncertainty reduced, this is for instance valid for the (...) declaration of side effects associated with pharmaceutical products or when a decision about drug approval or retirement must be delivered on the available evidence. In these cases, risk communication seems to accomplish other tasks than preventing risk or reducing uncertainty. The present paper analyzes the legal instruments which have been developed in order to control and manage the risks related to drugs – such as the notion of “development risk” or “residual risk” – and relates them to different kinds of uncertainty. These are conceptualized as epistemic, ecological, metric, ethical, and stochastic, depending on their nature. By referring to this taxonomy, different functions of pharmaceutical risk communication are identified and connected with the legal tools of uncertainty management. The purpose is to distinguish the different functions of risk communication and make explicit their different legal nature and implications. (shrink)

In this review of Ann Whittle's book, I take a closer look at, and raise some concerns about, two crucial steps in the argument of the book. First, I consider the ‘all-in can’, the sense of ‘can’ that is relevant for freedom, and argue that it sits uneasily with Whittle’s foundation in the semantics of agentive modals. Second, I take a closer look at the notion of ‘robust control’ and its role in Whittle's argument for contextualism about moral responsibility, and (...) argue that Whittle’s own conception of control is in tension with her argument for contextualism about moral responsibility. (shrink)

An examination of conceptually and rhetorically equivocating positions among academic philosophers and other theorists who are sympathetic to constructivist epistemological developments but unwilling to relinquish key aspects of traditional understandings of truth and knowledge and/or anxious to avoid charges of relativism. A major problem with the resulting hybrid formulations is that, seeking, as they often claim, to “steer a course between Scylla and Charybdis” and being composed of essentially incompatible elements, they can do little theoretical work. While the personal-intellectual and (...) professional-institutional pressures leading to such dubious navigations are substantial, so also, it is argued, are their intellectual costs. (shrink)

Niewielu łodzian pamięta, że do szybkiego rozwoju naszego miasta w XIX i na początku XX w. przyczynili się niemieccy koloniści z Saksonii, Śląska, Hesji i innych obszarów ówczesnych Niemiec. Zachęceni korzystnymi warunkami, oferowanymi im przez administrację Królestwa Polskiego, przybywali całymi rodzinami, z niewielkim dobytkiem, aby tu, nad Łódką, szukać poprawy bytu. Większość osadników rekrutowała się z kręgów rzemieślników. Byli to tkacze, farbiarze, folusznicy itd. W latach trzydziestych XIX w. powstały trzy osiedla niemieckie: Nowe Miasto, Łódka i Osiedle Ślązaków, które stale (...) rozrastały się. Niewielkie początkowo warszaty również były powiększane o nowe maszyny; właściciele zatrudniali coraz częściej robotników najemnych. W latach sześćdziesiątych XIX w. zaczęły powstawać ogromne fabryki włókiennicze, które na wiele dziesięcioleci zdominowały obraz Łodzi. Do najpotężniejszych należały właśnie fabryki niemieckich fabrykantów, „Lodzermenszów”, takich jak: Oeyer, Scheibler, Kunitzcr czy Grohmann. Lecz nie ta mała grupka najbogatszych nadawała ton w dziewiętnastowiecznej Łodzi, w której, jak w tyglu, mieszały się elementy rosyjskie, polskie, niemieckie i żydowskie. Niemiecka klasa średnia budowała w tym środowisku podwaliny życia kulturalnego. Krótkie ramy przyczynku nie pozwalają zbyt szczegółowo zająć się różnymi zjawiskami i postaciami ówczesnej Łodzi, ale powinien on zachęcić czytelnika do dalszej lektury i własnych badań. (shrink)