As anyone familiar with my own work would readily infer, I have virtually boundless admiration for Wayne Proudfoot’s Religious Experience. In fact, to be honest I think Religious Experience belongs together with Jeff Stout’s The Flight from Authority and David Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion as the books that have most profoundly shaped my teaching and scholarship. More than the other two works, however, Religious Experience has informed my most basic attitudes about the point and proper pursuit of the shared (...) enterprise we call the study of religion. I know I’m not completely idiosyncratic in my estimation of... (shrink)

Many of those working on moral responsibility assume that "once blameworthy, always blameworthy." They believe that blameworthiness is like diamonds: it is forever. We argue that blameworthiness is not forever; rather, it can diminish through time. We begin by showing that the view that blameworthiness is forever is best understood as the claim that personal identity is sufficient for diachronic blameworthiness. We argue that this view should be rejected because it entails that blameworthiness for past action is completely divorced from (...) the distinctive psychological features of the person at the later time. This is because on none of the leading accounts of personal identity does identity require the preservation of any distinctive psychological features, but merely requires some form of continuity. The claim that blameworthiness is forever should therefore be rejected. We then sketch an account of blameworthiness over time, and consider two objections. (shrink)

Epistemic defeat is standardly understood in either evidentialist or responsibilist terms. The seminal treatment of defeat is an evidentialist one, due to John Pollock, who famously distinguishes between undercutting and rebutting defeaters. More recently, an orthogonal distinction due to Jennifer Lackey has become widely endorsed, between so-called doxastic (or psychological) and normative defeaters. We think that neither doxastic nor normative defeaters, as Lackey understands them, exist. Both of Lackey’s categories of defeat derive from implausible assumptions about epistemic responsibility. Although Pollock’s (...) evidentialist view is superior, the evidentialism per se can be purged from it, leaving a general structure of defeat that can be incorporated in a reliabilist theory that is neither evidentialist nor responsibilist in any way. (shrink)

Aristotle’s typical procedure is to identify something's four causes. Intentional action has typically been treated as an exception: most think that Aristotle has the standard causalist account, according to which an intentional action is a bodily movement efficiently caused by an attitude of the appropriate sort. I show that action is not an exception to Aristotle’s typical procedure: he has the resources to specify four causes of action, and thus to articulate a powerful theory of action unlike any other on (...) offer. (shrink)

What should we make of claims by members of other groups to have moralities different from our own? Human Rights in Chinese Thought gives an extended answer to this question in the first study of its kind. It integrates a full account of the development of Chinese rights discourse - reaching back to important, though neglected, origins of that discourse in 17th and 18th century Confucianism - with philosophical consideration of how various communities should respond to contemporary Chinese claims about (...) the uniqueness of their human rights concepts. The book elaborates a plausible kind of moral pluralism and demonstrates that Chinese ideas of human rights do indeed have distinctive characteristics, but it nonetheless argues for the importance and promise of cross-cultural moral engagement. (shrink)

Current challenges in medical practice, research, and administration demand physicians who are familiar with bioethics, health law, and health economics. Curriculum directors at American Association of Medical Colleges-affiliated medical schools were sent confidential surveys requesting the number of required hours of the above subjects and the years in which they were taught, as well as instructor names. The number of relevant publications since 1990 for each named instructor was assessed by a PubMed search.In sum, teaching in all three subjects combined (...) comprises less than two percent of the total hours in the American medical curriculum, and most instructors have not recently published articles in the fields they teach. This suggests that medical schools should reevaluate their curricula and instructors in bioethics, health law, and health economics. (shrink)

Various prominent theories of pain assume that it is pain’s biological function to inform organisms about damage to their bodies. I argue that this is a mistake. First, there is no biological evidence to support the notion that pain was originally selected for its informative capacities, nor that it currently contributes to the fitness of organisms in this specific capacity. Second, neurological evidence indicates that modulating mechanisms in the nociceptive system systematically prevent pain from serving a primarily informative role. These (...) considerations threaten to undermine standard perceptual and representational accounts of pain. (shrink)

This volume aimed to highlight narrative identities of European cities or city neighbourhoods that have been overlooked, such as mid-sized cities. These cities are neither small towns nor metropolises, cities that are now unveiling their appeal or specificity. The present special issue thus covers a range of representations of cities. The articles investigate more systematically how different texts deal with various cities from different experiential and fictional perspectives. The issue covers the geographical scope across Europe, from east to west or (...) vice versa, as well as a range of different works of national literature(s), but with a clear emphasis on mid-sized European cities that have until now been deemed as lesser-known, secondary, peripheral, ‘other’ cities that are in the focus of the research of the COST project Writing Urban Places. New Narratives of the European City, within which this journal issue is being published. (shrink)

In this article I argue that the value of epistemic justification cannot be adequately explained as being instrumental to truth. I intend to show that false belief, which is no means to truth, can nevertheless still be of epistemic value. This in turn will make a good prima facie case that justification is valuable for its own sake. If this is right, we will have also found reason to think that truth value monism is false: assuming that true belief does (...) have value, there is more of final epistemic value than mere true belief. (shrink)

In this commentary, I critique three aspects of Emily Walsh's proposal to reduce the moral and legal weight of advance directives: (1) the ambiguity of its initial thesis, (2) its views about the ethics and legality of clinical practice, and (3) its interpretation and application of Ronald Dworkin’s account of advance directives and L.A. Paul's view on transformative experience. I also consider what Walsh’s proposal would mean for people facing the prospect of dementia. I conclude that our reasons to honor (...) many advance directives survive the move to a transformative experience framework. (shrink)

This article argues that a person’s well-being at a time and the goodness of her life are two distinct values. It is commonly accepted as platitudinous that well-being is what makes a life good for the person who lives it. Even philosophers who distinguish between well-being at a time and the goodness of a life still typically assume that increasing a person’s well-being at some particular moment, all else equal, necessarily improves her life on the whole. I develop a precise (...) statement of this standard assumption, and then show that it is subject to counterexamples. The possibility of such counterexamples depends only on premises similar to those sometimes invoked to argue that a person’s well-being over a long period is not simply the aggregate well-being of the shorter periods that compose the long period. The refutation of the standard assumption linking well-being and life-goodness entails that these are distinct and sometimes divergent values. As an alternative to the standard assumption, it is proposed that well-being is best understood as an ingredient in a good life. (shrink)

The standard treatment of conditional probability leaves conditional probability undefined when the conditioning proposition has zero probability. Nonetheless, some find the option of extending the scope of conditional probability to include zero-probability conditions attractive or even compelling. This article reviews some of the pitfalls associated with this move, and concludes that, for the most part, probabilities conditional on zero-probability propositions are more trouble than they are worth.

Much of the intuitive appeal of evidentialism results from conflating two importantly different conceptions of evidence. This is most clear in the case of perceptual justification, where experience is able to provide evidence in one sense of the term, although not in the sense that the evidentialist requires. I argue this, in part, by relying on a reading of the Sellarsian dilemma that differs from the version standardly encountered in contemporary epistemology, one that is aimed initially at the epistemology of (...) introspection but which generalizes to theories of perceptual justification as well. (shrink)

One finds, in Maxwell's writings on thermodynamics and statistical physics, a conception of the nature of these subjects that differs in interesting ways from the way that they are usually conceived. In particular, though—in agreement with the currently accepted view—Maxwell maintains that the second law of thermodynamics, as originally conceived, cannot be strictly true, the replacement he proposes is different from the version accepted by most physicists today. The modification of the second law accepted by most physicists is a probabilistic (...) one: although statistical fluctuations will result in occasional spontaneous differences in temperature or pressure, there is no way to predictably and reliably harness these to produce large violations of the original version of the second law. Maxwell advocates a version of the second law that is strictly weaker; the validity of even this probabilistic version is of limited scope, limited to situations in which we are dealing with large numbers of molecules en masse and have no ability to manipulate individual molecules. Connected with this is his concept of the thermodynamic concepts of heat, work, and entropy; on the Maxwellian view, these are concepts that must be relativized to the means we have available for gathering information about and manipulating physical systems. The Maxwellian view is one that deserves serious consideration in discussions of the foundation of statistical mechanics. It has relevance for the project of recovering thermodynamics from statistical mechanics because, in such a project, it matters which version of the second law we are trying to recover. (shrink)

To what extent are cognitive capacities, especially perceptual capacities, informationally encapsulated and to what extent are they cognitively penetrable? And why does this matter? Two reasons we care about encapsulation/penetrability are: (a) encapsulation is sometimes held to be definitional of modularity, and (b) penetrability has epistemological implications independent of modularity. I argue that modularity does not require encapsulation; that modularity may have epistemological implications independently of encapsulation; and that the epistemological implications of the cognitive penetrability of perception are messier than (...) is sometimes thought. (shrink)

Neo-Humean instrumentalists hold that anagent's reasons for acting are grounded in theagent's desires. Numerous objections have beenleveled against this view, but the mostcompelling concerns the problem of ``aliendesires'' – desires with which the agent doesnot identify. The standard version ofneo-Humeanism holds that these desires, likeany others, generate reasons for acting. Avariant of neo-Humeanism that grounds anagent's reasons on her values, rather than allof her desires, avoids this implication, but atthe cost of denying that we have reasons to acton innocent whims. (...) A version of neo-Humeanismthat holds that an agent has reason to satisfyall of her desires that are not in conflictwith her values appears to allow us to grantthe reason-giving force of innocent whims whiledenying the reason-giving force of alien desires. (shrink)

Human cognitive acts are directed towards objects extended in space of a wide range of different types. What follows is a new proposal for bringing order into this typological clutter. The theory of spatially extended objects should make room not only for the objects of physics but also for objects at higher levels, including the objects of geography and of related disciplines. It should leave room for different types of boundaries, including both the bona fide boundaries which we find in (...) the physical world and the fiat (or human-demarcation-induced) boundaries with which much of geography has to deal. Two distinct axiomatic theories of boundaries are accordingly presented, and the need for both is examined in some detail. The resultant dual framework is shown to have application above all for our understanding of issues involving contact, division, and separation, issues which have posed serious difficulties for the ontological theories of boundaries that have been proposed hitherto. (shrink)

Do famous athletes have special obligations to act virtuously? A number of philosophers have investigated this question by examining whether famous athletes are subject to special role model obligations (Wellman 2003; Feezel 2005; Spurgin 2012). In this paper we will take a different approach and give a positive response to this question by arguing for the position that sport and gaming celebrities are ‘ambassadors of the game’: moral agents whose vocations as rule-followers have unique implications for their non-lusory lives. According (...) to this idea, the actions of a game’s players and other stakeholders—especially the actions of its stars—directly affect the value of the game itself, a fact which generates additional moral reasons to behave in a virtuous manner. We will begin by explaining the three main positions one may take with respect to the question: moral exceptionalism, moral generalism, and moral exemplarism. We will argue that no convincing case for moral exemplarism has thus far been made, which gives us reason to look for new ways to defend this position. We then provide our own ‘ambassadors of the game’ account and argue that it gives us good reason to think that sport and game celebrities are subject to special obligations to act virtuously. (shrink)

Ordinary reasoning about space—we argue—is first and foremost reasoning about things or events located in space. Accordingly, any theory concerned with the construction of a general model of our spatial competence must be grounded on a general account of the sort of entities that may enter into the scope of the theory. Moreover, on the methodological side the emphasis on spatial entities (as opposed to purely geometrical items such as points or regions) calls for a reexamination of the conceptual categories (...) required for this task. Building on material presented in an earlier paper, in this work we offer some examples of what this amounts to, of the difficulties involved, and of the main directions along which spatial theories should be developed so as to combine formal sophistication with some affinity with common sense. (shrink)

In this short response to Kerstein and Bognar, we clarify three aspects of the complete lives system, which we propose as a system of allocating scarce medical interventions. We argue that the complete lives system provides meaningful guidance even though it does not provide an algorithm. We also defend the investment modification to the complete lives system, which prioritizes adolescents and older children over younger children; argue that sickest-first allocation remains flawed when scarcity is absolute and ongoing; and argue that (...) Kerstein and Bognar are mistaken to base their allocation principles on differences in personhood. (shrink)

The thesis that rationality consists in the straight-forward maximization of utility has not lacked critics. Typically, however, detractors reject the Humean picture of rationality upon which it seems based; they seek to emancipate reason from the tyranny of the passions. It is, then, noteworthy when an attack on this thesis comes from ‘within the ranks.’David Gauthier's paper ‘Reason and Maximization’ is just such an attack; and for this reason, among others, it is interesting. It is not successful, though. In defense (...) of this conclusion, we shall begin by relating the essentials of Gauthier's argument. Then we shall examine in some detail Gauthier's claim that the principle of straighforward max-imization fails to be self-supporting. We shall argue that Gauthier's defense of this claim is at best incomplete. Finally, we shall show that the fact that a normative principle is self-subverting or non-self-supporting does not entail that the principle is defective. (shrink)

This three-part paper presents Gordon Pask’s conversation theory (CT) and interaction of actors theory (IA) and outlines ways to apply these cybernetic approaches to designing technologies and scenarios for both formal and informal learning. The first part of the paper covers concepts central to CT and IA, explaining the relationship between conceptual and mechanical operators, and machines mediating informal and formal learning. The second part of the paper applies visual representations of CT and IA to understanding the use of Pask’s (...) course assembly systems (CASTE and THOUGHTSTICKER), created between the late 1960s and the 1980s, and the ThoughtShuffler search interface, created in the 2010s. The third part proposes two pathways for design based on CT and IA: firstly, the potential for designers and observers to reformulate the qualities of tools and learning scenarios to augment human thinking and collective action; and secondly, the possibility to create tools with malleable interfaces that allow users to become intermediaries rather than consumers of knowledge. (shrink)

Dieser Aufsatz ist eine kritische und erkundende Diskussion von Plantingas Behauptung, daß bestimmte Aussagen, aus denen evidentermaßen folgt, daß Gott existiert, berechtigterweise basal sein könnten. Im kritischen Abschnitt argumentiere ich dafür, daß es Plantinga nicht gelingt zu zeigen, daß das Kriterium des modernen Fundamentalisten für berechtigte Basalität, dem zufolge solche Aussagen nicht berechtigterweise basal sein können, selbstreferentiell inkohärent oder anderweitig mangelhaft ist. Im erkundenden Abschnitt versuche ich, ein Argument für die Auffassung zu entwickeln, daß solche Aussagen, selbst wenn sie berechtigterweise (...) basal sein könnten, wenn überhaupt, nur selten berechtigterweise basal für intellektuell differenzierte erwachsene Theisten unserer Kultur wären. (shrink)

Maurice Merleau-Ponty is often interpreted as claiming that opportunities for action are directly present in perceptual experience. However, he does not provide much evidence for how or why this would occur, and one can doubt that this is an appropriate interpretation of his phenomenological descriptions. In particular, it could be argued the Merleau-Pontyian descriptions mistakenly attribute pre-perceptual or post-perceptual elements such as allocation of attention or judgment to the perceptual experience itself. This paper argues for the Merleau-Pontyian idea that opportunities (...) for action are present in perceptual experience. It further argues that the phenomenological descriptions can be supported and explained via reference to contemporary research on motor imagery. In particular, it will be argued that non-conscious, covert motor imagery is used to prepare for and regulate skilled actions, and that it is plausible that this imagery combines with perception (likely vision) to create a single experience of the environment as enabling action. The paper will also show that contemporary views on motor imagery are broadly compatible with Merleau-Ponty’s aims. (shrink)

On the face of it, Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s views bear a strong resemblance to contemporary disjunctivist theories of perception, especially John McDowell’s epistemological disjunctivism. Like McDowell (and other disjunctivists), Merleau-Ponty seems to be a direct realist about perception and holds that veridical and illusory perceptions are distinct. This paper furthers this comparison. Furthermore, it is argued that elements of Merleau-Ponty’s thought provide a stronger case for McDowell’s kind of epistemological view than McDowell himself provides. Merleau-Ponty’s early thought can be used to (...) develop a unique version of epistemological disjunctivism that is worth consideration alongside contemporary views on perceptual knowledge. (shrink)

Felix reaches up to catch a high line drive to left field and fires the ball off to Benji at home plate, who then tags the runner trying to score. For Felix to catch the ball and transfer it from his glove to his throwing hand, he needs to have a sense of where his hands are relative to one another and the rest of his body. This sort of information is subconsciously tracked in the body schema (or postural schema), (...) a representation of the current bodily posture that is updated on the basis of proprioceptive inputs. While the existence of the body schema in not in dispute, its origin is. After reviewing the competing proposals, I introduce the conceptual tools needed to move the debate forward and apply them to the question of the extent to which the body schema could be learned from perceptual input in utero. I argue that it could give rise to something recognizable as the body schema, though not quite rising to the level of the mature body schema. After considering the implications for further research on the origins of the body schema, I show how these results apply to other body representations, helping clarify the vexing question of the number, nature, and interactions among body representations in the brain. This theoretical work also promises to advance our understanding and treatment protocols for disorders affecting such body representations (e.g., anorexia nervosa). (shrink)

This paper investigates the emotional import of literary devices deployed in fiction. Reflecting on the often-favored approach in the analytic tradition that locates fictional characters, events, and narratives as sources of readers’ emotions, I attempt to broaden the scope of analysis by accounting for how literary devices trigger non-cognitive emotions. I argue that giving more expansive consideration to literary devices by which authors present content facilitates a better understanding of how fiction engages emotion. In doing so, I also explore the (...) somatic dimension of reading fiction. (shrink)

This paper offers an overview of consciousness and personal identity in eighteenth-century philosophy. Locke introduces the concept of persons as subjects of consciousness who also simultaneously recognize themselves as such subjects. Hume, however, argues that minds are nothing but bundles of perceptions, lacking intrinsic unity at a time or across time. Yet Hume thinks our emotional responses to one another mean that persons in everyday life are defined by their virtues, vices, bodily qualities, property, riches, and the like. Rousseau also (...) takes persons to be fundamentally determined by our socially-mediated emotional responses to one another, though unlike Hume or Locke, he has little interest in placing this account of persons alongside a larger discussion of the human mind and its operations. Developing this idea further, Kant argues that our moral commitments require that we must take ourselves to be free. The fundamental equality that Rousseau sought in the political order is, for Kant, a requirement that reason puts on all of us. (shrink)

Recent work by Peijnenburg, Atkinson, and Herzberg suggests that infinitists who accept a probabilistic construal of justification can overcome significant challenges to their position by attending to mathematical treatments of infinite probabilistic regresses. In this essay, it is argued that care must be taken when assessing the significance of these formal results. Though valuable lessons can be drawn from these mathematical exercises (many of which are not disputed here), the essay argues that it is entirely unclear that the form of (...) infinitism that results meets a basic requirement: namely, providing an account of infinite chains of propositions qua reasons made available to agents. (shrink)

While it is often said that robotics should aspire to reproducible and measurable results that allow benchmarking, I argue that a focus on benchmarking can be a hindrance for progress in robotics. The reason is what I call the ‘measure-target confusion’, the confusion between a measure of progress and the target of progress. Progress on a benchmark (the measure) is not identical to scientific or technological progress (the target). In the past, several academic disciplines have been led into pursuing only (...) reproducible and measurable ‘scientific’ results – robotics should be careful to follow that line because results that can be benchmarked must be specific and context-dependent, but robotics targets whole complex systems for a broad variety of contexts. While it is extremely valuable to improve benchmarks to reduce the distance be- tween measure and target, the general problem to measure progress towards more intelligent machines (the target) will not be solved by benchmarks alone; we need a balanced approach with sophisticated benchmarks, plus real-life testing, plus qualitative judgment. (shrink)

While theories of animal rights maintain that nonhuman animals possess prima facie rights, such as the right to life, the dominant philosophies of animal rights permit the killing of nonhuman animals for reasons of self-defense. I argue that the animal rights discourse on defensive killing is problematic because it seems to entail that any nonhuman animal who poses a threat to human beings can be justifiably harmed without question. To avoid this human-privileged conclusion, I argue that the animal rights position (...) needs to both (1) deploy a new criterion of liability to defensive harm, and (2) seriously consider whether human beings themselves are liable to defensive harm in human-animal conflicts. By shifting the focus to whether humans are liable to defensive harm, we will find that in many situations of human-animal conflict, human beings are actually the ones liable to be harmed because they are often culpable or, to some degree, morally responsible for posing an unjust threat to nonhuman animals. (shrink)

This paper proposes to reconstruct Boaventura de Sousa Santos' conception of "epistemologies of the south" both (a) as a critical theory aiming at denouncing the impoverishment of the epistemic field entailed by the normative imposition of a certain model of knowledge (what we call "the monoculture of reason"), and (b) as a long-term political project of a harmonic coexistence of different epistemologies ("an ecology of knowledges").

In this essay I will try to convince you: (1) that the question of God’s relation to time is of practical relevance for every believer (2) that the idea of God being outside time is a philosophically untenable concept which creates major clashes with Christian doctrine and therefore that every Christian should adopt some temporalist view of God To do that, I will present four arguments against the “outside time” view of God. I then briefly treat the question where the (...) idea of God’s timelessness presumably came from and conclude with an outlook on problems that temporalist accounts of God must face. (shrink)

Scientific literacy is built on critical thinking. The postbaccalaureate workforce enhances our economies and societies by contributing a wealth of knowledge and skill sets to local communities, respective industries, and beyond as our world becomes increasingly interconnected. Education in scientific literacy should teach students how to learn about science and how to cultivate and communicate a positive attitude about science. Learners in a 200-level nonmajors biotechnology course engaged with a series of ethical dilemmas after mastering the basic elements of argument (...) structure and advanced tools in argument evaluation. To introduce collaboration as a constructive process in undergraduate education, student interactions with peers require guidance, flexibility, and compassion to learn from each other. Students gain critical thinking mastery from two modules addressing how we argue and evaluate claims. Students apply these critical thinking skills to various ethical arguments involving responsible conduct of research training. Using our structured and interdisciplinary approach, new scholars learn through practice how to read, analyze, and evaluate research scenarios and respond to potential ethical situations. This strategy allows students to develop important scholarly skills, including a systematic approach to evaluating credibility and applying generosity to theirs and others' understanding of their circumstances. (shrink)

Peirce and Dewey were generally more concerned with the process of scientific activity than purely mathematical work. However, their accounts of knowledge production afford some insights into the epistemology of mathematical postulates, especially definition and axioms. Their rejection of rationalist metaphysics and their emphasis on continuity in inquiry provides the pretext for the pragmatic a priori – hypothetical and operational assumptions whose justification relies on their fruitfulness in the long run. This paper focuses on the application of this idea to (...) the epistemology of definitions and an account of progress in mathematics, although it has broader implications for the study of conceptual change and the function and basis of presuppositions in the sciences. (shrink)

Nikolay Kondratieff is known primarily for his theory of long cycles. However, it is worth recalling that he was among the first who started to investigate the nature of different economic cycles and their systematic interaction. Actually the primary classification of cycles into short, medium and long belongs to Kondratieff.

Abraham J. Malherbe was one of the most influential New Testament scholars of the past half century. He is especially known for his use of Hellenistic moral philosophy in the interpretation of New Testament texts, especially Pauline literature. Whilst the comparative study of New Testament and Greco-Roman material remains a contentious approach in scholarship, Malherbe’s work provides important pointers in how to make such comparisons in a meaningful and reasoned manner, by paying due respect to the integrity of the texts (...) being compared and to the function textual elements have within their own contexts. I discussed the salient features of Malherbe’s approach, focusing in particular on his study of topoi. One of the most significant findings was Malherbe’s emphasis on the dialectical combination of common and individual elements in such topoi, which enabled ancient authors to embed their own texts within the cultural discourse of their time. His approach opens the way to further research of the New Testament within its philosophical context without requiring proof of a genealogical relationship between the texts or authors concerned. (shrink)

In "Evil and the Justice of God", N.T. Wright presses the point that attempting to solve the philosophical problem of evil is an immature response to the existence of evil--a response that belittles the real problem of evil, which is just the fact that evil is bad and needs to be dealt with. As you might expect, I am not inclined to endorse this sort of sweeping indictment of the entire field of research on the philosophical problem of evil. (I (...) sort of doubt that Wright really meant to either.) But I do think that there is a kernel of truth in what I take to be Wright's fundamental objection to attempts to solve the philosophical problem of evil. In the first section of what follows, I will try briefly to explain why. I will then go on to argue that, despite this fact, certain efforts at solving the problem of evil avoid Wright's objection. Indeed, drawing on recent work by Elenore Stump, I will argue that one perfectly legitimate way to try to solve the philosophical problem of evil is to follow precisely what seems to be the main piece of advice in "Evil and the Justice of God": namely, to look more seriously than we have at the attitudes taken toward evil by human authors of and characters in the Bible, and to attend more carefully to what the Bible says about how God deals with evil. (shrink)

This is a supplement to our book "Le tribolazioni del filosofare. Comedia metaphysica ne la quale si tratta de li errori & de le pene de l’Infero". It features an entirely new canto of the poem (originally thought to be lost) along with an extensive commentary. The canto covers the first ring of the circle of the Sullen, which hosts the Adverse to the Possible, and deals with several philosophical questions concerning the metaphysics of modality.

How does an engagement with religious traditions (broadly construed) illuminate and complicate the task of thinking through the ethics of eating? In this introduction, we survey some of the many food ethical issues that arise within various religious traditions and also consider some ethical positions that such traditions take on food. To say the least, we do not attempt to address all the ethical issues concerning food that arise in religious contexts, nor do we attempt to cover every tradition’s take (...) on food. We look at just a few traditions and a few interesting writings on food ethics and religion: What do they say about the ethics of eating? Why do they say these things? Here we use the terms “food ethics” and “religion” ecumenically as big tents under which many importantly different sorts of things may be grouped. Among the wide range of food ethical issues we consider in this chapter, for example, are religious views about the ethics of keeping, hurting, and killing animals, killing plants, dominion over creation, wastefulness, purity, blessing, atonement, and the connection between food and character. We realize, moreover, that it might be a stretch to label some of the views engaged by selected readings in this chapter as “religious” on a stringent understanding of that term; Lisa Kemmerer’s “Indigenous Traditions,” for instance, addresses some views that are recognizably spiritual but perhaps not religious in a strict sense. We hope that our ecumenical usage of the term can bring these important traditions to bear on the discussion without reducing them to something they are not. (shrink)

This paper defends a new argument for enabling citizen participation in government: individuals must have genuine opportunities to try to change the law in order to be able to satisfy duties of conscience. Without such opportunities, citizens who regard systems of related laws as partially unjust face a moral dilemma. If they comply with these laws willingly without also trying to change them, they commit a pro tanto wrong by willingly participating in injustice . If they disobey, or if they (...) obey only to avoid sanction, they respond inadequately to the morally important purposes that the laws advance despite their injustice. Government should help citizens avoid this dilemma. This argument bolsters the non-instrumentalist view that responsiveness in the political process is desirable even if it does not promote just legislative outcomes. It also helps to explain what governments owe to citizens with minority political views. (shrink)

In this essay it is shown that the imaginative art of scientific theorizing – at its technical best – animates Quine's philosophy as importantly as the more Spartan norms honored in his present pantheon of virtues. By drawing a contrast between the standing of theories in philosophy and theories in science, it will be shown that the speculative reaches of philosophy, along with developments in semantic theory, now oblige an internal revision of Quine's stance against meaning as it was announced (...) in “Two Dogmas of Empiricism.” So, corollary to this proposed revision, I argue that in natural philosophy, the muse of the “art of science” deserves an address along with the more Spartan norms in Quine's present philosophical pantheon. As semantic theory and analyticity thus gain a measure of philosophical tenability, Quine's holism emerges as the more central doctrine of his mature vision. (shrink)

In this essay, the tension that Benacerraf identifies for theories of mathematical truth is used as the vehicle for arguing against a particular desideratum for semantic theories. More specifically, I place in question the desideratum that a semantic theory, provided for some area of discourse, should run in parallel with the semantic theory holding for the rest of the language. The importance of this desideratum is also made clear by means of tracing out the subtle implications of its rejection.

This article aims to serve as an accessible introduction to the idea of "ontotheology" and to the so-called "ontotheological critique of Western metaphysics" for which the twentieth-century German philosopher Martin Heidegger is especially well known. I begin by distinguishing two uses of "ontotheology" employed respectively by Kant and Heidegger, and go on to develop the Heideggerian interpretation and critique of ontotheology under three main headings: The Onto-theo-logical Constitution of Western Metaphysics; Ontotheology's Problematic Legacy: Anxiety, Calculation, Oblivion; and Ontotheology and God. (...) The article concludes with an annotated bibliography of helpful resources for learning more about ontotheology, the critique of ontotheology, and directions the critique has taken after Heidegger. (shrink)