In his paper "Why a Class Can't Change Its Members," Richard Sharvy appears to establish the impossibility of the existence of a variable class—that is, a class that at one time has a member that is not a member of it at another time. I first indicate the importance of Sharvy's argument for our understanding of the concept of identity in the contexts of time and modality, and I summarize his argument. Sharvy says that a (...) class C that has one (non-variable) group of members at t2 and another (nonvariable) group of members at t2 would be identical with both the class C1 that always has the first group as members and the class C2 that always has the second group as members. This is an impossibility, since in general, one thing cannot be identical with two.I then criticize Sharvy's argument by pointing out a weakness in the defense of the claim that C = C1 and C = C2. This weakness is due to an ambiguity in Sharvy's Principle of Extensionality. (shrink)

The objective Bayesian view of proof (or logical probability, or evidential support) is explained and defended: that the relation of evidence to hypothesis (in legal trials, science etc) is a strictly logical one, comparable to deductive logic. This view is distinguished from the thesis, which had some popularity in law in the 1980s, that legal evidence ought to be evaluated using numerical probabilities and formulas. While numbers are not always useful, a central role is played in uncertain reasoning by the (...) ‘proportional syllogism’, or argument from frequencies, such as ‘nearly all aeroplane flights arrive safely, so my flight is very likely to arrive safely’. Such arguments raise the ‘problem of the reference class’, arising from the fact that an individual case may be a member of many different classes in which frequencies differ. For example, if 15 per cent of swans are black and 60 per cent of fauna in the zoo is black, what should I think about the likelihood of a swan in the zoo being black? The nature of the problem is explained, and legal cases where it arises are given. It is explained how recent work in data mining on the relevance of features for prediction provides a solution to the reference class problem. (shrink)

The naive theory of properties states that for every condition there is a property instantiated by exactly the things which satisfy that condition. The naive theory of properties is inconsistent in classical logic, but there are many ways to obtain consistent naive theories of properties in nonclassical logics. The naive theory of classes adds to the naive theory of properties an extensionality rule or axiom, which states roughly that if two classes have exactly the same members, they are identical. In (...) this paper we examine the prospects for obtaining a satisfactory naive theory of classes. We start from a result by Ross Brady, which demonstrates the consistency of something resembling a naive theory of classes. We generalize Brady’s result somewhat and extend it to a recent system developed by Andrew Bacon. All of the theories we prove consistent contain an extensionality rule or axiom. But we argue that given the background logics, the relevant extensionality principles are too weak. For example, in some of these theories, there are universal classes which are not declared coextensive. We elucidate some very modest demands on extensionality, designed to rule out this kind of pathology. But we close by proving that even these modest demands cannot be jointly satisfied. In light of this new impossibility result, the prospects for a naive theory of classes are bleak. (shrink)

The author reviews the planned withdrawal of healthcare from the primary public hospital, Grady Memorial Hospital, of Atlanta, Georgia. Prior to passage of the Affordable Care Act of 2010, at least half of the patients had no public or private health insurance and their care was financially supported by State and County funding as well as supplementation from Emory University. New administration in the elected positions of the State and County and at the University reached agreement to decrease care. The (...) University President stated that the Hippocratic Oath was no longer valid for salaried physicians who must follow the direction of their business manager. The author, a tenured Professor, was forcibly transferred to the Veterans Hospital, which also was withholding standard medical care, including life-saving medications. Organizing multiple concerned organizations including members of the King Center, the Carter Center, the Open Door Community Center, Gay Rights, etc., (Grady Coalition) multiple public protests were successful in raising the necessary funds to continue adequate care at Grady and begin an investigation of the Veterans Affairs Hospital. (shrink)

Probabilistic inference from frequencies, such as "Most Quakers are pacifists; Nixon is a Quaker, so probably Nixon is a pacifist" suffer from the problem that an individual is typically a member of many "reference classes" (such as Quakers, Republicans, Californians, etc) in which the frequency of the target attribute varies. How to choose the best class or combine the information? The article argues that the problem can be solved by the feature selection methods used in contemporary Big Data (...) science: the correct reference class is that determined by the features relevant to the target, and relevance is measured by correlation (that is, a feature is relevant if it makes a difference to the frequency of the target). (shrink)

Aesthetic theorists often interpret and understand works of art through the social and political context that creates and inspires the work. The recent economic recessions, and the accompanying austerity measures in many European countries, provide an interesting test case for this contextual understanding. Economists debate whether or not spending on entertainment and arts drops during times of recession and austerity. Some economists assume that spending will decline in times of austerity, but others point to evidence that spending on creative arts (...) and entertainment remains steady and even increases during a recession because of the relief and escapism that the arts provide. Tax incentives and production rights are often given to filmmakers in the United States; in hopes that such projects will enliven a local economy and provide work for a local creative community. In the context of recent austerity measures in Greece and Spain, new and creative ways for members of the arts community to bring about new projects, and fund them in ways that critique political leadership, have emerged. Following Richard Wollheim’s classic aesthetic theory of “criticism as retrieval,” we should be mindful of the cultural values that are at stake in the creativity-culture market now being created. In any case, some scholars estimate that austerity measures in many countries will last until 2020, giving us ample opportunity to be even more “creative” with both financial incentives and artistic achievements. Keywords: Austerity, Cultural Economy, Creative Class, Tax Incentives, Aesthetics, Microtheatres, Entertainment. (shrink)

Participant observation ethnography as a primary methodology, while common in other areas of social science, has been underrepresented in Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) literature. In many studies, ethnography is used to supplement findings or address questions arrived at through other methodologies, whereas the present pilot study promotes its viability as a primary method. In the Fall of 2017, graduate student researchers (GSRs) and other staff at the “Teaching Center” (TC) used ethnographic methodology as a means of meeting the (...) TC’s mandate for the 2017- 2018 year. The TC wanted to gather data on the efficacy of the classes as well as the staff members’ own processes of curriculum design and implementation. By adopting participant observation ethnography, the GSRs provided data for the TC and also discovered the utility of ethnography as a tool for designing research questions. This paper has five core sections devoted to describing the pilot study. These sections cover the aims of the TC and the context in which this pilot study was developed; a review of SoTL literature and the presence of ethnography as a primary methodology within it; an outline of the development of the methods used in this study; and how ethnography served as a tool for designing subsequent research projects. It concludes by offering several recommendations and comments to SoTL practitioners who are considering using ethnographic methods in higher education. (shrink)

Classrooms are unlevel knowing fields, contested terrains where knowledge and ignorance are produced and circulate with equal vigor, and where members of dominant groups are accustomed to having an epistemic home-terrain advantage. My project focuses on one form of resistance that regularly surfaces in discussions with social-justice content. Privilege-preserving epistemic pushback is a variety of willful ignorance that many members of dominant groups engage in when asked to consider both the lived and structural injustices that members of marginalized groups experience (...) daily. I argue that this dominant form of resistance is neither an expression of skepticism nor a critical-thinking practice. I suggest that standard philosophical engagements with these expressions of resistance are incapable of tracking the harms of privilege-preserving epistemic pushback. I recommend treating this pushback as a “shadow text,” that is, as a text that runs alongside the readings in ways that offer no epistemic friction. I offer this as one critical philosophical practice for making students mindful of the ways they contribute to the circulation of ignorance and epistemic violence during the course of their discussions. (shrink)

It seems that by ‘having meaning’ or ‘significating’ (σημαίνειν) Aristotle has something like kind of determination in mind: ‘If ‘man’ has one meaning, let this be ‘two-footed animal’; by having one meaning I understand this: If such and such is a man, then if anything is a man, that will be what being a man is (τοῦτ’ ἔσται τὸ ἄνθρώπῳ εἶναι).’ (Met., Γ, 1006a31-34) This also brings kind of whole-particular or class-member relationship to mind: if a word has (...) one meaning, everything that is a particular case of that word, has that meaning. If this is true, we can say ‘significating one thing’ not only determines a word to a sense, it also determines a particular to the sense of the universal word. And this determination is a determination of being, that is, it determines ‘being something’ to a specific sense: to say that A is the meaning of B, whatever will be a B, it will necessarily have A as its meaning. The mental process Aristotle hints as what happens in signification of something is also a determinative act: ‘Thought stops and arrests the hearer’ (ἵστησι γὰρ ὁ λέγων τὴν διὰνοιαν, καὶ ὁ ἀκούσας ἠρέμησεν). (OI., I, 3, 16b19-22) That signification is kind of determination can be approved from Aristotle’s emphasis that the meaning must be ‘one’ thing, or at least a limited number of things. This is evident both by Aristotle’s accompanying ‘one’ with ‘having meaning’ in ‘having one meaning’ (‌σημαίνει ἓν ... ἓν σημαίνειν) and by his assertion of the necessity of limited determination just after the above mentioned text: ‘And it makes no difference even if one were to say a word has several meanings, if only they are limited in number.’ (Met., Γ, 1006a31-34) Not having a limited number of senses, Aristotle argues, implies that there is no ‘one’ meaning for the word and this is not different from having no meaning at all: ‘For not to have one meaning is to have no meaning’ (Met., Γ, 1006b6-7) Aristotle takes this ‘signification of one’ as an argument for both reasoning and PNC. Not having ‘one’ thing as the meaning of a word annihilates reasoning: ‘For it is impossible to think of anything if we do not think of one thing.’ Therefore, Aristotle asks us not only to accept that a word has a meaning but that it has ‘one’ meaning: ‘Let it be assumed then … that the name is significant of something and signifies ‘one’ thing. (Met., Γ, 1006b8-13) ‘Having one signification’ has also another important result for Aristotle because it supports PNC: ‘It is impossible, then, that being a man should mean precisely not being a man, if ‘man’ is not only a signification of one subject but also has one meaning (μὴ μόνον καθ’ ἑνος ἀλλὰ καὶ ἓν).’ (Met., Γ, 1006b13-15) Rejecting PNC and approving both being and not being of a thing is indeed destroying signification: ‘He, then, who says this is and is not denies what he affirms, so that what the word signifies, he says it does not signify; and this is impossible. Therefore, if ‘this is’ signifies something, one cannot truly assert the contradictory.’ (Met., K, 1062a16-20; cf. a20-23) 1) Formula: what is signified That which is signified by a word is a formula, which becomes the definition of the word out of its signification: ‘Out of their necessarily meaning something definition is created; for the formula, of which the word is a signification, becomes definition.’ (Met., Γ, 1012a21-24) Now if we consider the three above mentioned points, namely that i) signification is of being, ii) signification is having one meaning and iii) what is signified is indeed a formula, together, we can understand Aristotle better when he says ‘being one’ and ‘having one formula’ are the same: ‘For being one means this, as in the case of ‘raiment’ and ‘dress,’ that the formula is one.’ (Met., Γ, 1006b25-27) 2) What has signification Besides words, sentences have signification and ‘sentence is a speech significant based on synthesis.’ (OI, I, 4, 16b26) Syllables and parts of simple words do not have meaning and are mere sounds. About parts of composite words, however, although they contribute to the meaning of the whole, they do not have meaning by themselves (καθ’ αὑτό). (OI, I, 4, 16b30-) . (shrink)

Two classes of arguments are often deployed by the anti-global egalitarians against attempts to universalize the demands of distributive equality. One are arguments attempting to show that global egalitarians have misconstrued the reasons for why equality matters domestically, and hence have wrongly extended these reasons to the global arena. These arguments hold that the boundary of distributive justice is effectively coextensive with the boundaries of state. The other are arguments that attempt to show that membership in political societies generates special (...) duties among members that may outweigh the demands of global egalitarianism. These arguments appeal to the ethical significance of state boundaries and membership. In my defense of global egalitarianism, I reject both the attempts to limit the boundary of justice and the attempts to give state boundaries special moral significance and priority. In particular, I will argue that the boundary of justice cannot coincide with the boundaries of states when the justice of the boundaries is at issue. (shrink)

The expressions ‘form’, ‘structure’, ‘schema’, ‘shape’, ‘pattern’, ‘figure’, ‘mold’, and related locutions are used in logic both as technical terms and in metaphors. This paper juxtaposes, distinguishes, and analyses uses of [FOR these PUT such] expressions by logicians. No [FOR such PUT similar] project has been attempted previously. After establishing general terminology, we present a variant of traditional usage of the expression ‘logical form’ followed by a discussion of the usage found in the two-volume Chateaubriand book Logical Forms (2001 and (...) 2005)—the most comprehensive work on the subject ever written and in many ways the focus of this paper. Key Words: morphology, character, sense, sentence, proposition, form, structure, schema, alternative constituent, type, token . (shrink)

Education fundamentally focuses on 'individuals', whose human value is rooted in the expression of 'self-identity'. This process is influenced by their social rank and linguistic culture, and within varied discourses and ideological communities, different 'self-identity values' emerge. This applies to all individuals, whether they are citizens or women, and encompasses complex social metaphysical questions. For instance, how do we define social identities such as poverty, disability, privilege, or femininity? 'Intuition' and 'common sense' often fail in such definitions, especially in recognizing (...) exceptions like gender identification, which challenges the distinctions between biological sex and gender identity. The paper analyzes 'Social Historical Structuralism' and ' Performative Theory' to see if they address the challenges of 'Essentialism'. It assesses both pluralism and monism and the autonomy of the 'true self' in educational philosophy's core concepts, grounded in the philosophy of self-identity. This study starts from female community perspectives, addressing women's disadvantaged status in social and linguistic structures and the impact of individualism on gender mainstreaming. This paper concludes by re-evaluating monistic approaches and considering the equitable recognition of community members' autonomy, underscoring the importance of self-identity in educational philosophy amidst the growing influence of identity politics in Western education. -/- Keywords: Self-Identity and Educational Philosophy, Social Metaphysics, Class and Identity, Ideology and Autonomy . (shrink)

For Marx, capitalism depends upon and perpetuates a system of relationships whereby members of one class of persons, capitalists, enjoys extensive and pervasive social and economic advantages over others. But on Marx’s analysis, this system of being-taken-advantage-of—this system of economic exploitation—is not to be understood by appeal to discrete incidents of fraud, bad deals, theft, or under-remuneration. Rather, the central contention of Marx’s analysis, the contention analyzed, developed, and evaluated here, is that economic exploitation is class exploitation, a (...) phenomenon that occurs only within and because of the complex system of capitalist production. And it is because this system presupposes a set of oppressive social and economic ownership relations that are not freely chosen and yet govern the terms of participation in the economy and polity that it can be appropriately described as wrong or unjust. (shrink)

In some cases, there appears to be an asymmetry in the evidential value of statistical and more individualized evidence. For example, while I may accept that Alex is guilty based on eyewitness testimony that is 80% likely to be accurate, it does not seem permissible to do so based on the fact that 80% of a group that Alex is a member of are guilty. In this paper I suggest that rather than reflecting a deep defect in statistical evidence, (...) this asymmetry might arise from a general constraint on rational inquiry. Plausibly the degree of evidential support needed to justify taking a proposition to be true depends on the stakes of error. While relying on statistical evidence plausibly raises the stakes by introducing new kinds of risk to members of the reference class, paradigmatically `individualized' evidence---evidence tracing back to A's voluntary behavior---can lower the stakes. The net result explains the apparent evidential asymmetry without positing a deep difference in the brute justificatory power of different types of evidence. (shrink)

The paper provides an axiological analysis of the concepts of respect for information and of information dignity from the vantage point provided by Information Ethics and the conceptual paradigm of object-oriented analysis (OOA). The general perspective adopted is that of an ontocentric approach to the philosophy of information ethics, according to which the latter is an expansion of environmental ethics towards a less biologically biased concept of a ‘centre of ethical worth’. The paper attempts to answer the following question: what (...) is the lowest possible common set of attributes which characterises something as intrinsically valuable and an object of respect, and without which something would rightly be considered intrinsically worthless or even positively unworthy and therefore rightly disrespectable in itself? The thesis developed and defended in the paper is that the minimal condition of possibility of an object’s least intrinsic worthiness can be identified with its abstract nature as an information entity. Thus, all entities, interpreted as clusters of information, have a minimal moral worth qua information objects (i.e. qua information), that deserves to be respected. The principles elaborated in the course of the analysis are those of ‘reflective respect’ (A’s respect towards all members of A’s class motivated by A’s respect towards A not qua individual, but qua instantiation of a class of entities), ‘ontic uniformity’ (A’s recognition of A’s membership to the class of information entities) and ‘ontic solidarity’ (A’s recognition of any information entity’s dignity). (shrink)

If people believe that some property is true of all members of a class such as sofas, then they should also believe that the same property is true of all members of a conjunctively defined subset of that class such as uncomfortable handmade sofas. A series of experiments demonstrated a failure to observe this constraint, leading to what is termed the inverse conjunction fallacy. Not only did people often express a belief in the more general statement but not (...) in the more specific, but also when they accepted both beliefs, they were inclined to give greater confidence to the more general. It is argued that this effect underlies a number of other demonstrations of fallacious reasoning, particularly in category-based induction. Alternative accounts of the phenomenon are evaluated, and it is concluded that the effect is best interpreted in terms of intensional reasoning [Tversky, A., & Kahneman, D.. Extensional versus intuitive reasoning: the conjunction fallacy in probability judgment. Psychological Review, 90, 293-315.]. (shrink)

Traditionally, species have been treated as classes. In fact they may be considered individuals. The logical term “individual” has been confused with a biological synonym for “organism.” If species are individuals, then: 1) their names are proper, 2) there cannot be instances of them, 3) they do not have defining properties, 4) their constituent organisms are parts, not members. “ Species " may be defined as the most extensive units in the natural economy such that reproductive competition occurs among their (...) parts. Species are to evolutionary theory as firms are to economic theory: this analogy resolves many issues, such as the problems of “reality” and the ontological status of nomenclatorial types. (shrink)

The claim is made in the book, Applied Ethics, published under the auspices of the Australian Association for Professional and Applied Ethics (AAPAE), that it can strengthen ethical behaviour. That claim, embodied in the subtitle, is based on more than a half dozen practices set out in the book. In total, they are drawn from an examination of ethical practices across fourteen different disciplines. The purpose of this paper is to outline and support that claim, drawing primarily on chapters of (...) the book, but also drawing on a small amount of additional information. The research on the ethical issues in each of these disciplines, and the writing of the chapters, were undertaken by members and associates of AAPAE. The fourteen disciplines were Marketing, Business, Accounting, Pharmacy, Nursing, Medicine, Veterinary & Animal Ethics, Engineering, Information and Communications Technology (ICT), Journalism, Policing, Politics, the Law and the Sciences. The findings have significance for the teaching of ethics by moral philosophers, for not all ethics classes follow the practices suggested by these findings. A few of the practices are even rejected by some moral philosophers. That the practices will improve ethical behaviour is the principal position taken by this paper. -/- . (shrink)

Within collective epistemology, there is a class of theories that understand the epistemic status of collective attitude ascriptions, such as ‘the college union knows that the industrial action is going to plan’, or ‘the jury justifiedly believes that the suspect is guilty’, as saying that a sufficient subset of group member attitudes have the relevant epistemic status. In this paper, I will demonstrate that these summativist approaches to collective epistemology are incompatible with epistemic permissivism, the doctrine that a (...) single body of evidence may rationalize multiple doxastic attitudes. In particular, I will make use of epistemic permissivism to provide a general recipe for generating so-called divergence cases, which demonstrate situations in which rationality requires group-level and member-level attitudes to diverge. I will call this class of cases permissive divergence cases. While other divergence cases have been discussed in the literature, permissive divergence cases prove themselves to be less susceptible to many of the worries raised against their competitors, while being directly built on an often-defended epistemological thesis. (shrink)

Recent research on algebraic models of _quasi-Nelson logic_ has brought new attention to a number of classes of algebras which result from enriching (subreducts of) Heyting algebras with a special modal operator, known in the literature as a _nucleus_. Among these various algebraic structures, for which we employ the umbrella term _intuitionistic modal algebras_, some have been studied since at least the 1970s, usually within the framework of topology and sheaf theory. Others may seem more exotic, for their primitive operations (...) arise from algebraic terms of the intuitionistic modal language which have not been previously considered. We shall for instance investigate the variety of _weak implicative semilattices_, whose members are (non-necessarily distributive) meet semilattices endowed with a nucleus and an implication operation which is not a relative pseudo-complement but satisfies the postulates of Celani and Jansana’s strict implication. For each of these new classes of algebras we establish a representation and a topological duality which generalize the known ones for Heyting algebras enriched with a nucleus. (shrink)

The object of this paper is to provide a solution to Nelson Goodman’s Imperfect Community difficulty as it arises for Resemblance Nominalism, the view that properties are classes of resembling particulars. The Imperfect Community difficulty consists in that every two members of a class resembling each other is not sufficient for it to be a class such that there is some property common to all their members, even if ‘x resembles y’ is understood as ‘x and y share (...) some property’. In the paper I explain and criticise several solutions to the difficulty. Then I develop my own solution, which is not subject to the objections I make to the other solutions, and which accords completely with the basic tenets of Resemblance Nominalism. (shrink)

For each positive n , two alternative axiomatizations of the theory of strings over n alphabetic characters are presented. One class of axiomatizations derives from Tarski's system of the Wahrheitsbegriff and uses the n characters and concatenation as primitives. The other class involves using n character-prefixing operators as primitives and derives from Hermes' Semiotik. All underlying logics are second order. It is shown that, for each n, the two theories are definitionally equivalent [or synonymous in the sense of (...) deBouvere]. It is further shown that each member of one class is synonymous with each member of the other class; thus that all of the theories are definitionally equivalent with each other and with Peano arithmetic. Categoricity of Peano arithmetic then implies categoricity of each of the above theories. (shrink)

A popular informal argument suggests that statistics about the preponderance of criminal involvement among particular demographic groups partially justify others in making defensive mistakes against members of the group. One could worry that evidence-relative accounts of moral rights vindicate this argument. After constructing the strongest form of this objection, I offer several replies: most demographic statistics face an unmet challenge from reference class problems, even those that meet it fail to ground non-negligible conditional probabilities, even if they did, they (...) introduce new costs likely to cancel out any justificatory contribution of the statistic, but even if they didn’t, demographic facts are the wrong sort to make a moral difference to agents’ negative rights. I conclude that the popular argument should be rejected, and evidence-relative theories do not have the worrisome implication. (shrink)

Jonathan Schaffer, among others, has argued that metaphysics should deal primarily with relations of " grounding. " I will follow John Heil in arguing that this view of metaphysics is problematic as it draws on ambiguous notions of grounding and fundamentality that are unilluminating as metaphysical explanations. I understand Heil to be arguing that grounding relations do not form a natural class, where a 'natural' class is one where some member of that class has (analytic or (...) contingent a posteriori) priority among others and explains order among other members in the class. To strengthen Heil's criticism that grounding is a non-natural class of relations, I will draw on an unlikely ally. St. Thomas Aquinas's " analogy of being " doctrine, if accurate, offers reasons that no categorical relations (like grounding relations) form a natural class. (shrink)

The moral community is a social community, and as such it is vulnerable to social problems and pathologies. In this essay I identify a particular way in which participation in the moral community can be constrained by social factors. I argue that features of the social world—including power imbalances, oppression, intergroup conflict, communication barriers, and stereotyping—can make it nearly impossible for some members of the moral community to hold others responsible for wrongdoing. Specifically, social circumstances prevent some marginalized people from (...) engaging in what Stephen Darwall calls “felicitous moral address” (Darwall 2006). We should think of some members of the moral community as having “second-class moral citizenship” in ways that parallel second-class political citizenship. The injustice of second-class moral citizenship can be understood by drawing an analogy with Miranda Fricker’s notion of “epistemic injustice” (Fricker 2007). Fricker’s account of how people can be undermined in their capacity as knowers can be extended to show how people can be undermined in their capacity as makers of moral claims, which can be called “claimant injustice”. (shrink)

Hume introduced important innovations concerning the theory of ideas. The two most important are the distinction between impressions and ideas, and the use he made of the principles of association in explaining mental phenomena. Hume divided the perceptions of the mind into two classes. The members of one class, impressions, he held to have a greater degree of force and vivacity than the members of the other class, ideas. He also supposed that ideas are causally dependent copies of (...) impressions. And, unlike Locke and others, Hume makes positive use of the principle of association, both of the association of ideas, and, in a more limited way, of the association of impressions. Such associations are central to his explanations of causal reasoning, belief, the indirect passions (pride and humility, love and hatred), and sympathy. These views about impressions and ideas and the principles of association form the core of Hume’s science of human nature. Relying on them, he attempts a rigorously empirical investigation of human nature. The resulting system is a remarkable but complex achievement. (shrink)

Copernican reasoning involves considering ourselves, in the absence of other information, to be randomly selected members of a reference class. Consider the reference class intelligent observers. If there are extraterrestrial intelligences (ETIs), taking ourselves to be randomly selected intelligent observers leads to the conclusion that it is likely the Earth has a larger population size than the typical planet inhabited by intelligent life, for the same reason that a randomly selected human is likely to come from a more (...) populous country. The astrophysicist Fergus Simpson contends that this reasoning supports the claims that the typical planet inhabited by ETIs is smaller than Earth (radius about 5,000km; cf. Earth's radius = 6,371km) and that the typical ETI is significantly larger than us about 314kg, the size of an adult male grizzly bear). Simpson's applications of Copernican reasoning are novel and exciting. They should be of interest to philosophers concerned with Richard Gott's delta t argument, the N=1 problem in astrobiology, limited principles of indifference, and probabilistic epistemology in general. While we agree with Simpson about the qualitative direction of his conclusions, we take issue with his presentation of precise quantitative results because his methods (1) display bias, (2) ignore other variables contributing to population size, (3) commit an equivocation, and (4) conceal their dependence on arbitrary assumptions. (shrink)

In this article, I argue that depression and suicide are natural kinds insofar as they are classes of abnormal behavior underwritten by sets of stable biological mechanisms. In particular, depression and suicide are neurobiological kinds characterized by disturbances in serotonin functioning that affect various brain areas (i.e., the amygdala, anterior cingulate, prefrontal cortex, and hippocampus). The significance of this argument is that the natural (biological) basis of depression and suicide allows for reliable projectable inferences (i.e., predictions) to be made about (...) individual members of a kind. In the context of assisted suicide, inferences about the decision-making capacity of depressed individuals seeking physician-assisted suicide are of special interest. I examine evidence that depression can hamper the decision-making capacity of individuals seeking assisted suicide and discuss some implications. (shrink)

According to our understanding, when we discuss about the religious life in Romania, one must take into account, first of all, the characteristics of this people, its culture and traditions that are over two millennia old. The similarities and differences with the organization and functioning of other religious systems in Europe and around the world cannot and must not exclude the defining elements of a people that has asserted its origins and defended its spiritual integrity over the centuries. In our (...) country there is a close connection between the history, culture, spirituality and education of this people of Latin origin and mostly of Orthodox faith. Starting from these realities, the Romanian Orthodox Church had an important role in preserving the values and national identity in the face of the frequent stepsons of history. Regarding interreligious education in Romania, it is done in public schools, with the discipline of Religion, where, especially in high school, there are classes in the History of Religions in which one learns about religious traditions around the world and how to interact with people belonging to other denominations, religions and ideologies. The phenomenon of migration increases in our country from one year to another producing important changes in terms of economic, cultural, social and religious realities. Taking into account all these realities, the state must promote policies that protect migrant populations and defend human rights for these communities. At the same time, they must be actively involved in protecting families where one or more members are working abroad and in the process of educating children who remain in the care of relatives. (shrink)

In this paper I defend the existence of a Dialectical school proper against criticisms brought forward by Klaus Döring and by Jonathan Barnes. Whereas Döring claims that there was no Dialectical school separate from the Megarians, Barnes takes issue with my claim (argued for in “Dialektiker und frühe Stoiker bei Sextus Empiricus”) that most of the reports in Sextus on the dialecticians refer to members of the Dialectical school. Barnes contends that these dialecticians are in fact Stoic logicians. As against (...) Döring, I argue that the passage in Diogenes Laertius II 113 (first drawn attention to by David Sedley) which talks of a the Megarian Stilpo winning over disciples from the Dialecticians is not refuted by Döring’s arguments. It clearly shows that the Dialecticians and the Megarians at the time were taken to be different philosophical sects. As against Barnes I insist on the differences between the report in Ps.-Galen’s Historia 9 and the Sextan report on the theory of sign in AM VIII. These reports offer incompatible definitions of the indicative sign. Moreover, the classification of simple propositions reported by Sextus at AM VIII 96f. cannot be a truncated version of the (Stoic) list to be found in Diogenes Laertius VII 69f. since in Sextus’ report one of the three classes of simple propositions is labelled middle (meson). This is a certain sign that we are dealing with a triad, and hence that this list is meant to be complete. Therefore the classification found in Sextus and attributed to the dialecticians and the one in Diogenes Laertius reporting Stoic material do come from different sources. (shrink)

We can read about the morality of that time in works by authors who describe or criticize the conduct and activity of the members of those classes taking the lead in the morality of that time. Thus, we can find a lot of information about ancient Greece and its morality in Plato’s presentation of Socrates, Peter Abelard presenting the Middle Ages, Erasmus of Rotterdam, Niccolo Machiavelli, Baldesar Castiglione, but even also Slovak authors such as Martin Rakovský and Juraj Koppay presenting (...) very interesting contemporary facts about the Renaissance. (shrink)

Lukács is widely recognized as being the first critical theorist to have explicitly developed the idea of a “standpoint theory”. According to such a theory, members of oppressed groups enjoy an epistemic privilege regarding the nature of their oppression. However, there is no agreement regarding what precise argument Lukács offers for his claims regarding the alleged epistemic privilege of the working class. Additionally, it remains unclear whether later feminist standpoint theories share any continuity with Lukács’s argument. In this analysis, (...) I identify four arguments for the epistemic privilege of oppressed groups that could be attributed to Lukács. I argue that, although Lukács does not consistently endorse any specific argument, the most promising interpretation suggests that epistemic privilege arises from a contradiction between the norms that guide the self-understanding of such groups and the effects of the social practices they are socially obligated to engage in. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:130 Feminist Studies 46, no. 1. © 2020 by Feminist Studies, Inc. Laura Bisaillon, Alana Cattapan, Annelieke Driessen, Esther van Duin, Shannon Spruit, Lorena Anton, and Nancy S. Jecker Doing Academia Differently: “I Needed Self-Help Less Than I Needed a Fair Society” A great deal of harm is being done by belief in the virtuousness of work. — Bertrand Russell, “In Praise of Idleness” We are committed to doing (...) academia in particular ways, and not in others. — Brocher Foundation Feminist Collective I had decided that becoming a university professor might be a good fit; friends and colleagues had suggested that I would be valuable to a university, so I prepared for a restructuring of my family life.1 I read Tokarczyk and Fay’s Working-Class Women in the Academy and Babcock and Laschever’s Women Don’t Ask to gather understandings of the milieu I was entering. I now see that my preparations had not shined sufficient light on the social and structural factors that organize the contemporary university.... As it turns out, the restructuring of our lives within the working conditions, priorities, and rationalities of this professional milieu triggered unanticipated and painful effects.... Had Mountz published her article “Women on the Edge” before I decided on a career migration into the university system and, had I been fortunate enough to discover it, I would have made other career choices.2 1. The authors, who describe themselves as the Brocher Foundation Feminist Collective, indicate their personal narratives in this text using italics. 2. Michelle M. Tokarczyk and Elizabeth A. Fay, eds., Working-Class Women in the Academy: Laborers in the Knowledge Factory (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993); Linda Babcock and Sara Laschever, Women Don’t Ask: Negotiation and the Gender Divide (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Bisaillon et al. 131 Introduction: Personal, Professional, and Political We are seven women who met at the Brocher Foundation in Hermance, Switzerland, in July 2017, where we had been selected to spend a few months as research fellows. This competitively awarded opportunity is open to persons fluent in English, from graduate students to senior scholars, with or without academic appointment, whose scholarship advances knowledge about the ethical, legal, and social implications of health and biotechnologies.3 When we found ourselves on the shores of Lake Leman with the gift of time, we began opening up to each other in unexpected, compelling ways. Whatever our vantage point in the hierarchy of the university system, we discovered that there was remarkable overlap in our experiences as women in academia. When we began writing, our authoring team was composed of two graduate students, four faculty members at the assistant professor rank, and one full professor, residing in Canada, the Netherlands, Romania, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Our plural subject position led us to underexplored and imaginative responses to broader social issues, which we share in this article as the “Brocher Foundation Feminist Collective.” We analyze our experiences from our standpoint as women health researchers laboring in the academy. Our similarities and differences were exciting entry points for discussion and analysis: we are all of eastern or western European descent. We have different countries of birth, mother tongues, ages, disciplinary training and career trajectories, relationships to chronic illness and disability, marital status, and experiences with parenthood. We bring the troubles and contradictions we experience as academics into conversation with each other. We seek to productively illustrate and emphasize that the tensions we see around us, and also feel within us, arise as a result of how the academic system is organized, produced, and sustained across time, place, and space. Press, 2003); Alison Mountz, “Women on the Edge: Workplace Stress at Universities in North America,” The Canadian Geographer 60, no. 2 (2016): 205–18. 3. We experienced this fellowship as a valuable opportunity. But we also recognized that our access to it was mediated by social, economic, or other obligations. As countries in the global north continue to tighten their national border regimes, marginalized academics, especially those from the global South, were less likely to succeed in getting a Swiss visa or securing relevant temporal and economic resources. 132 Bisaillon et al. The promise here, we posit... (shrink)

How should we explore the relationship between race and educational opportunity? One approach to the Black-White achievement gap explores how race and class cause disparities in access and opportunity. In this paper, I consider how education contributes to the creation of race. Considering examples of classroom micropolitics, I argue that breakdowns of trust and trustworthiness between teachers and students can cause substantial disadvantages and, in the contemporary United States, this happens along racial lines. Some of the disadvantages are academic: (...) high achievement is more difficult when one faces mistrust, ego depletion, effort pessimism, and insult. And within a knowledge economy, exclusion from knowledge work makes one vulnerable to injustice. But the problem goes deeper than achievement, for schools are contexts in which we develop self-understandings and identities that situate us as members of society. If students of color are systematically denied full participation in trusting conversations that create shared knowledge—especially, knowledge that holds power within the dominant culture—they are unjustly deprived resources to form flourishing selves that are suited to the positions of power and authority. The argument suggests that knowledge is not best understood simply as a commodity to be distributed, and opportunity is not just a matter of access. Moreover, even if access is granted, those who are motivated and talented can fail: they drain their willpower by coping with insults, or reasonably lose optimism about their efficacy. Over time, motivation may shift away from achievement, and under the circumstances this can be a rational response. The barriers to achievement are many, but true opportunity is impossible without trust and trustworthiness. (shrink)

Let us start by some general definitions of the concept of complexity. We take a complex system to be one composed by a large number of parts, and whose properties are not fully explained by an understanding of its components parts. Studies of complex systems recognized the importance of “wholeness”, defined as problems of organization (and of regulation), phenomena non resolvable into local events, dynamics interactions in the difference of behaviour of parts when isolated or in higher configuration, etc., in (...) short, systems of various orders (or levels) not understandable by investigation of their respective parts in isolation. In a complex system it is essential to distinguish between ‘global’ and ‘local’ properties. Theoretical physicists in the last two decades have discovered that the collective behaviour of a macro-system, i.e. a system composed of many objects, does not change qualitatively when the behaviour of single components are modified slightly. Conversely, it has been also found that the behaviour of single components does change when the overall behaviour of the system is modified. There are many universal classes which describe the collective behaviour of the system, and each class has its own characteristics; the universal classes do not change when we perturb the system. The most interesting and rewarding work consists in finding these universal classes and in spelling out their properties. This conception has been followed in studies done in the last twenty years on second order phase transitions. The objective, which has been mostly achieved, was to classify all possible types of phase transitions in different universality classes and to compute the parameters that control the behaviour of the system near the transition (or critical or bifurcation) point as a function of the universality class. This point of view is not very different from the one expressed by Thom in the introduction of Structural Stability and Morphogenesis (1975). It differs from Thom’s program because there is no a priori idea of the mathematical framework which should be used. Indeed Thom considers only a restricted class of models (ordinary differential equations in low dimensional spaces) while we do not have any prejudice regarding which models should be accepted. One of the most interesting and surprising results obtained by studying complex systems is the possibility of classifying the configurations of the system taxonomically. It is well-known that a well founded taxonomy is possible only if the objects we want to classify have some unique properties, i.e. species may be introduced in an objective way only if it is impossible to go continuously from one specie to another; in a more mathematical language, we say that objects must have the property of ultrametricity. More precisely, it was discovered that there are conditions under which a class of complex systems may only exist in configurations that have the ultrametricity property and consequently they can be classified in a hierarchical way. Indeed, it has been found that only this ultrametricity property is shared by the near-optimal solutions of many optimization problems of complex functions, i.e. corrugated landscapes in Kauffman’s language. These results are derived from the study of spin glass model, but they have wider implications. It is possible that the kind of structures that arise in these cases is present in many other apparently unrelated problems. Before to go on with our considerations, we have to pick in mind two main complementary ideas about complexity. (i) According to the prevalent and usual point of view, the essence of complex systems lies in the emergence of complex structures from the non-linear interaction of many simple elements that obey simple rules. Typically, these rules consist of 0–1 alternatives selected in response to the input received, as in many prototypes like cellular automata, Boolean networks, spin systems, etc. Quite intricate patterns and structures can occur in such systems. However, what can be also said is that these are toy systems, and the systems occurring in reality rather consist of elements that individually are quite complex themselves. (ii) So, this bring a new aspect that seems essential and indispensable to the emergence and functioning of complex systems, namely the coordination of individual agents or elements that themselves are complex at their own scale of operation. This coordination dramatically reduces the degree of freedom of those participating agents. Even the constituents of molecules, i.e. the atoms, are rather complicated conglomerations of subatomic particles, perhaps ultimately excitations of patterns of superstrings. Genes, the elementary biochemical coding units, are very complex macromolecular strings, as are the metabolic units, the proteins. Neurons, the basic elements of cognitive networks, themselves are cells. In those mentioned and in other complex systems, it is an important feature that the potential complexity of the behaviour of the individual agents gets dramatically simplified through the global interactions within the system. The individual degrees of freedom are drastically reduced, or, in a more formal terminology, the factual space of the system is much smaller than the product of the state space of the individual elements. That is one key aspect. The other one is that on this basis, that is utilizing the coordination between the activities of its members, the system then becomes able to develop and express a coherent structure at a higher level, that is, an emergent behaviour (and emergent properties) that transcends what each element is individually capable of. (shrink)

"Kapitał społeczny ludzi starych na przykładzie mieszkańców miasta Białystok" to książka oparta na analizach teoretycznych i empirycznych, która przedstawia problem diagnozowania i używania kapitału społecznego ludzi starych w procesach rozwoju lokalnego i regionalnego. Kwestia ta jest istotna ze względu na zagrożenia i wyzwania związane z procesem szybkiego starzenia się społeczeństwa polskiego na początku XXI wieku. Opracowanie stanowi próbę sformułowania odpowiedzi na pytania: jaki jest stan kapitału społecznego ludzi starych mieszkających w Białymstoku, jakim ulega przemianom i jakie jest jego zróżnicowanie? Ludzie (...) starzy są tu postrzegani jako kategoria społeczna, czyli zbiór osób podobnych do siebie pod względem społecznie istotnych cech (takich jak wiek, posiadane role społeczne i świadomość korzystania ze świadczeń społecznych), którzy są świadomi tego podobieństwa i swojej odrębności od innych. Przyjmuje się ponadto, iż osoby takie przekroczyły 60. rok życia. Zakłada się też, że w zasobach ludzkich skumulowany jest kapitał ludzki, społeczny i kulturowy. Kapitał społeczny jest tu ujmowany szeroko jako potencjał współdziałania osadzony w powiązaniach międzyludzkich i normach społecznych, który może przynosić korzyści osobom, grupom i społeczeństwom. W części teoretycznej przedstawiono informacje o starości jako etapie w życiu jednostki, wyjaśniono pojęcie ludzi starych, omówiono społeczne teorie starzenia się, historyczne czynniki oddziaływające na położenie kategorii społecznej ludzi starych, zmiany ich miejsca w społeczeństwie polskim w trakcie transformacji ustrojowej i na początku XXI wieku, możliwe konsekwencje wzrostu długości życia w warunkach demokracji i kapitalizmu oraz charakterystykę problemu starzenia się ludności Białegostoku jako miasta pogranicza. Zaprezentowano też różnorodne koncepcje kapitału społecznego, sfery jego oddziaływania na rozwój społeczno-gospodarczy, jego stan w Polsce oraz wytyczne do strategicznego budowania jego zasobów. Przybliżono również wybrane informacje o aktywności ludzi starych w życiu publicznym, społecznym i gospodarczym jako kluczowych cechach ich kapitału społecznego. Porządkując różne stanowiska teoretyczne, wyniki badań i dane statystyczne, dążono do powiązania wielu rozproszonych źródeł w przekonaniu, iż jest to istotne w celu określenia i zagospodarowania zasobów kapitału społecznego seniorów, jak również niwelacji opóźnienia polskiej socjologii w zakresie badań nad ludźmi starymi. Pomimo, iż za podstawową perspektywę teoretyczną publikacji uznana została koncepcja kapitału P. Bourdieu, autor bierze również pod uwagę propozycje badawcze J.S. Colemana, R.D. Putnama, F. Fukuyamy, A. Giddensa, P. Sztompki i A. Sadowskiego. Drugi rozdział zawiera określenie ram metodologicznych badań przeprowadzonych na potrzeby tej publikacji. Omówiono przyjęte założenia badawcze oraz przybliżono sposób i przebieg realizacji badań. Przede wszystkim zdecydowano się na korzystanie z metody jakościowej i zastosowanie techniki wywiadu swobodnego ukierunkowanego. Uznano, iż podmiotowy kontakt z ludźmi starymi umożliwi dokładniejsze rozpoznanie kontekstu, w którym znajdują się zasoby ich kapitału społecznego. Jest to ważne, gdyż przenoszenie na rodzimy grunt opracowanych za granicą interpretacji działań ludzi starych i rozwiązań aktywizujących, może okazać się nieskuteczne lub wywołać negatywne efekty zewnętrzne. Ponadto w literaturze przedmiotu zwraca się uwagę na niedostatek badań gerontologicznych zgodnych z paradygmatem interpretatywnym. Badaniu poddano 26 respondentów w wieku od 60 do 89 lat żyjących w mieście Białystok związanych z jedną z dwóch różnych instytucji: Domem Pomocy Społecznej i Uniwersytetem Trzeciego Wieku. Poprzez porównywanie osób znajdujących się na dwóch biegunach aktywności społecznej możliwe było dostrzeżenie podobieństw i różnic w ich wyposażeniu kapitałowym, a zarazem w osiągniętych w ciągu życia pozycjach w strukturze klasowej i zasobach służących pomyślnej starości6. W trzecim rozdziale przedstawiona została część wyników analiz empirycznych. Przybliżono tu sposób, w jaki ludzie starzy myślą o podobnych sobie przodkach i osobach współczesnych, a także czynniki, w zależności od których zmienia się ich pozycja społeczna w mieście oraz problemy społeczne, jakie uznają za najważniejsze dla ludzi starych. Analizie poddano opinie o ich czasie wolnym, szansach i barierach aktywności ekonomicznej. Wyróżniono typy kapitału społecznego ludzi starych w zależności od instytucji, z którymi są związani oraz podejścia do postrzegania i wykorzystywania zróżnicowania wewnętrznego seniorów. Omówiono wizerunek seniorów w środkach masowego przekazu. Publikacja nie zawiera ścisłego zakończenia. W ostatnim rozdziale wskazano jedynie na główne wnioski płynące z badań oraz na potencjalne dalsze kierunki analiz. Uzupełnienie tego podejścia stanowią zamieszczone w aneksie zestawienia oddolnych technik budowania kapitału społecznego oraz podstawowych cech Miast Przyjaznych Starszemu Wiekowi. Z opracowania tego z pewnością będą mogli skorzystać nie tylko naukowcy zajmujący się tematyką ludzi starych, ale i pracownicy socjalni, politycy, pracodawcy, przedstawiciele mediów i organizacji pozarządowych oraz obywatele Białegostoku i innych miast. ** "Social Capital of Old People on the Example of Bialystok Residents" is a book based on theoretical and empirical study, which presents an issue of diagnosing and using of old people social capital in the local and regional development processes. This issue is significant because of the threats and challenges associated with process of rapid ageing of Polish society at the beginning of 21st century. Publication, in particular, is an attempt to give answers to the following questions: what is the state of old people social capital in Bialystok, what transformations it undergoes and how is it differentiated? In this study old people are viewed as a social category, which is a set of people similar to each other in terms of socially significant features (such as age, possessed social roles and awareness of received social benefits), who are aware of these similarities and differences between each other. Moreover, it is assumed, that such persons exceeded the 60 years of age. It is also assumed that human, social and cultural capital is accumulated in the human resources. Social capital is recognized here broadly as a potential for collaboration embedded in interpersonal relationships and social norms that may benefit individuals, groups and societies. The book consists of three chapters. The first, which is the theoretical part of work, includes information about: old age as a stage of individual life and explanation of the old people notion. It discusses social theories of ageing, historical factors affecting on the social position of old people category, changes in their place in Polish society during the system transformation and in the early 21st century. It describes the possible consequences of increased life expectancy for democracy and capitalism - including the concepts of society for all ages, silver economy. It also features ageing population issue, as well as social policy towards the elderly and old age in Bialystok as the borderland city. A variety of social capital concepts were presented; the spheres of its influence on socio-economic development, its status in Poland and guidelines for strategic building of its resources. Selected information on the activity of old people in public, social and economic life as key features of their social capital was brought closer. Putting various theoretical positions, results of research and statistical data in order was aimed to link many dispersed sources considering that it is relevant to identify and develop seniors' social capital resources, as well as leveling the delay of Polish sociology research on the elderly. Fundamental theoretical perspective of publication is the concept of capital according to P. Bourdieu. However, the proposals of J.S. Coleman, R.D. Putnam, F. Fukuyama, A. Giddens, P. Sztompka and A. Sadowski were also used. The second chapter contains a methodological framework for the purposes of study. Research assumptions, method and course of implementation of studies were discussed. The study is based on the qualitative method and the application of in-depth interview techniques. It was considered that the personal contact with old people will be more accurate than other research techniques to identify the context in which they social capital resources can be found. It is important because the transfer of developed abroad activating solutions and interpretations of old people actions may be ineffective or have negative external effects in the Polish context. Moreover, in the Polish science literature attention is paid to scarcity of gerontological research in accordance with the interpretive paradigm. Study involved 26 respondents aged 60 to 89 years living in Bialystok associated with one of two different institutions: nursing home for the elderly and University of the Third Age. By comparing the persons on two extremes of social activity it was possible to see similarities and differences in their capital equipment, and also in achievements of the life positions in the class structure and resources aimed at successful ageing. The third chapter presents the empirical analysis of the research results. This part outlines the way in which old people think about their ancestors and contemporary people. It also shows factors according to changes in their social position in the city, social issues which they consider most important for old people, their opinions about leisure time, opportunities and barriers of economic activity and types of old people social capital depending on the institution with which they are associated. Approach to the perception and use of internal disparities of seniors were also discussed. The analysis additionally contains the evaluation of senior citizens image in the polish mass media. This publication does not contain a strict ending. It only identifies the main conclusions of the research and potential directions of future analysis. Above all, older people could improve their position not by demanding increases in social benefits from which major parts are often taken away by their family members, but by highlighting their human, social and cultural capital. It is necessary to create favorable conditions for social and professional life of old people and their cooperation with members of local communities. Important role in this regard is played by institutions implementing three tasks: stimulating senior citizens' desire to satisfy previously unrealized needs; creating relationships between them so that they can solve their own problems and work for the others; and providing legal, social and vocational guidance. Stimulating cooperation between existing public, commercial and non-governmental sector organizations may serve to achieve these goals. The dissemination of bottom-up techniques of social capital building and checklist of essential features of Age-friendly Cities may also be important. -/- . (shrink)

The primary aim of this chapter is to show that several missteps made by others in in their thinking about law as an artefact are due to misconceptions about the role of intentions in understanding law as an artefact. I first briefly recap my own contention that law is a genre of institutionalized abstract artefacts (put forth in The Functions of Law (OUP 2016) and subsequent papers), mostly following Searle’s understanding of institutions and Thomasson’s understanding of public artefacts. I highlight (...) the central place that this theory affords law’s functions, without requiring the theorist to say that possession or performance of the function is either necessary or sufficient for inclusion in the class of law. Some of the most common misunderstandings are exemplified in Brian Leiter’s paper ‘Legal Positivism about the Artifact Law’. He thinks that holding an intentionalist view of artefacts commits the theorist to privileging drafters’ intentions when interpreting law. (It doesn’t.) He also has confusions about the differences between artefact tokens and artefact types leading him to a problematically broad understanding of artefacts. Another problem can be seen in thinking that functional understandings of artefacts are vulnerable to the same problems that arise in functional explanations for biological systems. I go on to consider the work of Luka Burazin and Corrado Roversi, addressing worries that making intentionality central to artefacts implies too much conscious thought is required to make one, noting that several theories of intentionality do not require conscious thought in the execution of intentional action. While those who think a central place for intentionality threatens to leave us unable to explain customary law, this can be dealt with by noting the important distinction between customary rules and customary laws (where the latter requires a decision to enlist public aid in redressing violations). I claim that authors’ intentions are communicated requests for the artefacts’ audiences to see the artefacts as members of their putative kinds. Finally, I address the question of whether or not legal systems are themselves artefacts and institutions, given that they may or may not have been intentionally created. An early lawgiver might have created a legal system by accident in the process of handing down the first laws. I raise the possibility that we might want to impute intentionality to necessary by-products of artefact creation, seeing those by-products as artefacts as well. (shrink)

In the context of animal cognitive research, anthropomorphism is defined as the attribution of uniquely human mental characteristics to animals. Those who worry about anthropomorphism in research, however, are immediately confronted with the question of which properties are uniquely human. One might think that researchers must first hypothesize the existence of a feature in an animal before they can, with warrant, claim that the property is uniquely human. But all too often, this isn't the approach. Rather, there is an a (...) priori argument against attributing some properties to animals. Which features are thought to be uniquely human on a priori grounds? The class can be quite large, including psychological states such as beliefs and desires, personality traits such as confidence or timidity, emotions such as happiness or anger, social organizational properties such as culture or friendship, moral behavior such as punishment or rape. For convenience, I will refer to the members of the class as "psychological properties". One critic includes feeling, purpose, intentionality, consciousness, and even cognition in his list of psychological properties that are incorrectly attributed to animals (Kennedy 1992). Among the critics, there is quite a bit of disagreement about what counts as an anthropomorphic attribution, and this alone should raise questions about the charge. We can identify two different questions about the practice of attributing psychological properties to animals within a scientific context. First we can ask whether it is scientifically respectable to examine questions about the mental, psychological, cultural, etc. states of animals. Those who bemoan anthropomorphism think that we ought not even ask such questions. I will look at the worries about asking the question, and argue that there is no special problem with it. The second question arises with an affirmative answer to the first. Given that it is scientifically respectable to examine whether an animal has a psychological property, there must be some scientifically respectable method for doing the examination.. (shrink)

Amartya Sen argues that sectarian discord and violence are fueled by confusion about the nature of identity, including the pervasive tendency to see ourselves as members of singular social groups standing in opposition to other groups (e.g. Democrat vs. Republican, Muslim vs. Christian, etc.). Sen defends an alternative model of identity, according to which we all inevitably belong to a plurality of discrete identity groups (including ethnicities, classes, genders, races, religions, careers, hobbies, etc.) and are obligated to choose, in any (...) given context, which among our multiple affiliations to prioritize. While Sen’s model of discrete identity prioritization is a clear advance over single-factor accounts, it overlooks significant lessons about identity from over 150 years of scholarship by feminists of color. In ignoring the experiences of women of color, Sen’s model falsely assumes that identities are in-principle separable for the purposes of practical deliberation; and, in obligating individuals to make such identity-based “reasoned choices,” Sen’s model forces those with multiply marginalized identities to choose from a set of externally defined identity options, none of which sufficiently captures their experiences. (shrink)

Research ethics committees must sometimes deliberate about objects that do not fit nicely into any existing category. This is currently the case with the “gastruloid,” which is a self-assembling blob of cells that resembles a human embryo. The resemblance makes it tempting to group it with other members of that kind, and thus to ask whether gastruloids really are embryos. But fitting an ambiguous object into an existing category with well-worn pathways in research ethics, like the embryo, is only a (...) temporary fix. The bigger problem is that we no longer know what an embryo is. We haven’t had a non-absurd definition of ‘embryo’ for several decades and without a well-defined comparison class, asking whether gastruloids belong to the morally relevant class of things we call embryos is to ask a question without an answer. What’s the alternative? A better approach needs to avoid what I’ll refer to as “the potentiality trap” and, instead, rely on the emergence of morally salient facts about gastruloids and other synthetic embryos. (shrink)

“A Phenomenology of Seeing and Affect in a Polarized Climate,” focuses on the polarized political climate that reflects racial and class differences in the wake of the Trump election. She explores how to see differently about those with whom one disagrees—that is in this specific scenario for Lee, the Trump supporters, including Asian American members of her own family. Understanding Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s exploration of the interstice between the visible and the invisible, if human beings are to see otherwise, we (...) need to disrupt the ready association between the visible and the invisible. Here, she explores the function of affect for the possibility of this break. The phenomenological understanding of emotion does not necessarily empower emotion with any sort of superlative force, especially over reason. But a subject’s emotion chiasmatically reflects the world and vice versa. The caustic and strong emotions felt by people about this presidency reflects the entrenched political climate in our society and chiasmatically the entrenched political climate embroils people in strong emotions that make it difficult to see those with whom we disagree as people we can trust and consider reasonable. To break out of this standoff, to see differently about Trump supporters, one needs to feel differently about them as well. (shrink)

Sequel to Part I. In these articles, I describe Cantor’s power-class theorem, as well as a number of logical and philosophical paradoxes that stem from it, many of which were discovered or considered (implicitly or explicitly) in Bertrand Russell’s work. These include Russell’s paradox of the class of all classes not members of themselves, as well as others involving properties, propositions, descriptive senses, class-intensions and equivalence classes of coextensional properties. Part II addresses Russell’s own various attempts to (...) solve these paradoxes, including strategies that he considered and rejected (limitation of size, the zigzag theory, etc.), as well as his own final views whereupon many purported entities that, if reified, lead to these contradictions, must not be genuine entities, but ‘logical fictions’ or ‘logical constructions’ instead. (shrink)

Besides being the title of an EP by The (International) Noise Conspiracy, “Bigger cages, longer chains!” is an anarchist rallying cry. It’s meant to ridicule those political activists who compromise their ideals, make demands and then settle for partial concessions or, to put it bluntly, bargain with the Man. In the T.V. series Mr. Robot, Christian Slater plays the anarchist leader of a hacktivist group known as fsociety. Mr. Robot won’t negotiate with the FBI and E(vil) Corp for bigger cages (...) and longer chains. He tells Elliot Anderson, the young cybersecurity expert and hacker, “We live in a kingdom of bullshit!” Victory over the tyranny of corporations and states requires radical means to achieve radical ends. Mr. Robot wants freedom without limits, total liberation from corporate and statist control, and the opportunity to live in a world without bullshit. Mr. Robot’s objective is to free citizens of first-world nations from the cages of consumer debt and citizens of third-world nations from the shackles of extreme poverty. Meeting half-way will not do. So what are the inspirations for Mr. Robot’s hacktivist philosophy? The most proximate sources are David Graeber’s anarchism, which also influenced the Occupy Wall Street movement, and the hacktivist group Anonymous’s moralfaggery, that is, the policy of some of its members to use collective computer hacking to serve the greater good. Candidates for more remote sources are Marxism and pragmatism; the former, a blueprint for freeing the working class from their bourgeois oppressors; the latter, a philosophy of action, intelligent inquiry and democratic reform. Some might object that pragmatism is too conventional to be compatible with the radical ideas that motivate Mr. Robot’s worldview. Hacktivism demands action, not mere thinking! But any organized social-political movement requires a well-thought-out plan as well as a vision of what its participants hope to achieve. Since pragmatism is a philosophy of action and reform, it’s possible that Mr. Robot is a closet pragmatist! (shrink)

In these articles, I describe Cantor’s power-class theorem, as well as a number of logical and philosophical paradoxes that stem from it, many of which were discovered or considered (implicitly or explicitly) in Bertrand Russell’s work. These include Russell’s paradox of the class of all classes not members of themselves, as well as others involving properties, propositions, descriptive senses, class-intensions, and equivalence classes of coextensional properties. Part I focuses on Cantor’s theorem, its proof, how it can be (...) used to manufacture paradoxes, Frege’s diagnosis of the core difficulty, and several broad categories of strategies for offering solutions to these paradoxes. (shrink)

The Afro-Latin dance known as ‘salsa’ is a fusion of multiple dances from West Africa, Muslim Spain, enslaved communities in the Caribbean, and the United States. In part due to its global origins, salsa was pivotal in the development of the Figuration philosophy of dance, and for ‘dancing with,’ the theoretical method for social justice derived therefrom. In the present article, I apply the completed theory Figuration exclusively to salsa for the first time, after situating the latter in the dance (...) studies literature. My first section explores Juliet McMains’ recent history, Spinning Mambo into Salsa, with an emphasis on the dynamics of class, race and sex therein. My second section explores a resonant Afro-Latin dance history, Marta E. Savigliano’s Tango and the Political Economy of Passion, where she deploys salsa’s sister-dance (tango) as a ‘counter-choreography’ to the choreography of postmodern neocolonialism. And my third section applies Figuration’s four central aspects of dance (or ‘Moves’) to salsa qua member of its ‘societal’ family of dance. In conclusion, through partnering with salsa, Figuration emerges as a member of its own ‘discursive’ family of dance, while salsa emerges as a gestural discourse capable of helping reconstruct a more socially-just world from the postmodern ruins of today. (shrink)

A central task of schooling is to cultivate reasonableness in students. In this chapter we show how the teaching of reasonableness can be practiced successfully in secondary schools, using materials from the Western Australian curriculum. The discussion proceeds in four stages. We first defend the claim that the teaching of reasonable is a key aim of schooling. Here we offer an account of reasonableness, which we take to be both a skill and a disposition. Students learn reasonableness through the practice (...) of specific skills such as open and curious questioning, clarifying, and categorizing, and evaluating the merits of each contribution toward the problem or question under consideration. Reasonableness comes about as a joint commitment between the individual and the group to be honest in their views, to take care of those views, and for everyone to recognize that each member is a partial bearer of truth. Secondly, we discuss the pedagogies that cultivate reasonableness. The Philosophical Community of Inquiry is a natural pedagogy for this purpose. This can be supplemented with the thinking tools approach of Cam’s Twenty Thinking Tools or Harvard Project Zero’s Thinking Routines. In addition, we introduce our own two skill-building exercises, the Reasoning Game and the Argument Game. Thirdly, we show how this approach can be applied not just in Philosophy classes, but in the Humanities and Social Sciences. We argue that our approach brings these subjects to life, it develops understanding and reasonableness, and it bumps up student engagement. Fourthly, we discuss the assessment of reasonableness. In this type of learning environment, the way students perform in the philosophical community of inquiry is the focus of assessment. The desirable qualities of being reasonable become the assessment criteria for an on-balanced judgment about the student. (shrink)

It might be that intuitions are central to philosophy, and it might be that this is true because when philosophers give case‐based arguments for philosophical claims (in published philosophy), the case verdict is typically (a) an intuited proposition and (b) either left undefended or defended on the grounds that it is an intuited proposition. This paper remains neutral on these global issues, however, and instead focuses on whether there is a nontrivial (or many‐membered) class of case‐based arguments in philosophy (...) in which the case verdict is defended by appeal to background beliefs and not on the grounds that it is an intuited proposition. The paper argues that the answer is affirmative by examining seven such arguments that are referred to as “paradigm cases” of case‐based arguments in which the verdict is justified via an appeal to intuition. (shrink)

I distinguish two theses regarding technological successors to current humans (posthumans): an anthropologically bounded posthumanism (ABP) and an anthropologically unbounded posthumanism (AUP). ABP proposes transcendental conditions on agency that can be held to constrain the scope for “weirdness” in the space of possible posthumans a priori. AUP, by contrast, leaves the nature of posthuman agency to be settled empirically (or technologically). Given AUP there are no “future proof” constraints on the strangeness of posthuman agents. -/- In Posthuman Life I defended (...) AUP via a critique of Donald Davidson’s work on intentionality and a “naturalistic deconstruction” of transcendental phenomenology (See also Roden 2013). In this paper I extend this critique to Robert Brandom’s account of the relationship between normativity and intentionality in Making It Explicit (MIE) and in other writings. -/- Brandom’s account understands intentionality in terms of the capacity to undertake and ascribe inferential normative commitments. It makes “first class agency” dependent on the ability to participate in discursive social practices. It implies that posthumans – insofar as they qualify as agents at all – would need to be social and discursive beings. -/- The problem with this approach, I will argue, is that it replicates a problem that Brandom discerns in Dennett’s intentional stance approach. It tells us nothing about the conditions under which a being qualifies as a potential interpreter and thus little about the conditions for meaning, understanding or agency. -/- I support this diagnosis by showing that Brandom cannot explain how a non-sapient community could bootstrap itself into sapience by setting up a basic deontic scorekeeping system without appealing (along with Davidson and Dennett) to the ways in which an idealized observer would interpret their activity. -/- This strongly suggests that interpretationist and pragmatist accounts cannot explain the semantic or the intentional without regressing to assumptions about ideal interpreters or background practices whose scope they are incapable of delimiting. It follows that Anthropologically Unbounded Posthumanism is not seriously challenged by the claim that agency and meaning are “constituted” by social practices. -/- AUP implies that we can infer no claims about the denizens of “Posthuman Possibility Space” a priori, by reflecting on the pragmatic transcendental conditions for semantic content. We thus have no reason to suppose that posthuman agents would have to be subjects of discourse or, indeed, members of communities. The scope for posthuman weirdness can be determined by recourse to engineering alone. (shrink)

The Austrian system for pensions and care is dated back to the monarchy and was established in the year 1848 when the future empire ensured the whole country. In the settlement with Hungary, the Hungarians got their own system, and now there is a guarantee for the wellbeing of older persons in Austria. As most of the people remember, the only introduction was after the First World War in Austria, between 1918 and 1920 the social assurance system was created by (...) persons such as Ferdinand Hanusch or members of the social-democratic party. Now the whole system has three pillars: the assurance of health; the assurance of accidents; and the assurance for older persons and care, which is covering the risks after the age of 60. It was a class-struggle when people go into a pension, but as far as we can see, the development was similar in the whole of Europe. The changes were done after the Second World War when some of the countries became communist regimes, while Austria became a flower of diversity in the systems of social assurances. There were no private assurances, those who existed were plus-payers, so the state allowed the assurance according to professions and qualifications. As we see, the results are different from the communist states of the Warsaw Pact, and this chapter focuses on explaining the social system of today and the changes of it as it is perceived. (shrink)

The articles presents my journey with "Live Poetry" a participatory poetry methods created by Luis Enrique Amaya in Perù. This journey is marked by three encounters I had, that convinced me of the depth of the beauty and healing this journey can bring. The first occurs in Cali, Colombia, in a vast set of working-class neighbourhoods called Distrito de Agua Blanca. This area is dominated by drug trafficking and invisible borders between rival gangs. Teenagers experience a daily life of (...) violence and neglect. In this neighbourhood, I meet Luis Enrique Amaya, poet and social activist from Lima, Peru. Today, Luis will lead a poetry workshop with teenagers in the neighbourhood. It is based on a community poetry method he created years before with his collaborators. The workshop today will have two phases. In the first phase, the poet interviews a passer-by, a member of the community, and asks them to talk about someone important to her or him (a family member, a friend, a lover). In the second phase, the poet asks the interviewee to wait for few minutes. Then the poet sits alone for about ten minutes and composes a poem dedicated to the person chosen by the interviewee. When he has finished, the poet gives the poem to the interviewee as a gift saying: “After listening to you, I composed this poem and I give it to you as a gift. But beware: it is not for you. It is to invite you give it as a gift to the person you told me about”. (shrink)