Intellectualists about know-how tend to deny that knowing how to ϕ requires the corresponding ability to ϕ. So, it’s supposed to be an attractive feature of intellectualism that it can explain cases of knowing how without ability, while anti-intellectualism—roughly, the view that knowing how is a kind of ability—cannot. I show that intellectualism fails to explain the very cases that are supposed to showcase this feature of the view. Despite appearances, this does not amount to an objection to intellectualism per (...) se, but to the intellectualist’s rejection of ability entailment. It turns out that all parties to the debate about know-how should accept that knowing how entails ability. The upshot is that the central question of the debate should not be whether knowing how entails ability, but whether ability suffices for knowing how, as anti-intellectualists sometimes claim. (shrink)

In this paper, I expand our framework for epistemic injustice by shifting focus from epistemic evaluations of individuals in information exchange to epistemic evaluations of individuals engaging their know-how in performance. I call the injustice to individuals qua knowers-how performative injustice, and I argue that performative injustice has distinct features worth understanding apart from varieties of epistemic injustice devoted to information exchange. I develop an account of the performative authority that is unfairly evaluated in cases of performative injustice and show (...) how, in some cases, cognitive penetration can affect observers’ evaluations. Finally, I show how stereotype threat may short circuit what would otherwise be cases of performative injustice, which in turn reveals the significance of its systemic manifestations. (shrink)

In Descartes theological writing, he promotes two jointly puzzling theses: T1) God freely creates the eternal truths (i.e. the Creation Doctrine) and T2) The eternal truths are necessarily true. According to T1 God freely chooses which propositions to make necessary, contingent and possible. However the Creation Doctrine makes the acceptance of T2 tenuous for the Creation Doctrine implies that God could have acted otherwise--instantiating an entirely different set of necessary truths. Jonathan Bennett seeks to reconcile T1 and T2 by relativizing (...) modality to human understanding. I argue that Bennett’s approach to Cartesian modality is misplaced: One does not have to resort to conceptualism about modality in order to explain the subjective language found in Descartes or to reconcile Descartes’ Creation Doctrine with the necessity of the eternal truths. After showing that Bennett’s argument implies that Descartes held the non-eternality of the eternal truths and the independence of the eternal truths from God, I show that if one understands Descartes’ use modal terms as indexed to God’s willing, then apparent contradictions vanish. In addition, I show that if one evaluates the truth value of modal propositions ‘non-bivalently’, then one can also unravel the apparent contradiction. One can reconcile Descartes’ Creation Doctrine (T1) and the necessity of the eternal truths (T2) without Bennett’s conceptualism. (shrink)

The current rise of neurodevelopmental disorders poses a critical need to detect risk early in order to rapidly intervene. One of the tools pediatricians use to track development is the standard growth chart. The growth charts are somewhat limited in predicting possible neurodevelopmental issues. They rely on linear models and assumptions of normality for physical growth data – obscuring key statistical information about possible neurodevelopmental risk in growth data that actually has accelerated, non-linear rates-of-change and variability encompassing skewed distributions. Here, (...) we use new analytics to profile growth data from 36 newborn babies that were tracked longitudinally for 5 months. By switching to incremental (velocity-based) growth charts and combining these dynamic changes with underlying fluctuations in motor performance – as the transition from spontaneous random noise to a systematic signal – we demonstrate a method to detect very early stunting in the development of voluntary neuromotor control and to flag risk of neurodevelopmental derail. (shrink)

The doctrine of reincarnation is usually associated with Buddhism, Hinduism and other Eastern religions. But it has also been developed in Druzism and Judaism. The doctrine has been used by these traditions to explain the existence of evil within a moral order. Traversing the boundaries between East and West, we explore how Jewish mysticism has employed the doctrine to help answer the problem of evil. We explore the doctrine particularly as we respond to objections against employing it in a theodicy. (...) We show how it supplements traditional punishment, free will and soul-building theodicies, and helps these theodicies avoid various objections. (shrink)

Nicola Hoggard Creegan has written a thoughtful and subtle work on the challenge of natural evil to the life of faith in a post-Darwinian age. She contends that “the problem of evil will not be solved just by clever arguments, but also by our stance toward nature and toward God” (8). To this end, Animal Suffering and the Problem of Evil is a work intended to help Christian believers recognize the God of love at work in the universe. Although some (...) might be disappointed that Creegan does not attempt to provide the reader with a theodicy or a reason why God permits natural evil, she does deliver a theologically consistent way for believers to see God’s goodness in the natural world despite the manifest presence of violence and suffering. (shrink)

Judith Butler argues for collective liberatory action grounded in ontological vulnerability. Yet descriptive social ontology alone provides neither normative ethical prescriptions nor direction for political action. I believe Butler tries to overcome this gap by appealing to equality as an ethical ideal. In this article, I reconstruct how equality operates in her transition from ontological vulnerability to prescriptive commitments. Then, turning to Sylvia Wynter, I argue Butler's uncritical use of equality constrains the radical direction of her liberatory goals—firstly because (...) it cannot mitigate the coloniality of Being, and secondly because she figures the locus of critique as an anonymous and equally vulnerable body at the limits of the recognizably human. I conclude with Wynter's demand for liberatory critique to arise out of specific decolonial locations of rupture from our historically situated, oppressive, and overrepresented genre of being human. (shrink)

In dialogue with the critiques of the modern world in Sylvia Wynter and Afrofuturism, this chapter offers a reading of Early German Romanticism as a project of universal construction, where "universal" refers at once to conceptual universality and to the post-Copernican universe. For Novalis, Friedrich Schlegel, and August Wilhelm Schlegel, the joint task of poetry and philosophy is to re-mediate post-Copernican reality across all of its scales. This project of cross-scalar poiesis is inherently ambivalent, entwined as it is with (...) the colonial project of modernity, including the Western-centric racialized construction of global humanity and the ambition to master reality through the human mind. This project is also constitutively impossible due to the infinite, and infinitely fragmented, nature of post-Copernican reality. This impossibility generates, I suggest, the Romantic aporias of incompletion that later come to the fore in poststructuralism, which itself emerges from a renewed crisis of global and planetary reality. Most radically, these aporias call for a no to the meta-standpoint of universal history—for a refusal and ungrounding of the world, which I explore through the non-position of Blackness in Wynter, the antagonistic inhabitation of geocosmic depths in Afrofuturism, and Friedrich Schlegel's insistence on cosmic irony, contingency, and chaos. (shrink)

This article interprets Teresa Brennan’s work on the forgetting of affect transmission in conjunction with Sylvia Wynter’s argument concerning the rise of Western Man through the dehumanization of native and African peoples. While not directly in dialogue, Wynter’s decolonial reading of Foucault’s epistemic ruptures enriches Brennan’s inquiry into this “forgetting,” given that callous, repeated acts of cruelty characteristic of Western imperialism and slavery required a denial of the capacity to sense suffering in others perceived as differently human. Supplementing (...) Brennan with Wynter, we can better describe the limits of sympathy discourses as resting on identification and perceived sameness. In turn, Brennan comes to Wynter’s defense in her call for a new science of plural cultures to redefine the human, which some have interpreted as a positivist misreading of Frantz Fanon. Brennan and Wynter alike have been criticized for their appeals to science; yet, I defend their respective proposals for social-scientific inquiry with support from Brennan’s response to the 1996 Sokal Hoax: the influence of the social on the biological body is, indeed, difficult to study, but this does not invalidate the inquiry as such. (shrink)

The fact that Dewey was born the same year in which Darwin’s On the Origin of Species was published is one of the historical coincidences most commonly mentioned by those interested in American philosophy. Such lack of originality—mine included—is perfectly justified by the fact that pragmatism would not exist, at least not as we know it, without Darwin. The intersection between philosophy and evolutionary theories has been amply explored. In this book, Beth L. Eddy offers us an additional examination, (...) focused, this time, on the contribution of Darwinism and pragmatism to ethics.Eddy begins by examining the context in which Darwinism emerged and the two contrasting ethical standpoints derived from it, namely... (shrink)

In this article, I link Lisa Feldman Barrett's theory of constructed emotion1 to decolonial perspectives that also challenge this universality of affect in cross-cultural facial expressions. After first outlining some of the present-day political stakes of these questions, I turn to Sylvia Wynter on the "ethnoclass of Man" in Western modernity, where she asks: how were concepts of not only being, truth, power, and freedom but also affect—the intelligibility of one's feelings toward others—framed by histories of colonial violence and (...) refusals of imaginative identification?2 Wynter argues that the overrepresentation of the Western ethnoclass results in the naturalization of a limited and contingent mode of being as... (shrink)

This article looks at some of the metaphysical properties of cognitive artefacts. It first identifies and demarcates the target domain by conceptualizing this class of artefacts as a functional kind. Building on the work of Beth Preston, a pluralist notion of functional kind is developed, one that includes artefacts with proper functions and system functions. Those with proper functions have a history of cultural selection, whereas those with system functions are improvised uses of initially non-cognitive artefacts. Having identified the (...) target domain, it then briefly looks at the multiple usability of physical structures and the multiple realizability of cognitive function. Further developing insights from the “dual nature of artefacts thesis”, the article ends with conceptualizing the structure–function relations of cognitive artefacts. More specifically, it unpacks the relation between physical structure, representational structure, information, and cognitive function. (shrink)

RESUMO A inseminação artificial (IA) é a biotecnologia mais empregada com vantagens superiores em relação a utilização da monta natural, cuja eficácia se dá na larga escala de reprodução entre os bovinos. Associando essa biotécnica com hormônios pode-se estabelecer manipulações do sistema reprodutivo da fêmea, levando a manejos de inúmeras cabeças de gado para inseminar a um tempo fixo. Portanto, foram realizados 5 protocolos de IATF, tendo 2 categorias de animais: nulíparas e multíparas. No protocolo 1 foram submetidas 81 multíparas, (...) resultando em 47 animais prenhes; No protocolo 2 foram protocoladas 103 animais multíparas, no qual resultou em 51 prenhes; já o protocolo 5 foram submetidas 77 animais multíparas, no qual resultou em 36 animais prenhes. Cada serviço realizado foi matematicamente calculado, sendo o ponto de partida o escore corporal, bem estar animal e a técnica bem exercida. Desta forma obteve bons resultados na (IATF) , no qual destaca-se o percentual : o protocolo 1 obteve 58,02%, o protocolo 2 obteve 49,51% na taxa de prenhez, No protocolo 3 obteve 55,67% na taxa de prenhez, o protocolo 4 obteve 53,33% de prenhes, já o protocolo 5 resultou em 46,75% de prenhez. O uso das biotecnologias da reprodução, realizadas em bovinos de corte, obteve resultado dentro do descrito pela literatura consultada. A boa taxa de prenhes apresentada na IATF deveu-se ao bom controle hormonal do ciclo estral e da qualidade do sêmen utilizado. A taxa de prenhez dos animais que foram submetidos à monta natural foi baixa pelo fato de que os reprodutores não conseguiram cobrir todas as fêmeas. ABSTRACT The artificial insemination (AI) is the most used biotechnology with superior advantages in relation to the use of natural mounting, whose effectiveness is given in the large scale of reproduction among cattle. Associating this biotechnique with hormones it is possible to establish manipulations of the reproductive system of the female, leading to managements of numerous heads of cattle to inseminate at a fixed time. Therefore, 5 IATF protocols were performed, having 2 categories of animals: nulliparous and multiparous. In protocol 1, 81 multiparous animals were submitted, resulting in 47 pregnant animals; in protocol 2, 103 multiparous animals were submitted, resulting in 51 pregnancies; and in protocol 5, 77 multiparous animals were submitted, resulting in 36 pregnant animals. Each service performed was mathematically calculated, with the starting point being the body score, animal welfare and the well exercised technique. Thus obtained good results in the (IATF), which highlights the percentage: protocol 1 obtained 58.02%, protocol 2 obtained 49.51% in pregnancy rate, in protocol 3 obtained 55.67% in pregnancy rate, protocol 4 obtained 53.33% pregnant, and protocol 5 resulted in 46.75% pregnant. The use of the reproduction biotechnologies, performed in beef cattle, obtained results within the described by the consulted literature. The good pregnancy rate presented in the IATF was due to the good hormonal control of the estrous cycle and the quality of the semen used. The pregnancy rate of animals that were subjected to natural mating was low due to the fact that the sires could not cover all the females. Keywords: Hormones. Cattle Pregnancy Rate. Artificial Insemination in Cattle. Hormones in Cattle Reproduction. -/- REFERÊNCIAS BIBLIOGRÁFICAS AMBRÓSIO, P. H. et al. Ressincronização da ovulação em programas de IATF: novas estratégias. 2018. BARUSELLI, P. S.; GIMENES, L. U.; SALES, J. N. de S. Fisiologia reprodutiva de fêmeas taurinas e zebuínas. Revista Brasileira de Reprodução Animal, v. 31, n. 2, p. 205-211, 2007. BARUSELLI, P. S. et al. Evolução e perspectivas da inseminação artificial em bovinos. Revista Brasileira de Reprodução Animal, v. 43, n. 2, p. 308-314, 2019. BÓ, G. A. et al. Alternative programs for synchronizing and resynchronizing ovulation in beef cattle. Theriogenology, v. 86, n. 1, p. 388-396, 2016. BOTTINO, M. P. et al. Effects of eCG and FSH in timed artificial insemination treatment regimens on estrous expression and pregnancy rates in primiparous and multiparous Bos indicus cows. Animal Reproduction Science, v. 228, p. 106751, 2021. DA SILVA, Emanuel Isaque Cordeiro. Técnica da Inseminação Artificial em Bovinos: Manejo Passo a Passo. 2020. DA SILVA, Emanuel Isaque Cordeiro. Reprodução Animal: Inseminação Artificial. 2020. DA SILVA, Emanuel Isaque Cordeiro. Fisiologia da Reprodução Animal: Ovulação, Controle e Sincronização do Cio. 2020. DA SILVA, Emanuel Isaque Cordeiro. Fisiologia da Reprodução de Bovinos Leiteiros: Aspectos Básicos e Clínicos. Emanuel Isaque Cordeiro da Silva, 2022. KRAUS, Beth M.; PARENTE, Eric J.; TULLENERS, Eric P. Laryngoplasty with ventriculectomy or ventriculocordectomy in 104 draft horses (1992–2000). Veterinary Surgery, v. 32, n. 6, p. 530-538, 2003. MONGELLI, Melissa Sanches; TAVARES, Izabel Cristina; FERRANTE, Marcos. Evolução e premissas dos protocolos hormonais de inseminação artificial em tempo fixo na pecuária. Ciência Animal, v. 31, n. 1, p. 119-133, 2021. VILELA, G. C. Protocolos de IATF em novilhas precoce e super precoce. 2021. (shrink)

Mathematicians, physicists, and philosophers of physics often look to the symmetries of an object for insight into the structure and constitution of the object. My aim in this paper is to explain why this practice is successful. In order to do so, I present a collection of results that are closely related to (and in a sense, generalizations of) Beth’s and Svenonius’ theorems.

Amy saves a man from drowning despite the risk to herself, because she is moved by his plight. This is a quintessentially supererogatory act: an act that goes above and beyond the call of duty. Beth, on the other hand, saves a man from drowning because she wants to get her name in the paper. On this second example, opinions differ. One view of supererogation holds that, despite being optional and good, Beth’s act is not supererogatory because she (...) is not praiseworthy; the other agrees that Beth is not praiseworthy but holds that her act is nevertheless supererogatory because, while supererogatory actions are generally performed by praiseworthy agents, an individual need not be praiseworthy for their act to be supererogatory. In this paper, I raise a problem for this latter position, which I shall call the Anti-Motivation View of supererogation. While the Anti-Motivation View rejects the claim that the agent’s motivations are important, it accepts that the agent’s intentions are. Thus, this view assumes that a clear, coherent distinction can be drawn between intentions and motivations in the context of supererogation. This distinction is often attributed to Mill; however, his original discussion reveals an inconsistency. Consider Clara, who saves a man from drowning because she wants to torture him later. According to Mill, Clara’s act is not morally good; those who follow Mill will have to accept that it is therefore not supererogatory. Mill asserts that Clara’s act differs from Amy’s and Beth’s not just in motivation but also in intention. I question this explanation and demonstrate that the distinction between motivation and intention is not as clear as the Anti-Motivation View has supposed and that the gap between the Anti-Motivation View and the alternative Praise-Based View is either much greater or much smaller than previously thought. (shrink)

In 2011, a 5,000-year-old “male” skeleton buried in a “female” way was discovered by an archaeological team just outside of modern-day Prague. This article queries the impulse to name such a discovery as evidence of transgender identity, and bodies, in an increasingly ancient past. To do so, it takes up the work of Denise Ferreira da Silva, Sylvia Wynter, and Hortense Spillers as a means to push back against the impetus to name such discoveries “transgender” in order to shore (...) up the legitimacy of contemporary trans identity. Each of these three thinkers offers a different vantage point for rethinking such naming practices that push the reader to consider how desires to name and place “transgender” in a distant past papers over the violence of plantation slavery, global imperialism, and the Enlightenment's shift toward scientific reason. This article argues not that such anthropological discoveries should not be considered transgender, but rather that the desire for them to be, or become, transgender does not legitimate contemporary transgender identity, and may instead treat certain iterations of transness as spatially and temporally universal. (shrink)

The sacrifices of nurses in hard-hit cities during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic and of family caregivers for people with late-stage Alzheimer’s disease present two puzzles. First, traditional accounts of supererogation cannot allow for the possibility of making enormous sacrifices that make one’s actions supererogatory simply to do what morality requires. These caregivers, however, are doing their moral duty, yet their actions also seem to be paradigmatic cases of supererogation. I argue that Dale Dorsey’s new account of supererogation (...) can solve this puzzle. Second, these caregivers often deny that they are heroic, but standard explanations of these assertions either diminish their sacrifice, say they are confused, or attribute to them a vice. If we want to understand them without diminishing them, we should instead see their denials as a response to what Beth DeVolder calls compulsory heroism. Compulsory heroism occurs when someone is foisted into the role of hero for doing their moral duty as a distraction from the social realities that make doing their duty involve inordinate sacrifice. (shrink)

A god is a cosmic designer-creator. Atheism says the number of gods is 0. But it is hard to defeat the minimal thesis that some possible universe is actualized by some possible god. Monotheists say the number of gods is 1. Yet no degree of perfection can be coherently assigned to any unique god. Lewis says the number of gods is at least the second beth number. Yet polytheists cannot defend an arbitrary plural number of gods. An alternative is (...) that, for every ordinal, there is a god whose perfection is proportional to it. The n -th god actualizes the best universe(s) in the n -th level of an axiological hierarchy of possible universes. Despite its unorthodoxy, ordinal polytheism has many metaphysically attractive features and merits more serious study. (shrink)

Varzi (2005) discussed 6 ways of symbolizing the sentence 'If Alf went to the movies then Beth went too, but only if she found a taxi-cab.' In the present reply, a seventh symbolization is offered, along with an analysis of the six alternatives discussed by Varzi.

In this article I give an overview of some recent work in philosophy of science dedicated to analysing the scientific process in terms of (conceptual) mathematical models of theories and the various semantic relations between such models, scientific theories, and aspects of reality. In current philosophy of science, the most interesting questions centre around the ways in which writers distinguish between theories and the mathematical structures that interpret them and in which they are true, i.e. between scientific theories as linguistic (...) systems and their non-linguistic models. In philosophy of science literature there are two main approaches to the structure of scientific theories, the statement or syntactic approach -- advocated by Carnap, Hempel and Nagel -- and the non- statement or semantic approach --advocated, among others, by Suppes, the structuralists, Beth, Van Fraassen, Giere, Wojcicki. In conclusion, I briefly review some of the usual realist inspired questions about the possibility and character of relations between scientific theories and reality as implied by the various approaches I discuss in the course of the article. The models of a scientific theory should indeed be adequate to the phenomena, but if the theory is 'adequate' to (true in) its conceptual (mathematical) models as well, we have a model-theoretic realism that addresses the possible meaning and reference of 'theoretical entities' without relapsing into the metaphysics typical of the usual scientific realist approaches. (shrink)

The Deaf culture in the United States is a unique culture that is not widely understood. To members of the Deaf community in the United States, deafness is not viewed as a disease or pathology to be treated or cured; instead it is seen as a difference in human experience. Members of this community do not hide their deafness; instead they take great pride in their Deaf identity. The Deaf culture in the United States is very communitarian not individualistic. Mary (...) Beth and Dominic are a married couple in their late 20s who are genetically deaf. They are active members in the Deaf community and work as advocates for individuals who are deaf, family members of Deaf people and sign language interpreters who identify with the Deaf culture. Mary Beth and Dominic approach the fertility clinic with a request that they only want a child with the genetic gene for deafness. They would want the embryos that do not have the gene to be destroyed. This would entail creating a child who would have the gene for deafness. Medically and ethically, should the fertility clinic agree to the couple’s request? The authors argue that the couple's request should be denied and provide reasons for it from the perspectives of foundational and clinical ethics. (shrink)

The author considers the model-theoretic character of proofs and disproofs by means of attempted counterexample constructions, distinguishes this proof format from formal derivations, then contrasts two approaches to semantic tableaux proposed by Beth and Lambert-van Fraassen. It is noted that Beth's original approach has not as yet been provided with a precisely formulated rule of closure for detecting tableau sequences terminating in contradiction. To remedy this deficiency, a technique is proposed to clarify tableau operations.

Ziel des Beitrages ist die differenzierende Beschreibung des Projekts Cybersyn sowie die anschließende kritische Perspektivierung ausgewählter neokybernetischer Governance-Konzepte, die in den letzten Jahren verstärkt im Policy-Kontext diskutiert wurden. Die „Entscheidungsmaschine“ Stafford Beers, die der Management-Kybernetiker unter Salvador Allende in den frühen Siebzigern konzipierte, wird zumeist als Projekt eines technisch avancierten, ökonomischen Organisationskonzepts, eines „dritten Wegs“ beschrieben. Der Beitrag diskutiert die Grundkonzeption des „sozialistischen Internets“, seine fortschrittlichen, ökonomischen Ideen und Ästhetiken wie auch die Person Stafford Beer, legt den Fokus aber vor (...) allem auf ein eher selten beschriebenes Teilkonzept, namentlich „Cyberfolk“, eine Art binäres, affektives Echtzeit-Stimmungsbarometer der Bevölkerung zur Live-Bewertung von politischen Reden. In diesem Konnex werden gerade die demokratietheoretischen Implikationen von Cybersyn und seine Vorstellung „totaler Transparenz“ genauer untersucht. Im Anschluss wird expliziert, wie sich in unterschiedlichen gegenwärtigen Konzeptionen fluider Techno- bzw. technoider Expertokratien – von den „smart states“ Beth Novecks bis zur „direct technocracy“ Parag Khannas – die „Kybernetisierung des Politischen“ auch im digitalen Zeitalter – gewissermaßen unter umgekehrtem, d.h. neoliberalen Vorzeichen – revitalisiert und dabei sowohl problematische Partizipations- als auch Emanzipationskonzepte umreisst. Zu untersuchen sind in dieser Hinsicht so auch die reduktiven Aspekte der Beerschen letztlich feedbacklogischen Konzeption des Politischen. (shrink)

Thomas Elsaesser’s recent scholarship has examined the “mind-game film”, a phenomenon in Hollywood that is broadly characterised by multi-platform storytelling, paratextual narrative feedback loops, nonlinear storytelling, and unreliable character perspectives. While “mind-game” or “puzzle” films have become a contentious subject amongst post-cinema scholars concerned with Hollywood storytelling, what is to be said of contemporary European independent cinema? Elsaesser’s timely publication, European Cinema and Continental Philosophy, examines an amalgam of politically inclined European auteurs to resolve this query. Elsaesser concedes that there (...) exists a phenomenological confluence between the mind-game film and contemporary European cinema. For instance, both produce characters afflicted by productive pathologies, designating new socially useful forms of agency and identity. One only needs to consult the amnesiac protagonist M (Markku Peltola) in Aki Kaurismäki’s The Man Without a Past (Mies vailla menneisyyttä, 2002) or, as regards Lars von Trier’s cinema, Beth (Emily Watson) in Breaking the Waves (1996), Selma (Björk) in Dancer in the Dark (2000), “She” (Charlotte Gainsbourg) in Antichrist (2009) or Joe (Charlotte Gainsbourg) in Nymphomaniac (2013) to evince this overlap. However, this book is more concerned with performative self-contradictions, whereby cinema-as-enunciator is put under erasure, thus aggravating the inherent discrepancies troubling Europe today. Elsaesser, indeed, evaluates a growing general disaffection with politics, the rise of populist nationalism and far-right fringe parties, as well as an increasing population of economic migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers. (shrink)