Biomedical ontologies are emerging as critical tools in genomic and proteomic research where complex data in disparate resources need to be integrated. A number of ontologies exist that describe the properties that can be attributed to proteins; for example, protein functions are described by Gene Ontology, while human diseases are described by Disease Ontology. There is, however, a gap in the current set of ontologies—one that describes the protein entities themselves and their relationships. We have designed a PRotein Ontology (PRO) (...) to facilitate protein annotation and to guide new experiments. The components of PRO extend from the classification of proteins on the basis of evolutionary relationships to the representation of the multiple protein forms of a gene (products generated by genetic variation, alternative splicing, proteolytic cleavage, and other post-translational modification). PRO will allow the specification of relationships between PRO, GO and other OBO Foundry ontologies. Here we describe the initial development of PRO, illustrated using human proteins from the TGF-beta signaling pathway. (shrink)

Is calculation possible without language? Or is the human ability for arithmetic dependent on the language faculty? To clarify the relation between language and arithmetic, we studied numerical cognition in speakers of Mundurukú, an Amazonian language with a very small lexicon of number words. Although the Mundurukú lack words for numbers beyond 5, they are able to compare and add large approximate numbers that are far beyond their naming range. However, they fail in exact arithmetic with numbers larger than 4 (...) or 5. Our results imply a distinction between a nonverbal system of number approximation and a language-based counting system for exact number and arithmetic. (shrink)

What’s so good about John Ames? The narrator of Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead has been much admired, but it’s far from obvious why. His life is quiet and unassuming, and has for the most part been uneventful in the extreme. In this chapter I draw on Iris Murdoch’s moral philosophy to explain the moral arc of the novel, and suggest that the novel in turn can shed light on Murdoch’s key ethical ideas. What is so notable about John Ames, I suggest, (...) is his commitment to seeing the world justly and lovingly—a commitment which for Murdoch is at the heart of virtuous agency. (shrink)

What is common to all instances of friendship? Given their seemingly heterogeneous character, Phelan (2019. “Rethinking Friendship.” Inquiry) suggests that friendships are relationships that result from collaborative norm-manipulation. In this paper, I suggest that this proposal fails to account for all friendships without relying on the notion of some kind of care.

The Protein Ontology (PRO) provides a formal, logically-based classification of specific protein classes including structured representations of protein isoforms, variants and modified forms. Initially focused on proteins found in human, mouse and Escherichia coli, PRO now includes representations of protein complexes. The PRO Consortium works in concert with the developers of other biomedical ontologies and protein knowledge bases to provide the ability to formally organize and integrate representations of precise protein forms so as to enhance accessibility to results of protein (...) research. PRO (http://pir.georgetown.edu/pro) is part of the Open Biomedical Ontologies (OBO) Foundry. (shrink)

In a recent paper, Strabbing (2020) argues that forgiveness is openness to reconciliation relative to a relationship level. In this paper, we argue that the openness-to-reconciliation account of forgiveness does not constitute an improvement on the forswearing-resentment account. We argue that it does not fit well with our ordinary practices of forgiving and cannot allow for plausible cases of forgiveness without reconciliation. We also argue that the features Strabbing identifies as distinct advantages of her account are features of the forswearing-resentment (...) account as well. (shrink)

Two doxastically significant demands of friendship have been discussed in recent literature, a demand to be epistemically partial and a demand to take our friends seriously. Though less discussed than epistemic partialism, I suggest that the demand to take our friends seriously is motivated by similar cases and considerations, and can avoid key objections to epistemic partialism that have been raised. I further suggest that it does justice to what we care about in friendship, and thus is to be preferred.

A concise review of skeptician in the Carterian model with a discussion of the reframing of the Cartesian paradigm by John McDowell in the 20th century.

In “The Best of All Possible Worlds” William E. Mann argues that some possible worlds are morally incommensurable with some others, because some choices are between incompatible alternatives that are themselves incommensurable. The best possible world must be better than, and hence commensurable with, every other world. So if anyone in the actual world ever faces a choice between incompatible alternatives that are morally incommensurable, this is not the best possible world. But it seems that some of us do, on (...) occasion, face such choices. So this is not the best possible world. (shrink)

Coronavirus disease 2019 can lead to respiratory failure. Some patients require extracorporeal membrane oxygenation support. During the current pandemic, health care resources in some cities have been overwhelmed, and doctors have faced complex decisions about resource allocation. We present a case in which a pediatric hospital caring for both children and adults seeks to establish guidelines for the use of extracorporeal membrane oxygenation if there are not enough resources to treat every patient. Experts in critical care, end-of-life care, bioethics, and (...) health policy discuss if age should guide rationing decisions. (shrink)

‘Adams worlds’ are possible worlds that contain no creature whose life is not worth living or whose life is overall worse than in any other possible world in which it would have existed. Creating an Adams world involves no wrongdoing or unkindness towards creatures on the part of the creator. I argue that the notion of an Adams world is of little value in theodicy. Theists are not only committed to thinking that this world was created without wrongdoing or unkindness (...) but also must rule out the possibility that the world might have been better had God not existed. Nor is there much reason, independent of the availability of a satisfactory theodicy, for believing that the actual world is an Adams world. The need for a theodicy constructed along Leibnizian lines, incorporating the claim that this world is the best possible, is thus reinforced. (shrink)

Taking pride in being better than others in some regard is not uncommon. In a recent paper, Christopher Morgan-Knapp argues that such pride is misguided: it ‘presents things as being some way they are not’. I argue that Morgan-Knapp's arguments do not succeed in showing that comparative pride is theoretically mistaken.

The quantitative argument against the notion of a best possible world claims that, no matter how many worthwhile lives a world contains, another world contains more and is, other things being equal, better. Parfit’s ‘ Mere Addition Paradox ’ suggests that defenders of this argument must accept his ‘ Repugnant Conclusion ’ : that outcomes containing billions upon billions of lives barely worth living are better than outcomes containing fewer lives of higher quality. Several responses to the Paradox are discussed (...) and rejected as either inadequate or unavailable in a theistic context. The quantitative argument fails if some world is such that addition to it is not possible, i.e., if it is intensively infinite, as Liebniz claimed. If the notion of such a world is incoherent, then no world is quantitatively best and the quantitative argument succeeds, but only at the cost of embracing the Repugnant Conclusion. (shrink)

This poised and articulate volume addresses an area of pragmatist philosophy as yet relatively unexplored in pragmatism's welcome revival. Neopragmatism's preoccupation with changing philosophers' view of the relation between language (or as Rorty puts it: "vocabularies") and reality, has largely focussed their discussions on the 'metaphysics & epistemology', rather than the 'value' side of philosophy, apart from Rorty's brief flirtations with edifying Western political discourse. Yet the nature of truth in ethics has been a topic of keen discussion in recent (...) mainstream philosophy, and it's widely acknowledged that pragmatism has original and interesting things to say about truth. This book seeks to contribute in particular to discussions of objectivity in ethics which are arguably somewhat bogged down in a wealth of finely divergent terminologies and positions: prescriptivism, fictionalism, intuitionism, quasi-realism and expressivism, to name just a few. Heney organises her own discussion around a distinction between cognitivism and non-cognitivism about moral claims. (shrink)

If mourning is a proof of value, how could it be appropriate to move on when one has truly loved and valued someone? Assuming that it is appropriate to value others extremely highly – perhaps even infinitely – how could it ever make sense for one’s grief to abate? Do loss and proper mourning thus present us with a choice between living well and loving well? This paper aims to vindicate the pressing nature of these questions while arguing that we (...) do not need to choose between living well and loving well. It discusses how these questions become pressing, some empirical research seeming to imply that humans do not tend to love well at all, and finally, offers an explanation of why ceasing to mourn need not be a failure of love. In particular, we offer an account of how ceasing to mourn can be a fitting response to the object of love, as well as compatible with living well. (shrink)

The word “hacker” has an interesting double meaning: one vastly more widespread connotation of technological mischief, even criminality, and an original meaning amongst the tech savvy as a term of highest approbation. Both meanings, however, share the idea that hackers possess a superior ability to manipulate technology according to their will (and, as with God, this superior ability to exercise will is a source of both mystifying admiration and fear). This book mainly concerns itself with the former meaning. To Thomas (...) this simultaneously mystified and vilified, elusive set of individuals exemplifies “the performance of technology” xx), showing the way in which “the cultural, social and political history of the computer...is fraught with complexity and contradictions” ix). In fact, he claims that hacking is more a cultural than technological phenomenon, citing Heidegger’s, “[t]he essence of technology is not anything technological” (56). (shrink)

Remarks on naturalism--the belief that there is nothing besides the subway and its riders--and also on non-naturalism and supernaturalism, transcribed and edited from a notebook found on a subway train.

Representing species-specific proteins and protein complexes in ontologies that are both human and machine-readable facilitates the retrieval, analysis, and interpretation of genome-scale data sets. Although existing protin-centric informatics resources provide the biomedical research community with well-curated compendia of protein sequence and structure, these resources lack formal ontological representations of the relationships among the proteins themselves. The Protein Ontology (PRO) Consortium is filling this informatics resource gap by developing ontological representations and relationships among proteins and their variants and modified forms. Because (...) proteins are often functional only as members of stable protein complexes, the PRO Consortium, in collaboration with existing protein and pathway databases, has launched a new initiative to implement logical and consistent representation of protein complexes. We describe here how the PRO Consortium is meeting the challenge of representing species-specific protein complexes, how protein complex representation in PRO supports annotation of protein complexes and comparative biology, and how PRO is being integrated into existing community bioinformatics resources. The PRO resource is accessible at http://pir.georgetown.edu/pro/. (shrink)

The Protein Ontology (PRO) is designed as a formal and principled Open Biomedical Ontologies (OBO) Foundry ontology for proteins. The components of PRO extend from a classification of proteins on the basis of evolutionary relationships at the homeomorphic level to the representation of the multiple protein forms of a gene, including those resulting from alternative splicing, cleavage and/or posttranslational modifications. Focusing specifically on the TGF-beta signaling proteins, we describe the building, curation, usage and dissemination of PRO. PRO provides a framework (...) for the formal representation of protein classes and protein forms in the OBO Foundry. It is designed to enable data retrieval and integration and machine reasoning at the molecular level of proteins, thereby facilitating cross-species comparisons, pathway analysis, disease modeling and the generation of new hypotheses. (shrink)

Autorka nawiązuje do artykułu J.F. Lyotarda „A Few Words to Sing” w której filozof podejmuje się analizy utworu Sequenza III Luciano Berio napisanego i śpiewanego przez Cathy Bereberian. „A Few Words to Sing” jest przykładem podejmowania przez Lyotarda tematów muzycznych „na granicy”. W tym konkretnym przypadku autorka sugeruje, że wspomniana analiza bardzo dobrze wpisuje się w postulowane przez Lyotarda kategorie figury oraz oddania głosu [ofierze] w opozycji wobec tego co [czysto]estetyczne (resisting the aesthetic). Zainteresowania muzyczne Lyotarda, być może nie (...) tak wyeksponowane jak jego zainteresowania obrazem (choć kategorie figury i gestu okazują się łatwo przekraczać granice rodzajów sztuki) także bardzo wyraźnie wskazują na szczególny rodzaj [anty]estetyki uprawiany przez Lyotrada, gdzie udzielenie głosu ofierze staje się istotnym, jeśli nie podstawowym kryterium sztuki. (shrink)

I begin with an exposition of the two main variants of the Prosentential Theory of Truth (PT), those of Dorothy Grover et al. and Robert Brandom. Three main types of criticisms are then put forward: (1) material criticisms to the effect that (PT) does not adequately explain the linguistic data, (2) an objection to the effect that no variant of (PT) gives a properly unified account of the various occurrences of "true" in English, and, most importantly, (3) a charge (...) that the comparison with proforms is explanatorily idle. The last objection is that, given a complete semantic account of pronouns, proadjectives, antecedents, etc., together with a complete (PT), the essential semantic character of "true" could be deduced, but then, the idleness of the comparison with pronouns would be apparent. It turns out that objections (2) and (3) are related in the following way: the prosentential terminology is held to conceal the lack of unity in (PT), by describing the different data in the same terms ("proform", "antecedent", etc.). But this, I argue, is only a way of truly describing, rather than explaining, the data, these being certain relations of equivalence and consequence between sentences. I consider a language for which (PT) would be not only true, but also explanatory, but note that this language is very different from English. I end by showing that Robert Brandom's case that "is true" is not a predicate fails, and that his motivation for saying so is based on fallacious reasoning (namely, Boghossian's argument against deflationism). (shrink)

Cathy Mason (2020) argues – against my position in Phelan (2019) – that significant norm-manipulation is unnecessary for friendship. Instead, she holds that norm manipulation is a, perhaps omnipresent, causal result of the very feature I deny as necessary to friendship: mutual caring or love. Mason’s counter-examples allow for further explication of the norm-manipulation view of friendship. However, they do not constitute a compelling challenge to that view, because they do not seem to involve collaborative norm manipulation at all. (...) Instead, they are better described as cases in which people come to be subject to established cultural norms they were not previously subject to, because they voluntarily come to fall under a distinctive relationship relative to one another. (shrink)

What do we mean when we describe the history of the Caribbean as traumatic? Is it possible to use the term ‘trauma’ here in a more technical sense, or should we give it the less strict connotation of an extreme form of an event in which the past no longer stays just in the past and the future never ceases to demand something from the present? In this paper I analyze the image of the abyss, used by Édouard Glissant to (...) evoke poetically one of the beginnings of the Caribbean, as leading to a paradox on the attitude toward history: Caribbean communities have been burdened with a non-history that feels, at the same time, like too much history. I show that this image resembles the paradoxical structure of trauma developed in the works of Cathy Caruth, according to whom trauma is a paradoxical structure of experience in which the subject (or a community) is painfully possessed by an image that they have barely perceived and that is so minimal that it cannot be controlled. However, I argue, there are limits to this resemblance. I focus on the question whether the (traumatic) paradox is escapable in this region of the world, that is, whether Caribbean communities can be de-traumatized, and what are the connections of this possibility with the question, central to Glissant, of decolonization. In order to answer these questions, I analyze a central feature of the Caribbean history according to Glissant, transversality, to show in what way the paradox of history can be loosened. (shrink)

In Cathy Mason’s piece What’s Bad about Friendship with Bad People, she affirms that being friends with someone who has deep moral failings is itself corrupt. (529) Indeed her claim is true, but it is fallacious as she mistakenly ascribes the wrongfulness of such relationships to friends taking each other’s opinions seriously. But the mere consideration of unethical views is not a moral fault but a virtue and a skill. The real problem is that in befriending amoral people, we (...) by definition accept, approve of, and respect objectionable beliefs. (shrink)

This paper motivates taking seriously the possibility that brains are basically protean: that they make use of neural structures in inventive, on-the-fly improvisations to suit circumstance and context. Accordingly, we should not always expect cognition to divide into functionally stable neural parts and pieces. We begin by reviewing recent work in cognitive ontology that highlights the inadequacy of traditional neuroscientific approaches when it comes to divining the function and structure of cognition. Cathy J. Price and Karl J. Friston, and (...) Colin Klein identify the limitations of relying on forward and reverse inferences to cast light on the relation between cognitive functions and neural structures. There is reason to prefer Klein’s approach to that of Price and Friston’s. But Klein’s approach is neurocentric - it assumes that we ought to look solely at neural contexts to fix cognitive ontology. Using recent work on mindreading as a case study, we motivate adopting a radically different approach to cognitive ontology. Promoting the Protean Brain Hypothesis, we posit the possibility that we may need to look beyond the brain when deciding which functions are being performed in acts of cognition and in understanding how the brain contributes to such acts by adapting to circumstance. (shrink)

PHILIPPA RUTH FOOT was born on 3 October 1920, the second daughter of William Bosanquet, who had done mathematics at Cambridge and became the manager of a steelworks in Yorkshire, and Esther Cleveland, daughter of President Grover Cleveland. She was educated mainly at home in the country by governesses, and not well. She said, many years later, that, ‘unsurprisingly’, she had been left ‘extremely ignorant’, and when the last one, ‘who actually had a degree’, suggested to her that she (...) should go to Oxford, she had to work for it. She spent a year with an established Oxford entrance coach and took a correspondence course to acquire the necessary entrance Latin; the result was a place at Somerville College, where she went to read Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE) in 1939. (shrink)

Anselm’s ontological argument is an argument for the existence of God. This paper presents Iris Murdoch’s ontological argument for the existence of the Good. It discusses her interpretation of Anselm’s argument, her distinctive appropriation of it, as well as some of the merits of her version of the argument. In doing so, it also shows how the argument integrates some key Murdochian ideas: morality’s wide scope, the basicness of vision to morality, moral realism, and Platonism.

Many recent philosophers have been tempted by epistemic partialism. They hold that epistemic norms and those of friendship constitutively conflict. In this paper, I suggest that underpinning this claim is the assumption that friendship is not an epistemically rich state, an assumption that even opponents of epistemic partiality have not questioned. I argue that there is good reason to question this assumption, and instead regard friendship as essentially involving knowledge of the other. If we accept this account of friendship, the (...) possibility of epistemic partialism does not arise. (shrink)

‘Rival creator’ arguments suggest that God must have created the best of all possible worlds. These arguments are analyzed and evaluated, and Leibniz’s position defended.

Recent discussions of moral testimony have focused on the acceptability of forming beliefs on the basis of moral testimony, but there has been little acknowledgement of the limits to testimony's capacity to convey moral knowledge. In this paper I outline one such limit, drawing on Iris Murdoch's conception of private moral concepts. Such concepts, I suggest, plausibly play an important role in moral thought, and yet moral knowledge expressed in them cannot be testimonially acquired.

Frankfurt cases are supposed to provide us with counterexamples to the principle of alternative possibilities. Among the most well known responses to these cases is what John Fischer has dubbed the flicker of freedom strategy. Here we revisit a version of this strategy, which we refer to as the fine-grained response. Although a number of philosophers, including some who are otherwise unsympathetic to Frankfurt’s argument, have dismissed the fine grained response, we believe there is a good deal to be said (...) on its behalf. We argue, in particular, that reflection on certain cases involving omissions undermines the main objections to the response and also provides the groundwork for an argument in support of it. (shrink)

Experiments are presented showing that visual search for Mueller-Lyer (ML) stimuli is based on complete configurations, rather than component segments. Segments easily detected in isolation were difficult to detect when embedded in a configuration, indicating preemption by low-level groups. This preemption—which caused stimulus components to become inaccessible to rapid search—was an all-or-nothing effect, and so could serve as a powerful test of grouping. It is shown that these effects are unlikely to be due to blurring by simple spatial filters at (...) early visual levels. It is proposed instead that they are due to more sophisticated processes that rapidly bind contour fragments into spatially-extended assemblies. These results support the view that rapid visual search cannot access the primitives formed at the earliest stages of visual processing; rather, it can access only higher-level, more ecologically-relevant structures. (shrink)

In this article, I reconsider bio-essentialism in the study of kinship, centering on David Schneider’s influential critique that concluded that kinship was “a non-subject” (1972:51). Schneider’s critique is often taken to have shown the limitations of and problems with past views of kinship based on biology, genealogy, and reproduction, a critique that subsequently led those reworking kinship as relatedness in the new kinship studies to view their enterprise as divorced from such bio-essentialist studies. Beginning with an alternative narrative connecting kinship (...) past and present and concluding by introducing a novel way of thinking about kinship, I have three constituent aims in this research article: (1) to reconceptualize the relationship between kinship past and kinship present; (2) to reevaluate Schneider’s critique of bio-essentialism and what this implies for the contemporary study of kinship; and (3) subsequently to redirect theoretical discussion of what kinship is. This concluding discussion introduces a general view, the homeostatic property cluster (HPC) view of kinds, into anthropology, providing a theoretical framework that facilitates realization of the often-touted desideratum of the integration of biological and social features of kinship. [bio-essentialism, kinship studies, homeostatic property cluster kinds, Schneider, genealogy]. (shrink)

The Realist that investigates questions of ontology by appeal to the quantificational structure of language assumes that the semantics for the privileged language of ontology is externalist. I argue that such a language cannot be (some variant of) a natural language, as some Realists propose. The flexibility exhibited by natural language expressions noted by Chomsky and others cannot obviously be characterized by the rigid models available to the externalist. If natural languages are hostile to externalist treatments, then the meanings of (...) natural language expressions serve as poor guides for ontological investigation, insofar as their meanings will fail to determine the referents of their constituents. This undermines the Realist’s use of natural languages to settle disputes in metaphysics. (shrink)

In der Korrespondenz mit Clarke ist Leibniz' Standardargument gegen die Annahme, daß Raum und Zeit absolut seien, daß Gott sich bei der Wahl des zu erschaffenden Universums gezwungen sähe, gegen das Prinzip des zureichenden Grundes zu verstoßen, wenn diese Annahme richtig wäre: Bloße Unterschiede in räumlicher und zeitlicher Hinsicht ergeben keinen Vorteilsunterschied, und da Gott nur aus Vorteilsgründen handelt, sind solche Unterschiede nicht möglich. Leibniz stellt dieses Argument als ausschließlich abhängig vom Prinzip des zureichenden Grundes dar, eine gängige Interpretation ist (...) aber, daß dies Prinzip determinierte Objekte göttlicher Wahl nur dann ergibt, wenn ein ergänzendes Prinzip von Kontingenz hinzutritt. Diese Auslegung muß falsch sein, wenn Leibniz hier authentisch bleibt, und insofern wäre doch das Prinzip des zureichenden Grundes eher als irgendein Prinzip des Besten Leibniz' Prinzip der Kontingenz. (shrink)

John Locke is known within anthropology primarily for his empiricism, his views of natural laws, and his discussion of the state of nature and the social contract. Marilyn Strathern and Marshall Sahlins, however, have offered distinctive, novel, and broad reflections on the nature of anthropological knowledge that appeal explicitly to a lesser-known aspect of Locke’s work: his metaphysical views of relations. This paper examines their distinctive conclusions – Sahlins’ about cultural relativism, Strathern’s about relatives and kinship – both of which (...) concern the objectivity of anthropological knowledge. Although Locke’s own views of relations have been neglected by historians of philosophy in the past, recent and ongoing philosophical discussions of Locke on relations create a productive trading zone between philosophy and anthropology on the objectivity of anthropological knowledge that goes beyond engagement with the particular claims made by Sahlins and Strathern. (shrink)

Skepticism is one of the most enduring and profound of philosophical problems. With its roots in Plato and the Sceptics to Descartes, Hume, Kant and Wittgenstein, skepticism presents a challenge that every philosopher must reckon with. In this outstanding collection philosophers engage with skepticism in five clear sections: the philosophical history of skepticism in Greek, Cartesian and Kantian thought; the nature and limits of certainty; the possibility of knowledge and related problems such as perception and the debates between objective knowledge (...) and constructivism; the transcendental method as a response to skepticism and the challenge of naturalism; overcoming the skeptical challenge. (shrink)

Initial responses to questionnaires used to assess participants' understanding of informed consent for malaria vaccine trials conducted in the United States and Mali were tallied. Total scores were analyzed by age, sex, literacy (if known), and location. Ninety-two percent (92%) of answers by United States participants and 85% of answers by Malian participants were correct. Questions more likely to be answered incorrectly in Mali related to risk, and to the type of vaccine. For adult participants, independent predictors of higher scores (...) were younger age and female sex in the United States, and male sex in Mali. Scores in the United States were higher than in Mali (P = 0.005). Despite this difference participants at both sites were well informed overall. Although interpretation must be qualified because questionnaires were not intended as research tools and were not standardized among sites, these results do not support concerns about systematic low understanding among research participants in developing versus developed countries. (shrink)

This paper discusses and develops an account in the metaphysics of knowledge where knowledge is explained as a metaphysically primitive relation holding between a subject (or mind) and a fact.

Fodor's thinking on modularity has been influential throughout a range of the areas studying cognition, chiefly as a prod for positive work on modularity and domain-specificity. In _The Mind Doesn't Work That Way_, Fodor has developed the dark message of _The Modularity of Mind_ regarding the limits to modularity and computational analyses. This paper offers a critical assessment of Fodor's scepticism with an eye to highlighting some broader issues in play, including the nature of computation and the role of recent (...) empirical developments in the cognitive sciences in assessing Fodor's position. (shrink)

Is the institutionalization of religious freedom through human rights jurisprudence simply a means by which the modern nation-state manufactures and regulates “religion”? Is the discourse of religious freedom principally a technology of state governance? These questions challenge the ways that scholars conceptualize the relation between states, nationalism, human rights, and religious freedom. This article forwards an approach to human rights and methodological nationalism that both counters and explores alternatives to the prevailing conceptions of human rights, nationalism, and state sovereignty in (...) the discourse on the putative impossibility—and, by some accounts, insidiousness—of religious freedom. I first explicate the interpretive and contestatory dimensions of human rights discourse concerning religious freedom. I then explore cross-cutting ambivalences within the nationalisms that states need and cultivate in effort to transmute their monopoly upon coercive force (i.e. power) into legitimated authority. I argue that these provide two dimensions in and through which state sovereignty may be opposed, criticized, held accountable, and subject to change. (shrink)

Hillel Steiner has recently attacked the notion of inalienable rights, basing some of his arguments on the Hohfeldian analysis to show that infinite arrays of legal positions would not be associated with any inalienable rights. This essay addresses the nature of the Hohfeldian infinity: the main argument is that what Steiner claims to be an infinite regress is actually a wholly unproblematic form of infinite recursion. First, the nature of the Hohfeldian recursion is demonstrated. It is shown that infinite recursions (...) of legal positions ensue regardless of whether inalienable rights exist or not. Second, the alleged problems that this might pose for the analysis are discussed. The conclusion is that one should not worry about the recursion as long as one understands correctly the role of the Hohfeldian analysis in normative reasoning. (shrink)

This essay explores the nature of the most rudimentary form of empathy, interpersonal affective echoing, and attempts to give a cogent assessment of the roles it may play in human interactions. As an investigative background, it briefly sketches phenomenological findings with respect to feelings, to non-linguistic cognition, and to the analogical apperception of others. It then offers a phenomenological account of the basic structures of the experience of echoing another person’s feelings in a face-to-face situation. It also notes how echoing (...) differs from analogical apperception (while presupposing the latter), as well as from having one’s usual feelings and emotions. The relationship of echoing to sharing, caring, and morality is also briefly discussed. (shrink)