Psychopaths routinely disregard social norms by engaging in selfish, antisocial, often violent behavior. Commonly characterized as mentally disordered, recent evidence suggests that psychopaths are executing a well-functioning, if unscrupulous strategy that historically increased reproductive success at the expense of others. Natural selection ought to have favored strategies that spared close kin from harm, however, because actions affecting the fitness of genetic relatives contribute to an individual’s inclusive fitness. Conversely, there is evidence that mental disorders can disrupt psychological mechanisms designed to (...) protect relatives. Thus, mental disorder and adaptation accounts of psychopathy generate opposing hypotheses: psychopathy should be associated with an increase in the victimization of kin in the former account but not in the latter. Contrary to the mental disorder hypothesis, we show here in a sample of 289 violent offenders that variation in psychopathy predicts a decrease in the genetic relatedness of victims to offenders; that is, psychopathy predicts an increased likelihood of harming non-relatives. Because nepotistic inhibition in violence may be caused by dispersal or kin discrimination, we examined the effects of psychopathy on (1) the dispersal of offenders and their kin and (2) sexual assault frequency (as a window on kin discrimination). Although psychopathy was negatively associated with coresidence with kin and positively associated with the commission of sexual assault, it remained negatively associated with the genetic relatedness of victims to offenders after removing cases of offenders who had coresided with kin and cases of sexual assault from the analyses. These results stand in contrast to models positing psychopathy as a pathology, and provide support for the hypothesis that psychopathy reflects an evolutionary strategy largely favoring the exploitation of non-relatives. (shrink)

Despite the language we saw in the previous chapter, which allowed for time apprehension by perception and marking, in Physics iv 14, Aristotle famously argues that time is dependent on nous.

Biological ontologies are used to organize, curate, and interpret the vast quantities of data arising from biological experiments. While this works well when using a single ontology, integrating multiple ontologies can be problematic, as they are developed independently, which can lead to incompatibilities. The Open Biological and Biomedical Ontologies Foundry was created to address this by facilitating the development, harmonization, application, and sharing of ontologies, guided by a set of overarching principles. One challenge in reaching these goals was that the (...) OBO principles were not originally encoded in a precise fashion, and interpretation was subjective. Here we show how we have addressed this by formally encoding the OBO principles as operational rules and implementing a suite of automated validation checks and a dashboard for objectively evaluating each ontology’s compliance with each principle. This entailed a substantial effort to curate metadata across all ontologies and to coordinate with individual stakeholders. We have applied these checks across the full OBO suite of ontologies, revealing areas where individual ontologies require changes to conform to our principles. Our work demonstrates how a sizable federated community can be organized and evaluated on objective criteria that help improve overall quality and interoperability, which is vital for the sustenance of the OBO project and towards the overall goals of making data FAIR. Competing Interest StatementThe authors have declared no competing interest. (shrink)

Wall, G. Locke's attack on innate knowledge.--Harris, J. Leibniz and Locke on innate ideas.--Greenlee, D. Locke's idea of idea.--Aspelin, G. Idea and perception in Locke's essay.--Greenlee, D. Idea and object in the essay.--Mathews, H. E. Locke, Malebranche and the representative theory.--Alexander, P. Boyle and Locke on primary and secondary qualities.--Ayers, M. R. The ideas of power and substance in Locke's philosophy.--Allison, H. E. Locke's theory of personal identity.--Kretzmann, N. The main thesis of Locke's semantic theory.--Woozley, A. D. Some remarks on (...) Locke's account of knowledge.--Laudan, L. The nature and sources of Locke's views on hypotheses. (shrink)

Recent discussions of cognitive enhancement often note that drugs and technologies that improve cognitive performance may do so at the risk of “cheapening” our resulting cognitive achievements Arguing about bioethics, Routledge, London, 2012; Harris in Bioethics 25:102–111, 2011). While there are several possible responses to this worry, we will highlight what we take to be one of the most promising—one which draws on a recent strand of thinking in social and virtue epistemology to construct an integrationist defence of cognitive enhancement.. (...) According to such a line, there is—despite initial appearances to the contrary—no genuine tension between using enhancements to attain our goals and achieving these goals in a valuable way provided the relevant enhancement is appropriately integrated into the agent’s cognitive architecture. In this paper, however, we show that the kind of integration recommended by such views will likely come at a high cost. More specifically, we highlight a dilemma for users of pharmacological cognitive enhancement: they can meet the conditions for cognitive integration at the significant risk of dangerous dependency, or remain free of such dependency while foregoing integration and the valuable achievements that such integration enables. After motivating and clarifying the import of this dilemma, we offer recommendations for how future cognitive enhancement research may offer potential routes for navigating past it. (shrink)

This work demonstrates the implementation and use of an encoder-decoder model to perform a many-to-many mapping of video data to text captions. The many-to-many mapping occurs via an input temporal sequence of video frames to an output sequence of words to form a caption sentence. Data preprocessing, model construction, and model training are discussed. Caption correctness is evaluated using 2-gram BLEU scores across the different splits of the dataset. Specific examples of output captions were shown to demonstrate model generality over (...) the video temporal dimension. Predicted captions were shown to generalize over video action, even in instances where the video scene changed dramatically. Model architecture changes are discussed to improve sentence grammar and correctness. (shrink)

This work demonstrates the implementation and use of an encoder-decoder model to perform a many-to-many mapping of video data to text captions. The many-to-many mapping occurs via an input temporal sequence of video frames to an output sequence of words to form a caption sentence. Data preprocessing, model construction, and model training are discussed. Caption correctness is evaluated using 2-gram BLEU scores across the different splits of the dataset. Specific examples of output captions were shown to demonstrate model generality over (...) the video temporal dimension. Predicted captions were shown to generalize over video action, even in instances where the video scene changed dramatically. Model architecture changes are discussed to improve sentence grammar and correctness. (shrink)

This work demonstrates the implementation and use of an encoder-decoder model to perform a many-to-many mapping of video data to text captions. The many-to-many mapping occurs via an input temporal sequence of video frames to an output sequence of words to form a caption sentence. Data preprocessing, model construction, and model training are discussed. Caption correctness is evaluated using 2-gram BLEU scores across the different splits of the dataset. Specific examples of output captions were shown to demonstrate model generality over (...) the video temporal dimension. Predicted captions were shown to generalize over video action, even in instances where the video scene changed dramatically. Model architecture changes are discussed to improve sentence grammar and correctness. (shrink)

This essay challenges the widely accepted principle that a person is morally responsible for what he has done only if he could have done otherwise. The author considers situations in which there are sufficient conditions for a certain choice or action to be performed by someone, So that it is impossible for the person to choose or to do otherwise, But in which these conditions do not in any way bring it about that the person chooses or acts as he (...) does. In such situations the person may well be morally responsible for what he chooses or does despite his inability to choose or to do otherwise. Finally the author considers certain suggestions for revising the principle he rejects or for replacing it with a principle of an altogether different kind. (shrink)

Those who do not exist cannot be harmed. If someone is not worse off than she otherwise would have been, she is not harmed. Together, these claims entail that the individuals in non-identity cases are not harmed, because no one who exists is made worse off. While these claims might be true at the individual level, their truth does not preclude our having harm-based concerns about future persons in general. These concerns are justified when we recognize the responsibility we have (...) over certain offices that persons come to fill. By positing an account of de dicto harm and arguing for its moral relevance, I provide a solution to the non- identity problem that coheres nicely with our intuitions regarding harm, responsibility, and obligations to future persons. (shrink)

Some of the barriers to the realisation of equality reflect the value of respecting prerogatives people have to favour themselves. Even G.A. Cohen, whose egalitarianism is especially pervasive and demanding, says that.

Value capture occurs when an agent’s values are rich and subtle; they enter a social environment that presents simplified — typically quantified — versions of those values; and those simplified articulations come to dominate their practical reasoning. Examples include becoming motivated by FitBit’s step counts, Twitter Likes and Re-tweets, citation rates, ranked lists of best schools, and Grade Point Averages. We are vulnerable to value capture because of the competitive advantage that such crisp and clear expressions of value have in (...) our private reasoning and our public justification. There is, however, a price. In value capture, we take a central component of our autonomy — our ongoing deliberation over the exact articulation of our values — and we outsource it. And the metrics to which we outsource usually engineered for the interests of some external force, like a large-scale institution’s interest in cross-contextual comprehensibility and quick aggregability. That outsourcing cuts off one of the key benefits to personal deliberation. In value capture, we no longer adjust our values and their articulations in light of own rich experience of the world. Our values should often be carefully tailored to our particular selves or our small-scale communities, but in value capture, we buy our values off the rack. In some cases – like decreasing CO2 emissions – the costs of non-tailored values are outweighed by the benefit of precise collective coordination. In other cases, like in our aesthetic lives, they are not. This suggests that we should want different values suited to different scales. We should want value federalism. Some values are perhaps best pursued at the largest-scale level, others at smaller scales. The problem occurs when we exhibit an excess preference for the largest-scale values – when we consistently let the universal metrics swamp our quieter interests. (shrink)

Some theorists argue that rather than advocating a principle of educational equality as a component of a theory of justice in education, egalitarians should adopt a principle of educational adequacy. This paper looks at two recent attempts to show that adequacy, not equality, constitutes justice in education. It responds to the criticisms of equality by claiming that they are either unsuccessful or merely show that other values are also important, not that equality is not important. It also argues that a (...) principle of educational adequacy cannot be all there is to justice in education. (shrink)

In The Case for Animal Rights, Tom Regan argues that although all subjects-of-a-life have equal inherent value, there are often differences in the value of lives. According to Regan, lives that have the highest value are lives which have more possible sources of satisfaction. Regan claims that the highest source of satisfaction, which is available to only rational beings, is the satisfaction associated with thinking impartially about moral choices. Since rational beings can bring impartial reasons to bear on decision making, (...) Regan maintains that they have an additional possible source of satisfaction that nonrational beings do not have and, consequently, the lives of rational beings turn out to have greater value.. (shrink)

This paper explores the relationship of mourning and the gift in the work of Jacques Derrida. I argue that mourning is not a Derridean gift, but mourning does open us to the gift. Reading the works of Aristotle, Cicero, and Kierkegaard on friendship and love to the dead in the wake of Derrida’s Politics of Friendship makes this relation among mourning and the gift apparent for he presents mourning as the opening to a democracy to-come whose logic is the gift. (...) Through these accounts, I maintain that in preparing us for the gift, mourning the dead other can help us to relate better with the living other in ethical, political, and ontological terms. (shrink)

In her BBC Reith Lectures on Trust, Onora O’Neill offers a short, but biting, criticism of transparency. People think that trust and transparency go together but in reality, says O'Neill, they are deeply opposed. Transparency forces people to conceal their actual reasons for action and invent different ones for public consumption. Transparency forces deception. I work out the details of her argument and worsen her conclusion. I focus on public transparency – that is, transparency to the public over expert domains. (...) I offer two versions of the criticism. First, the epistemic intrusion argument: The drive to transparency forces experts to explain their reasoning to non-experts. But expert reasons are, by their nature, often inaccessible to non-experts. So the demand for transparency can pressure experts to act only in those ways for which they can offer public justification. Second, the intimate reasons argument: In many cases of practical deliberation, the relevant reasons are intimate to a community and not easily explicable to those who lack a particular shared background. The demand for transparency, then, pressures community members to abandon the special understanding and sensitivity that arises from their particular experiences. Transparency, it turns out, is a form of surveillance. By forcing reasoning into the explicit and public sphere, transparency roots out corruption — but it also inhibits the full application of expert skill, sensitivity, and subtle shared understandings. The difficulty here arises from the basic fact that human knowledge vastly outstrips any individual’s capacities. We all depend on experts, which makes us vulnerable to their biases and corruption. But if we try to wholly secure our trust — if we leash groups of experts to pursuing only the goals and taking only the actions that can be justified to the non-expert public — then we will undermine their expertise. We need both trust and transparency, but they are in essential tension. This is a deep practical dilemma; it admits of no neat resolution, but only painful compromise. (shrink)

Abraham has played a prominent role in recent developments in phenomenology and, in particular, continental philosophy of religion. This paper examines the importance that the scene of Genesis 22 plays in both Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Marion’s contributions to continental philosophy of religion. Specifically, I argue that Derrida and Marion turn to this scene of the binding of Isaac in order to describe the way in which our ethical life is structured religiously around the theme of sacrifice. In this, sacrifice (...) brings an impetus to ethical life that includes a comportment to the other but also extends beyond the other to include the givenness of phenomena themselves. (shrink)

This paper introduces a new, expanded range of relevant cognitive psychological research on collaborative recall and social memory to the philosophical debate on extended and distributed cognition. We start by examining the case for extended cognition based on the complementarity of inner and outer resources, by which neural, bodily, social, and environmental resources with disparate but complementary properties are integrated into hybrid cognitive systems, transforming or augmenting the nature of remembering or decision-making. Adams and Aizawa, noting this distinctive complementarity argument, (...) say that they agree with it completely: but they describe it as “a non-revolutionary approach” which leaves “the cognitive psychology of memory as the study of processes that take place, essentially without exception, within nervous systems.” In response, we carve out, on distinct conceptual and empirical grounds, a rich middle ground between internalist forms of cognitivism and radical anti-cognitivism. Drawing both on extended cognition literature and on Sterelny’s account of the “scaffolded mind” (this issue), we develop a multidimensional framework for understanding varying relations between agents and external resources, both technological and social. On this basis we argue that, independent of any more “revolutionary” metaphysical claims about the partial constitution of cognitive processes by external resources, a thesis of scaffolded or distributed cognition can substantially influence or transform explanatory practice in cognitive science. Critics also cite various empirical results as evidence against the idea that remembering can extend beyond skull and skin. We respond with a more principled, representative survey of the scientific psychology of memory, focussing in particular on robust recent empirical traditions for the study of collaborative recall and transactive social memory. We describe our own empirical research on socially distributed remembering, aimed at identifying conditions for mnemonic emergence in collaborative groups. Philosophical debates about extended, embedded, and distributed cognition can thus make richer, mutually beneficial contact with independently motivated research programs in the cognitive psychology of memory. (shrink)

In this paper, we aim to show that the framework of embedded, distributed, or extended cognition offers new perspectives on social cognition by applying it to one specific domain: the psychology of memory. In making our case, first we specify some key social dimensions of cognitive distribution and some basic distinctions between memory cases, and then describe stronger and weaker versions of distributed remembering in the general distributed cognition framework. Next, we examine studies of social influences on memory in cognitive (...) psychology, and identify the valuable concepts and methods to be extended and embedded in our framework; we focus in particular on three related paradigms: transactive memory, collaborative recall, and social contagion. Finally, we sketch our own early studies of individual and group memory developed within our framework of distributed cognition, on social contagion of autobiographical memories, collaborative flashbulb memories, and memories of high school at a high school reunion. We see two reciprocal benefits of this conceptual and empirical framework to social memory phenomena: that ideas about distributed cognition can be honed against and tested with the help of sophisticated methods in the social cognitive psychology of memory; and conversely, that a range of social memory phenomena that are as yet poorly understood can be approached afresh with theoretically motivated extensions of existing empirical paradigms. (shrink)

Full privatisation of schools would involve states abstaining from providing, funding or regulating schools. I argue that full privatisation would, in most circumstances, worsen social injustice in schooling. I respond to James Tooley's critique of my own arguments for funding and regulation and markets. I argue that even his principle of educational adequacy requires a certain level of state involvement and demonstrate that his arguments against a principle of educational equality fail. I show, furthermore, that he relies on an over-optimistic (...) attitude regarding the operation of markets, which involves a failure to appreciate the diversity of quality in states, and that he misreads the evidence concerning private schooling in some developing countries. (shrink)

We discuss potential biorisks from large language models (LLMs). AI assistants based on LLMs such as ChatGPT have been shown to significantly reduce barriers to entry for actors wishing to synthesize dangerous, potentially novel pathogens and chemical weapons. The harms from deploying such bioagents could be further magnified by AI-assisted misinformation. We endorse several policy responses to these dangers, including prerelease evaluations of biomedical AIs by subject-matter experts, enhanced surveillance and lab screening procedures, restrictions on AI training data, and access (...) controls on biomedical AI. We conclude with a suggestion about future research directions in bioethics. (shrink)

Shelly Kagan has recently defended the view that it is morally worse for a human being to suffer some harm than it is for a lower animal (such as a dog or a cow) to suffer a harm that is equally severe (ceteris paribus). In this paper, I argue that this view receives rather less support from our intuitions than one might at first suppose. According to Kagan, moreover, an individual’s moral status depends partly upon her ‘modal capacities.’ In this (...) paper, I argue that the most natural strategy for justifying Kagan’s theory faces some important challenges. More generally, I argue that philosophers who wish to defend the view that human beings have a higher moral status than that of the lower animals face a dilemma. Either their theory of moral status will imply (unacceptably) that some severely cognitively impaired human beings have a significantly lower moral status than that of typical human beings, or these philosophers will be forced to ground moral status in a set of properties so far removed from a subject’s actual capacities that it will become difficult to see why these kinds of properties should have such moral importance. (shrink)

We give a brief overview of several recent strands of speech-act theory, and then survey some issues in social and political philosophy can be profitably understood in speech-act-theoretic terms. Our topics include the social contract, the law, the creation and reinforcement of social norms and practices, silencing, and freedom of speech.

Panqualityism, recently defended by Sam Coleman, is a variety of Russellian monism on which the categorical properties of fundamental physical entities are qualities, or, in Coleman’s exposition, unconscious qualia. Coleman defends a quotationalist, higher-order thought version of panqualityism. The aim of this paper is, first, to demonstrate that a first-order representationalist panqualityism is also available, and to argue positively in its favor. For it shall become apparent that quotationalist and first-order representationalist panqualityism are, in spite of their close similarities, radically (...) different theories: quotationalist panqualityism locates qualities in the subject of an experience, while first-order panqualityism locates qualities in the world. I argue that this makes quotationalist panqualityism implausible and first-order, representationalist panqualityism a highly natural, elegant, and intuitive theory. (shrink)

Philosophical discussions of gentrification have tended to focus on residential displacement. However, the prevalence of residential displacement is fiercely contested, with many urban geographers regarding it as quite uncommon. This lends some urgency to the underexplored question of how one should evaluate other forms of gentrification. In this paper, I argue that one of the most important harms suffered by victims of displacement gentrification is loss of access to the goods conferred by membership in a thriving local community. Leveraging the (...) social scientific literature, I go on to argue that non-displacement gentrification also often damages local communities. One can hence extend existing philosophical critiques of displacement gentrification to argue that non-displacement gentrification likewise poses a threat to relational equality, and often violates certain basic occupancy rights. Focusing on the value that inheres in thriving local communities also suggests some new possibilities for critiquing gentrification. For instance, existing occupancy rights critiques focus on incumbent land users’ interests in stability. However, one can also argue in a Lockean mode that incumbent land users’ occupancy rights are at least partially grounded in their community having laboured together to create objects of value. An extension of Michael Walzer’s theory of justice to incorporate community goods as a separate ‘sphere’ might also have widespread appeal. Taken together, these arguments constitute a sustained and theoretically ecumenical case for the pro tanto moral objectionability of gentrification. (shrink)

Because factory-farmed meat production inflicts gratuitous suffering upon animals and wreaks havoc on the environment, there are morally compelling reasons to become vegetarian. Yet industrial plant agriculture causes the death of many field animals, and this leads some to question whether consumers ought to get some of their protein from certain kinds of non factory-farmed meat. Donald Bruckner, for instance, boldly argues that the harm principle implies an obligation to collect and consume roadkill and that strict vegetarianism is thus immoral. (...) But this argument works only if the following claims are true: all humans have access to roadkill, roadkill would go to waste if those who happen upon it don’t themselves consume it, it’s impossible to harvest vegetables without killing animals, the animals who are killed in plant production are all-things-considered harmed by crop farming, and the best arguments for vegetarianism all endorse the harm principle. As I will argue in this paper, each claim is deeply problematic. Consequently, in most cases, humans ought to strictly eat plants and save the roadkill for cats. (shrink)

This paper defends the claim that mere temporal proximity always and without exception strengthens certain moral duties, including the duty to save – call this view Robust Temporalism. Although almost all other moral philosophers dismiss Robust Temporalism out of hand, I argue that it is prima facie intuitively plausible, and that it is analogous to a view about special obligations that many philosophers already accept. I also defend Robust Temporalism against several common objections, and I highlight its relevance to a (...) number of practical policy debates, including longtermism. My conclusion is that Robust Temporalism is a moral live option, that deserves to be taken much more seriously in the future. (shrink)

Introduction -- Historical essays -- The humanist brain : Alberti, Vitruvius, and Leonardo -- The enlightened brain : Perrault, Laugier, and Le Roy -- The sensational brain : Burke, Price, and Knight -- The transcendental brain : Kant and Schopenhauer -- The animate brain : Schinkel, Bötticher, and Semper -- The empathetic brain : Vischer, Wölfflin, and Göller -- The gestalt brain : the dynamics of the sensory field -- The neurological brain : Hayek, Hebb, and Neutra -- The phenomenal (...) brain : Merleau-Ponty, Rasmussen, and Pallasmaa -- Neuroscience and architecture -- Anatomy : architecture of the brain -- Ambiguity : architecture of vision -- Metaphor : architecture of embodiment -- Hapticity : architecture of the senses -- Epilogue: The architect's brain. (shrink)

The Principle of Analogy. ABSTRACT. Sceptics question whether ‘distinctively human’ predicates such as ‘just’, ‘loving’ and ‘powerful’ can intelligibly be attributed to a divine being. If not, then a vicious form of agnosticism seems to threaten orthodox theism. Especially if one assumes a broadly empiricist semantics the challenge, whether formulated in terms of a univocal or an equivocal understanding of predicates, seems to generate intractable philosophical problems. Aquinas’ theory of analogical predication, understood either in terms of ‘analogy duorum ad tertium’ (...) or in terms of ‘analogy unus ad alterum’, is an influential response to this sceptical challenge. Difficulties in each understanding are explored and it is suggested that a more fruitful framework for understanding theistic language is to be found in late 20th century nativism of Fodor and Quine. (shrink)

In this paper we elaborate on the neo-Confucian interpretation of the Yi-Jing system. Based on a further exploration of the Diagram of the Supreme Polarity of Zhou Dunyi, we develop a cosmological-anthropological model in constructive engagement with Western thoughts and views on systems and on the universe. The vital energy and the pattern play central roles in this model and also in the interpretation of the images and forces of the trigrams. This leads to a comparative model, based on a (...) quadrant system with four perspectives: naturality, rationality, humanity and morality. This model fits in the quadrant system of Wilber, and also corresponds to the cosmic ring of duograms. The natural YI Ba-Gua, a cycle of trigrams where Heaven and Earth are seen as elements of the production cycle, supplies an alternative interpretation of the King Wen Ba-Gua. When extending the quadrant system to octants we observe a cycle of trigrams, the cosmic YI Ba-Gua, as a spiralling sequence, following the order of the Five elements. Heaven and Earth are seen, as in the elaborated Diagram of the Supreme Polarity, as instigator and receiver respectively of the production cycle. It forms the framework for an alternative interpretation of the Fu Xi Ba-Gua. In addition to the images, we can display the forces of the trigrams in the octant system of the cosmic YI Ba-Gua as concentric circles. In the YI Ba-Gua we combine both the cosmic and the natural YI Ba-Gua, and compare this with the Ba-Gua of King Wen and of Fu Xi. Finally we present some hypotheses for further analysis of the matrix of hexagrams based on the cosmic YI Ba-Gua. The comparison of the different philosophical views in one framework may lead to further engagement of these ways of seeing. We already conclude that there is so much structure in the Yi-Jing that it is possible to use the wisdom of the Yi-Jing without applying a divination system. (shrink)

Summary This paper examines contemporary virtue ethics and the claim that Christian ethics is a virtue ethic. Three central theses are identified as being central to virtue ethics: a priority thesis, a perfectionist thesis and a communitarian thesis. It is argued that defences of the priority thesis—it best addresses the moral crisis in our society, it does justice to historical consciousness and it remedies the incompleteness in deontic ethics—are unconvincing. It is argued that virtue and moral perfection are best understood (...) in terms of psychologically appropriate dispositions to act in accordance with moral principles. It is further argued that the communitarian thesis raises relativist difficulties and fails to do justice to the universal elements of morality. Each of these arguments is developed philosophically and the implications for Christian ethics are explored. In light of the theory of virtue sketched in the paper it is concluded that the independence thesis, upon which virtue ethics rests, is untenable and that an examination of the structure of the universal moral principles underlying the Christian faith remains the proper subject matter for Christian ethics. (shrink)

ABSTRACT. The paper explores the philosophical intelligibility of contemporary defences of collective political forgiveness against a background of sceptical doubt, both general and particular. Three genera sceptical arguments are examined: one challenges the idea that political collectives exist; another challenges the idea that moral agency can be projected upon political collectives; a final argument challenges the attribution of emotions, especially anger, to collectives. Each of these sceptical arguments is rebutted. At a more particular level, the contrasts between individual forgiveness and (...) collective forgiveness gives rise to various problems and the ‘desiderata’ for their resolution - authority, specificity and temporal proximity - are briefly explored. (shrink)

The paper attempts to clarify the concept of political forgiveness, distinguishing it from individual forgiveness and illustrating its presence in contemporary politics. It proceeds to explore grounds for criticism of political forgiveness - an authority criticism, a specificity criticism and a temporal distance criticism - and suggests that, although these difficulties can be overcome, they provide serious challenges to putative cases of political forgiveness.

Christian moral philosophy is a distinctive kind of moral philosophy owing to the special role it assigns to God in Christ. Much contemporary 'Christian ethics' focuses on semantic, modal, conceptual and epistemological issues. This may be helpful but it omits the distinctive focus of Christian moral philosophy: the human condition in a morally ordered universe and the redemptive work of jesus Christ as a response to that predicament. Christian moral philosophers should seek to remedy that neglect.

I introduce a formalization of probability which takes the concept of 'evidence' as primitive. In parallel to the intuitionistic conception of truth, in which 'proof' is primitive and an assertion A is judged to be true just in case there is a proof witnessing it, here 'evidence' is primitive and A is judged to be probable just in case there is evidence supporting it. I formalize this outlook by representing propositions as types in Martin-Lof type theory (MLTT) and defining a (...) 'probability type' on top of the existing machinery of MLTT, whose inhabitants represent pieces of evidence in favor of a proposition. One upshot of this approach is the potential for a mathematical formalism which treats 'conjectures' as mathematical objects in their own right. Other intuitive properties of evidence occur as theorems in this formalism. (shrink)

This essay analyzes the provocative image of the bodhisattva, the saint of the Indian Mahayana Buddhist tradition, descending into the hell realms to work for the benefit of its denizens. Inspired in part by recent attempts to naturalize Buddhist ethics, I argue that taking this ‘mythological’ image seriously, as expressing philosophical insights, helps us better understand the shape of Mahayana value theory. In particular, it expresses a controversial philosophical thesis: the claim that no amount of physical pain can disrupt the (...) flourishing of a fully virtuous person. I reconstruct two related elements of early Buddhist psychology that help us understand this Mahayana position: the distinction between hedonic sensation and virtuous or nonvirtous mental states ; and the claim that humans are massively deluded as to what constitutes well-being. Doing so also lets me emphasize the continuity between early Buddhist and Mahayana traditions in their views on well-being and flourishing. (shrink)

This essay undertakes a phenomenological inquiry into the ‘experiential structure of hip-hop’ – a structure that hip-hop artist Jay-Z (Shawn Carter) gestures towards in his text Decoded. In this book, Jay-Z argues that hip-hop has a particular power to act as the vehicle for the communication of a specific type of experience, i.e. contradictory experiences, or those which do not seem possible under the principle of non-contradiction. For instance, Tupac Shakur says of his mom that “…even as a crack fiend, (...) mama / You always was a Black Queen, mama.” The way in which hip-hop is a powerful vehicle for this communication lies, according to Jay-Z, in its very structure, which he describes using two sets of terms: rhythm/flow and music/rhyme. Using Jay-Z’s general outline, this essay attempts to complete a phenomenological analysis of hip-hop, in the effort to (1) isolate the experiential structure of hip-hop and (2) isolate, within this structure, the way in which hip-hop is able to communicate contradictory experiences. In the final analysis, the author isolates the experiential structure of hip-hop and shows how its multiple layers work to draw listeners in and induce them to experience-with the artist. (shrink)

Ethical objectivists hold that there is one and only one correct system of moral beliefs. From such a standpoint it follows that conflicting basic moral principles cannot both be true and that the only moral principles which are binding on rational human agents are those described by the single true morality. However sincerely they may be held, all other moral principles are incorrect. Objectivism is an influential tradition, covering most of the rationalist and naturalist standpoints which have dominated nineteenth and (...) twentieth century moral philosophy: there is widespread agreement amongst relativists themselves that objectivism is firmly rooted in common sense. (shrink)

Over the decades, scholarly discourses on sovereignty and globalization have been produced following various theories and numerous debates about the strength and weakness of the sovereign nation-state and globalization. In this paper, the various theories on the discourse of sovereignty and globalization are traced and placed into four categories as: contending paradigm, globalization paradigm, transformation paradigm and complementary paradigm. Both concepts, sovereignty and globalization, are explored by adopting the methodological framework, sources of explanation. The argument is that there is an (...) intricate relationship between these concepts. To determine the relationship between sovereignty and globalization, three world systems were examined and it revealed that, globalization is born of the sovereign nation-state and that globalization can only be assert in the current sovereign world system and not the ones preceding it. The overall conclusion is that globalization emerged as a result of sovereignty and since the discourse of sovereignty and globalization is about the same space and its inhabitants, they are bound to be discursively set against each other if the discourse focusses solely on the phenomena seen as globalization. The forces of globalization and sovereignty need to be further researched into to be able to tell where they are leading us. (shrink)

I prove that invoking the univalence axiom is equivalent to arguing 'without loss of generality' (WLOG) within Propositional Univalent Foundations (PropUF), the fragment of Univalent Foundations (UF) in which all homotopy types are mere propositions. As a consequence, I argue that practicing mathematicians, in accepting WLOG as a valid form of argument, implicitly accept the univalence axiom and that UF rightly serves as a Foundation for Mathematical Practice. By contrast, ZFC is inconsistent with WLOG as it is applied, and therefore (...) cannot serve as a foundation for practice. (shrink)