Henry Molaison, aged eighty-two, died at the end of 2008, and just after noon on exactly the first anniversary of his death, December 2, 2009, scientists began slicing his brain into 2,500 tissue samples. Known primarily in his lifetime as only H.M., he left his brain to science so that it could be dissected and digitally mapped – a gift much beloved by many scientists. An amnesiac in life, H.M. first rose to prominence in 1962 when Dr. Brenda Milner, a (...) pioneer in the field of neuropsychology, demonstrated that though H.M. was severely amnesic and could not remember past activities, he could nevertheless learn certain habits. The experiment involved the now famous mirror drawing. This article, written by a philosopher/artist and a neuroscientist/neuroaesthetician, argues that artists are unable to verbally articulate thoughts about their own art practice for reasons similar to why H.M. could not. All memories are not stored in the same part of the brain. Different categories of memories i.e., semantic memory or procedural memory, are stored in different parts of the brain. We argue that the procedural memory is not readily accessible to semantic memory. (shrink)

This paper argues that epistemic errors rooted in group- or identity- based biases, especially those pertaining to disability, are undertheorized in the literature on medical error. After sketching dominant taxonomies of medical error, we turn to the field of social epistemology to understand the role that epistemic schemas play in contributing to medical errors that disproportionately affect patients from marginalized social groups. We examine the effects of this unequal distribution through a detailed case study of ableism. There are four primary (...) mechanisms through which the epistemic schema of ableism distorts communication between nondisabled physicians and disabled patients: testimonial injustice, epistemic overconfidence, epistemic erasure, and epistemic derailing. Measures against epistemic injustices in general and against schema-based medical errors in particular are ultimately issues of justice that must be better addressed at all levels of health care practice. (shrink)

It has been a common assumption that words are substances that instantiate or have properties. In this paper, I question the assumption that our ontology of words requires posting substances by outlining a bundle theory of words, wherein words are bundles of various sorts of properties (such as semantic, phonetic, orthographic, and grammatical properties). I argue that this view can better account for certain phenomena than substance theories, is ontologically more parsimonious, and coheres with claims in linguistics.

While there seems to be much evidence that perceptual states can occur without being conscious, some theorists recently express scepticism about unconscious perception. We explore here two kinds of such scepticism: Megan Peters and Hakwan Lau's experimental work regarding the well-known problem of the criterion -- which seems to show that many purported instances of unconscious perception go unreported but are weakly conscious -- and Ian Phillips' theoretical consideration, which he calls the 'problem of attribution' -- the worry that many (...) purported examples of unconscious perception are not perceptual, but rather merely informational and subpersonal. We argue that these concerns do not undermine the evidence for unconscious perception and that this sceptical approach results in a dilemma for the sceptic, who must either deny that there is unconscious mentality generally or explain why perceptual states are unique in the mind such that they cannot occur unconsciously. Both options, we argue, are problematic. (shrink)

In this paper, we developed an Artificial Neural Network (ANN) for detect the absence or presence of lung cancer in human body. Symptoms were used to diagnose the lung cancer, these symptoms such as Yellow fingers, Anxiety, Chronic Disease, Fatigue, Allergy, Wheezing, Coughing, Shortness of Breath, Swallowing Difficulty and Chest pain. They were used and other information about the person as input variables for our ANN. Our ANN established, trained, and validated using data set, which its title is “survey lung (...) cancer”. Model evaluation showed that the ANN model is able to detect the absence or presence of lung cancer with 96.67 % accuracy. (shrink)

According to the person-affecting restriction, one distribution of welfare can be better than another only if there is someone for whom it is better. Extant problems for the person-affecting restriction involve variable-population cases, such as the nonidentity problem, which are notoriously controversial and difficult to resolve. This paper develops a fixed-population problem for the person-affecting restriction. The problem reveals that, in the presence of incommensurable welfare levels, the person-affecting restriction is incompatible with minimal requirements of impartial beneficence even in fixed-population (...) contexts. (shrink)

Not focusing on the history of classical logic, this book provides discussions and quotes central passages on its origins and development, namely from a philosophical perspective. Not being a book in mathematical logic, it takes formal logic from an essentially mathematical perspective. Biased towards a computational approach, with SAT and VAL as its backbone, this is an introduction to logic that covers essential aspects of the three branches of logic, to wit, philosophical, mathematical, and computational.

Since it is only five years since the publication of our paper, "Geographical categories: An ontological investigation" (Smith and Mark 2001), it seems somewhat strange to be making retrospective comments on the piece. Nevertheless, the field is moving quickly, and much has happened since the article appeared. A large number of papers have already cited the work, which suggests that there is a seam here that people find worthy of being mined. In this short essay, we first review the paper (...) and attempt to assess its significance from the perspective of our current work. We then put the paper in the context of our individual and joint works, which led up to it, and summarize our research trajectories since the paper appeared, pointing out what some of this reveals about spatial ontology in general. We conclude with some remarks on the future of ontological research in geographical information science. (shrink)

Multidisciplinary models aggregating ‘lower-level’ biological and ‘higher-level’ psychological and social determinants of a phenomenon raise a puzzle. How is the interaction between the physical, the psychological and the social conceptualized and explained? Using biopsychosocial models of pain as an illustration, I argue that these models are in fact level-neutral compilations of empirical findings about correlated and causally relevant factors, and as such they neither assume, nor entail a conceptual or ontological stratification into levels of description, explanation or reality. If inter-level (...) causation is deemed problematic or if debates about the superiority of a particular level of description or explanation arise, these issues are fueled by considerations other than empirical findings. (shrink)

According to the “internal” conception (Quong), political liberalism aims to be publicly justifiable only to people who are reasonable in a special sense specified and advocated by political liberalism itself. One advantage of the internal conception allegedly is that it enables liberalism to avoid perfectionism. The paper takes issue with this view. It argues that once the internal conception is duly pitched at its fundamental, metatheoretical level and placed in its proper discursive context, it emerges that it comes at the (...) cost of public dogma. The paper examines this problem and argues that a plausible response to this problem is to go beyond the internal conception and adopt a more inclusive, dynamic conception. But this calls for a form of perfectionism. Thus, the internal conception of political liberalism, far from showing how liberalism can be had without perfectionism, effectively calls for perfectionism as a remedy for its problems. (shrink)

Jacques Monod (1971) argued that certain molecular processes rely critically on the property of chemical arbitrariness, which he claimed allows those processes to “transcend the laws of chemistry”. It seems natural, as some philosophers have done, to interpret this in modal terms: a biological relationship is chemically arbitrary if it is possible, within the constraints of chemical “law”, for that relationship to have been otherwise than it is. But while modality is certainly important for understanding chemical arbitrariness, understanding its biological (...) role also requires an account of the concrete causal-functional features that distinguish arbitrary from non-arbitrary phenomena. In this paper I elaborate on this under-emphasised aspect by offering a general account of these features: arbitrary relations are instantiated by mechanisms that involve molecular adapters, which causally couple two properties or processes which would otherwise be uncorrelated. Additionally, adapters work by acting as intermediate rather than cooperating causes. (shrink)

Part of a larger project of constructing a new, historically informed philosophy of dance, built on four phenomenological constructs that I call “Moves,” this essay concerns the third Move, “grace.” The etymology of the word “grace” reveals the entwined meanings of pleasing quality and authoritative power, which may be combined as “beautiful force.” I examine the treatments of grace in German philosopher Friedrich Schiller, who understands it as playful, naive transformation of matter; and in American philosopher John Dewey, for whom (...) it represents rhythmic organism/environment reversal. I conclude by showing how “grace” can be used in analyzing various types of dance, which in turn suggests transformational potential for philosophy, dance, and society as a whole. (shrink)

This essay is part of a larger project in which I construct a new, historically-informed, social justice-centered philosophy of dance, centered on four central phenomenological constructs, or “Moves.” This essay in particular is about the fourth Move, “resilience.” More specifically, I explore how Judith Butler engages with the etymological aspects of this word, suggesting that resilience involves a productive form of madness and a healthy form of compulsion, respectively. I then conclude by showing how “resilience” can be used in the (...) analysis of various Wittgensteinian “families” of dance, which in turn could facilitate positive educational changes in philosophy, dance and society, with particular efficacy on the axis of gender. In brief, by teaching a conception of strength as vulnerability (instead of machismo’s view of strength as apathetic “toughness”), a pedagogy of dancing resilience provides additional support for feminists (including Anzaldúa, Haraway, Butler and Concepción) who advocate a cautious openness toward seemingly-unlikely resources and allies (including analytic methodologies, Machiavellian politics, and the discourses of the natural sciences). (shrink)

From folk tales to movies, stories possess features which naturally suit them to contribute to the growth of virtue. In this article I show that the fictional exemplars help the learner to grasp the moral importance of internal states and resolves a tension between existing kinds of exemplars discussed by virtue ethicists. Stories also increase the information conveyed by virtue terms and aid the growth of prudence. Stories can provide virtuous exemplars, inform learners as to the nature of the virtues (...) and offer practice in developing situational judgement. As such they are a significant resource for virtue ethics and moral education. (shrink)

This article explores Fanon's thought on dance, beginning with his explicit treatment of it in Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth. It then broadens to consider his theorization of Black embodiment in racist and colonized societies, considering how these analyses can be reformulated as a phenomenology of dance. This will suggest possibilities for fruitful encounters between the two domains in which (a) dance can be valorized while (b) opening up sites of resignification and resistance for Black (...) persons and communities-including a revalorization of Black embodiment as a kind of empowering danced experience. (shrink)

Although they were never to meet and corresponded only briefly, Catharine Macaulay and Mary Wollstonecraft shared a mutual admiration and a strong intellectual bond. Macaulay’s work had a profound and lasting effect on Wollstonecraft, and she developed and expanded on many of Macaulay’s ideas. While she often took these in a different direction, there remains a great synergy between their ideas to the extent that we can understand Wollstonecraft’s own feminist arguments by approaching them through the frameworks and ideas that (...) Macaulay provided. These included the principles of classical republicanism, particularly in its understanding of the values of freedom, equality and virtue, and an understanding of reason as grounded in immutable principles that apply equally to both sexes. On the question of women’s freedom and social equality with men, I argue that though Macaulay sets up the problem in far richer and more detailed philosophical terms, in the end it is Wollstonecraft that has the more compelling account of its far-reaching social implications and of how this might be addressed. (shrink)

My intellectual journey in philosophy proceeded along two mountainous paths that coincided at their base, but forked less than halfway up the incline. The first is that of my philosophical development, a steep but steady and continuous ascent. It began in my family, and accelerated in high school, art school, college, and graduate school. Those foundations propelled my philosophical research into the nature of rationality and its relation to the structure of the self, a long-term project focused on the Kantian (...) and Humean metaethical traditions in Anglo-American analytic philosophy. It would have been impossible to bring this project to completion without the anchor, compass, and conceptual mapping provided by my prior, longstanding involvement in the practice and theory of Vedic philosophy. The second path is that of my professional route through the field of academic philosophy, which branched onto a rocky detour in graduate school, followed by a short but steep ascent, followed next by a much steeper, sustained descent off that road, into the ravine, down in flames, and out of the profession. In order to reach the summit of the first path, I had to reach the nadir of the second. It was the right decision. My yoga practice cushioned my landing. (shrink)

This paper argues that the behaviorist label yields a caricature of Ryle's position in The Concept of Mind that cannot be adequately fleshed out by reference to the larger corpus of Rylean texts. On the interpretation of Ryle that I offer here, he is best characterized as an "ontological agnostic." Ryle's aim, I believe, is to develop a nondenotational theory of meaning for mental-conduct terms--a theory of meaning which does not presuppose any metaphysical or ontological theory and, hence, does not (...) presuppose behaviorism. (shrink)

In this paper I aim to show that the restoration model of pleasure as we find it in Plato’s Gorgias, Republic, Timaeus, and Philebus contain a common psychological core, despite the substantial developments and greater sophistication in the later works. I argue that, contrary to the scholarly consensus, all four dialogues take the necessary condition for pain to be a state of imbalance or disharmony rather than a process of destruction or deterioration. Given that the necessary condition for pleasure is (...) a process of restoration, it follows that the restoration model offers a strikingly asymmetrical account of pleasure and pain. This unorthodox interpretation of pain is not only favoured by the textual evidence but is also more charitable, as it attributes to Plato a more plausible view of impure pleasures, a more realistic account of desire, and a more compelling argument for the greater pleasantness of the philosophical life. (shrink)

In this article, I channel the autobiography of Black Panther cofounder Huey P. Newton, entitled Revolutionary Suicide, against the misogyny of the alt-right movement today. Both Newton and the alt-right have been powerfully influenced by Nietzsche, but one way of grasping the central difference between them is by comparing their conceptions of Dionysus. While the alt-right sticks closer to Nietzsche’s conception, which minimizes the god’s androgyny, Newton’s thought resonates with that androgyny, thereby bringing him closer to the most influential Dionysus (...) scholar since Nietzsche, Walter Otto. I therefore turn to the latter’s Dionysus: Myth and Cult, whose analyses I synthesize into the following image inspired by the god’s closest animal familiar: the dancingly-graceful panther as aqueous-androgynous soul-hunter. Reimagining Newton’s Black Panther in this way, finally, can help us overcome the alt-right. (shrink)

This essay—part of a larger project of constructing a new, historically informed philosophy of dance, built on four phenomenological constructs that I call “Moves”—concerns the second Move, “gesture,” the etymology of which reveals its close connection to the Greek word “metaphor.” More specifically, I examine the treatments of gesture by the philosophers George Herbert Mead and Etienne Bonnot de Condillac, both of whom view it as the foundation of language. I conclude by showing how gesture can be used in analyzing (...) various types of dance, which in turn suggests transformational potential for philosophy, dance, and society as a whole. (shrink)

A case could be made that the practice of philosophy demands a certain humility, or at least intellectual humility, requiring such traits as inquisitiveness, openness to new ideas, and a shared interest in pursuing truth. In the positive psychology movement, the study of both humility and intellectual humility has been grounded in the methods and approach of personality psychology, specifically the examination of these virtues as traits. Consistent with this approach, the chapter begins with a discussion of the examination of (...) intellectual humility as a “character trait,” comparing intellectual humility to various well-known traits in the personality psychology literature (e.g the “Big 5” and the “Big 2”) as well as other key traits such as the need for cognition and the need for closure. The chapter then turns to the proverbial issue of whether virtues in general, and intellectual humility in particular, are a matter of “nature”- that is, an innate trait determined by heritability, or “nurture” – a trait mostly shaped by situation and environment. While the chapter does not resolve the issue, it provides occasion for an examination of the role of situations in the expression of intellectual humility, and for the interaction of “situation” and “trait.” The chapter concludes with a discussion of how the interaction of trait with situation provides the most robust understanding of the psychology of any character virtue, including humility and intellectual humility. (shrink)

In this exploratory paper, I consider how intellectual humility and epistemic injustice might contribute to the failure of testimonial exchanges. In §1, I will briefly highlight four broad ways a testimonial exchange might fail. In §2, I will very briefly review the nature of epistemic injustice. In §3, I will explore how both epistemic injustice and intellectual humility can lead to failures in testimonial exchange, and I’ll conclude by suggesting how intellectual humility and epistemic injustice might be related.

The study aimed to identify E- Learning strategies and their relation to the efficiency of research performance in foreign and Palestinian universities (University of Ottawa, Munster, Suez Canal, Al-Azhar, Islamic, Al-Aqsa). The analytical descriptive approach was used for this purpose, and relying on the questionnaire as a main tool for data collection. The study society is from the senior management, where the number of senior management in the universities in question is 206. The random stratified sample was selected and (SPSS) (...) was used for statistical data analysis. The study found a significant relationship between E- Learning strategies and the efficiency of research performance in universities. It also reached the participation of senior management in the research that develops the university performance in the Palestinian universities. The senior management indicated that they do not care to follow the policies of implementing the development of scientific research. While the senior management in foreign universities indicated that they are interested in following up the policies of implementing the development of scientific research. The study also showed that senior management in Palestinian universities does not care about providing the appropriate budget for E- Learning. The study recommended that the senior management of Palestinian universities should provide an E- Learning budget and encourage employees to continue using E- Learning strategies. The administration in the Palestinian universities should adopt and support outstanding research, and the need to encourage interest in the implementation of policies for the development of scientific research. (shrink)

Truth is a locus of guilt for the Christian, according to Jacques Lacan. The religious person, he argues, punitively defers truth eschatologically. Yet Lacan’s own view dissolves eschatological deferral to the world, as the “Real”. The metaphysics of Erich Przywara SJ helps highlight that this mirrors Lacan’s view of the religious person. Przywara’s Christian metaphysics and Lacanian psychoanalysis converge on the immanence of truth to history. But Przywaran analogy corrects Lacan’s position on the religious person, which by implication calls for (...) an adjustment to Lacan’s worldview. In the final analysis, Lacan’s dialectical nihilism should yield to a Christian’s hopeful relation to the truth. (shrink)

Cross-species comparisons are benefited by compatible datasets; conclusions related to phylogenetic comparisons, questions on convergent and divergent evolution, or homologs versus analogs can only be made when the behaviors being measured are comparable. A direct comparison of the social function of physical contact across two disparate taxa is possible only if data collection and analyses methodologies are analogous. We identify and discuss the parameters, assumptions and measurement schemes applicable to multiple taxa and species that facilitate cross-species comparisons. To illustrate our (...) proposed guidelines for evaluating the role played by tactile contact in social behavior across disparate taxa, this paper presents data on mother-offspring relationships in the two species studied by the authors: chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes schweinfurthii) and dolphins (bottlenose and spotted, Tursiops truncatus and Stenella frontalis, respectively). Cross-species comparative studies allow for a more comprehensive assessment of the similarities and differences with respect to how animals traverse the relationships that form their social groups and societies. (shrink)

This essay is a critical examination of how Edmund Husserl, in his appropriation of Franz Brentano’s concept of intentionality into his phenomenology, deals with the very issues that shaped Brentano’s theory of intentionality. These issues concern the proper criterion for distinguishing mental from physical phenomena and the right explanation for the independence of the intentionality of mental phenomena from the existence or non-existence of their objects. Husserl disagrees with Brentano’s views that intentionality is the distinguishing feature of all mental phenomena (...) and that the mental status of intentional objects is what explains the said independence. The crucial concept in Husserl’s theory of intentionality is the noema of consciousness, which functions in the same way as Gottlob Frege’s sense in his theory of semantics. This essay argues that Husserl’s alternative solutions to the problems of Brentano run in conflict either with the desired rigor of his phenomenology or with the actual workings of language. (shrink)

We present an abstract social aggregation theorem. Society, and each individual, has a preorder that may be interpreted as expressing values or beliefs. The preorders are allowed to violate both completeness and continuity, and the population is allowed to be infinite. The preorders are only assumed to be represented by functions with values in partially ordered vector spaces, and whose product has convex range. This includes all preorders that satisfy strong independence. Any Pareto indifferent social preorder is then shown to (...) be represented by a linear transformation of the representations of the individual preorders. Further Pareto conditions on the social preorder correspond to positivity conditions on the transformation. When all the Pareto conditions hold and the population is finite, the social preorder is represented by a sum of individual preorder representations. We provide two applications. The first yields an extremely general version of Harsanyi's social aggregation theorem. The second generalizes a classic result about linear opinion pooling. (shrink)

[First paragraph]: Believe it or not, it’s no exaggeration to say that Ender’s Game has been the most transformative book of my life. In fact, when I first read it, at the age of fifteen, it almost single-handedly initiated a crisis of faith in me that ended up lasting for eight long years. The reason that it was able to do so is that it is positively full of important philosophical ideas (a fact attested to by the very existence of (...) this volume and its many essays). It should come as no surprise to fellow science fiction fans—and especially fans of Ender’s Game in particular—that science fiction is full to bursting with philosophical ideas. But the skeptical reader need not fear; in this case, at least, you don’t have to take my word for it. Orson Scott Card’s 1991 edition of Ender’s Game mentions his master’s degree in literature, and that all “the layers of meaning are there to be decoded, if you like to play the game of literary criticism.” So if you think you might have found a hidden layer of meaning in Ender’s Game, it’s a lot less likely that he or she is just crazy, and a lot more likely that there really is some hidden meaning there—and maybe even one that Card himself consciously put there to be found! (shrink)

This essay derives its focus on poetry from the subtitle of Die Fröhliche Wissenschaft: “la gaya scienza.” Nietzsche appropriated this phrase from the phrase “gai saber” used by the Provençal knight-poets (or troubadours) of the eleventh through thirteenth centuries — the first lyric poets of the European languages — to designate their Ars Poetica or “art of poetry.” I will begin with an exploration of Nietzsche’s treatment of poets and poetry as a subject matter, closely analyzing his six aphorisms which (...) deal explicitly with poets and poetry. Having considered The Gay Science as a text about poetry, I will then briefly explore three further ways in which The Gay Science can be thought of as itself a kind of poetry. The result of these analyses is an understanding of Nietzsche’s own understanding of philosophy (and of the best way to live) as also a form of poetry. (shrink)

Toleration is one of many responses toward diversity and difference. With the growing diversity, the theme of toleration has often taken center stage in discussions of multiculturalism and social pluralism. Nonetheless, it has not received much attention in the social work profession. Social workers often encounter situations in which they face a choice between tolerating and not tolerating. We argue that toleration is a legitimate and relevant topic in social work discourse. To make this point, first, this paper discusses different (...) conceptions of toleration. Then, it demonstrates its relevance to social work and explores a potential benefit of including the idea of toleration in social work discourse. Social work code of ethics implicitly supports toleration, or at least respect-toleration and esteem-toleration. Incorporating toleration in social work discourse may help social workers to better cope with or reduce ethical stress and disjuncture. (shrink)

Artikkeli käy läpi Quentin Meillassoux’n Äärellisyyden jälkeen -teoksessa esittelemiä spekulatiivisen materialismin lähtökohtia: ajatuksen Kantin jälkeistä filosofiasta hallinneesta korrelationismista ja sen ”heikosta” ja ”vahvasta” muodosta sekä Meillassoux’n perusargumentin, jolla hän pyrkii osoittamaan vahvan korrelationismin pyrkimyksen absoluuttisista viitepiisteistä luopumiseen sisäisesti ristiriitaiseksi. Tarkastelun pääpaino on Meillassoux’n väitteessä, että ajattelun riisuminen kaikista absoluuttisista näkökohdista johtaa vahvan korrelationismin omaksumaan ”fideistisen”, uskon ja järjen erillisyyttä ja keskinäistä riippumattomuutta korostavan suhtautumisen uskonnolliseen uskoon. Tällainen fideismi voi Meillassoux’n mukaan suojella tai jopa palvella ”nykypäivän fanatismia”. Artikkeli esittää joukon kriittisiä (...) huomioita Meillassoux’n fideismin ja uskon, uskonnollisten absoluuttien sekä fanatismin käsitteistä. Hänen klassiseen valistusmoderniin nojaava fideismikritiikkinsä osoittautuu toistaiseksi puutteellisesti perustelluksi ja ongelmallisesti muotoilluksi. (shrink)

Many strategies for incorporating poetry into non-poetry classes, especially outside of English and associated disciplines, appear to make poetry subservient and secondary in relation to the prose content of the course. The poet under consideration becomes a kind of involuntary servant to one or more prose authors, forced to “speak only when spoken to,” and effectively prevented from challenging the ideas of the course’s prose writers, and thereby the instructor. Fortunately, this is not the only strategy for incorporating poetry into (...) prose-dominated courses. In this chapter, I will suggest an alternate approach which recognizes and facilitates the agency of poets and poetry per se, which I term “empowering poetic defiance.” In brief, this approach consists of the following four steps: (1) challenge one’s own poetic self-loathing (2) position the course’s poetry’s content to challenge the course’s non-poetic contents (3) position the course’s poetry’s forms to challenge your class’s non-poetic forms (4) comport oneself as interlocutor toward the poets featured in the course as the intellectual equals of oneself and the course’s prose writers. My first section will elaborate on these four steps, and my second section will flesh out the method further with a new reading of one of the most powerfully defiant poets in the Western canon, the nineteenth-century French Symbolist poet Charles Baudelaire, in dialogue with one of the most formidable challengers to the power of poetry, the eighteenth-century Prussian philosopher Immanuel Kant. (shrink)

Richard Wright gave a series of lectures in Europe from 1950 to 1956, collected in the following year in the volume, White Man, Listen! One dominant theme in all four essays is that expanding the moral imagination is centrally important in repairing our racism-benighted globe. What makes Wright’s version of this claim unique is his forthright admission that expanding the moral imagination necessarily involves pain and suffering. The best place to hear Wright in regard to the necessary pain of expanding (...) the moral imagination, I would argue, is his poetry collection, This Other World: Projections in the Haiku Manner. To wit, for Wright the necessary pain of expanding one’s moral imagination is the loneliness that results from delegating to others—in the etymological sense of “deputizing or committing”—one’s whiteness qua privilege or social capital. In conclusion, lonely delegation constitutes an imperative template from Wright regarding the painful expansion of our own moral imagination, in the service of social justice for economically oppressed communities of color across the globe. (shrink)

[First paragraph]: On Wednesday, June 8, 2011, UK’s The Guardian reported that numerous US universities including Harvard and Vanderbilt were invested in companies that were buying large tracts of African farmland and kicking off the indigenous farmers in order for their employees (mostly non-Africans) to grow cash crops to sell to Europe.1 Harms associated with this land-grabbing include, in addition to the evictions themselves, corruption among African governments and among absentee African land owners, increased food prices, and accelerated climate change.

Independently of whether an object of experience becomes a candidate for being a part of the self or a part of the external world, it is always given to us as just an object of experience. The observer-observed relation can be seen as a type of relation with many instances, both between the self and different objects of experience and between any given object of experience and different selves. The self is situated in a spatial grid, where the latter can (...) be characterised as an array of relations, of which the relata include both observers and observed. The world, understood as independent existence, including the self, is empty. However, Paolo Bozzi’s method for identifying the self and delimiting its independent existence from the external world has taught us just the opposite lesson. Bozzi’s project is to teach us how to use them, and to recognise that they allow a self to be situated in a world of objects. (shrink)

Some philosophers argue that Hume, given his theory of causation, is committed to an implausibly thin account of what it is like to act voluntarily. Others suggest, on the basis of his argument against free will, that Hume takes no more than an illusory feature of action to distinguish the experience of performing an act from the experience of merely observing an act. In this paper, I argue that Hume is committed to neither an unduly parsimonious nor a sceptical account (...) of the phenomenology of agency. (shrink)

My intention in this paper is to respond to Jean-Luc Nancy’s claim that poetry, along with philosophy, is essentially incapable of what Nancy describes as "thinking love." To do so, I will first try to come to an understanding of Nancy’s thinking regarding love and then of poetry as presented in his essay "Shattered Love." Having thus prepared the way, I will then respond, via Pablo Neruda’s poem "Oda al Limón," to Nancy’s understanding of poetry vis-à-vis "Shattered Love." This response, (...) in acting out Nancy’s thinking regarding love, will suggest a greater plurality within poetry than Nancy acknowledged. (shrink)

Is there an approach to human rights that justifies rights-allocating moral-political principles as principles that are equally acceptable by everyone to whom they apply, while grounding them in categorical, reasonably non-rejectable foundations? The paper examines Rainer Forst’s constructivist attempt to provide such an approach. I argue that his view, far from providing an alternative to “ethical” approaches, depends for its own reasonableness on a reasonably contestable conception of the good, namely, the good of constitutive discursive standing. This suggests a way (...) in which constructivism about human rights might be able to coherently and plausibly negotiate the tension between the scope, the depth and the strength of discursive inclusion: the justification of rights-allocating moral-political principles needs to be premised on an “ethical”, perfectionist defense of the good of constitutive discursive standing. (shrink)

It is argued that a chief obstacle to a naturalistic explanation of the origins of mind is human exceptionalism, as exemplified in the 17th century by Descartes, and in the 20th century by Noam Chomsky. As an antidote to human exceptionalism we turn to the account of aesthetic judgment in Darwin’s Descent of Man, according to which the mental capacities of humans differ from those of lower animals only in degree, not in kind. Thoroughgoing naturalistic explanation of these capacities is (...) made easier by shifting away from the substance-metaphysical implications of the search for an account of mind, toward a dispositional account of the origins of mindfulness. (shrink)

The computer science (CS) graduated students suffered from documenting their projects and specially from coordinating it. In addition, students’ supervisors faced difficulties with guiding their students to an efficient process of documenting. In this paper, we will offer a suggestion as a solution to the mentioned problems; that is an application to make the process of documenting computer science (CS) student graduation project easy and time-cost efficient. This solution will decrease the possibility of human mistakes and reduce the effort of (...) documenting process. (shrink)

Mental explanations of behaviour are physical explanations of a special kind. Mental events are physical events. Mental explanations of physical behaviour are not mysterious, they designate events with physical causal powers. Mentalistic terms differ from physicalistic ones in the way they specify events: the former cite extrinsic properties, the latter intrinsic properties. The nature of explanation in general is discussed, and a naturalistic view of intentionality is proposed. The author shows why epistemological considerations rule out the elimination of "mentalistic talk" (...) from explanations of behaviour. (shrink)

According to Kant, if an agent acts according to his/her conscience, then s/he has done all that s/he ought as far as morality is concerned. But Kant thinks that agents can be mistaken in their subjective determinations of their duties. That is, Kant thinks it is possible for an agent to believe that some action X is right even though it is an objective truth that X is not right; according to Kant, agents do not have infallible knowledge of right (...) and wrong. In this paper, I explore this doctrine in order to determine whether it is defensible. In particular, I confront the blameworthiness of acting contrary to fallible knowledge and the blamelessness of acting according to fallible judgment. (shrink)

In their article, “Immigrant legalization: A Dilemma Between Justice and The Rule of Law,” Sarah Song and Irene Bloemraad address rule of law objections to policies that would regularize the status of undocumented immigrants in the United States. On their view, justice requires that liberal democratic states (i.e., states that are committed to individual liberty and universal equality) provide pathways for undocumented immigrants to regularize their status. We do not disagree with Song and Bloemraad’s account: rule of law and regularization (...) policies are not inconsistent, and in fact regularization supports rule of law, when properly understood. Our view is that there needs to be a deeper investigation into the motivations of “rule of law” objections considered in Song and Bloemraad’s account. We argue that the real purpose of these objections is not necessarily to serve as an alternative to the justice-based claims of undocumented immigrants, but as a way to undermine them. On our account, these rule of law objections accomplish this undermining task through the mechanisms of dog whistling, discrediting and distorting, and ostracizing. (shrink)

Are animals moral agents? In this article, a theologian and an anthropologist unite to bring the resources of each field to bear on this question. Alas, not all interdisciplinary conversations end harmoniously, and after much discussion the two authors find themselves in substantial disagreement over the answer. The article is therefore presented in two halves, one for each side of the argument. As well as presenting two different positions, our hope is that this article clarifies the different understandings of morality (...) in our respective fields and will help to offset confusion in interdisciplinary dialogue. In what follows, we each present our case. In the first section, Adam Willows argues that moral activity necessarily involves the use of reason, symbolic thought, and language and is on that basis an exclusively human affair. In the second, Marcus Baynes-Rock discusses his experience of relationality with other creatures; a relationality which, he argues, creates a shared understanding of obligations which are characteristically moral. (shrink)

In the article the effect of disbalances in the movement of financial resources on the national financial systems is formalized. For ensuring the corresponding monitoring objectives the financial sustainability indicators developed by the IMF and the World Bank have been used, as well as the integral indicator of financial resource disbalances, which serve as statistical units for measuring the financial situation and sustainability of the financial sector of the country. For the overwhelming majority of the studied countries, the hypothesis about (...) the negative impact of disbalances in the flow of financial resources on the stability of their financial sectors, regardless of the general economic conditions of these countries' development, was confirmed. At the same time, such a hypothesis was denied for a group of developing countries. Conditions-destabilizers of financial sectors’ stability of the countries under the influence of financialization of their economies, which should be considered the object of regulatory measures in financial markets, are defined. These include the level of market integration into the global financial space, which determines the tendency to systemic risks transmission and the degree of markets’ development that affects their volatility. (shrink)

In the worlds of philosophy, linguistics, and communications theory, a view has developed which understands conscious experience as experience which is 'reflected' back upon itself through language. This indicates that the consciousness we experience is possible only because we have culturally invented language and subsequently evolved to accommodate it. This accords with the conclusions of Daniel Dennett (1991), but the 'hermeneutic objection' would go further and deny that the objective sciences themselves have escaped the hermeneutic circle. -/- The consciousness we (...) humans experience is developed only within the context of crossing the 'symbolic threshold' (Percy 1975; Deacon 1997) and one of the earliest and most important symbols we acquire is that of the self, or 'the subject of experience'. It is only when we achieve self-awareness that the world, as such, comes to exist for us as an object (which contains categories and sub-categories of objects). Any consciousness imputed to prelinguistic stages of development is based on projection and guesswork, since we can know nothing directly of it. It can be said that any experience which does not separate an inner subject from an outer world is probably a continuum of sensation in which environmental stimulus and instinctive response are experienced as a unity; it may be 'lived experience' but it is experience 'lived' non-consciously. -/- Speech requires assertion and by learning to speak we find ourselves asserting, in essence, our selves into the world. The narrative form of language allows us to develop life stories, self-knowledge, and, most important, narrative memory coincident with narrative time. All this is made possible with the intersubjective 'net' of language which allows us to know ourselves by first identifying with the viewpoint of others; and, later, such allows us to identify with other minds as we anticipate their reception our communication. These three, assertion, narrative, and intersubjectivity are the essence of what language is and are the keystones that make culture possible outside of nature. (shrink)