Sumantra Ghoshal’s condemnation of “bad management theories” that were “destroying good management practices” has not lost any of its salience, after a decade. Management theories anchored in agency theory (and neo-classical economics generally) continue to abet the financialization of society and undermine the functioning of business. An alternative approach (drawn from a more classic institutional, new ecological, and refocused ethical approaches) is reviewed.

This paper presents a new objection to the buck-passing account of value. I distinguish the buck-passing account of predicative value from the buck-passing account of attributive value. According to the latter, facts about attributive value reduce to facts about reasons and their weights. But since facts about reasons’ weights are themselves facts about attributive value, this account presupposes what it is supposed to explain. As part of this argument, I also argue against Mark Schroeder's recent account of the weights of (...) reasons, which purports to explain the weights of reasons in terms of further reasons without circularity. I then argue that if we abandon the buck-passing account of attributive value, it would be ad hoc and unjustifiable to continue to endorse the buck-passing account of predicative value. In short, there seems to be little hope for the buck-passing account in either form. The paper ends by sketching a novel alternative theory according to which reasons are analysed in terms of the attributive value of motives. I suggest that a normative reason to is something that would be a good motive for -ing. At least at first glance, this view has numerous merits and few problems. (shrink)

In this paper, I defend a new theory of normative reasons called reasons as good bases, according to which a normative reason to φ is something that is a good basis for φing. The idea is that the grounds on which we do things—bases—can be better or worse as things of their kind, and a normative reason—a good reason—is something that is just a good instance of such a ground. After introducing RGB, I clarify what it (...) is to be a good basis, and argue that RGB has various attractive features: it has intuitive implications, makes good sense of the weights of reasons, and attractively explains the relationship between normative reasons and motivating reasons. I then briefly defend the view from objections and compare it to rivals. Finally, I sketch two possible implications of RGB: some kind of constitutivism, according to which the norms that govern us are explained by the nature of agency, and second, the claim that agents who do things for reasons generally do them for good reasons. (shrink)

Hud Hudson has argued that if MaxCon, Ned Markosian's favored answer to the Simple Question, is true, then there couldn't be gunky objects. If Hudson's argument succeeds, then those who believe that gunky objects are possible have a good reason to reject MaxCon. However, I show that Hudson's argument relies on substantive metaphysical claims that a proponent of MaxCon need not accept. Thus, one who endorses MaxCon need not reject the possibility of gunky objects and those who believe that (...) gunky objects are possible need not reject MaxCon. (shrink)

In this paper, I distinguish four ways to ask the question whether morality must be grounded in God. One asks whether or not God is the ultimate source for moral goodness, values, or standards. A second way asks whether a minimal morality, purified of any explicit reference to God, could not be worked out on bases of common human experience and rational reflection. A third way asks whether some kind of divine revelation is required for morality to be adequately understood (...) or worked out. A fourth way asks whether a person requires practical engagement with God in adequately live out a sufficiently moral life. I then examine Anselm of Canterbury's responses to each of these questions. -/- The first part examines the issue of God as the origin of moral value and standards. The second part shift to a vantage point taking Anselm’s God out of the picture, in order to outline a morality based upon the exercise of a natural human practical rationality. The third and fourth part address what Anselm would see as shortcomings of such an approach to morality. The third part focuses on guidance and assistance Anselm thinks Christianity provides to human reason in developing a more adequate morality. The fourth part looks at the indispensable role Anselm accords to God and to Christianity, understood not only as belief or practice, but as community and experience. (shrink)

In this paper it is argued that we should amend the traditional understanding of the view known as the guise of the good. The guise of the good is traditionally understood as the view that we only want to act in ways that we believe to be good in some way. But it is argued that a more plausible view is that we only want to act in ways that we believe we have normative reason to act (...) in. This change – from formulating the view in terms of goodness to formulating it in terms of reasons – is significant because the revised view avoids various old and new counterexamples to the traditional view, because the revised view is better motivated than the traditional view, and because the revised view is better placed to explain certain features of desire than the traditional view. The paper finishes by showing that the conclusions reached are compatible with theories such as the buck passing account of value. (shrink)

I begin the paper by outlining one classic argument for the guise of the good: that we must think that desires represent their objects favourably in order to explain why they can make actions rational (Quinn 1995; Stampe 1987). But what exactly is the conclusion of this argument? Many have recently formulated the guise of the good as the view that desires are akin to perceptual appearances of the good (Oddie 2005; Stampe 1987; Tenenbaum 2007). But I (...) argue that this view fails to capitalize on the above argument, and that the argument is better understood as favouring a view on which desires are belief-like states. I finish by addressing some countervailing claims made by Avery Archer (2016). (shrink)

The first of its kind, this anthology in the burgeoning field of technology ethics offers students and other interested readers 32 chapters, each written in an accessible and lively manner specifically for this volume. The chapters are conveniently organized into five sections: I. Perspectives on Technology and its Value II. Technology and the Good Life III. Computer and Information Technology IV. Technology and Business V. Biotechnologies and Enhancement A hallmark of the volume is multidisciplinary contributions both in analytic and (...) continental philosophy and across several hot-button topics of interest to students, including the ethics of autonomous vehicles, psychotherapeutic phone apps, and bio-enhancement of cognition and in sports. The volume editors, both teachers of technology ethics, have compiled a set of original and timely chapters that will advance scholarly debate and stimulate fascinating and lively classroom discussion. An online eResources site provides a glossary of all relevant terms, sample classroom activities/ discussion questions relevant for chapters, and links to Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entries and other relevant online materials. Key Features: Examines the most pivotal ethical questions around our use of technology, equipping readers to better understand technology's promises and perils Explores throughout a central tension raised by technological progress: maintaining social stability vs. pursuing dynamic social improvements Provides ample coverage of the pressing issues of free speech and productive online discourse. (shrink)

This is a fine book by an extraordinary author whose literary followers have awaited a definitive statement of his views on consciousness since his participation in the important book on biological autopoiesis, The Embodied Mind (Varela, Thompson, & Rosch, 1991) and his recent neurophenomenology of biological systems, Mind in Life (2007). In the latter book, Thompson demonstrated the continuity of life and mind, whereas in this book he uses neurophenomenology as well as erudite renditions of Buddhist philosophy and a (...) class='Hi'>good dash of personal experience to argue for the reality of altered states of consciousness, but also that these states are not distinct from the physical systems that subtend them. He must have touched a nerve, for Waking, Dreaming, Being continues to be read and widely discussed by the literate public. (shrink)

God is typically conceived as perfectly good and necessarily so, in two senses: in terms of always performing the best possible act and in terms of having maximal moral worth. Yet any being that freely performs the best act she can must be accorded greater moral worth for any such action than a being that does so necessarily. I conclude that any being that performs the best possible act of necessity cannot also have maximal moral worth, making the concept (...) of God’s perfect goodness incoherent. (shrink)

Jacques Lacan was constantly and consistently motivated by the aims of carrying out, improving, and critically understanding psychoanalytic practice and theory. In his work and teaching, he examined and (re)incorporated a number of key experiences, conceptions, and insights from moral life and moral theories into psychoanalysis. -/- One particularly interesting aspect of Lacan’s work, particularly in terms of moral theory, is that while problematizing them, and reconceiving how we must understand them, his approach remains anchored by key themes, concepts, and (...) experiences of older moral theories and perspectives, such as the truth of the human subject, the nature of the good, and the processes and pitfalls of moral development. -/- Three main sets of issues are analysed and discussed in this chapter. First, we examine Lacan’s criticisms of modes and schools of psychoanalysis that converted it into a simplistically moralistic discipline such as ego-psychology. Second, we run over Lacan’s main discussions and partial appropriations of Aristotelian, Kantian, Utilitarian, Sadean, and Judeo-Christian moral perspectives. Third and finally, we go deeper into discussing the implications Lacan’s reinterpretation of selected Freudian concepts bear for ethics, particularly in terms of ethics of subjectivity. Put very briefly, we might say that Lacan is situating a process of becoming-subject within a never-complete field of ethical discourses. (shrink)

Is there a sensible version of the slogan “Art for art’s sake”? If there is, does it apply to anything? I believe that the answers to these questions are Yes and Yes. A positive answer to the first question alone would not be of interest; an intelligible claim without application does not do us much good. It’s the positive answer to the second question which is, I think, more important and perhaps surprising, since I claim to find art for (...) art’s sake at a time well before most authorities would allow that there was any art at all. But I begin more recently than that. (shrink)

This is an important collection in that it fleshes out the vague postulate of panpsychism with a detailed analysis of how it might be understood (if not exactly what it might mean). For the many skeptics who simply dismiss the very idea as ridiculous, there is much here to demonstrate that a good deal of serious thought has gone into this ancient proposal. There are many ways to interpret panpsychism, and they are well represented in this group of philosophers, (...) each speaking for a unique take on the subject or one of its variations– from cosmopsychism to panprotopsychism to panexperientialism to neutral monism, etc. The combination problem is fully interrogated, as is panpsychism associated with dualism, idealism, physicalism, theism, etc. Anyone reading this book is bound to gain some respect for the complexity of such subject matter and the compelling logic for approaching it. (shrink)

The writings of Simone Weil support a feminist philosophy of education that locates freedom in self-determined creative work within contexts of necessity. In particular, Weil’s discussion of Force, the Good, Work, Method and Time provide criteria for a feminist philosophy of education, in terms of educational ends and means. Philosophy for Children is relevant to each of these themes, in various ways.

Rønnow-Rasmussen’s book explores the distinction between two kinds of value: good, and good-for. Rønnow-Rasmussen provides a reductive theory of both kinds of goodness: a fitting attitude account of goodness, on which facts about value reduce to facts about the norms governing agents’ attitudes. But Rønnow-Rasmussen argues that they conflict in an especially sharp way, so that we have a kind of choice about which to prioritise, and no obvious grounds on which to choose one over the other. I (...) articulate some virtues of the book but also doubts about the central thesis. (shrink)

This paper examines the status of naturalism in the philosophies of Edmund Husserl and John Dewey. Despite the many points of overlap and agreement between Husserl’s and Dewey’s philosophical projects, there remains one glaring difference, namely, the place and status of naturalism in their approaches. For Husserl, naturalism is an enemy to be vanquished. For Dewey, naturalism is the only method that can put philosophy back in touch with the concerns of human beings. This paper will demonstrate the remarkable similarities (...) between Husserl’s and Dewey’s thought before contending that Dewey’s “naturalistic humanism” offers a conception of naturalism which is compatible with Husserlian phenomenology. Furthermore, reading these two philosophers together, this paper argues, can point the way forward to a naturalism which avoids the dismissal of the contributions made by knowing subjects carried out by dominant contemporary strains of reductive naturalism. (shrink)

Gregory the Great depicts himself as a contemplative who, as bishop of Rome, was compelled to become an administrator and pastor. His theological response to this existential tension illuminates the vexed questions of his relationships to predecessors and of his legacy. Gregory develops Augustine’s thought in such a way as to satisfy John Cassian’s position that contemplative vision is grounded in the soul’s likeness to the unity of Father and Son. For Augustine, “mercy” lovingly lifts the neighbor toward (...) life in God. Imitating God’s own love for humankind, this mercy likens the Christian to God’s essential goodness and, by this likeness, prepares him or her for the vision of God, which Augustine expects not now but only in the next life. For Augustine, the exercise of mercy can—when useful—involve a shared affection or understanding. Gregory makes this shared affection essential to the neighborly love that he calls “compassion.” In this affective fellowship, Gregory finds a human translation of the passionless unity of Father and Son—so that, for Gregory, compassion becomes the immediate basis for and consequence of seeing God—even in this life. Compassion does not degrade; rather, it retrenches the perfection of contemplation. Reconciling compassionate activity and contemplative vision, this creative renegotiation of Augustine and Cassian both answered Gregory’s own aspirations and gave to the tumultuous post-Imperial West a needed account of worldly affairs as spiritual affairs. (shrink)

Verbal irony constitutes a rough class of indirect intentional communication involving a complex interaction of language-specific and communication-general phenomena. Conversationalists use verbal irony in conjunction with paralinguistic signals such as speech prosody. Researchers examining acoustic features of speech communication usually focus on how prosodic information relates to the surface structure of utterances, and often ignore prosodic phenomena associated with implied meaning. In the case of verbal irony, there exists some debate concerning how these prosodic features manifest themselves in conversation. A (...) form-function approach can provide a valuable tool for understanding speakers' varied vocal strategies in this domain. Here I describe several ways conversationalists employ prosodic contrasts, laughter, and other speech characteristics in their attempts to communicate effectively and efficiently. The presented examples, culled from spontaneous conversation recordings, reveal just a small sample of the enormous variation in delivery styles speakers adopt when communicating with ironic language. (shrink)

Throughout his career, Jean-Paul Sartre had a contentious theoretical relationship with psychoanalysis. Nowhere is this more evident than in his criticisms of the concept of the unconscious. For him, the unconscious represents a hidden psychological depth that is anathema to the notion of human freedom. In this paper, I argue that Lacan’s conception of the unconscious-structured-like-a-language overcomes many of Sartre’s most damning objections. I demonstrate that Lacan shares with Sartre a concern to rid the psyche of hidden depths. Both thinkers (...) therefore reject the depth psychological conception of the unconscious and arrive at strikingly similar positions on the nature of the unconscious. In this way, I show that the conceptual analogues that Sartre develops in order to avoid the psychoanalytic unconscious lead him to a position on the unconscious with which Lacan could be in agreement. This indicates that Sartre’s philosophical position is not as at odds with Freudian-Lacanian psychoanalysis as is typically thought. (shrink)

Philosophy of technology was not initially considered a consolidated field of inquiry. However, under the influence of sociology and pragmatist philosophy, something resembling a consensus has emerged in a field previously marked by a lack of agreement amongst its practitioners. This has given the field a greater sense of structure and yielded interesting research. However, the loss of the earlier “messy” state has resulted in a limitation of the field’s scope and methodology that precludes an encompassing view of the problematic (...) issues inherent in the question of technology. It is argued that the heterodox disunity and diversity of earlier philosophy of technology was not a mark of theoretical immaturity but was necessitated by the field’s complex subject matter. It is further argued that philosophy of technology should return to its pluralistic role as a meta-analytical structure linking insights from different fields of research. (shrink)

(Updated 5/23/24) This unpublished paper, which readers should feel free to cite, is posted primarily for the historical record. In recent work that has, deservedly, received some attention, Paul R. Daniels presents and defends a non-standard theory of persistence that he dubs transdurantism, according to which persisting objects are temporally extended simples. This is exactly what I do in work dating back to Spring 2004. (This work includes this version of this paper, as well as later version that was presented (...) to the University of Rochester's Philosophy Department in 2005.) While this might be a total coincidence, I doubt that it is, especially given that 'transdurantism' appears as a name for a theory of persistence associated with me in at least two places in the literature, one of which includes a citation of this paper. The paper begins with a discussion of what I call 'locative relations' (the relations borne by material objects to the regions of space and time they occupy), which draws relevant distinctions that others have failed to draw. The results of this discussion are then used in constructing spatial analogues for the three established theories of persistence--endurantism, perdurantism, and exdurantism--as well as for transdurantism. Next, these four views concerning persistence are explicitly formulated and a defense of their formulation is offered. Finally, transdurantism's advantages and disadvantages relative to the other theories are discussed. The main goal of the paper is to challenge the trichotomy between the established theories by arguing that transdurantism is also a viable view concerning persistence through time. [Note: Befitting its status as a historical document, with the exception of some light editing to fix typos that might impede understanding, no changes have been made to the paper.]. (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)

The field of of imprecise probability has matured, in no small part because of Teddy Seidenfeld’s decades of original scholarship and essential contributions to building and sustaining the ISIPTA community. Although the basic idea behind imprecise probability is (at least) 150 years old, a mature mathematical theory has only taken full form in the last 30 years. Interest in imprecise probability during this period has also grown, but many of the ideas that the mature theory serves can be difficult to (...) apprehend to those new to the subject. Although these fundamental ideas are common knowledge in the ISIPTA community, they are expressed, when they are expressed at all, obliquely, over the course of years with students and colleagues. -/- A single essay cannot convey the store of common knowledge from any research community, let alone the ISIPTA community. But, this essay nevertheless is an attempt to guide those familiar with the basic Bayesian framework to appreciate some of the elegant and powerful ideas that underpin the contemporary theory of lower previsions, which is the theory that most people associate with the term ‘imprecise probabilities’. (shrink)

Nico Silins (2012, 2013, 2020) argues that conscious judgments justify self-attribution of belief in the content judged. In defending his view, he makes use of Moore’s Paradox, seeking to show how his theory can explain what seems irrational or absurd about sentences of the form, ‘p and I do not believe that p’. I show why his argument strategy is not available to defend the view that conscious judgments can justify the self-attribution of belief in the content judged. I then (...) propose an amended version of his theory, which holds that sincerely asserting a proposition—whether aloud or silently—justifies self-ascribing belief in the proposition expressed. In doing so, I draw on an argument which I made in Gregory (2018) that there is something it is like to make a sincere assertion which is different from what it is like to make an insincere assertion. The phenomenology of sincere assertion provides immediate justification for self-ascription of belief in a proposition which has been sincerely asserted; nonetheless, it may be that we need to interpret our own assertions in order to determine which propositions they express. This paves the way for showing how two competing schools of thought about self-knowledge—one which holds that self-knowledge is immediate and one which holds that self-knowledge is inferential—might be combined. (shrink)

Defences of inference to the best explanation (IBE) frequently associate IBE with scientific realism, the idea that it is reasonable to believe our best scientific theories. I argue that this linkage is unfortunate. IBE does not warrant belief, since the fact that a theory is the best available explanation does not show it to be (even probably) true. What IBE does warrant is acceptance: taking a proposition as a premise in theoretical and/or practical reasoning. We ought to accept our best (...) scientific theories since they are the theories that are most likely to lead to the goal of science, which is that of knowledge. In support of this claim I invoke Bill Lycan's Panglossian reflections regarding Mother Nature.1. (shrink)

Information-based epistemology maintains that ‘being informed’ is an independent cognitive state that cannot be reduced to knowledge or to belief, and the modal logic KTB has been proposed as a model. But what distinguishes the KTB analysis of ‘being informed’, the Brouwersche schema (B), is precisely its downfall, for no logic of information should include (B) and, more generally, no epistemic logic should include (B), either.

Philip Goff has recently argued that due to the ‘subject-summing problem’, panpsychism cannot explain consciousness. The subject-summing problem is a problem which is analogous to the physicalist's explanatory gap; it is a gap between the micro-experiential facts and the macro-experiential facts. Goff also suggests that there could be a solution by way of a ‘phenomenal bonding relation’, but believes that this solution is not up to scratch because we cannot form a positive not-merely-role-playing concept of this relation. In this paper, (...) I argue that the phenomenal bonding solution is up to scratch. I argue that the panpsychist, by carefully inspecting their phenomenology and scrutinising their concepts, can form a positive concept of the phenomenal bonding relation. By doing this they can start to get around their explanatory gap. (shrink)

Advances in artificial intelligence and neuroscience claim to have begun to undermine the assumptions of the arts and educational theory community by explaining consciousness through either a reduction to mathematical functionalism or an excrescence of brain biology. I suggest that the worldview behind such reductionism is opposed to the worldview assumed by many educational practitioners and theorists. I then go on to outline a few common positions taken in the burgeoning field of consciousness studies that suggest that—though many attributes of (...) consciousness have been identified and explained—individual consciousness itself remains as much of an enigma to scientists as to the rest of us who experience it. However, I do suggest the necessity of intersubjectivity for conscious evolution. (shrink)

The desirable gambles framework offers the most comprehensive foundations for the theory of lower pre- visions, which in turn affords the most general ac- count of imprecise probabilities. Nevertheless, for all its generality, the theory of lower previsions rests on the notion of linear utility. This commitment to linearity is clearest in the coherence axioms for sets of desirable gambles. This paper considers two routes to relaxing this commitment. The first preserves the additive structure of the desirable gambles framework and (...) the machinery for coherent inference but detaches the interpretation of desirability from the multiplicative scale invariance axiom. The second strays from the additive combination axiom to accommodate repeated gambles that return rewards by a non-stationary processes that is not necessarily additive. Unlike the first approach, which is a conservative amendment to the desirable gambles framework, the second is a rad- ical departure. Yet, common to both is a method for describing rewards called discounted utility. (shrink)

According to Burri, a major reason why suicide is often irrational lies in the option value of life. Remaining alive is valuable because this allows for a larger menu of options, and the possibility of committing suicide in the future adds further value to the act of remaining alive now. In this note, I represent life as a trust game played by two selves – the young self and the old self – and I argue that the possibility to commit (...) suicide in the future can encourage committing suicide now, against what the theory of the option value of life predicts. (shrink)

When comparing alternative courses of action, modern military decision makers often must consider both the military effectiveness and the ethical consequences of the available alternatives. The basis, design, calibration, and performance of a principles-based computational model of ethical considerations in military decision making are reported in this article. The relative ethical violation (REV) model comparatively evaluates alternative military actions based upon the degree to which they violate contextually relevant ethical principles. It is based on a set of specific ethical principles (...) deemed by philosophers and ethicists to be relevant to military courses of action. A survey of expert and non-expert human decision makers regarding the relative ethical violation of alternative actions for a set of specially designed calibration scenarios was conducted to collect data that was used to calibrate the REV model. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the survey showed that people, even experts, disagreed greatly amongst themselves regarding the scenarios’ ethical considerations. Despite this disagreement, two significant results emerged. First, after calibration the REV model performed very well in terms of replicating the ethical assessments of human experts for the calibration scenarios. The REV model outperformed an earlier model that was based on tangible consequences rather than ethical principles, that earlier model performed comparably to human experts, the experts outperformed human non-experts, and the non-experts outperformed random selection of actions. All of these performance comparisons were measured quantitatively and confirmed with suitable statistical tests. Second, although humans tended to value some principles over others, none of the ethical principles involved—even the principle of not harming civilians—completely overshadowed all of the other principles. (shrink)

In this paper I consider the prospects for a skeptical version of infallibilism. For the reasons given above, I think skeptical invariantism has a lot going for it. However, a satisfactory theory of knowledge must account for all of our desiderata, including that our ordinary knowledge attributions are appropriate. This last part will not be easy for the infallibilist invariantist. Indeed, I will argue that it is much more difficult than those sympathetic to skepticism have acknowledged, as there are serious (...) problems with regarding paradigmatic, typical knowledge attributions as loose talk, exaggerations, or otherwise practical uses of language. So, I do not think the pragmatic story that skeptical invariantism needs is one that works without a supplemental error theory of the sort left aside by purely pragmatic accounts of knowledge attributions. In its place, I will offer a compromise pragmatic and error view that I think delivers everything that skeptics can reasonably hope to get. (shrink)

The ‘Toward a Science of Consciousness’ conference – which has now become ‘The Science of Consciousness’ conference – recently (June 5-10, 2017) took place instead at the receptive venue of the Hyatt Regency in La Jolla, California. It was well-planned and organized, which is extraordinary considering that it had to be organized all over again within a month or two when the original Shanghai location was cancelled. Things ran smoothly at La Jolla and it was well attended for an odd-year, (...) non-Tucson setting. The Director of the Center for Consciousness Studies, Dr. Stuart Hameroff, and his able Assistant Director and logistics manager, Abi Behar Montefiore, deserve full credit for carrying off this last minute transfer, as do many others who worked in supporting capacities. (shrink)

Human aesthetic practices show a sensitivity to the ways that the appearance of an artefact manifests skills and other qualities of the maker. We investigate a possible origin for this kind of sensibility, locating it in the need for co-ordination of skill-transmission in the Acheulean stone tool culture. We argue that our narrative supports the idea that Acheulian agents were aesthetic agents. In line with this we offer what may seem an absurd comparison: between the Acheulian and the Quattrocento. In (...) making it we display some hidden richness in what counts as an aesthetic response to an artefact. We conclude with a brief review of rival explanations—biological and/or cultural—of how this skills-based sensibility became a regular feature of human aesthetic practices. (shrink)

Background Men with antisocial personality disorder show lifelong abnormalities in adaptive decision making guided by the weighing up of reward and punishment information. Among men with antisocial personality disorder, modifi cation of the behaviour of those with additional diagnoses of psychopathy seems particularly resistant to punishment. Methods We did a case-control functional MRI (fMRI) study in 50 men, of whom 12 were violent off enders with antisocial personality disorder and psychopathy, 20 were violent off enders with antisocial personality disorder but (...) not psychopathy, and 18 were healthy non-off enders. We used fMRI to measure brain activation associated with the representation of punishment or reward information during an event-related probabilistic response-reversal task, assessed with standard general linear-model-based analysis. Findings Offenders with antisocial personality disorder and psychopathy displayed discrete regions of increased activation in the posterior cingulate cortex and anterior insula in response to punished errors during the task reversal phase, and decreased activation to all correct rewarded responses in the superior temporal cortex. This finding was in contrast to results for off enders without psychopathy and healthy non-off enders. Interpretation Punishment prediction error signalling in off enders with antisocial personality disorder and psychopathy was highly atypical. This finding challenges the widely held view that such men are simply characterised by diminished neural sensitivity to punishment. Instead, this fi nding indicates altered organisation of the information processing system responsible for reinforcement learning and appropriate decision making. This difference between violent offenders with antisocial personality disorder with and without psychopathy has implications for the causes of these disorders and for treatment approaches. (shrink)

What sort of moral theory should we view Saint Anselm of Canterbury as holding and using in his writings? In this paper, I argue that Anselm is best understood as a virtue ethicist. In the first part of the paper, I consider whether his approach could be understood in terms of deontological or natural law theories. In the second, I make a case for Anselm being a virtue ethicist. In the third part, I focus on this theme as found in (...) treatises published during Anselm’s lifetime. In the fourth, I look at other texts within the Anselmian corpus, notably the De humanibus moribus and the Dicta Anselmi. In the fifth and sixth parts, I turn to Anselm’s letters, focusing first on general discussions, and then on discussions focused upon specific virtues and vices. -/- . (shrink)

Over the past 40 years a tradition of Marx interpretation has built up around a single passage concerning black slavery in an 1853 letter from Marx to Engels, in order to demonstrate that Marx’s support for emancipation was conditional on the level of ‘civilization’ attained by black slaves. I will argue that this interpretation, which attempts to prove Marx’s racist defense of slavery, is overdetermined by an inattention to historical context and a hypersensitivity to Marx’s nineteenth-century epithets. This is important (...) because the alleged anti-black racism of Marx and the place black workers occupy in his historical materialist vision of class struggle are of the utmost significance for properly conceptualizing the relationship between Marxism and black liberation. (shrink)

Joel Pust has recently challenged the Thomas Reid-inspired argument against the reliability of the a priori defended by Alvin Plantinga, Nicholas Wolterstorff, William Alston, and Michael Bergmann. The Reidian argument alleges that the Cartesian insistence on the primacy of a priori rationality and subjective sensory experience as the foundations of epistemic justification is unwarranted because the same kind of global skeptical scenario that Cartesians recognize as challenging the legitimacy of perceptual beliefs about the external world also undermine the reliability of (...) a priori rationality. In reply, Pust contends that some a priori propositions are beyond doubt and that fact can be used to support the overall reliability of reason. This paper challenges Pust’s argument. I argue that while Pust successfully undermines a radical skeptical view of reason, he does not refute a more modest skepticism. I conclude with some suggestions for Cartesian a priorists. (shrink)

A number of recent historians claim to have defeated what they call the ‘conflict thesis’, the idea that there exists some inevitable conflict between Darwinism and Christianity. This is often thought to be part of a broader ‘warfare thesis’, which posits an inevitable conflict between science and religion. But, all they have defeated is one, relatively uninteresting form of this thesis. There remain other forms of the conflict theses that remain entirely plausible, even in light of the historical record.

When a technique purports to provide information that is not available to the unaided senses, it is natural to think that the only way to validate that technique is by appealing to a theory of the processes that lead from the object of study to the raw data. In fact, scientists have a variety of strategies for validating their techniques. Those strategies can yield multiple independent arguments that support the validity of the technique. Thus, it is possible to produce a (...) robust body of data with a single technique. I illustrate and support these claims with a historical case study. *Received September 2009; revised October 2009. †To contact the author, please write to: Department of History and Philosophy of Science, 1017 Cathedral of Learning, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA 15260; e‐mail: [email protected]. (shrink)

This paper argues that Carnap both did not view and should not have viewed Frege's project in the foundations of mathematics as misguided metaphysics. The reason for this is that Frege's project was to give an explication of number in a very Carnapian sense — something that was not lost on Carnap. Furthermore, Frege gives pragmatic justification for the basic features of his system, especially where there are ontological considerations. It will be argued that even on the question of the (...) independent existence of abstract objects, Frege and Carnap held remarkably similar views. I close with a discussion of why, despite all this, Frege would not accept the principle of tolerance. (shrink)

This essay is divided into two parts, deeply intermingled. Part I examines not only the origin of conscious experience but also how it is possible to ask of our own consciousness how it came to be. Part II examines the origin of experience itself, which soon reveals itself as the ontological question of Being. The chief premise of Part I is that symbolic communion and the categorizations of language have enabled human organisms to distinguish between themselves as actually existing entities (...) and their own immediate experience of themselves and their world. This enables them to reflect upon abstract concepts, including “self,” “experience,” and “world.” Symbolic communication and conceptualization grow out of identification, the act of first observing conscious experiencing and intimating what it is like, mimesis, a gestural protolanguage learned through imitation, and reflection, seeing oneself through the eyes of others. The step into actual intentional speech is made through self-assertion, narrative, and intersubjectivity. These three become the spiral of human cultural development that includes not only the adaptive satisfaction of our biological needs, but also the creativity of thought. With the mental-conceptual separation of subject and object – of self and world – the human ability to witness the universe (and each other) is the ground of our genuinely human quality. Consciousness gives human life its distinctively human reality. It is, therefore, one and the same ability that enables us to shape planet Earth by means of conceptual representations (rather than by means of our hands alone) while also awakening us to the significance of being. -/- Looking beyond human self-consciousness to investigate the origin and nature of awareness itself in Part 2, reductive objective materialism is found to be of little use. Direct experience also falls short in that, in order to be transformed into objective knowledge about itself, it must always be interpreted through and limited by the symbolic contexts of culture and the idiosyncratic conceptualizations of the individual. Awareness-in-itself must thus be considered ultimately unexplainable, but this may more indicate its inexpressible transcendence of all symbolic qualifiers than its nonexistence. It is suggested that awareness is not “self-aware” (as in deity) but is instead unknowing yet identical with the only true universal: the impetus of creative unfolding. Our human knowledge, as an expression of this unfolding, is seen to emerge from our conscious experiencing and, in turn, to have the power – and enormous responsibility – of directing that experience. Our underlying symbolic worldviews are found to be autopoietic: They limit or open our conscious experience, which, in turn, confirms those worldview expectations. As we explore a future of unforeseeable technological breakthroughs on an ailing planet who patiently copes with our “success,” truly vital decisions about the nature, meaning, extent, and future of conscious experience will have to be made. (shrink)

In this paper, I show that we should understand the direction of fit of beliefs and desires in normative terms. After rehearsing a standard objection to Michael Smith’s analysis of direction of fit, I raise a similar problem for Lloyd Humberstone’s analysis. I go on to offer my own account, according to which the difference between beliefs and desires is determined by the normative relations such states stand in. I argue that beliefs are states which we have reason to change (...) in light of the world, whereas desires are states that give us reason to change the world. After doing this, I show how the view avoids various objections, including two from David Sobel and David Copp. The paper ends by briefly discussing the relevance of the view to the Humean theory of motivation. (shrink)

Report submitted by Gregory B. Sadler, Pilot Project Coordinator to Sonya Brown, WAC Activity Director, Fayetteville State University, June 28 2011. -/- A Pilot program focused on improving student performance in carrying out Close Readings in humanities-based discipline courses was developed and implemented under the auspices of Writing Across the Curriculum and Title III at Fayetteville State University in Winter and Spring 2011. Five faculty were involved in the Pilot, myself as the coordinator, and four other faculty from four (...) different disciplines as participants. -/- The central idea behind the Pilot was that by focusing on the lower-order skills which are scaffolded as components into the higher-order activity of Close Reading of texts, and redesigning courses to emphasize development of these lower-order skills, student performances in Close Readings would also be improved. This did turn out to be the case. Most of the supporting data is qualitative rather than quantitative. -/- It is recommended that similar activities be continued, but that participating faculty be required to provide much more prescriptively structured and detailed assessment data and information about their course design. (shrink)

Why is there a long-standing debate about paraphrase in poetry? Everyone agrees that paraphrase can be useful; everyone agrees that paraphrase is no substitute for the poem itself. What is there to disagree about? Perhaps this: whether paraphrase can specify everything that counts as a contribution to the meaning of a poem. There are, we say, two ways to take the question; on one way of taking it, the answer is that paraphrase cannot. Does this entail that there is meaning (...) mysteriously locked in a poem, meaning that cannot be represented in any way other than via the poem itself? If that were so it would have profound implications for poetry’s capacity to convey insight. We suggest reasons for thinking that the entailment does not hold. Throughout, we connect the traditional debate over paraphrase, which has largely been conducted within the fields of philosophy and literary theory, with recent empirically oriented thinking about the communicability of meaning, represented by work in pragmatics. We end with a suggestion about what is to count as belonging to meaning, and what as merely among the things that determine meaning. (shrink)

Charles Mills' philosophical position has undergone a number of subtle shifts over the past 30 years. Nevertheless, there has been a relative consistency in his thought over the past two decades, at least since The Racial Contract of 1997. That consistency consists in his turn towards social contract theory and its liberal values and away from Marxism with its focus on class and political economy. Mills notes that this turn does not constitute a “a complete repudiation of Marxism, since I (...) do think that a modified historical materialism might be able to carry out an adequate conceptualization of the significance of race.” Some of the claims Mills makes about Marx and Engels, however, should be challenged; they (or their views) are not as “white” as Mills attests. Indeed, Marx and Engels made a considerable start at theorizing white supremacy as an outgrowth of modern capitalism. (shrink)

Recent work on the philosophy of modality has tended to pass over questions about iterated modalities in favour of constructing ambitious metaphysical theories of possibility and necessity, despite the central importance of iterated modalities to modal logic. Yet there are numerous unresolved but fundamental issues involving iterated modalities: Chandler and Salmon have provided forceful arguments against the widespread assumption that all necessary truths are necessarily necessary, for example. The current paper examines a range of ways in which one might seek (...) to identify limited regions within which some of the most well-known principles featuring iterated modalities may safely be assumed. (shrink)

Vlastos, G. Introduction: the paradox of Socrates.--Lacey, A. R. Our knowledge of Socrates.--Dover, K. J. Socrates in the Clouds.--Robinson, R. Elenchus.--Robinson, R. Elenchus, direct and indirect.--Robinson, R. Socratic definition.--Nakhnikian, G. Elenctic definitions.--Cohen, S. M. Socrates on the definition of piety: Euthyphro 10A-11B.--Santas, G. Socrates at work on virtue and knowledge in Plato's Laches.--Burnyeat, M. F. Virtues in action.--Walsh, J. J. The Socratic denial of Akrasia.--Santas, G. Plato's Protagoras and explanations of weakness.--Woozley, A. D. Socrates on disobeying the law.--Allen, R. E. (...) Plato's earlier theory of forms. (shrink)