"Heidegger on Being a Sexed or Gendered Human Being" is my contribution to a Symposium dedicated to the topic "Heidegger's idea of the human being." Editor Scott Campbell requested that participants (myself, Kevin Aho, Jesús Adrián Escudero, Tricia Glazebrook, Róisín Lally, and Iain Thomson) write a 1000 word statement addressing this question. Participants read each others contributions and submitted a 500 word response. This is my original statement.

Many philosophers have suggested that claims of need play a special normative role in ethical thought and talk. But what do such claims mean? What does this special role amount to? Progress on these questions can be made by attending to a puzzle concerning some linguistic differences between two types of 'need' sentence: one where 'need' occurs as a verb, and where it occurs as a noun. I argue that the resources developed to solve the puzzle advance our understanding of (...) the metaphysics of need, the meaning of 'need' sentences, and the function of claims of need in ethical discourse. (shrink)

It is often taken for granted that our desires can contribute to what it is rational for us to do. This paper examines an account of desire—the ‘guise of the good’— that promises an explanation of this datum. I argue that extant guise-of-the-good accounts fail to provide an adequate explanation of how a class of desires—basic desires—contributes to practical rationality. I develop an alternative guise-of-the-good account on which basic desires attune us to our reasons for action in virtue of their (...) biological function. This account emphasises the role of desire as part of our competence to recognise and respond to normative reasons. (shrink)

Using Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness as an inspirational backdrop, a novel whose story unfolds on a genderless planet that nevertheless relies on reproductive sex for the sake of generativity, this paper tackles the sex/gender debate, its entanglements with procreation, and its consequences for transgender pregnancies. More specifically, I analyze three issues that pose barriers to thinking about a more inclusive reproductive ethics: state-sanctioned sterilization, non-reproductive futurism, and access to assisted reproductive technology.

ABSTRACT This article takes Judith Butler’s epistemological problem of “framing” alongside Dana S. Belu’s notion of “reproductive enframing” to analyze whose bodies lie outside the borders of who is considered the appropriate reproductive citizen. Are all bodies subject to reproductive enframing under a totalizing technological ideology that Martin Heidegger refers to as Gestell? Or, does Belu’s notion of “partial enframing” allow a space to queer, or upset, our current understanding of such ideology? By queering the way that we currently view (...) assisted reproductive technology, can we widen the frame or cross its borders? In this article, I am primarily concerned with the necessity to queer French reproductive policy, though the questions I raise can be extended to any critiques of ART. (shrink)

What kind of rhetoric frames French reproductive policy debate? Who does such policies exclude? Through an examination of the “American import” of gender studies, along with an analysis of France’s Catholic heritage and secular politics, I argue that an unwavering belief in sexual difference as the foundation of French society defines the productive reproductive citizen. Sylviane Agacinski is perhaps the most vocal public philosopher who has framed the terms of reproductive policy debate in France, building an oppositional platform to reproductive (...) technology around anthropological assertions of sexual difference. This paper engages with Agacinski to examine rhetorical claims of sexual difference and how such claims delayed passage of France’s revised bioethics legislation that extends access of assisted reproductive technology (ART) to “all women.” Though the “PMA pour toutes” [ART for all women] legislation was eventually passed, such rhetoric motivated the explicit exclusion of all trans person from its extension, thus hardly permitting ART to all women. (shrink)

_Theurgy and the Soul_ is a study of Iamblichus of Syria, whose teachings set the final form of pagan spirituality prior to the Christianization of the Roman Empire. Gregory Shaw focuses on the theory and practice of theurgy, the most controversial and significant aspect of Iamblichus's Platonism. Theurgy literally means "divine action." Unlike previous Platonists who stressed the elevated status of the human soul, Iamblichus taught that the soul descended completely into the body and thereby required the performance of theurgic (...) rites—revealed by the gods—to unite the soul with the One. Iamblichus was once considered one of the great philosophers whose views on the soul and the importance of ritual profoundly influenced subsequent Platonists such as Proclus and Damascius. The Emperor Julian followed Iamblichus's teachings to guide the restoration of traditional pagan cults in his campaign against Christianity. Although Julian was unsuccessful, Iamblichus's ideas persisted well into the Middle Ages and beyond. His vision of a hierarchical cosmos united by divine ritual became the dominant world view for the entire medieval world and played an important role in the Renaissance Platonism of Marsilio Ficino. Even Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote that he expected a reading of Iamblichus to cause a "revival in the churches." But modern scholars have dismissed him, seeing theurgy as ritual magic or "manipulation of the gods." Shaw, however, shows that theurgy was a subtle and intellectually sophisticated attempt to apply Platonic and Pythagorean teachings to the full expression of human existence in the material world. (shrink)

This paper uses the figure of the nomad from the work of Rosi Braidoti to critically examine rhetoric about vaccine and masking mandates, and the science of covid more broadly. I draw out the tensions and ambivalence felt as we navigate this on-going crisis in ways epitomized by the phrase “I have a healthy mistrust of authority, and I am still vaccinated.” Though ambivalent, the nomadic subject finds an affirmative ethics, navigating the “right” response to incite positive change and expose (...) our current states of subjectivity. Recognizing the ambivalence of this state may be useful for feminists who critique medicine for its historical sexist and racist “objectivism,” while also supporting medical science and trust in the case of vaccine mandates. (shrink)

This paper argues that Socrates does not claim to be a political expert at Gorgias 521d6-8, as many scholars say. Still, Socrates does claim a special grasp of true politics. His special grasp (i) results from divine dispensation; (ii) is coherent true belief about politics; and (iii) also is Socratic wisdom about his own epistemic shortcomings. This condition falls short of expertise in two ways: Socrates sometimes lacks fully determinate answers to political questions, and he does not grasp the first (...) principles of politics. (shrink)

Desire satisfaction has not received detailed philosophical examination. Yet intuitive judgments about the satisfaction of desires have been used as data points guiding theories of desire, desire content, and the semantics of ‘desire’. This paper examines desire satisfaction and the standard propositional view of desire. Firstly, I argue that there are several distinct concepts of satisfaction. Secondly, I argue that separating them defuses a difficulty for the standard view in accommodating desires that Derek Parfit described as ‘implicitly conditional on their (...) own persistence’, a problem posed by Shieva Kleinschmidt, Kris McDaniel, and Ben Bradley. The solution undercuts a key motivation for rejecting the standard view in favour of more radical accounts proposed in the literature. (shrink)

Comments and replies from the 2021 Eastern APA book symposium on Jill North's Physics, Structure, and Reality.

Health care providers (HCPs) are routinely placed into morally challenging situations that have the potential to cause moral distress. This is especially true for HCPs working in the military, whether they are on deployment outside their typical contexts of practice such as in disaster relief (e.g., Haiti and the Ebola missions in West Africa), or in more typically military settings such as peace keeping or armed conflicts (e.g., Afghanistan, Syria). Moral distress refers to “painful feelings and/or psychological disequilibrium” (Nilsson, Sjöberg, (...) Kallenberg, & Larsson, 2011, p. 50) that occur when an individual is aware of a morally appropriate action in a moral dilemma but obstruction prevents them from carrying it out, or when in a situation where they must choose between upholding equally treasured but conflicting moral values. Similarly, moral distress can occur when faced with a ‘tragic choice’ where all available courses of action require something of moral significance to be given up, such as surgical triage in a mass casualty event (Hunt, Sinding, & Schwartz, 2012). In the literature, moral distress has been connected to negative psychological effects and even stress related mental health issues including compassion fatigue, burnout, and post-traumatic stress disorder (Owen & Wanzer, 2014; Gustafsson, Eriksson, Strandberg, & Norberg, 2010; Litz, et al., 2009). (shrink)

This paper aims for a more robust epistemological disjunctivism (ED) by offering on its behalf a new and better response to the ‘new evil genius’ problem. The first section articulates the ‘new evil genius challenge’ (NEG challenge) to ED, specifying its two components: the ‘first-order’ and ‘diagnostic’ problems for ED. The first-order problem challenges proponents of ED to offer some explanation of the intuition behind the thought that your radically deceived duplicate is no less justified than you are for adopting (...) her perceptual beliefs. In the second section, I argue that 'blamelessness' explanations are inadequate to the task and offer better explanations in their place—that of ‘trait-level virtue’ and ‘reasonability’. The diagnostic problem challenges proponents of ED to explain why it is that classical internalists disagree with them about how to interpret 'new evil genius' considerations. The proponent of ED owes some error theory. I tackle this problem in the third section, arguing that classical internalists overlook disjunctivist interpretations of new evil genius intuitions owing to a mistaken commitment to a ‘vindicatory’ explanation of perceptual knowledge. (shrink)

Epistemological disjunctivism says that one can know that p on the rational basis of one’s seeing that p. The basis problem for disjunctivism says that that can’t be since seeing that p entails knowing that p on account of simply being the way in which one knows that p. In defense of their view disjunctivists have rejected the idea that seeing that p is just a way of knowing that p (the SwK thesis). That manoeuvre is familiar. In this paper (...) I explore the prospects for rejecting instead the thought that if the SwK thesis is true then seeing that p can’t be one’s rational basis for perceptual knowledge. I explore two strategies. The first situates disjunctivism within the context of a ‘knowledge-first’ approach that seeks to reverse the traditional understanding of the relationship between perceptual knowledge and justification (or rational support). But I argue that a more interesting strategy situates disjunctivism within a context that accepts a more nuanced understanding of perceptual beliefs. The proposal that I introduce reimagines disjunctivism in light of a bifurcated conception of perceptual knowledge that would see it cleaved along two dimensions. On the picture that results perceptual knowledge at the judgemental level is rationally supported by perceptual knowledge at the merely functional or ‘animal’ level. This supports a form of disjunctivism that I think is currently off the radar: one that’s consistent both with the SwK thesis and a commitment to a traditional reductive account of perceptual knowledge. (shrink)

Facts about need play some role in our causal understanding of the world. We understand, for example, that people have basic needs for food, water and shelter, and that people come to be harmed because those needs go unmet. But what are needs? How do explanations in terms of need fit into our broader causal understanding of the world? This paper provides an account of need attribution, their contribution to causal explanations, and their relation to disposition attribution.

This article argues that postwar Seventeen magazine, a publication deeply invested in enforcing heteronormativity and conventional models of girlhood and womanhood, was in fact a more complex and multivocal serial text whose editors actively sought out, cultivated, and published girls’ creative and intellectual work. Seventeen's teen-authored “Curl Up and Read” book review columns, published from 1958 through 1969, are examples of girls’ creative intellectual labor, introducing Seventeen's readers to fiction and nonfiction which ranged beyond the emerging “young-adult” literature of the (...) period. Written by young people – including thirteen-year-old Eve Kosofsky (later Sedgwick) – who perceived Seventeen to be an important publication venue for critical work, the “Curl Up and Read” columns are literary products in their own right, not simply juvenilia. Seventeen provided these young authors the opportunity to publish their work in a forum which offered girl readers and writers opportunities for intellectual development and community. (shrink)

Experiences of urges, impulses, or inclinations are among the most basic elements in the practical life of conscious agents. This article develops a theory of urges and their epistemology. The article motivates a tripartite framework that distinguishes urges, conscious experiences of urges, and exercises of capacities that agents have to control their urges. The article elaborates the elements of the tripartite framework, in particular, the phenomenological contribution of motor imagery. It argues that experiences of urges and exercises of control over (...) urges play coordinate roles in enabling an agent’s awareness of their impulses. (shrink)

In the Gorgias, Socrates argues that just punishment, though painful, benefits the unjust person by removing injustice from her soul. This paper argues that Socrates thinks the true judge (i) will never use corporal punishment, because such procedures do not remove injustice from the soul; (ii) will use refutations and rebukes as punishments that reveal and focus attention on psychological disorder (= injustice); and (iii) will use confiscation, exile, and death to remove external goods that facilitate unjust action.

Only our lineage has ever used trackways reading to find unseen and unheard targets. All other terrestrial animals, including our great ape cousins, use scent trails and airborne odors. Because trackways as natural signs have very different properties, they possess an information-rich narrative structure. There is good evidence we began to exploit conspecific trackways in our deep past, at first purely associatively, for safety and orienteering when foraging in vast featureless wetlands. Since our own old trackways were recognizable they were (...) self-mirroring, triggering memories of what we had been up to in the past. Using them to find our way back to the band when temporarily lost or to re-find a resource-rich area discovered the day before enabled optimal foraging. Selection for daily reiteration of one’s own old trackways therefore triggered the evolution of what is distinctive about human cognition: the autobiographical or narrative (episodic) faculty for imaginative self-projection. This faculty enabled us to glean useful social information from the stories “told” by other band members’ old trackways, and created spin-off capacities for fast-track social learning. Resultant increases in socioecological complexity then created positive selective feedback loops for further entrenchment. Incrementally we became the ultra-social narrative-minded ape, capable of creating cumulative culture. (shrink)

In her Dinny Gordon series (1958–1965), junior novelist Anne Emery’s heroine manifests intellectual desire, a passionate engagement in the life of the mind along with the desire to connect with like-minded others. Within a genre which focused on socialization and dating, in Dinny, Emery normalizes a studious, inner-directed, yet feminine heroine, passionate about ancient history rather than football captains. Emery’s endorsement of the pleasure Dinny takes in intellectual work, and the friends and boyfriends Dinny collects, challenge stereotypes of intellectual girls (...) as dateless isolates while suggesting an alternative model of girlhood operating within apparent conformism to postwar “good girl” standards. (shrink)

ABSTRACT‘Exaltation views’ of humility are grounded on a kenotic view of humility, such that divine blessing comes proportionate to the extent to which an agent humbles herself. This article rejects exaltation views of humility which define humility kenotically, justify their arguments from a divine hiddenness perspective, and which conclude that divine concurrence with evil is justified as long as all humble believers eventually are exalted and blessed. Rather, I will contend that exaltation views misunderstand the meaning of both ‘humility’ and (...) ‘exaltation,’ even from their own Christian standpoint. I ultimately offer an alternate response to the problem of evil based on an existentially grounded conception of ‘humility’, which provides for a transmuted turn away from individual kenotic acts and toward community to transform those who suffer from atrocities. (shrink)

This paper evaluates the claim that some desires provide reasons in virtue of their connection with conscious affective experiences like feelings of attraction or aversion. I clarify the nature of affective desires and several distinct ways in which affective desires might provide reasons. Against accounts proposed by Ruth Chang, Declan Smithies and Jeremy Weiss, I motivate doubts that it is the phenomenology of affective experiences that explains their normative or rational significance. I outline an alternative approach that centralises the function (...) of such experiences. (shrink)

Cet article parle de la nécessité de repenser la notion de la différence sexuelle après le mal appropriation de celle-ci par « la manif pour tous ». Chaque tentative de former une ontologie fondée sur cette différence risque une favorisation de l’hétéronormativité et de l’essentialisme. En me servant de la philosophie d’Elizabeth Grosz sur Darwin, j’essaie de reformuler la différence sexuelle en des termes positifs et de voir celle-ci comme une notion qui facilite (plutôt que limite) la diversité. Le texte (...) est divisé en deux parties : 1. L’instrumentalisation de la différence sexuelle pour promouvoir l’hétéronormativité, et 2. Repenser une ontologie fondée sur la différence sexuelle. (shrink)

Matters of Certainty and Conviction. In the section on certainty, Shaw puts forth a proof of the external world, and considers topics such as change, difference, time, consciousness, substance and quality.

This paper argues that, although Margaret Cavendish’s main philosophical contributions are not in philosophy of religion, she makes a case for a defense of God, in spite of the worst sorts of harms being present in the world. Her arguments about those harms actually presage those of contemporary feminist ethicists, which positions Cavendish’s scholarship in a unique position: it makes a positive theodical contribution, by relying on evils that contemporary atheists think are the best evidence against the existence of God. (...) To demonstrate that Cavendish’s work should be considered as early modern feminist theodicy, this paper will briefly introduce the contemporary feminist worry about theodicy as a project, show that Cavendish shares the contemporary feminist view about situated evil, and argue that her theodicy aims for agreement about how to eradicate great moral evils while preserving free will—and so, carves out a space for future female philosophers of religion who aim to be agents of healing in the face of such evil. (shrink)

This introduction provides brief outlines of the articles collected in this special issue of the International Journal of Philosophical Studies on the topic of Ethics and Emotions. It also announces the winners of the 2021 Robert Papazian and PERITIA prizes.

We describe an evaluation undertaken on contract for the New Zealand State Services Commission of a major project (the Administrative Decision-Making Skills Project) designed to produce a model of administrative decision making and an associated teaching/learning packagefor use by government officers. It describes the evaluation of a philosophical model of decision making and the associated teaching/learning package in the setting of the New Zealand Public Service, where a deliberate attempt has been initiated to improve the quality of decision making, especially (...) in relation to moral factors. (shrink)

Le climat politique actuel en France abonde de débats à propos de l’identité nationale et du voile; en fait, le voile est devenu un symbole séparant l’idée d’une nation française et d’une nation islamique. Cependant, peu d’attention est portée sur la façon dont la perception de la différence de la femme est essentielle à la formation du citoyen français. Au lieu de se demander simplement “que veut dire être Français?” une seconde interrogation devrait suivre sur la façon dont se construit (...) la femme voilée dans la société française. En faisant appel à la philosophie de Hegel, les réflexions philosophiques employées pour ce projet cherchent à poser de nouvelles questions pouvant éclairer le débat sur l’identité nationale: la femme voilée est-elle l’Antigone des temps modernes? Quel est l’enjeu de dévoiler la femme voilée? D’où vient ce désir de la dévoiler? (shrink)

A feminist reading of how Heidegger may have responded to an unanswered questioned he posed in 1923, "Problem: What is woman?" while using his thought to better understand how contemporary society replies to questions in the realms of law, bioethics, pedagogy, and politics.

On Oct. 24, 2019, French philosopher Sylviane Agacinski was scheduled to speak at the Université de Bordeaux-Montaigne on « l’être humain à l’époque de sa reproductibilité technique » [the human being in the era of its technological reproducibility]. Amidst “violent threats” and their purported inability to assure the safety of Agacinski, the organizers cancelled the event. Agacinski and other French intellectuals lament what they perceive to be part of a “drifting liberticide”, a form of censorship that forbids the exchange of (...) ideas and forecloses open space for debate. The story goes that Agacinski, notable for her staunch opposition to surrogacy and extending assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) to non- heterosexual couples, as well as her anthropological claim that the fabric of our social order relies on the heteronormative structure of sexual difference, has been silenced. In a communiqué to the university, student organizations such as Riposte Trans and Mauvais Genre-s pleaded “no platform”, indicating that Agacinski’s reactionary homophobic and transphobic positions run contrary to the university’s mission of safeguarding against discrimination. What to do when an incitement to (epistemic) violence masks itself as free speech? Bring Sara Ahmed’s hammer to France. (shrink)

This paper reads Republic 583b-608b as a single, continuous line of argument. First, Socrates distinguishes real from apparent pleasure and argues that justice is more pleasant than injustice. Next, he describes how pleasures nourish the soul. This line of argument continues into the second discussion of poetry: tragic pleasures are mixed pleasures in the soul that seem greater than they are; indulging them nourishes appetite and corrupts the soul. The paper argues that Plato has a novel account of the ‘paradox (...) of tragedy’, and that the Republic and Philebus contain complementary discussions of tragic and comic pleasure. (shrink)

This paper inaugurates a discussion about the phenomenology of union decision-making. Phenomenology provides a new lens that may enable us to gain penetrating insights into how unions function in the fractious world of human resources management. The present paper is preliminary to any fieldwork that may be undertaken. Its main purposes are to identify theory that could be the foundation of further practical work, relate recent work in the phenomenology of management to union practices and to propose directions of enquiry. (...) The relevant theory is that of Edmund Husserl who provides us with a practical method of enquiry into the real world of human resource practice. Husserl’s work has already been applied in relation to local government functioning and some of the findings there appear relevant to the present enquiry. In particular, the nature and role of plebiscites. (shrink)

The present studies investigate how the intentions of third parties influence judgments of moral responsibility for other agents who commit immoral acts. Using cases in which an agent acts under some situational constraint brought about by a third party, we ask whether the agent is blamed less for the immoral act when the third party intended for that act to occur. Study 1 demonstrates that third-party intentions do influence judgments of blame. Study 2 finds that third-party intentions only influence moral (...) judgments when the agent's actions precisely match the third party's intention. Study 3 shows that this effect arises from changes in participants' causal perception that the third party was controlling the agent. Studies 4 and 5, respectively, show that the effect cannot be explained by changes in the distribution of blame or perceived differences in situational constraint faced by the agent. (shrink)

An existential interpretation of student angst in Chinese universities raises issues of autonomy and freedom. The governance arrangements in China create a conflict for Chinese students who in their coursework are urged to become critical-minded and open-minded. In this essay, Kant’s moral theory provides access to this phenomenon. His theory of duty–rationality–autonomy–freedom relates the liberty of thought to principled action. Kantian ideals still influence western business and university practice and they become relevant in China as that country modernises. The abilities (...) of graduates which officials say the country needs—insightfulness, creativity, innovation, progressiveness and commitment—are only achievable by professionals who are independent minded, rational and who commit to act on their own conclusions. Such people are Kant’s autonomous persons. Chinese students increasingly confront a conflicted educational environment. Universities require students to think, analyse and argue. An outcome of this deliberation is freedom, as construed by Kant as an ‘inner’construct. When students are unable to exercise Kantian freedom in matters which concern them they experience the angst of freedom. Students may carry a burden derived from bridles on information and authoritarian restrictions on dialogue. (shrink)

Human Beings and Freedom: An Interdisciplinary Perspective focuses on some contemporary issues relating to freedom, equality, identity and resistance from various perspectives, such as psychological, social, political, and metaphysical. In doing so it addresses topics such as the nature of human beings, political freedom, the relationship between freedom and equality, sex, gender and race, humour, and the notion of critique.

This thesis develops a hermeneutic philosophy of science to provide insights into physics education. -/- Modernity cloaks the authentic character of modern physics whenever discoveries entertain us or we judge theory by its use. Those who justify physics education through an appeal to its utility, or who reject truth as an aspect of physics, relativists and constructivists, misunderstand the nature of physics. Demonstrations, not experiments, reveal the essence of physics as two characteristic engagements with truth. First, truth in its guise (...) as correspondence enables a human being to prepare for the distinctive event of physics. -/- Second, the event of physics occurs in human perception when someone forces a hidden reality to disclose an aspect of itself. Thus, the ground of physics is our human involvement with reality achieved by way of truth. -/- To support this account of physics, the thesis reports phenomenological investigations into Isaac Newton’s involvement with optics and a secondary school physics laboratory. These involve interpretations of Heidegger’s theory of beings, schema and signification. The project draws upon, and contributes to, the hermeneutic phenomenology of modern physics, a tradition in continental philosophy that begins with Immanuel Kant, and advances particularly from Martin Heidegger to Patrick Heelan. -/- The thesis advocates an ontological pedagogy for modern physics which has as its purpose each individual student’s engagement with reality and truth. Students may achieve this through demonstrations of phenomena that will enable them to dwell with physics, an experience that contrasts with their embroilment in modernity, and which perpetuates nature’s own science. (shrink)

This paper proposes a unified reading of pleasure's nature and value in Plato's _Philebus_. It also explains how the proposed reading illuminates certain claims about pleasure across the corpus that initially seem to be in some tension: (i) that pleasure is not the good; (ii) that pleasure is choiceworthy and an aspect of the best human life; and (iii) that pleasure is dangerous and tends to make us into bad people who live badly.

Within the United States, the most prominent justification for criminal punishment is retributivism. This retributivist justification for punishment maintains that punishment of a wrongdoer is justified for the reason that she deserves something bad to happen to her just because she has knowingly done wrong—this could include pain, deprivation, or death. For the retributivist, it is the basic desert attached to the criminal’s immoral action alone that provides the justification for punishment. This means that the retributivist position is not reducible (...) to consequentialist considerations nor in justifying punishment does it appeal to wider goods such as the safety of society or the moral improvement of those being punished. A number of sentencing guidelines in the U.S. have adopted desert as their distributive principle, and it is increasingly given deference in the “purposes” section of state criminal codes, where it can be the guiding principle in the interpretation and application of the code’s provisions. Indeed, the American Law Institute recently revised the Model Penal Code so as to set desert as the official dominate principle for sentencing. And courts have identified desert as the guiding principle in a variety of contexts, as with the Supreme Court’s enthroning retributivism as the “primary justification for the death penalty.” While retributivism provides one of the main sources of justification for punishment within the criminal justice system, there are good philosophical and practical reasons for rejecting it. One such reason is that it is unclear that agents truly deserve to suffer for the wrongs they have done in the sense required by retributivism. In the first section, I explore the retributivist justification of punishment and explain why it is inconsistent with free will skepticism. In the second section, I then argue that even if one is not convinced by the arguments for free will skepticism, there remains a strong epistemic argument against causing harm on retributivist grounds that undermines both libertarian and compatibilist attempts to justify it. I maintain that this argument provides sufficient reason for rejecting the retributive justification of criminal punishment. I conclude in the third section by briefly sketching my public health-quarantine model, a non-retributive alternative for addressing criminal behavior that draws on the public health framework and prioritizes prevention and social justice. I argue that the model is not only consistent with free will skepticism and the epistemic argument against retributivism, it also provides the most justified, humane, and effective way of dealing with criminal behavior. (shrink)

Proponents of the aesthetic theory of art advocate that the aesthetic domain encompasses all artworks. However, there is a belief that although much art falls under the aesthetic, there are some artworks that do not. Avant-garde artworks are offered as counterexamples to the aesthetic theory as they are artworks that reject the very idea of the aesthetic. This paper explains the idea of non-perceptual aesthetic properties and explores whether it can incorporate avant-garde artworks into the domain of the aesthetic.

There is a palpable need for a new theory that embraces organisations and management – the hegemony of scientific theories is at an end. This paper argues that the phenomenological method which Husserl inaugurates has the potential to provide new insights. Those who adopt a phenomenological attitude to their situation within a business can explore unusual, and as yet unseen, depths within phenomena. The paper introduces Husserl’s method which requires the development of skills and a thoroughgoing rejection of scientific methods (...) of enquiry. However, this method is unlikely assist practitioners to achieve already determined business goals. (shrink)

Business education is at a critical juncture. How are we to justify the curriculum in undergraduate business awards in Aotearoa New Zealand? This essay suggests a philosophical framework for the analysis the business curriculum in Western countries. This framework helps us to see curriculum in a context of global academic communities and national needs. It situates the business degree in the essential tension which modernity (Western metaphysics) creates and which is expressed in an increasingly globalised economy. The tension is between (...) those who insist that the degree is to serve modernity and those who hope that it may contribute to a new era of justice and harmony with nature. One critical battle ground for the business curriculum is the subject Business Ethics. The business ethics curriculum often indicates the intention of the business ethics degree itself. Kant's distinction between heteronomy (rule following) and autonomy (making your own decisions) provides us with a means to judge the purposes of business ethics courses: there are courses which seek to produce reliable and compliant (heteronomous) employees, and there are those which seek to produce independent creative (autonomous) human beings. The question for this conference is: what do we as business educators see as our task? (shrink)

This paper introduces the concept of collective intentionality and shows its relevance when we seek to understand public management. Social ontology – particularly its leading concept, collective intentionality – provides critical insights into public organisations. The paper sets out the some of the epistemological limitations of cultural theories and takes as its example of these the group-grid theory of Douglas and Hood. It then draws upon Brentano, Husserl and Searle to show the ontological character of public management. Modern public institutions (...) – such as advisory organisations and service delivery agencies, including schools and universities – are expressions of human collective intentionality. The central concept within these institutions, as a phenomenology reveals, is cooperation. Public institutions are natural structures that emerge from our evolutionary ancestry as cooperative animals and enduringly display all the features of that ancestry. (shrink)

Epistemic contextualists like David Lewis allow that we have substantially infallibilist reflective intuitions about knowledge even though our everyday talk accepts fallibilist attributions of knowledge. They give serious weight to both our everyday talk and our propensity to assent to the skeptic's conclusions, and give us a concept of knowledge that accommodates both. The skeptic would, of course, leverage such infallibilist intuitions in order to undermine the legitimacy of our everyday attributions. Most contemporary epistemologists would simply argue that our concept (...) of knowledge is fallibilist, but this doesn't give them a particularly convincing reply to intuitively compelling skeptical arguments. ;This essay, most generally, takes up the question of how best to argue about skepticism. I claim that a philosophical account of knowledge that responds to skepticism should be able to clearly accommodate our epistemic agency. In chapter 1 I explain how skepticism challenges our naIve conception of agency and introduce two criteria for an adequate response to skepticism. In chapter 2, I discuss contextualist solutions; I argue they fail to satisfy our criteria and fail on their own terms; I explain how both failures relate to a failure to adequately treat epistemic agency. In chapter 3 I develop a conception of epistemic agency that describes what it is to be an active, reasoning source of belief. This picture is at odds with a dominant strain of epistemology that has it that one is substantially subject to belief, not effectively responsible for it; I criticize an influential argument by Bernard Williams that claims belief is not an attitude we control. This discussion in chapter 3 gives support to, a rationale for, the anti-insulationism requirement set out in chapter 1. Finally, in chapter 4 I return to the methodological issues of how to argue about skepticism. I first defend the idea that a knowledge-based skepticism is worth philosophical attention. I then offer an interpretation of what the skeptic is up to, and discuss what an effective counterstrategy might look like; I suggest that a particular sort of normative argument is the best way with the skeptic. (shrink)

This article is a review of David Hummel’s The Rise and Fall of Dispensationalism, a book that questions whether the academic debate around dispensationalism is truly dead. By exploring through the lens of metaphorical theology, we look at how commercialization caused academic dispensationalism to self-cannibalize. Applying analysis to both the ouroboros and butterfly metaphors we can examine whether dispensationalism is dead or if there is a potential for a newer, stronger version of academic debate on the topic to resurface once (...) again. Equally as plausible, is the notion that dispensationalism has changed its meaning through the metamorphosis process of changing from academic dispensationalism to pop-dispensationalism. By looking at the meaning change that occurs at the point of transaction, we see that the biography of dispensationalism shows a significant shift in meaning as it becomes a commercial hit. (shrink)

Slurring expressions display puzzling behaviour when embedded, such as under negation and in attitude and speech reports. They frequently appear to retain their characteristic qualities, like offensiveness and propensity to derogate. Yet it is sometimes possible to understand them as lacking these qualities. A theory of slurring expressions should explain this variability. We develop an explanation that deploys the linguistic notion of focus. Our proposal is that a speaker can conversationally implicate metalinguistic claims about the aptness of a focused slurring (...) expression. This explanation of variability relies on independently motivated mechanisms and is compatible with any theory of slurring expressions. (shrink)

D’après Heidegger, chaque époque/épochè est caractérisé par un certain mode de révélation des étants, qui est à la fois une dissimulation d’une façon de l’Être. Ce mode particulier paraît ne venir de nulle part en ce qu’il se base sur un certain oubli. Dana S. Belu le met en scène pour son livre en faisant valoir la tendance de Heidegger « to treat the history of being (Seinsgeschichte) as a noncausal succession of universal principles of intelligibility that presupposes the forgetting (...) (Seinsvergessenheit) of the clearing (die Lichtung) as their source » (p. 15). L’oubli de notre époque est marqué par une divulgation technologique dans le mode de l’arraisonnement (Gestell) où les étants se révèlent comme partie du fonds (Bestand) d’être calculés, manipulés, exploités, et mis en réserve pour un usage ultérieur. La phénoménologie féministe de l’A. essaie de faire sens à la gestation, la maternité et la procréation médicalement assistée (PMA) qui font aux femmes faire partie de ce fonds et ouvre, parmi les paramètres du Gestell, la porte à une ère « sans mère ». (shrink)

Sacrificial dilemmas such as the trolley problem play an important role in experimental philosophy (x-phi). But it is increasingly argued that, since we are not likely to encounter runaway trolleys in our daily life, the usefulness of such thought experiments for understanding moral judgments in more ecologically valid contexts may be limited. However, similar sacrificial dilemmas are experienced in real life by animal research decision makers. As part of their job, they must make decisions about the suffering, and often the (...) death, of many non-human animals. For this reason, a context-specific investigation of so-called “3R dilemmas” (i.e., dilemmas where there is a conflict between the principles of replacement, reduction, and refinement of the use of animals in research) is essential to improve the situation of both non-human animals and human stakeholders. An approach well suited for such investigation is experimental philosophical bioethics (“bioxphi”), which draws on methods similar to x-phi to probe more realistic, practical scenarios with an eye to informing normative debates and ethical policy. In this article, we argue for a need to investigate 3R dilemmas among professional decision-makers using the tools of bioxphi. In a first step, we define 3R dilemmas and discuss previous investigations of professionals’ attitudes in such cases. In a second step, we show how bioxphi is a promising method to investigate the whys and hows of professional decision-making in 3R dilemmas. In a last step, we provide a bioxphi template for 3R dilemmas, give recommendations on its use, explore the normative relevance of data collected by such means, and discuss important limitations. (shrink)

How should we think of the preferences of citizens? Whereas self-optimal policy is relatively straightforward to produce, socially optimal policy often requires a more detailed examination. In this paper, we identify an issue that has received far too little attention in welfarist modelling of public policy, which we name the "hidden assumptions" problem. Hidden assumptions can be deceptive because they are not expressed explicitly and the social planner (e.g. a policy maker, a regulator, a legislator) may not give them the (...) critical attention they need. We argue that ethical expertise has a direct role to play in public discourse because it is hard to adopt a position on major issues like public health policy or healthcare prioritisation without making contentious assumptions about population ethics. We then postulate that ethicists are best situated to critically evaluate these hidden assumptions, and can therefore play a vital role in public policy debates. (shrink)

What It’s Like to Chill Out With Whom the Rest of the World Considers As The Most Ruthless Men: Ratko Mladic, Goran Hadzic and Radovan Karadzic (+) Confessions of a Female War Crimes Investigator By Jill Louise Starr NJ USA -/- Read My Entire Book Here (True Story) http://sites.google.com/site/thelawprojectscenternycoffices/what-it-s-like-to-chill-out-with-whom-th e-rest-of-the-world-considers-as-the-most-ruthless-men-ratko-mladic-goran-hadzic-and-radovan-karadzi c-confessions-of-a-female-war-crimes-investigator -/- Retrospectively, it was all so simple, natural and matter of fact being on a boat restaurant in Belgrade, sitting with, laughing, drinking a two hundred bottle of wine and chatting (...) about war and peace while Ratko Mladic held my hand. Mladic, a man considered the world’s most ruthless war criminal since Adolf Hitler, still at large and currently having a five million dollar bounty on his head for genocide by the international community. Yet there I was with my two best friends at the time, a former Serbian diplomat, his wife, and Ratko Mladic just chilling. There was no security, nothing you’d ordinarily expect in such circumstances. Referring to himself merely as, Sharko; this is the story of it all came about. Diplomatic / International Relations Consultant & War Crimes Investigator - War - Peace - Preventive Diplomatic Strategies - International Law - Charitable Causes - International Business - International Political Economy - Human Rights - Politics - War Crimes Investigations - Anti-Terrorism - Law Projects Center Funded Projects (YCICC) Internationally LPCYU Home Website -/- Irrefutable Proof ICTY Is Corrupt Court/Irrefutable Proof the Hague Court Cannot Legitimately Prosecute Karadzic Case By Jill Starr I want to stress, in this particular meeting , there was no observer status at the ICC Preparatory Meetings at the United Nations in New York City in 2001. What I did, made a historical precedent. I was asked by, Darko Trifunovic 1st Secretary of the Bosnian MIssion, to take his place, in a CLOSED DOOR UNITED NATIONS MEETING. This means, ONLY HEADS OF AMBASSADORIAL MISSIONS WERE ALLOWED IN THE MEETING. There was no "Observer Status for say NGO's such as Amnesty International." I represented a Country as an American Citizen that day; the Repuklika Srpska. This never occurred before to my knowledge ever. It was an error. My former professor, Arnold Stark, walked me in, A former State Dept. man chosen to be the former Ambassador from the USA to Bonn/Germany (and he declined years back because of his wife at the time). He knew it was illegal. It said on these paper I picked up in the meeting, Anyone, Richard Holbrooke, sat across from me, discussing this meeting outside the meeting itself thereafter , "would be prosecuted to the fullest extent of int'l law." I heard the Ambassadors of the world ALL DISCUS TRADING MONEY FOR ICC AND ICTY COURT VERDICT AS WELL AS FUTURE JUDICIAL APPOINTMENTS -/- http://sites.google.com/site/thelawprojectscenternycoffices/home/irrefutable-proof-icty-is-corrupt-c ourt-irrefutable-proof-the-hague-court-cannot-legitimately-prosecute-karadzic-case -/- http://picasaweb.google.com/lpcyusa/IrrefutableProofICTYIsCorruptCourtIrrefutabl# (The Documentary Secret United Nations ICC Meeting Papers Scanned Images) OR http://community.jigsaw.com/t5/media/gallerypage/user-id/903610# -/- Rea dMore Here _> Read the entire story here My testimonial video on Youtube _> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dKe-5LORsGs -/- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dKe-5LORsGs (My YouTube VIDEO) -/- This legal technicality indicates the Hague must dismiss charges against Dr Karadzic and others awaiting trials in the Hague jail; like it or not. -/- Unfortunately for the Signatures Of the Rome Statute United Nations member states instituting the ICC & ICTY housed at the Hague, insofar as the, Radovan Karadzic, as with the other Hague cases awaiting trial there, I personally witnessed these United Nations member states having a substantial conversations, and, openly speaking about trading judicial appointments and verdicts for financial funding when I attended the 2001 ICC Preparatory Meetings at the UN in Manhattan making the iCTY and ICC morally incapable trying Radovan Karazdic and others. -/- I witnessed with my own eyes and ears when attending the 2001 Preparatory Meetings to establish an newly emergent International Criminal Court, the exact caliber of criminal corruption running so very deeply at the Hague, that it was a perfectly viable topic of legitimate conversation in those meetings I attended to debate trading verdicts AND judicial appointments, for monetary funding. -/- Jilly wrote:*The rep from Spain became distraught and when her country’s proposal was not taken to well by the chair of the meeting , then Spain argued in a particularly loud and noticably strongly vocal manner, “Spain (my country) strongly believes if we contribute most financial support to the Hague’s highest court, that ought to give us and other countries feeding it financially MORE direct power over its decisions.” -/- ((((((((((((((((((((((((( ((((((((((((((((((((((((( Instead of censoring the country representative from Spain for even bringing up this unjust, illegal and unfair judicial idea of bribery for international judicial verdicts and judicial appointments, all country representatives present in the meeting that day all treated the Spain proposition as a ”totally legitimate topic” discussed and debated it between each other for some time. I was quite shocked! The idea was “let’s discuss it.” "It’s a great topic to discuss." -/- Some countries agreed with Spain’s propositions while others did not. The point here is, bribery for judicial verdicts and judicial appointments was treated as a totally legitimate topic instead of an illegitimate topic which it is in the meeting that I attended in 2001 that day to establish the ground work for a newly emergent international criminal court.)))))))))))))))))))))))))))) -/- In particular., since “Spain” was so overtly unafraid in bringing up this topic of trading financial funding the ICC for influence over its future judicial appointments and verdicts in front of every other UN member state present that day at the UN, “Spain” must have already known by previous experience the topic of bribery was “socially acceptable” for conversation that day. They must have previously spoke about bribing the ICTY and ICC before in meetings; this is my take an international sociological honor student. -/- SPAIN’s diplomatic gesture of international justice insofar as, Serbia, in all of this is, disgusting morally!SPAIN HAS TAUGHT THE WORLD THE TRUE DEFINITION OF AN “INTERNATIONAL CRIMINAL COURT.” -/- I represented the state interests’ of the Former Yugoslavia, in Diplomat Darko Trifunovic’s absence in those meetings and I am proud to undertake this effort on Serbia’s behalf. http://picasaweb.google.com/lpcyusa (My Political Satire Blog) Diplomatic / International Relations Consultant & War Crimes Investigator - War - Peace - Preventive Diplomatic Strategies - International Law - Charitable Causes - International Business - International Political Economy - Human Rights - Politics - War Crimes Investigations - Anti-Terrorism - Law Projects Center Funded Projects (YCICC) Internationally http://sites.google.com/site/jillstarrsite -/- -/- . (shrink)

Né dans le sillage d’un « significant renewal of interest in Bergsonism and a greater recognition of his influence on twentieth-century philosophy » (p. 1), ce livre ne pouvait que poser des questions sur le temps, ramenant également à la philosophie de Heidegger, à qui l’on doit l’une des pensées les plus originales à ce sujet. Aussi Heath Massey s’emploie-t-il lire les textes de Bergson qui tentent de repenser la notion traditionnelle de temps à côté de ceux de Heidegger, mettant (...) plus particulièrement en lumière l’influence de celui-là sur celui-ci, une influence largement passée inaperçue. L’importance de cette œuvre tient dans la façon dont l’A. conteste la philosophie du temps que Heidegger attribue à Bergson. Notre guide considère la lecture bergsonienne de Heidegger comme une « oversimplication » (p. 84) et vise à éclaircir comment, malgré les propos du penseur allemand, le philosophe français a été capable de radicalement repenser le temps d’un point de vue ontologique. Dès lors, l’ouvrage s’achève sur un goût de soupçon, celui-ci faisant dire que Heidegger a essayé de se distinguer de Bergson pour ne pas admettre ce dont il lui est redevable. (shrink)