This article considers two related and fundamental issues about morality in a virtual world. The first is whether the anonymity that is a feature of virtual worlds can shed light upon whether people are moral when they can act with impunity. The second issue is whether there are any moral obligations in a virtual world and if so what they might be. -/- Our reasons for being good are fundamental to understanding what it is that makes us moral or indeed (...) whether any of us truly are moral. Plato grapples with this problem in book two of The Republic where Socrates is challenged by his brothers Adeimantus and Glaucon. They argue that people are moral only because of the costs to them of being immoral; the external constraints of morality. -/- Glaucon asks us to imagine a magical ring that enables its wearers to become invisible and capable of acting anonymously. The ring is in some respects analogous to the possibilities created by online virtual worlds such as Second Life, so the dialogue is our entry point into considering morality within these worlds. These worlds are three dimensional user created environments where people control avatars and live virtual lives. As well as being an important social phenomenon, virtual worlds and what people chose to do in them can shed light on what people will do when they can act without fear of normal sanction. -/- This paper begins by explaining the traditional challenge to morality posed by Plato, relating this to conduct in virtual worlds. Then the paper will consider the following skeptical objection. A precondition of all moral requirements is the ability to act. There are no moral requirements in virtual worlds because they are virtual and it is impossible to act in a virtual world. Because avatars do not have real bodies and the persons controlling avatars are not truly embodied, it is impossible for people to truly act in a virtual world. We will show that it is possible to perform some actions and suggest a number of moral requirements that might plausibly be thought to result. Because avatars cannot feel physical pain or pleasure these moral requirements are interestingly different from those of real life. Hume’s arguments for why we should be moral apply to virtual worlds and we conclude by considering how this explains why morality exists in these environments. (shrink)

In this article, I consider the permissibility of forming defensive alliances, which is a neglected topic in the contemporary literature on the ethics of war and peace. Drawing on the jus ad bellum criterion of proportionality in just war theory, I argue that if permissible defensive force requires that its expected harms must be counterbalanced by its expected goods, then, permissible defensive alliance formation seems to also require that its expected harms must be counterbalanced by its expected goods, as the (...) latter can result in much the same consequences as the former. Moreover, due to the incommensurability of values in play when making proportionality judgments, I argue for a value pluralist understanding of the criterion. On this view, defensive alliance formation is proportionate if the expected gains in certain values (goods) intuitively justify the expected losses in others (harms) when compared to the alternative expected value trade-offs of not allying. To explore the implications of my theoretical claims I consider them in relation to John Mearsheimer’s influential account of the causes of the Russo-Ukrainian War. On this account, the West’s strategy to assimilate Ukraine and Ukraine’s pursuit of NATO membership post-annexation of Crimea were disproportionate because the expected harms were unjustified when compared to the alternative expected goods and harms of forgoing Ukrainian membership of NATO. This does not imply that Russia’s aggression is just, but it does imply that the West and Ukraine are partially responsible for the war and that they acted impermissibly in attempting to expand/join NATO. (shrink)

Contemporary critical instincts, in early modern studies as elsewhere in literary theory, often dismiss invocations of mind and cognition as inevitably ahistorical, as performing a retrograde version of anachronism. Arguing that our experience of time is inherently anachronistic and polytemporal, we draw on the frameworks of distributed cognition and extended mind to theorize cognition as itself distributed, cultural, and temporal. Intelligent, embodied action is a hybrid process, involving the coordination of disparate neural, affective, cognitive, interpersonal, ecological, technological, and cultural resources. (...) Because the diverse elements of such coupled systems each have their own histories and dynamics, many distinctive or competing times are built in to the very mechanisms of remembering and reasoning. We make this argument by means of two distinct case histories: a reading of the site-specific audio walk of Canadian artist Janet Cardiff; and an extended discussion of a famously anachronistic moment in William Shakespeare’s King Lear. These readings reveal the inherent polytemporalities of human mental and social life. (shrink)

This article contrasts the sense in which those whom Bernard Williams called ‘political realists’ and John Rawls are committed to the idea that political philosophy has to be distinctively political. Distinguishing the realist critique of political moralism from debates over ideal and non-ideal theory, it is argued that Rawls is more realist than many realists realise, and that realists can learn more about how to make a distinctively political vision of how our life together should be organised from his (...) theorising, although it also points to a worrying tendency among Rawlsians to reach for inappropriately moralised arguments. G. A. Cohen's advocacy of socialism and the second season of HBO's The Wire are used as examples to illustrate these points. (shrink)

I show that the act-type theories of Soames and Hanks entail that every sentence with alternative analyses (including every atomic sentence with a polyadic predicate) is ambiguous, many of them massively so. I assume that act types directed toward distinct objects are themselves distinct, plus some standard semantic axioms, and infer that act-type theorists are committed to saying that ‘Mary loves John’ expresses both the act type of predicating [loving John] of Mary and that of predicating [being loved (...) by Mary] of John. Since the two properties are distinct, so are the act types. Hence, the sentence expresses two propositions. I also discuss a non-standard “pluralist” act-type theory, as well as some retreat positions, which all come with considerable problems. Finally, I extrapolate to a general constraint on theories of structured propositions, and find that Jeffrey King’s theory has the same unacceptable consequence as the act-type theory. (shrink)

As a libertarian studying, embracing, and teaching a philosophy of individual freedom, John Hospers, like many of us, was heavily influenced by the philosophical writings of Ayn Rand. Rand’s major novels The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged continue to delight and empower readers through embracing the heroic creator or inventor, technological and scientific progress, and the competent individual. These are some of the archetypes of the Randian hero. At the other end of the scale were the incompetent looters and moochers (...) who could only function in her world by controlling those with ability and the savages of ancient or undeveloped cultures who could not comprehend ability, seizing the means of progress before killing the inventor, then retreating into mysticism and magic. Rand was not an archaeologist and wrote at a time before scholars of prehistory focused on the rational and productive aspects of ancient civilizations upon which enabled the present to emerge in fits and starts. These aspects include technology, record keeping, maritime trade, and pre- monetary economies. This paper will consider the emergence of globalized connectivites in the Mediterranean during the Late Bronze Age (ca. 1700-1300 BCE) which was arguably the first age of globalization in human history. It was also one of the first ages of social acceleration characterized by a confluence of increasing technological and economic interdependency, yet fragile in its susceptibility to climate change, plagues, and authoritarian city-states and small empires ruled by kings claiming divinity or divine authority. Thus, the Late Bronze Age was also an economically fragile era with a high concentration of wealth distributed among supra-regional global elite plutocrats unified more by wealth and shared symbolism than by cultural tradition or ideology. This era was susceptible to populist resistance in the form of piratical activity and banditry. This paper explores the globalist and populist aspects of the ancient Mediterranean. In doing so, I suggest that some globalized elites of the present day perpetuate another Randian archetype, the moochers and looters. In doing so, it transcends ideology to focus on how the non-productive in current society acquire vast concentrations of wealth and power. (shrink)

The Discourse of Universalism , Moral Relativism & Utilitarianism Table of Contents: Chapter 1. Moral relativism: history and theory of moral relativism: Ancient Greece and Early Modern Era Chapter 2. Universalism and Relativism Chapter 3. Hume's Universalism Chapter 4. Plato's Universalism Chapter 5. Problems with Rawls Theory Chapter 6. Aristotle's Relativism Chapter 7. Is Aristotle an ethical relativist? Chapter 8. John Stuart Mill's Utilitarianism Chapter 9. Mill and Principle of Utility Chapter 10. Kant and Moral Theory The historian Herodotus (...) gives the anecdote of Darius, King of Persia, who summoned the Greeks and asked them if they would be willing to eat the bodies of their dead fathers. They replied they would not for any money in the world. Later, Darius asked some Indians of the tribe called Callatiae, who do eat their dead parents’ bodies, if they would ever consider burning the bodies, as was the custom among Greeks. “One can see by this what custom can do” writes Herodotus. He draws the conclusion that this story vindicates the view some acts may be right for some and wrong for others, depending on their individual conceptions of morality. The Sophists were also associated with relativistic thinking, notably Protagoras who asserts that “man is the measure of all things”. However, this view was quite uncommon and moral relativism hardly flourished, as Plato and Aristotle both defended forms of moral absolutism. Ancient Greek philosophers acknowledged moral diversity, but more often under the form of moral scepticism, which states that there is no moral knowledge (rather than moral truth is relative to a culture). (shrink)

HISTÓRIA DA SOCIOLOGIA: O DESENVOLVIMENTO DA SOCIOLOGIA I -/- A SOCIOLOGIA NOS ESTADOS UNIDOS -/- -/- HISTORY OF SOCIOLOGY: THE DEVELOPMENT OF SOCIOLOGY I -/- SOCIOLOGY IN UNITED STATES -/- -/- Emanuel Isaque Cordeiro da Silva – IFPE-BJ, CAP-UFPE e UFRPE. E-mails: [email protected] e [email protected] WhatsApp: (82)9.8143-8399. -/- -/- PREMISSA -/- A Sociologia nos Estados Unidos desenvolveu-se no contexto de dois grandes eventos que marcaram profundamente a história do país. -/- O primeiro foi a Guerra de Secessão (também conhecida como (...) Guerra Civil Americana), que ocorreu entre 1861 e 1865 e gerou ressentimentos e atritos entre a população do sul e a do norte dos Estados Unidos. -/- Em contrapartida, houve a urbanização das terras do oeste e das áreas centrais do país, o que contribuiu para o crescimento da economia e a expansão industrial. No norte, graças ao esforço de guerra, houve um grande crescimento, principalmente na metalurgia, no transporte ferroviário, na indústria de armamentos e na indústria naval. O comércio também se expandiu de maneira exponencial em todo o território estadunidense. -/- O padrão de cultura dos Estados Unidos passou a ser o ideal nortista de “trabalho duro, educação e liberdade econômica a todos”. Houve ainda um grande desenvolvimento de escolas e instituições de ensino superior. -/- O segundo grande evento que marcou a história estadunidense foi a chegada em massa de estrangeiros. Entre 1860 e 1900, os Estados Unidos passaram de país agrícola, com população em torno de 4 milhões, para país industrial, com uma das maiores economias do mundo e com 75 milhões de habitantes. -/- O incremento populacional e a industrialização redundaram em um processo de urbanização sem precedentes que continuou até a década de 1930. Para se ter uma ideia, em 1860 viviam em Chicago 102 260 pessoas; em 1900, a população da cidade passou a 1 698 575 e, em 1930, a 3 375 329. Em virtude desses fatores, consolidaram-se nos Estados Unidos uma burguesia industrial, comercial e financeira significativa, uma classe trabalhadora majoritariamente formada por imigrantes e uma classe média em ascensão. -/- As principais cidades passaram a ser um espaço de conflito e alvo de preocupações. Temas como imigração, aculturação, conflitos étnicos, comportamentos desviantes e políticas públicas foram importantes na Sociologia desenvolvida inicialmente no país. -/- Entre os principais fundadores da Sociologia nos Estados Unidos estão William Graham Sumner (1840 -1910), Lester Frank Ward (1841-1913), Albion Woodbury Small (1854-1926), Franklin Henry Giddings (1855-1931), Thorstein Bunde Veblen (1857-1929), William Isaac Thomas (1863-1947), Robert Ezra Park (1864-1944), Charles Horton Cooley (1864-1929) e George Herbert Mead (1863-1931). -/- A herança cultural desses fundadores é muito diversa: foram influenciados principalmente pela tradição religiosa protestante disseminada em quase todo o território, pelo liberalismo econômico clássico conservador, do tipo laissez-faire, pelo evolucionismo do inglês Charles Darwin (1809-1882) e pelo darwinismo social de Herbert Spencer (1820-1903). Acrescente-se a esse cadinho de concepções de mundo e ciência o pragmatismo do filósofo e psicólogo William James (1842-1910) e do filósofo Charles Pierce (1839-1914). -/- Essa herança permite compreender as duas grandes características da Sociologia nos Estados Unidos: -/- • multiplicidade de temas, problemas e propostas e diversidade teórica e metodológica; -/- • desenvolvimento desse campo do conhecimento em universidades, nas quais as atividades eram financiadas pelo Estado e pelo setor privado (Fundação Rockefeller, comitês e associações normalmente religiosas). -/- Por causa dessa segunda característica, optei por analisar o desenvolvimento da Sociologia nos Estados Unidos em três importantes universidades estadunidenses: a de Chicago, Harvard e Columbia. -/- 1. A Universidade de Chicago -/- A Universidade de Chicago foi fundada em 1890 pelo magnata do petróleo John D. Rockefeller e recebeu os primeiros alunos em 1892. Nela foi criado o primeiro departamento de Sociologia dos Estados Unidos, sob a direção de Albion Woodbury Small. -/- No início de seus trabalhos sociológicos, a Universidade de Chicago deu primazia à pesquisa empírica, procurando conhecer, por meio da observação direta, a dinâmica das relações sociais. Desenvolveu uma forte tendência pragmática e microssociológica, que viria a ser conhecida como a Escola de Chicago. A maior preocupação dos integrantes dessa Escola foi com os problemas das grandes cidades dos Estados Unidos, como a marginalidade social, o alcoolismo, as drogas, a segregação racial e a delinquência, estabelecendo uma relação entre a pesquisa sociológica e a intervenção dos organismos públicos na sociedade. -/- Os sociólogos de Chicago também se dedicaram ao que chamaram de ecologia humana, em oposição à ecologia animal e vegetal. -/- Em 1895, Albion Woodbury Small fundou o American Journal of Sociology e, em 1907, participou ativamente da fundação da Sociedade Americana de Sociologia. Ele publicou, com Georges Vincent, em 1894, talvez o primeiro manual de Sociologia para estudantes, intitulado Introdução ao estudo da sociedade. Tendo estudado na Alemanha, Small foi o principal divulgador do pensamento de Georg Simmel nos Estados Unidos. -/- Entre os integrantes da Escola de Chicago mais conhecidos no Brasil, podemos citar William I. Thomas (1863-1947) e Florian Znaniecki (1882-1958), cuja principal obra foi O camponês polonês na Europa e na América, editada em 1918. -/- Destacam-se ainda Robert E. Park (1864-1944) e Ernest W. Burgess (1886-1966), que escreveram, entre outras obras, Introdução à ciência da Sociologia, em 1921. -/- Os dois, com Roderick Mackenzie, escreveram o clássico A cidade, em 1925. Outro membro de destaque foi Louis Wirth (1897-1952), autor de O gueto, escrito em 1928, e de um artigo que se tornou famoso, “Urbanismo como modo de vida”, publicado em 1938, no American Journal of Sociology. -/- A Escola de Chicago congregou, ainda, sociólogos e antropólogos com ligação com a Psicologia Social, que desenvolveram uma abordagem sociológica das relações sociais conhecida como interacionismo simbólico. A principal figura dessa vertente foi George Herbert Mead (1863-1932), que trabalhou em diversas áreas, sobretudo como psicólogo social e como professor de várias gerações de antropólogos e sociólogos. Seus escritos foram sistematizados por seus alunos e publicados com o nome Mind, self and society (A mente, o eu e a sociedade), em 1934. -/- Além da tradição intelectual dos Estados Unidos, os integrantes da Escola de Chicago receberam a influência de Jean-Gabriel de Tarde, Émile Durkheim e Georg Simmel. Seus continuadores foram Herbert Blumer (1900-1987) e Everett C. Hughes (1897-1983). -/- 1.1 Erving Goffman (1922-1982) -/- O representante da Sociologia desenvolvida na Universidade de Chicago mais influente no Brasil é Erving Goffman, que nasceu em Manville, Alberta, no Canadá, em 1922, e faleceu nos Estados Unidos em 1982. Obteve o grau de bacharel pela Universidade de Toronto, em 1945, e concluiu mestrado (1949) e doutorado (1953) na Universidade de Chicago, onde estudou Sociologia e Antropologia Social. Em 1958, tornou-se professor da Universidade da Califórnia e, em 1968, ingressou na Universidade da Pensilvânia, onde foi professor de Antropologia e Sociologia. -/- Entre 1981 e 1982, Goffman foi presidente da Sociedade Americana de Sociologia e realizou pesquisas na linha da Sociologia interpretativa e cultural, iniciada por Max Weber, desenvolvendo a ideia de que o mundo é um teatro e cada um, individualmente ou em grupo, interpreta papéis de acordo com as circunstâncias em que se encontra. Essas circunstâncias são marcadas por rituais e posições distintivas em relação a outros indivíduos ou grupos. Para ele, é possível distinguir indivíduos, grupos e classes com base, por exemplo, em aspectos como as formas de vestir ou de se apresentar publicamente. -/- O sociólogo considera a interação social como um processo fundamental de identificação e de diferenciação dos indivíduos e grupos, analisando-a no cotidiano, especialmente em lugares públicos. Goffman estudou com especial atenção o que chamou de “instituições totais”, lugares onde o indivíduo é isolado da sociedade, como prisões e manicômios. -/- De acordo com o sociólogo brasileiro Édison Gastaldo: -/- O trabalho de Goffman trouxe à luz aspectos da vida cotidiana que não se julgavam “sociologicamente relevantes”. Seus insights sobre as interações ordinárias, sobre o deslocamento dos pedestres, sobre a ocupação social dos espaços públicos, sobre a atuação dos vigaristas, mendigos, loucos, espiões, jogadores e de todos aqueles que passam cotidianamente debaixo de nossos narizes sem que prestemos atenção modificaram o pensar sociológico no mundo. Sua descrição etnográfica de um hospital para doentes mentais colaborou decisivamente para deflagrar a luta antimanicomial no mundo inteiro. Vinte e dois anos depois de sua morte, os temas e os conceitos desenvolvidos por Goffman ainda estão em pleno uso e vitalidade (GASTALDO, 2004, p. 9/10). -/- Suas três obras mais conhecidas são: A representação do eu na vida cotidiana (1959), Manicômios, prisões e conventos (1961) e Estigma: notas sobre a manipulação da identidade (1963). -/- 2. A Universidade Harvard -/- A história de Harvard começa em 1636, quando foi fundada, na cidade de Cambridge, no estado de Massachusetts, uma instituição de ensino denominada New College. Em 1639, essa instituição recebeu o nome de Harvard College, em homenagem a John Harvard, seu principal mecenas. -/- A Sociologia desenvolvida na Universidade Harvard é marcada por uma preocupação teórica e tem dois sociólogos como expoentes: Pitirim Alexandrovich Sorokin (1889-1968) e Talcott Edgar Frederick Parsons (1902-1979). Este último influenciou muito o desenvolvimento da Sociologia no mundo e no Brasil. -/- 2.1 Talcott Parsons (1902-1979) -/- Talcott Parsons nasceu no Colorado, nos Estados Unidos. Em 1924, graduou-se em Biologia e Filosofia na Faculdade Amherst. Em 1925, pós-graduou-se em Ciências Sociais na Escola de Economia de Londres, na Inglaterra, e, em seguida, doutorou-se na Universidade de Heidelberg, na Alemanha. -/- Nos Estados Unidos, lecionou Economia e Sociologia na Universidade Harvard durante 45 anos (1927-1973). Em 1944, tornou-se presidente do Departamento de Sociologia, transformando-o, dois anos depois, no Departamento de Relações Sociais, a fim de unir a Sociologia a outras ciências sociais. -/- Assim como Sorokin, Parsons voltou-se para a Sociologia europeia, tendo por base as ideias de Max Weber, Vilfredo Pareto (1848-1923) e Émile Durkheim, além das do economista inglês Alfred Marshall (1842-1924). Fundamentado nesses autores, desenvolveu uma grande obra teórica, que dominaria a Sociologia estadunidense desde então. -/- Parsons é o sociólogo estadunidense mais conhecido no mundo. Em geral, seus críticos entenderam-no como um pensador conservador, preocupado basicamente com o bom ordenamento da sociedade. Seu interesse era determinar a função que os indivíduos desempenhavam na estrutura social. Entendia o indivíduo como expressão dessa estrutura, a qual devia ser mantida e preservada. Caso isso não ocorresse, deviam entrar em ação os mecanismos de controle social (moral, ética, sistema jurídico e penal etc.), como instrumentos preventivos ou corretivos. -/- Seu trabalho exerceu influência em diversos países e ambientes acadêmicos (particularmente nas décadas de 1950 a 1970), até mesmo na então União Soviética, onde, em 1964, ministrou aulas sobre a Sociologia estadunidense a convite da Academia de Ciências da União Soviética (URSS). -/- Suas principais obras foram: A estrutura da ação social (1937), O sistema social (1951), Economia e sociedade (1956, com N. Smelser), Estrutura e processo nas sociedades modernas (1960), Sociedades: perspectivas evolucionárias e comparativas (1966), Teoria sociológica e sociedade moderna (1968), Política e estrutura social (1969), Sistemas sociais e a evolução da teoria da ação (1977) e Teoria da ação e a condição humana (1978). -/- 3. A Universidade Columbia -/- A King’s College foi fundada em 1754, em Nova York, nos Estados Unidos. Quando as colônias inglesas se declararam independentes da Grã-Bretanha, a instituição passou a se chamar Universidade Columbia. A partir da última década do século XIX, essa universidade se destacaria por uma importante produção no campo da Sociologia, tendo como pioneiro Franklin Giddings (1855-1931), fundador da cadeira de Sociologia. Fortemente marcado pelo evolucionismo e pelo pragmatismo, foi um dos primeiros a usar métodos quantitativos e experi-mentais no estudo dos fenômenos sociais. -/- Dois sociólogos de Columbia merecem destaque, por serem muito conhecidos no Brasil: Robert K. Merton e Charles Wright Mills. -/- 3.1 Robert King Merton (1910-2003) -/- Merton nasceu na Filadélfia e faleceu em Nova York. Graduou-se em Sociologia na Universidade Temple e pós-graduou-se na Universidade Harvard, onde trabalhou com Pitirim Sorokin e Talcott Parsons até a defesa de seu doutorado, em 1936. -/- Em 1941 Merton transferiu-se para a Universidade Columbia, onde permaneceu durante 38 anos, até aposentar-se. Nessa universidade procurou integrar teoria à prática sociológica. Estudou o comportamento desviante e os processos de adaptação social, tendo por base pesquisas qualitativas e quantitativas do exercício profissional em ambiente de solidariedade e de conflito. Com Paul Lazarsfeld (1901-1976), desenvolveu o Departamento de Pesquisa Social Aplicada. -/- O nome de Merton está vinculado à proposta de criação de teorias de alcance médio, segundo a qual os sociólogos seriam mais úteis à sociedade se deixassem de lado as grandes teorias (criticando Parsons) e criassem outras de médio alcance. Essas teorias estariam situadas entre as hipóteses de trabalho rotineiras na pesquisa e as amplas especulações. Mediariam, dessa forma, as abstrações, generalizações e fundamentos empíricos da pesquisa. -/- Merton tinha uma visão humanista da função social da ciência, demonstrando influência clara de Max Weber. Concebia a ciência como um conjunto de conhecimentos compartilhados por todos os membros da sociedade, que deveriam julgar a credibilidade das postulações científicas de acordo com suas expectativas e valores morais. Mas as decisões acerca do fazer científico não caberiam à sociedade, e sim ao próprio cientista, sempre adequando seus valores aos da sociedade. -/- 3.2 Charles Wright Mills (1916-1962) -/- Charles Wright Mills (1916-1962) nasceu em Waco, no Texas, Estados Unidos. Mestre em Artes, Filosofia e Sociologia pela Universidade do Texas, concluiu, em 1942, seu doutorado em Sociologia e Antropologia pela Universidade de Wisconsin. Foi professor de Sociologia nas universidades de Maryland e Columbia, onde passou a lecionar em 1947 e permaneceu até a morte, em 1962. -/- Charles Mills representa uma tendência quase marginal na Sociologia dos Estados Unidos, por apresentar uma visão crítica e militante da sociedade estadunidense e da própria Sociologia. -/- Influenciado por Karl Marx e Max Weber, Mills procurou conciliar o conceito de classe social com o de status, visando esclarecer processos e mecanismos dos conflitos e das mudanças sociais. Por meio de pesquisas, tentou elucidar a complexidade de estruturas de poder, particularmente das elites (em lugar de classes dominantes), e de seu papel na mudança social, fugindo da ideia de revolução como única via para a transformação social. -/- Charles Wright Mills é conhecido principalmente por seu livro A imaginação sociológica, publicado originalmente nos Estados Unidos em 1959. Nele, o autor propõe que os sociólogos, ao exercer a profissão, não deixem a imaginação e a criatividade de lado em favor de uma pretensa objetividade e neutralidade do trabalho científico. Para Mills, os grandes intelectuais da história nunca abriram mão da reflexão e da criatividade e mantiveram uma postura crítica diante da realidade. -/- Atribuindo aos sociólogos a responsabilidade de agentes ativos na sociedade, cabendo-lhes tomar parte nos debates públicos de sua época, Mills defendia a ideia de que a Sociologia deveria ser compreensível para o grande público. Para ele, a ciência social era inseparável da vida pessoal do cientista: a intuição, a imaginação e o comprometimento com o tempo em que se vivia eram fundamentais para compreender cientificamente a sociedade. Suas obras foram publicadas em vários idiomas. Além da citada anteriormente, as mais importantes são: A nova classe média (1951), A elite do poder (1956), Sobre o artesanato intelectual (1959) e Os marxistas (1962). -/- Mills escreveu também artigos em revistas e dois livros que tiveram grande exposição na mídia dos Estados Unidos, por seu caráter polêmico: As causas da Terceira Guerra Mundial (1958), no qual discute a corrida nuclear, e A Revolução em Cuba (1960), em que analisa a fase inicial da Revolução Cubana. -/- Outros sociólogos que defendem uma postura crítica na Sociologia estadunidense, continuadores ou não de Charles Wright Mills, são Irving Louis Horowitz (1929-2012), Martin Nicolaus (1928-) e Alvin Gouldner (1920-1980). -/- REFERENCIAL TEÓRICO -/- BOTTOMORE, T.; et al. Dicionário do pensamento social do século XX. Trad. Eduardo Francisco Alves. Álvaro Cabral. Rio de Janeiro: Zahar, 1996. -/- COULON, A. A Escola de Chicago. Trad. Tomás R. Bueno. 1ª ed. Campinas: Papirus, 1995. -/- CUIN, C. H.; GRESLE, F. História da Sociologia. Trad. Roberto Leal Ferreira. São Paulo: Ensaio, 1994. -/- DOMINGUES, J. M. A sociologia de Talcott Parsons. 1ª ed. São Paulo: Annablume, 2008. -/- GASTALDO, É. (org.); et al. Erving Goffman, desbravador do cotidiano. 1ª ed. Porto Alegre: Tomo Editorial, 2004. -/- NOVA, S. V. Introdução à Sociologia. 6ª ed. São Paulo: Atlas, 2004. -/- SILVA, A. et al. Sociologia em movimento. 2ª ed. São Paulo: Ática, 2016. -/- VALLADARES, L. do P. A Escola de Chicago: impacto de uma tradição no Brasil e na França. 1ª ed. Belo Horizonte: UFMG, 2005. -/- VÁRIOS, autores. O livro da sociologia. As grandes ideias de todos os tempos. Trad. Rafael Longo. 1ª ed. São Paulo: Globo, 2015. -/- SBS - Sociedade Brasileira de Sociologia PUCRS - PPG em Ciências Sociais Avenida Ipiranga, 6681 - Partenon CEP: 90619-900 - Porto Alegre, RS [email protected] Emanuel Isaque Cordeiro da Silva ©2019 -/- Estimule a criatividade. Respeite os direitos autorais. (shrink)

Today's academia is obsessed about writing and speaking gobbledygook. At least most of the time. It has little time in sitting still and actually reading fiction, poetry and say, Wittgenstein. One pretends to say fancy things about these authors but one does not actually read books anymore. COVID 19 Lockdown prompted this author to answer queries from students and peers about a reading list. So prepare a wide ranging list he did which covers everything from the version of Mahabharata one (...) ought to read to novels on celibacy. But then he chose to publish at Prabuddha Bharata over all other platforms because the Ramakrishna Mission has the finances to keep this list alive 200 years hence. This was written during COVID 19 Lockdown in India at the end of April, 2020. Nirad C Chaudhuri insisted on making a good bibliography in his magnum opus. This author follows Nirad C Chaudhuri in quietly speaking about how Harold Bloom plagiarised the Late Professor John Senior's reading list. The list also comments on Romanticism and the art of writing itself. The list on Hinduism is truly contrarian. One hopes that this list survives when GoodReads and other Listopias are no longer. -/- Today's academia is obsessed about writing and speaking gobbledygook. At least most of the time. It has little time in sitting still and actually reading fiction, poetry and say, Wittgenstein. One pretends to say fancy things about these authors but one does not actually read books anymore. COVID 19 Lockdown prompted this author to answer queries from students and peers about a reading list. So prepare a wide ranging list he did which covers everything from the version of Mahabharata one ought to read to novels on celibacy. But then he chose to publish at Prabuddha Bharata over all other platforms because the Ramakrishna Mission has the finances to keep this list alive 200 years hence. This was written during COVID 19 Lockdown in India at the end of April, 2020. Nirad C Chaudhuri insisted on making a good bibliography in his magnum opus. This author follows Nirad C Chaudhuri in quietly speaking about how Harold Bloom plagiarised the Late Professor John Senior's reading list. The list also comments on Romanticism and the art of writing itself. The list on Hinduism is truly contrarian. One hopes that this list survives when GoodReads and other Listopias are no longer. -/- These COVID 19 days, while the First world is mooning over syllabi for their kids and third and fourth world folks like me are tackling Umphan; I chose to prepare a new kind of syllabus. A syllabus which is not merely a list. In these days of incessant and meaningless webinars which my students can only spread memes about and only the poor and doctors will actually travel to white nations which are killing their own; here's a list which ends with Hindu classics which are contrarian. Nirad C Chaudhuri, a much maligned man in India and a forgotten polyglot in white privileged academia said we must first prepare a bibliography. So, Figure it out. I used some of the Hindu resources on recognition mentioned here and tried to work on Stephen King; a privileged white tenure track person from Trumpland just snowballed me. Now, this list is syllabi and also just a list of a bunch of books to read during Lockdowns which will be more common in the future because COVID 19, as Dr Fauci tells us; is here to stay. Even if one COVID 19 person is there; then along with Ebola, my white privileged tenure track fiends; off you go to gagaland. We in India already know these diseases. Go figure it out. (shrink)

Collected and edited by Noah Levin -/- Table of Contents: -/- UNIT ONE: INTRODUCTION TO CONTEMPORARY ETHICS: TECHNOLOGY, AFFIRMATIVE ACTION, AND IMMIGRATION 1 The “Trolley Problem” and Self-Driving Cars: Your Car’s Moral Settings (Noah Levin) 2 What is Ethics and What Makes Something a Problem for Morality? (David Svolba) 3 Letter from the Birmingham City Jail (Martin Luther King, Jr) 4 A Defense of Affirmative Action (Noah Levin) 5 The Moral Issues of Immigration (B.M. Wooldridge) 6 The Ethics of (...) our Digital Selves (Noah Levin) -/- UNIT TWO: TORTURE, DEATH, AND THE “GREATER GOOD” 7 The Ethics of Torture (Martine Berenpas) 8 What Moral Obligations do we have (or not have) to Impoverished Peoples? (B.M. Wooldridge) 9 Euthanasia, or Mercy Killing (Nathan Nobis) 10 An Argument Against Capital Punishment (Noah Levin) 11 Common Arguments about Abortion (Nathan Nobis & Kristina Grob) 12 Better (Philosophical) Arguments about Abortion (Nathan Nobis & Kristina Grob) -/- UNIT THREE: PERSONS, AUTONOMY, THE ENVIRONMENT, AND RIGHTS 13 Animal Rights (Eduardo Salazar) 14 John Rawls and the “Veil of Ignorance” (Ben Davies) 15 Environmental Ethics: Climate Change (Jonathan Spelman) 16 Rape, Date Rape, and the “Affirmative Consent” Law in California (Noah Levin) 17 The Ethics of Pornography: Deliberating on a Modern Harm (Eduardo Salazar) 18 The Social Contract (Thomas Hobbes) -/- UNIT FOUR: HAPPINESS 19 Is Pleasure all that Matters? Thoughts on the “Experience Machine” (Prabhpal Singh) 20 Utilitarianism (J.S. Mill) 21 Utilitarianism: Pros and Cons (B.M. Wooldridge) 22 Existentialism, Genetic Engineering, and the Meaning of Life: The Fifths (Noah Levin) 23 The Solitude of the Self (Elizabeth Cady Stanton) 24 Game Theory, the Nash Equilibrium, and the Prisoner’s Dilemma (Douglas E. Hill) -/- UNIT FIVE: RELIGION, LAW, AND ABSOLUTE MORALITY 25 The Myth of Gyges and The Crito (Plato) 26 God, Morality, and Religion (Kristin Seemuth Whaley) 27 The Categorical Imperative (Immanuel Kant) 28 The Virtues (Aristotle) 29 Beyond Good and Evil (Friedrich Nietzsche) 30 Other Moral Theories: Subjectivism, Relativism, Emotivism, Intuitionism, etc. (Jan F. Jacko). (shrink)

This is the review of a book by Paula Byrne on Lord Mansfield's great-niece, Dido, whom he raised as his own daughter. Lord Mansfield was the Lord Chief Justice of England in the Eighteenth Century. The child was brought to him as an infant and grew up to become what we would today term his paralegal clerk in his Library at Kenwood House. His great-niece was the child of a black slave and his sister's son, Sir John Lindsay. This (...) is also a narrative of the British Slave trade including some of Lord Mansfield's judgements at the King's Bench Division, Royal Courts of Justice. (shrink)

There is at least one immediate sense in which legal discourse is perspectival: it qualifies acts and facts in the world on the basis of rules. Legal concepts are for the most part constituted by rules, both in the sense that rules define these concepts’ semantic content and that, in order to engage with legal practice, we must act according to those rules, not necessarily complying with them but at least having them in mind. This is the distinctive perspective of (...) law: however, it would be misleading to think that this is the only perspective we can have in legal discourse. That of rule-constituted legal concepts is the fundamental perspective -- the inevitable presupposition of most legal assertions -- but other perspectives are possible on top of this fundamental background: perspectives on law, stemming from the basic perspective of law. -/- In this paper, I will try to argue that some different perspectives regarding law can be accounted for by analyzing different kinds of concepts that emerge in connection with legal institutions. My argument will consist of three steps as follows. First, I will explain how legal concepts are constituted by rules, referring in this regard to John Searle’s analysis of institutional concepts as it emerges in his Making the Social World, of 2010, and amending this analysis according to some criticisms that in 1986 Neil MacCormick had raised against Searle with specific reference to the legal domain. -/- Second, I will show that there are some kinds of concepts relevant for an institution which are not captured by Searle’s analysis in terms of constitutive rules, even if this is amended according to MacCormick’s criticisms. This I will do by considering the game of chess as a simple system of rule-constituted concepts (concepts such as 'checkmate,' 'bishop,' 'king'). I will consider four examples of perfectly legitimate assertions regarding a match of chess -- these being (1) ‘I won’; (2) 'you made a good attack'; (3) 'you are cheating'; (4) 'you made good use of the first-move advantage,' and I will show that, while the first three assertions can be analyzed in terms of concepts (those of 'victory,' 'attack,' and 'cheating') which are not constituted by the rules of chess but are rather common to several different competitive games, being typical of the broader practice of competitive game-playing of which chess is an instance, the fourth assertion includes a concept (that of 'first-move advantage') which is peculiar to chess, just like a rule-constituted element, but is not constituted by the rules of chess. This analysis will lead to a new categorization of institutional concepts. Apart from rule-constituted institutional concepts, which are the only ones recognized by Searle, in order to account for cases (1), (2), and (3) I will distinguish between three kinds of meta-institutional concepts, namely, goal-oriented, mode-oriented, and value-oriented meta-institutional concepts, and then I will introduce the category of para-institutional concepts to account for case (4). -/- Finally -- and this is the third step of my argument -- I will explain how these different kinds of institutional concepts appear when we adopt different perspectives on the institutional frameworks we deal with. This will lead us to a categorization of possible perspectives regarding law that corresponds to the previous one regarding concepts. There is first a structural perspective regarding the instantiation of institutional elements which clearly involves rule-constituted institutional concepts -- as when we say 'I am making a will.' There is then a teleological perspective regarding the goal of our institutional acts which calls into question goal-oriented meta-institutional concepts -- as when we say 'I wrote that will in order for you to have a distinctive right to my property.' Then, we can adopt a strategical perspective regarding some peculiar ways in which institutional acts can be performed, and this has often to do with mode-oriented meta-institutional concepts -- as when we say 'the Labour Party is making parliamentary obstructionism so that the Government will fall before the enactment of the labour reform,' or 'workers start today a work-to-rule action.' Clearly, we can also adopt an evaluative perspective over institutional facts or acts, and here typically value oriented meta-institutional concepts emerge -- as when we say 'that rule is clearly unjust' or 'that contract is unfair.' Finally, we can limit ourselves to a descriptive perspective on phenomena which are peculiar to a given institutional setting, and here para-institutional concepts are often useful -- as when we say 'the Italian electoral system before 1990 led to a sort of reform paralysis' or 'a strict use of the criterion requiring proof beyond any reasonable doubt can be expected to entail a low conviction rate.'. (shrink)

Do aesthetic reasons have normative authority over us? Could there be anything like an aesthetic ‘ought’ or an aesthetic obligation? I argue that there are no aesthetic obligations. We have reasons to act certain ways regarding various aesthetic objects – most notably, reasons to attend to and appreciate those objects. But, I argue, these reasons never amount to duties. This is because aesthetic reasons are merely evaluative, not deontic. They can only entice us or invite us – they can never (...) compel us. Beauty gives us goods without shoulds. (shrink)

Conceptualism is the thesis that, for any perceptual experience E, (i) E has a Fregean proposition as its content and (ii) a subject of E must possess a concept for each item represented by E. We advance a framework within which conceptualism may be defended against its most serious objections (e.g., Richard Heck's argument from nonveridical experience). The framework is of independent interest for the philosophy of mind and epistemology given its implications for debates regarding transparency, relationalism and representationalism, demonstrative (...) thought, phenomenal character, and the speckled hen objection to modest foundationalism. (shrink)

Many policies and ethical guidelines recommend developing “trustworthy AI”. We argue that developing morally trustworthy AI is not only unethical, as it promotes trust in an entity that cannot be trustworthy, but it is also unnecessary for optimal calibration. Instead, we show that reliability, exclusive of moral trust, entails the appropriate normative constraints that enable optimal calibration and mitigate the vulnerability that arises in high-stakes hybrid decision-making environments, without also demanding, as moral trust would, the anthropomorphization of AI and thus (...) epistemically dubious behavior. The normative demands of reliability for inter-agential action are argued to be met by an analogue to procedural metacognitive competence (i.e., the ability to evaluate the quality of one’s own informational states to regulate subsequent action). Drawing on recent empirical findings that suggest providing reliability scores (e.g., F1-scores) to human decision-makers improves calibration in the AI system, we argue that reliability scores provide a good index of competence and enable humans to determine how much they wish to rely on the system. (shrink)

In all probability, future generations will outnumber us by thousands or millions to one. In the aggregate, their interests therefore matter enormously, and anything we can do to steer the future of civilization onto a better trajectory is of tremendous moral importance. This is the guiding thought that defines the philosophy of longtermism. Political science tells us that the practices of most governments are at stark odds with longtermism. But the problems of political short-termism are neither necessary nor inevitable. In (...) principle, the state could serve as a powerful tool for positively shaping the long-term future. In this chapter, we make some suggestions about how to align government incentives with the interests of future generations. First, in Section II, we explain the root causes of political short-termism. Then, in Section III, we propose and defend four institutional reforms that we think would be promising ways to increase the time horizons of governments: 1) government research institutions and archivists; 2) posterity impact assessments; 3) futures assemblies; and 4) legislative houses for future generations. Section IV concludes with five additional reforms that are promising but require further research: to fully resolve the problem of political short-termism we must develop a comprehensive research program on effective longtermist political institutions. (shrink)

Waiting time is widely used in health and social policy to make resource allocation decisions, yet no general account of the moral significance of waiting time exists. We provide such an account. We argue that waiting time is not intrinsically morally significant, and that the first person in a queue for a resource does not ipso facto have a right to receive that resource first. However, waiting time can and sometimes should play a role in justifying allocation decisions. First, there (...) is a duty of fairness prohibiting line-cutting where a sufficiently just queue exists. Second, waiting time has several morally attractive features that can justify its incorporation into allocation schemes. Where candidates are in relevantly similar circumstances, allocating by waiting time is relatively efficient, maximizes distribution equality relative to other Pareto efficient distributions, and treats candidates fairly. The claim that allocation using waiting time is fair is controversial. Some have claimed that formal lotteries are a fairer way to select among equal beneficiaries. We argue that lotteries are no fairer than allocation based on waiting time when it is equiprobable how a prospective queue will be ordered. In practice, lotteries share many of the disadvantages of queues; which is fairer will depend on contingent features of the allocation scenario. The upshot is that first-come, first-served is in fact a just way to allocate resources in many of the cases where it seems pre-theoretically compelling, and waiting time has unique normative properties which frequently justify its incorporation into resource allocation schemes. (shrink)

Perceptual Confidence is the view that our conscious perceptual experiences assign confidence. In previous papers, I motivated it using first-personal evidence (Morrison, 2016), and Jessie Munton motivated it using normative evidence (Munton, 2016). In this paper, I will consider the extent to which it is motivated by third-personal evidence. I will argue that the current evidence is supportive but not decisive. I will then describe experiments that might provide stronger evidence. I hope to thereby provide a roadmap for future research.

This article accomplishes two closely connected things. First, it refutes an influential view about the relationship between perception and knowledge. In particular, it demonstrates that perceiving does not entail knowing. Second, it leverages that refutation to demonstrate that knowledge is not the most general factive propositional attitude.

The rise of constitutional self-government in early modern Europe, I argue, owes much to a nationalist liberation narrative pioneered by French Huguenot François Hotman in Francogallia (1573). In response to appeals by absolutist thinkers to Ro- man law, which put the power of the king beyond legal or constitutional restraint, Hotman wove together tales of the heroism of ancient Gauls and Franks wresting their native liberties back from the Romans with a theory of constitutionally limited government grounded in the (...) common law of France. This type of narrative was adapted by Dutch and English thinkers who sought to defend constitutionalism in their respective countries. Through this examination of early modern liberation narratives, I argue we can gain insight on the relationship between nationalism and resistance to autocratic governments and the formation of regimes consistent with the principles of constitutional self-government. (shrink)

One widely used method for allocating health care resources involves the use of cost-effectiveness analysis (CEA) to rank treatments in terms of quality-adjusted life-years (QALYs) gained. CEA has been criticized for discriminating against people with disabilities by valuing their lives less than those of non-disabled people. Avoiding discrimination seems to lead to the ’QALY trap’: we cannot value saving lives equally and still value raising quality of life. This paper reviews existing responses to the QALY trap and argues that all (...) are problematic. Instead, we argue that adopting a moderate form of prioritarianism avoids the QALY trap and disability discrimination. (shrink)

Consequentialism is thought to be in significant conflict with animal rights theory because it does not regard activities such as confinement, killing, and exploitation as in principle morally wrong. Proponents of the “Logic of the Larder” argue that consequentialism results in an implausibly pro-exploitation stance, permitting us to eat farmed animals with positive well- being to ensure future such animals exist. Proponents of the “Logic of the Logger” argue that consequentialism results in an implausibly anti-conservationist stance, permitting us to exterminate (...) wild animals with negative well-being to ensure future such animals do not exist. We argue that this conflict is overstated. Once we have properly accounted for indirect effects, such as the role that our policies play in shaping moral attitudes and behavior and the importance of accepting policies that are robust against deviation, we can see that consequentialism may converge with animal rights theory significantly, even if not entirely. (shrink)

Country music has not gotten much attention in philosophy. I introduce two philosophical issues that country music raises. First, country music is simple. Some people might think that its simplicity makes country music worse; I argue that simplicity is aesthetically valuable. The second issue is country music’s ideal of authenticity; fans and performers think that country should be real or genuine in a particular way. But country music scholars have debunked the idea that country authenticity gets at anything real; widespread (...) ideas about country authenticity are rooted in a racist and fabricated picture of country music. In discussing these two issues, I highlight the importance of community in country music. (shrink)

Many real-world agents recognise that they impose harms by choosing to emit carbon, e.g., by flying. Yet many do so anyway, and then attempt to make things right by offsetting those harms. Such offsetters typically believe that, by offsetting, they change the deontic status of their behaviour, making an otherwise impermissible action permissible. Do they succeed in practice? Some philosophers have argued that they do, since their offsets appear to reverse the adverse effects of their emissions. But we show that (...) they do not. In practice, standard carbon offsetting does not reverse the harms of the original action, nor does it even benefit the same group as was harmed. Standard moral theories hence deny that such offsetting succeeds. Indeed, we show that any moral theory that allows offsetting in this setting faces a dilemma between allowing any wrong to be offset, no matter how grievous, and recognising an implausibly sharp discontinuity between offsettable actions and non-offsettable actions. The most plausible response is to accept that carbon offsetting fails to right our climate wrongs. (shrink)

Morality seems important, in the sense that there are practical reasons — at least for most of us, most of the time — to be moral. A central theoretical motivation for consequentialism is that it appears clear that there are practical reasons to promote good outcomes, but mysterious why we should care about non-consequentialist moral considerations or how they could be genuine reasons to act. In this paper we argue that this theoretical motivation is mistaken, and that because many arguments (...) for consequentialism rely upon it, the mistake substantially weakens the overall case for consequentialism. We argue that there is indeed a theoretical connection between good states and reasons to act, because good states are those it is fitting to desire and there is a conceptual connection between the fittingness of a motive and reasons to perform the acts it motivates. But while some of our motives are directed at states, others are directed at acts themselves. We contend that just as the fittingness of desires for states generates reasons to promote the good, the fittingness of these act-directed motives generates reasons to do other things. Moreover, we argue that an act’s moral status consists in the fittingness of act-directed feelings of obligation to perform or avoid performing it, so the connection between fitting motives and reasons to act explains reasons to be moral whether or not morality directs us to promote the good. This, we contend, de-mystifies how there could be non-consequentialist reasons that are both moral and practical. (shrink)

Time in electromagnetism shares many features with time in other physical theories. But there is one aspect of electromagnetism's relationship with time that has always been controversial, yet has not always attracted the limelight it deserves: the electromagnetic arrow of time. Beginning with a re-analysis of a famous argument between Ritz and Einstein over the origins of the radiation arrow, this chapter frames the debate between modern Einsteinians and neo-Ritzians. It tries to find a clean statement of what the arrow (...) is and then explains how it relates to the cosmological and thermodynamic arrows, representing the most developed and sophisticated attack yet, in either the physics or philosophy literature, on the electromagnetic arrow of time. (shrink)

Rape and sexual assault are major problems. In the majority of sexual assault cases consent is the central issue. Consent is, to borrow a phrase, the ‘moral magic’ that converts an impermissible act into a permissible one. In recent years, a handful of companies have tried to launch consent apps which aim to educate young people about the nature of sexual consent and allow them to record signals of consent for future verification. Although ostensibly aimed at addressing the problems of (...) rape and sexual assault on university campuses, these apps have attracted a number of critics. In this paper, I subject the phenomenon of consent apps to philosophical scrutiny. I argue that the consent apps that have been launched to date are unhelpful because they fail to address the landscape of ethical and epistemic problems that arise in the typical rape or sexual assault case: they produce distorted and decontextualised records of consent which may in turn exacerbate the other problems associated with rape and sexual assault. Furthermore, because of the tradeoffs involved, it is unlikely that app-based technologies could ever be created that would significantly address the problems of rape and sexual assault. (shrink)

It is one thing for a given proposition to follow or to not follow from a given set of propositions and it is quite another thing for it to be shown either that the given proposition follows or that it does not follow.* Using a formal deduction to show that a conclusion follows and using a countermodel to show that a conclusion does not follow are both traditional practices recognized by Aristotle and used down through the history of logic. These (...) practices presuppose, respectively, a criterion of validity and a criterion of invalidity each of which has been extended and refined by modern logicians: deductions are studied in formal syntax (proof theory) and coun¬termodels are studied in formal semantics (model theory). The purpose of this paper is to compare these two criteria to the corresponding criteria employed in Boole’s first logical work, The Mathematical Analysis of Logic (1847). In particular, this paper presents a detailed study of the relevant metalogical passages and an analysis of Boole’s symbolic derivations. It is well known, of course, that Boole’s logical analysis of compound terms (involving ‘not’, ‘and’, ‘or’, ‘except’, etc.) contributed to the enlargement of the class of propositions and arguments formally treatable in logic. The present study shows, in addition, that Boole made significant contributions to the study of deduc¬tive reasoning. He identified the role of logical axioms (as opposed to inference rules) in formal deductions, he conceived of the idea of an axiomatic deductive sys¬tem (which yields logical truths by itself and which yields consequences when ap¬plied to arbitrary premises). Nevertheless, surprisingly, Boole’s attempt to imple¬ment his idea of an axiomatic deductive system involved striking omissions: Boole does not use his own formal deductions to establish validity. Boole does give symbolic derivations, several of which are vitiated by “Boole’s Solutions Fallacy”: the fallacy of supposing that a solution to an equation is necessarily a logical consequence of the equation. This fallacy seems to have led Boole to confuse equational calculi (i.e., methods for gen-erating solutions) with deduction procedures (i.e., methods for generating consequences). The methodological confusion is closely related to the fact, shown in detail below, that Boole had adopted an unsound criterion of validity. It is also shown that Boole totally ignored the countermodel criterion of invalid¬ity. Careful examination of the text does not reveal with certainty a test for invalidity which was adopted by Boole. However, we have isolated a test that he seems to use in this way and we show that this test is ineffectual in the sense that it does not serve to identify invalid arguments. We go beyond the simple goal stated above. Besides comparing Boole’s earliest criteria of validity and invalidity with those traditionally (and still generally) employed, this paper also investigates the framework and details of THE MATHEMATICAL ANALYSIS OF LOGIC. (shrink)

Spinoza claims that a person’s mind and body are one and the same. But he also claims that minds think and do not move, whereas bodies move and do not think. How can we reconcile these claims? I believe that Spinoza is building on a traditional view about identity over time. According to this view, identity over time is linked to essence, so that a thing that is now resting is identical to a thing that was previously moving, provided that (...) they share the same essence. I believe that Spinoza has a similar view about the identity of minds and bodies. In particular, a thing that is thinking in the attribute of thought is identical to a thing that is moving in the attribute of extension, provided that they share the same essence. (shrink)

Spinoza's causal axiom is at the foundation of the Ethics. I motivate, develop and defend a new interpretation that I call the ‘causally restricted interpretation’. This interpretation solves several longstanding puzzles and helps us better understand Spinoza's arguments for some of his most famous doctrines, including his parallelism doctrine and his theory of sense perception. It also undermines a widespread view about the relationship between the three fundamental, undefined notions in Spinoza's metaphysics: causation, conception and inherence.

I am going to argue that it is a cost of libertarianism that it holds our status as agents hostage to theoretical physics, but that claim has met with disagreement. Some libertarians regard it as the cost of doing business, not a philosophical liability. By contrast, Peter van Inwagen has addressed the worry head on. He says that if he were to become convinced that causal determinism were true, he would not change his view that humans are free and morally (...) responsible. Rather, he would give up at least one of the formerly-thought-to-be a priori truths that are elements in his argument for the incompatibility of causal determinism and the relevant sort of freedom. Thus, according to van Inwagen, our status as free and morally responsible agents would not be held hostage to the physicists or hang on a thread I think that van Inwagen’s strategy for securing our freedom and responsibility is unattractive. Somewhat tendentiously, I have called the rejection of an a priori ingredient in the incompatibilist’s argument, contingent upon learning that causal determinism is true, ‘metaphysical fip-flopping.’ -/- And it does seem that van Inwagen’s approach is implausible insofar as he is open to such metaphysical fip-fopping. That he is open to it—that he would fip-fop if he became convinced of the truth of causal determinism—is a problem for his actual philosophical position. Or so I will argue. (shrink)

There are two different ways of understanding alienation: as a condition and as a struggle. On this distinction turns the whole theory and practice of Marxism.

: Two major philosophers of the twentieth century, the German existential phenomenologist Martin Heidegger and the seminal Japanese Kyoto School philosopher Nishida Kitarō are examined here in an attempt to discern to what extent their ideas may converge. Both are viewed as expressing, each through the lens of his own tradition, a world in transition with the rise of modernity in the West and its subsequent globalization. The popularity of Heidegger's thought among Japanese philosophers, despite its own admitted limitation to (...) the Western "history of being," is connected to Nishida's opening of a uniquely Japanese path in its confrontation with Western philosophy. The focus is primarily on their later works (the post-Kehre Heidegger and the works of Nishida that have been designated "Nishida philosophy"), in which each in his own way attempts to overcome the subject-object dichotomy inherited from the tradition of Western metaphysics by looking to a deeper structure from out of which both subjectivity and objectivity are derived and which embraces both. For Heidegger, the answer lies in being as the opening of unconcealment, from out of which beings emerge, and for Nishida, it is the place of nothingness within which beings are co-determined in their oppositions and relations. Concepts such as Nishida's "discontinuous continuity," "absolutely self-contradictory identity" (between one and many, whole and part, world and things), the mutual interdependence of individuals, and the self-determination of the world through the co-relative self-determination of individuals, and Heidegger's "simultaneity" (zugleich) and "within one another" (ineinander) (of unconcealment and concealment, presencing and absencing), and their "between" (Zwischen) and "jointure" (Fuge) are examined. Through a discussion of these ideas, the suggestion is made of a possible "transition" (Übergang) of both Western and Eastern thinking, in their mutual encounter, both in relation to each other and each in relation to its own past history, leading to both a self-discovery in the other and to a simultaneous self-reconstitution. (shrink)

Mathematical modeling offers a promising approach to improving mathematics education. This study aims to determine if the concept of metacognitive awareness in the learning process is associated with mathematical modeling. This study also considers the interaction effect of sex and academic year level on both variables. Focusing the study on preservice elementary teachers might address potential issues and targeted intervention in their preparation program concerning their ability to teach and guide young learners in modeling activities. The research sample includes 140 (...) preservice elementary teachers at Central Luzon State University, Philippines. Data collection used an adapted metacognitive awareness inventory and a validated researcher-made mathematical modeling competency test aligned with the K-12 mathematics curriculum in the Philippines. Results revealed that the preservice elementary teachers had a high metacognitive awareness and mathematical modeling competency, ranging from 22 to 31 out of 36 points. Besides, Factorial ANOVA indicates that academic year level positively affects both variables regardless of sex, and stepwise regression analysis unveiled that information management, declarative knowledge, and planning significantly predict 41.4% of the mathematical modeling competency variance. This suggests that developing metacognitive awareness supports preservice elementary teachers in performing modeling tasks that improve their competency level in mathematics. (shrink)

Conception and causation are fundamental notions in Spinoza's metaphysics. I argue against the orthodox view that, due to the causal axiom, if one thing is conceived through another thing, then the second thing causes the first thing. My conclusion forces us to rethink Spinoza's entitlement to some of his core commitments, including the principle of sufficient reason, the parallelism doctrine and the conatus doctrine.

I suggest a solution to two puzzles in Spinoza's metaphysics. The first puzzle involves the mind and the idea of the mind, in particular how they can be identical, even though the mind thinks about bodies and nothing else, whereas the idea of the mind thinks about ideas and nothing else. The second puzzle involves the mind and the idea of a thing that belongs to an unknown attribute, in particular how they can be identical, even though the mind thinks (...) about bodies and nothing else, whereas the idea thinks about things belonging to the unknown attribute and nothing else. I suggest that Spinoza would respond to both puzzles by rejecting the Indiscernibility of Identicals. (shrink)

Aristotle said that induction (epagōgē) is a proceeding from particulars to a universal, and the definition has been conventional ever since. But there is an ambiguity here. Induction in the Scholastic and the (so-called) Humean tradition has presumed that Aristotle meant going from particular statements to universal statements. But the alternate view, namely that Aristotle meant going from particular things to universal ideas, prevailed all through antiquity and then again from the time of Francis Bacon until the mid-nineteenth century. Recent (...) scholarship is so steeped in the first-mentioned tradition that we have virtually forgotten the other. In this essay McCaskey seeks to recover that alternate tradition, a tradition whose leading theoreticians were William Whewell, Francis Bacon, Socrates, and in fact Aristotle himself. The examination is both historical and philosophical. The first part of the essay fills out the history. The latter part examines the most mature of the philosophies in the Socratic tradition, specifically Bacon’s and Whewell’s. After tracing out this tradition, McCaskey shows how this alternate view of induction is indeed employed in science, as exemplified by several instances taken from actual scientific practice. In this manner, McCaskey proposes to us that the Humean problem of induction is merely an artifact of a bad conception of induction and that a return to the Socratic conception might be warranted. (shrink)

In the Summa Theologiae, Thomas Aquinas states that the “aspect of pastness” involved in memory is a certain kind of cognitive object — i.e., an intention — apprehended by the “estimative power.” All told, however, Aquinas mentions this idea precisely once. In this article, I construct an account of the idea that pastness is an estimative intention by drawing upon texts in which I argue that Aquinas develops this idea, albeit without invoking the terminology of the estimative intention. I conclude (...) that, by identifying the aspect of pastness as an estimative intention, Aquinas neatly synthesizes the Aristotelian and Arabic traditions on memory. (shrink)

Scholars of ideology in social-scientific disciplines, including psychology, sociology, and political science, stand to benefit from taking seriously the philosophical contributions of Professor Peter Railton. This is because Railton provides much-needed conceptual precision—and a rare sense of epistemological and moral clarity—to a topic that is notoriously slippery and prone to relativistic musing and the drawing of false equivalences. In an essay entitled “Morality, Ideology, and Reflection: Or, the Duck Sits Yet,” Railton (2000/2003) aptly identified the purpose of ideological analysis as (...) the unmasking of “nonepistemic” interests—that is, interests other than truth-seeking, accuracy, or warrant —that contribute to the development, adoption, and dissemination of political and religious belief systems. (shrink)

This chapter starts from the claim that the state is plagued with problems of political short-termism: excessive priority given to near-term benefits at the expense of benefits further in thefuture. One possible mechanism to reduce short-termism involves apportioning greater relative political influence to the young, since younger citizens generally have greater additional life expectancy than older citizens and thus it looks reasonable to expect that they have preferences that are extended further into the future. But the chapter shows that this (...) is unlikely to make states significantly less short-termist: no empirical relationship has been found between age and willingness to support long-termist policies. Instead, the chapter proposes a more promising age-based mechanism. States should develop youth citizens’ assemblies that ensure accountability to future generations through a scheme of retrospective accountability. (shrink)

This paper is concerned with the problem of speaking past one another due to an asymmetry of the interlocutors' backgrounds. When individuals with different levels of relative privilege interact, the party with relative privilege may fail to engage with what is being communicated. I take up critical Gadamerian hermeneutics to ask how we, as individuals with relative privilege, can 'unstop' our ears so that the burden of explanation does not (unfairly) remain on those we hurt by our mishearing/non-hearing. I offer (...) two methods to achieve this 'unstopping': 'critical self-knowledge' through Quassim Cassam's 'Vice Epistemology' framework and 'critical world-knowledge' through the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory (Max Horkheimer and Jürgen Habermas, specifically). I then take up contemporary critical hermeneutics (Lorenzo Simpson) to show how, through the application of the critical methods, one might be able to achieve a useful, cross-cultural dialogue. This is imperative given our inexorably multi-cultural world today. (shrink)

What’s wrong with begging the question? Some philosophers believe that question-begging arguments are inevitably fallacious and that their fallaciousness stems from a shared “formal” deficiency. In contrast, some philosophers, like Robinson deny that begging the question is fallacious at all. And others characterize begging the question as an “informal” fallacy of reasoning that can only be understood with the aid of epistemic notions. Sorensen joins this last camp by offering a powerful argument against both Robinson’s skepticism and fully formal approaches (...) to the phenomenon. According to Sorensen’s view, question-begging is fallacious because it compromises the rationality of the question-beggar’s position. Though his argument forces Robinson into a peculiar dialectical position, it does little to elucidate the reasons why Robinson’s position is unstable and it fails to embody Sorensen’s own conception of rationally persuasive argumentation. I utilize this conception to show how Robinson is left with no easily identifiable grounds on which to deny the fallaciousness of begging the question. By advancing the dialectic between Sorensen and Robinson, I aim to show that our argumentative practices must take the perspectives of others seriously, whether or not those perspectives are rational. (shrink)

The purpose of the study was to determine the demographic profiles in terms of age, sex, years in teaching, type of school and ethnicity, SOGIE, perception about the workplace climate in terms of the different gender prejudices faced by secondary science teachers at City of Dasmariñas, Cavite; the study aims to identify if there is a significant difference between perceptions of the participants about the gender prejudices when grouped according to demographic profile; determine if there is a substantial relationship between (...) SOGIE and perceptions about the gender prejudices. This study developed an action plan to promote awareness and make schools SOGIE-sensitive; the research design was quantitative, and an online questionnaire was the data-gathering tool. Descriptive statistics used were mean, median, and standard error; the second level was for relational statistics using Chi-square statistics, Mann-Whitney statistics, and Kruskal-Walli’s statistics. The study revealed that most science teachers in Dasmariñas City, Cavite, were female and young professionals. Science teachers at the secondary level have a diverse SOGIE; in addition, there is zero visibility for transgender people and intersex people. Generally, the secondary schools in the City of Dasmariñas, Cavite, are unsafe for people with diverse SOGIE, especially for transgender and intersex people. The study suggests that the action plan proposed in this study should be adopted by schools to address the issues of gender prejudices and to promote awareness of SOGIE. (shrink)

Over the last three decades, a vast literature has amassed debating the merits of skeptical theism, and it is easy to get the sense that the rationality of theism itself depends crucially on the viability of the skeptical theist response. I will argue that this is mistaken, as there is no need for theists to maintain that non-theists are wrong to treat inscrutable evils as compelling evidence for atheism. I will show that theists instead need only take themselves to have (...) grounds for rejecting the existence of gratuitous evils and that they may look for these grounds among their more personal reasons for sustaining their trust in the theistic God rather than the more generally available skeptical considerations appealed to by skeptical theists. Accordingly, I call this alternative approach “trusting theism.” I will also show that the viability of trusting theism seems crucial to the rationality of theism whether or not skeptical theism is successful. Finally, I will show that trusting theism does not render theism impervious to possible counterevidence in the way skeptical theism has been accused of doing. (shrink)

ABSTRACT. It is common for Bertrand Russell’s admirers to repeat his many quips about other people’s lack of good sense, for example, “most people would die sooner than think – in fact, they do so.”1 But it is less common for them to assert that this view is one of Russell’s fundamental assumptions about human nature and at the core of his serious moral, social, and political thought. This essay aims to show that this expressed scepticism about human reason is (...) indeed a core assumption of Russell’s public philosophy throughout his life. Even if one accepts this, however, one can still ask: “But is it true?” It will be argued that there is much support for Russell’s view of human reason in recent psychological literature. Examples of how this assumption affects Russell’s social and political thought are indicated. 1. The complete and correct quote is “We all have a tendency to think that the world must conform to our prejudices. The opposite view involves some effort of thought, and most people would die sooner than think – in fact, they do so.” (The ABC of Relativity, 1925). (shrink)

Aquinas, Ockham, and Burdan all claim that a person can be numerically identical over time, despite changes in size, shape, and color. How can we reconcile this with the Indiscernibility of Identicals, the principle that numerical identity implies indiscernibility across time? Almost all contemporary metaphysicians regard the Indiscernibility of Identicals as axiomatic. But I will argue that Aquinas, Ockham, and Burdan would reject it, perhaps in favor of a principle restricted to indiscernibility at a time.

In this essay, we consider the formal and ontological implications of one specific and intensely contested dialectical context from which Deleuze’s thinking about structural ideal genesis visibly arises. This is the formal/ontological dualism between the principles, ἀρχαί, of the One (ἕν) and the Indefinite/Unlimited Dyad (ἀόριστος δυάς), which is arguably the culminating achievement of the later Plato’s development of a mathematical dialectic.3 Following commentators including Lautman, Oskar Becker, and Kenneth M. Sayre, we argue that the duality of the One and (...) the Indefinite Dyad provides, in the later Plato, a unitary theoretical formalism accounting, by means of an iterated mixing without synthesis, for the structural origin and genesis of both supersensible Ideas and the sensible particulars which participate in them. As these commentators also argue, this duality furthermore provides a maximally general answer to the problem of temporal becoming that runs through Plato’s corpus: that of the relationship of the flux of sensory experiences to the fixity and order of what is thinkable in itself. Additionally, it provides a basis for understanding some of the famously puzzling claims about forms, numbers, and the principled genesis of both attributed to Plato by Aristotle in the Metaphysics, and plausibly underlies the late Plato’s deep considerations of the structural paradoxes of temporal change and becoming in the Parmenides, the Sophist, and the Philebus. After extracting this structure of duality and developing some of its formal, ontological, and metalogical features, we consider some of its specific implications for a thinking of time and ideality that follows Deleuze in a formally unitary genetic understanding of structural difference. These implications of Plato’s duality include not only those of the constitution of specific theoretical domains and problematics, but also implicate the reflexive problematic of the ideal determinants of the form of a unitary theory as such. We argue that the consequences of the underlying duality on the level of content are ultimately such as to raise, on the level of form, the broader reflexive problem of the basis for its own formal or meta-theoretical employment. We conclude by arguing for the decisive and substantive presence of a proper “Platonism” of the Idea in Deleuze, and weighing the potential for a substantive recuperation of Plato’s duality in the context of a dialectical affirmation of what Deleuze recognizes as the “only” ontological proposition that has ever been uttered. This is the proposition of the univocity of Being, whereby “being is said in the same sense, everywhere and always,” but is said (both problematically and decisively) of difference itself. (shrink)