False belief tasks have enjoyed a monopoly in the research on children’s development of a theory of mind. They have been granted this status because they promise to deliver an unambiguous assessment of children’s understanding of the representational nature of mental states. Their poor cousins, true belief tasks, have been relegated to occasional service as control tasks. That this is their only role has been due to the universal assumption that correct answers on true belief tasks are inherently ambiguous regarding (...) the level of the child’s understanding of mental states. It has also been due to the universal assumption that nothing in the child’s developing theory of mind would lead to systematically incorrect answers on true belief tasks. We review new findings that 4- and 5-year-olds do err, systematically and profoundly, on the true belief versions of all the extant belief tasks. This reveals an intermediate level of understanding in the development of children’s theory of mind. Researchers have been unaware of this intermediate level because it produces correct answers in false belief tasks. A simple two-task battery—one true belief task and one false belief task—is sufficient to remove the ambiguity from each task. The new findings show that children do not acquire an understanding of beliefs, and hence a representational theory of mind, until after 6 years of age, or 2 years later than most developmental psychologists have concluded. This raises the question of how to interpret other new findings that infants are able to pass false belief tasks. We review these new infant studies, as well as recent studies on chimpanzees, in light of older children’s failure on true belief tasks, and end with some speculation about how all of these new findings might be reconciled. (shrink)

This paper examines the need for static dispositions within the basic ontology of the powers view of properties. To lend some focus, Neil Williams’s well developed case for static dispositions is considered. While his arguments are not necessarily intended to address fundamental ontology, they still provide a useful starting point, a springboard for diving into the deeper metaphysical waters of the dispositionalist approach. Within that ontological context, this paper contends that Williams’s arguments fail to establish the need to posit static (...) dispositions, or at least any sort not already well appreciated by advocates of the powers view. The paper then proceeds to suggest an alternative motivation for positing static dispositions, the success of which depends greatly on which ontological approach to objects is paired with the powers view. (shrink)

Neuron diagrams are heavily employed in academic discussions of causation. Stephen Mumford and Rani Lill Anjum, however, offer an alternative approach employing vector diagrams, which this paper attempts to develop further. I identify three ways in which dispositionalists have taken the activities of powers to be related: stimulation, mutual manifestation, and contribution combination. While Mumford and Anjum do provide resources for representing contribution combination, which might be sufficient for their particular brand of dispositionalism, I argue that those resources are not (...) flexible enough to further accommodate either stimulation or mutual manifestation. Representational tools are provided to address these limitations, improving the general value of the vector model for dispositionalist approaches to causation. (shrink)

In this paper I adopt Kaplan’s framework for distinguishing between descriptive and expressive content. Racial slurs are an especially difficult challenge for truth-conditional semantics because of their projection behaviors. That is to say, the offensive content of slurs “scopes out” of logical operators. I argue that racial slurs express contempt and lack descriptive content, so that many sentences containing slurs are not truth apt. My theory accounts for the intuition of the ordinary speaker who refuses to assent to the truth (...) of a sentence containing a slur, but accepts the same statement made using a neutral counterpart of that slur. Weaknesses of rival theories are briefly discussed. (shrink)

In his recent book, The Universe As We Find It, John Heil offers an updated account of his two-category ontology. One of his major goals is to avoid including relations in his basic ontology. While there can still be true claims positing relations, such as those of the form “x is taller than y” and “x causes y,” they will be true in virtue of substances and their monadic, non-relational properties. That is, Heil’s two-category ontology is deployed to provide non-relational (...) truthmakers for relational truths. This paper challenges the success of Heil’s project with respect to causation. The arguments here are not entirely negative, however. An option is made available to Heil’s ontology so that it might, at least to some extent, regain non-relational causings. (shrink)

It is a commonsense thesis that unactualized possibilities are not parts of actuality. To keep his modal realism in line with this thesis, David Lewis employed his indexical account of the term “actual.” I argue that the addition of counterpart theory to Lewis’s modal realism undermines his strategy for respecting the commonsense thesis. The case made here also reveals a problem for Lewis’s attempt to avoid haecceitism.

It has become evident that mind–body supervenience, as merely specifying a covariance between mental and physical properties, is consistent with clearly non-physicalist views of the mental, such as emergentism. Consequently, there is a push in the physicalist camp for an ontologically more robust supervenience, a “superdupervenience,” that ensures that properties supervening on physical properties are physicalistically acceptable. Jessica Wilson claims that supervenience is made superduper by Condition on Causal Powers (CCP): each individual causal power associated with a supervenient property is (...) numerically identical with a causal power associated with its base property. Furthermore, according to Wilson, a wide variety of physicalist positions, both reductive and non-reductive, can be seen as relying on CCP to ensure that properties supervening on physical properties are physicalistically acceptable. I argue that imposing CCP on mind–body supervenience fails to ensure that mental properties are physicalistically acceptable. The problem, I contend, is that while CCP may guard against supervenient mental properties being insufficiently grounded in their physical bases it fails to guard against supervenient mental properties being too deeply grounded in their physical bases. (shrink)

Kevin Corcoran offers an account of how one can be a physicalist about human persons, deny temporal gaps in the existence of persons, and hold that there is an afterlife. I argue that Corcoran's account both violates the necessity of metaphysical identity and implausibly makes an individual's existence dependent on factors wholly extrinsic to the individual. Corcoran's defence is considered, as well as Stephen Davis's suggestions on how an account like Corcoran's can defend itself against these concerns. It is shown, (...) however, that the difficulties remain in full force and, therefore, that Corcoran's account fails to reconcile physicalism, no gappy existence, and an afterlife. (shrink)

A major criticism of David Lewis’ counterfactual theory of causation is that it allows too many things to count as causes, especially since Lewis allows, in addition to events, absences to be causes as well. Peter Menzies has advanced this concern under the title “the problem of profligate causation.” In this paper, I argue that the problem of profligate causation provides resources for exposing a tension between Lewis’ acceptance of absence causation and his modal realism. The result is a different (...) problem of profligate causation—one that attacks the internal consistency of Lewisian metaphysics rather than employing common sense judgments or intuitions that conflict with Lewis’ extensive list of causes. (shrink)

While concerns of the mental being causally excluded by the physical have persistently plagued non-reductive physicalism, such concerns are standardly taken to pose no problem for reductive type physicalism. Type physicalists have the obvious advantage of being able to countenance the reduction of mental properties to their physical base properties by way of type identity, thereby avoiding any causal competition between instances of mental properties and their physical bases. Here, I challenge this widely accepted advantage of type physicalism over non-reductive (...) physicalism in avoiding the causal exclusion of the mental. In particular, I focus on Jaegwon Kim’s influential version of the causal exclusion argument, namely, his supervenience argument. I argue that type physicalism’s advantage is undermined by the following two things: (1) the generalizability of the supervenience argument, and (2) type physicalism’s incompatibility with mental properties at the fundamental level. This involves evaluating the generalization objection to the supervenience argument, probing the metaphysics of physicalism, and showing how (1) and (2) combine in a way that appears underappreciated given the general confidence in type physicalism’s advantage. (shrink)

In his recent book Physicalism, Daniel Stoljar argues that there is no version of physicalism that is both true and deserving of the name. His argument employs a variation of Hilary Putnam’s famous twin-earth story, which Stoljar calls “the twin-physics world.” In this paper, I challenge Stoljar’s use of the twin-physics world. The upshot of that challenge, I argue, is that Stoljar fails to show, concerning the versions of physicalism for which he grants the possibility of being true, that none (...) of them is deserving of the name. (shrink)

Jaegwon Kim’s supervenience/exclusion argument attempts to show that non-reductive physicalism is incompatible with mental causation. This influential argument can be seen as relying on the following principle, which I call “the piggyback principle”: If, with respect to an effect, E, an instance of a supervenient property, A, has no causal powers over and above, or in addition to, those had by its supervenience base, B, then the instance of A does not cause E (unless A is identical with B). In (...) their “Epiphenomenalism: The Dos and the Don’ts,” Larry Shapiro and Elliott Sober employ a novel empirical approach to challenge the piggyback principle. Their empirical approach pulls from the experiments of August Weismann regarding the inheritance of acquired characteristics. Through an examination of Weismann’s experiments, Shapiro and Sober extract lessons in reasoning about the epiphenomenalism of a property. And according to these empirically drawn lessons, the piggyback principle is a don’t. My primary aim in this paper is to defend the piggyback principle against Shapiro and Sober’s empirical approach. (shrink)

The semantics of racial slurs has recently become a locus of debate amongst philosophers. While everyone agrees that slurs are offensive, there is disagreement about the linguistic mechanism responsible for this offensiveness. This paper places the debate about racial slurs into the context of a larger issue concerning the interface between semantics and pragmatics, and argues that even on minimalist assumptions, the offensiveness of slur words is more plausibly due to their semantic content rather than any pragmatic mechanism. Finally, I (...) note that slurs make a good test case for expanding our semantic theories beyond the truth conditional tradition of Frege, which will be necessary in order to broaden the types of expressions handled by semantic theories. (shrink)

The argument is that (1) the spiritual crisis that Zhu Xi discussed with Zhang Shi 張栻 (1133–1180) and the other “gentlemen of Hunan” from about 1167 to 1169, which was resolved by an understanding of what we might call the interpenetration of the mind’s stillness and activity (dong-jing 動靜) or equilibrium and harmony (zhong-he 中和), (2) led directly to his realization that Zhou Dunyi’s thought provided a cosmological basis for that resolution, and (3) this in turn led Zhu Xi to (...) understand (or construct) the meaning of taiji in terms of the polarity of yin and yang; i.e. the Supreme Polarity as the most fundamental ordering principle (li 理). (shrink)

Quarantines and virtual learning became necessary as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. This study investigates the challenges and opportunities in virtual classes; and how they affect the academic goals. There were 150 secondary students from Junior and Senior High School levels of education in the Philippines, who were deliberately selected; and they participated in the quantitative online survey that used a 62-item self-made 4-point Likert scale questionnaire, with 0.81 reliability coefficients. The data were evaluated by means of the percentage, (...) the mean, and the standard deviation. Sex and secondary education levels were used, in order to compare the students’ challenges and opportunities. One-way ANOVA compared the male and female respondents’ perceived challenges and opportunities. The results revealed that junior high-school (JHS) girls highlighted academic satisfaction; while school-life balance, and virtual learning helped as challenges and opportunities. The females found school-life balance, communication (F(1,149)=11.098; F(1,149)=8.430, p<0.01), academic fulfilment, self-directedness, and time-management (F(1,149)=4.224; F(1,149)=4.470; F(1,149)=4.030, p<0.05) more difficult than did the males. Senior high school (SHS) students were less satisfied with the virtual teaching (F(1,149)=14.391, p<0.001), technology use (F(1,149)=7.342, p<0.01), and communication (F(1,149)=3.934, p<0.05) than JHS students. Males were more satisfied with school and teachers’ assistance (F(1,149)=7.482, p<0.01). Some viewed virtual learning more favourably; and they regard themselves as being adaptive; they think the subject matter and learning tasks are interrelated; and they viewed virtual feedback more positively (F(1,149)=6.438; F(1,149)=5.900; F(1,149)=5.183; F(1,149)=4.470, p<0.05). The JHS students reported subject matter and the virtual learning tasks as being interrelated; and they valued virtual feedback, school and teacher support, and the adaptability to change. Challenges and opportunities may serve as the foundation for establishing a more inclusive policy on virtual learning implementation, with school and stakeholders’ cooperation needed to sustain learners’ holistic development. (shrink)

No reservations, no conditions to live a life of fiction.

In this essay, we suggest practical ways to shift the framing of crisis standards of care toward disability justice. We elaborate on the vision statement provided in the 2010 Institute of Medicine (National Academy of Medicine) “Summary of Guidance for Establishing Crisis Standards of Care for Use in Disaster Situations,” which emphasizes fairness; equitable processes; community and provider engagement, education, and communication; and the rule of law. We argue that interpreting these elements through disability justice entails a commitment to both (...) distributive and recognitive justice. The disability rights movement's demand “Nothing about us, without us” requires substantive inclusion of disabled people in decision‐making related to their interests, including in crisis planning before, during, and after a pandemic like Covid‐19. (shrink)

Common psychopathy rating instrument sdistinguish between an interpersonal-affective and an antisocial dimension.The suggestion that the interpersonal-affective dimension,often considered to be the core feature of psychopathy,is positively associated with executive functioning is occasionally made in the literature, without reporting objective empirical data. The primary aim of thep resent paper was to search for empirical studies reporting relevant data, focussing on four aspects of 'cold' executive functioning: inhibition, attentional shifting, working memory, and planning. Eleven published articles wereidentified, reporting data of 721 individuals (...) from incarcerated and non-incarcerated,male and female,and adult and non-adult samples. Using a heterogeneous set of tests and dependent measures across studies, the inhibition and attentional shifting components were assessed in eight and five studies, respectively; the working memory and planning components each in two studies. A small majority of the studies found positive associations with the different executive functions, although the associations were mostly non-significant. Given the scarcity of studies and the use of heterogeneous populations,tests and statistical analyses, no robust conclusions can be drawn at this stage. Therefore,caution is needed when claiming a positive association between the interpersonal-affective features of psychopathy and executive functioning. Clearly more research is needed to further validate and specify the suggested association. (shrink)

A large proportion of the total global burden of disease is caused by emergency medical conditions. Emergency care research is essential to improving emergency medicine but this research can raise some distinctive ethical challenges, especially with regard to (1) standard of care and risk–benefit assessment; (2) blurring of the roles of clinician and researcher; (3) enrolment of populations with intersecting vulnerabilities; (4) fair participant selection; (5) quality of consent; and (6) community engagement. Despite the importance of research to improve emergency (...) care in low-income and middle-income countries (LMICs) and the widely acknowledged ethical challenges, very little has been written on the ethics of emergency care research in LMICs. This paper examines the ethical and regulatory challenges to conducting emergency care research with human participants in LMICs. We outline key challenges, present potential solutions or frameworks for addressing these challenges, and identify gaps. Despite the ethical and regulatory challenges, conducting high-quality, ethical emergency care research in LMICs is possible and it is essential for global health. (shrink)

After introducing the new field of cultural evolution, we review a growing body of empirical evidence suggesting that culture shapes what people attend to, perceive and remember as well as how they think, feel and reason. Focusing on perception, spatial navigation, mentalizing, thinking styles, reasoning (epistemic norms) and language, we discuss not only important variation in these domains, but emphasize that most researchers (including philosophers) and research participants are psychologically peculiar within a global and historical context. This rising tide of (...) evidence recommends caution in relying on one’s intuitions or even in generalizing from reliable psychological findings to the species, Homo sapiens. Our evolutionary approach suggests that humans have evolved a suite of reliably developing cognitive abilities that adapt our minds, information-processing abilities and emotions ontogenetically to the diverse culturally-constructed worlds we confront. (shrink)

This chapter takes the form of a discussion between the editors of this volume and Joseph Agassi, regarding the relationship between methodological individualism and institutional individualism. The focus is on Agassi’s interpretation of traditional methodological individualism in terms of psychologism; the role of institutions and structural factors in social explanation; Popper’s theory of World 3; the application of Weber’s interpretative approach—Verstehen—to typical ways of thinking and acting; and the Austrian School of economics.

This study used a partial least squares structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM) to estimate curriculum management's direct and indirect effects on university graduate programmes' viability. The study also examined the role of institutional effectiveness in mediating the nexus between the predictor and response variables. This is a correlational study with a factorial research design. The study's participants comprised 149 higher education administrators (23 Faculty Deans and 126 HODs) from two public universities in Nigeria. A structured questionnaire designed by the researchers was (...) used for data collection. The questionnaire was duly validated with an acceptable scale and item content validity indices. The dimensionality of the instrument was determined using exploratory factor analysis (EFA). Convergent validity was based on Average Variance Extracted (AVE), whereas discriminant validity was based on Fornell-Lacker criteria and the Hetero-Trait Mono-Trait (HTMT) ratio. Acceptable composite reliability estimates of internal consistency were reached for the three sub-scales. Following ethical practices, the questionnaire was physically administered to respondents and retrieved afterwards. Smart PLS (version 3.2.9) and SPSS (version 26.0) programs were used for all the statistical analyses. This study uncovered significant direct and indirect effects of curriculum management on the viability of graduate programmes. Institutional effectiveness significantly impacted graduate programmes’ viability while mediating the nexus between curriculum management and graduate programmes’ viability. Curriculum management and institutional effectiveness jointly explained a significant proportion of graduate programmes’ viability variance. The result of this study proved that graduate programmes’ viability depends, to a great extent, on how much curriculum is managed and how effective institutions are with their services. The result of this study can enable institutions seeking to run viable graduate programmes to re-evaluate their curriculum management practices and the effectiveness of their services. (shrink)

In this conceptual article, the authors explore the possibilities of another approach to examining the human dimensions of wildland fire. They argue that our understanding of this issue could be enhanced by considering a cultural studies construct known as the ‘‘circuit of culture.’’ This cross-disciplinary perspective provides increased analytic power by accounting for the meaningful role of 5 cultural processes in terms of their location and interrelation within social experience. The authors compare the circuit of culture approach with a body (...) of recent literature focused on wildland fire. The authors make the case that this research has moved in a positive direction since wildland fire first ignited social scientific interest in the 1980s, but it is still missing key cultural processes. Ultimately, following the circuit allows us to make more nuanced statements about meaning, something much needed in the face of the wicked problem of wildland fire. (shrink)

This article identifies and compares meanings of wildfire risk mitigation for stakeholders in the Front Range of Colorado, USA. We examine the case of a collaborative partnership sponsored by government agencies and directed to decrease hazardous fuels in interface areas. Data were collected by way of key informant interviews and focus groups. The analysis is guided by the Circuit of Culture model in communication research. We found both shared and differing meanings between members of this partnership (the ‘‘producers’’) and other (...) stakeholders not formally in the partnership (the ‘‘consumers’’). We conclude that those promoting the partnership’s project to mitigate risk are primarily aligned with a discourse of scientific management. Stakeholders outside the partnership follow a discourse of community. We argue that failure to recognize and account for differences in the way risk mitigation is framed and related power dynamics could hamper the communicational efforts of the collaborative partnership and impact goals for fuels reduction. We recommend ways that both groups can capitalize on shared meanings and how agency managers and decision makers can build better working relationships with interface communities and other external stakeholders. (shrink)

I defend a new argument for causal finitism, the view that nothing can have an infinite causal history. I begin by defending a number of plausible metaphysical principles, after which I explore a host of novel variants of the Littlewood-Ross and Thomson’s Lamp paradoxes that violate such principles. I argue that causal finitism is the best solution to the paradoxes.

Matteo Ricci (1552-1610) was an Italian Jesuit and one of the first Christian missionaries to China in the modern era. He was a genuine polymath—a translator, cartographer, mathematician, astronomer, and musician. Above all, Ricci was a missionary for the gospel. As we briefly examine his 1603 seminal work, The True Meaning of the Lord of Heaven, our hope is that we, as evangelical educators, will perceive some of the deeper principles necessary for our own missionary work among unreached people.

Emotional states of consciousness, or what are typically called emotional feelings, are traditionally viewed as being innately programed in subcortical areas of the brain, and are often treated as different from cognitive states of consciousness, such as those related to the perception of external stimuli. We argue that conscious experiences, regardless of their content, arise from one system in the brain. On this view, what differs in emotional and non-emotional states is the kind of inputs that are processed by a (...) general cortical network of cognition, a network essential for conscious experiences. Although subcortical circuits are not directly responsible for conscious feelings, they provide non-conscious inputs that coalesce with other kinds of neural signals in the cognitive assembly of conscious emotional experiences. In building the case for this proposal, we defend a modified version of what is known as the higher-order theory of consciousness. (shrink)

Education is a necessary tool for national development and for development to take place, it is important that teachers who are the driving force of passing instructions to students in the school must be properly mentored for them to carry out their assignments. It is on the basis of this background that this study was conducted. Descriptive survey research design was found suitable for the study. A multistage sampling technique was employed in this research and 100 respondents were selected for (...) the study. Four research questions and hypotheses were raised and formulated and a questionnaire titled mentoring strategies and school effectiveness was developed for data gathering. The instument was validated and the reliability co-efficient of .84 was achieved. The finding revealed that there was significant relationship between mentoring strategies and secondary school effectiveness in Ilorin East, Kwara State. It was recommended among other things that teachers should be trained using mentoring strategies and that school administrators should ensure activities which will involve pairing new with experienced teachers so that they will gain new experience from the models. (shrink)

The recent comments by Pope Francis on abortion have caused a bit of a stir in the media. His nuanced responses are often lost in the media, and also by advocates on both sides of the abortion debate. While the Catholic position against abortion is common knowledge, this does not preclude an openness to dialogue. This article looks at some recent attempts at dialogue on the controversial topic of abortion. The first example comes from a book that surveys the public (...) view on abortion that surprisingly finds many areas of common ground. Followed by this is a theological reading of Pope Benedict’s encyclical ‘Charity in truth’ that can be the basis of dialogue between parties with divergent views. A third example refers to a conference in Princeton University three years ago, where I mentioned several points where dialogue could be built. (shrink)

Background: In prevalence studies of sexually transmitted infections (STIs), investigators often provide syndromic management for symptomatic participants, but may not provide specific treatment for asymptomatic individuals with positive laboratory test results due to the delays between sample collection and availability of results as well as logistical constraints in recontacting study participants. Methods: To characterize the extent of this issue, 80 prevalence studies from the World Health Organization’s Report on global sexually transmitted infection surveillance, 2018, were reviewed. Studies were classified as (...) to whether clinically relevant positive results were returned or if this was not specified. Results: More than half (56%) of the cited studies did not specify if participants were notified of clinically relevant positive STI test results. The percentages were similar for low- and middle-income country populations (57%) and high-income country populations (53%). Conclusions: The absence of documentation of the provision of test results raises the possibility that in some instances, results may not have been communicated, with potential negative effects for participants, their sexual partners, and newborns. From an ethical perspective, clinically relevant results should be returned to study participants and treating clinicians in a timely fashion to ensure appropriate management of identified infections. Study authors should document if they returned test results to study participants and report on numbers lost to follow-up. (shrink)

This article addresses the ethics of betel nut use in Taiwan. It first presents scientific facts about the betel quid and its consumption and the generally accepted negative health consequences associated with its use: oral and esophageal cancer, coronary artery disease, metabolic diseases, and adverse effects in pregnancy. It then analyzes the cultural background and economic factors contributing to its popularity in Asia. The governmental and institutional attempts to curb betel nut cultivation, distribution, and sales are also described. Finally, the (...) article analyzes the bioethical implications of this often-ignored subject from the perspectives of human dignity, the good of health, vulnerable groups, cultural diversity, informed consent, and ethical blind spots. (shrink)

In what follows, I appeal to Charles Babbage’s discussion of the division of mental labor to provide evidence that—at least with respect to the social acquisition, storage, retrieval, and transmission of knowledge—epistemologists have, for a broad range of phenomena of crucial importance to actual knowers in their epistemic practices in everyday life, failed adequately to appreciate the significance of socially distributed cognition. If the discussion here is successful, I will have demonstrated that a particular presumption widely held within the contemporary (...) discussion of the epistemology of testimony—a presumption that I will term the personalist requirement—fails to account for those very practices of knowers that I detail here. I will then conclude by suggesting that an alternate account of testimonial warrant, one that has heretofore been underappreciated, ought to be given more serious consideration—in particular because it is well suited to account for those actual practices of knowers that the personalist requirement leaves unrecognized. (shrink)

That Descartes’ God is not a deceiver is amongst the canonical claims of early modern philosophy. The significance of this (purported) fact to the coherence of Descartes’ system is likewise canonical, infused in how we teach and think about the _Meditations_. Though prevalent, both ends of this narrative are suspect. We argue that Descartes’ color eliminativism, when coupled with his analysis of the cognitive structure of our sensory systems, entails that God is a deceiver. It’s doubtful that Descartes recognized this, (...) given his insistence that God is not a deceiver, and the role this plays in his system. But this is a concession Descartes can grant if we are careful about the kind of deception at play—a kind Descartes _does_ recognize, albeit not without some ambiguity. On our story, Descartes’ metaphysics and epistemology are not driven by concerns about deception _per se_, but by concerns about God’s _benevolence_. (shrink)

What explains change? Edward Feser argues in his ‘Aristotelian proof’ that the only adequate answer to these questions is ultimately in terms of an unchangeable, purely actual being. In this paper, I target the cogency of Feser’s reasoning to such an answer. In particular, I present novel paths of criticism—both undercutting and rebutting—against one of Feser’s central premises. I then argue that Feser’s inference that the unactualized actualizer lacks any potentialities contains a number of non-sequiturs.

This article analyses Ukraine’s language policies from 2002 to 2022 within a framework of liberalism, while avoiding making normative judgements or recommendations, updating the discussion raised in Kymlicka and Opalski’s Can Liberal Pluralism be Exported? The analysis takes into consideration Ukraine’s present and historic position, including the challenge that postcolonial nation building can pose for achieving liberalism and linguistic justice. The paper focuses on three main areas of language policy: education, businesses and media, and assesses if they can be described (...) as liberal orthodox, pluralist or illiberal. The article begins by defining liberalism and illiberalism, discussing the context of Ukraine’s linguistic diversity and postcolonial context, before outlining the language situation until EuroMaidan. Then, the main issue of language policy in the areas of education, business and media is analysed, before considering whether Ukrainian language laws might be considered liberal or illiberal. Finally, potential future trajectories are outlined. (shrink)

Donors to global health programs and policymakers within national health systems have to make difficult decisions about how to allocate scarce health care resources. Principled ways to make these decisions all make some use of summary measures of health, which provide a common measure of the value (or disvalue) of morbidity and mortality. They thereby allow comparisons between health interventions with different effects on the patterns of death and ill health within a population. The construction of a summary measure of (...) health requires that a number be assigned to the harm of death. But the harm of death is currently a matter of debate: different philosophical theories assign very different values to the harm of death at different ages. This chapter considers how we should assign numbers to the harm of deaths at different ages in the face of uncertainty and disagreement. (shrink)

Some moral realists claim that moral facts are a species of natural fact, amenable to scientific investigation. They argue that these moral facts are needed in the best explanations of certain phenomena and that this is evidence that they are real. In this paper I present part of a biological account of the function of morality. The account allows the identification of a plausible natural kind that could play the explanatory role that a moral kind would play in naturalist realist (...) theories. It is therefore a candidate for being the moral kind. I argue, however, that it will underdetermine the morally good, that is, identifying the kind is not sufficient to identify what is good. Hence this is not a natural moral kind. Its explanatory usefulness, however, means that we do not have to postulate any further (moral) facts to provide moral explanations. Hence there is no reason to believe that there are any natural moral kinds. (shrink)

According to standard comparativist views, death is bad insofar as it deprives someone of goods she would otherwise have had. In The Ethics of Killing, Jeff McMahan argues against such views and in favor of a gradualist account according to which how bad it is to die is a function of both the future goods of which the decedent is deprived and her cognitive development when she dies. Comparativists and gradualists therefore disagree about how bad it is to die at (...) different ages. In this paper I examine two prominent criticisms of gradualism and show that both misconstrue McMahan. I develop a related criticism that seems to show that a gradualist cannot coherently relate morbidity and mortality. This criticism also fails, but has an instructive implication for how policy-makers setting priorities for health care investments should regard choices between life-saving interventions and interventions against non-fatal diseases in the very young. (shrink)

Over the last few decades, multiple studies have examined the understanding of participants in clinical research. They show variable and often poor understanding of key elements of disclosure, such as expected risks and the experimental nature of treatments. Did the participants in these studies give valid consent? According to the standard view of informed consent they did not. The standard view holds that the recipient of consent has a duty to disclose certain information to the profferer of consent because valid (...) consent requires that information to be understood. The contents of the understanding and disclosure requirements are therefore conceptually linked. In this paper, we argue that the standard view is mistaken. The disclosure and understanding requirements have distinct grounds tied to two different ways in which a token of consent can be rendered invalid. Analysis of these grounds allows us to derive the contents of the two requirements. It also implies that it is sometimes permissible to enroll willing participants who have not understood everything that they ought to be told about their clinical trials. (shrink)

Intra-molecular connectivity (that is, chemical structure) does not emerge from computations based on fundamental quantum-mechanical principles. In order to compute molecular electronic energies (of C 3 H 4 hydrocarbons, for instance) quantum chemists must insert intra-molecular connectivity “by hand.” Some take this as an indication that chemistry cannot be reduced to physics: others consider it as evidence that quantum chemistry needs new logical foundations. Such discussions are generally synchronic rather than diachronic —that is, they neglect ‘historical’ aspects. However, systems of (...) interest to chemists generally are metastable . In many cases chemical systems of a given elemental composition may exist in any one of several different metastable states depending on the history of the system. Molecular structure generally depends on contingent historical circumstances of synthesis and separation, rather than solely or mainly on relative energies of alternative stable states, those energies in turn determined by relationships among components. Chemical structure is usually ‘kinetically-determined’ rather than ‘thermodynamically-determined.’ For instance, cyclical hydrocarbon ring-systems (as in cyclopropene) are produced only in special circumstances. Adequate theoretical treatments must take account of the persistent effects of such contingent historical events whenever they are relevant—as they generally are in chemistry. (shrink)

Belief storage is often modeled as having the structure of a single, unified web. This model of belief storage is attractive and widely assumed because it appears to provide an explanation of the flexibility of cognition and the complicated dynamics of belief revision. However, when one scrutinizes human cognition, one finds strong evidence against a unified web of belief and for a fragmented model of belief storage. Using the best available evidence from cognitive science, we develop this fragmented model into (...) a nascent theory of the cognitive architecture of belief storage. (shrink)

We examine two competing solutions to Benardete paradoxes: causal finitism, according to which nothing can have infinitely many causes, and the unsatisfiable pair diagnosis (UPD), according to which such paradoxes are logically impossible and no metaphysical thesis need be adopted to avoid them. We argue that the UPD enjoys notable theoretical advantages over causal finitism. Causal finitists, however, have levelled two main objections to the UPD. First, they urge that the UPD requires positing a ‘mysterious force’ that prevents paradoxes from (...) arising. Since such a force is implausible, the UPD is in trouble. Second, they employ recombination or patchwork principles to argue that paradoxical situations would be possible if causal finitism were false. Since such situations are not possible, causal finitism is true, and so a substantive metaphysical thesis is needed to avoid the paradoxes. We argue that the UPD proponent can successfully respond to these objections. (shrink)

The idea that payment for research participation can be coercive appears widespread among research ethics committee members, researchers, and regulatory bodies. Yet analysis of the concept of coercion by philosophers and bioethicists has mostly concluded that payment does not coerce, because coercion necessarily involves threats, not offers. In this article we aim to resolve this disagreement by distinguishing between two distinct but overlapping concepts of coercion. Consent-undermining coercion marks out certain actions as impermissible and certain agreements as unenforceable. By contrast, (...) coercion as subjection indicates a way in which someone’s interests can be partially set back in virtue of being subject to another’s foreign will. While offers of payment do not normally constitute consent-undermining coercion, they do sometimes constitute coercion as subjection. We offer an analysis of coercion as subjection and propose three possible practical responses to worries about the coerciveness of payment. (shrink)

Edward Feser defends the ‘Neo-Platonic proof ’ for the existence of the God of classical theism. After articulating the argument and a number of preliminaries, I first argue that premise three of Feser’s argument—the causal principle that every composite object requires a sustaining efficient cause to combine its parts—is both unjustified and dialectically ill-situated. I then argue that the Neo-Platonic proof fails to deliver the mindedness of the absolutely simple being and instead militates against its mindedness. Finally, I uncover two (...) tensions between Trinitarianism and the Neo-Platonic proof. (shrink)

The paper presents the notion of “Spirit of Nature” in Henry More and describes its position within More’s philosophical system. Through a thorough analysis, it tries to show in what respects it can be considered a scientific object and in what respects it cannot. In the second part of this paper, More’s “Spirit of Nature” is compared to Newton’s various attempts at presenting a metaphysical cause of the force of gravity, using the similarities between the two to see this notorious (...) problem of Newton scholarship in a new light. One thus sees that if Newton drew from Stoic and Neo-Platonic theories of aether or soul of the world, we need to fully acknowledge the fact that these substances were traditionally of a non-dualistic, half-corporeal, half-spiritual nature. Both More’s “Spirit of Nature” and Newton’s aether can thus be understood as different attempts at incorporating such a pneumatic theory into the framework of modern physics, as it was then being formed. (shrink)

James Henry Collin recently developed a new symmetry breaker favouring the ontological argument’s possibility premiss over that of the reverse ontological argument. The symmetry breaker amounts to an undercutting defeater for the reverse possibility premiss based on Kripkean cases of a posteriori necessity. I argue, however, that symmetry re-arises in two forms. First, I challenge the purported asymmetry in epistemic entitlements to the original and reverse possibility premisses. Second, relevantly similar Kripkean cases equally undercut the original possibility premiss.

We argue that there is a conflict among classical theism's commitments to divine simplicity, divine creative freedom, and omniscience. We start by defining key terms for the debate related to classical theism. Then we articulate a new argument, the Aloneness Argument, aiming to establish a conflict among these attributes. In broad outline, the argument proceeds as follows. Under classical theism, it's possible that God exists without anything apart from Him. Any knowledge God has in such a world would be wholly (...) intrinsic. But there are contingent truths in every world, including the world in which God exists alone. So, it's possible that God contingently has wholly intrinsic knowledge. But whatever is contingent and wholly intrinsic is an accident. So, God possibly has an accident. This is incompatible with classical theism. Finally, we consider and rebut several objections. (shrink)