Du Bois regarded social reform as a legitimate object for the scientist. He gave a place to non-epistemic values in scientific reasoning and, to counter the effects of scientific racism, he constructed his approach around the belief that scientists must adopt an assumption or scientific hypothesis that African Americans are human. His engagement in scientific research was a way to reform the society in which he lived, which in turn, led him to defend the faithfulness to fact as his conception (...) of scientific objectivity. This essay examines his sophisticated theory of facts, account of the difference between the natural and human sciences, and unique pragmatist theory of truth. (shrink)

This study investigates the relationship between mental health and emotional intelligence among senior high school students in a public school. Thus, the study employed a correlational design to measure the relationship between mental health and emotional intelligence among 152 Grade 12 senior high school students in a public school. Hence, to measure the study’s variables - Mental Health Inventory and Emotional Intelligence Scale (EIS) were utilized. Based on the inferential statistics, the r coefficient of 0.32 indicates a low positive correlation (...) between the variables and a p-value of 0.00, indicating a significant relationship between the respondents' mental health and emotional intelligence. Implications and recommendations were discussed in the study. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In ‘Scorekeeping in a Pornographic Language Game’, Rae Langton and Caroline West borrow ideas from David Lewis to attempt to explain how pornography might subordinate and silence women. Pornography is supposed to express certain misogynistic claims implicitly, through presupposition, and to convey them indirectly, through accommodation. I argue that the appeal to accommodation cannot do the sort of work Langton and West want it to do: Their case rests upon an overly simplified model of that phenomenon. I argue further (...) that, once we are clear about why Langton and West's account fails, a different and more plausible account of pornography's influence emerges. (shrink)

This paper has three goals. The first is to defend Tristan Taromino and Erika Lust (or some of their films) from criticisms that Rebecca Whisnant and Hans Maes make of them. Toward that end, I will be arguing against the narrow conceptions that Whisnant and Maes have of what `feminist' pornography must be like. More generally, I hope to show by example why it is important to take pornographic films seriously as films if we're to understand their potential to shape, (...) or mis-shape, socio-sexual norms. (shrink)

What Bar-On and Simmons call 'Conceptual Deflationism' is the thesis that truth is a 'thin' concept in the sense that it is not suited to play any explanatory role in our scientific theorizing. One obvious place it might play such a role is in semantics, so disquotationalists have been widely concerned to argued that 'compositional principles', such as -/- (C) A conjunction is true iff its conjuncts are true -/- are ultimately quite trivial and, more generally, that semantic theorists have (...) misconceived the relation between truth, meaning, and logic. This paper argues, to the contrary, that even such simple compositional principles as (C) have substantial content that cannot be captured by deflationist 'proofs' of them. The key thought is that (C) is supposed, among other things, to affirm the truth-functionality of conjunction and that disquotationalists cannot, ultimately, make sense of truth-functionality. -/- This paper is something of a companion to "The Logical Strength of Compositional Principles". (shrink)

A reality for many information technology (IT) organizations is the need to hire IT talent from other cities or countries to supplement their employee staff. As organizations extend their software development work to remote locations, however, a distinct productivity gap can emerge between co-located and distributed teams. The problem this study addresses is the reduced productivity levels for teams practicing the Agile methodology when team members are distributed by location or time zone. Specifically, it was unknown if there are organizational (...) factors which can improve the productivity of these distributed development teams. The purpose of this study was to determine whether any amount of separation of team members impacts productivity, or if various degrees of time zone overlap allows for sufficient synchronous communication to overcome the communication lag inherit with having distributed teams. Productivity was measured by the number of story points per cycle day completed by the team. Two additional variables were collected to study the impact of sourcing and task complexity on distributed team productivity. A quantitative data analysis was conducted on a large, globally distributed technology organization practicing the Agile methodology across the Americas, Europe, Africa, Asia, and Australia. Teams were classified in the study based on the amount of time zone overlap of the team members. The results of the study found that teams which were co-located or had any amount of time zone overlap performed at similar levels of productivity, while teams with no overlapping business day experienced significantly lower levels of productivity (p < .05). Conversely, sourcing of the resources either as contractors or employees did not demonstrate a significant difference in team productivity. The data analysis on task complexity showed mixed results; there was a different level of productivity when some teams were working tasks of different complexity, but the data was further nuanced by team member location. This study indicates the importance of resource location as a key factor in team productivity. Further study on organizational design could be beneficial to better understand how organizations should select locations to optimize productivity. (shrink)

This is a completely informal presentation of the ideas behind the diagonal lemma. One really can't see this important result from too many different angles. This one aims at getting the main idea across. (For the cognoscenti, it is in the spirit of Quine's treatment in terms of "appended to its own quotation".).

It has been known for some time that context-dependence poses a problem for disquotationalism, but the problem has largely been regarded as one of detail: one that will be solved by the right sort of cleverness. I argue here that the problem is one of principle and that extant solutions, which are based upon the notion of translation, cannot succeed.

Disquotationalism is the view that the only notion of truth we really need is one that can be wholly explained in terms of such trivialities as: “Snow is white” is true iff snow is white. The 'Classical Disquotational Strategy' attempts to establish this view case by case, by showing that each extant appeal to truth, in philosophical or scientific explanations, can be unmasked as an appeal only to disquotational truth. I argue here that the Classical Strategy fails in at least (...) two cases: attributions of truth to context-dependent utterances and uses of truth psychological explanations of behavioral success or, more fundamentally, appeals to falsity in psychological explanations of behavioral failure. -/- It's my intention to turn this paper into two papers. It's become quite unwieldy as it is---not unlike "The Strength of Truth Theories". (shrink)

A speculative investigation of how Frege's logical views change between Begriffsschrift and Grundgesetze and how this might have affected the formal development of logicism.

Rae Langton and Caroline West argue that pornography silences women by presupposing misogynistic attitudes, such as that women enjoy being raped. More precisely, they claim that a somewhat infamous pictorial, ‘Dirty Pool’, makes such presuppositions, and that it is typical in this respect. I argue for four claims. (1) There are empirical reasons to doubt that women are silenced in the way that Langton and West claim they are. (2) There is no evidence that very much pornography makes the sorts (...) of presuppositions that Langton and West's explanation of silencing requires it to make. (3) Even ‘Dirty Pool’, for all its other problems, does not make such presuppositions. (4) Langton and West misread ‘Dirty Pool’ because they do not take proper account of the fact that pornography often traffics in sexual fantasy. The broader lesson is that we need to read pornography more sensitively if we are to understand its capacity to shape socio‐sexual norms (for good or for ill). (shrink)

A teaching document I've used in my courses on truth and on incompleteness. Aimed at students who have a good grasp of basic logic, and decent math skills, it attempts to give them the background they need to understand a proper statement of the classic results due to Gödel and Tarski, and sketches their proofs. Topics covered include the notions of language and theory, the basics of formal syntax and arithmetization, formal arithmetic (Q and PA), representability, diagonalization, and the incompleteness (...) and undefinability theorems. (shrink)

We attempt here to trace the evolution of Frege’s thought about truth. What most frames the way we approach the problem is a recognition that hardly any of Frege’s most familiar claims about truth appear in his earliest work. We argue that Frege’s mature views about truth emerge from a fundamental re-thinking of the nature of logic instigated, in large part, by a sustained engagement with the work of George Boole and his followers, after the publication of Begriffsschrift and the (...) appearance of critical reviews by members of the Boolean school. (shrink)

An overview of what Frege accomplishes in Part II of Grundgesetze, which contains proofs of axioms for arithmetic and several additional results concerning the finite, the infinite, and the relationship between these notions. One might think of this paper as an extremely compressed form of Part II of my book Reading Frege's Grundgesetze.

Building on findings that self-uncertainty motivates attempts to restore certainty about the self, particularly in ways that highlight one’s distinctiveness from others, we show that self-uncertainty, relative to uncertainty in general, increases creative generation among individualists. In Studies 1 to 3, high (but not low) individualists performed better on a creative generation task after being primed with self-uncertainty as opposed to general uncertainty. In Study 4, this effect emerged only among those who were told that the task measured creative as (...) opposed to analytical thinking, suggesting that the positive effects of self-uncertainty on performance are specific to tasks that bolster perceptions of uniqueness. In Study 5, self-uncertain individualists experienced a restoration of self-clarity after being induced to think about themselves as more (vs. less) creative. Implications for compensatory responses to self-uncertainty and factors that influence creativity are discussed. (shrink)

This study examined the effectiveness of video-based instruction (VBI) as a learning remediation strategy in teaching Laws of Thermodynamics among Prospective Science Teachers at Bulacan State University. The researchers employed – a one-group pretest–posttest design to assess the 35 prospective science teachers who were purposively selected. More so, data was gathered through researcher-made pretest-posttest achievement tests and an adapted Likert survey questionnaire. The data was treated descriptively and inferentially. The findings showed that VBI as a learning remediation strategy positively affected (...) the preservice teachers’ achievement. In addition, data shows a significant difference between the pretest and posttest in teaching the laws of thermodynamics. The ease of use of VBI as learning remediation in teaching laws of thermodynamics in terms of pedagogical content, individual learning focus, ability to work at pace, and increased engagement was very effective. The learning achievement of the prospective science teachers was significantly related to the ease of use of VBI as a learning remediation. However, it was observed to have a high positive association. Future use of VBI can enhance the prospective science teacher’s competence in using VBI in teaching science subjects. (shrink)

In two recent papers, Bob Hale has attempted to free second-order logic of the 'staggering existential assumptions' with which Quine famously attempted to saddle it. I argue, first, that the ontological issue is at best secondary: the crucial issue about second-order logic, at least for a neo-logicist, is epistemological. I then argue that neither Crispin Wright's attempt to characterize a `neutralist' conception of quantification that is wholly independent of existential commitment, nor Hale's attempt to characterize the second-order domain in terms (...) of definability, can serve a neo-logicist's purposes. The problem, in both cases, is similar: neither Wright nor Hale is sufficiently sensitive to the demands that impredicativity imposes. Finally, I defend my own earlier attempt to finesse this issue, in "A Logic for Frege's Theorem", from Hale's criticisms. (shrink)

The current assessment of behaviors in the inventories to diagnose autism spectrum disorders (ASD) focus on observation and discrete categorizations. Behaviors require movements, yet measurements of physical movements are seldom included. Their inclusion however, could provide an objective characterization of behavior to help unveil interactions between the peripheral and the central nervous systems. Such interactions are critical for the development and maintenance of spontaneous autonomy, self-regulation and voluntary control. At present, current approaches cannot deal with the heterogeneous, dynamic and stochastic (...) nature of development. Accordingly, they leave no avenues for real-time or longitudinal assessments of change in a coping system continuously adapting and developing compensatory mechanisms. We offer a new unifying statistical framework to reveal re-afferent kinesthetic features of the individual with ASD. The new methodology is based on the non-stationary stochastic patterns of minute fluctuations (micro-movements) inherent to our natural actions. Such patterns of behavioral variability provide re-entrant sensory feedback contributing to the autonomous regulation and coordination of the motor output. From an early age, this feedback supports centrally driven volitional control and fluid, flexible transitions between intentional and spontaneous behaviors. We show that in ASD there is a disruption in the maturation of this form of proprioception. Despite this disturbance, each individual has unique adaptive compensatory capabilities that we can unveil and exploit to evoke faster and more accurate decisions. Measuring the kinesthetic re-afference in tandem with stimuli variations we can detect changes in their micro-movements indicative of a more predictive and reliable kinesthetic percept. Our methods address the heterogeneity of ASD with a personalized approach grounded in the inherent sensory-motor abilities that the individual has already developed. (shrink)

Students using Ritalin in preparation for their exams is a hotly debated issue, while meditating or drinking coffee before those same exams is deemed uncontroversial. However, taking Ritalin, meditating and drinking coffee or even education in general, can all be considered forms of cognitive enhancement. Although social acceptance might change in the future, it is interesting to examine the current reasons that are used to distinguish cases deemed problematic or unproblematic. Why are some forms of cognitive enhancement considered problematic, while (...) others are not? In this paper, we consider cognitive enhancement as the amplification or extension of core capacities of the mind, using augmentation or improvements of our information-processing systems. We will analyse cognitive enhancement in an educational setting in order to clarify the fuzzy distinction between problematic and unproblematic forms of cognitive enhancement. We will show that the apparent distinction made by many people between problematic and unproblematic enhancement is not based on any fundamental difference between these two categories. (shrink)

In both the paper "Revisability and Conceptual Change in 'Two Dogmas of Empiricism'" and in Constructing the World, David Chalmers has argued against W.V.O. Quine's claim that there are no 'analytic' sentences. I argue here that Chalmers's argument does not advance this debate.

The product of a Kickstarter fundraising campaign, "Clear and Present Thinking" is a college-level textbook in logic and critical thinking. Chapters: 1. Questions, Problems, and World Views 2. Good and Bad Thinking Habits 3. Basics of Argumentation 4. Fallacies 5. Reasonable Doubt 6. Moral Reasoning In an effort to reduce the cost of education for students, this textbook was funded by over 700 people through the Kickstarter online crowd-funding platform.

from phenomenic studies to an aspect of a grain in a Win Wenders film or a butterfly on a wheal.

Enligt ett realistiskt synsätt kan ett påstående vara sant trots att det inte ens i princip är möjligt att veta att det är sant. En sanningsteoretisk antirealist kan inte godta denna möjlighet utan accepterar en eller annan version av Dummetts vetbarhetsprincip: (K) Om ett påstående är sant, så måste det i princip vara möjligt att veta att det är sant. Det kan dock förefalla rimligt, även för en antirealist, att gå̊ med på̊ att det kan finnas sanningar som ingen faktiskt (...) vet (har vetat, eller kommer att veta) är sanna. Man kan därför tänka sig att en antirealist skulle acceptera principen (K) utan att därför gå med på den till synes starkare principen: (SK) Om ett påstående är sant, så måste det faktiskt finnas någon som vet att det är sant. Ett mycket omdiskuterat argument – som ytterst går tillbaka till Alonzo Church, men som först publicerades i en uppsats av Frederic Fitch i Journal of Symbolic Logic 1963 – tycks emellertid visa att principen (K) implicerar principen (SK). Anta nämligen att (K) är sann, medan (SK) inte är det. Men om (SK) är falsk, så finns det ett påstående som är sant men som ingen faktiskt vet är sant. Anta nu att p är ett sådant påstående. Låt Kp betyda att någon vet att p är sant. Det galler alltså̊ att p är sant samtidigt som Kp inte är det. Betrakta nu påståendet (p ∧ −Kp). Enligt antagandet är detta påstående sant. Enligt (K) måste det då vara möjligt att någon vet att (p ∧ −Kp). D.v.s., det måste vara möjligt att påståendet K(p ∧ −Kp) är sant. Men i så fall är det också̊ möjligt att påståendet Kp ∧ K−Kp är sant, vilket i sin tur implicerar att det är möjligt att Kp ∧ −Kp är sant, vilket ju är absurt. Således kan inte (K) vara sann samtidigt som (SK) är falsk. Vi tycks således kunna sluta oss till att (K) implicerar (SK). I uppsatsen diskuterar jag några olika sätt att undgå̊ Church-Fitch paradoxala slutsats. Ett tillvägagångssätt är att ersätta kunskapsoperatorn med en hierarki av kunskapspredikat. Ett annat är baserat på distinktionen mellan faktisk och potentiell kunskap och ett förkastande av den vanliga modallogiska formaliseringen av principen (K). Den senare typen av lösning betraktas både från ett realistiskt och ett icke-realistiskt perspektiv. Utifrån denna analys kommer jag fram till slutsatsen att vi, vare sig vi är realister eller antirealister rörande sanning, kan sluta oroa oss för vetbarhetsparadoxen och ändå uppskatta Church-Fitchs argument. (shrink)

Neurath (1932) suggests that in our quest for scientific knowledge “we are like sailors who have to rebuild their ship on the open sea, without ever being able to dismantle it in dry-dock and reconstruct it from its best components”. Neurath's boat features in discussions of various philosophical ideas, including the debate with foundationalism and coherentism about justification, the ethics literature on reflective equilibrium, and naturalistic approaches to metaphilosophy.

This brief reply to Ferzan shows that her recent review of Self-Defense, Necessity, and Punishment is incoherent and completely misrepresents a central claim of mine (to the point of attributing to me the opposite claim than the one I am actually and quite clearly and explicitly making). Her other criticisms fall flat too.

How do we acquire the notions of cardinality and cardinal number? In the (neo-)Fregean approach, they are derived from the notion of equinumerosity. According to some alternative approaches, defended and developed by Husserl and Parsons among others, the order of explanation is reversed: equinumerosity is explained in terms of cardinality, which, in turn, is explained in terms of our ordinary practices of counting. In their paper, ‘Cardinality, Counting, and Equinumerosity’, Richard Kimberly Heck proposes that instead of equinumerosity or counting, (...) cardinality is derived from a cognitively earlier notion of _just as many_. In this paper, we assess Heck’s proposal in terms of contemporary theories of number concept acquisition. Focusing on bootstrapping theories, we argue that there is no evidence that the notion of _just as many_ is cognitively primary. Furthermore, since the acquisition of cardinality is an enculturated process, the cognitive primariness of these notions, possibly including _just as many_, depends on various external cultural factors. Therefore, being possibly a cultural construction, _just as many_ could be one among several notions used in the acquisition of cardinality and cardinal number concepts. This paper thus challenges those accounts which seek for a fundamental concept underlying all aspects of numerical cognition. (shrink)

I årtusenden har människan försökt definiera livet – hur levande djur och växter skiljer sig från död materia. Problemet är dock att livet är mångfacetterat, och varje regel har sitt undantag. Vi försöker möta kommande utmaningar med nya livsformer, genom att lyfta fram en ny definition av liv.

Den här boken handlar om invasiva främmande växter. I det föregående kapitlet reflekterade Niklas Vareman om vad som läggs i begreppet ‘invasiv’, men vad gäller då för den andra termen i begreppet – alltså ordet ‘främmande’? Vid första påseende kan det verka som att ’främmande’ borde vara ett enklare ord att definiera. Det är ju vanligare och inte så tekniskt jämfört med ‘invasiv’. Frågan är dock om inte just dessa två egenskaper gör ordet ’främmande’ mer svårdefinierat. Ord som är både (...) vanligare och mer vardagliga används av fler personer och på fler olika sätt. (shrink)

Denna artikel är den första i en serie om två artiklar som introducerar astrobiologins filosofi. Detta är ett förhållandevis nytt och i Sverige nästan okänt forskningsfält som dock befinner sig i snabb tillväxt internationellt. Ämnet presenteras här i form av exempel på några centrala frågeställningar inom området. I den här artikeln presenteras några frågeställningar hemmahörande i teoretisk filosofi.

Denna artikel är den andra i en serie om två artiklar som introducerar astrobiologins filosofi. Detta är ett förhållandevis nytt och i Sverige nästan okänt forskningsfält som dock befinner sig i snabb tillväxt internationellt. Ämnet presenteras här i form av exempel på några centrala frågeställningar inom området. I den här artikeln presenteras några frågeställningar hemmahörande i praktisk filosofi.

Plants have evolved with complex signaling circuits that operate under multiple conditions and govern numerous cellular functions. Stress signaling in plant cells is a sophisticated network composed of interacting proteins organized into tiered cascades where the function of a molecule is dependent on the interaction and the activation of another. In a linear scheme, the receptors of cell surface sense the stimuli and convey stress signals through specific pathways and downstream phosphorylation events controlled by mitogen-activated protein (MAP) kinases and second (...) messengers, leading to appropriate adaptive responses. The specificity of the pathway is guided by scaffolding proteins and docking domains inside the interacting partners with distinctive structures and functions. The flexibility and the fine-tuned organization of the signaling molecules drive the activated MAP kinases into the appropriate location and connection to control and integrate the information flow. Here, we overview recent findings of the involvement of MAP kinases in major abiotic stresses (drought, cold and temperature fluctuations) and we shed light on the complexity and the specificity of MAP kinase signaling modules. (shrink)

Neo-Fregean logicists claim that Hume’s Principle (HP) may be taken as an implicit definition of cardinal number, true simply by fiat. A long-standing problem for neo-Fregean logicism is that HP is not deductively conservative over pure axiomatic second-order logic. This seems to preclude HP from being true by fiat. In this paper, we study Richard Kimberly Heck’s Two-Sorted Frege Arithmetic (2FA), a variation on HP which has been thought to be deductively conservative over second-order logic. We show that it (...) isn’t. In fact, 2FA is not conservative over n-th order logic, for all $n \geq 2$. It follows that in the usual one-sorted setting, HP is not deductively Field-conservative over second- or higher-order logic. (shrink)

​I evaluate a suggestion, floated by Kimberly Ferzan (this volume), that the twitter hashtag campaign #BelieveWomen is best accommodated by non-reductionist views of testimonial justification. I argue that the issue is ultimately one about the ethical obligation to trust women, rather than a question of what grounds testimonial justification. I also suggest that the hashtag campaign does not simply assert that ‘we should trust women’, but also militates against a pernicious striking-property generic (roughly: ‘women make false sexual assault accusations’), (...) that distorts our evaluation of women’s testimony concerning sexual assault. I conclude #BelieveWomen does not demand that we believe against the evidence, or uncritically, or be more trusting than we have evidential justification to be. Rather, it aims to bring our trust closer to what is merited by the base-rate of reliable testimony from women concerning sexual assault. (shrink)

The future is evitable. That is to say if, as many of the contributors to Futures over the years have claimed, there is more than one future possible, and that more than one will be experienced, then talking about ‘inevitability’ is simply wrong. And what a task it is to attempt to say anything warranted, but nevertheless fresh concerning the futures of Europe—especially in such a context as considering the plural conception of futures in the title of this publication! Immediately (...) after the member states of the Union failed to agree the draft treaty on European Constitution at the Intergovernmental Conference ending on December 13, 2003, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung provided two full pages of political coverage under the rubric “After the Failure [or ‘running aground’] of Brussels— The EU in Crisis”, and on the front page reported “The EU at an Uncertain Future” [2]. Six months later, on the day after those same states agreed a Treaty Establishing a Constitution for Europe, The Irish Times reported that Sweden still supported the EU, but not the Euro, and that EU Council President Bertie Ahearn, the Irish Prime Minister, thanked all those who helped with ‘a ship that has been safely docked today’ [5]. Ships are useful not when they remain in port, but rather when they move, so six months later, after nearly four decades of failed attempts, on December 17, 2004, Turkey was given the possibility of opening talks for accession to the European Union. From the European docks of Ireland, Germany, Sweden, and the UK, there are contributions in this special edition of Futures on “The Futures of Europe”. Even within the geographic limits of Europe, the ships come at different speeds, as represented by two authors from outside the Eurozone and four within. There are also contributions from a ship between ports in Italy and the USA and from a ship between Germany and Turkey. And there is something from that port across the ocean—the USA. What may be perhaps the most telling contribution to this volume, however, is the one that is not here. I had invited a colleague from Beijing to provide a prospective from China on the futures of Europe, and he had enthusiastically accepted. (shrink)

According to the Behavioral View of consent, consent must be expressed in behavior in order to release someone from a duty. By contrast, the Mental View of consent is that normatively efficacious consent is entirely mental. In previous work, I defended a version of the Behavioral View, according to which normatively efficacious ‘consent always requires public behavior, and this behavior must take the form of communication in the case of high-stakes consent’. In this essay, I respond to two arguments by (...) proponents of the Mental View. First, Larry Alexander, Heidi Hurd and Peter Westen have argued that my view has mistaken implications concerning the culpability of different actors. I counter that my version of the view does not have these implications, as it leaves us free to draw moral and legal distinctions between different offences involving non-consensual behavior. Second, Larry Alexander and Kimberly Ferzan have argued for an analogy between consent and abandonment: on the grounds that the normative power to abandon resides in one’s will, Alexander and Ferzan concludes consent does too. I counter that abandonment requires behavior, and call into question the assumption that the ethics of property have much to teach us about the ethics of sexual consent. (shrink)

ÍNDICE Prefacio. Pensamientos sobre la violencia. Un libro como un bricolage. Ana Belén Blanco – María Soledad Sánchez | 9 Prólogo. La violencia como “objeto”. Una Aproximación Teórica. Sergio Tonkonoff | 19 I. Violencia, mito y religión. Rubén Dri | 35 II. Violencia, religión y mesianismo: reflexiones desde la filosofía judía. Emmanuel Taub | 53 III. Religión y violencia. Una mirada desde lo implícito y lo relacional. Gustavo A. Ludueña | 65 IV. Escrito en el cuerpo: la pregunta por la (...) violencia en algunas ficciones contemporáneas. VII. Política y Violencia: Una Introducción. Miguel Ángel Rossi | 129 VIII. Reflexiones sobre la violencia (y la política). Ezequiel Ipar | 147 IX. Variables de la violencia generalizada: real de la época. Carlos Gustavo Motta | 159 X. La función de la cópula Y en el título “violencia y espectáculo”. Daniel Mundo | 169 XI. Muerte, violencia y prohibición: ¿vínculo histórico o constitutivo? Martina Lassalle | 179 XII. Criminalización, Juventud y Delito. Algunas consideraciones teórico-metodológicas. Sergio Tonkonoff | 205 XIII. Activismo de los derechos humanos, tribunales y policías. Sofía Tiscornia | 233 El Docke. Ensayo fotográfico. Henrik Malmström | 247. (shrink)

Crime and Culpability, by Larry Alexander, Kimberly Kessler Ferzan (with Stephen Morse) is a visionary work of moral and legal philosophy. Nonetheless, it is fundamentally morally misguided. In seeking to free criminal law from what the authors take to be the distorting influence of outcome luck, they arrive at a position that is overly exculpatory. It fails to hold actors liable for the harms they cause when they have taken less care they should. -/- I argue, first, that the (...) authors’ attempt to strip criminal law of outcome luck is incoherent in its own terms, and that any attempt to follow through on their program would require a much more severe loss of accountability than the authors acknowledge. I then argue that outcome luck is pervasive in our moral lives, and that, given the choice of (a) not being able to hold agents accountable for much, or (b) holding them accountable for the results of their choices, including outcomes that result in part from moral luck, the right choice is (b). I wrap up with a concluding observation about the implausible moral psychology that underlies the authors’ view of culpable action. (shrink)