“Love hurts”—as the saying goes—and a certain amount of pain and difficulty in intimate relationships is unavoidable. Sometimes it may even be beneficial, since adversity can lead to personal growth, self-discovery, and a range of other components of a life well-lived. But other times, love can be downright dangerous. It may bind a spouse to her domestic abuser, draw an unscrupulous adult toward sexual involvement with a child, put someone under the insidious spell of a cult leader, and even inspire (...) jealousy-fueled homicide. How might these perilous devotions be diminished? The ancients thought that treatments such as phlebotomy, exercise, or bloodletting could “cure” an individual of love. But modern neuroscience and emerging developments in psychopharmacology open up a range of possible interventions that might actually work. These developments raise profound moral questions about the potential uses—and misuses—of such anti-love biotechnology. In this article, we describe a number of prospective love-diminishing interventions, and offer a preliminary ethical framework for dealing with them responsibly should they arise. (shrink)

Pharmaceuticals or other emerging technologies could be used to enhance (or diminish) feelings of lust, attraction, and attachment in adult romantic partnerships. While such interventions could conceivably be used to promote individual (and couple) well-being, their widespread development and/or adoption might lead to “medicalization” of human love and heartache—for some, a source of serious concern. In this essay, we argue that the “medicalization of love” need not necessarily be problematic, on balance, but could plausibly be expected to have either good (...) or bad consequences depending upon how it unfolds. By anticipating some of the specific ways in which these technologies could yield unwanted outcomes, bioethicists and others can help direct the course of love’s “medicalization”—should it happen to occur—more toward the “good” side than the “bad.”. (shrink)

Given the fact that many people use Wikipedia, we should ask: Can we trust it? The empirical evidence suggests that Wikipedia articles are sometimes quite good but that they vary a great deal. As such, it is wrong to ask for a monolithic verdict on Wikipedia. Interacting with Wikipedia involves assessing where it is likely to be reliable and where not. I identify five strategies that we use to assess claims from other sources and argue that, to a greater of (...) lesser degree, Wikipedia frustrates all of them. Interacting responsibly with something like Wikipedia requires new epistemic methods and strategies. (shrink)

In this issue, Ahmadi1 reports on the practice of hymenoplasty—a surgical intervention meant to restore a presumed physical marker of virginity prior to a woman's marriage. As Mehri and Sills2 have stated, these women ‘want to ensure that blood is spilled on their wedding night sheets.’ Although Ahmadi's research was carried out in Iran specifically, this surgery is becoming increasingly popular in a number of Western countries as well, especially among Muslim populations.3 What are the ethics of hymen restoration?Consider the (...) role of the physician. Two of the doctors interviewed by Ahmadi reported being in ‘a perpetual state of guilt because of the surgery's inherent aim at deceiving the groom’ and noted their ‘personal conflict’ at being involved in this deception. Yet: "None of the doctors believed that the surgery was unethical, arguing that the girl could be ‘abused’ and ‘can even die’ if she is discovered not … ". (shrink)

Merleau-Ponty suggests in his Nature lectures that myth provides the best way into thinking the relation of strange kinship between humanity and animality. He goes on to refigure Husserl’s paradigm of the two hands touching to extend beyond merely human-to-human relations, invoking in the process the myth of Narcissus. By carefully examining Merleau-Ponty’s late refiguration of that paradigm, alongside the revised conception of narcissism that it helps him to develop, we find that while human-animal empathy is made possible by a (...) ground of intercorporeal kinship, human-animal estrangement makes possible the emergence of an ethical relation to other animals, contingent upon the sublimation of animal desire. Holding human-animal kinship and estrangement in tension reveals a nascent ideal present implicitly in the early stages of childhood development: a vision of the possibility of interspecies harmony, rooted in the bodily reciprocity that drives the process of self-maturation. (shrink)

As persons we are irreducibly unique and essentially relational. In many contexts individual uniqueness has been accentuated at the expense of communal relationality. Our age has been marked by the loss of deep and meaningful relations to one another, and still more dramatically to the earth and its living creatures. The cosmological dimension of human personhood, that is, has been largely obscured. This chapter argues that our age has been marked increasingly by anesthetizing, alienating, and anonymizing tendencies. It proposes three (...) commensurate responses: aestheticization, or embodied philosophical knowing that remains faithful to the earth; anacarnation, or willful return to the wonders of embodied life, purged of romantic sentimentality; and attestation, or speaking up on behalf of the haecceitas or thisness of living creatures systematically instrumentalized for profit and pleasure. Together these responses help us to regain touch with animality by embracing the earth that hosts us, thus becoming more gracious guests, and to become more fully human by becoming better hosts to the multitude of earth's creatures, whose lives hang in the balance. (shrink)

If there is to be any progress in the debate about what sort of positive moral status Kant can give the emotions, we need a taxonomy of the terms Kant uses for these concepts. It used to be thought that Kant had little room for emotions in his ethics. In the past three decades, Marcia Baron, Paul Guyer, Barbara Herman, Nancy Sherman, Allen Wood and others have argued otherwise. Contrary to what a cursory reading of the Groundwork may indicate, Kant (...) thinks the emotions play an important role in the moral life. I want to extend the work of Baron, Guyer, Herman, Sherman and Wood in three ways. First, I will set out in a diagram Kant's taxonomy of feelings and emotions. Agreement on such a taxonomy should make it easier to evaluate debates about Kant and the emotions. Second, I will focus on a certain subclass of emotions – reason-caused affects – that have previously received little attention, even from these Kant scholars. Third, these scholars base much of their defence of Kant on his later works – especially the Metaphysics of Morals and the Anthropology – but Kant's fairly rich taxonomy of the emotions, including reason-caused affects, is clearly in place at least as early as the Critique of Judgment . I believe that the Critique of Judgment is an importantly ignored resource for understanding the moral role of the emotions for Kant. The third Critique makes positive, philosophically interesting claims about the emotions and morality. Kant emphasizes certain roles for emotions in this work that he develops to the same extent nowhere else. Nevertheless, the Critique of Judgment goes all but unmentioned by many who write on these issues. In what follows, I will defend as many of my claims as possible using the third Critique. (shrink)

The Ockhamist claims that our ability to do otherwise is not endangered by God’s foreknowledge because facts about God’s past beliefs regarding future contingents are soft facts about the past—i.e., temporally relational facts that depend in some sense on what happens in the future. But if our freedom, given God’s foreknowledge, requires altering some fact about the past that is clearly a hard fact, then Ockhamism fails even if facts about God’s past beliefs are soft. Recent opponents of Ockhamism, including (...) David Widerker and Peter van Inwagen, have argued along precisely these lines. Their arguments, if successful, would undermine Ockhamism while avoiding the controversy over the alleged softness of facts about God’s past beliefs. But these arguments do not succeed. The past facts they rely on must be clear and uncontroversial examples of hard facts about the past, and these facts must be such that an ability to refrain from the relevant future action implies an ability to alter the relevant hard fact. We demonstrate the flaw in these arguments by showing how they rely on past facts that do not satisfy these criteria. The Ockhamist may have troubles, but this type of argument is not one of them. (shrink)

Friedrich Nietzsche and Albert Schweitzer end up defending radically similar, yet critically opposed conclusions about the human animal and its place in nature, particularly with regard to the ethical awareness that does or does not follow from this situatedness. Arthur Schopenhauer’s notion of the will accounts for their similar foundational assumptions. But what accounts for the fact that their shared desire to affirm the will to life leads to fundamentally opposed ethical conclusions? What keeps Schweitzer’s ascetic ethic of reverence for (...) life from evolving into Nietzsche’s anti-ascetic vision of a second innocence beyond good and evil? We argue that situating the notion of reverence for life within an environmental virtue ethics, as one environmental virtue among many, aiming at ecological conversion, better articulates and motivates the disposition demanded by the ethics of reverence for life. (shrink)

Spinoza's use of the phrase “sui iuris” in the Tractatus Politicus gives rise to the following paradox. On the one hand, one is said to be sui iuris to the extent that one is rational; and to the extent that one is rational, one will steadfastly obey the laws of the state. However, Spinoza also states that to the extent that one adheres to the laws of the state, one is not sui iuris, but rather stands under the power [sub (...) potestate] of the state (TP 3/5). It seems, then, that to the extent that one is sui iuris, one will not, in fact, be sui iuris. In this paper, I offer an interpretation of Spinoza's notion of being sui iuris that enables us to overcome this paradox and sheds light on Spinoza's relationship to the republican tradition. I work towards this goal by distinguishing between two ways in which Spinoza uses the locution, which correspond to two different conceptions of power: potentia and potestas. This distinction not only allows us to save Spinoza from internal inconsistency, it also enables us to see one important way in which Spinoza stands outside of the republican tradition, since he conceives of liberty not as constituted by independence, or citizenship in a res publica, but as being sui iuris in the first sense described above: being powerful. (shrink)

Until recently Francisco Suárez (1548–1617) has been regarded as the “last medieval philosopher,” representing the end of the philosophically respectful scholastic tradition going back to the Early Middle Ages. In fact, however, Suárez stood at the beginning, rather than at the end, of a distinguished scholastic culture, which should best be labeled “Baroque scholasticism,” and which flourished throughout the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. In this paper I offer some ideas on why the study of this philosophical culture has been (...) so far neglected by the mainstream Anglo-American philosophical historiography and argue that more attention should be paid to it. (shrink)

Dombrowski and Murdoch offer versions of the ontological argument which aim to avoid two types of objection – those concerned with the nature of the divine, and those concerned with the move from an abstract concept to a mind-independent reality. For both, the nature of the concept of God/Good entails its instantiation, and both supply a supporting argument from experience. It is only Murdoch who successfully negotiates the transition from an abstract concept to the instantiation of that concept, however, and (...) this is achieved by means of an ontological argument from moral experience which, in a reversal of the Kantian doctrine, depends ultimately on a form of the cosmological argument. (shrink)

Given the importance of theoretical wisdom in Aristotle’s account of the human good, it is striking that contemporary virtue ethicists have been virtually silent about this intellectual virtue and what contribution it makes – or could make – toward human flourishing. In this paper, I examine, and respond to, two main worries that account for theoretical wisdom’s current marginality. Along the way, I sketch a neo-Aristotelian conception of theoretical wisdom, and argue that this intellectual virtue is more central to the (...) concerns of contemporary virtue ethicists than it has perhaps so far seemed. (shrink)

Between Schelling’s Über Dante in philosophischer Beziehung (1803) and the Dantean drafts of die Weltalter (1811-1815) stand the transitional texts of his middle period, the Philosophie und Religion (1804) and Freiheitsschrift (1809). His short essay on Dante contrasts an ancient conception of the closed cosmos with the modern universe as dynamic and expanding, then claims to extract from the Divine Comedy its eternal, threefold form. This article considers these schemata as they relate to the Philosophie und Religion and the Freiheitsschrift, (...) disclosing an enduring Dantean influence which first predicts, then persists throughout this stage of Schelling’s philosophical development. (shrink)

A legacy of Enlightenment thought was to see the human as separate from nature. Human history was neatly distinguished from natural history. The age of Anthropocene has now put all that into question. This human exceptionalism is seen by some as responsible for the devastating impact humans have had on the planet. But if we give up on the nature / culture distinction and see human activity as just another type of natural process, we risk losing our ability to attribute (...) moral agency and responsibility to humanity for the environmental crisis, argues Giuseppina D’Oro. (shrink)

In 2012, a German court ruled that religious circumcision of male minors constitutes criminal bodily assault. Muslim and Jewish groups responded with outrage, with some commentators pegging the ruling to Islamophobic and anti-Semitic motivations. In doing so, these commentators failed to engage with any of the legal and ethical arguments actually given by the court in its landmark decision. In this brief commentary, I argue that a firm distinction must be drawn between criticisms of religious practices that stem from irrational (...) prejudice and bigoted attitudes and those that are grounded in sound moral reasoning. Given that ritual circumcision is a pre-Enlightenment custom that elevates the inclinations of the community over the rights of the individual, it is hardly surprising that a growing number of post-Enlightenment philosophers and legal scholars are taking an ethical stand against it. As the “circumcision debate” continues, parties on all sides of the issue must remember to reason through the relevant considerations with care and respect. (shrink)

This paper analyses the question concerning the scope, possibility and legitimation of critical discourse. For this we understand the kind of discourse in which a single individual or a minority group sustain claims against what is considered correct by a majority. We concentrate in a controversy where this problem receives a focal attention: the debate between Habermas and Gadamer. The problem with critical discourse there is its apparent paradoxical status. On the one side, it is questioned whether the conditions of (...) meaning elucidated by hermeneutics does not make critical discourse impossible. Hermeneutics replies asking whether the scope of critical discourse critical theory is committed to is not beyond the condition of any possible discourse. Our analysis of the dispute elucidates a common assumption to both perspectives: the similar role both attribute to implicit recognition (although understood in a very different material way) in the constitution of the symbolic domain. We take profit of the inscription of Wittgenstein in the debate in order to asses critically the controversy through the analysis of this assumption. (shrink)

This study assessed external debts and the financing of education in Nigeria using time series data obtained from World Bank, and CBN Statistical Bulletin covering a period of 31 years from 1988 -2018. The model of the study was derived, while the data collected were analysed using the Ordinary Least Squares. Diagnostic tests such as Augmented Dickey- Fuller (ADF) unit root test, Johansen co-integration, Vector Error Correction (VEC) techniques of estimation, and Granger Causality tests were all performed. Findings revealed a (...) significant long-run relationship between external debts and the financing of education; external debts have a significant effect (F=39.07055, p<.05) on the financing of education in Nigeria; external debt stock and external debt service payment have no significant effect on the financing of education; real GDP and Exchange rate have a significant effect on the financing of education in Nigeria respectively. Based on these findings, it was concluded that external debt is a big hindrance to the financing of education and consequently, the economic growth of Nigeria. It was recommended amongst others that the government should use borrowed funds from external sources for productive capital projects or development initiatives such as investment in education and the eradication of illiteracy. (shrink)

On ground shared by environmental hermeneutics, critical social theory, and environmentally minded feminism, this article attempts to conciliate between the nearly antithetical ethical viewpoints of environmental philosophers David Abram and Steven Vogel. It will demonstrate first that Abram’s linguistic arguments for extending ethical considerability to nonhuman nature succumb to two of Vogel’s debilitating critiques, which it labels the social constructivist critique and the discourse ethics critique, and secondly that Abram fails to guard against the problem of human-human oppression. The article (...) also points out, on the other hand, that while Vogel evades the problem of human-human oppression, his view fails to protect against the problem of dangerous anthropocentrism. Operating within the boundaries that Vogel establishes, it will seek to avoid the pitfalls of Abram’s view, to address the underlying ideology that leads to both types of oppression, and to eliminate the problem of dangerous anthropocentrism. To do so it draws upon the arguments of Trish Glazebrook, contending that Abram’s appeals to the “speech” of nature can be more effectively conceptualized as erotic appeals, and that engaging in this call-and-response eros promotes the development of virtues that undermine our current ideology and extend to both the human and the nonhuman. (shrink)

Does the soul have powers? If so, what general account can philosophy give of powers of the soul? One can broach some of Thomas Aquinas’s more obscure teachings concerning the soul and its powers, such as that the soul alone is the subject of some powers and that powers flow from the soul, by asking these broad questions. Many commentators have preferred, however, to focus on specific powers of the soul, which has resulted in detailed studies of, for example, the (...) intellect and the will. Here, however, I take up powers of the soul in general and, through a causal analysis of their being, articulate what they are. (shrink)

Human cloning until recently has been considered to belong to the domain of science fiction; now it is a tangible possibility, a hopeful as well as a fearsome one. One of the fears that necessarily come along with it is about the peril cloning might represent for human uniqueness, since the clones are expected to be identical to their prototypes; this would unavoidably compromise moral agents’ right to a unique identity. In this paper I will put under examination the argument (...) against cloning that is based upon the right to a unique identity; I will argue that cloning represents no actual threat for anybody’s unique identity, therefore this argument is futile. I will also support the view that the so-called right to a unique identity is not as indisputable as to serve as the basis of a moral argument against human reproductive cloning. (shrink)

Emotion development research centrally concerns capacities to produce emotions and to think about them. We distinguish these enterprises and consider a novel account of how they might be related. On one recent account, the capacity to have emotions of various kinds comes by way of the acquisition of emotion concepts. This account relies on a constructionist theory of emotions and an embodied theory of emotion concepts. We explicate these elements, then raise a challenge for the approach. It appears to be (...) incompatible with various familiar ways in which cognitions about one’s own emotions can come apart from episodes of emotion. (shrink)

This chapter deals with the ways in which entrepreneurships driven by industrial design and the strategies for interconnecting design for innovation are articulated. In the first instance, current practices are recognized in order to analyze the different processes that entrepreneurial dynamics go through. This analysis is carried out from a systemic perspective, at three levels of abstraction: designer, entrepreneurship and ecosystem. The theoretical and conceptual framework will be structured based on the innovations driven by design, which occur around the designer, (...) his personal projects, and the possible interactions and singularities offered by living spaces. The objective of this work is to unravel the eventual relationships of the entrepreneurial designer in the ecosystem and to highlight the potential added by emerging connections, which allow for the projection of synergistic actions with other actors to create value(s). In this way, other possible views of the entrepreneurial process are provided, where the cultural and philosophical dimension that characterizes industrial designers allows them to achieve a higher quality of life, designing and producing collectively (in) their environment. (shrink)

Readers new to Santayana may feel puzzled by aspects of Scepticism and Animal Faith (1923). A number of Santayana’s early critics were puzzled as well. Some found the relation between scepticism and common sense troublesome. Others were put off by Santayana’s indirect poetic style and his lack of “clarity.” In this paper I reflect on these topics, as well as the relation between his poetic style and his vision of philosophical truth and sublimity. This should illuminate his “discovery” of essence, (...) which he re-enacts in this book and which holds the key to understanding Santayana’s mature project. (shrink)

This article, which appeared in the Library of Living Philosophers series, is a thought experiment that imagines Danto’s analytical framework reaching well beyond what he had called the “drab” state of philosophy in the early 2000s. It describes, in minimalist terms, what he saw as the fundamental project of all philosophy -- regardless of the specific theoretical content any particular philosopher might put forth. It discusses his central (and still underdeveloped) notion of representation, and his quasi-Hegelian view of how art (...) theory has been altered by its own recently emerging self-consciousness. It draws out the implications of his Argument from Intelligibility, which informs Danto’s interest in human self-consciousness, in autonomy, and (somewhat speculatively) in “spirit.”. (shrink)

This paper, written from the perspective of a liberal Protestant, addresses Karl Barth’s famous dispute with his predecessor Friedrich Schleiermacher. It claims that despite the vehemence he often employs against Schleiermacher, a careful assessment of Barth reveals an ever-shifting ambivalence. Barth’s dismissal was very much a heated reaction amidst post-war circumstances, and Schleiermacher served as a symbol for aspects of pre-war culture and theology that are not necessarily reflective of Schleiermacher’s original project. Later in his career, Barth seems to have (...) yearned to rehabilitate aspects of that very project. (shrink)

Olfactory perception provides a promising test case for enactivism, since smelling involves actively sampling our surrounding environment by sniffing. Smelling deploys implicit skillful knowledge of how our movement and the airflow around us yield olfactory experiences. The hybrid nature of olfactory experience makes it an ideal test case for enactivism with its esteem for touch and theoretical roots in vision. Olfaction is like vision in facilitating the perception of distal objects, yet it requires us to breath in and physically contact (...) the sensory object in a manner similar to touch. The paper offers an analysis of the central theoretical components of enactivism, whose soundness and empirical viability are tested using the empirical literature on sniffing. It will be shown that even if sniffing is an essential component of olfaction, the motoric component is not necessary for perceiving smells, which is contrary to the most crucial tenet of enactivism. Thus, the paper concludes that the theory cannot account for olfactory perception. (shrink)

Dewey’s view of art “as experience” takes the art object proper to be distinct from the physical artifact. The "work of art" is a label for a set of perceptual procedures in relation to a complex "situation" – one that is pregnant with vitality and saturated with “pervasive quality.” This qualitative trait is organic rather than merely mechanical in that the informed percipient’s sensibilities have already been sufficiently “funded” with a repertoire of emotionally imbued responses that culminate in a distinctive (...) “consummatory” experience. This account intends to combine classic notions of intrinsicality and instrumentality into a general story about art, which gets elevated into an honorific trait of human life generally -- all within a naturalistic framework. (shrink)

From famous figures in the history of philosophy to questions in religious theology to the relationship between knowledge and power, The Handy Western Philosophy Answer Book: Ancient Greek to Its Influence on Philosophy Today takes the sometimes esoteric ideas and the jumble of names and makes them easy to understand, enriching readers' lives and answering the question "What do the ancient Greek philosophers have to teach us about contemporary culture?".

Thirteen essays in this volume explore and investigate diverse contemporary philosophicla themes and issues...

In Gregory the Great’s Pastoral Care the balance of the Christian life of the clergy not only permeates Gregory’s discussions in each major section of the book but also this theological motif served him to challenge the tendency of the clergy of his times to have a negative attitude towards the active life.

Philosophers have rightly condemned lookism—that is, discrimination in favor of attractive people or against unattractive people—in education, the justice system, the workplace and elsewhere. Surprisingly, however, the almost universal preference for attractive romantic and sexual partners has rarely received serious ethical scrutiny. On its face, it’s unclear whether this is a form of discrimination we should reject or tolerate. I consider arguments for both views. On the one hand, a strong case can be made that preferring attractive partners is bad. (...) The idea is that choosing partners based on looks seems essentially similar to other objectionable forms of discrimination. (In particular, the preference for attractive partners is arguably both unfair and harmful to a significant degree.) One can try to resist this conclusion in several ways. I consider three possible replies. The first has to do with the possibility of controlling our partner preferences. The second pertains to attractiveness and “good genes”. The last attempts to link certain aspects of attractiveness to a prospective partner’s personality and values. I argue that the first two replies fail conclusively, while the third only amounts to a limited defense of a particular kind of attractiveness preference. So the idea that we should often avoid preferring attractive partners is compelling. (shrink)

Open peer commentary on the article “Sensorimotor Direct Realism: How We Enact Our World” by Michael Beaton. Upshot: In light of the construal of sensorimotor theory offered by the target article, this commentary examines the role the theory should admit for internal representation.

Over decades of teaching systematic theology at Union Theological Seminary (New York), Christopher Morse has set out to salvage “dogmatics” as a postmodern theological discipline that nevertheless retains a (more or less literal) construal of the apocalyptic gospel message. This article attempts to clarify this project in conversation with William James’ best-known work on religious belief.

The verb 'imagine' admits of perspectival modification: we can imagine things from above, from a distant point of view, or from the point of view of a Russian. But in such cases, there need be no person, either real or imagined, who is above or distant from what is imagined, or who has the point of view of a Russian. We call this the puzzle of perspectival displacement. This paper sets out the puzzle, shows how it does not just concern (...) language, but also states of imagining themselves, and then presents a solution. The solution draws on the idea that many reports of imagining conceal a distinctive kind of question, and such concealed questions have an extra argument place for (what we will call) an experiencer from whose perspective things are imagined. This solution has a range of advantages over other proposals in the literature, and helps to advance two debates concerning perspectival engagement with fiction. (shrink)

Arguments concerning central issues of contemporary Medical Ethics often not only bear similarities, but also derive their sheer essence from notions which belong to the celebrated history of Ethics. Thus, argumentation pro euthanasia and assisted suicide which focus on the detainment of dignity and the ensuring of posthumous reputation on behalf of the moral agent is shown to echo stoic views on arête and the subordination of life to the primary human goal, namely the achievement of virtue. The progress made (...) in palliative care when seen alongside the — steadily increasing — requests for suicide, is indicative of the fact that, though pain now days can be effectively controlled, moral agents often consider the preservation of their life detrimental to the detainment of virtue or posthumous reputation. The stoic view is considered to justify elective death as a personal choice, but is deemed inadequate as well as inconsistent in the broader context of a coherent value theory. (shrink)

Classical Greek philosophy in its struggle to grasp the material world from its very beginning has been marked by the – sometimes undercurrent, some others overt and even intense, but never idle – juxtaposition between the mind and the senses, logos and perception or, if the anachronism is allowed, between realism and idealism. Parmenides is reportedly the first philosopher to insistently assert that thought and being are the same by his famous aphorism τὸ γὰρ αὐτὸ νοεῖν ἐστί τε καὶ εἶναι, (...) and that the “way of truth”, as opposed to the “way of opinion”, only runs through the intellect, since the truth is unattainable by the illusory senses. Thus, true may be only what our intellect can firmly grasp, and – by an easy, though not equally sound step – vice versa: that which our intellect can firmly grasp is necessarily true. In this paper I intend to set off Parmenides’ apparent influence on Anselm with regard to the latter’s celebrated ontological argument concerning the existence of God, and the influence of both on Spinoza’s Ethica, which is founded on the key tenet that not only does God necessarily exist – since God is intellectually conceivable –, but that God also by necessity is an utterly good one. (shrink)

The construction of complex ontologies can be facilitated by adapting existing vocabularies. There is little clarity and in fact little consensus as to what modifications of vocabularies are necessary in order to re-engineer them into ontologies. In this paper we present a method that provides clear steps to follow when re-engineering a thesaurus. The method makes use of top-level ontologies and was derived from the structural differences between thesauri and ontologies as well as from best practices in modeling, some of (...) which have been advocated in the biomedical domain. We illustrate each step of our method with examples from a re-engineering case study about agricultural fertilizers based on the AGROVOC thesaurus. Our method makes clear that re-engineering thesauri requires far more than just a syntactic conversion into a formal language or other easily automatable steps. The method can not only be used for re-engineering thesauri, but does also summarize steps for building ontologies in general, and can hence be adapted for the re-engineering of other types of vocabularies or terminologies. (shrink)

The goal of this essay is to explain how Wittgenstein's philosophy may be helpful for understanding and addressing challenges to cross-cultural communication in educational contexts. In particular, the notions of “hinge,” “intellectual distance,” and “grounds” from On Certainty will be helpful for identifying cultural differences. Wittgenstein's dialogical conception of philosophy in Philosophical Investigations will be helpful for addressing that cultural difference in conversation. While here can be no panacea to address all potential sources of confusion, Wittgenstein's philosophy has strong resources (...) that are helpful for curbing some of our human tendencies to misunderstand other people. (shrink)

We discuss potential biorisks from large language models (LLMs). AI assistants based on LLMs such as ChatGPT have been shown to significantly reduce barriers to entry for actors wishing to synthesize dangerous, potentially novel pathogens and chemical weapons. The harms from deploying such bioagents could be further magnified by AI-assisted misinformation. We endorse several policy responses to these dangers, including prerelease evaluations of biomedical AIs by subject-matter experts, enhanced surveillance and lab screening procedures, restrictions on AI training data, and access (...) controls on biomedical AI. We conclude with a suggestion about future research directions in bioethics. (shrink)

This article is a preliminary presentation of conjunctive paraconsistency, the claim that there might be non-explosive true contradictions, but contradictory propositions cannot be considered separately true. In case of true ‘p and not p’, the conjuncts must be held untrue, Simplification fails. The conjunctive approach is dual to non-adjunctive conceptions of inconsistency, informed by the idea that there might be cases in which a proposition is true and its negation is true too, but the conjunction is untrue, Adjunction fails. While (...) non-adjunctivism is a well-known option, the other view is not so much studied nowadays, but it was not unknown in the tradition, and there are some positive suggestions, in recent literature, that the position is plausible and deserves to be developed. The article compares conjunctivism, non-adjunctivism and dialetheism, then focuses on some possible justifications, costs and benefits of the conjunctive view. (shrink)

In this chapter I offer a critique of the received way of thinking about responsibility for collective inaction and propose an alternative approach that takes as its point of departure the epistemic agency exhibited by people navigating impossible situations together. One such situation is becoming increasingly common in the context of climate change: so-called “natural” disasters wreaking havoc on communities—flooding homes, collapsing infrastructures, and straining the capacities of existing organizations to safeguard lives and livelihoods. What happens when philosophical reflection begins (...) here—in places where the institutions and practices that have emerged over the last century seem incapable of addressing the problems communities face now, and where people find themselves turning to one another for the sake of their own survival? (shrink)

Richard Rorty’s conception of literature has been criticised more than acclaimed. While Rorty certainly has impacted literary studies, a comprehensive account of his understanding of literature is still lacking. Moreover, while literature is seen as significant to his later work, the philosophical role this plays in Rortyan thought is underexamined and underappreciated. This paper aims to provide an account of the role of literature and the “literary” in Rorty’s philosophy and the functions he assigns to literature and poetry – in (...) a broad and narrow sense – in democratic cultures. Beginning with an account of Rorty’s conceptions of metaphor and “unfamiliar” language, it draws on this to explain Rorty’s parallel view of literature in the “narrower sense” as playing the same role in culture as metaphors do in language. “Stimulating” literature unsettles settled selves and beliefs and expands human imagination. Using Rorty’s readings of Lolita and 1984 as examples, it shows that to him, literature not only plays a part in increasing empathy and solidarity but has a distinct therapeutic epistemological task: it helps individuals and societies adopt a more pluralist, ironist, post-metaphysical outlook. Both are important democratic functions. For these reasons, Rorty recommends that we work to realise a “literary” culture that rejects any ontologically inflected distinctions between kinds of texts, where philosophy becomes comparative “literary” criticism, and we see literature in the “narrower sense” as equally necessary material for making selves, communities and just institutions as any philosophical or political treatise. (shrink)

This essay examines Ludwig Wittgenstein's 'Picture Theory' and the modes of reality presented by logical atomism. Simply this theory argues that the world can be understood by simple entities which can be broken down to substances that do not belong to anything else. This essay will illustrate that the Picture Theory cannot ultimately portray an accurate account of reality based on simples. To contrast this claim, I will use René Descartes as a means of countering my claim against Wittgenstein. Yet (...) this will only strengthen my argument regarding simples. Ultimately, this demonstrates that the Picture Theory is unable to accurately depict a complex reality. (shrink)

This paper traces the philosophical concept of life prior to Kant and uses this to contextualize his account of aesthetic judgment as a form of life. It argues on this basis that, according to Kant, the form that taste claims for itself, as explicated in its four moments, results in a demand being placed on the transcendental philosopher to admit the idea of an ultimate subjective basis of all cognitive activities in human beings, that is, a shared principle and form (...) of cognititive life htat is uniquely human. (shrink)

Defense of an account of intrinsic properties in terms of (what is now called) grounding rather than naturalness.