Editors' introduction to 3rd thematic issue on philosophy of medicine.

Arthur Danto asserts that Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington embodies the rhetoric paradigm of internal beauty’s meaning. However, the relationship to the Kant’s pulchritudo adhaerens is not an easy one: Danto’s recalls against the self-referent formalism of Greenberg’s Modernism and his tacit issues about the environmental non-monumentality of Richard Serra’s Minimalism, are, most importantly, haunted by the unquestioned spectral logic of the image embodiment. The beholders’ reflecting shape on the funeral Wall is, finally, both a pathetic index (...) and a medial incarnation–e.g. a Verkörperung–of the underworld. (shrink)

The standard counterexamples to David Lewis’s account of intrinsicality involve two sorts of properties: identity properties and necessary properties. Proponents of the account have attempted to deflect these counterexamples in a number of ways. This paper argues that none of these moves are legitimate. Furthermore, this paper argues that no account along the lines of Lewis’s can succeed, for an adequate account of intrinsicality must be sensitive to hyperintensional distinctions among properties.

Resemblances obtain not only between objects but between properties. Resemblances of the latter sort - in particular resemblances between quantitative properties - prove to be the downfall of a well-known theory of universals, namely the one presented by David Armstrong. This paper examines Armstrong's efforts to account for such resemblances within the framework of his theory and also explores several extensions of that theory. All of them fail.

The public rejection of scientific claims is widely recognized by scientific and governmental institutions to be threatening to modern democratic societies. Intense conflict between science and the public over diverse health and environmental issues have invited speculation by concerned officials regarding both the source of and the solution to the problem of public resistance towards scientific and policy positions on such hot-button issues as global warming, genetically modified crops, environmental toxins, and nuclear waste disposal. The London Royal Society’s influential report (...) “Public Understanding of Science”, which spearheaded the now-thriving area of science... (shrink)

The evidence-based medicine (EBM) movement is touted as a new paradigm in medical education and practice, a description that carries with it an enthusiasm for science that has not been seen since logical positivism flourished (circa 1920–1950). At the same time, the term ‘‘evidence-based medicine’’ has a ring of obviousness to it, as few physicians, one suspects, would claim that they do not attempt to base their clinical decision-making on available evidence. However, the apparent obviousness of EBM can and should (...) be challenged on the grounds of how ‘evidence’ has been problematised in the philosophy of science. EBM enthusiasm, it follows, ought to be tempered. The post-positivist, feminist, and phenomenological philosophies of science that are examined in this paper contest the seemingly unproblematic nature of evidence that underlies EBM by emphasizing different features of the social nature of science. The appeal to the authority of evidence that characterizes evidence-based practices does not increase objectivity but rather obscures the subjective elements that inescapably enter all forms of human inquiry. The seeming common sense of EBM only occurs because of its assumed removal from the social context of medical practice. In the current age where the institutional power of medicine is suspect, a model that represents biomedicine as politically disinterested or merely scientific should give pause. (shrink)

In "Does Four-Dimensionalism Explain Coincidence" Mark Moyer argues that there is no reason to prefer the four-dimensionalist (or perdurantist) explanation of coincidence to the three-dimensionalist (or endurantist) explanation. I argue that Moyer's formulations of perdurantism and endurantism lead him to overlook the perdurantist's advantage. A more satisfactory formulation of these views reveals a puzzle of coincidence that Moyer does not consider, and the perdurantist's treatment of this puzzle is clearly preferable.

Questions regarding the formation of the Universe and ‘what was there’ before it came to existence have been of great interest to mankind at all times. Several suggestions have been presented during the ages – mostly assuming a preliminary state prior to creation. Nevertheless, theories that require initial conditions are not considered complete, since they lack an explanation of what created such conditions. We therefore propose the ‘Creatio Ex Nihilo’ (CEN) theory, aimed at describing the origin of the Universe from (...) ‘nothing’ in information terms. The suggested framework does not require amendments to the laws of physics: but rather provides a new scenario to the Universe initiation process, and from that point merges with state-of-the-art cosmological models. The paper is aimed at providing a first step towards a more complete model of the Universe creation – proving that creation Ex Nihilo is feasible. Further adjustments, elaborations, formalisms and experiments are required to formulate and support the theory. (shrink)

Because “evidence” is at issue in evidence-based medicine (EBM), the critical responses to the movement have taken up themes from post-positivist philosophy of science to demonstrate the untenability of the objectivist account of evidence. While these post-positivist critiques seem largely correct, I propose that when they focus their analyses on what counts as evidence, the critics miss important and desirable pragmatic features of the evidence-based approach. This article redirects critical attention toward EBM’s rigid hierarchy of evidence as the culprit of (...) its objectionable epistemic practices. It reframes the EBM discourse in light of a distinction between objectivist and pragmatic epistemology, which allows for a more nuanced analysis of EBM than previously offered: one that is not either/or in its evaluation of the decision-making technology as either iconoclastic or creedal. -/- . (shrink)

While most of healthcare research and practice fully endorses evidence-based healthcare, a minority view borrows popular themes from philosophy of science like underdetermination and value-ladenness to question the legitimacy of the evidence-based movement’s philosophical underpinnings. While the feminist origins go unacknowledged, those critics adopt a feminist reading of the “gap argument” to challenge the perceived objectivism of evidence-based practice. From there, the critics seem to despair over the “subjective elements” that values introduce to clinical reasoning, demonstrating that they do not (...) subscribe to feminist science studies’ normative program——where contextual values can enable good science and justified decisions. In this paper, I investigate why it is that the critics of evidence-based medicine adopt feminist science’s characterization of the problem but resist the productive solutions offered by those same theorists. I suggest that the common feminist empiricist appeal to idealized epistemic communities is impractical for those working within the current biomedical context and instead offer an alternate stream of feminist research into the empirical content of values (found in the work of Elizabeth Anderson and Sharyn Clough) as a more helpful recourse for facilitating the important task of legitimate and justified clinical decision-making. I use a case study on clinical decision-making to illustrate the fruitfulness of the latter feminist empiricist framework. -/- See response by Sharyn Clough: http://wp.me/p1Bfg0-1aN See reply by Maya Goldenberg: http://wp.me/p1Bfg0-1oY. (shrink)

With twentieth- and twenty-first-century philosophy of science’s unfolding acceptance of the nature of scientific inquiry being value-laden, the persistent worry has been that there are no means for legitimate negotiation of the social or non-epistemic values that enter into science. The rejection of the value-free ideal in science has thereby been coupled with the spectres of indiscriminate relativism and bias in scientific inquiry. I challenge this view in the context of recently expressed concerns regarding Canada's death of evidence controversy. The (...) worry, raised by Stathis Psillos, is that as constructivist accounts of science demoted the previously secure status of evidence for drawing justified conclusions in science, we were left with no rational delineation between the right and wrong values for science. The implication for the death of evidence controversy is that we may have no rational grounds for claiming that the Canadian Government is wrong to interfere with scientific enterprise. But he does offer another avenue for reaching the conclusion that the wrong social values are directing the current stifling of some sectors of Canadian science. Psillos draws from standpoint epistemologies to devise a salient defence of ‘valuing evidence’ as a universalizable social value. That is, government bodies ought to enable scientific research via adequate funding as well as political non-interference. In this paper, I counter that non-epistemic values can be rationally evaluated and that standpoint epistemology’s universalizable standpoint provides an inadequate framework for negotiating social values in science. Regarding, I draw from the evidence-based medicine debate in philosophy of medicine and from feminist empiricist investigations into the science–values relationship in order to make the argument for empirically driven value arbitration. If social values can be rationally chosen in the context of justification, then we can have grounds for charging the Canadian leadership with being ‘at war with science’. I further argue that my recommended empiricist methodology is preferable to Psillos’s search for universalizable perspectives for negotiating social values in science because the latter method permits little more than the trivial conclusion that evidence is valuable to science. (shrink)

The once animated efforts in medical phenomenology to integrate the art and science of medicine (or to humanize scientific medicine) have fallen out of philosophical fashion. Yet the current competing medical discourses of evidencebased medicine and patient-centered care suggest that this theoretical endeavor requires renewed attention. In this paper, I attempt to enliven the debate by discussing theoretical weaknesses in the way the “lived body” has operated in the medical phenomenology literature—the problem of the absent body—and highlight how evidence-based medicine (...) has refigured medical phenomenology’s historical nemesis, “biomedicine.” What we now need is a phenomenology of the embodied subject in the age of evidence-based medicine. (shrink)

The conceptualizations of meanings of existence started with the ontological or metaphysical debates in philosophy. Then at the peak of modern times, the school of existentialism dealt with the issue of human existence particularly by citing individual freedom. In all these series of philosophizing, the human being was considered as a singular type entity who thinks and acts in the same way. So, the historical development of philosophical thinking has not brought enough solutions, with regard to the existential issues of (...) human females and other genders. It is through the end of the modern period only, the identities of caste, class, religion, region, ethnicity, gender etc. were taken into serious scrutiny to see the intersectional issues while conceptualizing the ontic status of humans. This article is a look at these aspects of philosophizing in general, and in particular, it analyses the issues of gendered experiences of human beings in cultures. This will lead to examining the meanings of existence for women as a category with reference to the modern writings of Simone de Beauvoir. The possible existence of many genders and the issues in conceiving an essentialist category called woman or man, are being scrutinized in this article through the postmodern writings of Judith Butler. To analyze the experience of genders, this study draws references from various feminist philosophers and concentrates on the existentialist phenomenological writings of Simone de Beauvoir and the deontological phenomenology of Judith Butler. (shrink)

In Clough’s reply paper to me (http://wp.me/p1Bfg0-1aN), she laments how feminist calls for diversity within scientific communities are inadvertently sidelined by our shared feminist empiricist prescriptions. She offers a novel justification for diversity within epistemic communities and challenges me to accept this addendum to my prior prescriptions for biomedical research communities (Goldenberg 2013) on the grounds that they are consistent with the epistemic commitments that I already endorse. In this response, I evaluate and accept her challenge.

The precondition of any feminist politics – a usable category of ‘woman’ – has proved to be difficult to construct, even proposed to be impossible, given the ‘problem of exclusion’. This is the inevitable exclusion of at least some women, as their lives or experiences do not fit into the necessary and sufficient condition(s) that denotes group membership. In this paper, I propose that the problem of exclusion arises not because of inappropriate category membership criteria, but because of the presumption (...) that categories can only be organised by identity relations or shared properties among their members. This criterion of sameness as well as the characterisation of this exclusion as essentialism attests to a metaphysics that is not conducive to resistance and liberatory projects. Following a strain of hybrid thinking in feminist and post-colonial theory, I outline an alternative pluralist logic that confronts oppressive binaries that impede theory work in gender, sexuality, and race theory, and limit political action and resistance. The problem of exclusion is neither irresolvable nor is it essentialism. Instead it is a denial of subjectivity due to pseudodualistic self/Other dichotomies that can be resisted by adopting a new categorial logic. While this paper focuses on the specific problem of formulating a category of ‘woman’, it has implications for other areas of gender, critical race, and postcolonial theory. Rather than working toward an inclusive category founded on sameness, theorists need to develop independent and positive categories grounded in difference. Our current categorial logic does not permit such a project, and therefore a new metaphysics must be adopted. (shrink)

As the quality movement in health care now enters its fourth decade, the language of quality is ubiquitous. Practitioners, organizations, and government agencies alike vociferously testify their commitments to quality and accept numerous forms of governance aimed at improving quality of care. Remarkably, the powerful phrase ‘‘quality of care’’ is rarely defined in the health care literature. Instead it operates as an accepted and assumed goal worth pursuing. The status of evidence-based medicine, for instance, hinges on its ability to improve (...) quality of care, and efforts are made by both proponents and detractors to unpack the contents and outcomes of evidence-based practice while the contents of ‘‘quality of care’’ are presumed to be understood. Because the goals of medicine are far from obvious, this paper investigates the neglected term, ‘‘quality of care,’’ in an effort to understand what it is that health care practices are so uncritically assumed to be striving for. Finding lack of consensus on the terminology in the quality literature, I propose that the term operates rhetorically by way of persuasive appeal (and lack of descriptive meaning). Unsatisfied that ‘‘quality of care’’ operates as a mere buzzword in morally contentious debates over resource allocation and duties of care, I implore health care communities to go beyond mere commitments to quality and, instead, to focus attention on the difficult task of specifying what counts as quality care within an economically constrained health care system. (shrink)

Dreaming has been a subject for debate for thousands of years as to what it entails and how it affects daily living. This paper goes into depth about if dreaming holds reality within, and if morality should be taken into consideration.

We live in an age of evidence-based healthcare, where the concept of evidence has been avidly and often uncritically embraced as a symbol of legitimacy, truth, and justice. By letting the evidence dictate healthcare decision making from the bedside to the policy level, the normative claims that inform decision making appear to be negotiated fairly—without subjectivity, prejudice, or bias. Thus, the term ‘‘evidence-based’’ is typically read in the health sciences as the empirically adequate standard of reasonable practice and a means (...) for increasing certainty. Supporters believe that evidence-based medicine (EBM) can introduce rational order to the deliberative processes of healthcare decision making. It is perhaps puzzling, then, to come across critical perspectives (typically arising from the humanities and the more theory-driven social sciences) raising concerns about a seeming technogovernance being introduced by this deferral to the evidence where power interests can be obfuscated by way of technical resolve. The critics holding this minority view argue that technological solutions to problems of knowledge and practice cannot replace medicine’s normative content. Against EBM’s democratic leanings toward transparency and accountability, medical criteria alone cannot decide valueladen ethically charged decisions. This paper attempts to explain and evaluate this important debate in the philosophy of medicine, focusing specifically on the dispute over 'evidence-based women's health'. (shrink)

The philosophical significance of rhythm in the United States has been undermined from both sides of what Adorno and Horkheimer called the ‘dialectic of enlightenment’. When rhythm has not been falsely exalted, promising a fetishised, racialised ‘return’ to the body, it has been devalued through the tainted associations of rhythmic synchronisation with fascist regimes and the demand for compliance. In this article, I engage these issues as they inflect the politics of musical form. Adorno’s notorious critique of jazz – developed (...) across a wide range of essays spanning three decades (1933-1962) – has been rightly disparaged, but his concept of the politics of metric regularity has not been repudiated. In what follows, I provide an analysis of how metric regularity works for Adorno as a concept – its limitations and presuppositions. Adorno opens up new critical thought about rhythm by taking seriously the problem of the bass drum in jazz and its historical and structural relation to the military march. However, he gets seriously wrong the different implications of marching rhythm for African-American (and therefore American) history, failing to understand its radical difference from the dangers of European fascism for its victims. -/- Transnational rhythmic forms in the black diaspora (including the United States) and the interracial experiences that these forms enable, at least as in-principle possibilities, continually contest the ‘the divisions between life and thought’ that have been taken for granted by majoritarian philosophy in the West. From this perspective, the segregation of intellect from feel (a technical term among musicians to indicate those normatively right aesthetic choices that nevertheless emerge in excess of predetermined rules is not tenable given the polyrhythmic background that must be presupposed in order for any piece of diasporic music, including and especially in the United States, to be intelligible. (shrink)

In accordance with the critical women’s health literature recounting the ways that women are encouraged to submit themselves to various sorts of health “imperatives”, I investigate the messages tacitly conveyed to women in “campaigns for the cure” and breast cancer awareness efforts, which, I argue, overemphasizes a “positive attitude”, healthy lifestyle, and cure rather than prevention of this life-threatening disease. I challenge that the message of hope pervading breast cancer discourse silences the despair felt by many women, furthers a tacit (...) blaming for disease infliction via a rhetoric of personal responsibility, underemphasizes other cogent health determinants like environmental toxicity, and undermines legitimate critiques of current biomedical practices like widespread mammography. While finding a cure for breast cancer is a laudable and worthwhile healthcare goal that can understandably be shared by women’s health activists, corporate sponsors, and the medical community, this paper resists the current formation of campaigns for the cure and “pink ribbon activism” in general. (shrink)

У статті здійснено аналіз понять комунікативної тактики, схарактеризовано білінгвальність комунікативної тактики у текстах українськомовного маркетингового дискурсу на матеріалі українських веб-ресурсів.

What makes a culture and what are the cultural traits identified by people are important questions to be developed more within diaspora studies. This article proposes a critical inquiry into the ways of defining socio-cultural traits through the discussions with Indian diaspora living in the context of Western culture. It suggests hypothesis that there is a possibility of hybrid cultures between the Eastern and Western. The ontological status of being ‘Indian’ would be different while living in India and abroad, and (...) the cultural ontology in those subject positions would also vary to produce hybrid cultures. Theories of migration, culture and gender constitute a background and framework in this study. Reflections on cultural identity and cultural traits are obtained in this study through direct interviews with diaspora Indians living in Germany. In this process of analyses, the methodology of gender is adopted along with other methods of qualitative research to see how the socio-cultural perspectives change after migration to Western cultures, and how those are different among men and women. The preliminary argument derived in this article is that cultural traits can be traced in aspects of people’s daily life, but not only through dominant art forms, literature or historical monuments. It is done with a critical perspective on the existing dominant methods of defining culture. This study has a critic on existing methodologies that are Eurocentric, male-centric and neglecting the individual and mundane experiences of people who live in varied cultural contexts with complex cultural identities. Key words: Culture, Gender, Migration, Germany, Indian Diaspora, Hybridity. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This paper is an analysis on the phenomenological notions of ethics, which Simon de Beauvoir calls as the ethics of ambiguity. Human beings always face ambiguity in their situations of lived world. As far as one is living the life, the ambiguity is unavoidable in her/his actions. Though one tries to hold on the philosophy of internality, to assert no external things are affecting in defining her/his actions or ethical positions, the ambiguity prevails. Simone de Beauvoir’s noted book, Ethics (...) of Ambiguity established that ethics could be understood only in real life contexts. This paper is an attempt to see her arguments from phenomenological approach to maintain that her ethics is more phenomenological than existential. This is a study on ethics from a feminist point of view too, to critically approach the absolute moral values of systems of hierarchy as patriarchy that divide human beings as oppressed and oppressor. -/- . (shrink)

The topic of the present paper is conducting feminist research in South Asia and the way politics works in this process. It is specifically based on the experiences of empirical work done in Kerala, the southernmost state in India, which is unique in being one of the only two states with a strong communist movement. In addition, the numerous religions, castes, and communities of the Kerala region can be profitably analyzed in connection with the policies of the Left, emerging feminist (...) movements, and mechanisms of power. As an indigenous, feminist activist and researcher, I have been working with a Western feminist scholar who is also a university professor, in a project concerning marriage and inheritance in Kerala in the twentieth century. The project is based on various archival materials, as well as interviews with families of different classes and communities, politicians, and religious leaders. The purpose of the paper is to elaborate upon methodological experiences gained from my collaboration as a research assistant for the Western scholar. Specifically, I wish to explore the way power, as based on gender, ethnicity, generation, and the researcher’s position in society, operated when data was collected and interviews carried out. The main thesis of my study is that, through our cooperation, we managed to overcome difficulties that each of us, working alone, would not have been able to surmount. Our production of “knowledge” must be seen in the light of the complex political and cultural power relations prevailing in Kerala, as well as of our own position in society and the role we each played within the research project itself. (shrink)

La “Cultura de la Sensibilidad (Sensibility)” ha sido un término destacado por algunos crı́ticos, para denominar una época entre la Era Augusta y el movimiento romántico. La Sensibilidad (Sensibility) estuvo unida a un sentido de la compasión producida por el sufrimiento del otro. Su máxima expresión fue la “novela sentimental” de Richardson y Sterne. David Hume, con una moral fundada en los conceptos de simpatı́a y benevolencia, ha sido considerado como uno de los artı́fices de esta Cultura. Sin embargo, llevó (...) a cabo una crı́tica del género emergente de la novela, a la que acuso de una afectación excesiva y artificial. En este artı́culo pretendo analizar el papel que tuvo Hume en la Era de la Sensibilidad (Sensibility). (shrink)

Because factory-farmed meat production inflicts gratuitous suffering upon animals and wreaks havoc on the environment, there are morally compelling reasons to become vegetarian. Yet industrial plant agriculture causes the death of many field animals, and this leads some to question whether consumers ought to get some of their protein from certain kinds of non factory-farmed meat. Donald Bruckner, for instance, boldly argues that the harm principle implies an obligation to collect and consume roadkill and that strict vegetarianism is thus immoral. (...) But this argument works only if the following claims are true: all humans have access to roadkill, roadkill would go to waste if those who happen upon it don’t themselves consume it, it’s impossible to harvest vegetables without killing animals, the animals who are killed in plant production are all-things-considered harmed by crop farming, and the best arguments for vegetarianism all endorse the harm principle. As I will argue in this paper, each claim is deeply problematic. Consequently, in most cases, humans ought to strictly eat plants and save the roadkill for cats. (shrink)

This chapter introduces and defends a pragmatist model of aesthetic disagreement that avoids many of the philosophical puzzles generated by the traditional, semantic, approach. Mainstream philosophical inquiry into aesthetic disagreement begins with a rather innocuous assumption: to understand what’s going on we must first explain what disputants are saying, which involves identifying the meaning of the relevant expressions or determining how aesthetic claims could be true. However, this task brings with it a new host of semantic and epistemic puzzles and (...) fails to vindicate the central role aesthetic disagreements occupy in our aesthetic lives more generally. Further, it isn’t clear how settling the meaning of aesthetic expressions bears on everyday aesthetic disagreements. Paying attention to what we do in an aesthetic disagreement will give us a better chance at identifying what matters for determining what we say. (shrink)

The voices of children and young people have been largely neglected in discussions of the extent to which the internet takes into account their needs and concerns. This paper aims to highlight young people’s lived experiences of being online.

In recent discussions, it has been argued that a theory of animal rights is at odds with a liberal abortion policy. In response, Francione (1995) argues that the principles used in the animal rights discourse do not have implications for the abortion debate. I challenge Francione’s conclusion by illustrating that his own framework of animal rights, supplemented by a relational account of moral obligation, can address the moral issue of abortion. I first demonstrate that Francione’s animal rights position, which grounds (...) moral consideration in sentience, is committed to the claim that a sentient fetus has a right to life. I then illustrate that a fully developed account of animal rights that recognizes the special obligations humans have to assist animals when we cause them to be dependent and vulnerable through our voluntary actions or omissions is committed to the following: a woman also has a special obligation to assist a sentient fetus when she causes it to be dependent and vulnerable through her voluntary actions or omissions. From these considerations, it will become evident that a fully developed and consistent animal rights ethic does in fact have implications for the abortion discussion. (shrink)

In The Case for Animal Rights, Tom Regan argues that although all subjects-of-a-life have equal inherent value, there are often differences in the value of lives. According to Regan, lives that have the highest value are lives which have more possible sources of satisfaction. Regan claims that the highest source of satisfaction, which is available to only rational beings, is the satisfaction associated with thinking impartially about moral choices. Since rational beings can bring impartial reasons to bear on decision making, (...) Regan maintains that they have an additional possible source of satisfaction that nonrational beings do not have and, consequently, the lives of rational beings turn out to have greater value.. (shrink)

There is currently a theoretical tension between young children’s failure in False Belief Tasks (FBTs) and their success in a variety of other tasks that also seem to require the ability to ascribe false beliefs to agents. We try to explain this tension by the hypothesis that in the FBT, children think they are asked what the agent should do in the circumstances and not what the agent will do. We explain why this hypothesis is plausible. We examined the hypothesis (...) in two experiments, each involving a new task. In the first task, the hypothesised misunderstanding of the question leads to failure without the need to ascribe a false belief, and we show that failure in this new task is correlated with failure in the FBT. In the second task, passing which requires ascribing a false belief to an agent, and for which we have partial yet encouraging results, the children are asked a question which is unlikely to be misunderstood. Children pass this task much more often than they do a standard FBT. The mentioned tension is thus resolved. We conclude that the so-called False Belief Task probably does not check the ability to ascribe false beliefs but rather linguistic development. (shrink)

It is argued that if we take grounding to be univocal, then there is a serious tension between truth-grounding and one commonly assumed structural principle for grounding, namely transitivity. The primary claim of the article is that truth-grounding cannot be transitive. Accordingly, it is either the case that grounding is not transitive or that truth-grounding is not grounding, or both.

The role of imagination in Descartes. The critic of Sartre to the concept of image in Descartes.

A representationalist-friendly introduction to representationalism which covers a number of central problems and objections.

This paper discusses methodological similarities between Collingwood's approach to causation and contemporary manipulability-based views. Firstly, I argue that on both approaches there is a preoccupation with the origin of causal concepts which further connects to the aim of establishing the priority of a certain concept/sense of causation as more fundamental. The significant difference lies in Collingwood's focus on the logical and historical priority (Collingwood's sense I) while in more recent theories the focus has been on psychology (i.e., on different philosophical (...) concepts of causation tested in psychological setting-- Woodward, Waskan, Gijsbers & de Bruin). Secondly, I argue that on both Collingwood's views and contemporary approaches (especially Menzies & Price, Price, but also Woodward) there is an important connection between causation and the agent's perspective. This can be subsumed under what Collingwood identifies as the main presupposition underlying causal thought: the relation between the agent's perceived situation and the agent's desired situation/ goal. More broadly, the recent views on causation under discussion share Collingwood's aim of elucidating the problem of causation through investigating causal knowledge and thus can be integrated with his wider project of addressing metaphysical issues through the means of epistemology. (shrink)

Any effort to specify identity conditions for corporations faces significant challenges. Corporations are amorphous. Nature draws no hard lines defining where they start or stop, whether in space or time. Corporations are also frustratingly dynamic. They often change the most basic aspects of their composition by exchanging parts, splitting and merging, changing ownership, and reworking fundamental internal operations. -/- Even so, we apply corporate identity conditions all the time. Both law and common intuition recognize that corporations do things—like pollute environments (...) or mislabel addictive medications—that call for judgment. Imposing judgment on corporations presupposes some implicit view of corporate identity that allows us to say, “This corporation that we now judge is the same one that misbehaved.” -/- This chapter draws on evidence from court decisions and experimental philosophy to unpack the fundamentally different visions of corporate identity implicitly encoded in law and in common intuition. The discrepancies suggest important lessons for lawmakers and corporate managers. (shrink)

The metaphysics of gender and race is a growing area of concern in contemporary analytic metaphysics, with many different views about the nature of gender and race being submitted and discussed. But what are these debates about? What questions are these accounts trying to answer? And is there real disagreement between advocates of differ- ent views about race or gender? If so, what are they really disagreeing about? In this paper I want to develop a view about what the debates (...) in the metaphysics of gender and race are about, namely, a version of metaphysical deflationism, according to which these debates are about how we actually use or should use the terms ‘gender’ and ‘race’ (and other related terms), where moral and political considerations play a central role. I will also argue that my version of the view can overcome some recent and powerful objections to metaphysical deflationism of- fered by Elizabeth Barnes (2014, 2017). (shrink)

This is a chapter written for an audience that is not intimately familiar with the philosophy of animal consumption. It provides an overview of the harms that animals, the environment, and humans endure as a result of industrial animal agriculture, and it concludes with a defense of ostroveganism and a tentative defense of cultured meat.

There is a curious phenomenon where people from marginalized populations are taken to be arrogant when they show no signs of superiority. In effect, their actions are misconstrued, and their attitudes are rendered unintelligible. Given that arrogance is standardly taken to be a flaw in one’s moral character, understanding such misattributions should give us insight into the affective marginalization many people face. This talk aims to give a thorough exploration of arrogance under oppression. I argue that arrogance is a kind (...) of self-preoccupation that involves projecting one’s values, goals, and concerns onto others as if they were objective values, goals, and concerns. When the affectively marginalized communicate their self-respect through things like protest, people mistake that self-respect as self-preoccupation given how the affectively marginalized are constructed. Furthermore, given how affective marginalization not only inhibits how the marginalized are understood by others, but inhibits their own affective lives, I argue that taking up an arrogant attitude is not always morally vicious, but can be a beautiful form of political resistance but all things considered good. (shrink)

Philosophers of race and other writers in the Black and Latinx intellectual traditions have remarked on what it is like to live under “the racial gaze,” to be shaped and limited by the way whites perceive us. However, little work has been spent developing how the racial gaze functions in whites’, and other racially privileged people’s, moral psychology. I argue in this paper that there is a morally objectionable way of perceiving people of color. This claim builds on an insight (...) from Iris Murdoch that our perception can be morally evaluable and extends it to issues of race. I articulate how racial stereotypes and misvaluing distort one’s perception of people of color and that these distortions are organizing around a dominant conception for race that plays an important role in the oppression of people of color. I believe understanding racist perception lays a foundation for understanding the moral dimensions of interpersonal (as opposed to structural) racism. (shrink)

According to the standard view in philosophy, intentionality is the mark of genuine action. In psychology, human cognition and agency are now widely explained in terms of the workings of two distinct systems (or types of processes), and intentionality is not a central notion in this dual-system theory. Further, it is often claimed, in psychology, that most human actions are automatic, rather than consciously controlled. This raises pressing questions. Does the dual-system theory preserve the philosophical account of intentional action? How (...) much of our behavior is intentional according to this view? And what is the role of consciousness? I will propose here a revised account of intentional action within the dual-system framework, and we will see that most of our behavior can qualify as intentional, even if most of it is automatic. An important lesson will be that philosophical accounts of intentional action need to pay more attention to the role of consciousness in action. (shrink)

There are many different meanings of sustainability and precaution and no evident connection between the new normative concepts and the traditional moral theories. We seek an ethical basis for sustainability and precaution—a common framework that can serve as a means of resolving the conceptual ambiguities of the new normative concepts and the conflicts between new and traditional moral concepts and theories. We employ a systemic approach to analyze the past and possible future extension of ethics and establish an inclusive framework (...) of ethical extension. This framework forms the basis for what we call a systemic ethic. (shrink)

The nature and consequences of readers’ affective engagement with literature has, in recent years, captured the attention of experimental psychologists and philosophers alike. Psychological studies have focused principally on the causal mechanisms explaining our affective interactions with fictions, prescinding from questions concerning their rational justifiability. Transportation Theory, for instance, has sought to map out the mechanisms the reader tracks the narrative experientially, mirroring its descriptions through first-personal perceptual imaginings, affective and motor responses and even evaluative beliefs. Analytical philosophers, by contrast, (...) have largely focussed on the problems fiction poses for traditional theories of rationality (as in the ‘Paradox of Fiction), challenging fiction’s wider epistemic value. The result has been a theoretical impasse in which the power of fiction to affectively ‘transport’ a reader is at once often lauded (by psychologists) as a privileged route to interpersonal understanding, and condemned (by philosophers) as an abdication of the authority of reason. This chapter surveys some of the central claims on both sides, tracing the source of the debate to competing conceptions of rationality. (shrink)

Originally published in 1975, this is the concluding section of E.P. Thompson's study of the 18th century English legislation known as "the Black Act." Thompson, a Marxist historian, here embraces and defends the notion of the rule of law, famously calling it "an unqualified human good" (p. 208).

It is natural to assume that every value bearer must be good, bad, or neutral. This paper argues that this assumption is false if value incomparability is possible. More precisely, if value incommensurability is possible, then there is a fourth category of absolute value, in addition to the good, the bad, and the neutral.

The present paper discusses different approaches to metaphysics and defends a specific, non-deflationary approach that nevertheless qualifies as scientifically-grounded and, consequently, as acceptable from the naturalistic viewpoint. By critically assessing some recent work on science and metaphysics, we argue that such a sophisticated form of naturalism, which preserves the autonomy of metaphysics as an a priori enterprise yet pays due attention to the indications coming from our best science, is not only workable but recommended.