Leibniz' first problem with contingency stems from his doctrine of divine creation (not his later doctrine of truth) and is solved via his concepts of necessity per se, etc. (not via his later concept of infinite analysis). I scrutinize some of the earliest texts in which the first problem and its solution occur. I compare his "per se modal concepts" with his concept of analysis and with the traditional concept of metaphysical necessity. I then identify and remove the main obstacle (...) to Leibniz' employment of these concepts by reflecting on his concept of a world and comparing and contrasting it with contemporary conceptions. Finally I sketch the place that this early problem and its solution had in the context of his mature philosophy. A disagreement between Sleigh and Adams which hinges on the assumption that there is just one problem with competing solutions is seen to dissolve in this light. (shrink)

Overview of fundamental work in deontic logic.

We model scientific theories as Bayesian networks. Nodes carry credences and function as abstract representations of propositions within the structure. Directed links carry conditional probabilities and represent connections between those propositions. Updating is Bayesian across the network as a whole. The impact of evidence at one point within a scientific theory can have a very different impact on the network than does evidence of the same strength at a different point. A Bayesian model allows us to envisage and analyze the (...) differential impact of evidence and credence change at different points within a single network and across different theoretical structures. (shrink)

The inclusion of De astrologia in the Lucianic corpus has been disputed for centuries since it appears to defend astrological practices that Lucian elsewhere undercuts. This paper argues for Lucian’s authorship by illustrating its masterful subversion of a captatio benevolentiae and subtle rejection of Stoic astrological practices. The narrator begins the text by blaming phony astrologers and their erroneous predictions for inciting others to “denounce the stars and hate astrology” (ἄστρων τε κατηγοροῦσιν καὶ αὐτὴν ἀστρολογίην μισέουσιν, 2). The narrator assures (...) readers that he, the knowledgeable astrologer, will correct for the “stupidity and laziness” (ἀμαθίῃ καὶ ῥαθυμίῃ, ibid.) that bring about false predictions. The narrator’s credibility quickly decays when he attempts to recast Orpheus, Bellerophon, Icarus, Daedalus, and a host of other mythological figures as Greek astrologers. Lucian’s audience would expect such far-fetched interpretations of myth from the stereotypical Stoic philosopher, a character lampooned elsewhere in the Lucianic corpus. (shrink)

The classic formulation of causal decision theory (CDT) appeals to counterfactuals. It says that you should aim to choose an option that would have a good outcome, were you to choose it. However, this version of CDT faces trouble if the laws of nature are deterministic. After all, the standard theory of counterfactuals says that, if the laws are deterministic, then if anything—including the choice you make—were different in the present, either the laws would be violated or the distant past (...) would be changed. And as several authors have shown, it's easy to transform this upshot of the standard theory of counterfactuals into full-blown counterexamples to CDT. In response to these counterexamples, I argue here that the problem lies, not so much with CDT's guiding idea—that it's the expected causal consequences of your actions that matter for rational decision-making—but with the fact that the classic formulation of CDT doesn't pay sufficient attention to the context-sensitivity of counterfactuals. I develop a contextualist version of CDT which better accounts for this context-sensitivity. And I show that my theory avoids the problems faced by the classic formulation of CDT in determinstic worlds. (shrink)

I explore various ways of integrating the framework for predeterminism, agency, and ability in[P.McNamara, Nordic J. Philos. Logic 5 (2)(2000) 135] with a framework for obligations. However,the agential obligation operator explored here is defined in terms of a non-agential yet personal obligation operator and a non-deontic (and non-normal) agency operator. This is contrary to the main current trend, which assumes statements of personal obligation always take agential complements. Instead, I take the basic form to be an agent’s being obligated (...) to be such that p. I sketch some logics for agential obligation based on personal obligation and agency, first in a fairly familiar context that rules out conflicting personal obligations (and derivatively, conflicting agential obligations), and then in contexts that do allow for conflicts (of both sorts). (shrink)

The standard analysis of supererogation is that of optional actions that are praiseworthy to perform, but not blameworthy to skip. Widespread assumptions are that action beyond the call is at least necessarily equivalent to supererogation ("The Equivalence") and that forgoing certain agent-favoring prerogatives entails supererogation (“The Corollary”). I argue that the classical conception of supererogation is not reconcilable with the Equivalence or the Corollary, and that the classical analysis of supererogation is seriously defective. I sketch an enriched conceptual scheme, “Doing (...) Well Enough (DWE)”, that allows for distinct analyses of action beyond the call and supererogation, among other often neglected fundamental moral notions. Parallels and asymmetries with suberogation are briefly explored. Apparently, DWE’s core act-evaluative notions are more fundamental than the agent-evaluative ones of supererogation/suberogation. (shrink)

Appears to give the first model-theoretic account of both "must" and "ought" (without conflating them with one another). Some key pre-theoretic semantic and pragmatic phenomena that support a negative answer to the main title question are identified and a conclusion of some significance is drawn: a pervasive bipartisan presupposition of twentieth century ethical theory and deontic logic is false. Next, an intuitive model-theoretic framework for "must" and "ought" is hypothesized. It is then shown how this hypothesis helps to explain and (...) predict all the pre-theoretic phenomena previously observed. Next, I show that the framework hypothesized possesses additional expressive and explanatory power (e.g. derivatively predicting the existence of supererogatory and permissibly suboptimal alternatives), thus adding further confirmation that it is on the right track. (shrink)

Continuing prior work by the author, a simple classical system for personal obligation is integrated with a fairly rich system for aretaic (agent-evaluative) appraisal. I then explore various relationships between definable aretaic statuses such as praiseworthiness and blameworthiness and deontic statuses such as obligatoriness and impermissibility. I focus on partitions of the normative statuses generated ("normative positions" but without explicit representation of agency). In addition to being able to model and explore fundamental questions in ethical theory about the connection between (...) blame, praise, permissibility and obligation, this allows me to carefully represent schemes for supererogation and kin. These controversial concepts have provided challenges to both ethical theory and deontic logic, and are among deontic logic's test cases. (shrink)

Im Zentrum von Vallas Umgestaltung der Dialektik als rhetorischer Methode steht ein neues Verständnis von certum, das aus Quintilians Institutio oratoria stammt. Diesem Verständnis zufolge ist Gewissheit in dem begründet, was allgemein akzeptiert wird, nicht in dem, was wahr ist. Damit trennt Valla certum und verum. In den Dialecticae disputationes stellt er Dialektik nicht als eine logische oder philosophische Methode zum Beweis von Wahrheiten dar, sondern als Praxis Geständnisse herbeizuführen und als juristische Produktion konsensueller Gewissheiten. Auch in anderen Werken, etwa (...) den Elegantiae und seinem Kommentar zu Quintilians Institutio, verbindet er durchweg certum mit Konsens, insbesondere Konsens im Sinne der rhetorischen Strategie der status-Theorie. (shrink)

I recast the DWE ("Doing Well Enough") deontic framework as an Andersonian-Kangerian modal framework and explore its metatheory systematically.

This dissertation explores how antiquity and some of its early modern admirers understand the notion of certainty, especially as it is theorized in Quintilian's Institutio Oratoria, a first-century educational manual for the aspiring orator that defines certainty in terms of consensus. As part of a larger discussion of argumentative strategies, Quintilian turns to the “nature of all arguments,” which he defines as “reasoning which lends credence to what is doubtful by means of what is certain” (ratio per ea quae certa (...) sunt fidem dubiis adferens: quae natura est omnium argumentorum, V.10.8). These certainties, he later specifies, include not matters of scientific demonstration or objective fact, but the agreements of various communities: the laws of cities, local customs, and other forms of consensus. As the foundation of persuasive rhetoric, these consensus-based certainties situate argumentation as the practice of crafting agreements rather than demonstrating necessary conclusions. Taking as its point of departure Quintilian's novel understanding of certainty, this study looks to some of Quintilian's intellectual forebears as well as his later readers to show how his work is both a nexus of earlier intellectual developments as well as an important inspiration for later accounts of certainty, even into the early modern period. After illustrating in the first chapters of this dissertation how Quintilian's manual incorporates elements from Aristotelian notions of dialectic and rhetoric as well as from Ciceronian skeptical approaches to epistemology, I show how Quintilian's curriculum for the orator shapes the thought of Italian humanists, especially that of Lorenzo Valla (1406–1457), a reformer of scholastic logic and dialectic, and Giambattista Vico (1668–1744), an influential Neapolitan jurist. Adopting Quintilian's rendering of certainty as a matter of agreements and conventions, these later authors elaborate their own novel approaches to various fields—including law, language, and logic—through this ancient understanding of certum. Contrary to modern notions of certainty as objective or scientific fact, Quintilian's humanist readers continue to root this concept in consensus, both within the courtroom and without. (shrink)

(See also the separate entry for the volume itself.) This introduction has three parts. The first providing an overview of some main lines of research in deontic logic: the emergence of SDL, Chisholm's paradox and the development of dyadic deontic logics, various other puzzles/challenges and areas of development, along with philosophical applications. The second part focus on some actual and potential fruitful interactions between deontic logic, computer science and artificial intelligence. These include applications of deontic logic to AI knowledge representation (...) in legal systems, to modelling computer systems where it is expected that sub-ideal states will emerge and require countermeasures, to norm-governed human interactions with computer systems, and to the representation of some features of multi-agent systems where different agent-like computer systems interact with one another. The third and final part briefly groups and previews the papers in the anthology. (shrink)

While much has been written about the functional profile of intentions, and about their normative or rational status, comparatively little has been said about the subjective authority of intention. What is it about intending that explains the ‘hold’ that an intention has on an agent—a hold that is palpable from her first-person perspective? I argue that several prima facie appealing explanations are not promising. Instead, I maintain that the subjective authority of intention can be explained in terms of the inner (...) structure of intention. In adopting an intention the agent comes to see herself as criticizable depending on whether she executes the intention. This allows us to explain in first-personal terms why the agent becomes disposed to act and deliberate in ways that are characteristic of intention. As intention-formation involves profound changes to reflexive evaluative attitudes, this is the ‘Self-Evaluation’ view of the subjective authority of intention. (shrink)

Many corporations are large, powerful, and wealthy. There are massive shortfalls of global justice, with hundreds of millions of people in the world living below the threshold of extreme poverty, and billions more living not far above that threshold. Where injustice and needs shortfalls must be remediated, we often look towards agents’ capabilities to determine who ought to bear the costs of rectifying the situation. The combination of these three claims grounds what I call a ‘linkage-based’ account of why corporations (...) have demanding positive duties to the global poor. In this paper, I put forward a distinctive linkage-based account of corporations’ positive duties centred on the idea of dependence and the importance of meeting agents’ core needs. In addition to outlining and defending this account, I will show that we can utilise its basic conceptual components to make headway on questions that have received insufficient attention in the business ethics literature; specifically, we can say something substantive about the weighting of needy agents’ competing claims to assistance, and about the limits to the demands that can be lodged against corporations on the basis of others' unmet needs. Having integrated considerations of duties' grounding, their comparative weight, and the limits of their demandingness into a single account of corporate positive duty, I conclude by discussing a challenge to attributing to corporations duties owed to the worst-off amongst the global poor. (shrink)

Central to Sellars’ account of human cognition was a clear distinction, expressed in varying terminology in his different works, “between conceptual and nonconceptual representations.” Those who have come to be known as ‘left-wing Sellarsians’, such as Richard Rorty, Robert Brandom, and John McDowell, have tended to reject Sellars’ appeals to nonconceptual sensory representations. So-called ‘right-wing Sellarsians’ such as Ruth Millikan and Jay Rosenberg, on the other hand, have embraced and developed aspects of Sellars’ account, in particular the central underlying idea (...) that human perceptual cognition involves a certain naturalistic ‘mapping’ correspondence or structural ‘picturing’ isomorphism between internal mental representations and the layout and behavior of objects in the surrounding environment. Sellars, despite his defenses of nonconceptual representational content throughout his career, has with no small irony come to be cited as one of the “founding fathers of conceptualism.” While recognizing the strong conceptualist elements in Sellars’ Kantian account of perceptual cognition, I argue that a central core of Sellars’ account of nonconceptual sensory contents does not by itself fall afoul of the philosophical worries raised by the left-leaning Sellarsians, and that in fact it has significant merits in its own right. (shrink)

Aquinas’s actual response to a naturalistic challenge at ST I.2.3 is one which most naturalists would find unimpressive. However, I shall argue that there is a stronger response latent in his philosophical system. I take Quine as an example of a methodological naturalist, examine the roots of his position and look at two critical responses to his views (those of BonJour and Boghossian). If one adjusts some of the problematical aspects of their responses and establishes a hybrid position on the (...) epistemology and metaphysics of an antinaturalistic stance, it turns out to be the position Aquinas himself takes on meaning and knowledge. (shrink)

According to the “standard framing” of racial appeals in political speech, politicians generally rely on coded language to communicate racial messages. Yet recent years have demonstrated that politicians often express quite explicit forms of racism in mainstream political discourse. The standard framing can explain neither why these appeals work politically nor how they work semantically. This paper moves beyond the standard framing, focusing on the politics and semantics of one type of explicit appeal, candid racial communication. The linguistic vehicles of (...) CRC are neither true code words, nor slurs, but a conventionally defined class of “racialized terms.”. (shrink)

Several philosophers have recently advanced wager-based arguments for the existence of irreducibly normative truths or against normative nihilism. Here I consider whether these wager-based arguments would cause a normative Pyrrhonian skeptic to lose her skepticism. I conclude they would not do so directly. However, if prompted to consider a different decision problem, which I call the normativity wager for skeptics, the normative Pyrrhonian skeptic would be motivated to attempt to act in accordance with any normative reasons to which she might (...) be subject. Consideration of the normativity wager will not inevitably cause the normative Pyrrhonian skeptic to lose her skepticism, but there are at least three routes by which it might: first, in considering the wager the agent may spontaneously (non-rationally) acquire a normative belief; second, considering the wager can motivate the agent to cause herself to (non-rationally) acquire a normative belief. Via either of these indirect, non-rational routes, she would cease to be a normative Pyrrhonian skeptic. Thus, consideration of the normativity wager may have value, even if it does not supply a rational argument that will dissuade skeptics. In addition, I consider the possibility of a third (rational) route by which the agent might lose her skepticism. (shrink)

Proclus and Aquinas envision a plurality of divine beings organized hierarchically under the aegis of a first principle: respectively, the One and the henads, and God and His angels. While the differences rule out a wholescale application of Procline henadology to Thomas’ angelology, Aquinas, nevertheless, incorporates Proclus’ henadology into his angelology in two ways. First, Aquinas borrows from Procline henadology when explaining the differences between angels: these can be known in an approximate way from their observable effects. Second, Aquinas incorporates (...) Proclus’ understanding of henadic hierarchy, which focuses on power and activity over ontology, into his conception of angelic hierarchy. (shrink)

China’s rise to global power status is set to be amongst the primary shapers of politics and life more broadly in the 21st century. Yet despite its immense significance, political philosophers have been surprisingly quiet on the normative implications of China’s rise. This, I will argue, is a mistake. Not only does China’s rise generate interesting normative questions in its own right; it also upends some basic assumptions that many of us have hitherto adopted in our thinking about international distributive (...) justice. In the philosophical literature, the international order is often characterised by two sorts of states – developed and developing – with the former owing demanding duties and the latter having expansive permissions to further their own development. China’s status as both a genuine superpower and a middle-income country facing significant development challenges calls into question the continued functionality of such simplifying assumptions. Against the backdrop of China’s rise – and, to a lesser extent, that of other large emerging economies – this paper develops a more fine-grained account of how to conceive of states’ differential levels of advantage, distinguishing between states that are incapable, precariously capable, and robustly capable of realizing a minimally decent standard of domestic justice. This account reaffirms the assignment of the most onerous international duties to developed states, but also assigns duties and claims to developing states in a scalar fashion, with the upshot that better-off developing states in particular bear positive duties of international justice, owed to least-developed countries (LDCs). (shrink)

This paper criticizes the assumptions behind Robert Brandom’s reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology, contending that Hegel’s concern with the rational structure of experience, his valorization of reflection over ordinary experience and his idea of the necessit y of progress in knowledge cannot be accommodated within the framework of semantic pragmatism. The central contentions are that Brandom’s pragmatism never comes to terms with Hegel’s idea of truth as a result, leading to a historicist distortion, and also that Brandom’s failure to deal with (...) Hegel’s distinction between natural consciousness and the phenomenological observer collapses Hegel’s phenomenology into a philosophy restricted to the level of natural consciousness. (shrink)

Bài viết đánh giá thực trạng hoạt động hệ thống ngân hàng Việt Nam trong bối cảnh thực hiện đề án cơ cấu lại hệ thống các tổ chức tín dụng (TCTD). Kết quả nghiên cứu cho thấy, hoạt động tái cấu trúc ngân hàng đã diễn ra mạnh mẽ với chỉ đạo quyết liệt của Chính phủ và Ngân hàng nhà nước, đặc biệt trong phê duyệt chủ trương chuyển giao bắt buộc 4 ngân hàng diện kiểm soát đặc (...) biệt nhằm lành mạnh và ổn định hệ thống ngân hàng. Tuy nhiên, với thực trạng nền kinh tế suy thoái, những vấn đề về nợ xấu gia tăng vượt qua ngưỡng an toàn 3%, tỷ lệ bao phủ nợ xấu giảm xuống dưới 100%, tín dụng tăng trưởng chậm, biên lợi nhuận thu hẹp đang trở thành nguy cơ dẫn dến rủi ro hoạt động của hệ thống ngân hàng Việt Nam. Trước thực trạng đó, tác giả đưa ra một số khuyến nghị chính sách nhằm nâng cao hiệu quả tái cơ cấu hệ thống ngân hàng. (shrink)

This article develops a civic republican approach to medical ethics. It outlines civic republican concerns about the domination that arises from subjection to an arbitrary power of interference, while suggesting republican remedies to such domination in healthcare. These include proposals for greater review, challenge and pre-authorisation of medical power. It extends this analysis by providing a civic republican account of assistive arbitrary power, showing how it can create similar problems within both formal and informal relationships of care, and offering strategies (...) for tackling it. Two important objections to civic republican medical ethics—that it overvalues independence and political participation in healthcare—are also considered and rebutted. (shrink)

Over 1000 companies have either curtailed or else completely ceased operations in Russia as a response to its invasion of Ukraine, a mass corporate exodus of a speed and scale which we’ve never seen. While corporate withdrawal appears to have considerable public support, it’s not obvious that it has done anything to hamper the Russian war effort, nor is it clear what the long-run effects of corporate withdrawal as a regularised response to war might be. Given this, it’s important the (...) evaluate the ethical merits of such a response. In this paper I critique what I take to be the two most common arguments given in favour of voluntary corporate withdrawal, which I label ‘the instrumental argument’ and ‘the clean hands argument’ respectively. After illustrating their shortcomings, I reframe corporations’ predicament as a ‘spattered hands’ case—one where they may do good by remaining in a war-waging state, but where they contribute indirectly to grave wrongdoing by doing so. Drawing on ideas from the ‘Business for Peace’ and ‘Business and Human Rights’ literature, I highlight the potentially positive role of corporate presence within war-waging countries, before highlighting four considerations which corporations ought to bear in mind when determining whether to withdraw, or whether it is the lesser evil to stay and to let their hands be spattered. (shrink)

This paper attempts to locate modern Zen and psychoanalysis in terms of contemporary philosophy of mind, particularly in view of dominant theories of cognitivism that see the mind as informational and material, with meaning being mere information in disguise. Psychoanalysis and modern Zen hold to the contrary view that the mind is “semantic,” not “syntactic,” and that the meanings we have in our heads are not reducible to the physical informational processes from which they have emerged. Meaning, as non-reducible, is (...) infinite and uncaused. However, the structure of meaning entails a split between a knower and what is known. This split creates problems in the mind which can be confronted through more, not less, engagement with the meanings in our minds, until we are self-aware and, perhaps, self-identical, with the mechanisms of consciousness that produce the meanings in our head. Such self-awareness is seen as being self-liberating rather than self-reducing. (shrink)

Socialist republicans advocate public ownership and control of the means of production in order to achieve the republican goal of a society without endemic domination. While civic republicanism is often attacked for its conservatism, the relatively neglected radical history of the tradition shows how a republican form of socialism provides powerful conceptual resources to critique capitalism for leaving workers and citizens dominated. This analysis supports a programme of public ownership and economic democracy intended to reduce domination in the workplace and (...) wider society. I defend this socialist republicanism from both the Marxist objection that it overlooks the impersonal nature of domination under capitalism and the left-liberal objections that property-owning democracy or worker codetermination are sufficient to suppress dominating relationships. The resulting position identifies the need for more ambitious institutional grounds for republican liberty than is often supposed, while offering us a distinctive emancipatory justification for socialism. (shrink)

R&D collaborations between industry, government, civil society, and research ) have recently gained attention from R&D theorists and practitioners. In aiming to come to grips with their complexity, past models have generally taken a stakeholder-analytical approach based on stakeholder types. Yet stakeholder types are difficult to operationalise. We therefore argue that a processual model is more suited for studying the interaction in QHCs because it eschews matters of titles and identities. We develop such a model in which the QHC is (...) represented as a process of generating four types of value: research value, market value, political value, and societal value. We then apply this processual model in analysing real-life cases of friction in QHCs. Friction is seen, not as an interpersonal clash, but as a discrepancy between two or more value-creation processes that compete for limited resources. (shrink)

This paper explains what an infinite regress argument is. Part 1 contains some examples of infinite regress arguments. Part 2 presents a schema for all such arguments an defines an infinite regress argument as one that approximates to the schema. Part 3 tests the schema on the examples. Part 4 contrasts my account of infinite regress arguments with that given by Passmore and shows that Passmore's theory succumbs to objections. Part 5 distinguishes an infinite regress argument from an infinite regress (...) and defines an infinite regress. Part 6 explains the dyslogistic force of 'infinite regress'. (shrink)

This article addresses two areas of continuing controversy about consent in clinical research: the question of when consent to low risk research is necessary, and the question of when consent to research is valid. The article identifies a number of considerations relevant to determining whether consent is necessary, chief of which is whether the study would involve subjects in ways that would (otherwise) infringe their rights. When consent is necessary, there is a further question of under what conditions consent is (...) valid or successful in waiving a right. The most influential account of validity conditions is non-moralized, in the sense that the conditions make no essential reference to whether the researcher soliciting consent has obtained it in a way that wrongs the subject. The article examines the implications of this account, and compares it with recent accounts that moralize some of the validity conditions. -/- . (shrink)

Abstract: Any normative inferentialist view confronts a set of challenges in the form of how to account for the sort of ordinary empirical descriptive vocabulary that is involved, paradigmatically, in our noninferential perceptual responses and knowledge claims. This chapter lays out that challenge, and then argues that Sellars’ original multilayered account of such noninferential responses in the context of his normative inferentialist semantics and epistemology shows how the inferentialist can plausibly handle those sorts of cases without stretching the notion of (...) inference beyond its standard uses. Finally, it is suggested that for Sellars there were deeply naturalistic motivations for his own normative inferentialism, though the latter raises further questions as to whether this really represents, as Sellars thought, a genuinely scientific naturalist outlook on meaning and conceptual cognition. (shrink)

These comments, which include informal offhand asides made during delivery, derive from an ‘Author Meets Critics’ session on Robert Brandom’s book, From Empiricism to Expressivism: Brandom Reads Sellars’ (2015), held at Kent State University and published subsequently in Sellars and Contemporary Philosophy (2017).

In this paper, we raise and discuss a puzzle about the relationships among goods, reasons, and deontic status. Suppose you have it within your power to give someone something they would enjoy. The following claims seem platitudinous: you can use this power to reward whatever kind of option you want, thereby making that option better and generating a reason for that person to perform it; this reason is then weighed alongside and against the other reasons at play; and altogether, the (...) reasons determine the deontic statuses of that person’s options. We show, however, that in a certain class of cases at least one of these apparent platitudes must be false. In particular, we show that in a certain kind of case wrongfulness cannot be rewarded. In some cases, if one tries to reward wrongfulness, something surprising must go awry: either what you attempt to give as a reward would not, in fact, be good, or it would not generate a reason, or it would have a surprising effect on the deontic status of the relevant options. The upshot is that the relationships among goods, reasons, and deontic status are complicated in ways that have not previously been remarked. (shrink)

The focus of this article is on the place of the limited-liability joint stock corporation in a satisfactory account of social justice and, more specifically, the question of how such corporations should be regulated and taxed in order to secure social justice. -/- Most discussion in liberal political philosophy looks at state institutions, on the one hand, and individuals, on the other hand, without giving much attention to intermediate institutions such as corporations. This is in part a consequence of a (...) certain degree of idealization in terms of the background model of society with which such theories operate. Intermediate institutions are in an important sense optional or discretionary, and one would be hampering an account of justice if it built-in from the start particular kinds of institutions which we could imagine doing without. The only non-state institution that has received adequate attention in political philosophy is the nuclear family, in part because of its pervasiveness and resilience. But the corporation is probably second only to the family in its significance, in terms of its effects on the lives of individuals, and yet has been left without adequate attention. (shrink)

This essay asks what it is about the practice of trade that grounds duties of justice between states as trade partners. The answer advanced is that such duties are grounded in the dependence that trade generates. The essay puts forward four conditions that a plausible account of grounding in trade must meet: it must admit of degrees, explain the distinctly international character of trade justice, ground both procedural and distributive duties, and it must be a necessary feature of all trade (...) relationships which generate duties of justice. A dependence account of grounding meets all four conditions, and does so in an intuitively compelling way. While other accounts of what grounds duties of trade justice can meet some of the conditions, none can meet all of them. Relative to rival candidates, then, the dependence account provides a firmer foundation for the ongoing attempts to develop a comprehensive theory of trade justice. (shrink)

Mereotopology faces problems when its methods are extended to deal with time and change. We offer a new solution to these problems, based on a theory of partitions of reality which allows us to simulate (and also to generalize) aspects of set theory within a mereotopological framework. This theory is extended to a theory of coarse- and fine-grained histories (or finite sequences of partitions evolving over time), drawing on machinery developed within the framework of the so-called ‘consistent histories’ interpretation of (...) quantum mechanics. (shrink)

Purpose: The modern development of mass culture is characterized by the growth of the market for graphic narratives, the rapid increase in the segment of digital comics, and the active use of comics as a communication tool in various industries and disciplinary areas. The purpose of the study: to determine the media capabilities of the comics in presenting educational, cross-cultural, problematic, and ethical content of modern organizational culture. Design / Method / Approach: The review nature of the article involves the (...) use of traditional general scientific methods (description, comparison, abstraction, and specification). The interdisciplinary nature of the study actualized the comparative method in presenting the cross-cultural features of organizational/office/corporate comics. Findings: The influence of visual mass culture and the spread of interdisciplinary research tools made it possible to analyze three areas within the stated problematic: adaptive and audience-oriented comics techniques popularized their use for training and educational purposes; the possibility of comparing the typology of world comics with cross-cultural global studies (we relied on the methodology and results of the GLOBE (Global Leadership and Organizational Behavior Effectiveness) project); the ability of the comics to reproduce, maintain, and spread the tradition of a particular organizational culture. Theoretical value of the study: The work has expanded: (1) the possibilities of a multidisciplinary approach to comics culture in order to clarify the interdisciplinary methodology; (2) the idea of forming and maintaining an authentic organizational culture using comics techniques; (3) the possibilities of using graphic narratives in the process of educational and professional communication. Practical value of the study: The possibilities of using comics in modern organizational culture at the level of self-presentation, training, and maintaining traditions. Originality/value of the study: A multidirectional analysis of the influence of mass culture (comics as a part of it) on the representation of everyday modern business processes is presented. Research limitations / Future research: Analyzing business processes in the language of graphic culture requires valid methods. Further research requires a larger statistical sample and improved interdisciplinary methods. -/- Мета роботи: Сучасний розвиток масової культури характеризується зростанням ринку графічних наративів, стрімким збільшенням сегмента цифрових коміксів, активним використанням коміксу як інструменту комунікації в різних галузях і дисциплінарних напрямах. Мета дослідження: визначити медійні можливості коміксу в представленні освітньо-навчального, кроскультурного та проблемно-етичного контенту сучасної організаційної культури. Дизайн / Метод / Підхід дослідження: Оглядовий характер статті передбачає залучення традиційних загальнонаукових методів (опис, порівняння, абстрагування та конкретизація). Міждисциплінарність дослідження актуалізувала компаративний метод у представленні крос-культурних особливостей організаційних/офісних/корпоративних коміксів. Результати дослідження: Вплив візуальної масової культури та поширення міждисциплінарних інструментів дослідження уможливили в межах заявленої проблематики аналіз трьох напрямів: адаптивні та аудиторноспрямовані коміксові техніки популяризували їх використання з навчальною та освітньою метою; можливість зіставлення типології світових коміксів з кроскультурними глобальними дослідженнями (ми спиралися на методику та результати проєкту GLOBE (Global Leadership and Organizational Behavior Effectiveness); можливості коміксу відтворювати, підтримувати та поширювати традицію певної організаційної культури. Теоретична цінність дослідження: Робота розширила: (1) можливості різновекторного підходу до коміксової культури з метою уточнення міждисциплінарної методики; (2) уявлення щодо формування та підтримки автентичної організаційної культури за допомогою коміксових технік; (3) можливості використання графічних наративів в процесі навчально-освітньої та професійної комунікації. Практична цінність дослідження: Можливості використання коміксу в сучасній організаційній культурі на рівні самопрезентації, навчання та підтримки традицій. Оригінальність/цінність дослідження: Презентовано різновекторний аналіз впливу масової культури (коміксової як її частини) на представлення повсякдення сучасних бізнес-процесів. Обмеження дослідження / Майбутні дослідження: Аналіз бізнес-процесів мовою графічної культури вимагає валідних методів. Подальші дослідження потребують більшої статистичної вибірки та вдосконалення міждисциплінарних методик. (shrink)

To hold an environmental ethic is to hold that non-human beings and states of affairs in the natural world have intrinsic value. This seemingly straightforward claim has been the focus of much recent philosophical discussion of environmental issues. Its clarity is, however, illusory. The term ‘intrinsic value’ has a variety of senses and many arguments on environmental ethics suffer from a conflation of these different senses: specimen hunters for the fallacy of equivocation will find rich pickings in the area. This (...) paper is largely the work of the underlabourer. I distinguish different senses of the concept of intrinsic value, and, relatedly, of the claim that non-human beings in the natural world have intrinsic value; I exhibit the logical relations between these claims and examine the distinct motivations for holding them. The paper is not however merely an exercise in conceptual underlabouring. It also defends one substantive thesis: that while it is the case that natural entities have intrinsic value in the strongest sense of the term, i.e., in the sense of value that exists independently of human valuations, such value does not as such entail any obligations on the part of human beings. The defender of nature’s intrinsic value still needs to show that such value contributes to the well-being of human agents. (shrink)

To avoid difficulties that arise when we appeal to speaker intentions or multiple rules to determine the meaning of indexicals, Cohen (2013) recently defends a conventionalist account of these terms that focuses on their context of tokening. Apart from some tricky cases already discussed in the literature, however, such an account faces a serious difficulty: in many speech acts, multiple apparent tokens are produced – for example when a speaker speaks on a telephone, and her utterance is heard both where (...) she speaks, and at the location of the receiver of the call. The ‘token-contextual’ account seems to imply that in such cases a speaker will simultaneously produce multiple contradictory utterances. Here I argue that to resolve such problems we cannot help but to invoke speaker intentions. However, by appealing to intentions at the level of the metaphysics of semantic tokens, rather than to decide their meaning, the token-contextualist can make this appeal without reintroducing the difficulties associated with intentionalist accounts that she hopes to avoid. The resulting metaphysics of semantic tokens is, interestingly, more complex than we might have expected. -/- . (shrink)

Unlike mainstream Cyrenaics, the Annicereans deny that friendship is chosen only because of its usefulness. Instead, the wise person cares for her friend and endures pains for him because of her goodwill and love. Nonetheless, the Annicereans maintain that your own pleasure is the telos and that a friend’s happiness isn’t intrinsically choiceworthy. Their position appears internally inconsistent or to attribute doublethink to the wise person. But we can avoid these problems. We have good textual grounds to attribute to the (...) Annicereans a doctrine of “non-hedonic habits,” which allows them to abandon psychological hedonism while still maintaining hedonism regarding well-being. (shrink)

A minimal truthmaker for a given proposition is the smallest portion of reality which makes this proposition true. Minimal truthmakers are frequently mentioned in the literature, but there has been no systematic account of what they are or of their importance. In this article we shall clarify the notion of a minimal truthmaker and argue that there is reason to think that at least some propositions have minimal truthmakers. We shall then argue that the notion can play a useful role (...) in truthmaker theory, by helping to explain the truth of certain propositions as precisely as possible. (shrink)