Le but de ce recueil est d’offrir des commentaires accessibles et introductifs aux textes classiques qu’ils accompagnent, en ouvrant des perspectives de discussion sur le thème du capitalisme. C’est en ce sens qu’Emmanuel Chaput lance le débat en commentant le texte de Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, « Qu’est-ce que la propriété ? ». Les textes de Karl Marx ne sont bien sûr pas laissés pour compte : Samuel-Élie Lesage s’engage fermement dans cette voie en discutant L’idéologie allemande de Karl Marx, Christiane Bailey (...) nous offre d’approcher différemment l’œuvre marxienne en abordant son traitement de la question animale dans des extraits du Manifeste du parti communiste et du Travail salarié et capital, et Mathieu Joffre-Lainé nous présente une analyse fine des questions proprement économiques du Capital. Abordant les alternatives au capitalisme dans la pensée de Léon Bourgeois, Éliot Litalien commente La Solidarité et Simon-Pierre Chevarie-Cossette s’attaque à l’analyse de l’Essai d’une philosophie de la solidarité. Enfin, en liant capitalisme, patriarcat et pouvoir politique, Tara Chanady propose une lecture du texte Du mariage et de l’amour de Emma Goldman. La conclusion de Marie-Eve Jalbert se situe dans une perspective contemporaine et critique en décortiquant la critique du socialisme avancée par Friedrich A. Hayek. (shrink)

Despre afinitățile elective dintre Mircea Eliade și diferiți oameni de cultură români și străini s-au scris multe pagini de-a lungul timpului. Cei interesați de opera savantului nu pot trece cu vederea legăturile spirituale și culturale cu Nae Ionescu, Mihail Sebastian, Emil Cioran, Constantin Noica, Goethe, C.G. Jung, Marcel Proust, Raffaele Pettazzoni etc. Și numărul acestora poate crește cu multe alte nume din țară și din străinătate, dovedind faptul că Mircea Eliade a fost și rămâne o personalitate care a marcat istoria (...) și cultura națională și universală și ale cărui idei încă fecundează spiritele preocupate de viața religioasă, de literatură sau de științele secolului în care trăim. Pornind de la aceste date, în cartea de față încercăm să creionăm felul în care ideile lui Eliade pot fi așezate alături de cele ale unor gânditori din arii diferite de cercetare, având în centru teme ce se regăsesc atât în lucrările savantului de origine română, cât și operele acestor personalități. În acest sens, ne-am oprit la câteva nume importante: Rudolf Otto, Sfântul Dionisie Areopagitul (alături de Meister Eckhart și Nicolaus Cusanus), Pr. Alexander Schmemann, Thomas J.J. Altizer, Sfântul Grigorie Palama (și isihasmul), I.P. Culianu, Marin Sorescu, Constantin Brâncuși, Nicolae Steinhardt, Pr. Dumitru Stăniloae. (shrink)

Asemenea altor procese istorice, procesul de destrămare a regimurilor comuniste din Europa Centrală și de Est nu poate fi periodizat cu ușurință și nu poate fi corelat cu o explicație cauzală irefutabilă. Prăbușirea acestor regimuri s-a petrecut accelerat în cursul anului 1989, însă procesul de decompensare a început mult mai devreme. Când anume? – Este foarte greu de spus. Fără îndoială, au existat cauze obiective care au dus la rezultatele spectaculoase consemnate de istorie, însă a existat și un joc al (...) întâmplărilor fericite, precum și un impact aproape imposibil de măsurat al unor factori subiectivi. Destrămarea regimurilor comuniste din Europa Centrală și de Est nu a părut inevitabilă pentru actorii scenei politice din anul 1989, după cum nu ni se pare nici nouă că ar fi fost vorba de un proces inexorabil, la trei decenii de la evenimentele respective. Dat fiind caracterul puțin previzibil al evenimentelor care au marcat destrămarea regimurilor comuniste din Blocul Estic, nu este de mirare că ziariștii de la „Scînteia“ au aplicat până la capăt stratageme propagandistice menite să apere în sfera mediatică establishment-ul comunist: (a) supradimensionarea taberei proprii, respectiv deprecierea adversarului; (b) prezentarea lacunară sau abstractizantă a faptelor; (c) decontextualizarea; (d) mistificarea. În ciuda „virtuozității“ de care au dat dovadă ziariștii, aceste stratageme propagandiste nu au dat rezultatele scontate, în primul rând din cauza faptului că regimul ceaușist nu controla perfect mediul informațional din țară. Cetățenii români puteau corobora informațiile oficiale din „Scînteia“ cu informațiile obținute de la Europa Liberă, Vocea Americii, posturile radio și TV din țările vecine. Cea mai întristătoare concluzie este însă aceea că articolele din „Scînteia“ au creat pentru România regimului Ceaușescu imaginea unei fortărețe a ortodoxiei socialiste. Până în ultima zi a regimului comunist din România (22 decembrie 1989), publicația „Scînteia“ s-a dovedit a fi organul de presă obedient al Partidului Comunist Român, partid aflat în cea mai dogmatică și inflexibilă perioadă de viață. Nu este de mirare, în aceste condiții, că sfârșitul regimului Ceaușescu a însemnat sfârșitul Partidului Comunist Român și sfârșitul ziarului „Scînteia“. (shrink)

A key source of support for the view that challenging people’s beliefs about free will may undermine moral behavior is two classic studies by Vohs and Schooler (2008). These authors reported that exposure to certain prompts suggesting that free will is an illusion increased cheating behavior. In the present paper, we report several attempts to replicate this influential and widely cited work. Over a series of five studies (sample sizes of N = 162, N = 283, N = 268, N (...) = 804, N = 982) (four preregistered) we tested the relationship between (1) anti-free-will prompts and free will beliefs and (2) free will beliefs and immoral behavior. Our primary task was to closely replicate the findings from Vohs and Schooler (2008) using the same or highly similar manipulations and measurements as the ones used in their original studies. Our efforts were largely unsuccessful. We suggest that manipulating free will beliefs in a robust way is more difficult than has been implied by prior work, and that the proposed link with immoral behavior may not be as consistent as previous work suggests. (shrink)

Epistemic defeat is standardly understood in either evidentialist or responsibilist terms. The seminal treatment of defeat is an evidentialist one, due to John Pollock, who famously distinguishes between undercutting and rebutting defeaters. More recently, an orthogonal distinction due to Jennifer Lackey has become widely endorsed, between so-called doxastic (or psychological) and normative defeaters. We think that neither doxastic nor normative defeaters, as Lackey understands them, exist. Both of Lackey’s categories of defeat derive from implausible assumptions about epistemic responsibility. Although Pollock’s (...) evidentialist view is superior, the evidentialism per se can be purged from it, leaving a general structure of defeat that can be incorporated in a reliabilist theory that is neither evidentialist nor responsibilist in any way. (shrink)

Sustainability science seeks to extend scientific investigation into domains characterized by a distinct problem-solving agenda, physical and social complexity, and complex moral and ethical landscapes. In this endeavor it arguably pushes scientific investigation beyond its usual comfort zones, raising fundamental issues about how best to structure such investigation. Philosophers of science have long scrutinized the structure of science and scientific practices, and the conditions under which they operate effectively. We propose a critical engagement between sustainability scientists and philosophers of science (...) with respect to how to engage in scientific activity in these complex domains. We identify specific issues philosophers of science raise concerning current sustainability science and the contributions philosophers can make to resolving them. In conclusion we reflect on the steps philosophers of science could take to advance sustainability science. (shrink)

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

In recent years, there has been an increasing interest in thedevelopment of ontologically well-founded conceptual models for Information Systems in areas such as Service Management, Accounting Information Systems and Financial Reporting. Economic exchanges are central phenomena in these areas. For this reason, they occupy a prominent position in modelling frameworks such as the REA (Resource-EventAction) ISO Standard as well as the FIBO (Financial Industry BusinessOntology). In this paper, we begin a well-founded ontological analysisof economic exchanges inspired by a recent ontological (...) view on the nature of economic transactions. According to this view, what counts asan economic transaction is based on an agreement on the actions thatthe agents are committed to perform. The agreement is in turn based on convergent preferences about the course of action to bring about. This view enables a unified treatment of economic exchanges, regardless the object of the transaction, and complies with the view that all economictransactions are about services. In this paper, we start developing our analysis in the framework of the Unified Foundational Ontology (UFO). (shrink)

Many advocate practices of ‘local food’ or ‘locavorism’ as a partial solution to the injustices and unsustainability of contemporary food systems. I think that there is much to be said in favor of local food movements, but these virtues are insufficient to immunize locavorism from criticism. In particular, three duties of international ethics—beneficence, repair and fairness—may provide reasons for constraining the developed world’s permissible pursuit of local food. A complete account of why (and how) the fulfillment of these duties constrains (...) locavorism will require extensive empirical evidence about the relationship between agricultural demand-led industrialization, international trade (rules), and local food practices. In this paper I can only gesture at some of this evidence and, for that reason, my policy prescriptions are merely provisional. Instead, the upshot of this paper is that advocates of locavorism ought to be attentive to the empirical-dependence of the moral permissibility of their projects. As local food ‘scales up’—and comes to be embraced as a goal of political communities—these concerns should receive even greater attention. (shrink)

Skeptics of the moral case against industrial farming often assert that harm to animals in industrial systems is limited to isolated instances of abuse that do not reflect standard practice and thus do not merit criticism of the industry at large. I argue that even if skeptics are correct that abuse is the exception rather than the rule, they must still answer for two additional varieties of serious harm to animals that are pervasive in industrial systems: procedural harm and institutional (...) oppression. That procedural and institutional harms create conditions under which abuse is virtually inevitable only increases the skeptic's burden. (shrink)

El debate que se gestó alrededor del concepto de existencia en manos de Willard Van Orman Quine y Rudolf Carnap, dio al siglo XX un cúmulo de aportes significativos a la ontología. La postura realista, con algunas variantes, de Quine y el criterio anti-realista de Carnap, otorga insumos para pensar de mejor forma cómo se intenta dar descripciones acerca del inmobiliario del mundo. Conocer este debate es importante, ya que, se expone los alcances y limitaciones que implican las explicaciones ontológicas (...) acerca de la realidad que deben ser tenidas en cuenta en la actualidad. Este trabajo cumple esa función, la de explicar sintéticamente uno de los debates más importantes para la ontología. (shrink)

This paper argues that in Eudemian Ethics 8.3, virtue’s mean between excess and deficiency is defined by the standard of promoting the most contemplation. Promotion is indirect and constrained by virtue’s other essential features. The chapter’s apparent restriction of the standard to actions concerning natural goods actually serves a dialectical, not a restrictive, purpose. This paper proposes to unify the chapter’s argumentative arc.

Стаття продовжує цикл опитувань, метою яких було з’ясування факторів впливу на вибір мови в білінгвальному середовищі. В аналізованому опитуванні, проведеному у Вінниці та Вінницькій області, охоплено 560 старшокласників віком 14–17 років. Результати анкетування дали змогу зробити висновки про психологічні чинники, що впливають на респондента, який перебуває в двомовному середовищі.

At first glance, it looks like Aristotle can’t make up his mind about the ethical or moral status of non-human animals in his ethical treatises. Somewhat infamously, the Nicomachean Ethics claims that “there is neither friendship nor justice towards soulless things, nor is there towards an ox or a horse” (EN 8.11.1161b1–2). Since Aristotle thinks that friendship and justice are co-extensive (EN 8.9.1159b25–32), scholars have often read this passage to entail that humans have no ethical obligations to non-human animals. By (...) contrast, although the Eudemian Ethics denies that non-human animals can participate in “primary” friendships, EE 7.2 claims that “the other kinds of friendship are also found among animals; and it is evident that utility is present to some extent among them both in relation to humankind, in the case of tame animals, and in relation to each other” (EE 7.2.1236b3–11). Does the Nicomachean account of non-human animals contradict that of the Eudemian Ethics? Ultimately, I believe the Nicomachean account is consistent with the Eudemian account. Nonetheless, I argue that Aristotle’s treatment of non-human animals differs significantly in the two texts. My chapter explores this difference in greater detail and considers the ramifications of such a difference for our understanding of Aristotle’s place in the philosophical tradition concerning the ethical status of non-human animals. (shrink)

Russell claims in his autobiography and elsewhere that he discovered his 1905 theory of descriptions while attempting to solve the logical and semantic paradoxes plaguing his work on the foundations of mathematics. In this paper, I hope to make the connection between his work on the paradoxes and the theory of descriptions and his theory of incomplete symbols generally clearer. In particular, I argue that the theory of descriptions arose from the realization that not only can a class not be (...) thought of as a single thing, neither can the meaning/intension of any expression capable of singling out one collection (class) of things as opposed to another. If this is right, it shows that Russell’s method of solving the logical paradoxes is wholly incompatible with anything like a Fregean dualism between sense and reference or meaning and denotation. I also discuss how this realization lead to modifications in his understanding of propositions and propositional functions, and suggest that Russell’s confrontation with these issues may be instructive for ongoing research. (shrink)

This paper discusses certain problems arising within the treatment of the senses of functions in Alonzo Church's Logic of Sense and Denotation. Church understands such senses themselves to be "sense-functions," functions from sense to sense. However, the conditions he lays out under which a sense-function is to be regarded as a sense presenting another function as denotation allow for certain undesirable results given certain unusual or "deviant" sense-functions. Certain absurdities result, e.g., an argument can be found for equating any two (...) senses of the same type. An alternative treatment of the senses of functions is discussed, and is thought to do better justice to Frege's original theory. (shrink)

In he Problems of Philosophy and other works of the same period, Russell claims that every proposition must contain at least one universal. Even fully general propositions of logic are claimed to contain “abstract logical universals”, and our knowledge of logical truths claimed to be a species of a priori knowledge of universals. However, these views are in considerable tension with Russell’s own philosophy of logic and mathematics as presented in Principia Mathematica. Universals generally are qualities and relations, but if, (...) for example, PM’s disjunction (∨) is a relation, what is it a relation between? There is no obvious answer to this given Russell’s other philosophical commitments at this time, although hints are left in some of the pre-PM manuscripts. In this paper, I explore this tension in Russell's philosophy and relate it to developments both before and after Problems. (shrink)

1) Introduction. 2) The key libertarian insight into property and orthodox libertarianism’s philosophical confusion. 3) Clearer distinctions for applying to what follows: abstract liberty; practical liberty; moral defences; and critical rationalism. 4) The two dominant (‘Lockean’ and ‘Hobbesian’) conceptions of interpersonal liberty. 5) A general account of libertarianism as a subset of classical liberalism and defended from a narrower view. 6) Two abstract (non-propertarian, non-normative) theories of interpersonal liberty developed and defended: ‘the absence of interpersonal initiated imposed constraints on want-satisfaction’, (...) abbreviated to ‘no initiated imposed costs’; and ‘no imposed costs’. 7) Practical implications for both main abstract conceptions of liberty derived and compared. 8) How this positive analysis relates to morals. 9) Concluding conjectures: the main abstract theory of liberty captures the relevant interpersonal conception; the new paradigm of libertarianism solves the old one’s problems. (shrink)

Many people appear to attach great value to sad music. But why? One way to gain insight into this question is to turn away from music and look instead at why people value sad conversations. In the case of conversations, the answer seems to be that expressing sadness creates a sense of genuine connection. We propose that sad music can also have this type of value. Listening to a sad song can give one a sense of genuine connection. We then (...) explore the nature of this value in two experimental studies. The results suggest a striking relationship between music and conversation. People see something distinctively musical in works that express precisely those emotions that they think most create connection within conversation. (shrink)

It would be an understatement to say that Russell was interested in Cantorian diagonal paradoxes. His discovery of the various versions of Russell’s paradox—the classes version, the predicates version, the propositional functions version—had a lasting effect on his views in philosophical logic. Similar Cantorian paradoxes regarding propositions—such as that discussed in §500 of The Principles of Mathematics—were surely among the reasons Russell eventually abandoned his ontology of propositions.1 However, Russell’s reasons for abandoning what he called “denoting concepts”, and his rejection (...) of similar “semantic dualisms” such as Frege’s theory of sense and reference—at least in “On Denoting”—made no explicit mention of any Cantorian paradox. My aim in this paper is to argue that such paradoxes do pose a problem for certain theories such as Frege’s, and early Russell’s, about how definite descriptions are meaningful. My first aim is simply to lay out the problem I have in mind. Next, I shall turn to arguing that the theories of descriptions endorsed by Frege and by Russell prior to “On Denoting” are susceptible to the problem. Finally, I explore what responses a.. (shrink)

How does an engagement with religious traditions (broadly construed) illuminate and complicate the task of thinking through the ethics of eating? In this introduction, we survey some of the many food ethical issues that arise within various religious traditions and also consider some ethical positions that such traditions take on food. To say the least, we do not attempt to address all the ethical issues concerning food that arise in religious contexts, nor do we attempt to cover every tradition’s take (...) on food. We look at just a few traditions and a few interesting writings on food ethics and religion: What do they say about the ethics of eating? Why do they say these things? Here we use the terms “food ethics” and “religion” ecumenically as big tents under which many importantly different sorts of things may be grouped. Among the wide range of food ethical issues we consider in this chapter, for example, are religious views about the ethics of keeping, hurting, and killing animals, killing plants, dominion over creation, wastefulness, purity, blessing, atonement, and the connection between food and character. We realize, moreover, that it might be a stretch to label some of the views engaged by selected readings in this chapter as “religious” on a stringent understanding of that term; Lisa Kemmerer’s “Indigenous Traditions,” for instance, addresses some views that are recognizably spiritual but perhaps not religious in a strict sense. We hope that our ecumenical usage of the term can bring these important traditions to bear on the discussion without reducing them to something they are not. (shrink)

From a European perspective the US debate about gun control is puzzling because we have no such debate: It seems obvious to us that dangerous weapons need tight control and that ‘guns’ fall under that category. I suggest that this difference occurs due to different habits that generate different attitudes and support this explanation with an analogy to the habits about knives. I conclude that it is plausible that individual knife-people or gun-people do not want tight regulatory legislation—but tight knife (...) and gun legislation is morally obligatory anyway. We need to give up our habits for the greater good. (shrink)

David Stove reviews Selwyn Grave's History of Philosophy in Australia, and praises philosophers for thinking harder about the bases of science, mathematics and medicine than the practitioners in the field. The review is reprinted as an appendix to James Franklin's Corrupting the Youth: A History of Philosophy in Australia.

This book chapter is a work of popular philosophy that offers general readers an opportunity to reimagine their relationship to non-human creatures by living vicariously through the experience of Jasmin--a hypothetical college student whose encounters with a cow, goat, and rooster on a visit to a local farm trigger a transformation in her views and actions toward other animals, allowing her to see them for the first time as subjects of their own lives rather than as objects for human use. (...) Though the chapter is written from the perspective of Jasmin's own Christian religious heritage, her awakening to the importance of the lives of other animals and the practices she undertakes in order to live out that new vision resonate with other religious and non-religious traditions, implicitly engaging the traditions of philosophical hermeneutics (Hans-Georg Gadamer) and philosophy as a way of life through the practice of spiritual exercises (Pierre Hadot, Martha Nussbaum). This chapter would be appropriate for use in introduction to philosophy courses or first-year writing seminars that seek to offer students an invitational introduction to some of the big ideas in animal and environmental ethics without getting philosophically technical in ways that can alienate beginners. (shrink)

While the 2010 EPSRC principles for robotics state a set of 5 rules of what ‘should’ be done, I argue they should differentiate between legal obligations and ethical demands. Only if we make this difference can we state clearly what the legal obligations already are, and what additional ethical demands we want to make. I provide suggestions how to revise the rules in this light and how to make them more structured.

Though commentators have paid little thematic attention to Heidegger’s 1928 treatise “On the Essence of Ground” (OEG), recently available subsequent writings suggest that Heidegger himself saw OEG as a pivotal step on the way to “overcoming” his analysis of fundamental ontological transcendence. Among these writings is a set of rarely discussed lettered notes originally scribbled into his personal copy of OEG in which Heidegger offers a point-for-point deconstruction of the treatise’s fundamental ontological interpretation of transcendence. I argue that examining the (...) interplay between these two tiers of analysis may illuminate the murky trail that cuts between the beaten track of Being and Time and the increasingly well-trodden paths of Contributions to Philosophy and other later writings. Part one motivates the reading I propose by situating OEG in the broader contexts of its reception in the secondary literature, its engagement by Heidegger himself in subsequent writings, and my own interpretation—in view of Heidegger’s remarks—of its utility for illuminating the catalyst’s role played by the transcendence problem in the development of his overall project. Against this backdrop, part two advances a selective reading of the most important developments in OEG’s main text and lettered notes, elucidating in the process their hermeneutic significance for returning to and “turning” from the progressive elaboration of transcendence that both initiates and eventually exhausts Heidegger’s fundamental ontological inquiries. The picture that emerges, I conclude, is that OEG is hermeneutically a significantly more important work (for Heidegger certainly, but potentially also for his interpreters) than its marginal status in the secondary literature might lead one to believe. (shrink)

This chapter provides a gentle introduction to contextual emergence and its implications for the structure of the material world as well as implications for meaning in our world.

As evidence of the unintended consequences of industrial farm animal production continues to mount, it is becoming increasingly clear that, far from being a trivial matter of personal preference, eating is an activity that has deep moral and spiritual significance. Surprising as it may sound, the simple question of what to eat can prompt Christians daily to live out their spiritual vision of Shalom for all creatures--to bear witness to the marginalization of the poor, the exploitation of the oppressed, the (...) suffering of the innocent, and the degradation of the natural world, and to participate in the reconciliation of these ills through intentional acts of love, justice, mercy, and good stewardship. The aim of this work is to understand the cultivation of more intentional "compassionate eating" habits as a form of engaged Christian discipleship that responds to a wide array of practical, moral, and spiritual problems affecting all aspects of creation--human, animal, and environmental. The guiding suggestion is that compassionate eating is a spiritual discipline that offers a symbolically significant and practically effective way to live in faithful anticipation of the "peaceable kingdom" described in Judeo-Christian creation and redemption narratives. (shrink)

Several interesting themes emerge from G. E. Moore’s previously unpub­lished review of _The Principles of Mathematics_. These include a worry concerning whether mathematical notions are identical to purely logical ones, even if coextensive logical ones exist. Another involves a conception of infinity based on endless series neglected in the Principles but arguably involved in Zeno’s paradox of Achilles and the Tortoise. Moore also questions the scope of Russell’s notion of material implication, and other aspects of Russell’s claim that mathematics reduces (...) to logic. (shrink)

Aristotle’s claim that poetry is ‘a more philosophic and better thing’ than history (Poet 9.1451b5-6) and his description of the ‘poetic universal’ have been the source of much scholarly discussion. Although many scholars have mined Poetics 9 as a source for Aristotle’s views towards history, in my contribution I caution against doing so. Critics of Aristotle’s remarks have often failed to appreciate the expository principle which governs Poetics 6-12, which begins with a definition of tragedy and then elucidates the terms (...) of that definition by means of a series of juxtapositions. The juxtaposition between poetry and history is one such instance which seeks to elucidate what sort of plot exemplifies a causal unity such that the events of a play unfold with likelihood or necessity. Within that context, Aristotle compares history and poetry in order to elucidate the object of poetic mimesis rather than criticize history as a discipline. Viewing Aristotle as antagonistic towards history fails to appreciate the expository structure of the Poetics and obscures the resource which history provides to the poet, a point which I explore by considering what Aristotle would have thought of an ‘historical’ tragedy like Aeschylus’ Persians. (shrink)

In the center of the fifth book of the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle elliptically characterizes political justice as a form of reciprocal rule that exists between free and equal persons pursuing a common life directed toward self-sufficiency under the rule of law. My dissertation analyzes Aristotle's thematic treatments of political justice in the Nicomachean Ethics and Politics in order to elucidate its meaning, clarify its relationship to the other forms of justice that he also discusses, and compare it to contemporary neo-Aristotelian (...) accounts of justice. ;The first chapter examines the unclear and disputed passages of Ethics V.6--7 and explains why Aristotle discusses political justice in his ethical treatise. The second chapter makes use of Aristotle's juxtaposition of political justice to household justice on the one hand and despotic justice on the other hand in order to explicate the necessary conditions of political justice, namely, freedom, equality, commonality, self-sufficiency, and the rule of law. To make sense of these concepts, the chapter explores such topics as Aristotle's understanding of the household, his notion of the self and his political criticisms of Socrates. The third chapter examines political justice or reciprocal rule in the Politics in order to understand how political justice can be both a human virtue and an institutional arrangement of offices. The fourth chapter offers a critique of Fred Miller's reconstruction of Aristotelian natural rights. Although Miller is correct to say that Aristotle recognized and understood "rights claims," he is mistaken in claiming that they are an integral part of Aristotle's practical philosophy. Aristotle understood the problems for political compromise posed by rights conceived as "trumps," and he rejects rights as philosophically fundamental on the grounds that they are an inadequate solution to both the political problem of justice and the stability of flourishing political institutions. (shrink)

Contra critical rationalism, the response begins by referring to “the variety of internalist and externalist versions of foundationalism” (Liberty, December 2002). But it makes no attempt to explain or defend any of them. Hence, no further criticism is due here. The response then argues that, “The critical rationalist method seems to suggest that Lester’s extreme compatibility thesis is probably false” because—quoting Escape from Leviathan (EfL)—“bold universal theories might be false, and probably are” and yet “he doesn’t think the thesis is (...) probably false”. And so this is, by implication, an inconsistent belief. But the Compatibility Thesis (CT) is not one of the “bold universal theories” of science. The review and the response appear, at times, to assume that the CT is a bold universal theory about the perfect compatibility of applying the relevant conceptions, or theories, of rationality, liberty, welfare, and anarchy. Then, at other times, they assert that it is not bold at all but merely about definitions designed to be compatible. In fact, the CT asserts both that there are no theoretical incompatibilities among relevant and plausible versions of the theories, and that there are no actual long-term, systemic, and practical conflicts among applying them. That is still a bold theory (perhaps even most libertarians would disagree with it), but it’s not a universal thesis of perfect compatibility. And if it were good practice to reject a theory just because of its boldness, then all scientific theories would be immediately rejected without even trying to produce a falsification. In any case, as stated in the reply to the review, anyone’s mere beliefs are irrelevant to the truth of objective theories and the soundness of objective arguments. (shrink)

Applying critical rationalism, all criticism is to be welcomed. A response can help to elucidate matters even when the criticisms are poor, misconceived, and hostile. Thus, we turn to the review.

The “free world” was the political rhetoric used during the Cold War in contrast to the “communist” countries. However, the “free world” was manifestly never free: the state considerably interfered with people in their persons and their property. And the “communist” countries were manifestly never communist in the Marxist sense: there was no common ownership of the means of production with the absence of social classes, money, and the state. It would have been more accurate to call them the “authoritarian (...) world” and the “totalitarian world”. Today the “free world” is sometimes still used, but Western countries remain authoritarian in terms of taxation and restrictive legislation. The, by implication, “unfree world” is largely only somewhat more authoritarian. Why does this continuing authoritarianism exist in the West? (shrink)

Abstract: In Vacco v. Quill, 521 U.S. 793 (1997), the Supreme Court for the first time in American case law explicitly applied the principle of double effect to reject an equal protection claim to physician-assisted suicide. Double effect, traced historically to Thomas Aquinas, proposes that under certain circumstances it is permissible unintentionally to cause foreseen evil effects that would not be permissible to cause intentionally. The court rejected the constitutional claim on the basis of a distinction marked out by the (...) principle, i.e., between directly intending the death of a terminally ill patient as opposed to merely foreseeing that death as a consequence of medical treatment. The Court held that the distinction comports with fundamental legal principles of causation and intent. Id. at 802. -/- Critics allege that the principle itself is intrinsically flawed and that, in any event, its employment in Vacco is without legal precedent. I argue in response to contemporary objections that double effect is a valid principle of ethical reflection (Part II); claims to the contrary notwithstanding, double effect analysis is a pervasive, albeit generally unacknowledged principle employed regularly in American case law (Part III); and drawing on the preceding two sections, Vacco's application of the principle of double effect is appropriate (Part IV). -/- My conclusion is that [o]peration of some form of the principle, by whatever name, is inevitable. In an imperfect world where duties and interests collide, the possibility of choices of action foreseen to have both good and evil consequences cannot be avoided. In rare circumstances, ethics and the law require that a person refrain from acting altogether. More often, however, they provide that a determination of whether an actor may pursue a good effect although knowing it will or may unintentionally cause an harmful effect requires a more complex analysis - a double effect analysis. -/- Keywords: Equal protection, double effect, intention, physician-assisted suicide, Constitutional Law, Bioethics. (shrink)

Over three decades ago, in a brief but provocative essay, Paul Ziff argued for the thesis that robots cannot have feelings because they are "mechanisms, not organisms, not living creatures. There could be a broken-down robot but not a dead one. Only living creatures can literally have feelings."[i] Since machines are not living things they cannot have feelings. In the first half of my paper I review Ziff's arguments against the idea that robots could be conscious, especially his appeal to (...) our linguistic usage. In the second half of the essay I try to provide a deeper ontological understanding of why we ought not attribute minds to nonliving artifacts. I argue that inanimate mechanisms are incapable of genuinely active and purposive behavior. They are importantly different in kind from living human beings and animals. (shrink)

Domestic violence is identified across the globe as a menace as it poses a threat to the mental health of its victims, the significant others of the victim and the security of a nation at large. In some cases, the victim of domestic violence is a pregnant woman and harm is caused not only to a woman but her fetus also and this calls for urgent psychological assessment and intervention. Although there is no doubt that psychological tests are effective in (...) the assessment of domestic violence, using the psychometric properties obtained from a different population may produce generate inaccurate findings. This paper therefore attempts the validation study of Women Abuse Screening Tool (WAST) using a sample of 379 pregnant women attending antenatal clinic at the State Specialist Hospital, Osogbo, Osun State, Nigeria. The study derived a Cronbach’s Alpha Reliability of 0.758, p <.05 and a Guttman split-half coefficient of 0.683, p <.05. Furthermore, concurrent validity of Women Abuse Screening Tool (WAST) and Ongoing Abuse Screen (OAS) was established as 0.29, p<.05. The norms of the instrument were given as 2.38 for tolerable level of domestic violence and 5.79 for severe and pathological level of domestic violence. Authors conclude that Women Abuse Screening Tool has acceptable psychometric properties to justify its usage for the assessment of level of domestic violence among pregnant women in Nigeria and other nations with similar socio-cultural backgrounds. (shrink)

Although there is much scholarship on Aristotle’s account of friendship (φιλία), almost all of it has focused on inter-personal relationships between human animals. Nonetheless, in both Aristotle’s ethical and zoological writings, he documents the intra- and inter-species friendship between many kinds of animals, including between human and non-human animals. Such non-human animal friendships establish both an indirect basis for establishing moral ties between humans and non-human animals (insofar as we respect their capacity to love and befriend others) and a direct (...) basis for establishing such ties (insofar as Aristotle provides a framework for thinking about utility and pleasure friendships between human and non-human animals). My paper defends Aristotle’s limitation of inter-species friendships to only utility and pleasure friendships and responds to scholars who claim that Aristotle recognizes no moral ties between human and non-human animals. (shrink)

This paper is a response to Anthony Brueckner's critique of my essay "The Self-Defeating Character of Skepticism," which appeared in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research in 1992. In this reply I contend that the three main avenues by which one might plausibly account for one's self-awareness are unavailable to an individual who is restricted to the skeptic's epistemic ground rules. First, all-encompassing doubt about the world cancels our "external" epistemic access via perception to ourselves as material individuals in the world. Second, (...) one does not have direct cpistemic access to one's substantial self through introspection, since the self as such is not a proper object of inner awareness. Third, we cannot claim, as Descartes did, that we have indirect epistemic access to the substantial self by inference from the occurrence of experiences.The summary conclusion for which I argue is that, if we are to account for our self-knowledge, we cannot adopt the purely subjective epistemological stance that is at the heart of global skepticism. (shrink)

One of the goals of physiologists who study the detailed physical, chemical,and neurological mechanisms operating within the human body is to understand the intricate causal processes which underlie human abilities and activities. It is doubtless premature to predict that they will eventually be able to explain the behaviour of a particular human being as we might now explain the behaviour of a pendulum clock or even the invisible changes occurring within the hardware of a modern electronic computer. Nonetheless, it seems (...) fair to say that hovering in the background of investigations into human physiology is the promise or threat, depending upon how one looks at the matter that human beings are complete physical-chemical systems and that all events taking place within their bodies and all movements of their bodies could be accounted for by physical causes if we but knew enough. I am not concerned at the moment with whether or not this ’mechanistic’ hypothesis is true, assuming that it is clear enough to be intelligible, nor with whether or not we could ever know that it is true. I wish to consider the somewhat more accessible yet equally important question whether our coming to believe that the hypothesis is true would warrant our relinquishing our conception of ourselves as beings who are capable of acting for reasons to achieve ends of our own choosing. I use the word ’warrant’ to indicate that I will not be discussing the possibility that believing the mechanistic hypothesis might lead us, as a matter of psychological fact, to think of human beings as mere automata, as objects whose movements are to be explained only by causes rather than by reasons, as are the actions of a personal subject. I intend to consider only whether the acceptance of mechanism would in fact justify such a change in conception. (shrink)

The emphasis on evidence based medicine (EBM) has placed increased focus on finding timely answers to clinical questions in presence of patients. Using a combination of natural language processing for the generation of clinical excerpts and information theoretic distance based clustering, we evaluated multiple approaches for the efficient presentation of context-sensitive EBM excerpts.

According to most accounts of trust, you can only trust other people (or groups of people). To trust is to think that another has goodwill, or something to that effect. I sketch a different form of trust: the unquestioning attitude. What it is to trust, in this sense, is to settle one’s mind about something, to stop questioning it. To trust is to rely on a resource while suspending deliberation over its reliability. Trust lowers the barrier of monitoring, challenging, checking, (...) and questioning. Trust sets up open pipelines between yourself and parts of the external world. Trust permits external resources to have a similar relationship to one as one’s internal cognitive faculties. This creates efficiency, but at the price of exquisite vulnerability. We must trust in this way because we are cognitively limited beings in a cognitively overwhelming world. Crucially, we can hold the unquestioning attitude towards objects and technologies. When I trust my climbing rope, I stop worrying about its reliability. When I trust my online calendaring system, I simply go to the events indicated, without question. But, one might worry, how could one ever hold such a normatively loaded attitude as trust towards mere objects? How could it ever make sense to feel betrayed by an object? Trust is our engine for expanding and outsourcing our agency — for binding external processes into our practical selves. Thus, we can be betrayed by our smartphones in the same way that we can be betrayed by our memory. When we trust, we try to make something a part of our agency, and we are betrayed when our part lets us down. To unquestioningly trust something is to let it in—to attempt to bring it inside one’s practical functioning. This suggests a new form of gullibility: agential gullibility, which occurs when agents too hastily and carelessly integrate external resources into their own agency. (shrink)

Twitter makes conversation into something like a game. It scores our communication, giving us vivid and quantified feedback, via Likes, Retweets, and Follower counts. But this gamification doesn’t just increase our motivation to communicate; it changes the very nature of the activity. Games are more satisfying than ordinary life precisely because game-goals are simpler, cleaner, and easier to apply. Twitter is thrilling precisely because its goals have been artificially clarified and narrowed. When we buy into Twitter’s gamification, then our values (...) shift from the complex and pluralistic values of communication, to the narrower quest for popularity and virality. Twitter’s gamification bears some resemblance with the phenomena of echo chambers and moral outrage porn. In all these phenomena, we are instrumentalizing our ends for hedonistic reasons. We have shifted our aims in an activity, not because the new aims are more valuable, but in exchange for extra pleasure. (shrink)

Queer Death Studies (QDS) refers to an emerging transdisciplinary field of research that critically and (self) reflexively investigates and challenges conventional normativities, assumptions, expectations, and regimes of truths that are brought to life and made evident by death, dying, and mourning. Since its establishment as a research field in the 1970s, Death Studies has drawn attention to the questions of death, dying, and mourning as complex and multifaceted phenomena that require inter- or multi-disciplinary approaches and perspectives. Yet, the engagements with (...) death, dying and mourning, constitutive of conventional Death Studies’ investigations, tend to remain insufficient and reductive. They are often governed by the normative notions of: the subject; bonds between humans, as well as between humans and (their) animals; family relations and communities; rituals; and finally, experiences of grief, mourning, and bereavement. Moreover, these engagements are frequently embedded in constraining beliefs in life/death divides, constructed along the lines of conventional religious and/or scientific mind/body dualisms, characteristic of the Western cultural imaginaries. Against this background, QDS offers a site for ‘queering’ traditional ways of approaching death both as a subject of study and philosophical reflection, and as a phenomenon to articulate in artistic work or practices of mourning. Here, the notion of ‘queer’ conveys many meanings. It refers to researching and narrating death, dying, and mourning in the context of queer bonds and communities, where the subjects involved/studied/interviewed and the relations they are involved in are recognised as ‘queer’. Simultaneously, the term ‘queer’ can also function as an adverb and a verb, referring thus to the processes of going beyond and unsettling (subverting, exceeding) binaries and given norms, normativities, and constraining conventions. In other words, ‘queer’ becomes both a process and a methodology that is applicable and exceeds the focus on gender and sexuality as its exclusive concerns. (shrink)

Background: There is a great deal of overlap between the symptoms of schizophrenia and the nature of yogic experiences described in various societies and religions. Aim: This study aims to separate the symptoms of psychotic disorders from the experiences described by various yogic systems. Materials and Methods: A review of various scriptures like Shrimad Bhagvad Gita, Vedas, and other spiritual literature was done and was compared with the various scientific studies regarding yogic experiences. Results: The result shows that, there exist (...) the abnormal behaviors, which need to be controlled by taking help from psychiatry, but there are also the genuine yogic experiences, that are often confused with the symptoms of a psychotic disorder like schizophrenia. Conclusions: The science of psychiatry is playing an important role in classifying the behavioral patterns and thus helping us to control the abnormal behavior patterns. Still, we cannot deny the fact that, the budding science in a developmental stage is unable to unravel the complete mysteries of human mind and because of that; some genuine yogic experiences are often confused with psychotic disorders. (shrink)

Curriculum review of any academic curriculum is one way of demonstrating the dynamism of such discipline. Mass Communication as a dynamic discipline is one such beneficiary of curriculum review. In line with Iwuchukwu’s (2010) earlier submission that no graduate of any academic level or discipline worth’s more than the curriculum that produces him/her, it was an observed inability of some practicing journalists, especially, those in the print. To handle ethical issues, which was traced to a lacuna in the curriculum that (...) led to the introduction of the course, ethics. This paper seeks to unveil another obvious lapse among mass communication practitioners cutting across, print, broadcast and electronic media. It further highlights that such lapses as incompetence in language use, both at the phonetic, phonological semantic. Syntactic stylistic and even psycholinguistic to be a direct fall out of a perceived lacuna in the present mass communication education curriculum especially in Nigeria. We contend that a review of the present curriculum is glaringly imperative recommending not only the inclusion of more language/linguistic courses but also a stronger synergy between language/linguistics and mass communication. This is our opinion could be boosted with a course "Language and Communication not only though to all mass communication students at all levels, but it being recognized as another Sub-field of specialization by mass communication graduates who wish to further their stadium at the postgraduates levels as in the case in the University of Calabar. (shrink)

We offer an account of the generic use of the term “porn”, as seen in recent usages such as “food porn” and “real estate porn”. We offer a definition adapted from earlier accounts of sexual pornography. On our account, a representation is used as generic porn when it is engaged with primarily for the sake of a gratifying reaction, freed from the usual costs and consequences of engaging with the represented content. We demonstrate the usefulness of the concept of generic (...) porn by using it to isolate a new type of such porn: moral outrage porn. Moral outrage porn is representations of moral outrage, engaged with primarily for the sake of the resulting gratification, freed from the usual costs and consequences of engaging with morally outrageous content. Moral outrage porn is dangerous because it encourages the instrumentalization of one’s empirical and moral beliefs, manipulating their content for the sake of gratification. Finally, we suggest that when using porn is wrong, it is often wrong because it instrumentalizes what ought not to be instrumentalized. (shrink)

The theory and culture of the arts has largely focused on the arts of objects, and neglected the arts of action – the “process arts”. In the process arts, artists create artifacts to engender activity in their audience, for the sake of the audience’s aesthetic appreciation of their own activity. This includes appreciating their own deliberations, choices, reactions, and movements. The process arts include games, urban planning, improvised social dance, cooking, and social food rituals. In the traditional object arts, the (...) central aesthetic properties occur in the artistic artifact itself. It is the painting that is beautiful; the novel that is dramatic. In the process arts, the aesthetic properties occur in the activity of the appreciator. It is the game player’s own decisions that are elegant, the rock climber’s own movement that is graceful, and the tango dancers’ rapport that is beautiful. The artifact’s role is to call forth and shape that activity, guiding it along aesthetic lines. I offer a theory of the process arts. Crucially, we must distinguish between the designed artifact and the prescribed focus of aesthetic appreciation. In the object arts, these are one and the same. The designed artifact is the painting, which is also the prescribed focus of appreciation. In the process arts, they are different. The designed artifact is the game, but the appreciator is prescribed to appreciate their own activity in playing the game. Next, I address the complex question of who the artist really is in a piece of process art — the designer or the active appreciator? Finally, I diagnose the lowly status of the process arts. (shrink)