The Pfizer-BioNTech coronavirus vaccine is 90 percent effective in protecting against COVID-19. It would not have been possible without the tireless effort of Professor Katalin Karikó, a scientific innovator fitting the mold of dynamic inventor Arthur Diamond presents in his book, Openness to Creative Destruction Sustaining Innovative Dynamism. Not only did Professor Karikó persist in her beliefs in the therapeutic potential of synthetic messenger RNA over the course of four decades, but she did so despite the criticisms of other (...) scientists and despite lack of financial backing for large parts of her career. Professor Karikó is a good example of the unconventional picture that Diamond paints of entrepreneurs in a specific version of market capitalism he terms, innovative dynamism. Specifically, she is an example of someone who does not hold prevailing academic theories in too high a regard and instead privileges her tacit knowledge (knowledge gained from years of working with mRNA in the lab) to persist believing in the potential of a therapy that now could quite literally save the world. Most surprisingly, she, like most of the entrepreneurs surveyed in the book, seem not primarily motivated by profit, though the money their projects eventually attract is integral to disseminating their creative ideas to the masses. -/- Are the many examples offered by Diamond that are similar to Professor Karikó’s story evidence against the long-standing suspicion that there is something morally damning in the self-interested motivations of innovative entrepreneurship? Is it the case that others would have inevitably pursued the cure that Karikó pursued, regardless of economic system? In light of COVID-19 and other high-pressure situations, ought we to care how we constrain the innovators who develop solutions? Diamond’s case for the economic system, innovative dynamism, seeks to answer these and other important questions concerning our political and cultural treatment of innovators and entrepreneurs. This review critically assesses his efforts. I make my case by first reviewing the major argumentative structure of the book, then I summarize and evaluate the three major themes Diamond presents in the book: (1) what is innovative dynamism and who are its competitors, (2) what are the major benefits of innovative dynamism, (3) who is the innovative entrepreneur and how do we support him or her? (shrink)

The host of SUSY(supersymmetry) based string theories is considered. Superstrings are comprehended as possible candidates on Quantum Gravity basic objects. It is argued that superstring theories constitute mainly mathematical progress and can reconcile general relativity with quantum field theory at best. Yet they cannot provide the genuine synthesis. Superstring unification of all the four forces at hand is a formal one . It is contended that genesis and proliferation of superstrings can better be described not by philosophy of science models (...) but in terms of modern sociology of science. The formal character of gravity and quantum fields fusion and the lack of experimental verification make the transition to superstring theories ad hoc in Lakatosian standards. Possible way of explanation is proposed based on social interests conception of Andrew Pickering. -/- Key words: superstrings, unification, Kaluza-Klein, sociology of science . (shrink)

Dieser Artikel stellt Cora Diamonds Begriff des Mitgeschöpfs dar und untersucht dessen Relevanz für tierethische und tierpolitische Diskurse. Die traditionelle Tierethik hat eine rationalistische, naturalistische und reduktionistische Tendenz. Diamonds Moralphilosophie stellt dem einen praxissensitiven Ansatz gegenüber, der Emotionen und die moralische Imagination umfasst, wobei Diamond die Bedeutung des Menschseins betont. Letztere entspringt zwar einem epistemischen Anthropozentrismus, jedoch folgt aus diesem keine Mensch-Tier-Hierarchie: Diamond plädiert dafür, andere Tiere als Mitgeschöpfe, als Gefährten auf sterblichen Pfaden, zu begreifen. Dabei zeigt (...) class='Hi'>Diamond an ihrer Interpretation von J.M. Coetzees The Lives of Animals, wie Konzepte von anderen Tieren auf das eigene Selbstverständnis rückwirken. Abschließend erörtert der Artikel den Vorwurf des Quietismus und die Schwierigkeit der politischen Umsetzbarkeit in Diamonds Philosophie. -/- [This article outlines Cora Diamond’s concept of the fellow creature and examines its relevance for animal ethics and animal politics. Diamond’s moral philosophy contrasts the rationalistic, naturalistic, and reductionistic tendency of traditional animal ethics with a practice-oriented approach that encompasses emotions and the moral imagination. Diamond emphasizes the importance of being human, which emanates from an epistemic anthropocentrism, but from which no human-animal hierarchy follows: She pleads for recognizing other animals as fellow creatures, as companions on mortal paths. In her interpretation of J.M. Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals, Diamond shows how conceptualizing other animals influences one’s own self-understanding. Finally, the article discusses the reproach of quietism and the difficulty of political feasibility in Diamond’s philosophy.]. (shrink)

The aim of my paper is to describe and evaluate different conceptions of holism in Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. I distinguish three readings of holistic elements in this work: i) Minimal Holism (E. Anscombe, M. Black, D. Pears); ii) Moderate Holism (J. Conant, C. Diamond, G. Ryle); and iii) Radical Holism (G. Bar-Elli, M. Kremer, P. Livingston). The conclusion is that the most viable option is Moderate Holism since it embraces the logico-syntactical notion of use, rejects an anachronistic interpretation (...) of Tractatarian ontology and allows us to see that the holistic elements are complementary to the initial atomism of the work. Moreover, I point to the consequences of the topic for the overall reading of Wittgenstein’s early and late work. (shrink)

I introduce a perceptual phenomenon so far overlooked in the philosophical literature: ‘visual evanescence’. ‘Evanescent’ objects are those that due to their structured visible appearances have a tendency to vanish or evanesce from sight at certain places and for certain ‘biologically apt’ perceivers. Paradigmatically evanescent objects are those associated with certain forms of animal camouflage. I show that reflection on visual evanescence helps create conceptual room for a treatment of looks statements not explicit in the contemporary literature, one which takes (...) its cue from the relatively neglected philosophy of perception of G.E.M. Anscombe. In sensory contexts in which evanescence is known to have occurred, the use of ‘looks invisible’ seems to be intelligible, a fact that sensationalist and objectivist treatments of the nature of looks, as I call them, cannot obviously accommodate - at least, as I explain, when coupled with what Cora Diamond (1981) describes as a ‘natural’ understanding of nonsense. Focusing on a number of imaginative scenarios in which the statement ‘looks invisible’ is permissible, I oppose these ontological treatments with the grammatical approach I draw from Anscombe and in doing so I uncover a degree of unity across the cases I consider: something can intelligibly be said to ‘look invisible’ if one can see or appears to see the entirety of the region that the ‘invisible’ thing occupies. The region ‘looks empty’ but is full. (shrink)

This paper argues that, by construing emotion as epistemologically subversive, the Western tradition has tended to obscure the vital role of emotion in the construction of knowledge. The paper begins with an account of emotion that stresses its active, voluntary, and socially constructed aspects, and indicates how emotion is involved in evaluation and observation. It then moves on to show how the myth of dispassionate investigation has functioned historically to undermine the epistemic authority of women as well as other social (...) groups associated culturally with emotion. Finally, the paper sketches some ways in which the emotions of underclass groups, especially women, may contribute to the development of a critical social theory. (shrink)

This article provides an original account of slurs and how they may be differentially used by in-group and out-group speakers. Slurs are first distinguished from other terms and their role in social interaction is discussed. A new distinction is introduced between three different uses of slurs : the paradigmatic derogatory use, non-paradigmatic derogatory use, and non-paradigmatic non-derogatory use. I then account for their literal meaning and explain how a family-resemblance conception of category membership can clarify our understanding of the various (...) natural-language uses of slurs, -. The focus is restricted primarily to race-based and sex-based slurs used in the context of English speakers, and the article concludes with desiderata to be met by any subsequent analyses of slurs. (shrink)

Two attitudes are possible: one, that the world is an absolute jungle and that the exercise of coercive power by rulers is only a manifestation of this; and the other, that it is both necessary and right that there should be this exercise of power, that through it the world is much less of a jungle than it could possibly be without it, so that one should in principle be glad of the existence of such power, and only take exception (...) to its unjust exercise. (shrink)

Moral and political forms of constructivism accord to people strong, “constitutive” forms of discursive standing and so build on, or express, a commitment to discursive respect. The paper explores dimensions of discursive respect, i.e., depth, scope, and purchase; it addresses tenuous interdependencies between them; on this basis, it identifies limitations of the idea of discursive respect and of constructivism. The task of locating discursive respect in the normative space defined by its three dimensions is partly, and importantly, an ethical task (...) that is beyond constructivism. Interdependencies between these dimensions call into question the possibility of a plausible and coherent form of discursive respect that is deep, inclusive in scope, and rich in purchase. This does not mean that we should reject discursive respect, or constructivism, for that matter. But it suggests that the task of reconciling the dimensions of discursive respect may not allow for widely shareable results. This task needs to be addressed on non-constructivist grounds. Accordingly, we have reasons to concede that constitutive forms of discursive standing are less fundamental in the order of justification than weaker, “derivative” forms, and this is so especially if we take constitutive standing to mark an important good. (shrink)

In “The Semantics of Racial Slurs,” an article recently published in Linguistic and Philosophical Investigations, Hedger draws upon Kaplan’s distinction between descriptive and expressive content to argue that slurs are expressions with purely expressive content. Here I review the key considerations presented by Hedger in support of his purely expressive account of slurs and provide clear reasons for why it must ultimately be rejected. After reviewing the key cases Hedger offers for consideration in support of his view that slurs are (...) expressions with purely expressive content, this article provides a critical evaluation of these cases, pointing out at least 13 ways in which his purely expressive analysis of slurs fails. In considering the 13 ways in which the purely expressive analysis of slurs remains inadequate, this article concludes with the suggestion that an adequate account of slurs will ultimately involve not only an expressive aspect but a descriptive aspect also. (shrink)

Intuitions play an important role in contemporary philosophy. It is common for theories in epistemology, morality, semantics and metaphysics to be rejected because they are inconsistent with a widely and firmly held intuition. Our goal in this paper is to explore the role of epistemic intuitions in epistemology from a naturalistic perspective. Here is the question we take to be central: (Q) Ought we to trust our epistemic intuitions as evidence in support of our epistemological theories? We will understand this (...) question as employing an epistemic ‘ought’ – insofar as we aim at developing a correct epistemological theory, ought we to trust our epistemic intuitions as evidence for or against our epistemological theories? As it stands, (Q) needs further clarification. Whether something is trustworthy is relative to what (a) what it is and (b) what we’re asking it to do. Sam might trust Marie but not George to care for his children, while he might trust both to care for his pet fish. So in order to address (Q), we first need to explore two questions: What are epistemic intuitions? And what sort of epistemological theories do we want? We will take up each of these questions in the following sections. (shrink)

"Surrender; therefore, surrender or fight" is apparently an argument corresponding to an inference from an imperative to an imperative. Several philosophers, however (Williams 1963; Wedeking 1970; Harrison 1991; Hansen 2008), have denied that imperative inferences exist, arguing that (1) no such inferences occur in everyday life, (2) imperatives cannot be premises or conclusions of inferences because it makes no sense to say, for example, "since surrender" or "it follows that surrender or fight", and (3) distinct imperatives have conflicting permissive presuppositions (...) ("surrender or fight" permits you to fight without surrendering, but "surrender" does not), so issuing distinct imperatives amounts to changing one's mind and thus cannot be construed as making an inference. In response I argue inter alia that, on a reasonable understanding of 'inference', some everyday-life inferences do have imperatives as premises and conclusions, and that issuing imperatives with conflicting permissive presuppositions does not amount to changing one's mind. (shrink)

Introduction and translation of “The Four Phases of Philosophy” by Franz Brentano.

Kadri Vihvelin, in "What time travelers cannot do" (Philos Stud 81: 315-330, 1996), argued that "no time traveler can kill the baby who in fact is her younger self, because (V1) "if someone would fail to do something, no matter how hard or how many times she tried, then she cannot do it", and (V2) if a time traveler tried to kill her baby self, she would always fail. Theodore Sider (Philos Stud 110: 115-138, 2002) criticized Vihvelin's argument, and Ira (...) Kiourti (Philos Stud 139: 343-352, 2008) criticized both Vihvelin's argument and Sider's critique. I present a critique of Vihvelin's argument different from both Sider's and Kiourti's critiques: I argue in a novel way that both V1 and V2 are false. Since Vihvelin's argument might be understood as providing a challenge to the possibility of time travel, if my critique succeeds then time travel survives such a challenge unscathed. (shrink)

I examine Hume’s ‘construal of the basic structure of human agency’ and his ‘analysis of human agency’ as they arise in his investigation of causal power. Hume’s construal holds both that volition is separable from action and that the causal mechanism of voluntary action is incomprehensible. Hume’s analysis argues, on the basis of these two claims, that we cannot draw the concept of causal power from human agency. Some commentators suggest that Hume’s construal of human agency is untenable, unduly skeptical, (...) or uniquely entailed by the limits of empiricism. However, as I argue, these criticisms depend either on a misunderstanding of Hume’s analysis of human agency or on a neglect of the historical context of his view. (shrink)

Two decades ago, Rolf Landauer (1991) argued that “information is physical” and ought to have a role in the scientific analysis of reality comparable to that of matter, energy, space and time. This would also help to bridge the gap between biology and mathematics and physics. Although it can be argued that we are living in the ‘golden age’ of biology, both because of the great challenges posed by medicine and the environment and the significant advances that have been made—especially (...) in genetics and molecular and cell biology—we feel that information as an essential aspect of life has been neglected, or at least misunderstood. We therefore summon Maxwell’s Demon and its distant relative the ratchet, and apply these to biology. (shrink)

I argue that Evolutionary Psychologists’ notion of adaptationism is closest to what Peter Godfrey-Smith (2001) calls explanatory adaptationism and as a result, is not a good organizing principle for research in the biology of human behavior. I also argue that adopting an alternate notion of adaptationism presents much more explanatory resources to the biology of human behavior. I proceed by introducing Evolutionary Psychology and giving some examples of alternative approaches to the biological explanation of human behavior. Next I characterize adaptation (...) and explain the range of biological phenomena that can count as adaptations. I go onto introduce the range of adaptationist views that have been distinguished by philosophers of biology and lay out explanatory adaptationism in detail. (shrink)

[This is an edited and improved version of "You Are Not Your Brain: Against 'Teaching to the Brain'" previously published in *Review of Higher Education and Self-Learning* 5(15), Summer 2012.] Since educators are always looking for ways to improve their practice, and since empirical science is now accepted in our worldview as the final arbiter of truth, it is no surprise they have been lured toward cognitive neuroscience in hopes that discovering how the brain learns will provide a nutshell explanation (...) for student learning in general. I argue that identifying the person with the brain is scientism (not science), that the brain is not the person, and that it is the person who learns. In fact the brain only responds to the learning of embodied experience within the extra-neural network of intersubjective communications. Learning is a dynamic, cultural activity, not a neural program. Brain-based learning is unnecessary for educators and may be dangerous in that a culturally narrow ontology is taken for granted, thus restricting our creativity and imagination, and narrowing the human community. (shrink)

Kant identifies what are in fact Free Riders as the most noxious species of polemicists. Kant thinks polemic reduces the stature and authority of reason to a method of squabbling that destabilizes social equilibrium and portends disintegration into the Hobessian state of nature. In the first Critique, Kant proposes two textually related solutions to the Free Rider problem.

The central hypothesis of the collaboration between Language and Computing (L&C) and the Institute for Formal Ontology and Medical Information Science (IFOMIS) is that the methodology and conceptual rigor of a philosophically inspired formal ontology greatly benefits application ontologies. To this end r®, L&C’s ontology, which is designed to integrate and reason across various external databases simultaneously, has been submitted to the conceptual demands of IFOMIS’s Basic Formal Ontology (BFO). With this project we aim to move beyond the level of (...) controlled vocabularies to yield an ontology with the ability to support reasoning applications. Our general procedure has been the implementation of a meta-ontological definition space in which the definitions of all the concepts and relations in LinKBase® are standardized in a framework of first-order logic. In this paper we describe how this standardization has already led to an improvement in the LinKBase® structure that allows for a greater degree of internal coherence than ever before possible. We then show the use of this philosophical standardization for the purpose of mapping external databases to one another, using LinKBase® as translation hub, with a greater degree of success than possible hitherto. We demonstrate how this offers a genuine advance over other application ontologies that have not submitted themselves to the demands of philosophical scrutiny. LinKBase® is one of the world’s largest applications-oriented medical domain ontologies, and BFO is one of the world’s first philosophically driven reference ontologies. The collaboration of the two thus initiates a new phase in the quest to solve the so-called “Tower of Babel”. (shrink)

Hume's Treatise arguments concerning space, time, and geometry, especially ones involving his denial of infinite divisibility; have suffered harsh criticism. I show that in the section "Of the ideas of space and time," Hume gives important characterizations of his skeptical approach, in some respects Pyrrhonian, that will be developed in the rest of the Treatise. When that approach is better understood, the force of Hume's arguments can be appreciated, and the influential criticisms of them can be seen to miss the (...) mark. (shrink)

I defend the following version of the ought-implies-can principle: (OIC) by virtue of conceptual necessity, an agent at a given time has an (objective, pro tanto) obligation to do only what the agent at that time has the ability and opportunity to do. In short, obligations correspond to ability plus opportunity. My argument has three premises: (1) obligations correspond to reasons for action; (2) reasons for action correspond to potential actions; (3) potential actions correspond to ability plus opportunity. In the (...) bulk of the paper I address six objections to OIC: three objections based on putative counterexamples, and three objections based on arguments to the effect that OIC conflicts with the is/ought thesis, the possibility of hard determinism, and the denial of the Principle of Alternate Possibilities. (shrink)

Coreferentialism refers to the common assumption in the literature that slurs and descriptors are coreferential expressions with precisely the same extension. For instance, Vallee recently writes that “If S is an ethnic slur in language L, then there is a non-derogatory expression G in L such that G and S have the same extension”. The non-derogatory expression G is commonly considered the nonpejorative correlate of the slur expression S and it is widely thought that every S has a coreferring G (...) that possesses precisely the same extension. Yet here I argue against this widespread assumption by first briefly introducing what slurs are and then considering four sources of supporting evidence showing that slurs and descriptors are in fact not coreferential expressions with precisely the same extension. I argue that since slurs and descriptors differ in their extension they thereby differ in their meaning or content also. This article additionally introduces the notion of a conceptual anchor in order to adequately account for the relationship between slurs and descriptors actually evidenced in the empirical data, and further considers the inadequacy of common dictionary definitions of slurs. This article therefore contributes to the literature on slurs by demonstrating that previous accounts operating on the assumption that slurs and descriptors are coreferential expressions with the same extension, and that they thereby have the same meaning or content, are inconsistent with empirical data and that an alternative account in accord with Croom better fits the facts concerning their actual meaning and use. (shrink)

The notion of antifragility, an attribute of systems that makes them thrive under variable conditions, has recently been proposed by Nassim Taleb in a business context. This idea requires the ability of such systems to ‘tinker’, i.e., to creatively respond to changes in their environment. A fairly obvious example of this is natural selection-driven evolution. In this ubiquitous process, an original entity, challenged by an ever-changing environment, creates variants that evolve into novel entities. Analyzing functions that are essential during stationary-state (...) life yield examples of entities that may be antifragile. One such example is proteins with flexible regions that can undergo functional alteration of their side residues or backbone and thus implement the tinkering that leads to antifragility. This in-built property of the cell chassis must be taken into account when considering construction of cell factories driven by engineering principles. (shrink)

Contemporary debates on obedience and consent, such as those between Thomas Senor and A. John Simmons, suggest that either political obligation must exist as a concept or there must be natural duty of justice accessible to us through reason. Without one or the other, de facto political institutions would lack the requisite moral framework to engage in legitimate coercion. This essay suggests that both are unnecessary in order to provide a conceptual framework in which obedience to coercive political institutions can (...) be understood. By providing a novel reading of Hobbes’s Leviathan, this article argues that both political obligation and a natural duty to justice are unnecessary to ground the ability of political institutions to engage in legitimate coercion. This essay takes issue with common readings of Hobbes which assume consent is necessary to generate obedience on the part of citizens, and furthermore that political obligation is critical for the success of political institutions. While the failure of the traditional Hobbesian narrative of a consenting individual would seem to suggest the Leviathan is indefensible as a project, this paper argues that the right of war in the state of nature was more central for Hob- bes’s understanding of political institutions than obligation. Furthermore, Hobbes provides an adequate defense of political institutions even if his arguments about consent, obligation and punishment are only rhetorical. In this way Hobbesian law is best understood as a set of practical requirements to avoid war, and not as moral requirements that individuals are bound to comply with. Thus Hobbesian political institutions are not vulnerable to contemporary philosophical anarchist criticisms about political obligation and political institutions as such. To develop this reading, I focus primarily on the Leviathan, including interpretations by Skinner, Kateb, Flathman, and Oakeshott. Ultimately, this argument provides insight into contem- porary political institutions of the state, citizenship, criminality, and the law in a world where political obligation has not been adequately justified. (shrink)

Normative theories can be useful in developing descriptive theories, as when normative subjective expected utility theory is used to develop descriptive rational choice theory and behavioral game theory. “Ought” questions are also the essence of theories of moral reasoning, a domain of higher mental processing that could not survive without normative considerations.

This paper examines the possibility of parenting as a queer practice. Examining definitions of “queer” as resistant to presumptions and practices of reprosexuality and repro-narrativity (Michael Warner), bourgeouis norms of domestic space and family time (Judith Halberstam), and policies of reproductive futurism (Lee Edelman), I argue that queer parenting is possible. Indeed, parenting that resists practices of normalization are, in part, realized by certain types of postmodern families. However, fully actualizing the possibility of parenting queerly—and thus teaching our children the (...) values of non-normativity--requires engaging political struggles for distributive justice. These are, thus, the struggles that should be at the center of queer politics, rather than the current struggles for gay marriage and homoparental rights. (shrink)

This paper examines a variety of social scientific studies purporting to demonstrate that transracial adoption is in the best interests of children. Finding flaws in these studies and the ethical and political arguments based upon such scientific findings, we argue for adoption practices and policies that respect the racial and ethnic identities of children of color and their communities of origin.

From folk tales to movies, stories possess features which naturally suit them to contribute to the growth of virtue. In this article I show that the fictional exemplars help the learner to grasp the moral importance of internal states and resolves a tension between existing kinds of exemplars discussed by virtue ethicists. Stories also increase the information conveyed by virtue terms and aid the growth of prudence. Stories can provide virtuous exemplars, inform learners as to the nature of the virtues (...) and offer practice in developing situational judgement. As such they are a significant resource for virtue ethics and moral education. (shrink)

Perhaps the greatest impediment to a viable libertarianism is the provision of a satisfactory explanation of how actions that are undetermined by an agent's character can still be under the control of, or ‘up to’, the agent. The ‘luck problem’ has been most assiduously examined by Robert Kane who supplies a detailed account of how this problem can be resolved. Although Kane's theory is innovative, insightful, and more resourceful than most of his critics believe, it ultimately cannot account for the (...) type of control that moral responsibility and (ultimate) agency legitimately require. (shrink)

John Searle’s The Construction of Social Reality and Hernando de Soto’s The Mystery of Capital shifted the focus of current thought on capital and economic development to the cultural and conceptual ideas that underpin market economies and that are taken for granted in developed nations. This collection of essays assembles 21 philosophers, economists, and political scientists to help readers understand these exciting new theories.

ABSTRACT Clinicians, researchers and the informed public have come to view addiction as a brain disease. However, in nature even extreme events often reflect normal processes, for instance the principles of plate tectonics explain earthquakes as well as the gradual changes in the face of the earth. In the same way, excessive drug use is predicted by general principles of choice. One of the implications of this result is that drugs do not turn addicts into compulsive drug users; they retain (...) the capacity to say ?no?. In support of the logical implications of the choice theory approach to addiction, research reveals that most addicts quit using drugs by about age 30, that most quit without professional help, that the correlates of quitting are the correlates of decision making, and, according to the most recent epidemiological evidence, the probability of quitting remains constant over time and independent of the onset of dependence. This last result implies that, after an initial period of heavy drug use, remission is independent of any further exposure to drugs. In short, there is much empirical support for the claim that addiction emerges as a function of the rules of everyday choice. (shrink)

Although social scientists have identified diverse behavioral patterns among children from dissimilarly structured families, marketing scholars have progressed little in relating family structure to consumption-related decisions. In particular, the roles played by members of single-mother families—which may include live-in grandparents, mother’s unmarried partner, and step-father with or without step-sibling(s)—may affect children’s influence on consumption-related decisions. For example, to offset a parental authority dynamic introduced by a new stepfather, the work-related constraints imposed on a breadwinning mother, or the imposition of adult-level (...) household responsibilities on children, single-mother families may attend more to their children’s product preferences. -/- Without a profile that includes socio-economic, behavioral, and psychological aspects, efficient and socially responsible marketing to single-mother households is compromised. Relative to dual-parent families, single-mother families tend to have fewer resources and less buying power, children who consume more materialistic and compulsively, and children who more strongly influence decision making for both own-use and family-use products. Timely research would ensure that these and other tendencies now differentiate single-mother from dual-parent families in ways that marketers should address. Hence, our threefold goal is (1) to consolidate and highlight gaps in existing theory applied to studying children’s influence on consumption-related decision making in single-mother families, and (2) to propose a hybrid framework that merges two theories conducive to such research, and (3) to identify promising research propositions for future research. (shrink)

Upshot: In our target article we claimed that, at least since Weber and Varela, enactivism has incorporated a theoretical commitment to one important aspect of Jonas’s philosophical biology, namely its anthropomorphism, which is at odds with the methodological commitments of modern science. In this general reply we want to clarify what we mean by anthropomorphism, and explain why we think it is incompatible with science. We do this by spelling out what we call the “Jonasian inference,” i.e., the idea that (...) we are entitled, based on our first-person experience of teleology, to take the appearance of teleology in other living beings at face value. (shrink)

Personal forgiveness, in a worldly setting, is an act performed by a human person to overcome resentment, among others, in order for that person to open up to possibilities of accommodation of, acceptance of, and reconciliation or communion with the Other. I want to argue that such an act is spiritual in nature or has an element of divinity in it. To forgive is to be lovingly compassionate, and the act of being lovingly compassionate in the midst of being wronged (...) or downtrodden, or exploited and so on—real or imagined—is an act that goes beyond being human: it appears knowingly or unknowingly—even for a non-believer—to have the guidance of a spiritual support. One overriding reason, among many, on why we must forgive is to have peace of mind, that is, to overcome the inherent spiritual distress or emotional burden, or both. In this regard, personal forgiveness may be considered as a form of an enlightened self-interest. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that there is no problem of Divine Hiddenness for Christians and offer an alternate explanation for the widespread claim that God's existence is hidden based on the Christian doctrine of Original Sin.

We are told by philosophers that photographs are a distinct category of image because the photographic process is mind-independent. Furthermore, that the experience of viewing a photograph has a special status, justified by a viewer’s knowledge that the photographic process is mind-independent. Versions of these ideas are central to discussions of photography in both the philosophy of art and epistemology and have far-reaching implications for science, forensics and documentary journalism. Mind-independence (sometimes ‘belief independence’) is a term employed to highlight what (...) is important in the idea that photographs can be produced naturally, mechanically, accidentally or automatically. Insofar as the process is physical, natural, mechanical or causal it can occur without human agency or intervention, entirely in the absence of intentional states. Presented innocuously, the idea is that although photographs are dependent on natural or mechanical processes, they can be produced independently of human agency – particularly human beliefs. Presented in a stronger form, the claim is that even if human agency is heavily involved in the production process, the definitive features that make the photograph a photograph and determine its salient properties are nonetheless independent of human minds. In epistemic debates, mind-independence is viewed as essential for explaining why photographs occupy a distinct category among images and justifying a variety of claims about their privileged epistemic and affective status in science, forensics, popular culture and journalism. But, in the philosophy of art, claims about mind-. (shrink)

This is an encyclopedia article about epistemic closure principles. The article explains what they are, their various philosophical uses, how they are argued for or against, and provides an overview of the related literature.

The paper explores the methodology and goals of H. Odera Oruka’s sage philosophy project. Oruka interviewed wise persons who were mostly illiterate and from the rural areas of Kenya to show that a long tradition of critical thinking and philosophizing exists in Africa, even if there is no written record. His descriptions of the role of the academic philosopher turned interviewer varied, emphasizing their refraining from imposition of their own views (the social science model), their adding their own ideas (like (...) Plato), or their midwifery in helping others give birth to their own ideas (like Socrates). The accuracy and consistency of the various metaphors used by Oruka is the main focus of the article’s analysis. The article sums up the shortcomings of Oruka’s method as well as its strengths and concludes with Oruka’s challenge to academic philosophers to rethink their own roles in society. (shrink)

Hume was correct in his critique of causation as understood by the New Science, a critique deadly to both causal and scientific realism. Getting beyond Hume's critique of causation requires that we call into question the New Science's understanding of causation and replace it with a Neo-Aristotelian account of causal processes. In this paper, I try to point the way to such an account.

It should come as little surprise to anyone familiar with his concept of ‘negative capability’ and even a cursory understanding of Daoism that John Keats’ thought resonates strongly with that tradition. Given the pervasive, reductive understanding of Keats as a mere Romantic, however, this source of insight has been used to little advantage. His poem Hyperion, for example, has been roundly criticized as an untidy Romantic fragment. Here, by contrast, I will argue for a strategic understanding of Hyperion as a (...) masterpiece in the Daoist tradition. (shrink)

Translation of "Von der Armut am Geiste; ein Dialog des jungen Lukács," by Ágnes Heller. This translation originally appeared in The Philosophical Forum, Spring-Summer 1972.

In this paper, I discuss the Categorical Imperative as a basis for an Ethics of Belief and its application to Kant's own project in his theoretical philosophy.

Replicability and reproducibility of computational models has been somewhat understudied by “the replication movement.” In this paper, we draw on methodological studies into the replicability of psychological experiments and on the mechanistic account of explanation to analyze the functions of model replications and model reproductions in computational neuroscience. We contend that model replicability, or independent researchers' ability to obtain the same output using original code and data, and model reproducibility, or independent researchers' ability to recreate a model without original code, (...) serve different functions and fail for different reasons. This means that measures designed to improve model replicability may not enhance (and, in some cases, may actually damage) model reproducibility. We claim that although both are undesirable, low model reproducibility poses more of a threat to long-term scientific progress than low model replicability. In our opinion, low model reproducibility stems mostly from authors' omitting to provide crucial information in scientific papers and we stress that sharing all computer code and data is not a solution. Reports of computational studies should remain selective and include all and only relevant bits of code. (shrink)

Empirically minded researchers (e.g., experimental philosophers) have begun exploring the “folk” notion of intentional action, often with surprising results. In this paper, we extend these lines of research and present new evidence from a radically new paradigm in experimental philosophy. Our results suggest that in some circumstances people make strikingly different judgments about intentions and intentionality as a function of whether the person brings about or observes an event. Implications for traditional action theory and the experimental study of folk intuitions (...) are discussed. (shrink)

In this essay I discuss the concept of suffering, the causes of suffering, and the Christian solution to the problem of suffering. I conclude that there is no basis, within the Christian view of things, for raising the traditional problem of evil through reflection on the fact of substantial suffering in the world. I thus respectfully suggest that the problem of evil is only a problem for non-believers, who have the wrong perspective on the nature and source of suffering. (When (...) first uploaded to this website, the text of this essay was inadvertently replaced by that for a different essay, "Morality and Fallen Man." That essay has been uploaded and the original text restored.). (shrink)

Peter Abelard's claim that universals are only words is well known, yet its metaphysical bearing for Abelard's philosophy is much disputed. Peter King has recently suggested that Abelard's nominalism is only an element of his larger irrealist metaphysic. Against this interpretation, I argue that Abelard's view is better understood as a form of moderate realism and a development of the solution attempted by Boethius in his Second Commentary on Porphyry's Isagoge. Both Abelard and Boethius clearly deny the independent existence of (...) universals, yet they should not be called irrealists, since they agree that universal words or concepts have a firm basis in real, individual things. (shrink)

This paper comments on the strategies and goals of a politics of recognition as celebrated by Nancy Nicol’s important documentary coverage of the gay and lesbian movement for family rights in Quebec. While agreeing that ending legal discrimination against lgbt families is important, I suggest that political recognition of same-sex families and their children is a too limited goal for queer families and their allies. Moreover, it is a goal, I argue, that often trades on trades on troublesome assumptions about (...) gender, class, race, age and normative commitments to monogamy as these relate to distinctions between, for example, “fit” and “unfit” parents. (shrink)