Moral discourse is propositionally clothed, that is, it exhibits those features – such as the ability of its sentences to intelligibly embed in conditionals and other unasserted contexts – that have been taken by some philosophers to be constitutive of discourses that express propositions. If there is nothing more to a mental state being a belief than it being characteristically expressed by sentences that are propositionally clothed then the version of expressivism which accepts that moral discourse is propositionally clothed (‘quasi-realism’) (...) is self-refuting. Fortunately for quasi-realists, this view of belief, which I label ‘minimalism’, is false. I present three arguments against it and dismiss two possible defences (the first drawn from the work of Wright, the second given by Harcourt). The conclusion is that the issue between expressivists and their opponents cannot be settled by the mere fact that moral discourse wears propositional clothing. (shrink)

I will argue here that for many of us the act of dressing our bodies is evidence of intentional expression before different audiences. It is important to appreciate that intentionality enables us to understand how and why we act the way we do. The novel contribution this paper makes to this examination is employing clothing as a means of revealing the characteristics of intentionality. In that, it is rare to identify one exemplar that successfully captures the relationships between the cognitive (...) and physical characteristics of its application. Nevertheless, this paper will not attempt to fully encompass the traditional approaches associated with this concept but instead employ both the early and later writings of French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau‑Ponty and his claim that our lived bodies are an expressive space from which we act intentionally. In other words, that the manner by which we dress our bodies is likely to offer a significant means of revealing the character of intentionality in everyday life and by this, claim that clothing can communicate. Accordingly, this first‑person account closely examines both the cognitive and physical experience of a simple clothing example: ‘what to wear?’ and the experience of an everyday clothing purchase in a store and its subsequent impact when the item of clothing is worn for different audiences. The ensuing discussion systematically examines the significance of marrying Merleau‑Ponty’s writings with this everyday example through private and public audiences and in abstract and public spaces. (shrink)

Affordances are standardly understood as perceived possibilities for interaction. What is afforded is in turn regarded as dependent on the properties of a body and its environment. Human bodies are nearly ubiquitously clothed, and clothing can change the capabilities of bodies. We argue that when clothing does this, it should be regarded as an affordance transforming technology. Clothing receives passing attention in remarks by Gibson, and some empirical work in ecological psychology uses worn items as experimental manipulations. We argue that (...) the effects of clothing should be a central topic of investigation. We further show how the notion of clothing as an affordance transforming technology allows ecological psychology to accommodate feminist insights about the restrictive or oppressive nature of some gendered clothing norms. We aim to show that if ecological psychology is to be a general framework for thinking about human perception and activity, then it should consider clothing, because of the differences it can make to what is afforded. It should do so critically because the ways that clothing transforms affordances are sometimes discriminating in that what people are expected to wear and what differences that makes aren’t independent of how they’re classified in systems of power and oppression. (shrink)

Research in pharmacogenomics and precision medicine has recently introduced the concept of Polygenic Scores (PGSs), namely, indexes that aggregate the effects that many genetic variants are predicted to have on individual disease risk. The popularity of PGSs is increasing rapidly, but surprisingly little attention has been paid to the idealisations they make about phenotypic development. Indeed, PGSs rely on quantitative genetics models and methods, which involve considerable theoretical assumptions that have been questioned on various grounds. This comes with epistemological and (...) ethical concerns about the use of PGSs in clinical decision-making. In this paper, I investigate to what extent idealisations in genetics models can impact the data gathering and clinical interpretation of genomics findings, particularly the calculation and predictive accuracy of PGSs. Although idealisations are considered ineliminable components of scientific models, they may be legitimate or not depending on the epistemic aims of a model. I thus analyse how various idealisations have been introduced in classical models and progressively readapted throughout the history of genetic theorising. Notably, this process involved important changes in the epistemic purpose of such idealisations, which raises the question of whether they are legitimate in the context of contemporary genomics. (shrink)

We criticize the bare theory of quantum mechanics -- a theory on which the Schrödinger equation is universally valid, and standard way of thinking about superpositions is correct.

“Crow recalls the story about his ancestor, Crow Forefather and Peacock, drawing feathers together. Crow Forefather had drawn a beautiful outfit for Peacock, but when it was the turn for Peacock to draw, Crow Forefather was in such a hurry to eat that he told Peacock to just pour the black ink bucket onto him. Since then, the Crows have lived with pit black, ugly-looking feathers.” -/- —In “Contentment”; The Kingfisher Story Collection [1].

Book Symposium on The Territories of Science and Religion (University of Chicago Press, 2015). The author responds to review essays by John Heilbron, Stephen Gaukroger, and Yiftach Fehige.

In recent decades, interest in the history and philosophy of the natural sciences has increased significantly. This interest has made scholars aware of the existing knowledge gap in these areas and has brought a kind of 'pressure' for more articles and books on the subject. Indeed, it also motivates academics to start new projects related to these disciplines. Volumes like this are much needed for scholars in the field, given the high amount of information they contain. This rich volume aims (...) at stimulating the field by presenting current research papers on Avicenna's influence on the fields of physics and cosmology. In order to achieve this goal, this work contains thirteen articles related to the reception of the Persian philosopher's thought in these areas in the Middle Ages. The book revolves around the three different languages and cultures which were crucial for the reception of Avicenna's thought. Hence, the volume is arranged in three main sections focusing on the Arabic, Hebrew and Latin traditions. It also contains an Index of Avicenna's Works with Passages Cited and an Index of Names. The introduction is rather short compared to other sections of the book. It covers the general topics presented in the volume. The first six chapters deal with the Arabic tradition ; the next two have to do with the Hebrew reception of Avicenna, and the last five analyse the Latin reception of Avicenna's physics and cosmology. (shrink)

Despite the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, assimilationist policies continue, whether official or effective. Such policies affect more than the right to group choice. The concern is whether indeed genocide or “only” ethnocide (or culturecide)—the elimination of a traditional culture—is at work. Discussions of the distinction between the two terms have been inconsistent enough that at least one commentator has declared that they cannot be used in analytical contexts. While these terms, I contend, have distinct senses, (...) yet in cases of governmental and other institutional assimilationist policy for indigenous peoples, such ethnocide effectively entails genocide. Insofar as any people’s cultural practices and beliefs are essential for life and health, individuals in groups value, if tacitly, their culture as highly as their language or any artifact: Thus, attempts to eradicate a culture through assimilation in fact eradicate individuals’ lives and health and so are effectively murderous. Acknowledgement by worldwide organizations that assimilationist ethnocide is effectively genocide should affect policy concerning indigenous peoples and thus has significance for international law. (shrink)

Review of G.P. Baker and P.M.S. Hacker's Wittgenstein: Rules, Grammar and Necessity, the second volume of their analytical commentary on Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations.

The ‘Animal Question’ has occupied Western philosophy for more than a decade now. Whether inspired by the rising urgency of the problem of violence towards and exploitation of nonhuman animals perpetuated by science, technology and culture broadly speaking, or by an enthralment with otherness, an increasing number of theorists engage with the concepts of the animal and human–nonhuman relations. These notions become an incessant impetus for creative and critical inquiry and the exploration of philosophical, political, ethical and artistic thinking. What, (...) however, needs to be asked in the first place is: how can we, as humans, relate to the nonhuman, and more specifically, to nonhuman animals ethically? Is it possible at all? The question of ethics is one of the main driving forces behind The Animal Catalyst: Towards Ahuman Theory, edited by Patricia MacCormack. (shrink)

Kohei Saito, a Japanese Marx researcher and editor of the historical-critical edition of Marx and Engels’s complete works (Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe or MEGA), is known to Anglophone readers for his...

Positive review of Laats and Siegel (2016) *Teaching Evolution in a Creation Nation* (University of Chicago Press).

Review of the first comprehensive companion to the growing scholarship on ancient Greek and Roman aesthetics.

Book Reviews Mehmet Karabela, Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review/Revue canadienne de philosophie, FirstView Article.

A review of Tiziana Andina's The Philosophy of Art: The Question of Definition: From Hegel to Post-Dantian Theories (Bloomsbury 2013).

Feminists have always been concerned with how the clothes women wear can reinforce and reproduce gender hierarchy. However, they have strongly disagreed about what to do in response: some have suggested that the key to feminist liberation is to stop caring about how one dresses; others have replied that the solution is to give women increased choices. In this paper, we argue that neither of these dominant approaches is satisfactory and that, ultimately, they have led to an impasse that pervades (...) the contemporary feminist debate. The problem is that both sides of the debate understand women’s complicity in patriarchal subordination as a matter of what women wear and do. Instead, we propose a phenomenological analysis that understands complicity as based in our relations to our clothes. Starting from this phenomenological perspective, we sketch a new relational feminist ethics of dressing. This alternative ethical paradigm cannot yield a simple recipe for how to dress or tell us what garments are off-limits. But it can offer a way to make critical feminist judgements about clothes without veering into a stifling new prescriptivism. (shrink)

When we participate in political debate or protests, we are judged by how we look, which clothes we wear, by our skin colour, gender and body language. This results in exclusions and limits our freedom of expression. The Politics of Becoming explores radical democratic acts of disidentification to counter this problem. Anonymity in masked protest, graffiti, and online de-bate interrupts our everyday identities. This allows us to live our multiple selves. In the digital age, anonymity becomes an inherent part of (...) everyday communication. Through our smart devices we express our selves differently. As cyborgs, our identities are disrupted and reassembled. We curate self-representations on social media, create avatars, share selfies and choose the skin colour of our emojis. The Politics of Becoming encourages us to engage in a revolution of the self. Democratic pluralism is not only a matter of institutional design but also about how we express our identities. Inner revolutions change our personal realities and plant a seed for democratic futures. (shrink)

Feminist social theory and female body experience are the twin themes of Iris Marion Young's twelve outstanding essays written over the past decade and brought together here. Her contributions to social theory raise critical questions about women and citizenship, the relations of capitalism and women's oppression, and the differences between a feminist theory that emphasizes women's difference and one that assumes a gender-neutral humanity. Loosely following a phenomenological method of description, Young's essays on female embodiment discuss female movement, pregnancy, clothing, (...) and the breasted body. In an introduction that situates her work in the context of shifts in feminist theory and politics over the past decade, Young emphasizes the rootedness of her theorizing in a dedicated and seasoned political activism. (shrink)

Many of the items that humans consume are produced in ways that involve serious harms to persons. Familiar examples include the harms involved in the extraction and trade of conflict minerals (e.g. coltan, diamonds), the acquisition and import of non- fair trade produce (e.g. coffee, chocolate, bananas, rice), and the manufacture of goods in sweatshops (e.g. clothing, sporting equipment). In addition, consumption of certain goods (significantly fossil fuels and the products of the agricultural industry) involves harm to the environment, to (...) future persons, and to current persons in low-lying and developing countries, by way of their impacts on climate change. When it comes to such large-scale harms, it's easy for the individual to feel helpless. Even if she sincerely wishes things were otherwise, she may wonder what she could possibly do to make them so. In this paper I briefly explore several promising avenues for generating duties in individuals to consume ethically, and develop one in particular: that an individual ought to signal her commitments to others, as a first step in collectivizing to act against unjust global labour practices. (shrink)

Every year, the Vietnamese people reportedly burned about 50,000 tons of joss papers, which took the form of not only bank notes, but iPhones, cars, clothes, even housekeepers, in hope of pleasing the dead. The practice was mistakenly attributed to traditional Buddhist teachings but originated in fact from China, which most Vietnamese were not aware of. In other aspects of life, there were many similar examples of Vietnamese so ready and comfortable with adding new norms, values, and beliefs, even contradictory (...) ones, to their culture. This phenomenon, dubbed “cultural additivity”, prompted us to study the co-existence, interaction, and influences among core values and norms of the Three Teachings –Confucianism, Buddhism, and Taoism–as shown through Vietnamese folktales. By applying Bayesian logistic regression, we evaluated the possibility of whether the key message of a story was dominated by a religion (dependent variables), as affected by the appearance of values and anti-values pertaining to the Three Teachings in the story (independent variables). Our main findings included the existence of the cultural additivity of Confucian and Taoist values. More specifically, empirical results showed that the interaction or addition of the values of Taoism and Confucianism in folktales together helped predict whether the key message of a story was about Confucianism, β{VT ⋅ VC} = 0.86. Meanwhile, there was no such statistical tendency for Buddhism. The results lead to a number of important implications. First, this showed the dominance of Confucianism because the fact that Confucian and Taoist values appeared together in a story led to the story’s key message dominated by Confucianism. Thus, it presented the evidence of Confucian dominance and against liberal interpretations of the concept of the Common Roots of Three Religions (“tam giáo đồng nguyên”) as religious unification or unicity. Second, the concept of “cultural additivity” could help explain many interesting socio-cultural phenomena, namely the absence of religious intolerance and extremism in the Vietnamese society, outrageous cases of sophistry in education, the low productivity in creative endeavors like science and technology, the misleading branding strategy in business. We are aware that our results are only preliminary and more studies, both theoretical and empirical, must be carried out to give a full account of the explanatory reach of “cultural additivity”. (shrink)

What could ground normative restrictions concerning cultural appropriation which are not grounded by independent considerations such as property rights or harm? We propose that such restrictions can be grounded by considerations of intimacy. Consider the familiar phenomenon of interpersonal intimacy. Certain aspects of personal life and interpersonal relationships are afforded various protections in virtue of being intimate. We argue that an analogous phenomenon exists at the level of large groups. In many cases, members of a group engage in shared practices (...) that contribute to a sense of common identity, such as wearing certain hair or clothing styles or performing a certain style of music. Participation in such practices can generate relations of group intimacy, which can ground certain prerogatives in much the same way that interpersonal intimacy can. One such prerogative is making what we call an appropriation claim. An appropriation claim is a request from a group member that non-members refrain from appropriating a given element of the group’s culture. Ignoring appropriation claims can constitute a breach of intimacy. But, we argue, just as for the prerogatives of interpersonal intimacy, in many cases there is no prior fact of the matter about whether the appropriation of a given cultural practice constitutes a breach of intimacy. It depends on what the group decides together. (shrink)

Constitution is the relation that holds between an object and what it is made of: statues are constituted by the lumps of matter they coincide with; flags, one may think, are constituted by colored pieces of cloth; and perhaps human persons are constituted by biological organisms. Constitution is often thought to be a.

The mass-count distinction is a morpho-syntactic distinction among nouns that is generally taken to have semantic content. This content is generally taken to reflect a conceptual, cognitive, or ontological distinction and relates to philosophical and cognitive notions of unity, identity, and counting. The mass-count distinction is certainly one of the most interesting and puzzling topics in syntax and semantics that bears on ontology and cognitive science. This volume aims to contribute to some of the gaps in the research on the (...) topic, in particular the relation between the syntactic mass-count distinction and semantic and cognitive distinctions, diagnostics for mass and count, the distribution and role of numeral classifiers, abstract mass nouns, and object mass nouns (furniture, police force, clothing). (shrink)

Reasons-responsive accounts of praiseworthiness say, roughly, that an agent is praiseworthy for an action just in case the reasons that explain why they acted are also the reasons that explain why the action is right. In this paper, we argue that reasons-responsive accounts imply that some actions of non-human animals are praiseworthy. Trying to exclude non-human animals, we argue, risks neglecting cases of inadvertent virtue in human action and undermining the anti-intellectualist commitments that are typically associated with reasons-responsive accounts. Of (...) course, this could be taken as a reason to reject reasons-responsive accounts, rather than as a reason to attribute praiseworthiness to non-human animal action. We respond to two reasons that one might resist the implication that non-human animal action can be praiseworthy. The first appeals to intuition: it’s too counterintuitive to attribute praiseworthiness to non-human animal action. In response, we argue that once the factors that determine an action’s praiseworthiness are disambiguated from the factors that determine whether an agent should be praised, the intuitive objection loses much of its force. The second appeals to empirical evidence: attributing praiseworthiness to non-human animal action involves a problematic kind of anthropomorphizing. First, we point out that this objection is mostly an _a priori_ objection in _a posteriori_ clothes: whether we give anthropomorphic vs. anthropectic explanations is a methodological choice, not an empirical one. Second, we argue that considerations from the literature on rational analysis and radical interpretation actually support anthropomorphic explanations over anthropectic explanations. (shrink)

Substructural approaches to paradoxes have attracted much attention from the philosophical community in the last decade. In this paper we focus on two substructural logics, named ST and TS, along with two structural cousins, LP and K3. It is well known that LP and K3 are duals in the sense that an inference is valid in one logic just in case the contrapositive is valid in the other logic. As a consequence of this duality, theories based on either logic are (...) tightly connected since many of the arguments for and objections against one theory reappear in the other theory in dual form. The target of the paper is making explicit in exactly what way, if any, ST and TS are dual to one another. The connection will allow us to gain a more fine-grained understanding of these logics and of the theories based on them. In particular, we will obtain new insights on two questions concerning ST which are being intensively discussed in the current literature: whether ST preserves classical logic and whether it is LP in sheep’s clothing. Explaining in what way ST and TS are duals requires comparing these logics at a metainferential level. We provide to this end a uniform proof theory to decide on valid metainferences for each of the four logics. This proof procedure allows us to show in a very simple way how different properties of inferences (unsatisfiability, supersatisfiability and antivalidity) that behave in very different ways for each logic can be captured in terms of the validity of a metainference. (shrink)

Can an agent deliberating about an action A hold a meaningful credence that she will do A? 'No', say some authors, for 'Deliberation Crowds Out Prediction' (DCOP). Others disagree, but we argue here that such disagreements are often terminological. We explain why DCOP holds in a Ramseyian operationalist model of credence, but show that it is trivial to extend this model so that DCOP fails. We then discuss a model due to Joyce, and show that Joyce's rejection of DCOP rests (...) on terminological choices about terms such as 'intention', 'prediction', and 'belief'. Once these choices are in view, they reveal underlying agreement between Joyce and the DCOP-favouring tradition that descends from Ramsey. Joyce's Evidential Autonomy Thesis (EAT) is effectively DCOP, in different terminological clothing. Both principles rest on the so-called 'transparency' of first-person present-tensed reflection on one's own mental states. (shrink)

Confucianism demands that individuals comport themselves according to the strictures of ritual propriety—specific forms of speech, clothing, and demeanor attached to a vast array of life circumstances. This requires self-regulation, a cognitive resource of limited supply. When this resource is depleted, a person can experience undesirable consequences such as social isolation and alienation. However, one’s cultural background may be an important mediator of such costs; East Asians, in particular, seem to have comparatively greater self-regulatory strength. I offer some considerations as (...) to why this may be so, and what insights it may afford to theories of virtue generally. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 41.3 (2003) 417-418 [Access article in PDF] Heidi M. Ravven and Lenn E. Goodman, editors. Jewish Themes in Spinoza's Philosophy. Albany: The State University of New York Press, 2002. Pp. ix + 290. Cloth, $78.50. Paper, $26.95.The current anthology presents an important contribution to the study of Spinoza's relation to Jewish philosophy as well as to contemporary scholarship of Spinoza's metaphysics and political (...) theory.In the opening essay, Lenn Goodman takes upon himself the ambitious task of evaluating Spinoza's positions as to several central disputes throughout the history of philosophy. In this rich and extensive essay Goodman argues that Spinoza's radical rationalism makes him pursue syntheses between traditionally opposed poles. Lee Rice's article, "Love of God in Spinoza," carefully analyzes Spinoza's concept of love and suggests the existence of three kinds of love parallel to the three kinds of knowledge. Warren Montag addresses the unresolved issue of Spinoza's relation to the Kabbalah. Montag sides with Deleuze against the association of Spinozism with the Neo-Platonic theory of emanation, arguing that unlike the Neo-Platonists and Kabbalists, Spinoza's view of God rules out any hierarchy, and does not assume a descent from primal simplicity into complexity. Edwin Curley contributes a beautiful reading of the story of Job and of Maimonides' interpretation of the story. Curley follows Maimonides' discussion of the various positions regarding the question of divine providence and his attempt to identify the speeches of the characters of the book of Job with each of these positions. Following a sensitive consideration of various attempts to [End Page 417] recover Maimonides' own rather concealed view about providence, Curley concludes that "[W]hatever you think Maimonides' final word on Job is, our examination of him certainly supports [Spinoza's] claim that [Maimonides] reads Scripture in terms of Platonic or Aristotelian speculations" (170).Warren Zev Harvey's essay addresses Spinoza's most neglected work, the Compendium of the Grammar of the Hebrew Language. Apart from providing an outline of Spinoza's work as a Hebrew grammarian ("a noun-intoxicated grammarian") and pointing out some of Spinoza's more eccentric views about the nature of the Hebrew language, Harvey makes a compelling case for the importance of the book for the study of Spinoza's metaphysics. He points out a fascinating analogy which Spinoza draws between the parts of speech: (proper) noun, adjectives, and participles, and Spinoza's key metaphysical terms: substance, attributes, and modes. (Think about the weighty implications of this analogy for Curley's interpretation of the substance-mode relation.) According to Harvey, Spinoza's claim that all Hebrew words are derived from nouns is a linguistic parallel to Spinoza's pivotal metaphysical doctrine which makes all things be in the substance (or God). Kenneth Seeskin's article discusses the views of Maimonides and Spinoza on the question of creation and God's relation to the world. Seeskin reconstructs an interesting critical dialogue between these two philosophers. According to Seeskin, both philosophers held that an effect must be similar to its cause. Maimonides' commitment to Negative Theology and to the denial of any common measure between God and finite things forced him to deny causal or explanatory relation between God and the world. What Maimonides can suggest instead is rather to prove that the emergence of the world ex nihilo and according to the divine will, is possible, and even likely given certain astronomical facts of medieval science. Thus, Maimonides would hold that "although we have grounds for believing that creation occurred, we will never be in a position to say how" (120). For Spinoza, such a view constitutes nothing but a "sanctuary of ignorance." Thus, according to Seeskin, Spinoza affirms a clear causal relation between God and the world of finite things insofar as God is said to explain the world. While I tend to agree with most aspects of this analysis, it is important to note that Spinoza also claims that "between the finite and infinite there is no relation" (Letter 54). This... (shrink)

Citizens in wealthy liberal democracies are typically expected to see to basic needs like food, clothing, and shelter out of their own income, and those without the means to do so usually receive assistance in the form of cash transfers. Things are different with health care. Most liberal societies provide their citizens with health care or health care insurance in kind, either directly from the state or through private insurance companies that are regulated like public utilities. Except perhaps for small (...) co-pays or deductibles, citizens are not expected to see to their health needs out-of-pocket, at least for some basic level of care. Instead, when a citizen gets sick, the state or her insurance company foots the... (shrink)

We consider a case where consumers are faced with a choice between sweatshop-produced clothing and identical clothing produced in high-income countries. We argue that it is morally better for consumers to purchase clothing produced in sweatshops and then to compensate sweatshop workers for the difference between their actual wage and a fair wage than it is for them either to purchase the sweatshop clothing without this compensatory transfer or to purchase clothing produced in high-income countries.

With millions of animals brought into existence and raised for food every year, their negative impact upon the environment and the staggering growth in the number of chronic diseases caused by meat and dairy diets make a global move toward ethical veganism imperative. Typi-cally, utilitarians and deontologists have led this discussion. The purpose of this paper is to pro-pose a virtuous approach to ethical veganism. Virtue ethics can be used to construct a defense of ethical veganism by relying on the (...) virtues of compassion and fairness. Exercising these values in our relations with animals involves acknowledging their moral value, thus seeing that they are not our property or our food. It is important to emphasize that this argument applies only to well-developed societies that need not rely upon animals as sources of food, clothing, and various by-products. (shrink)