Knowledge has almost always been treated as good, better than mere true belief, but it is remarkably difficult to explain what it is about knowledge that makes it better. I call this “the value problem.” I have previously argued that most forms of reliabilism cannot handle the value problem. In this article I argue that the value problem is more general than a problem for reliabilism, infecting a host of different theories, including some that are internalist. An additional problem is (...) that not all instances of true belief seem to be good on balance, so even if a given instance of knowing p is better than merely truly believing p, not all instances of knowing will be good enough to explain why knowledge has received so much attention in the history of philosophy. The article aims to answer two questions: What makes knowingp better than merely truly believing p? The answer involves an exploration of the connection between believing and the agency of the knower. Knowing is an act in which the knower gets credit for achieving truth. What makes some instances of knowing good enough to make the investigation of knowledge worthy of so much attention? The answer involves the connection between the good of believing truths of certain kinds and a good life. In the best kinds of knowing, the knower not only gets credit for getting the truth but also gets credit for getting a desirable truth. The kind of value that makes knowledge a fitting object of extensive philosophical inquiry is not independent of moral value and the wider values of a good life. (shrink)

We present a comprehensive model that integrates virtues, values, character strengths and ethical decision making (EDM). We describe how a largely consequentialist ethical framework has dominated most EDM scholarship to date. We suggest that reintroducing a virtue ethical perspective to existing EDM theories can help to illustrate deficiencies in existing decision-making models, and suggest that character strengths and motivational values can serve as natural bridges that link a virtue framework to EDM in organizations. In conjunction with the more fully formulated (...) extant research on situational determinants, we present and discuss our model that introduces a virtue based orientation to EDM. (shrink)

We give a fairly complete account which first shows that the solution to the inner model problem for one supercompact cardinal will yield an ultimate version ofLand then shows that the various current approaches to inner model theory must be fundamentally altered to provide that solution.

The proposal of anything like a feminist epistemology has, I think, two sources. Feminist scholars have demonstrated how the scientific cards have been stacked against women for centuries. Given that the sciences are taken as the epitome of knowledge and rationality in modern Western societies, the game looks desperate unless some ways of knowing different from those that have validated misogyny and gynephobia can be found. Can we know the world without hating ourselves? This is one of the questions at (...) the core of discussions of feminist epistemology. It has spinoffs, e.g., can we know the world in ways that will permit women as well as men to thrive? Can we know the world without hating any human group? and so on. Now, these questions might be answered in a way that does not require any rethinking of fundamental philosophical issues. Some philosophers might argue that sexism in the sciences from Aristotle to human sociobiology results from a masculinist blinding that impedes the normal workings of the human cognitive apparatus. Unblinded, that apparatus produces real knowledge rather than ideology. Or: that was then, this is now. This somewhat overestimates the progress made in the sciences in the last 20 years, but can be read as a promissory note. (shrink)

The history of Pythagoreanism is littered with different and incompatible interpretations. This observation directs this book towards a fundamentally historiographical rather than philological approach, setting out to reconstruct the way in which the tradition established Pythagoreanism s image.".

It is fairly standard in accounts of the epistemology of perceptual knowledge to distinguish three main alternative positions: representationalism, phenomenalism, and a third view that is called either naïve realism or direct realism. I have always found the last of these views puzzling and elusive. My aim in this paper is to try to figure out what direct realism amounts to, mainly with an eye to seeing whether it offers a genuine epistemological alternative to the other two views and to (...) representationalism in particular. My main thesis will be that it does not—that what is right in direct realist views turns out to have little bearing on the central epistemological issue concerning perceptual knowledge. (shrink)

Artificial intelligence has found its way into many areas of human life, serving a range of purposes. Sometimes AI tools are designed to help humans eliminate high-volume, tedious, routine tas...

This study demonstrates that Dewey did not reject Hegelianism during the 1890s, as scholars maintain, but developed a humanistic/historicist reading that was indebted to an American Hegelian tradition. Scholars have misunderstood the "permanent Hegelian deposit" in Dewey's thought because they have not fully appreciated this American Hegelian tradition and have assumed that his Hegelianism was based primarily on British neo-Hegelianism. ;The study examines the American reception of Hegel in the nineteenth-century by intellectuals as diverse as James Marsh and Frederic Henry (...) Hedge and how it flowered in late nineteenth-century St. Louis. The St. Louis Hegelians read Hegel as a particularly practical and politically liberal philosopher whose social philosophy promoted both social diversity and unity. Led by W. T. Harris, they studied Hegel in German and published their own scholarship, as well as translations of German scholarship, in their Journal of Speculative Philosophy. Their efforts to make "Hegel talk English" and to base the St. Louis public schools on Hegel's philosophy of education won them national, and even, international attention. The St. Louis Hegelians sought to adapt Hegel's thought to their American context by assuaging elitist elements within it; Dewey's intellectual development was profoundly shaped by their appropriation of his philosophy. ;Dewey drew upon Hegel's argument that humans form societies because of their differences, not in spite of them. Hegel's rejection of the self-sufficient, atomistic individual entailed that the individual is dependent upon others for the satisfaction of material needs. Moreover, like Hegel, Dewey rejected the hedonistic basis of the British political tradition by arguing that humans seek recognition from their equals as well as satisfaction of material needs. Dewey believed Hegel's emphasis upon equality and diversity provided a model of society in which there was fertile ground for the individual to conceive and articulate cultural criticism. The study ends by comparing recent Hegel scholarship to Dewey's, demonstrating that American Hegelianism has returned, in important ways, to a Deweyan reading of Hegel. (shrink)

Developing models of biological mechanisms, such as those involved in respiration in cells, often requires collaborative effort drawing upon techniques developed and information generated in different disciplines. Biochemists in the early decades of the 20th century uncovered all but the most elusive chemical operations involved in cellular respiration, but were unable to align the reaction pathways with particular structures in the cell. During the period 1940-1965 cell biology was emerging as a new discipline and made distinctive contributions to understanding the (...) role of the mitochondrion and its component parts in cellular respiration. In particular, by developing techniques for localizing enzymes or enzyme systems in specific cellular components, cell biologists provided crucial information about the organized structures in which the biochemical reactions occurred. Although the idea that biochemical operations are intimately related to and depend on cell structures was at odds with the then-dominant emphasis on systems of soluble enzymes in biochemistry, a reconceptualization of energetic processes in the 1960s and 1970s made it clear why cell structure was critical to the biochemical account. This paper examines how numerous excursions between biochemistry and cell biology contributed a new understanding of the mechanism of cellular respiration. (shrink)

Immortality has recently become a prominent topic of discussion, particularly in light of advancing technologies aimed at enhancing human life expectancy. Proposed scenarios encompass improved treatments for various diseases and the development of longevity medicine. In this essay, I examine the theory of the self and the concept of immor‑ tality as presented in Heshanggong’s commentary on the Daodejing. This analysis serves as a case study aimed at illuminating a unique perspective on the self that contributes to contemporary discussions of (...) immortality. I argue that Heshanggong’s commentary em‑ phasizes the significance of jing 精, qi 氣, and shen 神, positing that our essential property is to have the essential spirits (jingshen 精神). Furthermore, it suggests the possibility of a disembodied form of immortality without a physical human body. This interpretation of immortality offers a novel understanding of how immortality may be achievable. (shrink)

Accounts of personal identity over time are supposed to fall into two broad categories: 'complex views' saying that our persistence consists in something else, and 'simple views' saying that it doesn' t. But it is impossible to characterize this distinction in any satisfactory way. The debate has been systematically misdescribed. After arguing for this claim, the paper says something about how the debate might be better characterized.

Social enterprises, as typical hybrid organisations, are embedded in a plural institutional environment in which some stakeholders regard achieving social goals as fundamental, while others see economic profit as the priority. A great challenge for social enterprises is dealing with the conflicts resulting from the diverse expectations of stakeholders. Based on the existing works on organisational legitimacy and the social business model, we propose a legitimacy-based social enterprise model composed of three main phases, namely, legitimacy proposition, legitimacy strategy planning, and (...) legitimacy strategy implementation. Our model is meant to serve as an effective legitimacy-building tool for social enterprises of various kinds. (shrink)

Boredom has been characterized as a crisis of meaning, a failure of attention, and a call to action. Yet as a self-regulatory signal writ-large, we are still left with the question of what makes any given boredom episode meaningless, disengaging, or a prompt to act. We propose that boredom is an affective signal that we have deviated from an optimal (‘Goldilocks’) zone of cognitive engagement. Such deviations may be due to a perceived lack of meaning, arise as a consequence of (...) struggles we are experiencing in attending to a task, or be interpreted as a blunt call to find something different to engage with. Thus, the key to understanding boredom lies in its role in keeping us cognitively engaged. -/- . (shrink)

I defend a form of generalism in ethics and aesthetics. Generalism about a domain D is the view that there are principles that play an explanatory role in the metaphysics of D and can be used in reasoning when thinking about D. I argue that in both aesthetics and ethics, there are generic generalizations that are principles. I do this by (i) explaining the nature of a particularly important kind of generic, (ii) argue that generics of this kind play a (...) explanatory role, and (iii) argue that we licitly use these truths in reasoning about ethics and aesthetics. (shrink)

This commentary aims to build the idea that there was no collective language grounded in a shared vision for a democratic and pluralistic future in the 2024 uprising in Bangladesh. It makes the point clear that there was, in fact, a collective goal of the uprising: the removal of an authoritarian regime. It argues that the movement’s unity around the singular goal of regime change emphasized unresolved ideological divisions and future political challenges.

As Bruner so eloquently points out, and Gauvain echoes, human beings are unique in their “locality.” Individual groups of humans develop their own unique ways of symbolizing and doing things – and these can be very different from the ways of other groups, even those living quite nearby. Our attempt in the target article was to propose a theory of the social-cognitive and social-motivational bases of humans' ability and propensity to live in this local, that is, this cultural, way – (...) which no other species does – focusing on such things as the ability to collaborate and to create shared material and symbolic artifacts. (shrink)

Most philosophical accounts of emergence are based on supervenience, with supervenience being an ontologically synchronic relation of determination. This conception of emergence as a relation of supervenience, I will argue, is unable to make sense of the kinds of emergence that are widespread in self-organizing and nonlinear dynamical systems, including distributed cognitive systems. In these dynamical systems, an emergent property is ontological and diachronic.

Dans leLachèsde Platon, Socrate attribue à son interlocuteur la connaissance du courage et tente de reconstruire cette connaissance sous forme discursive. Son attribution de connaissance à Lachès détermine son comportement discursif dans le dialogue, nécessitant qu’il s’abstienne de juger erronés les propos son interlocuteur, qu’il interprète l’erreur apparente comme une erreur de discours plutôt que de connaissance, et qu’il cherche la vérité sous-jacente au contenu manifeste des paroles de Lachès. La méthode de Socrate dans cet elenchos peut être décrite comme (...) une sorte d’«exégèse épistémique», qui cherche à extraire et à donner une forme discursive à la connaissance de la vertu dont elle suppose que l’interlocuteur est déjà possesseur. (shrink)

In Search Of Mechanisms is a book about the methodology of biology. It is a work by Carl Craver and Lindley Darden, both of whom are well-known individually for their advocacy of mechanistic explanation—in the neurosciences and in the fields of genetics, cytology and molecular biology . Here, the two join forces to give a unified model of biological explanation, not limited to a particular area of biological enquiry, as rooted in the search for mechanisms.The objectives of the (...) book are threefold. First, it sets out to describe what biologists do. This first objective can be described as the goal of making biology more comprehensible. If biology involves the search for mechanisms, then one cannot understand the history of biology and its current practice without understanding mechanisms. Secondly, the book seeks to give a proscriptive account of explanation and the process of explaining some phenomena. This second objective relates to an interest in contributing to the .. (shrink)

Through an examination of French organicism–one of the models proposed for the nascent science of sociology in the late 19th century–this article argues two main points: that organicism was crucial in the establishment of ‘society’ as a scientific object; and that the specific characteristics of this new object were retained by later sociology long after the organic analogies and evolutionary views that justified them had been explicitly abandoned. Organicism played a significant role in establishing a strong notion of society as (...) a concrete, real entity–a notion that had a lasting impact on sociological theory and became one of the most important ‘categories of thought’ of the 20th century. (shrink)

Business ethics has gradually acquired a stable status, both as an academic discipline and as a practice. Stakeholdership is recognised as a guiding concept, business has widely accepted that it has a license to operate to win from society at large, and operational instruments such as codes of ethics and forms of ethical auditing and accounting take shape more and more. Yet lacunae remain. Three are mentioned explicitly. Business ethics has to improve its relations with business law, the concept of (...) competition deserves much more ethical attention than it has received up to now, and the shifting relations between the market, governmental agencies and civil society require the elaboration of an institutional business ethics. (shrink)

This paper issues a call to arms and seeks to entice the reader with some of the most captivating philosophical puzzles arising in quantum gravity. The analysis will be prefaced, in Section 1, by general considerations concerning the need for finding a quantum theory of gravity and the methods used in the pursuit of this goal. After mapping the field in Section 2, loop quantum gravity is introduced as an important competitor and particularly rich source of philosophical trouble in Section (...) 3. The so-called problem of time, i.e. the puzzle that no genuine physical quantity can change, is discussed in Section 4. Finally, Section 5 analyzes how the familiar continuous spacetime structure might re-emerge from the fundamental, non-spatiotemporal structure. (shrink)

This paper examines the deployment of science studies within the field of medical ethics. For a short time, the discourse of medical ethics became a fertile ground for a dialogue between philosophically minded bioethicists and the philosophers of science who responded to Thomas Kuhn's challenge. In their discussion of the validity of Kuhn's work, these bioethicists suggested a distinct interpretation of Kuhn, emphasizing the elements in his account that had been independently developed by Michael Polanyi, and propelling a view of (...) science that retreated from idealizations of scientific method without sacrificing philosophical realism. Appropriating Polanyi, they extended his account of science to biology and medicine. The contribution of Karl Popper to the debate on the applicability of philosophy of science to the issues of medical ethics provides the opportunity to discuss the ways in which political agendas of different epistemologies of science intertwined with questions of concern to medical ethics. (shrink)

The article is devoted to the problem of studying the activities of revolutionary and ideological virtuosi of the XX century by means of the historical sociology of modernity. It attempts both to identify the main trends in the participation of intellectually active strata of modern societies in the radical transformation of social reality, and to clarify the reasons that pushed them to do so. It is noted that the ideological background of such forms of socio-political radicalism were the symbolic means (...) of challenging the old forms of social reality and constructing new forms through secular ideologies of various types (socialism, communism, anarcho-syndicalism, fascism, national socialism, etc.). The role of conductors of the ideological message of these secular religions of salvation to the masses was usually performed by radical-minded intellectuals and students, for whom the worship of new idols and symbols of faith became the true meaning of life and struggle. In the XX century, it was the intellectuals who acted as the main creators and operators of collective salvation religions, and the social communities created on their basis. Moreover, they not only tried to save themselves with their help, but at the same time laid claim to the legitimate monopoly of determining who would be saved, and who would not. Thus, radical intellectuals acted as both the creators of the new norm and as agents of the policy of rationalization. The article pays special attention to the characteristics of the creators and social carriers of radical ideological views — and the worldviews based on them — as well as the refraction of these utopian visions in the socio-political practice of the last century. In conclusion, it is suggested that Max Weber’s historical sociology and Emile Durkheim’s symbolic theory of the “sacred”, supplemented by modern developments in the field of political sociology and socio-historical anthropology, can serve as a relevant system of theoretical coordinates for the study of ideological and revolutionary virtuosi of the XX century. (shrink)