Some transgender and nonbinary people undergo phalloplasty and/or metoidioplasty as part of their medical transition process. Across surgical disciplines, a variety of resources are used to assist patients who are preparing for surgeries, including educational materials, workshops, peer support, and lifestyle changes. For gender-affirming surgeries, patients undergoing assessments to discern whether they are ready to undergo the surgery, and to assist them in achieving preparedness when needed. Little research investigates what resources are useful in helping patients to feel prepared to (...) undergo phalloplasty or metoidioplasty, and how assessments and resources can promote patient autonomy in the process. Respect for patient autonomy is one of the central tenets of ethical healthcare, yet historically, scholarship related to pre-surgical assessments for gender-affirming surgery has focused determining the ideal surgical candidate rather than respecting patient autonomy and ascertaining individual patient needs. This study sought to fill this gap by utilizing data from PROGRESS (Patient-Reported Outcomes of Genital Reconstruction and Experiences of Surgical Satisfaction), a cross-sectional, community-based survey of trans and nonbinary adults from the United States of America and Canada who had undergone one or more of these surgeries. Results revealed most participants (86%, n = 186) felt prepared to undergo surgery, though the majority of our sample (53%, n = 105) did not find referral letter assessments to be helpful. Peer support such as online resources/blogs were rated as highly useful, along with surgical consults. In a multivariable logistic regression, higher perceived preparedness was associated with identifying as queer (inclusive of gay, bi and pansexual compared to being straight), and feeling that one’s assessment process was useful (as opposed to not useful). Type of assessment was not significantly associated with preparedness; therefore, what is most useful when preparing for surgery may vary across individuals. Healthcare professionals who interact with preparing patients should develop new or utilize existing resources to assist patients in identifying their preparation needs and achieving preparedness. Our data supports assessments that center surgical care planning rather than assessing level of gender dysphoria. Future longitudinal research could further refine which assessment processes are most effective in helping patients who are preparing for these surgeries. Assessments should ensure that patients are appropriately prepared to undergo and recover from surgery through a robust process of informed consent. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to bring recent work on metaphysical grounding to bear on the phenomenon of social construction. It is argued that grounding can be used to analyze social construction and that the grounding framework is helpful for articulating various claims and commitments of social constructionists, especially about social identities, e.g., gender and race. The paper also responds to a number of objections that have been leveled against the application of grounding to social construction from Elizabeth Barnes, (...) Mari Mikkola, and Jessica Wilson. (shrink)

The goal of this paper is to make headway on a metaphysics of social construction. In recent work, I’ve argued that social construction should be understood in terms of metaphysical grounding. However, I agree with grounding skeptics like Wilson that bare claims about what grounds what are insufficient for capturing, with fine enough grain, metaphysical dependence structures. To that end, I develop a view on which the social construction of human social kinds is a kind of realization relation. Social kinds, (...) I argue, are multiply realizable kinds. I depart from the Wilson by further arguing that an appeal to grounding is not otiose when it comes to social construction. Social construction, I claim, belongs to the “big-G” Grounding genus, but it is the specific “small-g” relation of realization at work in cases of human kind social construction. (shrink)

For Émilie Du Châtelet, I argue, a central role of the principle of sufficient reason is to discriminate between better and worse explanations. Her principle of sufficient reason does not play this role for just any conceivable intellect: it specifically enables understanding for minds like ours. She develops this idea in terms of two criteria for the success of our explanations: “understanding how” and “understanding why.” These criteria can respectively be connected to the determinateness and contrastivity of explanations. The crucial (...) role Du Châtelet’s principle of sufficient reason plays in identifying good explanations is often overlooked in the literature, or else run together with questions about the justification and likelihood of explanations. An auxiliary goal of the article is to situate Du Châtelet’s principle of sufficient reason with respect to some of the general epistemological and metaphysical commitments of her Institutions de Physique, clarifying how it fits into the broader project of that work. (shrink)

The dominant theory of parts and wholes – classical extensional mereology – has faced a number of challenges in the recent literature. This article gives a sampling of some of the alleged counterexamples to some of the more controversial principles involving the connections between parthood and identity. Along the way, some of the main revisionary approaches are reviewed. First, counterexamples to extensionality are reviewed. The ‘supplementation’ axioms that generate extensionality are examined more carefully, and a suggested revision is considered. Second, (...) the paper considers an alternative approach that focuses the blame on antisymmetry but allows us to keep natural supplementation axioms. Third, we look at counterexamples to the idempotency of composition and the associated ‘parts just once’ principle. We explore options for developing weaker mereologies that avoid such commitments. (shrink)

I argue that Émilie Du Châtelet breaks with Christian Wolff regarding the scope and epistemological content of the principle of sufficient reason, despite his influence on her basic ontology and their agreement that the principle of sufficient reason has foundational importance. These differences have decisive consequences for the ways in which Du Châtelet and Wolff conceive of science.

Du Châtelet holds that mathematical representations play an explanatory role in natural science. Moreover, she writes that things proceed in nature as they do in geometry. How should we square these assertions with Du Châtelet’s idealism about mathematical objects, on which they are ‘fictions’ dependent on acts of abstraction? The question is especially pressing because some of her important interlocutors (Wolff, Maupertuis, and Voltaire) denied that mathematics informs us about the properties of material things. After situating Du Châtelet in this (...) debate, this chapter argues, first, that her account of the origins of mathematical objects is less subjectivist than it might seem. Mathematical objects are non-arbitrary, public entities. While mathematical objects are partly mind-dependent, so are material things. Mathematical objects can approximate the material. Second, it is argued that this moderate metaphysical position underlies Du Châtelet’s persistent claims that mathematics is required for certain kinds of general knowledge, including in natural science. The chapter concludes with an illustrative example: an analysis of Du Châtelet’s argument that matter is continuous. A key premise in the argument is that mathematical representations and material nature correspond. (shrink)

This paper argues that Kant presents two different accounts of beauty, one that applies properly to art and one that applies properly to nature. The judgment of beauty that applies properly to nature can be free and thus judged without concepts. The work of art, however, is judged beautiful when it expresses aesthetic ideas. This distinction then enables me to explain several problematic passages in Kant's text: those that serve to distinguish these two conceptions of beauty from one another as (...) well as those passages in which Kant views them as overlapping. With respect to the latter, I argue that Kant lays especial significance on cases where we apply the conception of artistic beauty to natural objects, as in doing so we view nature as expressing ideas that step beyond nature. (shrink)

This book defends an interpretation of Peirce’s philosophical work as forming a systematic whole, emphasizing his empiricist epistemology and explaining the roots of his thought in earlier empiricist and common sense philosophers. In particular, the book develops the connections between Peirce, Reid, and the British empiricists, and provides focused analyses of Peirce’s accounts of experience, habit, perception, semeiosis, truth, and ultimate ends.

Caregivers should usually accede to parents’ requests for life-sustaining treatment. For such decision-making, the best interests standard is too limited. John Arras’s “relational potential standard,” con-joined to a contemporary care ethics framework, provides a better guide.

A prominent way of explaining how race is socially constructed appeals to social positions and social structures. On this view, the construction of a person’s race is understood in terms of the person occupying a certain social position in a social structure. The aim of this paper is to give a metaphysically perspicuous account of this form of race construction. Analogous to functionalism about mental states, I develop an account of a ‘race structure’ in which various races (Black, White, Asian, (...) etc.) are functionally defined social positions. Individual persons occupy these social positions by ‘playing the role’ characteristic of those positions. The properties by which a person plays a race role, are the realizers for one’s race. I characterize the social construction of a person’s race in terms of a realization relation that satisfies a ‘subset’ condition on the social powers of raced persons. Races, on this view, are functionally defined, multiply realizable social kinds. The final section of the paper outlines some explanatory benefits of the account. (shrink)

The idea that intentions make the difference between voluntary and non-voluntary behaviors is simple and intuitive. At the same time, we lack an understanding of how voluntary actions actually come about, and the unquestioned appeal to intentions as discrete causes of actions offers little if anything in the way of an answer. We cite evidence suggesting that the origin of actions varies depending on context and effector, and argue that actions emerge from a causal web in the brain, rather than (...) a central origin of intentional action. We argue that this causal web need not be confined to the central nervous system, and that proprioceptive feedback might play a counterintuitive role in the decision process. Finally we argue that the complex and dynamic origins of voluntary action and their interplay with the brain’s propensity to predict the immediate future are better studied using a dynamical systems approach. (shrink)

There is a tension in Emilie Du Châtelet’s thought on mathematics. The objects of mathematics are ideal or fictional entities; nevertheless, mathematics is presented as indispensable for an account of the physical world. After outlining Du Châtelet’s position, and showing how she departs from Christian Wolff’s pessimism about Newtonian mathematical physics, I show that the tension in her position is only apparent. Du Châtelet has a worked-out defense of the explanatory and epistemic need for mathematical objects, consistent with their metaphysical (...) nonfundamentality. I conclude by sketching how Du Châtelet’s conception of mathematical indispensability differs interestingly from many contemporary approaches. (shrink)

Kant’s moral philosophy both enjoins the acquisition of self-knowledge as a duty, and precludes certain forms of its acquisition via what has become known as the Opacity Thesis. This article looks at several recent attempts to solve this difficulty and argues that they are inadequate. I argue instead that the Opacity Thesis rules out only the knowledge that one has acted from genuine moral principles, but does not apply in cases of moral failure. The duty of moral self-knowledge applies therefore (...) only to one’s awareness of one’s status as a moral being and to the knowledge of one’s moral failings, both in particular actions and one’s overall character failings, one’s vices. This kind of knowledge is morally salutary as an aid to discovering one’s individual moral weakness as well as the subjective ends for which one acts, and in this way for taking up the morally required end of treating human beings as human beings. In this way, moral self-knowledge can be understood as a necessary element of moral improvement, and I conclude by suggesting several ways to understand it thereby as genuinely primary among the duties to oneself. (shrink)

Many are committed to the idea that the present generation has obligations to future generations, for example, obligations to preserve the environment and certain natural resources for those generations. However, some philosophers want to explain why we have these obligations in terms of correlative rights that future persons have against persons in the present. Attributing such rights to future persons is controversial, for there seem to be compelling arguments against the position. According to the “nonexistence” argument, future persons cannot have (...) rights (and so should not be attributed rights) because they do not exist. According to the “no-satisfaction” argument, future persons cannot have a right to resources that do not exist at the time of their existence because such a right could not, in principle, be satisfied. In this paper, I will argue that an eternalist ontology of time provides the resources for satisfactorily responding to both the nonexistence and the no-satisfaction arguments. (shrink)

_Welfare, Meaning, and Worth_ argues that there is more to what makes a life worth living than welfare, and that a good life does not consist of what is merely good for the one who lives it. Smuts defends an objective list theory that states that the notion of worth captures matters of importance for which no plausible theory of welfare can account. He puts forth that lives worth living are net high in various objective goods, including pleasure, meaning, knowledge, (...) and loving relationships. The first part of the book presents a theory of worth, a mental statist account of welfare, and an objectivist theory of meaning. The second part explores the implications for moral theory, the popularity of painful art, and the viability of pessimism about the human condition. This book offers an original exploration of worth as a combination of welfare and meaning that will be of interest to philosophers and ethicists who work on issues in well-being and positive psychology. (shrink)

I examine Du Châtelet’s methodology for physics and metaphysics through the lens of her engagement with Newton’s Rules for Reasoning in Natural Philosophy. I first show that her early manuscript writings discuss and endorse these Rules. Then, I argue that her famous published account of hypotheses continues to invoke close analogues of Rules 3 and 4, despite various developments in her position. Once relevant experimental evidence and some basic constraints are met, it is legitimate to inductively generalize from observations; general (...) hypotheses can thereafter be assumed as true until contrary experiments show otherwise. I conclude by arguing that this account of induction plays an essential role in her metaphysics, both in an argument for simple substances—which has an inductive premise—and in her attempt to distinguish acceptable and unacceptable metaphysical commitments. (shrink)

This paper defends a new version of truthmaker non-maximalism. The central feature of the view is the notion of a default truth-value. I offer a novel explanation for default truth-values and use it to motivate a general approach to the relation between truth-value and ontology, which I call truth-value-maker theory. According to this view, some propositions are false unless made true, whereas others are true unless made false. A consequence of the theory is that negative existential truths need no truthmakers (...) and that positive existential falsehoods need no falsemakers. (shrink)

Decisions regarding life-sustaining medical treatments for young children with profound disabilities can be extremely challenging for families and clinicians. In this study, Brick and colleagues1 surveyed adult residents of the UK about their attitudes regarding withdrawal of treatment using a series of vignettes of infants with varying levels of intellectual and physical disability, based on real and hypothetical cases.1 This is an interesting study on an important topic. We first highlight the limitations of using these survey data to inform public (...) policy and then offer a different interpretation from the authors’ regarding their findings about the value the public appears to place on relational capacity. The authors asked members of the lay public to interpret a disabled child’s best interest in a series of vignettes. The respondents were 92% white; 59% were atheist or reported no religious affiliation. Though the authors note this lack of diversity as a limitation, we would add that this limitation is particularly problematic in this context. Minority views on this issue may differ significantly from the majority perspective. When the stakes are high (as is the case for questions about withdrawing life-sustaining therapy from infants over parental objections), use of public opinion data to directly inform policy requires, at a minimum, a representative sample reflecting both the true diversity of views within the public and a method to justly account for the alternate views of the minority. Even if the sampled population were more …. (shrink)

Propositional attitude verbs, such as think and want, have long held interest for both theoretical linguists and language acquisitionists because their syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic properties display complex interactions that have proven difficult to fully capture from either perspective. This paper explores the granularity with which these verbs’ semantic and pragmatic properties are recoverable from their syntactic distributions, using three behavioral experiments aimed at explicitly quantifying the relationship between these two sets of properties. Experiment 1 gathers a measure of 30 (...) propositional attitude verbs’ syntactic distributions using an acceptability judgment task. Experiments 2a and 2b gather measures of semantic similarity between those same verbs using a generalized semantic discrimination task and an ordinal scale task, respectively. Two kinds of analyses are conducted on the data from these experiments. The first compares both the acceptability judgments and the semantic similarity judgments to previous classifications derived from the syntax and semantics literature. The second kind compares the acceptability judgments to the semantic similarity judgments directly. Through these comparisons, we show that there is quite fine-grained information about propositional attitude verbs’ semantics carried in their syntactic distributions—whether one considers the sorts of discrete qualitative classifications that linguists traditionally work with or the sorts of continuous quantitative classifications that can be derived experimentally. (shrink)

Recent advances in the field of statistical learning have established that learners are able to track regularities of multimodal stimuli, yet it is unknown whether the statistical computations are performed on integrated representations or on separate, unimodal representations. In the present study, we investigated the ability of adults to integrate audio and visual input during statistical learning. We presented learners with a speech stream synchronized with a video of a speaker’s face. In the critical condition, the visual (e.g. /gi/) and (...) auditory (e.g. /mi/) signals were occasionally incongruent, which we predicted would produce the McGurk illusion, resulting in the perception of an audiovisual syllable (e.g. /ni/). In this way, we used the McGurk illusion to manipulate the underlying statistical structure of the speech streams, such that perception of these illusory syllables facilitated participants’ ability to segment the speech stream. Our results therefore demonstrate that participants can integrate audio and visual input to perceive the McGurk illusion during statistical learning. We interpret our findings as support for modality-interactive accounts of statistical learning. (shrink)

Journal of Social Philosophy, EarlyView.

Porphyry, a native of Phoenicia educated in Athens and Rome during the third century AD, was one of the most important Platonic philosophers of his age. In this book, Professor Johnson rejects the prevailing modern approach to his thought, which has posited an early stage dominated by 'Oriental' superstition and irrationality followed by a second rationalizing or Hellenizing phase consequent upon his move west and exposure to Neoplatonism. Based on a careful treatment of all the relevant remains of Porphyry's originally (...) vast corpus, he argues for a complex unity of thought in terms of philosophical translation. The book explores this philosopher's critical engagement with the processes of Hellenism in late antiquity. It provides the first comprehensive examination of all the strands of Porphyry's thought that lie at the intersection of religion, theology, ethnicity and culture. (shrink)

In this issue of the American Journal of Bioethics, Kraft and colleagues (2018) provide important insights into the role trust plays in donor's decisions to contribute data and samples to local bio...

Ásta’s Categories We Live By is a superb addition to the literature on social metaphysics. In it she offers a powerful framework for understanding the creation and maintenance of social categories. In this commentary piece, I want to draw attention to Ásta’s reliance on explanatory individualism – the view that the social world is best explained by the actions and attitudes of individuals. I argue that this reliance makes it difficult for Ásta to explain how many social categories are maintained (...) and why certain categories are reliably available to us and so resistant to change. These explanatory deficiencies could be overcome, I argue, by eschewing explanatory individualism and positing social structures to figure in structural explanations of the maintenance and availability of social categories. (shrink)

In this commentary piece, I argue that Asay’s accounts of truth and truthmaking in A Theory of Truthmaking give no role to the idea that truth depends on being. In fact, some of the positions taken in the book are in tension with this idea that has been central to truthmaker theory. I consider how three aspects of Asay’s account relate to the idea that truth depends on being.

Draft for presentation at the 14th International Kant-Congress, September 2024. -/- Abstract: Kant claims we intuit infinite space. There’s a problem: Kant thinks full awareness of infinite space requires synthesis—the act of putting representations together and comprehending them as one. But our ability to synthesize is finite. Tobias Rosefeldt has argued in a recent paper that Kant’s notion of decomposing synthesis offers a solution. This talk criticizes Rosefeldt’s approach. First, Rosefeldt is committed to nonconceptual yet determinate awareness of (potentially) infinite (...) space, but I argue that such awareness is (1) prima facie implausible, as well as contravened by textual evidence from Kant’s (2a) definitions of ‘infinity’ and (2b) account of geometrical construction. Second, scrutiny of how Kant thinks awareness of potential infinity is afforded by geometrical construction (e.g., extending a line segment ad indefinitum) indicates no essential role for decomposing synthesis. Familiar synthesis from parts to wholes is sufficient. (shrink)

This chapter provides an overview of the philosophy of Adam Smith by examining the place of history and the role of impartiality in his philosophy. A brief introduction to Smith and his writings is followed by discussions of impartiality and Smith’s engagement with the philosophical role of history and the historian. The section that follows focuses on Smith’s discussion of rights as providing a connection between his moral theory and history via the role of the impartial spectator. The chapter concludes (...) with a brief description of Smith’s history of moral systems. Throughout the chapter tries to show unified philosophical commitments in Smith’s range of writings. (shrink)

I distinguish three ways in which early modern rationalists seek to apply the principle of sufficient reason to empirical science, and critically assess some of their attempts to do so. I focus especially on how these thinkers assume substantive theories of explanation and intelligibility--which are indebted to the mechanist and experimentalist traditions--in many of their deployments of this rationalist principle. A recurring problem is that these philosophers deploy their standards of intelligibility inconsistently: some of their own favored explanations do not (...) always live up to their standards. I argue that the problem is especially acute for Leibniz and Euler, given their enthusiasm for final-causal explanations. (shrink)

Metaphysics is the branch of philosophy that aims to give a theoretical account of what there is and what it is like. Social justice movements seek to bring about justice in a society by changing policy, law, practice, and culture. Evidently, these activities are very different from one another. The goal of this article is to identify some positive connections between recent work in metaphysics and social justice movements. I outline three ways in which metaphysical work on social reality can (...) make a contribution to movements seeking social justice, viz., (1) by providing basic categories and concepts useful for clarifying and defending claims made by social justice movements; (2) by offering accounts of the natures of social categories, structures, and institutions that these movements seek to change; and (3) by contributing to “unmasking” or “debunking” projects that reveal putatively natural arrange- ments to be social in nature and hence subject to moral critique, alteration, and possibly eradication. (shrink)

I reply to Hawthorne and Uzquiano’s arguments for the incompatibility between mereological universalism and plenitudinous co-location. I argue that a mereology in which antisymmetry for parthood fails is independently motivated, and allows for both universalism and plenitudinous co-location. There can be as many angels in a place as there are cardinalities.

Ecology arguably has roots in eighteenth-century natural histories, such as Linnaeus's economy of nature, which pressed a case for holistic and final-causal explanations of organisms in terms of what we'd now call their environment. After sketching Kant's arguments for the indispensability of final-causal explanation merely in the case of individual organisms, and considering the Linnaean alternative, this paper examines Kant's critical response to Linnaean ideas. I argue that Kant does not explicitly reject Linnaeus's holism. But he maintains that the indispensability (...) of final-causal explanation depends on robust modal connections between types of organism and their functional parts; relationships in Linnaeus's economy of nature, by contrast, are relatively contingent. Kant's framework avoids strong metaphysical assumptions, is responsive to empirical evidence, and can be fruitfully compared with some contemporary approaches to biological organization. (shrink)

I present three versions of the argument from divine hiddenness that are grounded in moral considerations regarding how a just deity would act and auxiliary commitments that theists often have. First, I argue that the problem of hiddenness is made worse if one also holds that many will suffer in the afterlife due to not achieving a proper orientation towards God and the demands of morality in this life. Second, I argue that if any version of the moral argument for (...) theism is successful, then God has a very good reason to not remain hidden. Third, I argue that a just God would not allow people to do evil in her name. (shrink)

When we judge something to be beautiful, do we identify an inherent feature of the object, or only our subjective response to it? This paper argues that, for Kant, pure aesthetic judgment occupies a middle ground. Such judgments are based upon affective responses to our own cognitive faculties. Thus, pure aesthetic judgment is subjective insofar as it concerns our feeling ourselves to be engaged in a certain task; it is objective insofar as the task we are engaged in is cognition (...) of an object, and the faculties that we are feeling to be at work are the cognitive faculties of the understanding and the imagination. This paper locates this interpretation in the text of the Critique of Aesthetic Judgment in the third Critique and uses it to make sense of many otherwise opaque features of Kant’s account of pure aesthetic judgment. (shrink)

While moral arguments for vegetarianism have been explored in great depth, the arguments for veganism seem less clear. Although many animals used for milk and eggs are forced to live miserable lives on factory farms, it’s possible to raise animals as food resources on farms where the animals are treated more humanely and never slaughtered. Under more humane conditions, do we harm animals to use them for food? I argue that, even under humane conditions, using animals for food typically harms (...) animals by restricting their freedom. My argument raises an important question about the extent to which animals are harmed when their freedom is restricted. On one view, it is possible to restrict animals’ freedom without harming them so long as we don’t make them suffer. This view underestimates the value of freedom for animals. Even if animals aren’t made to suffer, restricting their freedom can harm them insofar as it deprives them of freely pursuing their enjoyments in life. My argument has implications for not only the ethics of using animals as food resources but also the ethics of using animals in zoos and circuses. I examine these implications and also consider what we should do with farm animals if we cease using them for food. (shrink)

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the main themes covered in the present volume. It highlights the interdisciplinary approach taken in the choice of contributors to the volume which it is hoped will result in new perspectives on the philosophy of the Scottish Enlightenment. The chapter notes that the contributors approach Hutcheson, Hume, Smith, and Reid from new points of view, and other important figures and philosophical themes are discussed in terms of their contributions to a distinctively Scottish philosophical (...) scene in the eighteenth century. The chapter presents an outline of these themes including Scottish institutions and education, moral philosophy, aesthetic theory, religious thought, and historical and political theory. (shrink)

This chapter presents a general account of the speculative and practical moral philosophy of eighteenth-century Scotland. It gives particular attention to three topics: the Scottish insistence that moral philosophy is an empirical, or ‘experimental’, science, grounded in what might now be called a phenomenology of the moral life, and intimately connected with the other elements of the ‘science of man’; the project of combining Hutchesonian moral sense theory with a Butlerian faculty of conscience; and the attempt to combine an empirical (...) and broadly anti-rationalist moral philosophy—a moral philosophy that had a central place for the concept of virtue, with a natural jurisprudence taken from Grotius and, especially, Pufendorf. Particular attention is paid to the practical moral philosophy which was the focus of much of the teaching of moral philosophy in Scotland. (shrink)

This collection offers the first comprehensive and definitive account of Martin Heidegger’s philosophy of technology. It does so through a detailed analysis of canonical texts and recently published primary sources on two crucial concepts in Heidegger’s later thought: _Gelassenheit _and _Gestell_. _Gelassenheit_, translated as ‘releasement’, and _Gestell_, often translated as ‘enframing’ or ‘positionality’, stand as opposing ideas in Heidegger’s work whereby the meditative thinking of _Gelassenheit _counters the dangers of our technological framing of the world in _Gestell_. After opening with (...) a scholarly overview of Heidegger’s philosophy of technology as a whole, this volume focuses on important Heideggerian critiques of science, technology, and modern industrialized society as well as Heidegger’s belief that transformations in our thought processes enable us to resist the restrictive domain of modern techno-scientific practice. Key themes discussed in this collection include: the history, development, and defining features of modern technology; the relationship between scientific theories and their technological instantiations; the nature of human agency and the essence of education in the age of technology; and the ethical, political, and environmental impact of our current techno-scientific customs. With contributions from a number of renowned Heidegger scholars, the original essays in this collection will be of great interest to scholars and students of philosophy, technology studies, the history and philosophy of science, critical theory, environmental studies, education, sociology, and political theory. (shrink)

That a distinction can be drawn between the literal meaning of a metaphorical expression and its metaphorical meaning is assumed by a number of philosophical theories of metaphor, such as so-called comparison theories. These views descend from Aristotle and typically regard the metaphorical meaning of a metaphorical expression to be the literal meaning of a corresponding simile.1 “Man is a lion” literally means something that is clearly false, while “Man is a lion” metaphorically means something that may be true—man is (...) like a lion. Max Black’s (1962) “interaction” theory also affirms the distinction and remains popular, including among some Peirce scholars whom I will discuss. But Donald Davidson has been.. (shrink)

When studying science contexts, scholars typically position charismatic authority as an adjunct or something that provides a meaning-laden boost to rational authority. In this paper, we re-theorize these relationships. We re-center charismatic authority as an interpretive resource that allows scientists and onlookers to recast a professional conflict in terms of a public drama. In this mode, both professionals and lay enthusiasts portray involvement in the scientific process as a story of suppression and persecution, in which only a few remarkable figures (...) can withstand scrutiny and take on challengers with dignity. Description and elaboration of these figures and the folklore surrounding them sets in motion the interpretive processes by which some actors become charismatic leaders and others charismatic followers within science, ultimately providing alternative symbolic resources for an embattled research agenda to accrue legitimacy. To illustrate, we use the case of Arthur Jensen – a deceased intelligence researcher and the intellectual father to contemporary texts like The Bell Curve – and the circles of hero worship that admirers inside and outside academia have created to praise him. Using this perspective to study Jensen and his admirers demonstrates how the perennial race and intelligence debates gain a kind of symbolic power, unrelated to their scientific merit or racist appeal, which enables such debates to thrive and persist in the public sphere. More generally, our approach identifies contemporary processes by which scientific ideas can gain public authority even when their intellectual merit has been deemed dubious. (shrink)

It is initially odd to ask whether Confucianism is compatible with systems of law. Confucian thought has co-existed with Chinese legal systems throughout the various dynasties of China’s long history. Nevertheless, despite the extensive laws that China has boasted, traditional Chinese legal thought is not typically recognized as a genuine rule-of-law system, given its focus on moral development and the “rule of man.” In this essay, we argue that Confucianism, specifically Pre-Qin Confucianism, is compatible with the rule-of-law. We examine the (...) different models of compatibility, including “soft compatibilism” in which we examine whether abstract concepts between Confucianism and legal systems are compatible, as well as co-existing and integrating compatibilism. Co-existing compatibilism sees Confucianism and the law occupying different spheres within the same legal system while integrating compatibilism sees Confucianism and the law coming together into a new system. In this way, Confucianism offers China an alternative to liberal democratic and Marxist theories of law. (shrink)

The consensus is that in his 1755 Nova Dilucidatio, Kant endorsed broadly Leibnizian compatibilism, then switched to a strongly incompatibilist position in the early 1760s. I argue for an alternative, incompatibilist reading of the Nova Dilucidatio. On this reading, actions are partly grounded in indeterministic acts of volition, and partly in prior conative or cognitive motivations. Actions resulting from volitions are determined by volitions, but volitions themselves are not fully determined. This move, which was standard in medieval treatments of free (...) choice, explains why Kant is so critical of Crusius’s version of libertarian freedom: Kant understands Crusius as making actions entirely random. In defense of this reading, I offer a new analysis of the version of the principle of sufficient reason that appears in the Nova Dilucidatio. This principle can be read as merely guaranteeing grounds for the existence of things or substances, rather than efficient causes for states and events. As such, the principle need not exclude libertarian freedom. Along the way, I seek to illuminate obscure aspects of Kant’s 1755 views on moral psychology, action theory, and the threat of theological determinism. (shrink)