According to a tradition reaching back to Plato, questions about the nature of knowledge are to be answered by offering an analysis in terms of truth, belief, justification, and other factors presumed to be in some sense more basic than knowledge itself. In light of the apparent failure of this approach, knowledge first philosophy instead takes knowledge as the starting point in epistemology and related areas of the philosophies of language and mind. Knowledge cannot be analyzed in the traditional sense, (...) but this does not make it mysterious or unimportant. On the contrary, we are freed to use our grasp of what knowledge is to elucidate the nature of belief, justification, evidence, the speech act of assertion, and the demands on action and practical reasoning, and to treat knowledge as a purely mental state in its own right. Knowledge First? offers the first overview and critical evaluation of knowledge first philosophy as a whole. (shrink)

David Malament argued that Hartry Field's nominalisation program is unlikely to be able to deal with non-space-time theories such as phase-space theories. We give a specific example of such a phase-space theory and argue that this presentation of the theory delivers explanations that are not available in the classical presentation of the theory. This suggests that even if phase-space theories can be nominalised, the resulting theory will not have the explanatory power of the original. Phase-space theories thus raise problems for (...) nominalists that go beyond Malament's initial concerns. Thanks to Mark Steiner, Jens Christian Bjerring, Ben Fraser, John Mathewson, and two anonymous referees for helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper. CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)

Some have argued that chance and determinism are compatible in order to account for the objectivity of probabilities in theories that are compatible with determinism, like Classical Statistical Mechanics (CSM) and Evolutionary Theory (ET). Contrarily, some have argued that chance and determinism are incompatible, and so such probabilities are subjective. In this paper, I argue that both of these positions are unsatisfactory. I argue that the probabilities of theories like CSM and ET are not chances, but also that they are (...) not subjective probabilities either. Rather, they are a third type of probability, which I call counterfactual probability. The main distinguishing feature of counterfactual-probability is the role it plays in conveying important counterfactual information in explanations. This distinguishes counterfactual probability from chance as a second concept of objective probability. (shrink)

Higher education institutions have access to higher volumes and a greater variety and granularity of student data, often in real-time, than ever before. As such, the collection, analysis and use of student data are increasingly crucial in operational and strategic planning, and in delivering appropriate and effective learning experiences to students. Student data – not only in what data is collected, but also how the data is framed and used – has material and discursive effects, both permanent and fleeting. We (...) have to critically engage claims that artificial intelligence and the ever expansive/expanding systems of algorithmic decision-making provide speedy, accessible, revealing, panoramic, prophetic and smart analyses of students' risks, potential and learning needs. We need to pry open the black boxes higher education institutions use to admit, steer, predict and prescribe students’ learning journeys. (shrink)

Epistemic injustice has become one of the most widely discussed topics in social epistemology, and has revived interest in issues in the intersections between epistemology and ethics and political philosophy. Much of the impetus for this recent explosion of interest has been the influential work of Miranda Fricker; however, Fricker’s framework and terminology for discussing the phenomena and the kinds of examples she’s interested in has not always been cleanly separated from the phenomena themselves. This chapter examines what’s distinctive of (...) Fricker’s treatment of the phenomena she labels epistemic injustice, focusing on the two varieties that her discussion highlights, testimonial injustice and hermeneutical injustice. Once the distinctive elements of Fricker’s treatment are clearer, we will be better placed to assess which of them are plausible and which implausible, and to consider alternative theoretical frameworks for thinking about the phenomena, such as that developed by Kristie Dotson. (shrink)

This paper re-examines the debate between those who, with Miranda Fricker, diagnose the primary, non-contingent harm of testimonial injustice as a kind of epistemic objectification and those who contend it is better thought of as a kind of epistemic othering. Defenders of the othering account of the primary harm have often argued for it by presenting cases of testimonial injustice in which the testifier’s epistemic agency is affirmed rather than denied, even while their credibility is unjustly impugned. In previous work, (...) I have instead argued that such cases suggest that we need to enrich our conception of epistemic objectification in ways encouraged by Martha Nussbaum’s cluster analysis of objectification. Here I continue to make the case for this approach, and I consider the othering account in more detail. I focus in particular on Gaile Pohlhaus Jr.’s arguments for a version of the othering account in terms of the notion of derivatization, which turns on the idea that only such an account can enable us to properly understand the harms of testimonial injustice, in particular the ways in which it interferes with a subject’s epistemic agency and autonomy, and I’ll argue that such arguments should not sway us. Finally, I’ll further support my contention that it is illuminating and helpful to think of the primary harm of testimonial injustice in terms of epistemic objectification, though I will concede that the notion of epistemic othering may offer further helpful resources for understanding how subjects can be harmed by testimonial injustice. (shrink)

Crispin Wright has proposed that one has entitlements to accept certain propositions that play a foundational role within one’s body of belief. Such an entitlement is a kind of warrant that does not require the possessor to have acquired evidence speaking in favor of the proposition in question. The proposal allows Wright to concede much of the force of the most powerful arguments for scepticism, while avoiding the truly sceptical conclusion that one lacks warrant for most of one’s beliefs. Here (...) I will argue that Wright has underestimated a problem for his proposal, the alchemy problem, which is that it seems to make room for the easy conversion of mere entitlement to accept a proposition into justification to believe it. I question the adequacy of Wright’s own response to this worry, and instead explore the idea that epistemic alchemy, properly understood, is not epistemically objectionable. (shrink)

This paper criticises Miranda Fricker's account of the primary harm of testimonial injustice as a kind of epistemic objectification, where the latter is understood on the model provided by Martha Nussbaum's influential analysis of sexual objectification and where it is taken to involve the denial of someone's epistemic agency. I examine the existing objections to Fricker's account of the primary harm, criticising some while accepting the force of others, and I argue that one of Fricker's own central examples of testimonial (...) injustice in fact offers the basis of a particularly telling objection. While Fricker's other critics have mostly concluded that we need to look at alternative theoretical resources to offer an account of the primary harm of testimonial injustice, I aim to show that this is premature; both Fricker and her critics have underestimated the resources provided by Nussbaum's analysis of objectification when offering an account of the primary harm, and something very much in the spirit of Fricker's account survives the objections. (shrink)

Poverty remains a critical socio-economic challenge in South Africa, deeply rooted in the country’s history of colonialism and apartheid. This article examines the multifaceted role of churches in poverty alleviation efforts in South Africa, spanning both historical and contemporary contexts. Through analysis of historical records and contemporary literature, it argues that while churches have significantly addressed poverty, a more comprehensive and transformative approach is needed. The study proposes adopting a missional ecclesiology framework to enhance the effectiveness of church-led poverty alleviation (...) initiatives, offering insights into how churches can engage more deeply and sustainably in the fight against poverty.Contribution: This research contributes to existing scholarship by: (1) Providing a comprehensive historical analysis of church involvement in poverty alleviation in South Africa. (2) Critically examining challenges and opportunities in contemporary church-led poverty alleviation efforts. (3) Proposing missional ecclesiology as a framework for enhancing church-based poverty alleviation initiatives. (4) Offering practical recommendations for churches to address poverty within South Africa’s unique socio-economic context. (shrink)

What is Aristotle’s conception of thumos? This question can be broken down into two separate but related questions: what is the object of desire for thumos, and in which faculty of the soul is thumos grounded? The latter question is the focus of this paper. In this paper, “grounded in” is to be taken physiologically; the second question can be rephrased as “Which faculty of the soul is thumos a function of?” As a general rule Aristotle employs both a colloquial (...) and a technical sense of thumos throughout the corpus. When I ask “What is thumos?,” I am interested in the technical sense that appears primarily in On the Soul and in the Nicomachean Ethics, where thumos is defined as a category of desire. The main argument of this paper is that Aristotle’s thumos is grounded in the faculty of phantasia – specifically, a sub-faculty called definite phantasia. (shrink)

In the biomedical and behavioral sciences, it is widely recognized that researchers conducting studies involving human participants must respect the autonomy of research subjects. There is significant debate in the clinical research ethics and bioethics literatures about what it means for an individual to be autonomous. According to proponents of the Liberal Conception of Autonomy, an autonomous person is an agent who has interests and opinions and the capacity to deliberate about them. In contrast, proponents of the Relational Conception of (...) Autonomy argue that because humans are social creatures, autonomy is a relational concept and ought to be recognized as such by medical professionals. In this article, I argue that the LCA/RCA debate is flawed, and that the notion of freedom as non-domination, rather than autonomy, ought to be adopted for biomedical research ethics policies regarding informed consent and research agenda-setting. I then argue that this view of freedom should also be adopted... (shrink)

Este artigo tem como tema o problema filosófico da fundamentação da moral com o objetivo de apresentar o sentido e a validade de uma ética feminista. Parte-se da hipótese de que uma ética feminista se distinguiria das éticas antigas e apresentaria uma alternativa adequada ao problema da fundamentação da moral, bem como dos conflitos morais atuais, em especial, pelo tipo de solução que propõe, a qual segue uma lógica construída mediante uma práxis humana determinada. Em outros termos, o objetivo deste (...) artigo é ajudar a compreender como um conteúdo da moralidade surgido de elementos históricos, temporais, culturais pode ser construído; nesse caso, ligado às condições das mulheres surgidas no meio social. Para tanto, será apresentada uma nova concepção de ética e o exemplo de uma ética capaz de orientar uma solução para conflitos morais atuais, a ética feminista do cuidado de Carol Gilligan. (shrink)

Mindreading is often considered to be the most important human social cognitive skill, and over the past three decades, several theories of the cognitive mechanisms for mindreading have been proposed. But why do we read minds? According to the standard view, we attribute mental states to individuals to predict and explain their behavior. I argue that the standard view is too general to capture the distinctive function of mindreading, and that it does not explain what motivates people to read minds. (...) In order to understand why mindreading is evolutionarily adaptive, individually beneficial, and motivationally compelling, we need to include another level of explanation: the level of social relationships. I introduce a theory of the cognitive underpinnings of social relationships—the relational models theory of Alan Fiske. I outline the hypothesis that the function of mindreading is to shape social relations. I further hypothesize that mindreading is often motivated by social emotions. If mindreading serves r.. (shrink)

A main thread of the debate over mathematical realism has come down to whether mathematics does explanatory work of its own in some of our best scientific explanations of empirical facts. Realists argue that it does; anti-realists argue that it doesn't. Part of this debate depends on how mathematics might be able to do explanatory work in an explanation. Everyone agrees that it's not enough that there merely be some mathematics in the explanation. Anti-realists claim there is nothing mathematics can (...) do to make an explanation mathematical ; realists think something can be done, but they are not clear about what that something is. I argue that many of the examples of mathematical explanations of empirical facts in the literature can be accounted for in terms of Jackson and Pettit's [1990] notion of program explanation, and that mathematical realists can use the notion of program explanation to support their realism. This is exactly what has happened in a recent thread of the debate over moral realism. I explain how the two debates are analogous and how moves that have been made in the moral realism debate can be made in the mathematical realism debate. However, I conclude that one can be a mathematical realist without having to be a moral realist. (shrink)

Department of Economics, University of Calgary, 2500 University Dr NW, Calgary AB, T2N 1N4, Canada. Tel.: +1403220 5861; Fax: +1403220 5861; Email: ahollis{at}ucalgary.ca ' + u + '@' + d + ' '//--> . Abstract The Health Impact Fund has been proposed as an optional, comprehensive advance market commitment system offering financial payments or ‘prizes’ to patentees of new drugs, which are sold globally at an administered low price. The Fund is designed to offer payments based on the therapeutic impact (...) of the drugs or vaccines, so that innovators will have efficient incentives to develop drugs that maximize health gains. Consumers would have improved access to such drugs because of low prices. CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)

A theme running through Katherine Hawley’s recent works on trust and trustworthiness is that thinking about the relations between these and Miranda Fricker’s notion of testimonial injustice offers a perspective from which we can see several limitations of Fricker’s own account of testimonial injustice. This paper clarifies the aspects of Fricker’s account that Hawley’s criticisms target, focusing on her objections to Fricker’s proposal that its primary harm involves a kind of epistemic objectification and her characterization of testimonial injustice in terms (...) of prejudicial credibility deficits. I also offer an assessment of the potency of Hawley’s objections, concluding that they do point to genuine limitations of Fricker’s account, but that we can appreciate Hawley’s points without adopting her trust-centric approach to testimonial injustice, or her specific commitment-based accounts of trust and trustworthiness. However, in the last section I examine the positive picture of testimonial injustice that emerges from Hawley’s discussion of unequally distributed obstacles to both being trustworthy and maintaining a reputation for trustworthy testimony in her recent book How To Be Trustworthy, considering how this picture contrasts with Fricker’s account and where it might have important affinities with other accounts in the literature. (shrink)

This paper responds to arguments due to Joel Smith and Annalisa Coliva that try to show that James Pryor’s notion of wh-misidentification is philosophically uninteresting, and perhaps even spurious. It also proposes definitions of wh-misidentification and immunity to wh-misidentification which try to improve in various ways on the characterisations that standardly figure in the literature, and explores the relationship between misidentification and the epistemic structures characteristic of some kinds of Gettier cases.

This collection brings together a selection of writings on art by the internationally acclaimed novelist, historian and critic Marina Warner. For 30 years Warner has published widely on a range of art-world subjects and objects, from contemporary installation and film works to paintings by Flemish and Italian Renaissance masters, through Victorian photography and twentieth-century political drawings and prints. Warner's extraordinary curiosity in art and culture is conveyed in writing that is at once poetic and playful, elegant and rigorous, training our (...) eyes on the smallest of details while painting a broad-brushstroke landscape of art past and present. Themes familiar to Warner's readers--myth and fantasy, psychic and sexual experience, the vast and marvelous expanse of the human imagination--are treated in the lectures and articles, stories, interviews and essays contained here, some of which are published for the first time or republished from out-of-print sources. For the first of two volumes, editor Vivian Sky Rehberg has assembled themed sections titled "Playing in the Dark," "Telling Tales" and "Phantom Technologies." Texts include interviews with Tacita Dean and Paula Rego; catalogue essays on Leonora Carrington, Henry Fuseli, Zarina Bhimji, Tony Oursler and Fischli/Weiss; articles on Tracy Emin, Marlene Dumas, Louise Bourgeois; stories for artist's books by Kiki Smith and Helen Douglas; and lectures on Francis Bacon, Hieronymous Bosch and William Kentridge. "The Symbol Gives Rise to Thought" invites us to explore new ways of seeing and engaging with the traces of our artistic heritage. Marina Warner is a writer of fiction, criticism and history. Holder of 12 honorary degrees and two honorary fellowships, Warner is a Fellow of the British Academy and of the Royal Society of Literature. She has judged the The Jerwood Drawing Prize and the Turner Prize; she is a regular broadcaster on the BBC, and has taught and given lectures worldwide, including the National Gallery and ICA, London and the Prado in Madrid; she has delivered the Presidential Lecture at Stanford University and the Carpenter Lecture at Harvard. She has been awarded a CBE, Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, France and Commendatore dell'Ordine della Stella di Solidareità, Italy. Warner is a winner of the Aby Warburg Prize and a Getty Scholar. Vivian Sky Rehberg is an art historian and critic based in Paris and Rotterdam. A founding editor of "Journal of Visual Culture," she is a contributing editor of "Frieze," and has written for numerous contemporary art publications. Previously Chair of the department of Critical Studies at Parsons Paris School of Art + Design, where she taught modern and contemporary art, Rehberg is currently Course Director for the Masters in Fine Art at Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam.. (shrink)

This paper is about how to interpret and evaluate purported evidence for predicativism about proper names. I aim to point out some underappreciated thorny issues and to offer both predicativists and non-predicativists some advice about how best to pursue their respective projects. I hope to establish three related claims: that non-predicativists have to posit relatively exotic, though not entirely implausible, polysemic mechanisms to capture the range of data that predicativists have introduced ; that neither referentialism nor extant versions of predicativism (...) can offer a very plausible account of the interpretive possibilities for singular unmodified definite descriptions containing names ; and that the most plausible version of predicativism would treat bare names as non-anaphoric definite descriptions. (shrink)

Frege's puzzle is a fundamental challenge for accounts of mental and linguistic representation. This piece surveys a family of recent approaches to the puzzle that posit representational relations. I identify the central commitments of relational approaches and present several arguments for them. I also distinguish two kinds of relationism—semantic relationism and formal relationism—corresponding to two conceptions of representational relations. I briefly discuss the consequences of relational approaches for foundational questions about propositional attitudes, intentional explanation, and compositionality.

Among the virtues of relationist approaches to Frege’s puzzle is that they put us in a position to outline structural features of the puzzle that were only implicit in earlier work. In particular, they allow us to frame questions about the relation between the explanatory roles of sense and sameness of sense. In this paper, I distinguish a number of positions about that relation which have not been clearly distinguished. This has a few pay-offs. It allows us to shed light (...) on recent controversies about the ‘essential indexical’, and it also allows us to see what’s at stake between relationists and their opponents. When we see what’s at stake, we can see that we have reason to adopt an account of cognitive significance that incorporates elements of both relationist and Fregean approaches. (shrink)

In this paper, I develop two criticisms of Miranda Fricker’s attempt to offer an interpretation of MacKinnon’s claim that pornography silences women that conceives of the silencing in question as an extreme form of testimonial injustice. The intended contrast is with the speech act theoretical model of silencing familiar from Rae Langton and Jennifer Hornsby, who appeal to MacKinnon’s claim to argue against the standard liberal line on pornography, which takes a permissive stance to be demanded by a right to (...) freedom of speech. Fricker’s alternative suggestion is that women are the victims of ‘an especially acute form of testimonial injustice’, due to the kind of dehumanizing bad sexual ideology peddled in much pornography. Fricker suggests that both notions of silencing are coherent possibilities, but that ‘the epistemic model describes the more empirically likely possibility, simply because it requires less erosion of women’s human status before the silencing effect kicks in’. I question the truth of this advertised advantage of Fricker’s epistemic account of silencing, but also its relevance to philosophical debates about pornography and silencing. Second, I raise a concern about theorizing about sexual refusal as a kind of testimony, as Fricker does. (shrink)

ABSTRACTRegret over missed opportunities leads adults to take more risks. Given recent evidence that the ability to experience regret impacts decisions made by 6-year-olds, and pronounced interest in the antecedents to risk taking in adolescence, we investigated the age at which a relationship between missed opportunities and risky decision-making emerges, and whether that relationship changes at different points in development. Six- and 8-year-olds, adolescents and adults completed a sequential risky decision-making task on which information about missed opportunities was available. Children (...) also completed a task designed to measure their ability to report regret when explicitly prompted to do so. The relationship between missed opportunities and risky decision-making did not emerge until 8 years, at which age it was associated with the ability to explicitly report regret, and was stronger in adults than in adolescents. These novel results highlight the potential importance of the ability to experience r... (shrink)

In The Self-Help Myth, Erica Kohl-Arenas explores how antipoverty programmes consistently fail to alleviate the suffering and oppression of the poor within California’s Central Valley, a region whi...

The experiences of many transitional justice mechanisms have led to a general consensus on the central importance of local legitimacy and local ownership; this indeed is repeatedly avowed by both the UN and the EU in their prescriptions on effective transitional justice mechanisms. Yet, I argue that the Kosovo Specialist Chambers was established in the absence of both. The court was not created in response to domestic pressure from within Kosovo; rather, it was the result of external pressure which by (...) definition compromised local ownership and legitimacy. Drawing on the findings from first-hand qualitative research, I demonstrate that the court’s local legitimacy has not improved since its establishment. This lack of legitimacy, I argue, has potentially negative implications as, without popular legitimacy, the court’s proceedings and judgements are unlikely to command sufficient public support to either catalyse the societal changes promised by the court’s external sponsors, or withstand opposition to the court from within the Kosovo Albanian population resulting from any perceived slight against the ‘heroic’ KLA. (shrink)

BackgroundDespite the extensive research on war atrocities and risk factors for psychopathology, there is a paucity of research on the potential mediating and moderating effect of neuroticism in refugee children and adolescents.ObjectiveThis study aimed to analyze whether neuroticism mediated and/or moderated the relationship between war atrocities and different types of psychopathology in Syrian refugee children and adolescents who resettled in Lebanon and Jordan.Participants and SettingParticipants were 1,000 Syrian refugee children and adolescents of both sexes.MethodsQuestionnaires were administered in an interview format (...) with children at school by two trained psychologists. Descriptive statistics and inter-correlations among variables were used Then the mediator and moderator effect of neuroticism in the relationship between war atrocities and posttraumatic stress, emotion regulation and behavioral and emotional disorders were examined.ResultsA partial mediating effect of neuroticism on posttraumatic stress disorder, emotion dysregulation, and emotional and behavioral disorders was revealed. Findings also indicated full moderating effects of neuroticism on PTSD as well as partial moderating effects on emotion dysregulation, and emotional and behavioral.ConclusionsFindings contribute to the neuroticism literature by showing that high-N children develop more problems that are psychopathological and have more severe affective reactions to war atrocities in post- resettlement contexts. Early interventions aimed to reduce neuroticism might contribute to a better prognosis in refugee children at high-risk for psychological disorders. (shrink)