You meet someone new; you like them; you send them to your Facebook page. But how accurate is this representation of you? We all want to look our best, which is why we are drawn to the ability to fudge things a bit online. How does this projection of who we are distort us into who we want to be? Facebook allows us to hide our flaws that are all too visible in real life. We can embellish or correct what (...) we said earlier, edit out what we don’t like about ourselves, and only show photos where our chin is down and the lighting is blown out just enough to hide the bump on our nose. Our prospective employers can even turn to Facebook to assess our desirability. So might the constructed aesthetic of Facebook affect our approach to ethics – to interacting with other people? Does the way we design ourselves on Facebook directly impact the other people in our lives? Is each of us really just a rough draft that needs immediate editing? What about Facebook makes it possible to achieve genuine beauty? (shrink)

In this paper I will examine Husserl’s attempt to establish a ground for science with the so called transcendental reduction. This will entail both an identification of the problems that Husserl was attempting to solve as well as a careful analysis of Husserl’s account of his methodology. I will then examine how Derrida’s reading, which affirms the phenomenological project in many of its essential aspects, begins to signal a subtle yet ultimately radical disagreement. This disagreement will have lasting implications for (...) our understanding of the possibilities designated by the transcendental method in Husserl’s thinking. (shrink)

Few ideas have excited greater interest among theologians in recent decades than the idea of 'participation'. In thinking about creation, it is the notion that everything comes from, and depends upon, God, inviting the language of sharing, or of an exemplar and its images; in thinking about redemption, it points to the restoration of that image, and is expressed in the language of communion with God and with the redeemed community. In this volume, Andrew Davison considers these themes in (...) unprecedented breadth, investigating the fundamental character of participation as it can be applied to a wide range of theological topics. Exploring what it means to know, to love, to do good, and to live together well, he shows how these ideas animate a particular understanding of human life and how we relate to the world around us. His book offers the most comprehensive survey of participation to date, contributing to detailed discussions of these themes among academic theologians. (shrink)

The variety and complexity of the eight papers in this Symposium issue are evidence that immigration is a tough nut to crack both as a matter of policy and application. There is no way that any short summary can do justice to these papers, which take a variety of moral, economic, historical, and empirical approaches to some of the recurrent issues in the field, so it is best in this short issue to try to situate the problem in a general (...) classical liberal context, to show where the pressure points are most likely to appear.The initial way to approach this problem is to start with the simple proposition that the world today is divided into national territories where the practical norm is well-nigh universal: That each sovereign state has exclusive control over its own territory, which, among other things, allows it to decide which individuals are members of that state. These citizens have privileges that may be exercised, no questions asked, on such key matters as entering labor markets, owning property, voting, and otherwise participating in political affairs. All these activities may be denied or granted, at will, to any and all outsiders by the territorial sovereign.No one doubts the need for having some form of territorial control. The need to have some monopoly of force could not be achieved if the entire world, with its infinite diversity of locations and populations, were under a single sovereign. Indeed, in many cases, the divisions within a given country may be so pronounced that separation rather than aggregation is the norm. Thus, at the end of the British Raj, India split into India and Pakistan, and later Pakistan split into Pakistan and Bangladesh. Less dramatically, Czechoslovakia split into two countries, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, while the former Yugoslavia split into five nations, starting from the northwest: Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, and Macedonia. Clearly, these ethic differences, be they large or small, are a major obstacle to the expansion of the size of the state. And today, the territorial instinct reasserts itself as the member states of the European Union impose more restrictions on immigration.Yet at the same time, the normative foundations of this system seem elusive. There is the following deep skepticism about the importance of these borders, expressed in these essays by Jeremy Waldron and Ilya Somin, that these national boundary lines should have such a pronounced role in political economy. Michael Blake pursues this theme further by asking the extent to which classical liberals can justify exclusion through the use of violence—or is it force? The inquiry into the dominant role of territoriality can then be expanded, as by Peter Margulies, to examine all sorts of negative externalities that could be created both by easy and strict rules of admission.Taken as a whole, there is no doubt that these national barriers are a serious obstacle to the free trade in goods and services between two individuals, one inside the boundary and one outside. The general view is that these barriers block the gains from trade, which is what drives economic progress, so that ideally all tariffs and quantitative restrictions should give way to a system of free trade in which petty objections by domestic competitors of foreign firms should not dictate local policies.It should, of course, be evident that powerful conflicting forces on free trade and protectionism ebb and flow over time. It should therefore come as no surprise that the stakes are even higher where what is at stake is the movement of people across national boundaries. The loss to any given country from keeping out potential citizens can be enormous, and we see powerful political forces clamp down on open immigration, so many of these gains from trade are lost. The situation can be even more heartbreaking when the ability to leave a country exposes innocent people to imprisonment or death.So what is the explanation for so many nations closing their borders? Much of the explanation comes from old-fashioned protectionism. Your computer programmers will take the jobs of our specialists. There is all sorts of occupational licensing and other barriers to entry within a domestic economy, so there is no reason to expect that these forces will not exert even greater influence against outsiders who do not, after all, have a voice in the local economy and who, therefore, as Alex Nowrasteh, Michael Howard, and Andrew Forrester observe, have little ability to influence domestic policy even after they enter a country. In addition, as Gabriel Chin discusses, strong racial prejudices also lead to exclusions from the domestic economy. Not only are there objections in, say, the United States and much of Western Europe, of exclusion on straight racial grounds, as exemplified by Chinese exclusion acts. The force of these exclusions are also subject to political change. Thus, the Immigration Act of 1924 (the Johnson-Reed Act) was part of a white supremacist program, which gave way two decades later to a very different legal regime with the Immigration Act of 1965, which put an end to the venerable system of national-origin quotas.Yet two other reasons for exclusion are constantly at issue. Immigrants not only bring in their labor but also their families, cultures, and traditions that, in public spaces, may clash with local norms and cultures on such elementary and critical matters as to whether women should dress modestly and wear head coverings. Will freewheeling Danes and Swedes feel comfortable if large numbers of Muslims continue their traditional practices with strong barriers between men and women? There are no obvious market mechanisms that will mitigate these issues, and the situation becomes even more fraught if there are large welfare or educational costs that fall, at least in the short run, on local citizens. These are compounded by the fact that immigrants will typically gain political rights that could easily skew the balance of political power between established and newly arrived ethnic groups by altering the outcome of national and local elections. And letting people in is not just done on a simple open-borders policy. Thus, in many countries, as Lance Pritchett discusses, there is the controversial option of letting foreigners in on short-term labor visas that require them to leave after a certain period. And there are further questions about whether people should be deported if they lied on their entry applications or committed some crime while in the new country, as has occurred in the United States. The numbers of cases can be high and their complexity great, so it is fair to ask, along with Jill Family, whether some self-conscious exceptions to the Administrative Procedure Act of 1946, analogous statutes elsewhere, should be regarded as part of the new normal.It is therefore necessary to deal with the thrust and counterthrust on all these issues. It is also fair to ask whether classical liberalism has a distinctive view on these issues, or whether the combination of private gains and multidirectional externalities gives rise to empirical questions that, as always, require further reflection, even when certain situations—the major influx of illegal immigrants on the US southern border—will generate such powerful emotions that detached intellectual inquiry is ever more difficult. We cannot answer these questions, and thus offer to you a set of essays that take a stab at these difficult topics. (shrink)

Andrew Davis; 8. Reliability, Validity and Criterion-referencing, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 32, Issue 1, 7 March 2003, Pages 123–143, https://d.

Andrew Davis; 1. The Need for a Philosophical Treatment of Assessment, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 32, Issue 1, 7 March 2003, Pages 1–18, https:/.

Recasts Kantian philosophy along poststructuralist lines, particularly showing how Kantian ethics can be reformulated to take into account criticisms leveled by Foucault, Lacan, Deleuze, Derrida, and others.

This paper investigates the roles that abstraction and representation have in activities associated with language. Activities such as associative learning and counting require both the abilities to abstract from and accurately represent the environment. These activities are successfully carried out among vocal learners aside from humans, thereby suggesting that nonhuman animals share something like our capacity for abstraction and representation. The identification of these capabilities in other species provides additional insights into the development of language.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Commentary on “Psychological Courage”Andrew Moore (bio)Putman’s abstract tells us that “philosophy has never addressed the type of courage involved in facing the fears generated by our habits and emotions.” Later he says “almost never.” I think either claim overstates the case. True, Aristotle’s main concern is with courage as a martial virtue, and his central case is the soldier at war. Most translations of Nicomachean Ethics thus talk (...) of “bravery,” rather than “courage.” Aristotle also says, however, that “certainly the brave person is also intrepid... in sickness” (1115b1–2). In sickness, we often face pain and suffering, fear of further sickness, and death. Aristotle takes these to be central concerns: “Then what sorts of frightening conditions concern the brave person? Surely the most frightening; for no one stands firmer against terrifying conditions. Now death is most frightening of all....” (1115a25–26). We may conclude that in Aristotle at least, some attention is paid to psychological bravery or courage. Even if Aristotle had paid no attention to psychological courage, it is still an open question whether his general account of bravery or courage in Book 3, chapters 6–9 of Nicomachean Ethics could be applied also to Putman’s psychological cases, in which the source of fear and object of courage are internal to the agent’s psychology. Even if not, the Aristotelian might still try, as Putman himself notes, to absorb psychological courage into the virtue of “temperance.” I shall not pursue any of these possibilities further here.I turn now to Putman’s general account of courage, and to the way he distinguishes its psychological from its other varieties. His view is that types of courage are to be distinguished from one another in terms of the fear to be faced, and the goal to be attained. Physical courage responds to a fear of death or physical harm. Moral courage responds to a fear of loss of ethical integrity or authenticity. Psychological courage addresses fear of psychic instability or loss of self. It involves us in facing our irrational fears and anxieties, ranging from bad habits and compulsions to phobias. Different kinds of psychological courage then arise from the different sources of the fear of psychic instability. Quick generalizations about the goal to be obtained from various kinds of courage are harder to come by, but in one way or another, they all concern facing up to or confronting fear.A problem for Putman’s general theoretical framework is that fear seems in fact to be inessential to courage. Socrates was a paradigm case of the morally courageous person, as Putman notes, and yet (as Putman also notes) this consisted at least in part in his fearless defense of his moral convictions, even in the face of death. Plato’s Socrates did not face fear.If he had, he would not have had Socratic virtue. We must conclude either that he lacked [End Page 13] courage, or that fear is not necessary to courage. I favor the latter view.If courage is not necessarily a matter of facing fear, then what is it? I suggest that is a matter of facing personal risk or threat. Usually, of course, we respond fearfully to personal threat or risk. But that is not always or essentially so. Socrates and others can still be courageous, even if they face their personal risk or threat without fear. A risk-based conception of courage can also distinguish physical, moral, and psychological courage from one another, in terms of the source of the risk to which they respond. For example, psychological courage is at issue wherever a person is facing up to personal risks generated by her or his own habits, dispositions, commitments, and so on. Note too that fears are not the only elements of one’s own psychology that might generate personal risk. My innocent kindness, for example, might be an ingrained disposition which puts me at risk of cruel exploitation. Facing up to this trait of mine seems to me to be an instance of courage, just as is facing up to my debilitating fears. I probably do not fear my own innocent kindness, though if I strongly identify... (shrink)

Reframes philosophical understanding of, and engagement with, tragedy. In The Tragedy of Philosophy Andrew Cooper challenges the prevailing idea of the death of tragedy, arguing that this assumption reflects a problematic view of both tragedy and philosophy—one that stifles the profound contribution that tragedy could provide to philosophy today. To build this case, Cooper presents a novel reading of Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgment. Although this text is normally understood as the final attempt to seal philosophy from the threat (...) of tragedy, Cooper argues that Kant’s project is rather a creative engagement with a tragedy that is specific to philosophy, namely, the inevitable failure of attempts to master nature through knowledge. Kant’s encounter with the tragedy of philosophy turns philosophy’s gaze from an exclusive focus on knowledge to matters of living well in a world that does not bend itself to our desires. Tracing the impact of Kant’s Critique of Judgment on some of the most famous theories of tragedy, including those of G. W. F. Hegel, Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, and Cornelius Castoriadis, Cooper demonstrates how these philosophers extend the project found in both Kant and the Greek tragedies: the attempt to grasp nature as a domain hospitable to human life. (shrink)

The paper centres on a particular pattern of argument in Bernard Bosanquet aesthetic writings. This pattern is one which has roots in a more general Idealist response to Kant's formulation of the problem of aesthetic judgment. In other words, it has roots in thinkers such as Schiller, Schelling and Hegel. The core of the pattern of argument concentrates on the relation, in both artistic production and contemplation, between reason and sensuousness and form and content. The paper tries to show how (...) Bosanquet, in formulating his aesthetic theory, fashions his argument into what I call a 'social aesthetic'. He is helped in this process of formulating a 'social aesthetic' by subtly linking his Hegelian-based arguments with the ideas of both William Morris and John Ruskin. Throughout the paper the various arguments revolve therefore around the central relation of reason and sensuousness and form and content. (shrink)

Jerry Fodor begins chapter one of The Language of Thought with two claims. The first claim is that “[T]he only psychological models of cognitive processes that seem remotely plausible represent such processes as computational.” The second claim is that “[C]omputation presupposes a medium of computation: a representational system.” Together these two claims suggest one of the central theses of many contemporary representationalist theories of mind, viz. that the only remotely plausible psychology that could succeed in explaining the intentionally characterized abilities (...) and activities of sentient creatures must refer to computationally related representations. Although “[R]emotely plausible theories are”, according to Fodor, “better than no theories at all”, representationalism is not universally regarded as a “remotely plausible theory”. In what follows I will consider what many people believe to be a significant problem facing representationalism. I will then examine two different ways that this problem can be resolved, one based on the writings of Daniel Dennett, the other on ideas found in the later writings of Wittgenstein. I will conclude that although the resolution based on Dennett’s writings fails, a resolution based on ideas found in the later writings of Wittgenstein succeeds. (shrink)

The cosmological-meteorological writings of Paracelsus (1493-1541), presented here for the first time in the most reliable German versions with facing-page translations and thorough text-based and historical commentary, are essential documents of the transition from the medieval to the modern era.

This paper explores the use of Laban’s effort actions from the field of dance and drama as a means to document user responses to physical product interaction. A range of traditional and modern product pairs were identified and reviewed in two workshops, where participants were asked to discuss and complete worksheets on their emotional response. The results provide qualitative feedback on their reactions to the different movements, and form the beginnings of an ‘emotional vocabulary’ that we plan to use in (...) the development of semantic differentials for future studies. Key factors in emotional response to gesture have been identified, including aligning movement to product function, emotional conflicts in movement, and user readiness and framing a sequence of movements. Keywords: Design research; gesture; human factors; interface design. (shrink)

Within ‘animal ethics’, and indeed with most debates concerning nonhumans, speciesism is often cited as the prejudice which most human-people (often unknowingly) hold and which ultimately lies as the underlying justification for (i) all of the arguments in support of factory farming, experimentation, hunting, and so on, and (ii) the lesser status and consideration that is given to nonhuman animals in ethical, political, legal, and social deliberations. Despite this, scholars have increasingly argued that ‘human chauvinism’, not speciesism in general, is (...) a more accurate description of this prejudice, as speciesism can apply to any arbitrary species-preference whereas human chauvinism applies specifically to arbitrary preferences in favour of humans. Whichever term one uses, the aim of identifying whether a position rests solely on speciesism or human chauvinism is to see whether the argument put forward has a justifiable basis or is founded merely on a prejudice. The intention of this is usually an aim to demonstrate that the underlying problem that gives rise to the issues in ‘animal ethics’ is speciesism or human chauvinism, and thus that it is either of these that we must understand and eradicate before approaching the issues. In this paper I argue that while this attempt to resolve the issues has generally been a correct philosophical strategy, and largely convincing, it is anthropocentrism that is not only a greater problem for nonhuman animals but that is also the ultimate cause of most of the issues arising in ‘animal ethics’. I begin by considering what anthropocentrism is and how it is distinct from, yet related to, speciesism and human chauvinism. I argue that anthropocentrism is similar to androcentrism, in that it can include a chauvinism but can also involve unintentional world-views and systems of belief that goes beyond this. These additional elements, I argue, bias investigation and any positions put forward in the debates, while also creating new – and often unnoticed – difficulties for nonhumans. I explain why anthropocentrism as thus-defined is problematic for nonhuman animals, emphasizing the additional ways in which anthropocentrism raises difficulties for them, before explaining how anthropocentrism is related to (and likely causes) most of the issues relating to nonhumans; such as questions relating to culture, afterlife, property, intervention, hunting, entertainment, experimentation, consumption, activism, and so on. I finally point out how anthropocentrism is even involved within ‘animal ethics’, including those positions that reject speciesism and human chauvinism, and thus conclude that even while attempting to aid nonhumans these positions do not, and perhaps cannot, do as much as they could due to their implicit anthropocentrism. I then attempt to show how this situation may be resolved by recognizing, and removing (or at least limiting) as much anthropocentrism as possible when approaching the issues. I argue that this can be achieved by (truly) considering humans just as another animal that is no more special than any other, and attempting to consider all nonhuman points of view as of equal relevance in any issue. This, I claim, would have a profound effect not only for nonhumans and for the proposed resolutions made for each issue, but also for ‘animal ethics’, and more importantly for humanity and human society at large. (shrink)

Austrian business cycle theory is a body of hypotheses embodying particularly Austrian insights and assumptions. The canonical variant associated with Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich A. Hayek is particularly well suited to the Great Depression. However, it is an inadequate account of the recent US recession and financial crisis. This chapter develops a suitable ABCT variant that explicitly incorporates not only the economy’s time structure of production but also its structure of consumption and its risk structure. The continuous input–continuous output (...) nature of the housing market is highlighted, along with the Treasury and the Federal Reserve’s roles in externalizing the risk associated with government-sponsored entities’ debt. The chapter then extends Roger Garrison’s graphical framework to illustrate this ABCT variant. (shrink)

Research Articles Andrew Altman, Social Philosophy and Policy, FirstView Article.

Why is the philosopher Hegel returning as a potent force in contemporary thinking? Why, after a long period when Hegel and his dialectics of history have seemed less compelling than they were for previous generations of philosophers, is study of Hegel again becoming important? Exploring this revival via the notion of 'negation' in Hegelian thought, and relating such negativity to sophisticated ideas about art and artistic creation, Andrew Hass argues that the notion of Hegelian negation moves us into an (...) expansive territory where art, religion and philosophy may all be radically reconceived and broken open into new forms of philosophical expression. (shrink)

Meta chronicles the journey of Andrew Murtagh and Adam Lee in their uncommon exchange turned friendship. Why is there something rather than nothing? Does God exist? What of goodness, free will, and consciousness – what is the ultimate nature of reality and how does that extend into the public square? In this treatise, two young passionate truth seekers aim to change the way the discussion is being had from the vantage points of Christianity and atheism. Is theism or atheism (...) more compelling? If theism, why Christianity? Did Jesus even exist? After theism/atheism, then what? What is the good life? Is morality objective? What does abortion, education, and healthcare look like in the just city? Embarking on a quest for truth on the big questions, their worldviews clash in a philosophical tour de force. In their discord, a blossoming friendship; in their agreement, vows to change the world…. (shrink)

This discussion provides a brief commentary on each of the papers presented in the symposium on the conceptual foundations of field theories in physics. In Section 2 I suggest an alternative to Paul Teller's reading of the gauge argument that may help to solve, or dissolve, its puzzling aspects. In Section 3 I contend that Sunny Auyang's arguments against substantivalism and for “objectivism” in the context of gauge field theories face serious worries. Finally, in Section 4 I claim that Gordon (...) Fleming's proposal for hyperplane-dependent Newton-Wigner fields differs importantly from his previous arguments about hyperplane-dependent properties in quantum mechanics. (shrink)

This short article provides a response to Nowotny and Wynne's commentary on an earlier article by the author that examined the relation between science and technology studies and science policy. The article offers a reply with respect to understanding the domain of science policy; how Nowotny and Wynne seek to broaden the scope and so critical leverage of STS beyond the “policy room”; and the implications this has for the ways in which an STS/non-sts nexus might be configured in the (...) future. (shrink)

In a recent paper, Lyngzeidetson [1990] has claimed that a type of parallel computer called the ‘Connection Machine’ instantiates architectural principles which will ‘revolutionize which "functions" of the human mind can and cannot be modelled by (non-human) computational automata.’ In particular, he claims that the Connection Machine architecture shows the anti-mechanist argument from Gödel's theorem to be false for at least one kind of parallel computer. In the first part of this paper, I argue that Lyngzeidetson's claims are not supported (...) by his arguments; in the second part I consider some other aspects of parallel computation which may be of theoretical significance in cognitive science. (shrink)

The authors do the field of cultural evolution a service by exploring the role of non-social cognition in human cumulative technological culture, truly neglected in comparison with socio-cognitive abilities frequently assumed to be the primary drivers. Some specifics of their delineation of the critical factors are problematic, however. I highlight recent chimpanzee–human comparative findings that should help refine such analyses.

In this essay, I introduce Ikkyū Sōjun’s amoralism under the heading of negative ethics. I do so in the light of contemporary accounts of what some have called “Zen ethics.” Pushing away from such readings, the essay raises the issue of authority in Zen, whether it is construed as the authority of the dharma, the sangha, or the Buddha. Turning to the poetry of Ikkyū, I demonstrate that any such construing misses themark. As an alternative, I offer a reading of (...) Ikkyū that takes meta-ethics as its starting point. I read Ikkyū’s amoralism as a particular form of negative ethics. This point is drawn out further with an examination of the reversibility of seeming opposites. (shrink)