In his Kant on Laws, Eric Watkins presents an account of reason on which the principles of specification and continuity are regulative instructions to search for different kinds of the unconditioned. I suggest that we correct Watkins’ account in two ways. First, we need to complete Watkins’ claim to the plurality of the unconditioned: reason aims for three kinds of the unconditioned, associated with the lowest, next and highest concepts. Second, we need to look beyond reason’s search for the unconditioned (...) in order to properly understand the nature of the aim of reason. I argue that we construe reason’s aim as the systematic unity of cognition considered as a whole or, in Kant’s teleological terms, as the realization of an ‘idea’, or a ‘purposive unity’. (shrink)

Recently, a number of philosophers have begun to question the commonly held view that choice or voluntary control is a precondition of moral responsibility. According to these philosophers, what really matters in determining a person’s responsibility for some thing is whether that thing can be seen as indicative or expressive of her judgments, values, or normative commitments. Such accounts might therefore be understood as updated versions of what Susan Wolf has called “real self views,” insofar as they attempt to ground (...) an agent’s responsibility for her actions and attitudes in the fact (when it is a fact) that they express who she is as a moral agent. As such, they seem to be open to some of the same objections Wolf originally raised to such accounts, and in particular to the objection that they cannot license the sorts of robust moral assessments involved in our current practices of moral responsibility. My aim in this paper is to try to respond to this challenge, by clarifying the kind of robust moral assessments I take to be licensed by (at least some) non-volitional accounts of responsibility and by explaining why these assessments do not in general require the agent to have voluntary control over everything for which she is held responsible. I also argue that the limited applicability of the distinction between “bad agents” and “blameworthy agents” on these accounts is in fact a mark in their favor. (shrink)

Drawing on Hegel, Judith Butler argues that the subject is the product of its desire for subject-ion. The subject, its gender, and even the sexed body itself come into being through reiterating or parodying preexisting norms and discourses of power. Butler rejects the realities of substance and a fixed human nature that would limit the possibilities of performativity. I summarize and assess Butler’s proposals, highlighting both the value and the drawbacks of her theory. I then show how John Paul II’s (...) understanding of meaning and of the body as tasks takes up what is positive in Butler. He escapes the pitfalls of her thought, however, by retaining both metaphysics and revelation. He argues that the subject exists as substance or suppositum, which defends it against the encroachment of power. He also insists on the importance of human nature, which makes the human person to be the kind of substance who can form herself through the God-given task of creative action directed toward meaningful self-gift. Lastly, John Paul II emphasizes that the divine power of God enables the person to transcend the power dynamics of the culture of death. (shrink)

Philosophers traditionally recognize two main features of mental states: intentionality and phenomenal consciousness. To a first approximation, intentionality is the aboutness of mental states, and phenomenal consciousness is the felt, experiential, qualitative, or "what it's like" aspect of mental states. In the past few decades, these features have been widely assumed to be distinct and independent. But several philosophers have recently challenged this assumption, arguing that intentionality and consciousness are importantly related. This article overviews the key views on the relationship (...) between consciousness and intentionality and describes our favored view, which is a version of the phenomenal intentionality theory, roughly the view that the most fundamental kind of intentionality arises from phenomenal consciousness. (shrink)

Over the past few decades, the dominant approach to explaining intentionality has been a naturalistic approach, one appealing only to non-mental ingredients condoned by the natural sciences. Karen Neander’s A Mark of the Mental (2017) is the latest installment in the naturalist project, proposing a detailed and systematic theory of intentionality that combines aspects of several naturalistic approaches, invoking causal relations, teleological functions, and relations of second-order similarity. In this paper, we consider the case of perceptual representations of colors, which (...) is a challenging case for Neander’s theory. This case will brings out a general methodological concern with Neander’s and other naturalistic theories: these theories generally rest on the assumption that the mental intentionality we are acquainted with in everyday life—the phenomenon exhibited by desires for cups of coffee, perceptual experiences of dogs playing in yards, and thoughts about the weather—is the very same kind of phenomenon that cognitive science studies under labels such as “mental representation” and, in some cases, “information processing.” This assumption is dubious, as the case of Neander’s theory illustrates. (shrink)

Propositionalism is the view that all intentional states are propositional states, which are states with a propositional content, while objectualism is the view that at least some intentional states are objectual states, which are states with objectual contents, such as objects, properties, and kinds. This paper argues that there are two distinct ways of understanding propositionalism and objectualism: (1) as views about the deep nature of the contents of intentional states, and (2) as views about the superficial character of the (...) contents of intentional states. I argue that we should understand the views in the second way. I also argue that the propositionalism debate is fairly independent from debates over the deep nature of intentionality, and that this has implications for arguments for propositionalism and objectualism from claims about the nature of intentional content. I close with a short discussion of how related points apply to the debate over singular content. (shrink)

There is increasing attention to the centrality of idealization in science. One common view is that models and other idealized representations are important to science, but that they fall short in one or more ways. On this view, there must be an intermediary step between idealized representation and the traditional aims of science, including truth, explanation, and prediction. Here I develop an alternative interpretation of the relationship between idealized representation and the aims of science. In my view, continuing, widespread idealization (...) calls into question the idea that science aims for truth. I argue that understanding must replace truth as the ultimate epistemic aim of science. Additionally, science has a wide variety aims, epistemic and non-epistemic, and these aims motivate different kinds of scientific products. Finally, I show how these diverse aims---all rather distant from truth---result in the expanded influence of social values on science. (shrink)

The most pressing worry for panpsychism is arguably the combination problem, the problem of intelligibly explaining how the experiences of microphysical entities combine to form the experiences of macrophysical entities such as ourselves. This chapter argues that the combination problem is similar in kind to other problems of mental combination that are problems for everyone: the problem of phenomenal unity, the problem of mental structure, and the problem of new quality spaces. The ubiquity of combination problems suggests the ignorance (...) hypothesis, the hypothesis that we are ignorant of certain key facts about mental combination, which allows the panpsychist to avoid certain objections based on the combination problem. (shrink)

This paper argues that there are two distinct kinds of senses, immediate senses and reflective senses. Immediate senses are what we are immediately aware of when we are in an intentional mental state, while reflective senses are what we understand of an intentional mental state's (putative) referent upon reflection. I suggest an account of immediate and reflective senses that is based on the phenomenal intentionality theory, a theory of intentionality in terms of phenomenal consciousness. My focus is on the immediate (...) and reflective senses of thoughts and the concepts they involve, but it also applies to other mental instances of intentionality. (shrink)

This paper compares tracking and phenomenal intentionality theories of intentionality with respect to the issue of naturalism. Tracking theories explicitly aim to naturalize intentionality, while phenomenal intentionality theories generally do not. It might seem that considerations of naturalism count in favor of tracking theories. We survey key considerations relevant to this claim, including some motivations for and objections to the two kinds of theories. We conclude by suggesting that naturalistic considerations may in fact support phenomenal intentionality theories over tracking theories.

In this paper, I first outline the view developed in my recent book on the role of idealization in scientific understanding. I discuss how this view leads to the recognition of a number of kinds of variability among scientific representations, including variability introduced by the many different aims of scientific projects. I then argue that the role of idealization in securing understanding distances understanding from truth, but that this understanding nonetheless gives rise to scientific knowledge. This discussion will clarify how (...) my view relates to three other recent books on understanding by Henk de Regt, Catherine Elgin, and Kareem Khalifa. (shrink)

Levels of organization and their use in science have received increased philosophical attention of late, including challenges to the well-foundedness or widespread usefulness of levels concepts. One kind of response to these challenges has been to advocate a more precise and specific levels concept that is coherent and useful. Another kind of response has been to argue that the levels concept should be taken as a heuristic, to embrace its ambiguity and the possibility of exceptions as acceptable consequences (...) of its usefulness. In this chapter, I suggest that each of these strategies faces its own attendant downsides, and that pursuit of both strategies (by different thinkers) compounds the difficulties. That both kinds of approaches are advocated is, I think, illustrative of the problems plaguing the concept of levels of organization. I end by suggesting that the invocation of levels may mislead scientific and philosophical investigations more than it informs them, so our use of the levels concept should be updated accordingly. (shrink)

According to intentionalism, phenomenal properties are identical to, supervenient on, or determined by representational properties. Intentionalism faces a special challenge when it comes to accounting for the phenomenal character of moods. First, it seems that no intentionalist treatment of moods can capture their apparently undirected phenomenology. Second, it seems that even if we can come up with a viable intentionalist account of moods, we would not be able to motivate it in some of the same kinds of ways that intentionalism (...) about other kinds of states can be motivated. In this article, I respond to both challenges: First, I propose a novel intentionalist treatment of moods on which they represent unbound affective properties. Then, I argue that this view is indirectly supported by the same kinds of considerations that directly support intentionalism about other mental states. (shrink)

This paper offers a critical analysis of the strategic use of biomedical models of mental illness as a means of challenging stigma. Likening mental illnesses to physical illnesses reinforces notions that persons with mental illnesses are of a fundamentally “different kind,” entrenches misperceptions that they are inherently more violent, and promotes overreliance on diagnostic labeling and pharmaceutical treatments. I conclude that too much has been invested in the claim that the body is somehow morally neutral, and that advocates of (...) this approach oversimplify, misrepresent, and underestimate the personal and social costs of physical illness. (shrink)

The proposal of the ‘Anthropocene’ as a new geological epoch where humans represent the dominant natural force has renewed artistic interest in the ‘geopoetic’, which is mobilized by cultural producers to incite changes in personal and collective participation in planetary life and politics. This article draws attention to prior engagements with the geophysical and the political: the work of Simone Weil and of the editors of the Martinican cultural journal Tropiques, Suzanne and Aimé Césaire. Synthesizing the political and scientific shifts (...) in human-world relationships of their time, both projects are set against oppressive or narcissistic materialisms and experiment with the image of the ‘cosmic’ to cultivate a preoccupation not (only) with a tangible materialism but with an intangible one that emphasizes process and connectivity across wide spatial and temporal scales. The writers’ movement between poetics and politics will be used to enquire what kind of socio-political work a contemporary geopoetic could potentially do. (shrink)

Reliable misrepresentation is getting things wrong in the same way all the time. In Mendelovici 2013, I argue that tracking theories of mental representation cannot allow for certain kinds of reliable misrepresentation, and that this is a problem for those views. Artiga 2013 defends teleosemantics from this argument. He agrees with Mendelovici 2013 that teleosemantics cannot account for clean cases of reliable misrepresentation, but argues that this is not a problem for the views. This paper clarifies and improves the argument (...) in Mendelovici 2013 and response to Artiga's arguments. Tracking theories, teleosemantics included, really do need to allow for clean cases of reliable misrepresentation. (shrink)

Moving away from the strong body of critique of pervasive ‘bad data’ practices by both governments and private actors in the globalized digital economy, this book aims to paint an alternative, more optimistic but still pragmatic picture of the datafied future. The authors examine and propose ‘good data’ practices, values and principles from an interdisciplinary, international perspective. From ideas of data sovereignty and justice, to manifestos for change and calls for activism, this collection opens a multifaceted conversation on the kinds (...) of futures we want to see, and presents concrete steps on how we can start realizing good data in practice. (shrink)

Recent debate by feminist scholars in philosophy of sport has been focused on the status of women’s sport as a protected category. Positions have varied significantly, from no need for a protected category anymore—to allow women’s sport to flourish and to give them a fair opportunity, given that men’s sport still dominates, just as it has in the past.It will be argued that: i) the concept of a ‘protected category’ is tied logically to the concept of fair play and has (...) been defined and enforced through the rules in sport and generally requires some kind of certification for inclusion. These specific rules will be analyzed in detail. Having separate women’s events means that logically it must be possible to exclude, and exclusion is not a popular stance as many have argued that the onus is on inclusion from a human rights perspective. Thus, sport policy makers are truly in an intractable position. On the one hand, no qualifying athlete should have to ‘dope down’ (or ‘dope up’) to compete in the Olympic Games. On the other hand, women athletes have argued that sex equality in competitive sport is a legitimate goal and that separating athletes in competition by biological sex traits is the only way to achieve this goal. It seems criminal to ask athletes to ‘dope down’ to be able to compete in the Olympic Games, however, although a new auxiliary rule creating new sub-classification of women athletes with testosterone higher than the stipulated cut off seems logical on the face of it, these cases are statistically rare. It is concluded that the community of women athletes should have the most significant voice, as historically, the criteria for the women’s sport-protected category have been predominantly determined by men. That is not to say that men’s voices, or voices outside of the women’s sports community of practitioners, cannot be heard, but they should not be the deciding factor. (shrink)

Phenomenal intentionality is a kind of intentionality, or aboutness, that is grounded in phenomenal consciousness, the subjective, experiential feature of certain mental states. The phenomenal intentionality theory (PIT), is a theory of intentionality according to which there is phenomenal intentionality, and all other kinds of intentionality at least partly derive from it. In recent years, PIT has increasingly been seen as one of the main approaches to intentionality.

In North America, prenatal testing and genetic terminations are becoming clinically normalized. Yet despite this implied social acceptance, open discussions surrounding genetic terminations remain taboo and silenced. Women are socially isolated, their experiences kept secret, and their grief disenfranchised. The lack of social consensus regarding genetic terminations, the valorization of scientific knowledge, and the bioethical framing of the issue as a matter of personal choice and autonomy collectively serve to reify this silence. In many respects genetic screening offers a form (...) of technological surveillance procuring security from the unwanted kind of child. Yet the manner in which ‘the unwanted kind of child’ is understood varies from context to context. While we carry with us the consequences of decisions made elsewhere, the institutionalized discourses upon which these decisions are made are not always so readily transportable. One must somehow reconcile ‘the unwanted kind of child’ of the biomedical model with ‘the unwanted kind of child’ who was to be a member of one's family. In this paper, my intention is not to engage in the broader debate surrounding prenatal testing and genetic terminations. Rather, I employ my clinical encounters with these practices to illustrate the absence of an ethical language that might do justice to the experiences such practices construct. The limitations of a bioethical discourse that remains abstracted from lived experience are discussed. (shrink)

In the correspondence between Baruch Spinoza and his former friends Nicolas Stensen and Albert Burgh we find an interesting discussion on the sense of committing oneself to a particular institutionalized religion. Burgh and Stensen, both being converts to Roman Catholicism, tried to convince the former Jew to make the same move as they did. Spinoza answers Burgh that he will not do so, and refers to his ‘universal religion’, which he developed in his published work, the Theological-Political Treatise. This modern (...) religion should provide the grounds for a peaceful social and individual life. It is tolerant towards all kinds of personal views of God, while holding high a universal ethics, which should be acceptable to all good men. In this article this small correspondence is analyzed and clarified with reference to Spinoza’s works. Also the critical question will be asked whether Spinoza can convincingly maintain to have found a religion which is acceptable to all humankind. Rather, it is argued that his religion remains tied to the particular religious tradition from which it takes it’s ethical content. Finally, some valuable elements in Spinoza’s approach will be singled out. (shrink)

Human and animal interests are often in conflict. In many situations, however, it is unclear how to evaluate and weigh competing human and animal interests, as the satisfaction of the interests of one group often inevitably occurs at the expense of those of the other group. Human-animal conflicts of this kind give rise to ethical questions. If animals count morally for their own sake, then we must ask in which cases the satisfaction or frustration of the interests of humans (...) and animals in conflict situations is justified or unjustified from an ethical perspective. In this article, we argue that limited aggregation accounts represent a promising means for resolving interspecies conflicts. The reason for this is that they can appropriately consider the qualitative relevance of interests, their relative importance to each other, and the number of individuals affected. For our argument, we start from the premise that animals count morally for their own sake, albeit to a lesser extent than humans. That is, we accept the view that animals may be used, for example, as a source of food or in animal research. However, as we will show, many basic interests of animals are sufficiently similar to human interests and can thus be compared to them. Hence, they ought to be aggregated in cases of conflict with human interests. We illustrate our account and its practical implications with the real-world example of a human-animal conflict during the outbreak of a zoonotic disease among farmed animals. We conclude that, in many cases, animal interests ought to be given more importance than they currently receive, which includes distributing the burdens and risks of farming practices more fairly. (shrink)

Considering the overwhelming amount of media products that we are subjected to in the 21stcentury and the way in which those inevitably influence our perception of reality, this research pays specific attention to the role of the media in the construction and enhancement of stereotypes in everyday life, via the language or, more specifically, specialized languages. In particular, this paper aims to investigate an American legal TV series in order to analyze the way in which legal English is used in (...) dialogues. The major research questions are: to what extent such a kind of specialized discourse may be really understood by the greater audience? How does legal drama participate in the shaping of stereotypes relating to the legal environment in the country where it is produced, and cross-culturally, bearing in mind the prominence of “made in the USA” products in the television programming across the world? Ultimately, in the light of the previous questions, should the growing field of research in audiovisual translation extend its investigation into the area of legal English? Taking into consideration the seminal work of Pedersen and Diaz Cintas in the field of Audiovisual Translation, the study will examine the subtitling techniques employed for this atypical genre. Through the analysis of a corpus comprising several dialogues from a collection of episodes of the legal show Reckless, the paper will mostly focus on gender representations and their most common linguistically enhanced stereotypes. (shrink)

There is widespread recognition at universities that a proper understanding of science is needed for all undergraduates. Good jobs are increasingly found in fields related to Science, Technology, Engineering, and Medicine, and science now enters almost all aspects of our daily lives. For these reasons, scientific literacy and an understanding of scientific methodology are a foundational part of any undergraduate education. Recipes for Science provides an accessible introduction to the main concepts and methods of scientific reasoning. With the help of (...) an array of contemporary and historical examples, definitions, visual aids, and exercises for active learning, the textbook helps to increase students’ scientific literacy. The first part of the book covers the definitive features of science: naturalism, experimentation, modeling, and the merits and shortcomings of both activities. The second part covers the main forms of inference in science: deductive, inductive, abductive, probabilistic, statistical, and causal. The book concludes with a discussion of explanation, theorizing and theory-change, and the relationship between science and society. The textbook is designed to be adaptable to a wide variety of different kinds of courses. In any of these different uses, the book helps students better navigate our scientific, 21st-century world, and it lays the foundation for more advanced undergraduate coursework in a wide variety of liberal arts and science courses. Selling Points Helps students develop scientific literacy—an essential aspect of _any_ undergraduate education in the 21 st century, including a broad understanding of scientific reasoning, methods, and concepts Written for all beginning college students: preparing science majors for more focused work in particular science; introducing the humanities’ investigations of science; and helping non-science majors become more sophisticated consumers of scientific information Provides an abundance of both contemporary and historical examples Covers reasoning strategies and norms applicable in all fields of physical, life, and social sciences, _as well as_ strategies and norms distinctive of specific sciences Includes visual aids to clarify and illustrate ideas Provides text boxes with related topics and helpful definitions of key terms, and includes a final Glossary with all key terms Includes Exercises for Active Learning at the end of each chapter, which will ensure full student engagement and mastery of the information include earlier in the chapter Provides annotated ‘For Further Reading’ sections at the end of each chapter, guiding students to the best primary and secondary sources available Offers a Companion Website, with: For Students: direct links to many of the primary sources discussed in the text, student self-check assessments, a bank of exam questions, and ideas for extended out-of-class projects For Instructors: a password-protected Teacher’s Manual, which provides student exam questions with answers, extensive lecture notes, classroom-ready Power Point presentations, and sample syllabi Extensive Curricular Development materials, helping any instructor who needs to create a Scientific Reasoning Course, ex nihilo. (shrink)

One of the central aims of science is explanation: scientists seek to uncover why things happen the way they do. This chapter addresses what kinds of explanations are formulated in biology, how explanatory aims influence other features of the field of biology, and the implications of all of this for biology education. Philosophical treatments of scientific explanation have been both complicated and enriched by attention to explanatory strategies in biology. Most basically, whereas traditional philosophy of science based explanation on derivation (...) from scientific laws, there are many biological explanations in which laws play little or no role. Instead, the field of biology is a natural place to turn for support for the idea that causal information is explanatory. Biology has also been used to motivate mechanistic accounts of explanation, as well as criticisms of that approach. Ultimately, the most pressing issue about explanation in biology may be how to account for the wide range of explanatory styles encountered in the field. This issue is crucial, for the aims of biological explanation influence a variety of other features of the field of biology. Explanatory aims account for the continued neglect of some central causal factors, a neglect that would otherwise be mysterious. This is linked to the persistent use of models like evolutionary game theory and population genetic models, models that are simplified to the point of unreality. These explanatory aims also offer a way to interpret many biologists’ total commitment to one or another methodological approach, and the intense disagreements that result. In my view, such debates are better understood as arising not from different theoretical commitments, but commitments to different explanatory projects. Biology education would thus be enriched by attending to approaches to biological explanation, as well as the unexpected ways that these explanatory aims influence other features of biology. I suggest five lessons for teaching about explanation in biology that follow from the considerations of this chapter. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Human Rights and Women's RightsAngela KnobelMainstream feminists insist, with a degree of unanimity that is sometimes surprising, that access to abortion is an essential precondition of female equality. That feminism, which is in other respects so flexible, inclusive, and uncategorizable, should be so unyielding with respect to this particular issue seems surprising to many. It is especially surprising to those who, while sympathetic to other feminist goals, also oppose (...) abortion.1 Why is access to abortion so important? Why must one's views about the equality of women stand or fall on one's views about the value of unborn human life? If feminism has to have a flagship issue, why must that issue be abortion? In this paper, I will propose that Pierre Manent's Natural Law and Human Rights offers a possible answer to this question. I will argue that, to the extent that mainstream feminism assumes the truth of what Manent calls the "philosophy of human rights," it cannot not advocate abortion access. Similarly, I will argue that pro-life feminist attempts to defend the contrary position—namely, that abortion is antithetical to feminism—invariably assume the natural law that the philosophy of human rights rejects. My argument, if correct, suggests the pivot point in discussions of abortion and feminism occurs much further back than many acknowledge: in our very understanding of ourselves and our place in the world.In what follows I will first briefly summarize Manent's account of what he calls the "philosophy of human rights." With this background in place, [End Page 275] I will consider the mainstream feminist claim that access to abortion is a necessary precondition of female equality. When "equality" is understood through the lens of the philosophy of human rights, I argue, the mainstream feminist insistence on access to abortion becomes coherent: a feminism that assumes the truth of the philosophy of human rights cannot not insist on access to abortion. The pro-life feminist reply that abortion harms and oppresses women, by contrast, is coherent only to the extent one assumes the framework of natural law.2Natural Law or Human Rights?To believe in natural law is to believe that nature itself sets the standard for human life. What the "law" commands is simply action necessary for the realization of the potential implicit in our nature. Under such a framework, Manent notes, "natural inclinations and natural differences, if they exist, constitute a kind of language of nature."3 The fact that human beings are naturally rational or naturally social, or that biological males are (typically) attracted to biological women, helps provide insight into nature's "law": "Natural law issued commands in the name of a teaching implicit in human nature, in a tendency of human nature to society and to knowledge, or in a natural difference among ages, sexes, and capacities, a tendency or difference that reason once made explicit and on the basis of which it founded its commandments and recommendations."4 Nature's laws can be and frequently are violated: cultures or individuals can choose to live up to nature's laws or not. For this reason, Manent says that, under the traditional framework of natural law, human beings are "free under the law."5 Natural law is something we freely choose to follow or freely choose to reject, but because it stems from our human nature, it does not cease to bind even those who reject it.The philosophy of human rights, by contrast, accepts the notion of freedom but rejects the notion of any overarching "law" against which our free choices are to be measured. While the philosophy of natural law is rooted in the language of nature, and thus sees human beings as free "under the law" of nature, the philosophy of human rights puts freedom prior to [End Page 276] law and recognizes law only as a means of preserving freedom.6 While the philosophy of natural law understands individual human beings in terms of their human nature, and thus in terms of their natural inclinations and natural differences, the philosophy of human rights rejects the language of "nature" in favor of an "impoverished common denominator," namely equality... (shrink)

Laws of nature play a central role in Kant's theoretical philosophy and are crucial to understanding his philosophy of science in particular. In this volume of new essays, the first systematic investigation of its kind, a distinguished team of scholars explores Kant's views on the laws of nature in the physical and life sciences. Their essays focus particularly on the laws of physics and biology, and consider topics including the separation in Kant's treatment of the physical and life sciences, (...) the relation between universal and empirical laws of nature, and the role of reason and the understanding in imposing order and lawful unity upon nature. The volume will be of great interest to advanced students and scholars of Kant's philosophy of science, and to historians and philosophers of science more generally. (shrink)

Subset Spaces were introduced by L. Moss and R. Parikh in [8]. These spaces model the reasoning about knowledge of changing states.In [2] a kind of subset space called intersection space was considered and the question about the existence of a set of axioms that is complete for the logic of intersection spaces was addressed. In [9] the first author introduced the class of directed spaces and proved that any set of axioms for directed frames also characterizes intersection spaces.We (...) give here a complete axiomatization for directed spaces. We also show that it is not possible to reduce this set of axioms to a finite set. (shrink)

RESUMEN El artículo responde algunas críticas planteadas por Ignacio Ávila a mi interpretación de la epistemología davidsoniana. Presento argumentos en contra de: a) que sea necesario distinguir entre representaciones epistemológicamente “peligrosas”e “inofensivas”; b) que el empirismo mínimo sea un tipo de realismo directo; c) que mi uso de la expresión “evidencia distal” y el interés por la teoría de la correspondencia sean asuntos ajenos a Davidson. Finalmente, sostengo que la triangulación es un elemento fundamental de la epistemología davidsoniana, pues permite (...) sortear la ansiedad realista manteniéndose en una postura no representacionalista. ABSTRACT In this article, I respond to some of Ignacio Ávila's criticisms of my interpretation of Davidson’s epistemology. I argue against: a) the need to distinguish between epistemologically “dangerous” and “harmless” representations; b) the idea that minimal empiricism is a kind of direct realism; and c) the claim that my usage of the expression “distal evidence” and interest in the theory of correspondence are issues that do not pertain to Davidson. Finally, I claim that triangulation is a key element in Davidsonian epistemology since it allows us to deal with the realist anxiety while maintaining a non-representationalist viewpoint. (shrink)

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought to light significant failures and fragilities in our food, health, and market systems. Concomitantly, it has emphasized the urgent need for a critical re-evaluation of many of the policies and practices that have created the conditions in which viral pathogens can spread. However, there are many factors that are complicating this process; among others, the uncertain, rapidly evolving, and often poorly reported science surrounding the virus’ origins has contributed to a politically charged and often rancorous (...) public debate, which is concerning insofar as the proliferation of divisive discourse may hinder efforts to address complex and collective concerns in a mutually cooperative manner. In developing ethical and effective responses to the disproportionate risks associated with certain food production and consumption practices, we argue that the focus should be on mitigating such risks wherever they arise, instead of seeking to ascribe blame to specific countries or cultures. To this end, this article is an effort to inject some nuance into contemporary conversations about COVID-19 and its broader implications, particularly when it comes to trade in wildlife, public health, and food systems reform. If COVID-19 is to represent a turning point towards building a more equitable, sustainable, and resilient world for both humans and nonhuman animals alike, the kind of fractioning that is currently being exacerbated by the use of loaded terms such as “wet market” must be eschewed in favour of a greater recognition of our fundamental interconnectedness. (shrink)

There’s a recurrent divide among philosophical views about science—those focused on practice vs. those focused on metaphysics, assertions of pluralism vs. assertions of realism, accounts of how science’s history could have gone otherwise vs. accounts of how science achieves knowledge. Michela Massimi’s Perspectival Realism is ultimately a bridging project, aiming to cross this divide. The project is to recruit resources from perspectivism, a kind of pluralism about science, to show how science achieves knowledge and, thus, to inform a scientific (...) realism compatible with this pluralism. (shrink)

Does asking about trauma history create participant distress? If so, how does it compare with reactions to other personal questions? Do participants consider trauma questions important compared to other personal questions? Using 2 undergraduate samples (Ns = 240 and 277), the authors compared participants' reactions to trauma questions with their reactions to other possibly invasive questions through a self-report survey. Trauma questions caused relatively minimal distress and were perceived as having greater importance and greater cost-benefit ratings compared to other kinds (...) of psychological research in an undergraduate human subjects pool population. These findings suggest that at least some kinds of trauma research appear to pose minimal risk when compared to other minimal risk research topics, and that participants recognize the importance of research about trauma. (shrink)

Expert reasoning combines voluminous domain‐specific knowledge with more general factual and strategic knowledge. Whereas expert system builders have recognized the need for specificity and problem‐solving researchers the need for generality, few attempts have been made to develop expert reasoning engines combining different kinds of knowledge at different levels of generality. This paper reports on the FERMI project, a computer‐implemented expert reasoner in the natural sciences that encodes factual and strategic knowledge in separate semantic hierarchies. The principled decomposition of knowledge according (...) to type and level of specificity yields both power and cross‐doman generality, as demonstrated in FERMI's ability to apply the same principles of invariance and decomposition to solve problems in fluid statics, DC‐circuits, and centroid location. Hierarchical knowledge representation and problem‐solving principles are discussed, and illustrative problem‐solving traces are presented. (shrink)

What is it to be morally responsible for something? Recent philosophical work reveals considerable disagreement on the question. Indeed, some theorists claim to distinguish several varieties of moral responsibility, with different conditions that must be satisfied if one is to bear responsibility of one or another of these kinds. -/- Debate on this point turns partly on disagreement about the kinds of responses made appropriate when one is blameworthy or praiseworthy. It is generally agreed that these include "reactive attitudes" such (...) as resentment and gratitude, but theorists disagree about the nature of these attitudes. They dispute the connections between moral responsibility, desert, and the justification of punishment as well. -/- Many theorists take it that, whatever the appropriate responses are, they are responses to an agent's "quality of will," but there is no consensus on what this comes to. Are the agent's beliefs about the moral status of her behavior what matter, or is it what she cares about, or what she judges important? -/- This volume presents twelve original essays from participants in these debates. The contributors include prominent established figures as well as influential younger philosophers. A substantive introduction by the editors surveys recent debates and situates the contributions within it. (shrink)

This book provides practical and research-based chapters that offer greater clarity about the particular kinds of teacher reflection that matter and avoids talking about teacher reflection generically, which implies that all kinds of reflection are of equal value.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Radical Democracy:John Dewey and Angela Y. Davis on Pluralism and PrisonsAmanda Dubrulein 2013, the multiculturalism act marked its 25th anniversary; at the same time, the Office of the Correctional Investigator (OCI) was celebrating its 40th anniversary (Elizabeth qtd. in Eng 2–3) The OCI was created in response to the prison riot in Kingston Penitentiary that occurred in 1971. Yet, 40 years after, prisons in Canada still face "overcrowding, (...) the shortage of professional staff, programming cuts, the confinement in the institution of a number of people who did not require maximum security confinement, too much time spent in cells, a lack of adequate channels to deal with complaints" (Elizabeth qtd. in Eng 3). The "Annual Report on the Operation of the Canadian Multiculturalism Act 2019–20" (subtitled "Building a Better Canada Through Diversity") lists four principal objectives of the Canadian Multiculturalism Act: "the retaining and fostering of identity …, overcoming barriers to participation …, promoting exchanges, and language acquisition" (Canadian Heritage 10; emphasis added). One can then see that there is a marked disconnect between the ideals of plurality and participation that Canada supposedly rests on and the practices of the systems it maintains.Drawing on John Dewey's conception of democracy and Angela Davis's critique of the prison industrial complex, I aim to show that a state cannot truly be pluralistic or participatory while continuing to engage in carceral practices. To do so, I will first explicate Dewey's conception of democracy,1 then I will lay out the contemporary problems surrounding incarceration in Canada, and, finally, I will end with a discussion of abolition as a constructive practice.Discussions of democracy often center on the mechanisms of voting. We have formed the habit of believing that democracies will carry on as long as citizens perform rote political duties (Dewey, "Creative Democracy" 225). Yet, as Dewey saw and as we continue to see, a healthy democracy cannot [End Page 40] be maintained through rote action alone. Instead, it requires "conscious and resolute effort" because democracy is not a mere political system ("Creative Democracy" 224). Instead, as Dewey phrases it, it is a "way of life" and therefore has moral implications. A democracy cannot flourish where there is no community (Dewey, "Creative Democracy" 225). This is accomplished through dialogue and debate with others and the recognition of the transactional nature of associated living. The purpose of a state is to supply the "right conditions" so that every person can lead their life and flourish in their own capacity (Dewey, "Creative Democracy" 227).The public is composed of individuals who act and associate with each other; every individual is "subject to all kinds of social influences which determine what they can think of, plan and choose" (Dewey, The Public 115). Yet when people come together and discuss their wants and needs, new ideas are tested, and new beliefs are formed. This creates an unsettling of current modes and processes of political action (Dewey, The Public 103).2 Thus, Dewey argues that one of the main tasks required for maintaining (and reclaiming) democracy is the constant "discovering [of] means by which a scattered, mobile, and manifold public may so recognize itself as to define and express its interests" (The Public 174). For this to occur, the creation and recognition of community is central. For Dewey, community is not merely "physical and organic" (though it often is this), it is also "moral … emotional, [and] intellectual" (The Public 177–78). For the individual, who becomes a part of this association, democracy involves the responsibility of sharing with others the "capacity in forming and directing the activities of the groups to which one belongs and in participating according to the need in the values which the group sustains" (Dewey, The Public 175). For the group, democracy "demands liberation of the potentialities of [its] members" to flourish "in harmony with the interests and goods which are common" (Dewey, The Public 175). The flourishing of the group can only come about when we, as individuals, recognize the worth and potential of those around us and our capacity, when combined to direct the community, as a community.Thus, critique plays an important role in democracies: we... (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to show that animal rights are not necessarily at odds with the use of animals for research. If animals hold basic moral rights similar to those of humans, then we should consequently extend the ethical requirements guiding research with humans to research with animals. The article spells out how this can be done in practice by applying the seven requirements for ethical research with humans proposed by Ezekiel Emanuel, David Wendler and Christine Grady to (...) animal research. These requirements are i) social value, ii) scientific validity, iii) independent review, iv) fair subject selection, v) favorable risk-benefit ratio, vi) informed consent, and vii) respect for research subjects. In practice, this means that we must reform the practice of animal research to make it more similar to research with humans, rather than completely abolish the former. Indeed, if we banned animal research altogether, then we would also deprive animals of its potential benefits – which would be ethically problematic. (shrink)

In recent years, philosophy of science has witnessed a significant increase in attention directed toward the field’s social relevance. This is demonstrated by the formation of societies with related agendas, the organization of research symposia, and an uptick in work on topics of immediate public interest. The collection of papers that follows results from one such event: a 3-day colloquium on the subject of socially engaged philosophy of science (SEPOS) held at the University of Cincinnati in October 2012. In this (...) introduction, we first survey the recent history of philosophy of science’s social involvement (or lack thereof) and contrast this with the much greater social involvement of the sciences themselves. Next, we argue that the field of philosophy of science bears a special responsibility to contribute to public welfare. We then introduce as a term of art “SEPOS” and articulate what we take to be distinctive about social engagement, with reference to the articles in this collection as exemplars. Finally, we survey the current state of social engagement in philosophy of science and suggest some practical steps for individuals and institutions to support this trajectory. (shrink)

The future of health research will be characterised by three continuing trends: rising demand for health data; increasing impracticability of obtaining specific consent for secondary research; and decreasing capacity to effectively anonymise data. In this context, governments, clinicians and the research community must demonstrate that they can be responsible stewards of health data. IRBs and RECs sit at heart of this process because in many jurisdictions they have the capacity to grant consent waivers when research is judged to be of (...) particular value. However, several different terms are used to refer to this value, indicating a lack of conceptual clarity regarding the appropriate test for access to health data for research without consent. In this paper we do three things. First we describe the current confusion and instability in terminology relating to public interest in the context of consent waivers. Second we argue for harmonisation of terminology on the grounds of clarity, transparency and consistency. Third we argue that the term ‘public interest’ best reflects the normative work required to justify consent waivers because it is the broadest of the competing terms. ‘Public interest’ contains within its scope positive and negative implications of a study, as well as welfare, justice and rights considerations. In making this argument, we explain the normative basis for consent waivers, and provide a starting place for further discussion about the precise conditions in which a given study can be said to advance the public interest. Ipsos MORI study found that: … the public would be broadly happy with administrative data linking for research projects provided Those projects have social value, broadly defined. Data are de-identified. Data are kept secure. Businesses are not able to access the data for profit. (shrink)

According to Lynne Rudder Baker’s Practical Realism, we know that we have beliefs, desires, and other propositional attitudes independent of any scientific investigation. Propositional attitudes are an indispensable part of our everyday conception of the world and not in need of scientific validation. This paper asks what is the nature of the attitudes such that we may know them so well from a commonsense perspective. I argue for a self-ascriptivist view, on which we have propositional attitudes in virtue of ascribing (...) them to ourselves. On this view, propositional attitudes are derived representational states, deriving their contents and their attitude types from our self-ascriptions. (shrink)

In this paper, I bring together Jewish and Buddhist philosophical resources to develop a notion of radical responsibility that can confront a complicity within nursing and health care between empathy and (neo)liberal white supremacist hegemony. My inspiration comes from Angela Davis's call for building coalitions to advance struggles for peace and justice. I proceed as follows. First, I note ways phenomenology clarifies empathy's seeming foundational role in nursing care, and how such a formulation can be complicit with assumptions about (...) private individualism. Second, I turn to the Jewish philosophies of Martin Buber and Emmanuel Levinas, and their advocacy for a kind of responsibility that precedes the constitution of individuality as this can provide a resource for action and practice circumventing liberal influenced empathy. I note critical reservations about direct and practical application of Levinasian ethics in nursing care, and turn to engaged Buddhist philosophies of interdependence—such as in Thich Nhat Hanh and the Dalai Lama—as a corrective. Third, I conclude by indicating ways interreligious radical responsibility can reorient us toward housekeeping habits of character and away from exceptional crisis management, noting specific examples and actions in health care, nursing education and nursing scholarship. (shrink)