The levelling-down objection rejects the egalitarian view that it is intrinsically good to eliminate the inequality of an outcome by lowering the relevant good of those better off to the level of those worse off. Larry Temkin suggests that the position underlying this objection is an exclusionary version of the person-affecting view, in which an outcome can be better or worse only if persons are affected for better or worse. Temkin then defends egalitarianism by rejecting this position. In this essay, (...) I avoid Temkin's conclusion by arguing that the levelling-down objection is best understood as resting on an alternative position, which involves a distinction between those non-person-affecting ideals that posit value as tied to individuals in a particular manner and those that do not. Taken as the basis of the levelling-down objection, this position allows us consistently to reject egalitarianism while accepting many plausible non-person-affecting ideals. (shrink)

In this article, robust evidence is provided showing that an individual’s moral character can contribute to the aesthetic quality of their appearance, as well as being beautiful or ugly itself. It is argued that this evidence supports two main conclusions. First, moral beauty and ugliness reside on the inside, and beauty and ugliness are not perception-dependent as a result; and, second, aesthetic perception is affected by moral information, and thus moral beauty and ugliness are on the outside as well.

According to the most important objection to the existence of moral beauty, true judgements of moral beauty are not possible as moral judgements require being motivated to act in line with the moral judgement made, and judgements of beauty require not being motivated to act in any way. Here, I clarify the argument underlying the objection and demonstrate that it does not show that moral beauty does not exist. I present two responses: namely, that the beauty of moral beauty does (...) not lie in the moral goodness per se (the ‘adjacent properties’ response), and that only a dispositional motivation to act is required for the moral judgements that are typically made as part of judgements of moral beauty, whereas aesthetic judgements only rule out state motivations to act (the ‘equivocation of motivation required’ response). In addressing the objection, I show how moral beauty is consistent with disinterestedness, and so should be accepted more widely; also clarifying where the beauty in moral beauty resides, and how the moral–aesthetic distinction should be drawn. (shrink)

In this book, Robert Doran offers the first in-depth treatment of the major theories of the sublime, from the ancient Greek treatise On the Sublime and its reception in early modern literary theory to the philosophical accounts of Burke and Kant. Doran explains how and why the sublime became a key concept of modern thought and shows how the various theories of sublimity are united by a common structure - the paradoxical experience of being at once overwhelmed and (...) exalted - and a common concern: the preservation of a notion of transcendence in the face of the secularization of modern culture. Combining intellectual history with literary theory and philosophical analysis, his book provides a new, searching and multilayered account of a concept that continues to stimulate thought about our responses to art, nature and human events. (shrink)

Shelly Kagan argues in his ‘What's Wrong with Speciesism?’ for four provocative claims: 1. speciesism is not necessarily a mere prejudice; 2. most people are not speciesists; 3. ‘modal personism’ more closely reflects what most people believe, and 4. modal personism might be true. In this article, I object to Kagan's account of what constitutes a ‘mere prejudice’, and I object to the sort of argument he uses to show that most people are not speciesist. I then attempt to motivate, (...) and defend what I take to be the best version of modal personism; answer several problems for the view; and raise other problems that I think are harder to answer. (shrink)

Every day, new warnings emerge about artificial intelligence rebelling against us. All the while, a more immediate dilemma flies under the radar. Have forces been unleashed that are thrusting humanity down an ill-advised path, one that's increasingly making us behave like simple machines? In this wide-reaching, interdisciplinary book, Brett Frischmann and Evan Selinger examine what's happening to our lives as society embraces big data, predictive analytics, and smart environments. They explain how the goal of designing programmable worlds goes hand (...) in hand with engineering predictable and programmable people. Detailing new frameworks, provocative case studies, and mind-blowing thought experiments, Frischmann and Selinger reveal hidden connections between fitness trackers, electronic contracts, social media platforms, robotic companions, fake news, autonomous cars, and more. This powerful analysis should be read by anyone interested in understanding exactly how technology threatens the future of our society, and what we can do now to build something better. (shrink)

When are morally good actions beautiful, when indeed they are? In this paper, it is argued that morally good actions are beautiful when they appear to express the deep or true self, and in turn tend to give rise to an emotion which is characterised by feelings of being moved, unity, inspiration, and meaningfulness, inter alia. In advancing the case for this claim, it is revealed that there are additional sources of well-formedness in play in the context of moral beauty (...) in addition to those that have tended to be focused on to date: one which is connected to imagining a deep location for the goodness concerned, and another which is connected to imagining that the goodness stems from capacities which are essential to the person. (shrink)

What is the nature of the concept BEAUTY? Does it differ fundamentally from nearby concepts such as PRETTINESS? It is argued that BEAUTY, but not PRETTINESS, is a dual-character concept. Across a number of contexts, it is proposed that BEAUTY has a descriptive sense that is characterised by, inter alia, having intrinsically pleasing appearances; and a normative sense associated with deeply-held values. This account is supported across two, pre-registered, studies (N=500), and by drawing on analysis of corpus data. It is (...) suggested that this can help to explain why beauty, unlike prettiness, is thought to be deep in both the sense of being important, and in the sense of being less closely tied to sensory surfaces. (shrink)

Drawing on recent advances in evolutionary biology, prominent scholars return to the question posed in a pathbreaking book: how evolution itself evolved.

Why are moral actions beautiful, when indeed they are? This paper assesses the view, found most notably in Schiller, that moral actions are beautiful just when they present the appearance of freedom by appearing to be the result of internal harmony (the Schillerian Internal Harmony Thesis). I argue that while this thesis can accommodate some of the beauty involved in contrasts of the ‘continent’ and the ‘fully’ virtuous, it cannot account for all of the beauty in such contrasts, and so (...) needs to be weakened considerably (to the Internal Harmony Thesis). To account for the remaining beauty that cannot be fully accommodated even by this revised thesis, as well as the beauty contained in contrasts that involve agents who experience internal conflict as a result of being sensitive to different sources of moral value to an appropriate extent, a number of further theses need to be posited: namely, that the beauty of some moral actions is to be accommodated in terms of internal disharmony (the Internal Disharmony Thesis), and in terms of a felt harmony between the appreciator of the action and the executor of the action (the Affective Harmony Thesis). As such, in contrast to Schiller, I suggest that we need to take a pluralist and context-sensitive approach to accommodating the beauty of moral actions. (shrink)

I argue that the main existing accounts of the relationship between the beauty of environmental entities and their moral standing are mistaken in important ways. Beauty does not, as has been suggested by optimists, confer intrinsic moral standing. Nor is it the case, as has been suggested by pessimists, that beauty at best provides an anthropocentric source of moral standing that is commensurate with other sources of pleasure. I present arguments and evidence that show that the appreciation of beauty tends (...) to cause a transformational state of mind that is more valuable than mere pleasure, but that leads us to falsely represent beautiful entities as being sentient and, in turn, as having intrinsic moral standing. To this extent, beauty is not, then, a source of intrinsic moral standing; it’s a source of a more important anthropocentric value than has hitherto been acknowledged. (shrink)

Understanding how cooperation evolves is central to explaining some core features of our biological world. Many important evolutionary events, such as the arrival of multicellularity or the origins of eusociality, are cooperative ventures between formerly solitary individuals. Explanations of the evolution of cooperation have primarily involved showing how cooperation can be maintained in the face of free-riding individuals whose success gradually undermines cooperation. In this paper I argue that there is a second, distinct, and less well explored, problem of cooperation (...) that I call the generation of benefit. Focusing on how benefit is generated within a group poses a different problem: how is it that individuals in a group can (at least in principle) do better than those who remain solitary? I present several different ways that benefit may be generated, each with different implications for how cooperation might be initiated, how it might further evolve, and how it might interact with different ways of maintaining cooperation. I argue that in some cases of cooperation, the most important underlying “problem” of cooperation may be how to generate benefit, rather than how to reduce conflict or prevent free-riding. (shrink)

This study considers customer characteristics as situational influences on a salesperson'sethical judgment formation. Specifically, customer gender, income, and propensity to buy were considered as factors which may bias these judgments. Additionally, the gender of the salesperson and their moral value structure were examined as moderating effects. An experiment using real estate agents reading hypothetical sales scenarios revealed differences across (1) customer gender, (2) customer income, and (3) level of the respondent'sidealism. Significant interactive effects with these factors were also found involving (...) respondent gender and level of idealism. These and previous findings which consider situational effects on ethical decision-making, indicate that a more contingent approach to ethics studies is warranted. (shrink)

Which traits are beautiful? And is their beauty perceptual? It is argued that moral virtues are partly beautiful to the extent that they tend to give rise to a certain emotion— ecstasy—and that compassion tends to be more beautiful than fair-mindedness because it tends to give rise to this emotion to a greater extent. It is then argued, on the basis that emotions are best thought of as a special, evaluative, kind of perception, that this argument suggests that moral virtues (...) are partly beautiful to the extent that they tend to give rise to a certain kind of evaluative perceptual experience. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 9.4 (2002) 373-380 [Access article in PDF] Spiritual Experience and Psychopathology:Dichotomy or Interaction? Caroline Brett Keywords: mysticism, psychosis, values, phenomenology, spiritual emergence. THE PURPOSE OF Marzanski and Bratton's paper is to challenge Jackson and Fulford's (1997) treatment of the area of spiritual experience and psychosis, specifically the perspective of discriminating pathological from spiritual experiences on the basis of action enhancement in contrast to action (...) failure. In my opinion, they are partially successful in this aim, and in their analysis they further the discussion of this complex and controversial area in an interesting and potentially fruitful way. What the paper does not offer, or attempt to suggest, is an alternative way of making a distinction, and in the following discussion I intend to explain why I think that, on the one hand, the status of specific experiences is of practical importance, and on the other hand any distinction should not be conceptualized as mutually exclusive. I also hope to clarify those issues which I perceive as being raised by both Jackson and Fulford's and Marzanski and Bratton's papers. The Critique Marzanski and Bratton's first, and in my opinion strongest, point is to argue that "values and actions alone cannot always discriminate between religious experience and psychopathology." They demonstrate convincingly that the fact that an individual positively evaluates a certain anomalous experience and shows enhanced function as a result of it, does not in itself mean that the experience should be viewed as "spiritual." Their second and third points relate to the way spirituality ought to be regarded, suggesting that Jackson and Fulford are in error to identify spirituality with experience, and moreover that any judgment of genuine spiritual content or value requires reference to an individual's personal history, and also some spiritual tradition or authority. I believe that the former point, although certainly relevant to the issue, is in danger of broadening the debate too far from the consideration of particular anomalous experiences: namely, those that are phemenologically similar or identical to psychotic symptomatology. Marzanski and Bratton also mount an objection to the psychologization of spiritual experience by Jackson and Fulford, although I am not convinced that they represent these authors' opinions fairly. Whose Values? Action or Ethics? The first point, the refutation of the thesis that a spiritual experience can be distinguished from [End Page 373] psychopathology on the basis of a positive evaluation and preservation of functionality, succeeds in that it is shown both that (1) experiences accepted as spiritual within major religious traditions may actually be distressing and/or disabling; and (2) anomalous experiences that are both positively evaluated by the experient and action enhancing nevertheless may not have genuine spiritual characteristics. The argument proceeds through the use of counterexamples, and it is indeed a problem for the Jackson and Fulford account that suffering and periods of social withdrawal or distress do appear to be historically, anthropologically, and theologically associated with the spiritual journey. Bratton and Marzanski use, among other examples, the "dark night of the soul" of mystics, raising the very interesting point that a person may have experiences that, at least at the time of experiencing, are profoundly disturbing or even disabling, socially or functionally, and yet those same experiences may in some way set the scene for a profound transformation or spiritual renewal. To my mind this concept can be seen reflected in the "terrible" forms of the Wisdom Goddess in Advaita Vedanta (as expressed in my own paper), and can be related to the concept of "breaking down to break through" espoused by transpersonal psychologists such as Grof and Grof (1992).Therefore, on closer examination, it appears that Jackson and Fulford's notion of preserved functionality may play some role after all, even if it does require supplementation: if the breaking through aspect of the process is necessary to distinguish from simply breaking down, then action enhancement may remain a criterion determining the spiritual value of an experience. However, it will need to be observed in the longer term, and as such can only play a role... (shrink)

One recent topic of debate in Bayesian epistemology has been the question of whether imprecise credences can be rational. I argue that one account of imprecise credences, the orthodox treatment as defended by James M. Joyce, is untenable. Despite Joyce’s claims to the contrary, a puzzle introduced by Roger White shows that the orthodox account, when paired with Bas C. van Fraassen’s Reflection Principle, can lead to inconsistent beliefs. Proponents of imprecise credences, then, must either provide a compelling reason to (...) reject Reflection or admit that the rational credences in White’s case are precise. (shrink)

I offer the first sustained defence of the claim that ugliness is constituted by the disposition to disgust. I advance three main lines of argument in support of this thesis. First, ugliness and disgustingness tend to lie in the same kinds of things and properties (the argument from ostensions). Second, the thesis is better placed than all existing accounts to accommodate the following facts: ugliness is narrowly and systematically distributed in a heterogenous set of things, ugliness is sometimes enjoyed, and (...) ugliness sits opposed to beauty across a neutral midpoint (the argument from proposed intensions). And third, ugliness and disgustingness function in the same way in both giving rise to representations of contamination (the argument from the law of contagion). In making these arguments, I show why prominent objections to the thesis do not succeed, cast light on some of the artistic functions of ugliness, and, in addition, demonstrate why a dispositional account of disgustingness is correct, and present a novel problem for warrant-based accounts of disgustingness (the ‘too many reasons’ problem). (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Semiotica Jahrgang: 2018 Heft: 225 Seiten: 457-487.

Some have taken Bernard Lonergan's statements about the differences between the presentation of decision in Insight and the chapter on the human good in Method in Theologyto mean that chapter 18 of Insight is to be discarded in favor of chapter 2 of Method. The paper argues that there is a validity to both presentations, a validity that corresponds to the third and second modes of making an election in the Spiritual Exercises of St Ignatius. A concluding suggestions relates the (...) second mode of election and Method's presentation of decision to René Girard's mimetic theory. (shrink)

Philosophy -- Ethics beyond existentialism and structuralism: Sartre's critique of dialectical reason and the debate with Levi-Strauss -- Foucault's ethics of the self -- Derrida in Heidelberg: the specter of Heidegger's Nazism and the question of ethics -- Richard Rorty's cultural politics: ironist philosophy and the ethics of reading -- History -- From metahistory to the practical past: Hayden White's existentialist philosophy of history -- Hayden White and the ethics of historiography literature -- The ethics of conversion: metaphysical desire in (...) Ren, Girard, and Jean-Paul Sartre -- The ethics of realism: literary history and the sublime in Erich Auerbach's mimesis -- The ethics of philology: Erich Auerbach and the fate of humanism -- Edward Said, orientalism, and the political turn in literary and cultural studies. (shrink)

We argue that the concept of practical wisdom is particularly useful for organizing, understanding, and improving human-machine interactions. We consider the relationship between philosophical analysis of wisdom and psychological research into the development of wisdom. We adopt a practical orientation that suggests a conceptual engineering approach is needed, where philosophical work involves refinement of the concept in response to contributions by engineers and behavioral scientists. The former are tasked with encoding as much wise design as possible into machines themselves, as (...) well as providing sandboxes or workspaces to help various stakeholders build practical wisdom in systems that are sufficiently realistic to aid transferring skills learned to real-world use. The latter are needed for the design of exercises and methods of evaluation within these workspaces, as well as ways of empirically assessing the transfer of wisdom from workspace to world. Systematic interaction between these three disciplines (and others) is the best approach to engineering wisdom for the machine age. (shrink)

'the whole work is remarkably fresh, vivid and attractively written psychologists will be grateful that a work of this kind has been done ... by one who has the scholarship, science, and philosophical training that are requisite for the task' - Mind This renowned three-volume collection records chronologically the steps by which psychology developed from the time of the early Greek thinkers and the first writings on the nature of the mind, through to the 1920s and such modern preoccupations as (...) criminal and animal psychology. It is only in relatively recent times that psychology has been considered an empirical science independent of philosophy. Brett's account is thus concerned with the broadest definition of psychology, taking in such philosophical aspects as the relation of mind and body, thought processes, etc. For each period he gives an account of the state of the sciences which influenced psychology, the state of psychology itself, the influence psychology had on other areas, and the applications of psychological theories. Examining a huge range of figures, he describes their attitudes on fundamental questions and their contribution to the progress of the subject, as well as the history of the different methods of inquiry. The thinkers he discusses range from Aristotle, Democritus, Socrates, Plato, and Xenocrates to Proclus, the Arabian teachers, Magnus, Duns Scotus, and Ockham from Galileo, Descartes, Gassendi, and Cudworth to Locke, Berkeley, Condillac, and Kant from Reid, Stewart, Herbart, and Schopenhauer to Bain, Spencer, Mill and Darwin. Surprisingly clear and easy to read, Brett's account succeeds in illuminating the nature of psychology as well as its history. It remains a classic overview of the subject from its broad roots in philosophy through to the independent empirical science of the modern era. --a scarce work, rarely found as a complete set --a classic work - all historians of psychology and philosophy should have A History of Psychology. (shrink)

_Examines the significance of animal environments in contemporary continental thought._.

Truth by convention, once thought to be the foundation of a uniquely promising approach to explaining our access to the truth in nonempirical domains, is nowadays widely considered an absurdity. Its fall from grace has been due largely to the influence of an argument that can be sketched as follows: our linguistic conventions have the power to make it the case that a sentence expresses a particular proposition, but they can’t by themselves generate truth; whether a given proposition is true—and (...) so whether the sentence that expresses it is true—is a matter of what the world is like, which means it isn’t a matter of convention alone. The consensus is that this argument is decisive against truth by convention. Strikingly, though, it has rarely been formulated with much precision. Here I provide a new rendering of the argument, one that reveals its structure and makes transparent just what assumptions it requires, and then I assess conventionalists’ prospects for resisting each of those assumptions. I conclude that the consensus is mistaken: contrary to what is almost universally thought, there remains a promising way forward for the conventionalist project. Along the way, I clarify conventionalists’ commitments by thinking about what truth by convention would need to be like in order for conventionalism to do the epistemological work it’s intended to do. (shrink)

In the wake of Foucault, the debate on biopolitics has focused on the tensions of bíos and zoé, community and immunity, generation and thanatopolitics. What remains obscure in these accounts is the experiential aspect of life – its unfolding and entanglement with the ageing process. This is true both of approaches that emphasize the ethical implications of the life sciences and those that explore the biopolitical workings of wider social processes. In the contemporary capitalist formation, life’s unfolding is caught up (...) in global flows of information, finance and labour. The organization of the human faculties, the general preconditions for knowledge and communication, becomes central to value creation. And the human body, like fixed capital for Marx, becomes a cost to be amortized as quickly as possible. Investigating these processes with regard to transformations in practices of care provides a means for reassessing current debates regarding the ageing of people and populations. (shrink)

A Benacerraf–Field challenge is an argument intended to show that common realist theories of a given domain are untenable: such theories make it impossible to explain how we’ve arrived at the truth in that domain, and insofar as a theory makes our reliability in a domain inexplicable, we must either reject that theory or give up the relevant beliefs. But there’s no consensus about what would count here as a satisfactory explanation of our reliability. It’s sometimes suggested that giving such (...) an explanation would involve showing that our beliefs meet some modal condition, but realists have claimed that this sort of modal interpretation of the challenge deprives it of any force: since the facts in question are metaphysically necessary and so obtain in all possible worlds, it’s trivially easy, even given realism, to show that our beliefs have the relevant modal features. Here I show that this claim is mistaken—what motivates a modal interpretation of the challenge in the first place also motivates an understanding of the relevant features in terms of epistemic possibilities rather than metaphysical possibilities, and there are indeed epistemically possible worlds where the facts in question don’t obtain. (shrink)

Humane farming can be defined as the practice of raising animals for food in an environment that is good for them and where they are killed in a manner that is relatively painless. Many people who oppose factory farming think that humane farming is morally permissible, even morally laudable. In what follows, I focus on one argument in support of humane farming that emphasizes its good consequences, not only for producers, and consumers, but for the animals themselves. I discuss problems (...) for this argument and explain how it can be revised to overcome those problems. In the end, I explain why even the strongest version of the good‐consequences argument fails to show that most cases of humane farming are morally permissible. However, my objections to this argument suggest that humane farming may be morally permissible in rare cases. (shrink)

While research has focused on why certain entrepreneurs elect to create innovative solutions to social problems, very little is known about why some social entrepreneurs choose to scale their solutions while others do not. Research on scaling has generally focused on organizational characteristics often overlooking factors at the individual level that may affect scaling decisions. Drawing on the multidimensional construct of moral intensity, we propose a theoretical model of ethical decision making to explain why a social entrepreneur’s perception of moral (...) intensity of the social problem, coupled with their personal desire for control, can significantly influence scaling decisions. Specifically, we propose that higher levels of perceived moral intensity will positively influence the likelihood of scaling through open as opposed to closed modes in order to achieve greater speed and scope of social impact. However, we also propose this effect will be negatively moderated by a social entrepreneur’s higher levels of desire for control. Our model has implications for research and practice at the interface of ethics and social entrepreneurship. (shrink)

Research in the U. S. on fair trade consumption is sparse. Therefore, little is known as to what motivates U. S. consumers to buy fair trade products. This study sought to determine which values are salient to American fair trade consumption. The data were gathered via a Web-based version of the Schwartz Value Survey (SVS) and were gleaned from actual consumers who purchase fair trade products from a range of Internet-based fair trade retailers. This study established that indeed there are (...) significant interactions between personal values and fair trade consumption and that demographics proved to be useless in creating a profile of the American fair trade consumer. (shrink)

Which rules should guide our reasoning? Human reasoners often use reasoning shortcuts, called heuristics, which function well in some contexts but lack the universality of reasoning rules like deductive implication or inference to the best explanation. Does it follow that human reasoning is hopelessly irrational? I argue: no. Heuristic reasoning often represents human reasoners reaching a local rational maximum, reasoning more accurately than if they try to implement more “ideal” rules of reasoning. I argue this is a genuine rational achievement. (...) Our ideal rational advisors would advise us to reason with heuristic rules, not more complicated ideal rules. I argue we do not need a radical new account of epistemic norms to make sense of the success of heuristic reasoning. (shrink)

The field of emotion regulation has developed rapidly, and a number of emotion regulatory strategies have been identified. To date, empirical attention has focused on contrasting specific regulatio...

This article is an attempt to deepen our understanding of trust. To this end, several elements frequently present in trust-relationships are first identified, and then three underappreciated puzzles about trust are described. Next, it is argued that certain leading analyses of trust are unsatisfactory, in part, because they are unable to solve these puzzles succesfully. Finally, an alternative way of thinking about trust is proposed. It is argued that this new way of thinking about trust is bothindependently plausible and better (...) able to solve these puzzles about trust. (shrink)

This study analyzes the metajournalistic discourse surrounding leaks and whistleblowing crafted by online journalism industry publications since 2004. The goal of the study is to understand how jou...

Comparing engineering to evolution typically involves adaptationist thinking, where well-designed artifacts are likened to well-adapted organisms, and the process of evolution is likened to the process of design. A quite different comparison is made when biologists focus on evolvability instead of adaptationism. Here, the idea is that complex integrated systems, whether evolved or engineered, share universal principles that affect the way they change over time. This shift from adaptationism to evolvability is a significant move for, as I argue, we can (...) make sense of these universal principles without making any adaptationism claims. Furthermore, evolvability highlights important aspects of engineering that are ignored in the adaptationist debates. I introduce some novel engineering examples that incorporate these key neglected aspects, and use these examples to challenge some commonly cited contrasts between engineering and evolution, and to highlight some novel resemblances that have gone unnoticed. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Wittgenstein’s PrefaceBrett BourbonIn his preface to Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein admits his failure to make his book anything more than an interrelated collection of remarks: "After several unsuccessful attempts to weld my results together into... a whole, I realized that I should never succeed. The best I could write would never be more than philosophical remarks." The fragmented character of Investigations is matched by its other formal oddities and difficulties: (...) its metaphors, its cryptic evocative obscurity about some things and its linguistic precision about others, its dramatization of philosophical positions in stories, in hypothetical worlds, and in the role of the interlocutor(s). Our initial and continual problem in reading Investigations is to understand the reason for its form, and to justify this form relative to its philosophical concerns and methods. I will argue that the justification of the form of Investigations comes down to a single question: how do we take up Wittgenstein's example—in thinking and in confusion—without mimicking him?IThe justification pursued in the preface bears affinities with theological justification, defined as our becoming righteous relative to God, as Calvin characterizes it, "an acceptation, whereby God receiving us into [End Page 428] favour, taketh us for righteous" (Institutes III. xi. §2).1 Righteousness as a mark of acceptation, the very tone of "righteousness" and God's power of acceptation, have no direct counterparts in Wittgenstein's philosophy. Philosophical justification does not have a doctrinal foundation that would establish any particular content nor any special relation between the pursuit of that justification (through philosophy) and its fulfillment, even hypothetically, in some possible acknowledgment of righteousness. The seriousness betrayed by Investigations need for justification, however, is expressed in the moral fervor of Wittgenstein's philosophizing. It is also his philosophical goal to encourage a kind of acceptation that the ground of our involvement in the world, in what constrains and confuses us, is no more than how we live and what we are: "Instead of the unanalyzsable, specific, indefinable; the fact that we act in such-and-such ways, e.g. punish certain actions, establish the state of affairs thus and so, give orders, render accounts, describe colours, take an interest in other's feelings. What has to be accepted, the given—it might be said—are facts of living" (Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, §630; c.f. PI, p. 226d).2 The translators comment in a footnote that a variant for "facts of living" in Wittgenstein's manuscript is "forms of life." What has to be accepted are forms of life.The form of Investigations is justified as part of a discovery, with or without a supporting theology, of how to move ourselves toward some greater form of perfection (although not to reach it). The Protestant cast of this justification, in Wittgenstein's case, is just (and I wouldn't want to extend it further) that while this justification is achieved by virtue of our effort, it is not effort towards the world, but towards our intransigent will, and that the grace that might enable our work is less a gift, than a condition within which we can struggle.3 Thus, "what has to be overcome," in philosophy, "is not the difficulty of the understanding but of the will" (CV, p.17).4 Philosophy for Wittgenstein is a form of self-education. One works on the will in order to see differently: but the will is neither a thing nor a faculty. Working on the will is not a psychological project of self-reform, but a reconstitution of our attitude toward what we take as necessary. We can describe such attitudes with the vocabulary of the passions by which express or curb our will: devotion, derision, hope, fear, confidence, indignation, pride, repentance, emulation, gratitude, consternation, daring, timidity, and so on. And thus "philosophy is a work on the will" is kind of maxim to help us remember a kind of attitude, purpose, and justification.I will derive an agnostic notion of justification from its Protestant [End Page 429] theological form, retaining its moral force and claim on our person, but without psychologizing it, with minimal doctrinal content, and without God. This is... (shrink)

Recent work by Brian Skyrms offers a very general way to think about how information flows and evolves in biological networks—from the way monkeys in a troop communicate to the way cells in a body coordinate their actions. A central feature of his account is a way to formally measure the quantity of information contained in the signals in these networks. In this article, we argue there is a tension between how Skyrms talks of signalling networks and his formal measure (...) of information. Although Skyrms refers to both how information flows through networks and that signals carry information, we show that his formal measure only captures the latter. We then suggest that to capture the notion of flow in signalling networks, we need to treat them as causal networks. This provides the formal tools to define a measure that does capture flow, and we do so by drawing on recent work defining causal specificity. Finally, we suggest that this new measure is crucial if we wish to explain how evolution creates information. For signals to play a role in explaining their own origins and stability, they can’t just carry information about acts; they must be difference-makers for acts. _1_ Signalling, Evolution, and Information _2_ Skyrms’s Measure of Information _3_ Carrying Information versus Information Flow _3.1_ Example 1 _3.2_ Example 2 _3.3_ Example 3 _4_ Signalling Networks Are Causal Networks _4.1_ Causal specificity _4.2_ Formalizing causal specificity _5_ Information Flow as Causal Control _5.1_ Example 1 _5.2_ Examples 2 and 3 _5.3_ Average control implicitly ‘holds fixed’ other pathways _6_ How Does Evolution Create Information? _7_ Conclusion Appendix >. (shrink)

Robin McKenna’s excellent Non-Ideal Epistemology is, among other things, a testament to restraint. McKenna does not want to unnecessarily inflame tensions between ideal and non-ideal theorists in epistemology. Often ideal and non-ideal projects are aimed at different target domains and not in tension with one another (though not always; e.g. McKenna 2023, ch. 6, especially pp. 112-21). In this commentary, I will have much less tact. I sketch a route by which the non-ideal epistemologist might become more belligerent towards their (...) ideal counterparts. I do this by focusing on an area that McKenna mostly sets aside: non-ideal individual epistemology. (shrink)

When government actors seek to restrict the sale of hazardous substances, industry actors tend to intervene, deploying coordinated strategies aimed at delaying, preventing or weakening attempts to regulate their products. In many cases, this has involved deliberate efforts to obfuscate science, mislead the public and manipulate political actors in order to ensure desired policy outcomes. Strategies of regulatory obstructionism have resulted in the prolonged dispersal of harmful chemical substances with tangible impacts on public health. This article proposes that this behavior (...) should be interpreted as a form of violence. Examining the regulatory histories of lead, benzene, asbestos and PCBs, the article demonstrates how regulatory obstructionism and violence have become intractable characteristics of the chemical industry. (shrink)

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work.This work is in the public domain in (...) the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

On April 6, 2000, Dr. J. Craig Venter of Celera Genomics told a Congressional committee that his company finished its analysis of the human DNA and would have a completed map of the human genome by early summer, 2000. Scientists expect the completed human genome to revolutionize drug therapies through the creation of treatments tailored to specific genetic makeups. In order to create a map of the human genome, three billion letters of DNA that encode eighty thousand genes must be (...) identified and ordered. In March, 2000, Celera released a successful sequence of the fruit fly genome, and it employed the same methods in creating the human genome. (shrink)

Animals through Chinese History: Earliest Times to 1911. Edited by Roel Sterckx, Martina Siebert, and Dagmar Schäfer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Pp. xiv + 277. $105.