This philosophical investigation interrogates the relationship between G.W.F. Hegel’s concept of the master-slave dialectic in The Phenomenology of Spirit and the critique and reformulation of it by Frantz Fanon in Black Skin, White Masks. As a means of contextualization and expansion of Hegel’s original textual account, I consider Susan Buck-Morss’ seminal defense through grounding the dialectic in Hegel’s possible historical knowledge of the Haitian Revolution. I maintain that despite a compelling picture, Buck-Morss’ insights are unable to fully vindicate Hegel from (...) the rebukes of Fanon, and as a result, Hegel’s phenomenology necessitates a concrete analysis of the actual conscious experiences of the racialized and colonized subject in order to realize its aims. In pursuit of this critical methodology, I develop the upshot and positive movement of Fanon’s critique through what I describe as a “phenomenology of flesh” in conversation with Maurice Merleau Ponty’s The Visible and the Invisible. (shrink)

N. Scott Arnold has argued forcefully that, for the most part, those who win profits (and suffer losses) in a market economy deserve them. According to Arnold, profit opportunities arise when there are malallocations of resources, which entrepreneurs initiate changes in production to correct. If they succeed, they simultaneously further the essential point of the market system — to meet the needs and wants of consumers — and they make profits; if they do not, then they stand to suffer losses. (...) I argue that the structure of modern corporate enterprises tends to channel income into the hands of those whose entrepreneurial contribution is diminishingly small — namely stockholders — and away from those within the firm who genuinely participate in the entrepreneurial role. (shrink)

From a psychological point of view, human wants and desires form a multitiered structure. If values are related in any way to human affectivity or desire - and this is something most maximizing theorists would certainly not dispute - then we are forced to recognize that human values also form a multi-tiered structure. Failure to appreciate this connection leads maximization theorists seriously astray, both in their interpretation of human behavior and in their postulates of rationality. Optimizing involves satisficing, not strictly (...) maximization; satisficing is truly rational. (shrink)

Elective ventilation (EV) is ventilation applied, not in the interest of patients, but in order to secure transplantable organs. It carries with it a small risk that patients who would otherwise have died will survive in a persistent vegetative state. Is EV ever justifiable? We argue: (1) The only thing which can justify exposing patients to risk not taken for their benefit is their consent, and we cannot rely on implied consent or third party consent in the case of EV. (...) Thus, absent explicit consent of patients, EV is not justifiable. (2) It is not clear that explicit consent should be sought, or where it is offered honoured, given the potential EV has for deterring organ donors and causing stress to staff and families. (shrink)

The compelling, widely-accepted Satisfaction-is-Truth Principle says that if S wants p, then S has a desire that's satisfied in exactly the worlds where p is true. We reject the Principle; an agent may want p without having a desire that's satisfied when p obtains in any old way. Other theorists who reject the Principle rely on contested intuitions about when agents get what they want. We instead appeal to—and shed new light on—the dispositional role of desire.

_Black Intellectual Thought in Education_ celebrates the exceptional academic contributions of African-American education scholars Anna Julia Cooper, Carter G. Woodson, and Alain Leroy Locke to the causes of social science, education, and democracy in America. By focusing on the lives and projects of these three figures specifically, it offers a powerful counter-narrative to the dominant, established discourse in education and critical social theory--helping to better serve the population that critical theory seeks to advocate. Rather than attempting to "rescue" a few (...) African American scholars from obscurity or marginalization, this powerful volume instead highlights ideas that must be probed and critically examined in order to deal with prevailing contemporary educational issues. Cooper, Woodson, and Locke’s history of engagement with race, democracy, education, gender and life is a dynamic, demanding, and authentic narrative for those engaged with these important issues. (shrink)

Experiential evidence shows that pain is associated with common meanings. These include a meaning of threat or danger, which is experienced as immediately distressing or unpleasant; cognitive meanings, which are focused on the long-term consequences of having chronic pain; and existential meanings such as hopelessness, which are more about the person with chronic pain than the pain itself. This interdisciplinary book - the second in the three-volume Meanings of Pain series edited by Dr Simon van Rysewyk - aims to better (...) understand pain by describing experiences of pain and the meanings these experiences hold for the people living through them. The lived experiences of pain described here involve various types of chronic pain, including spinal pain, labour pain, rheumatic pain, diabetic peripheral neuropathic pain, fibromyalgia, complex regional pain syndrome, endometriosis-associated pain, and cancer-related pain. Two chapters provide narrative descriptions of pain, recounted and interpreted by people with pain. Language is important to understanding the meaning of pain since it is the primary tool human beings use to manipulate meaning. As discussed in the book, linguistic meaning may hold clues to understanding some pain-related experiences, including the stigmatisation of people with pain, the dynamics of patient-clinician communication, and other issues, such as relationships between pain, public policy and the law, and attempts to develop a taxonomy of pain that is meaningful for patients. Clinical implications are described in each chapter. This book is intended for people with pain, their family members or caregivers, clinicians, researchers, advocates, and policy makers. (shrink)

The Lily's Tongue offers a nuanced, sustained reading of what Maughan-Brown calls the "Lily Discourses"--four discourses that Kierkegaard wrote about the instruction in the Gospel of Matthew to "consider the lilies." Kierkegaard suggests that the lilies are "authoritative" rather than merely "figural" or "metaphorical." The aim of this book is to explore what exactly Kierkegaard means by asking, How do texts speak with authority? In Maughan-Brown's reading, Kierkegaard argues that the key to a text's authority is in the (...) act of reading itself. No text can have authority unless the reader grants it that authority. That is because, paradoxically, no text can avoid or escape the use of figural language. If the lilies speak authoritatively it is precisely because they are also figural. Texts do not speak directly; their tongue is always the lily's tongue. Drawing on the work of Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Benjamin, and Derrida, The Lily's Tongue situates Kierkegaard's reading of Matthew at the intersection of theological, philosophical, political, and literary investigations of figural language. It uniquely contributes to the ongoing discussion of Kierkegaard's theory and practice of "indirect communication" by introducing four pivotal signed discourses into this debate. In so doing, Maughan-Brown reveals a groundbreaking theory of figure--one that ultimately requires a renewed reading of the major pseudonymous works. (shrink)

Algorithms wield increasing control over our lives—over the jobs we get, the loans we're granted, the information we see online. Algorithms can and often do wield their power in a biased way, and much work has been devoted to algorithmic bias. In contrast, algorithmic neutrality has been largely neglected. I investigate algorithmic neutrality, tackling three questions: What is algorithmic neutrality? Is it possible? And when we have it in mind, what can we learn about algorithmic bias?

Davies and Wright have recently diagnosed the felt inadequacy of Moore’s response to the sceptic in terms of a failure of transmission of warrant. They argue that warrant fails to transmit across the following key inference: I have hands, if I have hands then I am not a BIV, so I am not a BIV, on the grounds that this inference cannot be used to rationally overcome doubt about its conclusion, and cannot strengthen one’s epistemic position with respect to the (...) conclusion. Here, for the sake of argument, I grant that the inference can neither rationally overcome doubt about its conclusion nor strengthen one’s epistemic position with respect to the conclusion, and examine whether, and in what way, this undermines.. (shrink)

It is often assumed that the first stage of many classical arguments for theism depends upon some version of the Principle of Sufficient Reason being true. Unfortunately for classical theists, PSR is a controversial thesis that has come under rather severe criticism in the contemporary literature. In this article, I grant for the sake of argument that every version of PSR is false. Thus, I concede with the critics of PSR, that it is possible that there is, at least, (...) one fact that is ontologically brute. I then proffer an epistemological challenge to ontological bruteness. Specifically, I argue that whenever a knowledge seeker, S, perceives some unexplained fact, F, it is never reasonable for S to believe F is ontologically brute. I conclude that, even if PSR is false, it is more reasonable to believe that the key premise in the first stage of classical arguments for theism is true. (shrink)

Applying speech act theory to the phenomenon of hate speech, some philosophers seek to explain how even ordinary people can obtain the capacity, power, or authority to oppress, subordinate, or marginalise the targets of their verbal attacks. Such explanations are answers to what is called the authority problem. However, hitherto these philosophers have focused exclusively on standard examples of racist speech in which members of historically oppressor groups verbally attack members of oppressed groups. In this paper, I address the (or (...) an) authority problem in relation to examples of reverse hate speech, where members of historically oppressed groups verbally attack members of oppressor groups. I critically examine two conventional answers to the authority problem: the first is that even ordinary people can successfully perform prototypical hate speech acts by virtue of being participants in norm-governed social practices of racism; the second is that such people can do so by virtue of the silence of bystanders granting them licensed authority. I argue these conventional answers have lesser explanatory heft as applied to examples of reverse hate speech. I then introduce and defend a third answer to the authority problem, which I believe can adequately account for examples of both standard and reverse hate speech, namely the possession of informal social authority. (shrink)

Polus admires orators for the tyrannical power they have. However, Socrates argues that orators and tyrants lack power worth having: the ability to satisfy one's wishes or wants (boulēseis). He distinguishes wanting from thinking best, and grants that orators and tyrants do what they think best while denying that they do what they want. His account is often thought to involve two conflicting requirements: wants must be attributable to the wanter from their own perspective (to count as their desires), but (...) wants must also be directed at objects that are genuinely good (in order for failure to satisfy them to matter). We offer an account of wanting as reflective, coherent desire, which allows Socrates to satisfy both desiderata. We then explain why he thinks that orators and tyrants want to act justly, though they do greater injustices than anyone else and so frustrate their own wants more than anyone else. (shrink)

Discussions of the liberal international order, both inside and outside the academy, tend to take its necessity and desirability for granted. While its specific contours and content are left somewhat open in such debates, the idea that this international order is essential for global peace and stability is left largely unquestioned. What is more, the potential loss or end of this order is often taken to mean a return to anarchy, chaos, and disorder. In this essay, I question the presumed (...) necessity and desirability of the liberal international order that most discussions of it seem to share. By rethinking the international order as processual, emergent, and grounded in the social and political contexts that shape its constitution and operation, I suggest that fears about the crisis of international order are less about international order itself and more about the loss of a specific order. This specific order, I argue, constituted in part through processes of racialization, is not so much a rules-based order of sovereign equality but rather an international order of White sovereignty that secures the domination and rule of some over others, of Whiteness over non-Whiteness. Recognizing the role of White sovereignty in the contemporary international order points toward a need to take seriously calls for abolition. Rather than signifying a return to chaos and disorder, the prospect and promise of abolition represents a call to break free from the constraints of the present order and reach into an as-yet-unimaginable future. (shrink)

John Locke holds that matter is solid, the soul thinks, and for all we know the soul may be a material substance divinely endowed with a power to think. Though he openly admits to nothing stronger than the bare possibility of thinking matter, Locke grants that what thinks in us occupies a definite spatial location to the exclusion of other souls. Solidity is the quality that prevents other things from occupying a spatial location. Locke’s general criterion for identity is spatiotemporal (...) exclusion of other things of the same kind. To meet these conditions for identity, souls must be solid. Although Locke refuses to declare that souls really are material things, taking the solidity of souls to be a condition for their identity is consistent with the following of Locke’s other important commitments: nominalism about the essences by which substances are classified, agnosticism about the underlying reality of what supports such “nominal essences,” and the identity of persons is distinct from the identity of any substance. Locke ignores the implication that souls are solid because the solidity of souls is irrelevant to those three aims. Nevertheless he could allow for the solidity of souls without giving up on any of his other important and explicitly held commitments. There is therefore no need for Locke’s commentators to refrain from employing solidity in their accounts of Locke’s general criterion for identity from fear of attributing to Locke the position that souls would be solid. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to examine the evidence commonly claimed to show the presence of slaves in the audience of Plautus’ comedies (above all the evidence of his prologue toPoenulus) and to argue that it more probably shows the opposite, that slaves werenotpresent, or at least were expected not to be. The question is given some urgency by the appearance of Amy Richlin's new book, which takes the presence of slaves in the audience for granted and builds on (...) it to develop a view of Plautine comedy as addressing the experiences, hopes and fears of those slaves. Richlin cites thePoenulusprologue at pages 89–90, accepting it without detailed discussion as indicating the presence of slaves in the audience; and it has been cited similarly in standard handbooks from which I quote a representative sample of remarks below. Some scholars have said things in passing which suggest a different conclusion, but they too have not discussed the question in detail or examined the other evidence that has been thought relevant to the issue. I think that the time is ripe for closer scrutiny of all this evidence. (shrink)

Moral conclusions cannot validly be inferred from nonmoral premises – this principle, commonly called “Hume’s law,” presents a conundrum. On one hand, it seems obviously true, and its truth is often simply taken for granted. On the other hand, an ingenious argument by A. N. Prior seems to refute it. My aim here is a resolution. I shall argue, first, that Hume’s law is ambiguous, admitting both a strong and a weak interpretation; second, that the strong interpretation is false, as (...) shown by Prior’s argument; and, third, that the weak interpretation is true. (shrink)

This policy report arises from the research project Augmented Reality: Ethics, Perception, Metaphysics, conducted at the University of Glasgow’s Centre for the Study of Perceptual Experience between November 2021 and November 2023. It was funded by a grant from the Royal Society of Edinburgh. The project brought together experts in various academic fields, with partners from industry and regulatory bodies, to explore the nature of augmented and mixed reality technology, the theories underpinning them, and the ethical and legal questions (...) prompted by new technology in this domain. (shrink)

This article addresses whether cardiopulmonary resuscitation and sustained physiological support should ever be permitted in individuals who are diagnosed as brain dead and who had held previously expressed moral or religious objections to the currently accepted criteria for such a determination. It contrasts how requests for care would normally be treated in cases involving a brain-dead individual with previously expressed wishes to donate and a similarly diagnosed individual with previously expressed beliefs that did not conform to a brain-based conception of (...) death. The paper first focuses narrowly on requests for CPR and then expands its scope to address extended physiological support. It describes how refusing the brain-dead non-donor's requests for either CPR or extended support would represent enduring harm to the antemortem or previously autonomous individual by negating their beliefs and self-identity. The paper subsequently discusses potential implications of policy that would allow greater accommodations to those with conscientious objections to currently accepted brain-based death criteria, such as for cost, insurance, higher brain formulations and bedside communication. The conclusion is that granting wider latitude to personal conceptions around the definition of death, rather than forcing a contested definition on those with valid moral and religious objections, would benefit both individuals and society. (shrink)

This essay addresses what is at the foundation of the US’s seemingly inherent “resistance” to racial justice and hence to Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream. This resistance is rooted in a moral imaginary corrupted by an epistemological gaze defined by whiteness and informed by anti-Blackness. For religious scholars, this means that we must adopt a preferential option for the knowledge and voices of those who historically have been granted little or no epistemic authority within our disciplines.

Given that the benefits of Corporate Political Activity (CPA) are usually granted in the form of favorable industry regulation that benefits all industry participants rather than a single firm, small politically inactive firms are often able to take advantage of the benefits from CPA without investing in them. We argue that the free‐riding problem is context specific. Situations of extreme uncertainty create institutional voids that enable individual firms to more fully appropriate the returns from their CPA. In this paper, we (...) examine the influence that CPA had on the U.S. government’s disbursements of TARP funding in 2008. We find that politically active firms were able to avoid the free‐rider problem by obtaining more instances of TARP funding when compared to firms that were not politically active. In addition to being more likely to receive TARP funds, politically active firms received larger amounts of TARP funding than those firms who were not politically active. (shrink)

Some two hundred years ago the course of philosophy was changed, and we shall in this paper take it for granted that we cannot return to an earlier standpoint. We have left behind, not simply the notion that we can penetrate the nature of things by pure reason, but also the idea that our knowledge moves in ever-widening circles of objectivity toward a standpointless comprehension of things. Absolute comprehension is a mere regulative idea, although even that is misleading if it (...) suggests that we could somehow speculate on what it would be like to circumscribe the world in some enormous final circle. The idea that the world is inexhaustible is part of this turning point, but that is in itself not a new idea. What is more to the point than an indefinitely long parade of new facts is the permanent possibility—even within the limits of some absolute but undiscovered conditions of thinking—of revising our human schemes, or, if you wish, of revising our concepts of what, relative to schemata, is to count as an element or part of a system, or as an instance of a general law. (shrink)

Some of Tichý's conclusions rest on an assumption about substitutivity which Kripke would not accept. If we grant the assumption, then Tichý successfully shows that we can discover true identity statements involving names a priori, but not that we can discover a priori what properties things have essentially. Many of Tichý's arguments require an implausible rejection of the possibility of indirect belief as described in Section III. 25Are there necessary a posteriori propositions? I have argued that we certainly can (...) discover necessary propositions a posteriori, but have left it an open question whether there are necessary propositions which we can only discover a posteriori.What effect do the considerations here presented have on the positivist doctrine that the a priori and the necessary coincide? My explanation of how we discover necessary propositions a posteriori involves our believing them indirectly, in virtue of believing contingent propositions. I would argue that Kripke's examples of the contingent a priori involve, similarly, our believing the contingent propositions in directly, in virtue of believing necessary propositions.This suggests that a reformulation of the positivist thesis along something like the following lines may well be correct. Let us say that someone directly believes a proposition just in case he could not fail to believe it without being in a different cognitive state. Then perhaps one can directly believe a proposition on the basis of a priori evidence only if it is necessary, and can directly believe a proposition on the basis of a posteriori evidence only if it is contingent. (shrink)

In his recent book, Aquinas and the Ship of Theseus, Christopher Brown has argued that the metaphysics of St. Thomas is preferable to contemporary analyticviews because it can solve the “problem of material constitution” without requiring us to relinquish any of the common-sense beliefs that generate that problem. In this critical study, I show that in the case of both substances and aggregates, Brown’s Aquinas endorses views that are extremely implausible. Consequently, even if it is granted that the (...) solutions to the PMC fall right out of his views, it is still not clear that this gives us reason to prefer his ontology to its competitors. I also consider Brown’s take on the status of the human being after death. (shrink)

Common sense, affirmed Ferrier, can neither be set aside nor taken for granted by philosophy. Rather, it must be converted into philosophy, and this "by accepting completely and faithfully the facts and expressions of common sense as given in their primitive obscurity, and then by construing them without violence, without addition, and without diminution into clearer and more intelligible forms". In the period under discussion, the early nineteenth century, the attempt to elucidate the phenomena of mind and their linguistic moulds (...) came under the title of 'mental science' or 'analysis'. More specifically, the process envisaged for this science was inductive, what Dugald Stewart would call a dual operation of analysis and synthesis or Cabanis the method of decomposition and recomposition. Agreement on the use of such a procedure for the philosophy of mind or on the details of the technique employed was never unanimous: in the case of the latter, it had first to be established whether the 'scientist' was dealing at the outset with 'simple' or 'compound' phenomena and whether he was to proceed from the known to the unknown or vice versa. Beneath this controversy lay the roots of an earlier separation between the 'analysis of nature' and the 'analytic of imagination'. Michel Foucault, whose distinction this is, argues that these two directions of analysis begin to converge towards the end of the eighteenth century. But the moment of convergence, being fraught with difficulties for those at the intersection, is less than happy. This uneasiness of mind accounts, moreover, for the strain of conversion in 'Common Sense' philosophy. Nevertheless, where the struggles at the juncture are most intense, there is a commensurate heightening of philosophical awareness. Faintly visible in the first inquiries of Thomas Brown into causality and volition, it reaches a crescendo in his more mature reflections on memory and attention, the nature of consciousness and reflection itself. Emerging with this apprehension, and giving it depth, is Brown's sensitivity to the feelings of selfhood and his belief in the recovery, however imaginary, of the individual's past. That sense of an order to be captured and restored, combined with a recognition of the affections which, more often, reap the havoc of human nature, create in his writings the sort of excitement associated not with the resolution of dilemmas, but with a prolonged, agonizing and continual tension. The subsequent discussion moves towards as it is moved by that realization. (shrink)

Does Henry Thoreau have a positive politics? Depending on how one conceives of politics, answers will vary. Hannah Arendt famously portrayed Thoreau's commitment to the sanctity of individual conscience as distinctly unpolitical. More recent commentators grant that Thoreau has a politics, but they characterize it as profoundly negative in character. This essay argues that Thoreau indeed sponsors a positive politics-a politics of performing conscience. The performance of conscience before an audience transforms the invocation of consciencefrom a personally political act (...) into a publicly political one. The aim of the performance is to provoke one's neighbors into a process of individual self-reform that will make them capable of properly vigilant democratic citizenship and conscientious political agitation. I establish this claim through a sustained reading of a relatively neglected text that deserves wider attention in political theory: Thoreau's 1859 lecture defending insurrectionary activities by radical abolitionist John Brown. (shrink)

Andreas Schmidt argues that ethicists have misplaced moral qualms about nudges insofar as their worries are about whether nudges treat us as rational agents, because nudges can enhance our rational agency. I think that Schmidt is right that nudges often enhance our rational agency; in fact, we can carry his conclusion further: nudges often enhance our self-governing agency, too. But this does not alleviate our worries that nudges fail to treat us as rational. This is shown by disambiguating two conceptions (...) of treating-as-rational. The more plausible conception of treating-as-rational undermines Schmidt’s case that nudges often treat us as rational. (shrink)

A persuasive monograph that answers the keyepistemological arguments against anti-individualism in thephilosophy of mind.

Royal Institute of Philosophy Lectures from 1977-1978.

This book takes seriously the idea that at least some groups, such as corporations and governments, are genuine agents with mental states on which they act. For instance, in morally assessing a government’s response to the coronavirus pandemic, we are interested in what the government knew at various points as the pandemic developed. And in predicting the outcome of the current war in Ukraine, we might ask what Russia believes about the West’s determination to defend Ukraine. The book examines a (...) range of phenomena central to the epistemic and moral assessment of groups: group evidence, group belief, the basis of group belief, group justified belief, group knowledge, group motivation, and group blameless ignorance. Overall, the book defends a ‘non-summative’ functionalist view of groups. On a non-summative account of group phenomena, it is neither necessary nor sufficient for a group to have a property α that some/most/all of its members have that same property. By contrast, on a summative account it is necessary and sufficient for a group to have a property α that some/most/all of its members have that same property. Across the book I provide new arguments for non-summativism and new accounts of key group phenomena many of which have been relatively neglected in existing literature. While I provide independent arguments for a non-summative view of each phenomenon discussed, the conclusions of the chapters are mutually reinforcing. For adopting a non-summative account of one group phenomenon motivates adopting a non-summative account of others. (shrink)

Statistical criteria of fairness are formal measures of how an algorithm performs that aim to help us determine whether an algorithm would be fair to use in decision-making. In this paper, I introduce a new version of the criterion known as “Equalized Odds,” argue that it is a requirement of procedural fairness, and show that it is immune to a number of objections to the standard version.

Fitness plays many roles throughout evolutionary theory, from a measure of populations in the wild to a central element in abstract theoretical presentations of natural selection. It has thus been the subject of an extensive philosophical literature, which has primarily centered on the way to understand the relationship between fitness values and reproductive outcomes. If fitness is a probabilistic or statistical quantity, how is it to be defined in general theoretical contexts? How can it be measured? Can a single conceptual (...) model for fitness be offered that applies in all biological cases, or must fitness measures be case-specific? Philosophers have explored these questions over the last several decades, largely in the context of an influential definition of fitness proposed in the late 1970s: the propensity interpretation. This interpretation as first described undeniably suffers from significant difficulties, and debate regarding the tenability of amendments and alternatives to it remains unsettled. (shrink)

A central reason to worry that managers should not use nudges to influence employees is that doing so fails to treat employees as _rational_ and/or _autonomous_ (RA). Recent nudge defenders have marshaled a powerful line of response against this worry: in general, nudges treat us as the kind of RA agents we are, because nudges are apt to enhance our limited capacities for RA agency by improving our decision-making environments. Applied to managerial nudges, this would mean that when managers nudge (...) their employees, they generally bolster their employees’ limited RA agency and, thus, treat employees as the kinds of RA agents they are. My aim is to vindicate a qualified version of the initial worry from the nudge-defender response and, as a result, provide a clearer, more plausible framework for evaluating managerial nudges than what nudge critics have previously given. I do this, first, by showing how nudge defenders rely on equivocation between two different senses of “treating someone as RA.” The _value-preserving_ notion that supports the nudge-defender prescription to protect and enhance RA capacities is different from the _authority-recognizing_ notion that underwrites the initial worry about nudging. Second, I argue that the authority-recognizing notion of treating someone as RA implies that managerial nudges treat employees as RA just when the nudges are compatible with relating to employees as equals. Third, I explain how, to determine when managerial nudges are compatible with relating to employees as equals, we need to consider how employees surrender aspects of their equal, agency-grounded authority to managers. (shrink)

Introduction: sport and the event -- Ron Artest: the black body at rest (Alain Badiou) -- Eric Cantona: the body in motion (Gilles Deleuze) -- Zinedine Zidane: coup de boule (Jacques Derrida) -- Epilogue: being, event, and the philosophy of sport.

Important features of the self-concept can be located outside of the individual and inside close or related others. The authors use this insight to reinterpret data previously said to support the empathy-altruism model of helping, which asserts that empathic concern for another results in selflessness and true altruism. That is, they argue that the conditions that lead to empathic concern also lead to a greater sense of self-other overlap, raising the possibility that helping under these conditions is not selfless but (...) is also directed toward the self. In 3 studies, the impact of empathic concern on willingness to help was eliminated when oneness--a measure of perceived self-other overlap--was considered. Path analyses revealed further that empathic concern increased helping only through its relation to perceived oneness, thereby throwing the empathy-altruism model into question. The authors suggest that empathic concern affects helping primarily as an emotional signal of oneness. (shrink)

Although parents are the default legal surrogate decision-makers for minor children in the U.S., shared decision making in a pluralistic society is often much more complicated, involving not just parents and pediatricians, but also grandparents, other relatives, and even community or religious elders. Parents may not only choose to involve others in their children’s healthcare decisions but choose to defer to another; such deference does not imply agreement with the decision being made and adds complexity when disagreements arise between surrogate (...) decision-makers for minor children and their physicians. I argue that clinicians and ethicists have a duty to consider voices marginalized by hierarchical structures, including but not limited to gender-based inequalities. This approach involves negotiating potential conflicts: between respecting differences of culture and religion, on one hand, and assuring that the wishes of those who are most invested in children’s lives are considered, on the other. (shrink)

Homology is a biological sameness relation that is purported to hold in the face of changes in form, composition, and function. In spite of the centrality and importance of homology, there is no consensus on how we should understand this concept. The two leading views of homology, the genealogical and developmental accounts, have significant shortcomings. We propose a new account, the hierarchical-dependency account of homology, which avoids these shortcomings. Furthermore, our account provides for continuity between special, general, and serial homology.

This chapter contains sections titled: On Definition Theories of Gaming A Definition of Videogames.