Aborder la violence telle qu’elle résonne en chacun dans son actualité singulière et proposer d’en faire « l’écho » collectivement, telle est l’invitation du dispositif en groupe de parole évoqué dans cet article. L’approche des auteurs définit la violence comme polysémique, polymorphe, continuelle, originaire, centrale et problématique. Chacun peut en faire l’expérience au cours de son existence dans divers champs, familial, professionnel, social, voire dans plusieurs, successivement ou simultanément, et selon des positions subjectives variables – auteurs, victimes ou témoins – (...) ou selon encore des configurations complexes. Deux cas cliniques éclairent en quoi le dispositif « groupe de parole » favorise le passage, « la passe », d’une violence engrammée par un sujet vers une métabolisation de ses effets. (shrink)

Are companies, churches, and states genuine agents? Or are they just collections of individuals that give a misleading impression of unity? This question is important, since the answer dictates how we should explain the behaviour of these entities and whether we should treat them as responsible and accountable on the model of individual agents. Group Agency offers a new approach to that question and is relevant, therefore, to a range of fields from philosophy to law, politics, and the social sciences. (...) Christian List and Philip Pettit argue that there really are group or corporate agents, over and above the individual agents who compose them, and that a proper approach to the social sciences, law, morality, and politics must take account of this fact. Unlike some earlier defences of group agency, their account is entirely unmysterious in character and, despite not being technically difficult, is grounded in cutting-edge work in social choice theory, economics, and philosophy. (shrink)

The goal of this book is to develop a new framework for thinking about what moral character looks like today. My central claim will be that most people have moral character traits, but at the same time they do not have either the traditional  ...

More often than not, recently popular structuralist interpretations of physical theories leave the central concept of a structure insufficiently precisified. The incipient causal sets approach to quantum gravity offers a paradigmatic case of a physical theory predestined to be interpreted in structuralist terms. It is shown how employing structuralism lends itself to a natural interpretation of the physical meaning of causal set theory. Conversely, the conceptually exceptionally clear case of causal sets is used as a foil to illustrate how a (...) mathematically informed rigorous conceptualization of structure serves to identify structures in physical theories. Furthermore, a number of technical issues infesting structuralist interpretations of physical theories such as difficulties with grounding the identity of the places of highly symmetrical physical structures in their relational profile and what may resolve these difficulties can be vividly illustrated with causal sets. (shrink)

It is often argued that higher-level special-science properties cannot be causally efficacious since the lower-level physical properties on which they supervene are doing all the causal work. This claim is usually derived from an exclusion principle stating that if a higher-level property F supervenes on a physical property F* that is causally sufficient for a property G, then F cannot cause G. We employ an account of causation as difference-making to show that the truth or falsity of this principle is (...) a contingent matter and derive necessary and sufficient conditions under which a version of it holds. We argue that one important instance of the principle, far from undermining non-reductive physicalism, actually supports the causal autonomy of certain higher-level properties. (shrink)

I argue that free will and determinism are compatible, even when we take free will to require the ability to do otherwise and even when we interpret that ability modally, as the possibility of doing otherwise, and not just conditionally or dispositionally. My argument draws on a distinction between physical and agential possibility. Although in a deterministic world only one future sequence of events is physically possible for each state of the world, the more coarsely defined state of an agent (...) and his or her environment can be consistent with more than one such sequence, and thus different actions can be “agentially possible”. The agential perspective is supported by our best theories of human behaviour, and so we should take it at face value when we refer to what an agent can and cannot do. On the picture I defend, free will is not a physical phenomenon, but a higher-level one on a par with other higher-level phenomena such as agency and intentionality. (shrink)

Since a couple of decades, the notion of a precautionary principle plays a central and increasingly influential role in international as well as national policy and regulation regarding the environment and the use of technology. Urging society to take action in the face of potential risks of human activities in these areas, the recent focus on climate change has further sharpened the importance of this idea. However, the idea of a precautionary principle has also been problematised and criticised by scientists, (...) scholars and policy activists, and been accused of almost every intellectual sin imaginable: unclarity, impracticality, arbitrariness and moral as well as political unsoundness. In that light, the very idea of precaution as an ideal for policy making rather comes out as a dead end. On the basis of these contrasting starting points, Christian Munthe undertakes an innovative, in-depth philosophical analysis of what the idea of a precautionary principle is and should be about. A novel theory of the ethics of imposing risks is developed and used as a foundation for defending the idea of precaution in environmental and technological policy making against its critics, while at the same time avoiding a number of identified flaws. The theory is shown to have far-reaching consequences for areas such as bio-, information- and nuclear technology, and global environmental policy in areas such as climate change. The author argues that, while the price we pay for precaution must not be too high, we have to be prepared to pay it in order to act ethically defensible. A number of practical suggestions for precautionary regulation and policy making are made on the basis of this, and some challenges to basic ethical theory as well as consumerist societies, the global political order and liberal democracy are identified. (shrink)

This book examines the epistemic function of perception and the relation between language and conceptual thought, and provides new ways of conceptualizing the Buddhist defense of the reflexivity thesis of consciousness: namely, that each cognitive event is to be understood as involving a pre-reflective implicit awareness of its own occurrence.

Defining ‘presentism’ in a way that saves it from being trivially false yet metaphysically substantively distinct from eternalism is no mean feat, as the first part of this collection testifies. In Wuthrich (forthcoming), I have offered an attempt to achieve just this, arguing that this is best done in the context of modern spacetime theories. Here, I shall refrain from going through all the motions again and simply state the characterization of an ersatzist version of presentism as it has emerged (...) from considerations there. Any acceptable formulation of presentism should remain neutral among competing spacetime theories in order to enable the present project of assessing the compatibility of presentism with various theories of modern physics, including both spacetime theories and theories of physical processes situated in a spatiotemporal setting. (shrink)

Despite the prevalence of human rights discourse, the very idea or concept of a human right remains obscure. In particular, it is unclear what is supposed to be special or distinctive about human rights. In this paper, we consider two recent attempts to answer this challenge, James Griffin’s “personhood account” and Charles Beitz’s “practice-based account”, and argue that neither is entirely satisfactory. We then conclude with a suggestion for what a more adequate account might look like – what we call (...) the “structural pluralist account” of human rights. (shrink)

The aim of the paper is to illuminate some core aspects of Leibniz’s conception of judgement and its place in his conception of the mind. In particular, the paper argues for three claims: First, the act of judgement is at the centre of Leibniz’s conception of the mind in that minds strive at actualising innate knowledge concerning derivative truths, where the actualising involves an act of judgement. Second, Leibniz does not hold a judgement account of predication, but a two-component account (...) that distinguishes between predication and alethic evaluation. Third, Leibniz understands the act of affirmative judgement in terms of establishing active dispositions, i.e. strivings, to make reasons available for future reasoning that aims at answering whether-questions. Correspondingly, he understands the act of negative judgement in terms of establishing dispositions to ban propositions from future reasoning that aims at answering whether-questions. In the final analysis, the acts of affirmative as well as of negative judgement turn out to be acts of changing memory dispositions. (shrink)

Can we design a perfect democratic decision procedure? Condorcet famously observed that majority rule, our paradigmatic democratic procedure, has some desirable properties, but sometimes produces inconsistent outcomes. Revisiting Condorcet’s insights in light of recent work on the aggregation of judgments, I show that there is a conflict between three initially plausible requirements of democracy: “robustness to pluralism”, “basic majoritarianism”, and “collective rationality”. For all but the simplest collective decision problems, no decision procedure meets these three requirements at once; at most (...) two can be met together. This “democratic trilemma” raises the question of which requirement to give up. Since different answers correspond to different views about what matters most in a democracy, the trilemma suggests a map of the “logical space” in which different conceptions of democracy are located. It also sharpens our thinking about other impossibility problems of social choice and how to avoid them, by capturing a core structure many of these problems have in common. More broadly, it raises the idea of “cartography of logical space” in relation to contested political concepts. (shrink)

Artificial intelligence represents a key technology being inbuilt into evermore products. Research investigating attitudes towards artificial intelligence surprisingly is still scarce, although it becomes apparent that artificial intelligence will shape societies around the globe. To better understand individual differences in attitudes towards artificial intelligence, the present study investigated in n = 351 participants associations between the Affective Neuroscience Personality Scales (ANPS) and the Attitudes towards Artificial Intelligence framework (ATAI). It could be observed that in particular higher levels of SADNESS were (...) associated with higher negative attitudes towards AI (fearing AI). The findings are discussed in this work from an evolutionary perspective because primary emotional systems—according to Affective Neuroscience Theory—represent tools for survival, which have been homologously conserved across mammalian species including homo sapiens. (shrink)

A journey surveying the land of space, time and motion Content Type Journal Article Category Book Review Pages 1-4 DOI 10.1007/s11016-011-9575-8 Authors Christian Wüthrich, University of California, San Diego, 9500 Gilman Drive, La Jolla, CA 92093-0119, USA Journal Metascience Online ISSN 1467-9981 Print ISSN 0815-0796.

This is a review of Andrei Marmor's book "Foundations of Institutional Reality", Oxford University Press, 2023.

The Euthyphro Dilemma is named after a particular exchange between Socrates and Euthyphro in Plato‟s dialogue Euthyphro. In a famous passage, Socrates asks, “Is the pious loved by the gods because it is pious, or is it pious because it is loved by the gods?” (Plato 1981: 10a), and proceeds to advance arguments which clearly favor the first of these two options (see PLATO). The primary interest in the Euthyphro Dilemma over the years, however, has primarily concerned the relationship between (...) God and morality in the monotheistic religious tradition, where God is taken to be omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent, having created the universe initially and still actively involved in it today. But as we will see at the end of this entry, there has also been a recent surge of interest in a version of the Dilemma which applies to so-called response-dependent accounts of normative properties in meta-ethics. (shrink)

In this paper we explore what sacrifices you are morally required to make to save a child who is about to die in front of you. It has been argued that you would have very demanding duties to save such a child (or any adult who is in similar circumstance through no fault of their own, for that matter), and some examples have been presented to make this claim seem intuitively correct. Against this, we argue that you do not in (...) general have a moral requirement to bear more than moderate cost to save even a child who is just in front of you. Moreover, we explain why you have a much more demanding moral requirement in certain cases by appealing to the notions of undue risk and cost sharing. (shrink)

Integrity is one of the leading normative concepts employed in our society. We frequently talk about the degree of integrity of community leaders and famous historical figures, and we highly value integrity in our elected public officials. But philosophers have had a difficult time arriving at consensus about what integrity consists in. Some claim that it is a purely formal relation of consistency, others that it has to do primarily with one‟s identity, and still others that it involves subjective or (...) objective moral requirements. The primarily goal here is to outline the leading facets of integrity in the contemporary philosophical literature. (shrink)

This essay is a critical assessment of Sellars' interpretation and criticism of Descartes. It argues that Sellars made several mistakes in his view of Descartes, although the general thrust of his critique is sound.

To study how populist sentiments have increasingly influenced businesses in society, we examine how German and Swedish corporations addressed the refugee situation in their 2015 and 2016 annual reports. We find that corporations changed their communication once refugee migration became subjected to populist political sentiments, but that they did so without subscribing to those sentiments. Although populism is based on such sharp oppositions as welcoming refugees or closing borders, our analysis shows that corporations have found ways to communicate about the (...) refugee migration beyond these oppositions. Rather than taking a political stance, the corporations studied have primarily articulated the refugee situation as it pertains to their business operations. We identify four modes of articulation: the refugee as someone needing international aid, as a factor for economic analysis, as a benefit recipient, or as a potential stakeholder. These findings help nuance our understanding of how corporations navigate contested political issues. (shrink)

The goal of this article is to outline a new account of the virtue of patience. To help build the account, we focus on five important issues pertaining to patience: (i) goals and time, (ii) emotion, (iii) continence versus virtue, (iv) motivation, and (v) good ends. The heart of the resulting account is that patience is a cross-situational and stable disposition to react, both internally and externally, to slower than desired progress toward goal achievement with a reasonable level of calmness. (...) The article ends with an application of the account to better understanding the vices associated with patience. (shrink)

Firms operating in developing economies are increasingly expected to implement CSR practices aligned with recognized global standards. Drawing on extensive field study data in four Latin American countries, we contribute to business ethics scholarship by making visible and explaining firm shortcomings across social, environmental, and governance goals and activities of CSR. Building on and extending sensemaking literature, we find that leaders and managers responsible for their firms’ CSR activities make sense of and justify CSR shortcomings. We specify that justification based (...) on individual, organizational/industry, and macro-environmental influences serves as a mechanism that decouples firms’ actual CSR practices from recognized CSR standards. Further, we propose that detachment, involving disconnection from the local operating environment, underlies the CSR shortcomings of firms. We develop a theoretical multi-level model that specifies justification as a mechanism and detachment as an underlying driver of CSR shortcomings. (shrink)

In this paper, I hope to provide an account of the conditions of moral realism whereby there are still significant metaphysical commitments made by the realist which set the view apart as a distinct position in the contemporary meta-ethical landscape. In order to do so, I will be appealing to a general account of what it is for realism to be true in any domain of experience, whether it be realism about universals, realism about unobservable scientific entities, realism about artifacts, (...) and so forth. (shrink)

In a number of recent papers, I have begun to develop a new theory of character which is conceptually distinct both from traditional Aristotelian accounts as well as from the positive view of local traits outlined by John Doris. On my view, many human beings do have robust traits of character which play an important explanatory and predictive role, but which are triggered by certain situational variables which preclude them from counting as genuine Aristotelian virtues. Like others in this discussion, (...) I have focused on helping behavior in particular, and have gone on to argue that much of the social psychology literature is compatible with this new approach. The goal of this paper is to develop the model as it pertains to helping behavior further by examining how helping-relevant traits can serve as impediments to helping behavior. (shrink)

The Buddhist philosophical investigation of the elements of existence and/or experience (or dharmas) provides the basis on which Dignāga, Dharmakīrti, and their followers deliberate on such topics as the ontological status of external objects and the epistemic import of perceptual states of cognitive awareness. In this essay I will argue that the Buddhist epistemologists, insofar as they accord perception a privileged epistemic status, share a common ground with phenomenologists in the tradition of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, who contend that perception is (...) best understood as bearing intentional content. On this phenomenological account of intentionality, to perceive an object (or to have a perceptual experience) is to apprehend an intentional relation: whether the object intended in perception (the one the perception is of) is real is less important than how it is intended. Indeed, the central feature of intentionality is that it reveals the co-constitutive nature of perception and that which is perceived; as such, it discloses the world rather than attempting to establish a relationship to a discrete, ‘external’ world. I will begin by offering an overview of Dignāga and Dharmakīrti's account of perception and intentionality, focusing on the epistemic role of svasaṃvitti ("self-awareness," "self-cognition") as a dual aspect cognition. Then, I will briefly discuss three dominant accounts of the relation between perception and phenomenal content in contemporary philosophy (drawing from the work of Dennett, Dreyfus, O'Regan and Noë, and Zahavi, among others). Finally, I will offer several reasons why the Buddhist epistemologists, along with Western phenomenologists, are justified in asserting that direct perception opens up a domain of phenomenal experience that is prior to our conceptualizing and theorizing about it. (shrink)

We live today in the first global system of sovereign states in history, encompassing all of the world's polities, peoples, religions and civilizations. Christian Reus-Smit presents a new account of how this system came to be, one in which struggles for individual rights play a central role. The international system expanded from its original European core in five great waves, each involving the fragmentation of one or more empires into a host of successor sovereign states. In the most important, (...) associated with the Westphalian settlement, the independence of Latin America, and post-1945 decolonization, the mobilization of new ideas about individual rights challenged imperial legitimacy, and when empires failed to recognize these new rights, subject peoples sought sovereign independence. Combining theoretical innovation with detailed historical case studies, this book advances a new understanding of human rights and world politics, with individual rights deeply implicated in the making of the global sovereign order. (shrink)

We treat the problem of reasoning with ambiguous propositions. Even though ambiguity is obviously problematic for reasoning, it is no less obvious that ambiguous propositions entail other propositions, and are entailed by other propositions. This article gives a formal analysis of the underlying mechanisms, both from an algebraic and a logical point of view. The main result can be summarized as follows: sound reasoning with ambiguity requires a distinction between equivalence on the one and congruence on the other side: the (...) fact that \ entails \ does not imply \ can be substituted for \ in all contexts preserving truth. Without this distinction, we will always run into paradoxical results. We present the sequent calculus \, which we conjecture implements sound and complete propositional reasoning with ambiguity, and provide it with a language-theoretic semantics, where letters represent unambiguous meanings and concatenation represents ambiguity. (shrink)

Statements’ rated truth increases when people encounter them repeatedly. Processing fluency is a central variable to explain this truth effect. However, people experience processing fluency positively, and these positive experiences might cause the truth effect. Three studies investigated positivity and fluency influences on the truth effect. Study 1 found correlations between elicited positive feelings and rated truth. Study 2 replicated the repetition-based truth effect, but positivity did not influence the effect. Study 3 conveyed positive and negative correlations between positivity and (...) truth in a learning phase. We again replicated the truth effect, but positivity only influenced judgments for easy statements in the learning phase. Thus, across three studies, we found positivity effects on rated truth, but not on the repetition-based truth effect: We conclude that positivity does not explain the standard truth effect, but the role of positive experiences for truth judgments deserves further investigation. (shrink)

This volume brings together a range of influential essays by distinguished philosophers and political theorists on the issue of global justice. Global justice concerns the search for ethical norms that should govern interactions between people, states, corporations and other agents acting in the global arena, as well as the design of social institutions that link them together. The volume includes articles that engage with major theoretical questions such as the applicability of the ideals of social and economic equality to the (...) global sphere, the degree of justified partiality to compatriots, and the nature and extent of the responsibilities of the affluent to address global poverty and other hardships abroad. It also features articles that bring the theoretical insights of global justice thinkers to bear on matters of practical concern to contemporary societies, such policies associated with immigration, international trade, and climate change. -/- Contents: Introduction; Part I Standards of Global Justice: (i) Assistance-Based Responsibilities to the Global Poor: Famine, affluence and mortality, Peter Singer; We don't owe them a thing! A tough-minded but soft-hearted view of aid to the faraway needy, Jan Narveson; Does distance matter morally to the duty to rescue? Frances Myrna Kamm. (ii) Contribution-Based Responsibilities to the Global Poor: 'Assisting' the global poor, Thomas Pogge; Should we stop thinking about poverty in terms of helping the poor?, Alan Patten; Poverty and the moral significance of contribution, Gerhard Øverland. (iii)Cosmopolitans, Global Egalitarians, and its Critics: The one and the many faces of cosmopolitanism, Catherine Lu; Cosmopolitan justice and equalizing opportunities, Simon Caney; The problem of global justice, Thomas Nagel; Against global egalitarianism, David Miller; Egalitarian challenges to global egalitarianism: a critique, Christian Barry and Laura Valentini. Part II Pressing Global Socioeconomic Issues: (i) Governing the Flow of People: Immigration and freedom of association, Christopher Wellman; Democratic theory and border coercion: no right to unilaterally control your own borders, Arash Abizadeh; Justice in migration: a closed borders utopia?, Lea Ypi. (ii) Climate Change: Global environment and international inequality, Henry Shue; Valuing policies in response to climate change: some ethical issues, John Broome; Saved by disaster? Abrupt climate change, political inertia, and the possibility of an intergenerational arms race, Stephen M. Gardiner; Polycentric systems for coping with collective action and global environmental change, Elinor Ostrom. (iii) International Trade: Responsibility and global labor justice, Iris Marion Young; Property rights and the resource curse, Leif Wenar; Fairness in trade I: obligations arising from trading and the pauper-labor argument, Mathias Risse; Name index. -/- See: www.ashgate.com/default.aspx?page=637&calctitle=1&pageSubject=483&sort=pubdate&forthcoming=1&title_i d=9958&edition_id=13385. (shrink)

States and other climate actors now commonly set ‘net zero’ targets – pledging that, by a certain date, they will put no more carbon into the atmosphere than they take out. However, there is controversy over what exactly should count as attaining such targets. The method of emissions accounting that states currently use – territorial emissions accounting – is often criticized as problematic, but a fully satisfactory explanation of the problem is needed. We argue that the key both to understanding (...) the problem and to solving it is that there is a specific kind of cooperative contribution – a mereological contribution – that a national net zero commitment needs to make to global climate action in order to meet the standards that global citizens should hold states to. On this basis, we propose an alternative method – Contributory Value-Chain Accounting – showing how it can be qualified to reflect trade relationships between net-zero-aligned countries, and defending it against the objections that it involves double counting, is infeasible and too informationally demanding, and that it would send the wrong incentive signals. (shrink)

In recent years it has often been claimed that policies such as subsidies paid to domestic producers by affluent countries and tariffs on goods produced by foreign producers in poorer countries violate important moral requirements because they do severe harm to poor people, even kill them. Such claims involve an empirical aspect—such policies are on balance very bad for the global poor—and a philosophical aspect—that the causal influence of these policies can fairly be characterized as doing severe harm and killing. (...) In this essay, we examine the philosophical aspect of this issue. We conclude that these policies do not do harm to the poor, but rather enable harm to them in various ways, and explore the moral implications of this fact. (shrink)

In this paper, I analyse Émilie Du Châtelet’s (1706–49) account of causation which, in turn, is crucial for understanding her philosophical main work, the Institutions de physique (1740/1742). So far, the topic of causation in Du Châtelet’s thought has received but little attention despite its importance. I will show that Du Châtelet’s account of physical causation is that of physical influx much in line with the position taken by some of the most prominent eighteenth-century German metaphysicians at the time of (...) the publication of her Institutions: Martin Knutzen (1713–49), Johann Peter Reusch (1691–1758) and the pre-Critical Immanuel Kant (1724–1804). I will argue that physical influx takes place at the level of simple substances or physical monads, and I will defend my interpretation against the main objection to physical influx: that it conflicts with Leibniz’s non-transfer argument. The ultimate metaphysical details regarding how physical influx has to be understood remain an issue, that of understanding the causality of the cause. This, however, is an issue that other causal theories face, too (in their own way). (shrink)

This paper discusses the accounts of self-cultivation and self-denial of Archibald Campbell (1691–1756). It analyses how he attempts to make room for moral self-improvement and for the control of the passions in a thoroughly egoistic psychological framework, and with a theory of moral motivation that focuses on a specific kind of self-love, namely the desire for esteem. Campbell's views are analysed in the context of his criticisms of both Francis Hutcheson's benevolence-based moral philosophy and of Bernard Mandeville's version of an (...) egoistic psychology. The paper explores the key role of Campbell's distinction between true and mistaken self-love, and it discusses how his account of self-cultivation reflects both his optimistic view of human nature as being naturally disposed to virtue and his moral rehabilitation of self-love – two points on which he is in conflict with the period's orthodox Calvinism. (shrink)

Gott ist schon seit Nietzsche tot? aber was ist mit dem Teufel? Woher kommt er, wie hat er seine bekannte Gestalt angenommen, und warum kann auch er nichts weiter als ein Produkt menschlicher Abstraktion sein? Erstmals in der Historie der Philosophie wird die Vermenschlichung des Teufels umfassend und interdisziplinär aufgeschlüsselt, um ihn als das zu entschleiern, was er ist: eine menschliche Kopfgeburt, die lediglich ein hässliches Abziehbild von uns selbst ist. Diese Erkenntnis mündet in den anthropologischen Adiabolismus, die anthropologische Teufelsverneinung: (...) Der Teufel ist nur die leere Hülle des ausgelagerten menschlich Bösen. Anhand vielfältiger Disziplinen wie Anthropologie, Theologie, Kunstgeschichte, Literatur und Volkskunde wird die riesige Anthropomorphismus-Matrix des Teufels religionsphilosophisch enthüllt. Von Feuerbachs wegweisender Religionskritik ausgehend weitet Matthias Christian Friedel den Blick auf Teufelsbilder der gesamten Religionsgeschichte und gelangt über die grossen Teufelscharaktere der Literatur bis zum Teufelsbild im wörtlichen Sinne: Den Abschluss seiner umfassenden Teufelsstudie bildet ein 57-seitiger Katalog, der mit vielen der bemerkenswertesten Teufelsabbildungen, von Blake und Doré bis Goethe, die Entstehungsgeschichte unserer heutigen Vorstellungswelt illustriert. (shrink)

In his famous monadological metaphysics, Leibniz distinguishes between simple monads, animal monads, and rational monads or minds. This tripartite metaphysical distinction is mirrored by his discrimination between cognitive performances these three types of monads are capable of. Simple monads perceive; animal monads additionally remember, sense, and mimic reasoning by associating mental images; rational monads, furthermore, think, reflect on and know themselves, know eternal truths, and reason logically. This essay will focus on Leibniz's account of the cognitive performances of minds and (...) their relationship to those of animal monads. After Leibniz's notion of perception is introduced in section three, in section four the essay turns to his conception of sensation in animal monads. The following sections five to seven address the mental performances typical of minds and present Leibniz's conceptions of ideas, concepts, thoughts, apperception, sensation in rational monads, and conscientia. While at the beginning of the essay Leibniz's views get situated in the context of early modern philosophy of mind, especially as it relates to Descartes and the Aristotelian tradition, the essay concludes with a summary of the main innovations we find in his conception of cognition. (shrink)

How did Elijah Muhammad's establishment of the Nation of Islam affect the civil rights movement in the United States? Philosophers and Religious Leaders answers that question and others as it presents 200 leaders whose lives and work have greatly influenced the world we live in today. Profiles include: Muhammad Abduh—architect of Islamic modernism. Mary Daly— influential feminist theologian and philosopher. Mary Baker Eddy—founder of Christian Science. Mencius (Meng K'o)—Confucian moral philosopher and interpreter. Shang Yang—Chinese philosopher of legalist school.

This encyclopaedia entry studies the philosophy of Johann Christooh Sturm (1635 - 1704). Sturm was a philosopher, physicist, mathematician, and theologian. He corresponded with Leibniz and influenced Christian Wolff. This entry analyses Sturm's scientific method and his natural philosophy grounded in mechanism, occasionalism, and final causes. It shows Sturm's important role in seventeenth-century philosophy.

Karen Warren’s ecofeminism contends that the domination or subjugation of women is linked to the domination or subjugation of nature. This essay argues she is largely correct in her views on this subject, and certain dimensions of social science help establish this conclusion firmly. The paper begins by reviewing Warren’s position, and one line of criticism of it, to clarify the interpretation of her work that informs this commentary. It then shows how developments in social science, especially regarding the concept (...) of “social dominance orientation,” validate Warren’s claim that women’s and nature’s oppression are connected, along with her contention that these connections entail elements of dualism, hierarchy, and domination. It concludes by examining two approaches to environmental issues found in the social science literature, and discusses what is problematic about one and promising about the other, ultimately highlighting the potential of interventions focused on connectedness to nature. (shrink)

In this paper, we challenge the usual argument which says that competition is a fair mechanism because it ranks individuals according to their relative preferences between effort and leisure. This argument, we claim, is very insufficient as a justification of fairness in competition, and we show that it does not stand up to scrutiny once various dynamic aspects of competition are taken into account. Once the sequential unfolding of competition is taken into account, competition turns out to be unfair even (...) if the usual fairness argument is upheld. We distinguish between two notions of fairness, which we call U-fairness, where ‘U’ stands for the ‘usual’ fairness notion, and S-fairness, where ‘S’ stands for the ‘sequential’ aspect of competition. The sequential unfairness of competition, we argue, comprises two usually neglected aspects connected with losses of freedom: first of all, there is an ‘eclipse’ of preferences in the sense that even perfectly calculating competitors do not carry out a trade-off between effort and ranking; and second, competitive dynamics leads to single-mindedness because the constraints on the competitors’ choices always operate in the sense of increased competitiveness and, therefore, in the direction of an increased effort requirements. We argue (1) that competition is S-unfair even if it is U-fair, (2) that as S-unfairness increases, the ethical relevance of U-fairness itself vanishes, so that (3) by focusing as they usually do on U-fairness alone, economists neglect a deeper aspect of unfairness. (shrink)