"Is higher education a right, or a privilege? This author argues that all citizens in a free and open society should have an unconditional right to higher education. Such an education should be costless for the individual and open to everyone regardless of talent. A readiness and willingness to learn should be the only qualification. It should offer opportunities that benefit citizens with different interests and goals in life. And it should aim, as its foundational moral purpose, to help citizens (...) from all walks of life live better, freer lives. Using concepts and ideas from liberal political philosophy the author argues that access to educational goods and services is something to which all citizens have a right over a full life. Such goods, it is argued, play a key role in helping citizens realize self-determined goals. Higher education should therefore be understood a basic social institution responsible for ensuring that all citizens can access such 'autonomy-supporting' goods. The book examines the implication of this justification of the right to higher education for questions of educational justice, political authority, distributive justice, civic education, and personal autonomy"--. (shrink)

Many philosophers hold that for various reasons there must be psychological laws governing beliefs and desires. One of the few serious examples that they offer is the _belief-desire law_, which states, roughly, that _ceteris paribus_ people do what they believe will satisfy their desires. This paper argues that, in fact, there is no such law. In particular, decision theory does not support the contention that there is such a law.

Christopher Winch launches a vigorous Wittgensteinian attack on both the "romantic" Rousseauian and the "scientific" cognitivist traditions in learning theory. These two schools, he argues, are more closely related than is commonly realized.

Can the use of psychedelic drugs induce lasting changes in metaphysical beliefs? While it is popularly believed that they can, this question has never been formally tested. Here we exploited a large sample derived from prospective online surveying to determine whether and how beliefs concerning the nature of reality, consciousness, and free‑will, change after psychedelic use. Results revealed significant shifts away from ‘physicalist’ or ‘materialist’ views, and towards panpsychism and fatalism, post use. With the exception of fatalism, these changes endured (...) for at least 6 months, and were positively correlated with the extent of past psychedelic‑use and improved mental‑health outcomes. Path modelling suggested that the belief‑shifts were moderated by impressionability at baseline and mediated by perceived emotional synchrony with others during the psychedelic experience. The observed belief‑shifts post‑psychedelic‑use were consolidated by data from an independent controlled clinical trial. Together, these findings imply that psychedelic‑use may causally influence metaphysical beliefs—shifting them away from ‘hard materialism’. We discuss whether these apparent effects are contextually independent. (shrink)

This article questions a common reading of Section 230 of Beyond Good and Evil as containing a canonical statement of Nietzsche’s naturalism. The section cannot be read simply as the programmatic statement of an investigative task, and is relatively vague as to its nature. Nietzsche’s aim is aporetic. He presents the naturalist task as involving mental self-cruelty and a struggle with unconscious vanity, suggesting that thinkers have found no way to justify why they choose this task, unless they invoke self-descriptions (...) which are false and belong to a metaphysical conception of truth and inquiry that naturalism must resist. In the Genealogy, Nietzsche revisits this theme and announces his task as that of calling into question these justifications of naturalist inquiry. (shrink)

Heidegger's connection with Nazism is well known and has been exhaustively debated. But we need to understand better why Heidegger believed National Socialism to be the best cure for the ills of modern society. In this book Christopher Rickey examines the internal logic of Heidegger's ideas to explain how they led him to become a powerful critic of liberalism and a Nazi supporter. Key to Rickey's interpretation is the radically antinomian conception of religiosity he finds at the core of (...) Heidegger's challenge to modernity. Heidegger responds to the crisis of modernity with a philosophy attuned to the fundamental need for humans to live with the proper stance toward the divine. Inspired by Lutheran and mystical theology, Heidegger outlines an essentially religious conception of authentic human being. Like his radical Lutheran forerunners, Heidegger politicizes the radical strains of Luther's theology to create a potent revolutionary brew: the revolution of the saints. Rickey traces out the ways in which these currents fundamentally shape Heidegger's thought: the Lutheran background to his critique of modern science and the technological rationality it spawns; his transformation of Aristotle's prudential conception of practical wisdom into the total revelation of being that lays the basis for revolutionary political action; and his mystical and sectarian understanding of authentic community. Rickey shows how this political-theological vision forms the basis of Heidegger's concrete political action, and concludes with an analysis of the fundamental problems this vision poses to our political thinking today. (shrink)

This fully revised and updated edition of God, Humanity and the Cosmos is an essential companion to the field, with exercises for the student, a comprehensive bibliography, and suggestions for further reading.

Applied ethics is home to numerous productive subfields such as procreative ethics, intergenerational ethics and environmental ethics. By contrast, there is far less ethical work on ageing, and there is no boundary work that attempts to set the scope for ‘ageing ethics’ or the ‘ethics of ageing’. Yet ageing is a fundamental aspect of life; arguably even more fundamental and ubiquitous than procreation. To remedy this situation, I examine conceptions of what the ethics of ageing might mean and argue that (...) these conceptions fail to capture the requirements of the desired subfield. The key reasons for this are, first, that they view ageing as something that happens only when one is old, thereby ignoring the fact that ageing is a process to which we are all subject, and second that the ageing person is treated as an object in ethical discourse rather than as its subject. In response to these shortcomings I put forward a better conception, one which places the ageing person at the centre of ethical analysis, has relevance not just for the elderly and provides a rich yet workable scope. While clarifying and justifying the conceptual boundaries of the subfield, the proposed scope pleasingly broadens the ethics of ageing beyond common negative associations with ageing. (shrink)

In the United States, food banks served an estimated 46 million people in 2015. A combination of government policy reforms and political economic trends contributed to the rising numbers of individuals relying on private food assistance in the US, the United Kingdom and other high-income countries. Although researchers frequently map urban food environments, this project is one of the first to map private food assistance and potential need at the census-tract scale. We utilize Geographic Information Systems, demographic data, and food (...) assistance locations to develop a rapid assessment tool that could support food banks, pantries, soup kitchens, and government agencies that seek to answer the question of whether people with the greatest need have food distribution sites in close proximity. We define access based on distance and then calculate potential food insecurity using either poverty rates or a food insecurity index. We apply these methods in a case study analysis of Santa Clara County, California. Our findings suggest that food assistance distribution locations match the areas of potential need in more than 80% of urban census tracts. However, there are several potentially underserved locations and populations that could benefit from new food assistance operations. The poverty and index-based approaches show significant spatial overlap in mapped areas of high food insecurity and low access. The poverty only approach produces a higher estimate of food insecurity rates, is easier to calculate, and draws attention to the need to address poverty as a root cause of hunger. (shrink)

Extinction is usually associated with the death of the last remaining individual of a species, taxon, or population of organisms. Here I ask the question of whether extinction might also be applied to cases where individuals of the relevant category remain alive. Global impacts in the Anthropocene suggest extinction may be broader than typically thought. Technologies available in the emerging ‘synthetic age’ alter taxa in ways that may appropriately be characterized as extinction. The core of the more traditional account of (...) extinction remains valuable. Losing the last few individuals of a taxon matters. But emerging types of loss may demand a broader understanding of extinction. This broader understanding could capture more of what humans are doing to the biosphere. (shrink)

The convergence of India’s rich cultural and religious heritage with its rapidly transforming economy provides a unique opportunity to understand how senior executives navigate the demands of the business environment within the context of their religious convictions. Forty senior executives with varying religious backgrounds and global responsibilities within Indian multinational corporations participated in this study. Drawing from virtue ethics theory and using systematic content analysis, several themes emerged for ethical virtues. The analysis illustrates how these deeply seated ethical virtues helped (...) to form and refine these executives’ ethical mindsets via guiding principles such as an ethical culture, environment, molding, education, commitment and leadership. In turn, these ethical mindsets influenced the executives’ ethical decision-making processes. We find that these executives’ ethical virtues and mindsets are inspired by their religious backgrounds. In summary, a very complex mental tug-of-war appears to take place as these executives rationalize and negotiate unethical circumstances while being cognizant of personal religious beliefs. We contend that in a pluralistic multi-faith society such as India, it is critical for corporations to align the virtues of its senior executives with those of the corporation so that virtues are applied consistently when dealing with various stakeholders. The findings present several theoretical and practical implications, which are discussed. (shrink)

This paper introduces the ontology of Emergent Dualism, which takes the position that the elementary stuff of everything in the universe is energy, that this energy can become structured into a series of levels of emergent organization whose operating principles are not derivable from the previous levels, that one of these levels is the concatenations of neural processes called brains, that brains have some particular emergent process that gives rise to subjective experience from the internal viewpoint of that process, and (...) that the private, subjective property of this emergent process entails a dualistic philosophical treatment of its analysis. Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE. (shrink)

Hope is important in Thomas Aquinas’s account of the emotions: it is one of the four primary emotions and the first of the irascible emotions. Yet his account of hope as a movement of the sensory appetite toward a future possible good that is arduous to attain appears to be overly restrictive, for people often hope for things that are not cognized as arduous. This paper examines Aquinas’s reasons for limiting hope to arduous goods.

An evaluation of a health condition-specific hope scale adapted from the more general dispositional Hope Scale (Snyder et al., 1991) is provided. Participants (N = 202) with a rare, debilitating, and potentially stigmatising health condition were recruited from readers of the Anal Fissure Self Help Page. Data were gathered anonymously using an online survey linked to the website. Consistent with hope theory, this new measure yielded a pathways factor (perceived capacity to find ways to achieve desired goals) and an (...) agency factor (perceived motivation to pursue goals energetically). Respondents with stronger pathways thoughts reported greater benefits from website information for understanding and generating strategies for managing anal fissures. Stronger agency beliefs were related to more frequent website visits, more rereading of first-hand patient accounts, and shorter duration of fissure symptoms. Results offer preliminary support for validity of this scale and for using web-based methodologies to study conditions, such as anal fissure. (shrink)

first-order HMM, the current tag t0 is predicted based on the previous tag t−1 (and the current word).1 The back- We present a new part-of-speech tagger that ward interaction between t0 and the next tag t+1 shows demonstrates the following ideas: (i) explicit up implicitly later, when t+1 is generated in turn. While unidirectional models are therefore able to capture both use of both preceding and following tag con-.

Liberal environmentalism, or green politics, intends to Dind a compromise between the prevailing global economic order and the need to protect the environment. The idea of sustainability, introduced in the Rio Summit, is the central component of international climate agreements. But on closer analysis, it can be argued that the problem of climate change is rooted in a neo-liberal system in which corporate interests collude with state policies. The free market is one of the fundamental causes of the systematic destruction (...) of the environment. Big corporations, so motivated by proDit, cannot be trusted to absorb the huge social costs of environmental degradation. For this reason, the use of indigenous wisdom is proposed to balance our way of life and environmental preservation. The study argues that climate justice would require dismantling an exploitative economic order to avert the existential threat from changing climactic patterns. (shrink)

Karen Ng's Hegel's Concept of Life tackles one of the hardest problems – the placement and status of the category of life within treatises on epistemology and logic—within what are already two of the most difficult texts in the history of philosophy—Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit and Science of Logic. It does so with good attention to contemporary debates surrounding Hegel's logic and metaphysics, and manages to integrate concerns that have been more typically expressed in continental scholarship—such as the influence of (...) Schelling and Hölderlin—with concerns that have come out of the more recent analytic conversation – such as the status of universals and the attributability of inferentialism to Hegel's thought. Ng argues for a distinctive kind of post‐Kantian reading of Hegel, one which emphasizes Hegel's interests in Kant's thoughts about judgment and teleology in the third Critique rather than the categories and dialectic of the first Critique. In the first section, I want to trace a tension in Ng's thought between inflationary and deflationary understandings of ‘life’ and its associated terms. Here I will try to make out the relevant concept of life that makes the living object the promising form of a richer object of judgment for a self‐conscious subject. In the following section, I try to tease out the relation of life to two very closely related notions, namely the notion of an organism and the notion of a purpose. (shrink)