Carruthers argues that an integrated faculty of metarepresentation evolved for mindreading and was later exapted for metacognition. A more consistent application of his approach would regard metarepresentation in mindreading with the same skeptical rigor, concluding that the “faculty” may have been entirely exapted. Given this result, the usefulness of Carruthers’ line-drawing exercise is called into question.

The application of digital humanities techniques to philosophy is changing the way scholars approach the discipline. This paper seeks to open a discussion about the difficulties, methods, opportunities, and dangers of creating and utilizing a formal representation of the discipline of philosophy. We review our current project, the Indiana Philosophy Ontology (InPhO) project, which uses a combination of automated methods and expert feedback to create a dynamic computational ontology for the discipline of philosophy. We argue that our distributed, expert-based approach (...) to modeling the discipline carries substantial practical and philosophical benefits over alternatives. We also discuss challenges facing our project (and any other similar project) as well as the future directions for digital philosophy afforded by formal modeling. (shrink)

British photographer Julia Margaret Cameron (1815-1879) has been described as "one of the Finest portraitists of the nineteenth century-in any medium.

Ross P. Cameron argues that the flow of time is a genuine feature of reality. He suggests that the best version of the A-Theory is a version of the Moving Spotlight view, according to which past and future beings are real, but there is nonetheless an objectively privileged present. Cameron argues that the Moving Spotlight theory should be viewed as having more in common with Presentism than with the B-Theory. Furthermore, it provides the best account of truthmakers for (...) claims about what was or will be the case. Cameron goes on to defend an account of the open future, and argues that this is a better account than that available to the Growing Block theory. (shrink)

According to recently influential conceptions of public reasoning, citizens have the right to demand of each other ‘public justifications’ for controversial political action. On this view, only arguments that all reasonable citizens can affirm from within their diverse ethical standpoints can count as legitimate justifications for political action. Both proponents and critics often assume that the case for this expectation derives from the special justificatory burden created by the systematically coercive character of political action. This paper challenges that assumption. While (...) conceding that citizens who propose to deploy the coercive apparatus of the state to enforce controversial legislation owe their fellows a justification that overcomes the strong presumption against coercing agents, it denies that this consideration can explain why public justifications are also required. Having argued that the public justification requirement is not among the justification conditions for public coercion, the paper then proposes an alternative rationale for the expectation that political action be publicly justified. On this alternative, the case for the public justification requirement depends on democratic citizens’ standing as legislative co-authors, and not on considerations having to do with their liability as private individuals to coercion at the hands of the state. (shrink)

Efforts to resolve the tension within the Christian moral theological tradition between just war theory and pacifism have so far not produced any broadly accepted resolution. Key sticking points lie both in the fact that even a just war typically involves the taking of human life, both combatant and civilian, and that the distinction between intentional and unintentional killing, so important to Christian moral reflection, is difficult to sustain in practice. Yet, with the prospect of the development of effective non-lethal (...) weapons, the path may be opened up to a genuine resolution of the tension. This article describes in general terms the way that such a development might be pursued, but also argues that the use of non-lethal weaponry would necessitate a re-interpretation of warfare as an exercise in a form of international policing. A number of potential criticisms of such a proposal are considered. (shrink)

Colin Morris traces the origin of the concept of the individual, not to the Renaissance where it is popularly assumed to have been invented, but farther back, ...

This deep presence of Foucault’s influence across contemporary theoretical landscapes signals a need for self-reflectiveness that has largely (though not entirely) been missing in contemporary uses of Foucault. While scholarship in a Foucauldian vein is obviously alive and well, scholarship on Foucauldian methodology is not. This paper develops a distinction between two methodological features of Foucault’s work that deserve to be disentangled: I parse the methods (e.g., genealogy, archaeology) and concepts (e.g., discipline, biopower) featured in Foucault’s texts. Following this, I (...) use the terms of this distinction to develop a detailed survey of two quite different contemporary uses of Foucault. My two test cases for comparison are the works of Giorgio Agamben and Ian Hacking, two contemporary theorists who demonstrate a productive engagement with central features of Foucault’s work. (shrink)

ABSTRACTTomasi's case for “market democracy” stands or falls, not on its credentials as a genuinely “liberal” argument—a consideration to which he attaches undue importance—but on the plausibility of his arguments about the value of “self-authorship.” Free Market Fairness fails to explain adequately why self-authorship, as Tomasi construes it, is as normatively significant as he thinks it is, and why, even if it has that normative importance, citizens should agree that taking it seriously requires them to endorse his intended political recommendations. (...) Indeed, there are good reasons to think that a commitment to self-authorship supports Marxian, rather than liberal, conceptions of “economic liberty.”. (shrink)

There are various theses that go by the name ‘mereological essentialism’, but common to all is the thought that things have their parts essentially. The most obvious way of stating this is: for all objects x, for all parts y of x, x has y as a part in every world in which x exists. But there are various ways to read this claim.

Utilitarianism tells us that actions are morally right and good if and to the extent that they add to human happiness or diminish human unhappiness. And—or, perhaps, therefore—it also tells us that the best action a person can perform is that which of all the possible actions open to him is the one which makes the greatest positive difference to human happiness. Moreover, as everyone will also remember, utilitarianism further tries to tell us, perhaps intending it as a corollary of (...) that first, main claim, that the motive for an action has nothing to do with its moral rightness or goodness. But even if, as utilitarians, we accepted the dubious corollary, it would not follow, as many have thought, that utilitarians have no moral interest in motives. For unless, absurdly, a utilitarian believed either that there was never more than a fortuitous connection between on the one hand what we intended to do and on the other what we did and the consequences of what we did, or that, if there were such connections, we could not know of them, he must believe, as a moralist, that the best motive a person can have for performing an action is likely to be the desire to produce the happiest result. Indeed, utilitarians ought to be morally committed, it would seem, to trying to find out as much as they can about the consequences of our actions, e.g. what connections exist, if any, between how we raise children and what sort of adults they grow up to be. (shrink)

Mechanisms to engage lay citizens in science and technology are currently in vogue worldwide. While some engagement exercises aim to influence policy making, research suggests that they have had little discernable impacts in this regard. We explore the potentials and challenges of facilitating citizen engagement in nanotechnology from the “topdown,” addressing the following questions: Can academics and others within institutions initiate meaningful engagement with unorganized lay citizens from the top-down? Can they facilitate effective engagement among citizens, scientists, and policy makers (...) while building citizen engagement capacities? Is it possible to create independent bottom-up citizen engagement in scientific and technological issues from the top-down, and what are the challenges in doing so? Our experiences show that although academics can build citizens' individual, collective, and political capacities to engage with each other, scientists, and policy makers, this work is enormously time and energy intensive, and institutional support is needed to sustain it. (shrink)

In the maximal form of indirect development found in many taxa of marine invertebrates, embryonic cell lineages of fixed fate and limited division capacity give rise to the larval structures. The adult arises from set‐aside cells in the larva that are held out from the early embryonic specification processes, and that retain extensive proliferative capacity. We review the locations and fates of set‐aside cells in two protostomes, a lophophorate and a deuterostome. The distinct adult body plans of many phyla develop (...) from homologous set‐aside cells within homologous larvae. We argue that the stocks from which these phyla arose utilized these respective larvae, and the diversity of their adult body plans reflects diverse pattern formation processes executed in their set‐aside cell populations. Chordates and arthropods develop directly, but share adult characters with indirectly developing phyla. Thus the deuterostome and protostome stocks that were ancestral to chordates and arthropods, respectively, also utilized maximal indirect development. (shrink)

Current models of insulin binding to the insulin receptor (IR) propose (i) that there are two binding sites on the surface of insulin which engage with two binding sites on the receptor and (ii) that ligand binding involves structural changes in both the ligand and the receptor. Many of the features of insulin binding to its receptor, namely B‐chain helix interactions with the leucine‐rich repeat domain and A‐chain residue interactions with peptide loops from another part of the receptor, are also (...) seen in models of relaxin and insulin‐like peptide 3 binding to their receptors. We show that these principles can likely be extended to the group of mimetic peptides described by Schäffer and coworkers, which are reported to have no sequence identity with insulin. This review summarizes our current understanding of ligand‐induced activation of the IR and highlights the key issues that remain to be addressed. (shrink)

Anthony Brueckner has argued that claims about underdetermination of evidence are suppressed in closure-based scepticism (“The Structure of the Skeptical Argument”, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 54:4, 1994). He also argues that these claims about underdetermination themselves lead to a paradoxical sceptical argument—the underdetermination argument—which is more fundamental than the closure argument. If Brueckner is right, the status quo focus of some predominant anti-sceptical strategies may be misguided. In this paper I focus specifically on the relationship between these two arguments. I (...) provide support for Brueckner’s claim that the underdetermination argument is the more fundamental sceptical argument. I do so by responding to a challenge to this claim put forward by Stewart Cohen (“Two Kinds of Skeptical Argument”, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 58:1, 1998). Cohen invokes an alternative epistemic principle which he thinks can be used to challenge Brueckner. Cohen’s principle raises interesting questions about the relationship between evidential considerations and explanatory considerations in the context of scepticism about our knowledge of the external world. I explore these questions in my defence of Brueckner. (shrink)

The journey into the world of midwifery or nursing requires the student to attend to the intertwining of self-body-world in order to shift their knowledge of self-body-world into a client/patient-centered context. One of the teaching-learning strategies used to provide safe opportunities is the use of simulations and virtual practices. Rather than learning intimate acts of touching, or life and death decision-making in situations with actual clients/patients, students enter their learning world with rubber torsos, cloth babies, and cyber clinics. The “other” (...) is a simulated other, not a human. How does the student shift from seeing this simulated other as object to a sense of other as subject? In our world of constant use of technology for communication and entertainment, do students shift in and out of a cyber world easily or are they more captured by the simulated experience than with the human world? Has the human world redefined itself where the intertwining of self-body-world blurs the sense of where human body ends and cyber or simulated world begins? What is the place of Bildung when engaged with a cyber other? As a result of educational challenges, including rising enrolments, limited clinical placement opportunities, and increasing risk management concerns, there has been a proliferation in the use of simulation as a teaching strategy. This has left us –the authors– wondering about the student experience of simulation. What do they learn? How do they learn? How can this learning be applied in practice? (shrink)

Whatever fond hopes their author may have entertained when he published them, the Letters of the younger Pliny did not meet with an appreciative public. The first, indeed almost the only, writer before modern times to have read them with care and to have signalled his admiration by imitation is Sidonius Apollinaris, bishop of Auvergne in the late fifth century.

Philosophy of Mind in the Early and High Middle Ages provides an outstanding overview to a tumultuous 900-year period of discovery, innovation, and intellectual controversy that began with the Roman senator Boethius and concluded with the Franciscan theologian and philosopher John Duns Scotus. Relatively neglected in philosophy of mind, this volume highlights the importance of philosophers such as Abelard, Duns Scotus, and the Persian philosopher and polymath Avicenna to the history of philosophy of mind. Following an introduction by Margaret (...) class='Hi'>Cameron, twelve specially commissioned chapters by an international team of contributors discuss key topics, thinkers and debates, including: mental perception Avicenna and the intellectual abstraction of intelligibles Duns Scotus soul, will, and choice in Islamic and Jewish contexts perceptual experience the systematization of the passions the complexity of the soul and the problem of unity the phenomenology of immortality morality the self. Essential reading for students and researchers in philosophy of mind, medieval philosophy, and the history of philosophy, Philosophy of Mind in the Early and High Middle Ages is also a valuable resource for those in related disciplines such as Religion. (shrink)

Barresi & Moore (B&M) provide a useful tool for the comparative study of social cognition that could, however, be improved by more subtle analysis of first person information about intentional relations. Knowledge of misrepresentation also needs to be better handled within the theory. I urge skepticism about B&M's sweeping phylogenetic claims.

Volume 55, Issue 2, April 2024, Page 198-199.