Duress is a defense in both law and morality. The bank teller who provides an armed robber with the bank vault combination, the innocent suspect who fabricates a story after hours of interrogation, the Good Samaritan who breaks into a private cabin in the woods to save a stranded hiker, and the father who drives at high speed to rush his injured child to the hospital—in deciding how to respond to agents like these, we should take into account that they (...) have acted under duress. In this paper, I offer a new duress defense, which I call “distinctive duress.” The distinctive-duress defense is neither ordinary justification nor ordinary excuse. Rather, it is a defense available to agents who act wrongly because they are appropriately insensitive to certain reasons. In the distinctive-duress cases, an agent’s normative sensitivities are rightly directed elsewhere, leading them awry. (shrink)

Throughout this century many philosophers and physicists have gone for thc ‘big ki11’ regarding tenses. They have tried to show via McTaggart’s paradox and special relativity that tcnscs arc logically and physically impossible, rcspcctivcly. Ncithcr attempt succccds, though as I argue, both lcavc their mark. In thc iirst two sections of thc paper I introduce some conceptual difficulties for the tensed theory of time. The next section then discusses the standing 0f tenses in light of special relativity, cspccially rcccnt work (...) by Stcin on thc topic. I argue that, Stcin’s possibility thcorcm notwithstanding, special relativity is inconsistent with any philosophicully interesting conception of tense. Finally, I search for help for tenses in the broader context of quantum theory, Lorcntzian interpretations 0f time dilation/length contraction, and gcncral relativistic spacctimcs. I suggest that these avenues d0 not provide tenses the home for which some have hoped. (shrink)

This article argues that most of the approaches to the foundations of statistical mechanics have severed their link with the original foundational project, the project of demonstrating how real mechanical systems can behave thermodynamically.

We describe a model of iterated belief revision that extends the AGM theory of revision to account for the effect of a revision on the conditional beliefs of an agent. In particular, this model ensures that an agent makes as few changes as possible to the conditional component of its belief set. Adopting the Ramsey test, minimal conditional revision provides acceptance conditions for arbitrary right-nested conditionals. We show that problem of determining acceptance of any such nested conditional can be reduced (...) to acceptance tests for unnested conditionals. Thus, iterated revision can be accomplished in a "virtual" manner, using uniterated revision. (shrink)

In this paper, I seek to advance the thesis that if we are to come to a better appreciation of the historical rootedness of philosophical thinking, we must strive to encourage the contextualization of philosophical texts and support this goal by developing methods and tools for research that are facilitative of this contextualist goal.

In 2017, Empedocles: European Journal for the Philosophy of Communication published an article by Adrian Pablé, an integrationist linguist, which considers the contribution that Roy Harris’ theory of sign can make to communication theory in terms of the constitutive metamodel of communication theory. This brief response to that contribution concludes that integrationism is a useful but limited perspective and that its claim to exclusive validity should be rejected by communication theorists.

John Milbank appropriates John Ruskin as part of his "Augustinian" tradition. Milbank's selective reading, however, omits Ruskin's fixed hierarchies as well as his acknowledgment of conflict in economic life. Neither of these ideas fits the social aesthetics of harmony and difference that Milbank claims is unique to Christian theology. While Milbank's strictly theoretical portrait of theology gains critical force from Ruskin's robust account of social practices and just exchange, Milbank lacks effective historical and institutional responses to the problems in Ruskin's (...) corpus. This deficiency undermines Milbank's dichotomy between theology and secular reason. (shrink)

What grounds the standard claim that classical mechanics is time-reversal invariant? Hutchison (1993, 1995) challenges the conventional reasoning underlying the belief that classical mechanics is time reversal invariant and argues that it is not in any well-defined sense. I find a defensible criterion that will exclude his cases, thereby rescuing a sense in which we can say that classical mechanics is time reversal invariant.

This paper searches for an explicit expression of the so-called problem of the direction of time. I argue that the traditional version of the problem is an artifact of a mistaken view in the foundations of statistical mechanics, and that to the degree it is a problem, it is really one general to all the special sciences. I then search the residue of the traditional problem for any remaining difficulty particular to time's arrow and find that there is a special (...) puzzle for some types of scientific realist. (shrink)

God is conceived in the Western theistic tradition to be both the Creator and Conservor of the universe. These two roles were typically classed as different aspects of creation, originating creation and continuing creation. On pain of incoherence, however, conservation needs to be distinguished from creation. Contrary to current analyses (such as Philip Quinn's), creation should be explicated in terms of God's bringing something into being, while conservation should be understood in terms of God's preservation of something over an interval (...) of time. The crucial difference is that while conservation presupposes an object of the divine action, creation does not. Such a construal has significant implications for a tensed theory of time. (shrink)

One of the principal objections to a tensed or dynamic theory of time is the ancient puzzle about the extent of the present. Three alternative conceptions of the extent of the present are considered: an instantaneous present, an atomic present, and a non-metrical present. The first conception is difficult to reconcile with the objectivity of temporal becoming posited by a dynamic theory of time. The second conception solves that problem, but only at the expense of making change discontinuous. The third (...) conception is the most plausible: that "the present" is a non-metrical notion which must be completed by the mention of some event or interval in order to have a measure, in which case what is present varies with one's context. (shrink)

Barrow and Tipler’s contention that the Anthropic Principle is obviously true and removes the need for an explanation of fine-tuning fails because the Principle is trivially true, and only within the context of a World Ensemble, whose existence is not obvious, does a selection effect become significant. Their objections to divine design as an explanation of fine-tuning are seen to be misconceived.

The Internet is rapidly developing into an important medium of communication in modem society, and both psychological research and therapeutic interventions are being increasingly conducted using this new communication medium. As therapeutic interventions using the Internet are becoming more prevalent, it is becoming increasingly important to conduct research on psychotherapeutic Internet interventions to assist in the development of an appropriate standard of practice regarding interventions using this new medium. In this article, we examine the Internet and the current psychological uses (...) which are being initiated using this medium. Ethical concerns related to the psychological use of the Internet are discussed, and guidelines are proposed for the conduct of Internet intervention research. (shrink)

Onc of thc problems of quantnun cosmology follows from thc fact that thc Hamiltonian H of classical general relativity equals zero. Quantizing canonically in thc Schrodinger picture, thc Schrodinger equation for thc wave function *1* of thc universe is thcreforc thc so-called Whcelc:r—DeWitt..

In this article, I present a contractualist conception of human-participant research ethics, arguing that the most appropriate source of the rights and responsibilities of researcher and participant is the contractual understanding between them. This conception appears to explain many of the more fundamental ethical incidents of human-participant research. I argue that a system of contractual rights and responsibilities would allow a great deal of research that has often been felt to be ethically problematic, such as research involving deception, concealed research, (...) and research on dependent populations. However, in defining the conditions under which such research should be permissible, my contractualist theory also makes it clear that there are limits-and explains what those limits are-to the propriety of such research. (shrink)

Faced with a minimally participatory democracy, a variety of populists have sought to revitalize popular political participation by strengthening local community mobilizations. Others have called for reliance on frequent referenda. Assessing the limits of these proposals requires theoretical attention to two key issues. The first is the growing importance of very large scale patterns of societal integration which depend on indirect social relationships achieved through communications media, markets and bureaucracies. This split of system world from lifeworld, in Habermas's terms, poses (...) a challenge to democratic theories which assume that the lessons of local social life and political participation are directly translatable into the necessary knowledge for state level (let alone international) activity. Secondly, changes in patterns of community formation and communications media have transformed the basis for democracy. In particular, socio-spatial segmentation by life-style choice, market position and other factors limits direct relationships increasingly to similar individuals. Mass media become increasingly predominant sources of information about people different from oneself, and indirect social relationships form the structural basis for the social integration of most politics. The present paper revised and adapts Habermas's conceptualization of system world and lifeworld in order to address the transformation of patterns of societal integration. This forms the basis for a critical analysis of the implications of changing community form and especially communications media for populist political proposals. (shrink)

Although therapist sexual attraction to clients is common, and therapist self-disclosure is an often-used intervention, therapist self-disclosure of sexual feelings to clients is an understudied phenomenon. In this article, I critically review the small base of literature on therapist self-disclosure of sexual feelings, including information on prevalence rates, empirical research, and case studies. By incorporating these findings with information from relevant sections of the American Psychological Association (2002) Ethics Code, my intent is to evaluate different aspects of therapist self-disclosure of (...) sexual feelings and arrive at conclusions regarding therapists' use of these disclosures. It appears that direct, explicit disclosures of sexual feelings can run the risk of harming clients and may therefore be unethical. Therefore, the use of this technique is discouraged. I discuss the issue of using less explicit interventions. (shrink)

One of the most serious obstacles to accepting a tenseless view of time is the challenge posed by our experience of tense. A particularly striking example of such experience, pointed out by Schlesinger but largely overlooked in the literature, is the wish felt by probably all of us at some time or other that it were now some other time. Such a wish seems evidently rational to hold, and yet on a tenseless theory of time such a wish must be (...) regarded as irrational, since it is logically impossible for the now to be located at some other time, there being no such thing as an objective now or present. In order to accommodate rationally such a belief, most protagonists of tenseless time twist the evident meaning of the wish. Oaklander, for example, misconstrues the wish in terms of my wanting to have different perceptions. Others, like Coburn, admit frankly that such a wish is rational only on a tensed theory of time but mistakenly reject that theory on grounds that at best constitute a defeater of an argument for a tensed view of time, rather than a defeater of the tensed view itself. The argument for a tensed view of time from the experience of tense remains undefeated. (shrink)

John Taylor complains that the "Kalam" cosmological argument gives the appearance of being a swift and simple demonstration of the existence of a Creator of the universe, whereas in fact a convincing argument involving the premiss that the universe began to exist is very difficult to achieve. But Taylor's proffered defeaters of the premisses of the philosophical arguments for the beginning of the universe are themselves typically undercut due to Taylor's inadvertence to alternatives open to the defender of the "Kalam" (...) arguments. With respect to empirical confirmation of the universe's beginning Taylor is forced into an anti-realist position on the Big Bang theory, but without sufficient warrant for singling out the theory as non-realistic. Therefore, despite the virtue of simplicity of form, the "Kalam" cosmological argument has not been defeated by Taylor's all too swift refutation. (shrink)