Drawing on the work of Henri Lefebvre and Barbara Adam, Gender, Space, and Time is a brilliant study that offers a unique and original threefold conceptualization of how space and time is developed and applied in an empirical study of women's lives. Moss conceptualizes women as centers of action and demonstrates the ways in which they construct personal pathways, connect different spheres of experience, intergrate new time demands into the multiple rhythms of their everyday lives, and carve out personal (...) space. (shrink)

Traditional philosophical discussions of knowledge have focused on the epistemic status of full beliefs. In this book, Moss argues that in addition to full beliefs, credences can constitute knowledge. For instance, your .4 credence that it is raining outside can constitute knowledge, in just the same way that your full beliefs can. In addition, you can know that it might be raining, and that if it is raining then it is probably cloudy, where this knowledge is not knowledge of (...) propositions, but of probabilistic contents. -/- The notion of probabilistic content introduced in this book plays a central role not only in epistemology, but in the philosophy of mind and language as well. Just as tradition holds that you believe and assert propositions, you can believe and assert probabilistic contents. Accepting that we can believe, assert, and know probabilistic contents has significant consequences for many philosophical debates, including debates about the relationship between full belief and credence, the semantics of epistemic modals and conditionals, the contents of perceptual experience, peer disagreement, pragmatic encroachment, perceptual dogmatism, and transformative experience. In addition, accepting probabilistic knowledge can help us discredit negative evaluations of female speech, explain why merely statistical evidence is insufficient for legal proof, and identify epistemic norms violated by acts of racial profiling. Hence the central theses of this book not only help us better understand the nature of our own mental states, but also help us better understand the nature of our responsibilities to each other. (shrink)

We construct logical languages which allow one to represent a variety of possible types of changes affecting the information states of agents in a multi-agent setting. We formalize these changes by defining a notion of epistemic program. The languages are two-sorted sets that contain not only sentences but also actions or programs. This is as in dynamic logic, and indeed our languages are not significantly more complicated than dynamic logics. But the semantics is more complicated. In general, the semantics of (...) an epistemic program is what we call aprogram model. This is a Kripke model of ‘actions’,representing the agents' uncertainty about the current action in a similar way that Kripke models of ‘states’ are commonly used in epistemic logic to represent the agents' uncertainty about the current state of the system. Program models induce changes affecting agents' information, which we represent as changes of the state model, called epistemic updates. Formally, an update consists of two operations: the first is called the update map, and it takes every state model to another state model, called the updated model; the second gives, for each input state model, a transition relation between the states of that model and the states of the updated model. Each variety of epistemic actions, such as public announcements or completely private announcements to groups, gives what we call an action signature, and then each family of action signatures gives a logical language. The construction of these languages is the main topic of this paper. We also mention the systems that capture the valid sentences of our logics. But we defer to a separate paper the completeness proof. (shrink)

Recent research on the metaethical beliefs of ordinary people appears to show that they are metaethical pluralists that adopt different metaethical standards for different moral judgments. Yet the methods used to evaluate folk metaethical belief rely on the assumption that participants interpret what they are asked in metaethical terms. We argue that most participants do not interpret questions designed to elicit metaethical beliefs in metaethical terms, or at least not in the way researchers intend. As a result, existing methods are (...) not reliable measures of metaethical belief. We end by discussing the implications of our account for the philosophical and practical implications of research on the psychology of metaethics. (shrink)

We present a bimodal logic suitable for formalizing reasoning about points and sets, and also states of the world and views about them. The most natural interpretation of the logic is in subset spaces , and we obtain complete axiomatizations for the sentences which hold in these interpretations. In addition, we axiomatize the validities of the smaller class of topological spaces in a system we call topologic . We also prove decidability for these two systems. Our results on topologic relate (...) early work of McKinsey on topological interpretations of S4 with recent work of Georgatos on topologic. Some of the results of this paper were presented at the 1992 conference on Theoretical Aspects of Reasoning about Knowledge. (shrink)

Contemporary philosophical discourse has deeply problematized the possibility of absolute existence. Hegel’s Foundation Free Metaphysics demonstrates that by reading Hegel’s Doctrine of the Concept in his Science of Logic as a form of Absolute Dialetheism, Hegel’s logic of the concept can account for the possibility of absolute existence. Through a close examination of Hegel’s concept of self-referential universality in his Science of Logic, Moss demonstrates how Hegel’s concept of singularity is designed to solve a host of metaphysical and epistemic (...) paradoxes central to this problematic. He illustrates how Hegel’s revolutionary account of universality, particularity, and singularity offers solutions to six problems that have plagued the history of Western philosophy: the problem of nihilism, the problem of instantiation, the problem of the missing difference, the problem of absolute empiricism, the problem of onto-theology, and the third man regress. Moss shows that Hegel’s affirmation and development of a revised ontological argument for God’s existence is designed to establish the necessity of absolute existence. By adopting a metaphysical reading of Richard Dien Winfield’s foundation free epistemology, Moss critically engages dominant readings and contemporary debates in Hegel scholarship. Hegel’s Foundation Free Metaphysics will appeal to scholars interested in Hegel, German Idealism, 19th- and 20th-century European philosophy, metaphysics, epistemology, and contemporary European thought. (shrink)

The medical profession is steeped in traditions that guide its practice. These traditions were developed to preserve the well-being of patients. Transformations in science, technology, and society, while maintaining a self-governance structure that drives the goal of care provision, have remained hallmarks of the profession. The purpose of this paper is to examine ethical challenges in health care as it relates to Big Data, Accountable Care Organizations, and Health Care Predictive Analytics using the principles of biomedical ethics laid out by (...) Beauchamp and Childress. Among these are the use of Electronic Health Records within stipulations of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. Clinicians are well-positioned to impact health policy development to address ethical issues associated with the use of Big Data, Accountable Care, and Health Care Predictive Analytics as we work to transform the doctor–patient relationship towards improving population health outcomes and creating a healthier society. (shrink)

Long touted in literary and historical works, the Mississippi River remains an iconic presence in the American landscape. Whether referred to as ‘Old Man River’ or the ‘Big Muddy,’ the Mississippi River represents imageries ranging from pastoral and Acadian to turbulent and unpredictable. But these imageries – revealed through the cultural production of artists, writers and even filmmakers – did not adequately reflect the experiences of everyone living and working along the river. The African-American community and its relationship to the (...) Mississippi River down the ages is occluded by these discourses. In focusing on this alternate history, namely the African-American experience with the Mississippi River, the overarching framework of this paper will consist of three lenses on the river as: refuge, labor, and cultural icon. From the moment of their arrival, the intersection of their lives with the Mississippi River reveals a history where the river offers freedom, oppression, escape, sustenance, renewal, disease and displacement. From this largely unexplored perspective, distinctions of race and class are exposed and reinforced. Although rivers have long been included in the historical record, whether through a geographical, spiritual, aesthetic or recreational perspective, the juncture where human lives intersect with rivers, constructing memory and identity, remains overlooked despite a plethora of cultural artifacts such as song, prose and poetry that distinguish experiences. These cultural artifacts, in turn, differentiate reciprocal relationships with the river based on race and class. For the African-American community, the Mississippi River alternated between liberator and oppressor, informing the social construct of an identity that was at times lamented, celebrated, demeaned and feared. But how did these linkages with the river not only influence a distinct collective memory but also nurture a culture with certain understandings and perspectives about the river? And if so, what have been their ramifications? Through an examination of folklore, song and first-person accounts, these questions will be addressed as multiple narratives persist, offering a history that makes more explicit the distinctive experiences of the African-American communities in their engagement with the Mississippi River. (shrink)

Gregory S. Moss examines the central arguments in Ernst Cassirer’s first volume of the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms to show how Cassirer defends language as an autonomous cultural form, and how he borrows the concept of the “concrete universal” from G. W. F. Hegel in order to develop a concept of cultural autonomy.

This paper considers the correspondence theory from modal logic and obtains correspondence results for models as opposed to frames. The key ideas are to consider infinitary modal logic, to phrase correspondence results in terms of substitution instances of a given modal formula, and to identify bisimilar model-world pairs.

Hans Urs von Balthasar is one of the most prolific, creative and wide-ranging theologians of the twentieth century who is just now coming to prominence. But because of his own daring speculations about the meaning of Christ's descent into hell after the crucifixion, about the uniqueness of Christ as savior of a pluralistic world, and because he draws so many of his resources for his theology from literature, drama, and philosophy, Balthasar has never been an easily-categorized theologian. He is neither (...) liberal nor conservative, neither Thomist nor modernist and he seems to elude all attempts to capture the exact way he creatively reinterprets the tradition of Christian thought. For that reason, this Companion is singularly welcome bringing together a wide range of theologians both to outline and to assess the work of someone whom history will surely rank someday with Origen, John Calvin, and Karl Barth. (shrink)

Humphreys and Forde argue that semantic memory is divided into separate substores for different kinds of information. However, the neuro-imaging results cited in support of this view are inconsistent and often methodologically and statistically unreliable. Our own data indicate no regional specialisation as a function of semantic category or domain and support instead a distributed unitary account.

The first year of the Trump Presidency has been marked by regressive steps in US climate policy. Trump’s announcement on 1 June 2017 of his intention to withdraw the US from the Paris Agreement was...

Offering an inside look at the hidden dimensions of teaching, this provocative text presents insight into, and analysis of, the work of teaching--from preparing ...

Traditional procedures for rational updating fail when it comes to self-locating opinions, such as your credences about where you are and what time it is. This paper develops an updating procedure for rational agents with self-locating beliefs. In short, I argue that rational updating can be factored into two steps. The first step uses information you recall from your previous self to form a hypothetical credence distribution, and the second step changes this hypothetical distribution to reflect information you have genuinely (...) learned as time has passed. While the second step resembles traditional procedures of updating by conditionalization, the first is best understood by analogy to traditional models of how agents transmit self-locating opinions through ordinary interpersonal communication. (shrink)

Much of the philosophical attention directed to Kant’s intervention into biology has been directed toward Kant’s idea of a transcendental limit upon what can be understood constitutively. Kant’s own wider philosophical practice, however, was principally oriented toward solving problems and the scientific benefits of his methodology of teleology have been largely underappreciated, at least in the English language literature. This paper suggests that all basic biology has had, and continues to have, a need for some form of heuristic “bracketing” and (...) that a renewal of some form of, albeit flexible, teleological methodological bracketing can better complement the productive assimilation into developmental biology of continuing advances in our understanding of the mesoscale physics and chemistry of soft, excitable condensed matter, than what has been the prevailing and de facto use of a form of bracketing shaped by the neoDarwinian Modern Synthesis. Further we offer a concept of biogeneric processes and a framework of physico-genetic “dynamical patterning modules”, that can begin to account for the appearance of new Kantian “stocks of Keime und Anlagen”, capable of potentiating some range of possible organismal forms, and provide grounds for moving up the teleological “goalposts”, i.e., expanding the range of what can be accounted for on a constitutive basis. (shrink)

"This reviewer had to be restrained from stopping people in the street to urge them to read it: They would learn something of the way science is done,...

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Politica of Justus Lipsius and the Commonplace-BookAnn MossThroughout Western Europe in the sixteenth century, schoolboys and grown men educated in the Latin schools of the humanists would recognize the commonplace-book as an indispensable tool for making sense of the books they read, for assimilating the written culture transmitted to them, and for possessing the means of production in their turn. This handy organizer of information and rather effective (...) retrieval mechanism has been treated with a fair amount of contempt after being sidelined towards the end of the seventeenth century and then falling into public disrepute, its rich stock of precious commonplaces devalued into the small change of mere banalities. Nor indeed does it suit the agenda of post-Romantic scholars and critics looking in a simplistic way for signs of originality and innovation. However, the last few years have seen commonplaces in their more sophisticated guise back on the critical agenda, with several particular studies and, latterly, two major overviews published in a single year. 1 The thesis underlying this paper is that the commonplace-book is central to an understanding of how knowledge was organized in the early modern period. More than that, the commonplace-book keys us into procedures of investigation and debate and into the dialectical and rhetorical modes of articulating thought which were agreed to have persuasive force; and it exhibits the commonality of expectations, the common places, which ensured a common route into a shared area of communication when the cultural consensus of Western Europe was strained to breaking point.One test of this thesis will be whether it can be usefully applied to texts which fit badly into interpretative frames familiar to the modern reader. The particular purpose of this paper is to apply the principles of commonplace-book [End Page 421] reading to just such an awkward case, in order at least to suggest the possibility of recovering an historically probable reading strategy which may more fully recuperate the text for the modern reader. The Politica of the eminent Stoic philosopher and scholar of antiquity, Justus Lipsius (1547–1606), is a network of quotations from ancient authorities linked together by Lipsius’s own words. He himself regarded it as one of his most important achievements. His contemporaries and their seventeenth-century descendants knew perfectly well how to read it, and there is plenty of evidence that they regarded it highly. 2 Modern readers find it an embarrassment, not knowing quite what to do with a book from which the author eclipses himself, yet keeps a dead hand on it: “All of it is mine and nothing is.” 3 Modern critics tend to assume it is all Lipsius, riding roughshod over the quotation indicators 4 ; or they prefer to think that nothing is and treat the text solely as a compilation of extracts 5 ; or they get tied in knots trying to rescue Lipsius’s voice drowned out in his quotations. 6 But Lipsius’s original readers in 1589 knew how to read it, because he told them: “For what is it but a well-arranged register of accounts or COMMONPLACES?” 7If we are going to get anywhere near the original point of reception, we must remind ourselves about commonplaces and commonplace-books. It was Erasmus in De copia who gave the first systematic guidelines for making commonplace-books, but by the time of Lipsius schoolboys in every Latin school in Northern Europe were busy excerpting from their [End Page 422] texts as they read, either under the schoolmaster’s instructions or at their own discretion. The commonplace-book was a probe and an instrument for redistributing text so as to ensure maximal retrievability and optimum application. Here is one of the many enthusiastic promoters of the practice, writing in 1564:So that the more important passages in the authors set for reading and the more brilliant sententiae, exempla, similitudes, words, phrases, and outstanding figurative expressions may be the more readily imprinted on the memory and available and ready for use as occasion requires, it is extremely useful to have the common-places of the main intellectual disciplines arranged in a definite order, under which students may note... (shrink)

The ethical and political dilemmas raised byInformation and Communication Technology (ICT)have only just begun to be understood. Theimpact of centralised data collection, masscommunication technologies or the centrality ofcomputer technology as a means of accessingimportant social institutions, all poseimportant ethical and political questions. As away of capturing some of these effects I willcharacterise them in terms of the type of powerand, more particularly, the ‘Power-over’ peoplethat they exercise. My choice of thisparticular nomenclature is that it allows us todescribe, firstly, how specific (...) technologiesoperate and second, exactly what sorts ofconstraints they impose on people. The reasonfor this focus has to do with a further aim ofthe essay, which is to intervene in aparticular type of debate that is often hadaround the appropriate use and scope oftheories of power that are employed in thinkingabout ICT, especially those theories associatedwith the work of Michel Foucault. There isconsiderable use of his work in computerethics, but my claim will be that despite theproductive uses of his work in the areas ofsurveillance, for instance, it does not exhaustthe larger potential of his work on power and,in part, `government.' I will argue that inorder to properly understand the politicalimpact of some aspects of ICT, especially thedigital divide, one needs an account of howpower operates that includes more traditionaltypes of power-over. To the extent that I willdeal with these concerns, the paper is both acontribution to debates about the nature andscope of Foucault's theory of power and to theissue of the effects of the digital divide. (shrink)

Education and Its Discontents: Teaching, the Humanities, and the Importance of a Liberal Education in the Age of Mass Information, by Mark Moss, is an exploration of how the traditional educational environment, particularly in the post-secondary world, is changing as a consequence of the influx of new technology. Students now have access to myriad of technologies that instead of supplementing the educational process, have actually taken it over. Faculty who do not adapt face enormous obstacles, and those who do (...) adapt run the risk of eroding the integrity of what they have been trained to teach. Moss discusses that it is now not only how we learn, but what we continue to teach, and how that enormously important legacy is protected. (shrink)

Benedict Spinoza (1634–1677) is feted as the philosopher par excellence of the popular democratic multitude by Antonio Negri and others. But Spinoza himself expresses a marked ambivalence about the multitude in brief asides, and as for his thoughts on what he calls “the rule of (the) multitude,” that is, democracy, these exist only as meager fragments in his unfinished Tractatus Politicus or Political Treatise. This essay addresses the problem of Spinoza’s multitude. First, I reconstruct a vision of power that is (...) found in the Ethics but that tends to be overlooked in the scholarly literature: power is not just sheer efficacy or imposition of will, but rather involves a capacity for being-affected; I call this the conception of power as sensitivity. The second part of my argument shows how, given Spinoza’s emphatic political naturalism, the conception of power as sensitivity can be extended to his political philosophy to shed light on what Spinoza calls potentia multitudinis, or “the power of the multitude”—a term found solely in the Political Treatise and nowhere else in his oeuvre. This juxtaposition reveals significant qualifications to the liberatory potential of the multitude currently claimed in the scholarly literature. (shrink)