No mental phenomenon is more central than consciousness to an adequate understanding of the mind. Nor does any mental phenomenon seem more stubbornly to resist theoretical treatment. Consciousness is so basic to the way we think about the mind that it can be tempting to suppose that no mental states exist that are not conscious states. Indeed, it may even seem mysterious what sort of thing a mental state might be if it is not a conscious state. On this way (...) of looking at things, if any mental states do lack consciousness, they are exceptional cases that call for special explanation or qualification. Perhaps dispositional or cognitive states exist that are not conscious, but nonetheless count as mental states. (shrink)

The problem of translation confronts every English, or French-language reader of Geschlecht III, from its title page on, by way of Derrida’s decision not to translate the German noun Geschlecht. In this paper, I explore the stakes of Derrida’s refusal to translate, by situating it within the context of the 1984–5 seminar, ‘Philosophical Nationality and Nationalism’, from which the text of Geschlecht III was taken. I show that the question of translation is already at the heart of that seminar, which (...) concerns the place of the idiom in philosophy, and why approaching the difficulty posed by the untranslatability of a term like Geschlecht might be the very objective of Derrida’s reading of Heidegger on Trakl. (shrink)

Conscious mental states are states we are in some way aware of. I compare higher-order theories of consciousness, which explain consciousness by appeal to such higher-order awareness (HOA), and first-order theories, which do not, and I argue that higher-order theories have substantial explanatory advantages. The higher-order nature of our awareness of our conscious states suggests an analogy with the metacognition that figures in the regulation of psychological processes and behaviour. I argue that, although both consciousness and metacognition involve higher-order psychological (...) states, they have little more in common. One thing they do share is the possibility of misrepresentation; just as metacognitive processing can misrepresent one’s cognitive states and abilities, so the HOA in virtue of which one’s mental states are conscious can, and sometimes does, misdescribe those states. A striking difference between the two, however, has to do with utility for psychological processing. Metacognition has considerable benefit for psychological processing; in contrast, it is unlikely that there is much, if any, utility to mental states’ being conscious over and above the utility those states have when they are not conscious. (shrink)

in Encyclopedia of Consciousness, ed. William P. Banks, Amsterdam: Elsevier, forthcoming in 2009.

Guided by the work of William Alston, Jonathan Adler and Michael Levin propose a solution to the generality problem for reliabilism. In some respects their proposal improves on those we have discussed. We argue that the problem remains unsolved.

Examination of a comprehensive database of political knowledge, constructed from pooled 1988 and 1992 National Election Studies, refutes criticisms that haue sometimes been lodged against standard tests that seem to reveal profound levels of public ignorance. Although most people know something about politics, the typical citizen is poorly informed, and only a small group is very knowledgeable about politics. Differentiating people according to their perceptions of the most important national problem does not reveal pockets of well‐informed “issue publics” among the (...) electorate. The NES data also show that knowledge makes a difference in how people feel about government spending for social‐welfare programs, and in how well citizens were able to connect their partisanship and ideological proclivities to their votes in the 2000 presidential election. (shrink)

A conception of probability that can be traced back to Johannes von Kries is introduced: the “Spielraum” or range conception. Its close connection to the so-called method of arbitrary functions is highlighted. Possible interpretations of it are discussed, and likewise its scope and its relation to certain current interpretations of probability. Taken together, these approaches form a class of interpretations of probability in its own right, but also with its own problems. These, too, are introduced, discussed, and proposals in response (...) to them are surveyed, some of which also go back to von Kries. (shrink)

Color subjectivism is the view that color properties are mental properties of our visual sensations, perhaps identical with properties of neural states, and that nothing except visual sensations and other mental states exhibits color properties. Color phys- icalism, by contrast, holds that colors are exclusively properties of visible physical objects and processes.

In what follows, then, I will make four basic points. First, I will take what Spinoza says in the Ethics about an exemplar of human nature as a clear and basic indication of what the purpose of an exemplar is: to transform value from an individual and subjective utility to a universal and objective standard. Second, I will argue that the function of prophecy in the foundation of the state is essentially to fulfil the role of an exemplar, but on (...) a political level; that is, to persuade the individual that his or her interest is only fulfilled through submission to the state's authority. Third, I will show how the history of the Hebrew state exemplifies the tension inherent in an exemplar between its particular imaginative origins and its universal pretensions. Fourth, I will claim that the narrative of the Hebrews' use and misuse of prophecy spoke directly to the Dutch of Spinoza's time and speaks indirectly to the political theorists of our own time. (shrink)

The empirical-normative split in business ethics is another manifestation of the fact-value problem that has existed betweenscience and philosophy for several centuries. This paper explores classical American pragmatism’s understanding of the fact-valuedistinction, showing how it offers a different way of understanding the empirical business ethics–normative business ethics issue.Unfolding the pragmatic perspective on this issue involves a focus on its understanding of both the nature of empirical inquiry and thenature of normative inquiry.

I argue that in the seven “dogmas of the universal faith,” which are introduced in chapter XIV of the Theological-Political Treatise, Spinoza reinterprets the traditional view of a minimal credo required for salvation. The dogmas are dialectical propositions that are true insofar as they are practically useful. Instead of obtaining salvation for the soul, the dogmas aid in the preservation of the body, particularly through the regulation of religion within the state. I show that reading the dogmas in light of (...) Spinoza’s method of interpreting Scripture is crucial to the understanding of their function in religion. In conclusion, I claim that the dogmas do not lead to the abolition of traditional religion, as some have claimed, but rather support the toleration of diverse religious practices. (shrink)

O evidencialismo é, primordialmente, uma tese sobre a justificação epistêmica e, secundariamente, uma tese sobre o conhecimento. Sustenta que a justificação epistêmica é superveniente da evidência. As versões do evidencialismo diferem quanto ao que conta como evidência, quanto ao que seja possuir algo como evidência e quanto ao que um dado corpo de evidência apóia. A tese secundária é a de que o apoio evidencial é necessário ao conhecimento. O evidencialismo ajuda a formular as questões epistemológicas de uma forma que (...) é ótima para que se perceba o núcleo dos problemas. Oferece soluções, sem mascarar as dificuldades. Nós fornecemos ilustração disso através da consideração dos problemas da justificação a priori e do ceticismo. O evidencialismo também oferece a base para que se compreenda uma grande variedade de fatos e conceitos epistemológicos. Nós fornecemos ilustração disso, mostrando que o evidencialismo pode explicar como a justificação pode ser anulada, como as atitudes distintas da crença podem ser objeto de avaliação e como a própria prática da filosofia é epistemicamente valiosa. PALAVRAS-CHAVE – Evidencialismo. Evidência. Justificação. Conhecimento. A priori. Ceticismo. ABSTRACT Evidentialism is primarily a thesis about epistemic justification and secondarily a thesis about knowledge. It holds that epistemic justification supervenes on evidence. Versions of evidentialism differ about what counts as evidence, what it is to have something as evidence, and what a particular body of evidence supports. The secondary thesis is that evidential support is necessary for knowledge. Evidentialism helps to frame epistemological issues in a way that is optimal for seeing the heart of the problems. It offers solutions without disguising the difficulties. We illustrate this by considering the problems of a priori justification and skepticism. Evidentialism also provides the basis for understanding a variety of epistemological facts and concepts. We illustrate this by showing that evidentialism can explain how justification can be defeated, how attitudes other than belief can be the object of evaluation, and how the practice of philosophy itself is epistemically valuable. KEY WORDS – Evidentialism. Evidence. Justification. Knowledge. A priori. Skepticism. (shrink)

Unique in both perspective and approach, this is the first book to use classical American pragmatism as an ethical framework for dealing with ethical issues in business. The book first explores ethical theory from both the traditional and pragmatic perspectives. Then, using the pragmatic perspective, discusses the nature of the corporation and its relationship to society, the various environments in which business functions, and specific issues in the contemporary marketplace and workplace.

People often think there are moral duties that hold irrespective of the consequences, until those consequences exceed some threshold level – that we shouldn’t kill innocent people in order to produce the best consequences, for example, except when those consequences involve saving millions of lives. This view is known as “threshold deontology.” While clearly controversial, threshold deontology has significant appeal. But it has proven quite difficult to provide a non-ad hoc justification for it. This chapter develops a new justification, showing (...) that acting like a threshold deontologist is a good strategy for being moral, given our uncertainty and imperfect moral knowledge. And failing to use good strategies for being moral is, itself, morally bad. (shrink)

Mind-body materialism is at its most inviting in the context of trying to give a unified treatment of the natural world. And the principle challenge it faces is to do justice to the distinguishing features of mental phenomena, which set them off from nonmental, physical reality. This challenge it not easy to meet. In 1971 I suggested that the difficulty in meeting it makes especially appealing the eliminative materialism of Feyerabend and Rorty. If adopting the materialist view that mental phenomena (...) are physical in nature prevents us from giving a satisfactory account of what is distinctive about the mental, perhaps the trouble is not with materialism but with the mental. If we can describe and explain everything about the world in physical terms but cannot give a satisfactory account of the distinctively mental, why not conclude that there simply are no mental states and events? Physical terms would then suffice to describe and explain the phenomena we now classify as mental. Even if describing and explaining these things physically is not a practical option, the possibility of doing so would underwrite the eliminative materialist position. (shrink)

The A to Z of Ethics covers a very broad range of ethical topics, including ethical theories, historical periods, historical figures, applied ethics, ethical issues, ethical concepts, non-Western approaches, and related disciplines. Harry J. Gensler and Earl W. Spurgin tackle such issues as abortion, capital punishment, stem cell research, and terrorism while also explaining key theories like utilitarianism, natural law, social contract, and virtue ethics.

As sharing and secondary research use of biospecimens increases, IRBs and researchers face the challenge of protecting and respecting donors without comprehensive regulations addressing the human subject protection issues posed by biobanking. Variation in IRB biobanking policies about these issues has not been well documented.

. Atomic individualism is embedded in most definitions of stakeholder theory, and as a result, stakeholders are not integral to the basic identity of the corporation which is considered to be independent of, and separate from, its stakeholders. Feminist theory has been suggested as a way of developing a more relational view of the corporation and its stakeholders, but it lacks a systematically developed conceptual framework for undergirding its own insights. Pragmatic philosophy is offered as a way of providing this (...) theoretical undergirding for . a relational understanding of the firm and its stakeholders. (shrink)

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recently issued its first approval of an oral contraceptive medication for access without a clinician’s prescription. One might expect this will lead to fewer people seeking to terminate unplanned pregnancies, including in states that imposed severe restrictions on abortion care following the Supreme Court’s reversal on abortion rights in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. Despite the clear potential health benefits, increased accessibility of oral contraceptives offers no real solution to ongoing threats to patients’ (...) reproductive health and moral rights created by post-Dobbs abortion restrictions. To secure their patients’ reproductive health and well-being, clinicians must work to maximize the benefits of OTC oral contraceptives without relenting in their advocacy for safe and accessible abortion care. (shrink)

Because of the problems associated with ecological concepts, generalizations, and proposed general theories, applied ecology may require a new "logic" of explanation characterized neither by the traditional accounts of confirmation nor by the logic of discovery. Building on the works of Grunbaum, Kuhn, and Wittgenstein, we use detailed descriptions from research on conserving the Northern Spotted Owl, a case typical of problem solving in applied ecology, to (1) characterize the method of case studies; (2) survey its strengths; (3) summarize and (...) respond to its shortcomings; and (4) investigate and defend its underlying "logic". (shrink)

People who teach business ethics seem locked between two general approaches: an applied philosophy approach that emphasizes the application of abstract ethical theories and principles to specific cases, and the case method approach that leaves the students without any more general theoretical framework with which to approach ethical issues. Classical American Pragmatism, understood as a school of philosophical thought, links these two approaches by providing a new grounding for moral theory in which moral rules are understood as working hypotheses abstracted (...) from concrete situations and moralreasoning demands the return to concrete situations as the foundation for moral decision making that is inherently contextual. Thus moral decision making is bottom up rather than top down, and a sense of moral rightness comes not from the indoctrination of abstract principles but from attunement to the way in which moral beliefs and practices must be rooted naturally in the very conditions of human existence. (shrink)

Cushman (1913-93) was a systematic theologian at Duke University. He looks at Plato's philosophy as a whole and single system, but also reappraises the basis of his pervasive and unyielding conviction that metaphysical relations actually obtain for people's finite existence, whether recognized or not, and that it is upon those relations that their present and ultimate hope rests. The 1958 edition was published by the University of North Carolina Press. Michae Henry (philosophy, St. John's U.) contributes a new introduction. c. (...) Book News Inc. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Selfhood and community Value The normative‐empirical split Environmental ethics.

Bryan Caplan’s The Myth of the Rational Voter treats several immensely important and understudied topics—public ignorance of economics, political ideology, and their connection to policy error—from an orthodox economic perspective whose applicability to these topics is overwhelmingly disproven by the available evidence. Moreover, Caplan adds to the traditional and largely irrelevant orthodox economic notion of rational public ignorance the claim that when voters favor counterproductive economic policies, they do so deliberately, i.e., knowingly. This leads him to assume (without any evidence) (...) that “emotion or ideology” explain mass economic error. Straightforward, unchosen mass ignorance of economic principles—neither “rational” nor “irrational,” but simply mistaken—is a more coherent explanation for economic error, and it is backed up by the vast body of public‐opinion research. (shrink)

Birch et. al. see their model as incompatible with higher-order-thought (HOT) theories of consciousness, on which a state is conscious if one is in some suitable way aware of that state. They see higher-order (HO) awareness as an “extra ingredient”. But since Birch et al go on to say that “[t]his is not the place for a detailed discussion of HOT theories,” they don’t address why they take HO awareness to be an extra ingredient or why HOT theorists are convinced (...) that it’s needed. In this commentary we argue that higher-order theories are a crucial for understanding consciousness. (shrink)

Over the course of his career, Murray Edelman made one of the few sustained attempts by a theoretically inclined political scientist to explore the effects of the public's overwhelming ignorance of politics. In his early work, he focused on political elites? manipulation of an ignorant public through the deployment of symbolism. In his later work, however, he suggested that even elites are the puppets of their ideologies. His early work has been well received; his later work has gone largely unremarked. (...) The reason may have to do with the very thing that Edelman was, in his later work, addressing: the ideological biases of his politically elite audience. (shrink)

There are a few things I’d like to say in reply to Adrienne Prettyman’s interesting paper, “Empty Thoughts: An Explanatory Problem for Higher-Order Theories of Consciousness,” in which she discusses the objection to higher-order theories from the possibility those theories leave open that a higher-order awareness represents one as being in a state that one is not actually in.

The creation of the state of Israel was the outcome of the Zionist movement, which originated in Europe and was itself inspired by fundamental European ideas—Enlightenment, national self-determination, democracy and socialism. From its earliest days Zionism was primarily a secular movement that rejected the religious establishment and religious way of life of the Jews in the Diaspora. In many respects, however, the founders of the state and the principles on which they founded its institutions—the political, judicial, economic, social, and educational—were (...) rooted in the ethical values and cultural practices of the Jewish tradition which they had apparently rejected. To explain this complex process of secularization of a very ancient religious and cultural tradition—which many see as an unresolved or unresolvable conflict between two opposing systems of thought—I draw on the hermeneutic philosophy of Hans-Georg Gadamer and especially on his Truth and Method (1960). Culture, according to Gadamer, is a continuous flow of tradition within what he called “the horizon.” People, he argued, create and live within a given cultural tradition, but they are at the same time its interpreters, enlarging it by adopting elements from various cultures and ideologies, or “horizons.” From this hermeneutic perspective, the founders of modern Israel and their successors were the active interpreters of the Jewish tradition within the larger historical context of the European Enlightenment. I illustrate this process of cultural interpretation by focusing on the secularization of the Jewish holidays, specifically on the way the Kibbutz movement, a leading symbol of the new Israel, re-interpretated Jewish holidays like Passover, Shavuot (Pentecost) and Yom Kippur, and gave these religious festivals a secular-Israeli content. However, this dynamic pioneering stage of secularization may be said to have ended by the 1980s. From then on, the secular identity of Israeli society has been undergoing a variety of radical changes. (shrink)