Contemporary Continental philosophy employs “ethnotropes” in its ethical critique of transcendental phenomenology. Ulysses, the Greek Hero, stands in for Edmund Husserl’s transcendental ego. Abraham, the Jewish Nomad, stands in for Jacque Derrida’s and Emanuel Levinas’s deconstructive subject. Ethical concerns arise when the transcendental ego is posited as the ground for all experience. The transcendental ego intends its world. The fulfillment of intention constitutes the metaphysics of presence. According to Derrida and Levinas, the other is reduced in the transcendental ego’s experience. (...) The other becomes transparent to phenomenological intention. Transparency elides the space between self and other necessary for ethics. Husserl’s transcendental ego is in this way like the Greek Hero Ulysses who conquers all others, returning to Athens unaffected by an encounter with true alterity. Derrida and Levinas employ the Jewish Nomad to offset the violence of the Greek Hero. Unlike Ulysses, for whom all others are merely moments on a centripetal, not to mention violent and heroic, return to the homeland, Abraham never reaches the other, a point constitutive of return. This is the case because Abraham is always awaiting the arrival of the other. Abraham waits for the Messiah to come. Accordingly, Abraham is the ethnotrope for the deconstructive subject for whom the messianic establishes a permanent structure of absence. The messianic is intended as an ethical critique of the heroic. The deconstructive project falls short of its ethical intention. This is the case because the messianic remains tied to the metaphysics of presence. The other is still to come to presence. To complete the critique, a third ethnotrope is available, the Hindu Bhakta. According to the Hindu tradition of viraha bhakti, or love-in-separation, the Other (i.e., Krishna) is withdrawing from the presence of the Bhakta. This establishes the negative messianic. The ethical critique of Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology finds its full voice in Hinduism’s negative messianic. Not only is the other not present, the other isn’t even coming. Banaras’s Hindu Bhakta affords an ethnotropic resource with which to complete the ethical critique of Athens’s Greek Hero begun, yet left incomplete, by Jerusalem’s Jewish Nomad. Keywords: Phenomenology; deconstruction; Hinduism; ethnotropes. (shrink)

In 2010, the Venter lab announced that it had created the first bacterium with an entirely synthetic genome. This was reported to be the first instance of ‘artificial life,’ and in the ethical and policy discussions that followed it was widely assumed that the creation of artificial life is in itself morally significant. We cast doubt on this assumption. First we offer an account of the creation of artificial life that distinguishes this from the derivation of organisms from existing life (...) and clarify what we mean in asking whether the creation of artificial life has moral significance. We then articulate and evaluate three attempts to establish that the creation of artificial life is morally significant. These appeal to the claim that the creation of artificial life involves playing God, as expressed in three distinct formulations; the claim that the creation of artificial life will encourage reductionist attitudes toward the living world that undermine the special moral value accorded to life; and the worry that artificial organisms will have an uncertain functional status and consequently an uncertain moral status. We argue that all three attempts to ground the moral significance of the creation of artificial life fail, because none of them establishes that the creation of artificial life is morally problematic in a way that the derivation of organisms from existing life forms is not. We conclude that the decisive moral consideration is not how life is created but what non-genealogical properties it possesses. (shrink)

This searching examination of the life and philosophy of the twentieth-century Indian intellectual Jarava Lal Mehta details, among other things, his engagement with the oeuvres of Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and Jacques Derrida. It shows how Mehta’s sense of cross-cultural philosophy and religious thought were affected by these engagements, and maps the two key contributions Mehta made to the sum of human ideas. First, Mehta outlined what the author dubs a ‘postcolonial hermeneutics’ that uses the ‘ethnotrope’ of the pilgrim to (...) challenge the philosophical hermeneutic emphasis on supplementation and augmentation. For Mehta, the hermeneutic encounter ruptures, rather than supplements, the self. Secondly, Mehta extended this concept of hermeneutics to interrogate the Hindu tradition, arriving at the concept of the ‘negative messianic’. In contrast to Derrida's emphasis on the 'one to come', Mehta shows how the Hindu bhakti model represents the very opposite, that is, the 'withdrawn other,' identifying thereby the ethical pitfalls of deconstructivism's emphasis on the messianic tradition. This is the only full-length study in English of this high-profile Hindu philosopher. (shrink)

Abstract This article identifies the tropes of “maturity” and “immaturity” in the dialogue between religion and science. On both sides of the aisle, authors charge, either directly or indirectly, that their dissenting interlocutors are not mature enough to see the value of their respective positions. Such accusations have recently emerged in discussions pertaining to Hindu theology, Indology, and science. Those who dismiss the substance dualism of Hindu yoga, according to Jonathan B. Edelmann, evince immaturity. Appeals to Hindu yoga are yet (...) one more appeal to religious experience. Indeed, what we find in Edelmann's text is an appeal to appreciate the private, unverifiable—or falsifiable, for that matter—“insights” of Hindu yogis. Yogic experience is interminably steeped in motivated perception and confirmation bias. There is simply no good evidence or rational argument to take yogic claims seriously. Insofar as that is the case, Indology must achieve consilience with the natural and human sciences, remaining thereby reductive of such supernatural claims. (shrink)

From Descartes to Hume, philosophers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries developed a dialectic of radically conflicting claims about the nature of the self. In the Paralogisms of The Critique of Pure Reason, Kant comes to terms with this dialectic, and with the character of theexperiencing self. Powell seeks to elucidate these difficult texts, in part by applying to the Paralogisms insights drawn from Kant's Transcendental Deduction. His reading shows that the structure of the Paralogisms provides an essential key (...) to understanding both Kant's critique of "rationalpsychology" and his theory of self-consciousness. As Kant realized, the ways in which we must represent ourselves to ourselves have import not only for epistemology, but for our view of persons and of our own immortality, and for moral philosophy as well. Kant's theory of self-consciousness is alsoshown to have implications for contemporary discussions of the problem of other minds, functionalism, and the problem of indexical self-reference. (shrink)

We present finitary formulations of two well known results concerning infinite series, namely Abel's theorem, which establishes that if a series converges to some limit then its Abel sum converges to the same limit, and Tauber's theorem, which presents a simple condition under which the converse holds. Our approach is inspired by proof theory, and in particular Gödel's functional interpretation, which we use to establish quantitative versions of both of these results.

Journal of Business Ethicsrecently published a critique of ethical practices in quantitative research by Zyphur and Pierides (J Bus Ethics 143:1–16, 2017). The authors argued that quantitative research prevents researchers from addressing urgent problems facing humanity today, such as poverty, racial inequality, and climate change. I offer comments and observations on the authors’ critique. I agree with the authors in many areas of philosophy, ethics, and social research, while making suggestions for clarification and development. Interpreting the paper through the pragmatism (...) of William James, I suggest that the authors’ arguments are unlikely to change attitudes in traditional quantitative research, though they may point the way to a new worldview, or Jamesian “sub-world,” in social research. (shrink)

We show that Spector's “restricted” form of bar recursion is sufficient (over system T) to define Spector's search functional. This new result is then used to show that Spector's restricted form of bar recursion is in fact as general as the supposedly more general form of bar recursion. Given that these two forms of bar recursion correspond to the (explicitly controlled) iterated products of selection function and quantifiers, it follows that this iterated product of selection functions is T‐equivalent to the (...) corresponding iterated product of quantifiers. (shrink)

We introduce a new formulation of the axiom of dependent choice, which can be viewed as an abstract termination principle that in particular generalises recursive path orderings, the latter being fundamental tools used to establish termination of rewrite systems. We consider several variants of our termination principle, and relate them to general termination theorems in the literature.

The original Italian text has been reproduced in the back of the volume.

In the Paralogisms of the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant challenges the possibility of a priori knowledge of the self. Implicit in this attack is a positive theory of mind which is comprehensible only through a reading of the Transcendental Deduction. There Kant argues that the possibility of experience requires that experience be represented as had by a Cartesian Ego, since only the representation of such a unitary subject can provide the necessary framework for representing a coherent course of experiences. (...) That the self is represented as a Cartesian Ego, however, does not warrant the claim that the self is in fact simple, substantial, unitary, or immaterial. This reading of the Subjective Deduction is contrasted with Kitcher's reading, and it is tied to Kant's Objective Deduction through a consideration and defense of Strawson's restatement of Kant's own argument. I apply this interpretation of Kant's theory of the self to each of the four Paralogisms, correcting misreadings of the first two by Bennett and Chisholm. I suggest that Kant's account of persons in the Third Paralogism supplies the connection between the Kant's epistemic and moral selves. Finally, I relate the Fourth Paralogism to the first three, considering the extent to which Kant's response to the mind/body problem is "functionalist". (shrink)

Several extensions of Gödel's system TT with new forms of recursion have been designed for the purpose of giving a computational interpretation to classical analysis. One can organise many of these extensions into two groups: those based on bar recursion , which include Spector's original bar recursion, modified bar recursion and the more recent products of selections functions, or those based on open recursion which in particular include the symmetric Berardi–Bezem–Coquand functional. We relate these two groups by showing that both (...) open recursion and the BBC functional are primitive recursively equivalent to a variant of modified bar recursion. Our results, in combination with existing research, essentially complete the classification up to primitive recursive equivalence of those extensions of system TT used to give a direct computational interpretation to choice principles. (shrink)

BackgroundTrial registration helps minimize publication and reporting bias. In leading medical journals, 96% of published trials are registered. The aim of this study was to determine the proportion of randomized controlled trials published in key nursing journals that met criteria for timely registration.MethodsWe reviewed all RCTs published in three (two general, one mental health) nursing journals between August 2011 and September 2016. We classified the included trials as: 1. Not registered, 2. Registered but not reported in manuscript, 3. Registered retrospectively, (...) 4. Registered prospectively (before the recruitment of the first subject into the trial). 5. Timely registration (as 4 but the trial identification number is reported in abstract).ResultsWe identified 135 trials published in the three included journals. The majority (n = 78, 58%) were not registered. Thirty-three (24%) were retrospectively registered. Of the 24 (18%) trials that were prospectively registered, 11 (8%) met the criteria for timely registration.ConclusionsThere is an unacceptable difference in rates of trial registration between leading medical and nursing journals. Concerted effort is required by nurse researchers, reviewers and journal editors to ensure that all trials are registered in a timely way. (shrink)

Thomas Reid's philosophy of mind, epistemology, and philosophy of language all rely on his account of signs and signification. On Reid's view, some entities play a role of indicating other entities to our minds. In some cases, our sensitivity to this indication is learned through experience, whereas in others, the sensitivity is built in to our natural constitutions. Unlike representation, which was presumed to depend on resemblances and necessary connections, signification is the sort of relationship that can occur without (...) any intrinsic ties between the sign and the thing signified. Of particular interest is the priority Reid gives to natural signs. Reid deploys his robust account of natural signs in a way that allows him to sidestep some skeptical worries common in the early modern period, as well as in grounding “artificial” human languages like English or Cantonese on a more basic human capacity for communication, that is, itself, the result of our sensitivity to natural signs of other people's minds. (shrink)

"The Liberty for which Patriot Patrick Henry was willing to die was more than a rhetorical flourish. The American Patriots and Founders based their ideas about Liberty upon almost 200 years of experience on their own as well as the heritage of English Common Law and even back to the natural order of Thomas Aquinas, not to mention the philosophy of Aristotle and the Biblical Exodus of the Israelites from Egypt. In over 50-years of scholarship Ellis Sandoz has (...) researched, documented and contemplated the governance of man throughout the ages. The erudition brought to bear in this compact tome reflects a depth and breadth of learning that illuminates the subject with dazzling insight. Yet, he always reminds us that principles of Liberty are readily comprehensible to the common man. Sandoz worries that the present day adherence to political correctness limits our response to obviously murderous terroristic movements. He attacks academia for ignoring the spiritual nature of existence and events. He even chastens "social dogoodism" when it is provided instead of, rather than as a reflection of, spiritual nourishment. The book revolves around the motivation and context of the American Founding and drives home its relevance to contemporary living. The Founders fought against tyranny that attempted to control their physical and spiritual lives. Unjust governance was deemed to be without authority. Aristocrats and commoners ultimately must answer to the Final Authority. These concepts are reflected in the Declaration of Independence: "all men are created equal and they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights -- that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." Sandoz is not only a scholar, but a grandfather; his words will engender Liberty for future generations."--Publisher's website. (shrink)

Despite the recent proliferation of scientific, clinical, and narrative accounts of auditory verbal hallucinations, the phenomenology of voice hearing remains opaque and undertheorized. In this article, we outline an interdisciplinary approach to understanding hallucinatory experiences which seeks to demonstrate the value of the humanities and social sciences to advancing knowledge in clinical research and practice. We argue that an interdisciplinary approach to the phenomenology of AVH utilizes rigorous and context-appropriate methodologies to analyze a wider range of first-person accounts of AVH (...) at 3 contextual levels: cultural, social, and historical; experiential; and biographical. We go on to show that there are significant potential benefits for voice hearers, clinicians, and researchers. These include informing the development and refinement of subtypes of hallucinations within and across diagnostic categories; “front-loading” research in cognitive neuroscience; and suggesting new possibilities for therapeutic intervention. In conclusion, we argue that an interdisciplinary approach to the phenomenology of AVH can nourish the ethical core of scientific enquiry by challenging its interpretive paradigms, and offer voice hearers richer, potentially more empowering ways to make sense of their experiences. (shrink)

Much has been written about recidivist punishments, particularly within the area of criminology. However there is a notorious lack of penal philosophical reflection on this issue. This book attempts to fill that gap by presenting the philosopher’s view on this matter as a way of furthering the debate on recidivist punishments.

Principles of procreative beneficence (PPBs) hold that parents have good reasons to select the child with the best life prospects. Sparrow (2010) claims that PPBs imply that we should select only female children, unlesswe attach normative significance to “normal” human capacities. We argue that this claim fails on both empirical and logical grounds. Empirically, Sparrow’s argument for greater female wellbeing rests on a selective reading of the evidence and the incorrect assumption that an advantage for females would persist even when (...) a serious gender imbalance is obtained. Logically, PPBs cite only pro tanto reasons and allow that the good of an individual child could be outweighed by other morally relevant considerations, such as those which take collectively suboptimal outcomes into account. There is thus no need to attach value to the “normal.”. (shrink)

The goal of this paper is show how an initially appealing objection to David Hume's account of judgment can only be put forward by philosophers who accept an account of judgment that has its own sizable share of problems. To demonstrate this, I situate the views of John Locke, David Hume, and Thomas Reid with respect to each other, so as to illustrate how the appealing objection is linked to unappealing features of Locke's account of judgment.

Thomas Reid is notorious for rejecting the orthodox theory of conception (OTC), according to which conceiving of an object involves a mental relationship to an idea of that object. In this paper, I examine the question of what this rejection amounts to, when we limit our attention to bare conception (rather than the more widely discussed case of perception). I present some of the purported advantages of OTC, and assess whether they provide a genuine basis for preferring OTC to (...) a Reidian alternative. I argue that Reid’s approach is no worse off than OTC at explaining intentionality of our conceptions, and suggest that OTC diverges less from Reid’s view than it would at first seem. (shrink)

In his Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man, Thomas Reid offers a barrage of objections to the view, held by David Hume, that conceivability implies possibility. In this paper, I present Reid's first two objections to the ‘maxim of conceivability’ and defend Hume from them. The first objection concerns our ability to understand impossible claims, while the second concerns thoughts about impossible claims (such as, for instance, the thought that they are impossible). Reid's objections have special force against (...) Hume because of his commitment to analyse all operations of the understanding in terms of conception. I argue that these objections fail, on the grounds that they presuppose substantive views about language which we are not warranted in attributing to Hume. Ultimately, Reid's objections help us draw out a set of intertwined issues about the language-mind relationship in Hume. (shrink)

Many scholars have sought to understand renaissance culture in terms of self-fashioning, a concept that sees the sixteenth-century preoccupation with imitation and performance as symptoms of a desire to conform outwardly to social expectations. Historians of Tudor England and biographers of Thomas More, influenced by this concept, have despaired of discovering the “true” Thomas More behind a bewildering array of self-fashioned masks that More “wore” as both an author and public figure. Recent scholarship seeks to show the coherence (...) of More's character, despite the fact that his life and writings do not fit neatly into contemporary scholarly categories. Understanding More as a “Christian Humanist” and focusing on More's intervention in a controversy between his friends Erasmus and Dorp, this study positions More as engaging in typological emulation, whereby in imitating the correspondence of Jerome and Augustine, he seeks to embody more perfectly the ideal of the Christian orator. (shrink)

Reid argues that Hume’s claim that justice is an artificial virtue is inconsistent with the fact that gratitude is a natural sentiment. This chapter shows that Reid’s argument succeeds only given a philosophy of mind and action that Hume rejects. Among other things, Reid assumes that one can conceive of one of a pair of contradictories only if one can conceive of the other—a claim that Hume denies. So, in the case of justice, the disagreement between Hume and Reid is, (...) at bottom, a disagreement over their respective conceptions of how the human mind works at its most fundamental level. (shrink)

Philosophers have routinely taken a pessimistic view of the account of cognition offered by David Hume in his Treatise of Human Nature, claiming that Hume's limited explanatory resources cannot capture the rich complexity of our thought, judgment, and reasoning. I provide a qualified defense of Hume's attempt to analyze a cognitive activity in terms of objectual conception, ie conceiving or imagining an object. I defend Hume from objections offered by his contemporary Thomas Reid (and echoed by various recent Hume (...) scholars), presenting an interpretation of the account that resolves these worries. (shrink)

Thomas Hurka writes, “an anti-theoretical position is properly open only to those who have made a serious effort to theorize a given domain and found that it cannot succeed. Anti-theorists who do not make this effort are simply being lazy, like Wittgenstein himself. His central example of a concept that cannot be given a unifying analysis was that of a game, but in one of the great underappreciated books of the twentieth century Bernard Suits gives perfectly persuasive necessary and (...) sufficient conditions for something's being a game.” In this paper, I show that the conditions that Suits proposes for something's being a game are neither necessary nor sufficient. They fail both ways. (shrink)

In an earlier paper Luu and Meißner we discussed emergence from the context of effective field theories, particularly as related to the fields of particle and nuclear physics. We argued on the side of reductionism and weak emergence. George Ellis has critiqued our exposition in Ellis, and here we provide our response to his critiques. Many of his critiques are based on incorrect assumptions related to the formalism of effective field theories and we attempt to correct these issues (...) here. We also comment on other statements made in his paper. Important to note is that our response is to his critiques made in archive versions arXiv:2004.13591v1-5 [physics.hist-ph]. That is, versions 1–5 of this archive post. Version 6 has similar content as versions 1–5, but versions 7–9 are seemingly a different paper altogether. (shrink)