Standard animalists are committed to a stringent form of restricted composition, thereby denying the existence of brains, hands, and other proper parts of an organism . One reason for positing this near-nihilistic ontology comes from various challenges to animalism such as the Thinking Parts Argument, the Unity Argument, and the Argument from the Problem of the Many. In this paper, I show that these putatively distinct arguments are all instances of a more general problem, which I call the ‘Too Many (...) Candidates Problem’ . Given my formulation of the problem, it is evident that standard animalists are mistaken in believing that restricting composition is the only solution. I show that there is another option for solving the TMC. The advantage of such a position, which I call ‘unrestricted animalism’, is that it is compatible with unrestricted composition and the existence of brains and other proper parts of an organism. I conclude by sketching several strategies one can take regarding this latter solution to the TMC. (shrink)

Recently, Stephan Blatti has argued that a deprivationist view (DV) of death’s harm is incomplete, and he presents a view such that the kind of distinctive harm that death brings to an individual involves the restriction of that individual’s autonomy.2 Not only does death deprivation-harm us, but it also restriction-harms us. Let us label such an account—one that includes both deprivation and restriction as comprising death’s harm—as a ‘deprivationist-restrictionist view’ (or ‘DRV’). Blatti favors DRV because it avoids several worries that (...) beset DV. In this paper, I present several objections to DRV; in particular, I raise some problems for the claim that death restriction-harms us and show that even DRV does not avoid the worries of DV—so there is no reason to prefer DRV over DV. (shrink)

Adam Smith is rediscovered every few generations by philosophers surprised by his subtlety, originality, and relevance. Smith’s status as mythical father of economic science and his role as canonical defender of free trade is secure within economics, but few philosophers have been more often misrepresented and underestimated. Because he is well known as an advocate of commercial society, many scholars, public intellectuals, commentators, and journalists are happy to implicate him automatically in its successes and failures, or to enlist him in (...) one side or another of the various ideological battles surrounding the utility and dangers of market economics. This book is an accessible and engaging introduction to Smith’s most important contributions to philosophy. Beginning with an introductory chapter on Smith’s life, writings and readings, Eric Schliesser locates Smith in his immediate social and philosophical context. Later chapters analyse key concepts in his core moral, political and metaphysical theories, before turning to Smith's contribution to areas of ongoing philosophical interest, especially philosophy of science, and the metaphysics of mind and self. Schliesser concludes by summarising Smith's complicated legacy in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries, and explores how Smith is being 're-discovered' in contemporary moral philosophy. (shrink)

Relationships between children and parents pervade the Star Wars saga, especially if people include surrogate parents. Anakin's relationship with his mother, Shmi, in the prequels impacts his trajectory toward the dark side. In The Mandalorian, Mando's role as a surrogate father to Grogu transforms them into a “Clan of Two”. But the most significant parent‐child relationship in the saga may be the one between Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader. Confucius's teachings highlight the importance of benevolence, social order, and ritual propriety (...) among other virtues and values. This chapter shows that understanding Luke's surrender to Vader in terms of Confucian filial piety makes sense of how Luke is able to overcome the allure of the dark side and become a Jedi. Confucius's Analects has a moral framework called “exemplarism”. This is the idea that moral knowledge and practice do not start with principles, rules, duties, consequences, or character traits. (shrink)

We argue that extreme endurance sport can be valuable for some nonhuman animals. To make the case, we focus specifically on dogsled racing. We argue that, given certain views about the nature of self-affirmation, perceptual agency, and affordances, sled dogs are capable of realizing significant value through extreme endurance running. Because our focus is on the axiological question of the nature of the value of the sport for its participants, we do not claim that extreme dogsledding is ethical; indeed, we (...) acknowledge the morally objectionable aspects of the practice in its current form. Still, we offer our argument as a critical step in providing an adequate moral justification for a reformed model of dogsled racing. If it is permissible, that is likely because it offers some significant benefits to sled dogs. Given some assumptions about sled dogs’ capacity to be guided by both internal and external affordances, those benefits include self-affirmation. (shrink)

This book considers how observations about the past influence future behaviour, as expressed in language. Focusing on information gathered from speech and other evidence sources, the author offers a model of how judgements about reliability can be made, and how such judgements factor into how people treat information they acquire via those sources.

The fundamental reason that the genetics of behavior has remained so controversial for so long is that the layer of theory between data and their interpretation is thicker and more opaque than in more established areas of science. The finding that variations in tiny snippets of DNA have small but detectable relations to variation in behavior surprises no one, at least no one who was paying attention to the twin studies. How such snippets of DNA are related to differences in (...) behavior—known as the gene‐to‐behavior pathway—is the great theoretical problem of modern behavioral genetics.Given that intentional human breeding is a horrific prospect, what kind of technology might we want (or fear) out of human behavioral genetics? One possibility is a technology that could predict important behavioral characteristics of humans based on their genomes alone. A moment's thought suggests significant benefits and risks that might be associated with such a possibility, but for the moment, just consider how convincing it would be if on the day of a baby's birth we could make meaningful predictions about whether he or she would become a concert pianist or an alcoholic. This article will consider where we are right now as regards that possibility, using human height and intelligence as the primary examples. (shrink)

We describe the results and implications of a literature review that identifies the number of normative and empirical articles, respectively, that have appeared in Nursing Ethics in each year from 1994 to 2017. The results of our analysis suggest a powerful trend away from normative scholarship and toward empirical investigation within the field of nursing ethics, both overall and comparatively. We argue that there are several important negative consequences of this trend, and we propose some potential solutions to address them.

The literature on the democratic legitimacy of judicial review and also on institutionalizing deliberative democracy neglects the possibility of employing juries rather than judges to determine bill-of-rights matters. This neglect is unfortunate, for there are findings emerging especially from deliberative polling that support the feasibility of such juries. Such feasibility would raise a new countermajoritarian concern with judicial review. The argument supporting this new concern also casts fresh light on the traditional countermajoritarian concern.

This paper discusses an analogical argument for the compatibility of the evidential argument from evil and skeptical theism. The argument is based on an alleged parallel between the paradox of the preface and the case of apparently pointless evil. I argue that the analogical argument fails, and that the compatibility claim is undermined by the epistemic possibility of inaccessible reasons for permitting apparently pointless evils. The analogical argument fails, because there are two crucial differences between the case of apparently pointless (...) evil and the case of the preface. First, in the preface case, our non-cumulative evidence supports a claim of error, whereas the analogical argument is based on the idea that our non-cumulative evidence supports the success claim that there’s at least one instance of truly pointless evil. Second, our non-cumulative evidence of error in the case of the preface rests on a track record establishing author fallibility; in the case of apparently pointless evils, there is no relevant track record to support the claim that some apparently pointless evils are truly pointless. These differences, together with certain plausible assumptions about our fallibility and reliability with respect to propositions about evil, also indicate that inaccessible reasons for permitting apparently pointless evil are epistemically possible. Given the epistemic possibility of such reasons, we’re in no position to judge whether such reasons are present in every case no matter how large the set of such evils may be. (shrink)

I argue for two major claims in this paper. First, I argue that the linguistic evidence best supports a certain form of contextualism about predicates of personal taste (PPTs) like ?fun? and ?tasty?. In particular, I argue that these adjectives are both individual-level predicates (ILPs) and anaphoric implicit argument taking predicates (IATPs). As ILPs, these naturally form generics. As anaphoric IATPs, PPTs show the same dependencies on context and distributional behavior as more familiar anaphoric IATPs, for example, ?local? and ?apply?. (...) Moreover, they are subject to important binding-related phenomena, for example, various kinds of anaphora, binding arguments, and strict-sloppy ambiguities. The latter are particularly problematic for relativism, contextualism's major competitor. I argue that relativism cannot account for these binding facts in a non-ad hoc manner. Second, I argue that disagreement is a predictable feature of dialogues involving PPTs in conjunction with the contextualist semantics defended. Appealing to ?off the shelf? analyses of genericity, I show how disagreement arises in just the cases we would expect, licensing just the kinds of responses we would expect. They also suggest promising explanations, unavailable to relativists, of various otherwise puzzling features of disagreements involving PPTs. (shrink)

This paper discusses the nature of competitiveness and argues that being competitive does not essentially involve a strong desire to win or to outperform others. The appeal of the ‘desire-to-win’ analysis of competitiveness can be explained away provided we distinguish between virtuous and vicious competitiveness. It is conceivable that a virtuously competitive athlete lack a strong desire to win or to outperform others. Moreover, there is empirical evidence that virtuous competitiveness and vicious competitiveness are distinct character traits. If being virtuously (...) competitive does not require a strong desire to win, then being competitive simpliciter does not require this. Other recent accounts, e.g. Kretchmar 2012 and Russell 2014, may appear to support the desire-to-win analysis, but careful reflection reveals that this is not the case. (shrink)

In his original semantics for counterfactuals, David Lewis presupposed that the ordering of worlds relevant to the evaluation of a counterfactual admitted no incomparability between worlds. He later came to abandon this assumption. But the approach to incomparability he endorsed makes counterintuitive predictions about a class of examples circumscribed in this paper. The same underlying problem is present in the theories of modals and conditionals developed by Bas van Fraassen, Frank Veltman, and Angelika Kratzer. I show how to reformulate all (...) these theories in terms of lower bounds on partial preorders, conceived of as maximal antichains, and I show that treating lower bounds as cutsets does strictly better at capturing our intuitions about the semantics of modals, counterfactuals, and deontic conditionals. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 25.1 (2001) 14-30 [Access article in PDF] Mallarmé Contra Wagner Eric Gans I In early 1885, Edouard Dujardin wrote to Stéphane Mallarmé for a contribution to his newly founded Revue wagnérienne. Mallarmé, admitting that he had never seen--and perhaps never heard--anything of Wagner, replied to Dujardin in July that he was working on a "half article, half prose poem," and that "never has anything seemed (...) to me more difficult." 1 A month later, the Revue published a text, more prose poem than article, entitled "Richard Wagner, rêverie d'un poète français." 2Wagner was an increasingly obligatory reference for the French avant-garde after his death in 1883. But as far back as 1862, the 20-year-old Mallarmé, no doubt influenced by Baudelaire's enthusiastic groundbreaking article "Richard Wagner et Tannhäuser à Paris" of the year before, had included Wagner along with Mozart and Beethoven in a group of three creators of the "mystery" of music, in a brief article entitled "Artistic Heresies: Art for Everyone." Characteristically enough, what fascinated the young Mallarmé was not music itself so much as the "signes sévères, chastes, inconnus" ("severe, chaste, unknown signs") (OC, p. 257) with which it was written, which give music the advantage over poetry--written in the universally understood alphabet--of being inaccessible to the uninitiated. This characteristic emphasis on writing over sound reappears in the "Hommage" sonnet for Wagner published in Dujardin's journal in January 1886, where Wagner's music is described as "mal tu par l'encre même en sanglots sibyllins" ("badly silenced by the ink itself in Sibylline sobs") (OC, p. 71). As we shall see, however, the relation between music and poetry suggested in "Art for Everyone" had by then been reversed. [End Page 14]Unlike most of his circle, Mallarmé was no Wagnerite; his "Rêverie," like his sonnet, expresses reluctant praise and reflects a certain professional jealousy. The theater had long been Mallarmé's chief preoccupation, as it had been for so many nineteenth-century writers who would be forced to make their reputation in other genres. The unfinished poem "Hérodiade," which occupied him throughout his life, took the form of a drama, and an early version of the "Après-midi d'un faune" had actually been presented to a theater director. References to music in Mallarmé's writings increase in number and specificity after 1885, and it is not unreasonable to assume that for him the prime representative of "music" in this period was Wagner. However much Mallarmé's own theater had become internalized and idealized, Wagner's theatrical success, as well as his near-deification by friends and disciples like Dujardin or Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, could not leave the poet indifferent. II What I would like to explore, however, is something more fundamental than the personal equation. Mallarmé's rivalry with Wagner over the theatrical center of culture is the rivalry of two arts and their respective means. What makes Mallarmé's critique of Wagner of particular interest is the exemplary rigor of the former's artistic intentions. Mallarmé's poems are a series of attempts to produce literary form with a minimum of figural content. Each poem has been submitted, so to speak, to Ockham's razor. The ultimate aim of this labor may be described as the discovery of the originary scene of poetry itself, the minimal sine qua non of representation, and therefore of humanity. 3 On the contrary, Wagner did not shrink from saturating the figural imagination in the pursuit of his totalizing aims. The confrontation reveals that musical maximalism in the service of national myth becomes a threat to what we may call, from Mallarmé's minimalist perspective, the anthropological mission of true art.Mallarmé held no particular brief for the theater of words; his tastes in performance went rather to the ballet, or to the mime-show, the subject of one of his most aesthetically interesting reflections. 4 Mallarmé anticipated 20th-century dramaturgy in seeing the theater not as a place for ratiocination and... (shrink)

The current ban on certain performance enhancing substances in sport such as erythropoietin faces a line-drawing problem: what is the moral difference between taking an EPO injection to incre...

The main task for philosophers is introducing, clarifying, articulating, or simply redirecting concepts as—to echo Quine’s poetic formulation— “devices for working a manageable structure into the flux of experience.” I sometimes use “coining concepts” as shorthand for this task. When the concepts are quantitative they are part of a possible science ; when the concepts are qualitative they can be part of a possible philosophy. Of course, in practice, concepts are oft en stillborn, while others have multiple functions in fi (...) elds of inquiry that may straddle philosophy and science. In this chapter I argue that historians of philosophy must, among other things, coin concepts that disclose the near or distant past and create a shared horizon for our philosophical future. In virtue of our expertise we can often do so by drawing on previously orphaned concepts. The more narrow aim of this paper is to introduce two concepts, “Newton’s challenge to philosophy” and, especially, “philosophic prophecy,” that are suitable to philosophers who engage with texts in a scholarly fashion. I do so by re-telling the story of early analytical philosophy and its connection to the reception of Spinoza. By “Newton’s challenge to philosophy,” I mean the following: from about 1700 onward, “natural science” is increasingly taken to be authoritative in settling debates within philosophy; it is a concept that focuses attention on the authority of science and its various manifestations within philosophy. By “philosophic prophecy,” I mean the structured ways in which concept formation by philosophers can shape possible futures, including that of philosophy. In what follows, I first develop and characterize philosophic prophecy more precisely. In order to illuminate the concept, I contrast it with several related, more familiar concepts. Second, I offer brief critical comments on two alternative approaches to the history of philosophy promoted by Quentin Skinner and Michael Kremer in order to make more precise the approach favored here. Third, I offer a fresh narrative about the prehistory and origin of analytical philosophy. My story focuses on Ernest Nagel, who, I claim, is the philosophic prophet of analytical philosophy. Along the way, I explore the shared origins of analytical philosophy and analytical history of philosophy in the anti-Spinozistic writings of George Boole and Bertrand Russell. I oppose Nagel’s and Russell’s narratives in light of Moritz Schlick, the founder of the Vienna Circle. I adopt Schlick’s bold and unappreciated vision of the task of philosophy in scientific age. I focus on his identification of philosophical legislation with qualitative concepts. (shrink)

Questions related to end-of-life decision making are common in clinical ethics and may be exceedingly difficult. Chief among these are the provision of cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) and do-not-resuscitate orders (DNRs). To better address such questions, clarity is needed on the values of medical ethics that underlie CPR and the relevant moral framework for making treatment decisions. An informed consent model is insufficient to provide justification for CPR. Instead, ethical justification for CPR rests on the rule of rescue and on substituted (...) interest judgments. Patients’ known wishes and values are relevant, particularly in protecting them from unwanted CPR. Clinicians should rescue patients with the means at their disposal, as a prima facie moral imperative, unless there are compelling reasons to refrain. We present a moral framework for making decisions regarding CPR and DNR. (shrink)

To date, emotion research has primarily focused on the experience and display of the emoter. However, of equal, if not more, importance is how such displays impact and guide the behavior of an observer. We incorporate a functionalist framework of emotion to examine the development of differential responding to discrete emotion, theorize on what may facilitate its development, and hypothesize the functions that may underlie such behavioral responses. Although our review is focused primarily on development, the theoretical and methodological ideas (...) laid out are relevant for researchers of emotion at all ages. (shrink)

In some cases where we are faced with a decision of whether to prioritize identified lives over statistical lives, we have no basis for assigning specific probabilities to possible outcomes. Is there any reason to prioritize either statistical or identified lives in such cases? The ‘uncertainty argument’ purports to show that, provided we embrace ex ante contractualism, we should prioritize saving identified lives in such cases. The argument faces two serious problems. First, it relies on the principle of indifference, and (...) as such it leads to inconsistent assignments of epistemic probability to possible outcomes. Moreover, even if the uncertainty argument can be reformulated in order to avoid reliance on the principle of indifference, the uncertainty in such cases still undermines any judgment of which course of action – saving a statistical, or rather an identified life – involves the greater burden. The indeterminacy involved in the statistical group might be thought to undermine the argument that application of the principle of indifference leads to inconsistency in this case, but the thought that it does rests on a misunderstanding of the relationship between indeterminacy and reference. (shrink)

Once again available in paperback, Plato is the first half of Eric Voegelin's Plato and Aristotle, the third volume of his five-volume Order and History, which ...

It appears that there is an inconsistency in combining epistemic contextualism with a plausible closure principle for knowledge and the view that knowledge is factive. I discuss the proposal that in order to avoid inconsistency the contextualist should reject closure and retain factivity. The proposal offers an alternative to closure and an argument that warrant fails to transmit through inference in the relevant cases. I criticize both accounts. The proposed alternative to closure is not well motivated and leaves unresolved the (...) question of why standard closure should not hold. The argument that warrant does not transmit is based on an inaccurate model of warrant transmission. An important lesson that emerges is that known propositions themselves can serve as warrant for further propositions, which may be known provided they are competently deduced from the former. Indeed it is arguably the factivity of knowledge that accounts for the fact that known propositions themselves serve as warrant. Thus, the strategy of rejecting closure while retaining factivity is a bad one not merely because the proposed alternatives to standard closure are inadequate and transmission failure in relevant cases would not imply closure failure, but because factivity ensures that warrant transmission worries in the relevant cases are unfounded. (shrink)

Much of the recent work on oncogenes has been interpreted as signifying that the cancerous phenotype is caused by the direct expression of ‘dominantly‐acting’ oncogenes. On the other hand, numerous somatic cell hybridization experiments suggest that there are potent tumour‐suppressor genes in the genome. The conflict between the observations and the possible nature of the relationships between oncogenes and tumour‐suppressor are discussed.

The conference explored an extraordinary diversity of aging strategies in organisms ranging from short‐lived species to “immortal” animals and plants. Research on the biological processes of aging is at the brink of a revolution with respect to our understanding of its underlying mechanisms as well as our ability to prevent and cure a wide variety of age‐related pathologies.

Although many B-theorists do not think that our perceptual experience provides evidence that time passes, they accept that we at least seem to be aware of time’s passage. Consequently, they accept the burden of explaining away the appearance of passage. This paper discuss three arguments aiming to discharge this burden. The first two arguments allow that there is a distinctive phenomenology of passage, whereas the third argues that the belief in passage phenomenology is the result of a cognitive error. None (...) of the arguments succeeds. The first two rest on assumptions that the A-theorist has reasons to reject, in light of facts about the nature of conscious experience – facts concerning both its basis in physical and functional processes, and facts concerning its representation of duration. The third argument fails to provide a compelling account of the source of our belief in passage phenomenology. (shrink)

RésuméLes auteurs présentent le problème de l'omniscience logique qui entrave la formalisation de la connaissance et de la croyance dans la thhrie des mondes possibles. Ils étudient ensuite les solutions qui s'inspirent de la distinction entre croyance implicite et explicite proposée par Levesque, et celles qui se fondent sur la logique de la conscience de Fagin et Halpern. Pour remédier aux insuffisances de ces solutions, ils proposent de concevoir la croyance explicite à partir d'une fonction d'analyse logique qui filtre les (...) propositions selon leur profondeur, ce qui permet de justifier logiquement et structurellement la limitation du pouvoir déductif des agents. (shrink)

A number of philosophers have recently held that the phenomenal aspect of experience cannot be adequately dealt with within a materialist account of the mind-body relation. A natural response for those who take both this objection and scientific considerations seriously is to adopt either a double-aspect theory of mind or a version of epiphenomenalism. In this paper I will examine such a view recently defended by Keith Campbell. Campbell calls his view a ‘new’ epiphenomenalism. I shall begin by considering Campbell's (...) conception of an imitation-man, a notion which has been elsewhere employed in arguments against materialism. I shall demonstrate that Campbell is thereby committed to entertaining seriously a suspect form of causation which I have labeled "sometime-causation". I shall then proceed to argue that for this and other reasons, Campbell's ‘new’ epiphenomenalism is not clearly superior to its traditional predecessor. (shrink)

Simply stated, Pragmatic Invariantism is the view that the practical interests of a person can influence whether that person’s true belief constitutes knowledge. My primary objective in this article is to show that Pragmatic Invariantism entails external world skepticism. Toward this end, I’ll first introduce a basic version of Pragmatic Invariantism (PI). Then I’ll introduce a sample skeptical hypothesis (SK) to the framework. From this I will show that it is extremely important that the phenomenally equivalent skeptical scenarios generated by (...) SK are actually false. We’ll then see that by combining PI and SK, the effect will be to place extremelyhigh demands upon evidence for ~SK. It will finally be observed that, while we may have good evidence for ~SK, we do not have extremely strong evidence sufficient for establishing ~SK. This supports my conclusion that any standard version of Pragmatic Invariantism ultimately entails external world skepticism. If successful, my conclusion will critically undermine the current view that Pragmatic Invariantism is actually a skeptically resistant position. (shrink)

This article presents the outcomes of a semiotic and cognitive analysis. The activities’ tracks of dissertations’ writing and artefacts’ design made by undergraduate design students were observed. Although the requirements of the dissertations’ writing are ambiguous, the activity of writing “increases” the activity of design and consequently widens the design skill. Because they provide new knowledge reorganizing the scientific and pragmatic concepts of the design by a process of “creative conflict”, the kinds of produced operational texts contribute to the renewal (...) of the abstract inheritances of the design and to the transformation of the activity and the professional situations. (shrink)

We investigate the expressive power of fragments of first-order logic that are defined in terms of prefixes. The main result establishes a strict hierarchy among these fragments over the signature consisting of a single binary relation. It implies that for each prefix p, there is a sentence in prenex normal form with prefix p, over a single binary relation, such that for all sentences θ in prenex normal form, if θ is equivalent to , then p can be embedded in (...) the prefix of θ. This strengthens a theorem of Walkoe. (shrink)