This essay argues that Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of embodiment can be an extremely helpful ally for contemporary feminist theorists, critical race theorists, and disability studies scholars because his work suggests that the gender, race, and ability of bodies are not innate or fixed features of those bodies, much less corporeal indicators of physical, social, psychic, and even moral inferiority, but are themselves dynamic phenomena that have the potential to overturn accepted notions of normalcy, naturalness, and normativity. Taking seriously Merleau-Ponty’s insistence that (...) our bodies are the means by which we directly engage with the world, I suggest, encourages us to be attentive to how an individual’s or group’s gender, race, and bodily abilities differentially affect how their bodies are responded to by other bodies. The responses of others, in turn, directly influences the significance of an individual’s actions within that situation. This essay provides a critical examination of specific feminist philosophers, critical race scholars, and disability theorists who creatively utilize Merleau-Pontian insights to illustrate, and ultimately combat, the insidious ways in which sexism, racism, and “compulsory able-bodiedness”, impoverish the lived experience of both oppressors and the oppressed, largely by predetermining the meaning of their bodily interactions in accordance with institutionalized cultural expectations and norms. (shrink)

Philosophers have offered many arguments to explain why historical injustices require reparations. This paper raises an unnoticed challenge for almost all of them. Most theories of reparations attempt to meet two intuitions: (1) Reparations are owed for a past wrong and (2) the content of reparations must reflect the historical injustice. I argue that necessarily no monistic theory can meet both intuitions. I do this by showing that any theory that can meet intuition (1) necessarily cannot also meet intuition (2). (...) This result suggests that a theory of reparations must either sacrifice one of the two intuitions or be pluralist. I argue that we ought to prefer the pluralist over the monistic theory. I sketch the pluralist theory and I defend it by considering an objection about the way it can resolve conflicts. (shrink)

This paper discusses the pluralist theory of reparations for historical injustice offered by Daniel Butt (Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 24(5):1161–75, 2021). Butt attempts to vindicate purely past-regarding corrective duties in response to Alasia Nuti’s historical-structural model of reparations. I agree with Butt that reparative justice requires both past-regarding and future-looking structural duties. And I agree with him that Nuti’s model leaves out purely past-regarding duties. I argue, however, that Butt does not offer a genuinely pluralist account. I present minimal (...) necessary conditions for past-regarding (corrective) justice and demonstrate that the past-regarding duties Butt advocates do not meet these conditions. The past-regarding duties Butt offers collapse into the kinds of distributive (structural) duties from which he attempts to separate them. Yet, I suggest these shortcomings are instructive and sketch a path forward for a genuinely pluralist account of reparations. A genuinely pluralist account must follow this path in order to vindicate the intuitions that motivate both past-regarding duties and the structural injustice model. (shrink)

This volume argues that Wittgenstein’s philosophy of religion and his thought in general continue to be highly relevant for present and future research on interreligious relations.

Since the outbreak of the war in the Ukraine, realism has made a comeback in public discourses but it is not clear what realism actually means as it seems to stand for everything: from supporting the Ukraine against Russian aggression to the war is the West’s fault. This is the result of decades of not distinguishing between neorealism and classical realism and implicitly acknowledging neorealist storytelling of having systematized classical realist thought. The present paper is a further intervention to carefully (...) distinguish between both theoretical perspectives to uncover what they can add to current world political problems. It finishes by asking if neorealist scholars like John Mearsheimer have a point that it is the West’s fault and a diplomatic solution needs to be found. They often refer to Hans Morgenthau not least because he was one of the most outspoken critics of the Vietnam War. (shrink)

How do opinion diversity and belief polarisation affect epistemic group decision-making, particularly if decisions must be made without delay and on the basis of permissive evidence? In an agent-based model, we track the consistency of group opinions aggregated through sentence-wise majority voting. Simulations on the model reveal that high opinion diversity, but not polarisation, incurs a significant inconsistency risk. These results indicate that epistemic group decisions based on permissive evidence can be particularly difficult for diverse groups. The results also improve (...) our understanding of what can reasonably be expected of expert groups, and where expert advice might have limits. (shrink)

Artificial intelligence (AI) is booming, and AI ethics is booming with it. Yet there is surprisingly little attention paid to what the discipline of AI ethics is and what it ought to be. This paper offers an ameliorative definition of AI ethics to fill this gap. We introduce and defend an original distinction between novel and applied research questions. A research question should count as AI ethics if and only if (i) it is novel or (ii) it is applied and (...) has gained new importance through the development of AI. We argue that a lack of such a definition contributes to six disciplinary problems: ethics washing and lobbying, limited applicability, dilution of the field, conceptual bloating, costs of AI ethics, and an internal dispute. Based on our definition, we construct a methodological framework for AI ethics and show how it helps address these problems. (shrink)

Niels de Haan (2023) defends the possibility of holding collectives morally responsible against a challenge posed by the problem of self-induced moral incapacity. Self-induced moral incapacity seems to introduce a responsibility gap that corporate agents might exploit to avoid responsibility. De Haan argues that the problem does not introduce responsibility gaps because collective moral agents become responsible for actions they committed while they were incapacitated once they reacquire moral capacity. I argue that de Haan’s argument is incomplete. Simply because a (...) group reacquires moral capacity does not also necessarily mean that the group retains attributability for the wrongs in question. This means we must supplement de Haan’s argument with an Attributability Proviso: To overcome the problem of self-induced moral incapacity it must be the case that the group reacquires moral capacity and that we can still attribute the earlier actions to the group despite the changes that it has gone through. (shrink)

In typical statistical learning studies, researchers define sequences in terms of the probability of the next item in the sequence given the current item (or items), and they show that high probability sequences are treated as more familiar than low probability sequences. Existing accounts of these phenomena all assume that participants represent statistical regularities more or less as they are defined by the experimenters—as sequential probabilities of symbols in a string. Here we offer an alternative, or possibly supplementary, hypothesis. Specifically, (...) rather than identifying or labeling individual stimuli discretely in order to predict the next item in a sequence, we need only assume that the participant is able to represent the stimuli as evincing particular similarity relations to one another, with sequences represented as trajectories through this similarity space. We present experiments in which this hypothesis makes sharply different predictions from hypotheses based on the assumption that sequences are learned over discrete, labeled stimuli. We also present a series of simulation models that encode stimuli as positions in a continuous two‐dimensional space, and predict the next location from the current location. Although no model captures all of the data presented here, the results of three critical experiments are more consistent with the view that participants represent trajectories through similarity space rather than sequences of discrete labels under particular conditions. (shrink)

First published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A Rejoinder to Professors Gosling and Taylor Hedonism is for Socrates the radical view that pleasure is the standard according to which one ought to steer one's life, the view that pleasure represents the proper end of human existence. Hedonism is not for Socrates the weaker view that the good life is also the most pleasant. Were it not for the Protagoras, all would agree, I think, that Socrates (...) does not regard pleasure as the highest goal of human life. Perhaps even Gosling and Taylor would concede that but for the Protagoras no reader of Plato would assign to pleasure a pivotal role in Socratic ethics:/ffdon~ as a standard of rightness or goodness is absent from the Apologyand Crito, and is railed against in the Phaedoand the Gorgias.The Gosling-Taylor project of reading all these dialogues in light of the Protagoras's presumed Socratic endorsement of hedonism, and interpreting them so that they are not incompatible with the Protagoras, drains the hedonism in the Protagoras of its radicality and substitutes--without warrant--the weaker, non-Socratic understanding of hedonism. Gosling and Taylor's accusation that I commit an ignoratioelenchiis one example of this sort of softening of the issue. I argue that Socrates (in the Apology) decides what to fear by appealing to the standard of what is right rather than determining what is right by appealing to the standard of fearfulness, and that it is therefore inaccurate to describe him as courageous through fear. Were the question here the weak one of whether the courageous man in fact chooses what is truly least fearful I could agree with Gosling and Taylor that it is irrelevant to consider the standard to which Socrates appeals in making his choice. Yet both in the Protagorasand in the Phaedo--as well as, I believe, in the Apology---what is at stake ~ the standard, the motivation behind the choice. In the Apology Socrates is not, as Gosling and Taylor claim, "motivated by" fear, even though he specifies what he fears. In order to explain what motivates him to fear and then to avoid what he fears, Socrates turns to the notions of duty and honor. Socrates declares (Apology 29b) that it is not because of fear of death or any other danger that he remains steadfast at his post and refuses to relinquish his duty of examining himelf and others; rather, he will obey his superior, whether God or man, becauseto do otherwise is wrong, wicked, and dishonorable. Indeed, it is since disobedience is wrong, wicked, and dishonorable that Socrates fears it more than death. Socrates thus can hardly be said to "leave inexplicit" the criteria that determine for him what is kak0n, nor does he allow any room for pleasure and pain to emerge as those criteria. As I sought to demonstrate in my paper, the philosopher in the Phaedo is characteristically indifferent to pleasure, pain, and fear. Although no human life can be devoid of intercourse with these, the way in which a philosopher negotiates his dealing with pleasures, pains, and fears is by choosing among them through reference to a higher standard. Regarding Gosling and Taylor's claim that I misrepresent their view on the Phaedo I shall of course defer to them. I direct the reader to pp. 522-23 and n. 18 of my paper, however, to explain what aspects of Gosling and Taylor's discussion prompted my interpretation. [117] 118 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 98:1 JANUARY 199 o Professors Gosling and Taylor insist that the Phaedo, in denouncing pleasure, concentrates specifically on bodily pleasure. I maintain that at Phaedo 68-69 what is deplored as spurious aret~ is the very goal of maximization of pleasure and minimization of pain and fear. As in the Protagoras, the calculus in the Phaedo has its eye on the bottom line; the type or quality of the pleasure is not a factor. The hedonism in the Protagoras, I firmly contend, is of the very crudest sort. I do not concede that it is enlightened in any sense--not even in Gosling and Taylor's limited sense in which its criterion of goodness is not immediate pleasure... (shrink)

Over the last decade, the international media has devoted increasing attention to operations that separate conjoined twins. Despite the fairly low odds that a child or adult will survive the operation with all of their vital organs intact, most people fail to question the urgency of being physically separated from one’s identical twin. The drive to surgically tear asunder that which was originally joined, I suggest, is motivated in part by a refusal to acknowledge intercorporeality as a basic condition of (...) human existence that doesn’t undermine identity but makes it possible in the first place. (shrink)

This volume is the first-ever collection of essays devoted to the Lurianic concept of tsimtsum. It contains eighteen studies in philosophy, theology, and intellectual history, which demonstrate the historical development of this notion and its evolving meaning: from the Hebrew Bible and the classical midrashic collections, through Kabbalah, Isaac Luria himself and his disciples, up to modernity (ranging from Spinoza, Böhme, Leibniz, Newton, Schelling, and Hegel to Scholem, Rosenzweig, Heidegger, Benjamin, Adorno, Horkheimer, Levinas, Jonas, Moltmann, and Derrida).

The following article discusses an edition of Hugo Grotius’s De jure belli ac pacis, issued without a place of publication or publisher in 1719. The article focuses on the claim first advanc...

There is widespread intuition that historical injustices require reparations. This paper considers one philosophical problem for reparations: the Nonidentity Objection. The Objection states that present agents are not owed reparations for historical injustices because without the historical injustice they would not exist. I show the Objection only challenges the possibility of reparations for historical injustice if we adopt a particular model of reparative justice that takes someone experiencing harms to be a necessary condition for reparative justice. Instead, if we adopt (...) a different model of reparative justice based on relational wrongdoing, we can avoid the Objection. I defend my solution by considering the Nonidentity Objection in detail. I show that it challenges harm-based models of reparative justice regardless of the account of harm that the Objection uses. And I demonstrate that common objections to wrong-based solutions to the general nonidentity problem do not apply in the case of historical injustice. I conclude by sketching challenges my wrong-based model faces and argue that despite these challenges we ultimately have reason to prefer it over harm-based ones. (shrink)

We study the position of the computable setting in the “common theory of locality” developed in [4, 5] for local problems on $\Delta $ -regular trees, $\Delta \in \omega $. We show that such a problem admits a computable solution on every highly computable $\Delta $ -regular forest if and only if it admits a Baire measurable solution on every Borel $\Delta $ -regular forest. We also show that if such a problem admits a computable solution on every computable maximum (...) degree $\Delta $ forest then it admits a continuous solution on every maximum degree $\Delta $ Borel graph with appropriate topological hypotheses, though the converse does not hold. (shrink)

"We shall become more Scandinavian." This sentence was pronounced in 2013 by French President François Hollande's entourage.1 It was the starting point for new legislation, notably on transparency, along with a general attempt to diminish the gap between the ruling class and ordinary people. Hollande was seemingly trying to transform "French political culture, a Latin culture, into a Scandinavian culture."2Hollande was not alone in this attempt. During the 2017 presidential campaign, Emmanuel Macron stated that his political project was "exactly like (...) the Scandinavian model," adding that this Scandinavian model "works much better than ours."3 He also pointed out that he saw the "moralization" of public life as one... (shrink)

En la conmemoración del octavo centenario del fallecimiento de Averroes, el recuerdo de un esfuerzo filosófico por armonizar fe y razón, por presentar la esperanza de la revelación monoteísta, por mantener el talante del pensar crítico aprendido en la tradición griega. Demasiada pretensión, quizá, para una cultura tan desagarrada como la nuestra que no quiere o no puede penetrar en lo mejor del impulso filosófico medieval. Por eso, quizá Averroes va a congresos presididos por altas jerarquías de la sociedad, pero (...) no entra en la escuela para enseñar una manera de enfrentar la vida, una manera de humanizar (que esto es educar). (shrink)

Biesta approaches different important educational topics that deserve some clarification and exploration. To begin with, Biesta emphasizes the preferential position that subjectification should occupy in education, a thesis I agree with. Nevertheless, qualification and socialization are also fundamental domains in education, much more in formal education. The aim of education, therefore, is to achieve an adequate balance between the three domains that makes possible a full educational process. On the other hand, it is valuable proposal to recover the importance of (...) the act of teaching, in a period of learning focuses the attention in educational environments. However, we need also to achieve a balance between teaching and learning; thus, a contrast between the two dimensions of education should not be highlighted: there is not teaching without learning, and there is not learning without teaching. Likewise, evaluation and measurement are essential elements of education, even if they involve risks that must be avoided. If we want to achieve some educational aims, we have to be able to find out whether we got them and how much we have achieved. That is, we have to measure and compare. Finally, education is an interpersonal relationship characterized by openness and encounter, which includes a positive view of heteronomy and obedience, in which empowerment does not preclude acceptance of interdependence and vulnerability. (shrink)

Desde comienzos del siglo XIX, los trabajadores buscaron asociarse para defender sus derechos y mejorar sus condiciones de existencia. Buscaban también en algunas ocasiones cambiar radicalmente la sociedad capitalista. Más de un siglo de lucha contribuyó decisivamente a la consolidación del estado del bienestar, con el consiguiente éxito del sindicalismo. Las condiciones de trabajo en las últimas décadas han cambiado significativamente y los sindicatos tradicionales, a pesar del reconocimiento social de que disponen, no han sido capaces de hacer frente a (...) las exigencias de un modelo de capitalismo más explotador. Por otra parte, otras organizaciones se muestran más activas en la lucha por un cambio social. En estos momentos, el sindicalismo tiene el difícil reto de reorganizarse para conseguir defender eficazmente a la clase trabajadora y proponer un modelo de sociedad más justo y solidario. (shrink)