Neurotechnological cognitive enhancement has become an area of intense scientific, policy, and ethical interest. However, while work has increasingly focused on ethical views of the general public, less studied are those with personal connections to cognitive impairment. Using a mixed-methods design, we surveyed attitudes regarding implantable neurotechnological cognitive enhancement in individuals who self-identified as having increased likelihood of developing dementia (n = 25; ‘Our Study’), compared to a nationally representative sample of Americans (n = 4726; ‘Pew Study’). Participants in Our (...) Study were additionally shown four videos showcasing hypothetical neurotechnological devices designed to enhance different cognitive abilities and were interviewed for more in-depth responses. Both groups expressed comparable degrees of worry and acknowledgement of potential ethical ramifications (all _ps_ > _0.05_). Compared to the Pew Study, participants in Our Study expressed slightly higher desire (_p_. (shrink)

Guiding the work of most linguists and philosophers of language today is the assumption that language is governed by rules. This volume presents a different way of viewing the partial regularities that language displays, the way they express norms and conventions. It argues that the central norms applying to language are non-evaluative; they are more like those norms of function and behavior that account for the survival and proliferation of biological species. Specific linguistic forms survive and are reproduced together with (...) cooperative hearer responses because some portion of the time these patterns of production and response benefit both speakers and hearers. What needs to be reproduced, however, for a given language to survive is not specific conceptual rules or inference patterns, but only satisfaction conditions concerning distal objects and properties, and essential elements of hearer response. Thus, the psychological processes that support the use of proper names, of words for kinds, properties and so forth, need to be examined anew, resulting in a fairly uncompromising rejection of conceptual analysis as a tool in philosophy. Further results concern the distinction between the propositional content and the force of a linguistic utterance and a new description of illocutionary acts. It turns out that neither the intentionality of thought nor the intentionality of language is derived from the other. Also, the processes involved in understanding language are best modeled as a form of direct perception of the world parallel, for example, to perception mediated by the natural signs contained in structured light, and results in a radically new description of how children learn language. (shrink)

Is Hume a naturalist? Does he regard all or nearly all beliefs and actions as rationally unjustified? In order to settle these questions, it is necessary to examine their key terms and to understand the character-especially the normative character-of Hume's philosophical project. This paper argues that Hume is a naturalist-and, in particular, both a moral and an epistemic naturalist-in quite robust ways; and that Hume can properly regard many actions and beliefs as "rationally justified" in several different senses of that (...) term. (shrink)

P. J. E. Kail's Projection and Realism in Hume's Philosophy is an excellent book, consisting—like Hume's Treatise itself—of three excellent parts. I will comment on one central aspect of its second part: its explanation of the source of the second thoughts that Hume famously expressed, with a frustrating lack of specificity, about his own initial discussion of personal identity in the Treatise.As is well known, Hume holds in the section "Of personal identity" (T 1.4.6) that a self, mind, or person (...) is "nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions" (T 1.4.6.4; SBN 252) and, more specifically, a "system of different perceptions or different existences link'd together by the relation of cause and .. (shrink)

Hume's Morality: Feeling and Fabrication 1 is a most useful and agreeable book. It contains a wealth of analysis, argument, and insight about many of the most central elements of the moral theory of one of the greatest moral philosophers in human history: David Hume. The book is well-conceived, well-argued, stimulating, informative, clear, precise, thorough, balanced, nuanced, and ingenious, while evincing—especially in its concluding chapter, when considering possible extensions of Hume's theory—a certain subtle but pleasing "warmth in the cause of (...) virtue." As Hume would be the first to recognize, these traits of the book are indications of the personal merit of its author: Rachel Cohon. Indeed, if Cleanthes. (shrink)

Self-love was a pivotal topic of debate for moral philosophers in the first half of the eighteenth century. But, as was also the case for related concepts like sociability and virtue, philosophers meant many different things by ‘self-love.’ The historians of philosophy who discuss self-love often do as well. A great virtue of Christian Maurer’s Self-Love, Egoism, and the Selfish Hypothesis is to disambiguate five senses of self-love in eighteenth-century discussions. ‘Self-love’ and its synonyms variously refer to egoistic desire, love (...) of praise, self-esteem, amour propre, and self-respect. Maurer uses these ideal types forensically to provide a better understanding of what is being debated by... (shrink)

Book Review of Leibniz, God, and Necessity by Michael Griffin.

In ‘The Sorites is disguised nonsense’ Analysis (2012) 77: 61–5 L Goldstein attempts to show that some of the conditionals in any Sorites argument are nonsensical, and hence no Sorites argument can be sound. I give four reasons why this is not the case.

A consideration of the role that the idealized lives of the founders of philosophical schools play in moral philosophy and of changes that the roles underwent in the 17th century.

Deliberative democracy entails a commitment to deciding political questions on their merits. To that end, people engage in an exchange of reasons in a shared endeavour to arrive at the right answer or the best judgement they can make in the circumstances. Of course, in practice a shared judgement may be impossible to reach. Yet while compromise may seem a natural way of dealing with the disagreement that deliberation leaves unresolved – for example, some deliberative theorists argue that a willingness (...) to compromise manifests respect for the considered views of others, even as we continue to disagree with them – the relationship between deliberation and compromise is not as straightforward as one might think. To explain why, this paper contrasts conflicts of judgement with conflicts of preference, interest and value to show why greater attention needs to be paid to the character of the decision to be made. (shrink)

We present and defend a Thomistic cosmological argument that runs independently of the principle of sufficient reason, sidestepping perhaps two of the most recurrent objections to cosmological reasoning: (a) the possibility of brute facts (i.e., that not everything needs an adequate explanation of its existence) and (b) the accusation of the composition fallacy. Drawing upon the work of Barry Miller, we show that any contingent entity like Thumper the rabbit, upon metaphysical analysis, is either a contradictory structure and therefore an (...) impossible existent or else points towards an extrinsic cause for the unity of its really distinct metaphysical parts (namely, its essence and its existence). This conclusion enables the inference that only an uncaused cause with no really distinct metaphysical parts can ultimately produce anything with really distinct metaphysical parts. We then suggest it is not implausible that this entity is God. (shrink)

Given that there is a forceful case for thinking that the affluent are morally required to devote a substantial proportion of what they have to helping the poor, Garrett Cullity examines, refines and defends an argument of this form. He then identifies its limits.

Michel Foucault surveyed the history of Western philosophy in terms of the Delphic ‘Know thyself’ and the Socratic ‘care of the self’. The former generates academic philosophy as we know it today whereas the latter conceives of philosophy as a ‘way of life’. At issue are competing notions of ‘truth’ and the philosophical relevance of the discursive/nondiscursive domains. Comparing this account with a similar but distinct reading of the same Greek texts by Greco-Roman historian Pierre Hadot, I underscore the ‘existentialist’ (...) tenor of this distinction and assess the challenges and liabilities of pursuing philosophy as a ‘way of life’. (shrink)

From the beginning the French philosopher Claude Lefort has set himself the task of interpreting the political life of modern society-and over time he has succeeded in elaborating a distinctive conception of modern democracy that is linked to both historical analysis and a novel form of philosophical reflection. This book, the first full-scale study of Lefort to appear in English, offers a clear and compelling account of Lefort's accomplishment-its unique merits, its relation to political philosophy within the Continental tradition, and (...) its great relevance today. Much of what passes for political philosophy in our day is merely politicized philosophical concepts, a distinction author Bernard Flynn underscores as he describes the development of Lefort's truly political philosophy-its ideas formed in response to his own political experience and to the work of certain major figures within the tradition of political thought. Beginning with Lefort's most important single work, his book on Machiavelli, Flynn presents the philosopher's conceptions of politics, modernity, and interpretation in the context within which they took shape. He then draws on a wide variety of Lefort's works to explicate his notions of premodern and modern democracy in which totalitarianism, in Lefort's singular and highly influential theory, is identified as a permanent problem of modernity. A valuable exposition of one of the most important Continental philosophers of the post-World War II period, Flynn's book is itself a noteworthy work of interpretive philosophy, pursuing the ideas and issues addressed by Lefort to a point of unparalleled clarity and depth. (shrink)

The central concept in modern democratic theory outlined by a well-respected authority.

Sartre and Foucault were two of the most prominent and at times mutually antagonistic philosophical figures of the twentieth century. And nowhere are the antithetical natures of their existentialist and poststructuralist philosophies more apparent than in their disparate approaches to historical understanding. In Volume One of this authoritative two-volume study, Thomas R. Flynn conducted a pivotal and comprehensive reconstruction of Sartrean historical theory. This long-awaited second volume offers a comprehensive and critical reading of the Foucauldian counterpoint. A history, theorized (...) Foucault, should be a kind of map, a comprehensive charting of structural transformations and displacements over time. Contrary to other Foucault scholars, Flynn proposes an "axial" rather than a developmental reading of Foucault's work. This allows aspects of Foucault's famous triad of knowledge, power, and the subject to emerge in each of his major works. Flynn maps existentialist categories across Foucault's "quadrilateral," the model that Foucault proposes as defining modernist conceptions of knowledge. At stake is the degree to which Sartre's thought is fully captured by this mapping, whether he was, as Foucault claimed, "a man of the nineteenth century trying to think in the twentieth.". (shrink)

We present a self-organizing approach to sentence processing that sheds new light on notional plurality effects in agreement attraction, using pseudopartitive subject noun phrases. We first show that notional plurality ratings predict verb agreement choices in pseudopartitives, in line with the “Marking” component of the Marking and Morphing theory of agreement processing. However, no account to date has derived notional plurality values from independently needed principles of language processing. We argue on the basis of new experimental evidence and a dynamical (...) systems model that the theoretical black box of notional plurality can be unpacked into objectively measurable semantic features. With these semantic features driving structure formation, our model reproduces the human verb production patterns as a byproduct of normal processing. Finally, we discuss how the self-organizing approach might be extended to other agreement attraction phenomena. (shrink)

The Attempt at a Critique of All Revelation was the first published work of Johann Gottlieb Fichte, the founder of the German idealist movement in philosophy. It predated the system of philosophy which Fichte developed during his years in Jena, and for that reason - and possibly also because of its religious orientation - later commentators have tended to overlook the work in their treatments of Fichte's philosophy. It is, however, already representative of the most interesting aspects of Fichte's thought. (...) It displays an affinity with his later moral psychology, introduces Fichte's distinctively 'second-person' conception of moral requirements, and employs the 'synthetic method' which is crucial to the transcendental systems Fichte developed during his Jena period. This volume offers a clear and accessible translation of the work by Garrett Green, while an introduction by Allen Wood sets the work in its historical and philosophical contexts. (shrink)

Three things often recognized as central to morality are concern for others’ welfare, respect for their self-expression, and cooperation in worthwhile collective activity. When philosophers have proposed theories of the substance of morality, they have typically looked to one of these three sources to provide a single, fundamental principle of morality – or they have tried to formulate a master-principle for morality that combines these three ideas in some way. This book views them instead as three independently important foundations of (...) morality. It sets out a plural-foundation moral theory with affinities to that of W.D. Ross. There are major differences: the account of the foundations of morality differs from Ross’s, and there is a more elaborate explanation of how the rest of morality derives from them. However, the overall aim is similar. This is to illuminate the structure of morality by showing how its complex content is generated from a relatively simple set of underlying elements – with the complexity resulting from the various ways in which one part of morality can derive from another, and the various ways in which they can interact. Plural-foundation moral theories are sometimes criticized for having nothing helpful to say about cases in which their fundamental norms conflict. Responding to this, the book concludes with three detailed applications of the theory: to the questions surrounding paternalism, the use of others as means, and our moral responsibilities as consumers. (shrink)

This book tackles the problem of overpopulation with an honesty and fearlessness that is unrivalled. Hardin suggests radical approaches to overpopulation and considers the consequences. This book is an intellectual feast that will enrage, disturb, and challenge the reader at every page.

Weak particularism about reasons is the view that the normative valency of some descriptive considerations varies, while others have an invariant normative valency. A defence of this view needs to respond to arguments that a consideration cannot count in favour of any action unless it counts in favour of every action. But it cannot resort to a global holism about reasons, if it claims that there are some examples of invariant valency. This paper argues for weak particularism, and presents a (...) framework for understanding the relationships between practical reasons. A central part of this framework is the idea that there is an important kind of reason-a 'presumptive reason'-which need not be conclusive, but which is neither pro tanto nor prima facie. /// [Richard Holton] Should particularists about ethics claim that moral principles are never true? Or should they rather claim that any finite set of principles will not be sufficient to capture ethics? This paper explores and defends the possibility of embracing the second of these claims whilst rejecting the first, a position termed 'principled particularism'. The main argument that particularists present for their position-the argument that holds that any moral conclusion can be superseded by further considerations-is quite compatible with principled particularism; indeed, it is compatible with the idea that every true moral conclusion can be shown to follow deductively from a finite set of premises. Whilst it is true that these premises must contain implicit ceteris paribus clauses, this does not render the arguments trivial. On the contrary, they can do important work in justifying moral conclusions. Finally the approach is briefly applied to the related field of jurisprudence. (shrink)

Book reviewed in this article:Claude Lefort, La Complication: Retour Sur Communisme.

This article examines Huston Smith's critique of and remedy for modernity from the perspective of a college professor who adopted “Why Religion Matters” as required reading for undergraduates. Smith's heartfelt plea to consider, if not embrace, the common wisdom of traditional religious worldviews deserves a hearing. But Smith's approach is also in need of qualification, supplementation, and critique. This article, ironically, finds the needed qualification, supplementation, and critique in Huston Smith's much earlier publication, The Purposes of Higher Education . This (...) article provides the dialogue. (shrink)